ERNTEZEIT
Resurrection Men
Let me tell you a little about the nature of that which you would vulgarly call “magic”. I have never liked that word for it so poorly describes the interplay of the energies of the otherworld upon our own physical realm.
Those who are blessed with the ability to harness and influence the flow and flux of these energies do not see the world as you mere mortals do. Our minds exist in the everyday world of shadows and the blazing eldritch world of the ethereal at the same time. This is true of all wizards, including those who practise the lore of death.
The malevolent energies employed by the Dark Art are easily the most dangerous form of sorcery but some would also say the most potent. Certainly it is the great adversary of the noblest most pure form of the Ars Magicae. But do not misunderstand me: the Dark Art is also, at its height, pure. It is the pure antithesis of High Magic, being the most purely corrupt and debased. For its energies are spawned by the raw power that spills from the rent in reality, at the top of the world in the forsaken wastes of the North.
Necromancy itself then is the distillation of the energies that are released upon the death of all living things. It combines the sorcerous power of the Dark with those same supernaturally generated energies. It is borne on the eldritch currents that blow across the world, in the wind that the pathetic spiritualist mediums of the Amethyst Order call Shyish and to which they give the symbol of the reaping scythe.
Therefore it is inextricably linked to the dead and where they can be found. Hence certain damned places become saturated with death energies: graveyards, charnel houses, the executioner’s scaffold, crossroad gibbets, even the barrows of the ancient tribes who once held dominion over the lands of what the upstart Karl-Franz now considers to be his Empire. At its most extreme, whole regions can soak up such concentrations of this malevolent paranormal power.
I speak of course of Mousillon in far Bretonnia, which is called Mousillon the Damned. I speak of the Blighted Marshes that lie north of the Tilean Sea in the shadow of the Irrana Mountains, of the desert kingdoms of the dead south of mystical Araby. And of course I speak of the tainted County of Sylvania, that accursed province of the leech-lords, where it is forever night and where none sleep easy in their beds when the wolves gather. In such places as these, where it is easier to summon the powers of death to do one’s bidding, an enchanter might more readily work his dire sorcery.
But of course death and the dead can be found everywhere, just as Morr holds the whole world in his cold grip and ultimately every living thing must submit to him. So the necromancer has dominion wherever he chooses.
Autumn arrived in an amber rush of turning foliage and falling leaves, the air damp and smoky, laden with the compost aroma of rot.
Erntezeit found the plague at its height in Bögenhafen. Festivals such as the infamous Pie Week of the Mootfolk, which the halfling community of the town would usually have celebrated with much merry-making and copious food consumption for a full eight days at the start of the month, passed without being marked. The town’s population had been ravaged by the remorseless plague, with fully half the population succumbing to its pox-ridden touch. This number included almost a third of the halfling community. The survivors of that hardy folk had already left the damned human town to return to the Moot many leagues away to the east and south.
The indiscriminate killer that was the black pox had cut down all manner of people, regardless of age, social class or gender. Young men in their prime were buried beside babes-in-arms, streetwalker girls beside merchant-lords. Councillors, scholars, tradesmen and rat-catchers; all had been taken by the hungry disease.
Men had deserted from the watch and were now surviving as desperate outlaws in the forests of the Reikwald. The Schaffenfest fairground had been abandoned long ago and was now littered with the scavenger-savaged corpses of livestock that had succumbed to the plague just as the citizens of the town had. Food waste rotted in the streets in festering piles, filling the air with noxious vapours. Bonfires were set in the streets to try and purify the air and mask the stench of death and decay that permeated everywhere. But the fires only served to make the river-mists even thicker, lending them a jaundiced tinge, as if the fog itself was tainted, its vaporous tendrils infecting the market town all over again.
Rats gathered, and some townsfolk, whose minds had run mad in the face of what they had seen happen to their neighbours, friends and loved ones, claimed to have seen rats as big as men scuttling through the empty, smog-shrouded streets, reemerging from the sewers at nightfall, walking on their, hind legs like men.
But such wild rumours and the desertion of the watch troubled not the two morbidly obsessed apprentices. In reality, the disaster that was steadily befalling the town was proving to be a blessing to Dieter and his accomplice Erich.
The black pox had made whole areas of the town veritable no-go areas, including the docks. No barges stopped in Bögenhafen anymore. The town lay under a pall of sickness and death. The boats which had been abandoned at their jetties had long ago become breeding grounds for rats, unloaded cargoes of foodstuffs rotting where they lay, fine bundles of cloth from Altdorf plundered by the vermin to line their nests.
With the docks and warehouses of the Ostendamm abandoned, Dieter and Erich were able to continue their clandestine work with even less fear of being troubled by the watch, or indeed anyone else in spite of the fact that a murder had been committed. There was no one there to discover it.
At first Dieter had panicked, expecting the watch to come looking for the missing Leopold, sent on the instructions of his masters at the physicians’ guild. However, he soon realised that during the current health crisis no one would come looking for him. Dieter doubted that he would even be missed. If any of those few remaining did question his whereabouts, they would doubtless assume that he too had become another statistic of the plague’s death toll.
The two apprentices themselves remained untouched by the plague; in fact they seemed untouchable. Dieter began to wonder if his gift protected him, and by extension Erich, from the disease.
In time the black pox would burn itself out, having burnt its way so fiercely and so quickly through the town. With the approach of winter it would slow and eventually die itself, black pox fever did not like the cold.
* * *
And so, on the night of the twenty-seventh of Erntezeit, Dieter was ready to begin the ceremony during which he would attempt to raise Leopold Hanser from the dead. It had taken them days—or rather nights—to prepare their fellow student’s body.
Leopold’s corpse had been laid out on the oak table. Its flesh had developed an unpleasant waxy texture and greeny-grey sheen, despite their best efforts to preserve it, so that they might finish preparing for the ritual. The angry red throttle-marks on Leopold’s swollen neck had darkened to purple. Unfortunately, gangrenous rot had begun to set in at the extremities. The body had been dressed again in a plain linen shift.
Candles had been placed on the tables and benches surrounding the central autopsy table, their inconstant, guttering light reflecting from the corpse’s waxy flesh like moonlight on oil. A lantern stood on the table next to Dieter, illuminating the pages of his open notebooks.
Dieter was sure that it had not been such a performance for Doktor Drakus to do the same, simply because he was so much more experienced and had gathered about him artefacts associated with death and the dark arts, such as the hand of glory and the homunculus.
In contrast, Dieter was trying to prepare the ritual based on a combination of what he had witnessed more than two months before, information he had culled from his dubiously procured books, what he had learnt from the physicians’ guild, what he had gleaned from all the years of watching his father about his work in the Chapel of Morr, and from what seemed to make sense, although he was sure he had not always possessed such wisdom. Perhaps the knowledge had been planted within him by the howling death-winds that had gusted through within Drakus’ basement vault.
Dieter had started his preparations by stripping the corpse and submerging it in a dyer’s wooden vat, filled with an alchemical solution, which had a coppery green tinge and an unpleasant acrid offal smell—but then Dieter had put a sheep’s intestines into the cauldron in which he had brewed the noxious liquid. The body had been steeped in the concoction for seven days. When Dieter and Erich had hauled it out again, Leopold’s skin had taken on a sagging leathery quality and rigour mortis had left it, making the joints supple again. Leopold’s face had gained a grotesque slack-jawed, open-eyed expression.
Some of the things that Leichemann’s Anatomy had said were needed at this stage neither Dieter nor Erich had been able to get hold of, such as a solution made from yew berries gathered at midnight when Morrslieb was full. But Dieter had decided that half of what Leichemann had recorded three centuries before was medical science way ahead of its time and the rest of it unsubstantiated folkloric nonsense with no real practical application. He could see how a solution of wolfsbane might help purge the body of toxins but he could not see how using a blade heated in a fire sprinkled with corpse dust and fuelled with coffin wood, and then cooled in the blood of virgins, could make any difference to the procedure he was developing. It was like trying to piece together a skeleton without knowing what one was supposed to look like.
After a full week’s work the body was ready. The temple bells had already chimed eleven by the time Dieter was ready to begin the ritual itself.
Erich was standing in the same position as they had seen Drakus’ manservant stand, at the head of the table. He was nervously picking at his nails, his silent lips working as he went over and over in his mind the words he would have to say as part of the ritual. Dieter stood at the side of the table, his eyes cast down, breathing deeply as he tried to calm his excitedly racing heart and focus his mind.
“Let us begin,” he breathed.
Dieter stretched his hands out over the body, palms down, trembling. It was not Leopold Hanser, he told himself, not anymore. With the vital spark of life gone, the carcass was nothing but an empty husk, a hollow man. He saw the words he had to speak form in letters of fire in his mind and began to chant. Erich’s wavering voice joined his and his accomplice began to recite the words, the pronunciation of which Dieter had spent long hours teaching him.
The two students did not know what the words meant but there was no denying their power. The darkness of the warehouse congealed. The air they breathed became thick, like the cloying river mists smothering the streets of the half-dead town, oozing into their lungs like slime. The alchemical stink of the preserved corpse became accented with the loamy smell of vegetable decay, the iron reek of spilled blood and the bittersweet perfume of fleshy putrefaction.
The hard consonants of the words produced a guttural alien sound that conjured up images of a distant, almost unreal land, where death had held sway for interminable eons. And although he might not know the meaning of the words, Dieter fully understood their intent. Images swirled and solidified briefly in the utter blackness filling his mind, only to dissolve again and change into something else.
Leering lichen-coated skulls. Bloated maggots grown fat in the eye-sockets of a dead horse. Blood running from the corner of a cold smiling mouth. Anselm Fleischer burning at the stake, shouting blasphemous obscenities. A hunchbacked abomination chewing on a human leg bone whilst perched atop a gravestone. Drowned faces puffed with stagnant water, with pondweed tresses and eyes plucked out by scavenging fish. Smashing a stone down again and again into the pulped mess of a man’s skull. Flayed human skin. Fingernails clogged with splinters and grave-dirt.
A nauseous ache knotted his guts and he felt his gorge rise. He swallowed hard and focused all the more intently on the mantra he was reciting over and over again.
Thunder rolled overhead like a tattoo drummed by skeletal musicians on skull-pans with human thighbones. The flickering candle-flames guttered, but did not go out.
Dieter’s head throbbed with the build-up of power behind his eyes. A sibilant murmur whispered through the warehouse as if other, unearthly voices were joining in the frenetic mantra-chant, calling on powers unknown and terrible to reverse nature and return Leopold Hanser to life.
The images continued to assail him. The dull gleam of a sweeping scythe. Wild dogs worrying at the carcass of a beggar. Butcher hooks hung with disembowelled cadavers. The glassy, slack-jawed stare of a rotting head on an iron spike. Grinding down bones in a pestle and mortar. His hands tight around his friend’s broken neck. The spill of purple-grey intestines as a hanged thief was drawn and quartered. The desiccated husk of a long-dead knight lying within its cold, stone tomb, still clutching his sword in rigour-locked fingers. Bodies struggling as they slipped down the greased stakes that punctured their midriffs. The last grains of sand running out of the bulb of an hourglass.
His breathing was hard and ragged now. It clouded as mist in front of him. He had not realised how cold it had become inside the warehouse.
Dieter reached out his hands to the darkness and the shadows swarmed towards him as he channelled the dark energy, howling through the warehouse, through his own nerve-jangling body and into the motionless corpse on the table in front of him.
Frost crackled on a glass alembic and a marble dissection slab. Erich was shivering but through chattering teeth continued to chant, unable to stop, as if hypnotised. The solidifying darkness pressed in around them.
The body twitched, an arm slipping from the table to dangle at its side. Dieter felt it brush against him rather than saw it move. A buzz of excitement leapt within him but he consciously maintained his concentration. And he had to concentrate even harder, for with the churning pressure building behind his eyes, Dieter felt pain flare along every nerve in his body. It was as if he was caught in the midst of a charged electrical storm. He could feel every hair on his body stand on end. He tried to keep chanting through gritted teeth, fighting back the searing physical pain he was feeling.
The body before him suddenly arched its back and then flopped down again. His searching eyes fell on Erich. His accomplice was rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth as he continued to chant. Then his eyes were back on Leopold Hanser’s corpse.
A strangely luminescent mist was coalescing out of the air above the table and rushing into the corpse’s mouth and nostrils, blown by the unnatural gale rising inside the warehouse, carrying with it slivers of congealed darkness. The ribcage rose as though its lungs were inflating.
The pain was now unbearable and yet he was so close to success. He was sure of it.
Dieter let out the agony in one almighty cry as he screamed the words of the invocation, the splintering pain in his head feeling as if it would split his skull open.
Thunder crashed and the storm broke directly overhead. Every light in the warehouse blew out, other than the lantern, and Dieter blacked out.
