House of Corruption (21 page)

Dead
.

A faint light caught his attention. It was a lantern, flickering fitfully against the breeze, set on the floor some distance to his right. Had it always been there? He approached and picked it up, its light pushing away the thick shadows.

A slender white shape crouched on the far side of the chamber, moving rhythmically as if lapping at water. Beneath this laid a smaller shape outstretched upon the stone floor, pale and small and moaning a piteous cry. Reynard raised the lantern higher. A woman in a white dress suckled at a bloody wound from the crook of a little girl’s shoulder. The girl was no older than eight or nine years old. When she started to cry the woman smothered her mouth with her hand and continued drinking, slurping with a dull sound of pleasure.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

The woman stood. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, blood staining the white fabric. Terror seized him—it was
her
, the woman from the Immigrant’s Market. She no longer looked like Lasha; the turn of a head, the wide look in her eyes, the thin-lipped, oversized mouth. There was something familiar about her now, like a fell bird crouching over its prey, much like—

“Where is Lasha?” he demanded.

“You took something of mine,” she said.

“I have nothing.”

She laughed. “That bullet was an infestation. I saved you by removing it.”

“Who do you think you are? I do not know you.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “Now give it back.”

“I have nothing to give.”

She clapped her hands together. “Oh good,
good
. You continue to lie to me. It makes things so much easier when I must hurt you. I
want
to hurt you, Renny.” She extended her hand. “Give it to me.”

His fingers slid back into his pocket. “You lured me here,” he said, “for a bit of silver? Your Master Carlovec needn’t have bothered.”

Her smile disappeared. “He is not my master.”

“You are his bitch.”

She slapped him across the face, hard, the chamber echoing with a resounding
crack
. His head recoiled against the blow but he did not move, did not cry out, glaring at her as the ruddy imprints of her fingers materialized upon his cheek. The blow cleared his head. There was a girl—a real little girl—lying on the floor with her blood pouring from her throat. He tried to move toward her, to help her, and found no will in it. When he considered moving his legs he heard only the woman’s voice in the back of his head.

The little girl started to cry again. She coughed and her blood pumped faster from the crook of her neck, draining along the stone floor. Reynard inhaled and caught the scent. He thought of the galley of the
Kalabakang
, the filthy square with Bill Tourney’s body, the taste of a man’s throat where granite vaults watched.

Down deep, a dull thirst grew inside his belly.

“You feel it,” the woman said.

“No.”

“You beg for the animal, crave it,
ache
for it. You want it to slide over your skin and cover you.” She brushed her finger along his shoulder. “I could sing to you, and the animal would come. All I need to say is
come out, my darling, come out
and your body would release into my hands.” Her fingers caressed his neck. “
Come out
. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

“Not particularly.” 

“We know what it means to suffer. We have given up everything, lost everything, and yet we keep living.” She pressed her body against him. “You suffer, Renny.”

“Leave me alone.”

The little girl moaned, her breath rapid and shallow, inexorably getting slower with each exhale. Reynard felt her life slip away long before he saw her chest stop moving, long before the last of her color drained from her face. He wanted to scream, to rail, to beg this woman to release him so he might
do
something! Yet he could not move. The woman’s lips brushed his cheek as she whispered, her mouth getting closer, her words steaming like smoke into his head.

“
Come out
,” she said.

“Stop.”

“
Come out
.”

“Stop.”

“Help me,” she said, “and save us both.”

Reynard strained against the desire raging deep inside himself—
out, out, out
—and then she was wrapped upon him as a lover. The curves of her shape pressed against his own.

Come out
.

She kissed him. First along his neck and edge of his jaw, then she drew his lip into her mouth and bit through the rind of his flesh. He winced. She suckled his lip, drinking, pulling him tight against her body with every swallow. Pain ached down his neck to his scar, mingled with dull lust, and he forced himself to burrow through those memories he desperately kept away:

—Burning ropes burning wrists and ankles—

—cutting oozing—

—high heady laughter—

—his laughing, sallow face—

—fingers cutting into his chest, clawing bloody—

—Lasha screaming screaming screaming—

“
I said stop!
” he shouted.

