Sanctum of Horror
67th Day of Summer
766 Karloman’s Peace
Blood stained the walls of his home red and black.
The foyer reeked of copper, sweat, and fear, mingled with the acrid scent of the burning barns beyond. The house was silent. No joyous laughter filled the air; only the oppressive silence of death surrounded Ekkehard as he stepped through the threshold.
Artworks littered the floor, torn from the walls. Yellow curtains had been ripped from their railings and wrapped around the face of a suffocated servant. The blood-stained fabric, now a cowl for the murdered girl, had lost its shine. Broken cupboards, scattered papers, and a dark wooden table smeared with sticky redness, dominated the centre of the room.
Severed limbs of multiple victims formed a triskelion of meat, surrounding the table. The torso of the last victim lay on top, and the axe used in the horrific ritual rested beside it.
Ekkehard forced himself to examine the body parts, trying to identify them. He looked away, gagging as vomit caught in his throat, only to regret it when he faced his grandfather, Ouss Pippin. His severed head had been nailed to the wall where a painting of Harvesters in the Fields once hung.
Ekkehard vomited.
His vision blurred, fixating on the viscous fluid he'd expelled. Panting, he struggled to regain his senses. He lifted his head but couldn't bear to look at his grandfather again. His heart pounded, each beat resounding in his ears as a tidal wave of grief surged against the bulwark of his will.
“No,” he muttered, shoving his emotions into a dark corner of his mind. “No time for this. Find Cheldric.”
With that resolve, he turned his back on the horror and ascended the stairs.
Bodies of servants, cut down by soldiers, and soldiers, cut down by Audomar, lay strewn across the upper balcony. Ekkehard ignored them, his heart still pounding, and headed straight for the room he shared with his wife and son. Halfway there, he tripped, falling quickly as his foot caught on the dead weight of a servant's leg. Glancing back, he recognized the body as Gadrick, an old man he had known all his life, sitting upright against the wall.
His face had been split in twain.
A cold, shameful shiver ran up Ekkehard's spine, making him spasm. He felt as if he had disturbed Gadrick in a most intimate and private moment. Ekkehard slowly crept away from the body, his movements careful and deliberate as if to not intrude. He moved on.
He reached the end of the long corridor and burst through the white door of his and his wife’s chambers. His eyes darted to the wooden crib, knocked over and shattered, but mercifully empty.
Relief washed over him for a brief moment but that was quickly overtaken by a chilling dread. His son wasn’t here. He was still somewhere in this slaughterhouse, somewhere Ekkehard hadn’t been to protect him.
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“Cheldric!” he shouted, eyes scanning the room for any sign of his son. Met with silence, he called out again.
Nothing.
He stormed through rooms, losing all sense of direction and time as he desperately searched for his boy. Ekkehard didn’t know how many doors he had opened when he barged into his mother’s bedchamber. It was the largest chamber in the house, with a feather bed big enough for four adults. The bedding was stained with blood. On it lay the naked body of his mother, Brunhild Reubke. Three spears pinned her to the bed. Her head hung slack, vacant brown eyes staring at Ekkehard.
Shameful intrusion crawled into him once more.
Beside the bed lay two of Ekkehard’s sisters, Oydela and Ereprad. Both were dead, their throats slit but otherwise unmolested. Their clothes, though drenched in blood, remained whole and intact. Ekkehard understood what had transpired in this chamber, and it left him numb.
He backed out slowly, absently closing the door behind him.
He resumed his search, less frantic now. Pausing at the next door, his hand hesitated on the handle. It led to Marcovefa’s bedchamber. Retracting his hand, he concluded that if Cheldric wasn’t in his own room, he was unlikely to be in any of the other bedchambers.
He decided to search downstairs instead, sparing his frozen heart any further horrors.
Moving through the reception rooms and atria meant for guests and servants, Ekkehard encountered fewer bodies. He wondered if perhaps more of his family had survived than it first appeared. Then he reached the kitchen, the room where the women of his family had joyfully prepared meals and shared stories. It was at the back of the house, usually bathed in light from its many windows.
Now, the room was dark and silent, the shutters tightly closed.
Nine women's corpses hung from the wooden support beams across the kitchen ceiling. Among them was Adda Reubke, his elder brother Audomar’s wife. Seeing Adda, Ekkehard's heart sank, feeling as though a weight pulled him to the ground wanting to drag him deep into the earth, into the cold darkness.
There had been so much death.
"Could Audomar endure?" Ekkehard thought. "Could any of them?"
He couldn't grieve yet; Cheldric was still unaccounted for. He shrugged off the weight pressing on his shoulders and urged his knees to hold strong.
He crept around the bloodstained kitchen, trying to avoid looking too closely at the hanging bodies. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted another familiar face among the murdered women. She was new to the estate; a wet nurse Auriana had hired from the city to help with the babe. He felt ashamed for not remembering the girl's name.
If Cheldric wasn’t in his room or with Auriana, then he must have been with the nurse. Heart racing, breath rapid, and eyes wide, Ekkehard began to pace around the room. Cheldric wasn’t anywhere obvious, and Ekkehard suspected the women had hidden the children.
He checked every corner of the room. He ripped the lids off wicker baskets for storing bread; all were empty. A large unopened chest for storing silverware sat on a counter. He rushed over and tried to open it, but it was locked. He searched and found several keys hanging from a hook at the back of the room. He tried them one after another until the sixth key clicked open the lock. He threw the lid back. Silver cutlery, candlesticks, and a mix of fine plates were inside.
Slamming it shut, he turned his back on the chest and looked around some more.
‘The oven,’ he thought. ‘No one would check the oven.’
Set into the stone wall of the manor, the oven had two wide chambers arranged in an over-under style. The lower chamber, touching the floor, burned coal and wood as fuel. The upper chamber was the oven itself, sealed by a black iron door.
Ekkehard froze as he approached. A bloody handprint, almost invisible against the dark metal, marked the handle. His own hand trembled as he gripped it.
It was warm.
He yanked it down. It was stiff and refused to budge at first, only relenting on his second, more desperate pull.
The door yawned gently open.
His chest collapsed, air rushing out of his lungs as if stolen by the vacuum of the oven’s contents. His hands shook uncontrollably, and the strength in his legs abandoned him, forcing him to his knees. Ekkehard broke as tears streamed down his face. Silent sobs and violent inhalations became the only sounds he could make.
Inside the cooking chamber lay the blackened remains of two infants; a baby boy and a young girl. His son, Cheldric, and Audomar's six-year-old daughter, Adalwif.
Ekkehard lay on his side, sobbing on the cold kitchen floor. He couldn't take his eyes off the charred and murdered body of his only child, his newborn infant son.