Gatherings

In 1901, a mysterious man arrives in rural North Dakota, summoned by a family in need with no one else left to whom they can turn. Yet awaiting him is something far more malignant than even he, gifted with esoteric expertise, could ever anticipate.

***Content warning: This episode touches upon themes of antisemitism, genocide against Indigenous peoples, and child abuse. Listener discretion advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Nothing ever dies, not truly, only takes on a new existence in ceaseless transformations. Our ancestors live on in us, in all that they left behind. The very bones under our feet sing in an ancient, atonal chorus, the slow work of millennia grinding them into dust, to that they may become something new, woven into the mineral matrix of embryonic stone, or becoming absorbed into the living tissues of other plants and animals.

Yet such survivals pertain to both good and evil, and can manifest in strange and subtle manners – especially in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty-One: Gatherings.

(Sounds of field insects)

NARRATOR

The day is darkly overcast, yet still heavy with the August heat, and the air is uncommonly still. Over the Dakota prairie, over the little town of lumber and brick that sprouts out of it like an unlikely weed, the tiny train depot at the town’s edge that is only a clapboard shack crudely painted in rusty red and off-white and a creaking, splintering platform – over it all hangs the oppressive heat and a sense of brooding expectation, of restless stillness.

A buckboard wagon rolls over the prairie road slowly, moving toward the edge of town. Atop it sits a man, dressed in the stolid style of the local Wolgadeutsch farmers. Drawing to a halt beside the train station, he shifts uncomfortably on the rudimentary bench seat, casting his gaze about the currently empty platform as though he expects something to suddenly materialize there – something perhaps not altogether welcome or wholesome. It is past the noonday hour, and there are few on the streets of the town, most either sitting to their midday meals or napping away the hottest hour before they return to their endless toils. The few who do pass nearby seem to ignore the man and his wagon altogether.

The bellowing sounds of an approaching train’s whistle breaks the stillness, and the horses hitched to the wagon stir and snort uneasily. The man calms them, and watches the train’s implacable approach.

As it grinds and screeches to a brief stop, only a single passenger disembarks. The man who steps down from the train, with only a single steamer trunk in hand, looks far taller than he is, due to his extreme thinness. His clothes are all somber black and white, of fine cut but worn and faded almost to the point of shabbiness. His long, gaunt face is shadowed beneath his brimmed hat. The man looks around the platform expressionlessly, and only moves toward the wagon when its owner waves uncertainly at him.

Stepping down from the bench seat, the farmer asks the newcomer if he is Ilie Gantz, pronouncing the name with a distinct Russo-German accent. The thin man nods in affirmation, and says rather than asks that the farmer must be Mr. Herman Werdt.

Herman welcomes him to the state of North Dakota, and takes his guest’s trunk, stowing it in the box of the wagon. Then the two men climb atop the wagon, and Herman, taking the lines in hand, gently gees the horses.

As they roll out of town and over the prairie, Herman begins to speak, repeating much of what he has already written to Gantz in his letter of pleading summons. Ilie nods once every few moments, his eyes fixed on the fields that roll by them as the town dwindles behind them and they move farther out into farm country. Werdt tells once more how his eldest daughter of fourteen years, Alma, has been strangely afflicted since the February of the previous year; how at first, they thought her feverish and tried to nurse her as best they could. When Alma began to rave of strange things and her fever had persisted far longer than is natural, they turned hesitantly to the pastor of their little Lutheran church, a man named Konstantin Rossel. Rossel, still believing it was nothing more than natural illness, wrote for his old friend, a certain Doctor Burschl, who had come at his own expense from his distant practice in Milwaukee to treat the girl. Yet he too soon became perplexed at the stubborn and curious ailment that seems to consume Alma’s body and yet leave her strangely energized and animated. After the doctor’s ministrations failed to yield any result and Burschl suddenly departed, with hardly a word to anyone, one early morning on a train to return to Wisconsin, the Reverend Rossel finally agreed to attempt an exorcism, something he had never yet had any calling to do. Yet even this desperate measure brought no sign of improvement; on the contrary, Alma grew paler and thinner, and yet the perverse energy within her seemed only to grow and grow, and she now spoke in alien, unpronounceable syllables. Her periods of catatonic unresponsiveness became fewer, and her fits of incredible violence, by all rights beyond someone of her size and wasted frame, became more frequent.

