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

by John J. Miller

  “McCool,” he said, “go up to my room and fetch that perfume I picked up the other day. I fancy that it would be a good gift for the young lady.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” McCool sketched a casual salute and went off on the errand as Thomas smiled down on Jonathan.

  “It’s all the rage in Manhattan. All the fashionable young ladies use it. I’m sure it’ll make a favorable impression on this country girl.”

  “I’m sure,” Jon muttered as he stood and stalked out of the kitchen, his breakfast only half finished. His brother’s low laughter followed him.

  Thomas wore his finest waistcoat and shirt and newly shined Wellington boots. He was as splendid a picture of young manhood, he was sure, as could be found east of Manhattan, including all of Brooklyn and Flatbush, let alone Geiststadt. Just to be doubly sure, however, he stopped off in the study to examine a certain papyrus that just might pertain to the occasion. He would work the spell, if needed, that evening. With Callie’s help, of course. For now, Thomas decided, he’d try his native charm on the girl. Often, that was all that was necessary.

  He and McCool made their way to Schmidt’s shop. McCool carried the gift nicely done up in tissue paper and ribbon. Thomas always had a few bottles of the cheap perfume on hand, just in case.

  It was, Thomas thought, a pleasant morning, if one [116] liked country scenery. He saw Trudi in the yard, scattering feed to a small flock of chickens, and felt the day’s prospects suddenly brighten. Jonathan was right about the girl. There was something almost irresistibly attractive about her. Thomas had known more beautiful girls. Certainly more sophisticated girls.

  But Trudi had an innocent, almost naive air about her that Thomas found refreshing. Her youthful good looks were also more than adequate. The pleasure of having her for herself, alone, might be even greater than the pleasure he’d get from taking her away from Jonathan.

  She saw him approach, and smiled. The chickens cavorted at her feet for more feed, but she stopped to drop a pretty curtsey in response to his elaborate bow.

  “Good morning Miss Schmidt,” Thomas said. “A delightful day made even more delightful by your presence.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Noir.”

  A slight blush stole upon her cheeks at Thomas’s words. That’s a good sign, he thought, a very good sign. He put his hand out without taking his eyes off Trudi and McCool slouched forwards with his usual insouciant grin, placed the tissue-wrapped package in Thomas’s hand, then quickly stepped backward.

  “A small token of welcome to Geiststadt,” Thomas said, handing her the package. “Forgive its lateness, but please accept its sincerity.”

  “Why, Mr. Noir—”

  “Please,” Thomas said, flashing his most engaging grin. “There are so many Mr. Noir’s around here that that form of address is much too confusing. One might think [117] you were addressing the Captain. Or even my brother Jonathan.” His laughter showed the absurdity of that notion. “Call me Thomas, for, the sake of clarity, if nothing else.”

  “Very well ... Thomas,” she said. She put the feed basket on the ground for the chickens to fight over and unwrapped the tissue paper, exposing the delicate hand-blown glass bottle. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

  Thomas smiled. “Here.” He stepped forward among the squalling chickens, who, he felt, were detracting from the scene. “Try some here.”

  He lifted the glass stopper from the bottle and took Trudi’s forearm in his other hand, rotating it to expose that the underside of her wrist. Delicately he trailed the stopper along her wrist and was happy to note a tiny shiver along her arm, almost suppressed. If he hadn’t still been holding her, he would have missed it.

  He released her hand and she brought it close to her face and sniffed. She smiled.

  “All the fashionable young women in Manhattan are wearing this scent,” he said, smiling back. It was somewhat of an exaggeration, of course, as this was a nice enough but relatively cheap perfume he bought by the pint. But she couldn’t know that. “You, of course, would fit right in with them.”

  Trudi’s smile turned to gentle laughter.

  “You flatter me.”

  “I only speak the truth!” Thomas protested, again flashing his engaging grin.

  “Manhattan.” He frowned momentarily as her attention [118] turned away from him to some internal desire of her own. “It must be wonderful.”

  “Oh, it’s fairly nice,” Thomas said. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  He smiled to himself again as he succeeded in dragging her attention back to him.

