Chapter 2

“Albert, I won’t hurt you,” Rachel said, as calmly as she could manage.

“Who are you? Let me go at once!” spoke the spirit frantically. His voice was a tinny echo as if coming from an old phonograph speaker. He was lost, and perhaps still oblivious of his own demise. Or he was in denial. A common trait among the newly deceased.

“My name is Doctor Rachel Blake,” Rachel responded. “I’m here to help you.”

“Help me? Help me?! How can you possibly,” the spirit sobbed.

“I am working with the polizei to discover the identity of your murderer. But to do that, I need your cooperation.”

Schulz sobbed louder. His white-glowing eyes pulsed with fear. Death was always hard on the spirits. It was always a lonely proposition. Despite the claims, no one ever accompanied the dead on their journey beyond the mortal plane. They were always on their own. It is always a distressing experience, but particularly so when their deaths are premature. As terrible as such circumstances were, Rachel long ago had stopped feeling sorry for them. Her time was limited. The longer she traversed beyond the mortal coil, the more her own soul eroded. Her time was limited not only by how long she could bear the pain but by how much of her own soul she had left to spare.

“Albert, get a hold of yourself and help me bring your killer to justice. Who did it?” She said more curtly.

“Doctor Schulz, tell me, now.”

“She’s after me! She’ll find me. It’s too much. Please. Let me go! Mein Gott, I see her! She’s coming. She’s coming!”

The response took Rachel by surprise. So, it was a woman, but the surprise was his claim that he could see her. Rachel looked around but could only see the grey-black storm that had always engulfed this plane.

“She can’t hurt you, Albert. What is her name? Please. I don’t have much time with you.”

“Oh no, she sees me! She’s after me. No, no, no, no, no, NO!”

Heinrich shrieked. Rachel felt her soul flicker like a flame in a sudden breeze. She could only watch in mesmerized horror as Heinrich’s soul darted away at an incredible speed, disappearing into the darkness.

Alarmed by his disappearance, and sensing he would not be returning anytime soon, she relaxed her hold on her arcana. As it faded away, the world returned. The ground came up to meet her. Her cheek smacked against the gravel. Schmidt dropped his umbrella and hoisted her to a sitting position.

Overwhelming nausea overtook her. She vomited. Schmidt pulled back, repulsed. He took out a handkerchief and handed it to her immediately. Rachel took it and wiped her mouth. She offered it back to Schmidt when she felt she had nothing left to vomit up.

“You may keep it,” Schmidt responded.

She crumbled the handkerchief into a ball and pocketed it. She grabbed her tool kit and her walking cane, then tried to get to her feet. Schmidt helped her up by the elbow and when she was on her feet, he took out another cigarette lit it, and handed it to her. She took it gratefully and took a long drag while she put her attention to Schulz’s body. She had seen enough bodies to know when its soul had vacated. Albert Schulz’s body looked this way now. His soul had been ripped from his corpse too soon. Ripped away by a malevolent spirit that haunted the proximate afterlife called Limbo. A ‘she’ evidently.

An eternity of a rainfall quietude seemed to pass before Schmidt finally said, “Are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about?”

Rachel shook away her pensive stupor and gave him a blank stare. A question that always came, and always was accompanied by shock, disgust, or fear, despite the advisory she always gave. He would not have seen anything that had just transpired in limbo. Limbo is unseen by the living. It exists only for the soul. A transitory plane to whatever comes next, like an airport or a train station. A miserable, hellish terminal to heaven or hell. The place was not meant for mortals, and few can traverse it. Rachel was one of those few, with the help of her henbane potion.

She always gave a truthful answer to the question. Lying, as it turned out, was harder. Even with the eye rolls, the head shakes, and anger (most often, anger), she found that most cops only cared about the results in the end. Corroborative evidence, which she always managed to get, was what mattered most to her success, and their acceptance of her methods. Most murder victims, as it turned out, were often able and more than willing to lead her to such evidence. That is to say, except when they were kidnapped by a mysterious entity before she had the chance to speak to them.

