Sign of the Eight E-Book

Benjamin Lebert

• Herausgeber: Arctis US
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 315

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

wo messengers, six allies, one fight for survival! A gateway to a world of the past, of vanished names, hopes and dreams has opened in the depths of the Black Forest. Two messengers have come to our present from the immense sunken realms of time. Tristan is the messenger of doom. Martha is the messenger of preservation. They used to be lovers, now they are sworn enemies. They have come together to fight one final, decisive battle. But they cannot fight this fight alone. Both must win allies to fight by their side. Time is of the essence and there can only be a few - everything revolves around the eight, a mystical number that refers to infinity. Tristan and Martha must search the Black Forest to find six comrades-in-arms to join their fight. Ultimately, five fighters for doom and three fighters for preservation will face each other. And the battle of the eight will continue until only one of them is left and the fate of humanity is sealed. For many years Benjamin Lebert has been one of the most interesting literary voices in Germany. -Joachim Scholl, Deutschlandradio Kultur In short chapters with many changes of perspective, preliminary interpretations and cliff hangers, Benjamin Lebert creates a rapid narrative pace at which he seldom decelerates. Atmospherically dense, he describes uncanny encounters in the forest, and in a sometimes very poetic language he lets the reader participate in the emotional world of the protagonists. -Deutschlandfunk Kultur

Leseprobe

Benjamin Lebert

Sign of the Eight

Roman

Translation by Oliver Latsch

W1-Media, Inc.

Arctis

Stamford, CT, USA

Copyright © 2022 by W1-Media Inc. for this edition

Text Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin Lebert

Im Zeichen der Acht first published in Germany by Arctis Verlag, 2020

First English language edition published by W1-Media Inc./Arctis, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

English translation edited by Carol Klio Burrell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

ISBN978-1-64690-609-3

www.arctis-books.com

For Levi and for Claudia,

who filled a small chamber with light and gave strength to a wavering heart.

PART ONE

THE APPROACH

1

He followed the creature through the darkness into a band of spruce trees, where a steep aisle opened up in the forest. He was running fast. He could barely make out the uneven ground. He was lucky not to fall.

Paul’s and the creature’s footsteps echoed each other, and he felt as if their hearts were beating in sync, as well. As if there was nothing left that separated them, no boundaries of physical form. There was only the forest, the mystery of the night.

Suddenly a lake appeared behind the rows of tall tree trunks. The shard of moon, hovering at an icy height, cast a glimmer on the water.

This was remote Lake Flint, which even many of the locals never got up so far to see. It lay in a mountain basin within the Black Forest, surrounded by a mighty chain of hills. Coniferous trees lined its shores like an army of sentinels.

Paul, too, had never in his sixteen years of life seen it. He had heard stories told about it, though. Some people claimed that at its bottom sat the remains of a black fortress, home to a tyrannical ruler. Allegedly, the fortress had sunk centuries before in a flood that erupted from nearby Kyb Rock. Others said that there were hidden channels under the water connecting the basin lakes that had formed in the Ice Age.

Unlike those lakes, though, the waters of this lake were not acidic, and during the night you could see the shimmering bodies of fish darting out of the depths.

Paul paid no attention to the fish.

His senses were focused on the creature who had now stepped out from between conifers and onto the shore and was slowly turning to peer at him. Paul was still standing in the cover of the conifers, taking in the musty autumn scents. His eyes saw no more of the creature than the darkness that cloaked it and which barely stood out against the black surface of the lake. But the young man knew exactly who was there on the reedy shore ahead of him. His memory summoned the colors. Let him see without seeing: a robe made of many patches. The grimacing mask with the long, pointed nose and the gaping mouth from which the tongue stuck out. And he saw what was hidden under this mask carved from limewood and painted with a mixture of oil paints and linseed varnish—a second face.

It was the face of a young woman dressed in a witch’s carnival costume. He knew her well. She was a student teacher at his school and had been attending classes for two months.

He knew her well. She showed up in his dreams.

He liked her eyes under her high, smooth forehead. There was a mystery in them and something demanding. As if there was a hunger gnawing at her. He liked the way she wore her hair. The plait with its braided and loose parts. And he liked the way her lips opened when she spoke in front of the class with a voice that sounded young and yet had the firmness of an aspiring teacher. He had imagined her resisting him but powerless. Imagined her voice losing that firmness and slowly melting into a moan.