He had only been unconscious for a second but, when he came to again, Dieter found himself lying on the floor in a pool of his own vomit with Erich anxiously trying to rouse him.
“What happened? What happened?” he was shrieking.
With Erich’s help, Dieter sat up, resting his back against a leg of the oak table, his knees drawn up, his head lolling forwards. The front of his black robe was spattered with yellow bile. Its acrid smell stung his nostrils; its bitter taste burnt his throat. His head was pounding. He closed his eyes tight against the throbbing ache as if that would somehow drive it away. When it did not, he opened his eyes again.
The warehouse was dark, the feeble light from the lantern doing little to penetrate the black murk that had slithered into the building. But the darkness did not seem so all-consuming anymore. The innocuous shapes of the warehouse resolved themselves again out of the gloom. The dark power Dieter had summoned was slowly dissipating.
Next to him the corpse’s arm hung limply over the edge of the table, unmoving. The ritual had failed.
Exhaustion washed through Dieter so sudden and so strong that he would have collapsed again if not for the way he was sitting.
It was only then that he realised he had expended a massive amount of energy in conjuring up the power of death and attempting the ritual. He felt weak, drained. His muscles trembled with palsied fatigue. He was bitterly cold and yet icy sweat still prickled his brow. His lank, black hair was wet with it.
He had expended all his energy to achieve as much as he had, and yet still it hadn’t been enough. Had he done something wrong? Had he misremembered the words or hand gestures? Was the whole rite missing some vital ingredient? Had he not prepared the body thoroughly enough? Had it failed because of something Erich had done?
It had been so easy with the cat, painfully easy by comparison, but then it was a smaller, simpler creature and had been fresher. But Dieter sensed that it was more than just that. His mind came round to the idea again that perhaps it was something about the night on which he resurrected Erich’s pet. Perhaps it had been the night of Geheimnisnacht itself that had helped him accomplish it? Strange things happened on Geheimnisnacht certainly. Supernatural things.
Slowly and with the finality of a death-knell, the fog-muffled temple bells began to mark the hour of twelve. Midnight. The witching hour.
Dieter lifted his head. The nervous high he had felt during the ritual was now replaced by another surge of exhaustion and negative feeling. Or was it simply clarity, as cold realisation soaked into him.
What had he been trying to do? To raise a corpse from the dead was blasphemy. Thank Morr and Shallya that he had failed. Frogs and rats were one thing, but to raise a human being to unlife was the vilest heresy, an act befitting the servants of evil and not a scholar of physic. And it hadn’t just been any corpse; it had been that of his friend and fellow scholar, Leopold Hanser. A man whose good deeds and generous heart would be missed. Dieter was suddenly wracked with gut wrenching, overwhelming feelings of guilt.
“What happened?” Erich was at him again. “We were so close! Why did you stop?”
Dieter sat on the dirt floor of the warehouse in shocked silence. He didn’t know what had come over him. He had been a man obsessed. Almost a man possessed, so driven had he been to succeed in his dark endeavour. What would his father have thought? If he had been alive he would have disowned his prodigal son and damned his immortal soul. As it was he was probably turning in his grave even now. And what would his darling sister think of him? The thought of her distraught horrified features was almost enough to cause him to break down in tears where he sat.
But as it was, the blasphemous invocation had failed and he had been saved. In all the time that he had been wondering if he could master his powers he had not once considered whether he should. And how could he have been so deluded as to believe the powers that had been awoken within him, having lain dormant for so long, were a gift? They were a curse: a filthy stain on his immortal soul, and one that it would take years of penance and contrition to remove. But if that was what it would take, that was what Dieter would do.
The bells finishing striking midnight. The heavens grumbled as the rain drummed down against the roof of the warehouse, finding its way inside in places and descending in a steady splattering dribble.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Dieter admitted testily. “But whatever it was, the gods be praised.”
“W-What? What are you saying?”
Dieter turned his weary head and fixed Erich with steely eyes. “I am saying that someone, some higher power, was merciful and stopped us before we damned our immortal souls forever and went the way of Anselm Fleischer.”
“You can’t m-mean that!”
“I can. And I do.”
“B-But we’ve worked for months for this. You have been given a gift. Think of all those you could save if you completed your work!”
“Think of all those others who would die you mean. Think of Leopold Hanser. Think of Anselm Fleischer. Think of us. Think of yourself.”
