Kornwolf (40 page)

He reached for the heavy wooden cane that hung from a coat peg along the wall. He brought it down, taking hold of the handle, then slid his grip to the opposite end.

Approaching the doorway, he slowed his advance. For a moment, he thought he had heard something—grinding, a shifting movement—though whether from above or behind him, he couldn't determine exactly. In truth, it had sounded to be right
beside
him, moving along with him, aping his gestures. But that was absurd. He was standing alone. And the house was silent.

Nerves
, he thought.

Breathing slowly, he rounded the jamb and, with watering eyes, peered into the light.

Candles were placed around the room in a distantly recognizable pattern. Their wicks had burned into the wax. They emitted a deep, reddish luminescence that flickered across the opposite wall—down the length of a faded patchwork quilt which, at first, he couldn't place, but which then took a turn for the identifiable—first as a blanket brought down from a box in the attic, then as a family heirloom, and finally, for just what it was, and exactly as had been displayed half a lifetime earlier: the bridal quilt of Maria Speicher, as woven with care by elderly spinsters …

Continuing down: a sheet was drawn back from a goose down mattress on a white oak bed frame. All four posts were staked with candles. Columns of wax ran down to the floor. At the foot of the bed sat a stool and a bucket, tools of the midwife's occupation.

A slam of imagery staggered the Minister: hot, fleeting streaks of intensity, straight from the furnace. Gone as quickly.

He teetered. His equilibrium stabilized.

Then it recurred—this time with greater impact and vivid, protracted clarity: a scream in the half-light, wailing hysteria, blood on the floor, on the mat, on the walls … He found himself gazing in tenuous dread from the doorway, over Grizelda's shoulder. Below, Maria lay screaming to Jesus. Her pallor was drained to a bluish gray. Her long red hair was matted and tangled and fanned out across the sweat-soaked pillow. Beneath her, the mattress was soaked in blood. The floor was awash in it, matted with towels. Grizelda's apron was splattered in thirty-six hours of amniotic discharge.

She cried out for help—more water and towels—from her brother, damn him. What was he doing?

She turned. Benedictus, now as then, could only gawk in speechless horror. Maria's body lay drained in a puddle of gore. She was dying, and nothing could save her.

“
She's dying!
” Grizelda screamed. “
You bastard! Help me!
”

He couldn't. He took a step back.

And, with that, as he watched in the role of his own captive witness, as though in a dream, he had fled—out the door and across the open yard to the fields in a shattered delirium.

Two days later, Jonas Tulk would find him passed out in a Soddersburg tavern.

For now, however, the image of Sister Grizelda persisted: cursing his name. He was still in the room with her, somehow—still looking down on them, frozen, unable to move.

He was trapped in the presence of all that had come to pass in his absence at Ephraim's birth.

Before him, Maria lay shuddering, too weak to scream, in the throes of imminent death. She managed to whisper discernibly: “
Please … Don't let it die
…” to Grizelda, begging. “
And never … ever … tell your … brother
.”

Her eyes clouded over. In a moment, she was gone.

The breath had scarcely left her body before Grizelda seized a knife. Without hesitating, she wiped both sides of the blade with a rag, then turned on the body. She drew a forceful downward
incision from over the navel to the lower abdomen. The skin opened up like a morning glory. There wasn't much blood. But the nerves were still active. The arms and legs continued to twitch as Grizelda traced the incision again, successfully cutting into the uterus. In she reached. Gray and puckering, Ephraim was pulled from his dead mother's womb.

Grizelda, having herself given birth to an infant daughter two weeks earlier, clutched the child to her lactating bosom, then stood and, with lifeless resolve, looked down on Maria's corpse.

“
I won't
,” she promised.

Reeling, the Minister fell over backwards. His head hit the wall. He collapsed in the hallway. At once, he was back up, scrambling, gasping, losing his balance. He couldn't see anything. Groping in darkness, he swung the cane. It shattered a porcelain vase on the cabinet. (Where was his handkerchief?) Something was burning inside of his chest. The stench was unGodly.

Coughing, he stumbled back into the sitting room. No one was there. Yet, the quilt was still hanging. Someone, or something, had entered the house. He could smell it. He needed to get to his gun.

He picked up a candle and, gagging, returned to the hallway in search of his handkerchief. There it was: under the cabinet. The cane slipped out of his sweaty palm as he stooped to retrieve it. The candle flame singed his beard. He sneezed on smoking hair.