Now there was no need for imagination, memories, and dreams. Now she was close. So close.

Around them, ferns, sedges, mosses, vines, the web of honey fungus that made the woods glow. Around them, the stirrings of the night creatures. The silent lapping of the water. Around them, nothing. The moment had come. At last he stepped out from between the trees and toward her.

She had led him here. He would never have believed it would be so easy. He had recognized her immediately by her voice. By the words: Come with me. He was sure: no one had noticed her disappearance. Quietly, in the distance, he could still hear drunk people chanting.

Twice a year, people from the surrounding villages climbed up to Kyb Rock to light a fire among the remains of a demolished castle. In spring to drive out the winter, and now on the night of the first of November. On that night, that fire was to carry sparks of life to the dead. That night, it was said, a crack opened. The gate that led into the realm of the dead.

Paul had also struck sparks into the night, as he had done since childhood. He had stuck a palm-size piece of wood onto the hazelnut stick he had cut earlier with his folding knife, which had a horn handle with leopardlike spots and which he always carried with him. He had set the wooden disk in the fire until it glowed and then swung the stick with the disk through the air. He had spoken the verse he had known since childhood. An old ritual. With that verse, the disks were consecrated. People cheered each time a disk was catapulted down the small slope into the valley.

Most of those who came to the ruins that night wore the costumes of the carnival guilds. Those were passed down through the generations and were usually worn during the parades in the spring, when witches and fools took over, village by village. But they were also worn on that special autumn night.

Paul did not wear a mask. He liked the feeling of being seen. He liked the feeling of people being exposed to his gaze. Liked seeing their uncertainty. It was the same with the young student teacher when he had first looked at her. She had not withstood the teenager’s stare for long. He had felt acutely that his gaze had exposed something.

He stepped closer and closer to her on the shore. He knew now: they belonged to each other. Now he would know everything, sense by sense, layer by layer. The wooden mask fell off and the lips of this student teacher, whose first name he did not know, opened in the dark.

The patchwork robe dropped away. He felt himself get hard, blood coursing through him. He pulled down her panties.

She embraced him. With her body. Her breasts. Between her legs. Trapped him like a moth on the shore of the lake.

“What was that?” she said suddenly.

“What do you mean?” said Paul.

“There’s something there. On the lake. A blue glow.” Paul’s eyes searched for it but couldn’t spot anything.

Then they both heard it—a sound in the water.

“Just a fish, I’m sure,” he said.

But what had detached itself from the lake’s roots and was pushing its way out of the depths wasn’t a fish. It was coming closer. Half swimming, half wading, it pulled itself to shore.

The two were spellbound. They could not move. The oozing creature rose up before them.

The creature resembled a human being. And yet was not a human.

Paul thought he saw pale, bloated flesh hanging from the bones. He thought he saw that the creature had empty eye sockets. The scrawny hand, covered with an oily coating, stretched toward the student teacher’s face. Motionless, she crouched beside Paul on the narrow shore. Paul felt how quickly her chest rose and fell, how frantically she was breathing. His thoughts exhausted themselves. Was someone playing a trick on them? Was this also just someone in a carnival costume? He briefly thought of his folding knife, which was in his jeans pocket. He wanted to reach for it. But he couldn’t, could not. He felt the nearness of the lake, he felt like was sinking into it. He felt soft, waving plants tangling around his limbs from the lake’s bottom. He saw a sharp thumbnail slice the young woman’s cheek. Blood gushed out, running down her face. Greedily, the creature licked the blood from its fingers.

It let the drops trickle into the warped opening of its mouth.

Those drops were only the beginning.

There were no screams. A tawny owl shot out of the spruces with a sound like tearing silk. Then silence fell again over Lake Flint, which carried away the flowing, unfathomable images of the night.

2

Summer had long ago detached itself from the earth and gathered in its light. But the conifers, the omnipresent scowling conifers of the Black Forest, held on to their green.

Among these spruces and firs, which had always reached far up into the heights of her dreams, she walked.

She knew the path. Knew it well.

When Isabel reached a clear elevation, she could see the wooded areas all around, the ancient hills, and the sky, like clouded marble, in which darkness gathered.

