It happened in the year Mom died. It was November, a month of short days when the air had the distinct smell of decaying leaves, and when foggy mist rolled in our garden from the dark forest at the onset of night.
For some unknown reasons, hedgehogs give birth twice per year, in the month of May, when days grow longer, and in November, just ahead of winter. Those November hedgehog babies are created to die, too small to stand the cold mountain winter in my native Bavaria, where the cold season is long and only grown-up and fat hedgehogs survive.
We always had a few hedgehogs in our big garden, full of apple trees. I befriended them to the point they wouldn’t roll-up as spiky balls but instead uncurl and let me strike their soft belly-pelt. One year, we took a tiny November hedgehog in the house, and it became our happy and fat cuddle-pet. We called him Max, and he seemed to remember me in the following year when I saw him in the garden at summer midnight, kicking around the china plate with the sour milk and bread Grandma reserved for our cat and hedgehog pets.
It was late and already dark when I caught a little hedgehog baby huddled in front of our house door, where a streak of light and warm air met the cold November night. I took the baby (we called it Little Max) into the house, and together with my sister we built a box in the cellar not far from the central heating boilers. We fed it every day, hoping we would get it through the winter that way. However, the little spiky animal didn’t have a good appetite. We tried to feed it with milk using a syringe, but it didn’t put on much weight. We feared it was ill.
Three weeks had passed. It was December, and the first snow had fallen and enveloped our world with its silent noise and soft blanket. One late evening I gave company to my sister who was ironing shirts in the cellar next to the boiler room with the hedgehog’s box. It was a place Dad had refurbished a few years ago, and it was full of old stuff and also contained an armored treasure chest from the 15th century. Sometimes we had parties with our school friends in that room, but apart from those occasional events it was mostly empty and hardly used. It didn’t have a proper window instead some diffuse daylight fell through an undulating-surfaced double-glass box into the cellar, and gave it the feel of a prison cell.
Nobody liked to be alone in that abode. Somehow all of us tacitly felt the room was haunted or inhabited some strange energy. When I went to the cellar to grab some beer or groceries, I always passed this room’s black entry opening as quickly as I could. Its dark door entry seemed to be full of cobwebs, forgotten bleakness and horror.
My sister was half through her pile of ironing when we heard a strange, eerie chirping sound which seemed to travel through the middle of the room.
"What was this," my sister asked.
We tried to localize the sound’s origin, but we couldn’t see anything. Then, as we looked at the glass box, which reflected wavy light from the feeble ceiling lamp, we saw something.
Some animal was running in there. Both of us saw it. “A hedgehog, a rat,” I whispered.
“Can’t be, impossible,” replied my sister. We approached the glass box, and I opened it.
It was empty.
I looked at my sister in awe, and our eyes met. We thought the same thing.
“It’s the Little Max,” my sister said.
We rushed to the boiler room. There we found Little Max dead, his mouth wide open, with glassy dead eyes gaping into the open space.
“Poor little animal,” my sister said sobbing. “His ghost passed through the other room to say us farewell.”
© 2004 by Franz L. Kessler
