Selected Stories Read online

  The keeper took a deep breath, as if the long monologue had tired him. “But I’m telling you only how I think about it; you may very well like Freihausgarten if you want peace and quiet. Maybe we can go down and you can sign the register now?”

  “Sure.” Herbert followed the man down, and wrote his name in the guest book. The man looked over his shoulder, rubbing his hands at his sides. “Herbert Ramon,” he read. "Which reminds me that I haven’t even introduced myself. Julien's the name, Julien- Charles Pandira.”

  They shook hands. “Enchante, Julien,” Herbert said, and the keeper’s face split in a wide grin.

  “Parbleu, you are the first who seems to be able to pronounce my name correctly. That calls for something.” His hands dived behind the registration desk and came up with two cognac glasses, which he filled from a dusty bottle out of the same hiding place. He pushed one of the glasses into Herbert’s hand, and lifted his own. “A votre sante, cheers,” he said.

  “To your health,” Herbert said, and tasted his drink carefully. He had to admit that it was good stuff.

  “Should be good,” Julien said, “the real Napoleon, and not the vitriolic acid they call ‘brandy’ here. Real French cognac, my only weakness. Once every four months I drive back to France and get my supply. But it is worth it.”

  Herbert agreed, while emptying his glass slowly, appreciating the soft yet burning aftertaste of the cognac. “Well, thanks, Julien,” he said, “but I guess I’ll go up now and start unpacking some of my things. By the way, is there a place here where I can eat?”

  “Sorry, there’s no restaurant,” Julien said. “As I said, they discourage tourists. I told you this nest is a ghost town, populated by the mummified spirits of the past, who only think they’re still alive. You can buy all you need from some farmer, and make your own dinner. Or else, if you like garlic and onion, and French spices, you can join me every day. It’s not extra trouble cooking for two instead of for myself alone, and it will be a pleasant change not having to eat alone. I won’t charge you much, only the cost of the extra stuff I have to buy.”

  “It’s a deal, then. I never was a good cook, so unless your very first dinner poisons me, I’ll be joining you with pleasure. See you later.”

  III. Von denen Verdammten

  Herbert went into his room and locked the door behind him. The dust clung to everything, but that didn't bother him. It was the kind of atmosphere he was used to in his research. He carelessly threw his cloak on the bed, and put his fingers through his hair. The mirror on the wall was broken, and reflected five times his own image: a somewhat older-looking man in his late thirties, with a sharply lined face and cold gray eyes.

  The small room was indeed all he needed. On top of the armoire there was room enough to stack his books, and the table was big enough to work on. He started unpacking his two bags, carelessly throwing his clothes, underwear, and similar things on a chair. He unpacked his working materials with much more care. A portable typewriter, other writing materials, stacks of paper, some geometrical instruments, a microscope, digging tools, small chisels, flashlights, batteries. Then came the books, most of them loosely bound Xerox copies, or handwritten copies in his own small, almost illegible handwriting.

  Some of the things contained in these copied books were as old as human knowledge... and as old as human fear. Their titles would have sounded very strange to Julien, and to most other men, and their contents would have sounded even weirder. A few of the intact books had been collector’s items for years, some even for centuries. Others were only to be found in the restricted departments of special libraries and private collections, and Herbert had needed all his influence to get a look at some of them, even then with the explicit prohibition not to copy them. But a very expensive and very effective miniature camera, which could be hidden in the palm of one’s hand, could indeed work miracles. He had been able to photograph those parts he needed, even while a guard was watching him from the other end of the reading room, to see that he didn’t take notes or tear pages out of the precious manuscripts or parchments. It had been child’s play to rewrite the needed parts from blown-up photographs. And here he had them now, those fragments from the R’lyeh Text, and the original notes by Ludvig Prinn for his De Vermis Mysteriis. Prinn was burned at the stake in Brussels, but before he had been living first in Bruges, and then in Ghent, where he had finished his book. Discovering his handwritten notes in the private collection had been sheer luck, especially since the owner hadn’t the slightest idea about their real contents and kept them only because they were old and thus valuable. There was Liyuhh, the almost unknown German translation, or rather adaption and analysis, of the R’lyeh Text; and a badly damaged copy of Frangois-Honore Balfour, le Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, rather disappointing because its author had possessed more fantasy than knowledge about the hideous things he was writing about. There were other titles as well, even more alien that these, and he often cursed, thinking that the one he really needed was not there. If only he could have obtained a copy of the Necronomicon. He had tried in vain, and then had tried to get the book through someone with even more influence than he had himself, but neither one had even been allowed to see the book.

