by John Langan
Which is how, later the night of that same first day, Italo appears at the Schmidts’ door, calling on Rainer. When Rainer greets him and invites him in, Italo wastes no time in saying what he’s come to say: “This woman, your neighbor—the one who has left her grave—something must be done about her.” “What do you mean?” Rainer asks. “We have to kill her,” Italo says, “we have to put her back where she belongs.” While Rainer asks him what’s wrong, Clara sends Lottie, who’s still up reading, off to bed. She starts to complain, but the flash of her mother’s eyes tells her to do as she’s told. Once the door to her room is safely shut, Rainer repeats his question, “What’s wrong?” Italo summarizes the afternoon’s events, refusing only to repeat Helen’s message to Regina. “It doesn’t bear being spoken out loud,” he declares. He verifies, however, that what she whispered is true, a truth there’s no way she could have learned. “The woman,” he says, “is no longer human. You,” he points at Rainer, “have seen her eyes. What happened today leaves no room for doubt.” “What is she, then?” Clara asks. “I don’t know,” Italo says. “A devil? Something else? I work with stone. This is not my profession. I cannot say what she is, only what she is not. She is not human.”
He’s agitated. He’s come inside and accepted the glass of iced tea Clara sets on the kitchen table for him, but he sits perched on the edge of his chair as if ready to jump and flee the house at any moment, maybe to seek out the neighbor’s. He keeps running his hands through his hair, and rubbing them together when he isn’t. Lottie, who has opened her bedroom door ever-so-slightly during the last part of Italo’s conversation with her parents, thinks he looks as if the secret he’s keeping is eating him alive, chewing its way out from where he tried to cage it deep down inside himself. To Lottie’s surprise, her father appears to be agreeing with Italo. Although Rainer’s favorite quotation is that Shakespeare one, you know, about there being more things in heaven and earth, he is, as a rule, the family’s resident skeptic, champion of what he refers to as “clear thinking.” Now here he is, nodding to Italo’s wildest speculations, going along with the man’s assertions that the woman has to be done away with, that she’s no longer a creature of this earth. It’s not so much that Lottie herself disagrees with Italo’s assessment—she thinks there’s more truth than not to what he’s saying—so much as that she can’t believe her father isn’t arguing with his friend, offering rational alternatives to Italo’s wild speculations. The two men sit up like this until well after midnight, long after Clara goes off to bed, Italo swaying from side to side as fatigue overtakes him, Rainer with his hands clasped together, his gaze on the floor. When Italo has run down, Rainer sends him home with a promise that they’ll attend to what needs attending to. Rainer stands in the doorway watching his friend walk up the street, and Lottie, who’s kept awake at her spot at the bedroom door, opens it and walks into the kitchen. Without turning around, Rainer says, “How much did you hear, Lottie?” When Lottie protests that she’s just up for a glass of water, Rainer cuts her off. “You want to know how much of what Mr. Oliveri said is true,” he says, which is close enough to the actual question plaguing Lottie—“How much of it do you believe, Papa?”—for her to claim it as her own. Rainer faces her, and Lottie is shocked to see the look written on his features: fear, fear so intense it has him on the brink of tears, his lip trembling. “What is it, Papa?” Lottie asks, “What’s wrong?” But Rainer only shakes his head and says, “It’s time for bed.” So thrown is Lottie by that expression that she forgets to ask her father for the answer he promised, and hurries off to join her sisters in their bed.
