The Werewolf of Mariahilf am Inn I.13
A Gothic Horror Novel
Book I, Chapter 13: The Schorn Foundation
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It was an hour before sunset in late October 1870, almost three years since Hermann and Henrietta had been evicted from their room in Cronenberg’s Old Town Square. Prussia was at war with France. And each night in the public houses of the North Rhine and Westphalian territories, revelers still hoisted their krugs to celebrate the Prussian Minister-President’s early September victory over Napoleon III at the Battle of Sedan.
Hermann removed his residency papers from his overcoat and handed them to the soldier at the gate to the Arbeitsviertel (the Work Quarter), as Cronenberg’s slums were now euphemistically called. The corporal glanced at the papers and waved him through, before turning back to the fire-pit to finish his lurid tale. The post was manned by four soldiers at any one time. When their shift ended, they returned to their barracks on the other side of town. Once it was closed at sundown the gate would not open again until dawn.
On days like this, the damp air made the scars in the crooks of Hermann’s arms itch. But he refused to scratch them. The discomfort reminded him of how far he’d come since his subjugation to the drug. And no matter how abject his current situation might seem, it was no longer as it had been when he and Henrietta were first admitted into Schorn-Stiftung (the Schorn Foundation), a Protestant charity for the laboring poor.
The baroque archway he now passed under, which smelled of urine, had originally marked the entrance to the slums. As he emerged from it he glanced to his left at the pontoon bridge spanning the river Wupper. He removed his gray cap and wrung it between his hands as he walked past it, whispering a prayer to Our Lady of Mercy to look after the souls of his children and in-laws who’d been murdered there on the day before Easter 1867. He cast his eyes up at the smokestacks of the Tar and Creosote Factory, where he now worked 12 to 16 hour shifts under increasingly harsh conditions. But the labor was his penance and the work had kept the werewolf at bay.
The slender brick chimneys vomited up their black poison and the acrid vapors clung to one’s clothes and seeped into the wood of the tumbledown buildings where the poorest of the town’s poor labored as bootblacks, tanners, stonemasons, and worked in other trades considered too menial to be plied openly in the charming streets of Cronenberg. Hermann and his coworkers often joked of how the creosote fumes had weatherproofed their skin and made their cocks as stiff as coffin boards. But the joke rang hollow on the days they bore a friend’s body over the pontoon bridge to bury it in the slime pits north of the factory.
The Work Quarter had been militarized since July to guard against French spies and saboteurs. At least that had been the declared intention. In reality it was to prevent laborers from fleeing Cronenberg to seek higher wages in places like Essen, where the Krupp foundries were hemorrhaging skilled workers, many of whom were French.
A journalist had published a scathing feuilleton accusing the town fathers of conspiring to subject the people to involuntary servitude. The article was published without having been reviewed by the Prussian censors. So every copy of the newspaper was confiscated, the publisher was stripped of his license, and the consumptive aesthete who had authored the piece (as an exercise in Demosthenean declamation) was condemned to six-month’s hard labor in the mines of Saxony.
Hermann followed the cobbled way along the river that terminated at the eastern wall, which was horrid with iron spikes. In this area stood two brick structures, Block 1 and Block 2, belonging to the Schorn Foundation. A Prussian soldier patrolled the buildings to deter anyone from attempting to flee across the river into the slime pits and marshes beyond, a prospect no one thought likely.
Block 1 housed the infirmary and was where the families lived. Block 2, which was much longer, sheltered over a hundred men who slept three or four to a room. The ground floor of Block 2 contained the kitchen, dining hall, a men’s bathhouse, and a place for the laundering of the factory uniforms.
Hermann entered Block 1 and noticed the infirmary was shut and no candlelight shone from under the door, which meant no one was ill or convalescing; although that did not preclude a corpse from being left there overnight. The stairwell leading up to his room stood adjacent to the folding oak doors leading into the Widow Schorn’s private chambers. Her rooms were said to be immaculate but sparsely furnished, with white plaster walls on which hung several large portrait paintings of her beloved husband covered in black velvet.
Even though the sun had not quite set, the Widow Schorn had withdrawn into her chambers for the evening. She would be asleep by 8:00 and rise six hours later. As she herself had openly declared in her sermons and testimonies, she spent the first two hours after rising in a state of meditation and communion with her dead husband “before he is called back to Heaven when the cock crows.”
