“I’m not lying to you,” Jon said in a dogged voice. “I did see her. Isaac, too. And Trudi Schmidt.”
For a moment his voice caught on Trudi’s name, and he told himself, go on. Go on and try to forget.
“I believe you. But it was not my sister you saw. It wa-wa-was her ghost.”
[203] Jon swallowed hard. This was not the truth he’d come to find.
“She spoke to me,” Jon said wonderingly. “She told me ... things ...”
“Yes?” Agatha Derlicht said, encouraging him to go on as his voice faltered.
“About the Dutch ghosts of the cemetery. About the Hessian.”
“Yes,” the old woman confirmed. “Her c-c-childhood f-f-friend.”
“The butcher of Geiststadt?” Jon asked. “He was her childhood friend?”
“She was so-so-so sensitive!” Agatha Derlicht said. “We thought she was only responding imaginatively to those strange, gruesome old stories. She told me he was sorry. He was repentant of his crime. She told me he b-b-begged for forgiveness and she was t-t-trying to help him find it. I thought she was only being dr-dr-dramatic.”
“If she wasn’t,” Jon said quietly, “I know where the answers must be found.”
If, he thought to himself, I have the courage to seek them out.
They looked at each other for a long moment. Jon remembered Agatha Derlicht’s earlier words and sighed. If not him then who? It would have to be him. But not tonight. Not in the dark. He couldn’t bring himself to go up HangedMan’s Hill alone at night.
His visit to Katja Derlicht’s resting place would have to wait for the morning, and the light it would bring.
Thomas woke suddenly. It wasn’t a sound that woke him. [204] It was a warning from deep in his consciousness. He blinked rapidly, uncertain and still dazed by sleep. His room was still dark, but he could sense a vague shape looming close by his bed.
The Hessian! Thomas thought. He cowered back uncertainly among his bedclothes, but recognition came suddenly and relieved his fear.
“Bastard!” a familiar, slurred voice said. He could smell the liquor on it.
“Ah, James.” Thomas sat up as his brother wove drunkenly on his feet. “How nice of you to visit. What’s on your mind, dear brother?”
Thomas struck a match and lit the candle on the nightstand adjacent to his bed. He looked at his brother and winced. It didn’t take special familiarity with James’s habits to realize that he was drunk. Drunker than a lord. Drunker than it seemed possible to be and still stand on his feet, especially since one of them, Thomas thought, was crippled.
He smelled, too. A sodden alcoholic stench wafted off his wrinkled, stained clothing in almost tangible waves. His hair was in disarray. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. He teetered back and forth as if defying a hurricane, but the only storm he faced was caused by the alcohol raging in his system.
“Bastard!” he said again.
Thomas sighed. Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to put up with scenes like this for much longer.
“Don’t be tiresome, James. If you’ve got nothing better to say then drag yourself to bed and sleep it off. I’m sure [205] it’ll still be pretty blurry in the morning, but you can always drink more and fall back into a stupor.”
“Seth found the will.”
“Really.” Thomas smiled. That was interesting. Things were progressing faster than he’d expected they would. “Read it, did he?”
“Yesh.” James wove in a larger than usual circle and almost went down. “Bastard!”
“Are you now discussing Seth?” Thomas asked with an amused smile, “or still referring to me?”
“Father!” James ground out. “He left everything to you. Everything!”
Thomas smiled widely. It was all coming out, just as he’d planned. Of course, Thomas had had no idea when he’d riffled the Captain’s desk and found the will why Benjamin Noir had left everything to him. At the time he’d taken it as just another sign of the Captain’s apparent favoritism. Having discovered the old man’s despicable plan to take over his body, the legacy was now obvious. Of course, he couldn’t let anyone else know what the Captain had intended to do. Not that anyone would believe his story, anyway.
“Well,” Thomas said smugly, “the Captain always did like me best.”
James screamed like an animal in torment and fell upon Thomas, swinging his fists wildly while sobbing like a sentimental drunk.
