HS04 - Unholy Awakening (31 page)

We stepped inside.

Everything was more or less the same, though it looked very different in the day light. The body was gone, of course. They had wrapped it up in the bed-sheets before they carried it off. The rest of the bedding had been burnt or thrown away, presumably. The wooden floor was old and worn, the planks hewn from knotted pine. There was a large dark stain close beneath the window, where Lavedrine and I had found the body. There was more blood on the wall and a cluster of spots on the low ceiling, but those stains did not seem so stark as they had seemed that night.

I took a deep breath. The air was fresher, too. The stench of decomposition had almost dispersed. The air inside the building was not much different from that outside in the yard. It was sweet, and only slightly tainted, a trifle more powerful than the smells of the river and the farmland which stretched away in three directions, together with the blood of years spilled in the nearby slaughter-house. The essence of living things lingers longer than any other smell.

I looked more carefully at the furniture.

Two kitchen chairs with wicker seats, a square table, a single chest of drawers. Old and scuffed, not particularly well cared for. Not worth caring for, perhaps, but practical and utilitarian. A little labour with a bucket, mop and dusters would make the place live able, and even comfortable in a sober sort of way. I was disconcerted to discover that the little house was pleasant, even homely. It was in the country, a short walk from a river. I could hear the singing of birds. Chopped logs had been stacked in the fire place. A kettle was resting on a low ledge of the hob, waiting only to be filled and put on the fire. The table and chairs were coated with a film of dust, but that could easily be swept away. And above the table – the only decorative thing in the room – was a small watercolour picture in a frame.

Helena was staring hard at it, her chin cradled in her fist.

‘What are you peering at?’ I asked, going towards her.

She did not answer me directly.

‘This is a home,’ she said some moments later.

I looked over her shoulder at the sketch. ‘A pretty one, too.’

‘Not the picture,’ she said. ‘I am talking about this house.’

‘Before the slaughter-house was closed…’

‘It is
still
a home,’ she said, raising her finger, touching the corner of the picture-frame, setting it swinging on its nail. ‘Other wise, why would anyone bother to hang up such a nice little picture here?’

If only Lavedrine and I had done the same thing the first time that we entered the place. If only we had looked beyond the horror of the decomposing body on the bed. Had either of us directed his lantern towards the picture on the wall, we might have noticed what Helena had just seen.

I leant closer, staring at the picture, wondering exactly what she had seen.

A thatched cottage, a hedge and garden, flowers…

I placed my finger on the corner of the picture, as she had done, moving it on the axis of the nail on which it hung. The wall beneath the picture was a uniform dark grey, the same dust-ingrained tint as the rest of the wall. Hanging nearby was a pierced metal plate with a wooden handle, the sort of implement we use for roasting chestnuts. I shifted that, and I saw the outline of its form – light grey against the darker background of the uncovered wall. The chestnut-roaster had been hanging there so long, it had left its impression on the surface like a silhouette.

‘This view was put up very recently,’ Helena said slowly. ‘But why would an officer hang a picture up if he was on the run, or if he was using this house to…to do what? Why do you think he was here, Hanno?’

‘Lavedrine and I believe that he probably used the house as a meeting-place. They might, for example, have been smuggling amber…’

‘Why meet here?’ she asked. ‘They could have met more easily down by the river. The reeds are thick. No-one would have seen them there at night. Why come
here
at all?’

She plucked the picture from the wall, examined the frame for a moment, then handed it to me.

‘Do you see what the hanging loop is made from?’ she asked.

I did not need to touch it, but I did so. Hair had been neatly woven together like a tiny rope. The hairs were blond. Two distinct shades of blond, I corrected myself, that is, hair belonging to two
different
people. Sebastien Grangé’s hair was blond. So, who did the other shade of hair belong to?

Emma Rimmele’s hair was dark brown
…

‘It is a love token,’ Helena continued. ‘Perhaps Lieutenant Grangé was not here on some sordid business, such as you have described. He might have come to meet a lover. Indeed, I think he did. And she came willingly to meet him. I would say that this was their home. That is, the home that they were dreaming of, perhaps.’

Helena placed her hand on mine.

‘Are you certain that Emma was raped by Grangé, Hanno?’

The smell of blood swept over me like a monster wave. I tasted it in my throat and nose, suffocating and horrible. I put the picture back in its hook, made my way quickly to the door, stepping out onto the balcony, into the light and the fresh air. I rested my hands on the wooden rail, steadying myself, looking down into the yard below. I felt as if I were about to lose my senses.