It was said that one morning in the dining hall a Catholic laborer mentioned to his table mates that the hours when she communed with her husband were the “witching hours” and that, according to Mother Church, it was profane to pray or conduct such devotions at that time, since Christ died on the Cross at that time. Frau Schorn overheard him and cleared her throat. The man lowered his eyes and apologized. And when a vat of tar broke from its braces and crushed the man three days later, the Widow whispered over his corpse, “Glorious is the Name of Jesus.”
Through the floorboards Hermann heard the Widow reading aloud from the Bible. It was one of the chapters from 1 Kings concerning the building of Solomon’s Temple. The manner with which she trilled her “R”s and intoned every word somehow imbued the arid details of the Temple’s construction—the beams of cedar, the rafters of fir, the cubits and ells—with a sacredness that stirred the heart of the Austrian carpenter’s son.
The room he and Henrietta occupied was as cramped as a hermit’s cell. When he opened the door, Nanna, the red-headed nurse, turned and grinned in the dim candlelight. Henrietta was propped in the padded chair with her head resting on a clean pillow. Nanna had just finished tightening the cloth diaper around her waist. Hermann smiled in gratitude as the young woman smoothed the skirts of Henrietta’s dress and ensured that the blanket completely covered her legs since it would likely be a chilly evening.
The layout of the room resembled their previous apartment, but the scale was greatly diminished. The furniture consisted of Henrietta’s chair (which Hermann never used), a squat round table, and a low stool. Hermann slept on a rush mat with a woolen blanket and bolster stuffed with hay, which he replenished often. On the table stood his father’s shaving mirror, straight razor, and (thank God) the memento mori, which he had come within a hair’s breadth of selling.
By the time Hermann had been forced into the workhouse he was so consumed by the morphine madness that the Widow Schorn had separated the ailing husband from his wife. Once he had recovered, the Widow proposed transferring Henrietta to the infirmary, which had four beds (one of which was always vacant). But Hermann insisted she be kept with him. “She’s all I have left,” he said. “And I don’t know how much longer it will be before one of us is called to the Lord.”
“Were you able to find the medicine?” Nanna asked.
“Yes,” Hermann mumbled. He handed her the brown bottle with its smudged label. It was strychnine.
The Widow’s voice beneath their feet had grown much quieter. Both Nanna and Hermann knew the old lady was listening in on them, even if the pace and tempo of her Biblical recitation had not slackened. There were strict rules governing the mixing of the sexes in the workhouse. The Foundation’s charter specified that the charity was devoted exclusively to laboring men. Small families were allowed to live in Block 1, so long as one of its twenty coveted rooms (located over the Widow’s chambers) was vacant. Children under the age of nine were not permitted to live in the compound, since they could not work effectively or follow orders consistently at such a tender age.
If any of the wives or daughters were discovered to be “with child,” the family was obliged to vacate the Foundation’s premises. The laborers’ wives and daughters served in the kitchen and infirmary or performed other menial duties as the Widow decreed. If the worker predeceased his dependents (as often happened), the survivors collected his last day’s wages, gathered up their belongings, and departed, but only after signing a letter never to return to the Work Quarter or appeal to the Widow’s boundless pity.
Nanna had been an exception to the rule. The girl had shown an aptitude for reading and arithmetic from an early age. And so the Widow Schorn took her under her wing and trained her to be a nurse and serve as her deputy. She and her father lived in the same room that Hermann and Henrietta now occupied. When Nanna’s father died, the Widow adopted the girl and took her into her private apartments as a confidant and companion.
The reason that Hermann had requested a pass to leave the Work Quarter that day was because Henrietta’s stomach had become swollen, and he needed a medicine that was not available in the Foundation’s infirmary. Nanna had suggested that the swelling might have been caused by the hysterectomy the doctors had performed on her in their effort to cure her of the catatonia she had slipped into in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
Hermann had gone to the same apotheke that he had purchased the morphine from years before since that was the only one he knew. The pharmacist had died but his son had taken over the business.
Nanna took the bottle and put it in her apron pocket. “I’ll prepare the solution tomorrow, because I’ll need to measure the dosage out by the full light of day. Strychnine can be fatal if too much of it is used.”
When she had gone, the Widow’s voice raised again; and a thick page of the massive Bible she read from (while standing at her lectern) could be heard turning over.
