NACHGEHEIM
Murder Most Foul

 

 

I can still remember the first time I took another man’s life, as clearly as if it happened only yesterday.

There have been so many since. The templar knight, the desperate street-walker, the mercenary soldier, the naive priest, the scolding fishwife, the leech-thing and his elemental creation the coarse sexton, the half-drunk militiamen, the pompous burgomeister, the guildsman, my own apprentice, the whiskered rat-catcher, the twin innocents, the grave robber, the avaricious thief. I could go on. But I still remember the first.

I can see his face now, as I squeezed the life from him. I can see the bulging, bloodshot eyes, the protruding swollen tongue, the puffed cheeks turning from red to purple. I can hear the spluttering, rasping gargle of the man choking, gasping for breath that would never come. I feel his desperate hands clawing at mine, the nails ripping through the skin into my flesh. And I feel my hands closing tighter and tighter about his neck, crushing his windpipe. I feel the bones of his neck grating against each other.

And I remember how it made me feel. The horror, the disbelief, the fear, the desperation, the panic, the unreality of it, the disconnectedness. The adrenalin rush. The sick excitement. The power.

Looking back now I realise that having taken that step, I was damned forever. I had passed the point of no return. There was no going back. There would be no forgiveness. No redemption. From that moment on, although I tried to fight it, my fate was already sealed.

Once the first steps are taken along that dark path, there is no going back.

 

Dieter Heydrich was there to witness the cold-blooded murder of Anselm Fleischer when the witch hunters executed the lunatic for the sacrilegious crimes committed by the Corpse Taker.

The execution took place on the one night of the year, above all others, when anyone who valued their life or their sanity stayed at home. It was the night when dark things were abroad within the world. It was the Night of Mystery. Geheimnisnacht.

In certain remote villages and hamlets across the Empire, where people more readily suffered the predations of the servants of darker powers, the populace would bar themselves in until the sun rose on the first day of Nachgeheim, for fear of what might be abroad on that night.

This Geheimnisnacht was an uncomfortable, sweltering night. The day had been the same, the atmosphere oppressive, ever promising thunder but the weather never delivering on that promise. The oppressive atmosphere remained as night fell, as did the humid heat.

The bells of the Temple of Sigmar chimed nine o’ clock. Both moons hung in the light-leeched sky, full and threatening, directly above the pyre constructed outside the temple in the Göttenplatz. The fissured face of green-hazed Morrslieb even appeared to be smiling like a feral predator.

Although people knew better than to be out on Geheimnisnacht, they had still come in their droves to see the Corpse Taker burn at the stake, the bogeyman of their nightmares laid to rest at last.

The crowd pointed at the two moons and muttered amongst themselves, making the sign of the holy hammer or touching iron to guard against evil. But still they had come.

The capture of the Corpse Taker had been the talk of the town for the last week, so much so that even Dieter, hiding away in his garret study, had come to hear of it. He had heard how the lunatic had been captured by a cadre of Sigmarites, led by Brother-Captain Krieger himself, the madman having attacked the town’s sextons, who tended the graves for Father Hulbert in the garden of Morr, following his escape from the Temple of Shallya. Krieger had not been as understanding as either the physicians’ guild or the Sisters of Shallya. Dieter had heard that Anselm Fleischer had been subjected to the torturers’ ministrations following which he had confessed to being the Corpse Taker and of having committed all the crimes of which he’d been accused, and more still.

His death had been inevitable, not only from that point when he had admitted to every accusation the witch hunters made against him, Dieter thought, but from the moment he had been seized by the Order of Sigmar; perhaps from the moment he had broken free from the infirmary to escape Dieter’s interrogation. Surely his death warrant had been written from the moment his will had been turned by the malevolent Doktor Drakus, working away behind the scenes of this morality play all along—seemingly directing everything that was happening to Dieter even. That was the way fate worked.

It had been Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger and not fate, however, who had decided that the Corpse Taker should be put to death on Geheimnisnacht. Many, even among the Church of Sigmar, riled at the idea. Krieger was as superstitious and as fearful as the next man, it was the message that he was giving that was important. The fact that the fiend who had terrorised Bögenhafen for the best part of nine months would perish on Geheimnisnacht would be a sign to all other malefactors and evildoers that they would have no power over Sigmar-fearing men, even on the treacherous Night of Mystery.

Dieter hung back at the edge of the square, cloaked and hooded despite the warm night. Moving from foot to foot he could see what was taking place on the other side of the Göttenplatz.

Anselm Fleischer wasn’t the only one to suffer the judgement of the witch hunters that night. Two others were to be put to the torch: an overweight merchant and his unnatural youthful lover. Their unholy lascivious union had been declared an act of dedication to the blasphemous Prince of Pleasure.