I felt Helena’s hand rest lightly on my shoulder. Her hand caressed my shoulder, then came to rest upon the back of my neck. ‘Something has upset you,’ she said. ‘Was it that picture? The loop of hair? Or something I have said?’

How could I answer? Could I tell her that her reading of the signs had probably been correct? That Grangé had almost certainly met a woman there, and more than once? Would she believe me if I told her that it was the memory of the blood that had upset me, the sheer quantity of blood that Lavedrine and I had uncovered beneath the bedding two nights before? And what was I to say of those interlacing strands of blond hair?

I breathed in deeply, felt the rhythm of my heart slowing down.

I told Helena what Elspeth, the little chambermaid from the Black Bull, had told me.

‘A dark creature,’ Helena murmured. ‘A mysterious female presence. Spying on them, perhaps. I wonder…’

I waited, wondering too, but she did not go on. She was waiting for me, perhaps, but I could tell her no more. I stared towards the iron grating of the far-off window of the slaughter-house, as if, by looking, I might clarify the troubled thoughts which raced in a jumble through my mind.

‘It looks like a cage to contain a wild beast,’ she whispered.

Her hand came to rest on my arm, catching at my wrist, holding it tightly.

‘Please, take me home,’ she said, her voice fearful, low.

We returned to the riverbank, skirting around the slaughter-house, so far as the narrow path would allow. The French soldiers had apparently abandoned the place. No-one stopped us as we left the house and the yard. Nor did we meet them again as we took the path towards the river. But as we stepped up onto the raised embankment which contained the river’s flood, I was not surprised to see them standing to attention, shoulder to shoulder, muskets at their shoulders. Nor to see an officer towering over them, as if he were inspecting them.

Only the fact that the officer was Lavedrine surprised me.

One of the men must have warned him of our presence, for he turned to meet us. His expression was darker than a starless winter night.

‘What brings you here?’ I gasped. ‘Has something happened at the prison?’

Anything could have emerged from his interrogation. Elspeth might have told her tale again. Wilhelm Voigt might even have confessed to the murder if they had used the irons on him. It would all depend on Layard’s desire to close the case and send Lavedrine packing.

He shook his head. ‘Not there,’ he said.

Even so, the dark clouds did not shift from his face.

Helena let go of my arm and took a step towards him. ‘Serge, what is wrong?’

Lavedrine held her gaze for a moment, then he looked at me.

‘You must go home at once, Herr Procurator. What you feared,’ he said, ‘has happened in Lotingen.’

‘I never saw the like of it, monsieur.’

The sergeant wiped dripping snot from his nose on the silver stripes of his lower sleeve, and glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I fought in the Vendée back in ’93,’ he said, his eyes wide with revulsion at the memory. ‘Them Tawny Owls didn’t dare do nothing to equal this lot. Nor the
sans-culottes
in Paris. I was there during the worst days of the Terror. But this…uh…it’s ferocious…’

The hiss of this word shifted into a guttural rasp of impending vomit. He turned away, hacking, coughing, his revulsion almost certainly justified by the horror of what he had seen inside the cemetery walls.

He turned again to face me, ducking his head apologetically to my wife.

‘Wasn’t there a guard?’ I asked him. ‘There’ve been two murders in as many days.’ I pointed across the lane to the copse where the crucified body of Ludo Mittner had been savaged by dogs. ‘One of the bodies was found just there.’

The man snarled in what was, I realised, a bitter laugh. ‘There were sentries posted, all right, monsieur.’

‘And yet they did nothing to stop it.’

He looked me squarely in the eye. ‘What could two men do against a pack of beasts, monsieur? They saw them coming down the lane, they tried to hold them back, but it didn’t work. Like fools they fired off their muskets, and then they were fucked. A bayonet wasn’t going to stop that lot. Not in those circumstances. We are skirmishers, monsieur, we fight, and then we run.’

I nodded.

‘They were lucky to get away with their lives, I reckon. They gave an account of what they’d seen, and all the officers were in a tizz. They wanted to send out the heavy brigade.’

‘Colonel Claudet issued orders, I imagine?’

‘His orders were to send for you, Monsieur Procurator,’ the man erupted. ‘And here you are. He thought that you might be able to stop them. Unfortunately, you did not come to work your magic on your countrymen.’

‘I was out of town last night…’

‘And isn’t that a pity, monsieur,’ he said dismissively. ‘I doubt you could have done much, in any case.’

I stepped beyond him, and passed through the large ornamental iron gates, one of which had been torn from its hinges, and thrown to the ground. Helena had been standing forlornly at my elbow while I spoke to the French sergeant. Now, she clung onto my arm, and I could feel her trembling. I knew what was going through her mind.

