Eifelheim

10. Now: Anton

I met Tom and Judy at the Hauptbahnhof in Bismarkallee, where the magnetic train slid up from Frankfurt-am-Main. We took the Bertholdstrasse streetcar to Kaiser Josef Strasse and walked from there to the hotel on Gerberau. I pointed out the sights like the worst of tourist guides. Tom had seen it all before, of course; but it was new to Judy.

When we walked through Martin’s Tor, she commented on its storybook appearance. This gate had been standing a century in the walls of the Old Town when Pastor Dietrich had befriended certain strangers. The wind from the Höllental was cool, a sign that summer’s end was near.

After settling them in their rooms, I took them to lunch at the Römischer Kaiser. We gave our full attention to the meal. To do otherwise in the Schwartzwald would have been a cardinal sin. No one on earth cooks like the Schwartzwalder; even our department store mannequins are portly. Not until the waiter had delivered our streussel did I allow the conversation to turn to business.

Tom wanted to leave for the Forest immediately. I could see the eagerness in him, but I told him we would wait for morning. “Why?” he wanted to know. “I want to see the site for myself.” Judy waited patiently, saying nothing.

“Because Eifelheim is deep within the Forest,” I said. “It will be a long drive and a hike, even if we can locate the site quickly. You will need a good night’s sleep to recover from the jet lag.” I took another bite of my streussel and set my fork down. “And another reason, my friends. Monsignor Lurm from the diocesan office will be joining us once he has received the bishop’s permission. I have not, naturally, told him what we expect to find. Thus, he will be a valuable check on our preconceptions.”

Tom and Judy glanced at each other. “What do you mean?” asked Tom. “Why do we need someone from the diocesan office?”

Sometimes my friend is a little slow. “It is a Catholic cemetery, nicht wahr? You did not come all this way only to look. Surely you will want to exhume the grave and see who, or what, is buried there. For that we need the permission.”

“But…” Tom frowned. “That cemetery is seven hundred years old.”

I shrugged. “What of it? Some things are eternal.”

He sighed. “You’re right. I suppose we must wait until morning then.”

Americans are in too much of a hurry. A single fact is worth a volume of deductions. Best to plan carefully how to find that fact. Tom would have had us on the site sooner — but without a shovel.

We did do one thing first. I took them to the crypt in the Franziskanerkirche and showed them the mural of the grasshoppers in imitation of the Last Supper. The colors were faded and the paint chipped, and the figures had that odd appearance that those unused to Klimt or Picasso think unnatural.

Tom stood close and peered at them. “Do you suppose this is them?” I only shrugged. “Why are there only eight?” he wondered.

“I suppose to avoid a charge of blasphemy.”

Judy said, “There are names under some of them.”

That, I had not noticed on my previous visit. We gathered round and tried to read the corrupted letters. There had once been names under all, but the centuries had destroyed many of the letters, even entire names. One grasshopper wore the mantle of a Knight of the Hospital and was called — if we guessed the missing letters properly — Gottfried-Laurence. Another sat with its head tilted back and its arms outspread — in death? In prayer? That name began with the letter U-, and must have been very short. Uwe, I thought, or Ulf. The one in the center, sharing out its bread, was “St. Jo—” and leaning on its breast was “-ea-ric-.”

“Not your traditional names for the apostles,” I commented.

But Tom made no answer. He could not take his eyes off the figure in the center.

Monsignor Lurm met us outside the hotel the next morning. He was a tall, gaunt man with a high forehead. Dressed in a faded bush jacket, only his collar revealed his calling.

“Na, Anton, meiner Alt,” he said, waving some papers. “I have them. We must pay the proper respect and disturb nothing but the one grave. Personally, I think Bishop Arni will be more than happy to bury this Dracula nonsense.” He looked at Tom and Judy. “That is something, isn’t it. To bury it, we must dig it up!” He laughed.

I winced. Heinrich was a virtuous man, but his puns had earned him many years in Purgatory. I also felt guilty that I had deceived him regarding our intentions. “Permit me,” I said. “This is my friend from America, Tom Schwoerin, and his assistant, Judy Cao. Monsignor Heinrich Lurm.”

Heinrich pumped Tom’s hand. “Doctor Schwoerin. It is to me a great pleasure. I much enjoyed your paper on the gene frequencies of the Swabian tribes. It greatly clarified the routes of their migrations. A good thing for you that my ancestors dropped their genes everywhere they went. Eh?”

Before Tom could respond to this latest bon mot, I interrupted. “Heinrich is an amateur archeologist. He has excavated several Swabian villages from before the Völkerwanderung.”

