The Kalbrandt Institute Archives: Book II: Monsters

By Chris H. Chelser

Several months after her first encounter with the archives, Eva's training relentlessly pushes her psychometric ability to the limit.

While digging for memories hidden in fossilised bones and ancient documents, she discovers the true purpose of her job, and any hope she had of leaving is dashed. With the help of a new ally, Eva exposes disturbing facts about their boss. Unable to escape his grasp, they will have to find another way to fight back.

Because there can be no doubt that they work for a monster...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris H. Chelser
• Release date: Oct 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9789492194244

Chris H. Chelser

Reading can be a transformative experience. Any story, whatever genre or purpose, has the potential to show new perspectives. You can't put an upfront price tag on such discoveries, only a token of appreciation afterwards. If you have enjoyed my stories, please visit my website and let me know. :)"Chris Chelser writes dark paranormal fiction about ghosts, monsters, history and the human soul. Preferring dark stories to ‘happy ever after’ since she was a child, she began writing in her teens and never stopped. She lives in the Netherlands with her family and the demons under the bed."

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The Kalbrandt Institute Archives

Book II: Monsters

Copyright 2018 Chris Chelser

Published by Azera Publishing at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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www.chrischelser.com

The Archives

BOOK I: HAUNTINGS

What went before…

BOOK II: MONSTERS

M/44008/GY – Jebel Ouenat, Libya, 2012

124/BL – Messina, Sicily, 1347

C/44230/NTD – Kalimantan, Indonesia, 2015

C/37065/SAJ – Bavaria, German Empire, 1938

P/35413/SRP – Ypres Salient, Belgium, 1917

Acknowledgements

About the author

BOOK III: ARTEFACTS – To be disclosed

BOOK IV: MONUMENTS – To be disclosed

What Went Before…

August, 2015

Veste Malsaulenberg, somewhere in the Bavarian Alps

On the first day of her job, Eva is instructed to explore the work of the Kalbrandt Institute, her new employer. In the castle’s underground archives, she studies research reports filed by her fellow agents through history. By reading their memories rather than their texts: she is, after all, hired for her psychometry.

Before long, she catches the unwanted attention of a colleague. Eva gives this man, Jonathan, the brush-off but when her abilities reveal the unexpected truth behind a key report in the collection, his interest in her turns out to have a dramatically different aspect.

As he relentlessly pushes Eva to the limit of her capabilities, she stumbles upon terrible secrets, which cumulate when, through memories of three centuries ago, she is executed by a man named Cael.

A man who is the spitting image of Jonathan.

‘That can’t’ve been you. Too long ago to be you.’

‘So it would seem,’ he said, smirking.

‘In God’s name… what are you?’

‘I’m your boss, Eva,’ Cael’s raw voice chuckled in the closing darkness. ‘The last one you will ever have.’

Book II: Monsters

December, 2015

Veste Malsaulenberg

Eva narrowly avoided two agents as she stormed down the carved stairs of the office wing. Out of breath after running up those same flights not a minute ago, her panting echoed louder in the three-storey tall stairwell. She leapt down the last steps, onto the ancient flagstone floor and into the gallery. An older colleague tutted at her for her haste, but she ignored him and ran down the length of the eastern wing. Up ahead, in the library’s antechamber, she spotted her mentor.

‘So sorry I’m late!’ Eva called as she jogged to a halt, gasping. ‘Only got your message when I was already in front of your office. The dishwasher packed up after breakfast, so we had to do the last load by—hand? Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘Quite all right,’ said Sanvy Kaur before turning back to the man standing beside her. ‘You were saying?’

Having lived in the castle for several months now, Eva knew most of her fellow inhabitants by face. But Dr Tan Duc Nguyen, resident doctor-in-chief, was one of the few people Eva had come to know early on, thanks to her disastrous first day. Vietnamese by birth, American by choice, and sporting an eternal smile that would put a patient with an arterial bleed at ease. At the moment, though, that smile was hidden by a nervous twitch.

