Necromancer

by Jonathan Green - (ebook by Undead)

  Erich’s voice was thick with the same syrupy tone he had used the night he had persuaded Dieter to lead him to the deathly house in Apothekar Allee.

  “You must practise your talents, develop them. I could help you. I could help you prepare your experiments; bring you what you needed, prepare your compounds. Whatever you need.”

  Dieter riled at the thought that he should take what he had accomplished this night any further. But there was something about Erich’s suggestion that excited him. There was something deep inside him, close to the very core of his being, that revelled in the suggestion.

  For a moment Dieter sensed a tingling aftershock of the power he had felt as he weaved his hands in the air above the dead cat, like a puppet master working a marionette, only without the aid of strings.

  He did not hear the heresy against Morr present in Erich’s words, that he could conquer death. He only heard that he would have the power to reverse the fatal effects of death.

  “You have a duty to all those whose lives you will save to do this. You have been given great power—the gods Know why—and with such power comes an even greater responsibility.”

  Ambivalent emotions vied for dominance within Dieter. His overwrought mind raced with it all. One moment he wanted to shout and laugh in exhilaration, the next he was ready to burst into tears. But the one overwhelming feeling he had, which steadily quelled all the other emotions, was the heady feeling of intoxication. He felt drunk with power.

  Then another, inevitable thought pushed its way to the surface of the fathomless black pool that was his mind.

  “I wonder. I wonder,” he said breathlessly, almost thinking aloud.

  Erich looked at him transfixed, waiting on his every word. The darkness writhed and spun around him. Shadows cast by the glowing moons became clawing hands pulling themselves across the wall towards the manic apprentice standing in the doorway.

  “If I can bring a cat back to life, I wonder if I could do the same with something larger. What if…” a crazed giggle suddenly escaped his lips. “What if I could do what Drakus was obviously attempting to do?” He was shaking. “What if I could bring a human being back from the dead?”

  Silence hung in the cloying air between them like a leaden pendulum. Dieter fancied he could detect the distant smell of desert-dry spices and carrion.

  “But where would I begin? Where could I get a body from?”

  Erich looked at him darkly and the chill in the room intensified still further.

  “I’m sure something could be arranged,” he said.

  * * *

  It was Erich who found the warehouse and Albrecht Heydrich’s money that paid the rent. The building stood towards the western end of the Ostendamm, a dilapidated dockside barn that smelt of mouldy hops and rancid beer. It had not been used for some time.

  The warehouse had an overweight landlord who smell little better. Dieter had learned months ago that Erich was the kind of person who had mutual acquaintances who knew such people. The man was too drunk most of the time to even know what day it was so he cared even less who took on the lease for the property. He certainly wasn’t going to bother checking the credentials of those he was renting it to, or follow up on what they were doing there.

  For Dieter had become a man obsessed. He realised that he had been a blinkered fool before, blind to the possibilities that this radical branch of natural philosophy presented. Motivated by the adrenaline surge of power he had felt and encouraged by the equally obsessive Erich, he had become driven to learn all he could about his newly awakened powers and hone them.

  But before he could do that he realised that preparation was key. He was also not so caught up in his studies to forget that not everyone would look upon what he was trying to do so favourably. In fact it would be positively dangerous to continue his experiments in Frau Keeler’s lodging house, especially if he were to attempt to resurrect a human being from the dead if he and Erich could acquire a corpse. For what better way could there be to learn how to cure the living of their ills than by studying the dead to ascertain precisely what it was that had killed them? And then to take it one step further, having determined the actual cause of death, to make alterations to the corpse and then resurrect it to see what difference the procedure had made.

  Dieter was as desperate now to find a way to stop people being claimed by death and disease as when he had first been able to give a name to the desire that had grown within him after his mother had been so cruelly taken from him at such a young age. And if he could he would even turn back the clock to prevent his father from dying, He might not have been the more caring and compassionate father in the world but he had been his flesh and Mood nonetheless. And if not for himself he would have done it for his dear sister Katarina.

  He hadn’t heard from her for several weeks now, although it might have simply been that he had not noticed if she had written to him or not, so caught up had he been in the events following the epiphany he had received under the house in Apothekar Allee.

  Once he would have agonised about what his sister would have thought of what he was doing, of what he had become. When he had first arrived in Bögenhafen six months before, not a day had gone by without him thinking of his sister and offering up a prayer to Morr to watch over her and not take her into his realm for many a year yet. Now barely a day went by when he did think of her. And he no longer prayed to Morr either. His mind was on other things.

  So it was that Dieter, assisted by his fellow apprentice, began to carry out his own experiments into the power that had awoken within him, to test his newly discovered abilities. Their days became nights, their nights days, Dieter attempting to copy what he could remember the sinister Doktor Drakus doing.

  He began small. He had to try for consistency and control. Judging by his first few attempts to raise frogs and rats he still had a long way to go. He was not ready to attempt the resurrection of a human being yet.

