HS04 - Unholy Awakening (20 page)

‘How have you managed to avoid the French, Herr Voigt?’

The landlord took a deep draught of beer and shrugged. ‘I reckon that they feel vulnerable outside the city walls. They are…well, they’re afraid of being seen alone in places like this, sir.’

‘Afraid?’ I echoed, bravely sipping at the ale again. ‘Why would they be afraid?’

He drank deeply, as if it were the finest beer that had ever passed his lips. ‘They don’t like the slaughter-house, if you ask me, sir.’

‘They’ve closed down everything that they consider unhygienic…’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘They can’t close off the smell of blood. Folks hereabouts have never stopped telling stories about the slaughter-house. Maybe that’s what scared them off.’

‘Stories?’ I asked, forcing myself to take another sip.

He ran the tip of a finger around the rim of his glass.

‘Stories,’ he said.

‘What kind of stories?’ Lavedrine had been right to send me here. Voigt would never have told a Frenchman what he was telling me. The important thing was to decide what was relevant, and what was not.

‘They’ve been slaughtering beasts down here for centuries, sir. Where there’s blood,’ he added, holding his ale-mug up to the light as if it were the finest crystal glass, then taking another large swig, ‘there’s creatures that drink nothing else.’

The tension which had been building up inside me melted away like ice thrown onto a blazing fire. I had fallen into the same dark pit that had almost swallowed me in Lotingen. Speak to a Prussian, and demons leapt out at you in every shape and form. Was this what Lavedrine had meant when he told me that the fact that French soldiers were the victims changed nothing?

‘Vampires, Herr Voigt?’

The landlord nodded vigorously. ‘Some say that they were drawn here at night when animals were being killed in such large numbers. Now, that river of blood don’t flow like it did, but still…There are people that leave carcasses there at night for the creatures to feed on. Dead dogs, sick animals, what have you. That way, the vampires come down here to quaff, and they stay away from the villages along the river.’

And one of them had taken the coach to Lotingen, I thought ruefully.

‘Are you suggesting that a vampire may have attacked the French officer?’ I asked with a smirk.

Voigt raised his mug, and winked again. ‘To the good health of the vampire, if that’s the case. I wish we’d had a few at Jena.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in that supernatural stuff. I told you what I thought had happened in that cottage, sir. That man had enemies in
this
world, sir. Forget the creatures of the night! There’s some thing down-to-earth behind it. Still, little Elsie thinks the vampires got him.’

I stopped writing and looked up. ‘Elsie?’

‘When the slaughter-house was up and running, sir, we had five servants working here. Now, we’ve just got little Elsie, Elspeth. Good girl, she is, an’ does the lot, dusting, clearing, cooking if there’s any call for it. She was here before, sir, brushing out the fireplace.’ He looked around him, then pointed over his shoulder with his thumb towards the far end of the dark room. ‘Down there, she is. Silent as a mouse is that girl. She got a real fright when she saw the soldiers milling about.’ He leant across the table. ‘Thought that they was going to rape her,’ he confided. ‘Some chance of that! We was watching at the curtains when we saw you coming, sir. I guessed that someone would come in here asking questions sooner or later.’

I stood up, looking over the massive shoulders of the tavern-keeper.

A girl no more than fourteen or fifteen years old was shovelling ashes up with her hands, pouring them into a large black pot, tamping them down. She lifted up some dirty clothes from a pile at her feet, dropped them into the pot, then threw in another handful of ashes. She glanced up, and realised that she had been found out. Her face was very pale, and she was very slight of build. I would have sworn that that work was too heavy for her.

‘May I speak with her?’ I asked.

Voigt’s chair scraped loudly as he got to his feet. ‘Elsie, come over here,’ he shouted. ‘Let that bucket alone. Herr Magistrate wants to ask you a few questions.’ He set his beer-mug down on the table with a thump. ‘You can finish drinking that, if you like,’ he said as the waif approached. ‘I’ve seen you at it often enough when you think that no-one’s looking. You answer the gentle man’s questions now,’ he warned, ‘or he’ll set the Frenchies on you.’

The girl stood dithering in front of me.

‘Sit down,’ I said.

