Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  I promised that I would certainly return all her keys, and asked whether she had been in show business like her grandfather, praising her appearance and melodious voice.

  She laughed. “Nein! Nein! But I have picture. You would like to see?”

  I thought she meant a picture of herself, but she led me to her office, a small room off the parlor, and showed me a framed theatrical poster on which rabbits bounded, rings flew, and maidens floated about an imposing man in evening dress—a man already portly, although from what Gertrun told me he must have been quite a bit younger in those days than his waxed mustache and full beard made him appear. Behind him a shadowy, Mephistophelian figure taller even than he stooped as though to whisper some dreadful confidence. Fat Ernst had been a conjurer!

  “Till his vater ist no more,” Gertrun explained. “Then he comes home to take care of mein hotel.”

  “With the secret room in which he hid the Jew and those others.”

  “Ja, ja.” Gertrun looked a trifle flustered. “Many more also, Herr Doktor.”

  “No doubt. The room that the Nazis were never able to find, even though they searched this building repeatedly and no doubt systematically, since Austrians are every bit as systematic as Germans.”

  “Ja. Never.” She was at ease now, and smiling. She has good teeth and is very attractive when she smiles.

  “You said that they found a yarmulke in the wine cellar?”

  Gertrun nodded. “In die attic, too, they find something once. I do not remember.”

  “A rosary or a crucifix, I’m sure. A breviary, perhaps. Something of that kind.” I took her hand, “Frau S——, I don’t know why you’re so anxious to keep the location of your grandfather’s secret room a secret, but I want you to know that whatever harm others may intend to you or your family, I intend none. I like you—more than I should, perhaps. And yet I can’t help being curious. Would it trouble you if I had a look at your wine cellar? And the attic?”

  “Nein!” She shook her head violently. “I take you myself, Herr Doktor.”

  I told her she need not bother and went up to my room, where I immersed myself in thought as well as hot water.

  Fat Ernst’s having been a conjurer had given me the clue. When I had dried myself and changed my underwear, shirt, and socks, I unlocked the heavy wrought-iron bolt on one of the connecting doors and tried to move it. It traveled a sixteenth of an inch, perhaps, but no farther.

  Let me interrupt myself here, Frank. On the first page of this letter, I promised you a mystery. It is the location of Fat Ernst’s secret room. You have all the facts that I had now. Where was it?

  Gertrun and I breakfasted together the next morning in her private apartment—a meal large enough to last me all day. Over coffee, I asked her whether her grandfather himself had ever spoken of a secret room. Had he said, for example, that there was one?

  She shrugged. “Gone he was before I am here to hear him, Liebling.”

  “I doubt that he did, although he may well have said that no one would ever find it. In that he was quite correct. No one ever will, because it does not exist.”

  She stared without speaking.

  “Allow me to tell you, so you’ll know I’m not bluffing. Then I will give you my word that I will never reveal the name or location of this hotel, or the name of your family. Never. Not to anyone.”

  “Danke.” I had taken her hand as I spoke, and she managed to smile. “Danke schön.”

  “There’s only one kind of secret room that can’t be found no matter how thorough the search, Gertrun. It’s a secret room that does not exist. Your grandfather put the people he was hiding into the ordinary rooms of his hotel. Many hotels have connecting doors between rooms, as yours does. And all of those I have ever seen have sliding bolts on both sides of the doors; I cannot enter my neighbor’s room unless his bolt is drawn back as well as my own, and he cannot enter mine. In this hotel, however, those bolts are connected by a slot through the door. I don’t know the word in German, but an American conjurer would say they were gimmicked. Or gaffed. That’s why you think it necessary to chain and padlock them.”

  I waited for her to speak, but she just stared; I saw her lower lip tremble.

  “When the Nazis put their room key into the lock, the person hiding in that room had only to slip into the next and hold the bolt of the connecting door closed until he heard the searchers leave and he could return. When the Jew’s room was being searched, he could slip into the priest’s, and when the priest’s was searched he could slip into the Jew’s. Or both could slip into the room occupied by the transvestite. I would imagine that they were careful to sleep on the floor, and so on—not to leave any indication that the room had been occupied that could not be snatched up and carried away. As for the yarmulke in the wine cellar, and whatever may have been found in the attic, they were false clues planted by your very clever and very brave grandfather to throw the searchers off the track.”

  She nodded and gave me a shaky smile.

  “How did he die? Was it an Allied bomb? That’s what Heinz thought.”

  “Nein. These Nazis here take him.”

  That puzzled me. I said, “But they can have had no evidence if they never found—”

  “For ein trial, Herr Doktor?” Gertrun’s smile was bitter then. “Evidence they do not need. They take him, und he ist dead.”

  It required some time to digest. That immense body sprawled in a gas chamber. Half a dozen Storm Troopers to drag it out and get it on the truck. Then I said, “You keep his secret—”

  “For nachst, Herr Doktor. For next time.”

  There you have it, Frank. But my train has not come yet, so let me tie up a few details. I promised you a mystery, and I think you will agree that I gave you one.

  A murder, as well. Was not Fat Ernst murdered by his government? If not, how did he die?

