Dieter existed at this time balanced on the blade-thin line
between sanity and insanity. He was teetering on the brink after all that had
been revealed to him in recent months, after all that he had done. At any moment
he could have gone over and become like Anselm Fleischer, his reason never to
return.
He would wake from half-remembered, death-haunted dreams, in
the darkest watches of the night, thinking that he could hear a hammering at the
door. More often than not it would turn out to be his dormer window come loose
of its latch and banging in the wind. He would eventually get back to sleep but
it would be unsettled and uncomfortable. He would wake the next day feeling even
more fatigued than he had before he had retired to bed the previous night. At
any moment he expected the watch, or worse still Brother-Captain Krieger and his
witch hunters, to turn up at his door. Or even Leopold’s scorched and shambling
corpse.
He found himself spending longs hours wondering what had
happened to the revenant Leopold. He was still half-expecting to hear that the
zombie had escaped the burning warehouse and been on a murderous rampage through
the town.
What was it that Dieter had unleashed that could reanimate a
rotting corpse? And why had it not died the moment his splitting headache caused
Dieter to break concentration? It had not behaved as the cat had, that much was
certain. It had possessed a malevolent cannibal instinct of its own.
Had the corpse been possessed by a daemon; was that how
necromancy worked? Had it been reanimated by another undead spirit? Was it
Leopold’s own spirit that had returned to the dead shell of his body? Or was it
that of a more powerful malevolent entity, a restless soul that had been trapped
on the earthly plane, perhaps because of some crime it had committed whilst it
was among the living? And if it was Leopold’s soul what insane torment must it
have been suffering to make the zombie behave in such a rabid way?
Was it the Dark Magic he had poured into the cadaver that
kept it so horrifically alive? Or had it simply been Dieter’s own subconscious
will that had driven the walking corpse? But then if that was the case, again he
had to ask, why had it kept going after Dieter’s blackout? And what had happened
to it? Had the zombie really perished in the fire, as Dieter sincerely hoped?
Could something that had been dead once already really be done away with again
that easily? Certainly wounds that both Dieter and Erich had dealt it had done
nothing to stop it. It had carried on as if it hadn’t even felt anything.
Would something so simple as a fire really be able to stop
something that had already been brought back from the dead once? The zombie had
still been moaning its pitiful cry when Dieter had locked the warehouse door
behind him. Surely only the intense heat found at the heart of a furnace would
be furious enough to destroy it. As the son of a priest of Morr, Dieter knew
that it took a great deal of heat to reduce a body to ash.
Holy scriptures always taught that fire could cleanse a place
of evil. But rather contradictorily, he had always thought, images of Morr’s
kingdom sometimes showed the realm of the damned consumed by fire. So which was
it? Was fire a servant of good or evil? Or was it simply like death, the great
leveller? It had no master, took no sides, and treated all alike.
And such thoughts did not cease when Dieter slept either. His
dreams were filled with images of shambling corpses, expelled from the foetid
soil of their graves. Every night the nightmarish host grew in number but always
it was led by the fire-burnt corpse of Leopold Hanser. He was now almost
unrecognisable as the beneficent, blond-haired would-be physician. Each night
the decomposing state of his body worsened so that Dieter could see exposed
pulsating organs between charred ribs and loops of entrails uncoiling from the
rent in his midriff.
It got to the point where Dieter was almost afraid to sleep.
He wasn’t sleeping for as long as he had used to and what little sleep he did
manage did not refresh him as it was broken by the horrific dreams and moments
of sudden, fretting wakefulness.
Brauzeit arrived after the equinox of Mittherbst, grey and
grim, in a bluster of autumnal gales. Howling squalls tore the colour-changed
leaves from the trees, sent slates flying from rooftops, and drenched the town
on an almost daily basis with rain.
In the surrounding villages people should have been brewing
cider and beer, were it not for the fact that the farming hamlets were all but
deserted by the living. The wind fallen apples had been left to rot in the
yellowing grass of the cider orchards, and the hops festered blackly on the
stalk in the unharvested fields.
