Houses of the Holy

Episode 2: Once Upon a Time

Watching his daughter painfully die from a brain tumor drives Nikol Bescu to make a nightmarish bargain with the sinister Ustrel. But at what terrible cost?

Storyline

Three monsters stalk 1930s Berlin.

Reinhart Fohl is a senior clerk in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, who’s recently made a dizzying discovery: the party gives its loyal servants so much support and so much latitude that he’s functionally omnipotent.

Basilisks–reptilian in infancy, close to human in adulthood–turn to stone in their dotage. ‘Welcome’, a basilisk in its final sessile stage, has become an old patrician house, complete with portico and gables.

Immortal vampire child Magda Bescu has to live–and to feed–otherwise the tumor in her brain, which is every bit as immortal as she is, will eat more and more of the healthy tissue and leave a bigger hole in her sanity and her memories. And in this place and this time, Magda has one other pressing problem: racially, she belongs to the Roma, the gypsy peoples. The eugenics laws of inter-war Germany have effectively declared open season on anyone of her race.