Tom flipped his hands up. “It doesn’t.” He called another map onto the screen. “Here’s the Black Forest. Notice anything odd?”
After all those maps, the empty cell fairly jumped out at her. Sharon touched the screen, her finger dancing from village to village. Bärental, Oberreid, Hinterzarten, St. Wilhelm… The roads all twisted around the blank spot, some doubling back on themselves to avoid it. She frowned. Tom was right. There should be a village there.
“That,” he announced sourly, “is Eifelheim.”
“The little town that wasn’t there,” she murmured. “But how can a town that isn’t there have a name?”
“The same way that the Elamite pueblo had a name. Enough references in various sources to triangulate its location. Attendez.” Another command entered. “The same region in the Early Middle Ages, reconstructed from LANDSAT photos.” He cocked his head. “C’est drôle, mon cherie. Up close, you wouldn’t see a damned thing; yet from miles above, the ghosts of vanished villages stand out clearly.” He looked at the screen and pointed. “There’s Eifelheim.”
The little dot stared back at her from the previously empty hex. “Then I don’t get it. You’ve discovered another ‘lost city,’ like in Sumeria.”
But Tom shook his head. “No,” he said sadly, gazing at the screen. “Settlements are abandoned because their affinity drops, or technology changes the effective distances. The silver mines play out, or an Interstate runs through. That’s not the case here. Affinity should have caused a successor-village to coalesce within a generation somewhere inside that hex. Look at the way Baghdad followed Seleucia, Babylon, and Akkad in the same hex in Mesopotamia.”
“Do your satellite photos tell when this Eifelheim disappeared?”
“Based on the pattern of stripping — the ‘furlongs’ — I’d guess the Late Middle Ages, probably during the Black Death. Land usage patterns changed after that.”
“Weren’t a lot of places depopulated then? I read somewhere that a third of Europe died.” She actually thought she had explained something. She actually thought she had seen something that Tom had overlooked. No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another’s.
Tom was deaf to her triumph. “Yeah,” he said off-handedly, “and the Middle East, too. Ibn Khaldûn wrote… Well, it took two hundred years for the population to rebound to medieval levels, but every other abandoned village was eventually either reoccupied or replaced by a new settlement nearby. Você accredita agora? People lived there for over four hundred years, and then — no one ever lived there again.”
She shivered. The way he said it, it did sound unnatural.
“The place became tabu,” he continued. “In 1702, Marshal Villars refused to march his army past the place to join his Bavarian allies.” Tom opened a slim manila folder on his desk and read from a sheet of paper. “This is what he wrote to the Elector: ‘Cette valée de Neustadt que vous me proposez. C’est le chemin qu’on appelle le Val d’Enfer. Que votre Altesse me pardonne l’expression; je ne suis pas diable pour y passer.’ This was the route he rejected, up the Höllenthal — Hell Valley.” His finger traced a path on the map screen, running northeast from Falkenstein past Eifleheim, below the Feldberg. “There wasn’t even a road through that tanglewood until the Austrians built one in 1770 — so Marie Antoinette could travel to France in comfort, which also turned out to be a bad idea. Even after the road was put in, it was a bad place to travel through. Moreau’s Retreat down the valley was such a feat that, when he finally reached the lower end, he was nearly hailed a victor. Then here…” He rummaged again in his folder. “…I have a copy of a letter by an English traveler named Hughes, who writes in 1900: ‘I pressed on to Himmelreich, lest darkness catch me on the malign ground of Eifelheim.’ He’s being a little tongue-in-cheek — a snooty Edwardian Englishman winking at ‘quaint’ German folktales — but you notice he didn’t stay the night. And Anton Zaengle — you remember Anton — he sent me a newspaper clipping that… Here, read it yourself.” He handed her the manila folder. “Go ahead. It’s right on top.”
If a cosmologist learned anything, it was that the shortest route was not always a straight line. Opening the folder, Sharon found a clipping from the Freiburger Wochenbericht with an English translation stapled to it.
(Freiburg i/Br.) Although officials discount it as superstition, some US soldiers on maneuvers here believe they have found the tomb of Count Dracula, hundreds of miles from Transylvania. A spokesperson for the US Third Infantry Division acknowledged that something between a cult and a fad had emerged among the soldiers over an obscure medieval headstone decorated with the carving of a demonic face.
The grave lies in a region of the Black Forest called Eifelheim.
The region is heavily forested and the soldiers refuse to divulge the precise location, claiming that curious tourists would offend the grave’s inhabitant. This suits nearby farmers, who have a superstitious dread of the place.
Monsignor Heinrich Lurm, a spokesman for the Diocese of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, is concerned about possible desecration of the cemetery by curiosityseekers, even though it is centuries old. “I suppose you can’t stop these young fellows from believing what they want,” he said. “Facts are much less exciting than fables.”
The monsignor also downplayed the possible connection between the carving the soldiers have described and local folk-tales of flying monsters, called the Krenkl. “After a few hundred years of wind and rain,” he said, “my own face would not look so good, either. If modern American soldiers can make up stories about a carving, so can medieval German peasants.”
Sharon returned the clipping. “There’s your answer. Krenkl. They’ve got their own version of the Jersey Devil flying around.”
He gave her a look of pity. “Sharon, this is the Black Forest. There are more demons, ghosts and witches per square mile than anywhere on the face of the earth. These ‘Flying Krenkl of Eifelheim’ sit on the shelf next to the ‘Feldberg Demon’ and the ‘Devil’s Pulpit’ and the witches covens on the Kandel and Tannhäusser’s secret cave and all the rest. No, Schatzi. History happens because of material forces, not mystic beliefs. The abandonment caused the stories, not the other way around. People don’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide that the place they’ve lived in for four centuries is suddenly verboten. Das ist unsinnlich.”
“Well… The Black Death…”
Tom shrugged. “But the Death was a ‘common cause.’ It affected all the villages. Whatever the answer is, it has to explain not only why Eifelheim was abandoned forever, but why only Eifelheim was abandoned forever.” He rubbed his eyes. “Trouble is, there’s no data. Nada. Nichts. Nichto. Nincs. A few secondary sources, nothing at all contemporary to the events. The earliest reference I found was a theological treatise on meditation, written three generations later. That’s it there.” He jabbed a finger at the folder.
Sharon saw a scanned image of a Latin manuscript. Most of the page was occupied by an ornate capital D supported by a trellis of vines twisted into a complex pattern that broke out here and there into leaves and berries, odd triangles and other geometric figures. A vague feeling of deja vu stole over her as she studied it. “Not very pretty,” she said.
“Positively ugly,” said Tom. “And the contents are worse. It’s called ‘The Attainment of the Other World by Searching Within.’ Gottes Himmel, I’m not kidding. Mystical drivel about a ‘trinity of Trinities’ and how God can be in all places at all times ‘including times and places we cannot know save by looking inside ourselves.’ But…!” And Tom held his index finger up. “The author credits the ideas to — and I quote — ‘old mason Seybke, whose father knew personally the last pastor at the place we call Eifelheim.’ Unquote.” He crossed his arms. “How’s that for first hand data?”