Chapter 2: Frederick Tschudi’s Surgical Chest Contents

I placed Great-Great-Grandfather Frederick’s surgical chest on the kitchen counter. The moment it touched the surface, it seemed to sink into the space, as though it had been waiting there for years, waiting for someone to finally open it. Despite its age, the chest showed little physical damage. Aside from a few scrapes and dents, it was in remarkable condition—remarkable for being 150 years old.

That didn’t surprise me. I’d been taught from a young age to take care of my belongings, to cherish the tools that helped build a life. Well-maintained tools would never let you down when the time came to use them, my grandfather would say. It was a simple lesson, but one that stuck with me.

I suppose it was a lesson passed down through generations of Swiss ancestry—an old-world pride in craftsmanship, in the belief that even objects had souls, if you treated them right. Perhaps it was a cultural trait, something that ran deep in the bloodlines. But as I stared at the chest, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t just a tool—it felt like something more. Something that had been passed down for reasons I couldn’t yet understand.

And the more I looked at it, the more I wondered if I was about to open something I wasn’t ready for.

I removed the key from the wire loop and slipped it into the lock. It slid in smoothly, a perfect fit—not the mismatched key I’d half-expected, but the one meant to open it. For a moment, I hesitated, the cold metal of the key heavy in my hand, as if the chest itself were holding its breath.

I turned the key with an audible click, the sound sharp and final, like a door to some forgotten room swinging open after decades of silence. The lock sprang open easily, the mechanism surrendering to the turn of the key with a reluctant, almost disappointed sigh.

I lifted the lid.

For a moment, nothing seemed to change. The world outside the kitchen continued to hum with its familiar noise—the soft buzz of the refrigerator, the distant murmur of traffic beyond the windows. But the chest? The chest seemed to exhale, releasing an air of something old and secret. Something that had waited far too long to be remembered.

Inside the fabric-lined chest lay the tools of a surgeon, each one meticulously arranged, as though they’d been waiting for their moment. Various-sized scalpels, their edges gleaming coldly in the light; probes that seemed to reach out with a quiet, unsettling intent; forceps, retractors, saws, tourniquets—each one more precise than the last. But it was the gorgets and suturing needles that made my stomach tighten, the sight of them suddenly too intimate, too real.

Among the familiar instruments were others, their shapes strange to me, their purposes unclear. They didn’t belong to the world I knew. I wondered what sort of surgeries my great-great-grandfather had performed with these—what kind of man he had been to need tools like these.

But it wasn’t just the instruments that caught my attention. Nestled beneath the tools, resting against the velvet lining of the chest, was a stack of leather-bound journals. Each one was embossed with the name Frederick Tschudi in gold lettering, along with a volume number beneath it. Eight volumes in total, their spines worn with age, but the pages inside seemed to pulse with the weight of secrets.

I counted them slowly, feeling the familiar chill creeping up my spine. Eight journals. Eight volumes, each one a window into a world I hadn’t been prepared to see.

I picked up the first book, titled Volume Number One, and for a brief, foolish moment, I thought I could simply open it and dive into whatever secrets it contained, as though the answers would come easily. But the reality of it hit me almost immediately—it was a ridiculous assumption.

The moment I opened the book, I saw it: my ancestor’s handwriting. It was stunning in its precision, each letter flowing into the next with such flawless execution that, at first, I wondered if it had been printed rather than written by hand. There was something unsettling about the neatness of it, something too perfect, as if the words themselves had been carefully crafted to maintain a controlled, almost sterile order.

But then I realized what I hadn’t expected. The text wasn’t in English—it was in German.

The words blurred in front of me, an elegant string of symbols that meant nothing to me. My stomach tightened. I could almost feel the weight of the language pressing in, as if the very letters on the page were locked in a code I had no key to unlock. I wasn’t sure if it was the language itself or the sheer foreignness of it that made the book feel even more distant—like a door I couldn’t open.

The text was written in an older style—one that hadn’t been taught in years, replaced by a newer script during the upheaval of World War II. It took me a moment to realize it, but the moment I did, I felt a sharp, uncomfortable recognition. The ink was like a relic, the kind of thing you might find in an old library, gathering dust in a forgotten corner. A language that had been left behind by time, now clinging to the pages like an echo of something long gone.

Fortunately, I could speak and write German. My years working for a German-owned pharmaceutical company had taught me that much. All internal memos, reports, even casual correspondence had been in German, and if I wanted to survive there, I had to learn the language. It wasn’t easy—German doesn’t come naturally to everyone—but I persisted, and over time, I grew familiar with the cadence of the language, the subtle intricacies of its structure. I’d learned not just to understand it, but to think in it.