IX.
The doctor called Astrid's name and she went inside his office and sat down across from him.
There's a link here…there's something about that girl that I saw yesterday that… triggers something, she mused. The doctor helped hook up the electrodes from the kinetoscope to the top of her head.
"Do you ever forget what day of the week or year it is?"
"Well, I remember the day of the week because each day has its own menial tasks…today's July 21st, I think."
"And the year?"
"1919."
"Okay. Now, this therapy that you've spoken of…what did it do? Did you experience any…other side effects from it? Or anything psychoactive?"
Astrid pondered for a moment then nodded slowly, then relayed her thoughts:
"I've been thinking about it…about what first happened approximately a week after he began treating me with it…at first I didn't think that there was a correlation between the two…"
"Where does he get it, first of all?"
"He just says he knows that it's a natural remedy that he knows where to find out in the woods. I just didn't pay much attention to it; he's the one who's studied this sort of thing."
"And what happened?"
"I remember it was sometime in early September – I was taking a night walk around town, and…suddenly I started feeling disoriented."
Astrid lapsed into memory…strange, she thought, it's as if I'd buried that memory in my subconscious, as if it had just been a dream.
She first remembered walking along a moonlit cobblestone street on a humid night in late May in downtown Rosenheim – the closest thing to a town in the rural town. Suddenly, a wave of disorientation washed over her; and in the next few moments her vision became more tunnel-like. Hues were more vivid and saturated and everything seemed animated, yet her mind still felt disconnected; like dreaming or in a deep trance. And then it was if her senses had blurred together - that faint jazz music, for example, had its own kaleidoscopic pattern of colors that hovered in the night air and looked tangible… her right hand reached out slowly, and her fingers felt the collection of jagged mosaic fragments that floated about and vibrated in the humid summer night air to the cadence of the horn music.
While walking down the moonlit street, the sense of freefalling hit her unexpectedly, followed by dissociation that engulfed her. She looked around her surroundings for any stores, any restaurants in case she felt herself about to collapse – but then she could make out a place on the corner of the next street block which teemed with liveliness. She tried her best to run, feeling as if she wasn't really running as it felt as if she lost function in her motor skills, but she knew she had to be moving fast somehow because she managed to make her way to the entrance. She stood at the front of the door between the two flickering gas lamps. She felt the vibration of the music in her body, and the laughter and din inside – yet the laughter didn't seem human, the way it resonated sounded like cosmic laughter emanating from something more arcane...
Fortunately, the first door she had come to inside the place was a restroom. She noticed the mirror and slowly approached it. The first thing she glimpsed of the reflection was her eyes – the pupils eclipsed the iris to the point where only the faint rim of blue could be seen. Like black holes... black wells inside which she felt she could see inside her soul…she had thought at the time. She had no idea how long she was there.
A man's voice was penetrating the trance-like state, seeming so intrusive and foreign…
Astrid opened her eyes again, feeling dazed. "Just now, I...I recalled the experience so vividly…it's as if I was there again..." She tried to retell what she had remembered as best she could.
"Some of what you described sounds like synaesthesia...and did you lose consciousness in that place?
"I don't think so…I just went in looking for the restroom so that I could look at my appearance. She shuddered upon recalling how the reflection in the mirror looked like her – and at the same time she didn't recognize the figure.
"Did anyone see that you needed help?"
"No…and I didn't try to find any…. I've never experienced anything like it. Yet there was a strong sense of…psychic discomfort, as if my identity was lost and I was merging and disappearing with everything around me. It was dissociating, most of all…"
"What you speak of is not like delirium that other patients here experience, Astrid. I'm not discounting what you saw, at all… it seems you entered an altered state of consciousness… characteristic of some sort of entheogenic substance. And I find it interesting that you too see a correlation here between this experience and the fact that your husband made this tincture from some kind of plant.
"Maybe you could learn more from these visions – even just a fragment of one could help you recall something. Also pay close attention to anyone else in them. If you were supposed to be stupefied at the time, whoever's involved may leave about some evidence that they're not as careful to conceal.
"Try to bring back more repressed memories. This may result in you loosing consciousness more, Astrid. You may notice arbitrary things or situations triggering."
Like collecting the fragments of a broken mirror, Astrid mused. Does she reflect components of me?
X.
Elke discreetly withdrew her small pocket watch to check the time for what seemed like the hundredth time or so this evening. Almost a quarter of midnight now. He usually goes to bed any time between ten and midnight…he should really be going soon. Should I go back to my room so that he doesn't think I'm staying up for him? I think I ought to. Elke slowly got up from her chair to make her way back to her bedroom, but her brother called her name when she was halfway from her chair to the corridor.
"What is it?"
"I just want to talk with you a moment."
"All right." She waited.
"Let's sit out on the porch swing a minute, how about that? It is very nice out there and all that."
"Willem…I'm sorry for not telling you what happened; I just got it back yesterday, in fact, and I was in disbelief at first anyway."
He didn't respond for a few moments – then, "Do you ever feel like time and place are just suspended out here sometimes, Elke?"
"Hm? Oh…I don't know. Haven't really thought like that." She reflected a moment. "Actually…maybe it's because I keep myself busy enough that I don't really feel that way as much."
Elke was already out the next morning when the ground was still dewy and the morning air thick with warm fog that hovered just over the ground. Although at first glance Elke mistook the device for a stag or other ruminant beast resting on the ground, she saw that it was in fact the kinetoscope – immobile, but still with the legs of the stand bent like an animal’s. She placed an eye against the periscope to see Astrid’s willowy white figure to the left of the first frame still: she was sitting at a dining table and as the picture moved, Klaus moved about the kitchen in the background with a flask, an eyedropper, and a small glass.
Astrid didn’t seem to be paying any mind to Klaus as he prepared some sort of tincture. With the eyedropper he extracted five drops of a reddish-brown fluid from the flask into the glass. As he was walking over to the table Astrid pushed her chair back to pull the edge of her skirt out from underneath one of the chair legs, but backed sharply into Klaus who was approaching the table with the glass and - he let out a string of curses as he stumbled and crashed into the table. The tincture splashed all over Astrid and the wooden cast of a deer.
“Oh no…oh no,” she heard him muttering.
“What, Klaus? Can’t you get more of it?” But Klaus’s face troubled her; he looked frightened, disbelieving.
“It’s not supposed to… come in contact with anything…” he trailed off, staring avidly at the cast that was stained with the tincture, as if expecting it to come alive and attack him.
And then the woodcarving started creaking.
The picture ended and only a black screen showed afterwards.
XI.
“Elke, why did you go back and meddle with that kinetoscope and that woman again? Do you think I would tell you not to unless I thought it was a bad idea?”
“I think he’s drugging her with something…but what?” she stared abstractly through the window.
Willem stared at her, as though he debating whether or not to impart something important. He sighed and then spoke:
“I’ll tell you a little more – about what else I discovered before the kinetoscope disappeared from the basement. After the war ended in 1918, many had what they call shell-shock. When this woman Astrid lost her whole family in Germany before emigrating here she was afflicted with it, too. She wouldn’t speak at all – at first her husband thought maybe she was becoming ill from the poison gas that was used so much in warfare. Then, apparently he met a shaman who used to live in those woods out there – a man who concocted something that could help her forget easier, made from some endangered insect in the woods. But the tincture proved to have some dangerous side effects: the hallucinations, delusions, different states of consciousness...”
“So it’s not her fault, then.”
“Well – I suspect, due to her dementia and how she’s written to her husband about where she’s living now, she may believe herself to be trapped in, for instance, a prisoner-of-war camp. And so – finding that you can talk to her – she probably thinks she can escape from there.”
“This shaman you mentioned… is he the one who enchanted all those things out there - the kinetoscope too? Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know if he’s still around. I imagine so. I’ve actually never seen him, so for all I know he’s not even real.”
“How did you find out about all this…?”
“Just as you did, for the most part,” he answered vaguely. He began to occupy himself again by carrying armfuls of kindling from outside into the woodstove. “Does that satisfy your curiosity, then?”
“Well…it clears up a few things, I suppose.”
The next morning, when Elke went out early to look for the coppice she had heard about, as dubious as it all sounded (even in light of other extraordinary occurrences); from the prospect of “entheogenic insects” to a shaman that concocted medicinal remedies. Elke still felt dubious about coming across this coppice where these entheogenic insects were supposed to be. Every time she heard the humming of a cluster of bees or a swarm of beetles she thought she was close to finding the elusive insects.
