Angels of Music (20 page)

The music was never right. They found it harder to select pieces, and quarrelled whenever they attempted a song.

Caralin never took sides.

Even when Falke was arguing for something, she didn’t support him. That part of
Le Gang
was none of her concern.

She fell ill and disappeared. For three weeks, Falke haunted infirmaries, convents and hospitals, searching for her. He even visited the Morgue.

He subjected Jones’s landlord to a barrage of questions he couldn’t answer. The man had no idea who Caralin was. Now, Gio denied there had ever been a connection. He said it was d’Aubert who found her.

Raoul referred him to Anatole.

Anatole thought it was Falke…

‘She was your girlfriend, remember? We thought she’d be like one of Raoul’s popsies but then that
voice
came out…’

While Caralin was missing,
Le Gang
worked together to find her. That she was gone altogether was worse than that she was with Falke.

On their rounds, they found the hospitals of Paris busy with a mysterious disease that was striking down children, the elderly, the weak. Scratch-marks on throat or chest, like bites; pallor, anaemia, bad dreams, spells of sleeping. Most but not all recovered, and those who died succumbed to other conditions they became too weak to fight off rather than the ailment itself.

Falke was in a panic that Caralin was a victim.

Then she came back, healthy. Healthier than before, it seemed. She almost had roses in her cheeks.

He was too relieved to press her about where she had been and what she had done. Whatever it was, it had been good for her.

* * *

The Professor made a dramatic entrance into their lives.

With Caralin away and the mystery illness on their minds, Anatole saw Van Helsing was giving a course of lectures on ‘diseases of the blood and soul’. He suggested they sit in. At that time, they were all worried about her health.

When she came back, they were still drawn to the lectures.

Van Helsing had theories about the bites and the loss of blood.

Raoul asked pertinent questions. The Professor theorised that in this matter the search should not be for a disease but a culprit. A creature was behind the outbreak, and – worse! – was a thinking being who knew what they were doing.

The word ‘vampire’ was mentioned.

The epidemic, suddenly, was over. No more bitten children.

Le Gang
did not set off to engage the forces of darkness, but shifted from music to mystery. There was no denying the thrill of it.

Van Helsing presented them with cases – hauntings, manifestations, unusual animal attacks. Raoul took the lead, but the others had useful interests and skills. Falke had a knack for designing and making gadgets. They dispelled their first ghosts without leaving his digs, as he showed how such and such a phenomenon was most likely created by deliberate trickery.

De Rosillon had funds to equip a coach for ghost-hunting expeditions, Anatole a swot’s ability to delve in libraries and public records for lost explanations, and Gio made a formidable figure when it came to scaring off pranksters.

Most matters Van Helsing placed before them turned out to be criminal enterprises dressed up with phosphorus paint and hidden doorways. The Black Coats, the best-resourced secret society of the Second Empire, liked to scare people away from their smuggling or coining enterprises with fabulous beasts and frightful spectres.
Le Gang
had many a battle with the Coats, even earning the respect of the official police. Raoul was certain of a place in Vidocq’s old office after graduation.

In other – more troubling – cases, smashing a mirror or pulling back a curtain only revealed a deeper mystery.

Van Helsing assured them that there were such things as ghosts and vampires.

* * *

Caralin became sickly again. She couldn’t sleep and went out late at night, without even bothering to make an excuse.

Falke – hating himself for thinking it – was certain she was with one of the others – any of them, all of them – when not with him.

He quarrelled with Raoul, his closest friend, then begged forgiveness and asked for his help. He was desperate, he said, desperate and desolate.

‘About what?’ asked Raoul.

He could not answer.

Caralin gave Falke no cause to doubt her, but…

In a graveyard where strange lanterns had been seen, de Rosillon made some foolish remark which prompted Falke to beat him senseless. Raoul, Anatole and Gio stood by and watched, making no move to intervene – as if hoping their friends would kill each other so they could have better chances with Caralin.

When he was exhausted and de Rosillon unconscious, Falke turned to find Caralin gone.

This time, she didn’t come back for three months.

* * *

The disease, which Van Helsing insisted was the spoor of a vampire, returned.

