The Forgotten Vault

Chantal Schaul, 2002

“Perhaps someone will be able to make sense of this one day; I certainly can’t, as much as I hate unresolved problems. I shall write down all the facts as I have witnessed them. At the time I noted down all the events in my diary, but my handwriting is rather illegible and not everything turned out to be relevant to the matter. I shall therefore leave this typed version behind, absolutely identical with the original.

The whole thing was triggered off when my closest friend, Alain Majerus, found his great-uncle Nic Majerus’s diary in his great-aunt Anna’s attic, briefly after she’d been moved to an old people’s home. The government had sent said diary to the family inside a tattered coarse envelope, which was dated after the war. A note read thus:

“This diary, which belongs to your son Nic Majerus, parish priest of the Verluerekascht until 1941, was found during the clearing of the casemates.

Our condolences.”

The diary was leather-bound and its covers were covered in humidity stains. The rusty lock had been broken decades ago. I will reproduce here the last entries, which are responsible for the ensuing events.

23. September 1941:

Oh God forgive me! I have sinned again. Why does an inner force compel me to keep doing it? I just cannot resist her! Maybe the war has put me in a different frame of mind where I forget my vows. No, it would be the same if I had met her anywhere else.

I don’t think the others have noticed. Did some see me stealing away at night? They behave differently towards me. I don’t care. If we survive this I shall marry her anyway.

24 September 1941:

I am a despicable monster. I have succumbed again. She is scared and intimidated by the war and keeps repeating “au secours!” She only speaks French. She is absolutely beautiful and wears an antique-looking green cloak, and a necklace of the most breathtaking rubies. She won’t tell me where she comes from. We don’t talk much in general. She refuses to see the others and prefers to stay hidden in the secret vault where I found her. Just as well, I couldn’t bear the confrontation yet.

25 September 1941:

More bombings but the casemates hold strong. We need more food soon. I don’t know if Jemp has gone mad. He followed me secretly to her cavern. I almost strangled him when I found him. But he kept protesting he had seen no one but me. I believed him in the end. It was dark after all.

26 September 1941:

I have to go outside to get her some food or she will starve. She looks paler every day. For protection I have piled up blocks of rock in front of the passage so the Nazis can’t find her. She trusts me. I won’t be long.’

Here the diary entries of Alain’s great-uncle Nic Majerus ended. The last lines drawn by his hand showed a rough plan of a part of the casemates underneath the fortress of Luxembourg. The casemates were underground tunnels, mainly used as subterranean defensive passages during the centuries. The word ‘casemates” – I had to look it up – is derived from Spanish. ‘Casa’ is ‘house’, and ‘matar’ ‘to kill’!

We were sitting in Alain’s living-room. His wife was out. “So what about it?” I asked. “Unfaithful priests aren’t that big a deal, even if one of them happened to be your uncle. Personally I have never trusted priests. And in those days all values must have been out of the window.” – “But I don’t mean that!” Alain jumped forward in his seat and spoke slowly: “My uncle died on the twenty-sixth of September that year! He must have been killed as he went outside to look for food!” That did strike me as quite disastrous. “It is possible that someone found her.” Alain shook his head: “I doubt it very much.” – “Did your aunt know anything about this?” He kept shaking his head: “I showed her the diary but she brushed it away as some old and insignificant scribbling. She is a bit weird nowadays, almost ninety.”

I left him to ponder over the matter. Admittedly, it did seem to be a strange story. But I stayed rational and assumed that there probably wasn’t much at the bottom of it. Presumably the uncle had got hyped up and ravaged by guilt, and had lost all sense of reality. He probably fooled himself into believing no one knew about his mistress, while they must all have been in on it. Who cares about a priest having an affair when bombs are exploding around you? But priests always think they are the centre of everyone’s existence. I was almost certain that someone, especially the suspicious Jemp, dug her out from her cave. Most likely she was in her eighties now, spoiling her grand- or even great-grandchildren.