Again, he buried his face in the cloth. Quickly, his tremors of fear and astonishment led into semiconvulsions of rage. Maria's dying plea reverberated: “
Never … ever … tell your … brother
—” again and again. He couldn't silence it. Nor could he bury Grizelda's response:

“
I won't
.”

The treacherous, filthy harlot …

Once and for all, she would die.

Tonight.

Leaving his cane on the floor of the hallway, Benedictus limped to the kitchen. Still holding the candle, he lit the wall-mounted
oil lantern. His back felt exposed to the darkness. He'd left himself open.

He turned.

The kitchen, too, had been thrown for a whirl. Paint on the walls, more trash on the floor. Scattered crockery shone in the glare of the steadily brightening oil lantern. The Minister swallowed. His heart palpitated.

He made for the gun cabinet, off in the corner. He opened it. Both of his shotguns were there. He pulled down the Mossberg ten-gauge pump—“The Non-Differentiator,” Tulk always called it. While loading the chamber with lead shot, the Minister's fingers trembled and twitched uncontrollably. His chest was still pounding. Something was wrong with his heart. His breathing felt sharp and constricted. He dropped the handkerchief, damning it. Using both hands, he finished loading the gun. Breathing the air was like siphoning shit through a mouth guard: waffled rectum in hog fat.

The Mossberg was loaded. He filled his pockets with extra shells. He made for the back room. There, every Bible he owned had been shredded to pieces. An overturned bureau lay smashed on the floor. And this time, the walls had been splattered with feces.

He yelled at the wreckage, then kicked the remains of an
Ausbund
across the floor.

A muffled, scarcely audible rustle of movement disrupted the silence to follow. The Minister stopped to listen. The house was quiet. Then the movement resumed: a definite shifting of weight upstairs, the groaning of floorboards, a steady creaking. Followed, shortly thereafter, by voices. Or maybe a single voice. More likely, yes—a single voice, by the sound of it …

Yes, and (incredibly, moreover:) laughing. A chilling cackle rolled through the house. There was something unreal in the tone of it, something so utterly insolent, so inappropriate, so out of place with the Minister's state that his rage was suspended momentarily, giving way to disbelief.

It was coming from just overhead, directly above him; jeering—it seemed to be taunting him. More: it was coming from Ephraim's room. And it sounded like Ephraim, however unlikely.

In equal breach of the judge's ruling as Minister Bontrager's household authority, the boy, that impudent, soon-to-be-choking-on-lead-shot whoreson was laughing upstairs …

Benedictus snapped from his trance. Quietly back through the kitchen he crept. As quietly, up the stairs he continued—gripping the Mossberg, his finger on the trigger—while, warbling madly, the laughter continued, discernibly muted inside of the room. Benedictus stopped at the top of the stairs to ignite an oil lamp. Again, the walls lit up to reveal a splattered assault of fecal matter: Ephraim's bedroom door, down the hall to the left, was marked with cryptic scribbles. Farther on, something had fallen through from the ceiling: a large black hole to the attic. A mound of plaster below, on the floor, trailed into the washroom, which seemed to be flooded.

The boy was still laughing. It made no sense.

Although insubordinate, Ephraim had never distinguished himself as suicidal. The current show of defiance gave Benedictus occasion to pause momentarily. What in the world could the kid have been thinking? Out of his mind, he was—must've been—crazy … And ready to die, by the look of the house.

The Minister found himself at a loss.

More alarmingly:
if
the boy had defiled the interior, thus, then it followed that he must have done the same to the outside—as the damage was nearly identical in nature. But, ceding as much, it also matched damages rendered to houses all over The Basin—houses, whole properties, widely assumed to have been desecrated by The Devil itself …

In the midst of which came another epiphany: the odor now filling the house was the very same stench that had filled the last worship service. (And Beaumont's cruiser the week before.) The whole congregation had choked on it.
(“Stunk up my whole back-seat!
”) And The Devil hadn't been there.

But Ephraim had—right down in front, on the Sinner's Bench.

Ephraim had been there.

No
, thought the Minister.

Despite any rumors of family curses, Ephraim could never have hosted The Devil. Of that much, Benedictus had always felt certain. The Devil was cunning, elusive. The boy was a worthless, incompetent wretch. He couldn't have leapt over Welshtown Road. He couldn't have run up alongside of traffic. Or straight through a plate glass window at the superstore …

Benedictus refused to believe it.

Ephraim was nothing at all like his uncle.

(“
Never … ever … tell your … brother
.”)

