“Not one more step, hangman!” Hannes shouted as he backed away toward the cliff. “Or Joseffa will fly like a little angel through the clouds.”
“Is that all you know how to do, boy?” Jakob growled, while trying to sound as calm as possible. “Torture and kill little children? Why don’t you come and fight someone your own size?”
“You’re the expert on that, hangman—torturing and killing,” he shouted back, with a grin. “Besides, you’re too old for me to fight. It wouldn’t be any fun. I’d just feel sorry for you.”
“I’m enough of a man to handle a pimply weakling like you.” Jakob took a step forward, but at once Hannes tugged at the leather leash. Joseffa let out a muffled cry and fell on her knees just a step away from the precipice.
“Believe me, I’m not kidding,” Hannes screeched. “I’ll toss her over if you don’t immediately turn around and go back down.”
The hangman raised his hands. “Calm down,” he grumbled, “there’s no need for this. I’m leaving.” Joseffa stared at Jakob with pleading eyes as he calmly turned around and disappeared between the boulders. As soon as he was out of sight, he stopped and looked around hectically. As the fog dispersed he noticed a tiny path on the right, probably used by mountain goats. It led down slightly beneath the summit and curved back to the top of the cliff. He hesitated briefly, then took the muddy path strewn with goat feces leading back just a hand’s width from the edge of the abyss. Was there another route to the summit? If he managed to approach Hannes from behind without being noticed, perhaps he could attack him before he could do anything to the child. Cursing under his breath and with knees trembling, the hangman groped his way forward.
The bastard deserves to die just for making me do this.
The path led past an old abandoned shelter along the edge of the cliff. Once again, Jakob remembered why he hated the mountains. They seemed to him like living, evil creatures bent on throwing him off their giant backs. Jakob tried hard not to look down. He stared straight ahead, where the path turned and finally ended on a ledge about fifteen feet below the summit. At this point the cliff fell off steeply, finally ending in a field of boulders far below. A few mountain jackdaws flew up, screeching excitedly, and a bit farther away an eagle circled lazily.
Jakob waited a moment to see if the jackdaws had perhaps warned Hannes, but on hearing nothing, he quietly said a prayer and began to climb the wall, groaning. There were rock overhangs where he could get a grip, but some of them were loose, crumbling under his fingers while he frantically looked for another hold. The short ascent was extremely tiring and dangerous.
He avoided looking down but could clearly sense the abyss below trying to pull him in. In addition, the wind blew upward like a poisonous breath directly from hell. Bit by bit, and as silently as possible, he worked his way upward. He was choked with fear such as he’d never known before, and streams of sweat poured down his back.
Just don’t look down.
A few times he almost slipped, but each time he managed to find another handhold. He paused to listen and could hear the muted cry of a child not far away.
“Hold your tongue, girl, there’s no point now,” Hannes growled. Jakob was shocked, realizing that his opponent had to be very nearby somewhere just above him.
“Ha! You see? Your great savior is a coward,” Poxhannes continued. “He just ran off,” he chortled. “And now what am I going to do with you, hmm? You’re just a burden. If I throw you over, I’ll be doing everyone a favor. You’ll never get better anyway, and your parents would just have to feed you until you died. Come on, now, let’s get it over with.”
There was a stifled gurgling sound, then Jakob heard something being dragged across the ground. Jakob’s heart beat faster. Clearly, Hannes was about to throw the child over the cliff. With trembling hands, Jakob pulled himself up the last few inches and now he could see Hannes just a few steps away, dragging Joseffa by the leather strap.
They were coming right toward him.
Fortunately, Hannes had his back to the cliff and didn’t notice Jakob’s face, covered in sweat. Joseffa let out a tiny cry of relief.
“No, no!” Jakob whispered, but it was too late. Hannes turned around and saw him. With a grin, he dropped the leather strap, took a few steps toward Jakob, and swung back his leg, preparing to kick the hangman straight in the face.
