Clay by C. Hall Thompson

Author:C. Hall Thompson [Thompson, C. Hall]
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Pale Criminal

"An idea made this pde criminal pale. Adequate was he for the deed when be did it, but the idea of it, he could not endure when it was done.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

*

I CONFESS, in the beginning the case of Simon Conrad did not strike me as singular. On my first visit to the Castle von Zengerstein, I had no suspicion of the secret that lay hidden in the vaults of that Gothic pile that towered on a craggy hill-crest at the Black Forest’s edge. I found Luther Markheim, master of Zengerstein, nothing more than a mountainous relic of the decadent line that spawned him; he and his companion, one Doctor Victor Rupert, were mildly concerned over the fate of Simon Conrad, but they feared they could be of little assistance since they had never even seen, the gentleman in question. It was all very commonplace. No hint of the festering evil of Zengerstein seeped through the veneer of ordinariness.

But, events have taken a strange turn. The Conrad affair is no longer simply a missing persons case; it is a crime whose, hideous memory still lurks in the mirror of the tarn that separates the Castle from the deserted village of Zengerstein. Perhaps, when you have come to know the facts of the case, you will say that I, Ludwig Koch, Inspector of Police of the town of Donaueschingen, some twenty kilometres to the north, should have guessed at the macabre truth. But, I am a simple man. My dealings in the world of crime had been with petty theft and trespassing. Never before had I been drawn into such a web of malignity as shrouded the house of Luther Markheim. I had heard men whisper, on a winter’s night in the hofbrau, of an evil that lingers in shadow, beyond the understanding of normal minds; once, in a visit to Baden, I had seen the Teufels Kanzel - on the brink of the Schwarzwald, Where, legend has it, the Devil preached to his disciples; to me, it seemed only an altar of scorched stone. The supernatural has always been beyond my ken. But, of late, I have undergone a change. Having witnessed the horror of Zengerstein, only an idiot could remain an unbeliever.

The entire truth of the affair has never before been disclosed. For years, it has lain in the police archives, at Donaueschingen, buried in the rotting pages of the manuscript of Luther Markheim. Qnly recently it was decided that in view of work being done by one Sigmund Freud in a new field called psychiatry, it would be advisable to release the story of Zengerstein that these doctors might benefit by study of the quirks of a criminal mind in action. To outward appearances, the manuscript does not seem extraordinary; it was written in ink by a precise hand the story is told with scientific clarity; and, except one turned to the last scrawled lines, except one examined the brownish stains on the final pages and knew

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