“We discovered that our cellar had flooded during that brief period of spring warmth last week, so we moved our stores here.”
He cast his light over the space, which was much larger than I had thought. In addition to the barrels of foodstuffs brought up from their cellars, the room was stocked with several shelves, all laden with reams upon reams of dusty paper, parchment, and portfolios. It was only then that I realized that these were the records and history of our little backwoods village.
“Ah yes, my life’s work.” The flickering light of the lantern cast deep shadows, carving strange shapes into the planes of the old man’s face. His nose grew long and sharp, his lips pinched and thin. His cheekbones protruded painfully, giving him a rictus grin. “I have traced the descent of every man, woman, and child in this town,” he said proudly. “The fruits grown from the bed of blood and seed from whence this village had sprung. But there are some families that disappear into time. Stories with beginnings and middles, but no ends.”
“Such things happen in a village as small as ours,” I said. “Mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors—over time we all become hopelessly tangled.”
The rector shrugged. “Perhaps. But there are mysteries not even I can unravel. Lives and lines cut off in the middle, vanished, unfinished. Yours is one such family, Fr?ulein.”
I shot him a sharp look. “Excuse me?”
He smiled, showing the tips of his yellowed teeth. “Did Constanze ever tell you about her sister, Magda?”
Magda. I thought of my grandmother calling K?the by that name the other night. Mother had dismissed it as yet another sign of Constanze’s deteriorating mind, but I had not known she had had a sister. “No,” I said slowly. “But I have heard the name.”
“Hmmm.” The rector lifted the lantern to a shelf a few inches above his head. He ran his fingers along the spines of years bound in calfskin leather, searching for the right book, the right generation. His fingernails were overgrown and black with dirt and ink. “Ah, here we are.”
He pulled down an enormous tome, nearly as large as he, setting it on the desk with a dusty slam. The book immediately fell open to a page, the leaves settling down on either side of a well-worn seam in the spine. The rector held the lantern aloft and pointed at an entry in the middle with a long, clawed finger.
MARIA MAGDALENA HELOISE GABOR
Magda. Constanze’s sister. My grandmother had been a Gabor before she married.
“Your grandmother’s family was one of the oldest, if not necessarily the most respectable,” the old man said. I bristled. I might not have been a Gabor, but the slight still stung. “Strange and queer, the lot of them. Elf-touched, they were called in the old days.”
I frowned. “Elf-touched?”
The rector’s yellow smile slowly spread wider across his face. “The mad, the fearful, the faithful. Those who dwell with one foot in the Underground and another in the world above.”
All the hairs rose at the back of my neck. There is madness in her bloodline. But was it madness? Or an unseen connection to something greater, something beyond mortal ken? Many of the beautiful and broken branches of my family tree were touched with genius, a drive to create that turned them inside out and upside down. There was my great-great-great-uncle Ernst, a talented woodcarver and carpenter, whose unearthly and transformative figurines were deemed heretical and destroyed. They still told stories of my distant cousin Annabel, whose poetic and twisted ways of speech cast her first as a prophet, and then a witch.
And then there was Papa. And Josef.
And me. Guilt throbbed in me at the thought of the klavier in my bedroom, untouched and unplayed since I had returned from the Underground.
“Magda was the youngest of Eleazor and Maria Gabor’s children,” the rector went on, handing the tome over to me to read. I staggered under its unexpected weight, heavy with heritage and history. “There were three: Bettina, Constanze, and Magda.”
Bettina. I understood better now why my grandmother had called me that. “What happened?”
He gestured to the book before me with his chin. Turning the pages, I moved back and forward in time, the parchment growing thinner with age. Agnes, Friedrich, Sebastian, Ignaz, Melchior, Ilse, Helena, generations upon generations of Constanze’s family. My family. Entire lives sprouted, then withered away beneath my fingers. They were born, got married, had children, died. All recorded in an impersonal hand.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What am I looking for?”
The rector’s dark eyes bored into mine. “The ending. Magda’s ending.”
Frowning, I returned to the book. Babies were born and, if they were lucky, grew old. Some never made it out of infancy; others lived to see several generations of their own children predecease them. There was no rhyme or reason but chance. I didn’t understand why Magda’s ending was so important.
Until I couldn’t find it.
Constanze and Bettina’s lives were well-recorded: their births and baptism, their marriages, their children. Bettina’s story seemed to end with her marriage to Ansel Bergman, but Constanze’s continued on through her children: Johannes, Christoph, Constanze, another Constanze, Georg, another Constanze, Josef, and Franz. Every single one of my aunts and uncles had their deaths written alongside their births, indelibly inked into history.
But not Magda.
I went backward and forward in time, searching for an exit, an ending. But no matter where I looked, there was no further sign of Magda, no marriages, no children, not even a death. Her life was unfinished, and if it weren’t for the fact of her birth, recorded by the rector several decades before, she might have never existed.
“There is—there is no ending,” I whispered.
The rector folded his hands into his voluminous sleeves. “Yes,” he said simply.
“Do you know what happened to her? Did she die? Move away? People don’t just . . . disappear.” I looked up from the tome, spooked and unsettled. “Do they?”
“People don’t disappear, but their stories become forgotten,” he said in a soft voice. “It is only the faithful who remember.”
“And you remember.”
The rector nodded his head. “She was taken. Stolen.” He swallowed. “By the Wild Hunt.”
The world narrowed to a single point of focus before me, the small, steady light of the lantern flame. All else was dark, and I felt myself falling, spiraling down, down, down into the abyss of fear. I tried to recall everything I knew of the Wild Hunt—what they were, who they were, and why they rode abroad—but a cold void of anxiety spun at the heart of my swirling mind. My hand went to the ring at my throat, feeling the comforting bite of the wolf’s head in my palm.
“How?” I croaked. “Why?”
It was a long moment before the rector replied. “No two stories of the unholy host agree. It is said their appearance presages some unspeakable catastrophe: a plague, a war, or even”—he flicked his gaze at my clenched fist—“the end of the world.”