The dignitaries of the faith of the Heldenhammer were also there. The citizens of Bögenhafen who were in attendance were from all walks of life and all levels of society, including members of the town council as well as representatives of the guilds, to see that Sigmar’s will was done.

Dieter saw Professor Theodrus there too, keen to show he condoned the action taken against Anselm Fleischer, and thereby disassociating himself and the guild from the madman’s crimes. Dieter pulled the hood of his cloak further over his face, just in case somehow, amidst the sea of faces, Theodrus was able to pick him out.

Krieger stood proudly next to the much less impressive figure of the Lector of Sigmar, a blazing brand in his leather-gloved hand, ready to set the fires of divine retribution himself. Before Sigmar’s will was enacted, the lector mumbled something spiritual to the condemned and blessed the masses observing the whole perverse ritual.

The three heretic criminals did not accept their fate with good grace, accepting their sins and seeing this as an opportunity to be cleansed of their wickedness. Anselm thrashed and riled against the ropes that bound him, calling on the secret masters of the undead and even grinning Morrslieb to deliver him. His madness had utterly consumed him at last.

Hearing his poisonous blasphemies the crowd responded in kind, calling to the witch hunter captain to finish his work here and send the Corpse Taker to join the Dark Powers he venerated in the world beyond.

The younger of the other two heretics sobbed and wailed hysterically. The merchant said nothing: the ordeals he had endured to extract his confession having practically killed him already. He sagged limply in his bindings, his chin hanging down on his chest, either unconscious or catatonic.

And then something happened that chilled Dieter’s blood and made his heart skip a beat.

It seemed to Dieter that of all the hundreds of people thronging the Göttenplatz, Anselm, tied to the stake atop the pyre, fixed him with his mad-eyed gaze. The madman’s words echoed from the temple buildings crowding the square, and over the heads of the people gathered there, as though he were speaking directly to him.

“Physician, heal thyself!”

They were the last words Anselm Fleischer ever spoke.

Dieter was sure that Anselm Fleischer could not be the Corpse Taker. How could he have carried out all the morbid things the Corpse Taker was accused of when he had been kept a virtual prisoner in a cell within the Temple of Shallya, watched day and night by the priestesses who served there? And it certainly hadn’t been Anselm Fleischer who Dieter had watched performing some unspeakable rite in the vault under the house in Apothekar Allee.

As Dieter watched Anselm burn and listened to his inhuman screams, the physician’s apprentice felt numb, as though a part of himself had died. But better that Anselm die, a wretched insane fool with nothing to live for, than Dieter Heydrich.

The effete Chaos-worshipper cried out for pity as the flames rose until the spark-blown smoke choked his lungs. Greasy black smoke eventually obscured the victims of Krieger’s brutal justice. The flames crackled and spat as the bodies crisped and blackened. The stink of over-cooked spit-roast meat which assaulted his nostrils made Dieter gag involuntarily.

 

The execution over, the crowd quickly dispersed, the townsfolk reasoning that it was not wise to tempt fate any longer on the night of Geheimnisnacht, and set off for home. Dieter did the same although his motivations were more inspired by not wanting to attract the attentions of Brother-Captain Krieger. If the witch hunter had a mind to, it would not be difficult for him to connect Dieter to the wrongly executed Anselm Fleischer.

Dieter reached Frau Keeler’s lodging house as the temple bells were chiming ten. In the darkness his foot brushed against something furred and damp. Dieter paused and took a step back.

The eerie luminescence of the twin moons illuminated even the gloom of Dunst Strasse, the monotone light bleeding all colour from the object, but it was unmistakable nonetheless.

Erich’s cat lay dead in the road. Its lank body was distended unnaturally. Sticky black blood matted its spiked ginger fur where a cartwheel had crushed its body.

Seeing such an incongruous sight distracted Dieter for a moment from his own preoccupations and concerns. Erich would be distraught. For some inexplicable reason he doted on the mangy stray.

Dieter bent down and gathered up the animal’s body in his cloak. The rank acrid smell of the dead cat assaulted his nostrils more sharply than the smell of burning pig-fat had in the square.

Dieter entered the quiet house and ascended the stairs to the attic room. The garret was in darkness other than for the penetrating glow of the Geheimnisnacht moons that permeated everywhere. The door to Erich’s room was closed. An empty wine bottle and glass stood on the table in the central living space of the apartment.

Erich had not joined Dieter to watch the execution of the Corpse Taker for he knew as well as Dieter that the real villain was still at large, and probably still somewhere within the town. He had become even more of a recluse than Dieter, spending most of his time locked away inside his room, only venturing out to rummage for scraps and eat the leftovers of Dieter’s meals. When he did go out, Dieter knew that he drank even harder than he had when they had first met.

