Thomas drowsed in his comfortable chair. The remnants of his meal were on the tray before him. The last of the hock was in his glass.
Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was too much beef for dinner. Perhaps it was too much ambition fulfilled too easily. But Thomas dreamed. Surprisingly, it was a disturbing dream.
Thomas was in his room, sitting in his chair, relaxing now that the day’s work was done and his dreams were all fulfilled. Thoughts of Manhattan danced in his head, [191] of fine clothes and even finer women. He would, he suddenly realized have to be very careful indeed in that regard. He was the thirteenth son of a thirteenth son. If the Captain had been right, he, Thomas, would only have to sire thirteen sons himself and he’d gain an entire other life to live. He’d even escape the messy, tedious aspects of infancy and childhood.
Of course, for all the Captain’s sureness, something had gone wrong in the process of transmigration. But it was in the books somewhere. He’d find and correct the Captain’s error.
As far as he knew, so far he’d sired no sons. There had been two children, but both had been girls. Two others had been aborted. Probably they didn’t count, but he’d have to make sure. Perhaps some other children had resulted from some of his very casual liaisons, but he didn’t think so. Women of that sort usually knew how to take care of themselves. Besides, if issue had come from any of his informal affairs, almost certainly the women involved would have come sucking around for money. It was in their nature. But that had never happened.
He was grateful to the Captain for his hints to immortality. He knew where he’d probably find the relevant manuscripts. The Captain had a shelf of forbidden volumes he’d kept locked in a special compartment in his crypt. The applicable tome was probably among them. It wouldn’t take long to unravel the mystery of the thirteenth son of the thirteenth son.
He’d best get busy, though, and start siring those thirteen sons. It was likely to be a long process [192] interrupted by the birthing of useless girl children. Trudi Schmidt would be good to start on. He doubted that she’d last through the entire process—after all, the Captain had had four wives himself. But he had to make a start somewhere. She was an excellent choice. The village would be sympathetic if they got married soon. Perhaps within the month. After all, they’d both lost their fathers suddenly and violently. They deserved to find some measure of happiness with each other.
On that note the dream shifted again—if he was in fact dreaming—to the scene he’d dreamed before, the scene of their wedding night. It made Thomas slightly uncomfortable. After all, it hadn’t gone well the last time he’d had it. But now there was nothing to be afraid of. The first time it hadn’t been a real dream. The Captain, who had orchestrated that version of the vision, was no longer around to lead Thomas’s psyche down dark and dangerous paths.
Thomas was free to dream his own dreams. Maybe, he thought, as he reclined in his bed and watched his wife’s ripe charms emerge as she slowly undressed, that was why his dreaming brain was repeating this scenario. After all, left to its natural conclusion, it would end quite pleasantly.
But, again, something went quite suddenly, desperately, wrong.
Trudi stood smiling and naked before Thomas’s bed. But suddenly, without a sense of transition, it wasn’t Trudi at all standing there. Nor was it some sort of inscrutable symbol. It was a man. He was shorter than Thomas, but as muscular. Perhaps more so. Worse, there [193] was a hardness to his expression, a look in his dark eyes that said he was used to violence. That he was unafraid of it. Worse yet, though, were the marks of violence on his body.
His face had been battered. It had been beaten by something harder than human fists. One eye was swollen shut by knots and bruises. His lips were bloodied. The teeth behind them were ragged. Some had been knocked cleanly out. Others had been shattered, broken off not far from the root but still set in his puffy and discolored jaw.
He was wearing some sort of military uniform. Thomas had no idea what kind. But it had seen hard use. It was dirty and bloody. His coat still hung over his shoulders, but his shirt had been ripped away. Thomas could see the damage that had been done to his chest. To the ribs hacked and cracked, to the torn flesh that had once covered a beating heart. Thomas couldn’t see within the man’s chest, but he was suddenly certain that no heart beat there.
He stood before Thomas’s chair, a vision of doom and destruction, looking upon him with steady, unblinking eyes.
“Who are you?” Thomas asked. “What do you want?”
The man smiled. It was ghastly.