Below her, she saw the lights of Hofsgrund, sparks of home and loathing. A hamlet of a few hundred inhabitants who lived at an altitude of over a thousand meters, below Schauinsland peak. A popular destination for hiking vacationers and skiers, Hofsgrund lay in the beautiful vastness of nature. But the inhabitants did not care for such immensity of thought.

Below her, Isabel could almost see in the distance the shingled roof of the house on Silberberg Street where she lived with other teenagers—the rebellious, the wayward.

The counselor, who was barely older than she, kept coming by to check on them. She acted like she belonged with them. As if she were a friend. On days when they were vulnerable, they believed her.

They were frequent, those days.

Isabel walked across the emaciated grass of a meadow and pushed deeper into the forest. The blues of the evening, the vines, creepers, and twigs became an ever finer web. Isabel had to hurry. The supervisor had made it clear, with a stern face, what time she expected Isabel to be back.

Once before, Isabel had run away and spent more than a day up here in the open, until a search party had trooped out and brought her back. She remembered that day well. The sounds that had gradually grown louder and more intense—the rustling, the clawing, the scratching. She remembered the movement of unseen wings and the slight stirrings of air. The quietly gnawing hunger. The plants that grew so slowly that you were afraid of them, because you couldn’t guess what they were up to. She had eaten some of the plants, even though she didn’t have a clue which ones were poisonous. She remembered one plant in particular, elongated and narrow, growing out into the sky from a clearing. Afterward, Isabel had gotten stomach cramps. Nothing more had happened. But she still had stomach cramps far too frequently and each time, she tasted that plant on her tongue. Time had slipped on as if in a dream.

Nevertheless, she had felt free for the first time in a long time.

In fact, Isabel was no longer allowed to go into the forest alone. But today was an exception. Today was a special day. A day that all the other children and teenagers around her associated with Halloween. The ancient Celts had called it Samhain, the night of the first of November, when many a boundary was supposedly mysteriously lifted.

Isabel knew her way, knew it well.

She had no idea that something was emerging from earthy depths.

Coming closer and closer.

The little chapel of St. Margaret lay hidden deep in the forest. No marked path led there. Some hikers who had set out to find it returned in the evening with the tale of their failure. The forest buried the chapel in its heart.

Isabel had read about it in the bookshop of the local history museum. Christian Albert, an old man she visited every week, had taken her there once.

It was not as boring as she had expected. There was also something in another book about the chapel. A settlement that had once existed there had been destroyed long ago. At that time, in the 19th century, the timber trade had flourished and the silver firs had been cut down and made into masts for Dutch ships of war and trade. The forest had almost disappeared, and the livelihood of the inhabitants was threatened. The state of Baden claimed the lands for itself to reforest them. Many farmers were forced to give up their properties.

But the small chapel resisted the centuries and remained standing.

There was a legend, from faraway times when the plague had ravaged through the Black Forest valleys. According to the legend, only places where the bells of St. Margaret’s could be heard were spared from the pestilence.

When Isabel stepped into the chapel, she was met by damp coolness. She lit a sacrificial candle. Its light spread hesitantly, and it could barely overcome the deepening darkness. Little by little, the colors of the stained glass vanished.

Isabel stared into the candleflame and felt like her body was evaporating into the night. She consisted of only a face, floating weightlessly in the musty air, looking outward, eyes fixed on the flame. For a brief moment, she thought she heard singing, a kind of choir. Then it was silent again.

In the tenuous light of the candle, she knelt with her hands folded, as if she were praying. But she wasn’t praying. She was trying to think of her mother.

Every year on her mother’s birthday, Isabel lit a candle here. But the images that surfaced in her mind were not of her mother. They were images of other women she had met fleetingly. Women she sometimes stealthily followed on the street because something about them reminded her of her mother. The build, the wavy hair, a hint of perfume. Isabel always tried to avoid looking at the women’s faces so that the sweet illusion would endure. But then she did. These women were alive and went on their way. But her mother, she was dead.

When Isabel came back out into the air, the moon was in the sky, like a shimmering notch that had been carved into the night. She stopped in front of the chapel and breathed in the cold air. She adjusted the collar of her coat, which was too thin for this time of the year. She liked it, though, because she felt sexy in it, and it contrasted perfectly with her blond hair.

