Van Horstmann by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2013-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Drufenhaag

‘I have seen the way!’ cried a voice. It was thin and hoarse, for it did little other than scream. ‘His eyes! His eyes look on you! He sees you!’

From the next cell came a low rhythmic moaning which, when listened to closely enough, resembled words in a cruel dark language that had not been created for the human tongue.

The inmate of the cell immediately opposite appeared to be dead. He – at least, Kant assumed it was a he, it could have just as easily been a woman – resembled a pile of rags in the centre of the cell. But the body would not be removed for a long time, until it was absolutely certain that it was indeed dead. The curators of this place had been fooled before by one of their charges playing dead, but only once.

Heiden Kant supposed there was a reason that to get to the shrine, one had to pass through this dank stone corridor lined with cells. He guessed this had once been a wine cellar, situated as it was beneath one of the finer houses in this district. Though the house was outwardly handsome it had seen no refurbishment or new furnishings for decades, because its real purpose was not to act as the seat of some rich burgher family but as a place for similarly driven people to gather.

‘One day you will wake up to blackness!’ cried the man in the first cell. The glimpse Kant had got of him suggested the kinds of sores and buboes that accompanied a concoction of diseases. He would be dead soon, like his fellow inmate across the corridor, unless he was animated by some force other than wholesome human life.

It was a strange combination of rooms that lay beyond the door at the end of the cell corridor. On the one hand it was lavish, with a deep rug taken from elsewhere in the house, wood-panelled walls and a chandelier that cast the equivalent of daylight into the windowless underground room. Fine cabinets and bookshelves stood against the walls, along with a fanciful circular map of the world hung on one wall. Its imaginary continents butted up against the known states of the Old World.

But it was also a grimly practical place. Where a feasting table or study desk might have been, there was a stone slab on four sturdy legs, its surface scored with knife marks and darkened by layers of bloodstains, still visible as dim ghosts across the pale surface in spite of diligent scrubbing. One of the glass-fronted cabinets held not curios or a set of finest tableware, but dozens of medical implements, scalpels and forceps, and other strange devices of metal with uncertain purpose. Among them was a trepanning drill with leather straps to keep it fixed to the skull of the subject. Beside the map on the wall was a medical chart, not Imperial in origin but florid and colourful with annotations in an unfamiliar language, its charting of the body’s innards as fanciful as the made-up lands on the map.

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