“Y-You’ve gone mad!” Erich shrieked, leaping to his feet. “Leopold H-Hanser died that we might further our cause.”
The furious apprentice necromancer kicked the table leg in frustration, jerking the body laid upon it.
“He d-didn’t understand the import of what we were doing here!”
The gangrenous arm swung like a leaden pendulum, morbidly marking each passing second as they steadily and inevitably approached the moment of their deaths.
“He would have b-betrayed us! But now he can help us f-finish our work.”
With a great exhalation of foetid gas the corpse sat up sharply.
Erich shrieked and stumbled backwards into a trestle table, hard enough to send phials and alembics crashing to the floor. In startled horror Dieter scrambled away from the table.
Leopold Hanser’s corpse turned its head to look at him, the crushed vertebrae of its neck grating as it did so, a sound like broken nails scratched across a slate. Its mouth gaped open and the corpse made a noise that sounded as if it was taking in a great, ragged breath. A phlegmy gargling began in the back of its crushed throat.
The detached, scholarly part of Dieter’s jittery mind wondered why something that was dead would need to breathe. Morr alone knew what state Leopold’s lungs were in. Half full of preserving fluid probably and about as much use as if Leopold had drowned to death, rather than been strangled.
Was it force of habit, the vestige of an ingrained response in the body, even though Leopold’s mind was gone and it could only be reacting on primitive instinct and nothing more?
Dieter had succeeded after all. But that knowledge did not make him feel any better. In fact it only served to make him feel sickeningly worse. It was too late. He was truly damned.
In the faltering light of the lantern the zombie’s sour mouldering flesh glistened wetly. Leopold’s blond hair had been stained green by the preserving bath and hung lank about his pallid shoulders.
It reached clumsily for Dieter with flailing arms. It jerked again and its legs kicked against the table, fists and heels hammering against the oak table. Dieter had not thought to keep the corpse secured to the table.
The zombie let out a ghastly moan—a spine-chilling cry that sounded as if the dead thing remembered being alive and was reliving the agony of its death all over again—and half-fell off the table. Swaying, it got unsteadily to its feet. It turned towards Dieter again, mewling pitifully, focusing on the one who had caused it to be born again, raised from the dead to shambling unlife.
The corpse’s thrashing convulsions had ruptured its skin at the joints of its elbows and knees. The flesh underneath was darkly discoloured. Despite the gloom Dieter could see that a darkening stain was spreading across the front of the linen shift as well.
Dieter dragged himself back further, banging into the side of another workbench. Something shaken from the work surface above clattered onto the floor next to him. It was a rusted bone-saw. He snatched it up, holding it out in front of him as he might brandish a sword.
The resurrected corpse bearing down on him with filthy talons outstretched might look like his erstwhile friend Leopold Hanser—the only person to have shown him true friendship when he arrived in Bögenhafen—but now it was a mindless monster that was little more than a rabid beast, driven by some insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.
The zombie took its first few faltering steps towards its saviour, its feet turned unnaturally inwards, its gait shambling as if it was remembering how to walk. All the time it wore Leopold’s dead face like a mask, staring through it at Dieter’s tarnished heart and tainted soul.
Dieter was trapped, the bench behind him, the undead creature in front of him. He still felt weak although the horror of the situation he now found himself in lent him some strength. He managed to struggle to his feet before the zombie could reach him.
He lashed out wildly at the stumbling corpse. The bone-saw snagged the cloth of Leopold’s shift and ripped the material open, cutting into the flesh underneath as well. Black, congealed blood oozed from the ragged hole in the corpse’s side. The neurotic Dieter fancied that he could see a nub of yellow bone and a rot-disfigured organ through the gash.
The creature continued to let out its heart-rending howl but did not particularly react to the messy wound Dieter had dealt it. Still it came on. It was almost on top of him now. He struck again. This time the saw dug into the meat of Leopold’s bruise-blackened neck. The rusty instrument struck bone with a clunk and snagged in the wound. Dieter released his grip, leaving half the saw’s blade and its handle protruding from the corpse.
Dieter felt freezing fingers lock around his wrist in a steely grip and cried out in pain and terror. Then somehow he found the courage and to break free, his horrified fear lending him the strength he needed. He slammed two bunched fists into Leopold’s chest and felt, as well as heard, a rib snap. The zombie staggered backwards and Dieter ran to the sackcloth curtain.
