He was as much an outcast from the town and the guild, as he had been as a child, the son of a priest of Morr, living in Hangenholz. Dieter was giving up on the dream that had become a nightmare. After all, he had nothing to lose anymore.
But there was also hope in his heart, in spite of all this. He had decided upon the course he wanted his life to take. He had been wrong to ever leave Hangenholz, and there was a place for him there now, a role to fulfil, helping to rebuild the plague-ravaged community. Dieter was also beginning to give credence to the old adage that some good really could come out of any evil. He would put all the skills and knowledge he had acquired at the guild of physicians to good use back in Hangenholz.
Frau Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse was empty when he arrived. Having let himself into the attic room, Dieter half-expected to meet a crazed, pox-eaten, Erich and have to explain to him why he was leaving Bögenhafen. But no matter what his fellow apprentice of the dark arts said or did, Dieter was not going to be dissuaded from his chosen course of action.
But Erich wasn’t there.
Dieter glanced into the chaos and clutter that was Erich’s dark-shuttered room. Having seen that the youth wasn’t there, he did not want to linger any longer. Seeing the dissected bats, toads and rats pinned out on every conceivable surface—from the walls to the very head of Erich’s bed—brought back too many unpleasant memories; memories that he was trying his very best to expunge from his mind altogether.
It also smelt like something had died in the room. Dieter just wondered how many somethings it had actually been.
It was hard to determine how long it had been since anyone had been in the garret apartment. It could have been anything from several weeks to only that very morning; the place was in such a state of disarray.
Dieter found his own room just as he had left it on the day he had received Josef Wohlreich’s summons to Hangenholz. Anything that he might once have kept here that he now wished to forget had thankfully been taken to the warehouse and destroyed in the fire there. There was very little for him to do before he would be ready to leave Bögenhafen once and for all.
But before he went anywhere there was one last, vital obligation Dieter had to fulfil; one that he had sworn on his sister’s soul that he would carry out in her memory, in penance for all that he had done that he was now so ashamed of.
Sitting down at his desk, he took a clean piece of parchment from his scrip, along with his writing tools. Dipping his quill into the ink-well Dieter began to compose a letter, taking care to make sure that he got all of the details right, in the correct chronological order, but taking pains not to reveal his own identity as the writer.
His report finished, the paper folded and sealed, Dieter went out into the street and hailed an urchin who was tossing stones into the gutter. For a farthing the boy agreed to deliver the letter, running off down the street laughing excitedly.
Going back to his room, Dieter hauled his trunk from under his unmade bed. Those items which hadn’t been lost to the fire—a few clothes and little else—he quickly packed into the small chest that he had brought to Bögenhafen with him when he had first arrived at the beginning of the year, in Nachexen. He slung his battered scrip over his shoulder, quill, paper and ink safely stowed inside again, and prepared to heft the trunk back down the stairs and across town to the Reisehauschen.
He looked up and an icy chill entered his heart.
Standing in the doorway was Erich Karlsen. Having been in the company of normal people again for the last fortnight, Dieter realised just how unhealthy, unkempt and demented Erich had become. His robe alone looked like it had not been changed in weeks. Madness glinted in his eyes but the expression on his face was one of utter panic.
“Where have you been?” Erich asked sharply.
“I had to go home,” Dieter replied, not telling Erich any more, not wishing to vocalise the horrid truth behind his homecoming as that wound was still raw and it still hurt too open it again.
“B-But this is your home,” Erich said manically.
“Not anymore.”
Erich’s glittering eyes fell on the trunk on Dieter’s bed. “Where are you going? We have work to finish here.”
“Not anymore we don’t.”
“Oh, b-but we do,” Erich insisted, the look of desperation still written boldly across his features.
“What do you mean?” Dieter asked guardedly.
“I-It’s easier if I sh-show you.” The youth was now hopping from foot to foot in nervous anticipation. “Come quickly. I-It’s urgent!”
Dieter took off his scrip and laid it on the bed next to his trunk.
“Very well,” he agreed, “but it cannot take too long. I do not have much time to spare,” he said, thinking of the letter he had just sent.
