Astert was a small village on the edge of Hamburg's Habitable Zone. Built mostly underground, it appeared from the sky a simple shipping and tram depot, with a sparse collection of sheds and some piles of coal radiating from the silver and black tarmac road which led to Lichte. Thin plumes of smoke rose from under the ice, and four open stairways led down, each on a corner of the main intersection. They spread like a borse's maw, with icicles and railings framing the entrance. Below, the stairs converged on a dimly lit plaza, often swept with snow and ice, a plaza filled with mining equipment, and lined with sealed doors
Behind those doors, the town glowed. Little side streets were lit by kerosene lamps and heated by fusion electricity, a place where the utilities were neatly packed into the walls and growth was well organized, never mind the empty homes at the far end of every row, places set aside for future generations. Children played in the open streets, running with mittens and coats done up, often out into the central plaza to skate across the patches of ice that pervaded the area. Greater Rhienland's economic crisis didn't seem to reach here, and the Gotkanzler's religion was catching on only slowly. The thousand villagers were folk of the old way, often unwilling to change, but a mite superstitious, in light of recent events.
It had started with a body, of course. A body which had been found in a Rhienland Military uniform. The dogtags proclaimed him Corporal Hans Hartmann, of Stuttgart. A big, burly man, dressed in green, dead in a toolshed. He seemed handsome, and peaceful, as long as you didn't roll him over. Of course, the police had rolled him over.
He'd had frost in his beard, and his clothing was stiff from it, cap and mitts frozen to his skin and stiff from the encrusting ice. When three men couldn't peel him from the riveted floor, they'd taken crowbars to the corpse, and slowly cracked the uniform from the floor, rolling him onto the coroner's cart. The body whacked the cart like a fallen log, without any sort of fleshy jiggle. The man was an icecicle.
The coroner reported his spine missing, the bones torn out, and soup made of his insides. His organs were a sort of jelly, melting far sooner than they should have. The goo ran when the body was touched, seeping from cracks in the brittle skin.
The body was burned.
Soon thereafter, a missing person's report went out, a young woman, around 19, had working in a mechanic's shop late one night, who never came home. The manhunt was simple, and brief, local authorities assuming that she'd simply taken the late tram in to the city to look for better work in a warmer climate. The climate may have been the key to the investigation, as well, as storms were moving in, and any evidence was soon frosted under a sheet of ice, and every shift was perforated by stops in the breakroom, or aboard the mobile operations center, until the storm itself settled over town, and the police were forced back underground.
Storms in the northern equatorial regions on Hamburg can take weeks to overpass a region. Nearly perpetual, the storms squat in concentric rings, gaining force over water and then skating across the snow and ice, they carry magnificent electrical charges, lighting entire regions with a dull glow, striking high points for prolonged periods...Other than electrical hazards, high velocity winds collected bits of dust and ash, which formed dangerous cutting saw teeth, carried by the wind, and hail the size of a human head fell from the sky, bouncing and shattering on impact. The sun would rise on a new horizon, cut with spires and blades, spikes and domes, and the ground would be hazardous to walk across, so sharply would the ice have frozen.
When the town of Lichte lost a person, no one noticed. There were simply too many people, and people moved around, sometimes without notice. If a body showed up...well, there'd been another three murders last week, and so what if this one was a bit gruesome? Some people were wackjobs. Between Lichte, Astert, and a few other villages, the pattern took months to develop. Things simply weren't clear, because of the isolated nature of a border village on Hamburg. Not one agency communicated with another, and Johns and Janes Doe drifted in, one every few weeks, and sometimes someone was murdered, and identified, but only rarely. In the beginning, each village sent out manhunts, looking for some madman in a trawler out in the hills, but when nothing was found, they assumed he'd moved on. Eventually, though, a manhunt didn't come back, and there was a search for the manhunt.
The search found twelve armed men, twenty dogs, six skiffs and a trawler, frozen rigid in the snow. There were traces of arms fire, and holes in the trawler. One of the skiffs had had the sheeting peeled off the frame. A corpse with its spine, throat, and lungs pulled through its chest, another with its limbs ripped off. There were dogs without heads, without lower jaws, men with their intestines strung over trees, or their chests impaled by ice sickles. The snow was a soft pink, and soon thereafter, a child went missing. Then another child, and another, gone without a trace.
Things changed. Old ladies dug up older and older superstitions, doors locked at night. There were gunmen posted on the stairs. Children no longer went out, and businesses closed down overnight. It happened in other places, too, but nowhere were the changes so drastic as in Astert, a little town on the edge of civilization, a town besieged, first by strange disappearances and stranger deaths, then by nightmares and sleepwalkers...Men ended up in straight-jackets, crying out in terror. Terrified of the darkness, any shadow..terrified of their fellow men. Children, in the night, would crawl into one another's beds, and strangle their siblings. People moved away. People ran away, out into the screaming Hamburg winter wearing nothing but their nightgowns...The town dwindled from many thousands to just over a thousand.
