Horses of the North

XI

They did not reach Salinas, not that year. They were surprised by an early storm that became a blizzard, while somewhere between Dorrance and Bunker Hill, Kansas, and they halted and set up camp on the spot. And in their ill-chosen, exposed position, they very nearly froze to death before the weather blew itself out and Milo and Bookerman chivvied them, one and all, into striking camp, loading the transport, harnessing the teams, gathering the herds and moving with all possible speed farther east, to the next town, True, those buildings still standing were in poor condition after thirty-odd years of the worst the elements could offer, but at least they offered frail human flesh and bone more protection from those same elements than did thin canvas tent walls.

When once the people were settled in, Milo began to devote serious thought to something better, more protective than the tents, but equally transportable. It was Dr. Bookerman, however, who came up with the answer.

“Yurts, friend Milo, felt yurts are the answer to this problem. They were designed for just such weather in just such a land as is this—windy and very cold or windy and very hot.”

“Now where in the hell are we to get felt, Doctor, as much of the stuff as we’d need for the undertaking of this project, anyway? Or have you already figured out exactly how many fedoras and billiard-table tops it would take to make each family a home?” demanded Milo.

Bookerman shrugged. “Some of it we will be able to find in the various towns and cities—more in the cities, of course—but the bulk of it we will have to fabricate ourselves. But that will not be so difficult, you’ll find, not anywhere nearly as difficult as the fabrication of cloth, yet a good many of the women have learned to do that.”

Although Milo still had his doubts, within a few weeks of gathering materials, equipment and volunteers, Bookerman and his crew were actually producing a medium-weight felt from raw wool and animal hair.

“Where in the devil did you learn to make felt?” inquired Milo.

Bookerman allowed himself one of his rare, brief smiles and simply said, “Neveryou mind, friend Milo. Besides, you’d not believe me if I tried to tell you.”

With the felt production in full swing, Milo took the neat, professionally rendered sketches provided him by Bookerman and, aided by some of the cart makers, began to go about turning out the wooden frames and poles of center wheels needed to hold the felt walls and roofs of yurts. When the prototype framing was ready, he turned it over to the doctor.

On a bitter day, with yet another blizzard clearly on the offing for their chunk of prairie, a party rode out of the tiny ruined town on horseback and on two carts to a very exposed place. There they cleared away the snow down to the frozen earth beneath the white blanket, then painfully hacked out a firepit, lined it with stones and laid the fuel for a fire therein.

That done, the physician directed a crew of men in setting up the supports and frames, locating the doorframe, then beginning the layering of felt and canvas on roof supports and side lattices. The frame and lattices were anchored by being lashed to stakes laboriously driven deep into the frozen ground; the side felts were carefully surrounded with small boulders and chunks of concrete earlier collected.

When once the shelter was set up and the coverings all in place, the ground inside, all around the firepit, was covered first with waterproofed canvas, then with several thicknesses of carpet. Fuel supply was stacked near the doorframe, foodstuffs, cooking utensils and bedding were brought in, along with a kerosene lamp and its fuel, some books, a folding chair and table, a five-gallon can of drinking water, some spare items of clothing and Bookerman’s treasured rifle—a bolt-action Steyr-Mannlicher, stocked almost to the muzzle in some rare wood, firing 8x57mm handloaded ammo and, in his skilled hands, more than merely accurate out to chilling distances.

With the wind picking up force by the minute, or so it seemed, the carts and riders headed back into the town at a stiff clip, leaving the doctor within the prototype yurt, by his fire, reading a book. Milo frankly wondered if they ever would see the German again with life in him, for thick as the layers of felt and canvas were, strong as were the sides and supports of carefully fitted, well-seasoned wood, heavy as were the surrounding boulders and deep as had the stakes been driven, still he wondered if the fragile-looking shelter could be proof against the wind—already, knife-edged—and the cold of the fast-approaching storm.

The blizzard raged and howled through the streets of the town for two days, hurling snow and ice on hurricanelike gusts to punctuate the steady blast of arctic air. So bad was it out on the open prairie that the herds were brought into town where they might at least enjoy a measure of protection from the winds, although the only available food for them there was the dried weeds that had grown up here and there through the cracked concrete and macadam, the grain and hay being hoarded for the horses and mules and draft oxen.

