by Byron Craft
The room was visited by the geologists always drawing the lock behind them when inside. The Cutters would gather selected photos from the map room and take them to the authorized area.
On my fifth day at Fort Blish I was distracted by what I interpreted as joyous commotion. Leaving my processor I went down the hall and witnessed two of the young men with armloads of photographs at the door to the barred room carrying on a conversation. They were excited, caught up in the emotional zeal of some new find. One of them was pointing to several large blow-ups pasted together while the other said, “There has been a definite uplift in the terrain since last week.” I had no idea what he meant so I approached the two of them and said, “what’s up?” That was when I had the door slammed in my face.
Under this environment I would have fallen into my old habit of letting my work slide if it hadn’t been for the circumstance of the next week. I am not even sure if they can be called circumstances, a feeling, a sense of disorientation rather than any physical set of events that I can put my finger on.
Actually it was the lack of circumstances that troubled me. I became aware of a lapse or loss of time, after the period of our coffee breaks. At ten every morning Jim would have individual decanters of coffee brought in on trays and we would break for fifteen minutes. He was always looking for an excuse to interrupt me. I was afraid that he may blunder in some day and spoil a batch of film, so I got into the habit of locking the door behind me. I normally take my coffee black, with no sugar, but the coffee from the base mess tasted bitter and I would have to sweeten it down a bit. It was after these interludes when I was back at my processor that the rest of the morning would slip by me and it was time to break again, this time for lunch.
Initially I let it pass with little concern. We have all experienced that timelessness caused by intense concentration on an immediate task. All distractions are shut out and in this “zero state” the mind focuses only on what is at hand. I believe the Japanese call it “muga.” I was content and even comfortable at the onset of these lapses. I became less rattled about my job and even entertained the notion that I was learning to cope with the situation and may eventually like it.
I did say that I originally felt that way because last Thursday I wasn’t in the mood for conversation and took my coffee in the lab avoiding Jim. I was cutting negatives and pouring my second cup when I became aware for the first time of the incessant ticking of the clock in the room. It was as if it had been stopped earlier then continued without further interruption. The hour was twelve noon. Two hours had mysteriously disappeared and the balance of the coffee in my carafe was cold.
***
That same week was when I detected a change in Janet. A change that concerned me in the days that followed, yet not enough, I am ashamed to admit, to recognize the warning signs in time to flee that shunned house and return stateside.
Even with all the unusual occurrences at work, I somehow became increasingly comfortable with my job, regarding the extraordinary as rare amusement, and as odd as it sounds, I felt at home with my surroundings and indulgent of the old house with its unnatural setting. Meanwhile these periods still occupied me with strong urges to walk the woods at night and roam the countryside.
These feelings comprised the better part of what normally should have been my common sense so that when I was faced with Janet’s plight in the beginning I laughed it off almost as cruelly as the horrors that assaulted her. I was, I must confess a mass of conflicting emotions, usually easing away from the confusion and lapsing into a luxurious solace of the mind.
I left work that day with the incident of the clock and the cold coffee fresh in my mind. I stopped on my way home to pick up a list of things in Valsbach for Janet. She was always giving me little lists of items to fetch in town. I parked in front of one of the local merchants and saw Falbridge through the car’s windshield leaving the telegraph office and walk down the street.
I got out and called to him but did not receive a reply. He stepped up his pace and rounded the corner of the block. I was reasonably sure it was Falbridge. I had only caught a glimpse of his face but the resemblance would have been too uncanny if it wasn’t. I jogged to the adjoining side street but found no sign of him when stepping past the corner. I hung around for a few minutes inspecting the windows of several shops hoping to catch sight of him again.
Later when my shopping list was filled I made a point to navigate the business area in my car going around the block several times and gave up when it grew dark.
The encounter would have probably lived in my thoughts for the remainder of the evening but Janet had other ideas in store for me. She was asleep on the sofa when I came home and awoke with a start. She reacted in that child-like way of hers that I love so much, pouting and complaining that she had slept the day away feeling useless in the outcome. It took a moment or two for her to completely wake up. She followed me in a few minutes to the kitchen and while I put away the groceries I saw that she was distant, preoccupied with something and became edgy when I asked her if anything was wrong.
We made dinner together and afterwards settled into the project of breaking into the tower. Janet gave a full account of our entry into that old dusty room in her journal, although I wasn’t to read it until a few nights later. I feel no need to repeat the story here with the exception of a few details.
What had come before my eyes by then was my great Uncle Heinrich’s notebook. It came into my possession one morning shortly after moving in. It was when I was cleaning out the basement. The floor of the cellar had been littered with pieces of broken and oddly cut mirror glass, fragments of silver solder and bits of wire. I swept the mess into a pile and was looking for something to scoop it up with when what I took for an old magazine caught my eye. It was stuck in the wall wedged between the blocks of masonry in a narrow slit that was once filled with mortar. Intending to use the stiff cover as a dust pan I withdrew it and knew right off that what I was holding was not a magazine but a notebook...a personal journal. I had been in the cellar many times before then and it had remained unnoticed. It had been written on bound yellowed paper which blended nicely with the beige colored mortar joints.
