In the Alpine Fog

"How much longer?"

"Almost there."

Angelina checked her Apple Watch. "Yeah — how long is almost?"

"I don't know. 5 minutes? I'm not taking my gloves off to check my phone." Karl shuddered. He could see his breath in front of him as he and Angelina walked up the forested hill.

"Ok. I'll check."

Karl glanced at his girlfriend. "Did you download the offline map? There's no reception up here."

Angelina had already pulled her thick wool-lined glove partway off her hand to thumb at her phone. She scowled.

"Yeah, you're right."

She tossed her cell back into her coat pocket — except she missed and it landed in the snow just behind her. She cursed.

"Wait up, Karl."

She turned and knelt down to fish it out. Before she could, a flicker of movement beyond the barren bramble and evergreen shrubs caught her eye. It was a small black dot in the distant fog, gone just as soon as it had appeared. A raven, she thought.

She admired the long tree shadows that dashed the freshly fallen snow in the clearing, then picked up her phone.

Angela wiped her runny nose. "I feel like we've been walking way too long."

"This is the right way. Trust me."

"How do you know?"

Opa had given Karl an old hand-drawn map and a set of coordinates that he'd punched into his phone before they began the trek. He'd studied the path to the house dozens of times. He knew the boundary stone was close, and from there the house was just a few minutes away.

He pulled the folded map from his coat pocket and waved it in the air. "I've got this thing memorized. Trust me." A pang of apprehension curdled in Karl's stomach.

He cleared his throat and tucked the map away. "If it makes you feel better, tag some trees." He motioned for her to unzip his bag. "Tape's in my small front pocket."

"I'm good. Can you just be a bit more sensitive to the fact that I'm cold, tired, and sweaty, please?" She sniffled, partly from the frosty air and partly from stress. "It's getting dark and my pack is heavy. And there's things moving in the woods."

Karl half smirked. "The animals are harmless at this hour. And your pack is only heavy because you aren't drinking any water." He clapped to the syllables of the word "water".

He stopped and looked back at his girlfriend. There were creases in her forehead that weren't usually there.

"Okay," he said. "Sorry. I know this has been a mission."

"It's fine," she said, deadpan. Her nose had turned a peachy red. The colour brought out her eyes, Karl thought. His gaze hung on her soft freckled face for a moment before taking in their surroundings.

It was getting dark. The sky had taken on a periwinkle hue blotched with salmon-grey clouds. A crescent moon was already visible in the dusk. Southern Wildsteig was replete with dark, dense forests sectioned off by dozens of unnamed roads. But from their vantage point, the couple could see no roads. Only evergreens. They carried onward.

"Coming here in November was kinda fucking stupid." She shoved her hands into her pockets.

He sharply adjusted his backpack. "We have a beautiful Airbnb in town. I planned a whole itinerary after this. Relax. I just want to find the book, go home, and then we're back to vacation mode. Okay?"

Angelina looked behind her and then back at Karl. "I hope you find it. I really do. But Karl." She hesitated. "Opa had dementia. This whole thing could be a waste of time. Who even knows if there is a book."

"Ange." There was a touch of incredulity in his voice. "He asked me to do this on his deathbed. I have to try."

"He also told you to go alone, which you didn't."

Karl rolled his eyes. "His word isn't gospel. I'm honoring his dying wish, not everything he ever said. There's no reason to go alone. I wanted you here with me."

"And that's sweet." She shifted her pack. "But I wanted a bit more of a vacation-vacation. Not snowy Bavaria. That's all."

Karl was silent for a few seconds. "If you were me, wouldn't you try? If we find nothing, fine." Karl breathed heavily between words, squinting in the sharp air. "At least this will have been a pleasant winter hike."

Angelina blew her nose. "Not really," she said.

Karl wasn't sure what she meant by "not really". He would have pressed her on it, except when he looked ahead of him, there sat the landmark.

"Yes!" Karl rushed a few paces forward and knelt before a small pillar of stone jutting from the ground. It was covered modestly in snow. He whisked the white fluff off the slab to reveal dark grey stone covered in mossy overgrowth. He backed away and dusted his gloves off. "Check it, Ange." He motioned toward the surname on the stone: Neumann.

"Okay, that's pretty cool," she said, laughing. "A literal slab of your family history." She snapped a picture of the stone to mark the occasion. "Now you get in there," she said.

Karl chuckled. "I'm good. We'd better hurry. And flash photography might disturb the spirits."