If all those other charmed creatures and objects came from there, then something like this should be there in that clearing where the kinetoscope was, if it’s anywhere at all, she decided. But after an hour or so of searching she gave up. Without knowing where it was before, it seemed futile to look so hard without having a general idea of where it was.
After arriving back at the cottage, Elke found her brother on the veranda. She walked up to him before he noticed her return and asked, “Willem…would you come with me to come look for it?”
He seemed surprised at her asking for his company. “Elke, I don’t know-” she noticed a subtle change in his visage, as he was reflecting on something - “All right, I’ll go with you. I suppose it’s safer than you going alone.”
“You don’t expect to find anything, do you?”
“Actually…”
Elke looked up quickly; she had found it a bit surprising that he’d agreed to accompany her without dismissing the idea at first – even if his constant concern with her safety in any circumstance was exasperating.
“I’ve been doing some research. Those insects – they truly do exist, after all, from what I’ve found. It’s not some myth after all. That doesn’t mean any still do exist, or that there’s any to be found there, however,” Willem said.
The two of them left the cottage and made their way toward the woods. She let him lead, and she followed him deep into the bosom of the forest. A dazed feeling came over her suddenly, and she felt as if the ground slipped out from beneath her. It happened again, but like a feeling of loosing her ground, or a freefalling. Blinking, her field of vision swirled and blurred faintly.
“What’s wrong?” Willem asked, when he realized she stopped following and was standing still.
“Nothing…just felt a bit dizzy for a second.” her voice sounding distorted. She looked at him closely. Something was changing. He didn’t look familiar to her anymore, and his face looked like it was changing.
Her vision became tunnel-like, and then she felt the velvety blackness of unconsciousness enclosing in.
Elke followed the dirt road lined with cypress and willow trees, winding behind the cottage toward the charnel house. She had to continuously swat sweat-thirsty gnats and fruit flies off wherever there was bare skin with the hand that wasn’t holding the lantern. Whatever time of day it was seemed stuck in a perpetual limbo; the sun wasn’t in view and it could have been either dawn or dusk.
Garter snakes slithered in and out of the concrete ruins and limestone debris at the entrance of the charnel house. The heavy alabaster door was lichen-stained and ornamented with dried poppy bouquets and funeral boughs. Elke gingerly opened the door to the crypt and the space inside was redolent of oak moss, frankincense, and embalming herbs.
Fifty burnished skulls were aligned on the shelf on the left wall – five ledges with ten on each row. Each had a pair of stones in the eye sockets that coruscated in the lantern’s light. Elke walked slowly over to them and picked up one on the second shelf – as if with a clairvoyant eye she knew this is the one she was supposed to find. She smoothed her thumb over its surface and the sutures, and the eye stones swiveled around to the back of the head. On the back, embossed in each stone, were the initials A.M. Caught off guard by the motion of the eye sockets, Elke backed away nervously.
Something in the air was creating more haze and thickness, and a hissing sound was issuing from somewhere. She found the source: a white effluvium was emitting from the skull she had just picked up off the shelf. Like a djinni rising from the vapors of a receptacle, the room was enveloped in the smoky substance and the ominous hissing increased in pitch. The room started swirling as the smoke intoxicated her like a narcotic, sedating her into a warm, soporific hypnosis. As the smoke was starting to overwhelm her senses, out of the skull’s eye socket a giant insect slowly squirmed out, as if in peristaltic motion.
Then, like an ectoplasmic mass festering in the hibernation of the cranium’s chamber, its writhing form fully emerged. Sliding down the ledges, it elongated itself and resembled a type of arthropod; its carapace was shiny, metallic, and variegated like a hologram.
Kill it…
Kill it now-
The voice was not audible, but Elke heard the words in her mind louder and more distinctively… but where had they come from? Something then caught her attention: a long, thin object which gleamed white on the cold concrete floor.
A sharp bone of some sort – perhaps a human femur? Elke surmised when she picked up the limb. The end of it was needle-sharp, as if it had in fact been sharpened that way; in any case, it was out of place among the collection of skulls. Elke gripped the bone and when the insect loomed closer, she instinctively shoved the sharpened point through the shell, somewhere between the creature’s head and body. It screeched and shrank closer to the floor; she thrust it again in its left eye socket and the creature recoiled and hissed from the lacerations of the weapon. Elke dealt a final slash to its thorax and the insect began to die, twitching sporadically.
