Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Peter was a bit nervous to knock on the door of the cabin. Unfortunately, it was already dark, and he couldn’t stand out here all night. Thankfully he had eaten already. He had packed a sandwich to eat tonight because he wasn’t even sure that he would have a place to sleep tonight. Peter’s backup plan was to sleep on the bus out of Winden and go to one of his more distant relatives. There was a second cousin and a first cousin once removed that he might be able to track down if he had to.

Maybe Peter shouldn’t have spent so long talking to that girl he’d met at the bus stop. She was kinda cute though. There was something about her that made Peter decide to struggle on through those awkward silences and try to get past his own shyness—which he must’ve done somehow since he all but told her his whole life story.

The cold of the night brought Peter back to reality. He didn’t have any other place to go. Well, no better place to go. He had to go to his father. And it would be fine. His mother had said that his father would take care of him. He had to trust her. Peter took a deep breath and knocked on the door. After a second or two, the door was opened, and there stood Helge Doppler.

Peter’s eyes instantly went to Helge’s ear, the one that was messed up.  His mom had said that Helge had suffered a major injury to the ear. That was Helge, no doubt about it.

After a second of awkward silence, Helge said, “Can I help you?”

“I’m Peter Schmidt, Ulla Schmidt’s son. Your son,” said Peter, anxiously trying to read Helge's expression.

“I have a son?” said a mystified Helge. He reached out and touched Peter’s face as if to make sure Peter was corporeal. “I have a son,” said Helge with a nervous but happy laugh. “You’re my son.”

Peter didn’t know what he had expected, but this wasn’t it. But on the positive side, if he hadn’t had any clear expectations, then this couldn’t be worse than his expectations.

“Oh, here, uh, come in, come in,” Helge said, beckoning Peter into the cabin.

The cabin was all a single room. Peter realized that there would be no room for him. Already he was an inconvenience.

“There’s not enough room for you here,” said Helge. “But I recently inherited my father’s mansion. There will be plenty of room there.”

Damn, his father owned a mansion? Wait—inherited? “When you say you inherited your father’s mansion,” Peter began to ask.

“My mother, she has been dead for several years now. My father, he died two days ago.” Helge then put his hands on Peter’s shoulders and looked directly into his eyes. “You’re all I have left.”

Peter had no idea what to say to this so he kept his mouth shut. This explained why Helge was so welcoming at least, but Peter didn’t want to be the only thing this man had to live for. 

“Hang on while I pack a bag for myself,” said Helge. “Then we’ll drive to the mansion.”

Peter nodded and looked around. There were little pinecone, acorn, and wood figurines on the shelf. Peter walked over and picked one up. It was so fragile and delicate. He looked at Helge, whose hands were shaking slightly as he packed. Interesting. Helge must have worked hard to make these. Or perhaps Helge hadn’t always been so shaky. Did he have Parkinson’s disease or something? What had happened to him?

After Helge had finished packing his bag they got into his car. Peter hoped Helge had a half-decent ability to drive. And Helge did, sort of. He drove so slow that it was almost painful. It was too dark for Peter to get a good look at his surroundings so he gave up on that.

While driving, Helge reminisced about Peter’s mother. “Your mother, she was so pretty. She was absolutely radiant. The most beautiful thing about her was her smile.” Peter could hear the admiration in his voice. “But she didn’t smile a lot in Winden. She wasn’t happy here. We both knew it, and we both knew that I wouldn't leave Winden. And so, she left Winden while I stayed. But I am glad to know that, while she was still here, I brought her what happiness I could.”

Peter was intrigued. He still wasn’t sure how his mother and Helge had a relationship. She really could have done much better than him.

Helge briefly glanced over at Peter. “Believe me, I knew she was out of my league. When I was with her, I felt like the luckiest man alive.”

That made Peter smile. What was it that his mother had said about Helge? “He was always so sweet.”

Helge lay awake in bed that night. It felt wrong to be back in his family’s mansion especially since his father had been killed here only two days ago. Helge tried to steer his thoughts back to Peter. Yes, Helge had reason to mourn, but he also had reason to celebrate. His son, his son that he never knew, had sought him out and found him. Now he had a purpose once more. Now he had a reason to live. Perhaps the diabolical man that haunted him in his sleep was wrong about God. There was a God. Peter, he was a gift from God. Perhaps the Lord was offering Helge a second chance.

Ever since he met Noah as a boy, faith had been Helge’s anchor, his compass, his strength. His faith gave Helge a will to live. His faith gave him hope. Noah had built up his faith only to tear it all down. Noah had taken away the one thing that gave him peace. And now Helge was beginning to cry just from remembering it all. Why was he so weak-willed? It would have been better if he had died long ago at the hands of the man with the stone or if Noah had taken him out of his misery. Noah, that god-cursed creature masquerading as a man of God—Noah did not save him. Noah had damned him to hell.

Helge tried to calm himself down. He tried to recall Bible verses about mercy, grace, and forgiveness. He didn’t want to think about eternal damnation right now. But instead, the verse that came to mind was the one Helge associated with Noah: Zechariah 11:16. “For I am now raising up in the land a shepherd who does not care for the perishing, or seek the wandering, or heal the maimed, or nourish the healthy, but devours the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs.”

Helge tried to think of something else, anything else, anything that wasn’t Noah or eternal damnation. But it was useless. Helge still couldn’t block out Noah’s words to him that day. “After looking into hell, as you have, it can never be forgotten. It becomes a part of you. And the idea of God, of Jesus the Savior, becomes a thread of hope you cling to. All of us who know the darkness long for the light, but … there is no God! God didn't make this hole among us. God doesn't have a plan. There is no plan at all. There's nothing but chaos out there. Pain… and chaos!”

And now Helge had blood on his hands. Helge was haunted by the fear in those children’s eyes—haunted by their screams and wails, haunted by the sight of their corpses, haunted by the truth.

But in the darkest of days, when everything worth living for was gone, a boy had arrived, a boy who needed him, a boy who gave him a purpose again. Helge told himself he would pick up the pieces of his shattered faith and his broken soul, and he would rebuild. It didn’t matter how tormented he was. Helge had a son, and for his son’s sake, Helge could not let himself drown in despair.

Chapter Text

The next few days were devoted to getting everything settled: moving things in and out of the mansion, bringing things from the cabin, dealing with paperwork, driving all the way to that storage facility where more of Peter’s belongings—which now included his mother’s things too—were stored, and ultimately, the funerals. Peter reminded himself that Helge was also dealing with the loss of a parent. It was weird and a bit unnerving that both he and his father had lost a parent right at the same time. It was all a blur for both of them, and they somehow staggered through it all. 

Monday. Peter found himself waiting outside the school, around the time it should end. It was pathetic to be waiting for someone outside the school like this. Peter hoped school would get out soon so he could stop thinking about how pathetic this was. He wouldn’t even start till next week, and here he was. Students began leaving the building. Peter did his best to ignore them and wait. He hoped he wasn’t waiting in vain. 

“Peter? What are you doing? Were you at school today? I didn’t see you,” said the person Peter had been waiting for: Charlotte. 

“I need to talk to somebody that’s not my father because neither me nor Helge really know how to interact with each other since neither of us ever thought we’d be in a situation like this. And it’s so awkward because now suddenly we live together even though we’re basically strangers, and I don’t know anybody else here except for you,” said Peter, all in one breath. 

They had gone to the woods to talk. Peter didn’t want to hang around the school and Charlotte said she’d planned to go to the forest later that day. They had sat down next to each other, each resting against a tree trunk.

“Neither of us have any idea what to do now, now that his father and my mother have passed,” said Peter.

“Helge’s father died too?” said Charlotte.

Peter nodded. “Bernd Doppler died two days before I arrived. And he died within a day of my mother. What are the odds of that? Now me and Helge are both mourning, and I feel like we’re both stuck in quicksand. We can’t get out of it and we can’t do anything to save each other. All we can do is watch each other sink.”

“That sounds awful,” Charlotte said softly. She sighed. Then, more to herself than to him, she said, “Why is life so goddamn sad? All at once, too, as if something’s trying to break us.”

Oh no, now he’d made Charlotte sad. He shouldn’t have talked about this, but he did, and now both of them were low-spirited. No, he didn’t mean to make her sad. Why did he have to be such an idiot? No, no, this wasn’t what he intended. 

“Peter, don’t worry. I’ve been like this for a while already; it’s not your fault,” said Charlotte.

She must’ve been able to tell what he was thinking from his facial expression. Wait, did all of his facial expressions give away his thoughts? No, no, this was not important. Charlotte—what did she mean?

“What exactly have you been like for a while now?” Peter asked hesitantly.

Charlotte shrugged slightly. Then, with a very pensive look, she said, “I’ve fallen into a spell of sadness.” She sighed. “I drag myself through life, day by day. Nothing more but nothing less, day by day by day.”

From the moment he met her, Peter felt like he had found a kindred spirit. Unfortunately, she was similar to him in this too. He knew this sort of feeling. He was able to read between the lines. What should he do? What could he do? He couldn’t protect Charlotte from her own thoughts and emotions. Peter couldn’t even protect himself from his own thoughts—thoughts that could always return, thoughts he had to guard against.

Peter put his hands on Charlotte’s shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “You are not alone. I know this feeling or something very similar to it. You are not alone in this.”

Charlotte was silent for exactly seven seconds—Peter counted. Then, she said, “Even if we’re alone, at least we’re together in being alone.”

Peter drew himself back and nodded. “At least there’s that.” A confusing jumble of emotions that he couldn’t sort out struck at his heart, and he wasn’t sure what to do. Well, there was one thing he needed to know. 

“Are you—er, should I—no, uhh, will you be safe?” he stammered. Peter didn’t know how exactly he should ask such a delicate question. “Will you be safe from yourself?” was what he meant. 

Charlotte said, “Yes, I’ll be fine. I’m doing fine enough right now. I haven’t lost the will to live, not yet. What about you?”

“I’m also doing fine enough,” he said. Had he really asked Charlotte something so personal? Did he just do that? And what was he supposed to say or do now? Charlotte was silent—what was she thinking? Was she thinking about him? What would she be thinking about him? Something good or something bad?

“Let’s talk about something else so we can get our minds off of this,” said Charlotte. “Tell me something that’s not related to any of this.”

“What do you want to hear about?”

“I don’t know. Is there something you find fascinating enough that you could ramble on and on about it, something that you’d have no problem talking about?”

Psychology, of course. It fascinated Peter—the history, the methods, the experiments, the schools of thought, all of it was fascinating. And better yet, he could sound so smart talking about it. This was his chance to show off!

“Are you sure? Because I will ramble if you let me talk about it,” he said.

“Go ahead. Enlighten me,” she said.

“Okay then. When you get tired of hearing me blather on, just tell me to shut up,” said Peter. “Now. You’ve probably heard of Sigmund Freud before, but have you ever heard of Wilhelm Wundt?”

“I have not,” said Charlotte.

In a grand, theatrical voice, Peter said, “The year is Leipzig and the place—shit. Let me try that again. The year is 1879 and the place is Leipzig.”

Peter realized it later in the evening. He liked Charlotte, and now he knew that it wasn’t just a shallow crush based on something superficial. It was still a crush, but don’t all relationships start out with infatuation? He cared about her. He should tell her, shouldn’t he? It’s better to ask someone out before a friendship starts, right? That way, there wouldn’t be a friendship that might be ruined. What did he have to lose? And what better way was there to get over a crush than giving it a shot? If it didn’t work, then he’d realize it rather than wonder and wonder about it.

But now, if he did ask her out, she would probably think all of that empathy was fake. She’d think that he was just pretending—that all he wanted to do was hook up with her. Peter wasn’t sleazy, but nobody knew him here. There was nobody that could vouch for him. And even worse, nobody knew anything about him, so this could potentially be the first thing people would hear about him. Then they’d get the wrong impression of him. Oh, what could he do now?

Great, now there were two people that he didn’t know how to interact with, and those two people were also the only two people he knew in Winden.

Chapter Text

Helge stood in the graveyard at the place Ulla Schmidt had been buried. Why hadn’t she told him about their son? Did she think that he would try to convince her to stay in Winden? Did she think that he would leave Winden for them? Or did she want to leave it all behind—anything and everything associated with Winden? 

Helge walked over to the graves of his parents. Dwelling on all the potential reasons Ulla might not have told him about Peter would not get Helge very far. Bernd and Greta Doppler—at least they were reunited at last. Would Helge ever join them? It was not easy believing in God, not now that his soul was stained with the blood of innocents. 

He looked in the direction of the church warily. Noah had left, but he could always return, could he not? Even worse, Noah might have fled to another time, found a new accomplice, and carried on with his sinister ways. Helge even wondered if Noah, in a final attempt to break his soul entirely, had murdered Bernd. Noah might not stop there. He could always return. He might take Peter next. Helge could see it in his mind—his son a corpse, eyes burned out, another unknown body found in an unknown time. 

Helge cursed himself for not killing Noah when he had the chance. Why was he so weak-willed? He’d never be free of Noah, not even in death: Helge might very well be reunited with Noah in hell. He tried to push that awful thought out of his mind and clutched the coin he wore around his neck. He looked in the direction of Mads Nielsen’s grave, then walked over to the graves of the “boys of ’53.” Erik Obendorf and Yasin Friese. Here and now only Helge knew their names. He would not let himself forget. 

Perhaps, just perhaps, Helge could save them in 2019—save them from himself and from the man of God who was really a man of the devil. What if Helge could change things? The man with the stone had said he could change the past and the future, and he had already been right about one thing.

Was it wrong that instead of trying to understand his own father better Peter was daydreaming about a girl? It did make him feel guilty a bit. But Peter had tried to learn more about Helge, and he lived with the man, so surely he’d come to understand his father better in time. It felt awkward and forced to ask his father questions about his life, and it felt awkward and forced for Peter to come up with things to say about himself. It was that same feeling Peter would get when, at the beginning of the year, at least one teacher would inevitably ask everyone to introduce themselves and share an interesting fact or two about themselves.

Charlotte was difficult to understand in a different way. Peter hoped that Charlotte and Helge happened to be the two most difficult people to understand in Winden. If everyone in Winden was like this, or even more difficult to understand—no, no, he was letting Winden get to him! Charlotte had warned him; nobody stays an optimist in Winden for long.

Peter told himself that if nothing ever happened between the two of them, if Charlotte rejected him, or if they got together but broke up, it would not be the end of the world. He would be able to get over her and move on. He had gotten over these sorts of feelings before: when things didn’t turn out right, when he made missteps that ruined everything, when his attempts at romance and relationships inevitably failed to last. Peter told himself he only thought Charlotte was different because he had feelings for her. He told himself that he only thought he had a deeper connection with her because he wanted it to be true.

The thought that this could be something truly important was daunting, so very daunting. Peter knew how this would go: he’d be overwhelmed with fear, unable to speak, unable to act, unable to think. He did not want to set himself up for failure or heartbreak. 

Yet his father had managed to charm his mother somehow, so Peter still had hope. If Helge had managed to do that, then surely Peter could at least tell Charlotte he liked her. Maybe it would go well, maybe not, but at least he would have tried. He should say something soon. He could play it off as something like this: “Oh, you look cute, and you’re single, and I’m single, and we get along so far. How about we go out together?” It sounded superficial and shallow, but that would be easier for him to say than something like this: “I have an overpowering crush on you; please, will you go out with me?”