He shoved her away. She grinned with hateful eyes and started for him again, her lips smeared with his blood. In a wide sweep, he raised the oil lantern and smashed it across her head.

The woman’s head ignited as flames burst down her neck and shoulders. She fell back, shrieking. The skin of her face tightened against her skull with shades of another woman, and another, and another, then a man with high cheekbones and forehead, then a shade of Frederick Burlington in a gaping mask of horror. At the last came the reflection of Edward Tukebote. It lasted only a moment before her face simply became death—the head of a lidless corpse.

“I will drink her,” she hissed, as the flames died. “I will drink Lasha dry and tell her you are a monster, that you gave her to me.”

Reynard removed the silver cross from around his neck and raised it up. She grabbed the cross with both hands and crushed the token like brittle paper, throwing the useless metal to the floor. She slashed her fingernails across his stomach, the sharp edges tearing through cloth from his navel to his throat. Blood splashed. He doubled over and stumbled back, gasping.

“
Ici
,” a man’s voice cried outside. “
Viens
!”

From the stairwell outside came the rattle of many footsteps, the slam of a door being forcibly opened. The woman laughed—first a subtle sound, deep in her abdomen, then a shrill cackling. She extended her hand. The remains of the silver bullet gleamed in the center of her open palm. She slid it into her grinning mouth, her tongue drawing it into the hollow of her right cheek. Reynard’s bloodied hands became frantic as he searched every pocket along his trousers and shirt.

The bullet was gone.

She pressed a finger to her withered lips with a naughty smile. “Get off!” she cried loudly in French. “Get your hands off me,
salaud!
” She gasped with a throaty moan. “
Get your filthy body off me!
”

She turned and ran across the room. Reynard started after her, to catch her, dully realizing the ramifications of this final game she played—and could only watch as she slipped between two of the columns. She leaped and hurled herself into the air. She flew over the terrace railing and fell, fell, screaming with a horrible grin on her face. She stared at him as she plummeted off the high spire of Notre Dame,
watched
him, until the shadows swallowed her up.

The door to the chamber flew open. Four
gendarmes
spilled inside, police officers garbed in dark blue cloaks and caps, bringing chaos as wild lights and shouting as someone commanded
see who fell outside!
Two men turned back. The remaining two thundered up the steps, their lantern lights blazing over Reynard. He stood with blood soaking his shirt and hands, a dead girl on the floor behind him.

“No,” he started, shaking. “It’s not what you—”

The officers slid batons from their belts. Reynard lunged at them. He plowed between them and knocked them aside. He fled down the steps out the open door. He ran across the Angel’s Terrace, plunged into the belfry, and started down the stairwell.

“He is up here!” a voice echoed at his back.

“Hurry,” Reynard shouted down the stairwell, “a man’s crossing the esplanade, heading south for the steps! He’s not alone!”

“—Up here!”

“—Faster, before he reaches the
Bois Sacré!
—”

“—Don’t listen—!”

“—Right below you!” Reynard added.

Every man shouted up and down the stairwell, those both ahead of him and following behind. Some gave contradictory orders. Others shouted for everyone to keep quiet. Reynard kept his pace as he descended, gripped with rage at having been played, at having lost the bullet, at his naïveté. He raged at the dull, heavy sensation prickling at his spine, commanding his weak and faithless body to ignore that horrible woman’s voice as it encouraged the Beast to emerge.

Out, out, out
—

“Turn around, you fools!” someone shouted from above. Below, footsteps stopped, paused, started back up the steps. “He’s up here!”