  Here were books of power, books about power greater than anything else on Earth, and books about knowledge. Knowledge about things older than man, books whose authors had been tortured and murdered because of what they wrote. Books which tried in vain to tell man that he was indeed far from alone in the universe!

  He went to the window and looked out at the valley, still sweating under the sun. Luck had indeed been with him when Julien chose the first room. Herbert Ramon looked at the hill at the end of the valley, and it was as if unseen eyes reached out for him from that hill, locking with his own in an unholy union. I am here, he thought. Deja vu. Yes, I have never been here before and yet I recognize it, and I know I have felt this before. Is it my imagination, or are the growths really darker on that hill? It very well could be!

  His hands gripped the window. I am here, he thought. Whatever you are, I am here, and I know you are there!

  He didn’t have to take his copy of Von denen Verdammten, oder: Eine Verhandlung über die unheimlichen Kulten der Alten—“Of the Damned, or: A Treatise about the Hideous Cults of the Old.” Even his Xerox copy was not made from the original, which dated back at least two centuries. The author, Kazaj Heinz Vogel, had been a German immigrant, who had returned from America to write his blasphemous text in his native country, Germany. No one knew what had become of him; maybe he had died in some state prison, or else had simply been liquidated by the church’s servants. His Von denen Verdammten had been an untitled book, published and immediately forbidden. Copies must have survived somewhere, but only two were known to be kept hidden in the locked parts of German libraries. Sometimes, if one knew someone with enough influence, it was possible to leaf through the book. That was what a young German student, Edith Brendall, had done in 1907. The girl had an astounding photographic memory, and she had rewritten the book. Unfortunately she had also published it, at her own expense since no publisher would touch it. Shortly afterward all copies in bookshops had sold out, and then the copies in public libraries started disappearing. Edith Brendall moved from Hamburg-Altona, her native city, to Berlin, and then to Bonn. No use—she disappeared on March 27, 1910, and her body was found floating in the Rhine eight days later.

  Herbert Ramon didn’t need Von denen Verdammten to recall the verses with which Brendall introduced her revision. He knew them by heart by now:

  Irgendwo, aufeinem einsamen Platz

  Wo Sie niemals bleiben wollten

  Irgendwann, in diesen leeren Raum

  Werden Sie einen Weg finden

  Das Pfad im Dunkeln

  Und Dunkeln, ist mein Name.

  [Somewhere, in a lonely place

  Where you would never want to stay

  Somewhen, in that hollow space

  There you will find a wayr />
  A way into darkness,

  And Darkness, my name is.]

  “Yes,” Herbert whispered, “and I will find that way. Because I know where to find it. Maybe Von denen Verdammten wouldn’t have been enough, but Liyuhh gives me the missing elements.”

  He turned away from the window and took his copy of Liyuhh. On the fifth page was the fading sketch of a map. The lines were hazy, but they were all he had. The map showed a valley, but only the strong lines had remained clearly visible. On one side of the valley was an opening; the rest was encircled by hills. A few strange symbols had been marked on the place where the valley continued into flatland, but these were unrecognizable. At the other end of the valley a figure was shown, resembling a creature with the aspects of a vulture and a bat.

