HS03 - A Visible Darkness (57 page)

For an instant, I saw a shadow of doubt flash upon his face. ‘I care not what was said last night. You have seen my work in Königsberg. I know that you will wish to see my
écorché
completed. If you are true to your own heart, you will rejoice in what I do. Otherwise, you’ll have what every homunculus deserves: endless pain and suffering.’

He flexed his knees and bent to pick up something from the floor. It was dark and sopping wet, like his clothes. He had brought it with him, whatever it was. He snatched this packet up, then rocked it gently in his arms.

As if it were a newborn baby . . .

In that instant, I ceased to breathe.

His eyes held mine.

I looked back with horrified intensity.

The fingers of his right hand pushed inside the sack. The canvas moved, as if the contents had suddenly come to life. He partially withdrew his hand, holding something small, tightly wrapped up in a dark-stained cloth. It had once been white. Now, it was grey, where water had soaked through it. But there were darker stains as well. Dark brown. Reddish brown. The colour of blood . . .

And I could smell it. It was mineral sharp, saltier than the sea.

The package was no more than ten or twelve inches in length.

If it was what I thought . . .

When had he killed Edviga?

Where had he left the body?

I heard her voice inside my head. Begging me to hide a piece of amber on the corpse of Ilse Bruen before the French threw her body into the sea. Asking me to do the same for her.

Gurten threw aside one fold of the swaddling cloth. It was seen and gone in a flash. A tiny face. A lump of blood and gore. The head of a child barely formed.

Inside my breast, a tempest roared.

I had failed in everything.

‘What have you done with Edviga Lornerssen?’

His eyebrows formed a double arch. His eyes and mouth gaped open.

‘Edviga?’ he asked, his voice a hollow whisper.

Suddenly, he laughed out loud. ‘Herr Stiffeniis,’ he admonished, ‘have you forgotten the name of your own wife? Do you fail to recognise the face of your very own son? Who is this Edviga that governs your heart?’

I heard a Frenchman speaking once of an event on the battlefield. A friend had been decapitated by a cannonball, he said, yet they spoke for half a minute before the poor man died. What cry of protest could I raise? My head had just been blown away, and I was helpless. I could see, but I was in another world already. What sense remained in words?

And yet, I heard him speak.

‘I went to Lotingen,’ he said. ‘But not to visit your Count Dittersdorf. Nor to read his dusty French journals. Surely, sir, you remember the message for your wife? Which I delivered, as you instructed me to do.’

He paused, laughed, found something funny in what he had said.

‘It was Helena that I was interested in. She was carrying something that was valuable to me. Where would I have found the crowning jewel of my new Eve, if not where
you
had put it, Hanno Stiffeniis?’

He held the package up and stared at me.

I heard the sharp intake of air through his nostrils.

I did not breathe. I felt no movement in my chest. No beating heart, no lungs expanding and retracting. I had no need of air. My blood was boiling.

‘Do you share my joy?’ he asked. ‘Or do you suffer like a poor homunculus?’

I could not shift my eyes from his ironic smile.

My hand stretched out and found what it was looking for. An object that I had discarded on Edviga’s bed. It slipped comfortably into my outstretched palm. It might have been formed for my hand, and no other. It was my hand, not my brain, that drew back suddenly, then struck forward.

The pointed blade arched through the air like Death’s scythe.

I pushed past his heart and into Infinity.

The sound was liquid, solid, a bucket overturned, a pile of clattering wood. My hand was deep inside his breast, blood spurted out and bathed my face. I pulled away, then thrust again to finish him off.

That smile never left his face.

As I pushed forward, he staggered back.

He opened his mouth to speak, and blood poured out like a crimson cataract, cascading onto his shirt and his vest. Then spluttered words.

‘It will not end with me,’ he gagged. ‘We are . . . the Dev il’s brood.’

Even in death, there was something twisted, false, and devilish about him.

I knew that I had killed him. I rejoiced in the deed, and Gurten knew it. His eyes peered into mine. He saw into my soul, I think, and knew what I was feeling. And in that instant, the creature dwelling in the black depths of my heart looked at him without a grain of pity.

