In panic Dieter looked around him past his assailants to see
if there was anyone around who could help him.
It was late afternoon; surely there was someone still about
their daily business who could see what was going on!
But there was no one else.
Dieter’s eyes focused on the crosses daubed on the doors of
the deserted street again and realised that the black pox had not left anyone
alive here to witness the end of his life.
He turned back to face Erich and the undead Leopold again,
reasoning that he had a greater chance of getting past them than the hulking
body snatchers. But then it was too late and they were on him, all of them,
rough hands grabbing at his body, their reeking charnel-stink making him gag.
Dieter screwed up his eyes, lest he have to look into the
soulless pits of the corpses’ eye-sockets. He retaliated with his own hands,
recoiling in revulsion as his fingers sank into clay-like flesh.
The shambling undead continued to press in on him, their
fists abusing his body as much as their very appearance and death-reek assaulted
his overwrought sensibilities, his mind strained to breaking point.
Dieter felt a sharp crack as something blunt connected with
the back of his skull and he mercifully blacked out, his consciousness swallowed
in black oblivion.
Awareness returned in a blaze of cranial agony. His body
ached from the pummelling he had received at the clubbed fists of the zombies.
Dieter opened bleary eyes, expecting to see the vaulted
ceiling of Doktor Drakus’ laboratory vault. Instead he found himself looking at
a lower curved ceiling of damp dark stone, adorned with strings of mould and
patterned with a faintly luminescent fungus. He could see the glistening nubs of
tiny limestone stalactites coming into gloomy focus above him.
He tried to move and immediately felt a sharp pain across his
shoulder blades and resistance against his legs. Rope rubbed against his wrists
and when he tried to move his feet again he realised that his ankles had also
been bound. There was a cold ridge of stone pressing against his spine. He could
move his head, although he almost dared not, afraid of what he might see.
However his inherent curiosity and sheer desperation won out in the end.
Dieter looked to his left. He was in an underground chamber
of some kind, the murk illuminated by the luminescent growth speckling the walls
and ceiling, and it didn’t take him long to work out what kind. A series of
horizontal alcoves, each the length of a man and only a couple of feet in
height, were recessed into the wall on the far side of the chamber. In each of
these shadowy niches lay the skeletal remains of a human being. The rotten
remnants of shrouds still clung to the bones of some of these revenants. All had
been laid out with their bony hands clasped across the hollow cages of their
ribs. Dusty spider webs festooned the calcified remains.
He was in a subterranean crypt. He guessed that it was
somewhere within the bounds of the town cemetery. It could even have been
underneath the Chapel of Morr itself. The small size of such mortuary temples
often belied a more extensive complex of morgues, embalming rooms and burial
chambers buried under the ground.
Dieter glanced to his right and saw the rectangular shape of
a stone sarcophagus between him and the opposite wall. He guessed that he was
tied to one like it. Craning his head back he could see the top of an inverted
archway and the suggestion of statues either side of it in the darkness. He also
thought he could see another sarcophagus tomb behind him.
There was a shuffling sound like the hem of a robe dragging
over flagstones. Dieter looked back past his feet, pushing his chin down on his
chest so that he could see what lay beyond the end of the tomb to which he had
been lashed.
Straining his eyes to peer through the gloom he began to see
shapes resolving there too; human figures. One of these solid shadows was moving
towards him. Dieter’s heart thumped wildly in his chest. Was this mausoleum
destined to become his final resting place too?
There was a sudden flare of light and a lantern glowed into
life.
“So, you are awake,” a voice slithered.
The lantern swayed closer and Dieter looked into a face
ruined by disease. The shrivelled skin was a mess of boils and weeping pustules,
crusted with foul discharge. A tumourous growth covered most of the right eye.
Dieter saw again the gaping sore at the side of the Corpse Taker’s mouth, the
nose stripped of flesh by the pox.
Dieter gagged at the necromancer’s horrific appearance as
much as at the accompanying stench of plague-rot that hung about him like his
glyph-adorned robe. Dieter’s head felt heavy and groggy as if he had
overindulged at the Cutpurse’s Hands the night before.
“Doktor Drakus!” he gasped, the plague-scarred creature
peering over him with cataract-clouded eyes.