“Ha! Now you’ll both fly through the clouds directly to hell,” he cried triumphantly. “Give my greetings to the devil when you—”
The words stuck in his throat as Jakob suddenly grabbed his leg with his left hand and pulled. Hannes shouted with surprise, while at the same moment the hangman let go with his right hand, a spontaneous action he almost immediately regretted. He fell, still holding tightly to Hannes’s foot, and the two tumbled to the narrow ledge below the summit. Jakob groaned as he felt his shirt rip and sharp stones tear into the flesh on his back. The precipice was just a few inches away.
It took his opponent just an instant to recover from his shock. He scrambled to his feet, tottering slightly, then attacked Jakob, who in the meanwhile had also gotten to his feet. Above them, Joseffa’s shocked face appeared.
“Run, girl!” Jakob called up to her. “Run back to the valley, quickly. I don’t need you here now.”
It had taken just a fraction of a second for the hangman to look up, but Hannes used that moment to attack. The schoolmaster’s assistant was almost as tall as Jakob and strong as a bull. Moreover, he wasn’t wounded and seemed accustomed to the high altitude. Jakob had trouble warding off the punches he threw and kept backing off closer and closer to the edge. Once again he could feel the wind pulling him by the legs, and he began to tremble. He blocked his opponent’s blows with his forearm, then finally went on the attack himself. His punches were off the mark, however, and the constant awareness of the yawning abyss alongside distracted him. A broad grin passed over Hannes’s face as he noticed Jakob’s uncertainty.
“Soon you will learn to fly, hangman,” he hissed. “Give up, old man, you’re as good as dead, you just don’t know it yet.”
Jakob remembered all the men he’d ever fought. His whole life had been one long fight. He’d often battled far stronger and more experienced fighters than this pockmarked fellow who was half his age, but he felt exhausted nonetheless. His fear of the abyss robbed him of his strength, but it was more than just that.
There’s no end to it . . . never . . .
Once again, Hannes’s blows rained down on him, and he was now at the very edge of the abyss. One more step and he’d plunge into the depths.
The exhaustion and despair in Jakob’s eyes seemed to give Hannes more strength, and with a triumphant cry he jumped at his opponent.
Then Jakob did something unexpected.
He didn’t fight, he didn’t strike back, he just let himself fall backward into the abyss. For Joseffa . . .
A piercing scream sounded in his ears as Hannes raced past him into the void. For a moment he watched as Hannes flailed his arms, then Jakob landed hard on another ledge below, which for a moment knocked him unconscious. When he came to, he instinctively looked for something to hold on to, reaching out to grasp the branch of a mountain pine growing out of a crevice in the rock. The branch started to bend, stones trickled down, but then the little tree held, at least for the moment.
Swinging gently back and forth like a pendulum, he clung to the thin branch over the abyss. Hannes was nowhere to be seen.
Jakob continued to sweat, and his fingers began to lose their grip on the damp wood. This was a real, living nightmare. He had never before felt fear like this, which paralyzed him and made his muscles cramp. To the right, about an arm’s length away, a crooked rock chimney led to a part of the cliff that was not as steep. Jakob blinked as dust clouded his eyes. If he made it over to the rock chimney, perhaps he had a chance, but to do that he’d have to jump—and to do that in his present condition seemed to be about as improbable as dancing over the clouds. His f
ear of the void below crept through every fiber of his body.
Moreover, he was getting increasingly tired and beginning to doubt himself. Was all this effort even worth it? Wasn’t it better just to close his eyes and simply give up, to let himself fall? A tiny, high-pitched voice suddenly spoke to him, whispering in his ear.
Why struggle, Jakob? The children are safe. Who needs an old drunken hangman? Why all the effort?
He turned around to the place where the sound was coming from and for a moment thought he saw a little man dressed in black with a pointed hat and evil eyes staring out at him from the rocky outcrop behind the pine tree.
The Venetian, he thought. The boogeyman. Now he has come to get me after all. Mother, God rest her soul, was right.
Again he heard a voice, this time silky, almost singing.
Let it go, Jakob. It’s over, you’ve had a long life. Sooner or later the end comes for everyone. Who needs you anymore?
“Who . . . needs . . . me . . .” Kuisl gasped.
His head started to spin.
He wanted to let himself go and fall into this huge, soft bed that had opened up below him, when suddenly he thought of his grandson Peter.
Just a single image flashed through his mind. He remembered how Peter had come running toward him a few days ago in the Oberammergau graveyard with outstretched arms and nothing in his eyes but joy at this unexpected meeting with his beloved grandfather. The image vanished, and was replaced by a new one. He could see little Paul, that hot-headed, boisterous child who sometimes made him think of himself when he was young, and how together they’d built waterwheels down at the river and carved wooden swords. He thought of his children, Magdalena, Georg, and Barbara, his family, with whom he was often so ferocious but whom he loved more than anything in the world. And suddenly he was quite sure.
“They need . . . me . . .” he groaned. “They need . . . me . . .”
The hangman was not yet ready to go.
Jakob began to swing his huge body back and forth. The pine loosened a bit more, but it didn’t give way. Finally, he’d swung far enough to jump to the rock chimney. He climbed onto it and crawled down until he’d finally reached the top of the slope. There were a number of mountain pines growing down here that he could hang on to. He slid down, reaching out for branches and rocky projections. Now everything happened as if in a dream. Later he would remember that he’d finally reached the debris at the bottom. He crawled through the scree, slipping again, falling, and setting off little avalanches that nearly buried him. But he kept getting back up, kept groping his way toward the bottom, where the first tall trees grew—beeches with green leaves providing shade. “They . . . need . . . me.”
He finally sunk down under the trees, found some melted snow in a depression, and bathed his grimy, scabby, bleeding hands in the cold water, then he lay down to sleep.
The last thing he remembered was the vague form of a little man with a pointed hat who shouted with disappointment and finally disappeared somewhere between the boulders.
“Salt, we need salt!” cried Simon frantically.
Georg Kaiser lay in the middle of the room among all his documents. The schoolmaster quivered all over, and his arms and legs twitched uncontrollably. Magdalena jumped up and ran out into the hallway, where there was a small kitchen in a niche. She knew why Simon needed salt so urgently. Georg Kaiser had obviously poisoned himself—there had been something other than cough syrup in the vial. If they infused him with lots of salt water, he would perhaps vomit before the poison could take its full effect. Magdalena looked around excitedly for the little pouch of salt usually found next to the fireplace and hurried back into the room. She couldn’t help thinking what a miracle this white powder really was, something men in this valley had died for.
Salt can kill, yet without salt, there is no life. It really rules the world . . .
Whether it would help Georg Kaiser at this point was doubtful. The schoolmaster thrashed around like a fish on dry land, and the poison had probably penetrated too far into his body. Magdalena’s suspicions were confirmed when she returned and saw Simon’s discouraged expression. Her husband had cradled the head of his old friend in his lap and shook his head sadly. Kaiser mumbled a few final, incomprehensible words.
“The . . . the Walen books,” he gasped. “Care for them, Simon. You are the only one I want to have the treasure, not . . . not these greedy Oberammergauers with their accursed Passion play. I . . . I could never stand the play . . . It was much too long . . .”
“You must spare yourself, Georg,” Simon said softly. “Perhaps the poison is too weak . . .”
Kaiser coughed, and it took a while for Magdalena to realize he was laughing. “Believe me, this poison is not too weak,” the schoolmaster said in a rasping voice. “I made it myself from wolfsbane, a beautiful blue flower that blossoms here in the mountains in summertime . . .”
Magdalena looked at Peter, who was staring in horror at the twitching man, and took her son in her arms. When she heard it was wolfsbane, she knew at once that there was no cure. Wolfsbane, or devil’s root, was the deadliest plant she kept as a bathhouse operator. It was said the blue blossoms came from the saliva of the Grecian hound of hell, Cerberus, and that sometimes even touching it led to death. A vial like the one Kaiser had prepared could not fail to have its intended effect.
