The bells finishing striking midnight. The heavens grumbled
as the rain drummed down against the roof of the warehouse, finding its way
inside in places and descending in a steady splattering dribble.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Dieter admitted testily. “But whatever it
was, the gods be praised.”
“W-What? What are you saying?”
Dieter turned his weary head and fixed Erich with steely
eyes. “I am saying that someone, some higher power, was merciful and stopped us
before we damned our immortal souls forever and went the way of Anselm
Fleischer.”
“You can’t m-mean that!”
“I can. And I do.”
“B-But we’ve worked for months for this. You have been given
a gift. Think of all those you could save if you completed your work!”
“Think of all those others who would die you mean. Think of
Leopold Hanser. Think of Anselm Fleischer. Think of us. Think of yourself.”
“Y-You’ve gone mad!” Erich shrieked, leaping to his feet.
“Leopold H-Hanser died that we might further our cause.”
The furious apprentice necromancer kicked the table leg in
frustration, jerking the body laid upon it.
“He d-didn’t understand the import of what we were doing
here!”
The gangrenous arm swung like a leaden pendulum, morbidly
marking each passing second as they steadily and inevitably approached the
moment of their deaths.
“He would have b-betrayed us! But now he can help us f-finish
our work.”
With a great exhalation of foetid gas the corpse sat up
sharply.
Erich shrieked and stumbled backwards into a trestle table,
hard enough to send phials and alembics crashing to the floor. In startled
horror Dieter scrambled away from the table.
Leopold Hanser’s corpse turned its head to look at him, the
crushed vertebrae of its neck grating as it did so, a sound like broken nails
scratched across a slate. Its mouth gaped open and the corpse made a noise that
sounded as if it was taking in a great, ragged breath. A phlegmy gargling began
in the back of its crushed throat.
The detached, scholarly part of Dieter’s jittery mind
wondered why something that was dead would need to breathe. Morr alone knew what
state Leopold’s lungs were in. Half full of preserving fluid probably and about
as much use as if Leopold had drowned to death, rather than been strangled.
Was it force of habit, the vestige of an ingrained response
in the body, even though Leopold’s mind was gone and it could only be reacting
on primitive instinct and nothing more?
Dieter had succeeded after all. But that knowledge did not
make him feel any better. In fact it only served to make him feel sickeningly
worse. It was too late. He was truly damned.
In the faltering light of the lantern the zombie’s sour
mouldering flesh glistened wetly. Leopold’s blond hair had been stained green by
the preserving bath and hung lank about his pallid shoulders.
It reached clumsily for Dieter with flailing arms. It jerked
again and its legs kicked against the table, fists and heels hammering against
the oak table. Dieter had not thought to keep the corpse secured to the table.
The zombie let out a ghastly moan—a spine-chilling cry that
sounded as if the dead thing remembered being alive and was reliving the agony
of its death all over again—and half-fell off the table. Swaying, it got
unsteadily to its feet. It turned towards Dieter again, mewling pitifully,
focusing on the one who had caused it to be born again, raised from the dead to
shambling unlife.
The corpse’s thrashing convulsions had ruptured its skin at
the joints of its elbows and knees. The flesh underneath was darkly discoloured.
Despite the gloom Dieter could see that a darkening stain was spreading across
the front of the linen shift as well.
Dieter dragged himself back further, banging into the side of
another workbench. Something shaken from the work surface above clattered onto
the floor next to him. It was a rusted bone-saw. He snatched it up, holding it
out in front of him as he might brandish a sword.
The resurrected corpse bearing down on him with filthy talons
outstretched might look like his erstwhile friend Leopold Hanser—the only
person to have shown him true friendship when he arrived in Bögenhafen—but now
it was a mindless monster that was little more than a rabid beast, driven by
some insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.
The zombie took its first few faltering steps towards its
saviour, its feet turned unnaturally inwards, its gait shambling as if it was
remembering how to walk. All the time it wore Leopold’s dead face like a mask,
staring through it at Dieter’s tarnished heart and tainted soul.