‘His responsiveness is deteriorating. When did you plan to see him?’ he asked Sanvy.

‘This afternoon.’ An uncharacteristic frown creased her dark brow. ‘Unless you reckon it has to be sooner.’

‘No, no. Any time today should be fine. Keep me updated?’

‘As always.’

The doctor gave her and Eva a half-hearted greeting and continued on his way.

‘Sounded urgent,’ said Eva. ‘Can I ask what that was about?’

‘You can, as long as you do not expect an answer. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to pretend doctor-patient confidentiality still means something. Even in this place.’

Eva felt her cheeks heat up as a surge of embarrassment washed through her body. ‘Right, sorry.’

Gentle lines creased the corners of Sanvy’s eyes when she winked. ‘Curiosity is natural, Eva. For you more so than for most. So let’s put that asset to its proper use shall we?’ She handed the file binder she was carrying to Eva with a flourish. ‘It’s the vaults for you today. Have you been there before?’

‘Once,’ said Eva as she flipped through the file. ‘During my first week I got lost on my way to the kitchens. Ended up in Castle Wolfenstein instead.’ She studied the assignment form. ‘Wait, fossils? You’re telling me Archaeology managed to squeeze a dinosaur skeleton behind one of those doors?’

‘Oh, that would be a sight,’ Sanvy chortled. ‘No, most of what we keep here is no larger than your hand. Typically we sell prehistoric fossils if they aren’t pertinent to ongoing research, but we have a few of interest to our agents’ private projects. No dinosaurs, though. Too old for the Institute’s taste.’

‘And mine,’ Eva snorted. ‘Fossils are essentially rocks, right? I can’t read rocks.’

Sanvy arched a brow. ‘You had no problem with the emerald last week.’

‘That’s different. A carved gem, embedded in a statue, is an artefact. Being separated from its setting doesn’t change that. But uncut rocks are just minerals. They have no memories beyond existing for a very long time.’

‘Valid point,’ said Sanvy. ‘However, fossils are mineralised bones that were once part of living beings. Scientifically speaking, conclusions based on the one cannot be extrapolated to apply to the other.’

Eva shrugged. She still felt uncomfortable calling her psychometry ‘science’. Physics was science, as was chemistry and mathematics. Endless discussions at her family’s dinner table had been unable to resolve whether Ludvík’s study of law was a science. If an official academic field failed to qualify, how could a psychic ability hope to don the label? Nevertheless, a major aspect of Sanvy’s mentoring consisted of her teaching Eva how to apply her skills in a controlled fashion, check her findings where possible, and write scientific reports for the archives.

‘We have until lunchtime for these exercises,’ said Sanvy, ‘so I suggest we stop dallying and get to work.’ She beckoned Eva over the library’s antechamber.

The brickwork of the present castle had been laid some time during the nineteenth century, Eva had learned. However, one of the antechamber’s walls consisted mostly of chiselled rocks, blackened by age, that stood out sharply against the newer, lighter bricks. A key feature of this preserved architecture was a weathered stone arch with supports polished by centuries of grimy hands.

‘No need to break our necks on the way down.’ Sanvy flipped a switch that had clearly not been a part of the original building. In the stairwell, a series of energy-saving bulbs struggled to fire up, their sterile glow gradually illuminating the medieval masonry. Just one of countless glaring paradoxes here. Eva had found the Institute was full of them.

Like so many people before her, Eva held on to the smoothened walls for want of a banister. The air around them grew noticeably colder as they spiralled into the bowels of the castle. The offices of the eastern wing and the library in the adjacent southern wing had been built on a much older foundation, which now served as an extensive basement. Below the library, the basement housed the paper archive, whereas this part consisted of an eerie maze of locked cellars called the vaults.

Eva peered down the dusky corridor. ‘I swear, I still think this is a church crypt rather than a storage area.’