The days were shortening as the year began to fade and run
into the dark, dead months of winter. Dusk came earlier each day and the sun
ever more reluctant to rise the next morning over the plague-ravaged market
town.
But Dieter was just as desperate to find out what had
happened in the wake of the fire at the warehouse. And it was this ravenous
desire that eventually drove him to venture out once again, into the world, in
search of information. He had to find out more.
Donning his cloak, he set out surreptitiously into the foggy
streets travelling further than the vitaller’s in Eisen Bahn on this occasion.
The Brauzeit mists muffled his footsteps against the cobbles, turning the
facades of the vacant cross-daubed buildings into ghosts of their former selves.
He stopped in at the Cutpurse’s Hands which he had long ago
learnt was a hotbed for all the gossip circulating the town. The salubrious
tavern was still open for business and appeared to be doing a good trade as
well. But then most of its clientele looked half-dead already, or like the sort
of characters who would do a deal with anyone, including a daemon, if it got
them what they wanted, even protecting them from all a pox-plague might have to
offer. It was probably all the weirdroot that was smoked there and the
quantities of alcohol that were consumed that had had something to do with the
continued survival of the drinking den’s clientele.
It was not somewhere he had ever dared go without Erich
before. But all that had changed now. Sitting quietly in a corner stall, in the
fog of stale smoke and with a flagon of ale in front of him, Dieter listened.
Some people had heard that there had been a fire on the Ostendamm but it did not
sound like it had spread to any of the other run-down buildings in that part of
the town. None present in the Cutpurse’s Hands knew what had started it. This
didn’t stop them from speculating, however.
Their suggestions ranged from the mundane, such as that the
cause of the fire had been a lightning strike on the warehouse during the storm,
to the wildly fanciful, that the building was being used by a profane cult who
were trying to summon their daemonic patron to save them from the plague and
instead incurred the blasphemous entity’s wrath which punished them with fire.
But none of their wild speculations were as bizarre or as
accurate as the terrifying truth that Dieter was now finding hard to comprehend
had really happened.
And, as was to be expected, there was more talk of the
plague. Some said that it had been spread by invisible daemons present in the
air all around them. Others said it was down to restless undead spirits who had
died without receiving a holy blessing. Some even put forward the ludicrous idea
that rat fleas spread it. Certain doom-mongers still declared that it was a
judgement upon the town just as Sigmar’s Hammer had been for Mordheim three
hundred years earlier.
The general consensus was that the black pox was itself now
dying as the year began to turn, the sickness having thrived in the foetid heat
of summer was unable to survive in the cold of approaching winter. Others of a
more religious persuasion were of course saying that the evildoers had been
punished and Sigmar was showing His mercy. There was even talk of some of the
town’s inhabitants returning to Bögenhafen before the year’s end.
By the time he eventually finished his drink, Dieter decided
he had heard enough and, daring not to stay any longer, returned to his home,
such as it was.
That night he dreamt of home, but it was changed beyond
recognition.
Beneath a lacerated sky bleeding wisps of cirrus cloud
stained crimson by the setting sun, lay the ruined village of Hangenholz. Dieter
stood in the shadow of the Highwayman’s Oak, Old Jack’s gibbet cage creaking
above him in the bitter breeze, looking across a scene of utter devastation.
The fields of barley had been reduced to smoking stubble. The
trees beyond the village were denuded as if the grip of winter were on the land,
their branches twisted like claws. The thatched roofs of people’s homes were
grey and sagging with rot. Smoke also rose from the fire-cracked stone walls of
the watermill, its huge wheel seized and broken.
The bridge still stood, as did the sundered tower of Raven’s
Crag, which watched over the village darkly. The steeple of the Chapel of Morr
was also intact, visible above the gables of the decaying village. The funereal
bell tolled mournfully with slow death-knells, a dead sound carried on the
keening wind that blew the smoke in drifts across the burned fields.