Reynard froze. He had about thirty seconds before he was pinned between two groups of policemen who would pummel him with their batons—if he was lucky. To his right, a shallow balcony overlooked the spine of the chapel’s roof. He did not think. He crawled over the balcony’s rim and dropped ten feet onto the iron ridge flashing. The roof led straight to the Byzantine dome where, he hoped, he could skirt its perimeter to another balcony on the far side. His impact was loud but he ran, knowing they would hear him, desperate to get distance. 

Behind him came a loud
crack
and a metallic squeal off to his right—a bullet ricochet—as two officers dropped off the balcony in pursuit. A third in the window raised his pistol for another shot. It fired.

A heavy burning exploded in Reynard’s left shoulder, flinging him hard to his stomach, sending him tumbling down the steep flashing. He scrambled to catch himself as he slid off the roof and into open air.

He dropped.

Twelve feet below lay a stone veranda. He landed hard, knocking the wind from his lungs, firing pain through his ribs and into his throat. Somehow he got to his feet. He burst through a wooden door into the basilica and sprinted down a twisting stairwell, gasping, the muscles in his thighs and forearms tightening like leather straps. The edges of his vision began to darken.

Keep moving!

He descended lower and lower down the steps, expecting to emerge into the nave or one of the transepts, and then he reached the bottom and shouldered his way through another door into a flickering dark. Polychrome mosaics at his feet dazzled his senses, the sweeping curves of the ceiling and the iron-wrought bars surrounding the basilica’s lower crypt. Dozens of votive candles burned in black sconces, bathing the crypt in deep, orange light.

He dropped to his knees. He could not breathe. Pain fired from the base of his spine into his lower gut. His teeth clenched so tightly his jaw shifted from its place in his skull, sending racking pain through his head and into his neck.

Come out
.

The Beast was his, not a dog to come at that whore’s beck and call.

His!

“It’s not time,” he whispered, shaking.

It’s mine!

Save me
—

Mine!

—
Slide over your skin
.

Lasha’s voice shrieked,
What have you done to him
?

—
Slide over my skin.

It is still you, Renny
.
Your hair, your blood, your bones.

Save me
—

If it is still you, then
—

—
Save
—

—
Your reason and ethics must also remain.

—
Animal
—

—
Pushed aside in some darker place
.

He fell to his face, tremors cascading up his legs and down his arms, his body drawn taut until his head touched his knees. Pale, prickly hairs, beaded with blood, stiffened on his arms and legs. The stitching on his shirt and vest began to give.

Pushed aside—aside—push it aside
—

“It’s not time!” he screamed.

Footsteps pounded on the ceiling. Another involuntary spasm sent him groaning, joints cracking as bones shifted in his wrists and ankles. The taste of coppery blood filled his mouth.

—
Not
—

A door slammed open. Footsteps thundered down steps. His eyes caught the bars of a wide grate set in the floor. He crawled to it. He looked through and saw a shaft dropping into the dark. He pulled the grate free and discovered a strange thing: an iron ladder dropping down the side of the shaft. He guessed it was part of the ancient sewer system, the old bones of a foundation that the basilica had been built upon, and that meant he might—

A latch quivered. Muffled voices.

Metal jingled—keys—a latch squealed.

Reynard looked at his long and crooked hands, his fingernails bleeding, and when he closed his mouth his teeth cut through his upper lip. He sucked at his own blood, voracious, wondering if Savoy would notice he was missing, if Lasha—

—Lasha?

Who? He tried to remember.

A pale girl bleeding on the floor?

“Inside,” came a muffled cry.

He crawled into the shaft, replaced the grate, and descended.      

22

Upon disembarking at Cassis Station, Savoy headed east on a rented one-horse cariole, following a winding road with an excellent view. The sea swelled against the shoreline cliffs. He thought about what he might say if Ernst Stronheim was lodging at his winter retreat, what questions he might ask. There was scant guarantee he would be there.

It cannot be coincidence,
he decided.
Of all the ports along the Mediterranean coast, why would the Kalabakang stop here?