Herman trails off as the wagon rattles and bucks over the rough ruts of the prairie road. Ilie has not moved, other than with the inevitable jostling of the seat, since Herman began speaking.

The patchwork of field and prairie around them teems with grasshoppers, grown fat and winged after a summer of voracious feeding. Despite the mugginess of the day and the grey sky’s mocking promise of rain, the summer has been dry here, and the grass and crops alike are sere and yellowing almost to brown, and the overgrown insects are almost a plague. With a chitinous fluttering, a singularly large red-legged specimen half-leaps, half-flies onto Ilie’s shoulder, and, clinging with bristled legs to the faded and fraying fabric of his black jacket, it remains perched there, now almost perfectly still. Ilie seems to pay it no mind, but the sight of insect and man both inert and quiet as corpses perturbs Herman, whose nerves are already raw from over a year of an inexplicably and helplessly unsettled household.

To drown out his troubled thoughts, the farmer begins to speak again, to enumerate all the ways the Doctor Burschl and Reverend Rossel attempted to alleviate Alma’s affliction. There were so many bitter medicines, tonics and tinctures and capsules, the names of which he has mostly forgotten. Then there were special diets and fasts and exercises, and then ceaseless bedside prayers, and then the disastrous three-day exorcism of shouting and screaming and weeping that left everyone within the household utterly depleted both physically and spiritually – save whatever lived within Alma, which seemed only more manically excited afterward.

All of this, Ilie has already more or less gleaned from the letter folded within his breast pocket, crinkled and glossy after many readings, the letter that brought him from his latest temporary residence in Topeka. Still, he does not speak, does not move. To Herman, he seems as heedless of the story as he is of the grasshopper near his lapel, and the farmer’s mood darkens as he settles back into silence, which has come to feel as oppressive as the breathless, clinging heat.

A humble farmstead emerges from the fields before them, seeming once well-ordered but recently somewhat neglected. At last Ilie speaks, saying that this is a lonely place. The sudden utterance takes Herman by surprise, and he sits a moment before he really absorbs the words and musters a reply. Falteringly, he says that it is a home, his home and his family’s, not lonely at all.

Ilie shrugs, but offers neither elaboration nor apology, and they ride the rest of the way in silence.

As they pull into the farmyard, two children emerge from the house to stare at the newcomer on the wagon: a boy of perhaps twelve, and a girl of around seven or eight. Herman brings the horses to a halt, and calls the children over, introducing them as his younger children, Walther and Luzia. He bids the girl to show their guest inside while he and Walther unhitch the wagon and tend to the horses, and she nods obediently.

As they move toward the house, Ilie asks his gracious little host if she likes it here, so far from town. She says that it’s fine, that maybe sometimes it’s a little boring and that there is always too much work to be done, but that she and the neighbor children sometimes get to play in the late afternoons and during the winter. Ilie offers a rare smile, which makes his gaunt face seem somehow older and wearier, then he grows grave again and asks if she spends much time with her older sister. Luzia hesitates, and says that she did once, but that Alma is gone now.

Gone where? Ilie asks gently, and the girl replies that she doesn’t know that, only that whatever is Alma’s room now is not her sister. Alma, she says, was too good to ever say the awful things that it does.

Ilie nods, and the girl pushes open the door and leads him over the threshold. The house is tidy and welcoming, though somewhat austere, yet Ilie seems more ill at ease with each step inside.

The hausfrau emerges from the kitchen, having heard them enter, and smiles and curtsies formally to Ilie, introducing herself as Gertrud. Ilie returns a stiff, deep bow, and thanks her, referring to her as Mrs. Werdt. Smells of baking bread, of roasting pork and vegetables, issue from the kitchen behind her, and Ilie notes the copious sweat upon the woman’s brow and wonders if it is solely from the oven’s heat.

