Eifelheim

“All right!”

The vehemence in her voice surprised him. After a moment, he said quietly, “This isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. There’s always a natural explanation for ‘supernatural’ events.”

Afterward, Tom remained at the PC, pulling on his lip. If bizarre visions had been the reason for the taboo, there would have been Teufelheims all up and down the Rhineland.

The Medieval collapse had spawned horrors enough to depopulate a thousand Eifelheims. Ca

So amidst these shambles, why had Eifelheim alone remained anathema?

He pulled out the project folder and carried it to the kitchen table, where he spread the hard copies out, scrutinizing each one, as if he could wrest answers from them by sheer concentration: Manorial records of the vassals of the Margraves of Baden and the earlier Dukes of Zähringen; the knight’s memoire; the religious treatise on the ‘i

There were also the usual monkish chronicles — from Freiburg, St. Peter, St. Blasien, and elsewhere — of harvests, fairs, gossip, noble doings. One spectacular event, a lightning strike in August 1348, had set several acres of forest (and not a few superstitious minds) ablaze. The plague was then just spreading north from the coast, and the bolt had in retrospect been read as Lucifer’s advent. (Had the village burned? No, the Moriuntur document and the business with the smith had come later.)

The bits and pieces were accumulating into a fuller picture, or at least into a sketch. The manor of Oberhochwald was one of two possessed by its knight (the other being in the gift of the Austrian Duke). The last knight to hold the fief was named Manfred, and his father had been named Ugo. The pastor at the time of the village’s demise had been named Dietrich, who may have been the “doctor seclusus” mentioned by Ockham and who had written the compendium in the Bibliotheque. There was an herb-woman named Theresia (he imagined her as a gray-haired hag with a face as ragged as the Black Forest itself), a farmer named Fritz, a smith named Lorenz, and a few others whose names had wound up in that doctoral thesis. Peel back the research onion another layer, locate the originals that the doctoral candidate had used, and even more names would likely surface.

I could almost write a complete history of this village, he thought. Harvest and tax records would let him estimate economic and demographic growth. The fief records showed how it fit into the local feudal structure. The knight’s memoire and the bishop’s letter even gave him a glimpse into the village’s intellectual life, such as it was.

In fact, he realized glumly, the only thing missing from the village’s history was the one thing that made it worth writing — why it had so abruptly and so completely come to an end.

What if it’s not there? he wondered. What if the key document had been lost? Burned to ashes in the struggles between Mercy and the Bernadines at the rag-tail end of the Thirty Years War; or during Moreau’s Retreat down Hell Valley; or in the campaigns of Louis or Napoleon or a dozen other strutting would-be conquerors. Eaten by mice or mold, consumed by fire or rain or flood, crumbled in neglect.

What if it had never been written down at all?

“Tom, what’s wrong? You look pale.”

He glanced up. Sharon stood in the kitchen archway, a freshly brewed cup of tea in her hands. The odor of rosehips and chamomile wafted through the room.

“Nothing,” he said. But he’d had the sudden, dreadful sensation that he already had a key piece of information in his hands; that he had read it several times already; and that it had meant nothing to him.

And so came I into the affair, although at first in only a peripheral way. I was teaching still at the Albert-Louis, and Tom sent me an e-mail asking me the manorial records for Oberhochwald to find. These were supposed to be in our University collection. I replied, Was that a personal supposition, a material supposition, or a simple supposition? And Tom responded ‹LOL?› because he did not understand the joke. He supplied a list of key words and a request to search our manuscripts and incunabula for references pertaining to Oberhochwald, which I suppose was fit punishment for my attempt at medieval humor. Supposition theory is not much fu