HS04 - Unholy Awakening by Michael Gregorio Read Free Book Online Page B

gesture of helplessness. ‘She said she was sure that there was something nasty in the well. She would have climbed down there on her own, if we had let her. Why, she even went and brought a lamp.’
    ‘A reasonable reaction, I suppose.’
    I remembered the fixed intensity with which she was staring down the well when I arrived in the garden of the Prior’s House. Such curiosity was an understandable reaction in a man, more surprising in a woman. Then again, everything about Emma Rimmele had come as a surprise to me.
    ‘Reasonable, Herr Procurator?’
    The vehemence in these words struck me like a bolt of lightning.
    It was not Gurt Schuettler who had spoken, but Benjamin, the silent one.
    ‘Nothing about that woman’s reasonable,’ he said with all the passion of a misogynist. ‘Is it reasonable to travel with your mother loaded on the carriage along with the baggage? In a coffin, I mean to say?’
    He turned to his brother with a sneer.
    ‘I told you she would bring us bad luck.’

Chapter 5
    I had to go to Krupeken at once.
    After what Knutzen had told Selleck the saddler, the villagers would be like sailors caught in a sudden squall.
    The village was a half-mile walk along the Cut, a balancing act across a narrow lock-gate, a half-mile more along a beaten path which led across the empty fields. I felt vulnerable and alone in that vast landscape. The harvest was in, the fields were cut to a stubble, the prospect was as flat as a billiard-table. If anyone had tried to follow me, I could not have failed to see that person.
    Was that why Angela Enke had been butchered close to where the Rimmeles lived?
    Was the Prior’s House the only spot where she could be taken by surprise?
    Krupeken consisted of one street only, if it could be called a street at all. A dusty lane of hardened cart-ruts wound between one-and two-room cottages spaced higgledy-piggledy in a clearing in the centre of the wood. A dozen cottages of ancient, weather-washed wood and crumbling daub, each one crowned with a steep sloping roof of black thatch. There were wooden shutters in the place of doors and windows. Each house had a fenced-in garden and a lean-to shed where the villagers might lock up their animals for the night.
    Everything seemed tranquil as I approached the village.
    Suddenly, an old man in a brown smock began to shout and whistle, chasing ducks and geese out of a stagnant pond of emerald green, herding them quickly along the street before him with a stick. I might have been a poultry thief.
    He did not acknowledge my presence, except by running away.
    ‘I am looking for the family Enke,’ I called after him.
    ‘Oh, aye?’ he said, hardly looking back.
    ‘Where do they live?’
    He pointed with his chin as he herded the fowl into a side lane. ‘End house on the left,’ he said.
    As I walked past him, he did something that I did not expect. He held up his hands, forming a cross with his forefingers, as if to ward off evil. Selleck had done a good job, raising the alarm and putting his neighbours on their guard.
    I glimpsed other persons as I moved along the road. That is, I saw them for a moment or two, then I saw them no more. A man was walking around his house with a basket on his arm, sprinkling thorn branches on the ground. I had seen this sort of ritual on my father’s estate when I was a child. On the 30th of April, we celebrated the holy feast of Saint Walpurgis. Huge bonfires were lit, and thorn branches were thrown on the flames. On Walpurgisnacht the dead rose up from their tombs, it was said, and they went on the prowl, looking to sate their thirst on fresh human blood.
    The man saw me, dropped his basket, and ran.
    A woman in a linen bonnet was hanging some thing up above her door. Our eyes met for an instant. She blessed herself rapidly, then darted into the house, leaving behind her a cross made of straw bound up with long white ribbons. It dangled starkly fresh and new from the ancient thatch. Two boys were