SOMMERZEIT
The House of Doktor Drakus

 

 

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; never was a truer word spoken. Some would say it is the quest for knowledge that is what defines us as being superior to the lesser races of our world. Some would say it has driven mankind to become the dominant species of our world, and that it has made the Empire the dominant power of the Old World.

I could speak of Leonardo di Miragliano’s steam tank, Todmeister’s harquebus or Avel Ferrara’s subterranean drilling machine. Wondrous accomplishments all, but none achieved without first taking their own toll in human lives.

But it could also be argued that it is the insatiable quest for knowledge, man’s inherent and iniquitous curiosity, that has brought us to the brink of destruction. For it is scholars and greedy men searching the ruined necropolises of the ancient Nehekharans that has led to the disruption of eons-long sleep of the tomb kings of the Lands of the Dead. It has been the study of the esoteric arts within the lauded establishments of the Colleges of Magic in decadent Altdorf that has set so many magicians on the path of darkness. I could speak of Egrimm van Horstmann, the Grand Magister. I could speak of Heinrich Kemmler, or the Doomlord of Middenheim.

It is the quest for knowledge that has come to threaten the Empire and put our civilisation in such jeopardy like nothing else.

For what is the Empire really but a few precious pockets of humanity that flicker like tiny candle-flames in the all-enveloping darkness of the night? They are but sparks of civilisation that are as unstable and as easily put out as candle-flames in a hurricane.

And worst of all, once something has been learned, it cannot be unlearned. Would that it could.

So truly it can be said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, as can a little ability, for it can set you on a path from which you may never turn back.

 

Waking up wrapped in the familiar, stale-smelling sheets of his own bed again, with the Sommerzeit sun climbing quickly in the sky, the events of the previous night were as fresh and clear in Dieter’s mind as if they had only just taken place.

But whereas only a matter of hours earlier, when night had still gripped the town and its environs, he had been determined to report what he witnessed to the town authorities, and even the Templar Order of Sigmar, in the cold light of day he felt less confident about pursuing that particular course of action.

Whoever he told of what he had seen, the witch hunters would come to hear of it eventually. And when Brother-Captain Krieger learnt of Dieter’s confession, as it were, he would assume the worst. He would want to know why Dieter had been in the town’s garden of Morr at night for a start. Even if he told Krieger about the attack on the Four Seasons coach, and assuming that the two highwaymen had not disposed of the evidence already, there had been no survivors other than the black-hearted brigands themselves, to corroborate Dieter’s story. And if Krieger then discovered that Dieter had been back to Hangenholz, and that whilst he was there the apprentice’s father had died, such facts would only serve to fuel the fire of the brother-captain’s suspicions.

Dieter had seen how unreasonable the witch hunter had been and what he was capable of. It had only been thanks to Professor Theodrus’ intervention that Dieter had not been hauled away and tortured the first, and last, time he had met the psychotic Krieger. He did not think that the guild master’s favour would extend to saving the daemon apprentice’s neck a second time.

He could try leaving an anonymous tip-off with the Temple of Sigmar, but how many of those did they receive a day? And he couldn’t be certain which house it was that he had seen the grave robbers enter in Apothekar Allee. He would have to return there during the hours of daylight to confirm its location. And the thought of doing that filled him with trepidation. What if he had been seen that night? If he returned he might be spotted again and find himself reported to the witch hunters. Perhaps the grave robbers would have realised that they had been followed and would be on the lookout for him again.

However, the thought of returning to that strange house also filled him with a stomach-turning thrill of excitement. It was the same feeling he had unsettlingly enjoyed the night he had followed the corpse thieves through the mist-shrouded streets.

If he were to return to the house with the dead-eyed windows, he knew that his own insatiable curiosity would make him want to know more. And Morr only knew what Dieter might find if he dug too deep.

So, to begin with, Dieter did nothing. He told no one.