The next morning, while I was in the middle of reading out a German dictation for my class (I teach in primary school), the porter interrupted. There was a phone call for me. How I hate these interruptions in the middle of class papers! It was Alain. “Please come to the casemates with me tonight. I have to find her!” He had started to go mad. “What do you expect? Even if she didn’t get out, all that will be left of her are a few bones at the most. And do you know it’s forbidden to just roam around at your will in there?” My attempts to speak reason to him had no effect. He convinced me in the end. “What about her ruby necklace?” I finally gave in. As I had the afternoon off, I booked us into the early evening guided tour, organized food and torches and went to pick him up from the bank at five o’clock (he was working for the Raiffeisen Bank in Wiltz).

We entered the Bock casemates among a group of tourists. The guide was multi-lingual, which gave her a licence to talk continuously. She took us to the archaeological crypt first, chattering on about the history of the town (which I knew all about anyway, but which I will briefly summarize here, because some of it will be useful background information). She explained how Count Siegfried built the first fort here in 963, how the later growing fortress was taken over by various foreign rulers, until it became independent in 1839, and how most of the casemates had been built by the Burgundians in the sixteenth century. They had mainly been used as shelter for soldiers and horses, but even as spaces for workshops, kitchens, bakeries, slaughterhouses, and so on. Their labyrinth reaches down as far as forty metres. In 1867 the dismantlement of the casemates started and all entrances and main connections were filled up with stones. The length of the tunnels decreased from twenty-three to seventeen kilometres. In 1935 the galleries were re-opened and provided protection for more than three thousand people in the Second World War.

As I always try to make my pupils comprehend, the casemates are rather impressive. At the time I thought I should take the children there on a school excursion in the summer, but now that doesn’t seem such a good idea. Anyway, to move away from my diversion, we descended a steep staircase into the lower galleries. The steps had been hollowed out by innumerable feet eroding them over the centuries. The soft sandstone shone orange and yellow in the electric light. We followed the group into the cellars of the old fort, which are more than thousand years old. Looking through the embrasures hewn into the thick rock, the whole valley lay at our feet. The sun was just about to set and reflected on the rounded tops of the surrounding hills, the majestic bridge that connected them and the roofs of the houses, huddled against each other, smudging them with a deep crimson colour, while the recesses of valley and river were already shrouded in darkness.

Alain grabbed my arm and pulled me back into one of the widened embrasures. We crouched behind the huge canon that had been left there to provide an air of authenticity. He drew his uncle’s diary from inside his jacket, studied Nic’s plan of the place and speculated: “I believe we are somewhere around here.” He pointed at a spot on the paper. Merely the old drawbridge between the castle and the rest of the town were annotated. Underneath it various levels of tunnels combed the rock. From the lowest of these passages a smaller tunnel branched off and led past the shaft of the fort’s well and underneath its former prison. That meant we were at that moment above the secret passage where (presumably!) the seductive lady had been walled in fifty-eight years ago.

We crouched behind the canon for another hour, before the lights went off. A few green exit signs coated the rocky walls with a cadaverous and sickly hue. We switched on our torches and followed the main passage back to the crypt next to the bridge. Another set of stairs led down to the lower tunnels, to which the public had no access. These stairs were extremely narrow and steeper than the ones before. We had to bend down not to hit our heads against the ceiling. The passage we found at the bottom was dripping with rank water. I didn’t expect us to get much further and was surprised that this area wasn’t locked off in the first place. I confidently assumed that we would have to turn back soon.

Unexpectedly, however, Alain found Nic’s side passage. It had partly fallen in and we had to crawl over heaps of dusty stone debris. I anticipated a dead end within proximity, when Alain suddenly shouted: “It’s here! This must be it!” He directed the spotlight of his torch towards a cavity in the rock, clogged by boulders and stones. Without delay he started to move the top stones, flinging them into the opposite end of the tunnel. I, less enthusiastic, merely pointed my torch towards the stone heap to light his work area. Gradually, an entrance opened up. It lead into a larger vault, for the light revealed an arched ceiling that seemed to cover a space the size of a hall, perhaps a secret chamber.

