The short story was created within a course were took a deep dive into “Geisterbahnen”. The result of the course was a book filled with all-things related to the scary rides. The story was my contribution to the book:
I had a lonely childhood. I cannot say that I had many friends and much of our family dreaded us. We pretty much lived in seclusion in a big lonely mansion in the countryside, so we also didn’t have much contact with our neighbors, most of whom I didn’t even know until I had to deal with them when my parents passed.
Or probably it was the fact that my father was a taxidermist, a craft passed down for generations on my father’s side of the family. Though my family had perfected that skill, it didn’t make it any less creepy to outsiders. At the end of the day, a house filled to the brim with dead animals must give off a strange aura.
I liked that aura though, it was the atmosphere in which I grew up and I didn’t know any different. My father always mentioned that we should consider ourselves happy. At the end of the day he inherited a big house with a huge plot of land. He—taking over the taxidermy enterprise of his father, my grandfather—was the provider. At least, when it came to the monetary aspect of it, my mother grew lots of vegetables and fruits in our fields. She was also the one taking care of our farm animals. Oh, my dear mother, she loved tea like nothing else in the world. I remember her getting big parcels full of tea leaves from all around the world. I used to keep the boxes and sometimes even the postmarks.
These are only stories from my father. I never really got to know my mum as she passed away when I was six. My mother’s death was the worst thing that could have ever happened to our family. She was supposed to bear another child—a boy named Cesar. She didn’t survive the birth and neither did Cesar. Our family shrunk from almost four members to two: my father and I.
The death of my mother didn’t really change a thing, yet everything was different. I did not miss her, but my father and I felt her absence. She was that one person in our house that kept the thunderstorm from pouring down, the only ray of light in our small family, the only one who could bear hope. I think that was partly the reason why, after my mother’s death, my father was a different person. As much as she was the light in our house, she was the one that kept my father sane. He spent way more time in his closed-off workshop than before, obsessed with his craft.
II
Life for us changed. The big house seemed even bigger. Our gardens became a mess, vines and bushes took over most of our fields and every year the forest came closer. Dust collected on the shelves. Windows got dirtier and dirtier; it seemed that not even the sun wanted to enter our mansion. The flowers my mother put around the house decayed, as much as our family—the relationship between my father and I—was decaying as well.
The years after my mother’s death were the strangest in my youth. Recalling this time now, it feels like one continuous block of nothingness, years where time was just standing still.
Growing up in a house full of dead taxidermy animals, death was always around me—I just couldn’t avoid it. It was something that was part of our day-to-day life, not to mention that my family directly profited from death itself. Therefore, the death of my dear mother was something I was confronted with daily and initially could handle very well, unlike my father.
But with every flower petal that fell, every corn of dust that fell upon the shelves in my room, with every vine that grew over our fields that she so beautifully cultivated, her absence made me sadder. Time was not healing these wounds, time itself ripped those memories out of my heart, and with every grain that fell in the hourglass that was my life, time brutally took a new memory and left me bleeding—again.
It was about two years after my mother’s death that I wanted to help those who lost a family member. At first, it was the roaches in our kitchen. I saw that one of them had died and two others were around it. I picked it up and put it back with the others. A few days later, I saw another dead one. It was missing one of its antennas. Out of a very small wire I tried to make a new one and inserted it into its head.
III
It wasn’t long before I tried this on other species: mice, rats, and then bigger animals, like foxes that found a new home in our garden, which more and more became a forest. In the beginning, my creations looked horrible and scary, their eyes molding and falling out, the general process of decay starting. I had to bring them out of the house after only a few weeks. But at the end I thought that, in this way, I can bring families back together.
One night my father noticed the smell of some animals I had “revived,” as I called it. He was upset, but at the same time fascinated. It was the first time in years that I saw him showing any emotion other than sadness and grief. It was the first time in years that we connected over something. I longed to feel someone being proud of me. I just felt accomplished.
My father promised to teach me the craft that had been in our family for generations. It meant the world to me. For the next two years I accompanied my father in his workshop. I helped him work on commissions and other things. He was a great teacher and I could feel his passion. Though as passionate as he was about his craft, the stricter he was about performing it to perfection. I remember him saying “If it is not perfect, it is horrible. Perfection is the only goal; the only possible option!”
I worked extremely hard in the workshop, trying to satisfy my father’s high expectations. I never was able to. Only when I was sixteen—I finished a squirrel back then—did I get some recognition for my work, but he never gave me as much appreciation as when he discovered my first attempts at taxidermy.
IV
Time flew by and soon I was in my twenties, still learning and perfecting the craft my father taught me. He was getting older and older and his body started to age. He lost his steady hand; his vision getting worse and worse, soon he was unable to work in the workshop.
I clearly recall one conversation we had while working on some pieces. It was one of those late-night sessions and he mentioned his death. He was preparing me to take on the family enterprise. He seemed sad, but again death was something that I experienced on a day-to-day basis. After he was done talking about the business, the house and the inheritance, he—in a way angrily—said that I could never, under no circumstances, open the door in the back of the workshop. It was the first time that I actually noticed it. Our house had many doors, some were locked, some were wide open. I never questioned it if I found a door locked or a room inaccessible. It was—next to the dead animals all over—part of the house’s aura, part of its mysticism.
My father’s health started to decline rapidly after we talked that night. He passed away two weeks later, leaving me the legacy of my family and our house at twenty-five years old. I didn’t mourn, I just kept going on with my life. I knew how to run the business while also managing the house, as best as a single person could handle such a huge mansion.
I never opened the door—never. Opening locked doors in our house was a thing that one simply does not do.
Twenty years later, at my father’s work desk, a key that must have been glued to the bottom of a drawer fell down. At first, I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it, but some instinct told me that it was the key to that door. When I twisted the key and the door unlocked, excitement grew in my chest. I carefully opened the door.
V
Cornelius was the last of the Kraft family to exist. After he died the house was empty and the family craft was forever lost. Because there was no one in their family who wanted to take on the house, it was given to the small community of the town and they decided to tear it down. Most of the townspeople thought the Kraft family was cursed due to their work with death.
Before the demolition began, the house was inspected by the town’s building yard to make sure it was ready. They didn’t bother to break into any locked doors or inaccessible spaces and eventually ended up in the taxidermy workshop. By then, they were already used to the taxidermies hanging in every corner of the Kraft mansion. They didn’t find anything in the workshop, until one of them noticed a door that was open just a tiny crack. They wouldn’t have bothered to look inside—just continue their superficial examination—if there wasn’t this horrible smell that made its way out of the room. They slowly opened the door from which this disturbing smell came.
What they found was a family drinking tea: an old man, a younger woman, and some humanoid creature lying in a stroller. None of them moved—frozen in time. In the corner was the corpse of a middle-aged man, a rope around his head, hanging from the ceiling.
Story by Elias Altrichter