  “Oh, yes, please. But first let me put the feed away. Then I must make sure my father has had his breakfast. I won’t be a moment,” she said, and turned and ran back to the shop.

  “Fairly nice,” McCool said in a dead-on imitation of Thomas’s voice.

  Thomas glanced at him. “Well, I’m sure it’s no Tipperary. That’s where you came from in the Auld Sod, eh?”

  McCool spit on the ground. “Fuck Tipperary. And the Auld Sod. I was starving there.”

  Thomas nodded. “Don’t you forget that.”

  They waited together. When the first scream came they looked at each other. Thomas’s face was blank of emotion, McCool’s blandly innocent. They ran together to the shop. The screams hadn’t stopped. They were coming louder and closer together. When they entered the shop they saw Trudi standing at the entrance to the room where Schmidt slept, which was partitioned off from the work area by cloth hangings too ragged and disreputable to be called curtains.

  Trudi was staring at her father’s bloody corpse. It sprawled across the bed, throat slashed, blade still embedded at the end point of the cut. Screams welled from her throat one after the other although her face was curiously blank, as if she didn’t even realize she was screaming.

  [119] Thomas grabbed her arm and turned her into his body, sheltering her from the gruesome sight of her father’s corpse. She went to him willingly, putting her face against his broad chest, resting in the refuge of his arms.

  “Shhh, shhh,” he said, patting her hair with the gentleness of a mother cat calming a frightened kitten.

  Her screams subsided into sobs. Thomas looked at McCool over her head, and nodded. McCool darted out of the room for help as Thomas continued to hold the grieving girl.

  The love spell, he thought, might not be necessary after all.

  Jon felt almost foolish carrying his homemade bayonet spear. The old graveyard was utterly without menace in the bright daylight. The fear-filled atmosphere the night before had vanished with the darkness. It was now just another lovely late spring day, with the official beginning of summer—and Jon and Thomas’s birthday—only three days away. Thomas. He forced the image of his brother and Trudi from his mind.

  It was still before noon. Jon had stopped briefly in the Glass House for a quick look at the Corpse Flower before picking up Isaac at the cow barn and heading for HangedMan’s Hill. He didn’t want to make this little jaunt on his own. Besides, Isaac was almost as good a tracker as he was himself.

  But first they had to discover if the strange glowing figure from the night before had even left tracks. Jon had the disturbing notion that the thing they’d seen was probably a ghost, or specter of some kind. In that case [120] it could hardly leave a material trace of its passing. He supposed, anyway, not being an expert on the physical manifestations of psychic presences. On the other hand—they had undoubtedly both seen it, and Isaac had seemed both deaf and blind to the evening’s other, assuredly spiritual manifestations.

  All of his doubts were laid to rest when Isaac called Jon over to where the forest margin blended into the grassland. Isaac pointed wordlessly, as if he didn’t want Jon to be influenced by anything he might say about his discovery. Jon sank down to his knees next to his friend, his sharp eyes picking up the clues left on the ground and among low-lying branches of the surrounding trees. He nodded.

  “Looks like this is it,” Jon said. He reached out and gently swept his
hands over a patch of moss whose delicate stems were crushed and bent as if someone had stood in place for awhile, watching something in the graveyard below. To confirm this, Jon stepped gingerly in the same spot, turned, and looked down upon the cemetery. He fingered a broken branch at the level of his throat. “Whomever stood here had a fine view of the graveyard—they snapped off this branch to make it even clearer.”

  “Way shorter than me,” Isaac said. “Shorter than you, even. A child?”

  “Or a small woman,” Jon said. He fell back to his knees and closely examined the nearby ground. There—a small dislodged stone. Further on a broken stem from a leafy shrub, snapped when whoever—or whatever—passed by and brushed against it.

  [121] “It’s a trail, all right,” Jon said.

  “Left by a human being,” Isaac said. “Thank the Lord.”

  Jon grinned, but he couldn’t tease his companion too much. He’d been just as worried as Isaac that they were after a ghost.

  It was slow going. It took over an hour to follow the infrequent visual clues-crushed or broken plants, disturbed sticks or stones, scatterings of fallen leaves that had once been piles—a quarter mile before it led to a somewhat more traveled trail.

