A pox on their accursed kind! May their damned souls never find rest until Morrslieb crashes to earth and obliterates our world!
No, necromancers love life with an unbearable passion. They crave it. And why are they so desperate to cling to the deathless semblance of life they strive to maintain? Because the only emotion they feel more strongly than an obsessive desire for life, or power, or mastery of the dark arts, or to satisfy a savage lust for murder and slaughter, is a total, unholy fear of the alternative—an abject, mortal fear of death itself!
Oh, how they dread the deathly touch of Morr’s cold hand. For all necromancers know that when Morr comes for them there will be no peace for those who would defile the final resting places of the dead, who would disturb the eternal sleep of the dead, who would—if their will were done—overturn nature and defy the god of death and dreams. For them, only the agonising torment of an eternity in limbo awaits.
The two men stood outside the dead-eyed house again. This time Dieter had been the one who was determined to return to the decaying town house: it was he who was the driving force behind the venture and it had been Erich who had needed cajoling to accompany him. In the end it had been a combination of alcohol and the guilty knowledge that he was responsible for getting the younger man into this situation in the first place that ensured Erich followed Dieter back to Apothekar Allee as dusk was falling on the evening of the third day of Vorgeheim.
It was whilst they were sitting in the Cutpurse’s Hands, Erich summoning the courage to fulfil the promise he had made to his once impressionable roommate, and with Dieter desperate for them to get on their way, that Erich had produced the knife. It was not so much a knife as a stiletto dagger—ten inches of black steel. He had dulled the blade with soot so that if it were necessary to go into the house armed, the weapon wouldn’t reflect any light and give the two of them away.
Dieter didn’t know how Erich had come by the dagger and he didn’t ask. Once he might have been shocked to see that Erich had a knife. Now it just seemed like a sensible precaution, all things considered.
The last rays of a dying sun stained the windows of surrounding buildings crimson, like blood clouding in water. As dusk’s shadows crawled along the street and thickened in the narrow spaces between the tenements, Dieter and Erich found that the window they had used to break into the house the first time was just as they had left it weeks before. Nothing had been done to secure it, so that Dieter could almost have believed that there was nobody living in the house at all, except that he knew otherwise now. He could feel it in his bones, deep in the very core of his being.
This time it was Dieter who led the way inside, wasting no time as the cerise stain of sunset above the western horizon darkened to purple. It was Erich who hung back anxiously, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds as he lingered in the alleyway, convinced that they might be seen or terrified of what might be waiting for them in the dark. It was the same sense of guilt tinged with a morbid fascination that had been awoken in him too that led him to eventually enter the house after Dieter, who seemed to no longer need his company for reassurance and to bolster his confidence.
Dieter did not delay in the spartan room but went immediately to the door. Peering through the crack Dieter could see no one on the stairs or the dark-panelled landing. Listening, he could hear nothing. He crept out of the room and across the landing, past the door to the esoteric library, only stopping when he reached the top of the staircase that led down to the ground floor of the house.
Dieter could feel his heart thumping loudly in his chest, but he inhaled deeply, through his nose, concentrating on keeping his pulse steady. His hand on the dark-stained banister, he began to descend the staircase. He didn’t quite know why, but some instinct buried deep within him told him that was the way he wanted to go.
Then Erich was there, his worried face peering down at him from the turn of the stair from the floor above.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
Dieter looked back up at Erich, fixing him with a dagger-tipped stare.
“Be quiet,” he replied, his voice low. “What does it look like?”
“Do we really need to be here?” Erich was leaning half over the banister, reluctant to go any further himself.
“I have to find out who Doktor Drakus is.”
Dieter continued to slowly descend the staircase. A board creaked beneath his foot and he froze, but no sound came from anywhere within the strange house. He heard a pattering on the threadbare carpet on the stairs and then Erich was behind him, both of them now standing in the tiled hallway of the ground floor.
“Is that really it?” Erich challenged him. “Is that really why we’re here? Are you sure you are not looking for the answers to deeper, more far-reaching problems?”
“I have to know if Drakus is the Corpse Taker,” Dieter whispered.
Erich’s appalled expression remained.
“But who is Drakus?”
Dieter suddenly sharply shushed Erich.
The other student froze. Neither said anything. Their senses strained to breaking point, their eyes adjusting to the gloom of the passageway, they could see marks on the walls showing where paintings and portraits must once have hung. But what scenes had they depicted? Whose portraits had been displayed here?
And as half his mind considered the missing paintings, Dieter heard muffled voices; distinct enough that he could be certain he was hearing them, yet indistinct enough to not know what was being said. Erich made as if he was about to turn and flee. Dieter grabbed his sleeve.
“We are not done here,” he said, his voice quiet but dripping with menace.
Taking measured, silent steps, Dieter led the way along the passageway towards the back of the house. There was a door to his right, under the stairs. Pressing an ear to the door, he could hear the voices more clearly. There seemed to be a regular rhythm to them now. It sounded like chanting. But what part of a doktor’s work could require him to chant?