Some victims reported nocturnal encounters with a beautiful woman. She lured children off pathways and subjected them to mesmerism. They woke up with torn clothes and deep scratches.

De Rosillon, bumptious again, said that happened to him all the time. Only his wallet was usually missing too.

Children remembered the musical voice of the vampire, but gave varying accounts of her. Small girls thought her old and bent, almost a crone. Budding lads described a wanton, voluptuous hoyden. A few listless, haunted victims recalled a wan maiden, scarcely more than a child herself. All mentioned her
voice
– but couldn’t quote anything she had said.

Le Gang
set out to catch the vampire.

Van Helsing lectured about famous female vampires… Elisabeth Bathory, the
Lamia
of Ancient Greece, Mircalla Karnstein.

On their nightly expeditions to derelict cemeteries and disreputable parks,
Le Gang
found many suspect women – mostly
demimondes
loitering in dark places. As de Rosillon said, they specialised in bait-and-battery, inveigling customers into the bushes for a quick poke then having a confederate bludgeon the poor clods for their valuables.

Few of them went after children, though.

With Caralin gone, Falke applied himself to the vampire hunt.

On Van Helsing’s recommendation, he read Dom Augustin Calmet’s two-volume
Traité sur les apparitions des Esprits, et sur les vampires ou les revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie Etc.
(1746). Picking through lore and legend, Falke tried to find hard facts. He sharpened stakes and contrived spring-loading mechanisms for firing them across rooms and through inch-thick boards. He designed a metal collar, with inset silver crosses, as a defence against vampire attack.

Even the others thought he was taking it too seriously.

‘It’s just some new pox,’ Raoul said. ‘And de Rosillon’s footpad fillies.’

Falke was convinced. There was a vampire in Paris.

‘It’s Caralin, isn’t it?’ Raoul said. ‘When she’s not here, you go mad… not as mad as when she is here, but mad all the same.’

Falke denied it.

* * *

Caralin came back, healthy again. She would answer no questions.

Van Helsing said the vampire was still at large.

He believed he had found the monster’s address on the map. In the centre of a cluster of red crosses marking attacks was the Hôtel d’Autriche, an abandoned palace. Once the Paris residence of Maria Theresa of Austria, mother of the late queen Marie Antoinette – though it was likely the Hapsburg Empress never set foot in the place. It gained a reputation as uncanny in the rational days of the Revolution. Sans-culotte mobs who set up households in former palaces shunned the HÔtel d’Autriche, supposedly frightened off by the headless ghost of the guillotined queen.

Van Helsing prepared for an expedition to the mansion, to find the grave of the vampire and bar her from it. Before facing the monster, he must fast and pray… though
Le Gang
suspected he also needed to wait for his shrew of a wife to leave the city so he could face evil behind her back.

Raoul proposed they venture to the HÔtel d’Autriche without the Professor.

They would wear Falke’s anti-vampire collars. The sly creature they were after preyed only on the weak, the young. She was not expecting men who knew her for what she was.

Caralin was against the proposal. She said abandoned palaces were places to avoid. She coughed a little, stressing the unhealthy air that could be expected.

All other votes went against her.

Even Falke disagreed. Since Caralin’s return, he was more convinced than ever that she was deceiving him.

He was sure one – or all! – of the others knew where she had been.

Getting them all to a haunted mansion might help solve the mystery of Caralin. Then, he would take steps.

He must have her free and clear.

At the risk of losing all else.

* * *

The Hôtel d’Autriche was in Le Marais, surrounded by high walls and gloomy, marshy gardens. It must have an evil reputation not to be occupied. The district was popular with the landed and wealthy. De Rosillon’s people had a
hôtel particulier
around here.

As befit the respectable people who lived in the fine homes, the streets were well-swept and deadly dull. Anyone who passed on foot or – more likely – in a carriage was quiet. They were eerily like ghosts after the raucous, earthy folk Falke knocked about with in the student quarter.

It struck him that, after graduation, they were expected by their families to live in places like this, go to church on Sundays and marry girls who wouldn’t rob them honestly like the flower girls and the tarts of the Quartier Latin did. At once, he saw the future as living death.

When he was a lawyer, would there be vampire hunts? Would there be Caralin?

‘Spooked, yet?’ asked Raoul, heartily.