Dieter’s first thought was to take the dead cat to Erich and let him know the fate of his pet.

But then another thought slithered in to his mind, from out of the darkness in which his mind was locked.

Dieter turned instead towards his own door, the cat’s corpse still held in the folds of his cloak. He entered his room, where the stub of a candle still flickered fitfully, and laid the cat carefully down on his workbench, clearing a space amidst all the papers and dissection instruments.

He removed his cloak and sat down in the chair at the bench, his eyes never once moving from the mangled remains of the cat. The indistinct darkness that lingered at the corners of the room thickened, the shadows pressing in more closely towards him. Despite what he was intending to do, Dieter’s pulse remained steady, and his breathing remained calm.

Since the night in Apothekar Allee he had not been able to shake the feeling that something within him had changed. It was as if something had been woken within him, a strange power that now longed to be unleashed.

The aftermath of what he had witnessed that night surrounded him now, recorded in notebooks and on disorganised scraps of paper; even in the dissections he had continued with under the guidance of Leichemann’s Anatomy. But he tried to ignore all that now, pushing it to one side.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on clearing his mind. There he found images of Anselm Fleischer’s corpse burning at the stake with the other heretics, the pox-ridden face of Doktor Drakus that haunted his dreams, and memories of all that had changed in his life since he had come to Bögenhafen.

And steadily the images faded until his mind was a dark and empty void. There, at the heart of the darkness, something writhed and uncoiled, something even blacker and darker still. An unknown, untold power. A previously unrealised ability. An affinity for the oblivion of death and all the dead places of the world.

Other memories returned, unfolding in his mind. He felt a rush of excitement but tempered it with anxious anticipation. He didn’t want to lose hold of what was awakening inside him. He let it come naturally. By not concentrating on trying to recall the words and gestures Doktor Drakus had used as he had called on the powers that dwelt beyond the veil of mortality, those remembrances came all the more readily. Images from the pages of the books he had stolen from the doktor’s library took on three-dimensional form in his mind’s eye.

An anatomical rendering of a human skull. The arteries and veins extruded from a man’s arm. A frog dissection, the amphibian’s organs pinned out on the board beside it.

Subconsciously Dieter stretched out his flattened palms, fingers splayed, over the prone body of the cat and began to mimic the gestures Drakus had made, shaping the air with his hands. He heard the words of Drakus’ invocation. His lips moved in imitation of the sounds, and then he was saying them, his voice low and barely audible, not understanding their meaning but fully understanding their purpose.

And now he could hear another sound. An insect sound; an insistent susurration. Voices whispering in another room. He could feel the skeletal fingers of a breeze ruffling his unkempt, uncut hair. He kept his eyes closed, in case by opening them he might somehow dispel the power he was now invoking. He breathed deeply and inhaled a curious scent, borne on the unseen wind. The smell of leaf-mulch, of mould, of damp earth. Of the grave.

The liquefying candle fizzled and blew out, as the blast of another esoteric squall gusted through the shadow-clad room. The wind felt cold. Dieter was sweating, but he knew that it was more than simply the warmth of the night that was producing such a physiological response. In fact there was a distinct chill in the air. There were supernatural forces at work in this place now.

Dieter could feel the change within him even more strongly now, and he welcomed it. He had never felt like this before in his life as the painfully shy, insecure, downtrodden and victimised underdog. So charged, so energised, so in control. So powerful.

And now he did open his eyes. A small part of him was surprised that the room was not in total darkness. A pallid luminescence bathed the workbench and the broken body of the cat in its wan grey light. It seemed to Dieter that the source of this strange light was not merely the moons, visible clearly now through the dormer window. It seemed to suffuse the very air around him and shimmer from his hands. The strange light created sinister flickering shadows so that he did not at first register the spasm of movement on the desk beneath his outstretched hands. But he heard the spitting hiss quite clearly and knew immediately what it was.

In a flurry of scratching claws and bared, glistening teeth, the cat returned to hissing life. The spitting stray pushed itself up on its front legs and turned narrowed, burning red eyes on Dieter. He felt a thrill of fearful excitement sizzle through him. But at the same time he dared not lose concentration; he kept his mind focused.

The cat’s back legs kicked, unsheathed claws scratching splinters from the surface of the bench. Its tail lashed angrily. It was unable to stand. Dieter might have managed to return the creature to life but he had not repaired its body first. The cat’s back was still broken, its midriff still a mess of mashed flesh and pulped internal entrails.

