The Library of Forbidden Books

Chapter 16

The house was warming, thanks to the delightful fire in the hearth. The three history buffs gathered around in front of it, sipping wine, and enjoying the music Gretchen played from her iPod, a bouquet of varied tunes from Enigma to Vera Lynn.

“Do you like music, Dr. Philips?” Nina asked. At the moment she asked, she meant only to make conversation, but as soon as her words were out she realized that it was quite an interesting thing to ask a man like Richard Philips.

“Call me Richard, please,” he smiled timidly, playing with his glass. “I have always found music a singularly bewitching entity, a thing with a mind of its own, and equally decisive of its impact on the listener.”

Gretchen rolled her eyes behind the pale man as he spoke and Nina had to try not to laugh at her smitten friend’s childish admiration. She could not deny that Richard had a very eloquent manner in conversation, his phrasing and choice of words almost poetic whenever he described something. He was not unattractive at all, apart from his weak body language, and the severely introverted lack of opinion he exhibited on most subjects, but his occasional verbalization was worth the imbalance.

Nina stared into the fire. Just how does one respond to that? Thankfully Gretchen came back into the banter and asked Richard about his presence.

“So, tell me, Richard, why did you have to see the house so desperately?”

He looked at her with a distinct glare of surprise, his dark eyes glimmering with a touch of insanity.

“You do not know?” he asked.

Nina shifted on her ass, turning her undivided attention toward him, “Know what?”

Richard looked at her with the same resolute amazement. Gretchen sat down next to him.

“My dear Nina, this house has historical value, I fear to admit, in the more ghastly vein of science,” he said nonchalantly.

Again with the overdone words, Dick, Nina thought with utter frustration. Just fucking tell us what is so weird about my house.

“Ghastly vein of science?” Gretchen asked. She was hooked like a little girl about to listen to a ghost story.

“Yes, Gretchen,” his husky softness came in words. Hardly an emotion showed on his face and its pasty hue showed no signs of the hype that could have gone with such a statement.

“Um, I hate to be so persistent,” Nina pressed, “but do tell us what you mean, Richard.”

“This house has a reputation for… ” he smiled coyly, and almost looked embarrassed, “well… strange phenomena.”

Silence among the three of them lasted too long for Nina to bear.

“Richard, please,” she cried out, gesturing with her half-full glass, “keep talking.”

Gretchen laughed, “You have to excuse her. She is very inquisitive,” and she looked at Nina with a reprimand before adding, “and impatient.”

Richard chuckled for a moment and then returned his face to its usual statuesque blankness.

“This house, even when my grandfather lived here, had a reputation among the locals as being… this might sound absurd… a portal to other dimensions,” he said quickly and took to the refuge of his wine.

“That is not absurd at all,” Gretchen noted. “Other dimensions exist and quantum mechanics allow us to explore the possibility of traveling among them.”

Nina could feel the emergence of the car conversation she had with Gretchen happening all over again. Sure, what she knew about mathematics and physics was meager, but her logic taught her that the things Gretchen believed to be possible were just a tad too farfetched for her logical deduction. But she listened anyway, for the sake of chiming in now and then, and this way she would not have to attend one of Richard’s lectures.

Speculation, her inner bitch sighed with every theory Gretchen tried to impress Richard with.

“But the place was known for it, because…?” Nina asked suddenly. “Were there any witnesses?”

Gretchen sighed at Nina’s cynicism, but Richard turned his attention to the skeptical historian and continued to tell her about the lore of the house.

“All witnesses obviously disappeared. Either the theory was true and they were pulled through portals, therefore vanishing into thin air, or they were murdered and their bodies used by the Nazis for medical research,” Richard said.

Nina refused to entertain the ideology, not because she thought it was impossible, but because she knew it to be true; and it terrified her to the bone. Not long ago she played witness to the fearsome factors of physics and dimensions when she spent a horrifying night in Hoia Baciu’s haunted forest. There was no denying what she and Sam experienced there, how they were ripped from day to night, from one place to somewhere else, in a blink. Now she lived in a house reputed to have the same qualities as the Romanian forest’s deadly circle? Denial was her best friend right now.

“It was said by the locals that strange lights would illuminate the windows of the attic,” Richard relayed calmly.

His words prompted the two women to lock eyes with a solid amount of panic.

“What?” Richard asked. “Did you see the attic?”

For the first time, he looked alive. His expression bent into excitement and his cheeks colored slightly with a flush of pink. He put his glass down.

“Please, ladies, do tell me that my grandfather was not decidedly mad.”

Nina and Gretchen were stunned into silence. They just looked at each other for a time and then both turned their eyes to Richard.

“Come, let me show you what we found in the attic,” Nina said with a strong tone. If she was fortunate, this academic could fill her in on the weird Nazi books about monsters and gods.