He returned to the physicians’ guild where little was said of the matters that had resulted in his absence from the guild for more than two weeks. Leopold showed some concern, lending Dieter his own notes so that he might catch up on at least some of what he had missed, but even his friend did not seem to know what to say in the face of the intense young man’s taciturn grief.

Dieter threw himself back into his studies with great gusto, determined to fulfil the vow he had made on leaving Hangenholz. He would learn all that he could about medicine, he would be the best. He had always preferred his own company to sharing that of others, and now he even distanced himself from those few people whom he had forged any bonds with before. He did little more than pass the time of day with Leopold when he saw him at the guild, and he no longer troubled the guild master himself.

The first day of summer and the feast day of Sigmar came and went with Dieter being almost totally unaware of the crowded streets, elaborate processions and banner-bedecked town houses, none coming close to the ostentation adorning of the grand Temple of Sigmar itself.

But no matter how deeply he immersed himself in his studies, Dieter could not get the memory of what he had seen out of his head. What a strange game it was that fate played. He would certainly not have chosen to be out during the hours of darkness, beyond the protection of the town walls.

He could not help wondering if he had stumbled upon the dealings of the infamous Corpse Taker. The ghoulish creature was supposedly responsible for numerous disappearances, possibly even deaths, and should be brought to justice. And if it was not the Corpse Taker, then there was another practitioner of the macabre and heretical hiding within Bögenhafen. Something needed to be done about the situation.

The longer it went on the worse it became, until Dieter had to tell someone else about what he had seen. He would go out of his mind if he did not. Worse than that, it was distracting him from his studies. He made the resolution there and then, as he was making a pretence of poring over Kerflach’s Agues and Maladies of the Reikland.

So it was that he found himself standing outside Professor Theodrus’ study, his knuckled fist raised ready to knock. But then something made him stay his hand.

Was this really what he wanted to do, a voice inside him asked? How kindly would Theodrus take to Dieter’s interruption, especially regarding their current “understanding”? And then there was the niggling reminder that the professor had already seemed to know a great deal about the Corpse Taker’s activities, a lot more than anybody else Dieter had encountered since he had come to Bögenhafen. More, it seemed, than even the witch hunters and he had been so assured in his protestations that Dieter was not the one the templars were hunting.

But he dared not tell Leopold either, not after how things had been left so inimically between them.

It was not until the twenty-eighth day of Sigmarzeit that Dieter went to Erich for advice. Even then, events did not turn out as he had planned.

Erich was at home for what as far as Dieter was concerned was the first time in three days. He was sitting at the table in their garret space with a familiar half-empty bottle of Reikland Hock uncorked in front of him, swilling the dregs around in his glass. His mangy ginger cat was sitting smugly on his lap having its ears fondled.

Emboldened by the glass of wine Erich had poured him, Dieter started to talk. And once he’d started, the words just poured out, and he found himself telling his friend everything… everything apart from how his pursuit of the grave robbers had given him a rush of excitement.

When he had finished Erich simply sat there, motionless in his chair, mouth agape and a stunned expression on his face. “Well, you’re a dark horse aren’t you, Herr Heydrich,” Erich said at last. “The black sheep of the family, eh? Well I don’t mind telling you, country boy, I didn’t think you had it in you. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

In the course of a few minutes, Dieter had changed Erich’s opinion of him utterly.

“But what do you think I should do?” Dieter asked, his shoulders sagging. He was suddenly aware of how relieved he felt having unburdened himself.

Erich stood up, a strange expression on his face, as if he wasn’t really there in the attic room anymore. He began to pace across the garret. “Do?”

His eyes were distant as if trained on something inside his own mind rather than in the cold reality of the chill attic room. It might be Sigmarzeit and the weather steadily warming outside, but the topmost apartment of Frau Keeler’s lodging house was still as draughty as a stable and cold as an icehouse.

“Do?” Erich repeated.

“Yes,” Dieter said mournfully, hoping that Erich was going to solve his problem for him. “Should I report what I saw to the authorities? To the witch hunters?”

