“What are you doing?” Erich hissed.
“You were the one who suggested we take a closer look,” Dieter replied in a whisper.
He opened the book. It smelt musty and damp. Spots of mould patterned the pages of the book. The title page was printed in a heavy, gothic type but the language appeared to be Bretonnian. Written on the flyleaf in a dated, over-fussy script was a name: Drakus. For want of an alternative Dieter took it that Drakus was the name of the individual whose library this was.
“It would appear our mysterious, progressive doktor has a name,” he whispered to his companion, who had crossed back to the door and was peering through the gap at the landing beyond.
“What?”
“It would seem that this house belongs to one Doktor Drakus.”
“What was that?” Erich suddenly hissed, peering through the gap in the half-open door.
Dieter froze, the book open in his hands. What was it Erich had heard? So engrossed was he in the book he held in his hands he had heard nothing. Neither of them moved nor spoke, ears straining for the slightest sound.
Nothing.
Dieter carefully replaced the slim volume into its place on the shelf.
Erich was getting nervous, his former bravado having evaporated entirely now that he was actually inside the house of Doktor Drakus. Strangely, Dieter was beginning to feel more relaxed the longer they stayed. Disturbingly, he almost felt at home in the moonlit library.
“We’ve seen enough. Let’s go,” Erich whispered, looking sidelong at Dieter but not daring to move from his position at the door.
But Dieter did not want to leave. He was fascinated by the library and its collection of seemingly morbid and macabre books.
“I heard something!” Erich hissed. “For Sigmar’s sake, we need to go now!”
Dieter listened. There was another echo of a creak outside the room.
Erich pulled open the library door and edged out onto the landing again, casting one last desperate look of exasperation at the curiously intense, pale young man.
Dieter heard another creak. Someone was coming up the stairs.
His eyes locked on the spine of Leichemann’s Anatomy and the plain, scuffed black leather book on the shelf next to it. His heart raced. His mind whirled.
And then he was tucking the two volumes inside the front of his robe and dashing from the room, hardly daring to let his feet touch the floor in case the floorboards creaked under his weight and gave him away.
Then he was back in the first room in the house they had entered, following Erich out of the broken window. He dropped into the alley behind the house from the roof of the lean-to. And then the two of them were sprinting away as if their very lives were in peril, back through the clinging mists that swathed the streets, back past the Cutpurse’s Hands and back to Frau Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse.
They did not stop to draw breath until they were back in their garret apartment, the door slammed shut behind them and the bolt thrown home.
From that moment on Dieter found himself living in a heightened state of anxiety, expecting the watch, or worse still Krieger’s witch hunters, to turn up on his doorstep at any moment, having somehow got word of the theft from the house in Apothekar Allee, and knowing him to be responsible.
What if, as Erich had first proposed, this Doktor Drakus was nothing more than a physician whose progressive practices had denied him acceptance by the guild? What if he were guilty of nothing more than showing a little ingenuity and perseverance in the face of adversity? And Dieter had stolen from him, something that was completely out of character for him.
Dieter dared not leave the lodging house now, so fearful had his own paranoid imaginings made him. Erich had taken to his bed with a bottle of cheap hock for company on their return from their night’s escapade and didn’t emerge again until more than a day had passed.
But Dieter was not idle during his self-imposed incarceration. Living on a stale loaf, a hard lump of cheese and the occasional bowl of vegetable broth that a concerned Frau Keeler began to bring up to him after two days had passed—concerned that the young medical student was himself pining for something that he no doubt picked up tending to the sick—he began to pour over the two volumes he had taken from the house of Doktor Drakus.
The plain, black leather book was the chronicle of one scholar’s search for the lost knowledge of the Nehekharans and although it made interesting reading, it did not really teach Dieter anything very useful. Leichemann’s Anatomy, on the other hand, fascinated him and he had to admit that he found the concepts and detailed information it contained easy to digest and integrate with his own knowledge. In fact, he seemed to have a strange affinity for the ideas presented within the book. He put that down to the long association he had had with death, growing up in Hangenholz as the son of a priest of the mortuary cult of Morr.
