Necromancer (19 page)

Dieter reached Frau Keeler’s lodging house as the temple
bells were chiming ten. In the darkness his foot brushed against something
furred and damp. Dieter paused and took a step back.

The eerie luminescence of the twin moons illuminated even the
gloom of Dunst Strasse, the monotone light bleeding all colour from the object,
but it was unmistakable nonetheless.

Erich’s cat lay dead in the road. Its lank body was distended
unnaturally. Sticky black blood matted its spiked ginger fur where a cartwheel
had crushed its body.

Seeing such an incongruous sight distracted Dieter for a
moment from his own preoccupations and concerns. Erich would be distraught. For
some inexplicable reason he doted on the mangy stray.

Dieter bent down and gathered up the animal’s body in his
cloak. The rank acrid smell of the dead cat assaulted his nostrils more sharply
than the smell of burning pig-fat had in the square.

Dieter entered the quiet house and ascended the stairs to the
attic room. The garret was in darkness other than for the penetrating glow of
the Geheimnisnacht moons that permeated everywhere. The door to Erich’s room was
closed. An empty wine bottle and glass stood on the table in the central living
space of the apartment.

Erich had not joined Dieter to watch the execution of the
Corpse Taker for he knew as well as Dieter that the real villain was still at
large, and probably still somewhere within the town. He had become even more of
a recluse than Dieter, spending most of his time locked away inside his room,
only venturing out to rummage for scraps and eat the leftovers of Dieter’s
meals. When he did go out, Dieter knew that he drank even harder than he had
when they had first met.

Dieter’s first thought was to take the dead cat to Erich and
let him know the fate of his pet.

But then another thought slithered in to his mind, from out
of the darkness in which his mind was locked.

Dieter turned instead towards his own door, the cat’s corpse
still held in the folds of his cloak. He entered his room, where the stub of a
candle still flickered fitfully, and laid the cat carefully down on his
workbench, clearing a space amidst all the papers and dissection instruments.

He removed his cloak and sat down in the chair at the bench,
his eyes never once moving from the mangled remains of the cat. The indistinct
darkness that lingered at the corners of the room thickened, the shadows
pressing in more closely towards him. Despite what he was intending to do,
Dieter’s pulse remained steady, and his breathing remained calm.

Since the night in Apothekar Allee he had not been able to
shake the feeling that something within him had changed. It was as if something
had been woken within him, a strange power that now longed to be unleashed.

The aftermath of what he had witnessed that night surrounded
him now, recorded in notebooks and on disorganised scraps of paper; even in the
dissections he had continued with under the guidance of
Leichemann’s Anatomy.
But he tried to ignore all that now, pushing it to one side.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on clearing his mind.
There he found images of Anselm Fleischer’s corpse burning at the stake with the
other heretics, the pox-ridden face of Doktor Drakus that haunted his dreams,
and memories of all that had changed in his life since he had come to
Bögenhafen.

And steadily the images faded until his mind was a dark and
empty void. There, at the heart of the darkness, something writhed and uncoiled,
something even blacker and darker still. An unknown, untold power. A previously
unrealised ability. An affinity for the oblivion of death and all the dead
places of the world.

Other memories returned, unfolding in his mind. He felt a
rush of excitement but tempered it with anxious anticipation. He didn’t want to
lose hold of what was awakening inside him. He let it come naturally. By not
concentrating on trying to recall the words and gestures Doktor Drakus had used
as he had called on the powers that dwelt beyond the veil of mortality, those
remembrances came all the more readily. Images from the pages of the books he
had stolen from the doktor’s library took on three-dimensional form in his
mind’s eye.

An anatomical rendering of a human skull. The arteries and
veins extruded from a man’s arm. A frog dissection, the amphibian’s organs
pinned out on the board beside it.

Subconsciously Dieter stretched out his flattened palms,
fingers splayed, over the prone body of the cat and began to mimic the gestures
Drakus had made, shaping the air with his hands. He heard the words of Drakus’
invocation. His lips moved in imitation of the sounds, and then he was saying
them, his voice low and barely audible, not understanding their meaning but
fully understanding their purpose.

