by Mark Hobson
“Please let me.”
Pieter squirmed, partly from awkwardness but mostly from the shiver her touch sent through him. “Lotte, I’m not sure.”
“It will be good for you. And for me. We both need the release.”
“You’re a lovely girl, but ah, it feels-“
“It feels right.” She placed a finger over his lips, nuzzled his neck. “No more talking.”
She unfastened his trousers and took him in her hand, squeezing and flexing until he was hard, and Pieter, his breathing coming faster, felt his passion rising. Taking a hold of his hand she glided it up under the hem of her nightie, where he felt her moistness, and her legs parted for him.
She undressed him, using her fingers and mouth on his body, and he now felt shivers of desire pass through him in waves, so he grabbed her and pulled her nightclothes away, nearly ripping the material, and she gave a small squeak of delight as he pushed her down onto the couch, and so she parted her legs even more but he pushed them wider still and thrust himself deeply inside. She was breathing hard like him, and thrusting up, as he drove his pelvis down, her breasts flushed and aroused, and she shivered as he finished inside her, calling out his name as he thrust one final time.
He gazed down, but now her eyes were pure black orbs, and her mouth stretched wide, impossibly so, until her jaw was distended, and she bit his neck as her passion continued, and her hand closed around his throat and squeezed.
A deep snicker came from her lips. Pieter flung her away in panic.
Again Pieter awoke with a shout, beating at the air to fend her off, and rolled off the couch onto the floor. He jumped to his feet, aware in the back of his mind that he was fully clothed, and he saw that the room was empty.
“Fuck!” he shouted, as the dream flickered in his mind before fading completely.
◆◆◆
Sometime during the night while he had been sleeping Lotte had quietly left, taking her few possessions with her. She left no message or forwarding address, and when he tried her number there was no connection, no voicemail recording, just silence. Without a word, she had gone.
GRISSLEHAMNS – UPPSALA DISTRICT – SWEDEN.
MARCH 1946.
After leaving the Convent of The Sisters of the Precious Blood, the two of them, Wenzel and Agent Gerdi, the young novice nun, had struck north. Driving in a stolen farm vehicle and using forged papers, they made good progress. Europe was just getting back to its feet after years of war but passage was much easier now, as long as they did not draw unnecessary attention. If anybody stopped them, then they were brother and younger sister trying to reach their home to be reunited with family, just like the millions of other displaced citizens.
After two weeks they passed over the Kiel Canal and then crossed the border into Denmark. Wenzel had planned this escape route many months before. Taking Gerdi with him hadn’t been part of it originally, but he realized that one young man travelling alone would still attract unwanted attention, and she had been of huge help, so allowing her to accompany him and thus avoid detection herself would be an advantage for them both. But with the onset of winter their journey had slowed to a crawl, and he decided they should see out the worst of the snows and bed down in a safe house in Copenhagen.
With the arrival of spring their journey had resumed. Crossing over into neighbouring Sweden at Malmö, they had headed north-east. Wishing to avoid the capital of Stockholm Wenzel instead drove into Uppsala, a wild and rugged district with a craggy coastline overlooking the cold waters of the Gulf of Bothnia. Finally in late March they had arrived at the tiny fishing hamlet of Grisslehamns, and awaited passage on board the fishing vessel MFV Toró, bound for the islands of Ǎland and their final destination – Finland.
They spent the time waiting by booking into a small ramshackle boarding house, offering to pay double as long as the elderly proprietor did not pry into their business. Happy to take the money, he left them be, and Wenzel and the girl whiled away the time by sitting on the porch and enjoying the stiff breeze blowing in.
Wenzel at times recalled events back at the convent.
Killing Mother Annette and the other nuns had been an abhorrent but unavoidable evil. Their screams and pleas for mercy, echoing around inside the stone walls, were pitiful and harrowing to hear, but Wenzel was ruthless, and carried out the task with the help of the novice nun without hesitation. Together they had chased them down one by one, their knives ripping and cutting and plunging at them in a sick orgy of bloodlust.
