“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 door 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.”
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!
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.