Episode Two: ...And the Phantom Village


Act Two: Germelshausen


The villagers that had gathered around insisted on shaking their hands gratefully before they would leave. They had attempted to talk to them but none of them spoke English with the exception of Josiah. Jake had managed to talk to a few of them but it didn't seem that he had managed to glean much information from them. Finally they dispersed and the three Librarians regrouped.

"Did you learn anything?" Ezekiel asked Jake.

"Not much," he said with a sigh. "For people who are so grateful to see us they were sure tight lipped."

Ezekiel glanced around suspiciously. If they wanted their help why were they so closed off about it?

"All I've managed to learn is that none of them are from present day," Jake told them. "And that they seem to be trapped here."

Cassandra bit her bottom lip as she thought and then her gaze drifted over to Josiah. "Let me see what I can find out," she said.

Neither Jake nor Ezekiel had time to ask what she meant by that before she turned and walked away from them.

"Josiah!" She called brightly.

Jake huffed as Josiah turned to face her eagerly and gave her a charming smile.

"What can I do for you, Lady Librarian?" Josiah asked with a grin as he tipped his hat at her.

Cassandra blushed lightly and smiled at him in return. "What happened here? All we can find out is that you're all trapped but by what? How?"

"Well," He said with a grin as he held his arm out to her. "Why don't I give you the grand tour and we'll talk about it?"

"That would be wonderful!" Cassandra said excitedly. "Can my friends come?"

"Of course, you're all Librarians. We'll need all of you to get out of this quickly," Josiah told her.

Her brow furrowed as she waved Jake and Ezekiel over and then accepted Josiah's arm by linking her arm through his. "What do you mean by quickly?"

He gave her a concerned glance. "Did the previous Librarian not tell you anything?"

"He left shockingly few clues," Ezekiel told him. "Which, for the record, is nothing like me. I would have left rather large clues. Clever ones."

Cassandra and Jake rolled their eyes at him as Josiah continued.

"We only have until sundown to save the village," Josiah stated.

"What happens at sundown?" Jake asked worriedly.

"The village disappears from the earth for 100 years," he answered in a matter-of-fact tone that seemed more casual than it should have.

Cassie stopped midstride and forced him to stop with her. "What? Disappears?"

"Once every hundred years Germelshausen appears in this very spot and then disappears again as the sun goes down. We've all been living this way for several centuries now. Your last Librarian attempted to save us but he couldn't pin point the type of magic that trapped us here. He didn't know how to reverse it," Josiah told him. "He said he would send someone back for us, but I never really believed him. Nor did I think that he would send three of you. We may actually stand a chance this time."

The three Librarians shared urgent looks. Cassandra immediately looked up to the sky to observe where the sun was in the sky and then down at the cobblestone roads and building shadows. Jake could see her calculating the time of day in her head and then estimating what time the sun would go down. While she thought Josiah rattled off useless information about the town and it's history while Jake rolled his eyes. This job had an expiration date. There was no time for a history lesson, though he had to admit he was really eager to learn about the different styles of architecture and the way they seemed to intersect. It was a hodge-podge of period architecture. It should have looked like a cluttered mess, but…it was rather beautiful.

"Does anyone know why the village disappears?" Ezekiel asked as they turned another corner.

"Not that they've told me," Josiah answered. "All I've managed to learn is that they were cursed by a witch. I'm not sure why. They won't say much about the witch either. They're not exactly forthcoming this group."

"Yeah, we noticed," Jake grumbled. "That's a little strange, don't you think? How do they expect to get help if they won't tell anyone what actually happened? Some one here has to remember."

Out of the corner of his eye Ezekiel noticed a figure following them. It was small but stealthy and moved from dark shadow to dark shadow. He turned quickly and managed to catch the spy as they stepped into the light. He found a boy, no older than eleven with a pale tired face watching them all. No one else had noticed but him. The boy beckoned him over and then promptly took off in the opposite direction.

What choice did Ezekiel have but to follow him?

