Did they see the true world and collapse under the burden, or did they simply begin hallucinating?
Was he hallucinating?
He thought not. If he was hallucinating, then so were his two brothers. He knew mental infirmity ran in families, but it seemed unlikely all three would go mad in unison. No, this house had been devouring his brothers before he arrived, and now it was devouring him. He didn’t think it was a ghost, at least not in the conventional sense, despite the fact he saw one last night. He had grown up in this house. No one had ever felt the haunting presence of a ghost. Something else was afoot here.
He wasn’t hungry, but he had to eat, so he gathered his wits, bathed off the accumulated stink, then headed to the kitchen to get some breakfast.
When he closed the door behind him, he was confronted with a strange sight. Ava was doing her usual household chores, washing the windows in the hall outside his rooms. Her eyes were barely open, her head nodding to her chest. There was a thin line of saliva hanging from her mouth, dropping to her blouse and becoming a puddle of drying spit.
Wilhelm peered at her. “Hello, Ava.”
It took a moment for Ava to even register Wilhelm. She slowly turned her head to him, barely conscious.
She said, “Hello… Wil… helm…”
A similar thing had happened to him the first time he tried laudanum. He’d seen people die drinking it. He was a certifiable drunk, but stayed clear of laudanum, and absinthe for that matter.
“Are you feeling all right, Ava?”
“Just a little tired is all, Mr. Wilhelm.”
“Long night?”
“No, I went to bed early… I think… I can’t remember.”
“What do you remember, Ava?”
If she could have looked surprised or defensive, she probably would have. But she was guileless to begin with. She really didn’t remember a thing. It was possible she only knew of her lack of awareness when he brought it to her attention.
“I don’t know… I was with Carsten, and…”
Wilhelm waved his hand and smiled reassuringly. “Ava, it doesn’t matter at all. You’re just tired. Now, I want you to walk to Carsten’s room, lie down in his bed, and go to sleep.”
She shook her head and said groggily, “Then everyone would know about us… can’t…”
“Nonsense, you’re just a good friend. No harm in taking a little nap, especially if I told you to do it, right?”
She looked at him with drooping, uncomprehending eyes. He took her by the arm and guided her to Carsten’s room.
It took her about two minutes of trying to get the door unlocked, and Wilhelm took note of the particular key she used. It looked different than the keys used by the staff for other doors. He closed the door behind them and guided her to the bed. She was asleep before she hit the pillows. The key ring was in her hand.
Wilhelm needed to be quick. Doubtful as it might seem, Ava could wake up at any moment. Carsten could, unlikely as it was, come home. After all, he was sure to be exhausted, too. So he hurried.
When he got to the door, he knocked loudly, not wanting to discover Carsten in there working, and he with stolen keys in his hand. After a few moments, he pulled out the key ring. There were two keys that stood out: the one for his bedroom, and one for this little house. Doubtless the only ones with them were Carsten and Ava.
Wilhelm left the door lightly ajar until he got a candle lit. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but first and foremost, he wanted to have a good look at that book Carsten was translating. He rushed to the desk and looked through the books. It wasn’t there. There were several very old books, treatises on language, most of them specifically about translating the Romani language. There were several notebooks. One in particular caught his eye. It was the focus of his writing. He looked at the others. One seemed to be notes of the text translated from Latin, the others were on what these Latinized translations were in light of variations in the Romani language; all very mysterious and perplexing. But the finalized notes were in the main notebook that the others were just rough drafts for.
Then there was the chalkboard. It contained several sentences, first in Latin, then in German, each time slightly different. They started out at the top, the German translation making no sense whatsoever, then working downward until the bottom sentence which, while slightly more legible, was still gibberish.
It read: I to beseech name of dread, hand of shining, mind of unlimited, I command!
But the Latin sentence above it read: Ego precor nomen of formidonis, manus manus of rutilus, mens of infinitus, ego to order!
When Wilhelm read it out loud, he recognized the words Carsten had spoken to his grandfather’s ghost. He was gripped by the same fear he experienced the night before. Most men live their entire lives and never know that kind of fear. He wanted to run out of this place and back to Paris. He wanted to drink, badly.
He stood transfixed, but managed to pull himself away from it. He still had work to do. He looked around the room. It was small, claustrophobic really. He felt the very air choking him. He set the candle back where he found it, blew it out, and left.
He went to his grandparents’ small burial plot. It appeared untouched. The three circles inside the triangle from the ritual the night before were gone. Wilhelm breathed a sigh of relief and said a short prayer of thanks in front of his grandfather’s headstone. But then he saw it. His grandfather’s gravesite had just been replanted with grass.
His feet couldn’t carry him back to the small servants’ quarters fast enough. He fumbled for the keys, searching for the right one. He found it and rushed back in, and the sunlight landed on two shovels leaning against the wall. They’d been used recently, with a caking of dirt on their blades.
He walked across the room to examine the shovel when he tripped over a loose floorboard. He reached over to set it right—he couldn’t have Carsten knowing anyone had been in here. But he found a small space underneath the loosened floorboard, containing a round object wrapped in rags. He pulled it out of the hole and unwrapped it. It was a skull.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Terror, shock, sleeplessness; a mind in such disarray can only take so much before the sufferer collapses from the strain. Wilhelm returned his grisly find to the space beneath the floorboards and left, careful to blow out the candle and lock the door behind him.