IX
As I’ve said, it isn’t until the following evening that Clara reveals the identity of the man in the big house to Rainer, so setting in motion the final chain of events in this drama. In the meantime, things at the house next door continue their downward spiral. Helen’s husband, George, keeps more or less quiet all that first day. Folks hear him moaning from time to time, but that’s about it. At dawn the morning after Italo’s visit, George starts screaming and yelling to beat the band. Once again, Rainer runs over to see what the matter is. He finds the front door to the house wide open, George writhing on the floor like a man having a fit, and Helen nowhere to be found. Rainer rushes to the man and tries to grab him, to stop him thrashing around, but George throws him across the room like he’s a rag doll. Knocks the breath right out of him. While Rainer’s sitting rubbing the back of his head from where he struck it on the wall, a few more neighbors arrive, all of whom have the same idea as Rainer, and none of whom has any better luck restraining George. It’s as if the man’s in the grip of a great power: “like a river of lightning was pouring through him,” is how Rainer will put it to Clara. As Rainer pushes himself to his feet, he realizes that the man’s screams aren’t just noise. They’re words. Hard as it is to believe, the man convulsing on the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head, his mouth bloody from where he’s bitten his tongue, is speaking. Rainer can’t make out all the words, but he’s reasonably sure of a few, and they make the scene in front of him even stranger. The man shuddering in front of him is speaking a hodgepodge of languages: English, and what Rainer is pretty sure is Hungarian, and German, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as a few more that Rainer isn’t too sure of but thinks are Russian and Greek, plus a couple that Rainer’s never heard before, guttural barks and snarls that don’t resemble any tongue he knows or knows of. He’s skipping from language to language, George, but all his speech seems to be circling around the same two or three sentences.
When Lottie, who listens to this story alongside her mother, asks her father what the man was saying, Rainer will ignore her and try to proceed with his story, until Clara picks up her daughter’s question and echoes it, insisting. “It was something about water,” Rainer says, “something to do with black water.” The answer will satisfy Clara, but not Lottie, who knows, from the way her father looks up at the ceiling as he delivers it, that he’s not telling the whole truth. They’re observant, your children. There’s more to what the man was saying than her father’s letting on, and for reasons Lottie doesn’t yet know but that trail nervous shudders up her spine, her father doesn’t want to tell his family everything he’s learned.
Nor will Lottie be able to ask George what he was saying, because, about five minutes after Rainer’s arrival, in the middle of his stream of languages, George’s back arches, quivering, and he vomits a torrent of brackish water, a geyser that goes on and on and on, fountaining over his face, his clothes, the floor, the men standing closest to him, who leap back, cursing. More water pours from that man than you would think one body could hold, and Rainer’s sure he sees it running out George’s nose, ear, even from the corners of his eyes.
There’s something else, too, something that Rainer flat-out refuses to tell, despite the threats and imprecations of his wife and daughter. Lottie will have to wait until later that same day, when she’ll hear the story from one of the girls at work, whose older brother was among the other men who went to George’s house. Splashed by the water the man vomited for his trouble, the brother said that the water was full of tadpoles. Only, they were such tadpoles as no one among them had ever seen before, black strips of flesh one or two inches long, every one capped by a single, bulbous blue eye, so it seemed as if the fellow who’d thrown them up had swallowed a bucketful of eyeballs. They flopped around on the floor, the things, as if they were trying to get a better look at the men standing horrified around them. For a moment, the men stood paralyzed as the things twitched about the floor, and then one of them flipped itself onto a man’s bare foot. He cried out, and all the men responded in a fury of stomping, crushing whatever the things were under the feet and boots as if there were no tomorrow, splashing the foul water all over the place. Long after they’d crushed the tadpole-things beyond recognition, the men kept stomping, as if they were trying to stamp out the very memory of what they’d seen. By the time they got hold of themselves a
nd stopped, panting, and thought to look to George, he was dead.
