Leering lichen-coated skulls. Bloated maggots grown fat in the eye-sockets of a dead horse. Blood running from the corner of a cold smiling mouth. Anselm Fleischer burning at the stake, shouting blasphemous obscenities. A hunchbacked abomination chewing on a human leg bone whilst perched atop a gravestone. Drowned faces puffed with stagnant water, with pondweed tresses and eyes plucked out by scavenging fish. Smashing a stone down again and again into the pulped mess of a man’s skull. Flayed human skin. Fingernails clogged with splinters and grave-dirt.
A nauseous ache knotted his guts and he felt his gorge rise. He swallowed hard and focused all the more intently on the mantra he was reciting over and over again.
Thunder rolled overhead like a tattoo drummed by skeletal musicians on skull-pans with human thighbones. The flickering candle-flames guttered, but did not go out.
Dieter’s head throbbed with the build-up of power behind his eyes. A sibilant murmur whispered through the warehouse as if other, unearthly voices were joining in the frenetic mantra-chant, calling on powers unknown and terrible to reverse nature and return Leopold Hanser to life.
The images continued to assail him. The dull gleam of a sweeping scythe. Wild dogs worrying at the carcass of a beggar. Butcher hooks hung with disembowelled cadavers. The glassy, slack-jawed stare of a rotting head on an iron spike. Grinding down bones in a pestle and mortar. His hands tight around his friend’s broken neck. The spill of purple-grey intestines as a hanged thief was drawn and quartered. The desiccated husk of a long-dead knight lying within its cold, stone tomb, still clutching his sword in rigour-locked fingers. Bodies struggling as they slipped down the greased stakes that punctured their midriffs. The last grains of sand running out of the bulb of an hourglass.
His breathing was hard and ragged now. It clouded as mist in front of him. He had not realised how cold it had become inside the warehouse.
Dieter reached out his hands to the darkness and the shadows swarmed towards him as he channelled the dark energy, howling through the warehouse, through his own nerve-jangling body and into the motionless corpse on the table in front of him.
Frost crackled on a glass alembic and a marble dissection slab. Erich was shivering but through chattering teeth continued to chant, unable to stop, as if hypnotised. The solidifying darkness pressed in around them.
The body twitched, an arm slipping from the table to dangle at its side. Dieter felt it brush against him rather than saw it move. A buzz of excitement leapt within him but he consciously maintained his concentration. And he had to concentrate even harder, for with the churning pressure building behind his eyes, Dieter felt pain flare along every nerve in his body. It was as if he was caught in the midst of a charged electrical storm. He could feel every hair on his body stand on end. He tried to keep chanting through gritted teeth, fighting back the searing physical pain he was feeling.
The body before him suddenly arched its back and then flopped down again. His searching eyes fell on Erich. His accomplice was rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth as he continued to chant. Then his eyes were back on Leopold Hanser’s corpse.
A strangely luminescent mist was coalescing out of the air above the table and rushing into the corpse’s mouth and nostrils, blown by the unnatural gale rising inside the warehouse, carrying with it slivers of congealed darkness. The ribcage rose as though its lungs were inflating.
The pain was now unbearable and yet he was so close to success. He was sure of it.
Dieter let out the agony in one almighty cry as he screamed the words of the invocation, the splintering pain in his head feeling as if it would split his skull open.
Thunder crashed and the storm broke directly overhead. Every light in the warehouse blew out, other than the lantern, and Dieter blacked out.
He had only been unconscious for a second but, when he came to again, Dieter found himself lying on the floor in a pool of his own vomit with Erich anxiously trying to rouse him.
“What happened? What happened?” he was shrieking.
With Erich’s help, Dieter sat up, resting his back against a leg of the oak table, his knees drawn up, his head lolling forwards. The front of his black robe was spattered with yellow bile. Its acrid smell stung his nostrils; its bitter taste burnt his throat. His head was pounding. He closed his eyes tight against the throbbing ache as if that would somehow drive it away. When it did not, he opened his eyes again.
