Eifelheim

“It’s your new girl friend,” she said. “Again.”

Tom closed the book on his finger. Sometimes he wasn’t sure how to take Sharon. He would admit this now and then, after a few beers, and if Sharon were not around. They kidded each other a lot, but at times he thought her comments had an edge to them — a thin and delicate edge, because he didn’t always feel the slice right off. “She’s not my girl friend,” he said.

He and Sharon had been together longer than most married couples and so certain customs had grown up between them, much as moss will accumulate on a damp rock or ivy creep up the walls of hallowed halls. They had long ago agreed that possessiveness had no place in their relationship, and so regarded any show of it with a sort of horror. But that was theory. Practice was something else, for too little possessiveness may also have its hazards. Moss may be a soft and comfortable thing upon which to rest, but it is also a very same sort of thing and its flowers require a certain subtleness of thought to admire. Now and then, Tom wished that Sharon would loosen up, and Sharon that Tom would grow more steady.

Sharon, who had not meant the comment all that seriously, jiggled the phone a little in her hand as she appraised his reaction. “Turn that thing to vibrate,” she told him, handing it over. “And keep it with you. That’s the whole point of a portable phone.” Without another word, she crossed to her sofa, where she curled up like the hidden dimensions of the multiverse. She found it difficult to concentrate at first on Janatpour space, which she attributed to the residuum of the interruption.

Tom acknowledged the command with an absent wave. “Did you hear that, Judy?” he asked the grainy image on the cell-phone’s screen. “Sharon thinks you’re my new lover.”

Judy frowned and said. “Maybe I should not call you at home.”

Sometimes the stuffy propriety of the younger generation was a little hard to take. “Oh, Sharon doesn’t mind you calling.” He dropped his voice when he said this so that he would not disturb the physicist on the sofa. “Everything’s fine. What do you have for me?” In truth, he looked forward to these exchanges. Judy scratched his curiosity where it itched. She and I click, he had told Sharon already. She knows historical research, which databases to tap, which archivists to contact. She knows what I’m looking for, so I don’t have to explain things twice.

And Sharon had answered, She’s a treasure, all right.

“I think I know why the village’s name was changed,” Judy a

“Das geht ja wie’s Katzenmachen!” Tom exclaimed — which did disturb the physicist on the sofa and earned him a glare, which he did not notice. “Meine kleine Durchblickerin! Schau mir diesen Knallfekt.”

Judy had gotten used to that sort of thing by then. She had no idea what he had said, but did have a good idea what he wanted, so a translation was not needed. She did something off the screen and the image of a manuscript replaced her face.

It is not possible to hop out of a recliner, but Tom managed it anyway. He hurried to CLIODEINOS, where he inserted his phone into the docking station, and the manuscript appeared at a more readable magnification on the monitor. The handwriting was fourteenth century work. The Latin was awful; Cicero would have wept.

“I used the Soundex to look for variant spellings,” Judy explained voice-over while he skimmed the document. “That casts a wider loop, of course, and it takes longer to sort through the… the…”

“The Krempl. The junk. What am I looking at?”

“It’s a bull from 1377 against the Brethren of the Free Spirit. It seems that Oberhochwald’s new name was not originally Eifelheim at all, but—”

“Teufelheim.” Tom had skimmed ahead, and his finger now touched the screen lightly where the name appeared: Devil-home. He chewed on his thumb knuckle while he considered that. What sort of people had lived there, he wondered, to have earned such a name from their neighbors?

“Shun the works of Satan,” he read aloud, “as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. Pastor Dietrich was tried and found wanting. Be you not also found wanting, sick with heresy and sorcery. Et cetera, et cetera.” Tom sat back in his chair. “The writer doesn’t much care for our friend Dietrich. I wonder what he did that was so terrible — besides stiffing that coppersmith.” He saved the file to his drive and Judy’s face reappeared on the screen.

“The co

“Yes. Why mention Dietrich in the next sentence unless Teufelheim was Oberhochwald. Although…” He rubbed his ear with his finger. “In all of Swabia, I suppose there could be two Dietrichs.”

“Dr. Wegner in the Language Department said that the corruption of ‘Teufelheim’ to ‘Eifelheim’ was linguistically natural.”

“Ja, we

Tom saved the new information, but with a mild feeling of anticlimax, or perhaps of a slight hangover. “We still don’t know why the place was abandoned, but I guess we’re one step closer.”

“But we do know,” Judy told him. “Demons. ‘Devil-home.’”

Tom was not convinced. “No,” he said. “It’s one more place-name in the Schwartzwald named after the devil. Like Teufelsmühle near Staufenberg, or the Devil’s Pulpit… There are two ‘Devil’s Pulpits,’ one by Baden-Baden and the other on the Kniebis. Plus Hex Valley and Hell Valley and—”

“But did you read the descriptions of the devils that this Dietrich supposedly conjured?”

He hadn’t, but he recalled the file and this time read past the comment on the name. “Ugly sons of bitches weren’t they?” he said when he had found the passage. “Yellow, bulging eyes. Gibbering incantations. Driving men mad. ‘They danced naked, but sported no manhood.’ ” The color control on the monitor, he noted, was fine enough to show Judy’s blush. “I don’t suppose demons ever won beauty contests.”

“They flew, too. This must be what started those folk tales about the Krenkl.”

“A few sentences in a bull? No, the writer was repeating a story already in circulation. He expected his readers to understand the reference, just as he expected them to know who ‘Pastor Dietrich’ was. I wonder if Krenkl comes from Kränklein — South German shortens ‘-lein’ to ‘-l.’ ”

“I thought…”

“What?”

“Well, the descriptions of the demons were so detailed, so vivid… Their appearance. Even the way the villagers behaved. Some ‘saved themselves and their souls.’ Others ‘befriended the demons and welcomed them unto their very hearths.’”

Tom dismissed her suggestion even before she could nerve herself to make it. “All it takes is a little imagination and a bit of hysteria. The medievals were great believers in mythic beasts. They heard vague tales of the rhinoceros and imagined a unicorn out of it. The horsemen of the steppes became centaurs. They had kobolds and dwarves and… I saw a drawing in a psalter, in the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, that showed two weird creatures — one like a stag, the other like a big cat — walking on their hind legs and carrying a pall-draped bier between them. And there’s a fresco in the crypt of the Freiburg Francziskanerkirche that shows giant grasshoppers sitting at a banquet table, probably a metaphor for the way locusts could consume entire harvests. And a carved doorpost in the Cloisters in New York portrays—”