Thomas was surprised by his brother’s sudden attack. He barely had time to throw his arms up in an attempt to ward him off, then they were wrestling on the bed. James had good size and a certain amount of strength, [206] but he was so drunk that his reactions were slow and his coordination that of a near corpse.
But he stank. He stank and he slobbered great gusts of alcohol-reeking breath. Thomas was nauseated as he fended off James’s fumbling punches. He pushed him down to the foot of the bed where he lay crying like a baby.
“But that’s all right,” James murmured to himself. “That’s all right. Seth’s going to burn it. He’s going to burn the damn will before anyone else sees it. Then it’ll be fair.”
Thomas leaped up in horror. “Damn him! He wouldn’t dare!”
James fixed his bloodshot eyes on him, smiled blearily, and spewed a stream of purple-stained vomit in an arc a good three feet long upon Thomas’s mattress and silken sheets.
Thomas’s jaw dropped. He was frozen in inarticulate fury, sputtering in anger that had reached the killing point.
“You—you—damned—!”
He whirled suddenly. Every second, he knew, counted. He was moments away from total disaster.
He screamed as he ran from his bedroom, down the stairs, and all the way to the study. He wasn’t sure exactly what he screamed. He just made as much noise as he could. He didn’t stop screaming until he slammed open the study door and skidded into the dimly lit room and saw Seth sitting at the Captain’s desk without lit match or candle in his hands.
His brother’s face was sour. His features were clenched [207] as if in inexpressible anger, perhaps at the sheaf of papers spread out before him. He looked up at Thomas and there was actual hate in his usually placid, emotionless eyes.
Thomas’s screams turned to laughter. His racing heart slowed and seemed to slip back down to its proper place in his chest.
“You couldn’t do it,” Thomas said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Did that drunken fool tell you I was going to burn the will?” Seth asked bitterly.
Thomas nodded. “But, of course, you couldn’t.”
Seth ground his teeth in inarticulate anger.
“Poor Seth,” Thomas laughed. “All those years obeying the Captain. Scurrying about at his beck and call. You thought you’d be able to break the spell he had over you once he died. But you couldn’t, could you?”
Seth just looked at him, shaking his head in wordless rage as Constable Pierce ran into the room, followed quickly by Jon Noir, Tully McCool, and, lastly, a puffing Washington Irving.
“What is it?” Irving cried. “What’s all the commotion about?”
Thomas smiled at him.
“Nothing much,” he said to the gathered assembly. “Just a bad dream.” But, he thought, there was no sense in taking chances. “Since we’re here, though, my brother has found a document he’d like to share with you all. Seth?”
Seth glared at him, his jaws grinding silently. But after a moment, he began to read.
[208] “ ‘I, Benjamin Noir, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare ...’ ”
13.
It was, Jon Noir thought, much too beautiful a day. It should have been dark and stormy with huge black clouds crying like lost children and wind wailing like animals in pain. Instead it was prosaically sunny, disappointingly mild with gentle breezes sweet with the promise of summer now only a day away.
Still, Jon had a feeling in his gut that things were about to change. Everyone, it seemed, in Geiststadt was walking softly
as if afraid to draw attention to themselves. They were conversing in whispers as if aware that someone or something was watching, was waiting, and could strike them down at any moment. Jon could feel it himself. It made him want to cower in his bed with the covers pulled up over his head.
It was not a pleasant sensation.
He ignored it as best as he could as he went through the eerily quiet village. He passed the bunkhouse quickly, almost furtively. He didn’t want to bring Isaac along with him. His quest had become totally personal. It was, he felt, up to him to solve the mystery of the awful murders. He didn’t even want to contemplate the price of failure.
Jon went up onto HangedMan’s Hill, through the old cemetery, and up the game trail that led eventually to the small side canyon where he and Isaac had found Katja Derlicht. The terrain was becoming increasingly familiar, though he knew he’d never feel comfortable [210] there. There was a strangeness to it that made the back of his eyes itch, as if he knew he was being observed by unseen watchers.
The canyon was quiet. Empty of human or ghost. But that odd annoyance, that unscratchable itch, worried at his flesh. He stood it as best he could, and advanced slowly.