Jake was so focused and watching Cassandra and Josiah that he didn't notice Ezekiel disappear. She still had her arm looped through his and Josiah kept staring at her. Jake knew she was gorgeous but did the man have to admire her so openly?

"Oh, I'm certain they remember," Josiah said in answer to his question. "They just choose not to let me in on the secret. The rumor is that they burned a witch at the stake and she cursed them as she died, but I don't know how much truth there is to that."

Cassandra nodded thoughtfully. "In order to figure out how to undo it we would need to know more about how and why it happened. It takes longer to solve an equation if I don't have all the factors."

"Then," Josiah told her as they left the alley they'd been walking through and wandered into a small grassy courtyard. "I suppose I'll have to take the three of you to see the Elders. Maybe they'll be willing to tell The Librarians more than they were willing to tell me."

Jake wasn't a botanist but he was pretty sure some of the plants in this courtyard weren't native to this area any more. They looked very foreign to him. "So, how did a cowboy end up here?" Jake asked him.

Josiah chuckled. "I followed a woman. How else?"

Cassandra gave him a questioning glance. "What do you mean?"

"I was hired by this lady scientist to be her translator and muscle for, what I was told, was a research expedition. When we got here, it became a treasure hunting mission. See, she'd heard tales of this village and one of them said there was a store room of gold in here somewhere, which there isn't. Why anyone would think a village located out here would be that rich I will never understand. They got a little rough with the villagers, I turned on her team and they knocked me out and left me here," he admitted. "And that's the short version."

"That's terrible!" Cassandra exclaimed. "They just left you behind?"

"It was that or kill me," he told her. "I'm glad they picked this option. I'd prefer living here than being dead out there," he said as he motioned to the village walls.

Jake rolled his eyes at Josiah's tale of woe. He wasn't completely convinced it was the truth. Josiah just seemed…too charming. Suddenly, Jake remembered something. A German folk story he'd read years ago after helping backstage with his high school's spring musical production. "Hang on, earlier you said Germelshausen."

"That's the village."

Cassandra gave Jake a questioning look. "What? What's going on? I know that look. You're remembering something."

"Germelshausen is part of German folklore. In 1860 Friedrich Gerstäcker wrote a story called Germelshausen. It was about an artist who fell in love with a young woman from a village called Germelshausen. The village sunk into the earth a long time ago, the story didn't say when exactly, and was only allowed to appear on a certain day once every century. The Artist is forced to leave the village just in time for it to vanish back into the earth, leaving him separated from his love forever," Jake said as he tried to quickly summarize the tale. "I read it in high school. It was, arguably, the basis for a musical that I helped build sets for—"

Cassandra gasped. "Brigadoon! Right? It was the basis for Brigadoon! Oh, I love that movie!"

Josiah's brow furrowed in confusion. "Brig o'doon? Isn't that a bridge in Scotland?"

"For a cowboy, you sure know a lot about the rest of the world," Jake said as he narrowed his gaze on Josiah.

Josiah tipped his hat at him in a cool tone. "So do you, brother. Way I see it, you and I are cut from the same cloth."

"We'll see about that," Jake said evenly. "Yes, it's the name of a bridge in Scotland—" Jake paused. "I thought the cobblestone outside looked familiar!"

"What?" Cassandra asked. She'd been distracted for a moment by the competitive tension that had risen between the two cowboys. "The cobblestone looked familiar? Doesn't cobblestone look the same pretty much every where?"

"No, there's different patterns in different locations," Jake told her. "Brig o'doon, has a very distinctive pattern. The legend is the pattern kept out witches. The pattern on the road outside matches the photos I've seen of Brig o'doon's cobblestone work exactly. The story about the witch may not be far off from the truth, Cassie."

"So," she said with a sigh and a nod. "We're definitely thinking dark magic, then? Great. That's always fun." She turned to Josiah with a decisive look. "We will definitely need to speak with these Elders you mentioned."