It was written in an unfamiliar hand, marked in a crabbed script which was scarcely legible and yet had about it a singular directness.
I wrestled with the first few pages realizing by then that it was my great Uncle’s writing, then Janet came downstairs surprising me. My immediate reaction was of concealment. I wanted to keep the thing from her and presented it as the fragments of an old diary which we would set aside and read when we weren’t so busy.
I know it has the ring of conspiracy to it but truthfully I meant only the best for her. Contained in those first few leafs that I read were the obvious ravings of an insane man. When alone I finished my Uncle’s record and was certain that in his deranged mind he thought he had come close to unraveling a nightmarish riddle, the knowledge of which drove him to madness and subsequently was the cause of his death.
My concern was for Janet’s piece of mind. Not that I believed any of my uncle’s insane ravings, instead I was afraid that she might begin to have doubts about the mental health of our child she was carrying. For a woman in her condition a notion like that could become an obsession. And so I faked the loss of the manuscript saying that I must have accidentally tossed it out with some other papers.
Insanity does not run rampant in my family, in fact this is the only case I am aware of. There have been stories in the past of course, what family is without them, but all of which except in my great uncle’s case are totally unconfirmed.
My uncle was mad though, as mad as they come. Who else but a mad man would wish such terrors on an unsuspecting world let alone his involvement in the Nazi party? It is difficult now to say whether he was ever a sane man to begin with, nevertheless I am certain he must have spent his last remaining years a raving lunatic. He had been a recluse from the rest of the family, separating himself from
all of us by thousands of miles of ocean and several continents. His hermitage was so radical that I had no knowledge of his existence until the notification of his death just a few months before.
My chief point in bringing this up is that my own ancestry and background on the whole are altogether normal.
I feel obliged to say this even more than a defense of my actions in suppressing certain facts from my wife but in lieu of the statements which will follow and when you are done listening to this recording, I am certain you will understand why I am taking the time to rationalize my own sanity.
Even though Heinrich Todesfall was mentally unhinged, many of his delusions must have been based in portions of reality and I was afraid that one of those bases in fact was the actual existence of the cemetery. So when I entered the tower that night I took with me the knowledge of my uncle’s mania. The clearing amidst a patch of thicket that delighted my wife left me with a sickening feeling. I had searched for it on previous evenings when wandering the woods alone but the brush and scrub trees had concealed it well.
I tried to dissuade Janet from going there the next day but I was unsuccessful. I didn’t say much actually to discourage her, since infatuation thrives on opposition and if I did I would have had to confess to my Uncle’s insanity and the lie about the notebook being lost. We did, I thought, compromise and agree to go together but as it turned out she went on her own the next day.
I perpetuated the lie further, discounting the unusual hand print on the window seat and, as if outside myself, heard my own voice rationalize away its origin.
I couldn’t help wondering, though, about the experiment conducted by my Uncle before he died resulting in his reference to the “other.” What ever it was he saw fit to include very little description or explanation about it. In spite of the obvious fabrication of an over imaginative mind, I had difficulty shaking an uneasy feeling about the tiny hand print. Could it have been left by the “other?”
***
There were other parallels to my great uncle’s story. One was the sailor from Innsmouth that he wrote of meeting and his journey to that town on the coast of Massachusetts years ago. Those people he met, if there were actually such people, they really must have been revolting in appearance and I gradually began to have misgivings about that meeting, the journey, its outcome and the webbed hands. Once again a parallel. I had come across some people having either all or part of the fingers joined by flesh. First Falbridge, then the two cutters, and now the men in my uncle’s chronicle. There had to be more to it than mere coincidence. I am not superstitious but the chance occurrences seemed like an omen.
The star stone supported these irrational feelings. My great Uncle Heinrich degenerated severely after parting with it. I still had the charm that Faab had given me in Vietnam. Todesfall called it the star stone of Mnar and its description was similar to the one I own. I developed an attachment for the charm and after rummaging through my old gear, I kept it with me for good luck. I started to believe that it had protective powers, protecting me once before in Nam and it became comforting having it with me.
***
The charm was on me the evening I visited Doctor VonTassell and whether it had any influence on my world is probably dumb to speculate, although I did intrude upon his apartment with a remarkable amount of courage.
There are some people who do not come to full flower until they are well over fifty. Among these are all males named VonTassell. Dr. VonTassell would have been nothing without his gray whiskers and scholarly background. Since bachelorhood is another essential attribute of the Doctor, I wonder how his breed is continued.
Except for our brief first meeting the day Janet and I arrived at Schloss Todesfall, Doctor VonTassell has been good natured towards me. On that first encounter we caught him off guard making introductions awkward. Ever since then he has always beamed and twinkled benevolently.
So it wasn’t too surprising that the Doctor treated my unannounced call with the courtesy and manners of a good host. I came there demanding an explanation. He was the only one that I had contact with that knew my Uncle. He was probably the last to have any communication with him.