The warehouse was dark, the feeble light from the lantern doing little to penetrate the black murk that had slithered into the building. But the darkness did not seem so all-consuming anymore. The innocuous shapes of the warehouse resolved themselves again out of the gloom. The dark power Dieter had summoned was slowly dissipating.
Next to him the corpse’s arm hung limply over the edge of the table, unmoving. The ritual had failed.
Exhaustion washed through Dieter so sudden and so strong that he would have collapsed again if not for the way he was sitting.
It was only then that he realised he had expended a massive amount of energy in conjuring up the power of death and attempting the ritual. He felt weak, drained. His muscles trembled with palsied fatigue. He was bitterly cold and yet icy sweat still prickled his brow. His lank, black hair was wet with it.
He had expended all his energy to achieve as much as he had, and yet still it hadn’t been enough. Had he done something wrong? Had he misremembered the words or hand gestures? Was the whole rite missing some vital ingredient? Had he not prepared the body thoroughly enough? Had it failed because of something Erich had done?
It had been so easy with the cat, painfully easy by comparison, but then it was a smaller, simpler creature and had been fresher. But Dieter sensed that it was more than just that. His mind came round to the idea again that perhaps it was something about the night on which he resurrected Erich’s pet. Perhaps it had been the night of Geheimnisnacht itself that had helped him accomplish it? Strange things happened on Geheimnisnacht certainly. Supernatural things.
Slowly and with the finality of a death-knell, the fog-muffled temple bells began to mark the hour of twelve. Midnight. The witching hour.
Dieter lifted his head. The nervous high he had felt during the ritual was now replaced by another surge of exhaustion and negative feeling. Or was it simply clarity, as cold realisation soaked into him.
What had he been trying to do? To raise a corpse from the dead was blasphemy. Thank Morr and Shallya that he had failed. Frogs and rats were one thing, but to raise a human being to unlife was the vilest heresy, an act befitting the servants of evil and not a scholar of physic. And it hadn’t just been any corpse; it had been that of his friend and fellow scholar, Leopold Hanser. A man whose good deeds and generous heart would be missed. Dieter was suddenly wracked with gut wrenching, overwhelming feelings of guilt.
“What happened?” Erich was at him again. “We were so close! Why did you stop?”
Dieter sat on the dirt floor of the warehouse in shocked silence. He didn’t know what had come over him. He had been a man obsessed. Almost a man possessed, so driven had he been to succeed in his dark endeavour. What would his father have thought? If he had been alive he would have disowned his prodigal son and damned his immortal soul. As it was he was probably turning in his grave even now. And what would his darling sister think of him? The thought of her distraught horrified features was almost enough to cause him to break down in tears where he sat.
But as it was, the blasphemous invocation had failed and he had been saved. In all the time that he had been wondering if he could master his powers he had not once considered whether he should. And how could he have been so deluded as to believe the powers that had been awoken within him, having lain dormant for so long, were a gift? They were a curse: a filthy stain on his immortal soul, and one that it would take years of penance and contrition to remove. But if that was what it would take, that was what Dieter would do.
The bells finish
ing striking midnight. The heavens grumbled as the rain drummed down against the roof of the warehouse, finding its way inside in places and descending in a steady splattering dribble.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Dieter admitted testily. “But whatever it was, the gods be praised.”
“W-What? What are you saying?”
Dieter turned his weary head and fixed Erich with steely eyes. “I am saying that someone, some higher power, was merciful and stopped us before we damned our immortal souls forever and went the way of Anselm Fleischer.”
“You can’t m-mean that!”
“I can. And I do.”
“B-But we’ve worked for months for this. You have been given a gift. Think of all those you could save if you completed your work!”
“Think of all those others who would die you mean. Think of Leopold Hanser. Think of Anselm Fleischer. Think of us. Think of yourself.”
“Y-You’ve gone mad!” Erich shrieked, leaping to his feet. “Leopold H-Hanser died that we might further our cause.”