He owed it to his old roommate to go with him, Dieter decided. It pained him to see Erich like this, and his roommate wouldn’t have been like this if it hadn’t been for his own obsessive quest to discover the identity of the mysterious Doktor Drakus. Dieter would go with him now, quickly, and then when the matter was resolved, whatever it might be, he would collect his luggage and set off on the return journey to Hangenholz.
Erich led Dieter out of Dunst Strasse, along the Eisen Bahn for a hundred yards and then down into the maze of back streets in the vicinity of the carpenters’ guild and Langen Strasse. As the pair hurried on their way they talked.
“Erich, where are we going?”
“I c-can’t tell you.”
“Why not? Are we heading for the docks?”
Erich paused before answering. “Y-Yes. Th-that’s right.”
“But I thought you said you couldn’t tell me.”
Logic seemed to have escaped Erich along with his senses.
“I-I c-can’t! B-Because you’ll be h-horrified.”
Dieter’s blood ran cold. What could it be that Erich was so desperate to show him and yet at the same time could not even bring himself to talk about?
Suddenly all of Dieter’s suppressed doubts and worries returned in a pulse racing moment of panic. Erich was pulling away, getting several steps ahead of him, turning into a narrow alleyway between looming neglected tenements, their doors marked with peeling red crosses.
“Erich!” he said, running after his companion and grabbing hold of the apprentice by the shoulders, spinning him round to face him. “Is it to do with Leopold?”
The look of apprehension melted from Erich’s face to be replaced by an even more unnerving smile.
“You could say that.”
Dieter let go of Erich’s shoulders and let his arms drop, taking a few slow steps away from the grinning maniac. As he did so he began to take in more of his surroundings. There was something uncomfortably familiar about the street in which they were now standing. Twisting his head round he took in the street sign secured to the disintegrating facade of a crumbling building and his suspicions were confirmed. He hadn’t been back to this street in over three months. Erich had led him back to Apothekar Allee.
Dieter took another step backwards as a black shape detached itself from a darkened doorway beside Erich. An appalled whimper escaped from Dieter’s open mouth. He thought that he was going to be sick.
Leopold Hanser’s corpse dragged itself a step closer, a low moan escaping its own blistered lips. The corpse was virtually unrecognisable but how could it be that of anyone else? Its flesh was a crisped black and red mess from the burns it had suffered as the warehouse fire consumed it. Its lank blond hair had burnt away completely. But the cadaver’s slack-jawed expression hadn’t changed, and Leopold’s corpse still wasn’t Dieter’s to control.
Dieter turned on his heel to run but then froze again. Advancing towards him with slow yet certain steps were two thugs he had hoped never to see again. The body snatchers—the town’s sexton and his collaborator—were blocking the end of the alleyway. To make matters worse, their shambling gait was that of Leopold’s walking corpse, and skin of the
ir hands and faces had developed a sickly grey-green pallor.
In panic Dieter looked around him past his assailants to see if there was anyone around who could help him.
It was late afternoon; surely there was someone still about their daily business who could see what was going on!
But there was no one else.
Dieter’s eyes focused on the crosses daubed on the doors of the deserted street again and realised that the black pox had not left anyone alive here to witness the end of his life.
He turned back to face Erich and the undead Leopold again, reasoning that he had a greater chance of getting past them than the hulking body snatchers. But then it was too late and they were on him, all of them, rough hands grabbing at his body, their reeking charnel-stink making him gag.
Dieter screwed up his eyes, lest he have to look into the soulless pits of the corpses’ eye-sockets. He retaliated with his own hands, recoiling in revulsion as his fingers sank into clay-like flesh.
The shambling undead continued to press in on him, their fists abusing his body as much as their very appearance and death-reek assaulted his overwrought sensibilities, his mind strained to breaking point.
Dieter felt a sharp crack as something blunt connected with the back of his skull and he mercifully blacked out, his consciousness swallowed in black oblivion.
Awareness returned in a blaze of cranial agony. His body ached from the pummelling he had received at the clubbed fists of the zombies.