Peter told himself he’d tell Charlotte once he managed to find her. He would tell her, right? Right? He could do it. Yes, he’d tell her. He’d absolutely, definitely, totally tell her. Or would he overthink it? Peter decided it would be better to focus on something else, like actually finding Charlotte.

It felt strange showing up at the school to talk to her, and she’d mentioned she usually goes to the woods, so Peter had decided he’d try to find her there. Unfortunately, “the woods” could refer to a large area, larger than Peter had anticipated. The spindly trees felt somewhat threatening, and Peter did not want to feel threatened by trees of all things. He’d been wandering around through the forest for—well, he wasn’t sure how long. He also wasn’t entirely certain that he knew how to find his way out of the forest.

Charlotte had said, “I feel at ease here in the woods, even though I don’t consider myself an outdoorsy sort of person.”

Peter did not feel remotely at ease here in the woods. He didn’t even feel at ease in Winden, not even in the Doppler mansion—which was his home, at least for now. Hopefully this was something that would go away with time. Perhaps Winden was an acquired taste. 

It had taken a while, but Peter had finally done it. He had found Charlotte! At this point, she wasn’t just the person he had wanted to talk to. She was also Peter’s only hope of finding his way out of the woods. He hoped he’d be able to find his way home once he got out of this godforsaken forest, but if it was absolutely necessary, he might have to ask Charlotte to walk him home.

“Here to finish telling me about Skinner boxes and the behaviorists?” she said.

“Uh, no,” said Peter, trying not to sound worn out from his trek through the forest. He wasn’t ready to tell her that he had feelings for her. He needed to come up with something fast. 

“I’m trying to familiarize myself with this place, you know, just to learn my way around,” he said. “So I’ve just been walking around, trying to get used to this place.”

“Ah, what do you think so far?” asked Charlotte.

What did he think? He hadn’t had time to think of what he should say. Charlotte was looking at him, waiting for an answer. What should he say? Quick, quick, Peter needed to come up with an answer.

“Even the trees here are oppressive and threatening,” he said. Peter immediately wished he had said something else. Did that not sound stupid? Maybe he should wait to tell Charlotte about his feelings. He couldn’t risk saying anything stupid on top of what he had already said, could he?

Peter thought he saw Charlotte smile for a second, but her smile was so slight that he couldn’t be sure. 

“I suppose I should’ve given you a stronger warning, but it’s too late now,” said Charlotte, who looked and sounded dead serious. “Welcome to hell on earth.”

“Hell on earth?” he asked, trying not to sound worried. If that was what the people here thought of their hometown, then surely Winden must be even worse.

“Don’t worry, I don’t actually think Winden is hell on earth,” said Charlotte, laughing quietly. “I didn’t even come up with that. Katharina is the one that says Winden is hell on earth. And if I tell her, ‘Go to hell,’ you know what she’ll say? ‘What do you mean? We’re already here,’ or something along those lines. I don’t know, I think it’s kinda funny, but that’s just me.”

Peter felt so relieved that she had only been joking that he didn’t mind Charlotte laughing at his expense. 

He said, “Ah, so nobody’s being serious when they say Winden is hell on earth?”

“Well,” said Charlotte, sounding uncertain and choosing her words carefully, “I don’t think anybody believes it in a literal sense.”

That answer was not reassuring.

Chapter Text

“I’ll have to tell you about everything that happened last year. I can explain it in more detail later,” said Charlotte. “But, for now, I’ll just tell you this: it involved sheep and birds dying, a missing persons case, lights flickering for no apparent reason—even things like flashlights and headlights—ominous noises from the caves, a false rape accusation, two new people showing up in Winden with no apparent reason for coming here—and they also never discuss their pasts—and an incident at the nuclear power plant.”

“What the hell’s going on here? What the hell is this place?” Peter said, trying to hide the intense feeling of unease that came over him.

“Winden,” Charlotte said with a slight shrug.

“I don’t think I like this place,” said Peter.

“I don’t think anyone does. Except maybe Aleksander Köhler—he was one of those two people that came here last year. The other one was just a kid, but Köhler is twenty-two, so he made the decision to come to Winden.”

Peter tore handfuls of blades of grass from the ground, in an effort to prevent himself from showing how much this town weirded him out. He was sitting near Charlotte—but not too close—on a grassy slope on the edge of the woods. Should he ask Charlotte to elaborate about Winden, or was it better not to know more about whatever was going on in this godforsaken place?

“Nobody knows why Köhler came here,” Charlotte continued. “Oh, I forgot to mention, he pointed a gun at a friend of mine and threatened to shoot her, so there’s that.”

Peter tried not to lose his nerve, but it was a struggle. “Please, change the subject,” he said. “I can’t take it. Just—no more about this place, or the people, or whatever else happens here.”

Charlotte seemed to understand and stopped talking. Peter didn’t have anything else to talk about, so he went silent too. What was Charlotte thinking about right now? What did she think about him? Did she think that he was afraid of everything about this town?

“I think it’s a good thing to be direct,” Charlotte said abruptly, bringing Peter out of his thoughts. She was looking straight ahead, but she turned to look at him briefly before going back to staring dead ahead. “It avoids confusion.”

Peter stopped tearing blades of grass up, hoping that Charlotte hadn’t noticed. He tried to quickly sweep the blades of grass by his hands away from him. “It does,” he said, referring to being direct. He wondered where this was going.

He hoped she wouldn’t tell him more about Winden that would make him even more convinced that something was wrong here. But then again, maybe it would be better to know.

A few seconds later, Charlotte said, “Then I’ll be direct.”

Peter ignored the grass and looked at her expectantly.

Charlotte continued to look straight ahead, not turning her head even slightly to look in Peter’s direction.

Sounding remarkably impassive, not betraying her emotions, Charlotte said, “I’ve got a crush on you. Should I get over it?”

“What? Uh, no,” Peter said quickly, still trying to process what she’d said. “No, don’t get over it. I like you too.”

A thousand thoughts rushed through his head—suddenly a thousand thoughts were there, then gone. Peter didn’t know how long he took to gather his thoughts—maybe it took a second, maybe it took a minute or more—he didn’t know. There was one thing Peter knew: his spirits were higher than they’d been in a long time.

He marveled at the way Charlotte had managed to do what he couldn’t. She’d confessed her feelings, and she’d done it in a way that was surprisingly indirect for being direct. She’d managed to say it in such a way that the question completely changed. The question was no longer “Do you like me?” or “Will you go out with me?” No no, Charlotte had done it in her own peculiar way. Now the question was one that did not leave her open to rejection. In fact, the correct answer was no!

“You astound me,” Peter told her. “You are amazing.”

Charlotte smiled—ah, Peter’s heart couldn’t take it! “I feel like we can finally breathe,” she said.

“Agreed,” said Peter. “So, uh, now that we know we both like each other…” He had spoken too soon. Now Peter felt like he could barely speak. Finally he managed to say, “Do you want to go out with me?”

Charlotte hesitated to answer. “Yes. Wait, I’m not sure. I think so.”

No, no, this wasn’t good, was it? Peter was afraid his heart would give out.

Charlotte attempted to explain. “I want to say yes, but—like, I’m not—I don’t think—wait, no, that’s not the right way to say it. Hang on, hang on. I feel like I need to read a lot of self-help books before I can feel like I’m capable of doing this right.” She looked at him nervously.

Okay, this situation wasn’t as bad as Peter had feared. It didn’t seem like Charlotte was rejecting him. She was just a bit unconfident. And was she getting flustered? Over him? Peter had a feeling that he was starting to blush if he hadn’t already. “That’s okay, that’s perfectly okay,” Peter said, trying to think of anything he could say that might reassure her or boost her confidence. “For our first date, we can go to the library and read self-help books together.”

“Deal,” said Charlotte.

Peter had no idea how serious she was being, but by God, if it would make her happy, he would read a bookstore’s worth of self-help books with her.

“For better or for worse,” said Charlotte, “I get the feeling that we’re equally unconfident about this.”

“Well,” Peter said, beginning to grin in a way that probably looked stupid, “I think you’re absolutely right, for better or for worse.”

“At least we’ll understand each other then.”

“We don’t already?”

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand you at all, and sometimes I feel like I understand you so well, it’s like, well, this will sound stupid, but it’s like—I feel like we knew each other in another life.”

Yes, that was a good way to describe it. Peter felt similarly about Charlotte even though he hadn’t thought of it in those terms. He felt drawn to her as if something was pulling at his heart—as if something tied the two of them together.

“You steal my heart,” Peter said, too happy to bother stopping himself from talking.  Charlotte briefly looked away—and was she blushing?

Then Charlotte asked, “Can we agree that, come what may, let’s try to have no hard feelings against each other? Could we try to still be friends even if this ends terribly?”

“Yes, absolutely! No hard feelings, come what may,” Peter said.

Peter and Charlotte shook on it and laughed at themselves when they realized the absurdity of shaking hands on something like this.

With A Journey Through Time in his trembling hands, Helge finally mustered enough courage to open the door and step into H.G. Tannhaus’s clock shop. HG appeared and stepped behind the counter. Helge gripped the book in his hands tighter. He heard countless clocks ticking away. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock… Time permeated every corner of this room.

“Helge?” HG said. “How may I help you?”

Helge told himself to focus because he could easily reveal too much if he spoke carelessly. He had to be very careful. “I want to ask you some questions about your book.”

“Ah, another unexpected fan? I never knew my book would reach such an audience,” HG said. “Here, come in. Sit down.”

“I want to talk about time travel in particular.”

Chapter Text

“You see nothing is complete without a third dimension,” said HG.

Helge nodded along. It was embarrassing how little he understood the concepts that H.G. Tannhaus—yes, H.G. Tannhaus himself—was trying to explain to him. Helge hoped he could leave before the true depth of his ignorance was revealed. Helge could not afford to let HG think he was a dunce with no understanding of the most basic elements of time travel.

“For that reason, it only makes sense that a wormhole would connect not two but three dimensions. Does that help? Does that chapter make more sense to you now?”

“Yes,” Helge said, getting up to leave. “Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me. Unfortunately I don’t have time today to discuss the next chapter.”

“Another time then,” said HG.

Helge nodded. “Yes, another time.”

The second he was out the door Helge breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t revealed his own stupidity. Now he could reread A Journey Through Time before talking with HG again. Helge walked as briskly as he could manage. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the car crash last November. Rehabilitation at the nursing home had taken months, but Helge told himself he should be grateful that his injuries hadn’t been worse.

Helge hadn’t gotten far when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. There was a boy, and when Helge saw the boy’s face he was overcome with dread and deep, deep fear. No, that was not just any boy. That was Jana’s boy. Helge tried to avoid Jana, desolate Jana, forever mourning the loss of her youngest son. He couldn’t even look at her without hearing the pleas of young Mads Nielsen in his mind. Why did this boy, Jana’s living son, cause Helge so much fear and dread? Was it simply because he was Jana’s son and the brother of Mads, or was there more to it?

The boy noticed Helge staring at him and gazed back. Suddenly the walls of the cave were closing in on Helge, darkness blotted out all light and engulfed him, and Noah seized him, ready to drag Helge to the deepest depths of hell.

Peter nearly shouted for joy when he got back to the Doppler mansion. His heart was soaring. He had a date, a date with Charlotte Tannhaus at some undetermined time in the future! The phone rang, so Peter went to answer it. He could celebrate later.

“Hello,” Peter said, picking up the phone. “This is, uh, this is the Doppler residence, Peter speaking.” He tried to remember the way his mom had taught him to answer the phone, the polite way. He stumbled through his words. “To whom do I have the pleasure—”

“Peter, this is H.G. Tannhaus. Your—”

As soon as Peter heard the name Tannhaus, he said, “Hang on, I’ll get Charlotte, just wait there!” Then he dropped the receiver, flung the door open, and ran.

Charlotte had walked him home, so Peter had time to catch her before she got too far. He was huffing and panting by the time he saw her. Thankfully she was walking home rather than running.

“Charlotte, Charlotte!” he called. “Charlotte, stop, stop! Wait!”

She stopped and Peter nearly collided into her. “Charlotte,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Charlotte, you—your grandfather, he’s—wait.” Peter had to stop and take a breath before continuing. “He called. So I told him to wait while I got you, and that’s,”—Peter took another breath—“well, here you are. Let’s go back.”

“Huh, I wonder what he wants,” said Charlotte. She and Peter began to head back to the Doppler mansion. “Should we walk? Should I go ahead of you?”

“Yes, yes, you know the way,” Peter panted. “Go, hurry. Forward, Charlotte, forward!”

Charlotte nodded and jogged ahead, disappearing from view. Peter was too tired to even consider trying to keep up with her. By the time he reached the Doppler mansion, she was already inside, answering the phone.

“Peter’s back,” she said into the phone. Then to Peter, she said, “Peter, it turns out my grandpa was calling for you, not me.”

“Oh,” he said, collapsing into a chair. That made more sense now that Peter thought about it. “What does he want?”

“So, the funny thing is that your father is at our house—well, at the clock shop. For some reason, after Helge left, he must’ve seen something that really spooked him ’cause he came right back. He insists that he’s not able to go home unless you come to get him.”

Peter sighed. “So, more walking?”

“Yep, unless you’ve got a bike, roller skates, or the ability to hot-wire a car. At least you already went to get me. I know the way, and you probably don’t,” said Charlotte.

“Ah, yeah,” Peter said as he got up. “I’d be completely lost without you. Lead the way.”

They foolishly decided to jog rather than walk. By the time they reached the edge of town, Peter and Charlotte had run themselves ragged. Heaving and wheezing, they had long since given up on trying to talk to each other. Soon they heard two voices.

One shouted, “Don’t dent it! Katharina, no, don’t dent it!”

“It’s easy, just like riding a normal bike,” said the other.

“Be careful! Careful! You’re going to crash it, Katharina! Katharina, no!”

After rounding the corner, Peter saw a boy and a girl up ahead. The girl was riding a moped, going in wide circles and laughing while the boy looked on with terror. The girl stopped when she spotted Peter and Charlotte.

“Hey, taxidermist-in-training,” she called out to them.

Charlotte glanced at Peter for a fraction of a second before answering. Wearily she said, “Yep, that’s me.”

Well then. Evidently “taxidermist-in-training” was a name Charlotte answered to.

The boy rushed to his moped and pushed the girl off. Relieved, he hugged the handlebars.

“Peter, that’s Katharina, and that’s Ulrich,” Charlotte said, pointing to them. 

Katharina ignored Ulrich and focused on Charlotte. “Tannhaus, first you bail on running with me for the second time in a row, and then you show up here with a new workout buddy?”

“Ah, sorry about that,” said Charlotte. “No, Peter and I, we didn’t plan to go on a run. We just have somewhere to be.”

“Peter,” Katharina said, studying him. “Am I supposed to know him from somewhere? Have we met before?”

“No, I’m new to Winden,” said Peter.

Katharina and Ulrich looked at him like he was absolutely mental. “It wasn’t my choice,” he explained.