The Doctor was of little help even when I presented him with my uncle’s notebook. His look and color changed perceptibly and his left hand quivered slightly when turning the pages. He remained silent the half an hour it took for him to read it. At one point in his reading he became motionless and stared at one of the pages for a full five minutes before continuing. When finished he never commented on its content and tried to persuade me to leave it with him.
When I refused he got up, left the room, returning shortly with two snifters of brandy appearing a bit paler than before, while making nervous attempts to maneuver the conversation to other topics.
It was obvious that he didn’t want to speak about his association with my great uncle. I was not in the mood for small talk, nor could I induce him to talk about it no matter how hard I pressed. Besides him admitting that Todesfall had not been a well man, which I already knew, and some general speculation about his physical health, he failed to produce any new information. I asked him about my uncle’s war record and his friend Peter he referred to in the journal but received only a well raised eyebrow and evasive replies.
I did eventually evoke a response from the Doctor. He had been very polite the whole time and I am sure that I was an unwelcome guest. Especially at that late hour. I realized by then that I had barged in on him demanding answers without giving an account of myself, putting him on the defensive. I was confused, angry and needed someone to talk to. I owned up to my feelings disclosing my fears for Janet’s health. In particular the health of our unborn child. He hadn’t been aware that Janet was pregnant and when hearing of it his face flinched then jerked back to its former expression. He did something peculiar after that. He gazed at me with a blank stare then without warning broke into joyful congratulatory remarks about my impending fatherhood and while reaching out to take my hand in his, he overturned my glass spilling the brandy. The move appeared forced, almost deliberate.
He mopped up the brandy with a handkerchief then hurried to the kitchen and refilled the glass. His cheeks had regained most of their color when he returned. VonTassell rushed the rest of our conversation, encouraging me to drink up and go home to my wife. Pressing me to leave, he voiced some assurances that in most cases insanity was not hereditary but thought it wise not to mention any of it to Janet for her own peace of mind. Before I left he offered his medical assistance, urged me to have my wife make an appointment with him so he could prescribe the proper vitamins and then gave me several telephone numbers to contact him.
As it happened, our next meeting was sooner than I had expected. That Friday I returned home from work after dark, as was usual, and found Janet upstairs in bed. She was asleep with all her clothes on. Her hair was in tangles and her mascara had run leaving muddy tear stained streaks across her face that circled down and around her high cheek bones, welling up in the corners of her mouth where it overflowed then settled under the chin creating an outline of a skull mask.
A pillow was laying on the rug and when I picked it up I noticed a small set of prints tracked across the linen. They were the same size and shape as the one we discovered in the tower. I sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes staring at the tracks, worried that Janet might have seen what had caused them.
VonTassell arrived within only fifteen minutes after telephoning but not before I had removed the pillow case from the bedroom and woke Janet. When he arrived she was sitting up in bed sipping tea. The cup and saucer trembled in her hands. Janet had told me about her walk in the woods, the little girl she had met there and the discovery of my great Uncle’s grave. Repeating the story for the Doctor, to my surprise, he listened with only partial interest and treated it like a flight of fantasy. He followed it with a tasteless remark about the effects of nervous tension brought on by overwork and an active imagination.
I was madder than hell. Some men in the medical profession lack the talent of a good bedside manner. I did not think that VonTassell would be that unfeeling. I felt Janet needed comforting above all else, not ridicule.
I left VonTassell to perform the mechanics of his trade suppressing the desire to tell him off and went downstairs.
In the living room I snatched up the flashlight and started outdoors to see the grave for myself. Unlike my previous evening jaunts when my search for the clearing came up empty handed, I had little difficulty locating it. The tall grass was brittle and the areas trampled by Janet created an easy path to follow. It ran in several directions, apparently when she changed her direction and after carefully exploring each route she took, one path opened on to the clearing. The moon was high and it provided adequate light to see by. To the north, in the area behind the summer house I could make out a slight rise in the earth creating a knoll about forty or fifty feet in width but barely a few feet higher than the surrounding ground area. It was insignificant. Although I wasn’t sure that the earth had sloped like that before.
I experienced some of the same uneasiness Janet spoke of and almost became sick to my stomach at the sight of those narrow mounds disinterred at one end while remembering my uncle’s reference in his notebook to his theft of the gold fillings.
I walked around the glade keeping close to the edge of the thicket not wanting to venture into the cemetery. A tall grouping of brush and grass loomed up on my right and beneath the beam of my light I discovered my great uncle’s grave just as Janet had described it. The headstone shielded from view by the outcropping of shrubbery. The charcoal colored stone wore a wig of snakes and serpents carved from the same material with a similar design engraved on its face. Embedded in the belly was a clock and below, sprawled upon the earth, were the books. Everything as Janet had said.
I was taken by a sudden urge to return as quickly as possible to the house. I had the feeling I was being watched and felt the woods and earth about me breath. Gathering up the school books my flashlight briefly illuminated the name of Heinrich Todesfall on the stone and below the dates of birth and death.