All Chapters of The Third Twin: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

12As we sat back for the first time in at least an hour, the ladies on their couch, I in my cushioned armchair, I’d left out nothing. No detail that I could readily recall, no impression, however fanciful it seemed. And not once had their suspension of disbelief seemed strained. Equipped with at least Dianna’s longstanding relationship with the paranormal, they’d apparently made the decision somewhere along the way to quit resisting what lay outside known bounds and to proceed as though the supernatural was as legitimate a player as anything that could be converted to formula. Which effectively rendered ‘suspension of disbelief’ an obsolete term unless proven otherwise, and somehow I didn’t see any of us reserving hope that the land-based and scientifically logical explanations would suddenly pop up out of the puzzle’s assembly. The sobe

The five of us sat as a group for the first time at an outdoor table at Berchtesgaden’s Café Strasbourg. The views from the terrace were grand, Herr Ritter having obviously selected the location that would speak most eloquently for the element in which his party would be spending the next two weeks. The restaurant was situated on the side of a hill, and from where I sat, Dianna to my left, Ritter to my right, I had a dead-on look at Germany’s third highest mountain, Mount Watzmann. Against the backdrop of an isolated cloud cluster in an otherwise clear sky, its twin snow-capped peaks looked like the hooks of a nasty vise that was as likely to shear its victim in two as to clamp it in place. Conspicuously out of the view was Mount Kehlstein, on a spur of which rested Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a visit not for another day as I’d have thought, but one which, unbeknownst to us, had been written into our itinerary. When I heard this, I’d been instantly suspi

To our relief, the snow showers quit around noon, though the sky remained threatening, in moving shades of gray. A wind had risen, channeling along the opposite slope and lifting the fallen snow up in swirls, but the road before us nonetheless looked traversable. We didn’t relish the thought of trudging across treacherous terrain in the face of a cold stiff wind, but we didn’t doubt that our Teutonic Knight, Champion of the Cause of Human Endurance, would drive us on, probably double time, to our next site. He had been eyeing the weather with impatience ever since he’d finished sewing Higgins up, likely having been anxious to flee the uncomfortable silence that had descended. It nearly knocked us backward when he entered the shelter saying he thought we should wait until morning to set out again, that even if we managed to avoid more snow, we were going to find the next shelter, a lean-to he had constructed himself out of tree limbs, less comfortabl

It was so out of place, character, context as the trees and their denizens fell away behind us, that Dianna and I could only stare in wonderment. The pavilion-like structure, which served as a covered porch to an adjoining cinderblock building, painted a mirage-like tableau. Two sides were open, while the one that stood opposite us abutting the building was a leeward wall fashioned of slim, rough logs lashed and nailed together. The roof, resting on six knotty supports, was just as crude, but the structure was clearly sturdy, withstanding the storm in creaking though staunch motionlessness. Yet it was the shelter’s interior that sang—with its fire pit, the stack of logs in the corner, the picnic table and bench, camping chairs. The scene was surreal, Daliesque, an unapologetic imposition upon rigidity and uniformity, upon the past itself. The shelter was Ritter’s lean-to, disassembled and put back together here, where in its alienness it somehow bel

I woke to a world so brilliant, I thought I was still in the clutches of the elaborate nightmare that seemed to have spanned years of mine and others’ lives; and that this must be the culmination of its chaotic conclusion, a blinding photograph to attach to mankind’s record, the moment in time when human evolution pinnacled not in glory, but in irony, for crimes against the very engine that had driven it.When my pupils adjusted to the brightness, I found that I lay beneath a clear blue sky in a world encased in, utterly suppressed by snow. Not a sound or flutter occurred. The story told in the dream had ended, and there was no epilogue. The point-of-view character had landed not in heaven or hell, but in oblivion, and this was what it looked like, a realm of white and blue. And yet there were memories, were there not? In his muscles and