The cat began to yowl, a hollow, menacing sound, rising from within its shattered ribcage to become a wailing scream. Its ears lay flat against its head, its matted bloody fur standing on end.

What he was witnessing before him defied belief. A creature that had been properly dead had been brought back to life. Admittedly it was a demented, pain-wracked, hate-filled form of life, but it was life nonetheless. And Dieter was the one who had brought it about. He knew that the blasphemous truth was that it was his will alone that was keeping the cat alive.

At the edges of his mind he saw flashes of mortality made flesh. The maggot-eaten carcass of a magpie. The deathcap fungus grown bulbous on the stump of a dead elm. Kittens drowned in a millpond. Old Gelda tied to the fence post, bundles of sticks piled at her feet.

The door to his room banged open. Dieter’s concentration was broken. The cat gave one last fading yowl as its lungs deflated and slumped back down onto the tabletop.

Dieter sat back in his chair, only then realising how tense his body had been as he channelled the eldritch powers that had brought a semblance of life where there should have been none. Every muscle ached. He was sweating even more heavily now. His skin felt cold and clammy and he was left with a nauseous headache.

He slowly turned his head and saw Erich standing in the doorway, open-mouthed shock painted on the horrified canvas of his face. For a moment neither of them said anything. Dieter was too busy panting for breath. Erich was simply too appalled to speak.

Dieter’s roommate did not need to explain what he was doing there. If anyone needed to explain anything it was Dieter. But nonetheless it was Erich, still standing at the threshold to Dieter’s room, not daring to cross it, who first spoke.

“I-I heard the cat. It was howling. I-I wondered what had happened to it.”

Dieter looked back at the body on his desk. The front of the ginger stray hung limply over the edge of the table.

“Well, now you know,” he said.

Erich looked from Dieter to the cat and back again, the same appalled expression of horror etched on his features. “H-How?” was all he could manage.

“I don’t rightly know…” Dieter admitted, mystified by the experience himself. He could feel the former power he had enjoyed ebbing from him now, leaving behind it feelings of exhaustion, confusion and emptiness.

Other thoughts began to fill the gaping hole, such as how Erich would be feeling about the death of his cat, what he now thought of the naive country boy and whether he would give Dieter up to the witch hunters.

And then Erich made a declaration that Dieter certainly hadn’t been expecting.

“Then you must find out how.”

“What?”

“It is clear you have a talent, a gift. You cannot waste it. You should use it.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?” Now it was Dieter who was the one who sounded appalled.

“J-Just think about it.” The horrified expression was fast becoming a rictus of manic excitement. A mad gleam had entered Erich’s eyes. “Ever since I met you, you have been driven by a passion, an all-consuming desire to help people, to heal them, to save them from the merciless hand of fate. And now you have developed a gift that could help you accomplish your dream. Just think, with such a talent you could help the ailing better than anybody else. You could conquer death itself. Nobody would have to suffer the loss you did, as a child, when your mother died.”

Erich’s voice was thick with the same syrupy tone he had used the night he had persuaded Dieter to lead him to the deathly house in Apothekar Allee.

“You must practise your talents, develop them. I could help you. I could help you prepare your experiments; bring you what you needed, prepare your compounds. Whatever you need.”

Dieter riled at the thought that he should take what he had accomplished this night any further. But there was something about Erich’s suggestion that excited him. There was something deep inside him, close to the very core of his being, that revelled in the suggestion.

For a moment Dieter sensed a tingling aftershock of the power he had felt as he weaved his hands in the air above the dead cat, like a puppet master working a marionette, only without the aid of strings.

He did not hear the heresy against Morr present in Erich’s words, that he could conquer death. He only heard that he would have the power to reverse the fatal effects of death.

“You have a duty to all those whose lives you will save to do this. You have been given great power—the gods Know why—and with such power comes an even greater responsibility.”

Ambivalent emotions vied for dominance within Dieter. His overwrought mind raced with it all. One moment he wanted to shout and laugh in exhilaration, the next he was ready to burst into tears. But the one overwhelming feeling he had, which steadily quelled all the other emotions, was the heady feeling of intoxication. He felt drunk with power.

Then another, inevitable thought pushed its way to the surface of the fathomless black pool that was his mind.

“I wonder. I wonder,” he said breathlessly, almost thinking aloud.

Erich looked at him transfixed, waiting on his every word. The darkness writhed and spun around him. Shadows cast by the glowing moons became clawing hands pulling themselves across the wall towards the manic apprentice standing in the doorway.

“If I can bring a cat back to life, I wonder if I could do the same with something larger. What if…” a crazed giggle suddenly escaped his lips. “What if I could do what Drakus was obviously attempting to do?” He was shaking. “What if I could bring a human being back from the dead?”