Nor, it was soon discovered when the storm finally blew itself out and the people forced a way out into the yards-deep drifts, were the domestic stock the only ungulates which had taken advantage of the shelter of the building walls. There were at least twoscore bison to be seen huddling with the shaggy cattle, deer, native antelope and a scattering of more exotic herbivores, a small herd of wild horses and a smaller one of burros.

Justly fearing the bestial panic that the discharging of firearms might engender, which might cause death or injury to the intermixed domestic animals, Milo saw to it that those wild beasts harvested were taken with bows, or roped in the deep, movement-hampering snow, then dragged away to have their throats cut.

All of the leaders worried themselves almost sick about the fate of Dr. Bookerman, way out there on the open prairie, his low-crouching little shelter unseeable from even the highest of the remaining buildings. And it was simply out of the question, just then, to try to reach him either mounted or afoot, so deep were the drifts, so frigid the air, and so threatening of a new storm was the sky. But no fresh storm occurred that day, although it remained frigidly cold and, in the following night, dropped even lower in temperature. On the next day, however, the sun rose and the thermometers ascended to a surprising high of twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. When the wild creatures began to push through drifts and work their way out of the environs of the town, Milo and Harry Krueger decided that they could safely seek out the yurt site and see if Bookerman had survived his ordeal.

First, however, every available man and herd dog was required to try to separate the domestic from the wild beasts. This task proved very taxing and not a little dangerous, as it cost the life of one man, a couple of dogs, and the necessity for—stampede danger or none—shooting dead a huge, powerful, short-tempered bison bull and one feral cow fanatically overprotective of a calf that looked to be about half bison.

Leaving the capture and nursing of the sturdy calf and the skinning and butchering of the bison and the cow to others, Milo and Harry and a hurriedly formed party saddled horses and set out for the site on which the yurt had been situated. They rode, not at all certain that even the intrepid Dr. Bookerman could have survived such hellishly cold and windy weather in so flimsy a habitation, and their worst fears seemed thoroughly justified when, coming within sight of the yurt, they could none of them espy even a wisp of smoke emanating from its peak.

But their fears were proved utterly groundless. When they were invited into the yurt, they all immediately began to sweat in the cloying heat. Bookerman had wisely and long since stripped down to boxer shorts, T-shirt and thick socks, yet the ashes in the firepit were cold and the only heat sources were the lamp and Bookerman himself. That was when Milo and the others began to truly appreciate the concept of the yurt and the degree of assured protection it would offer them and their dependent people from the savage elements of the prairies and the plains.

“So that is how you adopted those curious circular homes,” beamed Arabella Lindsay. “But how can anything that your mind tells me is so warm in winter be so very cool and comfortable in hot weather, Milo?”

“Simple, my dear,” he beamed back. “Just remove some of the outer layers of felt, then roll up those that remain for a foot or so from the ground; this provides plenty of air circulation, flushes out the heat and such smoke as doesn’t go up and out the peak hole, and, with the doorway coverings removed as well, provides plenty of light, even while the roof layers protect from direct sunlight and rain or hail. As I later learned, that old—that very, very old—man Bookerman had done some very terrible things in his long, long lifespan, but his pioneering of the yurt for us did, if anything, at least partially redeem him. I am only thankful that he was on our side, those long years ago, for as ruthless and cruel and brilliant as he was, as he proved himself over and over again to be, he would have made a most deadly and sinister enemy.”

She wrinkled her freckled brow in puzzlement, beaming, “But Milo, what made you think the doctor to be sinister, ruthless and cruel? Yes, he did torture the prisoner by the removal of one of his eyes, but had he not done so, how many more lives do you think that the aggressions of his cohorts would have cost you and the rest? As for the other thing that seemed to so upset you, I cannot understand why his wish to breed out any remaining scrubs from your people was so abhorrent to your mind. It’s as your memories tell me he said—such a process has been employed for thousands of years in breeding up horses, cattle, dogs, sheep and any manner of other dumb beasts; why should it not have been used to improve the strain of man?”

Milo sighed audibly, then beamed, “Arabella, it was not just that one point that so repelled me, it was the philosophy that clearly showed, that particular night, beneath his surface. I had suspected him, on the basis of things he had said and done and not done, for a long time, and that night’s conversation convinced me that I was right. Arabella, Bookerman was a Nazi, the worst kind of Nazi, an international criminal who had somehow managed to escape his just deserts—trial and execution or long imprisonment—and assumed a new identity and lived long and well in the United States of American for who knows how many years before the War.”