  That seems to me the greatest of all horror stories. When the millennium now ending began, government meant a king; and that king, whatever else he might be, was his nation’s leader. He might wage war upon his neighbors, but he would have been thought mad if he had waged war upon his followers. Bandits and cutpurses abounded, and they constituted a very real and present danger to everyone except the strongest; but the king was the sworn foe of all such criminals. In the century we are just now closing out, we ordinary men and woman have been in much greater danger from our own governments than from all the criminals in the world.

  In Nazi Germany, and not long afterward here in beautiful, smiling Austria, the government declared that Jews must die. The priest objected, so the priest had to die too. The man who cross-dressed disgusted the government’s functionaries, and he was added to the list.

  Which is more disgusting, a man in a dress or a government that murders the people who created it to protect them? Which is more horrible, Frank? Is it the werewolf of our folklore, or this soulless monster squatting over the corpse of its nation, its hands running with innocent blood?

  Sincerely,

  Sam Cooper

  PS. Still no train, although I spent nearly an hour sipping coffee in das snug Café. Thus I have time to tell you that last night about one thirty I woke to the sound of footsteps, footsteps slow and so heavy that the timbers of the landing creaked and groaned. Very distinctly, I heard the door open and saw a vertical bar of very bright-seeming light from stairwell. Somebody standing not more than a step from the bed in which I lay said softly but unmistakably, “1st gut,” and the door closed again. I got out of bed and turned on a light, but the only other person in the room was sleeping soundly. All three doors were securely fastened, as we had left them.

  I intend to return here to R——for a week or so after the conference to investigate this and other matters.

  Hunter Lake

  You’ll get arthritic eyes,’ Susan declared,”if you keep watching that thing. Turn it off and listen a minute.”

  Ettie pressed Mute.

  “Off!”

  Obed
iently, Ettie pressed the red button. The screen went dark.

  “You know what Kate told us. There’s a lake here—a beautiful lake that isn’t on anybody’s map.”

  “I did the Internet search, Mom. Remember?”

  “And you sit watching an old TV with rabbit ears in a rented cabin.” Susan was not to be distracted. “You know what your father says—people who get eyeball arthritis see only what they’re supposed to see, like that TV screen. Their eyes stiffen—”

  Ettie turned off the TV and brought out the artillery. “If Dad’s so smart and such a good father, why did you divorce him?”

  “I didn’t say he was a good husband. Come on! Get your coat. Don’t you want to look for a haunted lake?”

  Thinking it over, Ettie decided she did not. For one thing, she did not care for ghosts. For another, she was pretty sure this was a dream, and it might easily turn into a bad one. A haunted lake would give it entirely too much help. Aloud she said, “You’re going to write a magazine article and get paid. What’s in it for me?”

  “I’ll take pictures, too,” Susan declared. “Lots of pictures. It’s supposed to be very scenic. If a ghost shows up in one of my pictures, the sale will be a …”

  “Snap,” Ettie supplied.

  “Foregone conclusion.”

  The car door slammed, and the car pulled smoothly away from the oneroom log cabin that had been their temporary home. Ettie wondered whether she had left the TV on and decided she had. Would Nancy Drew have remembered to turn it off? Absolutely.

  “The Indians performed unspeakable rites there,” Susan continued. Studying Ettie from the corner of her eye, she concluded that more selling was in order. “They tortured their white prisoners, gouging out their eyes and scalping them while they were still alive. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Native Americans never did anything like that.” Ettie sounded positive, even to herself.

  “Oh yes, they did! A hunter found the lake hundreds of years afterward, and took his family there for a picnic because it was so pretty. His little daughter wandered away and was never seen again.”

  “I knew I wasn’t going to like this.”

  “Her spirit haunts it, walking over the water and moaning,” Susan declared with relish.

  “You can’t possibly know that.”

  “It’s what everybody says, Kate says. So today we’ll find it—you and me, Ettie—and we’ll stay out there all night and take lots and lots of pictures. Then I can write about how a sudden chill descended at midnight, a chill our struggling little fire could not dispel, seeming to rise from the very waters that—”

  “Mother!”

  “Harbor the ghosts of hundreds of Mohicans massacred by the Iroquois and thousands—no, innumerable—Iroquois massacred by white settlers, waters said to harbor pike of enormous size, fattened for centuries upon—ah! There’s the farmhouse.”

  It looked horrible, Ettie decided. “Burning that down would be an improvement.”

  “They’re old and poor. It’s not polite to make fun of old people. Or poverty.” A wrench at the wheel sent the car gliding into a farmyard from which no chicken fled in terror.

  “They’re dead, if you ask me.” Ettie pointed toward the little cemetery that should have been the front yard. Its cast-iron fence was rusting to pieces, and its thin limestone monuments leaned crazily.

  Susan took her key from the ignition. “Just a private burying ground, Ettie. Lots of old farms have them.”

  “Right in front of the house?”

  “I think that’s touching. They cared about their dead.” They were climbing broken steps to a ramshackle porch innocent of paint. “Probably they sat out here on rockers and talked to them.”

  “Cozy.”

  “It is, really. The dead are nearer the living than you know, Ettie.”