Dieter opened bleary eyes, expecting to see the vaulted ceiling of Doktor Drakus’ laboratory vault. Instead he found himself looking at a lower curved ceiling of damp dark stone, adorned with strings of mould and patterned with a faintly luminescent fungus. He could see the glistening nubs of tiny limestone stalactites coming into gloomy focus above him.
He tried to move and immediately felt a sharp pain across his shoulder blades and resistance against his legs. Rope rubbed against his wrists and when he tried to move his feet again he realised that his ankles had also been bound. There was a cold ridge of stone pressing against his spine. He could move his head, although he almost dared not, afraid of what he might see. However his inherent curiosity and sheer desperation won out in the end.
Dieter looked to his left. He was in an underground chamber of some kind, the murk illuminated by the luminescent growth speckling the walls and ceiling, and it didn’t take him long to work out what kind. A series of horizontal alcoves, each the length of a man and only a couple of feet in height, were recessed into the wall on the far side of the chamber. In each of these shadowy niches lay the skeletal remains of a human being. The rotten remnants of shrouds still clung to the bones of some of these revenants. All had been laid out with their bony hands clasped across the hollow cages of their ribs. Dusty spider webs festooned the calcified remains.
He was in a subterranean crypt. He guessed that it was somewhere within the bounds of the town cemetery. It could even have been underneath the Chapel of Morr itself. The small size of such mortuary temples often belied a more extensive complex of morgues, embalming rooms and burial chambers buried under the ground.
Dieter glanced to his right and saw the rectangular shape of a stone sarcophagus between him and the opposite wall. He guessed that he was tied to one like it. Craning his head back he could see the top of an inverted archway and the suggestion of statues either side of it in the darkness. He also thought he could see another sarcophagus tomb behind him.
There was a shuffling sound like the hem of a robe dragging over flagstones. Dieter looked back past his feet, pushing his chin down on his chest so that he could see what lay beyond the end of the tomb to which he had been lashed.
Straining his eyes to peer through the gloom he began to see shapes resolving there too; human figures. One of these solid shadows was moving towards him. Dieter’s heart thumped wildly in his chest. Was this mausoleum destined to become his final resting place too?
There was a sudden flare of light and a lantern glowed into life.
“So, you are awake,” a voice slithered.
The lantern swayed closer and Dieter looked into a face ruined by disease. The shrivelled skin was a mess of boils and weeping pustules, crusted with foul discharge. A tumourous growth covered most of the right eye. Dieter saw again the gaping sore at the side of the Corpse Taker’s mouth, the nose stripped of flesh by the pox.
Dieter gagged at the necromancer’s horrific appearance as much as at the accompanying stench of plague-rot that hung about him like his glyph-adorned robe. Dieter’s head felt heavy and groggy as if he had overindulged at the Cutpurse’s Hands the night before.
“Doktor Drakus!” he gasped, the plague-scarred creature peering over him with cataract-clouded eyes.
“That name will suffice I suppose,” the necromancer said, his voice a sibilant whisper. “It is certainly less conspicuous than that of Corpse Taker.”
Dieter saw now that it was not Drakus who was holding the lantern so as to inspect his prisoner’s body. The necromancer’s manservant stood silently at his shoulder, his cadaverous face white as polished marble in the flickering glow of the light he held.
“W-What do you want with me?” Dieter stammered, overwhelmed by the horror of the situation he now found himself in. He had to know why he had been brought to this place; he had to know why he was going to die.
“Can’t you guess?” the necromancer sneered and Dieter saw the gaping sore at the corner of his mouth split the evil smile even further across his cheek to a pox-eaten ear. “Your body is ripe for the taking. I want everything: your mind, body and soul.”
Dieter swallowed hard and tasted bitter bile in the back of his mouth. Was this how it had been for Anselm Fleischer? Was this what had driven the poor bastard mad?
“Why now? Why this night?” Dieter pressed.
“Because it is auspicious.”
The Corpse Taker pointed with a scabbed claw at what Dieter now saw was a body hanging from the back wall of the crypt.