We rolled the larger boulders away together and crawled over the rest of the debris into the vault. It turned out to be quite spacious, shaped in a circle but, paradoxically, the surrounding rock was ravaged with recesses and corners. The greater part of the walls was cast in shadow. We stayed together at first, exploring the rock with our torches. But very soon, Alain ran off full of excitement and approached a cavity, whispering with a voice that the rocks reverberated: “I found her. There’s her green cloak!” I followed him slowly and, in the light of his torch, perceived a figure wrapped up in a dark cloth and huddled up against the wall as if seeking shelter.

I stood still, watching Alain from a distance as he bent over the figure and touched – what would normally be – the shoulder. I was waiting for him to lift up the cloth and reveal a skeleton. What else could there be after so many years? Surely no one would be able to survive for that long on mould-bugs and vault-drippings. Alain froze. So did I. The cloak had stirred. He jumped, stumbled and fell backwards on to the mouldy ground. The figure rose, turned around and faced him. All I saw from the distance was a greyish face, whether stemming from the bad lighting or from decay, I couldn’t say. It whispered something I couldn’t hear. Alain stared up at it, or her, I couldn’t see, and raised his hand to the face to touch it softly with his fingers.

At this point I left the vault. I don’t want to qualify it as running away, but I was certainly scared of the whole thing. I called for Alain and waited till I heard him coming up behind me on the staircase. Regardless of scratching our hands and tearing our clothes on the bits of rock that stood out of the walls on each side, we raced back up to the main crypt, which was still bathed in the same sickening green light. “It was her, I saw her ruby necklace, and she really is amazingly beautiful!” he panted. “I don’t care what you saw, let’s get out of here now.” I tried the main entrance, which was locked, of course. There was an alarm button, which I pressed. The porter got there shortly. We had thrown away our torches and told him we had been locked in by mistake; he threatened to call the police but must have realized we were stiff with fear and let us go.

When we got into the car it was about one o’clock in the morning. Alain’s wife would assume we had been out drinking (if she didn’t inspect his dusty and scratched clothes too much). “What did she, if it was a she, whisper to you?” I asked. “Au secours,’ just like my uncle said. He was right. She really is irresistible.” – “What are you talking about? All I could see was a figure that looked like a rotten corpse hovering over you. It might have been someone in disguise to keep tourists away for all we know.” He looked at me despisingly. “Don’t be ridiculous. You should have come over and seen for yourself.” – “Ok, so how do you explain the whole thing?” He reflected. “I’m not sure. Can’t we get at the bottom of this and do some research? Maybe someone else knows about this.” I couldn’t believe he wanted to explore the whole thing further. “Forget it. Go to sleep and don’t think about it any more. That’s what I’m going to do anyway. Good night.”

I didn’t hear from Alain for a few days. Then his wife rang me up one evening. “Alain doesn’t know I’m calling, but I’m so worried. What happened the other night when you went out till late? He keeps waking up at night and rambling mad things like ‘I shall save you; I’ll come back for you,’ and similar stuff. What is he talking about?” – “Oh, we had a bit of a scary adventure, saw a strange figure along the road. You know how impressionable he is. I’m sure it’ll pass soon enough.” She was silent for a moment. “Was that all. Well, maybe you’re right then. Thanks for reassuring me.” She rang off.

Three days later I got another call, this time from Alain himself, again interrupting one of my lessons. His voice revealed his nervous and excited state: “The hospital rang. My aunt has had an attack and won’t live for much longer. I have to see her later today. I’ll ask her again about the diary. Will you come with me?” I hesitated. I had no desire whatsoever to accompany him, but was convinced that the old lady would put an end to his foolish assumptions and quests, which I would be able to keep reminding him of. So I agreed. The hospital Clinique St. Joseph was in Wiltz, just opposite Alain’s bank. He got an hour off to see his dying aunt.

