Baron Dunkel's Son

My Father had inherited Dunkel Hall from my Grandmother, Baroness Dunkel, the renowned seer.

I never cared for it, the Hall; a dishevelled crumbling shadowy edifice worrying the eponymous tiny hamlet in the lee of the massive Finster Hills. I always dreaded coming back to it's unlit corridors cloaked in dark fortunes and the place where my beloved mother died.

In short, I detested my Baronial home, its rain-soaked towers gagged with thick choking gothic unease and the atrocious memory of my mother's death.

I kept my distance from it and the vast county of Finsterland, where my family had ruled for centuries, albeit in relative peace and prosperity, where the Dunkels and their subjects, mostly farming folk, were free from the ubiquitous burgeoning unrest sweeping the world and always retired to quiet bedlam with bellies full.

I had been gone a long thirty years, sent away as a child to board school in far Mainz by my father.

Thirty years was indeed long and against my better judgement, to avoid forever the awful humour round that baleful pile that so forcibly kept me away, I now felt oddly summoned to urgently return to Dunkel Hall that Christmas.

Notwithstanding malicious civil feuds breaking out across the nations, exacerbated by a virulent pest, together killing hundreds of thousands, my new life in a modern city was, or certainly had been, entirely to my satisfaction, in which I had procured a handsome position in a bank as a Baron's son and adequate and airy lodgings by the Park. 

And so it was on the occasion of my Father's 80th birthday, after three decades absentia, that I found myself sat on the gloomy steam train from Frankfurt, that ironclad wonder of the age, upon which I was heading home to Dunkel after so long away.

It was a freezing late December Sunday as I left the grand financial metropole caressing the River Mainz, the locomotive's billowing smoke and steam coughing into the frigid blue sky like the thick incense I remember my Grandmother burning incessantly as she read her beloved Tarot to me, often hiding a singular card beneath the table as she foretold the household's doom. 

I handed my ticket to the ancient conductor, at which he peered over his glasses and spoke.

"You travelling to Dunkel Sir?"

"Yes"

"Ah. There's been a very heavy snowfall in those parts. On Finster's slopes. It'll be real hard going once you alight."

"Very kind of you to tell me Conductor. I shall take extra care. In any case, my Father's carriage shall be waiting for me".

"Your Father? I see. Would that be Baron Dunkel?"

"It would. Do you know my Father Sir?"

"I met him once. On this very train. He was travelling with his daughter. A lovely girl".

"His daughter? My Father doesn't have a daughter. I, Sir, am his only issue, of that I'm certain!"

"Ah, well, it's none of my business Sir. He said she was his daughter."

"When was this?"

"Oh, I should say about a year gone. I remember, as he said he'd turned seventy nine that very month and wished to do right by his companion before he reached eighty.  It was at this time of Christmastide and I recall he gave me a most generous monetary gift."

"His companion being ...."

"Yes, his daughter. Awful quiet she was. Pale too. I remember her scratching her hands, which were dreadfully wartsome, her nose was blistered and she appeared malnourished. I thought she might have been ill. Your father wore a large sword as well, which seemed odd, together with the black horse in the animal car, but then again, given the times, perhaps not".

"The times? You're referring to the tensions across the globe I take it?"

"Aye, so many dead already, the Generals stifled by corruption and the pox ravaging herds everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of cows slaughtered and burnt. A disaster for the farmers, all bankrupt, the farms lying empty. Starvation looms across the world."

"Yes. Of course, I felt the impending disaster in Frankfurt too; trouble at every corner and empty shelves in the shops. But there's no struggle in Finsterland I believe."

"That's correct Sir. Not a single outburst of violence or plague as yet. Very, very fortuitous for the farms thereabouts, but also ........ very strange too, Sir". The conductor stared at me for a second and turned away.

"Yes indeed", I whispered as he walked off.

The conductor busied himself elsewhere in the carriages and left me alone. Through the window I could see fires burning in the distance, the ravages of militant skirmishes and the acrid smoke of hundreds of charred cattle fingering it's way into my car, a truly egregious smell and I was glad to cross the border into my home county of the Finster.

