The Kindertotenlieder - 1. Chapter 1

“In this weather, in this gale, in this windy storm,

they rest as if in their mother's house:

frightened by no storm,

sheltered by the Hand of God.”

Closing stanza of Kindertotenlieder

The rain was beating down hard in the Whitechapel area of East London, the wind was howling, and the streets were understandably deserted. A dark figure entered The Royal London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road, and in spite of the driving rain outside, it was bone dry as it entered the hospital’s lobby.

The six and a half foot tall creature, for something as hideous and deformed as this being was really could not be called a man, walked past hospital staff and security officers unseen; it may have been unseen, but its presence was certainly felt. Some staff felt a cold breeze, some staff felt a malevolent presence, some staff suddenly felt queasy; whatever the reaction, everybody in that hospital lobby reacted to its presence in one way or another, but they all dismissed it just as quickly as they felt it.

The creature was the Kindertotenlieder; a very low ranking demon that was as old as time, whose sole reason for being was to take the lives of children. Its domain was littered with the lost souls of the children whose lives it had claimed over the millennia, its lair was adorned with their bloodstained skins, and the mortal world was filled with mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters mourning its victims.

The Kindertotenlieder slowly worked its way up flight after flight of stairs until it reached the seventh floor; five wards of potential victims. Whom will it claim tonight?

It walked past, or more accurately glided past, the gastroenterology and the respiratory wards. The demon entered Ward 7D; the surgical ward. The night nurse, Marianne, looked up from her paperback but saw nothing. She was sure someone had just entered the ward, she had felt them, and she had sensed them; after a cursory glance around the ward and finding it empty save her and the patients, Marianne just shrugged it off and returned to reading her book.

She hated working the night shift. She’d always been a little jumpy, hell she’d always been a lot jumpy, but she was doing a lot better now she was talking things over with a counsellor; it was just that the hospital felt more than a little spooky at three o’clock in the morning. The howling wind and rattling windows really didn’t help either.

Until that point, the ward had been quiet as a graveyard, but she then heard the first whimpering of the night. She approached fifteen year old Jason Masters’ bed, and found he was tossing and turning, and she could see he was crying in his sleep.

Jason wasn’t the first child Marianne had known of to have a nightmare in a hospital, but it was surprising, since Jason had always been reported to be a very restful sleeper, and no night nurse had ever reported any instances of disturbed sleep during his three week stay on Ward 7D. She was about to wake him up, when the whimpering suddenly stopped, he curled up under the covers, and he went back to a peaceful slumber.

She returned to her book and resumed reading. She suddenly looked up and saw a shadow move or thought she did; three o’clock in the morning, no caffeine in nearly six hours, she really wasn’t sure what she had seen.

The Kindertotenlieder was slowly making its way round the ward from bed to bed to bed, looking for its next victim. Although it was invisible to most of the human world, there were a few who could see more of it than most; nobody knows why. Oh, there have been theories over the centuries, each more wild and crazy than the next; even the Council of Demons themselves have been unable to explain away this phenomenon.

The demon truly had its pick tonight. Not only a ward full of slumbering children, but also it could feel power radiating from them, the kind of power that suggested some of these children were destined for greatness; it was the kind of power that would nourish the Kindertotenlieder for a long time.

It approached the bed of twelve year old Josephine Baxter who was two days post op, having recently had her gall bladder removed. Her pleasant dream of ponies and sunshine, turned into a truly horrific nightmare. The sun was obscured by dark black clouds, the sky was filled with lightning, and the ponies turned into winged skeletal demons that were snorting fire; but all she could do was toss and turn, and struggle and whimper against this black imagery that had invaded her sleep.

Marianne again put down her paperback and made her way to Josephine’s bedside. Just as she was about to try to shake the child awake, Josephine’s nightmare dissolved back to sweet dreams of ponies and sunshine, and she calmed down and her whimpering stopped.

The storm outside began to pick up. The wind gathered pace causing the windows to rattle louder, and the rain changed to hailstones that battered against the windows with such ferocity that Marianne was truly glad she was inside and out of that storm. Of course, if she had any idea as to what she was sharing her ward with tonight, she would have quite happily ran into that ungodly storm and welcomed being pelted with hail.