Alain was worked-up but quiet. I waited outside the hospital room but I could hear their low voices inside. After some general health enquiries, she said, after a long pause, without him having to initiate the subject: “There is something I want to tell you before I die. I have kept the secret for a long time, but now I must pass it on.” Another pause followed. I could picture Alain, looking at her intently, waiting impatiently for the revelation, whatever it would be. She proceeded: “Perhaps you remember you had a great-uncle Nic, the priest. You asked me about him not long ago and I didn’t give you an answer then because I foolishly believed I would live on for at least another decade.” – “Yes?” – “Well, I have to tell you now because I feel myself dying.” She coughed and struggled for breath. After another pause she said: “He is still alive.” – “Alive!” – “Yes. He was injured badly in the war and when he was found his mind was completely disturbed. Apparently he kept saying improper things about a woman. At the time the family was ashamed of his behaviour, and we didn’t want him to be excommunicated. One of our cousins was head nun in the convent St. François in Clervaux and offered to secretly admit him into their private hospital. He has been tucked away in a room there ever since. We declared him as missing during the war and finally arranged his backdated funeral.”

Another silence followed. I could hear the old woman breathe heavily. She added after a while: “Now you have to take care of him. He is old, eighty-two, and will probably follow me into the grave soon. All you need to do is pay a small monthly sum to the convent for his stay. Everything else is taken care of. You send a cheque of fifty thousand francs to sister Amalia at the end of each month. Will you do that?” He agreed in a low voice. She added: “But you have to promise that you will never go and see him, because it might upset him and destabilise him even further. Is that understood?” I couldn’t hear an answer to that, but her breathing became heavier and she started coughing again, until the bell rang and a nurse rushed in.

It went without saying that Alain would disregard his aunt’s plea and pay his uncle Nic a visit. After she had died, which she did on the same day, he soon received all the necessary documents to give him access to the convent. The building had been modernized fifty years ago when it started to shelter an old people’s home. Its central heating and water installations had by now become antiques in their own right. Sister Amalia, nurse and nun at the same time, had aged together with the technological commodities. Only her and a handful of subordinate nuns knew about the old man. Amalia was displeased to admit a visitor, but could hardly prevent Alain from entering the demented man’s chamber.

Alain later told me that his uncle looked more dead than alive. “He was sleeping when I went inside the dim room, located in one of the disused side wings of the convent. The place was furnished sparsely, in each corner was a statue of some saint looming over his oak bed. It smelt of chapel. A large crucifix faced him directly from the opposing wall, as if Jesus and him were dying together. As for himself, I have never seen a man so furrowed by guilt. A metal crucifix had sunk deep into the hollow of his collarbones. His face had fallen back into the cavities of the skull and shone in a greasy dirty white hue, as if he was made of wax. Jesus on the cross looked almost more alive than him.

I stood there for a while until he finally stirred and opened his eyes. He looked at me questioningly. I told him who I was but the name had no effect. When I mentioned his diary he became restless, but remained quiet. The words ‘au secours’ had a greater effect on him than I had hoped for. His torso jumped up, he started to howl abysmally, scratched his face until it bled, tore his bedlinen off, and to my horror revealed a stump where his left leg should have been. A voice laden with phlegm squealed from the depths of his clogged lungs: ‘I shall come back! I shall save you! I won’t leave you to die a second time!’”

Sister Amalia stormed into the chamber, pushed him back into bed and covered him up, but he kept struggling, until two more nuns rushed in to help. She led Alain outside and looked at him reprovingly. “We have kept him calm all these years. You manage to bring it all back in one minute. I will not allow you to see him again.” The following morning she phoned to inform Alain that Nic had died during the night. He had somehow managed to pierce the thick scar tissue that covered his stump with his metal crucifix and severed the sealed veins so that he had bled to death. They would dispose of him as arranged, whatever that meant.

Alain now insisted even more that we must dig out the history of that vault in the casemates. His visions of the woman had become worse, and haunted him in the daytime. He believed that they were similar to those that his uncle had and was afraid that he would end up in an asylum sooner or later if we didn’t find out who she was. Personally, of course, I was convinced that the family susceptibility had affected both of them. After all, I didn’t have any visions, and I had seen her too. But I believed that some kind of explanation could re-establish Alain’s sanity and so I agreed to visit the National Library with him on the following Saturday.

The rather silly research system we had to endorse only allowed us to look at the book titles on a computer screen. There was a limit of a mere six titles that we were allowed to order at one time for closer inspection. This turned our work into a tedious process. But, as if by a sheer coincidence, I eventually came across a book entitled True Mysteries and Murder Stories in and around the Fortress of Luxembourg: 963–1900. The author was a Swiss emigrant to America called Olivier Tappert, who had, as I recently found out, written a number of similar works about various other countries, and was now teaching as a Professor of History and Documentology at the University of Austin, Texas.