Silence hung in the cloying air between them like a leaden pendulum. Dieter fancied he could detect the distant smell of desert-dry spices and carrion.

“But where would I begin? Where could I get a body from?”

Erich looked at him darkly and the chill in the room intensified still further.

“I’m sure something could be arranged,” he said.

 

* * *

 

It was Erich who found the warehouse and Albrecht Heydrich’s money that paid the rent. The building stood towards the western end of the Ostendamm, a dilapidated dockside barn that smelt of mouldy hops and rancid beer. It had not been used for some time.

The warehouse had an overweight landlord who smell little better. Dieter had learned months ago that Erich was the kind of person who had mutual acquaintances who knew such people. The man was too drunk most of the time to even know what day it was so he cared even less who took on the lease for the property. He certainly wasn’t going to bother checking the credentials of those he was renting it to, or follow up on what they were doing there.

For Dieter had become a man obsessed. He realised that he had been a blinkered fool before, blind to the possibilities that this radical branch of natural philosophy presented. Motivated by the adrenaline surge of power he had felt and encouraged by the equally obsessive Erich, he had become driven to learn all he could about his newly awakened powers and hone them.

But before he could do that he realised that preparation was key. He was also not so caught up in his studies to forget that not everyone would look upon what he was trying to do so favourably. In fact it would be positively dangerous to continue his experiments in Frau Keeler’s lodging house, especially if he were to attempt to resurrect a human being from the dead if he and Erich could acquire a corpse. For what better way could there be to learn how to cure the living of their ills than by studying the dead to ascertain precisely what it was that had killed them? And then to take it one step further, having determined the actual cause of death, to make alterations to the corpse and then resurrect it to see what difference the procedure had made.

Dieter was as desperate now to find a way to stop people being claimed by death and disease as when he had first been able to give a name to the desire that had grown within him after his mother had been so cruelly taken from him at such a young age. And if he could he would even turn back the clock to prevent his father from dying, He might not have been the more caring and compassionate father in the world but he had been his flesh and Mood nonetheless. And if not for himself he would have done it for his dear sister Katarina.

He hadn’t heard from her for several weeks now, although it might have simply been that he had not noticed if she had written to him or not, so caught up had he been in the events following the epiphany he had received under the house in Apothekar Allee.

Once he would have agonised about what his sister would have thought of what he was doing, of what he had become. When he had first arrived in Bögenhafen six months before, not a day had gone by without him thinking of his sister and offering up a prayer to Morr to watch over her and not take her into his realm for many a year yet. Now barely a day went by when he did think of her. And he no longer prayed to Morr either. His mind was on other things.

So it was that Dieter, assisted by his fellow apprentice, began to carry out his own experiments into the power that had awoken within him, to test his newly discovered abilities. Their days became nights, their nights days, Dieter attempting to copy what he could remember the sinister Doktor Drakus doing.

He began small. He had to try for consistency and control. Judging by his first few attempts to raise frogs and rats he still had a long way to go. He was not ready to attempt the resurrection of a human being yet.

The things he did reanimate lived only briefly, or their movements were unnaturally sluggish, or they were unnaturally aggressive and violent. Other times he could not raise the vermin Erich had collected at all but merely caused their bodies to decay more rapidly as the conjured death energies took their toll.

And he was yet to recapture the ease with which he had summoned his power to revive the cat. Perhaps it had been something about Geheimnisnacht itself that had made the task seem so simple at the time.

His dreams became darker. But surely, he told himself, that was merely an adjustment to his newfound gift.

He filled notebook after notebook with what he discovered by lamplight each night. It had been weeks since either Dieter or Erich had attended a lecture at the guild. They slept at Frau Keeler’s lodging house during the day venturing out as dusk was casting its smoky shadows over the town to make their surreptitious way to the warehouse on Ostendamm. And they took a different route each night, sometimes doubling back on themselves, so as not to be followed and escape detection. There they would work without stopping until the first glimmers of pre-dawn light began to bleach the velvet darkness from the sky.

And so they continued as Nachgeheim matured. But the world beyond the insular world of darkness that the two of them had created continued to turn and by the twelfth of the month, the plague was already well established in Bögenhafen.

 

Word was that it arose in the area to the north of the river known as the Pit and took hold as readily in the Fort Blackfire guard barracks as in the slums of the Westendamm.

The Pit had always been a festering hotbed of infection. Sanitation in this part of the town was worse than in any other district and disease there was rife. It was a breeding ground for all manner of maladies and agues. It was an area of the town that members of the physicians’ guild avoided visiting if at all possible—they certainly didn’t have any paying clients living on that side of the river—and that fact alone might well have allowed the spread of the plague to go unchecked for several weeks at least.