She did so, taking the mug, looking inside. ‘Here, this is empty!’ she cried.

Voigt waddled away, laughing.

I pushed my beer towards her. ‘Drink that,’ I said. ‘I’ve had my fill.’

No sooner said than done. The child drank more deeply than the landlord had. As she put the mug down, and made herself comfortable, her pale tongue flickered over her lips like that of a tiny lizard. The girl enjoyed her ale. Indeed, I began to wonder whether I was the truly delicate one.

‘Now, tell me. Why do you think the Frenchman was killed by a vampire?’

Her brown eyes had a pinkish, bloodshot cast. Her blonde hair was lank and hung in uncombed tails which spiralled around pale, sunken cheeks. She had no eyebrows, eyelashes so pale that they were almost invisible, thin grey lips. There was no distinguishing feature to her face, nowhere to look, except into her eyes. She might have been a ghost on the point of disappearing.

‘Because I saw it.’

Her voice was like the voice of a young boy breaking into maturity. Maybe the foul liquid that she liked to drink and the smell inside the tavern had got into her throat and corroded it, I thought. Then again, it took no great quantity of ale to conjure up creatures in her head.

‘What exactly did you see?’

Elspeth shrugged her shoulders and looked at the bottom of the ale mug. ‘It must have been a week ago,’ she answered indirectly.

‘Can you describe it?’

Voigt was leaning on the bar, a grin on his face as he watched us.

‘A woman, more or less.’

‘Was it, or wasn’t it, a woman?’ I snapped.

She exhaled audibly. ‘Looked like a kind of woman to me, sir.’

I held up my stick of graphite, and indicated my drawing album. ‘Good. If you describe exactly what you saw, then I will try to draw it.’

‘Dark,’ she said.

I looked sharply at her. ‘Dark. And?’

‘Dark,’ she repeated stubbornly.

‘In heaven’s name, child, can you say no more than that?’ I said with exasperation. ‘How many times did you see this dark creature?’

‘Twice. Wearing a black shawl on her head. A kind of hood that hid the face.’

‘How can you be sure it was a woman?’

‘A man don’t move like that.’

‘What time of day was this?’

‘It was practically night, sir. I went down to the river to chuck out scraps. That was when I saw her. Walking on the river path. Well, not
walking
…not exactly. She was bent over, like, as if she didn’t wish to be seen. I chucked the rubbish in the water, and she must have heard the splash. She turned and looked in my direction.’

‘Was she old, young, ugly, pretty?’ I suggested.

‘She was strange, sir.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Her eyes, sir. They were evil. She looked around her like a wild thing. Lucky it was dark. She didn’t see me. And then she carried on towards the slaughter-house.’

‘And the second occasion?’

‘It was two nights after, sir. This time she was coming back from there. Then I knew that she was one of
them
!’

‘Them?’

The girl shuddered. ‘Them creatures that drinks blood, sir. Vampires. That’s why she had gone down to the slaughter-house. She knew what she would find there. Fresh blood, and others like herself. I could see it on her hands. They was black and shining ’til she washed them in the water, sir. Then, she ran off like a fury.’

If she had told that story to a French soldier, I had no doubt she would have got a slap for her trouble. I glanced at Voigt, who rolled his eyes to heaven.

‘Can I see what you have drawn, sir?’

I turned the album towards her. It was little more than a blur of black. Vertical lines at the bottom representing grass, a sort of dark hooded cloud of a figure filling the middle ground, the black of night behind her. The sort of illustration one might find in a book for children. I had no illusions about where my inspiration lay.

The girl’s mouth fell open. ‘Have you seen her, then, Herr Magistrate?’

‘Is this a fair picture?’

The girl nodded. ‘Except for the sliver of moon, sir. Just here,’ she pointed.

I added a slender slice of moon, then I closed the album. ‘If any Frenchman asks you what you saw, say nothing of this,’ I said. ‘He’d think that you were lying.’

As I replaced the graphite in its tube, and put my album in my bag, I wondered whether there was anything in what she had told me which might relate to what had happened in that house near the slaughter-house.

I stood up, thanked the girl, who went back to her work, then I turned to Voigt, who had already poured himself another mug of ale. ‘Did the girl mention to you that she had seen some one on the riverbank a week ago?’ I asked him.