After the three of them made their way up to the attic, filled still with the sickening odor of old masonry, rotten water, and mummified remains, Richard looked stunned. He moved carefully, making sure to absorb every morsel of information with every step he took.

Nina led him to the broken wall where the books were still scattered, and she told him of how they had discovered the hidden compact library with the grotesque book still lying a few feet away.

Richard seemed fascinated by the spider book with the ungodly binding, but he too could not get himself to pick it up.

“This book, like that other one you showed me, attests to the existence — at least, belief in the existence — of inter-dimensional creatures of unfathomed power and size. These were the same deities mentioned in my grandfather’s writings, notes he took from his own father’s ramblings when he was on his deathbed. My grandfather, Heinrich Schaub, joined the SS because of this very theory, did you know?” Richard dribbled on and on, while the two women stood confounded.

“So it’s a family thing?” Nina asked. “Not the Nazi thing; the physics-god-monsters from other dimensions thing.”

“I suppose so,” Richard scoffed with a taste of embarrassment. “You have to concede it is a fascinating concept, as nightmarish as it is.” Gretchen nodded in agreement, scrutinizing Richard’s hands as he explained. “It has connotations to the legend of the Library of Forbidden Books.” Nina gasped at the familiarity of the phrase.

As before, a waft of reeking putrefaction floated up through the house and Nina commented to her guests.

“Excuse the smell. I have not been able to find a pond or old swimming pool around here that could be responsible for the foul stench, but I’ll get that sorted out this week,” Nina apologized, but Richard looked at her with careless abandon.

“That’s the well, Nina.”

Gretchen exhaled an involuntary groan at the sound of it, and Nina could feel her skin crawling.

“The well,” she repeated. “Like, the well, you know, the well that naturally appears on the grounds here… ”

Richard could hear Nina’s sarcasm escalating, so he clarified the statement, which did nothing to make the idea less creepy.

“Yes, Nina. There is a large well under the house. It has always been here, even when my grandfather moved in. It is all written in his journal, and some of it he mentioned to my father when he was a young boy. You didn’t know?” Richard asked in his usual collected assumption that drove the fiery Nina mad.

“Umm, no, Richard. I did not know there was a well under my house,” she accentuated in frustration, looking at Gretchen with astonished disbelief.

“I myself have only heard of it, of course, but naturally my grandfather spoke about it a few times. I wonder, would you mind awfully if we go and see it?” he asked politely, leaving Nina no reason to refuse.

“Of course we can, but I will put this on the table right now, that the idea of a giant water hole under my house does not sit well with my fragile courage,” she said, and evoked a tiny snigger from both her accomplices.

“Get your flashlight,” Gretchen told Nina, as she gave hers to Richard. “We’re going Lara Croft tomb raiding, guys!”

“I’m glad you find it so exciting!” Nina marveled at her friend’s enthusiasm. “But I’m sure it’s not a tomb, and do we even know where it is?”

“From the tales, it is right under your bedroom, Nina, where the attic’s west wall ends,” Richard informed her.

“And now it gets even more creepy,” Nina announced to the amusement of the other two.

“Don’t worry, doll. We will protect you against those foul North Sea guppies!” Gretchen jested with a mocking tone of courage in her best cartoon voice.

Nina was not amused by her two companions, but she had to concede, the evening was filled with fun and intellectual banter and that made their presence quite welcome.

“Indeed. We should take our fishing poles down there. Imagine what a wealth the tide brings in every day,” Richard smiled. It was a full smile meant to cheer Nina, but all it instilled was a terror filled image of man-eating mermaids and plagues of slugs.

“Hope you two can swim,” Nina mumbled behind them, her teasing threat ineffective.

Down in the pantry of her kitchen, they located the trap door to the dark basement space that was still just composed of rock. It had never been renovated to accommodate living or storage space, so there was nothing but an uneven moist rock surface as floor and some old rope and rusted cabinets gathering spider webs down there.

With the flashlight casting its faint beam, the three moved forward deeper into the vast darkness, choking on the rotten wetness that assaulted their sense of smell.

“Oh, God, I’m going to puke,” Nina complained, but Gretchen and Richard did not respond, too curious to stop now.

“Be careful,” Gretchen said, “we can’t see when this rock floor falls into the well. Or does the well have stone fencing?”

“I don’t know,” Richard replied, from the cold, stinking blackness ahead of them, “I’ve never been here before. All I know is what I heard from my grandfather.”

“It’s probably not that big, because I don’t see any sign of a well yet,” Nina said, scanning the faint visibility in the beam of her flashlight. “No protruding wall anywhere.”

“There won’t be one,” Richard replied plainly. “That is why they call it the ‘mouth.’”

“Oh, Christ! Just what I needed to hear. Thank you, Richard,” Nina moaned. Gretchen looked back at her with a rather unsettled face.

“That does sound bloody scary to me too, doll.”