The body of Father Hulbert, Bögenhafen’s own minister of Morr, had been suspended from manacles secured to iron fastenings hammered into the ceiling. Hulbert’s feet swung a few inches off the ground, just above the pool of the dead priest’s intestines unravelled on the floor beneath him.
Dieter felt his gorge rise again.
“C-can I see?” came a familiar voice from the corner of the crypt. Dieter was reminded of the last time he had heard that voice, when Erich Karlsen had betrayed him to the Corpse Taker.
The gangly student moved into the pool of queasy light, his madly staring eyes reflecting back the flickering lantern in the dark mirror of his pupils.
Dieter felt cold hatred knot his stomach and subconsciously tensed his muscles, straining against his bonds once again.
“I think we are ready to begin,” Drakus told his two accomplices.
“Begin what?” Dieter demanded.
Drakus fixed Dieter with his cataract stare, which was none the less piercing in spite of the clouded lenses. “This will hurt you more than it will hurt me,” the necromancer hissed.
Panic gripped the physician’s apprentice. Dieter pulled on the ropes again, feeling them chafe the skin at his wrists. He had to free himself. He could feel the cords snagging on the rough edges of the sarcophagus. Perhaps he could break them that way. He pulled again. And again. And again.
Drakus and his manservant began to chant, just as they had done beneath the house in Apothekar Allee. Only now they were joined by another in the enactment of their iniquitous rite: Erich Karlsen.
The eerie sound echoed from the algae-stained walls, filling the mausoleum with spine-chilling, supernatural harmonics. It sounded as if ghostly voices were joining in the summoning of the winds of death to this place. And as always there were the half-heard noises of rustling wing cases and scuttling legs.
The words had a familiar flavour for Dieter now. In response to their resonances, images erupted unbidden from the heart of darkness he h
ad buried deep within himself.
He saw all manner of grotesque and grisly manifestations of death. Old Gelda, her tongue cut out, blood dribbling from her mouth, trying to scream as the heavily hooded Kreuzfahrer pushed the burning brand into the headman’s hand. Festering necrotic tissue. Erich’s cat coming to spitting life in the eerie light of the twin moons. Animal skulls picked clean by carrion feeders and bleached yellow by the wind and sun. The last precious bubbles of oxygen escaping from the lungs of a drowning man. Dieter’s own hands closing around Leopold Hanser’s scrawny neck.
He heard the hollow boom of crypt doors slamming shut. The creaking of wind-blown gallows. The tap of bare bone against a headstone. A mother wailing for her stillborn child. Pigs screaming as they met the slaughterman. The death-knell proclaiming Katarina’s death.
He could smell blood, mould, the stink of burning fat. Tasted rancid maggoty meat, the earthy flavour of grave-dirt, the tang of blood, the bitter aftertaste of vomit. Felt the stygian blackness reach for him, enclose him, smother him.
Dieter looked past the images appearing within his mind’s eye, as if in their own violent death-throes, at the necromancer standing over him. A shimmering black light surrounded Drakus like an aura of coruscating darkness. It suffused the air above the sarcophagus and coiled itself into disturbing silhouettes as the sorcerer’s pockmarked hands danced over Dieter’s body.
The air was filled with an insistent buzzing, like the scraping of a saw on the inside of his skull. Liquid darkness ran like blood across the walls.
The dark magic coalescing within the chamber was a tangible presence to Dieter. He could feel its stinging icy tentacles coiling around his arms, his legs, his torso, and even forcing their way inside him. An agonising, brain-splitting pressure was building behind his eyes. It was the same terrible pressure he had felt when he had witnessed Drakus’ evil awakening rite, as thunderous and oppressive as a building storm front. Lightning crackled across the surface of Dieter’s brain.
Drakus reached down and steepled the bony fingers of his right hand onto his prisoner’s sweat-slick forehead. Dieter let out a cry of surprise and pain. There was someone else inside his mind. At first the alien consciousness probed and poked at the surface of his mind, as a physician might investigate an open wound. But an instant later the necromancer pushed his scalpel-sharp will inside Dieter’s skull and took possession of his mind.
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