  The things he did reanimate lived only briefly, or their movements were unnaturally sluggish, or they were unnaturally aggressive and violent. Other times he could not raise the vermin Erich had collected at all but merely caused their bodies to decay more rapidly as the conjured death energies took their toll.

  And he was yet to recapture the ease with which he had summoned his power to revive the cat. Perhaps it had been something about Geheimnisnacht itself that had made the task seem so simple at the time.

  His dreams became darker. But surely, he told himself, that was merely an adjustment to his newfound gift.

  He filled notebook after notebook with what he discovered by lamplight each night. It had been weeks since either Dieter or Erich had attended a lecture at the guild. They slept at Frau Keeler’s lodging house during the day venturing out as dusk was casting its smoky shadows over the town to make their surreptitious way to the warehouse on Ostendamm. And they took a different route each night, sometimes doubling back on themselves, so as not to be followed and escape detection. There they would work without stopping until the first glimmers of pre-dawn light began to bleach the velvet darkness from the sky.

  And so they continued as Nachgeheim matured. But the world beyond the insular world of darkness that the two of them had created continued to turn and by the twelfth of the month, the plague was already well established in Bögenhafen.

  Word was that it arose in the area to the north of the river known as the Pit and took hold as readily in the Fort Blackfire guard barracks as in the slums of the Westendamm.

  The Pit had always been a festering hotbed of infection. Sanitation in this part of the town was worse than in any other district and disease there was rife. It was a breeding ground for all manner of maladies and agues. It was an area of the town that members of the physicians’ guild avoided visiting if at all possible—they certainly didn’t have any paying clients living on that side of the river—and that fact alone might well have allowed the spread of the plague to go unchecked for several weeks at least.


  By the time the authorities had put measures in place to prevent the spread of the plague within the town—boarding up the homes of those already infected and marking them with a red cross so that others would know to steer well clear, and restricting traffic across the river—it was already too little too late.

  The physicians’ guild and the Sisterhood of Shallya were drafted in to help with the rapidly worsening crisis. Those who could afford to quit the town in panic. The watch stepped up its patrols in the richer parts of the town, protecting their own best interests by making sure that the homes and businesses of the town’s wealthy patrons did not fall prey to looters, but, as a consequence, leaving the poorer parts of the town to their own devices.

  There were more burnings in the Göttenplatz as those accused by the witch hunters of spreading the sickness intentionally, to draw down the favour of the Dark Gods upon them, were put to death.

  But to Dieter and Erich it was as if nothing catastrophic had happened. In fact, if anything, it made it easier for them to go about their business undisturbed and, even more importantly, unobserved. Due to the crippling effects of the plague on the Blackfire barracks, the watch were soon hard pushed to maintain their observance of the areas around the Adel Ring and the commercial districts off the Bergstrasse and the Nulner Weg. They certainly weren’t concerned with what went on around the docks. After all, barges were no longer stopping in Bögenhafen, instead pressing on for Altdorf, it being common knowledge now that there was plague in the town. But then river traffic was down by fifty per cent compared to the same time the previous year, so greatly was the Reikland in the grip of what the physicians’ guild had termed the black pox. The streets around the Ostendamm were practically empty. There was only the occasional beggar, dead in the street.

  Although the numbers out and about on the streets had drastically reduced, the numbers attending the temples had doubled as those who had chosen to stay, or who had no choice but to stay, sought divine intervention against the plague. Many, such as the Sisters of Mercy of Shallya, believed it was a punishment visited upon the population in retribution for the sinful lives they led. Some blamed it on the events of Geheimnisnacht.

  Work increased for the physicians’ guild, the Sisterhood and the mourners’ guild as the dead soon choked the town cemetery. By the twenty-third day of Nachgeheim people were dying more quickly than Father Hulbert and the gravediggers could bless and bury them. Some claimed that bodies —particularly those of the poor—were going into mass unconsecrated graves, unblessed.

  Dieter and Erich took their own precautions against the plague, carrying nosegays about their person to mask the stench of death permeating the town and helping to keep the black pox from them. But then as the two of them hardly had any contact with anyone other than each other, they reasoned that their chances of infection were dramatically reduced. The lingering thought that he might still contract the plague simply motivated Dieter to press on with his new studies, and to persist with his experiments, for his work might mean that he found a way of beating the disease or of even finding a cure.

  It was on the twenty-ninth day of the month that Dieter heard from his sister again. Returning to his lodgings that morning he was surprised and suspicious to see an unkempt young man standing at the door to Frau Keeler’s tenement, note in hand.

  He considered waiting to see if the stranger would leave of his own accord but it wasn’t just the world that had changed; Dieter had changed with it. Whereas before the old Dieter might have been happy to hang back and avoid any confrontation, he now stepped forward confidently and challenged the youth.

  “What is your business here?” he said.

  “I have a message,” the young man replied, pressing the letter into Dieter’s hand.