After a week, with no sudden and unexpected visits from the watch, or worse, Dieter braved being out and about in the town again. He even dared return to the guild to continue his work there. When Doktor Hirsch asked where he had been, Dieter told him that he had been suffering from a heavy summer cold. Lying was something else he wasn’t used to doing quite so blatantly.
Hirsch backed away from him abruptly at that admission and said, “You want to be careful that it’s not something more serious.” The elderly physician took a flask from the shelf behind him that was cluttered with all manner of jars and bottles. “Here, drink this tincture. I’ve heard talk that there is plague in Stirland.”
He watched as Dieter downed the contents of the flask, making sure every last drop was consumed. Then, apparently satisfied that Dieter was no longer infectious or a danger to his own health, set him to work grinding popping seeds.
But Dieter no longer spent every hour possible studying in the guild library or with Doktor Hirsch in his laboratory. Instead, when he had some spare time, no matter if it was even only an hour between lectures, Dieter would return to his lodgings and the private study he was making there of Leichemann’s Anatomy.
On the thirtieth day of Sommerzeit, Dieter was making notes on a chapter entitled Of the Dismemberment of Rats when there was a loud knock at his door.
For a moment all of his previous worries that he might have attracted the attentions of the authorities by his breaking and entering escapade resurfaced. He glanced at the dormer window in his room but knew that realistically there was no escape from the attic room that way.
The knock came again: three loud raps.
He couldn’t not answer the door—he was the only one home—as whoever it was without might only break it down anyway, in which case he’d have no way of keeping them out. He would have to talk to whoever was there and put them off that way.
Dieter fumbled the book and his own notebook closed, then pulled a drift of parchment drawings over them. Taking a deep breath he crossed the shared dining room and opened the door a crack.
Leopold Hanser was standing at the top of the stairs. He looked almost angry.
“There you are,” the blond-haired student said, the annoyance apparent in his voice. “What are you doing stuck in here?”
“I-I’m studying,” Dieter replied.
“But you’ve missed another lecture at the guild.”
“Another? I wasn’t aware I had missed any.”
“Doktor Hirsch said you’d been feeling under the weather. He wanted to know if you’d been to Stirland recently.”
“What? No,” Dieter said, bewildered. His thoughts were still back with the volume on his desk. At that moment he wasn’t even quite sure what time of day it was, and he couldn’t be certain which day of the week it was either.
“Look, what’s going on, Dieter?” Leopold asked, his frowning features softening.
“N-nothing. There’s nothing going on.”
“Is it because of your father?”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with him!”
Leopold put a hand on the do
or as if to push it open. “Can we talk about this inside?”
“No.” Dieter’s tone was adamant. He held the door where it was, his body braced against it.
“Why not?”
“I’m studying.”
“By Shallya,” Leopold’s anger was coming to the fore again now. “I don’t know what’s come over you but it’s nothing good, I’ll warrant.”
“Good day to you, Leopold,” Dieter said and slammed the door shut in his friend’s face.
Dieter returned to his seat at his desk. As he pushed the scattered papers clear of the two books again he happened to notice that amongst them were two letters from Hangenholz, the address of his lodgings written on them in his sister’s cursive hand. Both were still unopened. He put the letters to one side with hardly a second thought and turned back to the utterly absorbing Of the Dismemberment of Rats.
The thought crossed Dieter’s mind, as he copied the diagram of a rat’s digestive system into his notebook, that if he were to advance any further in his study of anatomy then he would have to find his own specimens for dissection very soon.
Another thought followed. What would Professor Theodrus think if he knew that his erstwhile, most apt pupil was practising the barbarism of anatomy and that he had become no better than one of his dreaded barber-surgeons?