Hermann was exhausted. He would have to be awake by midnight to begin his shift, which would last until the afternoon of the following day. He didn’t have the energy to undress or pray. And he forgot to kiss Henrietta before stretching out on the mat and falling asleep.
He woke when the factory bell clanged at 11:15 to alert the relieving shift that they would be expected to report to their stations within forty-five minutes.
Hermann woke, sat up, yawned and stretched limbs. He went to the corner of the room to piss in the tin pail he used as a bedpan. He opened the window and looked down. The guard was snoring on a bench in front of Block 2 and several of the shift workers were milling around outside with a single cigarette being passed among them. Hermann raised his voice and uttered the French warning, “Gardez l'eau,” to let those below know that the contents of his chamber pot were about to be dumped. (But since he didn’t speak French, he pronounced it “Karte lü.”)
A woman stepped outside from the side door of Block 2 with a basket of potato cakes and a porcelain pot of lard. This would be the men’s first meal until they returned briefly from across the river for breakfast in the dining hall an hour before dawn where they would have a portion of meat.
Hermann used the water basin on the table to rinse his hands and face. Then he went to Henrietta’s chair, kissed her brow, adjusted her pillow and left. Nanna would stop by to check on her in a couple of hours when the Widow Schorn began her private devotions.
Minutes later he stood in formation with the other workers, waiting for the shift leader to conduct the roll call. The leader was none other than Maximilian, who had served as Berthold Landecker’s foreman at the wheelwright factory. When the roll call was done, Maximilian led the formation down the path toward the pontoon bridge. Hermann turned his neck and cracked it as he marched. He remembered the day he and Henrietta had been evicted from the room that Marty Fitzsimmons had secured for them.
It had been a few days after Frau Jeismann, the landlord’s wife, had given him three Vereinsthalers in the stairwell. In his manic state Hermann rushed to the apotheke with the coins in hand to purchase enough morphine to last him through the winter. Then later that night, having tended to Henrietta’s needs, he sat down at the table and decided to treat himself “to a little more” of the drug than usual. He had anticipated an evening of spiritual ease and solitary languor.
But to his shock, he woke to the sound of four sets of boots on the landing. And when he opened his eyes, he lay on the floor beneath the table, covered in roaches with his mustache grown out and a thin goatee on his chin. His trousers were soiled. He craned his neck and saw Henrietta on the floor under the window sill. The sheet that he had covered the window with had been wrenched away, and the corner of it was clenched in Henrietta’s fist.
He heard the doorknob turn and felt the men’s footfalls reverberating on the floor as they entered the room.
“Good God! The stench!” He recognized the voice of the justice of the peace. And his fat son, Emil, was with him.
The landlord, Ephraim Jeismann, clucked his tongue and said in a sad voice, “You may clean him in the yard behind the building. My valet will help you. When he is presentable, I will receive you in my study.”
The valet and Emil lifted Hermann from the floor and carried him between them down the steps and outside to the back. He was stripped naked. Buckets of cold water were poured over him. The wind was biting and he shivered and cried out. They scrubbed him down with a cake of soap. His heart pounded in his throat. He lifted his face to pray, but saw Frau Jeismann looking down pitiably from the upper window. Humiliated, he covered his genitals with his hands.
The justice of the peace stood by the tall wood paling that hedged in the back of the yard. He kept pulling off his hat and putting it back on as he cursed and stomped his foot. Herr Jeismann’s eldest son, Jacob, donated a change of clothes to the poor man. He even walked outside and handed them to the valet but refused to look at Hermann.
Once Hermann had been dried and clothed, the valet led the men up the steps and into Herr Jeismann’s study. The landlord asked the valet to step outside.
When the door was shut, Ephraim sat on a wooden stool by a table on which stood a silver objet d’art and open catalog. The landlord chose not to sit behind his desk, because he felt sympathy for the dying man and thought such a move would come across as imperious. He shook his head gravely.
Hermann’s teeth chattered and he trembled uncontrollably, more out of apprehension for what was coming than from the drafty room.
“Stand up straight,” Emil hissed.
The landlord pointed to the carpet to signify the rooms below. “My servants occupy rooms on the landing where Herr Tischler and his wife live. They have overheard obscene language coming from the room, as well as feral growls, which they claim sound inhuman. Herr Tischler has persisted in allowing his poor wife to stand at the window at all hours of the day, which is disturbing the pedestrians in the square. The heat of the bakery beneath them and the closed squalor of the room have led to an infestation of roaches and other vermin. I’m afraid the Tischlers will have to vacate the premises.”