“You’re that Heinrich Lurm? The pleasure is mine. I’ve read your reports, father. You’re no amateur.”

Heinrich flushed. “On the contrary, ‘amateur’ comes from the Latin amare, to love. I do archeology for love. I am not paid.”

Heinrich had rented two Japanese pickup trucks. Two men with drooping moustaches waited beside them, talking quietly. There were picks, shovels and other paraphernalia in the bed of the first truck. When the men saw us coming, they climbed into the bed of the second.

“I think there is an old logging road that will take us close to the site,” Heinrich told me. “It cannot be too far a walk from there. I will drive the first truck. Anton, you take the second. Fräulein Cao,” he turned to her. “You may ride with me. Since I am celebate, you will be safer than with these two old goats.” He grinned at me, but I pretended not to notice.

We took the Schwartzwald-Hauptstrasse into the mountains, turning off at Kirchzarten. The road began climbing as we drove into the Zastiertal. I rolled the window down and let the cool mountain air blow into the cab. In the back, the workmen laughed. One of them began singing an old country song.

“Too bad that Sharon could not come,” I said.

Tom looked at me briefly. Then he faced forward again. “She’s working on another project. The one I told you about.”

“Ja. The circuit diagram. That was the most remarkable thing of all. Never again will I look at a manuscript illumination in the same way. Think of it, Tom. Could you or I ever have recognized it for what it was, let alone what it meant? Pfaugh.” I waved a hand. “Never. And Sharon. Would she ever have seen it? Medieval manuscripts. No, physicists do not do such things. Only because the two of you were together could it ever have happened the way it did. And if she had not thought of that comment of Sagan’s just before she looked…?”

Tom looked out the side window at the trees whipping past. “It was the wildest sort of coincidence. Who knows what else may be out there, lying in archives and libraries, unrecognized because the right people haven’t looked at it in the right way? Things for which we’ve found safe, acceptable, believable explanations.”

A few kilometers past Oberreid the road became rough and I paid all my attention to my driving. The Feldberg loomed high on our right. Shortly, the Monsignor honked and his arm jabbed out of the leading truck, pointing left. I saw the old logging road and honked to show that I understood. I pulled the floor shift to put us in four wheel drive.

Heinrich drove like the lunatic he was. He seemed unaware that the road was no longer paved. Our truck bounced and shook as I followed him and I wondered if we would lose the two workmen clinging to the back. I silently praised the Japanese quality control workers who had helped make our shock absorbers.

The sun was already high when we reached the area where Eifelheim had once stood. There was no sign of it. I had copies of the satellite images in my hand but, close up, everything looked diiferent. Nature had reclaimed its own; and the trees had had seven centuries in which to grow and die and grow again. Tom bore a bewildered expression as he turned round and round. Where had the village green been? Where the church? We might have walked past the place entirely, except that the American soldiers who had stumbled upon the site had thoughtfully left behind their empty beer cans to mark it.

Heinrich took charge and the rest of us fell quickly into the roles of his assistants. But then he was a field man and we were not.

From among the equipment in his rucksack he took a GPS transceiver. Within moments he had pinpointed our location. He marked the map with a grease pencil, then pointed with it. “The church must be buried under a cruciform mound atop that small hill. The graveyard is most likely to the rear of the chancel; although it might also lie to the side.”

We found the mound quickly enough and split into three teams, each searching the ground in a different direction from the chancel end. It was not long before one of the workmen, Augustus Mauer, found what might have been a headstone, smashed to rubble. We could not be sure. Perhaps they were natural rocks. We resumed our search.

Judy found the grave. I could see her off to my right when she stopped and stared down at the ground. She did not call out, but only stood quietly for a time. Then she crouched and I could no longer see her through the brush.

I glanced around, but no one else had noticed. They continued to pace slowly forward, searching the forest floor. I made my way across and found her kneeling next to a sunk and broken stone. Soil action had claimed the lower half of the stone, but it had sunk at such an angle that the face on it had been partially protected from the elements.

“Is this it?” I asked quietly.

She gasped and sucked in her breath. She turned and saw me and relaxed visibly. “Dr. Zaengle,” she said. “You frightened me.”

“I am sorry.” I crouched beside her, my old bones protesting. I studied the face on the stone. It was worn, as only the breezes of seven centuries can wear. Its outlines were faded with time, obscure and barely visible. How had the soldiers ever noticed it? “Is it the grave?” I asked again.