The canyon’s back wall seemed to be naked rock, but it was covered by a cascade of flowering vines that flowed down the top of the outcrop nearly to the ground. The vines were thick enough to conceal whatever lay behind them.
The prickling sensation in his flesh got worse with every step. Setting his teeth against the bothersome phenomenon, he swept aside the curtain of vines to expose the hollow of a small cave set into the rock wall. There wasn’t much to it. It didn’t lead very far back though he couldn’t be sure because light didn’t penetrate inside the hollow.
He could be sure, though, that no one inhabited the cave. It bore no signs of human activity. No furniture, no bed, no hearth. No food stored against hunger. There was only a plain wooden box, and Jon had no desire to check it to make sure what lay within.
“So,” a voice said from behind him, “you’ve finally tracked me to my lair.”
The fact that Jon didn’t even jump the slightest bit showed how far he’d sunk into stolid acceptance of the strangeness that had ensnared him. He released the vines so that they flowed back to cover Katja Derlicht’s final [211] resting place. Or, more accurately, the resting place of her body. He turned to face her spirit.
She stood behind him, a tender smile on her old, pleasantly lined face. As she spoke the irritation that had crawled over Jon’s flesh suddenly vanished, as if it were a defense no longer needed. He nodded at her, accepting a marvel he would have scoffed at only days earlier. So much, he thought, can change so fast.
“What are you?” Jon asked, “and what do you want from me?”
“I’m Katja Derlicht,” she said. “As simple as that. And I want your help. Not for me, but for all of Geiststadt.”
Jon shook his head. “It’s not that simple. Not from my viewpoint. You’re Katja Derlicht—but you’re dead.”
“That’s right.” Her smile widened. “It is as simple as that, for me. Life does not end with death. Many move on. But some feel tight bonds to the land, or perhaps to living people they love and they feel they can’t abandon. They might have a great wrong to avenge or a great wrong to pay for. They don’t want to, or perhaps can’t, move on. Not right away, anyway.
“I spent most of my life imprisoned. I couldn’t leave Geiststadt. I hadn’t had enough of it. I couldn’t move on while I was filled with so much longing for my home.”
“But—that night we saw you, the next we followed your trail. A physical trail.”
“Of course,” Katja Derlicht said. “Do you think ghosts can’t affect the physical plane?”
Jon shook his head. “I don’t know much about what ghosts can or can’t do.”
“Yet,” she said slyly, “you have no trouble believing [212] that a ghost is responsible for these terrible killings? Erich. Rolf Derlicht. Johann Schmidt. Now even your own father.”
“I-I don’t know what to believe. I guess I just didn’t want to think that someone I knew—someone I grew up with, would be capable of such vicious savagery. And the clues left on the bodies themselves. The way the hearts were taken. The messages left behind carved into their very flesh.”
“A clever human could have done all that,” Katja Derlicht said. “To throw suspicion upon someone already dead.”
“So, you’re saying a ghost couldn’t have done the slayings?”
She shook her head. The action of head swiveling on neck, of tendons pulling and muscles swelling, looked real. Like she was still alive in a functioning body. It was almost easier to regard her that way. To set the question of her death and spiritual resurrection aside, and concentrate solely on what she was saying.
“Not at all. We can touch the physical world, if we want to.”
She approached. Jon steeled herself as her frail, ancient-looking hand reached out and softly lay against his cheek. Its touch was pleasant. Cool. As if a soothing breeze had wafted out from a beautiful forest glade and kissed his skin. Katja Derlicht smiled at the look on his face and drew her hand back and slapped him lightly like a coquettish girl might teasingly treat a wayward but still adored admirer. It stung for a moment, then [213] faded to a pleasing glow that seemed to warm his entire face.
“We can move stones, too, and bend branches. Even leave tracks in the earth, if we desire.”
“You laid the trail that led here on purpose, so that Isaac and I could find you?”
“It was a test. One of several you’ve taken over the past several days. But I didn’t, at the time, want you to know of my true nature. I didn’t want to take the risk of frightening you away.”