She asks if he is hungry, and before he can even respond she says that the midday meal is almost ready, and that they will eat as soon as her husband returns. Ilie nods, and Gertrud tells her daughter to set the table, before disappearing once more into the little kitchen. As the girl sets to this new chore, Ilie quietly begins helping her, returning briefly the bright appreciative smile she flashes at him.

Just as they finish, there is a ragged cry from upstairs, long and low and bestial. At its emanation, everyone downstairs freezes, the mother in the kitchen just over the oven, the man and the girl in the dining room – but from the locked room upstairs comes a series of loud crashes and sharp cracks. Yet despite the appalling auditory violence of the outburst, the silence that follows it is somehow far worse.

After a long moment of bated breath and rattled senses, Luzia looks over to Mr. Gantz and reiterates that it simply cannot be Alma.

No, Ilie slowly nods, her sister is indeed gone.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Mrs. Werdt fusses over her guest during what proves to be an excellent, if simple, meal. She also tries to keep the dinner table conversation light, but this proves difficult. Ilie, even when trying to be friendly, is plainly accustomed to minimal interaction with people, and his habitual reservedness makes his answers to her questions terse and uncomfortable, yet Gertrud persists. She asks about the wife and children Ilie never had, about the parents and siblings he left behind in New York, and about his early life. It is only after much pressing that he haltingly tells of his long studies of the Torah, Talmud, and Midrash, and of how he disappointed both his father and his rabbi when he abandoned it in favor of his current vocation.

A brief silence falls over the table as the staid Lutherans absorb his words and look at the pork on his plate, untouched, only broken when there is another series of cries from overheard, then three loud thuds, like the heavy impact of a body against timber.

Carefully setting down his knife and fork, Ilie looks to the parents and asks if he might see Alma now.

The Werdts slowly exchange glances, and then Herman slowly says that perhaps they should wait until after dinner, when they will all be refreshed and fortified by their full bellies. A few seconds afterward, Walther leans toward Ilie and mutters moodily that all the others are afraid of Alma, glancing sidelong at his father with barely concealed scorn. Herman flushes, but makes no reply.

The next cream is like the shriek of a red-winged hawk, piercing and primal, but far louder and sustained too long, and toward the end it becomes polytonic, almost as though many throats now shriek in a marred and hellish harmony.

As if continuing a conversation that never began, Herman turns his gaze from the vague ceilingward point where it was momentarily fixed back to Ilie, and asks what he meant earlier when he called their home a lonely place.

Ilie fusses with his already well-ordered shirt and jacket, brushes away imaginary crumbs before slowly saying that there are places in the world where unseen things gather and proliferate, like vermin in dark and fetid burrows. Such unclean spirits, he elaborates, are drawn to places of desolation, to inhospitable wilderness and to ruins, to places where wicked things have happened and tainted the land with their dreadful memory.

Carefully, he adds that there is something of all of that here, on their farm and the surrounding country, and that he can feel the way it calls to the impure and the malevolent.

The father’s face grows dark again at these words, clearly taking personal offense at such a description of his property, while his wife’s features turn drawn and pale. Now a softer rapping issues from overhead, and Ilie stands and moves to the point precisely below the sound’s source. After a few seconds of perfect stillness, he begins to speak aloud in a voice more resonant and commanding than he has previously evinced, a recitation which the Werdts do not comprehend.

(Fade in sound of Psalm 91 recited in Hebrew, slow fade out)

The rapping slows and then ceases, but the quiet that settles over the house in its wake is unnatural, as though the entire world has frozen in place. Even the unnoticed but ever-present sounds from outside, the myriad stirrings of plants and small creatures, are gone.

Then a long, shrill, wild cackling, far too loud and forceful to come from the lungs of an ailing child, cascades down the walls like a horde of fleeing cockroaches. When finally it echoes into stillness, a pale Ilie looks to the Werdts at the table and says wanly that he wants to speak to the Reverend Rossel.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Konstantin Rossel is a tall man, not quite as thin as Ilie and without the hollow gauntness in his features. With hooded grey eyes and a closely cropped beard of pale brown, his speech is soft and thoughtful in manner, yet when Herman introduces Ilie, the three of them standing on the threshold of the parsonage behind the church, Konstantin does not invite them inside. Regarding Ilie with sober appraisal, he breathes a one-word question to the farmer.