‘Just the night chill,’ said Falke.

Raoul handed him a flask of something they probably used at the flower factory to wash off the arsenic.

The spirits burned his throat going down and made his eyes water.

Anatole and Gio found a way in by hefting a rusty gate off its hinges.

Caralin hung back, but Falke put an arm round her.

‘He’ll protect you from the monster,’ said Raoul.

‘But who’ll protect you from him?’ said de Rosillon. The young Count laughed like a devil. He’d been drinking all day.

‘Remember, this thing is dangerous,’ said Anatole. ‘Professor Van Helsing has made that plain.’

‘We’re
Le Gang de Schubert
,’ sang Gio. ‘Fearless and bold…’

‘There’s a difference?’ asked Raoul.

Anatole was first into the mansion, climbing through a broken ground-floor window. He waved a lantern around. Falke saw decaying plaster and cracked floor-boards.

They all followed.

* * *

De Rosillon proposed they split into three teams to search the upper storeys, the extensive ground floor and the basements.

Somehow, Falke was paired with Raoul to search above.

Gio and Anatole were together on this level, and Caralin wound up consigned below with de Rosillon.

Falke saw de Rosillon was delighted at the outcome, which he had contrived.

Was Caralin in it with him?

The fire burned in his stomach. He took another drink.

The expedition upstairs was thwarted. The main staircase had collapsed. Much of the first-floor landing had fallen into the hallway. Looking up, Falke saw stars and felt spots of rain on his face – so the roof was gone too.

Raoul prised a jagged length of wood from a fallen bannister.

‘A natural vampire-impaling device,’ he said, handing it to Falke.

Falke wondered if he could thrust it through his friend’s ribs. His heart wasn’t protected by an iron-and-silver collar.

They waited a few minutes. The mansion was quiet.

‘Funny,’ said Raoul.

‘What is?’

‘I can’t hear Gio clumping around. Usually, you can tell him a mile off. With all these creaky, rotten boards, I’m surprised he’s not crashed through to the cellars.’

Both stood still and listened.

Falke had to agree. It was odd.

‘Let’s find them and pack it in,’ said Raoul. ‘This was one of de Rosillon’s foolish notions. We should have learned not to listen to him long ago.’

The notion was not so foolish if de Rosillon’s desire wasn’t to skewer a vampire but be alone with Caralin…

They looked in every room on the ground floor. In what must have been the ballroom, a rigged-up shack suggested gypsies or tramps had tried to squat here. The camp was cobwebbed and abandoned.

Gio and Anatole weren’t to be found.

‘They must have gone below,’ said Falke.

‘What ever for?’

‘Perhaps they heard something.’

Raoul looked sober and serious.

‘Let’s find them all and get back to the Saint-Flour Musette for supper. I don’t like this place. Not because it’s haunted by vampires, but because it’s obviously a death trap. Agree you?’

‘Agree I,’ said Falke.

* * *

The cellar door was open, but they heard nothing from beneath them.

Falke called out. No answer.

‘There’s light,’ said Raoul.

Carefully going down uneven stone steps, they found a lantern propped up on the last stair. Falke thought it was Gio’s.

The basements were a vaulted space. They smelled of earth and vile things.

Falke noticed Raoul had produced a primed pistol.

‘You keep the stake,’ he said. ‘I’ll trust a lead ball.’

‘You didn’t bring silver.’

‘Waste of money, my friend.’

‘I hope you won’t regret the economy.’

They zigzagged between columns. The basements of the Hôtel d’Autriche extended under the whole house and beyond. Beneath the gardens was a labyrinth or catacomb which had mostly fallen in and was partly flooded.

‘Caralin,’ called out Falke.

The name came back at him.

‘Anyone?’ called Raoul.

The same.

Falke was now seriously jittery.

‘The vampire can’t have got them all,’ he said. ‘Not with the collars.’

‘Vampires worry me less than other creatures of the night,’ said Raoul, striding off with lantern in one hand and pistol in the other. ‘This is just the sort of lair the Black Coats like. A hand over the mouth and a dagger in the ribs are as deadly as a vampire’s kisses – more so, since I’m sure they’re real while I have doubts about Van Helsing’s sanity.’