“Hey, Ulrich, listen,” Charlotte interrupted. “Out of the kindness of your heart, could you give Peter a ride to my place?”

“Oh? What are your reasons for requesting this of me?” Ulrich said.

Charlotte walked up to Ulrich and for a second Peter thought she’d grab Ulrich and shake him. “The clock shop, Ulrich, the clock shop! That’s where he’s going ’cause his father is there, and Peter needs to get him, and both of us are tired, so very tired.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“My eternal gratitude and undying loyalty.”

“You don’t have to sell your soul to me,” said Ulrich. “No, keep it; you’re actually a half-decent person.”

“All right, well, I saved your bike from being wrecked by Katharina,” Charlotte said.

“Hey, you know full well that I’m capable of steering that thing,” Katharina protested. Then she shifted her attention to Peter. “New person, do you like heavy metal?”

“Uh, I don’t listen to it,” Peter admitted.

Katharina looked at Ulrich expectantly.

“So he has shitty taste in music. What does that have to do with anything?” said Ulrich.

“Use your brain if that’s not too much to ask of you,” Katharina said.

“What do you—oh wait, I get it.” Ulrich turned to Peter. “Okay, I’ll drop you off where you need to be if you promise me one thing.”

Oh no. Peter got a bad feeling from the grin on Ulrich’s face.

“You and me, we are going to listen to heavy metal, and you’ll give me a chance to convince you that it is the greatest music known to man.”

Peter was thrown off by how surprisingly benign that was. “Okay, sure.”

The first thing Peter noticed was the sheer amount of clocks in the Tannhaus store. Sure, the man was a clockmaker, but it still took Peter by surprise. 

An older man emerged from behind a curtain and said, “Peter? I’m H.G. Tannhaus.”

“Hi, yes, that’s me, Peter,” Peter said.

“Your father’s over there.” Tannhaus pointed to the back of the clock shop. Helge was curled up, sitting in a corner, and muttering “tick-tock” to himself over and over again.

“He’s been like this for some time now. I wasn’t sure what I should do,” said HG. “I thought he might want to listen to a clock or watch since he keeps saying “tick-tock,” so I put out a few of them out near him, but he hasn’t touched them.”

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate the gesture,” Peter said, too stunned to say more.

“Peter, Peter, you’re here,” Helge said, getting up and embracing Peter. He held on to Peter, clutching his shoulders.

“Yes, I’m here,” Peter managed to say.

Ulrich was still outside, curiously looking in their direction. Did he doubt Charlotte when she explained why Peter needed to get to the clock shop? Helge’s grip on Peter tightened as they walked past Ulrich. Was Helge shaking right now?

“You are my strength,” Helge whispered to him. Peter didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know what to say to any of this.

Helge didn’t say anything else until they had nearly gotten back to the Doppler mansion. Sounding grateful, he said, “Thank you, son. Thank you.”

There were many things about his father that Peter didn’t understand, but Peter could tell that Helge needed him and was truly thankful for Peter.

Chapter Text

“Peter,” said Helge. “I have to warn you.”

Finally, Helge was going to address whatever it was that happened at the Tannhaus clock shop. Peter hoped he’d get an explanation for whatever caused that whole situation. HG had assumed that Peter had some idea of what was going on, and Peter felt guilty that he was as clueless as HG. As Helge’s son, he should know more about his father.

“There’s a man,” Helge said in his hesitant, unsteady way. “A dangerous man.”

Peter tried to be patient and wait for Helge to get to the point, however long that might take.

“A pastor, but not a real one,” Helge continued. “He’s dangerous, Peter, he’s dangerous!” He put his hands on Peter’s shoulders. Peter felt him shaking. “Never let your guard down.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “I’ll keep my guard up.”

“Good,” Helge said. He hugged Peter tightly. “Good.” 

Helge left it at that, leaving Peter confused and concerned.

“Should I drive you?” asked Helge.

“No, I can get there on my own,” Peter said. 

When they had walked home from the clock shop, Helge had apologetically explained that he didn’t like to drive because of a car crash last year. Peter did not want to be in a car with Helge if Helge was the one driving. Sure, his father had said that the crash was completely the fault of the other driver, but Peter was still apprehensive.

“Be safe.”

“Helge,” said Peter, hesitating at the door, “will you be all right while I’m at school?” Helge still hadn’t addressed the incident at Tannhaus’s shop. What if something like that happened again today?

“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’ll be fine,” Helge said. He awkwardly patted Peter on the shoulder in an attempt to reassure him. “Don’t worry about me. If anything, it’s my job to worry about you now.”

“All right then,” said Peter, trying to sound reassured. “Bye.” With a quick wave, Peter was out the door and on his way.

A second later, his father called, “Wait, should I go with you? I’ll go with you.”

No, no, this was not how Peter wanted this to go. “You really don’t need to,” he shouted over his shoulder, continuing to walk ahead. 

Peter probably wouldn’t get to school on time if he was walking with Helge. His father wasn’t—well, he didn’t seem to be in the best of health. Helge definitely was no athlete. Peter did feel guilty about rejecting Helge like this when the man was just trying to spend some time together, but still, Peter had somewhere to be. It was nice, having a place to be and something to do, even if it was school. Wait, wait, was he looking forward to school? Oh God, Winden really had gotten to him, hadn’t it?

“Peter!” Helge shouted, trying to catch up.

“Oh,” said Peter, trying to think of a polite way to turn Helge down. “Um, you really don’t have to, uh, put yourself through so much trouble for my sake.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Helge huffed as he finally caught up. “No, I insist. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t see you off to school on your first day here?”

Peter sighed. “Well, I do appreciate it. Really, I do,” he said, “but I’m afraid we won’t get there on time.”

“Then,” Helge said in that slow and cautious manner of his, “I guess that means I’ll drive you.”

Peter didn’t have the heart to refuse. 

Helge drove well enough. He was a very cautious driver, and Peter was grateful for that. They got to school with some time to spare, so Peter decided to wait around outside.

It was time to get back to carrying on with life. It wasn’t like Peter had much of a choice. But was it wrong to do so? Was he not grieving right? His mother had died. The life Peter had known was gone. Shouldn’t he be grieving more? Why wasn’t he grieving more? What did that mean? Was he cold and uncaring?

“Peter, hey!” someone called, interrupting Peter’s thoughts. It was Katharina.

“Oh, hello,” he said, glad that he had something to distract him from his thoughts about grieving.

“Charlotte told me that you two are together,” Katharina said gleefully.

“Oh, yeah, we’re together.”

“How did that happen?” Katharina asked.

“Uh, what do you mean?”

“Well, one of you must’ve said something to the other, you know. How did that go?”

Peter wasn’t in the mood to talk about something that personal with Katharina since he barely knew her. He needed to find something else to talk about. He looked around and saw a young man leaning against the side of the building, too old to be a student but too young to be a teacher. 

“Hey, who’s that guy?” Peter asked, pointing to the man.

“Oh, that bastard,” said Katharina. “Aleksander Köhler. He’s Regina’s boyfriend, and if you say one wrong word to her, he’ll beat you up.”

“Who’s Regina?” Peter asked, glad he had successfully changed the subject.

“Regina Tiedemann. I’ll point her out to you if I see her.” Then, lowering her voice as if sharing scandalous gossip, Katharina said, “You know, she and Aleksander are living together. Alone.” Bitterly, she added, “Yet I’m the one that gets called a whore.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s just an easy way to insult a girl. Regina is a vengeful bitch if I ever knew one.”

“And you aren’t a bit of a vengeful bitch?” said Charlotte, who had just arrived.

“Oh, fuck off, Charlotte,” said Katharina, now in a jocular mood, lightly shoving her.

Charlotte smiled and laughed quietly.

“I was just warning Peter here about Aleksander Köhler.”

Charlotte stopped smiling. “I think it’s pathetic how he hangs around the school, ready to beat teenagers up. He’s an adult. Doesn’t he doesn’t have anything better to do?”

Peter thought Katharina was exaggerating about Aleksander, but now that Charlotte said the same thing, he was worried. “Has he actually beaten someone up, or is that just what he threatens to do?”

“Oh, he did beat up this one kid several months ago,” said Charlotte.

“Yeah, ’cause that kid was an idiot. He thought it was just an empty threat, so he dared Aleksander to beat him up,” Katharina said, resting an elbow on Peter’s shoulder. “Went as well as you’d expect. Don’t say anything stupid and don’t act like an idiot, and you should be fine. You wouldn’t say you’re an idiot, now, would you?”

“No, I would not,” Peter said, surprised that Katharina’s jesting had improved his mood.

“You did good for yourself, Charlotte,” Katharina declared.

“Oh, shut up,” Charlotte said.

Peter Schmidt. That’s how he was introduced in each class. He hadn’t given it much thought until now, but he began to wonder if he should keep his last name or change it to Doppler. How did Helge feel about this? Was Helge secretly hoping Peter would one day say, “I think I’ll start going by Peter Doppler”? And what about his mother? Could Peter simply discard her surname like that? So much had changed since she had died. Shouldn’t he hold on to the things that hadn’t changed, the things from his old life that he could take with him into this new chapter of his life? 

Every time he wrote his name on worksheets and in his notebooks, his heart sank. Sooner or later, he’d have to make a choice. Even if he did nothing, that was still making a choice and picking a side. Right now, the only effect of using his mother’s surname was that nobody made the connection to Helge Doppler. Nobody realized that Peter was the bastard child of one of Winden’s own. But this would not last. Was he Peter Schmidt, the outsider looking in on Winden, or was he Peter Doppler, new to Winden yet wholly part of it?

Chapter Text

“Hang on, I want to show you something,” said Charlotte. She took something down from a shelf in the back of the clock shop and set it down on the table.

Peter couldn’t tell what it was. It was some sort of device. It had dials and gears and switches. It looked very intricate.

“What do you think this is?” asked Charlotte.

“Uh, I’m not sure,” Peter admitted.

“Come on, you’re smart. Guess what it is.”

“Do I have to?” He didn’t want to guess what that strange thing was. He was sure that any guess would make him sound stupid.

“Yes, you have to,” said Charlotte. “Look, I don’t know what it is either. I want to know what you think it might be.”

Peter scrutinized the unknown apparatus, trying to gain any insight into its intended purpose or function. “Who made it?” he asked.

“My grandfather.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about it?”

“Sometimes—well, rarely—the machine would start whirring and clicking on its own for no apparent reason,” Charlotte said.

Peter looked for a gear on the outside of the machine that he might be able to turn. He tried to turn something that looked like it could be a gear, but it didn’t budge. He flipped a switch, expecting something to happen—nothing did.

Peter crouched down till his eyes were level with the table. He stared at the machine, half-hoping he would have an epiphany. “Does this thing work? I don’t think it does,” he said. “Did it ever work?”

“That’s hard to say since I don’t know what it’s supposed to do. The machine’s condition has deteriorated a lot since last year. I don’t know what happened to it except that I didn’t do anything to it. The weird thing is that my grandfather doesn’t seem to care about it any more.”

“What would make him care about this thing to begin with?” Peter asked. “Does it have some sentimental value?”

“Maybe. He worked on it for thirty-three whole years, so it had to be important to him in some way.”

Peter quickly stepped back from the machine. Thirty-three whole years? This thing was way too important to be toying around with it. He shouldn’t have touched it. What if it broke? What if it had already been broken but HG didn’t know that and blamed him?

Charlotte laughed at how Peter recoiled. “This machine, it was built to last. Very durable,” she said, hitting the side of it to illustrate her point. “I bet it would still be fine even if I hurled it all the way into the caves. This thing will last till the end of time!”

“I’ll take your word for that.”

“Good. You know, I think this thing has some sentimental value to me even though I still don’t know what it is,” said Charlotte. She spun a cylinder-shaped part of the machine around. “It’s just always been here, you know? And I’ve been wondering about it since I was little. Maybe it’ll be a mystery to me forever. Maybe it’s better that way.” Then with a change of tone, she said, “Oh, you still haven’t guessed what this is yet.”

Peter sighed. “Fine, I’ll take a guess,” he said. “According to you, your grandfather makes clocks and watches. You said he made this. Therefore, this is a clock or a watch.”

“Clever! Absolutely brilliant,” Charlotte said sarcastically. “Great logic.”

“Come on, you can’t expect me to know what that thing is if you don’t know the answer yourself,” Peter said. “And what if it turns out that I’m right?”

“Hmm, I suppose there’s a possibility that you might be right,” she said. “It could be a timepiece of some sort. He’s made unusual types of clocks before, like a water clock.”

“A water clock?”

“Well, calling a water clock a clock would be like calling a sundial a sun clock or an hourglass a sand clock. It’s not really what we’d consider a clock, but it was used for timekeeping in ancient times. There’s another word for it too: clepsydra.”

“Wow, your grandfather is quite the horologist,” Peter said. “See, I can use fancy words too.”

Charlotte slightly smiled as she circled around HG’s work table and said, “So. What sort of tools would you need to build whatever it is that you’re building?”

“Oh,” Peter said. “That. I don’t know if it’s even feasible.”

Earlier he had mentioned that he came up with an interesting idea, just a fun project to do. Peter had been just about to tell Charlotte what his idea was—until he realized that his project might not be possible. Now he regretted saying anything about it. His sudden refusal to tell Charlotte had only made her more curious about it.

“You could just tell me what this project of yours is,” she said. “Maybe I’d know.”

“It’s just a dumb idea. I have no clue where I’d even start.”

Charlotte held up a very small tool, likely one of HG’s tools for making and repairing watches. “Will you be working with something small?”

“Uh, not that small,” Peter said.

“All right then,” said Charlotte. “Hmm, I think we’ve got some power tools in the garage. Do you think you’d need any power tools?”

Charlotte had believed that there wasn’t much in self-help books that could help her. Now, as she and Peter read over some books they found in the self-help section of the library, Charlotte felt even more convinced. So why had she mentioned self-help books to Peter?

Peter was directly across from her, leaning against the bookshelf opposite her. They were both sitting on the floor of the library, between two bookshelves, with a messy pile of self-help books between them. 

“Peter,” Charlotte said, “when I first brought up self-help books, what exactly did I say?”

Peter looked up from the book he was half-heartedly reading. “You said you wanted to read self-help books because you weren’t confident about being in a relationship.”

Charlotte shook her head. “No, I want to know what my exact words were.”

Peter looked up at the ceiling and sighed as he tried to recall the exact words of that conversation. Finally, he said, “You said, ‘I feel like I need to read a lot of self-help books before I can feel like I’m capable of doing this right.’”

That was it. That was the reason. Charlotte felt like she needed to read self-help books even though she didn’t think that those would help her. So the real question was why she felt the need to read self-help books. With a sinking feeling, Charlotte realized that she already knew. It was because she felt so lacking. She really didn’t want to think about the implications of that right now. She tried to focus on something else, anything else.

Peter stood up and stretched. He said, “Hang on, I’ll be back in a second. I’m gonna look around for some other books.”

While Peter wandered between bookshelves, Charlotte went back to skimming through self-help books. She decided to focus on finding all those strange New Age ideas that had shown up a couple of times.

She was reading about how all problems, all that was wrong in the world, could be solved with enough motivation and positivity—all bullshit, of course—when Peter returned. He tossed a book on top of her pile of self-help books.

