There was no going back to his misguided ways, Dieter knew,
he had already made that decision and besides, his books were burnt. But that
did not stop him feeling a pang of sorrow for all that had been lost on the
night of the fire, his innocence included.
Lying half in a puddle of ash-black water was a sodden
leather-bound notebook. Dieter bent down to pick it up and abruptly caught a
glimpse of his reflection in the rain-speckled surface of the puddle. His breath
caught in his throat and he gasped. The face looking back at him contorted into
a gargoyle grimace. Was this what he had become?
His black hair was long and lank, framing a pallid face in
which the bone structure could be clearly seen, the flesh gaunt and drawn. His
eyes were sunken in dark-ringed hollows but their gaze was as penetrating as
ever, as if they could look right through a man into his very soul.
But something inside Dieter made him pick up the book in his
gloved hands; perhaps that part of him that would always be the Dieter Heydrich
who had murdered his friend only to bring him back from the dead. He opened the
book, carefully turning the sodden pages, unable to tear his eyes from the
illustrations and diagrams he saw sketched there, their inky outlines smudged
and blurred.
For a moment, frozen images of that fateful night, when he’d
gone too far into the dark, flashed through his mind. He felt a tingle of power
again at the memory but at the same time the bitter taste of bile rose again in
the back of his throat as he saw what he had drawn in such macabre, surgically
precise detail.
With a thought he suppressed the dark power crackling within
him. He had put his dark obsession, those black and deep desires, behind him
now.
When he returned to Dunst Strasse Dieter was surprised to see
a ragged wretch of a boy, his pallid purple skin blotched with red rosettes of
sores, standing at the door to the lodging house, a letter in his hand. Dieter
took the letter from the boy with his own gloved hands. He had taken to wearing
gloves to guard against contamination, just in case.
He immediately knew something was wrong when he saw that his
name and address were not written in his sister’s hand but one much less used to
writing. He did not wait to read the letter in the privacy of his own chamber
but tore it open at once.
It was brief and to the point, and its few words chilled
Dieter to the bone.
Herr Heydrich
Your sister Katarina is sick. Come at once.
Yours in the faith of Morr,
Josef Wohlreich
Under a sky the colour of wet slate, Dieter paused beneath
the Highwayman’s Oak and looked across the fallow fields towards the village of
Hangenholz. After five frustrating days of travel, there being little coach
traffic on the roads in time of plague, he was home once more. Massing
thunderheads chased scudding billows of cloud across the sky, like wolves
running down sheep.
Hangenholz still looked just as it always had. Old Jack’s
gibbet cage creaked in the branches of the Highwayman’s Oak above him in the
bitter breeze. The woods that gave the dour village its name were dappled gold
and ruddy bronze, the charcoal marks of branches black against the parchment of
the sky.
Beyond the trees, the ruined tower atop the Raven’s Crag
escarpment continued its silent vigil of the village, but it seemed to Dieter
that it had been most negligent in that duty. Ragged-winged birds circled the
hill to which they had given their name, their croaking caws barely audible on
the breeze.
Turning off the road again to cross the denuded fields,
Dieter heard a dolorous sound that froze the blood in his veins. The lonely
tolling of the chapel bell drifted to him across the bleak landscape. It could
mean only one thing. The bell was rung when someone had died, marking their
passing from the mortal world to Morr’s twilight domain.
Dieter ran. He passed the scarecrow, barely noticing that it
was a turnip-headed imitation of a man again, and bounded over the footbridge
across the millstream into the village.
The black pox had come to Hangenholz.
As he ran, Dieter was dimly aware of red crosses painted on
the doors of other houses, as well as the smoky pyres burning in the streets
where the infected dead had been cremated on the order of Notary Krupster,
seeing as how Hangenholz was now without a priest of Morr to bless the bodies.
