THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Book 1: Shades of Night, Falling

by John J. Miller

  But life in Geiststadt was not all butterflies and cider.

  Jon stopped so suddenly that Isaac, trudging at his [25] heels as he led Eisa by the rope around her neck, almost blundered right into him.

  “What is it?” the ex-slave asked as his friend stood rooted to the ground.

  Jon Noir had a number of small, but useful talents that he accepted as his lot in the everyday scheme of things. One was his talent for finding lost things. He was so good at finding lost things, he’d often find things that no one actually realized were lost.

  Like old Erich’s body floating face down in a patch of scummy bog water, flies already buzzing around him looking for places to lay their eggs on a warm spring morning.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Isaac whispered, catching sight of the body over Jon’s shoulder.

  Though they could see only the back of the head, neither doubted that it was Erich. The body was dressed in the old cowman’s clothes. It was tall, lean, and stringy. The hair that floated like a dirty halo on the scummy marsh water was long and grey.

  Jon, finally compelled to action, ran forward, splashing through the standing water that had accumulated in a slight hollow. It came up to Jon’s thighs as he reached Erich’s side and kneeled beside him. He turned the body over.

  Isaac, who had followed him, cried out wordlessly.

  Erich’s expression was one of utmost horror, as if he realized his impending doom. As if he knew it would be horrible and painful beyond endurance. A wound gaped in the old man’s chest where his heart had once been. The organ had been messily excised, it seemed, by a [26] sharp blade that had hacked through Erich’s sternum and ribcage.

  But that wasn’t all. As if to make up in some fantastic measure for the removal of Erich’s heart, a childishly crude cupid’s heart had been incised on Erich’s wrinkled forehead. Words had been cut in block letters in his right and left cheeks. They were hard to read in the stubble that covered Erich’s hollow, seamed cheeks like a salt and pepper snowfall. They were in German, which was not Jon’s native tongue. But Jon was good with languages and he’d lived in a German-dominated community all his life. He’d picked up enough Deutch to decipher the legend “I AM” on the old stockman’s right cheek. His left bore the word “RETURNED,” spilling over past his jawline and onto his leathery neck.

  Jon and Isaac looked at each other in baffled horror as Eisa chewed her cud in bovine contentment.

  2.

  The limp corpse almost seemed to squirm out of their grip when they tried to carry it by its arms and legs. Jon decided to carry the burden alone. Isaac helped him heft the body over his shoulders, but Jon was staggering under its awful weight after only a few steps. He soon acquiesced to the inevitable and allowed Isaac to bear the corpse most of the way to the village.

  They were in the northern part of the marsh, so they headed—as best as they could figure—toward the northernmost of the three bridges that crossed Skumring Kill and led to Geiststadt and solid land.

  The heat got worse, as did their thirst, but Jon ignored as best he could both the harsh sun and his dry throat. His thoughts centered on who in Geiststadt could possibly want Erich dead and on who had the savagery to kill him in such a terrible manner. But there was no one whom Jon could think of who’d be the answer to those questions.

  The rickety old North Bridge was the oldest across Skumring Kill. It had been built by the Derlichts when they’d settled the village over a hundred and twenty years ago. Isaac carried Erich’s body like a baby in his brawny arms, though even he was obviously struggling by the time they reached Johann Schmidt’s cooperage on the village outskirts. Isaac set the corpse down gently on the thick grass in the cooper’s yard and collapsed in [28] the shade of the spreading oak which had become the gathering place for those who wanted to talk business with Schmidt.

  Schmidt, a recent arrival to the village who’d opened shop a few weeks previously, was not present. Agatha Derlicht, who’d been inspecting the cooper’s stock of wooden barrels, casks, tubs, and buckets, watched with her hawk-like eyes as Isaac and Jon approached, body and cow both in tow. She was in her eighties, but still spare and straight. The hair pinned under her cap was snow white, but still as thick as it had been nearly seventy years before when she’d been not only the richest but also the most beautiful girl in Geiststadt. Agatha had gone lean with age. Her face and broad forehead was lined with creases, but she still had the elegant cheekbones of her youth and her clear blue eyes were still sharp with intelligence. The age-induced leanness of her face made her blade of a nose seem even more prominent, and her lost teeth gave an unsightly pucker to a generous mouth that once had been inviting but was now drawn in a perpetual grimace of distaste. Wiry veins stood out in the thin column of her neck and pulsed rhythmically in the hallows beside her forehead with every breath she took. She shook with a constant tremor that made her seem like a lean tree trembling in an unseen wind. Sometimes the tremor extended to her voice, making her stutter.

