Quite a few people claimed to know for certain that the family’s souls still wandered restlessly through the house. And in fact, for several weeks Agnes had felt pursued by these souls. She saw them in her dreams, and was chased and tortured by them. As a child, Agnes had always feared ghouls and ghosts, the horrible bands of murdered people who, especially on raw winter nights, swooshed through the air with their dogs, horses, and other beasts.
In her nightmares, these creatures reached out for Agnes and dragged her down through a whirling vortex into the deep.
Another strong gust of wind shook the shutters, frightening the old woman. Agnes Gotzendörfer lived alone in this huge house; her children and other family had all died or moved to other cities. Lisbeth, the only maid, had long ago gone to bed. She was a lazy, garrulous old maid, but the only person who’d agreed to work in the haunted house. Agnes couldn’t stand her, but at the moment she wished Lisbeth were here to keep her company. Normally the nearly-eighty-year-old woman felt more or less secure here in her own four walls, but now a cold fear was creeping up her spine that even all her blankets couldn’t keep out.
Just an hour ago, long after the night watchman had announced the curfew, Agnes had heard quick footsteps in front of the house, and through a slit in the shutters she recognized Katharina, the daughter of the city scribe Hieronymus Hauser. Agnes’s husband, Egidius, had often called upon the young Hieronymus to take minutes of the meetings, so Agnes also knew his chubby daughter. What was the woman doing in the street at this hour? Agnes had heard she would soon be marrying the Bamberg executioner, a gloomy fellow who, it was said, drank the blood of his victims and sold magical amulets.
Perhaps even some that could turn their owner into a werewolf?
Agnes felt a chill and huddled down even deeper into the woolen blankets on her armchair. Her maid had told her that in the marketplaces the only thing people talked about was this horrible werewolf. It was said to have killed a countless number of people, and evidently a militia had already assembled since no one trusted the city council or even the bishop anymore. Agnes knew that Lisbeth liked to exaggerate, but she herself had heard of the missing people from other patrician widows she had spoken with. Among the missing were Klaus Schwarzkontz and Thadäus Vasold, two old city councilors her husband had known before his death ten years ago. They had sat together on various commissions and had both gotten rich, powerful, and fat. It seemed that the werewolf would stop at no one, and stole and ate everything it could catch-rich and poor, young and old, men and women. . It was quite possible that fat Katharina would be next. Why did that stupid woman have to run through the streets at this hour? It would be her own fault if-
A soft rapping interrupted Agnes Gotzendörfer’s thoughts. At first she couldn’t say where it was coming from-her hearing wasn’t what it used to be-but when she finally figured it out, the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
The knocking came from one of the shutters.
It was one of the shutters facing the street. The knocking grew louder, so that Agnes could no longer brush it off as a figment of her overworked state of mind.
Knock. . knock. . knock. .
“Is someone there?” she called out in a hoarse voice that broke apart and crumbled like an old, moldy rag. But even as she spoke those few words, she had a suspicion that no one would answer. Instead, the knocking began again.
Knock. . knock. . knock. .
She closed her eyes, struggling to think as her heart pounded wildly. She’d better call Lisbeth-but Agnes knew the maid was a deep sleeper and her bedroom was on the top floor, just underneath the roof. Agnes would probably have to go up and get her, but she was eighty, and going up stairs was getting harder for her by the week. The stairway was steep, the steps smooth, and just last month she had slipped and barely managed to grab the banister in time.
In her nightmares, Agnes saw the shadows of restless spirits trying to push her down the stairway, again and again.
Knock. . knock. . knock. .
When the knocking resumed, Agnes made a decision. She would look through a slit in the shutters and see who or what was outside, then she could still decide whether to call for help. She really had nothing to fear, as there were thick bull’s-eye windowpanes between her and the street, and beyond them, solid iron bars to protect the property from burglars. Only then came the shutters. No one, nothing, could break in here.
Agnes pushed her blankets aside, rose from her armchair, and hobbled carefully on her swollen legs toward the window. Her heart was pounding so hard that her chest ached. As she approached the window, she thought she heard a faint sound, like long nails scratching against the shutter.
Or claws?
Trembling, she summoned up all her courage and opened the window just a crack, carefully reaching through the iron bars until she felt the bolt for the shutters. Pushing it aside, she looked out into the night through a narrow slit. In the pouring rain and darkness, it wasn’t possible to see anything clearly. She squinted. And only then did she see it, standing a few steps in front of the bars, as if behind a clouded lens. The thick window glass distorted it somewhat, so it looked grotesquely large, much larger than a man. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much that was human about it.
What in the world. .
The next moment, the window with the bull’s-eye windowpane exploded into a thousand pieces. Rain poured into the room, the curtains fluttered like flags in the wind, and behind the bars and the wide-open shutters, a monstrous creature, like something from a nightmare, rose up.
Agnes’s nightmare.
The creature was a man, and yet not a man; it seemed to walk on two legs, but hair covered its entire body and it had a monstrous head atop a neck that was far too small. She peered into the dead eyes of a bear, or was it a wolf? Atop its skull was a set of horns dripping dark water-or blood-and below the head it had the black, soaked pelt of a horse or dog.
The creature looked as if the devil had cobbled together all the animals of the forest into one evil creature, in defiance of God.
And it let out a howl, high-pitched and loud.
Finally it raised its huge paws and reached through the bars toward Agnes Gotzendörfer. In its right paw it held a mangled human hand that had been chewed off.
Thoughts flashed through the widow’s mind: The creature from my nightmare. The ghosts of those who have been murdered. They are back. The beast has come to take me away.
That was too much for the old noblewoman. Her heart, which had been beating so strongly, suddenly stopped, and blood rushed through her skull like a raging, black torrent. She felt one last, stinging pain, then collapsed on the ground, lifeless, like a puppet.
The beast growled and rattled the bars for a while, as if trying to break them in two, but finally it gave up and slunk away through the alleyways, where it soon disappeared in the raging storm.
As the storm subsided, a few drops of rain, blown into the ancient house by a final gust of wind, fell onto Agnes’s face, twisted into a frozen grimace of terror.
Then, once again, silence fell over the house.
9
THE WILD MAN TAVERN, MORNING, OCTOBER 31, 1668 AD
Barbara sat on a bed in Jeremias’s little room, leafing dreamily through the works of this highly acclaimed William Shakespeare. On the bookshelf she had found a slender volume about an old king who decides to distribute his realm among his three daughters but ends up giving it all to the two unworthy sisters. In his stubbornness, this King Lear reminded Barbara of her own father. She didn’t understand everything in the play and often skipped pages, but nevertheless it led her into another world, far from her current problems.