Dieter couldn’t have stopped now if he wanted to; his obsessive inquisitiveness wouldn’t let him. It gripped him and wouldn’t let him go, like a dog with a marrowbone. Dieter put his hand to the door and eased it open, teeth gritted against the hinges squeaking. The door swung open. Before him a set of worn stone steps descended into the basement of the house, faintly illuminated by a flickering light source somewhere beneath him. A gust of chill air rose from the cellar, smelling of mould and putrefaction.
It seemed that Erich couldn’t leave him now either. His blade gleamed dully in his hand, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the knife’s hilt. They were both in this until the end, until Morr only knew what resolution to their investigation awaited them.
Dieter continued downwards, the chanting voices becoming clearer with each step. He still did not understand what words were being chanted; they seemed to be in a language he did not understand. But as he heard the words he felt his scalp tighten and the hairs on his head stand on end. The sound made a chill seep into every pore.
Dieter was abruptly aware that his teeth were chattering. He bit down hard, clamping them together. Was it really that cold beneath the house, or was it something else?
The stone steps ended and another passageway began, this one faced with crumbling bricks, slick with algae and water. The ceiling was strung with cobwebs bearing the skeletal husks of spiders. The light flickered at the other end of the passage. By following this path Dieter risked coming face-to-face with whoever was in the basement, probably Doktor Drakus. But he could not help himself now.
Before he really knew it, he was peering around the archway at the other end of the passage into the vault beyond. More steps descended to the floor of the chamber whilst to his right a low arched gallery ran around two sides of the chamber.
It was said that Bögenhafen was built on top of the ruins of previous settlements. Erich himself had once told him over a flagon of ale in the Cutpurse’s Hands that a long-forgotten order of Templar k
nights—he had not known their name—had once had a seminary within the environs of the dock on the River Bögen and had buried their dead in catacombs dug out beneath it. It seemed that the basement connected to part of these rumoured catacombs.
Dieter ducked into the gallery and crouched down, half-hidden by an arch. Erich followed him. From their vantage point Dieter could see clearly into the vault. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more the place reminded him of a crypt.
Erich’s breathing was shallow and noisy. Dieter glared at him and Erich, realising suddenly what he was doing, clamped his mouth shut. The two students then peered down into the chamber below and were appalled by what they saw.
The first thing that drew Dieter’s eye was the naked, greening corpse stretched out on the bloodstained table at the centre of the chamber. The gore-encrusted, grainy wood looked more like a butcher’s block than an autopsy table. It could not possibly be the body that he had seen the grave robbers steal from the cemetery of Morr’s field. That had been two months ago and this body was distinctly fresher. It had to be another, unless it had been subject to some embalming process.
The body was that of a man who had reached his fourth decade before he died, by the looks of things. A dark red incision that ran from below the dead man’s neck to his groin showed that the corpse had been gutted.
Standing at the head of the autopsy table was someone Dieter recognised. It was the manservant who had admitted the body snatchers to the house on that fateful night back on the second of Sigmarzeit. His cadaverous features made him look like he had more in common with the body on the slab than either Dieter or Erich. His hair was thinning and his visible scalp was marked with liver spots. He had the look of an ancient family retainer about him; the kind of servant who had seen at least three generations pass on their way without ever seeming to age himself, already seeming old to begin with.
It was clear that this cadaverous creature was nothing more than the manservant, for the real force at work here was the man Dieter assumed to be Doktor Drakus, or at least the man who went by that name. Whilst the manservant stood at the end of the table, holding a lantern over the body, the surgeon himself was leaning over the cavity in the eviscerated corpse, his back to the two uninvited observers.
Dieter’s heart skipped a beat. What was it he was witnessing here? The gruesome scene laid out beneath him, carried out in such clandestine conditions certainly suggested dark practices were being employed. But then Dieter disengaged his emotions and let wild speculation be superseded by rational thought, and he took in the rest of his surroundings.
Laid out on benches and trestle tables around the basement, within reach of the doktor as he worked, were the tools of his trade. Many of the accoutrements on display were those that Dieter would expect to be used by a doktor or a surgeon: knives, bone-cutting saws, long-handled tweezers, bowls of dirty water with blood-stained rags left soaking in them. The majority of these items were rusting, or crusted with strings of gore. And yet there were as many other instruments, the purpose for which they had been designed Dieter could barely begin to imagine.
Amongst these there was a clay mannequin of a human figure stuck with steel pins, a severed human hand mounted on a wooden stand, burning tallow wicks stuck in the tips of its fingers, and something that looked like the skeleton of an infant poised upon a wire frame to make it look like it was dancing a macabre jig. The addition of a bony tail and horns to the skeleton only served to make it look even more disturbing.
Dieter also noticed a heavy tome lying open on another table and tacked to a wall a curious drawing of a human figure marked with inexplicable lines. It was as though they mapped energy centres in the body. The chart was annotated with vertical columns of an even stranger script made up of crossed pen-brush lines. The image of the man looked like the description he had once heard of the race that lived in mysterious Cathay, far away to the east.
Both the doktor and his manservant were chanting. The eerie sound echoed around the vault, amplifying the sound and making it seem even more eerie, unnatural and inhuman.