“Are you insane?” Erich suddenly turned on Dieter. “Have you forgotten what that bastard Krieger almost did to you the last time? You give him this to fuel his fire and he’ll string you up from the nearest lamppost!”

Dieter looked at the floor, downcast. Of course his roommate was right. Krieger would treat anything that Dieter tried to tell him as evidence that Dieter was guilty of, if not actually being the Corpse Taker himself, then at least being his accomplice.

“S-so what now? I go on like this, knowing what I know but not being able to put things right? I-I was not able to prevent my father’s death, but if I could help expose the Corpse Taker I might be able to preserve the lives of others.”

Erich looked at Dieter from beneath beetling brows. “How can you be so certain that whoever it is that lives at the house in Apothekar Allee is the Corpse Taker?”

Dieter looked at him. “I don’t. B-but what I am certain of is that I watched as two thieves dug up a corpse and then followed them as they brought it into the town, under cover of mist and darkness, to that self-same house.”

“And what was it you told me that old duffer Theodrus said about there being unlicensed doktors—at least not ones licensed by the guild—practising secretly in Bögenhafen? Doktors with dangerously progressive ideas, Shallya forbid?”

“Yes,” Dieter admitted warily.

He recalled quite clearly what he had told Erich after his encounter with Anselm Fleischer at the Temple of Shallya, but he also recalled what had happened to Anselm Fleischer himself after allegedly apprenticing himself to a physician with progressive ideas.

“Couldn’t it simply be that the house belongs to one such doktor?”

“But you seem to be forgetting that I saw a human cadaver being delivered to the place.”

“Just think: how hard must it be for a scholar to get hold of a real human body to examine? And what if the study of that corpse was the only way to advance medical science? You certainly couldn’t get hold of a body by any conventional means that I’m aware of.”

“Anatomy is the preserve of barber-surgeons,” Dieter said, uncertainly.

“Listen to yourself,” Erich sneered. “You sound like Theodrus. I bet you wouldn’t be so down on barber-surgeons if you had St Salvus’ rot and the only cure was to have your arm lopped off. You’d want a man who knew his way around a body on the other end of the rusty scalpel then, I can tell you.”

Dieter inadvertently winced at the thought.

“You want to heal people, don’t you?” Erich suddenly challenged Dieter.

Dieter glowered at him. “Of course I do. You know that.”

“And you would do what you could to improve methods and cures so that you could save more people?”

“Yes.”

“What if the only way you could achieve that was to experiment on human corpses by dissecting them? Do you mean to tell me that you would give up your pursuit to cure the sick for fear of cutting up a few dead bodies?”

Dieter said nothing but fixed Erich with his intensely dark eyes, his mouth tight-lipped.

“Perhaps the occupant of the house in Apothekar Allee is just such a doktor,” Erich said, his voice dripping with reason. “Imagine what his work with the dead might mean for the living. Imagine what treatments might be discovered, what procedures developed. Imagine a cure for the red pox or manic moon fever. And you would deny all this because of the preconceived superstitions of a staid and out-dated association such as the guild of physicians?”

What if Erich were right, Dieter considered? If his suppositions were correct, then perhaps others would not have to go through what he had endured as a child after his mother died.

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Why don’t we find out for ourselves, before involving the bigoted brotherhood of Sigmar? Why don’t we go back to Apothekar Allee?”

 

It had been Erich’s idea to break into the house, as though they were a couple of common burglars, just as it had been his idea to go back to the house and have a look around. It had been a combination of three flagons of ale consumed at the Cutpurse’s Hands and an insatiable, almost obsessive, curiosity that had persuaded Dieter to join him. Erich’s natural charisma had also played a part. Dieter realised that he was surrounded by people he idolised and wanted to be more like. Theodrus was one, Leopold was one, and so was Erich.

The two apprentices waited until the salubrious tavern was on the verge of closing before leaving. Dieter chose their route through the night-muffled town, making it more circuitous than need be, keeping clear of the artisans’ quarter to make sure that in case they were seen, no one would suspect where they were heading.