Dieter was trapped, the bench behind him, the undead creature
in front of him. He still felt weak although the horror of the situation he now
found himself in lent him some strength. He managed to struggle to his feet
before the zombie could reach him.
He lashed out wildly at the stumbling corpse. The bone-saw
snagged the cloth of Leopold’s shift and ripped the material open, cutting into
the flesh underneath as well. Black, congealed blood oozed from the ragged hole
in the corpse’s side. The neurotic Dieter fancied that he could see a nub of
yellow bone and a rot-disfigured organ through the gash.
The creature continued to let out its heart-rending howl but
did not particularly react to the messy wound Dieter had dealt it. Still it came
on. It was almost on top of him now. He struck again. This time the saw dug into
the meat of Leopold’s bruise-blackened neck. The rusty instrument struck bone
with a clunk and snagged in the wound. Dieter released his grip, leaving half
the saw’s blade and its handle protruding from the corpse.
Dieter felt freezing fingers lock around his wrist in a
steely grip and cried out in pain and terror. Then somehow he found the courage
and to break free, his horrified fear lending him the strength he needed. He
slammed two bunched fists into Leopold’s chest and felt, as well as heard, a rib
snap. The zombie staggered backwards and Dieter ran to the sackcloth curtain.
The zombie swung round and its dead eyes fixed on Dieter’s
accomplice. Erich was hunched in a foetal ball next to the trestle table,
whimpering in the dark. He seemed to be paralysed by fear in the face of the
horrific appearance and unnatural movements of the thing that had once been
Leopold Hanser, rather than elated at Dieter’s success.
Dieter was so terrified himself that he was frozen into
inaction again. Part of him felt obligated to help his friend and yet he feared
what might happen to him should Leopold’s zombie actually manage to get its
gangrenous hands on him a second time.
The thing that had been Leopold lurched towards Erich. Its
jaws opened even wider and a baleful intent flared in its eyes, like some feral
predator with an insatiable hunger for raw meat.
And then the stiletto dagger was in Erich’s hand again.
Dieter had not seen him with it since the night of the second break-in they had
committed. Erich slashed and stabbed, getting to his feet and spinning his
gangling form lithely out of the way of the creature’s grabbing arms. The blade
opened dark wounds on the zombie’s torso and carved up the meat of its forearms.
Erich ducked the clutching hands one more time and twisted
free, able to get himself clear at last. As he barged past the poor undead
imitation of Leopold Hanser his hip bashed against the table bearing Dieter’s
notebooks and the lantern. The jolted lamp fell over, spilling the last of its
oil across the table and the covering of papers. Then it rolled off the edge of
the table and smashed on the floor, where the hem of the sackcloth curtain
trailed in the dirt of the floor.
The pages of Dieter’s precious notebooks first browned then
blackened as they charred and caught light. Tongues of fire licked up the rough
hemp fabric of the draped curtains, the hungry flames racing up towards the
rafters of the hayloft above.
For a split second Dieter went to rescue his notebooks and
then stopped himself, suddenly realising what he was doing and coming to his
senses. He would not be needing them again after this night.
Apparently disorientated, the zombie stumbled around the oak
table, which was also starting to burn. In no time at all it was surrounded by a
snarling wall of flame as the fire ate up the fabric of the curtain and the rest
of the fuel Dieter and Erich had unwittingly gathered in the warehouse.
Alembics cracked and exploded as the heat of the blaze
rapidly increased.
Dieter and Erich looked at each other without saying a word,
the fire reflected back at them in the dark mirrors of each other’s eyes. Then
they turned and bolted for the door.
In a mere moment they were out in the rain and cold of the
Erntezeit night and Dieter was locking the door behind them. He could still hear
the zombie’s bestial howling as it plunged about inside the burning building.
Erich led them away from the dockside, down a cobbled path
that ran alongside the watercourse of the Hafenback, back towards the town’s
water gate. In the shelter of another looming storehouse they stopped and looked
back to watch the destruction of the warehouse.
