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that house, my dear girl. It is something
else entirely that you must fear.’
    â€˜What?’ I asked, all a-tremble suddenly, & wrapping my cloak around me more tightly.
    â€˜The thing that did this to me,’ said Gudrun Olsen (& she did not need to indicate her mutilation for my eyes were still locked
to it, mesmerized), ‘was not of human flesh.’
    It was late afternoon when, soaked through with steam, I left that place, dear reader, a more fearful & anxious young woman,
so much so that I fancied, in my agitated state, that the tall balaclava’d man who had so kindly given me directions earlier
was now following me in a sinister & invisible fashion, at the periphery of my vision. But he remained elusive, for although
I sensed his presence, when I turned my head he was not to be seen. That night Gudrun Olsen’s words crept into my dreams,
where in the foul, sunken heart of that labyrinthine home on Rosenvængets Allé I imagined wizardry & toad-spore, & hooded
men performing dark deeds that the day would quake to look upon, to feed the avid hunger of a vile machine whose wheels never
stopped turning. I awoke shuddering & feverish & clad in a cold, cold sweat.
    Perhaps, dear reader, you might argue that no young woman in her right mind would have gone near that house again after what
Gudrun Olsen had said about the mysterious goings-on within it seven years ago. But Professor Krak himself was seemingly dead
& gone, & only superstitious fools believe in ghosts, & without its engineer, the demonic machinery Gudrun had spoken of,
whose purpose she did not know, was surely of no more harm than any abandoned object left to dilapidate. What did I actually
know that was concrete, as opposed to a random jumble of oddities? This is what I had learned: that Professor Krak was an
eccentric, reclusive man, prone to passionate outbursts of fury at his wife, & obsessed with the construction of a large machine
in the basement. That the more strained his marriage to Fru Krak became, the more time he would spend in his workshop, & the
more money his wife would spend on clothes, as though it were part of a silent bargain they had struck, that if she granted
him the peace he craved to work on his inventions, then he would fund her wardrobe. That the couple did not sleep or eat meals
together, & that Gudrun Olsen would set trays of food & drink outside his workshop door, & clear them away when she found
the dishes emptied. That she would show desperate-looking, dark-cloaked men & women in at midnight or the small hours, folk
whom she would never see emerge from a basement cellar known as the Oblivion Room, & how these people must be ushered in through
a back door, & Fru Krak must not discover their presence. That Professor Krak would send Gudrun Olsen on tortuous errands
to buy machinery parts – one kilo of nuts & bolts from this mechanical supplier, another half-kilo, of a different size, from
that; a little cog-wheel from a particular ironmonger’s in Frederiksberg, a flexible cord from a specialist india-rubber shop
in Amager, a huge, heavy jar of mercury from a one-eyed woman in a brothel in Christianshavn. Once she was obliged to take
a carriage all the way to Hellerup, at midnight, & knock on a door where a man handed her a heavy, squeaking, agitated box
which she suspected, from the smell, contained live sewer rats. Then on other occasions she had been dispatched to the home
of a widow, where she was instructed to elicit the story of her husband’s gory death by arsenic poisoning, & then recuperate
the handkerchief into which she had wept.
    â€˜You’d get her to cry, & bring him back the handkerchief?’
    â€˜That’s right’
    â€˜And he never told you why?’
    â€˜He never told me anything. But he paid me well.’ Each time he sent her on such errands, Gudrun said, Professor Krak would
give her a thick wad of banknotes, & tell her that