Once more, the freckled brow wrinkled. “I’ve seen that word before, Milo—read it, I believe, in some of the older works of military history kept in the fort library. But isn’t ‘Nazi’ just another word for ‘German’?”

“Oh, no, Arabella, you’ve apparently misunderstood that which you read. ‘Nazi’ no more means ‘German’—although most of the Nazis were German nationals—than ‘Communist’ means ‘Russian’ or ‘Felangist’ means ‘Spanish’ or ‘Fascist’ means ‘Italian’ or ‘Socialist’ means ‘Swedish.’ Although these groups led, dictated to, the bulk of the populations of these countries, the actual membership in the groups was always a very small percentage of the populations.

“Just how much do you know about what was called the Second World War and the events that led up to it and succeeded it?”

She shrugged. “Not very much, I confess, Milo. I believe that some of my ancestors fought in it, that some were slain and that others were injured, but then there were some of my ancestors in every war that Canada and Great Britain fought for at least a millennium … or so Father attests.

“How long ago was this war, Milo?”

“Something over a hundred and fifty years, Arabella.”

“And … and you truly fought in it, Milo?”

“Yes,” he beamed. “Yes, I did.”

“Then … then just how old are you? Are you human?”

“So far as I know my dear, I’m perfectly human, just … different, in some few ways from other men and women. As regards my age, I don’t know for certain, not my exact chronological age, anyway. But I have reason to believe that I’ve roughly two and a half centuries of life and living behind me, although, as I do not perceptibly age, I have no way of telling for sure. I looked no whit different from the way I look today when I soldiered in the United States Army before, during and after the Second World War, and I had just the same appearance during the periods that I just have shared the memories of with you, Arabella.”

“What made you the way that you are, Milo?” she begged.

“I have no idea why I differ in the few, but important, respects that I do from the general run of humans. Perhaps I was born different; I don’t know. You see, I have no memory at all prior to a point in time a few years before the Second World War. I was found by a policeman one late night in the alleyway in an American city called Chicago. Near my unconscious body he found a wallet—expensive of make, but empty of money or anything else. However, the name Milo Moray was stamped in gold inside it. It appeared to him that I had been struck on the head and robbed, and whoever struck me down hit me hard enough and in just the right place to rob me forever of my memories of my life up until then, a loss of far more real importance than a few paper bills might have had. But I’ll tell you more of myself at another time. Let us now get back to the original subject: World War Two and the Nazis and Dr. Bookerman.

“The seeds of World War Two and Nazism were sown in the wake of an earlier war, called World War One. Although the Germans did not really start that first war, they lost it, and then their enemies—notably the French—punished the entire German nation and king and people cruelly hard. The Kaiser—their king—was banished to live in and soon die in a foreign land, then a new form of government was imposed upon the people and nation, a government with which few of the people were ever really happy. Their military forces were disarmed and disbanded; they were occupied by foreign troops and forbidden to have more than a few thousands of men under arms. Their richest mining and industrial areas were taken away from them, as too were all of their overseas colonies. Large chunks of their traditional lands were taken away and given to other countries, some of them very artificial countries, places that never before had been sovereign or enjoyed an independence.

“All of their warships and merchant ships were taken from them, all of their aircraft, armored vehicles, rail transport and even many of their trucks and motorcars.

“As if they had not been sufficiently beggared, it was declared by the winners that Germany must recompense all of the costs of the war, and therefore all of the gold that backed the German currency was taken away, making the German mark not worth the paper that it was printed upon.”

“Why, that is awful, Milo!” declared Arabella. “How could those poor Germans live? Why would the winners so terribly mistreat the helpless, defeated Germans?”

“Some of the oldest reasons in the human lexicon, Arabella: envy, greed, revenge and hatred. The French were leaders in heaping every possible indignity and humiliation on Germany, Austria and Turkey, which countries had been their principal opponents in the war. Then their occupation troops sat back and watched while the German people starved, sold everything that had not already been expropriated for little or nothing just to keep themselves and their families alive for a few more days or weeks or months. Few Germans had meaningful income, for many factories had had to close because of total lack of capital, and none of the international banking houses would extend credit on reasonable terms to the defeated, robbed and stripped German nation or any of its businessmen and industrialists.