His uncle …

(but not)

The Devil.

His father.

As though in reply, a voice went up behind the door, in High German: “
What's wrong?
”—with a tone of impudent mockery. “
The family tree got away from you?
” Laughter. Then, hissing: “
Why not leave the perpetuation of kin to the able-bodied?
”

Trembling, Benedictus stepped away from the door. He had heard enough.

Hound of hell, delinquent brigade or crazed adolescent, it made no difference: whoever belonged to that voice was about to get blown in half.

“
Come on, old man!
” the taunting persisted. “
The only thing more hilarious than infertility
—”

The Minister tried the door. It was locked.

“
—is an armed and murderous cuckold!
”

He jammed the door with the butt of his gun. More howling went up on the other side: shrill peals of spite and hilarity laced with tones of inscrutable malice. Already dreaming of ways he would pummel, strangle and, finally, dispatch of this bastard, the Minister pitted one shoulder squarely into ramming the door from its hinges.

The voice lilted into a singsong delivery: “
Barren as winter, and nary a whelp
…”

And thereby, a realization—or more of a rudimentary
ob
servation, however delayed in forthcoming, as yet—began to dawn on Benedictus: something fundamental was wrong with this scene: something so basic, so simple—a break in the norm—that, until now, it hadn't occurred to him.

While ramming the door, it began to register, steadily creeping into the forefront: the voice behind the door was pronouncing articulate vitriol.

Ephraim was mute.

He hadn't completed a sentence—certainly nothing in German—in all of his life.

Yet now: “
Wir scheissen in die milch deiner Mutter
.”

The Minister blew a hole in the door.

A scream let out. Then a cough. Then a chuckle.

The son of a bitch was
still
laughing …

Benedictus pumped the Mossberg and leveled it. Three more shots exploded. Gaping, jagged holes opened up in the wood.

The door was still on its hinges.

The silence to follow was thick with a sweetly caustic haze of gunpowder smoke. At once, Benedictus reloaded his gun. The lantern behind him flickered and dimmed for a moment. It caught. The air was still. Only the sound of the shells snapping into the chamber and, faintly, the Minister wheezing, disrupted the otherwise deafening calm. Quickly, he finished reloading the Mossberg. As quickly, he sighted the doorknob and fired. It exploded. A hole opened up. There was still something barring the door—what felt like a bolt. In a fury of reckless abandon, he emptied the chamber, then, flipping his grip to the barrel, followed up with a woodcutter's swing.

Once
, he chopped at the splintered patchwork of holes, remembering Sister Grizelda,
twice
he jammed the butt of his Mossberg through the wood, recalling Maria,
three times
, a sizeable hole opened
up, conjuring fleetingly Ephraim's image, and
finally
, the whole of the slab fell in, giving way, in flesh and blood, to The Devil.

It pulled him through on his own momentum. The barrel was seized and torn from his grasp. His arm was taken ahold of and twisted.

Their eyes met only for an instant: remorseless, glowing red …

Then it sprayed him.

His vision was blackened with bile. His scream gurgled into a choke. Something was lifting him—something was gripping his windpipe. He couldn't look down. He thrashed and kicked his feet.

A series of turbulent visions commenced: just as he felt himself hoisted and borne up and over and
slammed
, headfirst, into the wall—a fragmented image of Ephraim, thus treated, in youth, when he'd knocked a lamp from the table, appeared before him with vivid intensity, just as the beating led into release, into weightlessness, free-floating, end over backwards and
slam
on the door frame, twisting his back on the drop and cracking his ribs upon impact—this time for having been ten minutes late home from fetching the Minister's wandering pacer—just as he felt himself spluttering, blindly lifted again—the pain in his back like a nerve ending under the blast of a torch—to be held overhead in a straight-armed brace, carried into the washroom—where Ephraim had once dribbled piss on the floor—and dunked to his ears in a basin of burning, corrosive liquid, just as he felt himself tossed, then tumbling, down the hall toward the top of the stairs, soon to be lifted again, a thunderous backhand triggered an image of Ephraim, hoisted aloft and slapped repeatedly. Another blow, this one harder, shattered the bridge of his nose in a white-hot flash. A third tore into his gut, invoking a scene of the boy doubled over in agony; the last, a full-force kick to the jaw, sent him end over end down the stairs, precisely as Ephraim had plummeted, spiraling blindly—slamming his head on the ridge of a step—and the rest in a tumble, landing flat on his back with a slap at the foot of the staircase.