Makeshift weapon still in hand, Elke backed out of the charnel house and ran blindly back toward the direction of the cottage, not daring to look behind her the entire way.
She felt herself coming to her senses as the sharp scent of cedar brought her back to consciousness. The wainscoting of the sod shanty absorbed most of the light that was infiltrating the room. As her eyes adjusted to the darker light, she observed the walls which were bedighted with elk molars, longhorn cattle antlers, various charms; many things fetishized and sylvan-inspired and rustic. Around his neck he wore a leather cord with an amber amulet. He shuffled slowly, slightly hunched over.
“…So there’s no way to stop it until we kill it,” a voice said softly. She stared at the figure and his silhouette turned to her.
“What happened to me just now?” she demanded.
“What do you mean?” said the voice. Her brother’s voice sounded distorted, for some reason, and something about hers did as well.
“How did we get here?”
“What? Astrid, do you feel all right? You look really dazed.” The figure turned to the cloaked man. “Can that… still be affecting her?”
“It could – side effects can last for a good five hours…” the man said.
“All I remember is that you and I were walking out in the deep heart of the woods when I began feeling lightheaded and then blacked out – I just came to when I heard you talking about killing something! And…you called me Astrid just now,” she added. She tried to study him in the wan light.
Her brother was staring intently at her, looking noticeably concerned. “Astrid… are you ok? Do you feel sick?” The figure had stopped shuffling about and was watching her, too. “If you need to lie down, I’m sure there’s a place somewhere in here where you can if -“
“No, no…never mind,” she murmured.
She felt his eyes on her again, feeling uncomfortable by his stare and she continued to inspect the floor, until he sighed and resumed talking. “In any case, we were talking about this creature that we think is causing your problems.”
But she was too perturbed by this to engage in conversation. She tried to rationalize what was happening; how, if anything, she could remember what was happening so that it could connect to the other pieces of the mystery later.
As the figure stood, she squinted through the dimly lit room and realized it wasn’t her brother at all: and then she noticed her clothes, and saw the raven locks of hair. This was compounded with the realization that, from seeing the figure through the kinetoscope before, who she thought was her brother was in fact Astrid’s husband, Klaus; and she, in turn, now had Astrid’s form.
The shaman shuffled over to the table on which a mason jar holding black beetles, a kerosene lamp, and a metal skewer. He opened the jar and pointed the skewer over the jar. He deftly speared one of the insects onto the skewer, and the metal barely pierced through as it crunched through the armored carapace and into its viscera. As he held the insect, angrily wiggling its spindle-legs, over the lamp he spoke, “I’ve been studying these insects for a long time. They are simply a marvel, and so exotic that even many entomologists are ignorant of its mystical properties. Not only do they possess this entheogen, but, if they bite – they can capture one’s memories. One could tell if this happens because it will physically manifest itself in the color of the shell - it will turn more holographic. Essentially, pieces of one’s psyche can be trapped in them, mimicking those symptoms of amnesia. It’s simply remarkable that it can affect brain chemistry in this two-fold manner.”
In her mind’s eye, the recollection of that insect with the variegated shell rising from the skull resurfaced briefly. She watched the flames licked up the sides of its body, but didn’t catch fire. As the shell heated it glowed phosphorescent, turning from jet-black and glossy to white and slightly transparent.
“The psychoactive ingredient needs to be heated to become active,” he added as an aside. A reddish-brown fluid came from the punctured beetle’s underside and he held it over the flask so that the liquid dripped into it. He did this until no more came out, and then he dropped the empty white shell in a dish on the table.
"That’s one, four left..." he mumbled, as he walked back over to the jar and re-opened the jar with the four beetles, seemingly aware of what was going on as they were now huddled together inside.
“Anyway - you wanted to know a bit about that kinetoscope over there? I bought it at an antique place that used to be around here ten years ago - it's not in business anymore. It was essentially useless - but one day, I was reading in this book - He picked up a book that rested on the table. The book had red binding and on the cover in gold-gilded typescript read “Para-relations and Kinetic Exploitation.”