“In such an atmosphere, in a nation aswarm with unemployed men, many of them former soldiers, those extremists who find their most fertile fields to be helpless, hopeless, frustrated and desperate people flourished—Communists, Anarchists, Fascists, religious fanatics of every stripe and persuasion, visionaries, perverts and out-and-out lunatics. Two groups finally emerged from the chaos as the major contenders. One was the Communist Party, which very nearly took over the southern portion of Germany, Bavaria. The other was a group calling itself the National Socialist German Workers Party—the Nazis, for short.

“Both of these major contenders formed bands of armed men—virtual private armies—and waged pitched battles in the streets and the countryside, while the overworked police and the tiny, ill-equipped army rushed madly from place to place in vain attempts to maintain some semblance of order, lest the occupiers take more severe action against the nation and people as a whole.

“Although both parties were made up of extremely violent, sadistic, murderous and clearly psychotic men, large numbers of otherwise sane and ordinary Germans flocked to swell their ranks and to give them support in attempts to legally attain to public office. They did this for two basic reasons, Arabella. The near takeover of Bavaria by the Communists had horribly frightened a great many people, and these Nazis, if they were nothing else, were clearly, openly, avowedly anti-Communists. The other reason was that they offered something that the legitimate, but foreign-imposed, government could not offer. They offered hope—hope of a brighter future in a strong, powerful, respected Germany, a Germany freed of its crushing debts and of its virtual enslavement to alien peoples and nations, a Germany in which all of the traditional German lands would be reunited and all people of German blood would be citizens, a Germany in which there was work and bread for all Germans, a Germany flushed clean of foreign troops and of alien ideologies and once more united behind a single, strong leader—the German word for ‘leader’ is Fuhrer, Arabella—such as their Kaisers had supposedly all been.

“The German parliament was called the Reichstag, and early in the 1930s, a large number of Nazi members were voted into it, whereupon the feeble, dying, politically impotent old onetime field marshal who was the figurehead that the victors had imposed upon the vanquished to govern them had no alternative but to name the leader of that party, one Adolf Hitler, to the Reichschancellorship. Very shortly thereafter, the old field marshal died and then the new Reichschancellor took up all the reins of government and began to shape the nation and its policies to conform to standards laid down by him and his personal advisers and staff.

“In his long and rocky road to power, Hitler had gathered about him a singular crew of men, some of them the very dregs of any imaginable society—sociopaths, sexual perverts, sadists, hatemongers of the worst sort, alcoholics and narcotics addicts, and a few brilliant but mentally and emotionally twisted men. The only thread that had held them all together through so many vicissitudes, through years of difficulties that had included shootings, stabbings, beatings resulting in not a few deaths within their ranks, persecution and imprisonment by the legal government, uncertainty every morning of whether or not the evening might find them in a jail or a coffin, that thread had been their belief in the goals of National Socialism and the personal charisma of their chosen leader, Adolf Hitler.

“Once installed in more or less legal office, however, Hitler found certain of the men who had with their blood and suffering put him where he was a definite liability, and he took care of that liability in a very firm and permanent manner: he had another group of his personal thugs—the Schutzstaffel or SS—murder the most of them, which deed so terrified the rest of them that he never had trouble from them again.

“Now Hitler and certain others of his cronies had early on become imbued with some crackpot theories of inborn racial superiority. That is to say, they had mentally divided all of the world’s people into two classes, which they called by the names of Herrenvolk and Untermenschen. Herrenvolk were all said by them to be tall, muscular, highly intelligent, fair of hair and skin, blue or gray of eyes, with oval skulls, fine facial features and a natural noble bearing—which constituted a type that very few of Hitler’s original staff fitted very well, least of all Adolf Hitler himself.

“The so-called Untermenschen were made up of everyone else of every race and ethnicity inall of the world. Herrenvolk means ‘superpeople,’ Arabella, while Untermenschen has the meanings of ‘submen’ or ‘barely human.’ The Nazis felt that it was the inescapable destiny of the few superpeople to rule, be the slave-masters of the vast hosts of subpeople, and in order to, make certain that there should be no further mixing of the precious Herrenvolk blood with the inferior peoples, they used and abused their power, going to extremes that were ridiculous and lunatic and would have been considered ludicrous, had the end results not been so ghastly, so terrible, so sickening to all decent men.