The handle of the weapon seemed to sear my skin.

I let it go, watching as his hands came up to clutch and hold it.

He staggered backwards.

I matched him pace for pace, my face two feet away from his. His shoulder smashed against the door-post, he spun away from me, falling heavily against the door. The handle of the weapon scraped a terrible dirge as he slid along the door, and staggered out into the air.

I followed quickly, but it happened in an instant. He seemed to buckle, then run forward. In an instant, he was gone, falling headlong off the platform into the sea. I saw him sink, then bob and float, then sink again. Then, he disappeared for ever beneath the waves.

I darted back inside the hut.

The package was gone. He had carried it with him into the bay.

I ran out again, scanned the oily waters, looking everywhere. I saw nothing. The Baltic Sea had opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.

And my dead son along with him.

D
AWN CAME
on by slow degrees.

Pitch black in Nordcopp, the heavens were indigo as I raced through Frombork. An hour later, a streak of speckled salmon-pink lit the far horizon, glinting off the tiled roofs and the distant spires of Lotingen. The clouds had formed themselves into puffy purple balls, like a hundred plums laid out on a large tray. Beyond the town, a lone star glistened over the sea, like a beacon.

Hunched in the saddle, sighting between the mare’s sharp ears, cutting every bend as closely as I could, saving every inch, I galloped forward. But why was I hurrying at all? I could have stopped to count the blades of grass along the roadside. Nothing would alter.

I was hurtling towards a massacre.

That
I knew.

Gurten had mentioned Helena and my son. But he had said not a word of Manni, Süzi, or Anders. Nor had the name of Lotte cropped up. Only one question remained to be answered. How deep would the chasm be?

That
I did not know.

I approached town by the East Gate, cursing as the bay mare lost her footing for an instant on the ancient, rounded cobbles of
the hump-backed bridge. Then, I reined in hard at the guard-post. The animal wheezed, I panted, we gave off one united cloud of steam and sweat. Without a word, I thrust my papers at the soldiers. A corporal, two privates, all bleary-eyed with sleep. They must have been on guard all night.

Suddenly, their eyes were wide awake.

I cannot say what they beheld. Dust and filth, without a doubt. Tiredness to outmatch their own, perhaps. But what did they make of my expression? What terror did they see upon my face?

‘
Allez, monsieur
,’ the corporal murmured, ignoring the rumpled papers in my outstretched hand.

I followed his gaze, saw a black slash across my right thigh. Blood had oozed from what appeared to be a deep cut, and it had stained my linen ducks. I had no remembrance of this accident. Had I jabbed myself with the riding-crop? Had a thorn-branch ripped at my leg as I flew by in the darkness? Might I have fallen from the saddle at some point along the road?

‘
Faites donc! Monsieur, allez, allez!
’ the Frenchman cried angrily.

He jerked his head away, and whacked his hand on the horse’s rump.

I almost fell as the animal spurted forward.

I reached the market-place two minutes later. My office stands on the far side of the square. The briefest glimpse: windows gleaming like brass plaques in the frail first light of the rising sun. I dug my heels with force into the mare’s wet flank. The staccato clash of hooves rang off the walls, echoing beneath the covered arches. The offices and shops were all locked up, the street deserted. A sentry raised his hand in warning as I galloped past the General Quarters, but he did not shoot, or cry out, as I veered around the corner into Frederickstrasse and charged for home.

Five minutes more, skittering gravel behind, hooves thumping on the sun-hard surface of the lane, I caught a first glimpse of my destination. The sight was lost to me at once as the lane ran downhill into the Dittersdorf estate. A light mist streamed through the lowland woods, rolling like billowing steam across the dew-damp lawns and the open meadows.

Death was too light a sentence, Gurten had decided.

I had left the coast without going in search of les Halles. There had been no time. As I wrested a horse from the enclosure at the camp, I told the flat-nosed ostler to send word to his superior officer that I was on my way to Lotingen.

‘Tell him I have killed the murderer,’ I said. ‘And that my family is in danger.’