Jude?

Before Herman can answer, Ilie nods and says, in a German dialect markedly different from that of the locals, Dat bin ich.

The pastor betrays his surprise with only a slight flutter of his heavy eyelids, then instantly regains his impassive expression.

Switching to English, Ilie and Konstantin converse economically on Alma and her condition, on its progression, on the specifics of the methods employed by the reverend and what he knows of those of his friend, the doctor Burschl. Ilie asks the reverend for his thoughts on the nature of the apparent possession, but Konstantin has little insight to offer and seems to grow very uncomfortable at the question. Never once does the pastor’s icy reserve show any sign of thawing, and Ilie’s manner is hardly warmer.

After perhaps a half hour of this clinical exchange, Ilie thanks Konstantin curtly, and indicates to Herman that he is ready to go. Bidding farewell to Reverend Rossel, Herman is unable to dismiss the feeling that the man’s cool demeanor extends now to him as well.

They ride home, the farmer sitting comfortably on his horse while the man from New York is stiff and ungainly on his borrowed steed. Ilie seems untroubled by Rossel’s unfriendly reception, and the farmer wonders how many such welcomes he has received, if that is a part of why he is so aloof and solitary in his habits. Herman reflects with some shame upon that dinner table silence with which he and his family greeted Ilie’s mention of Talmudic studies merely an hour or two previously. He is reminded, too, of things he has long forgotten from his childhood in the old country: of how people in his home village would speak of pogroms near and far as though they were of little consequence, or even approvingly, the same way one might speak of the spring rains.

The two men return to the homestead just as the sun’s disc first touches the western horizon. Herman waves off Ilie’s offer to help with the evening chores, and smilingly tells him to go inside and rest from his long trip for the evening, when a scream from the house splits the air. They begin to run toward the farmhouse, but before they have halved the distance, Gertrud emerges from the front door, blood smeared across her forehead and on her hands.

She cut me, the farmwife says, repeating it twice in disbelief. Ilie and Herman share a glance before moving to help the wounded woman, and the look in Ilie’s eyes terrifies Herman. Whether it is the fear there that terrifies him, fear in a man much more learned in the shadowy mysteries of hidden worlds, or the fascination that is mingled with that fear, the farmer cannot decide.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

For three weeks Ilie tries to relieve the girl of her unwelcome guest; for three long weeks of fasting and prayer, of benefices with ash of incense and anointing with rare oils and other small rites and charms commonly known to holy men and occult scholars; seven weeks of rarer rituals: food and drink that borders on poisoning, ancient and sometimes forbidden invocations and evocations, of sleeplessness and shivering cold and feverish heat – three weeks of dismal failure. Even the Seven Prisms of Segenburg do nothing to quell the ranting furies of the pale little girl who speaks in Latin and Greek, in Aramaic and Hebrew, even in fragments that Ilie fears are older than Harappa and Giza and Sumer.

Each dawn finds Ilie a little thinner and weaker, and despite a mirrored physical wasting in Alma, every evening the thing within her seems stronger, even fuller, somehow, as though it gluts and strengthens itself upon its adversary’s trials and miseries.

Sometimes, during the heights of their eldritch confrontations, the thing mutters and gibbers into the pregnant dark between them of former lives, wicked and wretched beyond belief. It boasts of taking nineteen Sioux scalps under General Sully, from not only warriors, but from the elderly, from women and children. It bemoans of its longing to take more scalps, hundreds, thousands, and to make a regal cape of long train from the grisly fabric of so much death and horror. When it speaks of this, its voice is soft and slurring, with a distinct drawl.

Other times, it talks in a voice far lower and harsher and carrying a faint Black Sea German accent, of its little kingdom, where once it held sway over a rude sod house, a ruder chicken coop, three small and pitiful fields and a pen of pigs. It talks of how it lured so many young men to it with promises of food and a bed for the mere price of a little honest labor, young men far from home or maybe having never known a true home and desperate for succor, and of how it would use and destroy those young men and feed what was left to the pigs. It speaks of the delight it took in this, in both the concealment of its crimes and of taking those pigs to market in town, where the hungry buyers, the voice’s erstwhile neighbors, would later unwittingly dine upon pork succulently fattened by human flesh, a monstrous and secret circularity at which the thing within Alma barks endless hyenic laughter.