  Another woman, much younger and much prettier, was with her. Jon hadn’t yet met her, but like everyone else in the small community he knew that she was the cooper’s daughter. She’d been extolling the virtues of [29] her father’s workmanship to Frau Derlicht. The expression on her lovely young face changed from polite inquiry, to puzzlement, to outright horror as she realized the nature of Isaac’s burden.

  “Pardon ... ladies,” Isaac said, panting for breath. “I need ... to rest ... a moment.”

  The two women, one the oldest inhabitant of Geiststadt and probably the wealthiest, the other, along with her father, the newest, looked at Erich’s body with uncertainty and horror.

  “E-E-Erich.” That Agatha Derlicht realized immediately who it was was unsurprising in a community of three hundred. Nor did the old woman fail to notice the blood splashed on his jersey. “What happened to him? What kind of acci-ci-ci-dent—”

  She fell silent as Jon Noir shook his head.

  “No accident, Frau Derlicht. Someone—” He hesitated. He had no wish to shock either Agatha Derlicht or the beautiful young woman, but he had no other words to describe it. “Someone took his heart.”

  “Took?” Agatha leaned over creakily. “L-l-looks more l-l-like it was cut out. B-b-butchered.”

  “Oh.” The cooper’s daughter made a faint sound of distress as Jon bobbed his head meekly, acknowledging the truth of Agatha Derlicht’s words. He wasn’t afraid of Agatha Derlicht. Not exactly. Before Benjamin Noir’s arrival she’d controlled Geiststadt with an iron fist rarely softened by a brocade glove. Her father’s older brother had founded the village in 1710 on the remnants of an abandoned Dutch settlement, and the Derlichts had controlled the community ever since. Only Benjamin Noir [30] disputed their leadership, and had actually succeeded in making some inroads upon it in the last twenty years. The matriarch of the founding clan was the only Derlicht left from the second generation of settlers. She and her younger sister Katja, purportedly bedridden in her dark bedroom in the attic of Derlicht Haus, purportedly mad. But no one ever talked of Katja.

  Agatha Derlicht settled her disquieting gaze on the girl. The matriarch had little use for the faint-hearted. Even, or perhaps especially, among women.

  “You act like you’ve never seen a b-b-body,” she sniffed.

  “Not one like this,” the girl said.

  “Forgive us,” Jon said, turning towards her. “If we’d known you were here, we’d have avoided your yard. But we couldn’t carry him farther without a rest—”

  Jon looked into her eyes and found himself captivated. He had seen her a few times before at a distance. Never close enough to talk to. Her eyes were blue like Agatha Derlicht’s, but where the Frau’s eyes were like ice on a frozen pond in the dead of winter, hers were like a summer sky on a warm afternoon. Soft and soothing and somehow infinite. Jon thought he could get lost in those eyes. Her face was heart-shaped, her cheeks plump, her thick golden hair, uncontainable, slipping away from the pins that tried to hold it in
place under her cloth cap.

  “Perhaps I could prevail upon your father for the loan of a barrow, so we can get poor Erich home as quickly and, um, in as dignified a fashion as possible.”

  “Father’s resting now,” she said. Her voice was music. [31] “But, certainly, please feel free to take a barrow. I’ll fetch a cloth to cover your friend.”

  Jon bowed. “Thank you.”

  She turned and hastened to their living quarters in the loft above the cooper’s workshop.

  Jon turned to look again at Agatha Derlicht. She was observing him with a disapproving expression. But that was not unusual. He cleared his throat.

  “What do we do now, Frau?” Crimes of a serious nature were rare in the village. There hadn’t been a killing in Geiststadt in all of Jon’s life, as far as he knew. Any disputes that occurred were usually settled through appeal to Agatha Derlicht, though in recent years some villagers had come to Benjamin Noir to settle their grievances.