‘Ah, but what is a crypt other than a consecrated storage for bodies?’ Sanvy quipped. ‘Not that the monastery’s cloister was ever used for such purposes.’

‘This used to be a cloister?’ Lamps were only mounted on every other vault in the ceiling. The intermittent light cast strong shadows on the old walls and on more recent brickwork that filled the arches of what, once upon a long time ago, might have been a colonnade which had let in the sun. ‘Talk about vandalism.’

‘Some people call it progress,’ said Sanvy with a hint of sarcasm. She took a small note from her jacket pocket and checked the pencilled plan. ‘This way.’

She led Eva down the corridor and around a sharp corner. To either side they passed numbered doors, although only the carved doorframes on their right seemed to be part of the original structure. In between, figurines adorned the base of every rib curving upwards to the ceiling: saints whose features were all but worn away. Eva suspected they remembered every monk and every agent who had walked past over the centuries.

‘Why build the castle on top of an old monastery?’

‘Because this is how the Institute began. As a Benedictine monastery. These rooms, for instance, were the monks’ cells. Long since converted, of course. No one has slept in here since the sixteenth century.’ Sanvy took out a keyring and unlocked a door labelled A-XII in brass letters. ‘Now they are vaults, in every sense of the word. See?’

Eva had half-expected a grated window and a crucifix hanging over a simple bed. A monk’s cell as it might once have been. Reality, however, was pitch-dark, until Sanvy turned on the light and the illusion wilted.

At three steps wide and not much deeper, the cell did its name justice, but its already claustrophobic dimensions were further constricted by the wooden shelves mounted on the walls, crammed with plastic boxes of various sizes. Most of the floor was taken up by two small pallets stacked with pine crates, placed directly in front of the door and leaving only a narrow path between them and the surrounding shelves. Overhead, a single LED lamp cast its cold light with greater intensity than this confined space could bear.

Unperturbed by any of this, Sanvy stepped inside, wedging herself between the crates and the shelves.

‘I’ll stay right here, if you don’t mind,’ said Eva.

‘Uneasy?’

‘A little. Normally I don’t mind tight spaces, but it feels like there isn’t enough room to breathe.’ She gripped the edge of the door. A strange cold seeped into her fingers and her stomach did a somersault. False alarm, she realised on closer inspection. What had startled her was a dull grey layer that coated the inside of the door.

‘Metal?’

‘Sterling silver,’ Sanvy clarified. ‘It has antibacterial properties, so all organic objects are stored in vaults with a silver lining. Add rock salt in a bucket to absorb unwanted humidity, and you have a precursor to modern climate-control.’

Eva ran her thumb over the exposed edge. The sheet wasn’t much thicker than paper, but to cover even a tiny room like this would require a significant amount. ‘Where does the Institute get the money for such things?’

Sanvy chuckled. ‘I’m not an accountant, I’m afraid. Nor are we here to audit expenditures. However, you will have to come in.’

Determined not to let a little nausea stand in the way of exploring what treasures Sanvy had selected for her this time, Eva squeezed herself between the crates and the shelves. To keep her mind occupied, she focused on the plastic boxes. Some were new and still transparent, but a good number had gone dull with age. And as she had come to expect, each box was neatly labelled with a file number.

‘Which one did you choose?’ she inquired, pulling the nearest box forward to peer through the lid.

‘Not that one,’ Sanvy said with a deliberate, chiding slowness. ‘By all means, give it a try though.’

A blush crept down her neck, but Eva lifted the lid and carefully pushed aside the cotton tufts covering whatever were the box’s real contents. Fragments of bones, as it turned out.

‘They look a bit like the souvenirs my brother used to have in his room when he was going through his dinosaur stage. Just as taciturn, too,’ she said, providing running commentary of her observations as Sanvy had taught her to do. ‘In fact, the container has more to say than these splinters.’

‘Why is that, do you think?’ her mentor asked and took out her notepad, thus officially starting today’s training.