He was getting punchy and didn’t want any potentially fatal blunders.
He returned the keys to the sleeping Ava and went to his room and threw open the curtains to let the light fill the room. He lay on his bed in the protective array of sunlight. It seemed that whatever Carsten was doing, sunlight would be its enemy.
Carsten… Carsten was causing this.
Whatever Carsten was doing was causing Uli’s torment. That book of alchemy from the 1300s had nothing to do with alchemy. It was for communing with the dead, or even worse, if its side effects caused a man to be able to paint the nightmares of another man. Wilhelm considered burning Carsten’s little study house to the ground. Douse it with kerosene and light it up. But that wouldn’t suffice.
He needed to burn that book.
Karl had to be considered. What role did he play in this? He went with Carsten to Prague and they came back with the book. Was Karl his accomplice? Was he behind the whole thing?
But exhaustion took its toll. Wilhelm slept and Wilhelm dreamed, and nothing could stop the avalanche. He was back on the eternal stone plane. In the distance was this house, the house where he grew up, the house where he presently slept. On this plain, this house was the only feature, save for a faint luminous mist.
He ran. He knew he needed to see the paining on the mantel, to see what horrible truths Uli’s work held for him. Would it be last night’s painting, or the painting that was to come?
But on the way, he was stopped in his tracks. He saw something. He could have sworn he saw faces. Faces, bodies, people, all in the mist.
The mist was made of people!
They were there for a second and then they were gone. They saw him, he saw them, but they were gone before their mutual puzzlement could register.
There was a rumbling, a sound of distant thunder. They heard it, too. He looked up, and they looked up. The omnipresent black boiling clouds in the sky were agitated, shifting and twisting. The focal point of their convulsions was directly above the house. The people in the mist could only look around curiously; they didn’t seem to exist long enough to feel genuine fear.
As Wilhelm sprinted to the house, the rumbling grew more powerful and menacing. Something was about to happen, and he wanted to be inside when it began. As he got closer and closer, the black clouds whipped into a spinning column above the house; he had seen pictures of these from the Americas, they were called tornados.
Wilhelm watched in horror as the clouds continued to churn and then coalesced into a nauseous tangle of giant tentacles thrashing and melting back into the mass. In a waking state, Wilhelm would have collapsed in terror, but he kept sprinting, trying to reach the house before it was enveloped in the curtain of tentacles.
As he threw himself through the door, the funnel of tentacles hit the ground with an unearthly crash that shook the very foundations of the house. Wilhelm frantically pushed the front door closed and felt their weight on the other side, just in time. He stepped back from the door and heard the shifting bulk outside, from all sides. He turned and saw it through a window, the tentacles slithering over it, searching for a living dreamer.
The house was the same as the previous night: empty, ancient, everything covered in a thick layer of dust. He found the familiar sets of footprints. He followed them to Carsten’s room and found that it wasn’t empty this time. There was an occupant, a tragic, piteous occupant.
Curled in the corner were the skeletal remains of a young woman wearing the clothes of a common maid. Her hair was long and blonde, in her hands was clutched a framed picture of young Carsten Ernst.
It was Ava.
Wilhelm reached down to touch her, to offer some kind of comfort, some kind of appeasement, but there was none to be had. This one had loved, and paid dearly for it.
He felt a slight illumination in the room. He turned to see a figure from the mist, but this one didn’t disappear. Its features came into focus, and it was undeniable. It was the same figure from the mantel above the fireplace. It was his grandfather.
Wilhelm faced this man he’d never met, but under whose gaze he’d grown into the fool he was. He wanted to apologize for his life, the life he had wasted and squandered, but the man was already speaking. His old lips moved, but no sounds emerged. He seemed only marginally aware of him, as if Wilhelm were actually the ghost in the room.
The apparition shifted strangely, and it took Wilhelm a few moments to figure out that it was moving backward, and when the ghost started walking, it became all the more obvious. He followed the ghost to the front door, where it reached out to the door handle. Wilhelm screamed, “No!” and the ghost stopped, as if it heard a distant voice, then it shuffled down the hall to Uli’s room.
Wilhelm stood back about ten feet from the ghost, not wanting to disturb it. He knew it sensed him, in the vaguest way. He watched it in Uli’s room, motioning and walking in circles around the spot where Uli would stand to paint.
It was fascinating, it was horrifying, it was unnatural. Wilhelm remembered what Uli told him—time is different here; in fact, various times existed here concurrently.
His grandfather’s ghost was undoubtedly from last night.
The remains of Ava, this was from something yet to come.
But that fact that his grandfather’s ghost vaguely sensed him could mean that time was pliable. That maybe this place was its own island in time, forced into existence by whatever diabolism Carsten had unleashed.
His ghost grandfather was trying to communicate with Uli from the other side.
Wilhelm watched as the ghost walked backward out of Uli’s room. He followed him down the hall to the front door. Wilhelm was about to shout for his grandfather to stop, but he knew this was in vain because he was watching something that had already happened.