He wiped his mouth on his arm. ‘Elsie’s full of stories, sir. Came back here one night – she’d been down to the river for a bucket of water – saying that she’d seen a wolf down there.’ Some private amusement caused him to laugh.

‘Is it so unlikely?’ I asked.

He laughed again. ‘Seeing a wolf, no, but she said that it had spoken to her!’

‘And what had the wolf told her?’ I asked, amused despite myself.

Herr Voigt grinned from ear to ear. ‘That wolf said that the Frenchies would all die in the snow, and he’d make a damned fine meal of ’em. So, what do you make of that, sir?’

I left the tavern a minute later, and turned in the direction of the river.

I saw no sign of the French soldiers who had been standing guard the night before. Then again, the body of Grangé would have been taken away. There was nothing there for the soldiers to do. I reached the riverbank, and stood there for a while considering the prospect. Despite the shimmering vision of the town and the fortress on the other bank, despite Herr Voigt’s tavern two hundred paces behind me, despite the nearness of the abandoned slaughter-house, it really was an isolated spot.

I heard the distant whistling of a plover, the hissing of the breeze through the long lush grass, the gentle flow and lapping of the water. At night, it must be a frightening place for a young girl all alone. Especially a girl with such a colourful imagination as the maid from the inn. Mysterious figures that might have been female, a dark and menacing creature seeking blood, a ravenous wolf that saw a defeated French army in the snow. In that spot anything seemed possible. Even that a French officer might have been attacked and murdered by a vampire.

I made my way along the narrow path towards the slaughter-house.

It was a big old barn of a place. The ribbed planks that protected the stone walls were black with age, stained, split with ingrained moisture, yellowish-green with moss, and yet it was solid and massive. It was closed on the river side by a big double entrance-door. One of the halves hung open on enormous rusty hinges. I paused outside the door for a moment, listening in case any one else was in there. Except for the shrill cries of the swallows which darted in the air, all was silent.

I stepped into the gloom.

The smell of putrefaction and rotting meat was strong. The buzz of flies was loud.

I glanced around, noting the large iron gratings, three on either wall, which let in light and air. Once, I supposed, they had also kept out thieves. In the centre of the room there was a large stone trough, six or seven feet long and three feet wide, like a Roman sarcophagus without a lid, a runnel cut down the centre of the tub. It was raised above the level of the ground on a base made of bricks, higher at the far end, sloping down towards a small hole and a run-off channel just where I was standing. At the upper end, this bath – ‘blood-bath’ was the word that first occurred to me – was two feet higher, and there was a stone block raised above the level of the trough.

It was stained and dark with encrusted blood.

I could see how the operation was organised: a cow, pig or sheep would be led in through the far door. It would be tethered to the block, its head pulled forward over the chopping-block with a rope. One sure blow with an axe and the head would be off, the animal dead.

I looked up into the air.

Beams of light crisscrossed, entering through holes in the roof and walls. A rusty pulley, chain and hook were hanging from a cross beam rafter of the ceiling. When the carcass was hauled up, the blood would run away to the bottom of the trough and out through the runnel, where it was collected in buckets. Then, the blood would be used in any one of a hundred different ways. The smell of black pudding and blood sausage filled my mind for an instant. Or it would be dried and used to make medications. Closed in bottles as sustenance for the sick, locked in amulets to protect the living. Blood was energy, life, renewal.

I bent and looked more closely at the chopping-block. The stone was blacker than the trough, though trough and block appeared to be made of the same rough, granite-like material. How much blood had been necessary to effect that change of tint? How many animals had been butchered and bled there? How many barrels of blood had the local butchers and the herders harvested in a hundred years?

I ran my fingers over the top of the stone. It was slick and almost warm; the thick black film had not entirely impregnated the stone. I examined my fingertip, and saw that it was stained a dirty brown.

The slaughter-house was still being used.

Did they slay beasts there to avoid paying French taxes, as Voigt suggested, or, as Elsie had said, to placate the blood-lust of the supernatural creatures who frequented the place, and stop them wandering farther afield? Dark female figures, who washed blood from their hands in the river, while looking all around with piercing eyes…