Drankersken

A frost-laced parlour, gaslight flickering like a failing pulse: Ada von Junghaus, porcelain-delicate in her bridal lace, raises a crystal goblet that catches the room’s last shimmer of respectability. Lieutenant Hohe, uniform still smelling of parade-ground iron, kisses her gloved fingertips before a telegram drags him back to the front, leaving only the echo of spurs and the scent of gun-oil. In the vacuum of his absence, the ancestral demon—distilled, amber, merciless—slides from the cellar of her blood. Dr. Hermann, the reluctant guardian with a physician’s calm and a vulture’s patience, watches her descend through brandy, absinthe, morphia, until the walls themselves seem to breathe in sync with her tremors. The mansion becomes a crucible: chandeliers drip wax like slow tears, corridors elongate into syringe-thin perspectives, and Ada’s reflection multiplies in cut-glass decanters, each shard holding a different version of her—ingénue, siren, cadaver. When Hohe returns on a winter dawn the colour of pewter, he finds not the wife he kissed goodbye but a wraith clothed in his own dress-coat, pockets weighted with empty laudanum vials, eyes already looking past him toward whatever lies beyond the next bottle.