"Of course," he said with a nod. "I'll lead you and your two friend—" Josiah stopped mid sentence and looked around the courtyard. "You did have two friends, right? I didn't imagine the third one. The one with the funny accent."

Jake cursed as he craned his neck to look for Ezekiel. "You'd think the kid would know better than to run off in the middle of a village that's going to disappear in a few hours."

"Four to be precise," Cassandra told him. "Sundown is in four hours."

"Great, and we're one man down," Jake said with a huff.

"I'll come back and look for him," Josiah offered when he saw the worried look on Cassandra's face. "I should really get the two of you to he elders so you can find out what happened here. You said the sooner you know the details the sooner you can start to work it out, right? So I should get you to the elders and then once you're there I'll come back and find your friend. He can't have gone far and given his accent and his wardrobe he shouldn't be hard to spot."

Cassandra gave Josiah a hesitant look. "You might be surprised. He's pretty sneaky."

"I promise I'll find him," Josiah said again. "And I keep my promises."

Cassandra sighed and then nodded hesitantly. "Okay. We don't really have the time to waste I guess."

"You know, Jones, Cass," Jake said with a small teasing grin. "He was probably distracted by something shiny. Or a girl."

Cassandra chuckled. "You're right. He's probably fine."

"Probably," Jake agreed with a forced smirk. He wasn't sure of that himself, honestly. Who really knew what Ezekiel was up to.


The boy led him further into the Village than Josiah had dared to. He'd followed him through twists and turns and through vacant dwellings and ruined store fronts until they reached the emptiest, and most likely furthest, corner of the village. The very last thing the boy did was climb down into a hole in the ground. Ezekiel stopped and peered down the wooden ladder into the hole. It was dark and it looked deep. It could be a trap.

He sighed and shrugged. He'd followed the kid this far and besides, it felt right, and his philosophy was always to do what felt right. He climbed the ladder slowly and when he reached the bottom he realized he was in some sort of underground tunnel system. He saw a faint light further down the tunnels and walked toward it. As it got closer he saw the boy holding a lantern. The boy motioned for him to follow and then stepped through a doorway on the right.

When Ezekiel joined him in the room, he froze. The space looked and felt eerily familiar to him. There was a table with books and papers and manuscripts spread out all around and a hand drawn map of the town. It reminded him of Flynn's chaotic desk at The Annex.

"He left. For you," the boy said in broken English. "Der Bibliothekar. Left for you."

Ezekiel nodded to the boy and then stepped closer to the table. One look at the hand writing on the map and he knew who "Der Bibliothkar" was. The hand writing was the same as the handwriting in the Appointment Book.

"Well, Jenkins, I think I found those details you wanted," Ezekiel said with a smirk. He studied the information and found that he understood most of it. He expected to read notes like Cassandra's, Flynn's, or Jake's. With formulas, social theories, or even history and facts he didn't know. But that's not what he found. He found schematics and observations and even written times of when certain people entered certain buildings in town. He found notes regarding interviews with townspeople. This Librarian had even mapped out an emergency escape route, which clearly he had used.

Turns out, Jenkins was right. This Librarian was like him.

He leaned over the table and the boy brought over the lantern and set it down for him. Ezekiel thought about bringing Jake or Cassandra here, but he honestly didn't know if he'd be able to find his way back. There were notes here that The Librarian must have brought with him to the village. There were excerpts from a diary of a team that claimed to have been there. He read over the notes The Librarian had taken, which started with what that team had learned about the village itself.

His eyes widened as he read and then he continued down the page to read the story of their harrowing escape from the village known to them as Germelshausen. He cursed as he read and then quickly tore the page out of the old notebook. He would need this. His eyes drifted to the map again and he grabbed that too. They needed to get out of here. Now.

Or else Cassandra could be in some serious trouble.

He turned to the boy and suddenly wished Jake was here. Or that he'd had Jake teach him to speak German. He had a feeling he would need the boys help to get them all out of here in one piece.