For the next two hours I dozed fitfully until at last we reached my stop

"Here we are Sir, Dunkel."

"Thankyou."

I stepped off the train with my case, the steam clouding in the darkness of the tiny station like an apparition.

"Give my regards to your Father and ..hmm, his daughter".

I nodded to the conductor and shuffled up the ramp, to where, indeed, a horse and carriage, where waiting for me.

Dripping candles burnt at either side of the driver's seat, affording the horse and vehicle an eerie luminous glow. 

"Young Baron?" Inquired the elderly coachman.

"Yes. Thank you"

"I'm Krendel, you may remember me. There's an awful nip in the air Sir, it'll be the end of you. Here, let me take your luggage and warm yourself in the cab. There's a flask of brandy and a glass inside"

I gladly drank a shot and braced myself for the rendezvous with my estranged Father, a half hour's ride away through thick snow. Three decades was a lifetime to have been absent from my family home, but the phantoms of the past, those despicable hurts, came slowly and inexorably crawling back.

My beloved mother had died in the Hall's stable in a most heinous fashion, inexplicably kicked fatally by her favourite horse, normally of placid demeanour, but on that tragic morning a malicious beast, which pummelled and mangled her body beyond recognition.

My Father had run into the vile building, where he smote the giant mare such a terrible blow with the huge Baronial blade that he cleaved the animal clean in half, it's two sides opening like a gored book. My Father then cursed the scene with unworldly incantations and scattered foul-smelling liquid from a phial across the creature and my mother. Still muttering strange utterances, he finished his raging by thrusting his sword deep into the stable's  crimson earth, directly through my mother's skull, upon which a baleful growl erupted from the ground as if some fell leviathan had been pinned. 

Although I never entered the hateful stable again, I sensed that the sword through my mother's skull remained there, erect and terrible, until the day I left.

Upon reaching Dunkel Hall I was suddenly aware of otherworldly shadows scurrying in the darkness, which, as my spirit waned, I fancied them to be imps, sprites and boggarts here to welcome me back to my own personal Hell.

I felt no love for my Father nor any semblance of affection normally associated between Father and Son. My parental bond lay impaled and bloodied in the decrepit shed. 

And so it was that when finally meeting my Baron Father in the vestibule, no warmth nor emotion ensued between us, save a strange reaction my Father displayed at my return.

"It is upon us Klaus!" He said solemnly and grasped my shoulders tightly.

"I have returned to see you Father, nothing more. After thirty long years, I want for nothing else but to see you".

"Thirty years! Is it really that long. No matter, it is time now. It feels but a single day has passed since that terrible morning in the horse shed. I have been so numbingly alone since that day and so dreadfully exhausted by my constant vigil since".

My Father looked broken, a husk of his once regal self, a shadow in his own terrible Hall. Yet a flicker of something else, something otherworldly ignited in his eyes as he stared at me.

"Come, Klaus, let us remove from this dank  threshold and warm ourselves by the study's fire, a glass of schnapps besides".

I followed my Father's shambling figure draped in his tattered greatcoat until we entered the toasted air of the study, where a large open fire blazed in the grate, projecting fantastical swirls and flicks of light around the mahogany walls.

Krendel, the familial butler and coachman for nearly a century, furnished us with two glasses of weinbrandt and a tray of small crackers, caviar and tartar with diced onions.

I had not realised just how ravenous I had become, having abstained from food all day on the long train journey across the South.

A second tray of entrees was supplied, after which I sat back and enjoyed the fiery tang of the brandy and the orange warmth of the blaze, a pleasant but albeit fleeting sense of arrival coming over me. 

"So, how is the City Klaus? I trust you have prospered in its edifices of gold and the struggles have not harmed you?"

"I have Father and now enjoy, at the age of forty, a generous stipend from the mercantile bank and a kindly life in Frankfurt, despite the growing sense of civil disobedience".

"I am glad to hear it I am, after such awfulness in your tender years, that tragic accident, that mad horse, the loss of your mother at such a fragile age. I remain truly sorry. I hope you have escaped further anguish my Son. Tell me, do you still suffer from uncontrollable bouts of fury, for which you were born?"