By the time the authorities had put measures in place to prevent the spread of the plague within the town—boarding up the homes of those already infected and marking them with a red cross so that others would know to steer well clear, and restricting traffic across the river—it was already too little too late.

The physicians’ guild and the Sisterhood of Shallya were drafted in to help with the rapidly worsening crisis. Those who could afford to quit the town in panic. The watch stepped up its patrols in the richer parts of the town, protecting their own best interests by making sure that the homes and businesses of the town’s wealthy patrons did not fall prey to looters, but, as a consequence, leaving the poorer parts of the town to their own devices.

There were more burnings in the Göttenplatz as those accused by the witch hunters of spreading the sickness intentionally, to draw down the favour of the Dark Gods upon them, were put to death.

But to Dieter and Erich it was as if nothing catastrophic had happened. In fact, if anything, it made it easier for them to go about their business undisturbed and, even more importantly, unobserved. Due to the crippling effects of the plague on the Blackfire barracks, the watch were soon hard pushed to maintain their observance of the areas around the Adel Ring and the commercial districts off the Bergstrasse and the Nulner Weg. They certainly weren’t concerned with what went on around the docks. After all, barges were no longer stopping in Bögenhafen, instead pressing on for Altdorf, it being common knowledge now that there was plague in the town. But then river traffic was down by fifty per cent compared to the same time the previous year, so greatly was the Reikland in the grip of what the physicians’ guild had termed the black pox. The streets around the Ostendamm were practically empty. There was only the occasional beggar, dead in the street.

Although the numbers out and about on the streets had drastically reduced, the numbers attending the temples had doubled as those who had chosen to stay, or who had no choice but to stay, sought divine intervention against the plague. Many, such as the Sisters of Mercy of Shallya, believed it was a punishment visited upon the population in retribution for the sinful lives they led. Some blamed it on the events of Geheimnisnacht.

Work increased for the physicians’ guild, the Sisterhood and the mourners’ guild as the dead soon choked the town cemetery. By the twenty-third day of Nachgeheim people were dying more quickly than Father Hulbert and the gravediggers could bless and bury them. Some claimed that bodies —particularly those of the poor—were going into mass unconsecrated graves, unblessed.

Dieter and Erich took their own precautions against the plague, carrying nosegays about their person to mask the stench of death permeating the town and helping to keep the black pox from them. But then as the two of them hardly had any contact with anyone other than each other, they reasoned that their chances of infection were dramatically reduced. The lingering thought that he might still contract the plague simply motivated Dieter to press on with his new studies, and to persist with his experiments, for his work might mean that he found a way of beating the disease or of even finding a cure.

 

It was on the twenty-ninth day of the month that Dieter heard from his sister again. Returning to his lodgings that morning he was surprised and suspicious to see an unkempt young man standing at the door to Frau Keeler’s tenement, note in hand.

He considered waiting to see if the stranger would leave of his own accord but it wasn’t just the world that had changed; Dieter had changed with it. Whereas before the old Dieter might have been happy to hang back and avoid any confrontation, he now stepped forward confidently and challenged the youth.

“What is your business here?” he said.

“I have a message,” the young man replied, pressing the letter into Dieter’s hand.

Dieter looked at the crumpled envelope in his hand, then at the scruffy messenger.

“Good day to you,” he said. “That will be all.”

He admitted himself to the building and slammed the door shut behind him.

Dieter did not open the letter until he was in his own room in the garret. For a moment he had entertained all sorts of paranoid ideas as to who had sent him the letter on seeing the state of its deliverer. But these had been dispelled when he saw his name and the address of the lodging house written in his sister’s familiar hand, to be replaced by long-buried feelings of guilt, loss and longing.

With a pang in his heart, Dieter sat down on the end of his unmade bed, tore open the letter, and read.

 

My dearest brother,

 

I do hope that this letter finds you well. Only I fear that it will not, that something terrible has befallen you. I pray to Morr daily that it has not and that he might spare you a while yet. But in my dreams I see such terrible things, things I dare not recount here lest by the act of putting them to paper I invoke whatever it is that dwells in the darkness of my dreams and make them come true.

What has happened to you? I have not heard from you now in months. And now word reaches Hangenholz that there is plague in Bögenhafen!

Please come home, I beg of you. Hangenholz is clean, and everyone is doing all they can to make sure that it remains so. Hangenholz is your home. It is where you belong, with me.

This letter comes with all my love and every day I will pray that it reaches you, finding you safe and well, and that you heed my plea. Please respond. Please come home.