  This more clearly defined path probably had started out as a game trail, used by the deer, raccoon, rabbits, and other wild denizens of HangedMan’s Hill to travel to favorite eating or drinking spots, but it had been definitely been used by at least one person. Occasionally the two hunters could discern human footprints. All seemed to have been made by the same set of small, badly worn shoes.

  The trail snaked up HangedMan’s Hill, taking them deep into a forest largely untouched by the villagers who lived in the flatland below. Certainly some hunters may have passed through occasionally, and Jon and Isaac may have come close sometimes during their rambles across the countryside, but the center of Geiststadt life was the plains below the ridge way, not the hills themselves. After only a short time on the game trail they both realized that they were in an unfamiliar part of the heavily forested hillside.

  It was dark inside the forest, cool, and quiet. They could smell the rich loam at their feet, piled thick with decades, probably centuries, of dark humus compounded [122] of fallen leaves and rotted branches and moss encrusted logs.

  Jon was enjoying the various rustic sensations that so fully enveloped his senses that he almost passed another faint path that forked off the game trail, leading up the mouth of a small, knife-edged gorge. He caught Isaac by the arm and pointed. Isaac nodded. Their silence was unintentional—an unconscious desire to fit in with the magnificent forest which surrounded them.

  They paused at the gorge’s threshold, listening to a soft murmuring babble that seemed to accentuate the silence rather than break it. They followed the sound and discovered a wandering forest stream. Jon stooped and drank a handful of water. It was sweet and cool. Isaac joined him and they drank until their thirst was slaked, then they continued on their way on up the gorge. The path was now was almost as obvious as a city street.

  The canyon dead-ended thirty yards before them, apparently untouched by human hands. They looked at each other uncertainly. Jon shrugged. He put a hand to his mouth, cupping it.

  “Hello,” Jon called out. “Anyone here?”

  The silence, but for water running over stone, continued, and for a moment Jon thought that their trip had been in vain. Then he felt, somehow, the irresistible pressure of eyes gazing at him, and he turned to see a small, raggedly dressed old woman who had come upon them from the rear, silent as creeping death.

  “Agatha Derlicht!”

  As soon as he blurted the name, Jon knew he was wrong.

  [123] She was too short for one thing, and her hair, though clean and snow white, was wild and unbound. Her clothes were much patched and, needed patching where they weren’t. But he knew why he’d thought she was the eldest Derlicht when he first glimpsed her. Her resemblance to the old woman was unmistakable. She had the same thin face—though even more weathered by sun and wind than Agatha’s—the same blade of a nose and hawklike eyes.

  Her eyes were wild when they first focused on the boys, but she seemed to recognize them and relax at least a little.

  “No,” she croaked in a voice that seemed rusty from disuse. “No. Not ‘Agatha,’” she said. “I am Katja Derlicht.”

  “But—but,” Jon stuttered. “You’ve been dead for fifteen years!”

  She laughed wildly, like one insane.

  “Only to my oh-so-loving family,” she said when she finally regained a semblance of control.

  “I don’t understand,” Jon said.

  Katja’s bitter gaze turned inward, as if her sharp old eyes were fixed on a scene occurring in some other place, at some other time.

  “She kept me locked up in that dark old house for years. For years. She knew I loved the sun and flowers and wind on my face. She knew I hated small, enclosed places. But she kept me chained in a little room with a little window so I couldn’t feel the rain or dance in the moonlight or talk to the birds and the foxes. But I escaped from my rotten prison. Fifteen years ago I broke [124] my bonds. I escaped to the sun and moon and stars and have never looked back!”

  “Why?” Jon asked. “Why did your sister keep you locked up all those years?”

  Katja looked at him and he could feel the power of her eyes. It was like the heka that his father had told him about. There was no denying that the old woman was animated by some kind of supernatural energy.