Dieter saw Josef Wohlreich standing in the porch of the
chapel, a cloth tied over his mouth, ringing the bell, and saw the tears
streaming down his face as he turned, hearing Dieter’s pounding steps. Ignoring
the fresh cross daubed on the door of his own home, and the risk of infection,
Dieter burst into the priest’s house, running up the stairs to his sister’s room
three at a time.
At the threshold of her room he paused for a moment that
seemed to stretch out into an eternity of heart-rending agony, seeing Katarina
lying there on her bed under the thin sheet already covering her like a shroud.
Her skin was the colour of purest driven snow, her hollow-eyed countenance
almost peaceful. He would never gaze into her limpid brown eyes again.
Wailing, Dieter threw himself on his knees at her bedside and
gathered her up in his arms, hugging her cold, slight form to him, sobbing into
the emaciated hollow of her neck.
Then he lay down on the cold sheets next to her, brushing the
hair out of her eyes and telling her that he would always take care of her.
And that was how Josef Wohlreich found him an hour later.
“She passed away this morning,” he said flatly.
“Was she alone?” Dieter asked.
“No, I was with her.”
“Then thank you for that,” Dieter said. “I could not have
bared it if she had gone on into Morr’s kingdom without someone who loved her at
her side.”
His tears were spent for now. He might be a doktor in the
making but there was no remedy that he could prescribe for his grief.
He did for her what he could; what he had done for their
father. He washed Katarina’s body with herbs and, after anointing it with holy
oils, dressed her in a plain cotton nightdress for a shroud. And he blessed her,
although he was unsure whether his blessings meant anything anymore.
As he kept his lonely vigil in the Chapel of Morr, with
Katarina’s body lying on the bier before the pillared gateway of the holy
shrine, a garland of white frostflowers in her hair, Dieter was at war with his
emotions and with his god.
When he looked upon Morr’s gateway in the chapel he felt
nothing but bitterness in his heart. There was a hole in his being where Morr
had once dwelt. At that moment he hated the god of death and dreams; he had
taken all of Dieter’s family from him, despite his father’s loyal service. What
had they done to deserve this? He knew what he was thinking was heresy but he
cared not.
He was wracked with grief and guilt. He had been too late to
save his devoted sister. He had been too late to even say goodbye. He remembered
her as he had last seen her, months ago at the end of Pflugzeit. He suddenly
remembered that her seventeenth birthday had been only two days away.
The one person in the whole world who had really known what
it had been like for him growing up in Hangenholz—the ostracised child of the
priest of Morr—because she had gone through it too, was gone. She had been the
only one who had shown him any love since his mother died when he was only five
years old. And, had he but known it, she had been the one who had kept his
darker, more morbid tendencies in check.
Had he brought this fate upon his sister, by replying to her
letter? Had the messenger who had carried his missive to Hangenholz already been
infected with the merciless disease? Was that what had happened? Why had this
insane disease taken her and not him, he who was so much more deserving of its
dark ministrations?
He had been unable to save his father because he lacked the
appropriate skills, he was convinced of it. But there was a way he could make
amends for bringing about his sister’s demise. He had the skills that could
bring her back! Even if his powers were born of darkness, how could they produce
something evil if they were put to the service of good, brought to bear with
only the best of intentions and honest love in his heart?
He would not let the cremation pyres have her, nor the cold,
unwelcoming earth of Morr’s field. He would resurrect her.
Beyond the corrupted signifiers of the plague, there was
hardly a mark on her. She had only died that morning, and she had died of
natural causes rather than in violent circumstances. She would return with her
wits intact, free of the madness of the undead Leopold Hanser had suffered, he
was sure of it. Leopold’s body had been spoiled by days of decomposition.
Katarina’s was not. She would be whole again.
At the final chime of midnight, Dieter carried his sister out
of the chapel and back into her own home. She was no burden: it was as if she
weighed nothing at all.
Laying her peaceful corpse out on the table in the dining
room of the house, Dieter stoked up the fire and began his preparations. Two
guttering candles had been lit in sconces around the room and Dieter had
inscribed dark sigils that seem to squirm before the eye in the polished surface
of the tabletop. His one surviving notebook lay open on the table at Katarina’s
feet, its pages crinkled but dry.