“Where will we go?” Hermann asked in desperation. Emil slapped his arm. And the justice of the peace said, “You will not speak, Herr Tischler!”
“Please,” Ephraim touched his brow. Then he turned to Hermann. “You are a dying man, Herr Tischler. And it is not my wish to add to your hardship. I have independently looked into your situation and I think there is a solution.”
Hermann was only half listening because he was trying to figure out why his hypodermic needle was wrapped in a rag and stuffed in Emil’s coat pocket.
Ephraim rose from his seat. “I was granted an interview with Colonel Landecker, who was moved to tears by his cousin’s reduced circumstances. He explained to me that the Cronenberg Tar and Creosote Factory is partially owned by the Prussian military, and that the Widow Schorn, who runs the charity affiliated with it, is indebted to the Landeckers for a substantial donation that his family recently made to the Foundation. The Widow has agreed to take in Herr Tischler and his wife.”
Hermann appealed to the justice of the peace. “But my room here has been paid for until spring.”
Herr Jeismann replied. “You will be reimbursed for the advance the American paid for the room, along with a pro rata adjustment for the month of November. And I shall accept the furniture you brought with you when you moved from the Landecker estate as compensation for the damages you have done to my property. . . Besides, Herr Tischler, your new room will not be large enough to accommodate these articles.”
Ephraim went to the desk and removed a leather purse from the drawer. He counted out five Vereinsthalers and twenty-five groschen, which he placed on the blotter. Hermann’s eyes bulged as he scooped the coins into his palm.
When the interview was over, the justice of the peace seized Hermann’s arm and led him out of the landlord’s study and down the stairs to the room, so that he could gather up his belongings.
Hermann transferred the money into his own coin purse, which he put in his overcoat pocket. When Emil offered to lift Henrietta from the floor, Hermann went to him and said firmly: “She’s my wife. No other man has the right to touch her.”
His memories of that day were vague; but he would never forget the way the citizens of Cronenberg gawked at him as he carried Henrietta over the cobbles slick with the morning’s hoarfrost. Emil and his father marched behind them carrying their personal effects. Hermann averted his eyes when he caught sight of the elderly Alsatian maid, Imogene, standing aghast beneath a shop awning. A wave of nausea hit him when realized that he would be living a stone’s throw away from the place where his babies had been slaughtered.
When they arrived at Block 1, no one was there to greet them. The Widow Schorn was mopping the floor of the dining hall. But Nanna (who seemed far too young to have so much responsibility) emerged from the infirmary with a nurse’s cap on her head. She told him their room was the first one at the top of the steps. The justice of the peace set down the bundles he’d been carrying and directed Emil to help Hermann and Henrietta settle in. Then he walked out, covering his nose with a handkerchief.
Emil placed an arm around Hermann’s waist to ensure he didn’t stumble or drop Henrietta as he carried her up the stairwell. Moments later Hermann sat alone on the rush mat with Henrietta’s head on his lap, sobbing. Because it was only then that he realized that Emil had not only stolen his hypodermic needle, but had picked his pocket in the staircase and taken all the money he had left in the world.
There were no locks on the doors of the upper landing. Nanna opened the door to the room and saw that Hermann was dozing with his back against the wall. So she rapped her knuckles on the doorjamb to wake him.
“Yes?” he asked as his eyes snapped open.
“The Widow Schorn will see you now.” She set one of the bundles on the table that the justice of the peace had left downstairs.
Hermann lifted Henrietta’s head and placed it gently on the pillow. Her eyes were open and her pupils remained fixed on him.
“Don’t worry,” Nanna said. “I’ll take care of her.”
When he reached the bottom of the steps he heard a clang and commotion coming from inside the infirmary.
“In here,” the Widow said.
She was washing her hands in a water basin when he entered. A man lay dead on one of the beds, face covered.
“Remove your shirt,” the Widow said.
Hermann did as she bade.
Already an old woman by the outbreak of the Crimean War, Greta Schorn and her husband had been forced to flee their mission in the small German colony of Neu-Akania, located in the Russian Chersonese, due to rumors circulating among the Tsar’s courtiers that the two were British agents. What leant credibility to the rumor was the curious fact that Greta Schorn spoke English without an accent, since five of her sixteen quarters of nobility could be traced to prominent houses in Northumbria and Sussex.