When it was done they returned to the small room hidden deep beneath the convent where the sleeping babes lay in their cribs. Retrieving his knapsack from the floor Wenzel had removed a number of other items. First a pair of large syringes, one of which he handed to Gerdi. Then the glass phial given to him by the beautiful She-Wolf Ilse Hirsch as she had lain wounded in the grass, with its contents of blood and semen.
Placing it on a small shelf, he and the girl had moved from crib to crib, quietly and gently drawing blood from the tiny infants. Most had slept through with barely a flicker, or at most a little murmur, before resuming the sleep of the innocents, unharmed and unaware.
Finished with this task, Wenzel had removed the stopper from the glass phial and they had emptied the contents of their syringes into the mixture, the potent combination of sweet blood and male seed and menstrual energy creating a powerful unifying force.
And finally, Wenzel and the girl had used salt to lay down the necessary symbols on the stone floor, the markings and letters and pentagrams, copied from the heavy leather-bound file called UNTERNEHMEN WERWOLF that Wenzel had read back at Hulchrath Castle over a year and a half ago. Those strange and otherworldly signs, together with the obscure rituals and the incantations he now spoke, his voice echoing in the dark room beneath the convent.
On the evening of their second day of waiting, they received word that the fishing trawler would be leaving on the morning tide. They were to be ready, with any baggage they required, on the small stone pier at first light.
Later that night Wenzel drove their farmer’s truck further up the coast and left it amidst the sand dunes, then walked back to the boarding house.
They slept a little. Yet the anticipation of what was to be the final leg of his long journey, and the prospect of reaching a safe haven, meant he could not rest for long. So in the early hours the two of them made their way down the grassy slope from the boarding house, each carrying a small suitcase, Wenzel still wearing the knapsack with its priceless items inside.
The MFV Toró was waiting for them. It was a sturdy-looking wooden vessel, normally crewed by three or four men, but for this trip Wenzel had insisted on just the captain. He was being paid handsomely and so was happy to oblige.
Climbing on board, they both immediately went below deck.
A few minutes later the boat set out across the water, heading east into the brightening dawn sky.
The world was to hear no more of Herbert Wenzel.
CHAPTER 14
PRISHA KAPOOR, AND THE FOOT-TRACK SPELL
He had no time to think about Lotte’s whereabouts, for his mobile phone immediately started to jangle and buzz with notifications of updates and messages from work.
General requests for information and answers to a multitude of queries had built up overnight, including questions from the media who had somehow got a hold of his number. These latter he ignored. Pieter scrolled through the others, picking out one or two of the more important ones, and did his best to respond, either by phone call or email. The others could wait until he arrived at HQ.
This took up an hour. He managed to snatch a quick breakfast, and then he dashed down the stairs and out the front door, where his driver was waiting for him. His own car, damaged in the shootout, was in the compound, and he would pick up a temporary replacement from the carpool later.
His first stop was the hospital morgue. He’d received a garbled voicemail message from the Chief Pathologist, Prisha Kapoor, which sound
ed quite urgent.
Overnight all of the bodies had been ferried over from the temporary morgue to the hospital. When he strode through the automatic doors, Pieter was confronted with the gruesome sight of several rows of corpses lined up on autopsy tables awaiting examination, with still more stored away in the freezer storage units.
Some of the bodies were still bagged up, whereas others were laid out, unclothed and being processed. Prisha and one of her assistants were busy at work. To say they were snowed under was an understatement.
At the moment she was gowned and masked up and using a small circular saw to cut away the top portion of a man’s skull. The high-pitched noise set Pieter’s teeth on edge, and a fine white mist sprayed up as she worked.
He watched from the other side of the room, feeling like a morbid ghoul, fascinated and repulsed in equal measures. Prisha prized away the skull section and placed it to one side, and then reached into the cavity and, with a loud sucking noise, pulled the brain free and plopped it into a set of scales. Her assistant, a pale-faced young man with bug-out eyes, made notes on his iPad.