The Kindertotenlieder crossed the ward to the bedside of nine year old Charlie Mellors, who was currently dreaming about Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory; he was ripping cotton candy from trees, singing and dancing with the Oompa Loompas, and he was drinking from the river of chocolate. As the demon approached his bedside though, his dream turned sinister and twisted. The river of chocolate suddenly ran red as if it were blood, the Oompa Loompas chased the dream-Charlie around like savage cannibals on the hunt, and Willie Womka himself was cackling and dementedly egging on his maniacal Oompa Loompas.

Charlie began whimpering as his pleasant dreams continued to be perverted by the presence of the demon. Marianne approached him slowly and became even more concerned when she saw him up close. Charlie was violently tossing in the bed, his whimpering had taken on a haunting sound, and his skin had lost all sign of colour. Marianne was not unaccustomed to children having nightmares in hospital; one child she could pass of as a natural occurrence, two children in one night she could shrug off as just one of those nights, but three! Three children on the same ward, in the same hospital having nightmares one after the other really did not feel right to her; and no child who ever had a nightmare looked anything like this!

Marianne was unable to explain the reasons for her unease, but as she attempted to awaken Charlie her nerves began fraying as he slept on; becoming more and more traumatised with every passing second.

The Kindertotenlieder had selected its next victim. It had found a source of power in Charlie, and as it toyed with Charlie’s dreams, it realised his fear had a sweet, intoxicating aroma; it would make this child’s meat tender and full of flavour.

Charlie’s nightmare changed from the perverted Chocolate Factory, to a woodland setting. Dream-Charlie recognised the wood as being from the horror film he had sneakily watched three weeks ago without his parent’s knowledge. The film had scared him deeply, and he had suffered with nightmares for four nights after watching it. He had finally shaken the dread the film had held him in, but now here he was; back in that wood, back in the grip of his darkest, deepest fear. His terror exploded as he heard the howl of the creature from the film.

Dream-Charlie ran in a blind panic. He had no idea where he was heading; he just knew he had to run away from that creature. He ran deeper and deeper into the darkened woods, and he could hear the thundering approach of the creature from the film. His lungs started to burn from the combination of running full tilt and the adrenaline that was flooding his system, his heart felt like it would burst from the strain it was under, but still Dream-Charlie ran on and on; running for his life, perhaps even his soul.

Back in the real world, Marianne had hit the alarm next to Charlie’s bed, and the on call emergency crash team had arrived. The doctors began administering drugs in an attempt to slow his heart rate, which was now running at one hundred and seventy beats per minute. The machinery recording his heart rate, respiration rate and oxygen saturation levels was beeping wildly and the lines indicating the readout values were in such a state of flux, they looked like the needles on a seismograph recording an earthquake that was over nine on the Richter Scale.

Dream-Charlie ran blind into a graveyard, still being pursued by an unseen monster. Dream-Charlie could run no further. He collapsed on to one of the gravestones and began taking long deep intakes of breath; he sighed as his body finally began getting the oxygen it had been crying out for. He was slowly regaining controls of his nerves when he felt something grab his ankle. He let out a scream and looked down to find the grave’s inhabitant breaking free, and using his ankle to provide some much need leverage with the extraction process.

It was only then that he noticed that this inhabitant wasn’t the only one climbing out of its grave. Every single inhabitant of every single grave was breaking free; Dream-Charlie had no idea how much more of this nightmare he could take. He kicked away the hand that was wrapped around his ankle, and ran again into the dark night screaming for his life.

In the real world, Charlie’s heart stopped beating and the monitor flat-lined. The crash team tried unsuccessfully for forty minutes to revive him, without success. The Dream-Charlie finally saw the thing it was running from, and he felt a fear like he had never felt in his young life.

“You are now mine, Charles Michael Mellors.” The last thing Charlie saw was the Kindertotenlieder opening its mouth, showing all of its teeth, and then it closed its jaws over the young boy and now he truly was dead.