“I found this book at that store also; purchased it on a whim. Anyway, while perusing it one day I found a page that specifically said how to enchant mechanical devices such as this one. I tried a few things on it, and through serendipity it worked: this machine has all kinds of interesting functions its capable of now – it can read brainwaves, and will show the pictures on the screen.”
He opened to the page where the bookmarker ribbon was, which showed a black and white diagrammed illustration of a device similar in make-up to the kinetoscope.
“In fact, there’s an institution that used to use this – they’d manufacture them from other similar mechanisms to measure the brain activity which would project on the screen – there were only four others made. If I remember correctly, the other four included a Cinematograph, a Phonoscope, a Magniscope and a Thaumatographe.
“But when the Bavarian parliament found out about these clandestine practices, they threatened to shut the place down for good and prosecute all the doctors if they didn’t cease these practices and give up these devices for confiscation. They really are more of a research institution, but call themselves a psychiatric hospital so as to avoid too much curiosity from the public. Anyway, this is the last one around that I know of; I don’t know what happened to the rest. But this one – this is the only one enchanted in such a way.”
Elke’s eye then caught the figurine in the corner of the shanty. The shaman followed her gaze and asked Klaus to bring it over. "Is that supposed to represent my totem animal or something, that 'elk'?" She said lightheartedly, but as soon as she uttered the words she inwardly chastened herself for forgetting whose body she was in, now uneasy about arousing suspicion. She covered it up by complimenting him on the workmanship of it.
"Oh, do you like it? You can take it back with you. I haven't the space to keep it here anyhow."
She laughed nervously; its beady eyes and the lifelike expression made her uneasy. "It's all right, I don't think I could offer it a good home; our place is rather cluttered -"
"Go ahead and take it if you like it, Astrid," Klaus said. "There's plenty of room for it that I can think of. It's a rather elegant piece of work."
"Oh…well, ok. Thank you," she told the shaman feebly.
“Now, we’ll use that object to focus on – not so much the object itself, as something inanimate while you concentrate on trying astral projection for the first time.”
Elke felt the pit of uneasiness growing in her stomach, apprehensive of what would happen if she took the tincture. She wondered - could she be stuck in this body forever? That possibility of that was something she couldn’t begin to fathom right now.
After a few moments of silence in which their eyes were on her, and she stood motionless, she said slowly, “I don’t feel ready just yet….I’m…having a bad headache right now,” she finished lamely. She looked furtively about the room. “Mind if I look at the kinetoscope over there?”
Inside the peephole Elke saw Astrid projected on the screen – but is that me or is that really Astrid? Elke wondered. This opened the door to many philosophical questions that Elke didn’t have the time to ponder the implications of.
The woman was kneeling on the floor of a room – an elegant room decked with gold-gilded furniture and crimson rugs and falls of matching crushed velvet curtains. Elke surmised it was Astrid’s house. On the plush rugs laid two objects which Elke squinted hard to see: a skull, and a transparent phial which was half-filled with a prismatic fluid.
Klaus entered the room and handed her an ornamented wooden coffer. “Make sure that box is put somewhere where it can never be found by anyone, Astrid,” he said gravely.
“I know, Klaus…” she mumbled, as she carefully placed both of the objects inside.
“Don’t forget, there’s the last one that needs to go in there,” Klaus said. Astrid nodded, and rose from the floor to follow Klaus out of the room and downstairs. On the kitchen table was the woodcarving of the deer, with a saw beside it. Klaus hewed into the left front leg and severed it at the joint.. He handed her the deer cloven-hoofed extremity to her and she placed it inside the reliquary.
“Because if she finds it… she can turn the tables and destroy you. Those are vestiges of you, Astrid. She’s the one who is going to be, well, departing soon. She can’t find out anything,” he repeated.
XII.
“What an intriguing device,” Elke ventured to say as nonchalant as possible as she forced herself to pull away, realizing she had probably been looking inside of it too long when the shaman had said there was no pictures in there to see. But as she took her eyes away from the screen and turned from the kinetoscope, she saw that, although she was still in the shanty – the room was empty.
She walked through the small house, but could find no trace of anyone. And yet, everything was in place as it had been, but Klaus and the shaman were nowhere to be seen. Thinking that the kinetoscope could offer some explanation, some clue, she placed her eye against the viewer again, waiting for a picture to show up.
