The Killing Moon

By Allister Timms

Young Max Schumann's mother, Isolde, has been stolen away by the malevolent Erlking, a trickster spirit of death out of German legend. Alone and scared in a chicken coop with only three hens and nightmarish sketches to keep him company, Max realizes he must embark on an odyssey into the dark, violent heart of war-torn Europe if he is to save his mother. But first he must find his father, Oscar Schumann, a captain of the elite Wehrwolf, a band of guerrilla fighters and shape-shifters out of folklore.

Through the blood-streaked and ravaged twilight of the Third Reich, father and son begin a hunt through a world transfigured by terror and strangeness, an atavistic world where magical history collides with actual history and where sacrifices must be made for those we love.
The Killing Moon is a novel of fantasy and myth-making that forges a link between ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and moments of tenderness that keep people alive in the face of total devastation and loss. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362568

Book preview

For Vienna and Gwyneth

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O Father! O Father! now, now, keep your hold, / The Erl-King has seized me—his grasp is so cold!

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness.

—Thomas Carlyle

CHAPTER I

MOTHER HEN

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Max was so afraid to crush the eggs he hardly slept. But it was warm and safe in the chicken coop, not like in the house. Sometimes he tried to sleep with his favorite hen tucked beneath his arm, to keep him warm, but the fowl clucked and then pecked, drawing little spots of blood, so Max let her go. But Max had learnt a trick. He grabbed the hen to him, turned her over on her back, and gently stroked her breast feathers. He kept stroking until she struggled no more. Max snuggled her warm body in his arms, sensing her racing heart beneath her tiny wishbone.

On those nights when Max couldn’t sleep, he would stare at the three roosting chickens, listen to their untroubled clucks, and try to fall asleep. But when the sight of his dark, squat house through the slat of the coop made him shiver, he would light the fat finger of tallow, its tiny flame like a whispering tongue in the dust and feathers of his new home. And then he would cover another side of the coop with images that haunted him.

Max’s favorite chicken, with her scruffy head feathers, watched him from her nest. She clucked softly, plucking up her chest feathers, casting a stern eye on the boy’s frenzied patchwork of art.

A week had passed since Max had crawled into the coop. His only food had been the eggs he sucked or sometimes even the shells he crunched and swallowed. One time, he had made a dash for his dog’s abandoned water bowl, raced back to the coop with the water sloshing over the sides. Now there was only a mouthful of water left, like a liquid eye watching him from the bottom of the bowl. The water pump was no more than twenty feet away, but Max would not go to it. He just sat and stared at each slow drip, drip, drip, his hen scratching in the straw beside him as if annoyed at his cowardice.

You go, he snapped.

The hen just pecked around in the straw, waddled back to her nest, her eggs. She seemed to cluck a lot louder at the sudden discovery of one more egg missing, shuffle down on her clutch, and stare hard at Max with an irritable rasp. The other two hens squawked along with her, all three scolding Max.

This always brought a blush to Max’s cheeks and he inspected his nub of charcoal and pushed more straw over the eggshells.

Now he sat looking at his small brick cottage. At the innocent white curtains fluttering in a breeze on his parents’ upstairs window. At the back door. At the washing still folded in the wicker basket beneath the clothesline. At the skittish leaves that danced so merrily in the yard. At the kitchen window, where something lurked, always watching.

Max quickly scrambled back into the dark of the coop, his breath sharp. He squeezed the charcoal tight in his hand and began to scribble on the coop’s weathered boards, pressing hard on his dwindling charcoal, letting loose a picture of his mother hunched over their kitchen table with a vase of bright, freshly picked wildflowers, rabbit stew boiling on the range, and his dog huddled under the table.

His hen clucked as if to egg him on, the guttural sound like a peculiar metronome that Max followed as he feverishly drew.

He wondered where his dog Mozart was now.

Max’s charcoal bit deep into the boards on the side of the coop that brought him good dreams. Among the miniature worlds of his dog Mozart sleeping, running, flying with wings, of owls with his mother’s face, of apples that hid a giant father, Max sketched himself snuggled up to his mother like a bee.