“It began innocently enough with a form of state-controlled marriage licensing—Herrenvolk were not allowed to marry anyone not of reasonably pure Herrenvolk descent—and encouragement of Herrenvolk wives to breed more of their approved kind, with honors and money given to those who produced larger than usual numbers of children. The next step was to mandate that unmarried Herrenvolk women and girls fornicate with pure Herrenvolk men—mostly officers and other ranks of the aforementioned SS, with the single-minded purpose of producing still more Herrenvolk children for the future of the race, the party and the state. Up to that point, the Nazi racial-purity obsession could at the very worst have been considered to be but a form of nationalism taken to ridiculous, insane extremes, for there was not then anything approaching a pure race upon the face of the earth, with the widely scattered exceptions of some few tiny tribes of stone-age primitives.

“But there was another side of the Herrenvolk coin, Arabella, and that other side was far more sinister and more dangerous to all other races upon the earth. It consisted of nothing less than the total extirpation or enslavement of all peoples not, by the peculiar standards of the Nazis, racially pure Herrenvolk.

“Soon after the Nazis took power in Germany, and then in the German-speaking nation of Austria, camps had been established to contain dissident elements such as Communists, criminals, deviant types and the physically or mentally abnormal. Later, leaders and members of religious groups that opposed various aspects of state policy were added. These people all were, in the beginning at least, legally tried and sentenced to these camps; and, though primitive and brutal, these camps were really labor camps wherein the residents worked at manual labor for the length of their sentences, then were freed.

“But there was another aspect to the camps. Hitler and a good many of his henchmen had conceived a deep and abiding hatred of Jews and gypsies, both of which they considered to be races, although many people of that time thought the Jews, at least, to be a religion, not a race. Of all the various races of the Untermenschen, the Nazis considered the Jews to be the very dregs, the lowest of the low, undeserving of anything but enslavement and eventual death. Hitler had written as much in a book he produced while he was imprisoned on one occasion.

“When the Nazis first came to power, the more astute of the German Jews, the born survivors, recalled the words of that book, that savage blueprint for genocide, and got out of Germany with their families and as many of their assets as they could easily bear away. But those were only a few. Most remained, for they considered themselves to be good Germans, whose religion had nothing to do with their German nationalism, and not a small number of them were and had been early supporters of the anti-Communist National Socialist German Workers Party, harboring fully as much desire as any other good German man or woman to once more have their country for their own and at peace internally, freed of the oppressive, foreign yokes of slavery and the totally disruptive radical terrorists spawned by the loss of the war and the subsequently depressed economy.

“But as the Nazis consolidated their power, their stranglehold upon the German nation and people, being a Jew gradually became a crime within the borders of Germany and, a little later, Austria. All of the privations and humiliations heaped upon the German nation and people by the cruel, ill-considered treaty that had followed the war were laid, by the Nazis, at the doors of the Jews, invoking amongst the German people the latent anti-Semitism that had lain just below the surface for generations.”

“What is anti-Semitism, Milo?” asked Arabella.

“Another term for hatred of Jews, my dear. I suppose that its genesis was in the theology, the teaching, of the early Christian Church. Jesus Christ was born a Jew, it is said, but it also is said that he was arrested, condemned and executed at the behest of the Jews, and a frequent epithet referring to Jews was ‘Christ killers.’ ”

“Be that as it may, the bulk of the too-long downtrodden, despised but proud German people undertook the persecution with a vengeance, overjoyed to have a group of scapegoats on whom to vent the angers and frustrations that they had for so long endured in helplessness. At that juncture, emigration of Jews from Germany and Austria was being officially encouraged, and many Jews took advantage of that encouragement to get out, though most of those emigrants were allowed to go only at the cost of almost everything that they owned of any value.

“Now, by this time, many German and Austrian Jews had already been killed—murdered, beaten to death on streets and in jails, convicted on trumped-up charges of capital crimes and then executed with the semblance of legality—but large numbers of them were also beginning to be gathered up and shipped off to the aforementioned labor camps without even the mockery of a trial—old and young, men, women and even children, of every station and occupation, rich and poor. The story given out was that they were being collected to be resettled on the lands that the German armies were then conquering in the countries to the east of Germany—Poland and Russia—but that story was never anything more than a lie designed to prevent resistance and ease the intended transition from living Jews to dead Jews, courtesy of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

“Arabella, in that war and its aftermath, between twelve and thirty millions of human beings died, the numbers only dependent on which nation’s figures you credit. Now this is not a large figure, true, not when compared with the losses worldwide caused by the last world war, but it still was a shocking, an almost unbelievable number for those long-ago days and times. And, Arabella, three to six million of them were Jews. So many of the European Jews either emigrated or were killed that, for a long while, Jews were rare in most of Europe and almost unheard of in Germany itself.