“Waiting for Godot,” he said. “It’s a play. I think you should read it. I think it’s like Winden. Well, the way you talk about Winden reminded me of it, and it’s a play I like.”

Charlotte picked the book up. “Have you ever seen it?”

“Oh, ah, no,” Peter said. “I’ve never seen a performance or anything. I just like some of the scenes, you know, and the dialogue. It’s kinda fun to read the lines out and stuff.”

“I’ll get around to reading it then,” Charlotte said. “Or I might as well read it now. After reading these books,” she said, gesturing to the pile of self-help books, “I feel qualified to write one myself. And I don’t mean that in a good way.”

Peter had brought back a book on psychology—of course—which he was now reading. Charlotte had hoped that he’d bring back a book that was related to whatever his project was. Maybe his project was something related to psychology, maybe not. Charlotte gave up on that and decided to do something useful. She began going through the chaotic pile of books scattered all around her to put them back on the shelves. 

She found a book that she definitely hadn’t put in the book pile. “Peter, is this one of your books?” 

Peter shut his eyes tightly, sighed, and said nothing for several seconds. 

“Are you planning on building a model of Noah’s ark? A nativity set, perhaps? Or do you just like reading Bible stories for children?”

“Look,” said an embarrassed Peter. “Helge reads the Bible a lot, and I mean a lot, like a sinner on his deathbed. I don’t have much to talk about with him. I don’t really know what his interests are other than that. So I’ll talk to him about Bible stuff if I have to.” Taking the book out of Charlotte’s hands, he said, “I’m sure all the Sunday school stories will come back to memory with a quick read over this.”

“Huh, I guess that makes sense,” Charlotte said. “But you can’t think of anything better to do with him?”

“Well, I got an idea a second ago, when you asked if I was going to build a model of Noah’s ark,” Peter said. “Model kits, like of airplanes and ships—that’s what I could do with Helge!” Peter sounded almost giddy now. “He makes these tiny little figures out of acorns and sticks, so maybe he’d like to build a model with me. That’s what we’ll do. Which do you think he’d prefer: building a model airplane or a model ship?”

Chapter Text

“So what is it you want to discuss today?” said HG.

Helge tightly gripped the armrests of his chair. “Sic Mundus.” His words came out as a timid whisper. Helge cringed and tried to steel himself. “I want you to tell me what you know about Sic Mundus,” he said a bit louder.

“Sic Mundus,” HG said, sounding mildly impressed, “now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Where did you hear of it?”

“I met someone who told me about it.” This wasn’t untrue. Helge had learned of Sic Mundus from Noah.

“Interesting,” said HG. “How intriguing.”

Suddenly Helge found himself full of fear. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. How was HG able to intimidate him in his own home?

“Before we can discuss that, however, there’s something more important to be addressed,” said HG. “You want to travel through time.”

Helge’s heart sank. He hadn’t been ready to reveal his true goal yet. HG was not supposed to know this yet. But there was nothing to be done now. HG was confident enough that he stated it as if he knew it to be true.

With a slight smile, HG said, “I have yet to meet a person that’s interested in A Journey Through Time for its literary merit.”

“I know that you know time travel is real. You build a time machine,” Helge said, trying to stay calm. “And I, well, I traveled through time before.” His hands were shaking.

HG intently stared at Helge. “When and how did you time travel?”

Helge tried to keep his voice steady as he answered. “In November 1953, I traveled to 1986. It was not voluntary. After several months, I was sent back to June 1954.”

“Those were the months you were missing,” HG said. Helge nodded. “Yes, that’s where I was.”

“What happened to you in ’53? How did you end up thirty-three years in the future? When you returned, was it by the same method? You said you were ‘sent’ back to ’54. Sent by whom?”

“Stop, stop,” Helge cried. “No questions. Stop!” He was breathing fast—too fast—he couldn’t panic like this. He couldn’t afford to panic. Helge took several deep breaths. He glanced warily at HG. “I’ll tell you—I’ll explain—but I’ll do it on my own terms.”

“Do you ever worry that you’ll never get your life together?” said Charlotte.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “Life feels strange right now, different, like it’s not exactly real life.”

“How so?”

“To me, it feels like a dream,” he answered. “Suddenly everything changes. There’s no consistency. Everything has been going one way, but then the world changes in a second. It feels like there’s no logic. You can’t reason your way through any of it. There’s no control over any of it.”

Charlotte looked at him with concern.

“But I don’t think it’s abnormal to worry that we’ll never get our lives together,” Peter said. “What makes you bring that up?”

“I worry,” she said.

“Yes, I figured,” he said. “Is it those self-help books that are making you worry? So what if they aren’t helpful? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“No, I don’t—I wouldn’t trust these books,” Charlotte said.

“It’s not Waiting for Godot, is it?” Now Peter regretted recommending a play to her in which the two main characters contemplate hanging themselves.

“Maybe it is,” said Charlotte. “But I like it.”

“It can get a bit dark at times.”

“It’s no worse than Winden. And I like dark comedy.”

Charlotte continued reading Waiting for Godot. Peter watched her, looking for any changes in her expression. As Peter tried to think of something else to do, something that would be less disheartening, he remembered something he’d said to Charlotte before.

“Charlotte, do you remember what we said that day about going to the library and reading self-help books?” he asked.

“Yep, I remember,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he said carefully, “I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.” His nervous system was really kicking in now. Peter tried to ignore it and just say the words. “You aren’t counting this as our first date, are you?”

Flatly, Charlotte said, “No, I understand when people are only being half-serious. Why? Do you want to?”

“Well, I don’t know, do you?”

“That depends,” she said. “Do you? If you want to count it, I’ll count it.”

“Maybe I think that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to count this as a date,” Peter said. He sounded so defensive, didn’t he? “I just thought that maybe we should count this as a date. So at the end of the day, we can say, ‘I accomplished something today. We had our first date and it didn’t go horribly wrong.’ I mean, this is going well enough, right?”

“It would save us a lot of stress,” Charlotte said. “If we started out with a date that we were trying to take seriously, that would put a lot of pressure on us, don’t you think?”

“Yes, see, you understand my reasoning,” Peter said. He was thankful, so very thankful that Charlotte understood. Charlotte, she was the best.

Charlotte was smiling, but it looked like she was trying not to smile.

“What?” Peter asked.

“Nothing,” said Charlotte, regaining her composure. “I just thought of something, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Peter said hesitantly. Was it something about him? Did she think less of him now? He was so nervous now it nearly hurt. “Uh, so, what’s your answer?”

Charlotte looked Peter right in the eye and said, with a completely straight face, “Sweep me off my feet, lover boy.”

Peter was stunned and speechless. By the time he managed to comprehend what she had just said, Charlotte burst out into laughter.

Between laughs she said, “I’m sorry, but the look on your face, it’s priceless.”

“Charlotte, we’re in a library,” he said, feeling his face heat up with embarrassment. He put his head in his hands and sighed. “Am I blushing?”

“Yep,” Charlotte said, still laughing.

“Charlotte, we’re still in the library,” Peter said. He threw a book in her direction, but he missed her on purpose.

Charlotte smiled. Suddenly a book hit Peter in the face.

“Fight me,” she said playfully.

Peter couldn’t help himself from bursting out into laughter too. Before he knew it, he had thrown a book at Charlotte, she threw one back at him, and suddenly they were engaged in a fierce book battle!

They were having the time of their lives on their first date, throwing books at each other, running across the library, ducking behind bookshelves, and laughing the whole time! It was the most fun Peter had since arriving in Winden. Finally, even if it was just for a moment, he could forget about all the things that weighed his heart down. Peter let himself forget all his troubles. It felt great to be this carefree.

Then the librarian dragged them out.

Chapter Text

“I don’t want to relive what happened to me when I was missing,” Helge said. “I don’t want to go into the exact details.”

“You don’t have to tell me every detail if you don’t want to,” HG said.

Helge had already decided long ago that there were some details he would never tell another soul. But some of the guilt he felt about withholding this information, which was just a fraction of the guilt he carried with him every day, was eased a bit.

“Just enough for me to understand, that I’d like to know.”

Helge closed his eyes. Yes, he could tell his story in a way that HG could understand without revealing certain things, certain deeds he had done. Then again, HG might not understand what Helge had to say, no matter how much he said. But HG did make a time machine; if he could do that, then surely he’d be capable of understanding Helge’s story. It was just a matter of revealing only what was necessary.

“The man that tried to kill me, the man with the stone, he threw my body into the bunker, the one by my cabin.”

HG was watching him intently. Helge couldn’t look at him. He stared at the wall and pretended that he was all alone in the room. He told himself that this was no different than playing a role in a play. Helge was not Helge the weak-willed any more; he was the lead actor, and it was time for the dramatic monologue.

“I think he thought I was already dead before he left me trapped in the bunker. If not, then surely he thought I would die soon, like I thought, of starvation, dehydration, or blood loss. After some time, I regained consciousness. I have no idea how long I spent in that bunker. But then, this rift— later I learned it was a wormhole—opened up in the middle of the bunker. I saw a teenager on the other side. He was in the same bunker as I was, but he was in 1986.”

“Exactly thirty-three years later,” said HG.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Helge said. “We reached out to each other, I lost consciousness again, and when I woke up, I was in the teenager’s place in the bunker in 1986.”

“And where did this teenager go? Did he go to 1953?”

“I don’t know. Let me tell my story,” Helge said. “This isn’t easy, you know, telling you about my childhood trauma.”

“My apologies. I’ll save my questions for later.”

“Yes,” Helge said. He took a deep breath and resumed his story. “A man found me in the bunker, a pastor. I used to think he had been an angel. He told me to call him Noah, but he used a different name, Hanno Tauber, when he was posing as a pastor. I didn’t know that—”

“Hanno Tauber? The pastor we had just a few months ago, that Hanno Tauber?” HG said, with surprising intensity.

Helge shrank back in his armchair, hands shaking as he gripped the armrests tighter. “Yes, that Hanno Tauber. Why are you loud all of a sudden?”

“That cur! I get angry thinking about him.”

Helge was surprised but curious to know what Noah had done to cross HG. Was it the time machine? Had Noah stolen it from HG?

Helge leaned forward in his chair. “Why? What did Noah do?”

“He leered at my granddaughter one day when she was alone in the woods,” said HG.

“He leered at her?” Helge asked. Leering at a teenager didn’t sound like something Noah would do. The man was single-mindedly focused on his mission.

“In Charlotte’s words, that Tauber man stared at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable and fear for her safety. I don’t think it’s a stretch to call that behavior ‘leering,’ do you?”

“When?” A horrible, dreadful realization hit Helge.

“It was sometime in June, not long before he left. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why Tauber left town. I wanted to confront him, but I couldn’t find him. I hope he hasn’t gone to another town to use his position as a pastor to take advantage of his congregants’ trust.”

“He’s not a real pastor. He doesn’t believe in God,” Helge said, trying to prevent himself from getting overwhelmed.

HG said something, but Helge didn’t hear it. His hands began to shake again, and his mind went back to the bunker, the chair, and the children. Noah had meant for Charlotte to be another sacrifice, hadn’t he? And he would’ve made Helge do it. If the car accident hadn’t happened, if Noah told him to do his bidding once again, what would Helge have done?

The memories came back to Helge, the ones he tried to block out, the ones that made him wish he had been killed by Noah and died in the children’s place. He could see it in his mind: Charlotte, alone in the woods, an easy target, easy to overpower. It wouldn’t be difficult to carry her to the bunker. Her body would be heavier than Mads but lighter than Erik or Jonas. In the bunker, like all the others fated to die in Noah’s war against time, what would Charlotte do?

Would she realize she’d die, like Erik and Mads had? Would Charlotte tell him that people would look for her, that they’d find her, that they’d find Helge too—just as Mads had done? He had said that his brother would find him, hadn’t he? Or did Mads mean that his brother would find out that Helge had killed him?

HG’s hand was on Helge’s shoulder, gently shaking him back to the present. HG sounded concerned. “Helge? Was this Noah fellow ever... indecent toward you?”

It took a couple of seconds for Helge to realize what HG was asking. “No, no, that—no. Thank God Almighty that didn’t happen. No, that’s not it. You don’t understand what Noah was intending.”

HG’s face displayed a look very familiar to Helge: that of confusion and concern. And pity too—yes, he knew he was someone to be pitied. A pitiful boy, a pitiful man, that pitiful Helge! No, no, HG wouldn’t understand. The panic, it was coming back—he wouldn’t be able to say another word, no, not again—by God, he had to speak! Quick, quick, before his fear silenced him!

Helge grabbed HG’s arm. “Noah meant for your granddaughter to be another sacrifice like all the other children that had to die! The chair—we built it—he made me build it! It sent me back to my own time, but it came at a price—it needed sacrifice!”

“Well that was quite a tongue-lashing,” Peter said as they walked away from the library. 

“Who would’ve thought that someone who works in a place that’s supposed to be quiet all the time would have so much to say?” said Charlotte.

“That’s the longest conversation I’ve had since arriving in Winden,” Peter said. “At least we didn’t have to pick up any of those books. I’d much rather be kicked out of the library than be forced to stay, pick up all those books, and endure the glares and stares of everyone there.”

“Lucky us,” said Charlotte.

“Do you think it was worth it?”

“Totally. Now we get to tell Katharina and Ulrich that we’re delinquents too!”

Peter walked with Charlotte till they reached her house. They stood outside for a moment looking at each other, unsure of what to say to each other. 

“Forgive me if I overstep,” said Peter, taking her hand. He hesitated for one second, looked into Charlotte’s eyes, and then he kissed her hand. It was a date; shouldn’t there be something slightly romantic about it?

“Swoon,” Charlotte said, dramatically pretending to swoon for a second. 

Peter smiled and let out a nervous laugh. He didn’t know what reaction he had expected from her, but this wasn’t the worst.

Charlotte laughed and said, “How chivalrous, Sir Peter,” curtsying to him.

Peter blushed. “I try,” he said. “Lady Charlotte,” he added, giving her an equally dramatic bow.

They were no longer laughing nervously; now Peter and Charlotte were both giggling like children, laughing at their own silliness. They continued on like they had, not taking themselves seriously at all.

“Get thee gone, sirrah,” said Charlotte.

“Nay, hie thee hither from hence to thence!” Peter said.

Charlotte had to think about that one before responding. “Whither? Didst thou mean hither from thither?”

After several more minutes of not taking themselves seriously had passed, Peter decided now would be a good time to reveal his idea, his project, to Charlotte. 

“Charlotte, do you want to hear what my project will be?” he said. “You could even help me.”

“Enlighten me,” she said.

“Okay,” said Peter. “So, I thought about transportation. And I realized that the obvious solution would be to get a bike. But I came up with a dumber, more convoluted solution: in-line skates.”

“Like roller-skating?”

“Yes, but different and better,” Peter said. Now he was excited to explain, not worried. “In-line skates aren’t the normal kind of roller skates. I’m talking about the kind of skates that hockey players and speed skaters use to train during the off-season! They’re a lot faster than the regular kind of roller skates. Speed skaters and hockey players! Some are even at the Olympic level! Obviously we don’t have any way of getting our hands on anything that high-quality, but still, it’ll be fun.”