Isabel suddenly thought of Daniel, whom she always met when she rode her bike to the farm to buy eggs. He was sixteen—the same age as her—and was in a different homeroom. His father owned the farm. When she went there, the young man always looked at her with such wonder. Her friends all said he was much too well-behaved. Boring. But Isabel liked his gentle face. Very much. It wasn’t locked shut, like the faces of other boys. It revealed a lot. You could tell he came from a world that was clearly defined, one that smelled of buttercups, hay, and cow manure. You could tell he was more interested in things rooted in the earth than images that gleamed on touchscreens. But that’s precisely what she liked about him.

The tree that Isabel often stood and gazed at stood in the moonlight—a hanging beech which stood to the left of the chapel in a small clearing, its somber tangle of small and large branches sprawled almost to the ground. For a brief moment her gaze was caught in the tangle.

Then Isabel heard a sound.

At first, she thought she heard only the wind blowing through the forest. Then she realized that it was most definitely not the wind. It was a soft gurgling groan like a strained breath that wouldn’t let up. The sound came from the depths. From the depths of the disused, half-ruined well that sat halfway between the hanging beech and the chapel. The sound seemed to swell in the well’s shadows, coming nearer and nearer.

Isabel scurried behind the promontory of the chapel’s walls.

Her breathing was shallow and rapid. She peered over at the well and saw what was emerging from the shaft.

She saw hands, a body silhouetted against the darkness, pushing out into the open. Isabel heard the pulsing of her blood in her ears. A naked creature with sore, charred flesh rolled from the well’s ledge down to the grass. Isabel did not dare to move. Her eyes no longer wanted to look but did so anyway. She saw the body crawl laboriously forward across the ground. She heard the labored breathing, which sounded different from that of a human being. Almost as if this being had to painfully learn to breathe. There was rustling and cracking in the grass as the creature crawled along. It crawled toward the hanging beech and disappeared behind the curtain of hanging branches. There it remained, breathing. Breathing.

Isabel wanted to run away. But she couldn’t. Something tied her to that place. What had slipped into the shadows there seemed to have forged an invisible bond with her.

She cautiously approached the tree, which seemed enchanted in the blue of the night. When she reached it, she stopped, hesitated. Fear still surged through her body. But then she took heart. She felt the touch of fine twig tips as she slipped under the hanging branches.

There under the tree trunk in the dim light lay no longer a flame-consumed creature but the body of a huddled, naked woman, with curls around her pale face. She looked up at Isabel from the leaf-covered earth. Her trembling hands reached out to her in a gesture seeking help. Isabel thought she saw a vein protruding from her pale forehead. Then the young woman grabbed her hand and bit furiously into her flesh. Isabel cried out. The woman immediately let go of her. It seemed as if she was frightened by her own act. She sank back to the earth, making helpless movements as if she wanted to dissolve into the darkness. Her fingers clawed at the dead foliage, which offered no purchase.

Isabel turned away, wanted to run away as quickly as possible. But she did not move. She had the strong sense that she could not detach herself from this woman. She could not leave her behind.

Despite the laws of nature, it seemed to her that the brightness of the day was returning, in red and orange colors.

Isabel looked down at the naked stranger and thought she perceived it in her eyes: the glow. Then Isabel heard the woman’s brittle voice.

“You have to help me,” she said.

3

Christian Albert sat at his workbench and suspected nothing.

He was busy lathing a palm-size wooden disk that would later become a wheel with fifty teeth. An essential part of a mechanical balance-beam Waagbalken clock, which he was making according to the old Black Forest tradition. He built these clocks in different shapes and sizes. One after another, with aging, battered hands that possessed the calmness so essential to this work. With a heart that did not know rest.

In his youth, he had apprenticed as a precision mechanic. His years in the factory had been filled with the roar of machines and the screech of steel meeting steel.

The incomparably quiet work with pliant wood had become an indispensable hobby for him.

Christian Albert strictly adhered to the old watchmaking customs that had fascinated him since childhood. He cut the wood for his clocks only on the nights between Christmas and New Year’s Day, during waning moons. The blanks for the gears lay in liquid manure for four weeks and afterward hung outside in his smoke chamber, between hams and sausages, until they became black and hard and could not be warped. The machines with which he ground, drilled, and turned had all been built by himself from wood. Most were driven by foot, by steady treadling.