 

Your devoted Katarina

 

Frustrated anger and obstinacy welled up within Dieter. He understood that his darling sister had his best intentions at heart, that her anxiety was born out of love for her distracted brother, but did she not realise that he was doing it for her, for all people, but especially for her? Could she not see that there was no way he could abandon his studies now, at such a critical juncture.

Annoyed that such concerns—although well meant—were interrupting his work, Dieter penned a reply immediately, hoping that in doing so he might calm himself by working out some of his frustrations in the writing of it.

 

My dearest sister,

 

Thank you for your letter and your concerns, but do not fret. I am well and, after all, an apprentice of the physicians’ guild. The plague will not touch me. Besides, I am sure that the reality is not as bad as the rumours and half-truths that you have heard. The stories that have reached as far as Hangenholz will have been exaggerated with every mile of the road they have travelled.

I bless you for your love and prayers: It makes all the difference knowing that you are there for me and thinking of me as I labour at my studies here.

But that is why I cannot come home, not yet. I feel that I am close to a breakthrough now, one that will mean people might never fall victim to such cruel diseases as the black pox ever again. So you see that I cannot quit my work here.

And I in turn beg of you, do not come looking for me. You were right to remain in Hangenholz when I left after our late father’s funeral. Remain there now where it is safe, where this accursed plague cannot touch you.

I remain your loving brother,

 

Dieter

 

Dieter sealed the letter and laid it on top of his workbench. He stretched and yawned. He felt so bone-numbingly tired and yet, at the same, his mind was constantly racing, swelling every day with all that he was learning and discovering about his gift. He would sleep now—fitfully, probably, beset by dreams that once he might have termed nightmares—and at dusk, when he left for the warehouse again, he would deliver the letter to the Reisehauschen to be taken to Hangenholz.

No, he stubbornly refused to leave Bögenhafen, not unless it became absolutely necessary. His work was here. And he was actually starting to get somewhere. He would not—could not—abandon his studies now.

 

That night Erich and Dieter, having delivered his letter to the coaching inn, met at the dilapidated warehouse on the Ostendamm again. There was now a distinctive autumnal bite in the air after the sun had set, suggesting that the seasons were on the turn again. In all too little lime the rot of autumn would give way to winter and the dead months of the year. A chilling wind blew in under the wooden-banded doors and whistled between the slates of the roof above the hayloft.

Laid out around them was a scene not unlike that which had greeted them in the basement of Doktor Drakus’ house. Trestle tables were covered with Dieter’s open notebooks. A workbench bore the tools of a barber-surgeon. And in the middle of it all was a heavy oak table, ready to be transformed into an autopsy table when the opportunity arose.

Erich had “acquired” much of the equipment and Dieter had chosen not to ask how. Dieter had simply told him what he needed and Erich had found it for him. Around all of it was erected a sackcloth curtain so that should someone unexpected find their way into the warehouse, they would not immediately see what it was being used for.

They had moved Dieter’s things from Dunst Strasse over the course of several evenings, so as to again try to avoid arousing anyone’s suspicions or attracting unwanted attention by wheeling a cart through the town laden with books and bizarre pieces of equipment.

Behind where Dieter’s temporary laboratory had been set up, towards the back of the musty warehouse, a trapdoor covered the pit into which the results of Dieter’s previous experiments had been dropped: vermin, amphibians and the like that he had managed to give life to again, an unlife that they had somehow clung on to and which had told Dieter he was ready for the next stage, to attempt something more impressive, to transfer the skills he had learnt. The inhabitants of the pit burped and flopped, croaked and chattered, splashed and scratched in the dank, lightless hole.

Dieter was under no illusion that it would be much harder to bring a human being back to life; a human being was so much more complex a creation than a frog or a fish. But it was not an impossible task to achieve. And it was that matter he and Erich were discussing when they were interrupted.

“So where do we get our corpse?” Dieter was asking.

“T-That shouldn’t be too hard with a plague decimating the town populace,” Erich gurgled.

In the last few months a dramatic change had come over Erich as well. When Dieter had first got to know him, months ago now, he had wanted to be more like the confident, rebellious Erich. And now he was, only Erich had become something less than the naive priest’s son from the country, who had first arrived in Bögenhafen wanting to change the world.

“But it can’t be just any body. Not for the first time. I don’t want one that’s too badly disfigured by the disease or that has been left to rot for too long. I certainly don’t want anything from one of those lime-slaked grave pits they’ve dug out beyond Morr’s field.”

Dieter had collated and combined the knowledge he had uncovered from the undoubtedly proscribed books he had taken from Drakus’ library with what he had taught himself and discovered from actually using his powers. And having been surrounded by death from an early age, he knew what he needed.