Who cared? Dieter certainly didn’t anymore.
Dieter was at the work table in his garret room, papers and notebooks spread out all around him. Stretched out on a dissection tablet block in front of him was the eviscerated toad, thick steel pins holding its contorted body in place. He was poking at its pallid innards with the razor-sharp blade of his scalpel.
In the flickering candlelight it almost looked like the toad’s tiny heart was still beating.
Dieter peered closer. The dark muscle of its heart spasmed again. Dieter jerked his head back, startled. It must be some vital energy of the amphibian’s still trapped inside it, somehow released as he dissected it. It certainly couldn’t be alive, not after he had caught and killed it the day before and what with half its internal organs missing.
Dieter stared at the toad’s small black heart, not moving a muscle, concentrating on keeping his breathing calm and measured. The candle continued to crackle and flicker. The heart did not move again.
Cautiously Dieter probed deeper into the toad’s innards with the tip of the scalpel. He felt resistance and then a sudden release of pressure as the blade severed something. A spurt of sticky black fluid squirted out of the toad’s viscera into Dieter’s face, making him blink and draw back again.
This time it was the whole of the toad’s body that moved. It spasmed where it was, its jerking movements tearing its limbs free of the pins, ripping the flesh away to leave ragged wounds. Inexplicably, it also seemed larger to Dieter than it had been before.
Dieter jumped up from his chair, throwing it over on the floor behind him, his own heart pounding in his chest in panicked horror. The warty creature rolled itself over and began to drag itself in an ungainly motion towards him, its bloated yellowed body trailing the mess of its intestines and other bloated purple organs.
The creature’s disgusting tongue suddenly whipped out from between the drawn, and for some reason fang-lined, edges of its cavernous mouth and caught Dieter’s right hand a stinging blow.
Dieter looked down at his hand. A strike from a toad’s tongue shouldn’t hurt that much. Where the toxic purple tongue had stung him the skin was rising in pus-weeping red welts. Dieter rubbed his hand against the rough cloth of his robe, as if that might rub away the painful stinging sensation.
The scalpel was still clenched in his hand. The tongue shot out again but Dieter was ready for it this time. He lashed out with the silvered blade. The worm-like tongue flopped onto the floorboards of his room, oozing black ichor.
He looked back to the table.
Dieter could hear a rustling amongst the piles of papers. He looked to where a notebook was sliding across the worktop. Then the book slipped to the floor as well, revealing the putrefying cut up body of a rat crawling across the table. The rat turned its nose towards Dieter, whiskers twitching, fixing him with one beady, jaundiced eye and one glistening empty eye-socket.
But that was only the first. From beneath the papers on his desk they came, from under the table, from the dark corners of the room, from knotholes in the floorboards and the shadowy rafters of the ceiling above him: slithering things, decomposing bodies, dissected vermin. Dead things.
“Heydrich! What’s the matter?”
Dieter opened his eyes. He was lying in bed, the sheets and his nightshirt wringing wet. Violet pre-dawn light was creeping in through the dormer window. A figure was standing at the door in the partition that divided Dieter’s room from the rest of the garret. The figure’s face was in shadow.
“Erich? D-did I wake you?”
“You were screaming. That must have been one hell of a nightmare you were having.”
“Y-yes, I suppose it was,” Dieter conceded.
“Well, if you’re all right I’m going to try and get some more sleep before the hangover I can feel swelling behind my eyes really kicks in,” Erich said, the shadow retreating from around him as the sky continued to lighten outside.
Half Erich’s face was missing. Where there should have been warm pink flesh there was only the bare bone of his skull. Dieter screamed again. What made the vision all the more horrible and repulsive was the fact that the rest of his roommate’s face was still there, only fat maggots writhed and wriggled in the rotten jelly that filled the eye-socket and a thin black gruel dribbled from the corner of his mouth.
