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

from the rocks 500 years ago. It has its dogma. But it still fascinates me. Not because of its explanations. But the things which it is trying to explain. That’s what fascinates me.

“Urs is very sweet,” Marthe continued, “but he has no imagination. For him, a life after death is unthinkable, because it cannot be scientifically demonstrated. He is just like the Catholic priests who have studied their dogma. I think this is why he finds your husband’s case so irritating.”

“What do you mean?” Ellen felt oddly offended by this last remark.

“He talks about your husband almost every night when he comes into bed. He cannot understand it. And this annoys him, because it does not correspond to any of his explanations.”

“And what do you think?” Ellen asked.

“I? What I think about your husband’s case?”

The bells above them began to chime, and Marthe was compelled to pause for reflection before committing herself to a reply. Ellen had the impression she welcomed this reprieve.

The bells grew fainter as they walked, but still they were loud enough to keep the two of them locked in the privacy of their own thoughts, until a few minutes later the chiming stopped altogether, and she admitted: “It fascinates me for the same reason it irritates my husband. I have no explanation for what has happened with Frank. Maybe psychiatry can help, but we need to find him first.”

“I just wish I knew what the problem was. I know Bill Plattner had a funny influence on him, but I can’t believe he’s into drugs. And I can’t believe he’s capable of burglary either, let alone murder. I just wish I knew what’s going on, and where he is. I just wish. Every morning I wake up and I just wish.”

Marthe detected the despair in Ellen’s voice – it would have been palpable even over the deafening noise of the bells – and she touched her arm in her incomparably gentle way.

“Let’s walk,” she said, suddenly switching back to her earlier vivacious mood. Taking Ellen’s hand, she led her up the hill overlooking the plateau where the abbey fitted so much more naturally into the landscape now that Ellen knew it better. When they reached the brow of the hill and the road into France that was nothing more than a farm track, Ellen was struck by the beauty of the scene before her, which she had not fully appreciated on her first visit here. Just beneath, on a kind of saddle between them and the hill opposite, lay the same hamlet of half a dozen half-timbered houses, dwarfed by the same castle ruins that rose above them, lit up by the low midday sun almost white against the smoky blue backdrop of the sky.

“On the left of the castle, in the distance,” Marthe said with a certain breathless excitement in her voice which Ellen put down to the climb up the hill in the cold winter air, “you can just see the snow on the Vosges Mountains through the mist. On the right, not so far, the buildings of the chemical industry and the city.

“But that’s another world,” Marthe added. “We’re standing in France now. So much more space. So emptier. I find it so beautifully peaceful up here. But depressing in a way – it reminds me how alone we all are.”

She stood in silence for some time, looking out over the dark green forest of the foreground that fell away into the mists between them and the snowy peaks of the Vosges. She seemed to be lost in the disturbing pregnancy of her own words. She appeared concerned.

“Ellen,” said Marthe, turning to Ellen as if suddenly struck by a momentous thought. “We must find Frank soon. Urs is perhaps lacking imagination, but if he believes that Frank could be in danger, he may be right. We must find him soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. We need to keep an open mind.”

Marthe’s words unsettled Ellen. She did not fully understand, but Ellen almost had the feeling Marthe was struggling with a personal problem of her own, that what she was saying had nothing to do with Frank at all.

‘Perhaps this accounts for the mistakes she’s suddenly making in her English’, Ellen speculated. ‘It seems absurd to think that Frank could be a danger to anyone.’

“But for now, we will walk to the castle and enjoy the view from there,” Marthe said, suddenly changing tack. “Until then we have an appetite for lunch.”

She had an uncanny ability to manipulate the mood without irritating Ellen. Whatever she said, Ellen felt safe in her company. It was not simply that Ellen was a hapless foreigner who needed the guiding hand of a native. Marthe seemed to be interested in her and Frank as people and not simply as a case of psychiatric interest. And yet, her unsettling words stayed with Ellen all the way to the castle ruins.

As they were approaching the woods that surrounded the castle, Ellen’s eye fell on a narrow path leading off to the right. A path to which she would not normally have paid any attention, but the sound of gardening, a hoe against stony ground, caught her ear. When she stopped and looked a little closer, she could see a short, stocky man in a small clearing a few yards down the path busily working the soil. It was obviously a well-tended patch. In the earth around where he was hard at work removing the last few weeds of winter, there stood a cross.

For some inexplicable reason Ellen was reminded at that moment of Frank. At any other time, she would have been uncontrollably curious to know what this incongruous scene in the middle of nowhere meant. And she was curious now. Nosy, Frank used to call it, and he did his best to get her out of the habit, which she found slightly sanctimonious coming from a journalist. But so successful was he in controlling her natural instincts that, on