Josiah led them to a building in the very center of village. It was made of cobblestones and had two floors. Josiah knocked on the door and it immediately opened. Cassandra moved to step through but Josiah stopped her. He reached down at the base of the doorway and pulled out a cobblestone at the very center of the doorway. He sat it on the ground next to the door and them flashed her a charming smile. "It was loose. Wouldn't want ya to trip, Lady Librarian." He then motioned for her to lead the way with a broad sweep of his arm.

Jake rolled his eyes and followed the two of them into the building. Cassandra wasn't that klutzy. The guard by the door closed it behind them and he thought he heard the sound of a lock closing on the other side of it but he couldn't be sure. At the far end of the room sat three older gentlemen, all looking very grim.

"Who have you brought to us, Josiah?" the man in the middle asked with a blank expression. "This had better be worth our time."

"Yes," the one on the far right agreed as he leaned back in his chair. "The last two you've brought to us have been a bit of a disappointment."

"Not this time," Josiah said with a smirk. "This one's a witch."

Cassandra tensed and Jake stepped closer to her. He glared at Josiah and shook his head at him.

"Yeah, you and I are definitely not cut from the same cloth, hoss," Jake sneered as he slowly pulled Cassandra behind him.

"I saw her save one of her friends when he fell off the wall earlier," Josiah said as his sinister smile grew. "He was floating above the ground. I saw it with my own eyes. She's a witch."

Cassandra gulped and gripped Jake's arm nervously before she spoke. "You know, if I was going to be called something I think I'd prefer to be called sorceress. Witch just makes me sound so…evil."

"She can save us," Josiah assured them. "We can do it right this time. Release the curse."

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Jake said as he glared at the Elders and Josiah. They weren't even bothering to address them as if the presence of two additional people didn't concern them at all.

"You said if we found and burned a real witch then we'd be free," Josiah said with a smirk. "The only problem was, no witch could get passed the bridge. The cobblestones kept them out and kept us from bringing them in. Well, here she is. She found her way to us. That's fate! The way I see it, we burn her and we can all stay on solid land for the rest of our lives."

Cassandra gasped and covered her mouth with her free hand. The other still had a death grip on Jake's arm.

"Oh, hell no," Jake said angrily as he glanced around the room for possible escape routes. He had to get Cassandra out of here. Fast.

The three elders glanced at each other and finally the one of them who hadn't spoken sighed in resignation. "Fine, take them upstairs. If it doesn't work we'll be no worse off than we were before."

"Do we need the man, Josiah?" The one in the center asked as he pointed to Jake. "Does he possess magical abilities as well?"

"No," Josiah answered quickly. "But I'd keep him for insurance. The witch seems attached to him." Josiah seemed to recognize the look on Jake's face because he smirked pointedly at him. "And don't bother escaping. You know that cobblestone you noticed on the bridge? The Brig o'doon pattern that kept witches out? This building is built with that same pattern. The fault in the idea of keeping witches out, Jake, is that it can also keep them in. Cassie's not getting out of here anytime soon. Not when she's got magic flowing through those pretty little veins of hers."

"The cobblestone," Cassandra said softly. "You removed one of the stones before I came in." She glared angrily at him. "It wasn't loose! You had to move the stone or else I couldn't have stepped inside this building!" She lifted her free hand with her palm up at Josiah and her eyes narrowed. Everybody kept telling her to practice her magic, well, now was as good at time as any.

The guards that had been standing by the door grabbed Jake from behind before he had a chance to fight them and then grabbed Cassandra before she'd managed to summon up any magic.

"Take them upstairs and lock the door," one of the Elders commanded. "Keep a guard posted in case they get any ideas to try and escape."

They tried to fight off the guards, but they were too strong and within moments they were locked in an empty stone walled room with one barred window.

Cassandra slid down against one of the walls until she was sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest. "I guess Ezekiel wasn't the one I should have been worried about, huh?"