  “We must send a messenger to the magistrate in Brooklyn.” Brooklyn was the county seat, the source of law and government in Kings County. “They will send someone to investigate this hideous crime.”

  Jon and Isaac exchanged glances, nodding. Yes, that was the natural first step to take in finding the murderer. But who, Jon wondered again, who in Geiststadt could have done such a terrible thing? And furthermore, why? Erich had been a grumpy old man with a temper, but he was harmless. He owned nothing worthy of stealing. He had no personal enemies that Jon knew of, and Jon was pretty sure that he’d know if the old man did. Erich had been garrulous to a fault. But no one would kill an old man in such a savage manner because he could be ill tempered and sometimes talked too much. Would they?

  Jon chewed on his lower lip thoughtfully.

  [32] “What,” he asked Agatha Derlicht, “do you make of those words and signs carved on his cheeks and forehead?”

  “Eh?” The old lady seemed a little startled by Jon’s question. The incised words weren’t obvious. They hadn’t bled much and, as Jon had noted himself, they were almost hidden by Erich’s facial stubble. Also, Frau Agatha’s eyesight wasn’t what it had been. She bent down limberly for one her age, and looked closely at Erich’s face, grasping his cheeks almost absent-mindedly and turning his head on his stiffening neck to get a good look at both. “I AM RETURNED,” she read aloud.

  She looked back at Jon Noir, and he was surprised to see a suggestion of surprise on her face.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what it means.”

  “And the heart on his forehead? At least, I think it’s a heart.”

  She took another close look at the dead man’s face and shook her head, obviously baffled, as the cooper’s daughter approached with a length of linen cloth to cover the body. Agatha Derlicht lowered her head and said softly, “There’s no sense in bandying this about town. No sense in scaring people. This is something for the magistrate’s investigator. Perhaps the priest as well. Not for idle gossip in the tavern and stables. Understand?”

  Both Jon and Isaac nodded. The tone in her voice had turned her words from suggestion to command. “Yes, Frau Agatha,” they said in unison.

  [33] She nodded back at them. “Good boys. Now take him home.”

  Thomas drowsed, despite the stifling heat and the clouds of dust swirling about the coach as it jostled down the rutted dirt road to Brooklyn. At least the coach wasn’t crowded. Thomas had one bench all to himself. The other was occupied by a couple of cloddish farmer types who seemed bound for an even more distant—and pitiful—destination than Geiststadt. Thankfully, for some reason they seemed suspicious of Thomas. Other than eyeing him distrustfully and whispering to each other in an unfamiliar language, they left him alone. There was no attempt at travelers’ camaraderie, for which Thomas was grateful. He stretched out his long legs, achieving a certain amount of comfort as the coach bounced along. He closed his eyes. Perhaps even slept. His inchoate thoughts were part dream, part reminiscence, part desire, as the coach clattered down the road.

  There was nothing to look forward to in Geiststadt . The place itself was a tedious sinkhole that smelled mostly of cows and pigs. He liked no one in his family. He had active contempt for the three brothers who still resided in Noir Manor. As to the Captain—he was more of an impediment to Thomas’s ultimate goal than a revered parent. He respected, in his own manner, the old witch, Callie. Perhaps even feared her. A little, at least. She’d almost been like the mother he’d never known and scarcely missed. More importantly, she’d been his first teacher. She’d laid down the foundations of his real education, which, once he’d understood the basics of [34] reading and writing and manipulating human nature, had then been taken up by the Captain.

  He’d spent hours with the Captain, cooped up in that big gloomy room on the second floor that was Benjamin Noir’s study. And in what the Captain had called his “work room,” a claustrophobic underground chamber in a crypt below Noir Manor’s basement. It was an elaborate chamber where the Captain stored and experimented with dangerous materials, chemical and otherwise.

  It was there that Benjamin Noir had taught Thomas his first lessons about the nature of heka and how it could be used to transform base materials. They couldn’t create gold from lead. Not yet, anyway, though the Captain was exploring some very promising avenues along that line. They’d had some very tantalizing near-successes. Near-successes that would have astonished Thomas’s oh-so-learned superiors at Columbia, if he’d been foolish enough to mention them.