“What is it, Heydrich?” Erich asked, his voice gargling through the disgusting fluid collecting in his throat, apparently oblivious to his own horrific predicament.
Dieter’s stomach turned over and he vomited over his already sodden bed sheets. Then he was up and out of his bed. As he pushed past the startled Erich, the rest of his friend’s face fell away as well. He half-ran and half-fell down the stairs but then he was out in the street, gulping in great lungfuls of cold morning air. Frau Keeler was there too.
“Good morning, Herr Heydrich,” she said through rotten teeth. “I see you’re feeling better then.” The landlady’s face was a mess of necrotic tissue, ripe with burrowing grave-worms. In her hands she was holding bloody clumps of her own hair.
Dieter ran. The night mists from the River Bögen still clung to the town. As he ran in mortal terror through Bögenhafen, Dieter found that the streets were thronged with people. But as he passed and they turned towards him, he saw that every single one of them was a grotesque living corpse, their bodies at varying stages of decay. Hands that were little more than skeletal claws reached for him. As he listened, their pleas and protestations were transformed into incomprehensible moans. Then the mists swallowed him up.
There was an abrupt silence. The walking dead were gone.
The sickly fog parted and Dieter found himself standing at the door of the house in Apothekar Allee; the house of Doktor Drakus.
Dieter put his hand to the door. The moan of creaking hinges broke the silence of the muffling mist and the door yawned open before him.
“Heydrich! What’s the matter?”
Dieter opened his eyes. He was lying in bed, the sheets and his nightshirt soaked with sweat. The orange light of dawn was permeating his room. Erich was standing at the door, his face in shadow.
Dieter sat up sharply, drawing his sheets close to him, up under his chin, as if that might somehow protect him.
“Erich, step out of the shadow,” he hissed madly.
His roommate took a step forward.
“You were screaming. That must have been one hell of a nightmare you were having.”
Erich’s face was gaunt, pale and drawn, but as it should be.
“We have to go back,” Dieter said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
“What? What are you talking about? Go back where?�
��
“You know where,” Dieter fixed Erich with a wild-eyed stare.
“No, not there,” Erich replied, his face falling and a look of horror forming in his own eyes. “Our last visit freaked me out totally. I had to drink myself to sleep that night. I’m not going back there.”
“But we have to. I have to know more. I have to know who Doktor Drakus is,” Dieter was raving now. There was a manic quality to his demeanour. “I think the library there holds the answers I’m looking for, the secret knowledge I’ve been searching for without really realising it. I think that in that library I’ll find the means to put off death, delay it, prevent it; perhaps conquer it altogether!”
Erich stared back at Dieter aghast, not knowing what to say.
But Dieter was determined. “We have to go back to Apothekar Allee. We have to return to the house of Doktor Drakus.”
VORGEHEIM
Post Mortem
It is a commonly held misconception that, because of their dealings with the world of the dead, necromancers hate life. This could not be further from the truth!
Those who pursue the art of necromancy might well spend years plundering the burial places of the dead—neglected graveyards, foetid charnel houses, ancient barrow mounds and dusty desert necropolises—shunning daylight in favour of the cloaking shadow of night and the company of the living for that of mouldering corpses. But the rationale for this behaviour is so that they might cling on to life—what life they have—with the tenacity of a gut-lodged tapeworm.
Some, it is true, come to necromancy by mistake. They desire knowledge for its own sake, or seek to save their own lives or that of a loved one. Perhaps it is also true that many who come to practise the dark art are inclined to madness and dark desires, for what else could bring them to the study of the most base and vile form of the mage’s art? However, there is something about their proscribed pursuit that invariably turns them to the dark path.
And then there are some for whom the study of necromancy is undertaken purely out of an intrinsically evil purpose to bring about the end of others, perhaps even that of the world. Such creatures are the vile leech-sorcerers of vampire-kind, the necrarchs, W’soran take them all!
Necromancer Page 11