The day had been overcast for much of the time, despite the months having matured to Sommerzeit now, but with the night the cloud cover was clearing. Mannslieb looked upon their endeavours with an impartial eye as they progressed through the town.

Having taken a wrong turning once or twice, after almost half an hour, the two found themselves at the end of a narrow alleyway that ran between tall, neglected and possibly even empty tenements. A sign fastened to the crumbling bricks of one of the buildings stated that they had at last found their way to Apothekar Allee.

“Come on, what are we waiting for?” Erich whispered, but even he had lost some of the enthusiasm that he had displayed earlier.

Neither of them felt particularly confident about their chosen course of action, but they had come this far. Just a few more steps and they would be at the house. What harm could that do? They advanced into the narrow street together and approached the dead-eyed house.

“There’s a plaque here,” Erich said in a harsh whisper. “Next to the door.”

“What does it say?” Dieter asked.

“I can’t make it out. Whatever name was written here has been scratched out.”

Dieter made no further comment, but the defaced plaque only served to add to his sense of unease.

The house was in an obvious state of decay and it was this fact that provided them with a way in. It was Erich who found the loose shutter and the rotten window behind it on the first floor. With both of them balancing on the roof of an abutting lean-to belonging to a neighbouring derelict house, the students were able to reach the window. It did not take much to force the latch, the wood of the casement splintering wetly around the rusted iron fitting.

“Come on,” Erich said, the moonlight reflecting madly from his eyes, “give me a leg up.”

Dieter was not entirely sure what is was that made him cup his hands for Erich to push his body up and in through the window, or what it was that meant he then allowed himself to be pulled inside too, rather than turn tail and flee right there and then. As he stood in the all but pitch-black room beyond, he tried to tell himself that it was merely alcohol-fuelled bravado and nothing more. To admit that it might be anything more than that was to invite an uncomfortable degree of introspection and mental self-exploration.

Inside, the property was as rundown as it appeared from the outside. The room they found themselves in was lacking any furniture whatsoever. The floorboards were bare, bristling with splinters; the walls damp, flaking plaster. Erich, recovering some of his former courage, led the way out of the room.

Beyond they found themselves on an equally bleak landing. A staircase ran both up to a floor above and downstairs, the banister staves broken or entirely missing in places. There was a musty smell of mildew in the air around them. It seemed as if no one had lived here for a very long time, and yet he had seen the two body snatchers admitted by a manservant of some description only last month.

Erich peered up the next flight of stairs to the darkness of the floor above. Satisfied that there was no danger likely to come from that direction, he looked cautiously over the edge of the banisters. Dieter did the same.

Light from a street lamp entering the building from outside through the slats of a shuttered window barely made the floor below visible to them. The passageway below was laid with interlocking tiles which might once have been black and white but which were now a uniform grey-brown, thanks to the layers of dirt that had been allowed to besmirch them.

Erich led the way forward, along the landing, keeping his back flat against the wall and as far from the staircase banisters as possible. Two other doors led off to rooms on this floor, one directly ahead and one to the left. The panels of the doors were scratched, their varnish peeling.

Any haze of alcohol had been cleared from the inquisitive apprentices’ minds by the adrenaline now racing round their bodies at the thought of exploring the sepulchral house. Erich stopped outside the first door. No light spilled from underneath it. Pressing himself close against the jamb, he turned the handle and pushed the door open. Hinges groaned in protest. Erich froze.

There was a noise like footsteps, but had it come from the alleyway beyond the window through which they had broken in, or from somewhere inside the house?

The two students waited for several long, anxious moments. Dieter had never felt so on edge, so exhilarated.

Hearing nothing else, at long last Erich peered into the room. His jaw dropped open and he stepped inside. Dieter followed. Once they were both inside Erich pushed the door to again. Then he spoke for the first time since they had entered the deathly house.

“Will you look at this?” he whispered excitedly.