  Herbert placed his copy of Von denen Verdammten beside it. The book contained only two maps, but the one he was comparing Liyuhh with now was very sharply drawn. The creature guarding the opening of the valley had slightly different body proportions, but was essentially the same. The second map also showed much more. On top of the greatest hill, the most distant from the beginning of the valley, strangely asymmetrical buildings were shown, built from great chunks of stone. There were several smaller structures, or whatever they represented, placed in a circle around a higher building. This looked somewhat like a pyramid with one extremely projecting side. Seven obelisks formed a line toward the entrance of the pyramidical structure, which was partly opened up so one could see what was inside. With incredible precision the artist had designed a long hall, with a stone altar (?) at its end.

  Herbert often wondered who that artist had been, and what had become of him. Certainly the drawings in Von denen Verdammten were not the work of Edith Brendall herself, though she must have given the artist all the details from her photographic memory. Still, considering that fact, it was even weirder that the drawing of the being above the altar resembled so much the creature guarding the entrance of the valley in Liyuhh. Man had always had a bizarre vision of his self-created gods, but this artist had surpassed himself and his contemporaries. This drawing here was much more than just a being with aspects of a vulture and a bat: The thing was partly human or seemed so at first sight, but no longer when one looked closely at its details. The eyes were cold and fishy, all four of them, and placed sidewise of the head. The body itself had scales; the five arms were long and spidery, covered with hair or thorns. The hands, each possessing a different number of fingers, were clumps of veined flesh, the fingers nailless and looking more like small twisting tentacles. The lower part of the body had explicit male and female sexual organs, but obscenely oversized ones. It stood on two feet, ending in bird-like claws. The creature held two of its “arms” in front of it. In one it held the nude and seemingly unconscious body of a woman, from whose back bat wings sprouted. In the other outstretched tentacle-arm it had a toad-like being with oversized bulging eyes and two forked tongues.

  Herbert closed the two books. Fifteen years, he thought, fifteen years spent in libraries and with private collectors of rare books on demonology and the occult, hunting for those scarce clues to find that valley, that hill. And now he had found it, or at least he was reasonably sure that he had found it. This had to be that valley, and there, on that hill, the remains of that temple.

  A temple built for a god so frightening that they didn’t even mention his name in the books. Liyuhh spoke about “the thing that waits in darkness" but gave no further details. Von denen Verdammten was more explicit on every aspect except about the nature of “das wartende Dunkel". “the waiting dark.” Still it was strange that no one seemed to know about the existence of that temple. If it really had been as big as the drawings showed, he should be able to see the remains from here. But there was nothing on top of the hill.

  Power and knowledge, he thought, they are still there, on top or maybe even inside that hill, and I will find them. And your memory too lies there, alien god who once was worshiped by man. You are gone, long gone now, but the artifacts, the stones, maybe even manuscripts, they still should be there. And I will find them.

  But before that he had to find out if the people here knew something, and how much. The temple could have been brought down, stone by stone; they could have stripped the hill bare of its treasures. And if they had, he would find out what they had done with them.

  He closed his room, and went down to see if Julien had fixed something to eat.

  IV. Dunkelhügel

  After a sober but very enjoyable dinner, Herbert decided that it was too late to do anything else today, so he took Julien’s advice and went to the cafe for a drink. The inn had only one big room, which was completely crowded. Maybe Freihausgarten’s citizens didn’t care much for socializing, but they certainly wanted their drinks. All places around the small, circular tables were taken. The smell of pipe tobacco mingled with the smells of beer and human sweat. A few card games were going on, but there was not much real talking. Most of the customers were middle-aged; there were almost no young people except for a few sullen-looking youngsters. Most seemed satisfied just standing at the bar with their oversized pints of beer. The heat was smothering in the room, and Herbert felt the sweat running down his ears and back after only a few minutes inside. He ordered a brandy, and tasted it suspiciously. Compared with Julien’s brandy it was cheap stuff, but it was drinkable. It took him over an hour before he succeeded in mingling in the conversation. The topics were typical: the weather, the heat and the danger it represented to the crops of this season, some buildings that needed much fixing, some talk about housewives, a dog which had run away from its owner and hadn’t been found yet—all typical small-town talk. He subtly tried to lead the conversation to things that interested him more, without mentioning them directly. However, he soon noticed that a few hostile glances were being thrown at him, and the townspeople simply continued to talk about their own interests. He tried it another way, bringing up the pastoral aspects of the valley, its geographical position and natural beauty, and all went well until he mentioned the hill. There was a short moment of total silence, and then immediately everybody began chatting about entirely different things. The hint was too obvious to ignore.