"Guess not," Jake said through gritted teeth. He knew Josiah couldn't be trusted, but he'd suspected himself of jealousy and pushed it aside. Truth be told, he still wasn't sure jealousy hadn't played a part in what he felt. In fact, on some level he knew it had, but the point was…his mistrust had been proven correct. Josiah was a self serving snake.

And a murderer, apparently.

"What do you think Josiah meant by 'this time'?" Cassandra asked. "He said they could get it right. This time."

"I don't know, sounds like to me, they've tried to burn people two times before this," Jake told her. "Maybe he was talking about that."

"Maybe," Cassie said thoughtfully. That didn't feel right though. Something about Jake's answer didn't fit. She sighed and put her head in her hands. "God, Jake, I'm sorry."

Jake looked over at her sharply from where he stood by the window and furrowed his brow at her in confusion. "For what? What could you possibly be apologizing for?"

"If I weren't here right now, you wouldn't be locked up in this room. You wouldn't have trusted Josiah and no one would be about to burn at the stake for being able to use magic," she told him with a sigh. "My magic did this to us. Maybe it's just as much of a curse as the brain grape. I mean, I can't control it, I can't use it when I need it, and when I do use it I come very close to hurting people! Plus, I can't seem to stay conscious afterward—"

"That's not true, earlier with Ezekiel you—"

"One time, that was one time! And that was mostly because you were there to talk to me through it. You won't always be there, Jake. No matter how much I want you to be. I need to be able to do it on my own and I—I can't," she said in a shrill tone. He crossed the room and sat down beside of her so that they were sitting shoulder to shoulder.

"You can't expect to have full control right away, Cass. Nothing works like that. You know that," he told her as he reached over pulled a hand away from her face to hold in his. "It's like with your synesthesia. We had to practice with the memories, remember? After a while you were able to bring yourself back down to Earth without me, but we had to practice it first. There's no reason that can't happen with magic too. You just have to give it time and have faith in yourself. The rest of us do."

"I'm scared," she admitted. "What if I end up hurting someone instead of helping them? We don't even know what would happen if I happen to hallucinate while I'm trying to use magic. We don't how the synesthesia is going to react to it. It's unpredictable. I've hurt all of you enough already, I don't want to do it again."

"Sweetheart, the only person still harpin' on your slip up with the Serpent Brotherhood these days is you. No one blames you for that. Not anymore," he told her. "Not even me. If we've forgiven you for it, shouldn't you forgive yourself? Hell, you saved Flynn's life with Excalibur. You've done so many other things that more than make up for that one misstep. Even deciding to take that magic from Viviane was a selfless thing. You knew it would cause you pain for the rest of your life and yet you still accepted it. You knew the alternative was too dangerous. You gave up hope of a perfect and complete cure to keep this magic out of le Fay's hands. You don't need to keep torturin' yourself over something that's over and done with. Besides, you're not going to hurt us with your magic. Not seriously, at least," he said as he squeezed her hand and winked at her playfully. "I may take a few cup-fulls of pens to the head but if it helps you then it's worth it."

"One of these days," Cassandra said as she placed her head on his shoulder. "I need to help you with something as much as you've helped me. It's not fair, really. Not to you, at least."

"Right now, I'd settle for helpin' me get us out of here," he said with a sigh. "Ezekiel's still out there somewhere. If we had cell signal in this damn place I could try to call him," Jake said as he pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. "But we don't. So I can't."

"Even if we get out of this room we'd have to get past the guards, the Elders, and the cobblestone doorway," she reminded him. "And at this point," she said as she glanced at the clock on Jake's phone. "We have 3 hours until we disappear with the village. You know, unless they kill me first."

She'd said it lightly, as a joke, but Jake had felt it in his bones. She was in real danger. If they didn't get out of here these people would kill her. She'd just gotten her life back. She couldn't lose it again. He wouldn't let her die. He couldn't.

He was at a complete loss as to how he was going to do that, though. She was right, they had a lot to get passed in order to escape and it would be impossible to do from inside this room.

They needed Ezekiel.

"Where the hell are you, Jones?" Jake muttered under his breath.