Wicht von Astert

[Unseelie]

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.