She sighed. “I believe so. At least, it is the one that the soldiers found.” She held up a cigarette butt to show how she knew. “The inscription is nearly illegible, and parts of the top are broken off; but see here? The letters? …HANNES STE…” She traced them with her fingers.

“Johannes Sterne,” I said for her. “John from the Stars. The name he was baptized under.” I looked around us. “Do you realize how many graves there must have been? And this is the one we find.”

“I know. I’m scared.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“When we dig him up. He won’t be the right shape. He’ll be something wrong.”

I did not know how to answer her. Burgher or alien, whatever the shape, it would be wrong in one sense or another. “Gus found another headstone,” I told her. “So did Heinrich. Both were smashed. Tom thinks that when the Plague swept through here the neighboring villagers came and destroyed the gravestones of the ‘sorcerors.’ Yet, this one — presumably the one that most frightened them — was not touched. Why?”

She shook her head. “There is so much we do not know, and never will know. Where did they come from? How many were there? Were they brave explorers or bewildered tourists? How did they and Dietrich establish communications? What did they talk about, those last few months of life?” Her face, when she turned it up to me verged on tears.

“I imagine,” I said as gently as I could, “that they talked of going home and the great things they would do when they got there.”

“Yes,” she said more quietly. “I suppose they would have. But those who could have told us are long dead.”

I smiled. “We could hold a seance and ask them.”

“Don’t say that!” she hissed. Her fists, clenched tight, pressed on her thighs. “I’ve been reading their letters, their journals, their sermons. I have been inside their heads. They don’t feel dead to me. Anton, most of them were never buried! Toward the end, who was left to turn the shovel? They must have lain on the ground and rotted. Pastor Dietrich was a good man. He deserved better than that.” There were tears on her cheeks now. “As we were walking through the forest, I was frightened that I would meet them, still alive. Dietrich or Joachim or one of the villagers or—”

“Or something horrible.”

She nodded silently.

“That’s what frightens you, isn’t it? You are a rational, secular, twenty-first century woman, who knows absolutely that alien creatures would look different and smell different; and yet you would run screaming like any medieval peasant. You are afraid you would act as badly as Fra Joachim.”

She smiled a faint, small smile. “You are almost right, Dr. Zaengle.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “Hay cu’ú giúp tôi. Cho toi su’c manh. I am afraid I would not act as Pastor Dietrich did.”

“He shames us all, child,” I said. “He shames us all.” I looked around at the tall oaks and the wildly beautiful mountain flowers — the woodmasters and butterheads — and listened to the rattle of the woopeckers. Perhaps Dietrich had had a fine burial, after all.

Judy took a deep breath and dried her tears. Then she said, “Let’s tell the others.”

Heinrich gave directions for the dig. “After so long, the coffin will have disintegrated. Everything will be filled with clay. Dig until you find wood fragments; then we will switch to the trowels.”

Gus and Sepp, the other workman, began their digging a little ways out from the grave. Because the remains would have sunk over the centuries, they would have to dig deep. They wanted the sides of the hole to slope inward so that they would not collapse. Both men were of old Breisgau families. Gus’ folk had been stoneworkers for many generations; and Sepp Fischer was descended from a long line of fishermen along the River Dreisam.

It was already late afternoon when the digging began, but Heinrich had come prepared with gas mantles to work into the evening. There were also tents and bedrolls. “I would not want to try and find my way back in the dark,” he said. “Remember Hansl’ and Gretl.”

It was only when the evening sun was setting that we discovered how the soldiers had discovered the face. The light streamed through a gap in the trees, stiking the stone and throwing the carving into sharp relief. Through some accident of weathering, it was only when lit from that angle, in the growing gloom of twilight, that the features stood out, as if it were a hologram projected into the stone. Gus and Sepp were bent over their shovels and did not notice; but Heinrich was stooped just beside it and, hearing Judy’s gasp, turned and stared.

It was a mantis’ face and it wasn’t. The eyes were large and bulging and the stone carver had given them a hint of faceting, so that they sat like gemstones in the alien countenance. (Those eyes would have been yellow, I knew.) There were traces of lines that might have been antennae or whiskers or something else entirely. Instead of insectlike mandibles, there was a mouth of sorts; a caricature of human lips and chin. Judy grabbed my arm. I could feel her nails dig into my skin. Tom was tugging his lip. It was the face from the church crypt.

Heinrich paused and stared at the stone without speaking. It was obvious that this was no weathered distortion of a human face. It was a demon. Or something like a demon. Heinrich turned and looked at us, gauging our reactions. Already the sun had moved and the visage was fading. “I think,” he said, “perhaps I should take a rubbing.”