Charlotte smiled. “I like this idea. It sounds stupid but in a fun sort of way.”

Peter cheered.

“Doesn’t sound safe, though. How are we going to do this? Trial and error?”

“Well, yes,” Peter said. “I think. It’s not the most developed idea.”

“Well, I guess we can also tell Katharina and Ulrich that they aren’t the only ones that like living on the edge,” said Charlotte.

“Charlotte, you—you’re the best. You’re great.”

“Unless—Noah might’ve been planning to drag Charlotte off to another time,” Helge said. “He said some people were in the wrong time, and he was insistent that people stay in certain times, like Mikkel—Noah stopped him from going back.”

“Mikkel?” said HG. So far he’d been silent, listening intently, not stopping Helge to ask for an explanation.

“A boy from another time,” Helge said.

“Interesting,” said HG.

“Do you—are you understanding this? Any of this?” Helge asked.

“Not completely, but I’ll interrogate you another day. You seem—well, I’ll let you get some rest,” said HG, getting up to leave.

Chapter Text

“This is the first time I’m seeing some of these rooms,” Peter said. 

He had invited Charlotte over to look around the Doppler mansion with him. Peter was hoping to find something that he could use for his in-line skates project. Unfortunately, neither of them knew what to look for, since they didn’t really know what would be useful for such a project.

“And you’ve been living here for how long now?” Charlotte asked.

Peter walked into the next room. “A little over three weeks. But I haven’t had a reason to explore this part of the mansion. It’s so weird, living in a place this large. I have no clue how many rooms there are. Helge and I generally stick to the same several rooms.”

“I guess that makes sense,” said Charlotte.

“If we could have it our way, we wouldn’t be living somewhere so large and empty,” Peter said. He was almost certain that Helge preferred the tiny cabin over the mansion. “We don’t need a place this large. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. But the cabin is already small for one person. And it doesn’t feel right to be complaining about living in a mansion.”

They went from room to room, looking all around. They weren’t finding much, but Peter was still having some fun. By the time Peter decided that they had done enough exploring, he and Charlotte had found two notable things. They found an old pair of roller skates—the usual kind, quad skates—which must have been Helge’s when he was a child. The other thing they had found, well, Peter didn’t know what to think about that.

He had opened a wooden box that had been lying in one of the rooms that seemed to only be used for storage. Much to his embarrassment, the contents of the box had startled Peter so much that, with a quick, slight scream, he hurled the box to the ground. 

“Dead birds,” Charlotte said, sounding more fascinated than alarmed. 

“Why would there be a box here filled with nothing but dead birds?” Peter asked.

Charlotte didn’t seem to hear him. She reached into the box and pulled one of the dead birds out. “Interesting,” she said.

“Yeah. Interesting,” Peter said. “That’s the word.” He was a bit uncomfortable with Charlotte’s apparent lack of alarm when seeing or handling the bodies of dead animals.

“They’ve been preserved,” Charlotte said. “It’s taxidermy. See, look at the eyes. They’re glass.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Peter said, leaning away from the dead bird Charlotte held out toward him. “Charlotte, why do Katharina and Ulrich call you ‘taxidermist in training’?”

Now Charlotte looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, do you remember when I mentioned that birds fell out of the sky not long ago? I think we both agree that it’s very strange for dead birds to start falling out of the sky, or for birds to die by falling out of the sky. You know, I could never figure out for sure whether the birds were dead before they hit the ground or not.”

“Right,” Peter said. He wasn’t doing a good job of hiding how uneasy this situation made him, was he?

“So I would study the dead birds.”

“By taxidermy?”

“No, I couldn’t even do that if I tried,” Charlotte said. “No, I would just find dead birds, measure them, draw them, and note any unusual things about them. No taxidermy involved. But, I would have to hold on to the dead birds for a little while, since I couldn’t do all that immediately.”

“So you’re saying you collected dead birds?”

“Not exactly. I didn’t keep them. It was always temporary.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “I guess that’s not—well, no, that’s not true. I honestly have no clue what to make of that.”

“Well, you don’t have to think about it ever again,” Charlotte declared. “There aren’t any dead birds right now. Well, I mean, there’s obviously still dead birds, but they aren’t dying of unnatural causes.” Charlotte then walked out of the room, taking the box of dead birds with her. 

“Cool, it’s like a personal library here,” Peter said, walking into yet another room, Charlotte following behind him.

As Peter was reading the titles of the books on the bookshelves, he heard someone call his name. He turned around and realized that his father and HG were in the room.

“Oh, hi Helge. And Mr. Tannhaus,” Peter said. “We were just looking around and exploring some of the rooms I hadn’t seen yet.”

To her grandfather, Charlotte said, “Huh, you’re here too.”

“I don’t even get a ‘hello’?” said HG.

“Why? I see you all the time,” said Charlotte. “We live in the same house.”

HG sighed. “Yes, yes, I remember where I live.”

Helge was staring off into space—no, he was staring at the wooden box in Charlotte’s hands. 

“Mr. Doppler,” Charlotte said, “I want to ask about one of the things we found.” She opened the box.

“Oh no, not the dead birds again,” HG said.

“Ah, those,” Helge said. He looked nervous, but then again, Helge always looked somewhat nervous to Peter. 

“What year are they from? Why do you have them?”

“Those are from 1953,” Helge said. “The birds would just fall out of the sky, the same way they did in June, September, and last November. For whatever reason, I collected them back then.”

Two people in Winden just happened to collect dead birds? Peter hoped that nobody else would reveal that they also collected dead birds.

“You’ve probably heard somewhere that I was kidnapped as a child.”

“You were kidnapped?” Peter said. “I’m your son. I should know these things.”

“I’ll tell you about it later, Peter,” Helge said. “Now when I was kidnapped, the box of dead birds was all my parents found of me. They needed something to hang on to, something to cling to and remember me. For my parents, it was those birds. They got them preserved too since the birds would’ve rotted long ago if they hadn’t.”

Peter couldn’t get past the fact that his father had been kidnapped as a child. Questions raced through his mind. Why hadn’t Helge told him about this?

“You can take a few of those of you want,” Helge said. “My parents never got rid of them, but we never even thought about the birds since the day I returned. Besides, I don’t like to dwell on that.”

Charlotte’s eyes lit up. She took three of the birds out of the box.

“No, no,” HG said. “Charlotte, no. No taxidermy. No dead animals in the house.”

“Who am I to refuse this most generous gift?” said Charlotte.

“Actually, you can have all of them,” Helge said. 

Peter couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw Helge smile ever so slightly.

“Yes!” said Charlotte.

“No,” said HG, sounding more and more exasperated by the second. “No. Helge, why must you encourage her? Is this your idea of humor? Charlotte, we’re giving those back.”

Charlotte clutched the box close to her body and ran, shouting, “You’ll have to take these from my cold, dead hands!”

It was barely louder than a whisper, but Peter heard what his father said in response to HG’s question: “Perhaps.”

Chapter Text

“Is Aleksander a believer in guilt by association?” Peter said, acutely aware of Aleksander’s cold stare on him. Katharina and Ulrich had gone to talk to their other friends before school started, so Peter couldn’t pretend that Aleksander was only watching those two.

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “I keep my mouth shut and my head down.”

“But you aren’t bothered by him?” Peter said. “Not by the way he just stands there and watches us?” He was definitely bothered by the way Aleksander stared down all of them.

“I was Regina’s friend once,” Charlotte said. “Well, I considered her more of an acquaintance. I’m not sure what she considered me, and I’m not sure what she considers me now. We’re still acquaintances, I think. But that’s not the point. She knows I’m harmless.”

“Ah,” Peter said. “I guess that makes sense.” Maybe he could try to befriend Regina, or talk to her at the least, so that if Aleksander ever did attack, she might call him off.

“I guess I am bothered by Aleksander a bit. I hope Regina’s right about him, I really do,” Charlotte said. “I don’t want to think about what it would mean for her if she’s wrong.”

Regina was in a few of Peter’s classes. He should talk to her. He had the opportunity. But Peter thought about Aleksander and the consequences of screwing this up. Would Regina see right through him, immediately realizing that Peter was being less than genuine? Was Aleksander the jealous sort that disliked any guy that got too close to his girlfriend? It wasn’t worth the risk. He couldn’t do it.

Aleksander was there when school ended that day, like he usually was. As Peter walked out of the school building with Katharina, he noticed Aleksander watching them. Peter was getting sick of this. He was about to ask Katharina if he should talk to Aleksander, but she was already walking away to meet up with Ulrich. And Charlotte wasn’t here yet. It was just himself and Aleksander. Peter could go talk to Katharina or Ulrich while waiting, but he didn’t know any of their other friends. But why should that stop him from going over there? Why was he being so shy today?

Aleksander was still there, eyes darting from Peter to Katharina. Peter stared back at him, trying to prove that he couldn’t be intimidated by Aleksander. Time seemed to slow down just to prolong Peter’s discomfort. He couldn’t stand it. If Aleksander had a problem with him, then Aleksander could say it to his face!

“Show no fear,” Peter whispered to himself as he walked up to Aleksander.

“You got a problem with me?” said Aleksander.

“Yes,” Peter said a little too loudly, revealing his fear. “Why are you here? Do you just like to intimidate people, is that it?”

Aleksander said, “Some people need to be kept in check.”

Aleksander was really starting to irritate Peter, so he didn’t bother hiding his feelings. “Why do you get to ‘keep people in check’? Is it because you’re bigger and stronger than everyone else? Is that it? Because you could beat up anyone here? You’re nothing but a bully.”

Aleksander laughed. “I’m the bully here? You really have the gall to come up to me and say I’m a bully?”

Peter frowned and said, “I’m serious.”

Then Aleksander frowned and grabbed Peter by the collar of his shirt. “If you feel bullied by me, then take a good look at yourself. Take a good look at the people you think are your friends. The only ones I have problems with are the bullies.”

Peter tore Aleksander’s arm from his shirt collar, freeing himself from Aleksander’s grip, and took a few steps back. This Aleksander Köhler was infuriating! And it was a rare thing for somebody to get under Peter’s skin like this. He thought of himself as level-headed and mild-mannered for the most part.

“I haven’t done one damn thing to wrong you,” Peter said, his voice growing louder and his emotions increasing in intensity with every word. “Not one damn thing! You act like you’re doing the world a public service. But what good are you doing? You’re only part of the problem. If you fight fire with fire, the whole world will burn. The only thing you’re teaching people is that violence makes the world go round!”

Peter shoved Aleksander with barely enough force to move him. It was a stupid spur-of-the-moment thing. Aleksander shoved Peter away, and suddenly they were grappling. Peter already knew Aleksander was the stronger man—he had no delusions about that. He didn’t have much of a strategy for fighting either. Peter couldn’t remember ever getting into fights at school. Aleksander was going to kick his ass, no doubt about it, and the best Peter could hope for was going down as a martyr.

Aleksander pinned Peter against the wall, holding him there effortlessly. “What the hell are you trying to prove?” he said.

“I’m telling you to fuck off and leave me and my friends alone,” Peter said.

He knew that this had less to do with himself and more to do with Katharina and Ulrich. From the things Charlotte said, Peter gathered that Katharina and Ulrich had been bullies but were reforming. They weren’t reformed yet, but there was an attempt being made. And Regina and Aleksander hated Katharina and Ulrich, and Katharina and Ulrich hated them back.

“Sander, what’s going on?” asked an alarmed Regina, hurrying over to Peter and Aleksander.

“Has this one ever given you any trouble?” Aleksander said.

“Sander, no, stop,” Regina said. “That’s Peter. He’s new. He hasn’t had time to give me any trouble.”

Aleksander looked genuinely surprised. Peter smiled, feeling vindicated, and Aleksander let go of him.

Regina shook her head and sighed. “What have you done?”

“He’s friends with Katharina and Ulrich,” Aleksander said, trying to explain himself. “He told me to fuck off and leave them alone. Those were his words, not mine.”

“I’m sure he had good intentions,” Regina said. “Or maybe Katharina and Ulrich put him up to this.”

“Why are you still here?” Aleksander said, noticing that Peter hadn’t left.

“I still have things to say,” Peter said. He was more confident now since it seemed less likely that Aleksander would beat him up now that Regina was here.

“Peter, let it go,” Regina said. “You don’t realize who you’re defending. Katharina and Ulrich, they’re not good people.”

“I don’t care if they’re the shittiest people in the universe,” Peter said. “What will intimidation achieve? What will they learn? You’re only reinforcing the idea that using fear to control others is justifiable. They’ll become bitter and vengeful when instead they could become better people.” Walking away, he said, “God forbid I show them kindness! God forbid I object to creating more negativity in the world!”

He heard Regina say, “Sander, just leave him alone, please? I think he truly does mean well. He’s just a bit misguided.”

Peter smiled when he saw that Katharina and Charlotte were waiting for him.

“I was afraid I’d have to hold Katharina back,” Charlotte said. “You handled that well.”

“Did I? I nearly got myself beaten up,” Peter said.

“Which is why it’s a good thing I came back to see what was going on,” Katharina said. “I would have saved your ass if it turned into a real fight.” With a look at Charlotte, she added, “But someone here objects to violence.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like violence either,” Peter said.

Katharina simply looked at him, clearly not believing that.

“I know, I know, I guess that makes me a hypocrite,” Peter said. “Shame on me. I feel like that nearly ruined the point I was trying to make. But I wasn’t setting out to start a fight with Aleksander.”

“Really? I don’t believe that,” said Katharina.

“Ignore her,” Charlotte said.

“Oh, Peter,” Katharina said, putting her arm around his shoulders, “you’ve got to let me and Ulrich teach you some self-defense. Before I taught Charlotte, a kindergartener could’ve kicked her ass.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Charlotte said. “And that’s not true. I wouldn’t fight against a kindergartener, but that doesn’t mean I’d just let one beat me up.”

“I think she can hold her own against a seventh grader now,” Katharina said, pretending like she didn’t hear Charlotte. “Definitely a fourth grader at the least. Today I kinda regretted teaching her so well. Charlotte looked like she would have choked me unconscious if I shouted ‘Kill, Peter, kill!’ and charged into battle like I wanted to.”

“That would have escalated things and made the situation worse,” Peter said.

Katharina turned to Charlotte and said, “Hey Charlotte, you can be very intimidating when you want to be, did you know that? Can you find Ulrich for me? Where the fuck is he?”

“Sure, if you quit saying that a kindergartener could’ve kicked my ass,” Charlotte said.

Katharina laughed. “It bothers you that much, huh?”

“Go to hell,” Charlotte said, running off to find Ulrich.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Charlotte? This is hell,” Katharina shouted after her.

Then Katharina turned to Peter and said, “Peter, nobody’s ever stood up for me and Ulrich that way, risking a fight like that. Thank you. I appreciate it, I really do.”

“Please don’t praise me for getting into a fight,” Peter said. “I mean, thank you for saying that, but don’t praise me for getting into a fight.”

“Okay, Peter the Pacifist,” she said. “But seriously, I appreciate it. I don’t know you too well, and we don’t have a lot in common, but you can consider yourself a friend of mine. But you don’t have to—sometimes I wonder why Charlotte associates herself with me when she’s a good person and me and Ulrich aren’t. And you’re a good person too. If anyone gives you trouble, I will defend you.”