“You know who I am.” The phantom replied in German, though Thomas’s questions had been put in English. It was a wonder that his voice could flow intelligibly from his mangled mouth.
Thomas thought of denying any such knowledge, but what did it matter? He shrugged.
[194] “And if I do?”
“If you do,” the specter said, almost reasonably, “then I want you to stop.”
“Stop?” Thomas asked. Some of him wondered at the utter banality of their conversation. Most of him didn’t want to think about it all.
“Stop blaming me for things I haven’t done. Stop using my behavior as a guide. As an example for your own conduct.”
Thomas couldn’t believe it. Here he had finally rid himself of the Captain. And now some other being had arrived from some Godforsaken netherworld to dictate to him. He felt a flash of anger that was more than mere bravado. It was like the squalls that erupted from his lungs at his birth, a raging hatred towards a universe that should have been his own personal domain, yet frustrated his desires at every single turn.
“Be gone spirit!” Thomas roared. “I plotted the death of my own father because he stood in my way. And you’re a complete stranger. I care even less for your reputation, let alone your feelings. Get your ugly, filthy carcass out of my sight, or you will know my anger!”
The dead Hessian laughed aloud, and Thomas felt as if the thing’s cold hand had touched the base of his spine. He shivered in a sudden spasm of fear.
“Your anger!” the specter repeated, as if those words were a punch line to a very funny joke. He leaned suddenly forward. Thomas could see into the cavity of his chest and confirm what was not there. “Your anger is nothing compared to mine, boy. I was a mercenary all my life. I lived in anger for decades. I killed men, women, [195] and children without compunction or thought, let alone regret, and then I myself was taken, tortured, and slain. Anger! I lay for over sixty years in an unmarked grave constantly feeling the pain of my death. It never left me for a moment for all those years. Blades hacking through my pulsing flesh. Snapping my living bones. A cruel hand closing about my beating heart and yanking it from the hole cut into my chest. But that wasn’t the worst of it. No.
“I felt for over sixty years the choking earth in my open, screaming mouth. I felt it press down upon me, frigid in the winter, scorching in the summer. I felt the worms eat my tongue, boy. I felt them crawl through my guts. You think to compare your anger to mine?”
Thomas cowered back into the depths of his chair.
“I’ve done my penance and have achieved my peace. I’ll not let you destroy it for me.”
The Hessian began to fade, as if he no longer had enough strength to maintain his appearance, even in a dream. Thomas watched him dissolve like a cloud on a windy day, until the specter was nothing but a transparent smear of white across the landscape of his room.
Thomas blinked, suddenly panicked by the realization that he actually wasn’t sleeping. That all the while the Hessian had been in his room, he’d been wide awake.
Jon had never realized that life could change so fast.
Four days ago, he’d planned to spend the summer studying butterflies. Now he had to redeem his vow to find a killer. The only problem was, he had no idea how to go about it. He wasn’t a constable. He didn’t know [196] how to put clues together to solve a crime. If his suspicions were correct—and Thomas, it seemed, was in agreement with
his own suspicions—was the crime even solvable? How can you bring to justice a man dead nearly seventy years?
The Hessian’s bones were safely ensconced in the wooden casket in the Glass House. Could they be the key to the whole affair?
One person might know. One person seemed to have some faint idea about what was going on. Katja Derlicht. As odd as that seemed. Where did the old woman’s knowledge come from? Had she spent her years studying occult knowledge and ancient wisdom like his father? He should go to her. Question her. She must know more about the strange happenings around the village than she’d divulged so far.
What if, though, she was just playing with him? What if she was releasing information in drips and drabs, perhaps wrong information, or information designed to make him draw the wrong conclusions? She was a Derlicht. Could he trust her at all? She had said that she’d harbored feelings for Benjamin Noir. What if those feelings had turned sour over the years, eventually leading her to plot his destruction? What if she had called up the shade of the Hessian to carry out her black desires?
One person might know. Might have the key to understanding Katja’s motivations. It was late. Most of Geiststadt was asleep, but it’s said that the old sleep little. Jon knew that it had been true of his father. Perhaps it was true of his father’s greatest rival as well.