“That name will suffice I suppose,” the necromancer said, his
voice a sibilant whisper. “It is certainly less conspicuous than that of Corpse
Taker.”
Dieter saw now that it was not Drakus who was holding the
lantern so as to inspect his prisoner’s body. The necromancer’s manservant stood
silently at his shoulder, his cadaverous face white as polished marble in the
flickering glow of the light he held.
“W-What do you want with me?” Dieter stammered, overwhelmed
by the horror of the situation he now found himself in. He had to know why he
had been brought to this place; he had to know why he was going to die.
“Can’t you guess?” the necromancer sneered and Dieter saw the
gaping sore at the corner of his mouth split the evil smile even further across
his cheek to a pox-eaten ear. “Your body is ripe for the taking. I want
everything: your mind, body and soul.”
Dieter swallowed hard and tasted bitter bile in the back of
his mouth. Was this how it had been for Anselm Fleischer? Was this what had
driven the poor bastard mad?
“Why now? Why this night?” Dieter pressed.
“Because it is auspicious.”
The Corpse Taker pointed with a scabbed claw at what Dieter
now saw was a body hanging from the back wall of the crypt.
The body of Father Hulbert, Bögenhafen’s own minister of
Morr, had been suspended from manacles secured to iron fastenings hammered into
the ceiling. Hulbert’s feet swung a few inches off the ground, just above the
pool of the dead priest’s intestines unravelled on the floor beneath him.
Dieter felt his gorge rise again.
“C-can I see?” came a familiar voice from the corner of the
crypt. Dieter was reminded of the last time he had heard that voice, when Erich
Karlsen had betrayed him to the Corpse Taker.
The gangly student moved into the pool of queasy light, his
madly staring eyes reflecting back the flickering lantern in the dark mirror of
his pupils.
Dieter felt cold hatred knot his stomach and subconsciously
tensed his muscles, straining against his bonds once again.
“I think we are ready to begin,” Drakus told his two
accomplices.
“Begin what?” Dieter demanded.
Drakus fixed Dieter with his cataract stare, which was none the less piercing
in spite of the clouded lenses. “This will hurt you more than it will hurt me,”
the necromancer hissed.
Panic gripped the physician’s apprentice. Dieter pulled on
the ropes again, feeling them chafe the skin at his wrists. He had to free
himself. He could feel the cords snagging on the rough edges of the sarcophagus.
Perhaps he could break them that way. He pulled again. And again. And again.
Drakus and his manservant began to chant, just as they had
done beneath the house in Apothekar Allee. Only now they were joined by another
in the enactment of their iniquitous rite: Erich Karlsen.
The eerie sound echoed from the algae-stained walls, filling
the mausoleum with spine-chilling, supernatural harmonics. It sounded as if
ghostly voices were joining in the summoning of the winds of death to this
place. And as always there were the half-heard noises of rustling wing cases and
scuttling legs.
The words had a familiar flavour for Dieter now. In response
to their resonances, images erupted unbidden from the heart of darkness he had
buried deep within himself.
He saw all manner of grotesque and grisly manifestations of
death. Old Gelda, her tongue cut out, blood dribbling from her mouth, trying to
scream as the heavily hooded Kreuzfahrer pushed the burning brand into the
headman’s hand. Festering necrotic tissue. Erich’s cat coming to spitting life
in the eerie light of the twin moons. Animal skulls picked clean by carrion
feeders and bleached yellow by the wind and sun. The last precious bubbles of
oxygen escaping from the lungs of a drowning man. Dieter’s own hands closing
around Leopold Hanser’s scrawny neck.
He heard the hollow boom of crypt doors slamming shut. The creaking of
wind-blown gallows. The tap of bare bone against a headstone. A mother wailing
for her stillborn child. Pigs screaming as they met the slaughterman. The
death-knell proclaiming Katarina’s death.
He could smell blood, mould, the stink of burning fat. Tasted
rancid maggoty meat, the earthy flavour of grave-dirt, the tang of blood, the
bitter aftertaste of vomit. Felt the stygian blackness reach for him, enclose
him, smother him.
