Tales Between the Lines

III.2 Legends Live Forever

The laughter fuelled the legend-in-question's anger even more. His eyes started to emit a fiery glow and some of the archaeologists prudently stepped back. Not so the head scientist, a committed historian who just started to warm up to the subject. He plunged into a lecture he clearly didn't deliver for the first time.

"You, Mister, are an invention of one Hans Schriber, scribe in Sarnen in the 15th century. He invented the story of the freedom fighter Willhelm Tell around the year 1470 and incorporated the Nordic motive of the bowshot and apple in his so-called White Book. Schriber's goal was to give the movement against Habsburg and the emperor a sound and relatable foundation, and this he did with cunning and great literary talent. There's no reason to get excited about it, these are well-known facts in historical circles."

He gave the bailiff a contemptuous glance over the rim of his spectacles. But his opponent hadn't been a timid man in life. As might have been expected, he didn't turn into a timid ghost. Quite the contrary.

The only thing that temporarily saved the unsuspecting historian's life was an angry shriek. The semitransparent ghost of a big European hamster lunged for the bailiff's throat.

In fact, the hamster was surprisingly big. It's another little-known fact that ghosts—when sufficiently infuriated—don't merely materialize, but they can balloon, inflating themselves to a size larger than mother nature intended. In the hamster's case, its ghostly, anger-amplified stature matched the one of a fine specimen of guinea pig.

The ghostly rodent clawed at the bailiff's throat. "This is for having broken my wheel out of pure spite, for having abducted me from my lovely cage, for having transported me in the smelly abyss of your pockets, for having me placed on the greasy top of a brat's head, and for having shot me." It bit into his enemy's Adam's apple with the passion a prey holds for its species' predators.

The bailiff fell and landed on his back. Surprise tends to weaken a ghost, and Gessler was badly surprised.

As he looked up, he saw the head historian grinning at him. The man took a breath for the final blow. "You're nothing but... fake news. Invented to fuel anger against a political enemy."

The man on the ground shook his head, thereby gently shaking the rodent that still had its teeth buried in his throat. "No... I'm an alternative fact..."

But his protestations were too late. The discredit of being called fake news started to dissolve the bailiff's specter, and he quickly lost definition and visibility until only a left elbow and an angry rodent remained. With two anticlimactic puffs, both dissolved into plumes of smoke—the elbow's was green, the hamster's a rather unappetizing brown.
The residual stench of the ghosts' disappearance drove the archaeologists from the burial chamber. Out in the sunlight, the scene they'd witnessed suddenly seemed farfetched and entirely improbable.

Now, the human brain has the amazing capacity to prioritise the material it's handed to stow away in its memory banks. Thus, it's a natural process that unexplainable events like ghost sightings and giant killer hamsters get eliminated from human consciousness rather quickly.

This is exactly what happened in the case of our group of archaeologists. Suddenly, one of them remembered he had promised his wife to be home early to watch the children while she got her overdue weekly new haircut. Another one realised he was already late for a meeting with his tax advisor, and the head historian felt the urgent need to start reading his students' essays on the impact of coffee on European culture during the Turkish siege of Vienna.

One after the other left the excavation site, leaving the youngest one to close it for the night. Everything secured, he climbed his bicycle and pedalled home, softly whistling the national anthem.

Suddenly, he stopped himself. Why would he whistle this tune of all the possible songs he knew? Had it something to do with the bones they had found? Not very likely. He shook his head and drove on with more force, looking forward to a beer, a pre-baked pizza, and a quiet evening in front of the tv.

But somewhere, deep in the uncharted maze of his scientifically trained brain, some hidden doubts remained...

These doubts, though, lay dormant for a long time, and they were buried under layer upon layer of scientific prejudice. Only years later—and only once—they stirred again when the archeologist's daughter asked him for a pet hamster to play with. He immediately snapped at her, yelling that such dangerous beasts were nothing for a six-year-old. Taken aback by the harshness of his own words, and put to shame by the frightened look on his girl's face, he bought her a puppy instead.

And somewhere else, in a gloomy nook of the seven-dimensional multiverse, a hamster had still buried its immaterial teeth deep in a bailiff's throat.

And the legend lives on...

~ ~ ~

A/N
This, folks, was the third and (presently) last Tale Between the Lines. To the few who have arrived at this point: Thanks, we are honored (and surprised) that anyone has read this.
We may or may not spin another Tale in the future. Call us totally unpredictable, but that's life.

Illustration by the excellent EvelynHail