This thing that I have done, this theft of your property, this destruction of your work, is doubtless going to be the final insult that my life has inflicted upon yours. If you no longer wish to call me brother, I understand.
I do not claim to know what it is that you are doing or even why you are doing it, but I have seen its evidence. I have seen that you raised the spirit of our grandfather from the grave and attempted to communicate with it. I watched the ritual that you performed, I saw the three circles drawn on the ground, I saw Ava, drugged with laudanum and naked, being used to this end. I have seen that you dug up our grandfather’s grave and removed his skull for purposes of raising his ghost as well. What you may not know is that beyond the sheer depravity required to have done such things, it is causing problems.
In some way that I cannot hope to understand—I can only hope to convey to you the horror of it—your actions have caused Uli to go mad. His paintings are the way they are because of something, according to him, that you will unleash into this world. He is painting what is happening now as a result of your work, and what is going to happen. I know, on some level, that you know this.
I want you to know also that, since I have gotten here, I have had nightmares—only to discover that Uli painted them. He was painting them as I was dreaming them. So, it is not only affecting Uli, it is affecting me as well.
Before I finish this letter, I would like to let you know about the place in my dreams. It is an eternal stone plain, featureless save for one single thing—this house. The sky is filled with pitch black, boiling clouds. The clouds become ever more agitated and turn into a nightmare of tentacles. When I reach the house, it is entirely empty, long abandoned, full of ghosts and dust. I fear this is what is to come if you succeed in whatever it is that you are seeking.
Please forgive me, brother, but I understand if you cannot.
Always,
Your Brother
Wilhelm Ernst
PART THREE
APOCRYPHA
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Carsten Ernst had questions—too many questions and too little time. Everything he tried had worked, but nothing had worked out right. This task, this quest, the Great Work, was bigger than him; it was deeper, wider, and longer than the life of a single man. But it was his and his alone.
A simple fact became crystal clear to him in that moment: he was playing for time. Time was the enemy and the reward. If he succeeded, he could be rewarded with more time, time to finish what he was doing, time to plumb the depth of the universe and unravel its mysteries. If he ran out of time, he would die, surely damned, and without the answers to questions far greater than any man could even ask. Or, if he was caught, found to be an abhorrent freak who played with corpses… he laughed out loud at this in their private train cabin.
Karl didn’t look up from his newspaper at this outburst; he was used to eccentricity on the part of his employers.
The funeral and wake for his brother Uli were more sober affairs than Carsten expected. All of the members of Munich society came and paid their respects and condolences, and nobody mentioned Uli’s embarrassing last year of life. His father handled it as well as could be expected. He sat silently as people said nice things about Uli. Occasionally, he nodded.
Greta and Karin managed to stay somewhat sober and provided no embarrassing outbursts. Wilhelm, on the other hand, cried like an infant throughout the entire wake and funeral. He cried as if he knew what he was crying about. A perplexed look would cross his face when he stumbled on a blank spot in his memory, then he would resume crying again.
Then he was packed aboard a train and sent back to Paris; the Munich police could only look the other way for so long. Poor Wilhelm. He would never truly know what he cried about.
Even though he had more questions than answers, Carsten had succeeded to a degree that would have amazed Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin, had they known the truth about the world around them. In their own ways, these men explored and gained an understanding of the universe, but Carsten knew other parts of this universe… and part of another universe behind an invisible veil separating our world from that world. Carsten discovered that man actually straddled several of the worlds concurrently.
Man and some animals had souls. The body was just a vessel for the soul, and the soul was a vessel for the self. The self held all the knowledge learned in the life of a man, and this shaped the soul. The body needed the soul to live, and when the body died, the soul left, taking its knowledge with it. But there was a link between the soul and the body that could never be completely severed, and with the correct understanding and practice, the soul-self and all of its knowledge could be brought back into the body.
The dead could speak to the living.
Carsten scratched the surface with the book from the Romani hag Piroska. It contained the incantation for summoning a shade of a dead person. He succeeded in doing just that, bringing forth the incorporeal form of his grandfather, but not in compelling any sort of awareness from it. It seemed that the soul was present, but that the self was not. His other success was the physical resurrection of a dead dog. This was the most complex task the book described. It involved the summoning of an entity to provide the power to bring the dead dog back to life.
This ritual went badly, but Carsten needed more. He was beginning to understand that he was on a road others had traveled before. Several persons had owned the book before him. They wrote copious notes in the margins of the pages. There were at least five different sets of handwriting. He used these notes to fill in the blanks of important information in the book. All of the notes pointed to a very important fact—there was another book, a more in-depth book, called La Canzone del Dio di Morte, or Song of the Death God.
Pe Corpul Nemuritor was a title known by very few persons, and La Canzone del Dio di Morte was known by even fewer still.
Piroska had been right about a great many things. Carsten wished it hadn’t been necessary to kill her.
