House of Corruption (8 page)

—
Drink—

Too close. He flattened against the moist earth, did not flinch when a firefly lighted on his back. A part ached for the trees, but the deeper part, the wild part—

—
Drink—

Sound. Wood on stone—
click, click, clack, click
.

Along a cobbled path walked two shapes: A taller female in a long, black dress and an old fashioned bonnet of black lace. She smelled of fish and lavender and hair oil. Beside her walked a small girl in a yellow dress and floppy round hat. She chatted with a constant noise like an excited bird.

—
Drink—

—
No—

—
Drink—

He moved, his breath quickening, despite him. The craving raged from his gut, down into his groin and up his spine into his teeth.

—
no—

—
DrinkDrinkDrinkDrinkDrink—

He exploded from the darkness.

—
Drink—

He leaped upon the woman and brought her down, clamping his teeth onto her face, inhaling the thrashing of her body and the sound of her voice in his throat. He gripped her tighter by the shoulders and breathed in her taste, her screaming vibrating the marrow of his teeth and he did not hear her, did not feel her fingers tearing at his fur, did not see the bawling lump of a girl shrieking nearby—

—
Yes YES drink yes DRINK drink DRINK
—

Reynard seized in a violent fit and bolted from his bed with a horrified cry. He reached for a bottle of brandy on the end table, drank, gulped, until threads of crimson liquid poured down his neck.

The wolf is dead it’s dead it’s dead and I know I know I cannot not another, not another terrible
—

The bottle emptied. He tossed it aside.

—
terrible.

Nightmare. He reached for another bottle. It too was empty. He found a half-filled decanter of vodka and flipped off the lid with a finger. In great gulps he drained the alcohol down his throat. Disgust washed over him and he tossed the decanter, smashing it against the wall. Since Lisbon he could never get drunk, no matter how hard he tried—and he wanted, really
wanted
, to try.

That bloody presumptive, intrusive, miserable letter!

His rage intensified as he thought of Miss Kiria Carlovec and her pleasant vagaries. He imagined every lurid reason such a woman would flaunt his secret. The more he examined her false concern, the pretentious sweep of her signature—as if he would rush to her side!

No one was supposed to know.

The First Time came at age nineteen, sitting in the last row of the Western Civilization lectures at The University of Montreal. The professor was droning on about Cortez and his rout of the Aztecs when the pressure in Reynard’s gut came so immediate, so demanding, that he spilled the contents of his stomach all over his desk. He panicked, his instincts warning him not to run to the nurse’s station but to isolate himself, far away.

He knew, somehow. Something terrible was going to happen.

He scurried into a concrete maw of a drainage pipe outside the school grounds, huddling in wet sewage, wailing like a child. The bones in his face cracked and skin ripped like cloth and every joint pulled from its place, forcing him to his belly as if prostrating before an unclean god. When he was himself again, five days later, he was naked, alone, sheathed in dead skin and more than twenty miles from school. When he tried to remember where he had been, what he had done, his memories were but fragments: running through darkness between the lights, his ragged breath and heartbeat, a cascade of earthy scents, the dull satisfaction of filling his belly. Whatever he had eaten, he dared not speculate.

Over the months that followed, he read books. He asked questions. He raised his hand in his biology and psychology and anthropology classes, surprising those professors who marked him sullen and uncommunicative. He drew ire from those more conservative students with his keen interest in Darwinism, especially the science of mutation. Could this be, he speculated, some product of evolution?

He soon concluded his condition was beyond scientific understanding. He turned inward, to every myth he could gather matching his condition. He discovered the word
werewolf
, but he found his affliction had many differences from common folklore: his change had nothing to do with the moon, though his body kept to a rough six-week cycle. He carried no demonic sign, no magic belt, no animal skin. He offered no oath to God or Satan. As far as he knew, his parents were not inclined to dabble in anything supernatural other than their pointless social circles.

So it was, that after having tried to bind himself, drown himself, drink himself into oblivion and slit his wrists, he decided he was mad, alone, and there was nothing that could be done until God, or the Devil, or Fate, had finished with his sad and sorry life.