The zombie swung round and its dead eyes fixed on Dieter’s accomplice. Erich was hunched in a foetal ball next to the trestle table, whimpering in the dark. He seemed to be paralysed by fear in the face of the horrific appearance and unnatural movements of the thing that had once been Leopold Hanser, rather than elated at Dieter’s success.
Dieter was so terrified himself that he was frozen into inaction again. Part of him felt obligated to help his friend and yet he feared what might happen to him should Leopold’s zombie actually manage to get its gangrenous hands on him a second time.
The thing that had been Leopold lurched towards Erich. Its jaws opened even wider and a baleful intent flared in its eyes, like some feral predator with an insatiable hunger for raw meat.
And then the stiletto dagger was in Erich’s hand again. Dieter had not seen him with it since the night of the second break-in they had committed. Erich slashed and stabbed, getting to his feet and spinning his gangling form lithely out of the way of the creature’s grabbing arms. The blade opened dark wounds on the zombie’s torso and carved up the meat of its forearms.
Erich ducked the clutching hands one more time and twisted free, able to get himself clear at last. As he barged past the poor undead imitation of Leopold Hanser his hip bashed against the table bearing Dieter’s notebooks and the lantern. The jolted lamp fell over, spilling the last of its oil across the table and the covering of papers. Then it rolled off the edge of the table and smashed on the floor, where the hem of the sackcloth curtain trailed in the dirt of the floor.
The pages of Dieter’s precious notebooks first browned then blackened as they charred and caught light. Tongues of fire licked up the rough hemp fabric of the draped curtains, the hungry flames racing up towards the rafters of the hayloft above.
For a split second Dieter went to rescue his notebooks and then stopped himself, suddenly realising what he was doing and coming to his senses. He would not be needing them again after this night.
Apparently disorientated, the zombie stumbled around the oak table, which was also starting to burn. In no time at all it was surrounded by a snarling wall of flame as the fire ate up the fabric of the curtain and the rest of the fuel Dieter and Erich had unwittingly gathered in the warehouse.
Alembics cracked and exploded as the heat of the blaze rapidly increased.
Dieter and Erich looked at each other without saying a word, the fire reflected back at them in the dark mirrors of each other’s eyes. Then they turned and bolted for the door.
In a mere moment they were out in the rain and cold of the Erntezeit night and Dieter was locking the door behind them. He could still hear the zombie’s bestial howling as it plunged about inside the burning building.
Erich led them away from the dockside, down a cobbled path that ran alongside the watercourse of the Hafenback, back towards the town’s water gate. In the shelter of another looming storehouse they stopped and looked back to watch the destruction of the warehouse.
The crackle of the flames could be heard even from here, their russet glow beginning to light the other buildings around the warehouse as roiling flames broke free of the inferno now raging within. The cleansing flames were rapidly and effectively destroying all the evidence of Dieter’s and Erich’s crimes. Soon the only proof of what they had been up to for the last two months would be the burnt out shell of the fire-ravaged warehouse itself.
Flames swirled into the night sky. Beyond the spark-filled billows of tarry smoke, Dieter caught a glimpse of the buildings on the other side of the river. Almost no lights twinkled on the far bank amidst the squalor of the Westendamm slums. Only the highest, arrow-slit windows of the Fort Blackfire barracks, close against the northern battlements of the town wall, showed any signs of life. And those guard barracks were only manned by a skeleton staff now.
Dieter wondered if the few guardsmen left on watch there could see the fire raging in the docks through the rain. If the conflagration spread to the surrounding buildings they certainly would. But the sudden autumnal downpour, soaking him to the bone even now, might save them and finish the job of purification for them yet.
Heavy rain poured down, sluicing the streets clean of the accumulated detritus, streams of mud and filth washing down into the Bögen. The downpour hissed as it fell on the burning warehouse but already Dieter could see that it was dampening down the crackling flames.
Dieter stared transfixed, mesmerised by the fire, despite Erich tugging at his sleeve, eager to be away. His heart was racing and he was out of breath again. He felt as if he could sleep for a week, only he knew that he would be plagued by fitful dreams, haunted by the image of Leopold’s slack-jawed dead-eyed face.
“We were so busy wondering if we could we didn’t ever stop and consider if we should,” Dieter muttered to himself, half under his breath. “I never stopped to really consider the consequences of what I was doing.”
The warehouse continued to burn.
And the unrelenting rain continued to fall.