It was a dream of a place like an abstract painting. Perhaps the dream was something like that: the conscious mind projecting the known to describe something that may not have any description.
He dreamed of a world where the souls of the living, dead, and the unborn existed simultaneously. Why his vision of this place offended Piroska was a mystery to him, but he was beginning to have a theory. Angellika said that she knew this place, and she was a natural psychic medium. Carsten’s hypothesis was that he possessed a natural talent for necromancy, and Piroska found that to be dangerous. He formed this idea when he saw Uli’s paintings. The paintings showed him doing mundane tasks or things that no one could have seen. The other recurring theme of Uli’s paintings was of that dream place.
That he had the dream before beginning his necromantic studies told him something else: time was different there.
It also told him that there was no such thing as a world without consequences. What he was doing was wrong in some way. Nature abhorred it. Reality itself seemed to fight back. Every action sent ripples out through the physical universe, the most obvious so far being Uli’s paintings.
Wilhelm told him that Uli wasn’t the only one affected in this way. He said he bought a painting in Paris that was a manifestation of the same sort, even though it was painted by a different artist.
Poor Wilhelm.
One of the other things that Pe Corpul Nemuritor taught him was a lesser form of magic that caused a person to forget a period of days. Carsten experimented with it on Ava, and it worked. In Ava’s case, it made no difference since all her days were the same; she worked at his house and attended to his needs, and that was it. Wilhelm could possibly have more trouble, but he was weak and would drink away the confusion. Carsten held no ill will toward Wilhelm and was moved by his turnaround as a person. It was regrettable, but it had to be done. Carsten’s allegiance was to his work, and nothing could be allowed to stand in the way.
The night Piroska left Carsten with no alternat
ive but to kill her, he had acquired a letter of recommendation with the name and location of a man who had access to the book Carsten needed now.
His name was Alim Cihan, a Turk on the island of Crete.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Carsten stood on the bow of the Triarri, looking out into the Gulf of Venice. Karl sat on a deckchair in his ever-present bowler hat and dinner jacket, his moustache curled at the tips as was the fashion of the day. He read a German newspaper purchased in Venice.
Carsten hadn’t been to Venice before and enjoyed the chance to see its famous sights while waiting for a ship to Crete. He wanted to take the first available boat, but Karl objected. He said such boats were inappropriate for someone of Carsten’s social standing and they had to engage in subterfuge as it was. Someone would figure out he was a wealthy Bavarian and the questions would begin. A wealthy young Bavarian buying an astoundingly expensive book of early European occult understanding was already suspicious. So they travelled as exactly who they were, young master Ernst and his chaperone.
They departed from Munich to Venice, taking the train across the Alps. It was a breathtaking ride, but darkness pressed in as the wind whistled around the train chugging across the mountains. So far, Carsten had managed to survive to accomplish deeds that would have frightened the great thinkers from Aristotle to Darwin, but he knew the stakes would only grow exponentially. His enemy was the fundament of the universe; it resisted the efforts of men such as him. If it could go wrong, it would go wrong, and as he climbed higher up the mountain, the furies would seek to dislodge him and kill him.
Pe Corpul Nemuritor, or The Immortal Body, taught the essence of bringing forth the dead, but little on communicating with them, much less controlling them. La Canzone del Dio di Morte, or Song of the Death God was a different creature altogether. When Carsten first started translating The Immortal Body, he discovered the margins were filled with the notes of at least five persons who had translated the book during its hundreds of years of existence. These notes referred to Song of the Death God extensively.
The Immortal Body was a dictation by a Romani witch named Piroska, allegedly an ancestor of the Piroska who sold Carsten the book. Song of the Death God was the account of Gaius, a Roman student of necromancy. Gaius had brought an African shaman from the source of the Nile to Carthage, and had the man’s teachings transcribed.
The purpose of the rituals described in Song of the Death God, were to raise an intact corpse back into animation. This was a daunting notion and a far more difficult task. When Carsten had raised a dead dog, he had learned how dangerous this could be. The experience nearly proved fatal for him and Ava. When he went to Prague and saw the ritual performed by Piroska, they decapitated the dog before bringing it back, and for good reason. All it could do was thrash madly and look at Carsten with its terrified eyes. When Carsten sought to reproduce this, he killed a dog by suffocating it with ether. When he raised it back into animation, its head was able to communicate with its legs.
Carsten managed a brief smile and laugh. His task would be to attempt to reanimate the corpse of a human. The consequences of failure could be exponentially worse.
***
Carsten and Karl spent the next days aboard the elegant steamship Triarii, taking in the beauty of the Mediterranean, playing cards and drinking fine wine. The Italian passengers seemed thrilled that Crete was an island with practically no law. When they enthused about the anarchic island, Carsten and Karl would exchange amused glances. They didn’t need to speak out loud what was obvious: the German states, the German culture, was the future. These Italians’ and Greeks’ time had come and gone.