Dieter looked past the images appearing within his mind’s
eye, as if in their own violent death-throes, at the necromancer standing over
him. A shimmering black light surrounded Drakus like an aura of coruscating
darkness. It suffused the air above the sarcophagus and coiled itself into
disturbing silhouettes as the sorcerer’s pockmarked hands danced over Dieter’s
body.
The air was filled with an insistent buzzing, like the
scraping of a saw on the inside of his skull. Liquid darkness ran like blood
across the walls.
The dark magic coalescing within the chamber was a tangible
presence to Dieter. He could feel its stinging icy tentacles coiling around his
arms, his legs, his torso, and even forcing their way inside him. An agonising,
brain-splitting pressure was building behind his eyes. It was the same terrible
pressure he had felt when he had witnessed Drakus’ evil awakening rite, as
thunderous and oppressive as a building storm front. Lightning crackled across
the surface of Dieter’s brain.
Drakus reached down and steepled the bony fingers of his
right hand onto his prisoner’s sweat-slick forehead. Dieter let out a cry of
surprise and pain. There was someone else inside his mind. At first the alien
consciousness probed and poked at the surface of his mind, as a physician might
investigate an open wound. But an instant later the necromancer pushed his
scalpel-sharp will inside Dieter’s skull and took possession of his mind.
Pain such as the young man had never known before flared
through every fibre of his being. He arched his back in convulsing agony, the
muscles in his body going into spasm. But somehow Dieter knew that this
torturous pain was what came as a consequence of great power, and part of him
thrilled at that dark realisation.
He had never felt power like it. It was at least ten times
what he had felt when he succeeded in raising Leopold Hanser from the dead.
Suddenly he was experiencing another existence in another
place, at another time, as well as enduring what was happening to him here and
now in the sepulchral darkness of the mausoleum.
Through Drakus’ haunted memories, with the necromancer’s own
eyes, Dieter saw how, with perfect irony, a man driven to prolong his own life
by whatever means necessary had contracted the plague. He saw the necromancer
fleeing from an angry pitchfork-waving mob. He watched—an omniscient observer—as the sorcerer came to Bögenhafen under the pall of night, how he assumed the
identity of Doktor Drakus and carried out his foul research so that he might
find a way to rid himself of the rapacious, flesh-wasting disease.
Dieter still wondered how he himself had avoided succumbing
to the vile black pox himself. Was it because he had been marked by Morr, or had
some other malevolent force marked him out as its own?
Amidst the turmoil raging like a cyclone inside his mind,
realisation dawned. It was Drakus who had ultimately brought the curse of the
plague upon Bögenhafen, the vermin infesting his laboratory-vault carrying the
black pox to the wider world beyond the house in Apothekar Allee.
As he continued to share Drakus’ awareness, Dieter saw the
necromancer performing the very same ritual he was attempting now, only this
time with Anselm Fleischer instead of himself. He saw the misguided fool’s
psyche collapse under the pressure, his mind not strong enough to contain
Drakus’ undying spirit. He saw the ritual fail. It had cost the necromancer
almost as dearly as the sanity-robbed Anselm, bringing Drakus to the verge of
death. It had taken him months to recover.
Dieter felt that he himself could slip into inescapable
insanity at any moment. It had become a true battle of the wills now as, with
the sweat pouring off him, Dieter physically strained to force the necromancer
out of his mind.
Now Dieter was back in Doktor Drakus’ cellar, only he was
not watching the scene through his own omniscient eyes but through those of the
necromancer. He saw his own unconscious form lying on the floor of the crypt. He
saw a petrified Erich prostrate himself before the Corpse Taker, begging his
mercy, promising to do anything if the necromancer would only spare his life. He
heard the necromancer and the apprentice make their unholy bargain—Erich’s
life in return for Dieter’s soul—and witnessed them seal the pact with Erich’s
blood.
Erich had been Drakus’ pawn ever since, manipulating Dieter
in the cruellest way imaginable. Dieter was able to fill in the rest himself:
Erich carrying him back to their lodgings in Dunst Strasse, observing his
progress after the change Drakus had forced in him, encouraging him to develop
his necromantic abilities and strengthen his mind, Dieter’s friend becoming his
betrayer, unknown to the impressionable country boy, acting as Drakus’ spy,
judging when Dieter had honed his talents enough and become a suitable vessel
into which Drakus might transfer his malevolent soul.