Until his great-uncle Lanquin.

At age twenty-two, Reynard and his family spent a summer family reunion in his father’s ancestral village of Aix-en-Provence. It proved to be their last, a bittersweet gathering of those stubborn few, those remaining members of a line near to extinction. Reynard enjoyed the nostalgia of the old villa, the wild gardens, wandering through the dying vineyards. There the ancient, wrinkled shape of Marienne LaCroix, widow of great-uncle Lanquin, found Reynard alone in the conservatory. She had pressed a book into his hands. A strap and brass lock bound tight a leather cover with many yellowed pages. With it, she gave him a tarnished key.

“I see it,” she said. “In your eyes.”

“What?” he asked her.

“May God have mercy on your soul.”

He did not understand until he opened the lock and began to read the scrawled handwriting:

I am Lanquin LaCroix. I bear a terrible burden
.

Reynard sequestered himself in the garden near the old family tombstones, refusing sleep and food as he read the tale of another who had suffered the same condition. Lanquin wrote with clarity, an almost clinical detachment at first—he too had tried to determine the cause. It struck at random, never skipping more than two or three generations. He traced the unholy line back to their ancestor Giorgio Basta, he who called upon darkness to command the Habsburgs in some old war. The devil betrayed him, the legend said, but from there the trail turned cold. The chief players had long turned to dust.

Reynard read page after page, grimly noting the mind of his grand-uncle deteriorating with each passing entry. Clinical curiosity became ravings until the handwriting leaned heavy with a rush of crowded, half-formed letters. Dry blotches of ink flecked the yellowed pages. Reynard pressed his finger under the last sentence, looked hard at every word, read it over and over again to be sure—

If God saw fit to impart this impossible puzzle
, the last sentence went,
then I must consider the final solution.

A soft knock echoed at his door.

“Renny?”

He pushed the memory away. Ancient history. He slid off the bed, dressed in his robe, and opened the door. Lasha held a candle in one hand and kept her own frilly robe closed with the other, her pale hair loose and tangled over her shoulders.

I did not mean to do it
, he wanted to say.
I did not hurt you, you see? You are my sister—I would never hurt you
. He imagined little Lasha, laughing, the halls of LaCroix echoing with her delight, and his heart felt it might burst with the heaviness of both love and regret.

“I heard a noise,” she said.

“My apologies.”

“Is everything—?”

“Nothing. Insomnia, bad dreams, that sort of thing.”

“Well. I am glad it was nothing worse.” She started to turn away.

“Lasha.”

She stopped.

“About this evening,” he said. “My reasons for not keeping my word were legitimate. But I could have contacted you sooner, provided a carriage, something. I had forgotten Eleanor and Gordon were away. I treated you poorly.”

“Yes, you did,” she said.

“Please forgive me.”

Her eyes softened. “I…I thought I heard glass break.”

“Good night, Lasha.”

He shut the door. Her voice was sad and faint behind it.

“Good night, Renny.”

8

Lasha slept, fitfully, feeling the outline of her bed and room every hour that passed, wondering if she only dreamed of sleeping.

In the morning, she awoke to discover sunlight in her window, the dying smell of sausage and an empty house; Reynard had breakfasted without her, having returned to the city without even a farewell—
of course
—and the caretakers were still away. As she bathed and dressed, she wondered if she had done something wrong, committed some crime to be exiled in that old and dreary house.

So it was that, still early, a heavy knock resounded against the front door. She rushed down the stairs and crossed the foyer, uncertain if she felt afraid or exhilarated at someone at her doorstep.

Twice in two days
.
Extraordinary
.

“Why hello Freddie,” she said, as she opened the door. “What a surprise, to come all this way.”