His grandfather opened the door; he expected a black swarm of tentacles to come pouring in to envelop the both of them, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he watched his grandfather walk out and the curtain of tentacles part for him.
The ghost walked out, then turned to face him, now seeming to be fully aware of him. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, then the tentacles grasped the ghost and jerked him up into those black infernal clouds.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Wilhelm Ernst never considered himself a great thinker. While this wasn’t something he would admit, or tolerate another person saying, he knew it. It never bothered him that much.
After this last dream, he was now convinced of two things: first, that he wasn’t insane or delusional, that what he was experiencing was real; second, he didn’t know if he was smart enough to stop it. He was also alone. Anyone he told would think him a lunatic. He knew if anyone came to him with a story like this, he would think they were crazy.
Wilhelm wondered, well, what does one actually do? Call the Landespolizei? They would lock him up for being in town in the first place.
Could he just sit Carsten down and tell him that what he was doing was dangerous, wrong, and unnatural? Wilhelm forced out a small dry laugh at that idea. He had no moral authority. He was simply the oldest of a pack of spoiled, ungrateful brats. Carsten was studious, serious, and had the humility to understand the gifts that he was given and not waste them. His path was evidence of genius, only of a dangerous, ruthless kind.
Wilhelm couldn’t see Carsten as evil. This was a characterization he shunned, even though Carsten was engaging in something evil. He had to get that damnable book and burn it to ashes, regardless of the cost or if Carsten hated him for doing it. But that wouldn’t be easy. Carsten wouldn’t tell him where it was, and Karl wouldn’t allow him to beat Carsten until he confessed. More likely, Wilhelm would be the one receiving the beating.
Wilhelm had slept all day, even though his dream seemed momentary. The sun was going down, and the sky going dark. Soon, Uli would start painting, Greta and Karin would be carted off to their drunken stupidity, and Carsten would do whatever it was he did.
He turned on the electric light and looked at himself in the mirror. He’d aged since returning to Munich. He looked closely and saw wisps of grey in the formerly impeccable mane of black, and deep lines around his eyes. He was starting to look like Uli.
Carsten may not be evil, but there were consequences to everything he did. He decided that one way or another, tonight he would end this thing, even if it meant burning down the old servants’ quarters. Hopefully, he could snatch that damn book and burn it, but if not, he was willing to go further. He wouldn’t harm Carsten, but he would kill that thug Karl if he had to.
He knew this would end their brotherly bond, whatever remained of it. But to stop the harm it was doing, to stop the harm that could come to Carsten, he was willing. For reasons that he himself didn’t understand, he wrote a letter to Carsten. He hoped to explain why he was taking these actions.
Wilhelm took the letter and folded it into an envelope, putting it in the inner pocket of his evening jacket. If he succeeded, he may have to leave in a great deal of haste.
Wilhelm regarded himself in the mirror again. He saw a changed man, and for the first time, an adult with a purpose. His hair was greying, but he looked to his right hand and it wasn’t shaking. He hadn’t had a drink all day.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
All there was to do now was wait. After Greta and Karin returned from their nightly drinking binge and Karl stabled the horses, Carsten would be in his study.
So far, that was the pattern. Wilhelm figured that Carsten estimated everyone would be passed out and he would be undisturbed. Ordinarily, he would have been right. But by strange fortune, he arrived in Muni
ch while trying to be rid of the same poison Carsten counted on to camouflage his activities.
Wilhelm knew the only house staff around would be Ava and Karl. He went to the kitchen, opened the icebox, and threw together a meal. As he ate, he heard Karl pull the carriage to the front of the house. This was the way it worked every night; Karl would pull up the carriage and wait to take Karin and Greta to their evening drinking.
Wilhelm walked from the kitchen to an entry hall window. Karl pulled the carriage up, and tended to the horses. Then he did something unexpected. Karl opened the carriage and pulled out a frightened little dog. It was a shivering, starving little animal, and Karl had made friends with it by feeding it. He pulled some scraps out of a wad of newspapers and fed the excited little animal. It was very grateful, swallowing the food whole and wagging its scrawny tail so hard that its rear quarters wriggled along with it. He tied a length of rope around its neck in a makeshift leash then walked it around the side of the house.
Wilhelm went to another window and watched Karl taking the mutt to Carsten’s study. While this was curious, it wasn’t especially intriguing.
He left his dishes in the sink and took the short walk to Uli’s room. He would need a drink for that, so he poured himself a tall glass of red wine. When he got to Uli’s room, he knocked and walked in.
Uli glanced at him, but said nothing. He was busy putting a new canvas on an easel and was applying thick dark pigments to an artists’ palette. Wilhelm didn’t ask if he used any bodily fluids to mix those pigments. A cigarette hung from the corner of Uli’s mouth, and he wore the omnipresent blousy paint-stained shirt. He was gaunt, skeletal, and haunted, a glass of laudanum close at hand. He was trembling. Many artists wished to posture their way to the state that Uli now lived in, but Wilhelm doubted any paid the price of admittance that poor Uli had.
The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God Page 11