Some minutes later Angelina checked her watch and swallowed nervously. She looked up at the sky, slightly darker and pinker than it was before. It was still early twilight, but that didn't give them much time. The boars would be coming out soon. Her stomach growled. The sweat beading in her jacket made her arms and back itch.

"Karl, let's—"

"That's it. Right up ahead."

Newly visible in the fog, before them stood a cottage. It was covered top to bottom in ivy, moss, and vine. A small outhouse sat beside it to the right, and just in front of the house was a small well next to an even smaller wooden sign that said "Neumann".

Karl jogged toward the front door and eyed the structure. Countless leaves and stems cloaked timbered walls. Two small stained glass windows flanked the front door. They depicted goblets and eyes and some symbols that reminded Karl of the zodiac signs. Lining the perimeter of the house were small, densely packed evergreen shrubs. The whole property was bathed in the dying light of the day.

Snow clung undisturbed to the steps at the main entrance, cascading in neat little rows. Angelina stood at Karl's side, eyeing the large padlock on the door, flashing her phone light on it. He pulled the key from the envelope in his breast pocket, pressed it into the lock, and turned it. The snow dispersed beneath their feet as they entered.

Inside, musky air enveloped them. The scents of wet logs and dried herbs coagulated in the air along with invisible clouds of dust. Angelina swept the flashlight across the room to their left. There were hand-carved wooden chairs with high backs, their embroidery frayed and yellowed by time. Soiled rags, carving tools, and small blocks of wood littered a table in the center of the room. Wooden crucifixes of all sizes peppered the walls.

She raised her phone to take photographs. Something in Karl said to stop her. Instead he said: "Just gonna go check out the upstairs."

Karl peeled away from her, drawn to the staircase just ahead, before the kitchen and just past the door that led to what he guessed was a cellar. The stairs looped back to the front side of the house. He flicked his phone flashlight to maximum brightness. The old, striated wood groaned under his squeaky wet boots as he climbed. The upstairs consisted of one narrow hallway with a door at each end, and one door in between. He entered the two rooms at the ends — both completely vacant. Then he entered the middle door, the only one that had been closed.

It was a study. Sort of. In the corner sat a ramshackle old desk, warped from years of moisture damage. A black oil lamp, heavily rusted, was perched in the corner. Water-damaged papers and a water-damaged globe also decorated the desk. A single wooden crucifix hung above it. Karl inspected it closely.

A bible verse was carved into it.

Sprueche 25:2

Es ist Gottes Ehre, eine Sache verbergen; aber der Könige Ehre ist's, eine Sache zu erforschen.

Karl knew this verse well. Opa had taught it to him in English: "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter."

Karl was beginning to sweat more than usual, despite the chill in the air. His hands were clammy and his head ached at the temples. Something pulled at his gut, a persistent gnawing feeling that he had to get out of there.

He took one last trembling look around the room to check that nothing else was there, then motioned to leave.

As his flashlight passed across the window overlooking the well outside, Karl saw something dart across the snow. It was a small black blur, likely an animal. But it was fast enough to catch his attention. When Karl looked more closely, he saw nothing.

He lingered, staring into the darkening landscape beyond the glass, sweating more than before.

"Karl! Come check these out!"

Angelina's muffled voice beckoned him away from his thoughts and down to the kitchen. He glanced one more time out the window before rushing to her.

She’d found a series of framed photographs hung on the kitchen wall. Karl's forefathers stood there in stiff poses, their stern eyes lending each photo an air of intensity that Angelina found comical. She pointed to one photo: in it was a gaunt-faced boy with strong brows, his shoulders tense under his father's hands. He was holding a book.

“Doesn't that look like Opa?”

It was unmistakably Opa. "Yep. That's the man." He swallowed. He wondered if that book in the photo was the book.

Angelina put a palm to her cheek. "He looks sad here, don't you think?"

Karl scratched at his arm. "They all looked sad in these things. Or mad. Or both."

Opa looked no more than ten years old. It was hard to imagine that he was ever a child, especially now that he was gone. Karl looked into his grandfather's juvenile eyes in the blurred photograph. He understood what Angelina meant. There was a sadness there. It was a sadness he knew.

"You okay?"

He snapped out of it. "Yeah. Just—"

A muted thump came from downstairs.

Neither Karl nor Angelina spoke for five seconds.

“What the fuck was that?" Angie whispered with her mouth covered.