Reaching out over Katarina’s body, Dieter began to shape the
air above his sister’s corpse, making the same gestures of conjuration he had
seen Drakus make and that he himself had performed on that dreadful night almost
a month before. He began to chant, the words revealed before him within the
charred, water-damaged pages of the notebook.
The Brauzeit wind beat against the walls of the house,
rattling the windows in their frames and sending the flickering candlelight into
a frenzied dance. The air thickened. The temperature dropped.
Dieter continued to chant. He could hear chattering laughter
echoing as from another room in the house. The darkness drew in, shadows running
like quicksilver across the walls. What little light there was dimmed still
further.
An insistent buzzing, like the drone of flies inside his
skull, rose in Dieter’s ears. Leopold’s Hanser’s face, a lifeless, rotting mask,
loomed into view in his mind’s eye.
Katarina’s hair began to stream out around her head,
fluttering with frostflowers, teased by some unseen, esoteric wind.
In mid-flow Dieter stopped chanting and picking up the book,
in one fluid motion hurled it into the grate of the fireplace behind him with a
scream of pent-up grief and rage. He would not do this to his beloved sister. He
would not consign her to such a blasphemous fate. He could not do that to the
one person he had loved in this world since his mother’s death thirteen years
before.
The book burst into flame at once, the fire in the grate
rising to become a roaring inferno, so that Dieter had to shield his face from
its intense white heat. In only a minute the book was reduced to ash and glowing
embers that were sent swirling up the chimney on the rising thermals. The fire,
having raged so fiercely and so intensely, had burnt itself out.
Dieter collapsed on the floorboards of the pitch-black dining
room and sobbed himself into a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep.
On the day of her seventeenth birthday, Katarina Heydrich was
interred in the cold ground of Morr’s field, next to her mother and father.
There was no sign of Engels Lothair this time, so Dieter and
Josef saw to the burial themselves. Few dared come to the plague village.
“Lord Morr,” Dieter whispered under his breath as Josef cast
the first shovelfuls of earth over Katarina’s coffin, “although I am sure I am
beyond your forgiveness now, I pray nonetheless that you take your devoted child
Katarina into your kingdom and guard her soul until the crack of doomsday.”
The bitterness he had harboured in his heart for the god of
death had gone, to be replaced by penitent regret. The plans of gods were far
beyond the comprehension of mortal man.
The day after the funeral, Dieter walked alone through the
oak woods beyond the village where he and Katarina had played together as
children, seeking solace where the Chapel of Morr could offer none to his
troubled soul. It was here beneath the spreading oak canopy that the Heydrich
children had escaped their strange, strained lives for a while, escaping into
worlds of their own imaginings, of noble knights and sorcerous maidens, of
monsters and magic, even, ironically, acting out the parts of witch hunter and
witch.
He trod the woodland paths, his boots squelching through the
sodden leaf mulch covering the ground in a sludgy layer. He eventually emerged
at the foot of Raven’s Crag tor and the blasted tower that stood atop it, a mile
and a half from the village. It was said that there were dungeons beneath the
ruin but the roof had fallen in long ago and buried the entrance to them. It was
just a dark stone shell now.
To the west the river ran past the limits of the tillable
pastures into peaty marshland. To the north, beyond the trees in the shadow of
the Skaag Hills was the site of an ancient battle, fought between the primitive
tribes people who had also dotted the landscape hereabouts with their burial
mounds and pagan tumuli shrines.
It felt, to Dieter, as if a great weight had been lifted from
his shoulders. In fact he had not realised that he had been feeling on edge for
so long. For the first time in months he felt that he was free of the curse of
his unnatural “gift” the malign Doktor Drakus had awoken within him.
With the burning of the last of his books, months of study—the labour of the best part of a year of his life—had literally gone up in
smoke. And it had taken the death of his dear sister for Dieter to realise that
his practice of the dark arts should be put to rest with her.