Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(35)

“I don’t understand your words. A severed forest?”

The old man put his fingertips together like the ribs of a fish, and tapped his thumbs five times. “In dying, you lost something, I think, and you also gained something. You possess something I don’t have. I have curiosity. But you have knowledge.”

“I have a headache.”

“Must you be stubborn? Of course you must: It is your youth. Most of the people who have experiences like the kind you’ve had are much older, some of them at the end of a long life. When they come back—oh, through a tunnel, they sometimes say, or down from a great height where they were floating above their bodies, or out of a blinding white light at once peaceful and abnegating—they are often furious at being revived. And they can be terrifically different people than they were before. But I never heard of it happening to a child.”

“What causes this—this detachment—to happen?” asked Dirk. Unconvinced, he was looking for a way to undercut the mad Doktor’s assertions.

“I once knew a man who was struck by lightning. Those who ran to him said his heart had failed. It was stopped for ten minutes as they carried his body through the barley. At the edge of the meadow, startled by a wild boar bolting from a ravine, they dropped the poor corpse, and the heart in the corpse began to pound again. The man recovered, and raved about his journey into the otherness. But I saw that he was never the same. He would not look at or address his wife, and the comforts of the pulpit and the pew were as burning coals on his ears and heart. He sat in a doorway like someone twice his age, unable to work the fields anymore, and he died again several years later. His hand tangled in his beard, as his face remained unshaven from the day of lightning unto the night of the actual grave.”

“I suppose I shall have to remember to shave, no matter what comes.” But Dirk’s voice was less strident now.

“Shall I tell you another case? This one is hearsay, but from a reliable observer. A man of probity.”

The boy didn’t nod, neither did he shake his head to forbid it.

“The woman was not gifted in noetics.” At Dirk’s shrug, Doktor Mesmer said, “Noetics. Having to do with knowledge and canniness. I am trying to say that she had all the perspicacity of . . . of a shrub. A bucket. A slab of mutton. I’m told her speech was slow, and her sentences rarely reached a verb. She was good for nothing but carrying rags for the rag man. An itinerant without a real home.”

“The poorhouse ought have taken her in.”

“Now, this middle-aged woman had a dreadful swelling in the forehead like a bald peach pit. People avoided her. They said the contusion was the stump of a devil’s horn, and though she’d been able to break off the prong, the root remained, poisoning her. My colleague, a fellow in Vienna, offered to try to cut it out for her. He promised her enough liquor to make her pass out, which appealed to her. Perhaps she hoped she would die under his knife, and dying dead drunk would be better than life. Or perhaps she was too dull to disagree with his proposals. At any rate, the operation went ahead, for her benefit and for his medical curiosity.”

“Did she awaken as a knife plunged into her skin?”

And here Dirk remembered the axe in the old man’s leg, and his awful screams.

“I will admit my colleague drew a veil over those unseemly details. I think ropes may have been involved. But the important part is that the dreadful devil’s root was indeed removable, and the head bandaged, and the woman seemed to leave this valley of sorrow and lie stony and limp upon the board. She was cold as a riverbed in March. Then, I’m told, after an hour or so of death, quite suddenly, she revived. She survived a prodigious loss of blood, she slept for seven days, and when she woke up . . .”

“Waking up, that’s good . . .”

“She spoke in a language never heard on earth. No one else could understand her for the rest of her life. But she spoke—voluminously. Like a cataract, night and day, even in her sleep. It made her distressing to be with, as she stared at those around her with maddened eyes, entirely unable to share whatever it is she had seen while she was dead.”

“What happened to her?”

“In the end they had to lock her in a tower room. I believe she slipped and fell from a high window.”

“I still don’t know what this has to do with me.”

The old man mopped his brow with a stained cloth. “You said things while—oh, why should I be falsely modest—while Mesmerized. As some folks call it, admiringly or not. You said things that led me to think you have had a similar experience. But you were young. You were a child. You went someplace and came back. Would it bother you if I asked some questions?”

“I oughtn’t stay too much longer.”

“You can come back another time. I made notes. I can wait.”

“Do it quickly. My life has many turns. Perhaps on the way home I will be struck by a woman throwing herself out of a high tower, and I won’t see you again.”

“You killed a tree; and then the tree killed you.”

Dirk waited. Motes of dust revolved in the lamplight. The drawn curtains gapped at the top, revealing a dart of dulled sky. He said at last, “That isn’t a question.”

“You went to a forest. It was not a forest of the mortal world.”

“Dreams are not of the mortal world, Herr Doktor.”