Dieter just stood agog, staring. One of the room’s windows was unshuttered and wan moonlight lit the chamber with its eerie, unearthly luminescence. In that light the layout and contents of the room could be seen quite clearly.

Rows of bookshelves covered every wall of the room. This had to be the owner’s private library. The only other piece of furniture in the room was an ink-stained, leather-topped writing desk but this appeared as old and neglected as the rest of the fabric of the house. Resting on its surface, rather disconcertingly, was a human skull.

Dieter suspected that the rarity of some of the books kept here could rival those of the physicians’ guild library itself. Dieter was in a state of rapture. Imagine what knowledge would be available here to one who wanted to improve his knowledge of the human body and all its ills, and improve his chances of healing that same assemblage of organs?

Dieter scanned the shelves, reading the spines of the volumes collected there. Some, like Hampfner’s Herbs of the Mootland and their Uses and the Tilean text known simply as the Medicina, he recognised. Others were entirely new to him. There was Nemilos’ Ars Immortalis and Burial Rites of the Unberogens.

Then there were other books whose titles were written in languages he didn’t understand and some using alphabets he didn’t even recognise. There was something labelled in a calligraphic script that Dieter believed was from the far away, mystical kingdom of Araby that lay across the sea beyond the lands of the Border Princes. And there weren’t just books; there were scrolls as well, and even, most curiously, a broken baked clay tablet covered in markings that looked like crude pictograms.

Dieter reached up and took an untitled volume down from a shelf.

“What are you doing?” Erich hissed.

“You were the one who suggested we take a closer look,” Dieter replied in a whisper.

He opened the book. It smelt musty and damp. Spots of mould patterned the pages of the book. The title page was printed in a heavy, gothic type but the language appeared to be Bretonnian. Written on the flyleaf in a dated, over-fussy script was a name: Drakus. For want of an alternative Dieter took it that Drakus was the name of the individual whose library this was.

“It would appear our mysterious, progressive doktor has a name,” he whispered to his companion, who had crossed back to the door and was peering through the gap at the landing beyond.

“What?”

“It would seem that this house belongs to one Doktor Drakus.”

“What was that?” Erich suddenly hissed, peering through the gap in the half-open door.

Dieter froze, the book open in his hands. What was it Erich had heard? So engrossed was he in the book he held in his hands he had heard nothing. Neither of them moved nor spoke, ears straining for the slightest sound.

Nothing.

Dieter carefully replaced the slim volume into its place on the shelf.

Erich was getting nervous, his former bravado having evaporated entirely now that he was actually inside the house of Doktor Drakus. Strangely, Dieter was beginning to feel more relaxed the longer they stayed. Disturbingly, he almost felt at home in the moonlit library.

“We’ve seen enough. Let’s go,” Erich whispered, looking sidelong at Dieter but not daring to move from his position at the door.

But Dieter did not want to leave. He was fascinated by the library and its collection of seemingly morbid and macabre books.

“I heard something!” Erich hissed. “For Sigmar’s sake, we need to go now!”

Dieter listened. There was another echo of a creak outside the room.

Erich pulled open the library door and edged out onto the landing again, casting one last desperate look of exasperation at the curiously intense, pale young man.

Dieter heard another creak. Someone was coming up the stairs.

His eyes locked on the spine of Leichemann’s Anatomy and the plain, scuffed black leather book on the shelf next to it. His heart raced. His mind whirled.

And then he was tucking the two volumes inside the front of his robe and dashing from the room, hardly daring to let his feet touch the floor in case the floorboards creaked under his weight and gave him away.

Then he was back in the first room in the house they had entered, following Erich out of the broken window. He dropped into the alley behind the house from the roof of the lean-to. And then the two of them were sprinting away as if their very lives were in peril, back through the clinging mists that swathed the streets, back past the Cutpurse’s Hands and back to Frau Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse.

They did not stop to draw breath until they were back in their garret apartment, the door slammed shut behind them and the bolt thrown home.