The furious apprentice necromancer kicked the table leg in frustration, jerking the body laid upon it.
“He d-didn’t understand the import of what we were doing here!”
The gangrenous arm swung like a leaden pendulum, morbidly marking each passing second as they steadily and inevitably approached the moment of their deaths.
“He would have b-betrayed us! But now he can help us f-finish our work.”
With a great exhalation of foetid gas the corpse sat up sharply.
Erich shrieked and stumbled backwards into a trestle table, hard enough to send phials and alembics crashing to the floor. In startled horror Dieter scrambled away from the table.
Leopold Hanser’s corpse turned its head to look at him, the crushed vertebrae of its neck grating as it did so, a sound like broken nails scratched across a slate. Its mouth gaped open and the corpse made a noise that sounded as if it was taking in a great, ragged breath. A phlegmy gargling began in the back of its crushed throat.
The detached, scholarly part of Dieter’s jittery mind wondered why something that was dead would need to breathe. Morr alone knew what state Leopold’s lungs were in. Half full of preserving fluid probably and about as much use as if Leopold had drowned to death, rather than been strangled.
Was it force of habit, the vestige of an ingrained response in the body, even though Leopold’s mind was gone and it could only be reacting on primitive instinct and nothing more?
Dieter had succeeded after all. But that knowledge did not make him feel any better. In fact it only served to make him feel sickeningly worse. It was too late. He was truly damned.
In the faltering light of the lantern the zombie’s sour mouldering flesh glistened wetly. Leopold’s blond hair had been stained green by the preserving bath and hung lank about his pallid shoulders.
It reached clumsily for Dieter with flailing arms. It jerked again and its legs kicked against the table, fists and heels hammering against the oak table. Dieter had not thought to keep the corpse secured to the table.
The zombie let out a ghastly moan—a spine-chilling cry that sounded as if the dead thing remembered being alive and was reliving the agony of its death all over again—and half-fell off the table. Swaying, it got unsteadily to its feet. It turned towards Dieter again, mewling pitifully, focusing on the one who had caused it to be born again, raised from the dead to shambling unlife.
The corpse’s thrashing convulsions had ruptured its skin at the joints of its elbows and knees. The flesh underneath was darkly discoloured. Despite the gloom Dieter could see that a darkening stain was spreading across the front of the linen shift as well.
Dieter dragged himself back further, banging into the side of another workbench. Something shaken from the work surface above clattered onto the floor next to him. It was a rusted bone-saw. He snatched it up, holding it out in front of him as he might brandish a sword.
The resurrected corpse bearing down on him with filthy talons outstretched might look like his erstwhile friend Leopold Hanser—the only person to have shown him true friendship when he arrived in Bögenhafen—but now it was a mindless monster that was little more than a rabid beast, driven by some insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.
The zombie took its first few faltering steps towards its saviour, its feet turned unnaturally inwards, its gait shambling as if it was remembering how to walk. All the time it wore Leopold’s dead face like a mask, staring through it at Dieter’s tarnished heart and tainted soul.
Dieter was trapped, the bench behind him, the undead creature in front of him. He still felt weak although the horror of the situation he now found himself in lent him some strength. He managed to struggle to his feet before the zombie could reach him.
He lashed out wildly at the stumbling corpse. The bone-saw snagged the cloth of Leopold’s shift and ripped the material open, cutting into the flesh underneath as well. Black, congealed blood oozed from the ragged hole in the corpse’s side. The neurotic Dieter fancied that he could see a nub of yellow bone and a rot-disfigured organ through the gash.
The creature continued to let out its heart-rending howl but did not particularly react to the messy wound Dieter had dealt it. Still it came on. It was almost on top of him now. He struck again. This time the saw dug into the meat of Leopold’s bruise-blackened neck. The rusty instrument struck bone with a clunk and snagged in the wound. Dieter released his grip, leaving half the saw’s blade and its handle protruding from the corpse.