Frederick J. Burlington, Reynard’s office manager and financial clerk, managed a slight, if uncomfortable smile. He never liked anyone to call him “Freddie” and Lasha knew it, seeing he was incredibly shy around women. In finance Mister Burlington served LaCroix Brokerage with a maniacal attention to the bottom-line, but as an office manager he had the candor of a fence-post and (as Reynard once remarked, with no irony) the social skill of a block of ice. With his pinstripe suit and worn leather shoes and gold chain draped from lapel to breast pocket he tried as hard as he could to promote the clerkly image, as if his dullery might discourage conversation. It usually worked. His soft shape and rosy cheeks, however, encouraged the occasional girl to remark that, with some work, he might prove a plain but adequate catch.

“Forgive me, but I bring a message,” he said. “Please accept your brother’s apologies on yesterday’s cancellation.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Yes.”

“
Monsieur
finds a messenger service too expensive. So here I am...all this way, as you said. He wishes you to join him for dinner this evening. A carriage will retrieve you at seven thirty.”

“He sent you to tell me this?” she asked.

“He did.”

“When he could have left a note?”

“He only just decided this morning,
m’oiselle
.”

“That does sound like him.”

“Pardon?”

“Inefficient.”

“So it would seem. Seven thirty.”

“Yes,” she said. “Seven thirty. Thank you.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

He descended the porch stair to his horse, to the reins lashed loosely to the hitching rail. She did not know Freddie could ride, expecting him the kind of man who only used a cab, and was surprised he allowed a smattering of French into his conversation. She chided herself; he was a man, after all, and had to know something more than ledgers and inkwells. Perhaps that block of ice was beginning to thaw?

So Reynard does care
.

She closed the door and leaned her back against it. This must have something to do with that letter, the fancy one addressed to him. A thrill of relief went through her chest. This was an uncommon gesture from an older brother who considered her as a cipher, someone to be tolerated while he shouldered father’s burdens. This, from a brother who abandoned his family and fled to Europe, only to return years later with no explanation, inexorably changed as if a doppelganger had taken his place.

It may have been the timbre of Reynard’s voice the previous evening, but she was reminded of the young man in her warmer memories, the one before their family knew such sorrow, he who laughed and chased her down hallways and taught her to swim and made her feel there was no brother in the world as fine as he.

“Robert Neville or no,” she said as she raced down the hall to bathe, “Elisabeth will eat shepherd’s pie tonight, while I enjoy veal.”

***

That day in New Orleans came electric with the tang of impending thunderstorm. Pedestrians paced a little faster, and horses and their coaches clip-clopped as if to arrive sooner than usual. Savoy regarded the charcoal tint to the clouds as his coach stopped for the omnibus to amble past. The weather was taking a turn for the worst. When the coach kept on so did he, dictating his thoughts into his notebook as fast as his pen would allow.

Stretched out on the opposite bench, Mahonri Grant stared out the back window as Parish Prison shrank behind them. Even from that distance he considered the watchtower guards with their rifles slung at their backs.

“How did you manage this?” he asked.

“Barrister of a friend,” Savoy said. “Warden Mealey is enslaved to his pocketbook, and miracles are often accomplished with the stroke of a pen. Besides—the police broke two or three laws regarding your capture. Irresponsible all around. The authorities were far too eager to pin those murders on someone, an outsider especially, and the Warden knows it. I’ve been granted authority to watch over you, Mister Grant, until your hearing. I do hope you’ll mind yourself.”

“What happens now?” Grant asked.

“That is a very good question,” Savoy said. “Our first stop is to visit a colleague of mine. Some particular details of this crime have bothered me from the outset.” He paused, stoic. “He may be of help.”

“So why me?”

“You are the only lead I have and, frankly, I have no evidence to either confirm or dispute your story. If you are to be believed, then I would think there is a purpose in what this woman did, and to whom. I will need your help to identify what you saw.”

“I’m sharp with a rifle.”

“With all due respect, I’m no fool.”

Grant reached across the coach, quick as a cat, and slipped his hand under Savoy’s coat. He grasped the handle of the revolver holstered against his chest—a weapon Savoy thought unknown to his companion—and snapped it free from its strap. He pointed the barrel at Savoy’s astonished face.