Norm DePlume - December 1819 - A broken down, abandoned barn in Geneva Switzerland. Adam, age 1, who wants a mother and father for Christmas but is afraid no one wants him. Adam is the name used by the creature that was created by Victor Frankenstein in 1818.
The Aurora Archives: Day 14
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 1819-DEC-24 LOCATION: The Zbinden Estate, outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland SIGNAL RESONANCE: High/Gravitational anchor OPERATIVE: Lumi Protocol (Sub-type: Guardian)
TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED CORRESPONDENCE: (Two documents filed together in the Zbinden Family Trust. Document A is an entry from the private journal of composer Cyprian Zbinden. Document B is a handwritten note found on a scrap of linen paper.)
Journal of C. Zbinden, dated Christmas Eve, 1819
I came to the barn to compose a Requiem. The house was too full of ghosts; the silence of my parents’ empty chairs was deafening. The music room had grown silent. The halls lined with dust. I thought the cold air in the farm would sharpen my mind for the Kyrie. I wanted chords heavy enough to bury this estate and my history with it.
I found the basket in the horse stall. A wicker thing, covered in old newsprint and full of hay.
I was annoyed to see within lay a foundling. A burden left by some village girl who knew the Zbinden name but did not know the Zbinden line had ended. A severe encroachment on my families generosity. I looked at the sleeping infant. I felt nothing but a tired pragmatism. I resolved to take him to the orphanage in Carouge immediately. I reached down to lift the handle, but it would not budge.
It was mightily heavy. I strained like I was trying to lift a bag of potatoes with one hand.
***
The Note pinned to the blanket
To the one who finds him,
My name is of no consequence, by the time you read this, I shall be with father. The sickness has taken my breath, and soon it will take my heart. I cannot leave Adam to the frost but there is no one else. I did not know what else to do.
He has no father, so do not look. The world calls him a mistake, and has ostracized us both. I call him my miracle.
***
Journal of C. Zbinden
It defied logic. The child could not have weighed more than a sack of flour, yet the basket felt bolted to the earth. I pulled until my shoulders cracked. It was as dense as a limestone block.
I thought the frost had frozen it to the ground. I kicked the straw away, but there was no ice gripping the baskets weave. Just the basket itself, sitting there with the clumsy dead weight of a corpse.
The Requiem in my head faltered. The heavy, trudging rhythm I had been composing... it stopped. I was forced to sit on the milking stool, breathless. I was forced to look at the dratted child.
I saw the note. I saw the child’s face. He was not crying. He was warm, snuggled into a thin blanket and with not much but a bit of hay to keep him so. The child seemed strangely comfortable, as if a small furnace lay beneath his blankets.
***
The Note
They say that on the Holy Night, a King was found in the straw. My Adam is no King. He has nothing but this blanket and the love of a dying woman.
But I pray for a Joseph. A man who does not look at blood, but at the spirit within. I pray that you are he. That you might find room in your inn.
Do not let him be heavy to you. Let him be your joy.
***
Journal of C. Zbinden
“Do not let him be heavy.” The note read. How could it know.
The words struck me with the force of a hammer. The heaviness was not in the basket, surely. It was in me. It was the weight of my grief, my selfishness, my refusal to let life continue after death.
I sat there for an hour in the cold. I watched the boy breathe and whimper in its sleep. I listened to the wind rattling the eaves and watched the sun slowly descend into the mountains.
And the music changed.
The D-minor dirge i had been pondering dissolved. In its place, a melody rose. Simple. Ascending. Three notes, climbing like a bird taking flight. A lullaby, not a funeral march.
Sleep, my Adam, sleep...
I hummed it aloud. The moment the melody left my lips, a rustling came from the basket.
Something moved beneath the child. A white shape, I took it at first for a large barn cat or a rat, but instead a rabbit squeezed itself out from under the blankets, it pulled with it a cloth of red and dragged it gently over the child. It looked exhausted, trembling as if it had held up the sky. It hopped out of the basket, shook its fur, and scurried into the dark corner of the barn.
I reached for the handle again.
It was light as air, and yet, no rabbit could have weighed as much as that. Instead I looked inward and felt my grief and my callousness lifting for the first time since I had first learned to sing. A memory of christmas singing with my sister washed through me and had lightened my mind, but strtengthened my arm.
I lifted the boy. I walked out into the snow, humming the new song. The farm is not ending, mother. It is beginning.
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE: The operative utilized Mass Amplification. This is a desperate defensive maneuver where a Rabbit anchors itself to the gravitational pull to become an immovable object tied to the earth. This technique places immense physical strain on the operative as it increases its gravitational weight. The trembling observed by the subject was not fear, but extreme muscle fatigue from channeling that amount of gravitational density. Cyprian Zbinden never finished his Requiem. He did, however, publish the “Lullaby of Geneva” in 1821, which remains a staple of Swiss choral music. The operative did not disengage. Local burrow records indicate a specific white watcher monitored the Zbinden cottage for the next fourteen years, often seen sitting on the garden wall while Adam practiced his violin. The boy was never alone.
This was excellent.