This time, the first frame showed a barren, dismal landscape that looked like a farmstead. After a few slides she could make out a small goat moving slowly through a field. At closer look, Elke saw that the animal was emaciated and dismembered, hobbling along and foaming at the mouth. Two condors kept descending in on the poor wretched creature as it ambled helplessly in the direction of an old barn. The next frame sequence showed two repulsive-looking insects copulating in another dilapidated setting of some sort. In another, a butcher hacked into a calf with a cleaver, the blood spatter contrasting gruesomely with his white apron. Several of the severed pieces quivered and slid off the table, making their way for the door; the butcher grunted with vexation and chased their slippery path to collect whatever he could get a hold of.
She found herself unable to endure watching any more any more of the monstrous images and turned away from the kinetoscope. “Who put these here instead…” she muttered out loud, her voice wavering with fright.
“Quite a whimsy, isn’t it - what’s happened to my head since I’ve been “treated” with this miraculous medicine?” the mordant female voice dripping with venom laughed mirthlessly, seeming to issue from a specific source in the room.
Elke, whose visage was so pallid she looked drained of blood, searched desperately around the room looking for an exit, or for one of them to come back, or the source of that voice – in the next room she saw the barred door that led to outside, and as she unlatched it she heard a clacking on the wooden floors from the room she’d came from. It occurred to her the sound mimicked that of cloven hooves; what that signified she didn’t stop to ponder. But the door seemed stuck – and something was coming toward her…
Finally the door opened as Elke pressed all of her weight against it. She didn’t even turn around to look behind her again as she blindly stumbled out of the hovel, running as fast as she could.
Fronds of ghostly Spanish moss billowed in her path as Elke sprinted through the forest. The familiar sensation of dissociation began creeping upon her against as she ran through the woods. She finally stopped running and held on the limb of a tree, breathing raggedly; as she tried to ward off that force that was causing her to enter a swoon again…
When Elke awoke for the second time, at first completely disoriented and with no idea of how long she’d been lying there, she felt her brother shaking her gently. When she was cognizant again, she recalled everything in a flash and immediately examined herself, discovering with immense relief to find herself in her own body again.
“What happened to me, Willem?” she asked, brushing off the leaves and rising to her feet.
“You passed out while we were walking through here. Are you feeling okay now?”
“How long was I passed out for?”
“Roughly five minutes, I’d say.”
“I have to tell you everything I saw…we need to go back.” They walked back to the cottage and arrived as dusk was approaching.
Elke sat and told her brother everything she’d felt and witnessed in the shaman’s hovel.
“This is what happens when you meddle with mysterious forces such as these…I’m not surprised that there’s witchcraft involved in all this,” he answered stoically.
“Willem – she is trying to communicate with me, and I think she does have ulterior motives of some sort…but I still think she’s been brainwashed, or possessed, or something. What I saw in the kinetoscope again – before all this happened, she had to find someone to “trade places” with, if you will. I think this was accidental – I think she forgot what she tried to accomplish then, and now just seeks help from something, anything that can help her.”
“From what you’ve told me – what it comes down to is either you or her.”
Elke had rather hoped he wouldn’t say those last words, but she wasn’t exactly surprised that he did, either – it affirmed what had been brewing in her mind after ruminating on everything that had happened hitherto - from the wooden deer to the dreamlike state she’d entered earlier that day.
XII.
“I really don’t want to do this…” Elke said sadly.
“It’s you or her, there’s no other way to look at it. I can’t fathom why you have so much compassion for someone you don’t even know; someone who hardly exists in the world… She’s like a crafty Svengali, Elke, and you’ve come close enough to letting her puppet your mind – didn’t I tell you not to trust her?”
Elke didn’t find any comfort in her brother’s words at all; his apathy was typical and just exasperating.
“But it’s my fault…not hers. I’m the one who, in her mind, made that decision. Unknowingly, of course, but nonetheless it’s still because of me. But…when it comes down to it… I didn’t choose to have a part in this; I did what I thought would help…” she realized she was speaking more to herself than to him; she didn’t expect him to be understanding, only rational and indifferent to anyone who didn’t involve them.