Christian Albert sat at his workbench and suspected nothing . . .

The workshop he had built out of beams from a demolished farm was adjacent to the small forester’s house he had lived in since his wife’s death. He had inherited it from his grandparents when he was still a teenager. For a long time, the forester’s house had been a retreat for vacations. After his wife’s death, he had left their Hofsgrund penthouse south of the Schauinsland summit.

The forester’s house, which lay a few forest-cloaked miles down the valley from the village, had turned into his only residence. A leaf-covered home in the middle of the forest, on the edge of civilization.

At first, he had felt uneasy in its seclusion. Then he had gotten used to it. Working on his watches helped him.

But after his wife died, something had happened. He had become unable to stand the ticking that had been a source of comfort to him for so many years. So he only made clocks that remained silent, with hands that did not move. Christian Albert made clocks that silenced time. Many of them decorated the walls of the cottage and the workshop. Many clocks. One silence.

He sat at the workbench and suspected nothing . . .

Outside the windowpane covered with gossamer wood shavings, the sun had turned to blood. Blackness now lay over the autumnal forest. He saw sparse lights from his left-behind world, shimmering tiny and distant.

Inside, an oil lamp cast its glow over the countertop, over the drill, and the chair. And over the fur of his dog, Nina, who was dozing on the floor, occasionally making whimpering sounds of dreaming.

As these sounds drifted into his subconscious along with the familiar sounds of his work, he thought of his wife. Tatjana. She had suffered from an eye disorder. As she had grown older, her days had gradually disappeared behind a veil. He thought of how her delicate fingers had run along the walls of the loft, groping for a path. Those fingers had known all the irregularities of each surface. Had sensed edges, dangerous pitfalls. Only once had the fingers failed in their duty, on a day in March when he had not been home. An unfortunate fall, they had called it.

Several months had passed since then.

He went twice a week to her grave in the hillside cemetery. He would leave Nina at home. He took his folding chair with him because he couldn’t stand for long, and a woolen blanket. His wife had knitted it for him more than half a century past. As a young woman, knitting had been her support after losing their child—their only child, who had stopped living two hours and twenty-three minutes after birth.

He would put the blanket over his lap when he sat at the graveside, feeling the heaviness and warmth of all those years against his legs. When it rained, he would simply open an umbrella while he sat by the grave.

Lately, he often dreamed of his wife. He heard her voice saying: Help the girl! At first, he had thought she meant the child they had lost. But now he was no longer sure.

Christian Albert did not know who she could be referring to.

He was pondering this when Nina snapped him out of his thoughts. She had suddenly risen from the floor. Her big head with its deep eyes and long snout was directed at the closed door. Her nose sniffed something. The sharply erect ears listened outside, into the darkness. Christian Albert smiled as he looked at her. He was very fond of his mongrel dog, whose existence expressed all the contradictions of life and also the ability not to be affected by them in any way.

Christian Albert stopped smiling when he heard the footsteps approaching the workshop. The footsteps and the heavy breathing.

The old man stood up and quietly extinguished the oil lamp so he could see better through the window whatever was going on outside. That hope quickly faded.

Outside, only the dark shroud of the night was visible.

He tentatively opened the window a crack. Cold air burst through in eddies.

Meanwhile, the footsteps were coming closer. Someone was on his property. Was outside in the garden, in front of the door. Their breathing sounded unnaturally loud. Briefly, he saw a glimmer of light under the crack of the door. It was a strangely warm hue, like the evening glow of the sun. However, the sun had long since disappeared into the darkness.

Nina, who had up until then remained motionless, started to pace around the narrow space in the workshop. Panting, she trotted toward the door, returned to him, then approached the door again. This went on a few times. She did not bark, however. No whimpering, no signs of fear. Only a restlessness like tense anticipation.

On a spring night when some lowlife had gained access to the property to get drunk, Nina had barked into the sky as if she could chase away the grey shadow of the rabbit in the moon. Now she made no sound.

Then there was a knock at the door, not very loud. A voice, not very loud.

“Mr. Albert, please open up!” Christian Albert knew the voice. It belonged to Isabel from the group home where the young people lived. The ones who had it hard or made it hard for others, depending on how you looked at it.

