Oliver Pötzsch - The Werewolf of Bamberg

She looked around at Simon and the other members of her family, who were following her sullenly. Peter and Paul in particular were dead tired and whined softly as they gripped their father’s hand. Jakob Kuisl stomped ahead of them silently.

“Do we still have far to go?” Magdalena asked after a while in a tired voice. “The children are hungry, and my feet hurt. Besides, I don’t like walking for hours through a strange city after nightfall. All sorts of riffraff are wandering about.”

The hangman just shrugged. “Executioners don’t live in the central market square, and since my last visit a lot has changed.” He looked around. “Damned fog. We should just head north here and follow the city wall.”

“The wall is behind us,” Simon interrupted, pointing back over his shoulder into the darkness. “I just saw it a moment ago by the little square with the fountain-”

“Aha, Herr Son-in-Law will now tell me, perhaps, where I can find my own brother?”

“Herr Son-in-Law is just trying to help you, that’s all,” Magdalena replied. “But, as always, you know better.” She sighed. “Why do you men have to be so stubborn when you’ve made a mistake?”

“I didn’t make a mistake-it’s just dark and foggy,” Kuisl grumbled as he hurried along. “You could have stayed at home. I’m just doing this so I can see Georg again, and certainly not because of my brother, the old stinker. I wonder why he’s even inviting us to his wedding.” He spat in the dirt. “When I think about how the Steingaden executioner is taking over my work in Schongau in the meantime, it makes me sick. It will be a real mess.”

As Magdalena walked along behind her father, her vague feeling of anxiety grew. In the narrow, unlit lanes it was already so dark and foggy she could hardly see to the next intersection. Occasionally she heard a whooshing, scraping sound as if someone or something was following her through the little alleys. She turned around to look at the others and could see that Simon and Barbara were also looking around anxiously. She couldn’t help but think of the ashen-faced watchman at the tower, and his final words.

What do you know about this damned city?

Did the watchman have something to hide? Something that had to do with this beast that the wagon drivers had told them about? The severed arm had belonged to a wealthy citizen. Perhaps a nobleman from Bamberg?

When Magdalena looked once more into the darkness, she suddenly understood where her strange feeling was coming from. It was so obvious, yet she’d not really noticed it until now.

The houses, she suddenly realized. Many of them are empty.

And in fact, the windows on many of the buildings they passed were boarded up. Other houses were missing a door, or there were black holes where there once had been bull’s-eye windows. Frowning, Magdalena examined the abandoned buildings more closely. They were clearly not the shabby houses of the poor but were the homes of those who’d once been patricians and wealthy citizens. Some of the houses were now nothing but ruins, though some had been rebuilt or renovated. Magdalena remembered all the cranes, pulleys, and sacks of mortar they had passed on their way through the little streets. Simon, too, now seemed to take note of the empty buildings.

“What’s going on with all these houses here?” he asked, addressing his father-in-law. “Why are so many of them unoccupied?”

“Well, the war was fought here in Bamberg, as well,” Jakob replied, stopping at the next fork, trying to get his bearings. “And it was pretty bad. The city was attacked by soldiers more than a dozen times. That may have been twenty years ago, but many Bambergers fled then and didn’t return. When I was here some years ago, things looked even worse. It takes a while for a city to recover from something like that. Some never do, and all that remains of them are a few abandoned ruins with the wind whistling through them.”

“But Schongau quickly got over it,” Magdalena replied. “Besides, it’s mostly the homes of the patricians that are empty.”

“I don’t care what happened here long ago,” wailed Barbara, who was shuffling along slowly at the end of the line. “I’m just tired. Hopefully, Uncle Bartholomäus’s house is not a ruin, too. I should have stayed home, where the town fair is going on now, with dancing and-”

“I fear the houses were abandoned for another reason,” interrupted her father, who was paying no attention to his younger daughter’s whining. “A reason even more dreadful than the war, if such a thing is possible. I heard about it even far away in Schongau. A grim story.”

Magdalena looked at him, puzzled. “And what was that?”

“I think Bartholomäus should tell you. I suspect he knows more about it than he wants to.” The hangman started walking faster. “Now hurry up and come along before your sister’s whining gets the guard’s attention.”

Silently, he plodded on through the fog, while somewhere beyond the city walls, the wolves continued their howling.

Adelheid Rinswieser paused for a moment and listened. The howling of the wolves grew louder, like cries of children, long and shrill. The silver disk of an almost-full moon was just rising over the pine trees.

The howls of the animals were still far off, deep in the forest. Nevertheless, Adelheid’s heart beat faster as she crept through the dense forest of pines and birches outside the walls of Bamberg. It was not at all unusual for wolves to be found in this area. Even twenty years after the Great War, many parts of the country were still devastated and villages abandoned by their residents, and only wild animals remained among the ruins. But no wolves had been seen in the Bamberg Forest. Their fear of people with clubs, swords, and muskets was just too great, and they preferred to relieve their hunger with a sheep or two grazing in the meadows south of the old castle.

Unless their hunger was greater than their fear.

Trembling, Adelheid pulled her coat tightly around her and kept walking farther into the forest. Now, at the end of October, it was already miserably cold at night. If her husband had learned of this nighttime adventure, he surely would have forbidden it. It had been hard enough for her to convince the watchman at the Tanggass Gate to open the door for her at this time of night. But what the apothecary’s wife was searching for could also help the watchman’s wife-and hence, grumbling, he had finally allowed Adelheid to pass.

Branches snapped beneath her feet as she passed gnarled pines reaching out for her like fingers. In the distance, she could see the watch fires at the city wall, but otherwise it was pitchdark among the trees. Only the moon showed her the way. Once again she heard the howling of the wolves and instinctively hastened her pace.

She was searching for the fraxinella plant- Dictamnus albus , a rare, lily-like flower considered a sure method for aborting unwanted pregnancies. Often young women came in secret to see her or her husband at the court pharmacy near the great cathedral on the hill, pleading for a medicine to save them from shame and public humiliation in the stocks at the Green Market. Her husband usually turned away the poor things or sent them to a midwife outside the city gates, as abortion-or even assistance with an abortion-in the Bamberg Bishopric, as elsewhere, was punishable by death. But Adelheid always felt pity for the poor women. Before her marriage to the honorable pharmacist Magnus Rinswieser, she, too, had had a few affairs and had gotten into trouble. The old midwife Frau Traudel, over in Theuerstadt, had helped her then with fraxinella, and she felt an obligation now to help others.

The old woman had also revealed to her that fraxinella should be picked only when the moon was full. The flower was also called witch’s flower or devil’s plant , and it was very rare in this area. But Adelheid knew a secret clearing where she’d picked some of the flowers the year before. Now she hoped to find a few despite the late-autumn season.