“You might as well do what you have to do tonight,” he said softly. And with that, he handed her the reliquary and disappeared back inside the cottage.
Elke walked slowly down the steps of the veranda. A pair of eyes glowed neon-green down the path; as the moon was unveiled by clouds she saw a fox dash away into the woods to the right of the dirt path. She looked and contemplated the night sky: the steely sickle moon glistened in the sky, looming low as if heralding the harvesting season of autumn, and she envisioned it swooping down and reaping the fields of corn and wheat with its honed cusps. The night air was hushed save for the symphony of nocturnal creatures.
The charnel house shone in the moonlight. Elke hands shook as she unfolded the last letter she’d received from her. Scrawled in a few lines on the middle of the page read simply:
Thank you for helping me. I owe you so much but I can’t think of how to repay you. Maybe fate will have us cross paths one day, somehow.
I should at least hurry up and do it as quickly as possible… she thought sorrowfully. She opened the reliquary one more time, beholding each item in it. Then, with an unwilling heart, she began walking in the direction of the charnel house.
She opened the door, and placed the box on the floor while she collected some kindling outside the charnel house. Carrying an armful back inside, she laid the bark in a circle so that it formed a pit. She took the matchbook from her pocket and lit the woodpile. Nervousness consumed her as with shaking hands, she placed the reliquary over the flames and watched as the woodwork of the box catch fire. On a whim, she quickly withdrew the folded note to burn along with the coffer. It was as if the ghostly presences were watching her with omnipresent eyes. The crackling flames rose higher and danced about like an angry afreet. After a few minutes the charred box popped open suddenly, and the flames grew and became a spectrum of colors. The objects inside caught fire; the phial broke and the liquid bubbled in the pit. The skull turned black, and steam rose from the top of it.
Elke intently watched the blazing pyre and the radiant display of colors. The heat was getting to her; she backed away a bit. There was something tranquil about watching it, too, she felt. The light reflected brilliantly in her half-mast eyes until they shut completely. She didn’t even feel it happening, but she opened them slightly once more to catch the sight of the blackened skull – she imagined it was just her imagination, but it really looked like an apparition resembling her rising from the steam.
XIII.
As the flames were beginning to die down, the door to the charnel house flew open and a bedraggled woman in a white dress stood in the entrance, her wide dark eyes sharply contrasting her sallow appearance. She beheld the girl lying in a sprawl on the floor, her form somewhat transparent now; the charred pit, and the embers smoldering the final remnants of the relics. She held onto the door, grief-stricken by the spectacle and the realization that she had been too late…
XIV.
May 1926.
Astrid walked the familiar path to the ossuary – it had been nearly a year since she’d been there. The last time was when she had brought the deer sculpture and placed it beside the young girl’s crypt – since her physical form had disappeared, the crypt was actually empty, but Astrid felt that the woodcarving had had some sort of significance to her. She had also placed her quiver bow and set of arrows inside the crypt; the only sign that she’d been there when she found her.
Opening the door to the crypt, she saw the charred spot on the ground, one of the only other affirmations that she hadn’t just been a figment of her imagination. However, Astrid noticed with disappointment that the woodcarving was gone. She was angry that someone must have come in and stolen it, but then the charnel house door was never barred or kept locked.
Astrid contemplated the crypt once more, placing a small wreath of poppies on the marble surface and left. Klaus thought it was silly and overly sentimental of her; he still didn’t consider her “any more real than a fairy-tale character” to begin with, and he remarked that the “in the end the impudent girl tried to escape with her own life, anyway,” but inwardly Astrid knew the girl couldn’t really be blamed for that. She gave up on trying to have him understand that the girl had essentially sacrificed her life, knowingly or not, and that she had tried to help her when Astrid hadn’t even been aware of what was going on because of the treatment she had been receiving.
On the way back, passing the ivy-clad arcades that aligned each side of the road, Astrid thought she saw a pair of antlers in her peripheral vision on the other side of the colonnade. She looked up momentarily but saw nothing, not sure why she found anything out of the ordinary about it anyway. Moments later she heard twigs snapping and a rustling in the trees that sounded like it came from the hilltop. Astrid glanced up again, and saw a pair of obsidian eyes meet hers fleetingly before it disappeared into the undergrowth.
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