Isabel had never made it hard for him. She was polite. Quiet. He liked to share the silence with her. Never had he thought that something could grow in that silence that would put him in danger.

Isabel came to see him once a week. She would lend a hand where it was needed, help him run errands. They cooked together. Sometimes they played cards. He had taught her Cego, a game from Baden he had known since childhood and used to play with his wife. Actually, you couldn’t play as a pair. You needed several people to play it. But he had come up with a more straightforward version where you only needed one player. Isabel’s favorite card was the poke, the highest ranking card. Mr. Albert liked the smile that appeared when she saw it. A smile that showed a crooked tooth.

Isabel’s counselor had made the arrangements. She thought these visits would do her good. Connecting with life, she called it. But he was an old man. You were much more likely to come in contact with death being around him, he thought.

Isabel had never come to visit so late, or unannounced.

He opened the door of the workshop. Christian Albert saw that she was not alone. Someone was with her, out there—a slender figure.

“Please!” he invited them, because they couldn’t seem to get their mouths open. Hesitantly, he asked her to step over his threshold.

He could not immediately make out the person Isabel was bringing into the workshop. Only when the light of the oil lamp was reignited did he see that it was a young woman, scarcely older than Isabel. She seemed barely able to stand on her feet. Isabel supported the petite, swaying body. The other young woman’s hair was curly, and she possessed a mysterious beauty that seemed to him like the memory of an irretrievable bliss. But her eyes, the young woman’s eyes, seemed as if they had stared into an abyss.

She was wearing a thin coat that he knew belonged to Isabel. Underneath, the woman appeared to be naked. He saw battered skin, a pitch-black belly button. He detected the tinge of a musty smell that reminded him of the nuns’ crypt he had once seen on a tour of Freiburg’s hidden vaulted cellars. He saw the woman’s dirty feet and her hands, groping for a handhold, with blood-crusted nails. Nina, who usually gleefully pounced on Isabel to lick her face, stayed back. He had never seen such an expression on her canine face. He thought he recognized awe, although he wasn’t sure a dog could feel such a thing. Nina timidly approached the woman now, licking her fingers as if to soothe a pain. Only gradually was Christian Albert able to sort out his thoughts.

“What is this?” he said to Isabel. “Who are you dumping on me?” Isabel told him she had found the woman in that condition in the woods. That something terrible must have happened to her. That she was confused. She wouldn’t even give her name.

“She seems to be afraid of something,” Isabel said. “Someone—something—is after her.”

“Who? Who is after you?” asked Christian Albert the woman. She didn’t answer. She looked at him, just looked at him . . . He wanted to scold Isabel for bringing the poor creature here, of all places. To him. Tell her that he wanted nothing to do with this. Then he caught another glance from his dog. Christian Albert knew that glance and could seldom resist it. A look that was like a silent plea. His resentment found no more words. He smiled, let himself become gentle and composed. His mind was working. He said he would call a doctor and notify the police.

The woman became visibly agitated. In a forceful voice, she said, “No tracks, no. Leave no trail.” That was all he could get out of her.

Suddenly he thought of the displaced persons from the war.

A few of them had shown up then, with chapped feet and no belongings, in the small Black Forest town where he had grown up.

Among them had been a girl, five years old. He had still been a baby when she arrived. But a time when he was to tenderly whisper her name was soon to come. Tatjana.

Christian Albert looked at the pale woman standing barefoot in his workshop. Finally, he gave in and led the two of them come through. Nina followed them. Fearfully, the stranger, supported by Isabel, peered around. The moon was haunting the trees.

They entered the small cottage, which consisted of a single long room divided into kitchen, sleeping, and living areas. He had Isabel pick out a cotton dress that had belonged to his wife for the stranger from a dresser. It was the only garment of hers that he had kept. Her lily perfume still clung ever so faintly to it. The dress was too tight for the young woman, in certain places. He tried to ignore how her nipples stood out under the fabric. At least now she had something to clothe her body. She also received some slippers, and he gave her his cardigan so that she would be warmer.

Isabel said goodbye with the promise to come back the next day after school to check on her. It had gotten very late. Isabel would have been expected back at the group home a long time ago. Then he and Nina were alone with the stranger.

