VIII - Asche zu Asche

A Chapter by Johann L. Kohler

"Ashes to Ashes." A little explanation for prior insanity. Well, somewhat.

It was all gone...the remains of the house stood above her, rain falling through gaping holes in the wine cellar’s ceiling.  She lay spread-eagled on a pile of rubble, all of her senses tingling from the sudden withdrawal of the pain, the fear, the terror.  Marie breathed a sigh of relief, but she didn’t feel it.  Her mouth still felt parched and dry, but whose wouldn’t after such nightmares?  How she’d come to be in the wine cellar remained beyond her, though, but it was as though her memory had finally broken through.

She remembered the fire now, remembered the pain and terror...remembered being found here, in the wine cellar, by firefighters after she’d survived the falling house by hiding in that same little alcove.  But there was no encounter with the strange man in black who claimed to be a demon...no, that had been entirely in the dream.  As ridiculous as it was, she couldn’t help but feel that she’d almost rather he had been...he was Mephistopheles as she’d seen him when she’d read Faust.  He couldn’t be in her head, he couldn’t.  He also couldn’t be real...maybe just a dream?  She raised herself carefully to her feet, her head aching once again.  She figured she had sleepwalked down here...she moved towards the stairs, the stone having weathered the brunt of the firestorm three years ago.

Until her foot crunched on something metallic.  She fell to a knee, regretting moving the sore joint; there was something embedded in a pile of congealed ashes, though, and she took a moment to carefully dust it off.  It was a knife – not just a knife, but his knife.  Or was it?  She turned it over; a very simple blade, it looked like brushed steel, with a handle of the same material, just smoke-blackened.  She thought immediately to toss it away, leave it buried with the rest of the house...but she couldn’t put it down.  She looked at her feet again, seeing a black leather sheath just several inches to the left of where she’d found the knife.  She replaced the knife in the sheath, tucking the combined items in her waistband.

She still felt dazed as she climbed the stairs, feeling intensely uneasy; she knew now that her perception of her home had been nothing more than a hallucination keeping time with reality.  Now she knew why the doors had been so easy to open; they hadn’t existed.  She knew why the floors had felt unstable; they were barely there.  She couldn’t trust what she was seeing, what she was feeling, or even her very own thoughts and emotions.

She walked back into the main room; the walls were completely gutted, remains of the long central table sat in a grey pile upon the floor.  Portions of the upper loftway remained, a skeleton frame of floor planks and shattered timbers; she tried hard to push the delusions from her mind, flickers of her old life blocking out what she was really seeing...a candle flickered back into life on the wall and then disappeared into the past once more, the glass of the windows in the foyer flew back into place and reshattered...her head felt ready to fly apart, to fling bits of her memory all around her.  She moaned, staggering head in hands towards the door and escape...but no, she had to go upstairs, had to get her school things, and her glasses, she couldn’t see.  Tears started running down her face again as she climbed the remains of the staircase, careful not to place her weight unevenly.  She stuck close to the walls on the loft, circumnavigating the room slowly, rain falling through holes in the ceiling.  Her vision flickered in and out, accompanied by a ringing in her ears.  The floor was intact, the floor was ashes devoured by flame, the floor was on fire...images flashed before her like static on a television, and she resisted the urge to cry out, for someone, anyone, to save her.

She saw her glasses on what of the carpet remained, forcing herself to see only the present...briefly, she saw the lenses liquefy in the heat, but fought it down, picked them up, and continued on to her once-bedroom.  The door was blackened, destroyed...she blinked again as flames rolled up and down the frame, feeling relieved as today stayed in focus.  Her room’s stone floor remained intact, though the glass of the window was gone, covered by plywood; much in the room was actually unburned, though the ceiling and everything near it was covered in the black of smoke.  She retrieved her bag that she’d set down by the window, seeing the burned-out stump of what only an hour ago she’d perceived to be a long candlestick.

Marie worked her way back to the foyer, grabbing her coat and laying it over her right shoulder, unafraid of the freezing cold and rain outside.  She walked the length of Altenkirchstrasse as one in a state of shock, calling for a taxi just within city limits; a different driver of the same company arrived 20 minutes later, offering to buy her something hot to drink...she couldn’t imagine she looked terribly amazing, even though she’d managed to brush much of the ash from her clothing, which despite her hallucinations remained intact.

She rode in silence, oblivious to the taxi’s incessant pop music.  They reached the train station once more 30 minutes later, judging by the station clock – she had another 15 minutes before the final train arrived to return her to the school – and as an afterthought, concealed the knife in the inside pocket of her bag before entering the station’s platform.

Marie waited for the train for a little over 10 minutes beneath the station’s overhanging platform roof, even though the rain was only now a miserable drizzle, incomparable to the near-monsoon that had held the skies iron-fistedly an hour before.  The train screeched into the station at a little after five o’clock, its forward lanterns shining like a lighthouse in the damp, freezing fog that began to settle around the city.  The new driver, the old one having gone off duty shortly after 1 at the school, waved to her, slight surprise that anyone had come to Regensburg and stayed to this hour.  She waved back half-heartedly, going back the length of the train to the rearmost compartment of the second coach, hoping for isolation.

Lost in thought, the hour-and-a-quarter ride back to the school was as memorable as it was eventful; the laughter of the man in her dream ricocheted back and forth within her mind, and flashes of the past continued to haunt her if she closed her eyes.  No-one else boarded the train on its return journey, and the campus was devoid of all activity when they returned, hushed under a blanket of solid ice.
Marie hardly remembered ascending the stairs to her room, or the bitter cold as night deepened in the January outside.  She only took time to lock the door securely behind her and to remove her jacket before crashing heavily to her bed, sleep taking her the moment her head met the pillow.