She turned toward the front door and lost her footing. Karl steadied her, nausea mounting in his own body. “Don't worry. Animals nest in old buildings like this. Martens, weasels. Maybe rats. You know. It's all good." His laugh was shaky, tinny.

Angelina said nothing to Karl, only stared at him with the same intensity as the figures in the old photographs.

"I'm going down there. It's all that's left. You can stay here if you want," he said.

Angelina shook her head. "I'm not leaving you."

Karl stared into her eyes and noticed they were wider and redder than usual. It was no longer intensity in her eyes. It was fear.

Karl opened the door, took her trembling hand in his, and led the two of them into the basement by the shine of their flashlights.

The basement is where the real study was.

The air there was warmer than it should have been. It was warm like candlelight, or like someone's breath. Like something had been living there. But there were no martens or weasels in sight.

"Holy shit," Karl breathed.

Angelina bit her nails as the steadied her phone to light the room.

Shelves lined every wall of the study. They were stuffed with books, bottles, loose papers, alembics, tinctures, salves, retorts, stones, herbs, and several items neither Karl nor Angelina recognized. A desk sat squarely in the center of the room.

On this desk was a book. It was The Book. Karl knew it when he saw it. He didn't need to look at the others on the shelves. It looked just like the one his grandfather held in the old photograph.

"Is... that it?" Angelina asked.

Karl approached the desk, ran his hands over centuries-old oak, flitting through loose papers written in vaguely familiar script. The desk had numerous sigils burnt into it. Candles with blackened wicks had melted into the grain. And then, of course, there was The Book.

Lying at the center of the desk was The Book.

The Book that Karl sought.

The one Opa said was very, very important for him to get back.

Karl now understood why.

He touched the stiff brown leather cover. On it was script Karl did not recognize. It pulsed with its very own warm glow, separate from the glow of the air, but very much like it. It was the warmth of a person, he thought. He peered at the walls. And he saw that they, too, were alive and warm.

He lifted the book to his nose and inhaled.

"Karl? Can we go? Please?" Angelina's voice was panicked.

“I did it, Opa,” he muttered, smiling. "I found our book."

"Yes. You did it. Let's go." She was nearly screaming. Angelina took one of his hands and ushered him away from the desk.

Angelina cut through the thick warm air and up the stairs and out through the old beaten study door. She nearly collapsed into herself as she rushed Karl to the last step, dragging him to the front door.

He was staring daggers at her. She didn't know it, but he knew it, and he kept repeating to himself: Go alone. Go alone. Geh allein. Geh allein.

He clutched The Book tight in his one free hand as Angelina burst the front door open. She slipped on the wooden steps. Karl let go of her as she fell. He was staring at something.

"Karl, what's gotten into you? Fuck. My leg." She got up — or tried to. As she half-rose from the ground, something at the well caught her eye. That's where Karl was looking, too.

A pair of black hands gripped the outer edge of the well from the inside. First the wrists appeared. Then the forearms. All black, hazy at the edges, shifting in the stillness of the air.

A head and a torso soon emerged. The black mass hoisted itself over the ledge to reveal skinny, gangly legs. What stood in full form was a swirling mass of black, humanoid, a moving shadow with limbs, the only other anatomical detail being a pair of shallow, hollow eyes.

The wind had died. It was dark now. There was no sound anywhere. Karl could not speak and neither could Angelina. But Karl was smiling with a vacant look in his eye. Angelina was hyperventilating.

Fog crawled low across the snow and parted where the figure walked into it. The well was behind it, glowing, illuminating the edge of the forest and the path back home.

Go alone.

The figure dissolved into the fog.

Go alone, it said again.

The shadow collapsed into a small black mass, a floating shadow.

Go alone.

The mass barrelled forth into Angelina's chest.

Go alone.

She did not scream.

Go alone.

Karl looked at her limp on the ground, then at the book in his hand.

He understood now what Opa had been trying to tell him, when he had said "Go alone."

Karl turned from Angelina's body and opened the door to the house.

Go alone.

He shuffled across the hallway, back to the sacred door, to the place he'd found warmth and meaning and purpose.

He turned the knob.

Go alone.

He walked through the threshold.

G̷o̸ ̸a̵l̴o̴n̴e̵.̴

And he shut the door behind him.

G̴͍͊o̵̗̮̒̄̽͠ ̷̦̯͍͆a̷̠̓͋l̶̛͎͇̪͊̚ŏ̴̝̭͗̓̌ñ̷̠ē̴̬̜̘̭̒͑.̸̪͑̋.