Sign of the Eight Read online

  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.

  ISBN 978-1-64690-609-3

  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 hou
se 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.