Shapes were seen. Wandering the edges of the settlement, wreathed in windblown snow, wearing mantles of ice. Sometimes men, sometimes women...sometimes recognizable. The terrors that haunted the town were legion, and the host that surrounded them...too disturbing to count. To alluring.
The siren calls began in early 814 AS. Everyone left had lost someone..and they'd see them. Live, whole, hale, beckoning from the edge of the settlement. From beyond the fence. Worse than husbands, wives, lovers...the very worst, were the children. Children, crying just out of sight, crying out for their siblings, their parents...children outside the fence, trying to get in...eventually, someone left a gate open, or turned down the electric charge, and no one stopped them. No one saw it, or no one cared. A family got back together, had a wonderful dinner. Children stayed up all night, chatting with a specter, entranced.
Above, thirteen men died, their heads pulled right around. The next day, the town was stuck. Trawlers had been driven into each of the four staircases, and industrial sealant sprayed into whatever spaces were open. Lines were cut, and the town died, cut off from everything. When the winter storms died down, a party was sent from Lichte, to discover what had happened to the struggling settlement. It seemed like the population had gone berzerk, sealing themselves below and attacking one another with mining tools, cutting saws, torches...The town had torn itself to shreds, and cannibalized its own corpse. And there were...figures...wandering around, just out of sight in the mists.
When Hamburg had first been settled, the native Hamburg Borse had caused a horrible shock..one of them took as many bullets as a trawler before going down, and berserked with such a rage...a small pack could round out a settlement, tearing through walls and wrestling even power armoured marines to the ground. The policy had been to wipe out the species, and the task had been successful, at least in the Habitable Zone. Ecologists suggested that such a brutal creature must have brutal competition, but no comparable creatures were ever found. In fact, the only creatures living on Hamburg, other than Borse, were fish and rodents. Settlements were assumed safe from animal attacks.
For the last 15 years, people had dissapeared around the outskirts of Astert, Vogtshagen, Bayern, and Exdorf, on Planet Hamburg. Children had grown up knowing you didn't leave the settlement, and not just because of the cold. Even if you were suited up, you left armed, and in groups, if you walked at all. Generally, people took the tram. A person would disappear. A little girl would stray too far from the playground, and months later, her body would be discovered, sometimes as far away as the city of Lichte. The border towns weren't as safe as crime ridden cities. None so bad as Astert, of course, which had declined, and then gone insane, but all the hamlets were in decline, slowly going wild, back to the terrain, storms and snows piling frost higher along their fences, outskirts consumed entirely by the encroaching bales.
The authorities in Lichte suggested that a cousin of the Borse, something a bit more intelligent, could have mimicked human activities, and torn Astert apart. This creature, hypothetical though it was, gained a name in the news, as the Wicht von Astert. Exobiologists were brought in to study this hypothetical creature, and they suggested something might have forced it into the Habitable Zone, and that more could be coming, that the polar regions should be better explored, its ecologies cataloged. So skiffs flew out, and skiffs disappeared. Some came back, carrying hibernating creatures of every sort, worms, birds, woolly creatures of every description..but nothing like the Wight.
Meanwhile, in a crevice in the ice, not far from Astert, a body crouched, growled. Its hair hung lank, icecicles matting its clothing. It rocked back and forth, and muttered about the light. How dark it was. How very, very dark. And alone. It wore most of an environment suit, tattered and bloodstained.
It stumbled through the snow, feet frozen and broken...it left toes behind, chipped off on the ice. With every step, the coat cracked, and shattered fragments of ice fell from its hair and back. Snow whirled around it, and the creature stumbled forward. It had three bullet holes in its chest, and another in an arm, the blood slowly seeped out and steamed. They eyes were rotten, a grey blue and moldering, growing fungus across the irises. It never moved its head, simply put one foot in front of another, till the snow subsided, and it crossed one street, then another. It ran straight into a wall, corrugated iron, and stuck, the blood freezing it to the frost. The creature reached up, and grasped the low roof, losing fingers in the process. The ring-finger and pinkie on the left hand chipped around their knuckles and then fell off, landing in the snow. It pulled itself up onto the roof, and lost its legs beneath the knees. A fingerless hand punched through the aluminum roofing, and it received another gunshot wound to its shoulder. Relentless, another hand went through the roof, and the voices on the inside were cut off. With its head, it bashed a bigger hole, and fell through.
Hunks of meat, frozen fingers, parts of bone, were strewn around the shed. Against one wall, a body lay, mangled, arms torn off and legs broken. A third body leaned against the wall, gasping for breath through a stump just above its shoulders. Glottis shuddered open, and closed...blood pumped, and poured down the body. Tatters of muscle and sinew flopped wildly, and for a while, it just stood there, bleeding out, breathing heavily. Then it staggered out the door, headless, heading towards the closest source of heat. It needed a new body.