Anders
.

To the left of the gate, Lars Merson’s cemetery was what it had always been: a haven of peace where the dead had been laid out in orderly ranks to wait for the final trumpet. Some of the stones marking the graves and the vaults in that section were two or three hundred years old, covered in moss, darkened by weathering, the names no longer legible. Nothing had happened to disturb the rest of those who slept on that side of the burial ground.

But on the right, it was a different story.

There had been rain in Lotingen the night before, it seemed. What had once been grass was now churned mud, hardening in the sun, ploughed up by many boots and shoes. Flowers had been crushed beneath the heedless feet of those who had devastated the place. Glass vases in which the flowers had once been standing were broken into shards. Sunlight speckled on the broken fragments, which shone like a thousand diamonds cast upon the earth. A drunken army might have swept through the cemetery. Many grave stones and markers had been rooted up, thrown aside, some broken, others shifted. And there were gaping holes in the ground, as if the cemetery had been subjected to a massive bombardment. The field of Jena must have looked like this as our troops took flight, abandoning their positions and their equipment, leaping out of shattered trenches and collapsed earthworks, leaving their useless cannon behind them as they followed in the wake of the broken infantry squares and scattering cavalry. And as they fled, they left behind the corpses of their fallen comrades.

Wherever I looked, I saw fragments of wood, tilted statues, shattered crosses, fencing torn up, trampled down, any obstacle carelessly pushed or pulled aside. There were bodies, too, as if a massive explosion had uprooted them. Bare skulls stared up at the heavens from empty sockets. Other skulls had been pressed down into the soft soil by heavy feet. They looked as if they meant to eat their way to the centre of the Earth. Hands – fingers bent and twisted – sat on top of clods of earth like large black spiders. Arms and legs lay twisted and stretching, as if they had been frozen in the act of rising from the dead.

How many bodies had been disinterred?

‘Anders?’

Helena’s voice was a pitiful pleading sob. There was no way to hide from her what I was seeing, nor to protect her from what I still feared. I took her hand in mine, leading her like a child along the path towards the forgotten corner of the cemetery where my own son, and Angela Enke, had both been secretly laid to rest.

‘Close your eyes,’ I urged her. ‘Trust in me.’

And for my own part, I prayed.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me
.

As we passed through the ravished graves, we might have been traversing Hell.

‘Don’t look, Helena,’ I whispered, guiding her carefully around a twisted corpse which lay directly in our path. It was the body of a woman. Her diminutive size and the discoloured shroud in which she had been buried told me so. Skeletal hands stretched stiffly from the sleeves of her eternal night dress. A tiny skull with tatters of blackened skin was still attached to the skeleton, while a cluttered skein of long grey hair wafted gently in the breeze. The body had been tipped from its coffin, then left behind as if the Day of Judgement had come and gone.

In this, the newest section of the cemetery, the area where they might expect to find what they were looking for, they had dug up grave after grave. I counted nine deep holes in all. Each body had been torn from its coffin, examined, dismissed, discounted, the skeletons mixed and scattered by their rough handling. Who could hope to re-compose them? Bones, skulls, funeral clothes, everything had been thrown aside as the rampage moved on to the next, and the next, and the next.

My voice rose into my throat, but my cry died there.

I turned to Helena, placing my hand upon her shoulder, shaking her.

‘Helena.’

It was the only word that I could manage to pronounce at first.

‘Look!’

We stood together, holding hands, looking towards the plot where Merson and I had buried the child. There was nothing to mark the place, nothing to distinguish it as a grave. The tiny wooden cross had been trampled underfoot. Having come to me in Marienburg, Helena had placed no fresh flowers on the plot. The withered blooms had been carried off by the rushing tide of marauders. She fell down on her knees on the grass, clasping her hands together, her voice a babbling brook of disconnected wails and half-formed words. I heard the name of God and His son in the midst of them.

I looked beyond the plot of grass, and there was Angela Enke.

Her corpse had stopped them short. She had brought the desecration to an end. She had, in a sense, saved Anders. They had found her body, and there the hunt had ended. Five days and nights had not yet passed, but her corpse was riddled with corruption and decay. She was hardly recognisable as the girl that I had brought up from the bottom of the well. If the hunters were looking for a vampire that they believed was Angela Enke, they had been disappointed. The infidels had pulled her out of the pit, examined her for signs of vitality, then pushed her out of the way. Of life, there was no hint remaining. Her skin had turned black, it had swelled, split and burst, exploding outwards, revealing more than I desired to see. The trailing worms and slugs were enough for me.