Sounds a bit much, doesn’t it? Not that the whole story doesn’t sound more and more fantastic—walking dead woman and all. It’s just those tadpoles, they’re—well, they push the tale that much closer to outright fantasy, don’t they? (That’s assuming, of course, you don’t think it’s already there.) Myself, I’d be inclined to believe that George had quenched his thirst at one of the local ponds after a bout of drinking, swallowing a school of tadpoles—plain, ordinary tadpoles—in the process. When he throws up, out come the tadpoles, which, to be sure, would be a pretty disturbing sight in and of itself. The monster-tadpoles I’d chalk up to the overheated imagination of the girl who told Lottie the story. Problem is, I’m not as sure as I’d like to be. You see, the same night that Lottie hears this story, after Clara has revealed what she’s learned about the man in the big house, and Rainer is chewing over the information at the kitchen table, rubbing his jaw the way he does when he’s thinking, Lottie comes right out and asks him if the story she was told is true. She’s that kind of girl.
Rainer jumps up from his chair as if he’s been stung. At first, he looks surprised, as if he can’t believe how his daughter heard such a story. Then the anger comes, such anger as Lottie hasn’t seen on his face in a long time, maybe ever. She can see his right arm twitching, and she’s sure he’s going to hit her—for the truth or the lie of her question, she doesn’t know. Lottie tenses herself for the slap, and that’s when Clara, who’s been standing to the side watching, steps in front of her. Lottie can’t see her mother’s face, but whatever’s in it washes the anger clear from Rainer’s. His arm relaxes, his head slumps, and Lottie realizes that underlying the anger she’s been the focus of is fear, a terror deep and profound. She thinks of the other night, what she saw in her father’s eyes after Italo left. All of a sudden, she has one of those moments you have growing up, when you see your parents as people, as something like older versions of you and your friends. From head of the household, Rainer becomes a man whose heavily lined face and thinning hair are the badges of too much care and worry. Lottie understands that the fear she’s found in him is not a new thing, that it’s been part of her father for a while now. If not originally part of his fundamental architecture, then it’s infiltrated him the way termites will devour the frame of a house, leaving only the brick exterior in place. And from mother, Clara becomes a woman whose worn hands mark the effort she’s put into holding together not only the family she and Rainer have made, but Rainer himself. Lottie sees that Clara knows all about Rainer’s fear, that if her mother has been unable to exterminate what’s wormed its way into her husband, she’s at least done her best to support him where she can. A burst of sympathy, of pity compounded by love, takes hold of Lottie, and she wants to throw her arms around her parents and comfort them. She doesn’t, though, because she also wants to protect them from her revelation.
“This is bad business,” Rainer says at last.
This isn’t exactly the revelation of the year. Before Lottie can ask Rainer what the bad business is, Clara does. “Enough riddles,” she says. “We know bad things are happening. What do you know about them? Who is the man in the big house?”
“I don’t know,” Rainer says, “I don’t know who he is.”
Lottie sees her mother’s shoulders straighten, a sure sign she’s ready to yell, so she steps in with her own question: “What is he, Papa?”
Rainer’s face falls; he didn’t expect that one. It’s as if he’s decided he won’t lie to his family. He simply won’t tell them any truth he doesn’t have to. “I’m not sure what he is,” he says.
But Lottie’s started to figure out the rules to his game. “What do you think he is?” she asks.
When she was a child growing up in Germany, she played a game like this with Rainer, a game whose object was to find not only the correct question, but the correct phrasing of it. Lottie was good at that game, which she thinks about now. Maybe Rainer remembers it, too, because as she re-words her question into a form he can’t evade, the faintest of smiles crosses his lips. “All right,” he says, “all right. I’ll tell you what I think. I think—I am afraid the man in the big house might be ein Schwarzkunstler.”
He uses the German, even though they’re all speaking English, a house rule Rainer himself has insisted on. Lottie knows the word, which translates “black artist” and means something like “black magician” or “sorcerer.” It’s a word Lottie associates with childhood stories from the old country, not real life in a construction camp in upstate New York. For a moment, she thinks Rainer is having her and Clara on, then she sees that he’s crossed his arms, something he only does when he’s presenting an uncomfortable truth. He did it when he told the family that he thought the only recourse left them was to leave their home and go far away, maybe to America, and again when he described the fine job he’d taken in the beautiful country north of the City. Her skeptical father is telling Lottie and her mother that an evil magician is behind the strange goings-on next door and expecting them to believe it. “Ein Schwarzkunstler?” Lottie says. “Like in the storybooks?” The tone of her voice shows her opinion of her father’s theory.