“And all of this slaughter and horror and misery because an aggregation of powerful fanatics, trying to practice an insane theory, striving toward a patently impossible goal, were allowed by the people of an unbelieving world to enforce their will upon those over whom they happened to hold sway.

“Can you now understand, comprehend my feeling of loathing, my fear for the liberty and safety of those who depended upon me when I had to listen to Bookerman’s oration, that night, my dear?”

“I … I think so, Milo. But what ever happened to him? Did you finally have to kill him, after all?”

Once more, Milo opened his memories to the Lindsay girl.

Not much felt could be made that winter, for it was stormy and extremely cold, and consequently the sheep and goats and cattle and horses and mules needed their coats of hair and wool for the maintenance of life-giving body warmth. But with the spring, the shearing and the wide-ranging collection of other hair began in earnest. Parties of hunters and those who carted out to gather wild plants and roots bore along bags for the collection of stray wisps of shedding winter coats from the bodies of wild beasts. All of these many and varied contributions went into the heaps and piles of washed wool and hair—hair of horse and hair of mule, hair of cattle and hair of goats, hair of dogs and even hair trimmed from the heads of men, women and children.

Milo and Harry Krueger and old Wheelock handled all of the mundane affairs of the people, leaving Bookerman free to do nothing but supervise and work with those who were engaged in turning the mountains of fur and wool and hair into sheets of felt.

The physician experimented constantly with mixtures and concoctions of many and sundry natural plant extracts and animal products in search of fullering and hardening agents other than the old and increasingly rare man-made chemicals for which he sent cart expeditions to the empty towns and villages along the route they had traversed as far westward as the outskirts of nuked Denver. He knew that these would not always be available to the fledgling nomads and that even were they now to obtain large stores and cache them away somewhere or try to bear them with the caravan, they would deteriorate sooner or later—probably sooner, for they already were at least forty years old. The records that he meticulously kept of each and every experiment with mineral, animal and vegetable substances were eventually to prove invaluable to Milo and the people of the group that would one day call itself the Horseclans.

But they found themselves unable to stay in the little town for long after the arrival of the warmer weather and new growths, for their herds quickly exhausted the graze around and about, and their repeated incursions against the wild game soon drove those herds beyond their reach. So it was load up and move on again, though this time without old Colonel Wheelock, who had died when the spring was but two weeks old.

By midsummer, they had finally reached the city of Salina, from which the decision had been made to bear due south, if the southbound interstate was still as passable as was the eastbound one. Meanwhile, they camped in the buildings, grazed their herds in the overgrown parks and scavenged, as usual, among the dilapidated, often dangerously decrepit structures.

Two men and a woman were killed and several more people suffered injuries of varying degrees of seriousness when the ground floor of a onetime store collapsed into the cellar below and the remainder of the rickety two-story frame building crashed down atop them all. It required most of two days to dig out the dead and the still-living from the ruins, and, fearing repetitions, the council proclaimed that thenceforth scavenging would be done only by experienced and organized teams of men and women under the overall command of a member of the council. Naturally, there was some grumbling at the announcement of the new rule, but when the councillors presented a united front backing their decision, the people at last seemed to accept it.

Bookerman, alone, had not taken part in the meeting and the decision. This was not considered by any of the other councillors to be odd or unusual, for the doctor had already set up and was supervising a new felting operation. He still was also carrying on experiments, and he still practiced medicine, as well.

The next morning, however, when a felter came to Milo and asked if he knew where Bookerman might be found, he not having been seen at the felting operation, at his experimental lab or at the building set up for use as a hospital for some days, Milo went looking for the physician.

Milo’s persistent knocking at the door of the small cottage inhabited by the doctor, however, raised nothing other than echoes, so he proceeded to break in the locked portal, bracing himself for the likely discovery of the aged physician’s corpse, cold and probably decomposing by this time.