When Peter got home, Helge said, “Peter, what happened? It looks like somebody roughed you up.”

“Oh, no, it’s nothing,” Peter said.

“Is something happening at school?” Helge asked, voice full of concern. “It’s okay, you can tell me. Please, tell me so I can help you.”

Peter was touched by his father’s concern for him. “Don’t worry about it. It was a good kind of fight.” Seeing Helge’s confusion, Peter elaborated. “I stood up for my principles and now I’ve made friends.” 

“Oh. I guess that’s a noble fight,” Helge said, sounding uncertain.

“Don’t worry, I know that violence is bad. I’ll avoid it in the future,” Peter said, giving his father a reassuring hug.

“You’re my son. It’s my job to worry about you.”

Chapter Text

Ulrich found Peter before his first class started. He ran through the hall, shouting at people to move out of his way, nearly sprinting.

“Peter, my man,” Ulrich said. “Remember when you said you’d listen to heavy metal with me? Today’s the day!”

“Oh yeah,” Peter said. “Yeah, that’s right.” He nearly forgot about that.

“Is it fine with you if there’s also someone else there, another potential convert to heavy metal?”

“Is it someone I’d know?” Peter asked.

“Nah, I don’t even know him myself,” Ulrich said. “This random kid a few grades below us just walked up to me and said he wanted to get into heavy metal. I bet he’s trying to impress someone or thinks it’ll make him seem cool. And usually I’d say, ‘No way, I don’t know you,’ but I was in an exceedingly generous mood. I might as well kill two birds with one stone, right?”

Peter got the sense that Ulrich was one of those people that defined themselves by the music they listened to. If Ulrich didn’t succeed in convincing Peter of the greatness of metal, he’d probably be disappointed. But if there was another person there, and this other person was totally sold on metal, then Ulrich might not be disappointed.

“Sure, that’s totally fine,” Peter said.

Peter managed to find his way to Ulrich’s house and get there by the time they had set. He still didn’t know his way around Winden, so he asked Helge for directions to the address Ulrich gave. Instead of simply telling him, Helge grabbed a pen and drew a map for Peter. Even though the lines were shaky, it was a very neat map.

Michael was standing outside, hanging back from the door. He was probably nervous and didn’t want to be the first to show up. Peter could relate to that.

“Michael,” Peter said, “small world, huh?” Helge had been at the clock shop recently, and Michael had been there too, so Peter had seen him when he came to get Helge.

Ulrich opened the door and led the way up the stairs to his room.

“Michael, right?” Ulrich said. “I’ve thought about all the right songs to play for Peter, but since you only told me today, you’re more of an afterthought.”

“That’s fine,” Michael said softly.

“How old are you?” Ulrich asked.

“Eleven,” Michael said. “But play the songs you listen to. You don’t have to tone it down for me.”

Ulrich laughed. “Good for you, kid. I like that answer.”

“Hey, uh, hang on,” Peter said. “I don’t want to listen to anything too graphic.”

“I’ll try not to offend your delicate sensibilities, Saint Peter,” Ulrich said. He laughed at his own joke and said, “You think it’s funny too. Come on, admit it. ‘Saint Peter,’ that’s a good one, isn’t it?”

“Hey, Saint Peter was not weak-willed,” Peter said. “But if that’s what you think, then why are you wearing the cross of Saint Peter around your neck?”

“It’s satanic, dumbass,” Ulrich said.

“That’s the cross of Saint Peter. You know how he died?” Peter said. “He was going to be crucified. And you know what he said to that? He told them to crucify him upside down.”

“Damn,” said Ulrich. “What a badass way to go. Doesn’t matter though. I don’t believe any of that stuff. And you know what? This symbol looks cool, and nobody in their right mind would ever be confused whether I’m using it as a Christian symbol or an anti-religious symbol. If some long dead saint has a problem with that, then he can take it up with me.”

“Fair enough,” Peter said.

“Enough of this,” Ulrich said. He grabbed a record album and held it up. He looked so excited. “It’s time for metal!”

The song ended. Peter sighed. Michael was in a corner of the room, sitting in the bean bag chair and looking pensive. He was so quiet that Peter forgot he was there a couple of times, but he seemed content to just sit and take everything in.

“Oh come on, what was wrong with that one?” Ulrich said.

“I said I’d like to hear some songs that can be sung,” Peter said. “Something that doesn’t require you to scream or growl.”

“And? That song was totally singable!” Ulrich said. He had a very loose definition of singable.

“Fine, I’ll give you a few more chances,” Peter said. “But you have to sing.”

“You want me to sing?”

“How else are you going to convince me that a song is singable?” Peter said.

Ulrich sighed dramatically. “The things you demand of me.”

“We can call it a day if it’s too much for you,” Peter said.

“No! There’s a metal song out there that you’ll like,” Ulrich said. “We just have to find it. Okay, I’ll get serious.”

“You weren’t serious before?”

“I was serious,” Ulrich insisted. “It just—I like thrash metal. There are lots of kinds of metal, and I don’t limit myself to one, but thrash metal is what I love. I haven’t found anyone else that also likes it, you know, so I had to give it a shot. I couldn’t help it.” Ulrich turned to Michael. “But hey, at least you get to hear my favorites.”

Michael didn’t say anything. His eyes were closed and he had leaned back against the wall.

“Hey, are you asleep or something?” Ulrich said. “How can thrash metal put a person to sleep? Hey, wake up!”

Michael, brought out of his daydreams or whatever he was imagining, opened his eyes and said, “I’ve been awake this whole time.”

“Whatever,” Ulrich said. He took a notebook out of his backpack and flipped through it a bit. “Okay, I think I know what kind of metal you’d like.” 

He put on a record that had a pirate ship on the album cover. “Weigh anchor, hoist the sails,” Ulrich sang. “Cruising for booty on watery trails! No exploiter we see can still sail on! Our cannons fire till his ship goes down!”

This song was fun, just plain fun. It made Peter want to round up some friends and sail the seas on a ship. Ulrich’s singing was also better, since this song was actually singable. Peter did appreciate Ulrich’s effort.

When the song had ended, Peter said, “I liked that one. It’s fun.”

Ulrich’s face lit up. “Yes! Victory!” he shouted. “We’ve found one song for you, Peter, one song! It’s a start.” He put his hands on Peter’s shoulders and said, “I can work with that, Peter, I can work with that!”

Ulrich grabbed a pencil and began jotting things down in his notebook.

“Are you taking notes?” Peter asked.

“Pay attention to the music, but yes, I am,” Ulrich answered.

The next few songs were tolerable. Peter didn’t mind listening to them if it meant Ulrich would be happy. He looked over at Michael, but he couldn’t tell what Michael was thinking. Michael had asked Ulrich to write down the names of all the good bands and songs, so he must have enjoyed the thrash metal to some degree.

“This one is one of my favorites out of songs that aren’t thrash metal,” Ulrich declared, getting to his feet.

Peter had to admire his determination, and it was amusing to watch Ulrich. 

“Raise your fist! Raise your fist! Raise your fist high!”

Dancing wasn’t the right word for what Ulrich was doing. He was jumping around and gesturing, and Peter found it hilarious.

“Raise your fist! Raise your fist! Raise your fist high!”

The sight of Ulrich this happy and energetic made listening to all this metal worth it. And surprisingly, there was something almost adorable about it, but Peter would never say that out loud. Ulrich would probably punch anyone that wasn’t his mother in the face if they called him adorable.

“Monday morning, ringing school bell, homework isn’t done / Teacher’s gonna break your balls, don’t expect no fun / Jailer’s wild and furious, classmates deride you too / Wrath is overwhelming you—can’t stand this fucking crew!”

Peter and Michael made eye contact. Peter wondered if Michael was thinking the exact same thing as him: this song sounded so much like Ulrich. Whether or not Michael thought that, he nodded to Peter. Peter nearly burst out laughing at that.

Eventually Ulrich got exhausted from bouncing around on his feet, but he wasn’t so exhausted as to call it a day yet. “Alright, Peter, I think I know what you’ll like for sure. The upbeat stuff. I think the lyrics are cheesy as hell, but Katharina likes that stuff.”

“Last record, Ulrich,” Peter said.

“Fine, fine.”

Peter didn’t know what to expect. Ulrich probably had a very loose definition of upbeat too. The song began, and Ulrich got ready to sing.

“You, you say that you have lost the way / Got no aim, just living for today / Look up to the sky above and see the morning sun again / You got so much power inside, so cry it out, my friend / I’m alive! / I’m alive!”

Damn. Ulrich wasn’t kidding when he said upbeat. Peter told himself that this would be a good song to listen to whenever he was feeling down. The next songs were interesting. There was something comical about Ulrich singing to him about things like friendship.

“The feeling of togetherness will be at your side / You’ll say you love your life and you’ll know why,” Ulrich sang.

Peter thought he saw Michael wipe away a tear or two. Did he find this song that beautiful? Or was Michael trying so hard not to laugh at Ulrich that it made his eyes water?

“’Cause we all live in Future World / A world that’s full of love / Our future life will be glorious / Come with me—Future World!”

“Ulrich, why don’t you serenade me the way you serenade Peter?” said Katharina, appearing in the doorway.

“I am not serenading him,” Ulrich said, indignant. “It’s metal! You don’t serenade a person with metal.”

Katharina pointed to Michael. “Who’s that, and what’s he doing here?”

“The unholy church of heavy metal has a new convert,” Ulrich declared. 

“I’m here because, well, I know someone that listens to metal,” Michael stammered.

“He’s trying to impress a girl,” Ulrich said. “Yeah? Am I right?”

“What? No,” Michael said. “Wait, no, yes. Exactly. You’re right.”

“Good luck with that,” Katharina said derisively.

“Michael here likes the heavier stuff,” Ulrich said, putting his arm over Michael’s shoulders. Michael seemed to freeze up. “You gotta respect that. I wish I could say the same of you, Peter.”

“I’m going to go now,” said Michael, quickly slipping away and out of the Nielsen house.

“What’s with him?” said Katharina.

Ulrich shrugged. Turning to Peter, he said, “That’s the thing about Winden. Everyone’s a bit weird here.”

Chapter Text

“What book are you reading?” Peter said.

Helge lifted the book up so Peter could see the cover.

“Ah, the Bible,” Peter said. “Uh, what book of the Bible are you reading?”

“Daniel,” Helge answered.

“Oh. Cool. Is he the one that got thrown to the lions?”

Helge nodded and went back to reading.

Then Peter asked, “What do you think about that Daniel, like as a character?”

Helge was a bit confused now. “Um, well, he’s quite a character.”

That seemed to satisfy Peter so Helge resumed his reading.

“Helge,” Peter said, after a long silence, “I’m worried that I’m not grieving correctly.”

Helge was caught off guard by this question. Closing his Bible and setting it aside, he said, “In what way? Different people grieve in different ways.”

“I keep expecting the reality of losing her to set in, but it hasn’t.” It was clear Peter was referring to his mother, Ulla Schmidt.

“Well, you aren’t in denial about her death, are you?” Helge asked.

“Well, yes, I know that she passed away,” Peter said. “But it doesn’t feel like that. I don’t know—I guess I expected the grief to hit me right away, all at once. But it hasn’t.”

Helge tried to remember how he felt when his own mother, Greta Doppler, died. How much had his grief changed him? Had he been happy before she died and sad after her death? It was hard to imagine being happy, truly happy. Ever since Noah returned in 1986, Helge’s emotions ran together. There was always sadness; it was only a matter of how intense the sadness was.

“And now, I’m starting to worry that it’ll build up,” Peter said.

Brought out of his thoughts, Helge said, “What will build up?”

“The grief, the pain—I’m not sure. But I feel like if it hasn’t already hit me now, it’ll hit me all of a sudden, just out of the blue one day, and I’ll be completely unprepared. How did you feel—what did you do—when your mother died?

Helge didn’t know what to say. He might as well be stuck in a state of perpetual grieving. Certainly it wouldn’t help Peter to hear that. His father’s death, his mother’s death, all the deaths, all the emotions, everything—everything ran together. Nothing was distinguishable from anything else—except Peter. A perpetual state of sadness, a perpetual cycle of guilt and self-loathing, and a perpetual nightmare all deadened Helge to the world. But his son was a reminder of a different world: the world of the living, a world of feeling. Was it better or worse that Peter dragged Helge out of his indistinguishable despair? Was it better or worse to climb out of that pit only to fall in again?

Helge sighed. “I can’t help you there. I don’t know how to deal with these things. I don’t remember what it was like before her death—back when I was happy.” More to himself than Peter, he said, “Happy—that’s right, I was happy once.” He looked at Peter, into his eyes, and said, “Everything blended together, all emotions, until I was left with this one I still have now.”

“That doesn’t sound like an emotion,” Peter said. “That sounds like something persistent.”

“It is what it is,” Helge said. “It can’t be helped.”

Peter was looking up at the sky. He had lain down when they got to their spot in the forest. Charlotte was sitting on a fallen tree trunk a little bit behind him. Well, it wasn’t really their spot. For all Peter knew, this spot in the forest might not be the same as the spot they’d gone to yesterday or the day before that.

“Do you ever want to just talk about the woes of the world?” Peter asked. “Just for the sake of letting it out?”

Talking to Helge had reminded Peter that he should see how Charlotte was doing. Man, Winden was a depressing place. Charlotte wasn’t as open as Helge—which was to be expected; Helge was family, she was not—so Peter didn’t expect her to say anything particularly revelatory. But it was worth trying.

“How astute,” Charlotte said. 

Peter lifted his head and turned to look at her. There were bits of fallen leaves in his hair. He brushed them off.

“I don’t—today is not the day,” Charlotte said.

“Right, that’s perfectly fine,” Peter said. “I don’t want to make you feel like you have to talk, but at the same time, I wanted to let you know that you had the opportunity to.”

Charlotte didn’t say anything.

“I’m worried about Helge and myself, not just you,” Peter said. “Wait, that came out wrong.”

“I know what you meant.”

There was something that made Peter wonder if she was trying—struggling—to maintain her composure. Maybe it was the way she said it, maybe it was the way she was clenching her jaw, or maybe it was her eyebrows.

“I meant to say that there’s nothing inherently worrying about you,” Peter said. “I’m a worrier by nature.”

He tried to listen for her breathing—it sounded irregular. Her eyes—she was becoming teary-eyed.

Peter got up from the ground and said, “Shit, no, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Charlotte shook her head, and by then Peter was right beside her on the fallen tree trunk. He put his arms around her—it ended up being an awkward sort of side hug since they were sitting side by side. Charlotte leaned into him a bit. 

Peter felt a nervous happy feeling, the kind of feeling he associated with having a crush on someone. Charlotte was technically his girlfriend now, but Peter still couldn’t believe they were dating. He was in a relationship, and it hadn’t gone wrong yet! How? Of course, Peter’s emotions were mixed—Charlotte was going through something. Even though he didn’t know what it was, he still felt sad and worried.

