Haunters of the Black Forest - Paperback

"WHO TRULY KNOWS THE HAUNTERS THAT STALK THE BLACK FOREST?"

In the enlightened year of 1730 in Germany, many such have vanished into legend, but some have survived - the water-sprites of Mummel Lake, trees that bleed when cut, and the Lost Souls of the Black Forest (weeping ghosts of them that were murdered and still wander aimless and forlorn through the woods).

Nor many reptilian witches and wolf-into-man werewolves remain. Something has been thinning the forest of them - Die Geisteruhle aus den düster Wälden, the Ghost-Owl of the Darksome Woods, a gigantic bird that has haunted the forest for milenia. The villagers of Dürrengrün are unsure whether it's a menace or an ally. But, since it roosts in the tall, wooded mountains above Dark Whisper Lake 50 miles north, it has rarely been seen by them.

But it is to that lake and its adjoining swamp that Sacha Athenois (later to rename himself SETH ATHENOR) must travel. On holiday from his medical studies in Paris, he has been persuaded by his apothecarial mentor to join in a search for the vital ingredient of Theriac - that legendary panacea sought by apothecaries and alchemists for centuries. The ingredient is rumored to be only found near that lake.

So, they must make their way north from Dürrengrün, past the mysterious and sinister All Souls Abbey, whose monks wear no crucifixes and who worship something quite different from ordinary monastics:

At the bottom of Dark Whisper Lake, there is a vast cavern in which underwater trees claw up, their dead branches festooned with drifting weeds.

And, somewhere in the shadowy recess of that lake, there waits something terrible.