Alain was leafing through Tappert’s book for wartime reports, while I was perusing a few other documents. He suddenly squeezed my arm and drew his breath: “Here!” He pointed at a passage which related the following events. During the French blockade of 1794 and 1795, a lady who passed herself as a French noblewoman took cover inside the fortress in order to hide from the mob outside. She had an affair with the Austrian Count Joseph Evrard von Copenrath, a Minister of the Emperor. She turned out to be a traitor, however, when the Count was suddenly found poisoned. She was inculpated and consequently imprisoned in one of the lower vaults of the casemates underneath the old prison. The infuriated Austrian soldiers, threatened by starvation and the invasion of the French army, tortured and raped her pitilessly. They dressed her in a green cloak, robbed her of all her jewellery apart from a ruby necklace, and left her to rot in the vault. A few days later, when the fortress was taken by the French, she had already died from her wounds.

“I know it’s her. There is absolutely no doubt. The necklace proves everything.” I pretended to agree. “So you think she is a ghost then.” – “Of course, how else can you explain everything?” I left it at that, but of course did not agree with his explanation. Everyone knows that ghosts don’t exist, especially those that have affairs with priests. But I left Alain with his opinion and thought that now that he had found his explanation he would soon forget the whole thing. But I was wrong. Two weeks later his wife called me again, close to a nervous breakdown. She asked me in a high-pitched voice if I knew where Alain disappeared to every night. Why did he look so pale and kept raving about an unknown woman? Did I know anything about this and was he having an affair?

I told her to calm down. I would take care of it and find out what was going on. I was seriously worried and a terrible suspicion began to take shape in my mind. I waited outside the Raiffeisen Bank the next afternoon and followed Alain in the car to Luxembourg town. He parked in the valley, walked up to the honeycombed rock that held the casemates and disappeared behind a group of shrubberies. I realized he had discovered another entrance to the lower level of the galleries. It was pitch dark and I didn’t have a torch on me, so I oriented myself on the halo of Alain’s light in the distance. We reached the vault from the opposite direction. When I finally got there he was already inside. I could hear his voice and that of a woman whispering and occasionally laughing softly. Echoes of breath reached my passage. Then there was silence.

After ten minutes of stillness I could no longer bear it. I looked inside the vault. The torch was lying on the ground; its light swallowed up by a rock. “Alain!” I shouted into the darkness. The noise set off rustling and cursing. Alain howled. The female voice screamed something about damnation. I darted back through the tunnel as if chased by the devil, waited in my car all night and when the shops finally opened I bought a torch. Despite being frightened to death, I crept back inside the darkness of the casemates. I had to find him before it was too late.

When I reached the vault, his torch was still shining weakly against the same rock. I let my light slither across the cavities until I discovered the figure I was looking for. She was lying in a different spot this time, and I was determined to unveil her skeleton. I advanced rapidly to convince myself of my own courage, grabbed one end of the cloak and pulled it off violently. Then I must have lost my senses for a few hours. When I finally emerged from the rocks it was bright afternoon. The picture I had seen in front of my eyes has been imprinted on my mind until today. What I had uncovered was Alain with his forehead bashed open and his blood smudged across the rock. I think, but of this I am not sure, because my brain seems so muddled recently, he was wearing a ruby necklace.

Now that I have written everything down as I remember it, I will leave my statement in my bank safe until I die. I don’t care whose hands it will fall into one day. My wish would be for them to discover the truth. I have finished with the whole business and I will never think of it again. To initiate the process of my forgetting I shall go to Greece for two weeks and return refreshed and sun-tanned.”

7th April 2001

Signed: Jérôme Franck”[i]

———————————- [i] To the editor:

I suggest that this report, which fell into my hands as I was clearing out the locker of the deceased Jérôme Franck on 15th April 2001, should be part of your publication of the collection entitled Strange but True Tales Surrounding the Fortress of Luxembourg 1900–2000.

Yours faithfully,

Romain Consemius 14th January 2002