Derlicht Haus was a huge jumble of stone and dark [197] wood bulking menacingly in the night. Jon stood before it alone. He couldn’t ask Isaac to accompany him on this quest. He’d already exposed his friend to much danger. Besides, it wasn’t as if he were going through the marsh or the old cemetery on HangedMan’s Hill. He was in the village. How dangerous could it really be?
Pompey answered the door as Jon rapped on it with the ponderous bronze knocker. The old butler didn’t look surprised, merely supercilious.
“Yes?”
“I have to see Frau Derlicht.”
“At this time of night?” Pompey asked. He was dressed in a robe, stockings, and slippers. His puff of white hair was haloed by the ring of light cast by the full candelabra he held high in his right hand.
“It’s important—”
“Let him in, P-P-Pompey.”
Agatha Derlicht stood behind the old butler, a single candle wavering in her palsied grip. She, too, wore a dressing gown. Her hair had been let down for the night so that it spilled in thick white coils around her shoulders. She looked as old as a saint in the candlelight, but her eyes were as hard as a sinner’s.
“Pompey, bring some t-t-tea to the sitting room. Come along,” she said over her shoulder to Jon.
Inside the silent parlor it was dark and surprisingly chilly, as if the air in the room had been left over from early spring.
“I’ll do that,” Jon offered as Agatha Derlicht started to light the multi-armed candelabrum sitting on the mantle, holding her single candle with both hands which [198] were shaking more than usual. She relinquished it to Jon with something of a sigh and tottered over to the sofa, sinking down into it creakily. Jon finished lighting the candelabrum, then sat down in a stiff, uncomfortable chair across from her. He had never seen her look so old.
“I’m sorry to wake you—” Jon began, but she waved off his apology with a shake of her trembling hand.
“I wasn’t sleeping. I’ve slept little since ... since the d-d-deaths began.” Uncharacteristically, she looked down upon her hands laced together in her lap, and not at Jon. “The fortunes of both our families have fallen. Rolf was to take over the family when I passed on. He wasn’t much—but this is not a good time for the Derlichts. There is no one else. Roderick, perhaps. Perhaps one of the other boys. But I’ll need five, maybe six years to get him ready.” She shook her head. “I don’t know if I have it in me.”
Jon looked at her, shocked. When she finally looked up into her eyes, she read his expression easily enough.
“Surprised? No need to be. I’m an old w-w-woman. I’m tired. I’m ready to go to my rest. But I can’t possibly, now. Not with Thomas set to take over the Noir fortune. Once he does there’ll be no D-D-Derlichts left in Geiststadt within twenty years.”
“You can’t believe that,” Jon said. “I know he can be vicious—”
Agatha Derlicht laughed. For the first time that night she sounded like the formidable old woman Jon had known all his life.
“Can be v-vicious? You know your brother. He’s [199] vicious as a starving dog denied meat. He wants what he wants when he wants it. He’ll let nothing stand in his way. I’m telling you this because you’re our only hope. Our only chance for protection against your brother’s vaunting desires.”
“Me?” Jon asked.
“Of course,” Agatha Derlicht said. As she spoke her posture straightened. Her gaze sharpened. She even lost the stutter that plagued her most in moments of weariness and doubt. “Who else could curb his ambition now that your father is gone? Seth? James? Ludicrous, both of them. Unchecked, Thomas will devour all of Geiststadt, and far beyond, to feed his desire for wealth and dominion.” She fell silent for a moment. “Your father was powerful in many ways. He had an uncommon strength. He was ungodly and no doubt his soul now wr-wr-writhes in Hell. But he followed an oddly personal road. He had strange interests. He was not adverse to making money, but only to support himself in a comfortable manner and finance his profane researches. He didn’t accumulate wealth for the sake of wealth or material things for the sake of showing his wealth to the world. Thomas is different. Surely you realize that.”