“Not exactly,” Rainer says. “More a kind of,” he waves his hands, “scholar, or surgeon, or—or a strongman, at the circus.”
“A surgeon?” Lottie asks. “A strongman?”
“Someone who slices into the surface of things and peels it away to discover what is underneath,” Rainer says. “Someone who wrestles with powerful forces.” This doesn’t help Lottie in the least, which Rainer sees. He says, “The result would be the same as in the books.”
Clara, meanwhile, is slowly nodding her head. When Rainer has finished speaking, she says, “It explains all of this, doesn’t it? God help us.” Then, to Rainer, “What are you doing about it?”
“Me?” Rainer says.
“You,” Clara says.
“Why should I do anything?”
“Because who else knows about these things?” Clara says.
“I’m hardly an expert,” Rainer says.
“You’re what’s at hand,” Clara says. “Besides, you’ve done well enough in the past.”
“I don’t think Wilhelm would agree with you,” Rainer says. There it is, suddenly: that name. Lottie’s never heard it said out loud before, only caught it in whispers from Rainer and Clara.
But if Rainer thinks bringing up this name will stop the conversation, he’s mistaken. Clara steams ahead: “Wilhelm understood what he was doing.”
“I don’t think so,” Rainer says, “I don’t think either of us did.”
“That’s the past,” Clara says. “Let the dead bury the dead. You have the living to worry about. Are you telling me that, since that woman appeared, you’ve been doing nothing?”
Rainer resembles the little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I have been looking at the books,” he says. “After everyone’s gone to bed.”
“I knew it,” Clara says.
“It’s not as simple as all that,” Rainer says. “It’s not like looking up the dictionary for ‘Schwarzkunstler.’ The books are difficult to read. The meanings are hard to follow—it’s like they’re written in code. The words keep shifting themselves. They don’t want to give up their secrets. It’s like an oyster with a pearl.”
“You can make an oyster surrender its pearl,” Clara says. “All you need is persistence and a sharp enough knife.”
Lottie cannot believe what she’s hearing. It isn’t that she herself is especially rational. Of all the family, she’s the most religious, and she has no trouble with the miracles found in the Old and New Testaments. Nor does she have any problems accepting the prophecies in the Book of Revelation. Manna in the desert, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, the coming of this and that evil beast, those are fine with her. If you ask her, she’d say that she believes in God’s hand shaping events in the world, and in the Devil’s efforts
to frustrate that design. She isn’t sure about guardian angels or personal demons. That may be veering too much towards popery; it depends on her mood, though. The Bible, however, is the past, except for Revelation, which is the future. As for the present, you have to look carefully for the supernatural in it. It’s a matter for study and interpretation. God and the Devil, good and evil, are active, but their actions are subtle. All this—broken woman returning from the grave and threatening their children, men vomiting monsters, sorcerers—it’s so blatant, so vulgar.
That isn’t the only thing. There are her parents. I guess you could say that, as regards Rainer and Clara, this night is one of surprises for Lottie. First there’s her insight into their humanity, which is disconcerting enough. Then it’s capped by talk of magic. While Rainer and Clara attend church services with Lottie and her sisters, neither of them has ever appeared all that devout. Rainer, of course, is the skeptic. Clara prides herself on her common sense. In fact, one of Clara’s favorite activities is teasing her husband about this or that example of his lack of common sense. Now, in a matter of minutes, both Lottie’s parents have abandoned their hard-headedness for mysticism, and not a particularly Christian-sounding one at that. It’s as if, up until this evening, Rainer and Clara have been acting, playing roles they’re only too happy to set aside. For a second, Lottie’s parents seem stranger to her than any woman with gold eyes and a weird voice.