  Dieter looked at the crumpled envelope in his hand, then at the scruffy messenger.

  “Good day to you,” he said. “That will be all.”

  He admitted himself to the building and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Dieter did not open the letter until he was in his own room in the garret. For a moment he had entertained all sorts of paranoid ideas as to who had sent him the letter on seeing the state of its deliverer. But these had been dispelled when he saw his name and the address of the lodging house written in his sister’s familiar hand, to be replaced by long-buried feelings of guilt, loss and longing.

  With a pang in his heart, Dieter sat down on the end of his unmade bed, tore open the letter, and read.

  My dearest brother,

  I do hope that this letter finds you well. Only I fear that it will not, that something terrible has befallen you. I pray to Morr daily that it has not and that he might spare you a while yet. But in my dreams I see such terrible things, things I dare not recount here lest by the act of putting them to paper I invoke whatever it is that dwells in the darkness of my dreams and make them come true.

  What has happened to you? I have not heard from you now in months. And now word reaches Hangenholz that there is plague in Bögenhafen!

  Please come home, I beg of you. Hangenholz is clean, and everyone is doing all they can to make sure that it remains so. Hangenholz is your home. It is where you belong, with me.

  This letter comes with all my love and every day I will pray that it reaches you, finding you safe and well, and that you heed my plea. Please respond. Please come home.

  Your devoted Katarina

  Frustrated anger and obstinacy welled up within Dieter. He understood that his darling sister had his best intentions at heart, that her anxiety was born out of love for her distracted brother, but did she not realise that he was doing it for her, for all people, but especially for her? Could she not see that there was no way he could abandon his studies now, at such a critical juncture.

  Annoyed that such concerns—although well meant—were interrupting his work, Dieter penned a reply immediately, hoping that in doing so he might calm himself by working out some of his frustrations in the writing of it.

  My dearest sister,

  Thank you for your letter and your concerns, but do not fret. I am well and, after all, an apprentice of the physicians’ guild. The plague will not touch me. Besides, I am sure that the reality is not as bad as the rumours and half-truths that you have heard. The stories that have reached as far as Hangenholz will have been exaggerated with every mile of the road they have travelled.

  I bless you for your love and prayers: It makes all the difference knowing that you are there for me and thinking of me as I labour at my studies here.

  But that is why I cannot come home, not yet. I feel that I am close to a breakthrough now, one that will mean people might never fall victim to such cruel diseases as the black pox ever again. So you see that I cannot quit my work here.

  And I in turn beg of you, do not come looking for me. You were right to remain in Hangenholz when I left after our late father’s funeral. Remain there now where it is safe, where this accursed plague cannot touch you.

  I remain your loving brother,

  Dieter

  Dieter sealed the letter and laid it on top of his workbench. He stretched and yawned. He felt so bone-numbingly tired and yet, at the same, his mind was constantly racing, swelling every day with all that he was learning and discovering about his gift. He would sleep now—fitfully, probably, beset by dreams that once he might have termed nightmares—and at dusk, when he left for the warehouse again, he would deliver the letter to the Reisehauschen to be taken to Hangenholz.

  No, he stubbornly refused to leave Bögenhafen, not unless it became absolutely necessary. His work was here. And he was actually starting to get somewhere. He would not—could not—abandon his studies now.

  That night Erich and Dieter, having delivered his letter to the coaching inn, met at the dilapidated warehouse on the Ostendamm again. There was now a distinctive autumnal bite in the air after the sun had set, suggesting that the seasons were on the turn again. In all too little lime the rot of autumn would give way to w
inter and the dead months of the year. A chilling wind blew in under the wooden-banded doors and whistled between the slates of the roof above the hayloft.

  Laid out around them was a scene not unlike that which had greeted them in the basement of Doktor Drakus’ house. Trestle tables were covered with Dieter’s open notebooks. A workbench bore the tools of a barber-surgeon. And in the middle of it all was a heavy oak table, ready to be transformed into an autopsy table when the opportunity arose.

  Erich had “acquired” much of the equipment and Dieter had chosen not to ask how. Dieter had simply told him what he needed and Erich had found it for him. Around all of it was erected a sackcloth curtain so that should someone unexpected find their way into the warehouse, they would not immediately see what it was being used for.

  They had moved Dieter’s things from Dunst Strasse over the course of several evenings, so as to again try to avoid arousing anyone’s suspicions or attracting unwanted attention by wheeling a cart through the town laden with books and bizarre pieces of equipment.

  Behind where Dieter’s temporary laboratory had been set up, towards the back of the musty warehouse, a trapdoor covered the pit into which the results of Dieter’s previous experiments had been dropped: vermin, amphibians and the like that he had managed to give life to again, an unlife that they had somehow clung on to and which had told Dieter he was ready for the next stage, to attempt something more impressive, to transfer the skills he had learnt. The inhabitants of the pit burped and flopped, croaked and chattered, splashed and scratched in the dank, lightless hole.