  “She knew I was different,” Katja Derlicht said. She smiled and for a moment her face was transformed. The madness was gone. Her features were transfused by a gentle light, as if shining from within. “If I’d been fifty ... even forty years younger when your father had arrived in Geiststadt ... Well, no use sighing about what might have been. I was the age I was. Your father wanted a young wife. Still, it seems to me that if Fate had only been kinder, Noir and Derlicht would have become one twenty years ago.” Katja Derlicht’s expression became troubled, but the sadness that touched it was a human sadness, not insanity. “Fate being what it is, I see trouble ahead. Years. Decades. Centuries, even.” She sighed and turned her worried face to Jon’s again. “But you, you of all Noirs who could have been my child, be careful. The next days are critical. Danger abounds.”

  “The killer?” Jon asked eagerly.

  Katja Derlicht nodded.

  “Is he of Geiststadt?” he asked.

  “It is hard to say,” she said. “But I think not.”

  “Is he ... human?”

  “I think that has already been answered for you.”

  [125] “By the ghosts, you mean? The spirits who spoke to me last night.”

  She only nodded.

  “I really did hear the voices of the dead, then?” Jon asked, wonderingly.

  “You are your father’s son. It’s not surprising that you have some of his abilities.”

  Jon suppressed a shiver. “Even if I don’t want them?”

  Katja Derlicht frowned sternly.

  “Don’t turn your back on your talents,” she said. “They may mean the difference between life and death some day. Some day very soon now.”

  Jon nodded abstractedly. It was all rather difficult to take in. He had known that his father had been exploring strange paths all these years. But he had never pried into his father’s business. It seemed, though, that perhaps he was involved more deeply in the doings of his father than he realized. Probably all the Noirs were. Maybe even all of Geiststadt.

  Jon looked at Katja Derlicht and nodded solemnly.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll be careful. But what about you? You’re all alone out here.”

  She laughed, and this time she sounded almost human.

  “Alone? Hardly. I have the sun and stars and moon for companionship. The birds and rabbits, foxes and possums, are all my friends. This is where I had longed to be all my life. I am in no danger now.”

  “All right.” Jon
nodded dubiously. “Can we come see you again?”

  “I’d like that,” Katja Derlicht said. “I do miss the sound of human voices sometimes. Living human voices.”

  [126] Jon and Isaac exchanged glances.

  “Do you want us to bring you anything?” Isaac asked.

  “My needs are few,” she said, “and taken care of by all that is around me.”

  She gestured at the forest and hillside and stream, and Jon knew that, odd as it seemed, the old woman was indeed content with her strange life, and now at peace with the world.

  “Been out tramping in the woods again?” Thomas was perched comfortably on a chair on the porch. It was mid-afternoon and sunny, with the uraeus figure beaming like a beacon above the doorway to Noir Manor.

  Jonathan put one foot on the staircase leading to the porch and stopped to look at his brother.

  “Yes,” he said, “I have. How have you been wasting your day?”

  Thomas smiled like a hungry cat that spies an unlucky mouse well within reach.

  “Hardly wasting it, my dear brother,” he said. “Fortunately I was at the proper place in the proper time to console Trudi.”

  “Console Trudi?”

  Thomas’s smile widened as he saw the sudden look of concern on Jon’s face.

  “What for? What happened?”

  “Her father is dead,” Thomas said carelessly. “Killed himself, it seems, in remorse over the murders.”

  “Dead?” Jon asked, stunned. “Killed himself?”

  “Do try to keep up, dear boy.” Thomas stretched languidly and made a production out of consulting his [127] pocket watch. “The Captain should be down any time now. We’re going to examine the body. Care to come along?”

  “Not really,” Jon said. “But I will.”

  “Too late,” Thomas murmured, “and a penny short. As usual.”

  This killing, Jon thought, was not like the others. Not at all.

  Five of them were in the room with the corpse. Jon. His father. Thomas and his man McCool. And Agatha Derlicht.

  The reconstruction of events was simple. Perhaps deceptively so. Johann Schmidt had apparently sat on his bed fully dressed and taken a sharp edged woodworking tool to his own throat, cutting it through in a single motion. He had fallen back among his bedclothes and quickly bled to death. Both the body and blanket were stiff with clotted, dried blood that was attracting hordes of flies. A scrap of paper next to Schmidt’s pillow had been touched by the spray of blood that had burst from the cooper’s throat, but the brief message scrawled upon it by a shaky hand was untouched.