  Thomas was well aware that those experiments were only for the Captain and himself. And perhaps Callie, though her talents were more visceral than intellectual. The clay she preferred to work with was more basic. Closer to nature. Fire and water. Animals. People, even, were the elements that Callie knew how to mold best. From her and the Captain Thomas had obtained the knowledge he valued most highly. The rest, the book learning he’d received from the limited intellects at Columbia, was mostly polish. He needed the proper veneer to fit in comfortably with high society. To make the proper contacts in the proper world in which he really wanted to live.

  [35] The Captain seemed unaccountably happy living in Geiststadt. So did his cloddish twin brother, Jonathan, whose idea of a good time was chasing butterflies through the swamp. His world would be considerably wider, Thomas promised himself.

  Thomas almost smiled when he thought of his twin brother. Jonathan was useful in his own limited way. Someone had to milk the cows and butcher the hogs. That was his rightful place.

  As she did in so many circumstances, nature favored the strong. The brave. The decisive. He’d been so favored since before his birth. Thomas had no conscious memories of that event, but he’d retained murky visions of it in his brain. Dreams, perhaps. They were vague and inchoate, probably much like the primeval chaos that the Captain liked to go on and on and on about. Somehow Thomas knew that even in the womb he’d bested Jonathan, and so became the Captain’s favorite son. He would inherit. That wasn’t conjecture. It was knowledge. He’d seen the will the Captain had thought was securely locked in his desk.

  While Jonathan remained the fourteenth son. In Geiststadt. With cow shit on his boots.

  By the time Jon and Isaac returned bearing Erich’s body, the entire Noir household had been stirred up by another recent arrival. A young, red-haired man was directing some of the field hands as they unloaded trunks of clothing, furniture, and odd bric-a-brac that Jon immediately recognized as belonging to his brother Thomas. Automatically his hand went to the base of his throat [36] where his tightly buttoned collar hid what he euphemistically thought of as his “birthmark.” Actually only he and Thomas sensed its real significance from cloudy memories that barely reached the level of consciousness but had always had fueled the intensely antagonistic relationship that existed between them. Thomas had tried to kill him once. They both knew it. Neither was ever likely to forget it.

  The sudden appearance of Thomas’s possessions, Jon kne
w, meant that his brother was almost home for the summer. He frowned. He’d hoped that the insufferable fop was going to fritter away a few more weeks in Manhattan, wasting life, time, and money at his usual prodigious rate.

  “What in name of the good Lord is this durn thing?” one of the fieldhands asked wonderingly as he and a companion manhandled a large copper basin out of the wagon, carefully setting it on the ground. It looked like some kind of cooking vessel, only it was large enough to stew a whole calf.

  “Oh, that.” The red-haired man spoke with a lilt that Jon recognized as coming from Ireland. He was probably, Jon thought, a recent arrival from the old country, perhaps right off the boat. “That’s His Honor’s bathing basin, isn’t it.”

  The farmhand scratched his head.

  “Bathing basin?” he asked.

  “Yep,” the Irishman said with a grin. “Master Thomas fills it with hot water, climbs into it, and washes himself.”

  “Washes himself?” the field hand exclaimed in disbelief. “You mean, all of him? He washes all of himself?”

  [37] The Irishman nodded, grinning. “With soap. Sometimes two, three times a week.”

  The two farmhands looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “Someone should tell him that ain’t healthy.” The hired man shivered. “All that water. Why, you could drown in it.”

  “Mebbe,” the Irishman said, “but His Honor thinks it’s very progressive.” He leaned forward and said, confidentially, “He gets his ideas from an Englishman, he does. Beau Bumfull. Or something like that.”

  The hired man shrugged, as if it was all beyond him. Like all normal people, he submitted to soap and water maybe once a month in the summer and much less often during the cooler months. He motioned to his fellow worker and together they lifted the bathing basin, carrying it towards the manor.

  Like everyone else in the vicinity, they stopped and stared at Jon and Isaac as they approached. Isaac was leading the cow while Jon pushed the barrow with Erich’s body. The workmen’s eyes widened and they just managed not to drop the bathing basin as they recognized Erich’s corpse.