Jon nodded. His father’s greatest desire had been to be left alone. He’d been happy—at least as happy as he ever seemed to be—as long as things were going smoothly and he didn’t have to be bothered with mundane matters. Thomas, on the other hand, wouldn’t be satisfied unless he could watch the power flow directly from his hands. His father hadn’t cared how or when the barn was mucked out as long as the animals were healthy and [200] producing. Thomas wouldn’t get involved in the actual mucking, either, but it would have to be done to his precise and exacting order. And he would watch over everything with a magnifying glass to make sure that it was. In the end, he wouldn’t be happy until all the barns in sight were under his command. All the barns, as Agatha Derlicht said, in Geiststadt. And eventually, beyond.
“Surely,” Jon said, “you can stand up to him.”
“For a while,” she acknowledged. “And if God grants me enough time I’ll raise up a younger Derlicht, my grandson Roderick, or one of his brothers, who will be capable of taking my place.”
“What about your sister?” Jon asked, finally seeing an opportunity to turn this disturbing discussion to the path that had brought him there.
“My s-s-sister?” Agatha Derlicht frowned.
“Yes, Katja. I know that ...” Jon’s voice ran down at the sudden peculiar expression that over took Agatha Derlicht’s face. It was something he had never seen on it before. It was fear. Actual undisguised fear.
“My sister Katja is dead,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.
A sudden knock on the door made them both jump. It opened and Pompey entered, bearing a silver tea tray with pot, cups, saucers, and all the accouterments. Jon and Agatha Derlicht looked at each other guiltily as if they were lovers caught at a secret tryst.
“Tea, madame,” Pompey announced. He set the tray down on the table in front of her. “Shall I pour?”
[201] “No,” Agatha Derlicht said. “Th-th-thank you. That will be all.”
“As you say.” He shot Jon a suspicious, supercilious look and glided from the room, pulling the door shut after him.
They resumed their conversation, the teapot sitting before them untouched and cooling
“That’s impossible,” Jon said.
“S-s-she’s dead,” Agatha Derlicht insisted. “S-s-she’s been dead for almost f-f-fifteen years.”
“That’s impossible,” Jon repeated flatly. “I’ve seen her myself, twice, in the last week. I’ve spoken to her—”
He fell silent at
the expression that crawled over Agatha Derlicht’s face. It went beyond surprise, beyond fear, well into terror. Mind-numbing, soul-killing terror. He suddenly felt that he’d better explain himself, but was uncertain what words would comfort the old woman trembling before him.
“She told me that you’d kept her in the house. That she escaped some years ago, and has been living as a hermit in a sheltered spot in a small side canyon up on HangedMan’s Hill. I—I sort of figured you’d been slipping her food and supplies on the side. She seemed quite well and happy. Somehow in tune with the strangeness that has always been a part of Geiststadt.”
“She was t-t-that,” Agatha Derlicht said, almost dreamily. “My sister was always odd. Perhaps she should have been born a Noir rather than a Derlicht, though of course there were no Noirs in Geiststadt when she was born. As a child she was always running about the w-w-woods. She refused to dress ... appropriately. She liked [202] to go to the old Dutch cemetery. She said she had friends there. When she matured she was quite a beauty. There was trouble with m-m-men. Sev-ev-everal men. She ... we finally had to ... restrict her ... to the house.”
“She had a free spirit,” Jon interpreted, “so you locked her up.”
A flash of anger lit Agatha Derlicht for a moment, then it vanished, as if she’d recognized that there was justice in Jon’s words.
“For her own s-s-safety. There was a child. It was stillborn. After that, she was never really healthy again, and her ideas got ... odder. She would go out at night. In the winter during storms wearing nothing but her d-d-dress and a shawl. She almost d-d-died several times before we decided to keep her in the house. In a spacious room in the attic.”
“For how long?” Jon asked. He couldn’t stop himself from asking the question.
“F-f-forty years,” Agatha Derlicht whispered. She was silent for almost a moment. “She d-d-died, as I said, f-f-fifteen y-y-years ago. She left a note s-s-saying she wanted her body to be p-p-put in her favorite spot. A s-s-small cave, as you said, on t-t-the Hill overlooking the cemetery. We granted her w-w-wish.”
THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Book 1: Shades of Night, Falling Page 16