Prisha glanced up then and noticed him. Saying something to her assistant, she removed her plastic face-shield and waddled over to the wash basins. Snapping off her latex gloves and binning them, she washed her hands and arms, and then joined him.
“I was on my annual leave until this happened,” she told him grumpily, as though blaming him personally. “I’ve been here since midnight.”
“Sorry.”
Prisha looked him up and down sternly, then her features softened a little. “From what I hear, you’re lucky not to be one of my specimens today.”
“Hope you’re not disappointed?”
“You’re a man. By default you’re all a disappointment.”
“But aren’t you gay?”
“Yes,” she fixed him with her stare, “and now you know why.” Spinning on her heels she beckoned over her shoulder. “Follow me.”
She gave him a tour around the room, leading him up and down the rows of cadavers.
“As you would guess, most of the victims from yesterday’s attack died from gunshot wounds or shrapnel wounds resulting in severe trauma and blood loss. There are a few exceptions. Your colleague, Mr Beumers, died from asphyxiation. The overweight man over there,” she pointed at the obese naked form of Levi Kohnstamm, “he suffered a massive coronary, so wasn’t technically murdered. The eyes and tongue were removed post mortem. And the one who jumped from the roof of the science museum, he experienced multiple blunt fractures from impacting the water, and then drowned. He’s bagged up over there.”
Pieter noted the short row of bodies still in their body bags were slightly separate from the rest.
Prisha stopped before another one of the victims. The figure on the metal autopsy table was burnt beyond all recognition, and he had adopted the familiar pugilistic attitude of most burn victims, a ‘boxer-like’ body posture of flexed arms and knees and clenched fists. The smell was revolting, and Pieter took an involuntary step backwards.
“This was the tram driver. When we found him he was still in his seat at the front of the tram, hunched over his controls.”
After a moment, she resumed her stroll.
“All very normal from a pathological point of view. Normal, that is, until we come to these.” She came to a halt next to the row of body bags.
There were six of them lined up against the back wall.
“The attackers I’m guessing?”
“Correct. Again, most of them died from injuries sustained during the battle. Nothing odd about that. I didn’t pay much attention to them initially. I wanted to start with their victims, the members of the public and the police officers, and so most of last night and through the early hours I concentrated on the other deceased. It was only when I checked on them a short time ago that I noticed… ah…”
Pieter glanced at her. “Noticed what?”
Prisha pursed her lips, her eyes darting back and forth over his face as though weighing something up in her mind.
“Perhaps you’d better see for yourself.”
She reached across and slowly unzipped the nearest body bag, and then stood back to watch his reaction.
Pieter didn’t know how to react. He didn’t fully comprehend at first what he was actually seeing.
Inside was the skeletal remains of one of the gunmen. Not a fresh corpse as he was expecting, but just bones. A full set, laid out on the table, the bones already turning brown with age. Some of them actually rotting and crumbling, with the skull having already collapsed in on itself.
“These are not the bones of a recently deceased person, Inspector. I’ve worked on several cases involving the discovery of interred murder victims, many of them dug up decades after they died. So I know old bones when I see them. I will need to do more tests to be sure, but I’d estimate that if I didn’t know otherwise this person, and the other five with him, died many years ago.”
As if to prove her point she reached out and touched the rib cage with the tip of her pen, and the bone crumbled to dust.
Pieter had no response. The skeleton on the table, along with all of the other cadavers set out in the room or stored away in the freezer unit, was no more than eighteen hours old. But the level of decomposition overnight to these six was undeniably much more advanced than that, was of the nature of someone long-dead. The flesh and organs had already gone, a process that would takes months if not years, until all that remained was a pile of old bones turning to dust.
He became aware that Prisha was looking at him. Perhaps she was not expecting a reply from him. Going from the expression on her face, a worried frown creasing her brow and a hint of fear in her eyes, she merely wanted confirmation that he saw what she saw. That she wasn’t imaging this.