She sat on the bed. Cautiously, the dog approached her and began to sniff her fingers. The young woman calmly let Nina have her hand. Then she began to scratch the dog under the chin with one finger.

“You should eat something,” Christian Albert said. “You need to get your strength back.” The old man didn’t own a refrigerator. A hinged door in the floor opened to a tiny cool storage space for food, and a few other, useful features in case of trouble, which he had made mouse-proof. A small ladder led down. He rummaged around to see what he had in there. He was not practiced at entertaining and generally struggled with cooking. What food to serve someone who had obviously had something terrible happen to them? He decided on brown bread with bibilis cheese, a Black Forest soft cheese made of low-fat curds and sweet cream, and topped with chives, onions, and spices. He pressed the curd through a hair sieve to loosen it, just like Tatjana had always done. He served it with sauerkraut, which he cooked with plenty of butter. Soon the distinctive heavy smell of the heated cabbage spread through the cottage. But the stranger could hardly manage a bite. She stared ahead of her, with eyes that were open and yet seemed to be in the grip of dark dreams.

He let her have his bed. Nina stayed there with her in the house. He prepared a place for himself to sleep in the workshop.

He took a book of old Black Forest legends with him, well-worn because he loved to read in it.

His sinewy fingers turned many pages during that night because he couldn’t sleep. However, he could not read either. The letters slipped away from him, and he found himself in the emptiness that lay between the lines.

His thoughts wandered in ways that made him uneasy. Where did the woman come from? Was it right to give her shelter? What did those words mean? Leave no trail. A strange phrase. As if fallen out of another time.

Toward morning, when a light sleep finally fell over him, he heard his wife’s voice again.

Protect the girl!

He startled awake, drenched in sweat. He felt that something was coming closer—closer and closer. Something he was powerless against.

From what? What was he supposed to protect this girl from?

4

Threads of sunlight filtered through the trees as he set to work. The light of the afternoon was somewhat ephemeral and had the color of overripe apricots. In contrast, he sensed a beginning. A beginning that was like the opening of a blade.

A night and half a day had passed, there by the lake. The blood and flesh of the two young people had nourished him. He felt his strength returning. His life force. And how inner currents arose to sustain him. How tendons and nerves connected, in this body in which a wrathful will ruled, directed toward a single indelible goal. From within the body, the name surged forth onto his tongue. The name that had been submerged for so many years. A name of darkness: Nightsworn. Tristan Nightsworn.

Images emerged from memory. The battlefields on which he had fought, the rivers of red that had seeped into the cracks of the earth, from where they brought forth—so the people used to say—the glow of new days. Tristan felt that glow. And how it spread through him.

A particular vision also came back to him: the image of a woman with whose fate he was inextricably linked.

Tristan knew that she had also already returned. He felt her near. Although he could not determine exactly where she was. Not yet. He sensed her presence like the delicate scent of a flower. He would find her soon. He knew his purpose.

He had done well. Had left the two bodies lying exposed for now so that the scent would attract other animals. A fox, roaming the barren expanses of autumn, had approached cautiously. But its caution had not saved it. He had broken its neck. As Tristan Nightsworn had sunk his teeth into the raw flesh, he had lapsed into a state that had come close to the strongest feelings he had ever felt. Then he had sunk into sleep, deep and unknowing. Afterward, he had picked up the jackknife that had found in the young man’s pants, which were made of a blue, very sturdy fabric. He had never seen such legwear before. But he did not pause to wonder about it. Everything had a naturalness to it. As if, to his eyes, which were seeing ever more clearly, the tremendous changes brought about by this new age were no more than the barely perceptible change over a day in the angle of light.

He felt safe. He felt energy pulsing through him and his senses reaching into regions he had never even imagined before. He registered them: the life impulses out there in the vastness. He experienced a sense of majesty over them. Even a feeling of being able to control them, to harness them for his own purpose. And above all, he felt them giving him direction: his task.

The day was waning. Colors faded, darkness came.

The time had come. He took the human skins he had previously dried on branches and wrapped them around him like a protective covering. He felt their weight, the little weight that remained of life. He waded into the lake, plunged into its darkness. When he emerged from the water a little later, he wore a coat that was an intense blue color.

Soft and supple, the coat closed around his slender body.