  He spent another two hours at the inn, paying for a few drinks to wash away the ill feeling he somehow had conveyed, and talked with them about the weather and the differences between country life and life in the big cities. He stuck to his tale of being a writer on vacation, and carefully kept away from the subject of the hill.

  He got up very early the next morning with a slight headache from the poor brandy. The sun was just rising, and outside it was still fresh and cool. He dressed in jeans and a light sweater, and took his first long walk. He had nothing specific in mind; what he wanted to have first of all was a general firsthand knowledge about the geography of the valley and the hill. The valley was enclosed between two hills. The first one was far to the left of the valley’s entrance, a low and unimportant hill taking in about one sixth of the incomplete circle. The second hill locked with the first one and completed the circle, except where the valley flooded into the lowlands. There was also the station whose trains passed but never entered the valley. The village itself was situated at the opposite end of the valley, leaning against Dunkelhiigel, the Dark Hill, where it reached its highest point. He walked aimlessly through the valley, and then made for the Dark Hill. In full daylight it didn’t seem more menacing or strange than any other hill. He wondered about the strange dark appearance of the hill when seen from a distance. Maybe it was due to some trick of the light after all? The vegetation seemed completely normal anyway.

  He took a few readings with his instruments, and took a few soil samples with him. There proved to be nothing abnormal in them either.

  The next day he covered the hill completely, and this time his trip left him completely baffled, and doubting the information given him by Liyuhh and Von denen Verdammten. There was nothing on the hill, absolutely nothing!

&nb
sp; Which was plainly impossible. This had to be the valley mentioned in his books; it all fitted too closely. Still, a temple as shown in the drawings couldn’t just disappear, though if he looked at it realistically, the only place where it could be would be inside the hill. Which was impossible. It had taken this hill countless centuries to form, erode under the seasons’ influences, take on vegetation as wild as here. Nothing had touched this hill for centuries, he was absolutely certain of that, so the notion that maybe a landslide had covered the temple proved as ridiculous as all the rest. Besides, the books were very clear: The temple had been on top of the hill. There were a few reasonably bald spaces there, but none big enough on which to construct a temple of that size, and even then, there would be traces left.

  Brendall had done some research of her own when rewriting Von denen Verdammten, and had added her own notes to the book. The temple was not mentioned any longer after 1850, but she wrote about old and hideous ceremonies which were conducted “at a dark and hidden place where they speak of The Waiting Dark.” That “dark and hidden place” could be nowhere else but inside that temple. Or was it possible that the temple was a symbol? That this was nothing else but the folkloristic tradition of some conventional witches’ coven, maybe meeting in some hidden cave? But no, Liyuhh too mentioned the temple, so maybe the members of the coven (if that was what it was) could have brought the remains of the temple into their hidden meeting place.

  Still, would Kazaj Heinz Vogel then have written so much about it? A witches’ coven was not so very frightening or blasphemous in present times, when there was even an official Church of Satan. Did that coven still exist? After more than two centuries this was doubtful, but possible. The tradition could have been passed down through generations, and it would explain the villagers negative reaction to his inquiries, no matter how discreet they had been. Or maybe the existence of this mythical coven was not generally known? Even in a small community like this it could pass unnoticed if its members were careful enough.