The crackle of the flames could be heard even from here,
their russet glow beginning to light the other buildings around the warehouse as
roiling flames broke free of the inferno now raging within. The cleansing flames
were rapidly and effectively destroying all the evidence of Dieter’s and Erich’s
crimes. Soon the only proof of what they had been up to for the last two months
would be the burnt out shell of the fire-ravaged warehouse itself.
Flames swirled into the night sky. Beyond the spark-filled
billows of tarry smoke, Dieter caught a glimpse of the buildings on the other
side of the river. Almost no lights twinkled on the far bank amidst the squalor
of the Westendamm slums. Only the highest, arrow-slit windows of the Fort
Blackfire barracks, close against the northern battlements of the town wall,
showed any signs of life. And those guard barracks were only manned by a
skeleton staff now.
Dieter wondered if the few guardsmen left on watch there
could see the fire raging in the docks through the rain. If the conflagration
spread to the surrounding buildings they certainly would. But the sudden
autumnal downpour, soaking him to the bone even now, might save them and finish
the job of purification for them yet.
Heavy rain poured down, sluicing the streets clean of the
accumulated detritus, streams of mud and filth washing down into the Bögen. The
downpour hissed as it fell on the burning warehouse but already Dieter could see
that it was dampening down the crackling flames.
Dieter stared transfixed, mesmerised by the fire, despite
Erich tugging at his sleeve, eager to be away. His heart was racing and he was
out of breath again. He felt as if he could sleep for a week, only he knew that
he would be plagued by fitful dreams, haunted by the image of Leopold’s
slack-jawed dead-eyed face.
“We were so busy wondering if we could we didn’t ever stop and consider if we
should,” Dieter muttered to himself, half under his breath. “I never stopped to
really consider the consequences of what I was doing.”
The warehouse continued to burn.
And the unrelenting rain continued to fall.
What is death? What does it mean to die? Where does that
immortal part of us go when we die? Or is this frail world of shadows all there
is?
As a priest of Morr yourself, Father, I need not tell you
that Morr is the most austere, exacting and unforgiving of deities. He offers
little in terms of blessings and boons to the everyman about his daily business
and yet all come before him in the end.
All dead souls belong to him and he hoards them greedily—I
should know. And he is a cruel tormentor of a god. You think that I speak
heresy? Maybe I do but I also know that it is the truth. He sends dreams to
confuse and confound and nightmares that wake a man screaming in the dark
watches of the night. He is the master of illusions, so much so that he has
succeeded in fooling an entire civilisation into believing that death is not the
end.
Well I have seen into the other world, into the freezing
abyss of what some fools call the afterlife.
I’ll tell you what death is. Death is the ultimate thief. It
is stronger than love and longer lasting than time.
You might wonder how one such as I can talk of love, how I
can consider myself capable of love. Yet I have loved and known I love. In all
my long life there has been no stronger feeling than that which I had for my
dear, darling sister Katarina. I would have given my life for hers: would that I
could have done. It was because of her that I turned my back on the dark sorcery
I had taken to my heart.
And she almost saved me from the fate that ultimately befell
me, which nonetheless has brought me to this confession now as I stare death in
the face at last.
I tell you, true death is not just the end of life, it is the end of
everything; I should know as I now stare into the hungry void.
Nothing awaits us beyond the threshold to Morr’s dark realm
other than an eternity of endless oblivion.
Dieter spent the last days of Erntezeit living in a state of permanent
anxiety, much as he had done in the days following his theft from Doktor
Drakus’ house all those j months before. Neither he nor Erich dared venture out
from their lodgings for fear of whom they might run in to.
But they felt as safe in Frau Keeler’s lodging house as they
would anywhere. They were the only ones still residing in the tenement now. Frau
Keeler had gone to stay with her sister in Ubersreik, saying that if they were
foolish enough to want to stay then they were welcome to it. Herr Liebervitz,
the weirdroot-addicted actor and playwright who rented the apartment on the
first floor, had also escaped Bögenhafen before the plague reached its height.
And no one had seen the lustful merchant prince or his paramour in months.