Dieter veered off the stony trackway that curved round to the
east into Hangenholz, moving as if drifting over the stubble-burnt fields
himself. The scarecrow was still there, only now it was Leopold’s crucified
corpse. As he neared it, his murdered friend’s eyes snapped open and the zombie
lashed out at him with the bloody gnawed stumps of its fingers, its greening
face twisted in a hissing bestial snarl.
Then he was past the feral, undead thing and floating across
the footbridge over the millstream. He crossed the village square between the
lengthening shadows, where a cremated thing fused to the charcoal stump of a
stake chattered and prattled blasphemous obscenities to itself, and approached
the door of the priest’s house; his former home.
He glided through the open door and up the stairs. Another
door creaked open ahead of him. He could see the bottom of a bed beyond the
door. Someone was lying there, the outline of legs visible under the taut sheet,
an emaciated arm resting on top of it. He got the impression that there was
someone—or something—else waiting for him behind the door. Dieter slowly
entered the room and saw who lay in the bed…
Dieter woke with a start and sat bolt upright in his bed,
cold sweat beading his forehead.
Of all the horrors that he had seen since arriving in
Bögenhafen the image of the body lying in the bed had been the worst by far,
even though it had not been the most bloodthirsty or gruesome. He tried to cast
the image of the death-bed from his mind, praying to Morr that it had not been a
prophetic vision of the future sent by the deity of dreams to torment him for
having turned his back on his god.
But Morr did not send his dreams without reason. Dieter’s
dream of Hangenholz told him that there was still something wrong with the
world, something unnatural that had no right being there. Something that
sickened nature and had to be destroyed.
Or was it something that was still fundamentally wrong with
Dieter? He certainly suspected that it was something of his making, something
that he was now inextricably linked with.
It was no good, just because no one else had encountered
Leopold’s zombie—at least no one that had lived to tell the tale—Dieter had
to know for himself what had become of the walking corpse. He had no choice but
to return to the scene of his most blasphemous and despicable crime.
He went back the next day on Bezahltag the seventh of
Brauzeit, with the autumnal sun a pale disc in the cold white sky. He chose the
middle of the day, when the sun was as high in the firmament as it would ever be
at this time of the year.
Secreted beneath his black cloak was Erich’s dagger, just in
case. He had not told his roommate where he was going; it would only have caused
the unstable Erich to behave even more strangely than was now the norm.
They had not exchanged many words since the night of the
fire. Dieter had been unsettled to discover that Erich had begun to imitate
Dieter in that he had started dissecting vermin. He had also developed a heavy
head cold. At least Dieter kept telling himself that it was only a cold.
Following the events of the twenty-seventh of Erntezeit, Dieter would have been
half-afraid that Erich himself might report them both to the witch hunters, had
it not been for the older youth’s healthy distrust of authority, which had not
left him.
Through force of habit now, more than anything else, Dieter
took a convoluted route through the town, avoiding the main thoroughfares of the
Hafenstrasse and Bergstrasse where possible, even though the streets of
Bögenhafen were still deathly quiet.
He approached the rain-slicked ruins of the warehouse along
the bank of the Hafenback. There was a hole between the other buildings of the
Ostendamm where the warehouse should have been. No one was around and a light,
yet insistent, drizzle had begun to fall. Dieter pulled his cloak tighter about
him, picking his way through the tangle of fire-broken beams and boards, ever on
the lookout for a grasping, blistered hand or the sudden appearance of a howling
rot-ruined face. The walls of the warehouse still stood to a height of two spans
but the whole of the hayloft and the roof had been brought down by the raging
conflagration that had consumed the building before the torrential rain put it
out.
Much of Dieter’s makeshift laboratory had been buried. It
would be impossible for him to shift the wreckage to see if Leopold’s body was
underneath, but he was reassured to think that it would have been almost
impossible for the zombie to have escaped from the burning building before
perishing in the flames. There was no evidence left of his crime, he was pleased
to admit at last. Then he felt guilty for feeling relief in the face of the
murder of his friend. Perhaps part of him wanted to be found out and made to pay
for what he had done.