Then she heard a shot, followed immediately by another shot, and she knew another dead child lay somewhere in her house.
She walked down the stairs and into a room and found her oldest boy, Wilhelm. He was handsome, and she was proud in the way that only a mother can be, but she knew the life he had lived, too. She carried him to lie next to her daughters and husband. Her middle son Uli had committed suicide; only her youngest son Carsten remained.
She knew Carsten had done this, but in her mother’s heart she loved him and was proud.
She lit the kerosene to take her family home with her.
***
Carsten took off the robes and put on the clothes Ava bought him more than a year ago. It was the simple garb of a stable boy or a shoeshine. He walked out of a side door. The crowd of policemen never noticed him. They were too busy gawking at the house and the impenetrable blackness inside. Whatever bravery they had, it didn’t extend to a house of swimming shadows and torn open bodies.
He took a roundabout route to the servants’ quarters. There were no policemen here. He looked behind him and saw a fire spreading from his father’s room. He sighed. He hadn’t even thought of the man. He had no illusions about him surviving, much less his sisters.
Wilhelm had killed Karl, and he had killed Wilhelm. A shiver passed though him.
Everything had gone so completely wrong. He succeeded in the Great Work, but the results were incomplete—incomplete and extremely dangerous. The next time, he would know more; the next time, he would succeed completely and without any flaws. But right now, he needed to get Ava and the books and get clear of this disaster. He wasn’t sure if this could be sorted out anymore. He might need to leave Munich and go far away.
Maybe he would go to Africa and find the men described in The Song of the Death God, or maybe he would go to America. He smiled—perhaps he would go to Mississippi and find Angellika to try to discover what her natural ability to speak to the dead could tell someone like himself.
He opened the door of the little servants’ quarters, and for the first time since he’d hidden here to escape from his siblings so many years ago, he cried. Ava had cleaned the servants’ quarters exactly as he would have her do. She had laid out his books and papers. Then she had hanged herself from the rafters. The knowledge of the thing that occupied her body and mind was too great for her to bear.
EPILOGUE
Herr Kleinhoffer strenuously objected, but finally assented to a questioning of Carsten Ernst. He allowed this only under the provision that the accountancy’s attorney, Herr Kunkel, be in attendance to provide counsel. At no point was Herr Ernst to be threatened with arrest or required to take an oath.
Ordinarily, he would have refused out of hand, but Haas threatened the full force of Munich law to seize the estate of the Ernst family. Kleinhoffer knew this was a delaying tactic, but Haas could tie him up in the courts for years. And after the tragedy, he just wanted Carsten given his due, and to end this disrespect.
Everyone knew Wilhelm Ernst killed his family and burned their home to the ground after committing the same in Paris. Yet despite this, a modern day witch hunt was unfolding in Munich blaming the victim: Carsten Ernst.
After the flames consumed the Ernst manse, the papers correctly heralded it as a tragedy. But in the following days, the halfpenny papers started running hysterical interviews with the house staff claiming that the Ernst house was haunted. Then the stories took a sensational turn to orgies and séances, then to devil worship, and finally to Carsten Ernst as the veritable spawn of Satan.
Perhaps the worst actor in the sordid affair was Albert Hausmann, the immediate neighbor of the Ernsts. Here was an owner of coalmines in the Ruhr Valley screaming like an illiterate street peasant. He swore that Carsten had disinterred the body of Anna Ernst for use in diabolism, and only the timely arrival of Haas and his men had prevented it… from there the story became very confused.
Now these halfpenny papers were paying for the names of any member of society who ever attended a gathering at the Ernst home. Soon, the rabble would demand court hearings on the coven of witches that was proper Munich society.
Herr Marten, the counsel for Haas, sat directly across from Carsten, and maintained a steady and penetrating stare. For his part, Haas watched the young man intently, but not overtly.
What am I looking at?
Wilhelm Ernst was a bully, Uli Ernst a sodomite, his sisters Greta and Karin slatternly whores, and his father a shut in. All of them were stupid and crudely destructive drunks.
Carsten was something else.
But the puzzle pieces didn’t fit. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that all of his men saw the same things, Haas would be questioning his sanity far more. And he had been questioning his sanity quite a bit lately.
In his time as police inspector, he’d met murderers, rapists, mad arsonists, and every other kind of deviant. Some were mad. Some were evil. But Haas saw right through them to the heart of weakness that made them what they were. But no flaw made Carsten who he was. It was perfection, pitiless and incisive, self assured in a way that Haas had never seen before. He’d known Carsten Ernst was different since first setting eyes on him, but couldn’t begin to explain what Carsten Ernst was. To his mind, there wasn’t a word for it other than monster.
“Mr. Ernst, before we begin, we wish to express to you our deepest condolences regarding the loss of your family. It is with heartfelt apologies that we insisted on this meeting to help clarify some of the confusion about what happened the night of the fire.”
Klaus Martin spoke the words, and they really did sound convincing.
But Kleinhoffer and Kunkel did not smile, or even nod their heads in appreciation of the words.
Kunkel cleared his throat. “Herr Martin, Herr Haas, our client has been aggrieved enough. It is clear for all to see what this is about. Herr Haas’s vendetta against Wilhelm Ernst was never fulfilled, so the attention has been turned to Carsten Ernst. The howls of the mob are simply the casus belli to harass our client.”