They sat there for a minute or two like that. Somehow Charlotte managed to triumph and maintain her composure in the end. Honestly, it was impressive. It seemed like it took a lot of strength—strength Peter didn’t think he had.

“You know that point you get to when nearly anything can make you emotional?” Charlotte said. Her voice was quieter than usual.

“Yeah,” Peter said.

“I think that’s where I am right now.”

“Ah.”

“Or maybe it’s just one of those days, you know, where you just get sad for no reason at all,” Charlotte said.

“Maybe,” Peter said. He sighed. “Those sorts of days…” Those were the days that his thoughts would turn sad and serious no matter what he was thinking about. So for Charlotte, implying that there were woes of the world worth getting off her chest was demoralizing in and of itself, most likely.

They were silent after that for a little while.

Then Charlotte said, “Tomorrow, let’s come here again tomorrow.”

“We can do that,” Peter said. “We can do that.”

They were silent after that for a little while, once again.

“Are you really a worrier by nature?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes,” Peter said. “I am a bit of a worrier by nature, for better or for worse.”

“For better or for worse,” Charlotte repeated.

In the evening Helge came back from somewhere. Peter didn’t know where Helge was in the habit of going, and it wasn’t really his business. Helge was a grown man after all. Peter did try to pay attention to how often Helge left the mansion. Helge might only be going on walks or getting fresh air, but at least he was getting out of the mansion—that was better than nothing. 

The Doppler mansion still didn’t feel like home to Peter, but that might have more to do with the size of it more than anything else. It was good for Peter to know that he could still hear the door from the room he was in, whatever it was meant to be. Since he and Helge stuck to a few rooms, they had rearranged things to be more practical. 

Peter began to wonder if he and Helge could subdivide the mansion. Maybe they could rent out some rooms or something. Then a sillier idea came to Peter: this mansion would be great for parties! He knew it wasn’t realistic at all, but he indulged himself in fantasizing about the legendary parties he could throw. Then he remembered that he didn’t have enough people to invite to a party. And Peter had never thrown a party before, not a real one. He had made some arrangements for his mom’s birthday before, but he always had the help of some of her friends. Besides, a party for teenagers would be vastly different to a party for an adult woman and her mom friends. Hell, he’d never been to a real party before, had he? The birthday parties he had been to as a kid didn’t count.

Katharina and Ulrich had other friends—Peter didn’t know how many—that they could invite to a hypothetical party. He and Charlotte were in a completely separate group from their main friend group. Katharina and Ulrich probably knew a thing or two about parties. What would happen if he told Katharina and Ulrich that they could throw a party here? Imagine that, what a thought! Peter would never do that, of course, but it was hilarious to imagine.

As Peter lost himself in daydreaming, Helge walked by and hugged Peter. Since Peter was sitting at the table he had turned into a desk, Helge stood behind Peter, put his arms around Peter’s neck, and rested his chin on top of his son’s head. This startled Peter, catching him off guard.

“Helge,” Peter said, trying to figure out why Helge would just hug him out of the blue. He guessed that Helge got a bit scared of something. Or maybe his father was just that nervous. “Did something happen?”

“Why do you say that?” Helge said.

“I—well, you’re hugging me. I don’t know…” He didn’t want Helge to take anything he said the wrong way.

“It’s not normal for a father to hug his son?” Helge said, sounding a bit hurt. He stepped away from Peter. “I can’t hug you without it meaning something abnormal?”

Helge didn’t feel like a father to Peter, not yet. At first Helge felt like a stranger since he was a stranger to Peter. Now he did feel like a family member of some sort: not a father, not an uncle, but maybe like an older cousin. There were some positives. Peter felt like Helge’s equal. He wondered what he would do if Helge ever tried to set some rules and lay down the law. If the rules were reasonable, then Peter would follow those, of course, but what if they weren’t? Wait, it didn’t make sense to worry about that right now. Focus!

“No, I didn’t say that,” Peter said. Quick, he needed to think of something. “I just—your hands, I thought they were shaking a little bit.” He actually didn’t have a clue whether Helge’s hands had been shaking, but Peter figured that there was a good chance it was true.

“Really?” Helge said, worried. He held his hands up in front of his face.

“Maybe I was mistaken,” Peter said.

Helge kept staring at his hands, eyes wide with fear. “They—they are shaking!”

“I can’t tell from here,” Peter said, turning around in his chair. Oh God, what had he done? Had Helge’s hands actually been trembling before? Or did Peter just create a self-fulfilling prophecy? Helge, poor Helge, he looked so pitiful right now.

Peter got up and clasped Helge’s hands to make them stop shaking. Helge looked up at him, then looked back down at their hands.

After several long seconds, Peter let go of Helge’s hands. “There,” he said.

Helge nervously looked at his hands, but they didn’t start shaking again. Peter smiled. Even if Helge didn’t feel like a father to him yet, Peter had come to feel protective of Helge. It was a bit strange to be protective of his own father, but that was nothing compared to all the other strange things in Winden.

Then Peter suddenly found himself wrapped in a bear hug.

Chapter Text

“Peter! Charlotte!” Ulrich called, running over to them. Katharina jogged at an easy pace behind him.

Charlotte looked up and flatly said, “Ulrich. Katharina.”

“If this is about listening to thrash metal, the answer is no,” Peter said.

Ulrich reached the spot in the woods where Peter and Charlotte were. Panting, he said, “Ha, we finally found you. I wish I could’ve gotten to you before you left school.”

Charlotte and Peter waited for Ulrich to catch his breath and tell them whatever it was that he deemed worth telling them. Katharina then reached them, but unlike Ulrich, she was not out of breath.

“A story,” Ulrich said. “My dad’s working on this story for the paper—the goal is to get it out by the 10th, but he’s told me some stuff already—and I really wanted to tell you two.”

“Don’t forget to breathe,” Peter said. Ulrich was so eager to tell them about this story that he was barely pausing to take a breath or two.

“It involves Helge, well, something that happened to Helge. And Charlotte,” Ulrich said, “you know how we feel about Egon Tiedemann.”

“Enlighten us,” Charlotte said.

“So my dad is writing this piece for the newspaper revisiting the case of the lunatic that attacked Helge long, long ago. And this is the same man that escaped from the psychiatric hospital in June. Have you heard about that, Peter?”

“No,” Peter drawled. Charlotte had mentioned some weird things that had happened in Winden before, but Peter didn’t recall being told anything about a patient escaping from the psychiatric hospital. He hadn’t even known Winden had a psychiatric hospital. “I don’t know about the second thing.”

Peter was glad that Helge had told him a little bit about the attack. Peter still didn’t know much about it, but at least he didn’t have to be embarrassed by a complete lack of knowledge about his own father.

“Well, it’s a good thing that I can tell you all about it,” Ulrich said.

Ulrich finally took the time to sit down, joining the rest of them on the ground. Charlotte was on Peter’s right, Ulrich was in front of Peter, and Katharina was between Ulrich and Charlotte.

“Long story short,” Katharina said, “a crazy man managed to get out of the psychiatric hospital, and he crossed paths with what’s-his-name, that kid, Ulrich’s so-called newest convert to thrash metal.”

“Michael,” Ulrich said.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Katharina said. “So the crazy man grabs Michael and they run to the cave entrance of all places. And the police get Michael away from him and put the old lunatic back where he belongs in the madhouse. My mother works there, you know. I think she belongs in the madhouse too, even more than that old lunatic.”

Ulrich laughed. “Agreed. Do you think you could have her committed?”

“I wish,” Katharina said.

“Well, even though I intended to tell you that story,” Ulrich said to Peter, “I guess Katharina’s explanation was good enough.”

“Oh come on, you’re no expert,” Katharina said.

“Maybe so, but I’ve got a direct line to the expert.”

“Expert? Ha. He’s just your father, Ulrich,” Katharina said.

“Yeah, so? What if my dad is my man on the inside? You’re just jealous I have inside information.”

“Yes, inside information that’ll become public knowledge next week,” Charlotte said.

Sarcastically, in an over-the-top manner, Ulrich said, “I am just blown away by how appreciative you two are.”

“I’m sure my mother knows far more inside information than your dad,” Katharina said.

“And I’m sure your mother would be very emotionally invested in a random patient at the psych hospital,” Ulrich said.

“You know, my grandpa actually spoke to that man on the same day Helge went missing,” Charlotte said. “My grandfather was in the clock shop with that man when he first heard that two bodies had been found.”

“Yeah, yeah, that was decades ago,” Ulrich said.

“It’s all very entertaining to listen to the three of you bicker,” Peter said. It was.

“I’m sure it is,” Ulrich said. “What’s your point?”

“You’ve barely told me anything about your father’s story.”

“Oh, right,” Ulrich said. “All right, listen up. My dad interviewed the lunatic himself. He’s known as ‘the Deputy’ at the psychiatric hospital. There was some reason for that, but I forgot what my dad said. But isn’t that a cool nickname?”

“Get on with it,” Charlotte said.

“The Deputy told my dad all about his treatment at the hands of Daniel Kahnwald, the police chief in the ’50s, and Egon Tiedemann, Daniel Kahnwald’s second-in-command. They tried to beat a confession out of him.”

A sickening feeling came over Peter. He couldn’t help but think about the troubling implications.

“According to the Deputy, Daniel’s men nearly beat him to death,” Ulrich said. “He really thought he would die at their hands.”

“And this man is mentally ill?” Peter asked. Even though the man had tried to kill Helge, Peter still pitied him. Did the man even understand what was going on? Did he know why the policemen beat him or what they accused him of? Did he have a fair chance to defend himself?

“No, the lunatic I’m referring to happens to be completely sane,” Ulrich said. “What do you think? Of course he’s mentally disturbed. Have you been listening? That’s the whole reason he was put in a psychiatric hospital.”

“Well, you know what they do in the Soviet Union,” Peter said, betting that Ulrich would ask him what he meant.

Ulrich gave Peter a blank stare. “They do many things in the Soviet Union, Peter,” he said with a condescending tone. “How on earth am I supposed to know which thing you’re referring to?”

“The Soviets diagnose their political dissidents with schizophrenia and lock them away to silence them,” Peter said. “The situation there is appalling. It’s terrifying to think that psychiatry can be abused for political ends, and so effectively too.”

“Last time I checked, Peter, the Inner German Border is hard to miss,” Katharina said. “Even you and Charlotte couldn’t cross over into the GDR without realizing it. This isn’t the Eastern Bloc. Not relevant.”

“Ooh, now that you mention East Germany,” Ulrich said, “here’s a question for you: what’s the difference between Egon and the Stasi?”

Peter wasn’t surprised that the political abuse of psychiatry under oppressive regimes was something Katharina and Ulrich didn’t care to discuss, but he was a bit disappointed.

“Hey, wait a second,” Charlotte said. “Katharina, what are you trying to imply about me and Peter?”

“What do you think?”

“That we’re absentminded?”

“See, you know it’s true too,” Katharina said.

“Stop mocking us,” Charlotte said. “You know what I meant. And I disagree with your premise.”

“Oh, Charlotte,” Ulrich said. “Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. You’ve got your head in the clouds, and it’s time for you to come back down to earth.”

Katharina laughed.

“No need to gang up on me,” Charlotte said. “Peter, defend me.”

Peter hadn’t really been paying attention to the conversation until Charlotte said his name. He was still thinking about the way that society treated mental illness. Since Peter didn’t have a good comeback ready in his mind, he only said the truth: “I still have no clue who Egon Tiedemann is or why he’s hated by you.”

“Oh yeah,” Charlotte said. “I guess you wouldn’t know about that.” 

“If anything, that means I’m more absentminded than Charlotte.” It wasn’t the defense Charlotte wanted, but at least Peter tried.

To Peter, Katharina said, “No, that just means you’re uninformed.” She looked at Ulrich and Charlotte. “Who wants to be the one to tell him?”

“None of you even let me finish my joke first,” Ulrich complained.

“What joke?” Peter asked.

“Exactly,” Ulrich said.

“All right, Ulrich,” Charlotte said. “This better be a good joke. Tell me, what’s the difference between Egon Tiedemann and the Stasi?”

“The Stasi is scarily competent. Egon Tiedemann is scarily incompetent.”

“Not bad,” Charlotte said. “That was a good one.”

“Christ,” Katharina said, shaking her head. “Both of you have terrible taste.”

While Katharina and Ulrich listed their grievances against Egon Tiedemann, Charlotte was busy thinking about the Winden police department. She didn’t want it to be true that the police beat a suspect to force a confession out of him. She hoped it wasn’t a common practice. It wasn’t right. It would lead to false confessions. But she had a feeling that this hadn’t been an isolated incident. Winden itself gave Charlotte the feeling that something terrible was lurking beneath the surface.

How many innocents were wasting away in prison as a result of Daniel Kahnwald and Egon Tiedemann’s policing? The thought alone made Charlotte’s blood boil. Wait—the Deputy might be innocent too. What if he was another victim unfairly singled out by the police the same way Egon had singled out Ulrich?

Peter tapped Charlotte on the shoulder and said, “You really weren’t kidding when you said a lot of things happened last year.”

“Oh, did I mention that Egon’s dead now?” Katharina said. “He died in June—not of natural causes.”

“Great. How many more people in this town have disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances?” Peter asked.

Charlotte felt a bit guilty that Peter had been in the dark about this. It wasn’t like she had tried to keep the truth from Peter. She just forgot to tell him. But if she didn’t tell Peter about the strange things that happened in Winden, how else would he learn about them?

Ulrich’s expression turned serious. “I’ll say this just so you won’t say anything insensitive or stupid: my younger brother went missing last year. Disappeared without a trace.”

“Oh God, this place…” Peter said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Like I haven’t heard that a thousand times,” Ulrich said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“What do you think happened to him?” Peter asked.

“Some days, I’d rather not think about that,” Ulrich said. “I just hope he didn’t suffer. The police investigation didn’t find a thing because the drunken bastard himself, Egon Tiedemann, was in charge of it. He wasted valuable time looking at me instead. Sometimes I wonder if Mads could’ve been saved if anyone else had been in charge.”

After a moment of staring off into space, Ulrich’s tone noticeably changed. “Let’s talk about something else. Claudia Tiedemann disappeared too, around the same time Egon died, right? What do we think happened to her?”

“Does Winden have a serial killer?” Peter asked.

“God, I hope not,” Katharina said.

“You know,” Charlotte said, “the one good thing about Claudia’s disappearance is that she can’t bring further disgrace on the Tiedemann name.”

Tronte Nielsen’s story for the newspaper sounded like a hit piece more than anything else. And Charlotte was perfectly fine with that. She wanted Egon’s reputation to be tarnished forever. She wanted everyone to know his crimes. She wanted everyone to know what a terrible person he was—everyone, even his granddaughter, Regina. She hated to admit it to herself, since she knew it was bad to think this way, but it was true. Charlotte wanted Regina to realize that Egon Tiedemann was not a good man, however painful it might be, and she wanted to hear Regina admit it.

“Ooh, that’s surprisingly vicious for you,” Ulrich said.

Katharina said, “Charlotte, have I ever told you how much I love your brand of optimism?”

“You can hardly call that optimism,” Peter said.

“Well, it’s the closest thing we’ve got,” Charlotte said.

“Yeah, Peter, optimism,” Ulrich said. “Take it or leave it.”