I knew les Halles would follow me to Lotingen. I knew that he would bring armed soldiers with him when he came. For all the good that it would do. I had to be the first to enter the house. I had to go alone.

The mare was almost spent. She galloped mechanically onward, loping stiffly, shifting heavily, this way and that. When the gravel path veered left towards the house, she slid away again, and almost threw me off. I did the first sane thing that I had done all night: I slackened the reins and let the animal canter. Long before I reached the garden gate, I had slowed her down to a walk, approaching the house more warily, taking stock of what I could see. It was not that I was afraid. Rather, I realised the futility of haste.

I slid down from the saddle, and my legs buckled beneath me. My right thigh quivered and quaked with fierce pain. After galloping relentlessly for over three hours, I was as exhausted as the mare. The reins slipped from my hands. The mare loped off to the far side of the lane and the long grass growing there.

I steadied myself against the garden gate. My head weighed down as heavy as a millstone. I had to force myself to raise my eyes and look towards the little house that I had once called home. The mist was thicker in the dell. Helena often remarked that they had not picked the healthiest spot to situate that house. ‘It will be the death of all of us,’ she joked, because she loved it so. The roses beneath the kitchen window had shrivelled up and died in the summer heat-wave. The hazelnuts and the apple trees seemed alien, hostile.

All was motionless, suspended, silent.

The windows were six dull blanks, the curtains tightly drawn, the shutters closed. The blinds excluded everything, enclosing everything within. Visitors not welcome, those windows proclaimed.
The general impression reminded me uncomfortably of the family mausoleum in Ruisling, though no wrought-iron gate had yet been placed before the door to keep the living out.

Another world began beyond my own front door.

The gate fell open. The old familiar creak. The rusty hinge. I suppose I must have shaken it loose with the violence of the emotion which threatened to overwhelm me. I had been entrusted with the investigation. I had been commanded to put a stop to the killings, to halt the travesty of mutilation. But Gurten had followed me to my own door. He had desecrated my house. He had carried Death along with him from the coast. There was little I could do. Bear witness. Assess the horror. Take leave of my wife and children. Do my best to compose and dress the fragile corpses. Before any other person entered the house.

I stood before the door, hesitating.

In some deep recess of my mind, I heard it.

My brain did not react. My animal spirit may have done. Suddenly, everything juddered to a halt. My blood lay stagnating. No room for thought. Energy drained out of me, like water from a lock. My lungs were empty. I was as immaterial as the morning mist. Had I heard the ghost of something brushing over the stone tiles in the hall?

The sound repeated. Slightly louder. On the other side of the door.

The bolt slid back. The inner bar was removed.

I crouched and bunched my fists as the door swung open.

A frightened whisper sounded to my ears like thunder.

The dawn light painted her cheeks, nose, lips in delicate pastel shades of blue. She seemed less tall, less strong in such domestic garb.

That frock was Helena’s
. . .

I recognised the lustrous pale-blue taffeta, the sprigs of pink blossom, the simple lace collar of the gown that Helena sometimes wore when she went out walking. I had brought it back from Hamburg several years before. I had never seen it worn before with one of Lotte’s grey sack-aprons.

‘What . . . are you . . . doing
here
?’

I had to swallow, could not speak. It went beyond the powers of my imagining. Edviga and Gurten were in league together. She barred the entrance to my own home. And Helena’s gown was not the only element in the transformation. I had never seen her hair let down before. It hung in lustrous golden curls which graced her brow, her neck, and shoulders like ripe wheat, or amber of the purest hue. Only the livid scar on her left cheek proclaimed who she truly was.

What right had I to call myself a magistrate? This case had swallowed my family whole. And still I had failed to see the truth. Johannes Gurten could not have done it all alone. Edviga Lornerssen was the creature who would be his prototype. By means of her, a Garden of Eden would be created anew on Prussia’s shores. Amber had united them. She had led her naive companions into his wily net. She had seduced me to confide in her the delicacy of Helena’s state. She had lulled me into confidentiality. And all the while, I had convinced myself that
she
was expecting a child, that
that
was the child which Vulpius had set his sights on to complete his horrid work in wax.