“W-We could ask the doktor’s b-body snatchers. The sexton and his f-friend,” Erich stammered. An insane glimmer flashed in Erich’s eyes. “I k-know where I can f-find them.”

“Very well. But you know my demands,” Dieter said, “and be subtle about it.”

Both Dieter and Erich jumped as the sackcloth curtain was suddenly yanked back.

“So this is where you’ve got to!”

“Leopold!” Dieter exclaimed.

Leopold Hanser stood before them now, wearing a long leather coat, the posy-packed bird-beaked mask of a plague-doktor under one arm, an appalled expression on his face. Magnanimous as ever, he had obviously been out doing what he could to halt the spread of the terrible disease besetting the town.

“I wondered what had happened to you and then when I saw this wretch”—he pointed at Erich—“skulking his way along the Bergstrasse as I went about my guild-appointed business, I decided to follow him and find out, thinking he might lead me to you. And sure enough he has.”

“I-lt’s not what you think,” Erich said suddenly, leaping between Dieter and Leopold.

“What are you doing? Why are you protecting him?”

Leopold moved and glanced at what he saw laid out before him again.

“Dieter, what in Shallya’s name are you going to do here?” Leopold looked at him with pleading eyes, worry etched in every line of his furrowed brow. “I thought I heard you talking about body snatchers and a corpse and now I see tools laid out as though for an autopsy.”

Dieter said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. Shame, anger, frustration and doubt were all welling up inside him; ambivalent emotions battling for dominance.

The look of worry on Leopold’s face became one of horror as he took a step forward into the operating theatre-cum-laboratory space.

“And why would you have to do this here? Why not at the guild?” he was practically thinking aloud now.

“W-We’re not doing anything here!” Erich was panicking.

“Unless what you’re planning is proscribed by the guild.” Leopold turned to Dieter again. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you wouldn’t do such a thing, Dieter.”

Dieter opened his mouth to speak, but still couldn’t find the words.

“By all the gods! I thought the templars had burnt the fiend at the stake but it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Corpse Taker, Dieter, aren’t you?”

Leopold barged past Dieter and picked up a notebook, open at a page on which Dieter had attempted to record the invocation he had heard Drakus make over the gutted corpse in his cellar, underneath drawings of the hand gestures he had made.

“This is sorcery,” Leopold gasped. “Witchcraft. By my oath, you’re necromancers!”

A cold chill settled in the pit of Dieter’s stomach. He was not that. He would not be called that. They were an anathema to all he stood for. He wanted to save lives, not end them, and that was what necromancers sought to do, to bring an end to all things in the name of their dark lords of undeath.

“We are not necromancers!” Erich screeched.

“I’ll have to alert the witch hunters. It’s for your own good, for the good of Bögenhafen. By Shallya, it could be your work here that has brought this damned plague upon the town!”

Leopold sounded hysterical now.

“You will not go to them! We are not necromancers!” Erich shrieked, bearing down on Leopold arms outstretched, hands become grasping claws. “You will not! Or I’ll… I’ll…”

“What?” Leopold challenged, backing away from the advancing maniac. “Or you’ll what?”

Leopold backed into Dieter. He gasped and turned around, surprised. His panicked eyes met the cold, glassy orbs of Dieter’s.

Hands closed around Leopold’s neck. Dieter’s hands.

He was not a necromancer. He would not have anyone call him that!

His grip tightened. Leopold’s eyes bulged. His fat tongue protruded from his mouth.

He would not have anyone call him that.

Leopold’s face turned from red to vein-bulging purple. His desperate hands pulled on Dieter’s wrists, clawed at Dieter’s steely grip, tore the skin until the blood ran. Desperate feet kicked against his shins.

Erich hung back, giggling.

He was not a necromancer.

A strangled sound rose from somewhere within Leopold that a part of Dieter realised could only be his death rattle, for how could anyone living make such an inhuman, rasping sound?

He was not that.

Beneath the flesh squeezed between his fingers, Dieter felt bones shift and grate.

Then there was silence, and Leopold stopped struggling. His body sagged. In fact there was no movement at all. Dieter let go and Leopold’s body fell to the warehouse floor.

Erich capered from foot to foot, dancing a macabre jig. His cackling swelled to full-blown maniacal laughter.

Dieter just stood there, the colour draining from his cheeks. What had he done? He had killed a man. But more than that, he had murdered the man he had once considered to be his best, possibly his only, true friend.

Erich looked from the cooling corpse of Leopold Hanser to the white-faced Dieter Heydrich and smiled. It was a sick smile that in the lantern-light contorted his face into a grotesque daemonic visage.

“Well, now we have our body,” he chuckled.