In any case, she gave Schulz the truthful answer.

“The powder I used is an ancient alchemical formulation principally derived from the noxious plant called henbane. I use it to talk to the dead. Or, more specifically, to deceased souls that have not yet departed the transcendental plane called ‘Limbo’. In this case, I was interrogating Doktor Schulz. Or attempting to, anyway. Someone prevented me from doing so.”

Schmidt responded in a way she did not anticipate. Not an eye roll, not a disbelieving headshake. Only a single nod and a follow-up question.

“What did you find out?”

The question caught her off guard. She pulled her gaze from the corpse to look into his eyes. Stone-gray eyes. Aloof, yet not an ounce of the typical intense judgment she often found in her minders. Not that they contained any warmth in them at all, but it was still comforting to her to know that she was at least taken seriously.

“Nothing particularly of value. Well, except that the killer may be a woman.”

“Is he married?” Rachel asked.

“How was his marriage?” She asked.

“Like the marriage of most of his pedigree. Expedient.”

“As it should be. Was it happy nonetheless?”

“Nothing to suggest otherwise.”

She finished her cigarette, flicked the butt into the bushes, and returned her gaze to the corpse. The jagged swastika seemed to smolder like dying coal, a brazen taunting.

Schmidt responded, “Did he say nothing else?”

“His soul was ripped from his body by a malevolent spirit before he had a chance to say anything useful. Perhaps by the same being that killed him in the mortal plane.”

Schmidt tensed up. She could tell he was disturbed, both by what she said, and in the nonchalant way she said it, but was trying his very best to hide it. Rachel was always careful not to show how much she was bothered by what she experienced, but she too was disturbed. Never had she ever seen a soul stricken from its corpse the way Schulz’s had. And the fear in Schulz’s voice when. It was a visceral fear. A prey fear.

Whatever it was that carried Schulz’s soul off, Rachel was all but certain it was the same thing that clawed that swastika into his torso. A creature able to traverse between the planes. A creature that understood that her investigation was a threat to its plot. Whatever the creature was, it could potentially be dangerous to her. But then again, she was dangerous to it. It was a soul after all — a soul that she could reap. The final soul she needed to satisfy the bargain she made with a demon. That was all the encouragement she needed to press forward.

“Can you take me to Rauschenberg?” Rachel asked.

Schmidt nodded. “Of course. But first, we must see the rector.”

Rachel slumped her shoulders. Her cigarette slumped in her mouth.

“I’m afraid it’s the only time she has in her busy schedule,” Schmidt replied.

⛧ Chapter 2 ⛧

The rector’s Belle Epoque-style mansion was a beautiful structure. Despite that, she couldn’t help but feel disturbed by its looming vastness. Autumn red vines threatened to pull it into the ground. Its windows were dark, like the eye sockets of a skull.

Schmidt led her to the front door and when the butler answered, Schmidt turned to Rachel and said, “I have to leave you here. I have some business to attend to at the police station. Meet me at the coroner’s office as soon as you’re done.”

After Schmidt’s departure, the butler led Rachel to a wondrous library. Towering cathedral-like stained-glass windows splashed soft sunlight in red, purple, and green across the thousands of volumes contained within. Rain streamed down the tall windowpanes, obfuscating a misty scene of dark pine trees outside. A fire crackled in the corner, inviting Rachel to pick a book off the shelf and sit there and read for hours.

“She’ll be with you soon,” said the butler to Rachel, then left her there to continue quietly admiring the rector’s vast collection. Long fond of books, such was the stuff of dreams for Rachel.

She went to a shelf and picked out a random book. In gold-leaf text inlaid in patinaed leather read the title, “The necromantic symbols and lexicon of the cults of Ankh.”