Crete was perhaps the best example of the contrast between the modern world and those lands that still hadn’t fully shrugged off the Dark Ages. Karl told him that one could buy a wife if he desired, that Muslims and Christians smoked hashish and ate at the same table together, but only when they weren’t killing each other in great bleeding batches. All in all, the island sounded like the opposite of Munich, perhaps even as degenerate as the Romani quarter of Prague.
From a distance, Crete looked just as Carsten hoped it would, as the land of Zeus and Aphrodite, the cradle of civilization in Europe. The sense of antiquity was palpable. This was the home of the first written language known to have existed in Europe, possibly in the entire world. They disembarked in large rowboats to long graceful piers, where they were loaded into comfortable horse-drawn carts and taken to their hotel. Carsten now understood that Central Europe was the exception rather than the rule. Where he thought before that the antique had intruded upon the modern, he now saw that it was the modern intruding upon the antique. The Triarii sat on the horizon like a visitor from the future, while all about it people lived as they had for millennia. It didn’t matter to them that this island gave birth to western civilization and written language in Europe; they couldn’t read anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Carsten lay in his hotel room in Heraklion, the capital city of Crete. He was in and out of troubled dreams all night. His dreams didn’t frighten him, but he wondered if they meant something. All people have an instinctive need to assign meaning to their dreams, but among the millions on earth, Carsten actually had a right to believe his dreams meant something.
He got up and walked over to the open doors of the balcony. The drapes were blowing dreamily in the sultry Mediterranean breeze. As he looked out, he saw how dark the world could be. Apart from this hotel and a cluster of other buildings, there was no electricity, no light at the push of a button or flick of a switch. Candles and lanterns and torches lit Heraklion through the night. Out past the city, the beautiful mountains of Crete were dotted with campfires.
Maybe it was the antiquity of the place, maybe his dreams, but it felt as if something were here, calling to him. Something was different about this place. He wanted to go out into the hills, into the mountains, and sink his fingers into the rocky soil, to crawl into caves, to breathe the air there.
But why? Had his first forays into necromancy altered his mind? Was he going crazy? The thought was disturbing, but passed. Only the weak worry about going mad, and the mad will be mad regardless of how they feel about it.
In his dreams, he saw himself both here in Crete and in that place. The land was Crete, but the sky was that of the other. In the first dream, he walked for an eternity through the maze of the streets of Heraklion. It could have been now or it could have been a thousand years in the past. He was alone. It was absolutely still. But he could hear something—not with his ears, but with his mind—the sound of a million voices whispering prayers in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and what sounded like Arabic.
He tried to call out, “Who’s there?” but nothing came from his lips. There was no noise at all. He tried to pick up a stone to throw it against a wall to see if that would make a sound, but his hand passed though the stone as if it were not there.
He was a ghost, empty Heraklion his eternity.
He awoke with a start, recalling enough of the dream to feel perplexed. He drifted off again. This time, he was in a Mosque, but of a sort that most Muslims would strongly disapprove. There were hundreds of Muslims in Turkish garb, kneeling and praying in unison. But instead of all facing towards Mecca, they were arrayed in rings around a central point, facing inwards. Every time they knelt in unison, there was the sound as if from a great ship’s horn, a giant sound that seemed to come out of the sky, commanding them to kneel and to pray. They were arrayed around a wavering, hazy pillar of air making a buzzing, crackling sound. It rose from a well in the floor in the very center of their confluence.
The thing was twenty feet tall at least. It was a fearful thing, utterly alien and unnatural, emanating malevolence and madness. Yet these men, these hundreds and thousands, knelt before it in mindless worship.
Their prayers, their abasement before it, brought it into being.
There was another blast of the titanic sound from the skies, and the worshippers s
tood as one and raised their faces to the ceiling. A light from the center of the thing in their midst cast down upon them. It was an otherworldly, heavenly golden glow, and the expressions of the men showed a religious ecstasy.
Then, slowly, they began to rotate as a circle around the well and the thing rising from it. After three turns around the well, they threw themselves in. They were all in a trance, and none heard the shrieks of terror as their brethren stepped over the edge and fell into the black depths. When they stepped over, the spell was broken, and they understood that they’d cast themselves into the belly of agony incarnate.
And now, he looked out from the balcony over the city and let the wind wash over him. The sensation rising in him came to the surface. It was the inescapable knowledge that this island was no stranger to the knowledge he sought: at one point it was practiced here openly. This was a city of men when civilization was unknown in the dark forests of Germany, but it was earlier than even that when these people heard the dead speak.
This gulf of time nearly bowled Carsten over underneath its weight.
He had killed, and would kill again in the quest, but that didn’t frighten him. What did frighten him was knowing others had tried to do what he was doing, and failed. Perhaps none had ever succeeded.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Carsten awakened early, with the sounds and smells of Heraklion billowing through the open doors of the balcony. He squinted his eyes. Even the light here was different than in Munich—brighter, more vibrant.
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