‘It’s not telling me, is it? Possibly the pieces are too small to have retained any memories. Or it has been dead too long compared to its life.’

‘What about this one.’

Sanvy took out another small box and set the two side by side on the nearest crate. Inside the second box, on a bed of wood shavings, lay a large, brittle-looking claw.

‘Didn’t Sam Neill show off a nail like this in Jurassic Park?’

Sanvy laughed and checked the label affixed below the file number. ‘No dinosaur. It is genuine, though. Is this one more forthcoming than the splinters?’

Eva traced the curved claw with a fingertip, dismissing the adjacent memories of the plastic box being machined and the wood shavings being milled. ‘It barely remembers having been part of a living creature, but it seems to have held on to something.’

Mud between toes. Green brushing hairs. Leaves, high up. Dark leaves are bitter, but young shoots taste good.

‘It belonged to a herbivore. A furry mammal, I think.’

‘Cheers,’ Sanvy raised the box lid as if toasting. ‘Megatherium, better known as the Giant ground sloth. They became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age. A furry plant-eater, so well done indeed. How much did you see?’

‘Only a glimpse. It was deciding which plants were nice to eat.’

‘As might be expected. Animals do not have a terribly complex emotional life.’

Eva chewed her lip. ‘Sure. But, why did I see anything to begin with? Those bone splinters are smaller, but size isn’t everything. That tiny brass pin the other day kicked me right in the ribs.’

‘Go on,’ said Sanvy, making notes. ‘Both are bones of animals, animals long dead. If the difference in size doesn’t account for the different results, what other variables are there?’

‘Age,’ said Eva at once. She compared the labels of the boxes. Reading the name on the box with the splinters, she needed three tries to untangle her tongue. ‘Who names these critters, pharmaceutical companies? Okay, so here we have bits of Diprotodon. From the Mid-Pleistocene. When was that?’

‘I’m a psychologist, Eva, not a palaeontologist. I really couldn’t say.’

‘Doesn’t matter. The claw is from the early Holocene, according to the label. Our era. So the splinters must be much older.’ She huffed, displeased. ‘Ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years. When you’ve been alive for a decade or two, being dead for a long time or a very long time shouldn’t matter. How come that it does?’

‘Now you are asking the right questions,’ said Sanvy. ‘And the only way to confirm inconclusive data is with more experiments.’ She put away her notebook and glanced around. ‘Time to improvise.’

With the two small boxes back on their respective shelf and out of focus, the oppressive atmosphere wormed its way into Eva’s mind again. The air seemed intent to compress her and her head ached mildly, as did the spot beneath her sternum. She resisted her urge to rub it.

‘We don’t have that many animal bones for you to practice on,’ said Sanvy, ‘and I should think it’s still a bit too soon to move on to human remains.’

Eva blanched. ‘The Institute keeps human bodies?’

‘Only insofar as they are pertinent to our research,’ said Sanvy. ‘Or when Cael takes a particular interest in them.’

‘He would,’ Eva muttered, feeling queasy. The strange pressure in the vault didn’t help.

Apparently unaffected by the tightness in the air, Sanvy leafed through the manifest attached to a smaller crate. ‘Hmm, I think not. Maybe the larger one. Give me a hand with this, would you?’

Eva didn’t mind taking hold of the smaller crate, but as she helped Sanvy manhandle it onto the other pallet, she couldn’t stop herself from leaning against the bottom crate that Sanvy wanted to free. At the touch, a sour taste filled her mouth. Resentment, she realised, but not her own. A silent anger broiled beneath the pine, the passive and cowardly kind that sent chills like tiny needles raking down her skin. For an instant, she imagined herself back in primary school, taking the long route home to avoid the bullies.

‘On occasion, our archaeological teams bring back something that doesn’t fit in a lunchbox,’ Sanvy commented as she inspected the big lid for an opening. ‘This is from the Libyan expedition a few years ago. One of several crates, but