 

From that moment on Dieter found himself living in a heightened state of anxiety, expecting the watch, or worse still Krieger’s witch hunters, to turn up on his doorstep at any moment, having somehow got word of the theft from the house in Apothekar Allee, and knowing him to be responsible.

What if, as Erich had first proposed, this Doktor Drakus was nothing more than a physician whose progressive practices had denied him acceptance by the guild? What if he were guilty of nothing more than showing a little ingenuity and perseverance in the face of adversity? And Dieter had stolen from him, something that was completely out of character for him.

Dieter dared not leave the lodging house now, so fearful had his own paranoid imaginings made him. Erich had taken to his bed with a bottle of cheap hock for company on their return from their night’s escapade and didn’t emerge again until more than a day had passed.

But Dieter was not idle during his self-imposed incarceration. Living on a stale loaf, a hard lump of cheese and the occasional bowl of vegetable broth that a concerned Frau Keeler began to bring up to him after two days had passed—concerned that the young medical student was himself pining for something that he no doubt picked up tending to the sick—he began to pour over the two volumes he had taken from the house of Doktor Drakus.

The plain, black leather book was the chronicle of one scholar’s search for the lost knowledge of the Nehekharans and although it made interesting reading, it did not really teach Dieter anything very useful. Leichemann’s Anatomy, on the other hand, fascinated him and he had to admit that he found the concepts and detailed information it contained easy to digest and integrate with his own knowledge. In fact, he seemed to have a strange affinity for the ideas presented within the book. He put that down to the long association he had had with death, growing up in Hangenholz as the son of a priest of the mortuary cult of Morr.

After a week, with no sudden and unexpected visits from the watch, or worse, Dieter braved being out and about in the town again. He even dared return to the guild to continue his work there. When Doktor Hirsch asked where he had been, Dieter told him that he had been suffering from a heavy summer cold. Lying was something else he wasn’t used to doing quite so blatantly.

Hirsch backed away from him abruptly at that admission and said, “You want to be careful that it’s not something more serious.” The elderly physician took a flask from the shelf behind him that was cluttered with all manner of jars and bottles. “Here, drink this tincture. I’ve heard talk that there is plague in Stirland.”

He watched as Dieter downed the contents of the flask, making sure every last drop was consumed. Then, apparently satisfied that Dieter was no longer infectious or a danger to his own health, set him to work grinding popping seeds.

But Dieter no longer spent every hour possible studying in the guild library or with Doktor Hirsch in his laboratory. Instead, when he had some spare time, no matter if it was even only an hour between lectures, Dieter would return to his lodgings and the private study he was making there of Leichemann’s Anatomy.

On the thirtieth day of Sommerzeit, Dieter was making notes on a chapter entitled Of the Dismemberment of Rats when there was a loud knock at his door.

For a moment all of his previous worries that he might have attracted the attentions of the authorities by his breaking and entering escapade resurfaced. He glanced at the dormer window in his room but knew that realistically there was no escape from the attic room that way.

The knock came again: three loud raps.

He couldn’t not answer the door—he was the only one home—as whoever it was without might only break it down anyway, in which case he’d have no way of keeping them out. He would have to talk to whoever was there and put them off that way.

Dieter fumbled the book and his own notebook closed, then pulled a drift of parchment drawings over them. Taking a deep breath he crossed the shared dining room and opened the door a crack.

Leopold Hanser was standing at the top of the stairs. He looked almost angry.

“There you are,” the blond-haired student said, the annoyance apparent in his voice. “What are you doing stuck in here?”

“I-I’m studying,” Dieter replied.

“But you’ve missed another lecture at the guild.”

“Another? I wasn’t aware I had missed any.”

“Doktor Hirsch said you’d been feeling under the weather. He wanted to know if you’d been to Stirland recently.”

“What? No,” Dieter said, bewildered. His thoughts were still back with the volume on his desk. At that moment he wasn’t even quite sure what time of day it was, and he couldn’t be certain which day of the week it was either.

