There’s something else, too, something that Rainer flat-out refuses to tell, despite the threats and imprecations of his wife and daughter. Lottie will have to wait until later that same day, when she’ll hear the story from one of the girls at work, whose older brother was among the other men who went to George’s house. Splashed by the water the man vomited for his trouble, the brother said that the water was full of tadpoles. Only, they were such tadpoles as no one among them had ever seen before, black strips of flesh one or two inches long, every one capped by a single, bulbous blue eye, so it seemed as if the fellow who’d thrown them up had swallowed a bucketful of eyeballs. They flopped around on the floor, the things, as if they were trying to get a better look at the men standing horrified around them. For a moment, the men stood paralyzed as the things twitched about the floor, and then one of them flipped itself onto a man’s bare foot. He cried out, and all the men responded in a fury of stomping, crushing whatever the things were under the feet and boots as if there were no tomorrow, splashing the foul water all over the place. Long after they’d crushed the tadpole-things beyond recognition, the men kept stomping, as if they were trying to stamp out the very memory of what they’d seen. By the time they got hold of themselves and stopped, panting, and thought to look to George, he was dead.
Sounds a bit much, doesn’t it? Not that the whole story doesn’t sound more and more fantastic — walking dead woman and all. It’s just those tadpoles, they’re — well, they push the tale that much closer to outright fantasy, don’t they? (That’s assuming, of course, you don’t think it’s already there.) Myself, I’d be inclined to believe that George had quenched his thirst at one of the local ponds after a bout of drinking, swallowing a school of tadpoles — plain, ordinary tadpoles — in the process. When he throws up, out come the tadpoles, which, to be sure, would be a pretty disturbing sight in and of itself. The monster-tadpoles I’d chalk up to the overheated imagination of the girl who told Lottie the story. Problem is, I’m not as sure as I’d like to be. You see, the same night that Lottie hears this story, after Clara has revealed what she’s learned about the man in the big house, and Rainer is chewing over the information at the kitchen table, rubbing his jaw the way he does when he’s thinking, Lottie comes right out and asks him if the story she was told is true. She’s that kind of girl.
Rainer jumps up from his chair as if he’s been stung. At first, he looks surprised, as if he can’t believe how his daughter heard such a story. Then the anger comes, such anger as Lottie hasn’t seen on his face in a long time, maybe ever. She can see his right arm twitching, and she’s sure he’s going to hit her — for the truth or the lie of her question, she doesn’t know. Lottie tenses herself for the slap, and that’s when Clara, who’s been standing to the side watching, steps in front of her. Lottie can’t see her mother’s face, but whatever’s in it washes the anger clear from Rainer’s. His arm relaxes, his head slumps, and Lottie realizes that underlying the anger she’s been the focus of is fear, a terror deep and profound. She thinks of the other night, what she saw in her father’s eyes after Italo left. All of a sudden, she has one of those moments you have growing up, when you see your parents as people, as something like older versions of you and your friends. From head of the household, Rainer becomes a man whose heavily lined face and thinning hair are the badges of too much care and worry. Lottie understands that the fear she’s found in him is not a new thing, that it’s been part of her father for a while now. If not originally part of his fundamental architecture, then it’s infiltrated him the way termites will devour the frame of a house, leaving only the brick exterior in place. And from mother, Clara becomes a woman whose worn hands mark the effort she’s put into holding together not only the family she and Rainer have made, but Rainer himself. Lottie sees that Clara knows all about Rainer’s fear, that if her mother has been unable to exterminate what’s wormed its way into her husband, she’s at least done her best to support him where she can. A burst of sympathy, of pity compounded by love, takes hold of Lottie, and she wants to throw her arms around her parents and comfort them. She doesn’t, though, because she also wants to protect them from her revelation.
“This is bad business,” Rainer says at last.
This isn’t exactly the revelation of the year. Before Lottie can ask Rainer what the bad business is, Clara does. “Enough riddles,” she says. “We know bad things are happening. What do you know about them? Who is the man in the big house?”
“I don’t know,” Rainer says, “I don’t know who he is.”
Lottie sees her mother’s shoulders straighten, a sure sign she’s ready to yell, so she steps in with her own question: “What is he, Papa?”
Rainer’s face falls; he didn’t expect that one. It’s as if he’s decided he won’t lie to his family. He simply won’t tell them any truth he doesn’t have to. “I’m not sure what he is,” he says.
But Lottie’s started to figure out the rules to his game. “What do you think he is?” she asks.
When she was a child growing up in Germany, she played a game like this with Rainer, a game whose object was to find not only the correct question, but the correct phrasing of it. Lottie was good at that game, which she thinks about now. Maybe Rainer remembers it, too, because as she re-words her question into a form he can’t evade, the faintest of smiles crosses his lips. “All right,” he says, “all right. I’ll tell you what I think. I think — I am afraid the man in the big house might be ein Schwarzkunstler.”
He uses the German, even though they’re all speaking English, a house rule Rainer himself has insisted on. Lottie knows the word, which translates “black artist” and means something like “black magician” or “sorcerer.” It’s a word Lottie associates with childhood stories from the old country, not real life in a construction camp in upstate New York. For a moment, she thinks Rainer is having her and Clara on, then she sees that he’s crossed his arms, something he only does when he’s presenting an uncomfortable truth. He did it when he told the family that he thought the only recourse left them was to leave their home and go far away, maybe to America, and again when he described the fine job he’d taken in the beautiful country north of the City. Her skeptical father is telling Lottie and her mother that an evil magician is behind the strange goings-on next door and expecting them to believe it. “Ein Schwarzkunstler?” Lottie says. “Like in the storybooks?” The tone of her voice shows her opinion of her father’s theory.
“Not exactly,” Rainer says. “More a kind of,” he waves his hands, “scholar, or surgeon, or — or a strongman, at the circus.”
“A surgeon?” Lottie asks. “A strongman?”
“Someone who slices into the surface of things and peels it away to discover what is underneath,” Rainer says. “Someone who wrestles with powerful forces.” This doesn’t help Lottie in the least, which Rainer sees. He says, “The result would be the same as in the books.”
Clara, meanwhile, is slowly nodding her head. When Rainer has finished speaking, she says, “It explains all of this, doesn’t it? God help us.” Then, to Rainer, “What are you doing about it?”