The greasy smell of Rhenish kesselkuchen drifted between the timber beams. Police officers were securing a low-ceilinged dining room. The constable narrowly avoided a cast-iron chandelier. On a gleaming silver platter, a sliced potato cake with onions and small sausages spoke of an interrupted meal.
The constable cut himself a slice onto a small plate and helped himself. Cold kesselkuchen, alongside flat beer, was the only thing making this day any better. Cases like this had been piling up of late. His colleagues were growing nervous. Something had taken root among the early-modern façades, they feared. Superstition was rife.
In this instance, they had called in the special commission.
The constable shovelled the potato cake into himself, eyeing a fellow in a long black robe. He had a bald, long face and wore a leather hat with a buckle.
He called himself Romswinckel.
‘We’ll take it from here,’ said Romswinckel.
The constable cleared his throat to dislodge a stray sausage from it.
‘And you are ...?’
He put the question to a second person, one distinguished by a long, dark overcoat that, trench-coat fashion, concealed the hands and every other contour of the body. A brown set of side-whiskers framed his round face. He, too, wore a distinctive buckled leather hat — and a white ruff.
‘Get on with your Döppekuchen and let us do the work,’ replied the man with the side-whiskers.
It was beginning to dawn on the constable.
‘You’re Blanckenberg, from the Special Division?’
‘Doctor Walram Blanckenberg,’ he stressed, then added, pointedly: ‘Witch Commissioner.’
Blanckenberg examined the body on the floor, covered by nothing more than a sheet.
‘Particulars, Romswinckel?’
Romswinckel leafed through a notebook.
‘Jupp Achsenmächer, sixty years old, furrier.’
‘Course of events?’
‘Attacked his wife without provocation. She managed to hide in the kitchen cupboard. She says he seemed possessed by the devil.’
‘Textbook,’ Blanckenberg remarked, uninterested. ‘And then?’
‘According to the wife’s statement, he began imagining apparitions. Felt persecuted. Fell down the stairs and broke his neck.’
Blanckenberg looked up the wooden staircase with its small, crooked steps. His thoughts crept back down again to the floorboards below — to the cracked patches, the holes, and the dust swirling in the air.
The constable finished off his portion of Döppekuchen. He had watched Blanckenberg and Romswinckel go about their business for quite long enough.
‘Everything points to an accident.’
‘Yes,’ said Blanckenberg irritably, ‘that’s exactly what the devil would have you believe.’
The constable raised his eyebrows in incomprehension. But Blanckenberg had already raised his voice.
‘Romswinckel, search the kitchen for table salt. Take two men with you.’
‘Doctor?’
‘Just go, now.’
For a quarter of an hour, pots and pans clattered. Spice powder hung in the air, leaving behind a note of cheap flavour enhancer. For another ten minutes, cutlery and crockery clinked. Plates piled up. One of the officers sorted through tins, vinegar bottles, a pepper mill and a quantity of kitschy Rhenish bric-a-brac.
After a good half an hour, Romswinckel returned.
‘Why table salt?’
Blanckenberg had not moved an inch in the meantime. He was still standing beside the dead man — and now bent down over him.
‘Because you won’t find any.’
The Witch Commissioner rolled up the furrier’s sleeve. Black blotches, as if from some outbreak of acne, covered the arm.
‘Bromism,’ Blanckenberg explained. ‘The fifth case in Ahrweiler. The pattern is plain.’
Romswinckel felt he’d been made a fool of.
‘Why didn’t you say so earlier?’
‘Because witchcraft and demonology are a serious discipline,’ Blanckenberg replied with inquisitorial severity. ‘I needed absolute certainty that there was no table salt in the house. Anything less would have been charlatanry.’
In the background, the officers had returned. They had been listening to the revelation. Blanckenberg rose once more and straightened his leather hat, which had slipped some two centimetres out of place.
‘This wretched individual has consorted with Satan,’ he announced. ‘There can be no doubt of it.
‘You mean ...’
‘ChatGPT, presumably.’
The police officers held their breath. Other men refrained from uttering such names in public. Whoever spoke a demon’s name aloud risked summoning it. Not so Blanckenberg.
The soles of his boots scuffed across the wooden floor.
‘Only a fortnight ago, young Kathrinchen Nantzich of 24 Wolfsgässchen asked an LLM for a substitute for sodium chloride. Naturally, the demon gave her some obliging, idiotic answer.’
‘Sodium bromide,’ Romswinckel understood.
‘Precisely,’ Blanckenberg confirmed sharply. ‘She was admitted to hospital — with hallucinations.’
The Witch Commissioner made a brisk, cutting gesture through the air.
‘Hallucinations, of the very kind Achsenmächer had.’
An uneasy silence fell. The Witch Commissioner’s gaze moved to the metal glinting atop an ornately baroque writing desk.
‘Examine the laptop on the beechwood bureau. You’ll find illegally installed AI apps. The chat history will tell you all you need,’ Blanckenberg said, in a routine tone, addressing the police officers. ‘As for everything else — we’re already too late.’
The Witch Commissioner’s eyes, narrowed to slits, turned back to the floor. Higher justice mattered little to Blanckenberg.
He was a jurist. Whoever took up with the AI would perish by the AI. His concern was for the living — those who had not yet fallen into the clutches of a diabolical technology that used language to seduce people, to manipulate them — and to reduce them to mindless zombies, until at last they did away with themselves. His job was simply damage limitation.
And this city still had a great many potential victims. Underemployed students; pensioners without hobbies; bored women in their mid-thirties, who could still think up questions a good deal more foolish than one about a substitute for table salt.
‘And afterwards, Doctor?’ asked one of the men.
‘Burn it.’
‘The laptop?’
‘That — and Achsenmächer.’
Blanckenberg’s mobile phone shrilled through the room. He swiped a finger across the screen. In Bliesheim, near Lechenich: a fresh demonic attack. Possibly Grok. There were still far too many young hotheads out there, making AI videos of the US president and selling their souls for a moment’s cheap amusement.
He muttered darkly in Romswinckel’s direction, telling him to follow.
‘Anything infected with this plague belongs on the fire.’
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