“Look, what’s going on, Dieter?” Leopold asked, his frowning features softening.

“N-nothing. There’s nothing going on.”

“Is it because of your father?”

“No, it’s got nothing to do with him!”

Leopold put a hand on the door as if to push it open. “Can we talk about this inside?”

“No.” Dieter’s tone was adamant. He held the door where it was, his body braced against it.

“Why not?”

“I’m studying.”

“By Shallya,” Leopold’s anger was coming to the fore again now. “I don’t know what’s come over you but it’s nothing good, I’ll warrant.”

“Good day to you, Leopold,” Dieter said and slammed the door shut in his friend’s face.

Dieter returned to his seat at his desk. As he pushed the scattered papers clear of the two books again he happened to notice that amongst them were two letters from Hangenholz, the address of his lodgings written on them in his sister’s cursive hand. Both were still unopened. He put the letters to one side with hardly a second thought and turned back to the utterly absorbing Of the Dismemberment of Rats.

The thought crossed Dieter’s mind, as he copied the diagram of a rat’s digestive system into his notebook, that if he were to advance any further in his study of anatomy then he would have to find his own specimens for dissection very soon.

Another thought followed. What would Professor Theodrus think if he knew that his erstwhile, most apt pupil was practising the barbarism of anatomy and that he had become no better than one of his dreaded barber-surgeons?

Who cared? Dieter certainly didn’t anymore.

 

Dieter was at the work table in his garret room, papers and notebooks spread out all around him. Stretched out on a dissection tablet block in front of him was the eviscerated toad, thick steel pins holding its contorted body in place. He was poking at its pallid innards with the razor-sharp blade of his scalpel.

In the flickering candlelight it almost looked like the toad’s tiny heart was still beating.

Dieter peered closer. The dark muscle of its heart spasmed again. Dieter jerked his head back, startled. It must be some vital energy of the amphibian’s still trapped inside it, somehow released as he dissected it. It certainly couldn’t be alive, not after he had caught and killed it the day before and what with half its internal organs missing.

Dieter stared at the toad’s small black heart, not moving a muscle, concentrating on keeping his breathing calm and measured. The candle continued to crackle and flicker. The heart did not move again.

Cautiously Dieter probed deeper into the toad’s innards with the tip of the scalpel. He felt resistance and then a sudden release of pressure as the blade severed something. A spurt of sticky black fluid squirted out of the toad’s viscera into Dieter’s face, making him blink and draw back again.

This time it was the whole of the toad’s body that moved. It spasmed where it was, its jerking movements tearing its limbs free of the pins, ripping the flesh away to leave ragged wounds. Inexplicably, it also seemed larger to Dieter than it had been before.

Dieter jumped up from his chair, throwing it over on the floor behind him, his own heart pounding in his chest in panicked horror. The warty creature rolled itself over and began to drag itself in an ungainly motion towards him, its bloated yellowed body trailing the mess of its intestines and other bloated purple organs.

The creature’s disgusting tongue suddenly whipped out from between the drawn, and for some reason fang-lined, edges of its cavernous mouth and caught Dieter’s right hand a stinging blow.

Dieter looked down at his hand. A strike from a toad’s tongue shouldn’t hurt that much. Where the toxic purple tongue had stung him the skin was rising in pus-weeping red welts. Dieter rubbed his hand against the rough cloth of his robe, as if that might rub away the painful stinging sensation.

The scalpel was still clenched in his hand. The tongue shot out again but Dieter was ready for it this time. He lashed out with the silvered blade. The worm-like tongue flopped onto the floorboards of his room, oozing black ichor.

He looked back to the table.

Dieter could hear a rustling amongst the piles of papers. He looked to where a notebook was sliding across the worktop. Then the book slipped to the floor as well, revealing the putrefying cut up body of a rat crawling across the table. The rat turned its nose towards Dieter, whiskers twitching, fixing him with one beady, jaundiced eye and one glistening empty eye-socket.