But it never kept his gaze away from the side of the coop where he covered in scratches and scrawls a giant horse, a knife, a tiny bee trapped in a glass jar, and a disfigured, hulking man with two fox ears being struck over and over with bolts of lightning.

Rising stormheads rumbled over the distant hills. The sky was drained of its blue and encased in big, boisterous clouds. Rain began to fall like nails.

Distant thunder rumbled like a giant with a bellyache. The rain then fell like tin cans.

Max slowly turned to the side of coop that always made him chew the top of his charcoal. The teeth marks were deep. Across the boards he scratched a claw of lightning. He stopped its point at the head of a man.

Max grabbed his hen and hugged her to him. You mustn’t look at him, he whispered to her. And that is not a crown upon his head. The hen clucked as if she understood.

Even the sketch of the man scared Max. He buried his head into the chicken’s feathers, her dulcet clucks sounding like a purr. But she kept her beady stone eyes on her three remaining eggs.

Max shut his eyes tight as the thunder rolled. It sounded to him like the violent footsteps of the man who had taken his mother away.

CHAPTER II

STRANGER AT THE TABLE

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It had been thundering the night the Erlking came.

Max’s mother had made wild mushroom soup with thyme for supper. Mozart was gnawing on a pig’s ear, the pig his mother had slaughtered last winter with the help of their woodland neighbors, old Almot Klint and his mute son, Hugo. She had slathered his bread with wild strawberry jam and made a pot of elderberry tea. She lit the oil lamp, raked the coals in the fire, and snug in the inglenook with Max, had read the Grimm’s The Wolf and the Fox, Mozart stretched before the amber world of the fire.

Max pestered her to tell him about his father, how she and he had met.

Wouldn’t you rather hear more Grimm?

No, tell me how you and Papa met, he asked with excitement, wild strawberry jam smeared across his face.

Even as she smiled and began to tell him the story, Max noticed his mother’s furtive glances to the locked door. But Max felt so safe, snuggled in the inglenook, Mozart stretched out on his back, his mottled belly warm from the fire. Max knew what made his mother look. It was because of the solitary fox that had shown up. He never bothered the chickens. He just sat on the hill beside their cottage and watched. One time, Max had looked up from the book he was reading to find the fox at the window, looking in. His mother shooed the fox away, but he always came back, his white-tipped tail waving back and forth. His mother had even found the fox sleeping on her bed.

Max, she said, interrupting her telling of how she had met his father. If anything ever happens to me, will you promise me something?

Max nodded. But nothing will happen to you, will it Mama?

No, Max. But this war ... She stopped, stroked his chin. This war might bring unexpected things into our lives.

Max nodded again.

So if anything does happen, this is what you must do for me. Her face turned serious in the firelight. You must go back to our old bookstore in Munich, convince Hugo to take you, even old Almot if you must. And you must go down into the ratskeller and talk to the kobold that lives there.

Max’s eyes widened. Kobold!

Yes, and you must ask him to find your father. I don’t ever want you to be alone in the world, Max. Promise me you’ll do this for me.

Max’s head nodded furiously.

His mother laughed and tousled her son’s hair. He had his father’s expressive blue eyes, his father’s puckish grin. This will be our own little secret, she said. Now, back to the story of how your father and I met a long time ago in a little wood, she continued, her long fingers clasping and unclasping in her lap. He took me home with him to meet his parents, but Karl Schumann didn’t like me. So your father and I ran away. We lived in the big city of Munich, with its bright lights and its shops and its cobbled streets and its artists and the River Ismar sparkling both day and night. But I missed the woods, the streams, so we left Munich and came to live in this secluded little cottage.

His mother ran her fingers through his tangled hair. Did I ever tell you about the night you were born, how your father saw a shooting star?

Max stirred beneath his mother’s caresses. Yes, Mama. Many, many times, he sighed.

Isolde ruffled his hair. And there were so many apples in the orchard that year, she continued, your father climbed into the branches and shook the fruit free. And when an owl hooted, you would cry. So we called you our Little Owl, because you had a small sad face with big eyes and the hair on your head was as soft as down.

Max drifted off to sleep to the soothing song of his mother’s voice, like the sweet buzz of a honeybee.