And now he could hear another sound. An insect sound; an
insistent susurration. Voices whispering in another room. He could feel the
skeletal fingers of a breeze ruffling his unkempt, uncut hair. He kept his eyes
closed, in case by opening them he might somehow dispel the power he was now
invoking. He breathed deeply and inhaled a curious scent, borne on the unseen
wind. The smell of leaf-mulch, of mould, of damp earth. Of the grave.

The liquefying candle fizzled and blew out, as the blast of
another esoteric squall gusted through the shadow-clad room. The wind felt cold.
Dieter was sweating, but he knew that it was more than simply the warmth of the
night that was producing such a physiological response. In fact there was a
distinct chill in the air. There were supernatural forces at work in this place
now.

Dieter could feel the change within him even more strongly
now, and he welcomed it. He had never felt like this before in his life as the
painfully shy, insecure, downtrodden and victimised underdog. So charged, so
energised, so in control. So powerful.

And now he did open his eyes. A small part of him was
surprised that the room was not in total darkness. A pallid luminescence bathed
the workbench and the broken body of the cat in its wan grey light. It seemed to
Dieter that the source of this strange light was not merely the moons, visible
clearly now through the dormer window. It seemed to suffuse the very air around
him and shimmer from his hands. The strange light created sinister flickering
shadows so that he did not at first register the spasm of movement on the desk
beneath his outstretched hands. But he heard the spitting hiss quite clearly and
knew immediately what it was.

In a flurry of scratching claws and bared, glistening teeth,
the cat returned to hissing life. The spitting stray pushed itself up on its
front legs and turned narrowed, burning red eyes on Dieter. He felt a thrill of
fearful excitement sizzle through him. But at the same time he dared not lose
concentration; he kept his mind focused.

The cat’s back legs kicked, unsheathed claws scratching
splinters from the surface of the bench. Its tail lashed angrily. It was unable
to stand. Dieter might have managed to return the creature to life but he had
not repaired its body first. The cat’s back was still broken, its midriff still
a mess of mashed flesh and pulped internal entrails.

The cat began to yowl, a hollow, menacing sound, rising from
within its shattered ribcage to become a wailing scream. Its ears lay flat
against its head, its matted bloody fur standing on end.

What he was witnessing before him defied belief. A creature
that had been properly dead had been brought back to life. Admittedly it was a
demented, pain-wracked, hate-filled form of life, but it was life nonetheless.
And Dieter was the one who had brought it about. He knew that the blasphemous
truth was that it was his will alone that was keeping the cat alive.

At the edges of his mind he saw flashes of mortality made
flesh. The maggot-eaten carcass of a magpie. The deathcap fungus grown bulbous
on the stump of a dead elm. Kittens drowned in a millpond. Old Gelda tied to the
fence post, bundles of sticks piled at her feet.

The door to his room banged open. Dieter’s concentration was
broken. The cat gave one last fading yowl as its lungs deflated and slumped back
down onto the tabletop.

Dieter sat back in his chair, only then realising how tense
his body had been as he channelled the eldritch powers that had brought a
semblance of life where there should have been none. Every muscle ached. He was
sweating even more heavily now. His skin felt cold and clammy and he was left
with a nauseous headache.

He slowly turned his head and saw Erich standing in the
doorway, open-mouthed shock painted on the horrified canvas of his face. For a
moment neither of them said anything. Dieter was too busy panting for breath.
Erich was simply too appalled to speak.

Dieter’s roommate did not need to explain what he was doing
there. If anyone needed to explain anything it was Dieter. But nonetheless it
was Erich, still standing at the threshold to Dieter’s room, not daring to cross
it, who first spoke.

“I-I heard the cat. It was howling. I-I wondered what had
happened to it.”

Dieter looked back at the body on his desk. The front of the
ginger stray hung limply over the edge of the table.

“Well, now you know,” he said.