Dieter felt freezing fingers lock around his wrist in a steely grip and cried out in pain and terror. Then somehow he found the courage and to break free, his horrified fear lending him the strength he needed. He slammed two bunched fists into Leopold’s chest and felt, as well as heard, a rib snap. The zombie staggered backwards and Dieter ran to the sackcloth curtain.
The zombie swung round and its dead eyes fixed on Dieter’s accomplice. Erich was hunched in a foetal ball next to the trestle table, whimpering in the dark. He seemed to be paralysed by fear in the face of the horrific appearance and unnatural movements of the thing that had once been Leopold Hanser, rather than elated at Dieter’s success.
Dieter was so terrified himself that he was frozen into inaction again. Part of him felt obligated to help his friend and yet he feared what might happen to him should Leopold’s zombie actually manage to get its gangrenous hands on him a second time.
The thing that had been Leopold lurched towards Erich. Its jaws opened even wider and a baleful intent flared in its eyes, like some feral predator with an insatiable hunger for raw meat.
And then the stiletto dagger was in Erich’s hand again. Dieter had not seen him with it since the night of the second break-in they had committed. Erich slashed and stabbed, getting to his feet and spinning his gangling form lithely out of the way of the creature’s grabbing arms. The blade opened dark wounds on the zombie’s torso and carved up the meat of its forearms.
Erich ducked the clutching hands one more time and twisted free, able to get himself clear at last. As he barged past the poor undead imitation of Leopold Hanser his hip bashed against the table bearing Dieter’s notebooks and the lantern. The jolted lamp fell over, spilling the last of its oil across the table and the covering of papers. Then it rolled off the edge of the table and smashed on the floor, where the hem of the sackcloth curtain trailed in the dirt of the floor.
The pages of Dieter’s precious notebooks first browned then blackened as they charred and caught light. Tongues of fire licked up the rough hemp fabric of the draped curtains, the hungry flames racing up towards the rafters of the hayloft above.
For a split second Dieter went to rescue his notebooks and then stopped himself, suddenly realising what he was doing and coming to his senses. He would not be needing them again after this night.
Apparently disorientated, the zombie stumbled around the oak table, which was also starting to burn. In no time at all it was surrounded
by a snarling wall of flame as the fire ate up the fabric of the curtain and the rest of the fuel Dieter and Erich had unwittingly gathered in the warehouse.
Alembics cracked and exploded as the heat of the blaze rapidly increased.
Dieter and Erich looked at each other without saying a word, the fire reflected back at them in the dark mirrors of each other’s eyes. Then they turned and bolted for the door.
In a mere moment they were out in the rain and cold of the Erntezeit night and Dieter was locking the door behind them. He could still hear the zombie’s bestial howling as it plunged about inside the burning building.
Erich led them away from the dockside, down a cobbled path that ran alongside the watercourse of the Hafenback, back towards the town’s water gate. In the shelter of another looming storehouse they stopped and looked back to watch the destruction of the warehouse.
The crackle of the flames could be heard even from here, their russet glow beginning to light the other buildings around the warehouse as roiling flames broke free of the inferno now raging within. The cleansing flames were rapidly and effectively destroying all the evidence of Dieter’s and Erich’s crimes. Soon the only proof of what they had been up to for the last two months would be the burnt out shell of the fire-ravaged warehouse itself.
Flames swirled into the night sky. Beyond the spark-filled billows of tarry smoke, Dieter caught a glimpse of the buildings on the other side of the river. Almost no lights twinkled on the far bank amidst the squalor of the Westendamm slums. Only the highest, arrow-slit windows of the Fort Blackfire barracks, close against the northern battlements of the town wall, showed any signs of life. And those guard barracks were only manned by a skeleton staff now.
Dieter wondered if the few guardsmen left on watch there could see the fire raging in the docks through the rain. If the conflagration spread to the surrounding buildings they certainly would. But the sudden autumnal downpour, soaking him to the bone even now, might save them and finish the job of purification for them yet.
Necromancer Page 17
