Oliver Potzsch: The Poisoned Pilgrim

But even Simon couldn’t keep his son from leaning down and passing his hand through the man’s blood-spattered red hair.

“Matthias sick?” Peter asked anxiously.

Magdalena nodded. “Your friend Matthias is very sick,” she said softly. “He’s probably going to die.” She cast an anxious gaze up at the balcony, then at the stairway leading from there up to the belfry. “But before that perhaps, he’s going to tell us what’s happening there. Do you hear me, Matthias?” She turned to the mortally injured workman. “Who’s up there? If you want to make amends, do it now.”

Matthias grumbled, then reached for his dirty, torn jacket. Pulling a wax tablet and stylus from a pocket, he started laboriously composing a message.

“This is taking too long,” Simon groaned. “In the meantime, Virgilius may kill our child.”

“Wait!” Magdalena raised her hand for silence, but she, too, kept staring through the hole in the roof where the tower was clearly visible. “Just a moment. This might be important.”

Finally Matthias finished writing. He groaned and handed the tablet to Magdalena, who quickly started reading.

Virgilius and the boy are in the belfry. So is your father and the abbot. No harm will come to the boy. Don’t let the boys think badly of me. Only God knows the entire truth.

Magdalena looked sorrowfully at the childish scribbles.

Only God knows the entire truth…

When she looked down again, she saw his head had tipped to one side and his eyes were staring rigidly skyward. A few green and red beech leaves floated down from the hole above.

“Matthias dead?” Peter asked anxiously.

Magdalena nodded. She couldn’t hold back a few tears forming in the corner of her eyes. “He… he is now with our dear Lord, and we’ll probably never find out why he conspired with this madman. But deep inside, I know he wasn’t a bad man.”

“Not a bad man?” Simon shook his head furiously. “Magdalena, he abducted our children. He’s a murderer and a criminal.”

“How many murderers has my father executed who would perhaps have been saints in another life?” she said softly. “And how many scoundrels are running around free, dressed in expensive clothes.”

She crossed herself, rose to her feet, and straightened up.

“You stay down below here with Peter,” she told her husband gruffly. “I’ll go up there now and bring my son back. If my father and the abbot can’t do it, I’ll just have to do it myself. To hell with Virgilius.”

Without another word, she ran toward the balcony that lay in the growing darkness.

There was something in the watchmaker’s eyes that tipped Jakob Kuisl off a fraction of a second before he released the boy.

An instant just long enough for Kuisl to lunge for the opening. Slowly, as if God had ordered time to stop, the hangman saw his grandson falling. He reached out and just managed to catch the bawling child by the collar. There was a horrifying rip as the clothing started to tear, but then it held. With his arms and legs thrashing about, Paul dangled like a marionette from his grandfather’s outstretched arms.

As Kuisl pulled the boy back inside with a loud shout, Virgilius gave him a sudden push from behind. For what seemed like an eternity, the hangman tottered at the edge of the opening. The watchmaker screeched behind him in an inhumanly high pitch. “The sacrifice! You took away my sacrifice. I need this boy so that Aurora can live.”

A sudden gust of wind struck the hangman from the front, allowing him to regain his balance. One last time, he glanced down into the gaping void and then, summoning all his strength, threw himself back onto the platform. The boy landed safely beside him and clung tightly to his grandfather.

“It’s over, Virgilius,” the abbot shouted into the storm. “Give up and return to God. It’s still not too late.”

“Never!” Only the whites of the watchmaker’s eyes were still visible, shining eerily in the gathering darkness as he broke into a defiant laugh.

“God took away what was dearest to me; how can I return to him? He mocked me and forsook me.” Virgilius’s voice was so loud that it even drowned out the clap of thunder. “I can be my own God. I don’t need him. Don’t you understand, Maurus? It’s faith alone that makes this Christian Moloch so strong. I used my faith to bring Aurora back.”

“God alone can create life,” the abbot admonished, approaching him with raised hands. “Repent, Virgilius. Let me grant you absolution.”

“I curse your absolution. I curse God.” Virgilius ran to his automaton, grasped it by its stiff arms, and looked out into the darkened heavens.

“All I need is a single bolt of lightning,” he cried, looking up into the clouds. “There will come a day when we realize that lightning, too, isn’t divine, but a natural phenomenon we can use for our own purposes.” He reached for the wire leading from the ceiling down to the bier, where it branched into other smaller wires. Carefully he checked the connections. “I must have done something wrong. There must be some reason the lightning hasn’t hit the steeple yet,” he murmured. “Exactly, that must be it. We must work even more carefully if we wish to abolish God. Like a watchmaker. We must-”

Suddenly the stairway started creaking again and footsteps could be heard coming up. Virgilius turned around to stare at the woman who had just appeared in the opening. He couldn’t recognize her in the darkness. Her hair was drenched from the rain and she was breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs, but she held her determined head up and chin out. Like an angry, vengeful goddess, she raised her hand to point at the watchmaker, who cried out in delight.

“Aurora… is it you?” he asked hesitantly. “Did you finally come back to me after all these years? But…” His gaze shifted from the automaton to the woman standing before him in the opening. “How… how is that possible? The lightning…”

“Go to hell, Virgilius,” she snarled.

At this moment, there was a crash so loud that Kuisl thought the tower would split apart. A fraction of a second later, a blue light as thick as a man’s arm shot from the top of the steeple directly into the puppet. Virgilius, still clinging to an end of the wire, was enveloped in a bluish aura like a gigantic halo. Flames shot out from his hair, his sleeves, even from his ears, and as he opened his mouth in a shrill, inhuman scream, tiny flames appeared there, as well.

Virgilius twitched and thrashed. His whole body trembled as he continued holding the wire. Then it became a giant flaming torch.

The force of the explosion threw Kuisl back against the side of the tower as everything around him erupted in flames. His ears were ringing shrilly, but otherwise all he could hear was blood pulsing through his head. Coughing, the Andechs abbot crawled toward the trapdoor, his robe ablaze. In the opposite corner, Magdalena clutched her boy in her arms, her eyes and mouth open wide in a scream, though Kuisl still couldn’t hear a thing.

He jumped up, rushed to Magdalena, seized her and the child, and pushed them both toward the trapdoor. All around them timbers were beginning to fall from the ceiling. Though Kuisl could feel flames singeing his beard, he didn’t stop until he made sure his daughter and grandson made it to the trapdoor over the stairs. Then he climbed down behind them.

When he turned around one last time, he could see Virgilius still standing like a flaming scarecrow alongside his beloved Aurora. A blackened clump engulfed in flames, he bared his teeth and stared at the automaton he had created. The puppet’s wax face was melting like honey, revealing the metal parts and iron beneath.