Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [216]
HEINRICH GAVE directions for the dig. “After so long, the coffin will have disintegrated. Everything will be filled with clay. Dig until you find wood fragments; then we will switch to the trowels.”
Gus and Sepp, the other workman, began their digging a little ways out from the grave. Because the remains would have sunk over the centuries, they would have to dig deep. They wanted the sides of the hole to slope inward so that they would not collapse. Both men were of old Breisgau families. Gus’s folk had been stoneworkers for many generations; and Sepp Fischer was descended from a long line of fishermen along the River Dreisam.
It was already late afternoon when the digging began, but Heinrich had come prepared with gas mantles to work into the evening. There were also tents and bedrolls. “I would not want to try and find my way back in the dark,” he said. “Remember Hänsel and Gretel.”
It was only when the evening sun was setting that we discovered how the soldiers had discovered the face. The light streamed through a gap in the trees, stiking the stone and throwing the carving into sharp relief. Through some accident of weathering, it was only when lit from that angle, in the growing gloom of twilight, that the features stood out, as if it were a hologram projected into the stone. Gus and Sepp were bent over their shovels and did not notice; but Heinrich was stooped just beside it and, hearing Judy’s gasp, turned and stared.
It was a mantis’s face and it wasn’t. The eyes were large and bulging and the stone carver had given them a hint of faceting, so that they sat like gemstones in the alien countenance. (Those eyes would have been yellow, I knew.) There were traces of lines that might have been antennae or whiskers or something else entirely. Instead of insectlike mandibles, there was a mouth of sorts; a caricature of human lips and chin. Judy grabbed my arm. I could feel her nails dig into my skin. Tom was tugging his lip. It was the face from the church crypt.
Heinrich paused and stared at the stone without speaking. It was obvious that this was no weathered distortion of a human face. It was a demon. Or something like a demon. Heinrich turned and looked at us, gauging our reactions. Already the sun had moved and the visage was fading. “I think,” he said, “perhaps I should take a rubbing.”
THE MOON was a ghost drifting through the treetops when Gus finally struck wood. The gas lanterns hissed and sputtered, embedding a shifting circle of brightness in the dark of the forest. Judy was kneeling by the edge of the hole, her eyes closed, sitting on her heels. I don’t know if she was praying or sleeping. I could barely see the heads of the men in the pit.
Tom came and stood next to me. He held Heinrich’s rubbing of the alien’s face. Hans, I reminded myself. Not “the alien” but Johann Sterne, a person, someone who died a long time ago; far from home, in the company of strangers. What had he felt near the end, when all hope had been lost? What emotions had washed through that alien mind? Did my question even mean anything? Did strange enzymes coursing his blood play the role of adrenaline? Had he even had blood?
Tom pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” he said. “Wrong time to dig up Dracula’s grave.” He tried to smile to show that he was joking. I tried to smile to show him that I knew. I shivered. It was cooler in the mountains than I had thought it would be.
Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came suddenly alert and leaned forward over the pit. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and looked in.
Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich probed in the clay with a trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. Pale. Not bone-white, but yellow and brown. He excavated around it and removed it, earth and all. Then he sat back on his haunches and scraped at it with a putty knife, cleaning it; his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.
He knows, I thought.
A face emerged gradually from the embrace of the clay. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel.