Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(12)
“Follow me.”
I flinched at the feel of his dry, spindly fingers on my right elbow, but the rector carefully guided me down a small flight of steps as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. At the foot of the stairs, he unlocked yet another door and gestured inside. I frowned, wondering where we were headed. The church cellars?
The door slammed shut behind me, sealing me in complete darkness. I thought of stories of maidens and lovers buried alive in crypts and catacombs, and the creeping sensation of having been locked in a tomb crept up and around my throat.
“Herr Rektor—” I began.
A snap, and then a flame blazed to life, hovering in midair before me like a fairy light. I squinted against the brightness and saw the old rector with a lantern in hand, although I could not guess how he had lit it so quickly with no taper or candle to kindle it.
“We are in the old vestry,” he said in answer to my unasked question. “Priests used to get robed in here before coming up to the chancel through there.” He gestured toward a door on the far side with a tilt of his head. “But Father Abelard prefers to dress in the choir. Says he finds it unsettling down here.”
I found myself rather sympathetic to our priest. “What are we doing here?” I asked.
“We discovered that our cellar had flooded during that brief period of spring warmth last week, so we moved our stores here.”
He cast his light over the space, which was much larger than I had thought. In addition to the barrels of foodstuffs brought up from their cellars, the room was stocked with several shelves, all laden with reams upon reams of dusty paper, parchment, and portfolios. It was only then that I realized that these were the records and history of our little backwoods village.
“Ah yes, my life’s work.” The flickering light of the lantern cast deep shadows, carving strange shapes into the planes of the old man’s face. His nose grew long and sharp, his lips pinched and thin. His cheekbones protruded painfully, giving him a rictus grin. “I have traced the descent of every man, woman, and child in this town,” he said proudly. “The fruits grown from the bed of blood and seed from whence this village had sprung. But there are some families that disappear into time. Stories with beginnings and middles, but no ends.”
“Such things happen in a village as small as ours,” I said. “Mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors—over time we all become hopelessly tangled.”
The rector shrugged. “Perhaps. But there are mysteries not even I can unravel. Lives and lines cut off in the middle, vanished, unfinished. Yours is one such family, Fr?ulein.”
I shot him a sharp look. “Excuse me?”
He smiled, showing the tips of his yellowed teeth. “Did Constanze ever tell you about her sister, Magda?”
Magda. I thought of my grandmother calling K?the by that name the other night. Mother had dismissed it as yet another sign of Constanze’s deteriorating mind, but I had not known she had had a sister. “No,” I said slowly. “But I have heard the name.”
“Hmmm.” The rector lifted the lantern to a shelf a few inches above his head. He ran his fingers along the spines of years bound in calfskin leather, searching for the right book, the right generation. His fingernails were overgrown and black with dirt and ink. “Ah, here we are.”
He pulled down an enormous tome, nearly as large as he, setting it on the desk with a dusty slam. The book immediately fell open to a page, the leaves settling down on either side of a well-worn seam in the spine. The rector held the lantern aloft and pointed at an entry in the middle with a long, clawed finger.
MARIA MAGDALENA HELOISE GABOR
Magda. Constanze’s sister. My grandmother had been a Gabor before she married.
“Your grandmother’s family was one of the oldest, if not necessarily the most respectable,” the old man said. I bristled. I might not have been a Gabor, but the slight still stung. “Strange and queer, the lot of them. Elf-touched, they were called in the old days.”
I frowned. “Elf-touched?”
The rector’s yellow smile slowly spread wider across his face. “The mad, the fearful, the faithful. Those who dwell with one foot in the Underground and another in the world above.”
All the hairs rose at the back of my neck. There is madness in her bloodline. But was it madness? Or an unseen connection to something greater, something beyond mortal ken? Many of the beautiful and broken branches of my family tree were touched with genius, a drive to create that turned them inside out and upside down. There was my great-great-great-uncle Ernst, a talented woodcarver and carpenter, whose unearthly and transformative figurines were deemed heretical and destroyed. They still told stories of my distant cousin Annabel, whose poetic and twisted ways of speech cast her first as a prophet, and then a witch.
And then there was Papa. And Josef.
And me. Guilt throbbed in me at the thought of the klavier in my bedroom, untouched and unplayed since I had returned from the Underground.
“Magda was the youngest of Eleazor and Maria Gabor’s children,” the rector went on, handing the tome over to me to read. I staggered under its unexpected weight, heavy with heritage and history. “There were three: Bettina, Constanze, and Magda.”
Bettina. I understood better now why my grandmother had called me that. “What happened?”
He gestured to the book before me with his chin. Turning the pages, I moved back and forward in time, the parchment growing thinner with age. Agnes, Friedrich, Sebastian, Ignaz, Melchior, Ilse, Helena, generations upon generations of Constanze’s family. My family. Entire lives sprouted, then withered away beneath my fingers. They were born, got married, had children, died. All recorded in an impersonal hand.