But that was only the first. From beneath the papers on his desk they came, from under the table, from the dark corners of the room, from knotholes in the floorboards and the shadowy rafters of the ceiling above him: slithering things, decomposing bodies, dissected vermin. Dead things.

 

“Heydrich! What’s the matter?”

Dieter opened his eyes. He was lying in bed, the sheets and his nightshirt wringing wet. Violet pre-dawn light was creeping in through the dormer window. A figure was standing at the door in the partition that divided Dieter’s room from the rest of the garret. The figure’s face was in shadow.

“Erich? D-did I wake you?”

“You were screaming. That must have been one hell of a nightmare you were having.”

“Y-yes, I suppose it was,” Dieter conceded.

“Well, if you’re all right I’m going to try and get some more sleep before the hangover I can feel swelling behind my eyes really kicks in,” Erich said, the shadow retreating from around him as the sky continued to lighten outside.

Half Erich’s face was missing. Where there should have been warm pink flesh there was only the bare bone of his skull. Dieter screamed again. What made the vision all the more horrible and repulsive was the fact that the rest of his roommate’s face was still there, only fat maggots writhed and wriggled in the rotten jelly that filled the eye-socket and a thin black gruel dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

“What is it, Heydrich?” Erich asked, his voice gargling through the disgusting fluid collecting in his throat, apparently oblivious to his own horrific predicament.

Dieter’s stomach turned over and he vomited over his already sodden bed sheets. Then he was up and out of his bed. As he pushed past the startled Erich, the rest of his friend’s face fell away as well. He half-ran and half-fell down the stairs but then he was out in the street, gulping in great lungfuls of cold morning air. Frau Keeler was there too.

“Good morning, Herr Heydrich,” she said through rotten teeth. “I see you’re feeling better then.” The landlady’s face was a mess of necrotic tissue, ripe with burrowing grave-worms. In her hands she was holding bloody clumps of her own hair.

Dieter ran. The night mists from the River Bögen still clung to the town. As he ran in mortal terror through Bögenhafen, Dieter found that the streets were thronged with people. But as he passed and they turned towards him, he saw that every single one of them was a grotesque living corpse, their bodies at varying stages of decay. Hands that were little more than skeletal claws reached for him. As he listened, their pleas and protestations were transformed into incomprehensible moans. Then the mists swallowed him up.

There was an abrupt silence. The walking dead were gone.

The sickly fog parted and Dieter found himself standing at the door of the house in Apothekar Allee; the house of Doktor Drakus.

Dieter put his hand to the door. The moan of creaking hinges broke the silence of the muffling mist and the door yawned open before him.

 

“Heydrich! What’s the matter?”

Dieter opened his eyes. He was lying in bed, the sheets and his nightshirt soaked with sweat. The orange light of dawn was permeating his room. Erich was standing at the door, his face in shadow.

Dieter sat up sharply, drawing his sheets close to him, up under his chin, as if that might somehow protect him.

“Erich, step out of the shadow,” he hissed madly.

His roommate took a step forward.

“You were screaming. That must have been one hell of a nightmare you were having.”

Erich’s face was gaunt, pale and drawn, but as it should be.

“We have to go back,” Dieter said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.

“What? What are you talking about? Go back where?”

“You know where,” Dieter fixed Erich with a wild-eyed stare.

“No, not there,” Erich replied, his face falling and a look of horror forming in his own eyes. “Our last visit freaked me out totally. I had to drink myself to sleep that night. I’m not going back there.”

“But we have to. I have to know more. I have to know who Doktor Drakus is,” Dieter was raving now. There was a manic quality to his demeanour. “I think the library there holds the answers I’m looking for, the secret knowledge I’ve been searching for without really realising it. I think that in that library I’ll find the means to put off death, delay it, prevent it; perhaps conquer it altogether!”

Erich stared back at Dieter aghast, not knowing what to say.

But Dieter was determined. “We have to go back to Apothekar Allee. We have to return to the house of Doktor Drakus.”