Baron von Blütvinnich’s manic cackles echoed through the halls of his ancestral home as the cathedral bell struck midnight. A bolt of lightning hit the manor’s ornate dome just as the clangs faded away, exactly as he had planned it.
The loyal oak bookshelves, creaking from centuries of forlorn duty, finally snapped under the weight of volumes new and old. They held firm against the antique titles of Liber de compositione alchemiae and De viribus herbarum, but they could no longer withstand the added pressure of Latin for Dummies and Best Speeches of the 1835 Conference of Amateur Vivisectionists, new volumes hastily piled atop the past centuries of forbidden knowledge. Then again, the world as we knew it was about to end if the baron’s experiment turned out to be a success, and, let’s be real, who needs hundred-year-old bookshelves in the post-apocalypse, anyway?
Out in the corridor, toothless gargoyles and stone angels with broken wings cast furtive glances toward each other and the basement entrance in equal measure. Had they had the capacity to think, they surely would have cried in horror about the desecration of this ancient manor, much like how the murky paintings on the wall of ancestors long past would have echoed their disappointed resentment of the sixteenth von Blütvinnich, hollowed was his name, a failed academic with a meaningless language-teaching job who turned to the dark arts to resurrect the family glory and to carve out his own place in the history books.
With every passing year, the staircase leading to the basement showed more and more of the makings of a shaft. In fact, those in the habit of nitpicking might have called it a dungeon rather than a basement at this point. No matter.
It was not possible, they said. You will go mad, they said. You are mad, they said. Baron von Blütvinnich XVI, amateur chess player and legendary regular of Köln’s oldest teahouse, never listened to these dastardly voices. Who knows, they may have only been in his head, after all, and why listen to the sounds of conscience and idiocy, no matter whether they are the whispers of your mind or the whinings of some irrelevant university Sekretärin or a white-coated Doctor Something-or-other and his thrice-damned so-called analysis of the psychiatric kind? You’ve got a world to change, after all.
“Co… Cog…” rasped an otherworldly voice in the underground chamber. The baron could hardly contain his excitement. After so many successive snafus, the moment had finally come. Not since the day he got to hand out forty-three different failing grades across two final exams has he felt this alive, this much of a man.
The rising wind blew open the shutters upstairs, and a stream of bats flew into the manor.
“Cogitoooooo,” came the raspy voice again, the being behind it still finding its footing in this world. “Cogitoooooo, eeeeeeergooooooo…”
“Go on, my child,” the baron cried out. He thought this day would never come. The idea of calling someone his child became rather far-fetched after the velocipede accident that took away most of his self-esteem and both of his testicles.
“Cogitooooo… ergo…. sum….”
“Yes! Yes!” cried the baron. “Yes! Yes! Ita! Vero! Certe! Sic!” Could he believe his eyes? Has it really happened? After so many languages that didn’t come back to life despite his best efforts, has he finally succeeded, with the granddaddy of them all, no less?
The amorphous blob of flesh and words sitting upright on the slab reminded him of someone he once knew. No, not the butcher boy he tossed down the stairs yesterday in a bid to acquire just the right amount of human essence after tracing his family lineage back all the way to the collapse of the Roman Empire to ensure there is the perfect portion of Latin in his genes, nor the excerpts taken from the Romantic and necromantic books from the university’s forbidden underground library, which were now hastily orbiting his reborn creation. No, it was the eyes, cold and blue, staring back at him that brought on the memory: The former owner of the teahouse, may God rest his soul. These were his final gift to the baron.
“Anything for my loyal guest and his important experiment!” That’s what he said before the blade chopped his head clean off. Or was that one of those… What did Doctor Something-or-other call them? Hallucinations?
No matter. The reborn Latin language was sitting in front of him now, ready to transform the world into something altogether new, a place where long-forgotten dynasties that withered into underpaid professors at West German universities would rule anew with divine right.
The shadowy, shapeless being, part bloody pulp, part Roman classics, some black magic and a bit of snake oil, got up and shambled towards the staircase. The baron was too gleeful to notice, lost in his hazy thoughts of linguistic world domination.
If the dilapidated gargoyles could speak, they would surely have exclaimed “oh my god what the fuck” as they watched the undead being drag itself up to the hall, slowly making its way past ancestors annoyed and aroused in equal measure. That’s the thing with newly resurrected zombie languages: no matter how weird and messy they may seem, they do have some semblance of will of their own, and while the baron’s dreams were also of the destructive kind, he had somewhat more specific terroristic aspects in mind than the mere idea of random uncontrolled linguistic carnage.
No, he wanted to tie up and weaponize his new creation, load it into a trumpet-like device he called the Latinizer 4000 (of the Unholy Kind), walk up to the city hall on a cloud-filled early morning and threaten the mayor with the instant and permanent latinization of everything the residents of Köln hold near and dear to them, cultural heritage and superior Germanic status be damned. One by one, he would hold all elected officials of the Holy Roman Empire at languagepoint and extract significant enough concessions to make his long-forgotten university classes the most important occasions of the land, catapulting himself into a position of supreme importance. Mwahahaha, he thought to himself.
His unspoken evil laugh was rudely interrupted by the rapidly developing situation outside his head.
He only figured that something had gone very wrong when he heard the words “bella, horrida bella” from upstairs. The zombie Latin was not supposed to emerge from underground, not in this unshackled form! He growled and ran after the undead monster of communication, racing past the crumbling gargoyles and the angry ancestors and the broken bookshelves and the piles of custom-made underwear and the unpaid bills and the empty beer bottles, but his creation had already escaped the premises. He spotted its contours at the metal gate, forming an eerie shadow below the iron-cast family symbol, the crest with the goat and the half-eaten cabbage surrounded by ravens of subpar intelligence, each flying in a different direction to form a teardrop of idiocy.
The baron cursed. He only wanted himself a nice little weapon with which to change the world. What he got instead was a loose cannon of the Ciceronian kind.
“Get back here, you deformis-deformis-deforme fuck!” he screamed, but the reborn Latin language paid him no heed as it shambled across the narrow streets of Kölner cobblestone, busy exploring and transforming its newfound Germanic surroundings into something altogether more vile and ancient. “Alea iacta est,” it screamed at a hospital, and it turned into a gambling den. “Memento mori,” it howled at a cheese shop, and, poof, it was now a cemetery.
In response, the baron opened up a secret hatch in the garden shed to unveil the Language Catch-O-Tron 5000, an emergency device he devised for potential catastrophes like this. He never expected to need such a blunt instrument in his hour of triumph, but Baron von Blütvinnich, the sixteenth of his line, was nothing if not prepared.
Testicle-less and ambition-filled, he raced after his shambling zombie language creation into the cold winter night of Köln. No one in the city knew it yet, but a new era had just begun.
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Luci Kelemen is a Budapest-based human product that may contain traces of writer. He has spent a decade and a half packaging up words in his mind’s warehouse and selling them off to the middlest bidder, with non- often attached to fiction. His debut Hungarian short story collection, Szivárványpitypang (Rainbow Dandelion), was published this March.