And occasionally, a third voice, sounding aged far beyond Alma’s years and bearing a feminine trace of Eastern, even aristocratic, origins, speaks of the mercy trains that brought it so many mouths to feed, so many idle hands to put to honest, purifying work, and it speaks of itself as a sort of guardian angel, shepherding them away from the temptations of the devil and the empty joys of worldly fulfillment. It speaks of how many little souls it saved by depriving the bodies, then laying them, small and withered, into the earth before the impurity of sinful pleasure could touch them.

During these black hours, the three distinct voices that issue from a single throat make Ilie’s face seem gaunter and greatly aged, and his flesh ripples, cold and clammy. For one unclean spirit, he thinks, is a bitter enough foe, but three gathered in a single body is beyond his mortal ken. Sometimes, he fears, it is beyond any power upon which he can call, for the knowledge he has so painstakingly collected since forsaking his early rabbinic studies is as tenuous and elusive as the rare prairie fog.

Slowly, he teases out names from the evil voices, after countless hours of tedious interrogation in the face of their diabolical mockery and goading, of their relished tales of depravity that make Ilie so nauseous that he doubts he can ever enjoy another meal.

The scalper answers to the name of Aeneas Smyth, and claims to have held the rank of lance corporal during the wars against the Sioux people. He is so proud of his exploits, that extracting his name and story takes the least effort for Ilie.

Joerg Kettler is the birthname of the murderous pig farmer, though he prefers the Anglicized version of his first name, George. When Ilie, after much hesitation, asks Herman one evening of rare rest if he knows the name, his host is horrified – he says that Kettler was once their neighbor, shortly after the Werdts and several other families had finally arrived on these prairies from their distant homeland, living only about twelve miles away from this very house. Few ever had an ill word to say of him, beyond that he was little aloof and miserly and too eager to mingle with outsiders, and he had died of a bad heart well into his sixties.

The woman is the most difficult to pry information from, proving coyer and cleverer than the masculine voices, but at last he learns that she went by Dinah Cread. The name means nothing to Ilie or the Werdts, but when Konstantin visits one evening, frosty as before and clearly driven more by nagging sense of duty than by kindly feeling, Gertrud manages to coax the knowledge from him. Dinah Cread, a moderately wealthy widow whose husband had cunningly and mercilessly acquired a massive acreage before his premature death from stroke, was known to have adopted dozens of orphans, and to have used them as unpaid labor in maintaining the sprawling expanse of farmland just outside of Bismarck. Upon her own death from a nighttime slip on the stairs of her large and beautiful home, the remains of many of those children were found buried in an unused corner of a large barn – the very same barn that the surviving orphans had been compelled to sleep in every night, cold and hungry and filthy, their bodies emaciated and misshapen from malnourishment, overwork, and untreated injuries. It was later determined that the orphans had been forced to bury their own dead, and knew that they slept near the decaying bodies under only a thin blanket of soil.

At the end of those three weeks, Ilie, on the precipice of utter despair, takes to his bed and lies unconscious for three full days, while the worried parents fret over him without daring to disturb his rest.

And when he wakes and speaks to them – a conversation of several hours – they find no reprieve in his strange and terrible utterances.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After his long sleep, which barely replenishes him, but which is all the time Ilie dares give over to rest, Ilie pores over the musty volumes which comprised the bulk of his steamer’s contents. Some are almost two centuries old, many are incomplete and damaged; all of them are exceedingly rare, and took great pains to acquire. And yet for all of that, most of the information in their yellowing pages is too vague to be useful, or woefully inaccurate, or even utter nonsense. This has always been the way of his occult studies, both through reading and through stranger and more immediate experience – winnowing mountains of chaff to find but a few grains of true wisdom.