  You’re dead yourself, Ettie thought rebelliously, and ohmyGod how I miss you.

  Susan knocked. The knocks echoed inside the old farmhouse. There was no other sound.

  “Let’s go,” Ettie suggested.

  “I’m right here, dear.”

  “I know you are,” Ettie said. “I’m scared anyway. Let’s go. Please?”

  “Kate says there’s an old man here who knows precisely where Hunter Lake is. I’m going to question him and tape everything he says. I’m going to take his picture, and take pictures of this house.”

  Somebody behind them said, “No, you’re not.”

  Ettie found that she had turned to look, although she had not wanted to. The woman behind them was old and bent, and looked blind.

  Susan smiled, laid a hand on Ettie’s shoulder, and tried to grasp that shoulder in a way that would make it clear to Ettie that she, Susan, was counting on her not to misbehave. “Mrs. Betterly?”

  “Ain’t no business of yours, young woman.”

  “My name’s Susan Price,” Susan continued bravely, “and my daughter and I are friends—good friends—of Kate Eckert’s. We’re looking for Hunter Lake—”

  The old woman moaned.

  “And Kate said your husband would help us.”

  “He won’t talk to no women,” the old woman declared. “He hates women. All of us. Been fifty years since he spoke civil to a woman, he tolt me once.”

  Susan looked thoughtful. “My daughter isn’t a woman yet.”

  “Mother!”

  “Really now, Ettie. What would Nancy Drew say?”

  “‘I’m getting out of here,’ if she had any sense.”

  “He won’t hurt you. How old is he, Mrs. Betterly?”

  “Eighty-seven.” The old woman sounded proud. “He’s ten year old’n me, and won’t never die. Too mean.”

  Susan gave Ettie her very best smile. “You see? What are you afraid of? That he’ll hit you with his walker? He might call you a name, at worst.”

  “Or shoot me.”

  “Nonsense. If he shot little girls for asking polite questions, he’d have been sent to prison long ago.” Susan turned to the old woman. “All right if Ettie tries?”

  “Door’s not locked,” the old woman said. After a moment she added grudgingly, “That’s a brave little gal.”

  As though by magic, Ettie found that her hand was on the doorknob.

  “He’ll be in the parlor listenin’ to us. Or if he ain’t, in the sittin’ room. If he ain’t in the sittin’ room, he’ll be in the kitchen for sure.”

  The hinges are going to squeak, Ettie told herself. I just know it.

  They did, and the floorboards creaked horribly under her feet. She closed the door so that her mother would not see her fear and pressed her back against it.

  Outside, Susan endeavored to peep through several windows, returned to her car, and got her camera. “All right for me to take your picture, Mrs. Betterly?”

  “Just fog your film,” the old woman said. “Always do.”

  “Then you don’t mind.” Susan snapped the picture, being sure to get in a lot of the house.

  In it (it appeared immediately on the back of her camera) the old woman was holding a bouquet of lilies. “Where did you get the flowers?” Susan asked.

  “Picked ‘em,” the old woman explained. “Grow wild’round here. Buttercups, mostly.”

  “Where did they go?” Susan tried to hide her bewilderment.

  “Threw’m away once your picture was took.”

  Inside, Ettie was poking around the parlor, pausing every few seconds to look behind her. The carpet, she noticed, was too small for the room, torn and moth-eaten. Dust covered the bare floor, and there were no footprints in the dust save her own.

  He isn’t here, she thought. He hasn’t been here for a long, long time.

  And then: I could take something. A souvenir. Anything. None of this stuff is doing anybody any good, and I’ve earned it.

  There was a glass-topped case at the end of one of the divans. It held old coins and arrowheads, and the top was not locked. She selected a worn little coin with a crude picture of a Native A
merican on it, and slipped it into her pocket. It had not looked valuable, and she would have it always to remember this day and how frightened she had been.

  There was no one in the sitting room and no one in the kitchen. No one in the dining room, either.

  A crude stair took her upstairs as effortlessly as an escalator. He’s old, she thought, I’ll bet he’s sick in bed.

  There were three very old-fashioned bedrooms, each with its own small fireplace. All were empty.

  He’s gone, Ettie told herself happily. He’s been gone for years and years. I can tell Mother anything.

  Outside again, speaking to Susan from the porch, she said, “Do you want everything, or just the important parts?”

  “Just the important parts.”

  “Where’s the old lady?”

  “She went away.” For an instant, Susan forgot to look perky. “I turned around, and she wasn’t there. Did her husband call you names?”

  That was easy. Ettie shrugged. “You said you just wanted the important stuff. Here it is. He said for us to go home.”

  Susan sighed. “That’s not what I sent you in to find out.”

  “Well, that was the important thing.” Ettie did her best to sound reasonable.

  “All right, everything. But leave out the names.”

  “Okay. He said, ‘Little lady, that lake’s a real bad place, so don’t you ever forget you’re a grown woman and got a Ph.D. and a daughter of your own.’ Am I supposed to do the dialect?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. He also said,’f you got to go there, you time it so your alarm goes off before anything bad happens. You go home. One way or the other. That’s all I’m going to tell you. Get on home.’”