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 winter 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.