The Schorns hired a Tartar fisherman to smuggle them in his boat along the eastern coast of the Black Sea. They disembarked in Sinope on the Asiatic side of Turkey, where an Ottoman Bey received them and escorted them to a British camp in Scutari. There, Greta Schorn volunteered her services to the English “Lady with the Lamp,” who treated the aging aristocrat and fellow sister in Christ with respect and deference. Greta learned not only art of medicine from Florence Nightingale, but studied her techniques of recording the stages of a patient’s recovery or decline to aid future generations of doctors and nurses.
By the time the Baron and his wife returned to Europe in 1858, the Duchy of Anhalt-Köthen (where they had been born) existed no more and the Baron’s private landholdings had been confiscated. Undaunted, the couple traveled to Frankfurt am Main, where a princely sum was withdrawn from the Baron’s secret account there.
The couple relocated to Cronenberg, where they gave themselves over to Christ by establishing a charity for the laboring poor, which flourished until the Baron’s death in 1863. Since that time the Widow Schorn had run the charity alone and had acquired a reputation throughout the German-speaking lands as die Taube des Wupperthales (The Dove of the Wupper Valley), not only for her innate skill as a nurse but for the many learned articles she contributed to both German and English periodicals on topics ranging from vaccines to spiritual healing.
“What are these?” the Widow asked, grabbing Hermann’s arm and palpating the bruises and needle marks. She saw similar bruises and marks on his other arm. “And these!—What are these?! Have you been tortured in a prison?”
“No.”
“Then what are they?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re from an accident.”
“These were intentionally inflicted.” She looked at him; and the right corner of her mouth curled up in that reptilian smile that would become all too familiar to him in the coming months. “Stand up straight—like this.” She thrust her chin forward.
Hermann did as she had asked.
She went behind him and ran her fingers along his spine. “You have good posture. Your spine is not crooked.” She faced him again. “Bend down to my level.” She ran her fingers through his hair, looking for lice. “Open your mouth,” She peered in and touched his teeth. “Your gums are scorbutic. . . Nanna will see that you’re provided with lemon juice.” (Frau Jeismann had suggested the same remedy.)
He reached for his shirt, and saw that she was still contemplating the bruises from the hypodermic needle.
“Did you fight in the American War of Secession?”
“What?” He was confused.
“The soldiers in America were given morphine. . .”
Hermann looked away. “I’ve never been to America. But my best friend is from there.”
Again, that cruel smile. She glanced at the open medicine cabinet. “Once you step out of this infirmary, you will not cross its threshold again without my permission. Is that clear?”
He nodded.
She slapped him full in the face. “When I speak to you, you will respond with words. Not nods. Not gestures. Not coy winks. Not smiles. I was born to a greater station than you, and you will respect it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Frau Schorn.”
“You shall be fitted out with a work uniform this afternoon. Tonight you rest. Tomorrow you report at 6:00 in the morning to the dining hall in Block 2 for your first meal. Nanna will wake you, since your ears will not yet be accustomed to the factory bells. . . Can you read?”
“Yes.”
She pulled a lacquered plank from behind the medicine cabinet and handed it to him. “Written on this board are the Foundation’s rules. They are in verse to facilitate memorization.”
“Yes, Frau Schorn.”
“Can you write?”
“Yes, Frau Schorn.”
The Widow opened a black ledger and told Hermann to sign his name and write his wife’s name underneath it. When he had finished, she recorded the date that they entered the workhouse: 6 November 1867.
The level of description and detail here, Daniel, is second to none. You paint a vividly accurate picture of living and labouring in these workhouses and how death is just accepted as part of daily life with bodies being taken to the lime pits when they are of no more use. Brutal but just how things were.
Despite all his trials and what we know becomes of him, we still hold out hope for Hermann as he’s such a well drawn and sympathetic character who, even though he has faults, doesn’t deserve what is happening to him.
This is a magnificent piece of work that continues to captivate and intrigue in equal measure
Really well done, Daniel 👍🏼
Lots of great descriptive passages but my favourite is this one:
The man lowered his eyes and apologized. And when a vat of tar broke from its braces and crushed the man three days later, the Widow whispered over his corpse, “Glorious is the Name of Jesus.”
😅 She's a witch!