The schoolmaster now became weaker and weaker. “So . . . so cold,” he mumbled. “Can’t feel anything anymore . . .” One last time his head shot up and his fingers dug into the papers all around him. “The Walen books . . . my treasures . . . Simon, see to it that . . .” He collapsed and his eyes glazed over.
A strange silence spread through the room, almost as if time stood still for a moment, but then the birds started chirping again outside and the first rays of the morning sun passed through the slats in the shutters. Life went on in the village.
“It’s over,” Simon said sadly, closing Kaiser’s eyes. He gently placed the head of his old friend on the ground and released the documents from his clawlike fingers. “Even if he was a murderer, he once meant much to me.” Simon sighed. “He was like the father I always yearned for.”
“Yet in the end, he was a monster,” Magdalena added harshly. “I actually liked your deceased father. Maybe he was peculiar, but he was not possessed by the devil.” She shook her head. “Well, at least not when he was sober.”
“It was these Walen books that cast a spell over him,” said Simon, pointing at the crumpled papers surrounding Kaiser’s head like a halo. “The thought is appealing,” he conceded. “Hundreds of secrets all pointing to a huge treasure. A treasure hunt . . .”
He began to gather up the papers and started reading with a thoughtful expression on his face. “Listen to this,” he said after a while, turning to Magdalena. “‘Here, where a chasm opens up like the mouth of a fish, you will acquire great wisdom.’” He frowned. “Hmm. That could be a fountain or also a puddle in a mountain brook. Do you remember seeing, up in the Ammer Valley . . . Hey! What are you doing?”
Magdalena had ripped the pages out of his hand and started picking up the other documents from the floor.
“You’re right,” Simon said excitedly. “First we have to sort them and put them all in order so we can read them, and perhaps they’ll make more sense then. Georg Kaiser would surely be proud if we . . . Stop! Are you crazy?”
Magdalena walked over to the tile stove with the stack of papers in her hands. She opened the little door for stoking the fire and was about to toss them inside.
“What are you doing?” Simon shouted angrily, pushing her aside. “Have you lost your mind? These pages could lead us to a treasure. Don’t you understand what that would mean for us? We could say goodbye to this life as dishonorable people. We could move to another town and begin new lives. Georg Kaiser had almost figured it out, and perhaps we just have to look a bit more. You’re crazy if you throw these documents into the fire now.”
“You’re the
crazy one!” Magdalena slipped away from him and began feeding the papers one by one into the fire.
“What . . . what are you doing?” he shrieked, his head turning red as a beet. “How dare you destroy something my old friend bequeathed to me? Stop right now, or I’ll do something I’ll regret.” He raised his hand and was about to strike Magdalena.
“Stop, Father,” shouted Peter, running toward him. “What are you doing?” He wrapped his skinny little arms around his father and clung to him for dear life.
Simon stopped, confused, with his hand still raised as Magdalena stared at him with a mixture of ridicule and horror.
“Don’t you see what these Walen books are doing to you?” she said finally, shaking her head. “They really are cursed.” She pointed at Georg Kaiser’s corpse on the floor. “There’s your dead friend, he just breathed his last, and you are crying bloody murder and want to beat your wife just because of a few accursed sheets of bizarre scribblings. Is it really worth it, Simon?”
Slowly Simon lowered his arm. “No . . . it’s not. It’s really not worth it. I’m sorry, Magdalena. It’s as if I was—”
“Possessed, I know.” Magdalena smiled. “But I excuse you because you are my husband and I love you.” She motioned to Peter to come over. “And now, both of you, help me destroy once and for all this devilish claptrap.”
The three stood in front of the stove and continued throwing the papers in the fire. Once Simon stopped and held one of the documents between his fingers, lost in thought. “And you really think . . .” he started to say. But the stern look on Magdalena’s face silenced him at once.
Simon cast that sheet into the flames as well. Holding one another by the hand, father, mother, and son watched as the pages were gradually consumed by the flames.
At the Malenstein, keep an eye out for . . .