Erich looked from Dieter to the cat and back again, the same
appalled expression of horror etched on his features. “H-How?” was all he could
manage.

“I don’t rightly know…” Dieter admitted, mystified by the
experience himself. He could feel the former power he had enjoyed ebbing from
him now, leaving behind it feelings of exhaustion, confusion and emptiness.

Other thoughts began to fill the gaping hole, such as how
Erich would be feeling about the death of his cat, what he now thought of the
naive country boy and whether he would give Dieter up to the witch hunters.

And then Erich made a declaration that Dieter certainly
hadn’t been expecting.

“Then you must find out how.”

“What?”

“It is clear you have a talent, a gift. You cannot waste it.
You should use it.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?” Now it was Dieter who was
the one who sounded appalled.

“J-Just think about it.” The horrified expression was fast
becoming a rictus of manic excitement. A mad gleam had entered Erich’s eyes.
“Ever since I met you, you have been driven by a passion, an all-consuming
desire to help people, to heal them, to save them from the merciless hand of
fate. And now you have developed a gift that could help you accomplish your
dream. Just think, with such a talent you could help the ailing better than
anybody else. You could conquer death itself. Nobody would have to suffer the
loss you did, as a child, when your mother died.”

Erich’s voice was thick with the same syrupy tone he had used
the night he had persuaded Dieter to lead him to the deathly house in Apothekar
Allee.

“You must practise your talents, develop them. I could help
you. I could help you prepare your experiments; bring you what you needed,
prepare your compounds. Whatever you need.”

Dieter riled at the thought that he should take what he had
accomplished this night any further. But there was something about Erich’s
suggestion that excited him. There was something deep inside him, close to the
very core of his being, that revelled in the suggestion.

For a moment Dieter sensed a tingling aftershock of the power
he had felt as he weaved his hands in the air above the dead cat, like a puppet
master working a marionette, only without the aid of strings.

He did not hear the heresy against Morr present in Erich’s
words, that he could conquer death. He only heard that he would have the power
to reverse the fatal effects of death.

“You have a duty to all those whose lives you will save to do
this. You have been given great power—the gods Know why—and with such power
comes an even greater responsibility.”

Ambivalent emotions vied for dominance within Dieter. His
overwrought mind raced with it all. One moment he wanted to shout and laugh in
exhilaration, the next he was ready to burst into tears. But the one
overwhelming feeling he had, which steadily quelled all the other emotions, was
the heady feeling of intoxication. He felt drunk with power.

Then another, inevitable thought pushed its way to the
surface of the fathomless black pool that was his mind.

“I wonder. I wonder,” he said breathlessly, almost thinking
aloud.

Erich looked at him transfixed, waiting on his every word.
The darkness writhed and spun around him. Shadows cast by the glowing moons
became clawing hands pulling themselves across the wall towards the manic
apprentice standing in the doorway.

“If I can bring a cat back to life, I wonder if I could do
the same with something larger. What if…” a crazed giggle suddenly escaped his
lips. “What if I could do what Drakus was obviously attempting to do?” He was
shaking. “What if I could bring a human being back from the dead?”

Silence hung in the cloying air between them like a leaden
pendulum. Dieter fancied he could detect the distant smell of desert-dry spices
and carrion.

“But where would I begin? Where could I get a body from?”

Erich looked at him darkly and the chill in the room
intensified still further.

“I’m sure something could be arranged,” he said.

* * *

It was Erich who found the warehouse and Albrecht Heydrich’s
money that paid the rent. The building stood towards the western end of the
Ostendamm, a dilapidated dockside barn that smelt of mouldy hops and rancid
beer. It had not been used for some time.

The warehouse had an overweight landlord who smell little
better. Dieter had learned months ago that Erich was the kind of person who had
mutual acquaintances who knew such people. The man was too drunk most of the
time to even know what day it was so he cared even less who took on the lease
for the property. He certainly wasn’t going to bother checking the credentials
of those he was renting it to, or follow up on what they were doing there.