The doktor straightened, turning to reach for something on the workbench behind him. For the first time Dieter saw his face. He stifled a gasp and glanced at Erich, but his companion was too terrified to make a sound. It was not who he had half been expecting to see. Erich was simply staring in open-mouthed horror at the man. Dieter’s own morbid fascination compelled him to look again.
Doktor Drakus was tall and lean, not unlike Erich in build. He was wearing a filthy robe, stained almost black in places by dried blood and other fluids, but made notable by the esoteric glyphs picked out in gold thread on the collar and lapels. His tapered fingertips and filed nails made his hands look more like talons. But it was the man’s face that made Dieter’s stomach knot in repulsion and dread.
Drakus’ head was completely bald. Instead of hair his shrivelled scalp was covered with suppurating green buboes, crusted with mouldering black scabs. One oozing canker obscured much of his right eye. An open sore at the corner of his drawn lips made it look like the mouth split open almost to his ear on the left side. Some flesh-eating disease had eaten away much of the soft tissue of his nose so that Dieter could practically see the denuded bone underneath. The man looked like a victim of the most terrible plague.
Almost as an afterthought Dieter put his hand to his mouth. If there was plague here he and Erich should get away as quickly as possible, before they were infected. Perhaps they were already too late? Perhaps they were already carrying the terrible disease simply by having entered the house? But then again, the doktor’s manservant showed no signs of illness.
There was talk of plague in nearby towns and villages. Could the two be connected? And yet even though Dieter knew that he should get away, he could not tear himself away from the disturbing ritual he was witnessing. The doktor was now suturing the split in the corpse’s midriff. He and Erich watched transfixed as the doktor worked.
Dieter kept telling himself that this could still just be a doktor about his Shallya-ordained business. He assured himself that the buboes and lesions on the doktor’s face were merely symptoms of some other non-contagious disease that the unfortunate wretch was suffering from. He kept trying to convince himself that the chanting, the carving up of the body and the unsettling artefacts were all simply part of some new medical procedure. He kept telling himself that there was nothing to really fear here. He failed on all counts.
But he dared not admit to himself what he was witnessing.
He was sure that he had discovered the lair of the Corpse Taker.
The doktor had finished sewing up the gaping hole in the cadaver and now he was making strange hand gestures over the body, the chanting growing in intensity. This curious procedure made Dieter feel sick to the pit of his stomach. Each gesture the doktor made burnt itself into his memory. The incomprehensible words of the chanting reverberated through his mind as if they were somehow familiar to him.
As the mantra went on, the atmosphere in the cellar-laboratory changed perceptibly. Dieter could feel a static charge building within his own body, as if caught in the middle of a nascent thunderstorm. He felt the shadows thicken around him. The air itself had taken on a cloying quality. It seemed greasy and tainted.
Seen out of the corners of his eyes as he watched the doktor and the ritual taking place before him, the impenetrable darkness that would not be beaten back from the corners of the vault seemed to run out like an oil slick across the ceiling and the crumbling walls, gradually enveloping the room, as if the shadows were trying to quench what little, inconstant light there was.
Erich was whimpering now but Dieter heard the sound as if he were a dispassionate observer and did nothing to stop him. His whole being was too intently locked on the scene in front of him. It seemed to Dieter that there were things moving in the spreading shadows. There was the impression of clawing hands reaching towards the doktor and the corpse on the table. And now he thought he co
uld hear another sound in the cellar accompanying the chanting, a susurrating whisper like the rattling of insect wing cases, disembodied voices chattering insistently from beyond the other side of the veil of existence.
A familiar acrid smell assailed his nostrils now: Erich had lost control of his bladder.
Dieter could feel a terrible pressure building behind his eyeballs. As the shadows grew, images and thoughts entered his head unbidden. Grinning death’s-head skulls. His father intoning a prayer as he prepared a body for burial. Sticking a knife into the guts of another and twisting. Lank-haired corpses swinging from crossroad gibbets. Dark tombs ripe with the stink of decay. Scattering shovelfuls of grave-dirt on a struggling, gagged body bound in a filthy shroud. Soil and stones skittering from the mounds of freshly dug graves as the things buried within tried to push free of their damp earth prisons. Rat-eaten bodies jerking with unnatural life. Cutting the hands from a hanged man. Albrecht Heydrich lying cold in his bed, his last breath having left him and along with it the vital spark of life. Removing mouldering, black organs from a butchered carcass. Battlefields strewn with the fallen as the ravens made their feast. Fashioning a creature from the pieces of other dead things. The images were familiar, not frightening.
The pressure continued to build. And now it was as if he were caught in the middle of a great gale that howled across the world, sweeping over ancient battle sites, barrow-tombs, hangman’s scaffolds, cemeteries and massacred villages, saturated with doom and despair, carrying death in its wings. The cold, dark wind whipped at his robes, tugged at his hair, even blew through him.
Dieter was now standing, reaching out to the shadows. And it was as if the shadows were drawn to him, channelling through him, filling his mind with the horrific thoughts and images, borne from all the darkest places of the world.
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