His mother carried him up to bed. The stairs squeaked as she trudged, Mozart padding behind her. The room she slept in was sparse—just a bed, stool, and a big Bavarian chest that had belonged to her husband’s uncle. On the wall was a photo of Max’s father, Oscar Schumann, dressed in his new Wehrmacht uniform. It was taken three years ago. Below it was a handwritten line: Beautiful being, you live as do delicate blossoms in winter. Beneath it, the words, I love you, my sweet pussywillow, Happy Birthday. September 1941.

Max stirred as he felt his mother tuck him into her bed. Mozart sighed as he slumped down at the foot of the bed. Max felt his mother snuggle beside him, felt her heart beat so close to his, smelt the cinnamon and autumn gusts of her thick auburn hair.

Max had woken that night to the sound of thunder, rattling off rounds like artillery. A flash of zodiac-white lightning exposed an empty bed. Even Mozart was gone. Max didn’t move, but listened. Listened beyond the grinding of the rainheads, the sharp shot of the lightning, the small quiet of the house pressed between eave and window, wall and alcove. There was no sound except for the thunder and the wind wincing through the cracks in the windows. But he couldn’t hear his mother or Mozart.

A loud boom shook the valley and lightning burst like an artery.

Max jumped when he saw his mother pressed tight against the bedroom door. She drew a finger to her lips. Max crawled to the edge of the bed.

Thunder boomed and lightning lit up his mother’s ghostly face. Stay here, she whispered. There’s someone in the house.

Max shook his head and held out his hand to grasp his mother’s. She took it and squeezed.

When they crept downstairs, there was a stranger sitting at the kitchen table. Lightning flashed at the windows like skeletal wings and lit up the kitchen with each passing white snare, tugging the stranger’s face into the mercurial light, his unearthly features syncopating between light and dark. A belt of brambles and thorns twisted around his fox-pelt riding cloak like barbed wire.

You! gasped Isolde. Max squeezed his mother’s hand and shook like an animal.

At the next streak of lightning, the stranger pulled a jar from his fox-pelt riding cloak, placed it in the crass glare for Max and Isolde to see. A bee clung to its side, the insect’s wings frantic, its little abdomen working some strange madness. The stranger tapped the lid of the jar with a long finger. You remember the little bee, the family Hymenoptera, don’t you, daughter? His voice was cold, bitter, a chipped knife plunged into a victim’s flesh.

Max shuddered. Why did this stranger call his mother, daughter?

Isolde stepped in front of her son. Get out of my house, she said.

Thunder boomed like a massive door being slammed shut.

The stranger sat with a cruel white sneer like a jagged scar across his face. He stank of fox. Isolde. Is that any way to treat your father?

You are not my father, spat Isolde. You stole me away, Erlking, like you did all the other children.

The Erlking scraped his long nails along the table and his eyes narrowed to slits of malice.

Max squeezed his eyes closed. He didn’t want to hear any of this. When he sensed the white strike of lightning, he opened them, hoping to see his mother sitting at the table, a glass of warm milk in her hands, Mozart licking her bare feet. But she was trembling before him, shielding him from the Erlking.

After all this time, I’m still upset with you, Isolde, said the Erlking, tapping his long fingers on the kitchen table. Running away from me like that. So, I’ve decided you must pay. And the price for your disloyalty will be the boy.

No! screamed Isolde.

The Erlking howled with laughter that out-boomed the thunder and two fox ears twitched on his head. You’re still a foolish little girl, I see. Why don’t you act like a dutiful daughter and hand your son over.

The back door slammed back and forth, back and forth.

Isolde stepped forward, clutched the edge of the kitchen table. She suddenly noticed the bread knife set beside the covered bread and snatched it up. Get out of my house.

The Erlking stood, the hem of his fox-pelt riding cloak brushing his boots caked with mud. Oh, why must you always complicate things, Isolde? He stepped back from the table and began to walk towards her. Not only do you run away from me, but instead of your father coming to save you and bringing me what I wanted, it ended up being your mother. And we both know what happened to her, don’t we?

