“All right!”

The vehemence in her voice surprised him. After a moment, he said quietly, “This isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. There’s always a natural explanation for ‘supernatural’ events.”

Afterward, Tom remained at the PC, pulling on his lip. If bizarre visions had been the reason for the taboo, there would have been Teufelheims all up and down the Rhineland.

The Medieval collapse had spawned horrors enough to depopulate a thousand Eifelheims. Cannibalism followed the famines of 1317 and 1318, when the crops drowned from incessant rains. “Children were not safe from their parents,” one chronicler had written. But no villages had been shunned on that account. Peasant bands had roamed the countryside, espousing poverty and free love, sacking manors and monasteries and lynching Jews to make their point. But those who fled soon returned, even the Jews. A century of war and banditry in France destroyed the mystique of the knight, the tourney, the minstrel, and courtly love. Cynicism and despair replaced hope and anticipation. Witchcraft and heresy; flagellants and plague. The macabre cult of death, with its dancing skeletons. Absurdism, nihilism, eventually, death camps. A new world order so closed, so paranoid, so repressive, so stunned by meaningless death that people forgot completely that there had ever been a different and more open world before it.

So amidst these shambles, why had Eifelheim alone remained anathema?

He pulled out the project folder and carried it to the kitchen table, where he spread the hard copies out, scrutinizing each one, as if he could wrest answers from them by sheer concentration: Manorial records of the vassals of the Margraves of Baden and the earlier Dukes of Zähringen; the knight’s memoire; the religious treatise on the ‘inner world’ with its awkward illuminated capital; seignorial approvals of marriages and vocations, of fines and grants; enfoeffments encompassing Oberhochwald and feudal levies upon its knight; the newspaper clipping Anton had sent him; an ecstatic prayer citing ‘eight secret paths to leave this earth of sorrows’ and attributed at third hand to a ‘Saint Johan of Oberhochwald’; the episcopal letter addressed to Pastor Dietrich.

There were also the usual monkish chronicles — from Freiburg, St. Peter, St. Blasien, and elsewhere — of harvests, fairs, gossip, noble doings. One spectacular event, a lightning strike in August 1348, had set several acres of forest (and not a few superstitious minds) ablaze. The plague was then just spreading north from the coast, and the bolt had in retrospect been read as Lucifer’s advent. (Had the village burned? No, the Moriuntur document and the business with the smith had come later.)

The bits and pieces were accumulating into a fuller picture, or at least into a sketch. The manor of Oberhochwald was one of two possessed by its knight (the other being in the gift of the Austrian Duke). The last knight to hold the fief was named Manfred, and his father had been named Ugo. The pastor at the time of the village’s demise had been named Dietrich, who may have been the “doctor seclusus” mentioned by Ockham and who had written the compendium in the Bibliotheque. There was an herb-woman named Theresia (he imagined her as a gray-haired hag with a face as ragged as the Black Forest itself), a farmer named Fritz, a smith named Lorenz, and a few others whose names had wound up in that doctoral thesis. Peel back the research onion another layer, locate the originals that the doctoral candidate had used, and even more names would likely surface.

I could almost write a complete history of this village, he thought. Harvest and tax records would let him estimate economic and demographic growth. The fief records showed how it fit into the local feudal structure. The knight’s memoire and the bishop’s letter even gave him a glimpse into the village’s intellectual life, such as it was.

In fact, he realized glumly, the only thing missing from the village’s history was the one thing that made it worth writing — why it had so abruptly and so completely come to an end.

What if it’s not there? he wondered. What if the key document had been lost? Burned to ashes in the struggles between Mercy and the Bernadines at the rag-tail end of the Thirty Years War; or during Moreau’s Retreat down Hell Valley; or in the campaigns of Louis or Napoleon or a dozen other strutting would-be conquerors. Eaten by mice or mold, consumed by fire or rain or flood, crumbled in neglect.

What if it had never been written down at all?

“Tom, what’s wrong? You look pale.”

He glanced up. Sharon stood in the kitchen archway, a freshly brewed cup of tea in her hands. The odor of rosehips and chamomile wafted through the room.

“Nothing,” he said. But he’d had the sudden, dreadful sensation that he already had a key piece of information in his hands; that he had read it several times already; and that it had meant nothing to him.

And so came I into the affair, although at first in only a peripheral way. I was teaching still at the Albert-Louis, and Tom sent me an e-mail asking me the manorial records for Oberhochwald to find. These were supposed to be in our University collection. I replied, Was that a personal supposition, a material supposition, or a simple supposition? And Tom responded ‹LOL?› because he did not understand the joke. He supplied a list of key words and a request to search our manuscripts and incunabula for references pertaining to Oberhochwald, which I suppose was fit punishment for my attempt at medieval humor. Supposition theory is not much funny, especially as we don’t really know what they meant by it all. They used many of the same words as we do — motion, intuition, realism, natural, occult — but their meanings lay often at odd angles to ours. Still, I promised to rummage around as best I could and, a week later, I sent him what little I had found.

XI. November, 1348

The Kermis

The Krenken were coming into the village.

The announcement struck Dietrich like a blow to the stomach. He steadied himself with a clutch to Eugen’s bridle. They meant to take the village. Given the krenkish choler, it could be nothing else. But why, after the months of hiding? He looked up at the junker, whose face was as white as the ground. The lad knew. “The Herr sent hand-picked men to face them, I hope.”

Eugen swallowed. “They’ve been told. They’ll stand.”

God vouchsafed Dietrich a vision of the coming events. He saw them unfold with awful clarity, as if they had already been accomplished — already factum est. Grim ranks of the strange creatures hurl bullets with their pots de fer, ignite their thunder-paste. Men are pierced, shattered. Krenken swoop from the air to strike men from above.

Max’s men cry in terror. But they are men who answer fear with blows. The Krenken have their magic weapons, but a broadsword hews them as easily as a man. And once frightened men see that, they fall upon the survivors with a fury more murderous for having been born of fear; hacking and chopping to bits the creatures he had named Hans, and Gschert, and Kratzer.

Whichever way the fight might go, too many would die for the remainder to live. It would be pressed to the last. There would be no men left. Or no Krenken.

But if the Krenken were only beasts that spoke, what did it matter? One slays attacking beasts, and it would end his anxiety.