“You almost did, anyway,” Jon muttered.
“But you persevered as I’d hoped you would.”
“How’d I do on those tests you mentioned?” Jon asked. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the notion that he’d been manipulated by unseen forces.
“I wouldn’t be here now if you had failed,” Katja Derlicht said, smiling. As much as she physically resembled her older sister, she seemed different emotionally. Warmer and much more pleasant. Loving, even.
“I wish I’d known you when you were alive,” Jon said. Then he smiled himself. He couldn’t have ever imagined that he’d ever say something like that.
“I do, too,” she replied. “It would have meant that I’d have probably had a much more pleasant life. But—I didn’t arrange all this so that we could moon over what-might-have-beens.”
“The killer,” Jon said, jerking back to unpleasant reality.
She nodded. “The killer must be stopped. Your fate rests on it.” She gestured all around them. “Geiststadt’s fate—the fate of all that I love—rests upon it.”
[214] “The voices that night—the spirits of the Dunkelstad dead—they told me to seek a human suspect.”
“They were right,” Katja Derlicht said. “The Hessian is not guilty of these crimes.”
“How do you know this?” Jon demanded.
“I’ve known him since I was a little girl,” Katja Derlicht said. “I was ten when he came to Geiststadt and committed his terrible crimes. And then paid horribly for them.” She shook her head. “The rest of the village tried to forget him. Maybe they did, but I couldn’t. I could hear his agony. I could see a blackness, a tremendous cloud of darkness, hovering over the spot where they buried his mutilated body after they’d taken their anger out on him. For years I was afraid to approach the old cemetery. It took many attempts, but finally I overcame my fear. Even then, it was not easy to achieve rapport with the Hessian’s spirit, bound to his grave by a great wrong that he had to redress. Gradually through the years, through fits and starts, I was able to start his spirit on the road to redemption. Even when I was locked in the prison of Derlicht Haus, all those long, lonely, empty years, his rage would reach out for me and, with the sparrows and mice, were my only company. My only solace. It was in those y
ears he discovered the meaning of forgiveness and he started on his way to absolution.
“He had almost reached the end of his long road. And then the killings started. The killings done under his name, without his license.”
She spoke softly, sincerely, with ghostly tears shining in her eyes. Jon wondered if he’d reached out and touched them if they’d be wet. If he put his fingers to [215] his mouth, they’d be salty. But he hadn’t earned that intimacy.
Katja Derlicht’s words, though, had earned her his trust. He believed her. It might be madness, but, good God, he believed that she was a ghost. Was her story of redemption and false accusation any harder to accept?
“If I believe you and the Hessian is innocent of these killings, who committed them?”
She shook her head. “That’s not for me to say. A ghost is an insubstantial being, but we cannot be everywhere at once. The killer has been sly and stealthy. He’s struck suddenly, unexpectedly. I have no direct knowledge of who he might be. Certainly, I have no proof.
“Despite the ravages the killer has committed on the body of his victims, he’s not a madman. No madman would so cunningly lay the blame on another. Another who couldn’t argue for his own innocence—or so most would think. No madman could strike four times in five days and not be apprehended. At some point, if he were doing this out of simple lust, he would totally give in to that lust and so reveal himself. No. This killer is cool and calculating.”
“He’s acting according to a set plan, then.”
“Exactly,” Katja Derlicht said. “The question is, who profits from these killings? Who gains from the deaths of these four men?”
It didn’t take long for the realization to come to Jon. It wasn’t totally set yet. There were still points of doubt. Areas of uncertainty. But it was clear as day who profited from the death of Benjamin Noir. Who was the only person who could gain anything from the death of Johan [216] Schmidt. Who would have achieved emotional satisfaction, at least, from the death of Rolf Derlicht. And even how poor old Erich’s death would have served as a smokescreen. Apparently he was even the one who had planted the theory of the Hessian’s supernatural guilt in the minds of the villagers. Jon himself had come up with the same theory independently, of course, but he’d kept it to himself and Agatha Derlicht.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Book 1: Shades of Night, Falling Page 17