Isolde thrust the bread knife before her. I swear I’ll drive this knife into your rotten heart if you come any closer.

The Erlking let out another howl. The tongue on you, child. I really should have cut it out.

Isolde lunged with the knife. Run Max, run!

The Erlking’s ears flattened and he snarled.

Max cried out. No Mama, no!

Isolde ran at the Erlking, driving the knife before her. The Erlking tugged an alder switch from his boot and whipped it across her face. Isolde screamed at the sting and the knife thudded harmlessly into the wall. The Erlking seized her around the neck. He traced a broken and filthy fingernail down her cheek. You know what, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll take you back after all. I’m in need of a feisty queen bee around the hive. The children get so unruly. He shoved her face before Max. Have one last look at your mother, boy, before I take her away for good.

Max shook with tears and reached out.

The Erlking grabbed Max to him. Whispered into the boy’s little ear. I’m not going to take you, he said with a sneer. I’m going to let you come after your mother. What do you think about that?

Max punched blindly at the Erlking’s arms. But I won’t make my little game easy. Oh, no. I may kidnap children to fulfill a basic need, but my appetites require immortal exploits. And with your mother gone, Max, you’re going to need looking after. That’ll make you grow up fast, won’t it?

Two red eyes burned in the dead ashes of the fireplace.

You’re going to need someone to rock you to sleep.

A shadow lowered itself from the cobwebbed eaves on a sinewy strand.

You’re going to need someone to feed you. But then my parliament of spooks is always hungry, so who knows who’ll get fed first.

Something wet and slimy slithered from the sink’s drain.

The Erlking laughed and released his grip on Max. The boy slid to the floor in a shivering heap.

Things moved around Max. Unseen things that slithered, groped, scraped, skulked, stalked, and smacked their slathering maws.

The Erlking dragged the shrieking, fighting Isolde out the door.

Max ran out after the Erlking into the rictus lightning, the heavy bellows of thunder. The lashing rain soaked his pajamas.

A massive horse, its coat raked with burning sable, its eyes wild with forks of lightning, snorted and plowed at the earth. The Erlking sat on its back, Isolde held tight before him.

Mama! shouted Max.

The Erlking’s hand clamped over Isolde’s mouth. He leaned down to Max, a mad sneer on his lips. You have until the winter solstice to save your mother.

At the sound of another thunderclap, the massive horse vanished into the night.

Max saw nothing but the sturdy whitewashed chicken coop. He ran to it as if it had been his mother’s open arms.

The cottage’s door slammed in the wind as if trying to drown out Max’s screams.

CHAPTER III

OWL AND LOCKET

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A distant scream woke Captain Oscar Schumann. It sounded like a child’s cry. He tossed and turned on his pallet in the otherworldly hour before dawn when the screams of the dying and sometimes the living brought nothing but tears. Night still hung on by its broken fingernails, the light subsumed.

Oscar Schumann crept out of the burnt-out German farmhouse that made a makeshift roof over his head and stepped over the sleeping forms of his men, still like effigies in the dram of morning light.

He walked over to the farmhouse’s broken stone wall, to a spot where he wouldn’t have to see the heap of Russian corpses. He rested his war-weary hands on the cold stone, drew a deep breath. A mist rose off the scorched crop fields and the dead cows, bloated like mines with stiff legs.

Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. There was no sound except for dying thunder. But at least there was no gunfire, no artillery rounds thumping like crazed rabbits.

Oscar spilled his last Russian cigarette from its pack, struck his damp matches until a weak flame took, and sat on the wall. His men would be up soon, grumbling, swearing, buckling on provisions, checking chambers, cleaning bolts, pissing, scratching, talking, some even crying as they sat on the broken crapper.

Oscar sat alone within the tiny kingdom of his skull and his mind wandered to his family. He thought about the little cottage on the Bavarian border snuggled away in its hidden valley. And he thought about his son, Max. Would he remember a father that had been gone for three years? But his thoughts lingered the longest on his wife, Isolde. He tried to remember his fondest memory of her, and he almost had it. But just as the sun soaked the horizon in a crimson wash, a young recruit came running into the camp.

