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 knights—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 could 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.