“Interesting,” she murmured as she leafed through the pages. Many of the pages had scribbled notes on the margins. Words and phrases were underlined. The rector seemed to take her reading quite seriously.

It was surprising to see such dedicated fascination in the historiography of occult mythology. But perhaps it should not be, given the rector’s background in clinical psychology. Occult magic takes its power from the shadows of the human mind after all. 

She slid the book back into its place and took out another at random. This one was titled, “Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis.” This book, she had heard of, though only vaguely, as a grimoire of dark sorcery. This book too contained scribbles and underlines on nearly every page, affirming the rector’s fascination with the occult.

She put it back in its place and picked out another that had caught her attention. A book with a strong binding called “The Watchers and the Rise of the Nephilim.” Again, a title with which she was vaguely familiar. Again, the pages full of barely decipherable notes and underlined text. A watcher, she recollected, was a sort of high angel referenced in various Abrahamic apocrypha, most notably the Book of Enoch. And she knew that a Nephilim was a hybrid bred from fallen watchers and humans, and, in the apocryphal text, often described as giant savage beasts bent on pillaging the earth and ending humanity. Leafing through the book, she found again pages filled with notes. This time, she tried to read what the note said, trying her best to translate it from German, word by word, but between the shorthand, and the messy script, she could not make out anything significant.

As she placed the tome back into its place, something caught her attention from the very edge of her vision. She turned and found a young woman wrapped in a thick blanket lying in a Lincoln-green chaise facing the windows. Lying as still as a marble statue. She was beautiful. Ageless. Her hair the color of sunlight filtered through the leaves of autumn birch. Her lips the ruby of apples. Her eyes, blue, were wide in frozen torpor.

Alarmed by the presence of the intently still woman, Rachel stood for a few seconds, holding her breath, unsure of what to make of the woman’s stillness. Finally, she cleared her throat and politely greeted, “Hello, there.”

The woman responded only changing the slow pattern of her breathing and tilting her head slightly. Intrigued, Rachel moved cautiously closer.

She was soft-skinned. She wore a nice blue dress a young German woman might wear on a Sunday stroll when the weather was nice.

As she leaned over the still woman, a voice from behind made her jump.

“Her name is Isolde.”

Rachel spun around to find standing before her, a woman she never met, but who she immediately recognized as the rector of Heidelberg University. Her paying client.

“She is my daughter and I am Doctor Sabine Fischer. You are Doctor Rachel Blake, I presume.”

Rachel nodded. “I am.”

A thin smile came to the rector’s face. “It is nice to finally meet you, Frau Doktor. If the basis of our meeting were more sociable, I would love nothing more than to pick your brain about your methodologies. Yet it is not. We are pressed instead by the rather morbid matter of finding a killer.”

She motioned with her hand for Rachel to follow her into her office. Rachel glanced once more at Isolde as the office door went shut, her rather lifeless state a point of bother.

The rector found her seat at her desk, behind a mountain of books and papers scattered across its expansive surface. She was a thin, attractive lady. Her silver hair, tied back in a tight chignon, gleamed richly in the dim office light. In her blue eyes, the same blue as her daughter’s, was the depth of wisdom certainly befitting the woman’s esteemed position at such a venerable university. Normally indifferent at best towards her clients, Rachel could not help but feel admiration for this woman, the first female rector of Heidelberg University, and perhaps of any university in Germany.

Rachel sat, putting her tool case in her lap, her hands atop the case, and her cane through the handles.

“The Bundeskriminalamt was very resistant to your involvement in the case,” said the rector.

“Very much so. They were obviously, perhaps rightly – if you don’t mind me saying – skeptical of your unorthodox methods. Do you know why I insisted on you?”

“I have my suspicions, but no.”

“You have an extraordinary curriculum vitae.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Your first time working with the police — the case of the infamous Holcroft vampire.”

“It wasn’t a vampire, was it? As it turns out the man they accused of vampirism, was caught merely sucking the venom out of Holcroft’s neck.”