introduction

When the Americans liberated the Auschwitz concentration camps at the end of the Second World War in January 27, 1945, they found a horrible truth in the starving, emaciated and half-dead prisoners—victims of torture. But they found an even worse truth in the medical examination block of the camp.

When the Allies' armed forces entered the building, they heard laughter from the end of the long hallway that they had come into. As the soldiers cautiously made their way down the corridor, the laughing got louder, punctuated by occasional screams. These screams were terrible to hear. But it was worse when they finally entered the room at the end of the hall.

The room was not just a room. It was an experimental laboratory, with once white walls that were now stained with filth. In it was much complex machinery; jail cells as well, some with living humans, in all states of disarray and unhealthiness, some containing motionless, maybe dead bodies. The odor of the room was ghastly. It smelled of putrid urine, vomit, dried blood, and who knew what else?

In the center of the vault-like room was a man. His back was turned to the men, and apparently he had not heard them enter the laboratory. This man's hair was blonde, and cut rather sloppily. He was wearing a filthy doctor's lab coat, and apparently he had been the source of the laughter the soldiers had heard in the hallway. In fact, he was more than just laughing, he was shrieking maniacally with glee.

In front of the man was a filthy young child, dressed in rags, who screamed every time the man jabbed at her with an oversize syringe from a nearby surgical tool tray.

Eventually the child screamed its last, and ceased to move. The soldiers held their breath, weapons at the ready, frozen in their horror. Slowly, the man turned around.

His face was evidently one of a madman. The malicious, crooked grin, the sunken in face (yet not as much as the prisoners' condition), and the eyes—oh, how the soldiers recoiled at the look in his eyes! They were filled with madness, cruel madness that knows no mercy, madness that delights in pain, laughs at sadness, madness that wallows in the joy of causing others suffering. All this the soldiers saw. And they readied their weapons to shoot, threatening the man to spill all of the knowledge he had of this vindictive slaughtering.

The man confessed readily, despite smiling all the while, as if unaware of the fifty guns pointed directly at him. His name was Klaus van Schatten, and he was apparently experimenting on what he defined as the "humans' ability to adapt to such perilous situations". He did this by tormenting them with experimental chemicals, then reviving them with his necromancy. To prove his point, he demonstrated by reviving the young child in front of his doubtful, tense audience.

And revive her he did. Klaus van Schatten's hands, raised as if he was preaching a sermon, began to glow with a green aura. The child's body shook with a tremor, and then fell still. The soldiers apprehensively watched as she opened her eyes, sat up, and looked around. And she screamed.

The soldiers' response was immediate. All guns were now completely loaded and pointed directly at either the madman's head or heart. Klaus' only response was to laugh derisively.

"You cannot kill me, fools," he chuckled. "Necromancers are immortal."

The soldiers looked at one another, then back at the insane man who showed no fear even in the face of death. "What about the gas chambers?" one of them suggested, with a sly glance at the general direction of said gas chambers.

Immediately Klaus' face went ashen. "No," he begged. "Not the gas chambers." The soldiers grinned evilly at each other. They had found the necromancer's weakness.

Five minutes later, they had him bound in ropes, lying exhausted, panting and terrified on the ground. To Klaus' credit, he had fought back, but his fear had affected him to the point where he was too distraught to poise a true challenge to the determined soldiers. So there he lay, breathing hard and staring wide-eyed with fright at his captors. For years he had victimized the Jews, tormenting them, killing them and reviving them only to start all over. Now he was the victim, and he was going to get the punishment he deserved.

The soldiers heaved the sobbing man headlong into the nearest gas chamber. "Mercy," Klaus shrieked as the snickering men dropped cyanide canisters through the holes in the ceiling. "Mercy, please…"

But his cries fell on deaf ears, and were soon muffled by the cement that the soldiers had piled up around the small building, locking the terrified man in forever…