It is only by chance, when he drops his copy of the Liber susurri mortuorum Memphites and opens it to the wrong page, that he finds the mention of Minmose’s Twelvefold Seal – an exorcistic rite of which Ilie has only heard of vaguely and distantly, always mentioned in mingled tones of awe and trepidation. The text, arcane to begin with and translated at least three times from Demotic to Koine Greek to Late Latin, is almost impenetrable, and it takes him the better part of a day to be certain he has understood the passage correctly. Even then, he sits in hesitation, looking out the window of the tiny room where he rests and reads, a room which was previously the bedroom of the two younger children, before their sister’s cries made it impossible for any of the Werdts to find sleep upstairs. Minmose’s Seal, if the text is accurate, is far more precarious a route than he even guessed, but none of the tamer, more familar methods he has attempted so far has fazed the abomination for more than a few moments, let alone shaken it free from the body it has so cruelly usurped.

Despite his misgivings, by evening, he has resolved to attempt it. And when he enters Alma’s room, careful as ever to prevent her frequent and vicious attempts at escape, he is both surprised and unsettled to find her lying on the bed peaceably, smiling at him with gleeful amusement and anticipation.

(Sinister music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

In the sitting room below, gathered around the fireplace, the Werdts huddle, waiting for the next round of screams and invocations and mocking laughter, for the crashes and poundings that will surely come. None of them say a word, each lost in their own dark and listless thoughts. The father broods on his own helplessness, the mother on lost days of what now seems like perfect peace in her house, and of her Alma’s face when she was little more than a babe. Walther, already grown moody with the coming of youth, is now drowning in a sea of bitterness and contempt for all around him, and most of all for himself. Little Luzia thinks only of the elder sister, both playmate and idol to her, who is now so inexplicably and irretrievably out of reach.

A voice, imperious and speaking in syllables wholly foreign to their ears, falls through the floorboards to them, and in answer comes a loud hissing, like an angry housecat grown to behemothic proportions. All of the Werdts feel a prickling on their skin, like the goose flesh that a sudden cold draught can bring, despite the warmth of the crackling fireplace before them. That feeling only intensifies, and there are three cracks like nearby thunderclaps, and then what sounds like the spilling of water. The scents of burning flesh and of waterlogged rot fill the air, and beneath that, something not unlike the cherry brandy that Herman sips on rare occasions, only sharper and sourer.

The little ram’s horn, which Ilie has twice used before in his failed attempts, blasts three short, complex melodies, and repeats them twice. The house around them, so solid and well-built, begins to creak and groan, and then to quiver slightly, thin clouds of dust and tiny splinters shaken loose drifting down onto the heads of the bewildered family.

An ugly, drawling male voice shrieks, promising to take their scalps, to take their eyes and tongues, and is followed by deeper voice that says it will feed them all to the pigs. Then comes a long, piercing wail that sounds like that of an aged woman, and then there is only Ilie’s voice, still speaking in that strange language that has been dead for millennia. The house stills, and the smell abates, and the Werdts look at one another in cautious hope.

And now another voice, like distant thunder and yet also like the sliding and shifting of a million bones, like the skittering of countless small and filthy things unseen in the deepest, darkest caverns, answers in the same language, and then in another, and then in hundred all at once. Ilie cries out, suddenly and sharply, and then is cut short, but the voice that is calamity continues in its polyglottal chorus.

An apocalyptic crack makes their vision flash white, and their skulls feel cloven by axes of red-hot iron, leaving them mute and stunned upon the floor. In the silence that follows, there is a soft sliding and then a heavy thump from above. The first to stir downstairs is Gertrud, thinking only of her daughter above, the daughter she still and will always love, and she struggles to her feet and unsteadily ascends the narrow stairs. When a figure appears from the darkness above her, she stops and looks up, her heart on the verge of cracking her sternum.

Alma’s soft voice, sounding dazed and on the verge of failing, falls down to her with a single querying word: Mutti?

Ja, mein Liebchen, Gertrud staggers upward, weeping and smiling and shaking with disbelieving joy. Hier bin ich.

