“His pathetic figure was seen wandering within the ruins of the cloisters, shouting, gesticulating and collapsing intermittently in a kind of trance of terror. Plague and the terror has come for me were the only intelligible words that came from his mouth.”
Hans, a delirious old vagrant without a past who speaks in German over six hundred years old is found in Baden Baden. Who is he? Where did he come from? His history is mystery until the pandemic and a terrifying phantom force his past identity out of hiding, and it turns out to be no less than the haughtiest and most careless aristocrat of Gothic fiction himself.
Reich der Illusion appeared in HORLA, the Home of Intelligent Horror, in February 2021.