"Sorry Father, I don't understand. I have never suffered from such a malady. It is you I recall raging in the house, battling my Grandmother's claim of looming armageddon."

"Ah, you do not remember do you. It is to be expected in such a young mind that wanted so much to shut down. I forget that I sent you away almost immediately. It was you who stormed into the stable that hateful day and rent the berserk horse in two, then impaling your mother's head with the family blade."

"Me?"

"Yes, you my son. I arranged schooling in Frankfurt to avoid any scandal and to keep you safe until the time was right for you to return to take your rightful place at my side as the time approaches."

"I'm sorry Father, I don't know what your talking about. My rightful place? I have returned simply for Christmastide. I do not plan to stay beyond that."

"You will. Once you meet your sister. You will."

"My sister?"

"Yes, Klaus, you have an older sister. Monika. Also sent away at an early age like you, before you were born. But now she is also returned to her home, rested and restored, to become what she must."

Despite some foreknowledge of this from the conductor, in which in all honesty I had placed very little stock, my head reeled from my Father's revelations. For thirty years I had believed that it was he who dealt the fatal blow to my Mother and that I, Klaus Dunkel, was his only child. The two firm pillars of my existence came crashing down and left me bereft of sense or feeling.

At this juncture, Monika, my unknown sibling, glided into the study and hugged me.

"Brother, it is truly a joy to meet you after these decades of secrecy. I cannot wait to ride saw with you by our Father's side in glorious splendour!"

It was too much. How can it be that my life was such a brazen lie. I staggered and swooned, whereupon my newly appointed Sister caught me and helped me to my bed upstairs.

I slept fitfully dreaming of artillery and carnage; amidst the tumult I visited my Mother's skull pinned to the ground and grasped the hilt of the sword, whereupon my Mother spoke:

"Do not be afraid my Son, I may have lost my place and gone too soon, but I shall ride with you in spirit as you cut a swathe in the fields of limbs and lead us to the bloodied dusk!"

I awoke, sat upright and shuddering, sodden from feverish perspiration.

I looked out of my window and saw fires and shelling exploding in the distance, the moonlight illuminating the clouds of smoke like collosal and terrible titans. The civil battles were raging and the gunfire was so much closer as the pox now drove even Finsterland's ordinary subjects to madness and murder. It seemed like it would erupt into monumental catastrophe any minute.

Outside in the Hall's yard I could see figures in the darkness busying themselves around the old stables in the shadows beyond the moon's grasp: my Father, Monika and Krendel. I was certain I could see them on horseback, the three beasts' breath billowing in the frosted dark as a fourth riderless horse reared. The night seemed to envelope it like a curse. 

It was midnight on Christmas Eve when I stepped outside into the freezing yard, the air stinking of gunpowder and cordite, the sky bruised by canons and shelling, as if Gehenna itself had opened it's gates.

And then I realised, it had.

Waiting for me at the snow-caked steps were the three horse riders. The mares: massive, winged, fire-strewn, snorting: the enormous figures brandished colossal swords, their helmets aflame above eyes blazing like the pyres of Hades. 

Rearing up, the central rider spoke with a voice that shook the very earth and boomed like thunder above the encroaching militias and the guns.

"The end is truly nigh, for we are three of the chosen Horsemen: Conquest, Famine and I am War."

My Father War raised his Lordly blade up high, whereupon in chorus the fell beings three beckoned to me and roared: 

"We bid you join us and make us four, oh Mighty Death, Lord of Destruction, the Desolate One!"

At once my city clothes fell away in flames sizzling on the icy ground. I grew in stature, my sinewy arms lengthening like vines, my face stretching on its contorting hooded skull and I was garbed in an ancient black sail and armed with a scythe forged for a titan.

It was thus that I alighted a huge dark steed, it's nostrils flaring with the fires of Hell as we, the four Horsemen, rode yelling into the desperate carnage of global war.

And so it was that I became the Leveller and together with the three, as was foretold, we destroyed the living and brought all existence to a deafening close and ceased the gyres of the Earth until nothing in this world remained but the ...

Final Apocalypse.