Captain Schumann snubbed his cig out under his jackboot and adjusted his gray peaked cap.

The recruit spotted him and jogged over, navigating chunks of the farmhouse, a downed tree, broken chairs, a bullet-riddled old side-board, a heap of smoldering clothes.

The recruit was a young boy, no more than twelve. He was slim, haggard, face begrimed, his slack, worn uniform too big for him. He saluted and his eyes were as bright as the eagle above his breast pocket.

I have a letter for Captain Schumann, sir.

Oscar motioned to hand it over. Noted the boy was almost as young as Max.

The boy hesitated. You are Captain Schumann?

Of course he fucking is, snapped a voice. It was Sergeant Otto Mull. He clipped the boy on the ear, knocking the oversized cap off his head. The young recruit winced, handed over the package, and reclaimed his cap. He saluted once more and then jogged off.

That was cruel, Otto. Oscar studied his broad-chested sergeant with the beefy arms, the big ox head with its shorn hair, the flat nose like a plug, and the mouth that was never short of a joke or a taunt. He’s just a boy.

Fuck ’em. They’re all the sons of rich bureaucrats and party men, anyway, who think they’re brave little soldiers fighting for the Fatherland.

Oscar allowed Sergeant Mull to speak to him like this out of camaraderie. Both shared a mutual disgust for the Nazi worm that had crawled its way into the apple of German soldiery. They were both simple fighting men who wanted to protect their family. Oscar knew Mull couldn’t give a Teutonic shit for the dogma and allegiance to the party, he just wanted to end this war and go home to his family and his newspaper job writing scandalous obituaries for the little-known Berlin newspaper Das ist Kaput!

So, who’s it from? asked the sergeant.

Oscar studied the letter. He had hoped it was from Isolde. It wasn’t. It looked official.

Right, I’ll leave you to it then, Kapitán. Sergeant Mull yawned and stretched his big bones. It’s time I got this ratpack up anyway. There’s hunting afoot!

Rise and shine, lovelies, bellowed Mull, clomping about the wrecked farmhouse, loosening debris, loosening tongues, loosening his belt for the worst lazybones.

The sun crawled up into the sky like a wounded man. Oscar tore the letter open. A locket and a wooden owl slid out. Oscar dropped them as if they’d stung him. He scooped them up, pressed them hard against his heart. With his heart pounding, he set off to the scorched barn, hoping to find the loft empty.

There was no one in the hayloft, just a trail of rat shit and the blood of a dead Russian. Oscar held the toy owl and the locket in shaking hands. He silently mouthed two words: hummel; eulechen. Reluctantly, and yet compelled, he clicked the clasp on the locket open. His own face and that of his son, Max, stared back at him.

Oscar felt as if a spade had shoveled his heart into his mouth. He tugged the letter free. It was typed on letterhead from high command. Oscar relaxed a little. He began to read.

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Dear Captain Oscar Schumann:

Life can be very cruel, can’t it? One minute your family is safe, the next, whisked away into a nightmare. Although I do tend to exaggerate, so maybe it’s not as bleak as all that.

Still, I have some sad news. I’m afraid I have your wife and son. They’re mine now.

I know you are going to want them back—what devoted husband and father wouldn’t?

But it’s not in my nature to make things easy. But I’m also not a fanatical dictator. So I’m willing to be generous: If you ever want to see them alive again, you must cross into my kingdom on the borderland, between this world and the world beyond. The only way in is a pair of boots and a key. But my minions guard both. I won’t tell you their names, since that will make it too easy. And, anyway, you know all about secrets and duplicity, don’t you, Captain Schumann?

Affectionately,

The Erlking

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Oscar dropped the letter. He felt a Panzer’s tank tracks shredding his body to pieces.

He quickly peered over his shoulder as if someone was watching him in the empty hayloft. He shot his gaze out the hayloft’s twisted door, pockmarked with bullet holes. Oscar couldn’t think straight. He paced back and forth. Breathe deep, okay, just breathe deep. He could hear the clatter and barrage of his men waking. Sergeant Mull crowing. He stopped pacing. He knew what he had to do. His mind set in a flash. But why was he still trembling?

He stuffed the locket and the