The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

day when Dr Zellweger drove out to visit his mysterious protégé in the country and left Marthe and Ellen in a little village up in the hills. Ellen fell in love with these hills the first time she was here. A little sombre in its winter coat perhaps. But it was a coat with promise in its pockets and the contentment of knowing the promise would be kept. So elegant and peaceful the brown wooded hills and limestone rocks against the blue sky. Nature at her tidiest and most reassuring. Ellen had no choice but to put everything to the back of her mind and to forget. If only for a few hours.

Marthe was right. This trip was just what she needed. Ellen’s newfound friend, who showed such an uncanny sense of timing and offered the sisterly affection that she had found so lacking when she most needed it, exuded a mood that Ellen had never seen in her before. She had always been incredibly accommodating and friendly. But today she seemed to Ellen especially carefree and light-hearted. So full of life.

Almost as if wanting to put the flourish of a signature to her vivacious mood, she accelerated the car out from the sombre light of a narrow treelined gorge that Ellen recognised from her earlier trip out here and into the bright expansiveness of the plateau where they had walked before.

“You’re not Catholic, are you?’ Marthe Zellweger asked as she swung the car to a standstill under one of the trees in the village square.

“I’m not into religion at all,” Ellen replied.

“Yes, I remember you felt uncomfortable when we were here last. You said you didn’t like churches.”

Ellen nodded.

“I went to a Catholic boarding school,” she said. “And that told me all I needed to know about religion.”

“But I would like you to try once more,” Marthe insisted. “There are not many people here during the week, so I think you will not find it so uncomfortable. You must see this. For me it is one of the most beautiful places in this part of Switzerland.”

There was a trace of reverence in Marthe’s voice that Ellen found oddly unlike the woman she had come to know.

This place had been a holy site for hundreds of years, she explained – ever since a child fell from the rocks into the gorge below and was caught in mid-flight by the Virgin Mary. A chapel of mercy was carved out of the rock to celebrate the miracle, which eventually led to a whole industry of religious construction – a Benedictine monastery, a convent.

Marthe giggled quietly, speculating on what the nuns and monks got up to together in the cold winter nights, as she led Ellen into the church.

When Marthe now led her through the door off the side of the building and into the long windowless passageway, Ellen sensed her pulse quicken. She remembered the dimly lit walls, showing pious inscriptions in all kinds of languages that she was only partly able to decipher. And the coolness of the air, as it wafted off the marble walls with a hint of incense. The powerful atmosphere of mysticism in the passageway was overwhelming. But – unlike before –she did not feel the same light-headedness when they came to the top of the steep staircase.

“We’re lucky,” Marthe said in a whisper that restored that reverential tone after her brief foray into titillating speculation.

“If you would come at a weekend, there would be very many people here,” she explained, before leading Ellen down the long staircase into the bowels of the rock on which the church stood. From a window halfway down, Ellen saw that the stairs were actually cut into the face of the rock. She judged that they were now about fifty or sixty feet below the abbey. At the bottom of the steps, Marthe took her arm and guided her through an iron gateway into a small dark grotto lit in one corner by the flicker of candles.

“On a Sunday, you would find this whole chapel lit by candles,” she said, adding a quietly earnest “Excuse me” as she left Ellen standing just inside the iron gateway to the chapel and went to light a candle herself. For a moment, Marthe had returned to her more serious mode. And although it was true to the character Ellen had come to know, it surprised her, because she had never imagined that Marthe would entertain religious leanings in any direction.

“Oh, I think it’s in the blood since a very early age,” Marthe explained, as they came back along the passageway and up the last flight of steps into the fresh winter air. “Most of my school years I spent at a Catholic boarding school in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A very strict education which you never forget. Perhaps that explains why I have never taken my husband’s psychiatry as seriously as he does.”

“Well, you certainly talk like a psychiatrist sometimes,” Ellen said, as she recalled the grilling Marthe had given her at times about her relationship with Frank.

“Do I? How awful.” She laughed with a hint of embarrassment.

“That’s because I live with one,” Marthe added. “I also considered studying it at one time. It seemed so intriguing. But I could never really believe in it like Urs. He could not live without it. He believes it has the key to all our problems. It has an explanation for everything. Even the things it cannot explain at the moment, he is confident to find an explanation soon. It began with sex and psychoanalysis, but now it has become more complicated. Now everyone is talking about biological psychiatry and neurotransmitters. In a way, I think it is worse than it has ever been. We seem to have forgotten that psychiatry has to do with people, individuals.

“But it still fascinates me. Like the Catholic religion. It makes all the same mistakes. Catholics have an explanation for everything also. Like why that little boy survived his fall