And she takes the wasted, pale girl in her arms, and the two of them clinging to each other for a long moment, while the father and siblings rise and look on in wonder beyond all words.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Through the autumn and the winter, Ilie remains with the Werdts, vigor returning only by tiny increments. He helps with the farmwork as much as he is able, insists on doing so despite his hosts’ protests, determined not to be a burden and assuring them that it will help him build back his strength. The latter proves untrue, with even a little exertion leaving the breath rattling in his throat and his head and heart pounding, and he often goes to bed early and rises late, unable to sleep less than ten hours most nights no matter how much he tries.

Alma, though by all signs finally and fully free from the clutches of the unclean spirit that so long robbed her of her body and her volition, is likewise frail and slow to mend. Yet despite all of this, they both remain cheery, and though Alma remembers almost nothing of her time under that otherworldly bondage, she seems to instantly regard Ilie as a sort of uncle. The two of them talk often and long, and Ilie’s former reserve at last melts away. The other children, encouraged by the return of their good-natured sister, follow her in this affection, and Gertrud always serves him the best portions of their meals and takes great pains to see that he is comfortable during his stay, telling him that he is welcome to stay with them indefinitely. If Herman is at all bothered by this, or by the way the other families sometimes murmur about them when the Werdts attend church on Sundays, he gives no indication of it.

At last, spring comes, and with it, a letter addressed to Mr. Ilie Gantz. When Gertrud brings it to him, Ilie’s face falls slightly, and he reminds her again of the solitary and strange man who first arrived on their doorstep. After reading it, he says somberly that when the last of the snows melt, he must go west. And though the words make her want to weep, thinking of how fond both she and her children have become of this benevolent presence under their roof, this man who rescued her daughter when no one else seemed able, she nods and says she understands.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The three of them, two men and a girl, look on from the creaky wooden platform as the train rolls in, its brakes squealing and its engine huffing impatiently. The thinner of the two men turns toward the others, and his pallid face looks sorrowful, but resigned.

Alma thanks him again from the crude wheelchair her father has constructed. Despite the difficulty of travel in her state, she insisted on accompanying the men to the train depot to see Ilie off. Though the Werdts have taken great care to feed both the exorcist and the exorcised over the winter months, they both remain thin and frail, and Ilie is certain that neither of them will ever truly recover from that final confrontation.

Still, his heart surges with joy and even with a hint of fatherly affection when the takes his hand and presses it tearfully to her face, and says that she hopes God sees him safe and happily home, wherever that may be and whenever he may find it.

He gently squeezes her hand, and wishes her a long life and health. But even as he says it, he fears that neither of them will be so blessed. When their hands disentangle, Ilie is surprised to find that he too is weeping, for the first time in many years.

Herman takes his hand, and only after a moment, pulls him into a brief hug, murmuring that Ilie has brought his daughter back to him. After they part again, he tells Ilie to ask anything of him or his family, if they can ever be of help.

Ilie smiles, and for once, the expression fully lights his face, and he says that he is glad to have met Herman and his beautiful family.

Then, with but a few more words of farewell, he hefts his trunk and boards the westbound train.

It is only after the engine has roared once more into life, and the train clatters on its iron path away from the little Volga German town and out into the wild, desolate prairie, that the smile and the joy in Ilie fade once more. As he stares out the window at the wide cultivated fields that slowly give way to open, dusty grassland, he wonders where the thing that tormented the Werdts is now, and if it will ever truly leave either him or that psychically bruised family, or haunt their dreams and unconscious minds forever. And he wonders if, even now, it roams the vast spaces into which Ilie gazes, if there are more of its kind, and how many places there are for such foul things to gather and multiply, fattening themselves upon past evils and the promise of those yet to come.

And he thinks, too, of those awful promises made, during that final spiritual battle, in several languages known to him and dozens more besides. Some of those promises were of future torments, and chill him still through to his marrow, but worse even than those were the honey-sweet ones, the offers to fulfill desires he never even knew his heart harbored.

Ilie shivers and draws his coat around his body, but even so he feels like the blood in his veins has turned to ice, and like his body lies naked to the scouring of stark blizzard winds. The sun, approaching its zenith, shines down bright and warm on the ancient, reticent plains beyond his window.

(Peaceful music, slowly fading out; eerie wind sounds fade in)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and music by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]