The moon was a ghost drifting through the treetops when Gus finally struck wood. The gas lanterns hissed and sputtered, embedding a shifting circle of brightness in the dark of the forest. Judy was kneeling by the edge of the hole, her eyes closed, sitting on her heels. I don’t know if she was praying or sleeping. I could barely see the heads of the men in the pit.

Tom came and stood next to me. He held Heinrich’s rubbing of the alien’s face. Hans, I reminded myself. Not ‘the alien’ but Johann Sterne, a person, someone who died a long time ago; far from home, in the company of strangers. What had he felt near the end, when all hope had been lost? What emotions had washed through that alien mind? Did my question even mean anything? Did strange enzymes coursing his blood play the role of adrenaline? Had he even had blood?

Tom pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” he said. “Wrong time to dig up Dracula’s grave.” He tried to smile to show that he was joking. I tried to smile to show him that I knew. I shivered. It was cooler in the mountains that I had thought it would be.

Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came suddenly alert and leaned forward over the pit. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and looked in.

Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich probed in the clay with a trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. Pale. Not bone-white, but yellow and brown. He excavated around it and removed it, earth and all. Then he sat back on his haunches and scraped at it with a putty knife, cleaning it; his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.

He knows, I thought.

A face emerged gradually from the embrace of the clay. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel. He crossed himself hastily three times. Sepp remained calm, watching with narrowed eyes. He nodded solemnly, as if he had always known the soil of Eifelheim would yield unearthly fruit.

It was a skull, and not a skull, and no earthly mind have ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had for their part found it unappetizing. The eyes were gone, of course, and two enormous sockets set on either side of the head gaped empty; but whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was a mummy’s head.

Heinrich held it out and Judy took it gingerly. Tom stood behind her, inspecting it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on its edge with his feet dangling in the hole. He took his pipe from his pocket and lit it; though I noticed his hands trembled a bit with the match. “So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten into? I have a feeling Bishop Arni will not like it.”

So I told him. Tom and Judy added the details. The mystery. The folktales. The hints and fragmentary evidence. Heinrich nodded as he listened and asked an occasional question. Tom’s explanation of hypospace physics confused him, I think; but then he was getting it at second hand. I think Tom was confused as well. Sharon lived in a different world than we, an austere world and stragely beautiful; but one whose beauty we could at best only dimly grasp. Sharon had seen the likeness of a circuit in a manuscript illumination. Let it go at that. Her insight had given Tom the courage to test his intuition; and his intuition had sent her groping down a path that might one day give us the stars. Surely, God moves in mysterious ways.

Heinrich accepted it all quietly. How could he doubt when he had held the skull in his own hands. He looked out into the surrounding forest. “There will be the remainer of the skeleton, of course,” he said pointing into the grave with the stem of his pipe. And of others as well. You say there were several of these beings? And out there?” The pipe stem swept the black forest. “Out there, what? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed beneath the living soil.” He sighed. “There is much work to be done. And don’t forget the cries of fraud or hoax that will be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Arni and the University people.”

“No!”

We all looked at Judy in surprise. She still held Johann’s skull in her hands, and Gus, his initial fright over, was peering at it curiously, eyeball to eyesocket. I was proud of the way our two workmen had reacted. Whatever was to come of all this, it boded well.

“You know what they’ll do, don’t you?” she said. “They’ll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bullet-proof plastic so tourists can gawk at him and children make nasty jokes and laugh. It isn’t right. It isn’t.” When she shook her head her whole body shook.

“That’s not true, Judy,” Tom said gently putting his hands on her shoulders. She twisted her head around and gazed up at him.

“Let them gawk and let them joke,” he said. “Oh, we’ll take measurements and holographs and chip of some cells for the biologists to wonder at. That much, he would have wanted. Then we’ll make plaster casts and hang those. But him, we’ll keep safe from harm and someday — when Sharon’s work is done — someday we’ll find out where he came from and take him home. Or our children’s children will.”

Heinrich nodded, his pipe sending filigrees of smoke toward the sky. Sepp still stood in the pit, leaning on his shovel. He had his hands folded over the top of the shaft, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and anticipation the like of which I have never seen.

I know where the path to the stars lies. The gate opened once, a long time ago; and a few wayward travelers suffered a lonely death. Then it closed. But before it did, two creatures reached across an unimaginable gulf and touched. They didn’t flee and they didn’t fight, and because they did not they left the gate open, just a crack.