Eventually she broke the silence herself.
“If you think that is weird, then wait for this.”
She walked away and then came back with a sheet of paper. Catching a brief glimpse he saw a list of letters and notations, lots of medical words that made little sense to him.
“The results of the tests on your soil sample. I was told that you found this in your home?” She appeared sceptical.
“That’s right. On the floor of my attic.”
“Right. Well, they ran various tests to determine what it was, what compounds and chemicals it was made up of. So I can tell you that it contains, amongst other things, oxygen bacteria of the Enterobacteriaceae family such as gram-positive cocci and Stayhylococcus. They then heated the sample to detect traces of yeasts and mould, as well as – get this – saline fungi.”
Prisha, seeing the confused and slightly glazed look on his face, lowered the paper she’d been reading from.
“I’ll put it more simply for you. The soil from your house contains seaweed and soil from a cemetery. Grave dirt.”
Pieter gave a nervous little laugh. “Ok”
“Can I tell you something? And you must promise me that this goes no further than these four walls.” She’d lowered her voice, but her assistant was well out of earshot. “I have my reputation to maintain.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“My partner, Rowan, she is into all kinds of whacky stuff. New age remedies, Wiccan legends, Harry Potter. It must come from her Irish roots. Anyway, during our time together I have picked up the odd piece of trivia from her regarding these things, she leaves books lying around the flat which when I’m bored I have glanced through, like you do.”
Pieter nodded encouragement, wondering where this was going.
“Have you heard of a foot-track spell?”
“Pardon? A what?”
“A foot-track spell. Somebody who wishes you harm will put a concoction of ingredients, such as elements from animal foetuses, baby blood, soil from the grave of a recently deceased person, really revolting things like that, they will put this on the floor where a person – in this case you - will walk through it. To curse them, to cross them. Did
you walk through it?”
Pieter looked at her, his mouth hanging open, wondering if she’d been on the weed overnight.
“Uh… yes, I think so.”
“Do you have the shoes or slippers you were wearing?”
“I was in my bare feet.”
“Shit, then you have a problem.”
“I do?”
“Well if you believe this kind of thing,” Prisha smiled at him sheepishly. “Which, being of a scientific bent, I don’t. But if you were susceptible to it, and open-minded enough to be concerned, then certain consequences may occur as a result of walking through a foot-track spell.”
“Consequences?”
“Of a health-related nature. Things like heart attacks, strokes, dementia, or death. Have you been feeling unwell lately? Or perhaps depressed?”
Pieter shrugged. “I’m fit as a fiddle. No coughs or sneezes. My digital prostrate check came back all good.”
“Well, it’s all to do with the power of suggestion of course. Spells and curses. It’s not the fact that you may or may not have had a curse put on you, but whether you believe it or not. If you firmly believe that you have been crossed, then that in itself is enough for you to talk yourself into feeling unwell, convinced that every ache and pain is a sign that you have some fatal illness.”
“And me being a cynical, world-weary, non-believing copper rules that out?”
“Naturally.” Prisha handed him the sheet of paper, trying to smile but still looking frazzled and nervous. “Nothing for you to worry about then.”
As he left, Pieter wondered why he’d failed to mention the vivid and terrifying nightmares haunting him at night.
Pieter climbed back into the car and told his driver to head over to HQ. But the driver, a bald cop called Joos, shook his head.
“Another lead’s come in, sir. A witness.”
* * *
Amstelsluizen was a series of huge locks on the river Amstel. It comprised of five massive concrete sluice gates, each about 75 metres long, running parallel with the river. Every twelve hours, the sluice gates were opened, allowing a flow of fresh water to pour into Amsterdam’s canal system from the eastern side of the city, whilst over on the west a similar set of locks allowed the old water to gush out. It was supposed to ensure that the water in the canals was constantly fresh and clean enough to drink – or so they claimed. It worked as regular as clockwork, so much so that the average Amsterdammer never even noticed it was happening.