Peter sighed. “Fine, whatever. Just tell me your theories about Claudia.”

“By all accounts she was a powerful, ambitious woman,” Charlotte said. “I bet Claudia made a few enemies. I think she was run out of town.”

“I want to imagine that Claudia made it out of Winden,” Katharina said. “I want to imagine that she saw her life here for what it was and that she wasn’t afraid to leave everything behind.”

“I think both of you have missed the most obvious conclusion,” Ulrich said.

“Oh? What’s that?” Charlotte said.

“Egon died under suspicious circumstances. Claudia was last seen with Egon. And we already know the Tiedemanns are heartless. Why would Claudia be any less cutthroat?”

Chapter Text

The ambitious project to build in-line skates was bound to come to an end. Unfortunately, Peter had not been prepared for his project to nearly come to an end in HG’s clock shop.

Charlotte didn’t have the time to clean the blood off her face and hands before HG saw them.

“It looks worse than it is,” Charlotte said. “I had a nosebleed. That’s all. I was able to stop the bleeding but I got the blood all over my face.”

“A nosebleed?” HG seemed suspicious. “What caused it?”

“It’s the dry air,” Charlotte said. She held her gray coat up. “Do you think the blood will come out of this?”

“You tell me,” HG said.

Charlotte went through a door Peter had never noticed before and charged down the hallway, asking, “Do I soak it in hot water or cold water?”

“Cold,” HG said.

What really had happened was that Peter and Charlotte had fallen during their attempt at in-line skating, and—it all happened so fast—somehow Charlotte’s face collided with one of Peter’s skates, and that triggered Charlotte’s nosebleed.

Charlotte had cupped her hands around her nose to prevent blood from getting all over her clothes. Unfortunately that had the side effect of getting blood all over her face.

“Tilt your head back,” Peter had told her.

Charlotte tried that, made a hacking sort of noise in the back of her throat, and leaned forward instead, using her hands to catch her blood and keep it from getting on her clothes. Somehow, she managed to say, “That only causes the blood to go down my throat instead. I don’t want to drink my own blood—has a horrible taste to it.”

“As opposed to the taste of anybody else’s blood?” Peter joked, trying to lighten the mood. “I wonder how vampires do it. I guess they don’t care about taste too much. Do you think vampires could just punch people hard enough in the face to cause a nosebleed and then drink that blood instead of biting into people’s necks and all that?”

“Blood transfusions,” Charlotte said. “What if vampires raided blood banks instead?”

Peter laughed. “Somebody needs to write a book or movie about that.”

“You know, if vampires were real, they’d probably get AIDS, don’t you think?” Charlotte said.

Eventually Charlotte got her nosebleed under control. After realizing just how much blood she had on her hands and face, Peter wondered if he should’ve done something. If he had been the one with the nosebleed, and if Charlotte wasn’t here, Peter would’ve taken his shirt off and bled into that instead. Should he have offered to take off his shirt and let her use that to stop her nosebleed? The thought alone made Peter sweat. Charlotte obviously would be focusing on her bloody nose, not him, but Peter was self-conscious, way too self-conscious to actually do that. 

It was too late now to do anything either. He shouldn’t worry about it. He didn’t need to worry about it. No, Peter believed in the equality of the sexes. He was no male chauvinist pig. Charlotte could have taken off her own damn shirt and bled into that if she wanted to; she didn’t need a man to offer up a shirt for her. She could make her own decisions, and it was an insult to her to doubt her capability to do so. If she had wanted to do that, then she would’ve done it herself, because equality of the sexes! Wait—taking a shirt off—no, no, Peter wasn’t going to think about that right now.

Peter decided to reflect on his project instead. The creation of roller skates that had the wheels all in a line, resembling the kind used by hockey players for training during the off-season, had gone in a direction that he hadn’t anticipated. It turned out that Regina’s intimidating boyfriend had experience as a metalworker, which surprised Peter since Aleksander took Helge’s job as janitor after Helge was injured in the car crash. Peter ended up asking Regina to ask Aleksander—he did not want to ask Aleksander directly—about possibly doing some work for them. Aleksander thought that they were harebrained idiots, but they were harebrained idiots that would pay.

It did feel like less of an accomplishment since they got Aleksander to help them, but it was an accomplishment nonetheless. Sort of. Aleksander had told Peter and Charlotte, “You’d be better off taking these to an ice hockey shop.” But Winden didn’t have an ice hockey shop, neither of them could drive, and neither of them had the courage to interact with any people at any hockey shop. And Peter had money—from Helge. It wasn’t his fault that Helge didn’t have the best sense of scale and overestimated how much money to give a teenager the one time Peter asked for some cash. 

So in the end, Aleksander and an ice hockey shop in Mannheim did most of the work for Peter and Charlotte. But at least they created the prototypes all on their own, so they could be proud of that, even if those prototypes hadn’t exactly been safe. The prototypes hadn’t been dangerous or anything like that. It was just that they weren’t undangerous.

“Why do a safety check now?” Charlotte asked.

HG had decided that now was the time to confiscate her in-line skates in the name of safety.

Peter wished that he had brought normal shoes with him. It wasn’t like HG had confiscated his skates too, but Peter didn’t trust that he could get far on those. Ulrich had donated some hockey skates that he rarely used and didn’t need any longer. Those formed the boot of Peter’s and Charlotte’s in-line skates. The skate couldn’t come off the boot or be attached to a normal shoe. It was less convenient, but it seemed to be more stable than before.

“Even if it’s a coincidence that there happens to be an injury—” HG said.

“A nosebleed is hardly an injury,” Charlotte said.

“All right then. Injury or no injury, I have decided that a safety inspection would be a good thing to do.”

“Uh, you can look at my skates too,” Peter said. “I mean, if they’re not safe, then I should know, right?”

Charlotte talked just loud enough for Peter to hear her. “You want to stick around for the lecture? He’s a lecturer.”

“I didn’t bring normal shoes with me,” Peter answered, equally quiet as Charlotte. “I don’t think I want to walk home in my socks or barefoot, and I don’t think I would get far on my skates. So I’ll have to ask Mr. Tannhaus if he could drive me.”

Charlotte shrugged. “Maybe he’ll lecture us all about the basics of making roller skates as if it’s one of the most basic concepts that everybody should know already.”

Since there weren’t many chairs except for those next to HG, Peter decided to sit down on the floor, leaning against a wall. There was a shelf of clocks opposite him. It looked like a few of the clocks had been set to random times—either that or they didn’t work right.

“Your father used to do that,” HG said, startling Peter.

“Used to do what?”

“Helge would come in here, sit down on the floor, and look up at all the clocks, just watching time pass.”

“Huh. Interesting,” Peter said.

Charlotte sat down next to Peter while HG looked over the skates.

“There is no braking mechanism as far as I can tell,” HG said. “Tell me, what’s the way you come to a stop without using brakes?”

“The same way hockey players stop when ice-skating,” Charlotte said.

“You’ve never played hockey,” HG said. “Do you know how hockey players stop?”

Peter had an idea. He had experience with hockey skates. When he was younger, whenever he went ice-skating, he always wanted to use hockey skates instead of the normal figure-skating ice skates because ice hockey was cooler and manlier than figure-skating. 

“You pivot,” Charlotte said.

Hockey skates had been much more difficult than the regular kind for Peter. He remembered the accidents. He remembered the blood. And yet, even when his mom told him to stick to the normal kind of ice skates, he would always try to get a hold of hockey skates instead.

“Elaborate,” HG said.

“You pivot,” Charlotte repeated. She didn’t know how to do a hockey stop as far as Peter knew.

HG did not look convinced that Charlotte knew what she was talking about.

Charlotte stood up. “Okay, so if I’m ice skating in this direction,” she said, positioning her feet accordingly, “I pick a direction, and I pivot.” She changed position, and the end position was close to correct, but she jumped instead of pivoting on one foot.

“You would most certainly fall over if you tried to stop that way,” HG said.

“That’s why we don’t use that stop,” Peter said, quickly trying to think of what to say.

HG looked at him, waiting for Peter to explain how they stopped.

“We do a V-stop, like this.” Peter said, moving his feet into what he hoped resembled the correct position. “Er, no, I meant a stop like this.” Peter moved his feet again. “I think that’s a T-stop?” He changed the position of his feet one more time. “I don’t know what letter it is, but the important part is that I can do it.”

HG only said one thing: “Hmm.” And that was all.

Chapter Text

Helge couldn’t read people well. He had never been good at that, never. 

Peter, assembling a model biplane, said, “I suppose we’ll have to paint these too.”

At least Peter didn’t look unhappy. Helge could tell that much. And he didn’t mind doing this activity in the cabin rather than at home, at the mansion.

“Yes, we can paint these together,” Helge said. He was working on a model biplane of his own. These little toy airplanes took him back to his boyhood. He had plenty of them in his room at one time. 

Peter held his model biplane up and said, “Or were we supposed to paint all the pieces before we put them together?”

“I can’t remember how I used to make these back in the day,” Helge said. “I didn’t paint all of them though. Some can be left unpainted.”

“But that’s where the creativity is,” Peter said, “in the painting and the patterns.”

Creativity. That was certainly not Helge’s forte. “I don’t see myself as a very creative person,” he said.

“Really?” Peter said.

“Yes, really,” Helge said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Peter said. “I just think you’re underestimating your own creativity.”

“Really?” Helge said. “I can’t tell when you say something simply to be nice rather than actually meaning it.”

“Why do you doubt my sincerity?” Peter asked. “I mean what I say.”

“Okay,” Helge said.

“Look at all those little crafts you’ve got there on the shelves,” Peter said. “You have a little army of acorn and pinecone people.”

That got a laugh—well, it was more of an extremely quiet snort—out of Helge. “An army,” he said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

Peter walked over to the shelves to look at Helge’s “army” of crafts.

“Do you know if that friend of yours still has the birds?” Helge asked.

Peter turned around. “Huh?”

“Your friend, the Tannhaus girl,” Helge said.

“Oh, right, the birds,” Peter said. “Yeah. Now I remember. Uh, I don’t know if she still has those dead birds you gave her, but I can ask.”

When Peter left, Helge returned to another little project of his. He had finished whittling a bird out of a block of wood. It was a bird like the ones that had fallen out of the sky, the birds that fascinated himself and Charlotte alike, except this one was meant to be a living bird. He threaded a red string, one resembling the red string tied around the coin Helge still wore to this day, through a small hole in the wooden bird’s beak. It was just about done now. Helge could give it to Charlotte the next time she came over.

It was about the same time this year as the time all of the odd phenomena of last year had occurred. Today was November 12, 1987. But that was not on the minds of Peter and Charlotte, not today. They were in the forest again, as usual, but this time they were reading the parts from Waiting for Godot to each other. Charlotte was reading the part of Vladimir, and for this part she managed to make her voice sound deeper. She sounded like some pretentious philosopher or scholar. Peter was reading the part of Estragon.

“What is terrible is to have thought,” Charlotte proclaimed.

In contrast to Charlotte’s seriousness, Peter wryly said, “But did that ever happen to us?”

“Where are all these corpses from?” Charlotte asked calmly, as if corpses were a normal sight for the woods around Winden. That was the way the line was supposed to sound according to the way she interpreted it.

“These skeletons,” Peter said, sounding equally unsurprised and disinterested.

“Tell me that.”

“True,” Peter said.

It was like talking about dead birds. Even though it was not normal for birds to fall out of the sky and die en masse, someone might get the impression that Charlotte thought it was unremarkable from the way she talked about that strange occurrence.

Absurdism. Unlike Peter, Charlotte couldn’t define absurdism and didn’t understand much in the way of philosophy. But theater of the absurd was something that resonated with her. Oedipus the King, that famous Greek tragedy, also resonated with her too, for a different reason. Her parents—what secrets would Charlotte unearth if she tried to learn all she could about them? Theater of the absurd reminded Charlotte of Winden. And even if she had no idea what all the surreal moments meant or what they represented, Charlotte liked the play regardless.

She and Peter walked on top of fallen trees, balancing on them.

“Charlotte,” Peter said. “Could you help me figure something out?”

“Sure,” Charlotte said. She jumped off the fallen tree, landing back on solid ground. “What is it?”

Peter looked away for a second, but then he met her gaze and said, “Which sounds better? Peter Schmidt or Peter Doppler?”

Charlotte smiled. “Let me think about that for a second.” 

Even though she knew it was silly to think about something like this at this time, Charlotte couldn’t help but think about which name she would prefer: Charlotte Schmidt or Charlotte Doppler. The alliteration of Charlotte Schmidt was not something she liked, but Charlotte could imagine herself using the name Charlotte Doppler one day. When she realized just exactly what she was thinking of when comparing the names Charlotte Schmidt and Charlotte Doppler, Charlotte blushed.

“Doppler,” Charlotte said. “I like the sound of Peter Doppler better.”

“Then I suppose I should look into the process of legally changing my name,” Peter said. He was also smiling. “Do you think I could try that out? Or would I have to get it changed first?”

“Good question. I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “But how often do people call you by your full name anyway?”

“True,” Peter said. “I’m just Peter. I bet most people don’t even know what my last name is or that it’s different than my father’s last name.”

“You’re probably right,” Charlotte said.

Peter jumped onto another fallen tree and began to walk across it. “Where shall we go?” he asked.

“Not far,” Charlotte said. Peter was jumping ahead to a different section in the play.

“Oh yes, let’s go far away from here,” Peter said, sticking his arms out for balance.

“We can’t,” Charlotte said, reminded of how no one ever seemed to leave Winden.

“Why not?” Peter asked.

Charlotte glanced at her copy of Waiting for Godot. “We have to come back tomorrow,” she said. Good for Peter—he didn’t even have to look at the book. He must have memorized this little section.

“What for?”

“To wait for Godot.”

“Ah!” Peter said. He paused for as long as he thought the stage directions warranted before he finished the his line. “He didn’t come?”

“Peter,” Charlotte said, ending their reading of Waiting for Godot. “I think, well, what if I told you why I was so upset that day we first met?” She had wanted to tell Peter why she had been so upset that day from the moment Peter told her about his mother. But now Charlotte was finally ready.

Peter looked ready to listen, as always. He was such a good listener.

It was really weird that the first two people Peter met in Winden had this strange fixation with dead birds falling from the sky. The dead birds supposedly falling out of the sky was weird in and of itself, but Peter had arrived after it had stopped, so he hadn’t witnessed it. Sometimes Peter wondered if it was even true. Maybe the thing with the dead birds was just an elaborate joke that all the locals were in on. He probably seemed really gullible to them.

H.G. Tannhaus had helped Peter and Charlotte with their in-line skates. Without him, their skates would probably still be at the barely functioning level they were at before. Helge had promised Peter that he’d get a bicycle, but for now Peter was content to try to skate along the forest road.

There was a strange stirring in Peter’s heart as he skated on the forest road. The forest seemed to have its own rhythm, its own pulse, and Peter found himself drawn to it, falling into step. Peter realized he was part of Winden in a way. He was part of Winden now, wasn’t he? He was, Peter knew he was—or felt that he was, at the least. Winden was part of his life now, and he would stay. Peter would stay for Helge, for Charlotte, and for Winden.