Chapter 3: The Dead Man's Voice

Chapter 3: The Dead Man's Voice

The ancient words felt like grit and ash in Maxwell’s mouth. Each syllable was a struggle, a foreign artifact he had to excavate from his throat. His voice, a reedy, trembling thing, wove itself into the haunting drone of the women’s choir, creating a discordant harmony that scraped at the edges of his sanity. He kept his eyes fixed on the spidery ink of the parchment, not daring to look at the body on the table, not daring to meet the intense, predatory gaze of the villagers surrounding him.

The air in the hall grew colder. This wasn't the passive chill of a winter’s night seeping through the walls; it was an aggressive, encroaching cold that sank into his marrow, a cold that felt unnervingly familiar. It was the same absolute, life-leeching cold he had felt when he’d pressed his palm against the dead man’s forehead. Now, that single point of contact had expanded to fill the entire room. The candle flames, which had been flickering merrily, now danced with a frantic, desperate energy, stretching their wicks thin as if trying to escape the encroaching frost.

Maxwell read on, the scholar in him clinging to the task of translation as a drowning man clings to a splinter of wood. The text was a bizarre tapestry of legal jargon and occult command. “Let the bloodline’s claim be witnessed… Let the earth that holds him reject his passage… Bind the lingering spirit to the Scribe’s word, until the final debt is paid.”

The Scribe’s word. His word. He wasn't just a reader; he was the anchor. He was forging a chain with his voice, linking this world to whatever lay beyond, with Hermann Blatzer’s corpse as the nexus. The realization came with a fresh wave of nausea. The five thousand euros weren’t a payment for a service; they were a price. For him.

He reached the final line. The women's chant rose to a fever pitch, a wall of sound that vibrated through the floorboards and up through the soles of his boots. He took a ragged, icy breath.

“So sei es besiegelt,” he choked out, the final words of sealing. “So it is sealed.”

As the last syllable died on his lips, the clock tower bell tolled one final, deafening time.

And everything stopped.

The chant cut off mid-note. The candles ceased their wild dance, their flames suddenly standing perfectly, unnaturally still. The silence that fell was more profound, more terrifying than the noise it replaced. It was the silence of a vacuum, the silence of the grave. Maxwell’s own breathing sounded like a thunderstorm in the crushing stillness.

He dared to lift his eyes from the parchment. For a breathless second, nothing happened. The body of Hermann Blatzer lay as it had before, serene and still. A hysterical bubble of relief began to rise in Maxwell’s chest. It was over. It was a grotesque, terrifying piece of local theater, but it was over.

Then came the sound.

A soft, wet click.

It was the sound of eyelids, dry and brittle with death, peeling open.

Hermann Blatzer’s eyes were open.

They were not the eyes of a living man. The irises were a cloudy, cataract-grey, filmed over with a milky, spectral luminescence that seemed to glow with a light of its own. They did not blink. They moved with a slow, jerky rotation in their sockets, scanning the faces of the inner circle with a horrifying, dispassionate appraisal.

Maxwell felt the blood drain from his face. Every instinct screamed at him to run, but his feet were leaden blocks, fused to the floor. The villagers around him were statues, their faces a mixture of awe and terror. Even Elsbeth, the iron matriarch, had a flicker of shock in her cold green eyes. This was the moment they had been waiting for, the horrifying miracle they had orchestrated.

The corpse’s gaze swept past his daughter, past his grim-faced male heirs. Then, the milky orbs stopped. They swiveled and locked directly onto Maxwell.

There was no mistaking it. In those dead, glowing eyes, there was a dreadful, focused intelligence. It saw him. It knew him. A low, rattling sound started deep in the dead man’s chest, the sound of dry leaves skittering across pavement. It was the sound of lungs that had not held air in days trying to work again. The corpse's jaw, stiff with rigor mortis, began to creak open.

Maxwell’s mind screamed, the words from the mimeographed paper flashing behind his eyes like lightning. Rule 5. If the Awakened Speaks Your Name, Do Not Answer. Do Not Flinch. Do Not Acknowledge It.

A voice slithered from the corpse’s throat. It was not a voice of flesh and blood. It was a guttural whisper, a dry rasp that scraped the air, a sound stitched together from static and malice.

“Maaaax-wellllll… Thooorne…”

The two words hung in the dead air, a violation of all natural law. The sacred rule was broken. The carefully constructed ritual had spiraled out of control. A collective gasp, a hiss of pure terror, rippled through the villagers. The hook had been cast.

Maxwell was paralyzed. The voice, the impossible sound of his own name from those dead lips, had severed the connection between his brain and his body. He couldn't answer, but he also couldn't run. He was frozen, a statue of pure fear, staring into the abyss that had opened in the dead man’s eyes.

And the abyss stared back.

His paralysis was his undoing. With a sudden, violent crack of stiffened joints, the serenity of the corpse shattered. Hermann Blatzer’s body, moving with a strength that belonged to no living thing, sat bolt upright on the table. The ceremonial robe fell away from one arm. The hand that had been folded peacefully on his chest snapped open, its fingers curled into a rigid claw.

Before anyone could react, the reanimated body lunged.

It moved with the terrifying, unstoppable momentum of a fallen boulder. It crossed the small gap between the table and Maxwell in an instant. All he could see were those cloudy, hateful eyes and the gnarled, waxy fingers of the dead reaching for him. The same absolute, soul-sucking cold he had felt before now rushed towards him like a tidal wave.

A silent scream was trapped in his throat as the icy fingertips, hard as stone and cold as the void, slammed against his chest.