The two apprentices themselves remained untouched by the
plague; in fact they seemed untouchable. Dieter began to wonder if his gift
protected him, and by extension Erich, from the disease.
In time the black pox would burn itself out, having burnt its
way so fiercely and so quickly through the town. With the approach of winter it
would slow and eventually die itself, black pox fever did not like the cold.
* * *
And so, on the night of the twenty-seventh of Erntezeit,
Dieter was ready to begin the ceremony during which he would attempt to raise
Leopold Hanser from the dead. It had taken them days—or rather nights—to
prepare their fellow student’s body.
Leopold’s corpse had been laid out on the oak table. Its
flesh had developed an unpleasant waxy texture and greeny-grey sheen, despite
their best efforts to preserve it, so that they might finish preparing for the
ritual. The angry red throttle-marks on Leopold’s swollen neck had darkened to
purple. Unfortunately, gangrenous rot had begun to set in at the extremities.
The body had been dressed again in a plain linen shift.
Candles had been placed on the tables and benches surrounding
the central autopsy table, their inconstant, guttering light reflecting from the
corpse’s waxy flesh like moonlight on oil. A lantern stood on the table next to
Dieter, illuminating the pages of his open notebooks.
Dieter was sure that it had not been such a performance for
Doktor Drakus to do the same, simply because he was so much more experienced and
had gathered about him artefacts associated with death and the dark arts, such
as the hand of glory and the homunculus.
In contrast, Dieter was trying to prepare the ritual based on
a combination of what he had witnessed more than two months before, information
he had culled from his dubiously procured books, what he had learnt from the
physicians’ guild, what he had gleaned from all the years of watching his father
about his work in the Chapel of Morr, and from what seemed to make sense,
although he was sure he had not always possessed such wisdom. Perhaps the
knowledge had been planted within him by the howling death-winds that had gusted
through within Drakus’ basement vault.
Dieter had started his preparations by stripping the corpse
and submerging it in a dyer’s wooden vat, filled with an alchemical solution,
which had a coppery green tinge and an unpleasant acrid offal smell—but then
Dieter had put a sheep’s intestines into the cauldron in which he had brewed the
noxious liquid. The body had been steeped in the concoction for seven days. When
Dieter and Erich had hauled it out again, Leopold’s skin had taken on a sagging
leathery quality and rigour mortis had left it, making the joints supple again.
Leopold’s face had gained a grotesque slack-jawed, open-eyed expression.
Some of the things that
Leichemann’s Anatomy
had said
were needed at this stage neither Dieter nor Erich had been able to get hold of,
such as a solution made from yew berries gathered at midnight when Morrslieb was
full. But Dieter had decided that half of what Leichemann had recorded three
centuries before was medical science way ahead of its time and the rest of it
unsubstantiated folkloric nonsense with no real practical application. He could
see how a solution of wolfsbane might help purge the body of toxins but he could
not see how using a blade heated in a fire sprinkled with corpse dust and
fuelled with coffin wood, and then cooled in the blood of virgins, could make
any difference to the procedure he was developing. It was like trying to piece
together a skeleton without knowing what one was supposed to look like.
After a full week’s work the body was ready. The temple bells
had already chimed eleven by the time Dieter was ready to begin the ritual
itself.
Erich was standing in the same position as they had seen
Drakus’ manservant stand, at the head of the table. He was nervously picking at
his nails, his silent lips working as he went over and over in his mind the
words he would have to say as part of the ritual. Dieter stood at the side of
the table, his eyes cast down, breathing deeply as he tried to calm his
excitedly racing heart and focus his mind.
“Let us begin,” he breathed.
Dieter stretched his hands out over the body, palms down,
trembling. It was not Leopold Hanser, he told himself, not anymore. With the
vital spark of life gone, the carcass was nothing but an empty husk, a hollow
man. He saw the words he had to speak form in letters of fire in his mind and
began to chant. Erich’s wavering voice joined his and his accomplice began to
recite the words, the pronunciation of which Dieter had spent long hours
teaching him.
The two students did not know what the words meant but there
was no denying their power. The darkness of the warehouse congealed. The air
they breathed became thick, like the cloying river mists smothering the streets
of the half-dead town, oozing into their lungs like slime. The alchemical stink
of the preserved corpse became accented with the loamy smell of vegetable decay,
the iron reek of spilled blood and the bittersweet perfume of fleshy
putrefaction.
The hard consonants of the words produced a guttural alien
sound that conjured up images of a distant, almost unreal land, where death had
held sway for interminable eons. And although he might not know the meaning of
the words, Dieter fully understood their intent. Images swirled and solidified
briefly in the utter blackness filling his mind, only to dissolve again and
change into something else.
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.