Martin oriented his body away from Kleinhoffer and Kunkel directly to Carsten and offered a kind and harmless smile. “Carsten, we want to put this all behind us so that you can assume your inheritance and move on to university.”
He paused for effect. “Isn’t that what you want?”
Kleinhoffer put his hands flat on the table and smiled. “What my client wants is none of your business, Herr Martin.”
Carsten shook his head and a half smile formed. “I’ll not be going to university, not here at least. I plan on travelling abroad and have no real notion of when I’ll return.”
Haas spoke, “But Kleinhoffer and his associates will still be handling your financial affairs?”
Carsten began, “Yes, of course, why—”
Kleinhoffer sternly interrupted. “This is also none of your business, Haas.”
“Will you be rebuilding your family estate?” asked Haas.
Carsten looked to Kleinhoffer, who nodded in assent. “Yes, Herr Haas. Eventually, but not now. In fact, I really don’t know when this will happen.”
“When Herr Haas’s men found you in the servants’ quarters, you were taking down the body of Ava Bolm, who had hanged herself. Can you tell us why she might have done this?” Martin asked.
Kleinhoffer sighed. “My client is not required to speculate as to the actions of others.”
Martin nodded. “Her mother, a Helga Bolm, has been telling tales in the halfpenny rags. Some of the tales are quite sensational. We are merely hoping to dispel these myths.”
Kunkel interjected, “She is seeking money and attention and to disparage the character of my client. These questions merely perpetuate this malice.”
Haas leveled his gaze at Carsten. “Herr Ernst?”
Kleinhoffer shook his head. “He has nothing to say.”
Haas pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. All eyes were on him now. He shook his head and looked back up. “Ava Bol
m’s body went missing from the morgue yesterday.”
Kunkel scoffed. “As if the inventories of the corpse houses were germane to this inquiry. Do you really think the potter’s fields are well inventoried? Please, if you must harass my client, at least bring questions that he can respond to, not these wild and irresponsible… accusations.”
Haas fixed Kunkel with a hard gaze and saw the other man inwardly flinch. “What exactly am I accusing him of, counselor?”
Kunkel stammered, “I… I’m not certain, but—”
Carsten interrupted them. “I didn’t steal Ava’s body from the morgue.”
All of the gathered men looked at Carsten with a kind of ill-concealed horror.
Kleinhoffer cleared his throat. “I can attest to Carsten’s whereabouts. I have him lodged in the guesthouse at my estate.”
But all of the men gathered were rich men, and all of them knew that if a rich man wanted such a thing done, then it would be done.
Haas pressed on, “It appears your mother’s body was disinterred. The coffin was found in the servants’ quarters… your study, but her body appears to have been consumed in the flames at the main house. Can you tell us why her body was disinterred?”
Kunkel answered, “This was part of a larger renovation process initiated at the behest of Carsten’s father.”
Martin’s eyebrows knitted together in apparent confusion. “There was a large silver vessel found in the study as well. Flat bottomed. It appears that it was made for a human body. Can you tell us what this vessel is? Where did it come from?”
Kunkel again answered, “This was from ancient Egypt. Surely archeological studies aren’t verboten now in Munich?”
Martin looked down at a list of questions. “A great number of sheep were found behind the servants’ quarters with their hearts removed. Can you tell us what this was?”
Kunkel answered yet again, the anger rising in his voice. “The house staff were preparing some kind of festivity! What is the meaning of this line of questioning?”
Kleinhoffer’s voice hitched up an octave. “Do you expect a busy student to keep track of the house staff’s activities? Why do you bring irrelevant questions to these proceedings? To which I must add we can discontinue at any time if I feel that the questioning has taken a turn to the inappropriate, and gentlemen, you have now crossed that line.”
Without a word, Kleinhoffer, Kunkel, and Carsten stood to leave.
With a loud thump, Haas slammed a pile of notebooks down on the table. There were six notebooks in two distinct sets of three. These were translations, one of a book called The Immortal Body and the other called Song of the Death God. He arranged the sets and opened each one to a preselected page. One translated from Romani, one from Latin, both scribed with geometric forms dizzying to the point that the men averted their gazes.
All except Carsten.
All of the men present knew they were written by Carsten Ernst.
Haas’s expression was both grave and slightly unhinged. He appeared a man who hadn’t slept in days, gnawed by having seen something that his mind could not process.
His voice cracked. “Herr Ernst, what in God’s name is this?”
Kleinhoffer cleared his throat. “My client has nothing further to say.”
TO BE CONTINUED
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Holloway is a horror novelist from the Great State of Texas. His first novella, aptly titled Death in Texas, was written in 1998 and correctly presaged the zombie apocalypse hysteria that swept the zeitgeist of the 2000's. It has since been lost to time, but rumors of it's existence abound.
More than a decade later he put pen to paper and began his cosmic horror series, titled The Singularity Cycle. The first novel was titled The Immortal Body and was self published in 2012. Not many people read it, but those that did saw something unseen in cosmic horror…
The Immortal Body, and it's follow up, titled Song of the Death God, have been acquired by British Horror Maven Graeme Reynold's Horrific Tales Publishing along with his standalone novel entitled Lucky's Girl.
WWW.TWITTER.COM/HollowayHorror
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http://www.horrifictales.co.uk
The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God Page 26