‘The true horror is down that way, monsieur.’

The French sergeant was standing at my shoulder, his flat face grimmer, and even less expressive, than before, his finger pointing further down the path

‘In town they are saying that they found what they were looking for.’

I left Helena on her knees, lost in communion with her infant son, while I followed the sergeant, turning away from the desecrated part of the cemetery down by the river, taking a gently rising path which leads towards the ancient vaults of the noble families on the slight knoll on the eastern boundary. My heart was thudding painfully in my chest.

I knew where he was taking me.

‘Here we are, monsieur.’

The tomb might have been a pagan temple on the Palatine hill in ancient Rome. It was made of local sandstone. No longer red, the stone was stark black, as if the edifice had been baked in a sooty oven. The problem with sandstone is that it erodes, and this particular vault was in a very bad state, as if it had not been attended to in many, many years. The family name was inscribed above the door.

I had been there before, but on that occasion, I had not had time to look at it.

KASSEL.

The letters were worn, but they had been deeply cut, and were still legible.

‘What did they find here?’ I asked the sergeant, and my voice sounded strange to my own ears.

‘Come and see for yourself, monsieur,’ he replied.

I followed the Frenchman into the Kassel funeral vault.

The iron gates which sealed the tomb had been rudely ripped from their hinges. As I waited for my eyes to adjust to the gloom, my nose was assaulted by the mould of ages. Bones had been scattered over the stone floor. I counted six skulls, then I spotted another one in the darkest corner. But it was the coffin in the middle of the room on newly-made trestles which immediately won my attention. It seemed to glow in the twilight. The wood was relatively clean and new. The lid had been unscrewed, removed and cast aside. I stepped up to the coffin, my legs barely able to hold me up.

I knew what I would find in there.

It was two or three feet long, made of ash, poking vertically into the air.

I heard the French sergeant speaking at my back.

‘You are Prussian, monsieur. Can you explain these things?’

I did not try. I was robbed of speech.

I knew what that coffin ought to have contained. Emma Rimmele had told me. She had brought it all the way from Kirchenfeld. Her mother had died some months ago of the nervous fever, she said. Having seen the state of Angela Enke, who had been dead but a few days, I had prepared myself to stare into a face which was marked by advanced age, the ravages of a mortal illness, and the greater ravages of
post mortem
decay. I had prepared myself for horror.

But that was not what I saw.

I do not know how long I stood there, staring down into the coffin.

Nor do I know how Helena arrived there. But suddenly, she was standing by my side. ‘Is this the vampire they were looking for?’ she murmured, holding onto my arm, leaning forward, peering into the coffin. ‘Who is she, Hanno?’

There were signs of imminent decay on the forehead, dark spots, staining. Even so, the skin of the cheeks was the purest white of unsullied eggshell. The well-formed mouth was a round black hole, the white teeth framed by shapely lips of ghostly grey. The half-closed eyes had sunk into their dark sockets, the eyelids parted. And yet, I could see that she had once been very beautiful. Her long hair was laid out on her shoulders, and it was blonde. As bright and golden as it had been when she was living.

…woven together like a tiny rope. Two shades of blond…

‘She is not wearing a shroud,’ Helena murmured.

The girl’s fine figure was encased in a long pink dress. Her legs below the hem were covered by pale silk stockings. And on her feet she wore an elegant pair of calfskin slippers which matched the colour of her dress. The upper half of the dress was covered by a massive dark brown stain of dried blood. Not blood spilled recently. Not caused by the ash spike which had been driven through her heart. The death-wound was on the left side of her slender neck, and it was unmistakable. Two round black holes, ripped skin, the haemorrhaged artery.

I heard the sergeant click his tongue. Her beauty was so evident that it could still provoke lascivious thoughts in the mind of a soldier. Clearly, this was
not
the aged mother of Emma Rimmele. Nor was it the corpse of the Emma Rimmele that I knew, though they looked to be about the same age, more or less.

‘Who is she, Hanno?’ Helena whispered.

I cannot say how long I held my breath. It burst from me in a sudden gasp. ‘She is Emma Rimmele,’ I said. ‘The
real
Emma Rimmele.’

Helena did not speak at once. She huddled close by my side, slipping her arm through mine. ‘You know where she has gone to,’ she said very quietly. ‘You know where she is hiding.’

The silence inside the tomb was unbearable.

I felt my wife’s weight pulling on my arm. Her mouth pressed close to my ear. Her voice was the merest murmur.

‘You have to stop her, Hanno.’