The Golden (14 page)

“Welcome,
cousin,” he said in a dry, somewhat nasal voice. “Do you
bring greetings from Lord Agenor?”

This perplexed
Beheim, but he was too frightened to consider what it might mean.
Against the gloomy backdrop of an old dark tapestry and worn carpet,
the two vampires were aglow with vitality, with a tangible emotional
charge, seeming to outshine the lanterns, which cast a smoky yellow
light throughout the room.

“Your
pardon, my lord,” Beheim said. “As you know the Patriarch
has ordered me to investigate the murder of the Golden—”

“And that,
of course, is what brings you here.”

Felipe spoke
these words in a mocking tone, and Beheim, encouraged by the fact
that they had not attacked him, said, “Why else?”

“Why else,
indeed?”

Dolores shook
off Felipe’s arm and shrilled, “How can you allow this
insult? Kill him now!”

Felipe tipped
his head to the side as if considering this. “No,” he
said calmly. “There’s something more interesting.”

“Lord,”
said Beheim, “you misunderstand my motives! I’ve come
here tonight not to humiliate you, but to put to rest all suspicion
concerning your guilt.”

Beheim broke off
his protestations as Felipe came a pace forward and lifted his arms
like a priest supplicating god; then he brought his arms down slowly
as if suppressing some invisible resistance. The arcs his fingertips
described became visible as black lines, thin slashes in the fabric
of reality, creating the outline of an oval at whose center Felipe
was standing. The blackness of the lines began to mist, to spread and
fill in the oval, making it appear that a doorway was opening into
the heart of night, a darkness so palpable, it bulged from its
confines as might a volume of black gas restrained by a transparent
membrane.

“Do you
know the Mysteries, cousin?” Felipe asked, stepping aside so
that Beheim’s view of the oval was unimpeded. It floated a few
feet off the ground, impossible yet undeniable, a horrid black
interruption of the real some four feet high, like the maw of a huge
disembodied worm that had burst through the wall and the begrimed
tapestry into the midst of the room. “I’m sure you are
familiar with some, but this one, I’d wager, will be new to
you.”

“Listen, I
beg you!” said Beheim, terrified, his eyes drawn to the black
oval. “I was sent here by Lady Alexandra. She offered evidence
implicating you in the murder. I had no choice but to investigate.”

“Liar!”
Lady Dolores’s dark face darkened further, suffusing with
blood; she turned to Felipe. “How you can permit him to spew
such poison?”

“Keep
quiet!” He went a few feet toward Beheim, who retreated into
the doorway of the study. “Even were I to believe you, it would
not lessen your offense. You have entered my apartments without
invitation, you have by your own admission made a tacit accusal of
murder. I have no qualms about killing; I harvest my food as it
pleases me. But I am no slaughterer of tradition. And I care not
whose charge you bear, I will not tolerate such dishonorable
treatment. I do not credit your tale concerning Alexandra, but
because I know who has inspired this breach of trust and common
decency, I am moved to be merciful.”

“I assure
you, lord, I’m telling the truth!”

“No, you
are not. You are simply a point in an argument between Lord Agenor
and myself. A point ill-taken, I might say.”

“I know of
no business between you and Lord Agenor.”

“What are
you talking about?” Lady Dolores asked Felipe. “Are you
and Agenor involved?”

“Agenor
thinks we are,” said Felipe impatiently. “Though I have
told him we are not.”

Frightened as he
was, Beheim nonetheless did not fail to notice the discrepancy
between Felipe’s journal and his words.

“Then why
does he continue to press you?” Lady Dolores insisted.

Felipe shrugged.
“Who can say? Perhaps he
has
taken me at my word.
Otherwise I doubt he would have sent a thief to steal from me. At any
rate, he has always been mad, and now he wishes me to validate his
madness with my chemicals.”

He pushed Lady
Dolores—who appeared bewildered by this response—to one
side, and approached to within a foot of Beheim. Beheim was
captivated by his cruel, too pink lips, his reddened eyes with their
black target pupils, the sickly polish of his skin, the handsome
features reduced to a brutish fixity by arrogance and willfulness.

“I want
you to comprehend the fate that awaits you, cousin, for it is
uncommon both in its essentials and its merciful character.”
Felipe indicated the black oval with an eloquent gesture, and—the
gesture apparently being the agency of a further magic—the
blackness was lent depth and form, so it seemed that Beheim was
peering into a vacant eye socket that afforded a view of an emptiness
figured by pale phantoms, winged entities too vague and fleeting to
identify. There was a faint rushing hiss, like a wind driving grit
against a windowpane. He felt cold and frail, as if standing upon the
edge of a gulf into which one could fall forever.

“Hermeto
DiLanza, a convert of my daughter, Alexandra,” Felipe said
blithely, “she whose reputation you sought to injure, he was
the Columbus who was first to sail the waters you now survey. In
passing from life to life upon his night of judgment, he chanced to
brush past this particular darkness, and recognizing it to be
uncharted territory, sensing an advantage to be had, he told no one
of his discovery and set himself thereafter to laying bare its
potentials. Sadly for poor Hermeto, his researches did not go
unnoticed.” He picked up the ceramic figurine of a fancily
dressed dancing lord and lady from an end table next to Beheim. “Were
I to allow my children to carry out unlicensed research, I would
undoubtedly lose their respect. Thus I accosted Hermeto one evening
while he was exploring the abyss you see before you by merrily
pitching his servants into it. I thought it only fair that he follow
them.”

He tossed the
figurine into the oval. On breaching the surface, it was suspended
for an instant, the surrounding blackness displaced, splashing out
around the depression it had created with the sluggishness of
mercury, of some liquid heavier than water, a few droplets flying
into the air, hovering there briefly, like peepholes punched through
into an ebon sky, then falling back as the figurine receded, spinning
slowly, comic in its stiff gaiety, yet somehow a sad and terrible
image, those two painted courtiers with their embroidered silks and
rouge-dappled cheeks wheeling down into the absence of everything,
into the utter dark. Just before the figurine vanished, one of the
pale winged shapes came swooping near.

Death, Beheim
thought; he had never before glimpsed this place, this particular
Mystery, but knew it to be part of the black country he had traveled
during the time of his judgment, and the prospect of entering it, of
enduring even a shadow of the pain and fright he had then endured,
made him faint and unsteady.

“Intriguing,
is it not?” said Felipe, considering the figurine’s
passage. “I have never gained a satisfactory understanding of
it, yet I think of it as a pool on the plain of death in which things
are suspended from judgment. Everything it absorbs continues to live
after a fashion. If you were as attuned as I to the vibrations of the
ether, you might sense the vital signals of Hermeto and his
servants . . . and of the creatures that torment them.
I am ignorant of their natures, these creatures, though I believe
they may be an evolutionary stage of the spirit to which Hermeto and
his fellows will one day aspire.” He gave Beheim a cheerful
grin. “You see, I am not condemning you to death. A new
transmogrification awaits you. Or else I may someday discover how to
retrieve what I have stored there. In that case, I will reclaim you
from the deep. Doubtless you will have an intriguing tale to tell.
So!” With another florid gesture, he invited Beheim to enter
the black oval. “Come now, cousin. What’s the point of
delay?”

Beheim, half
under the spell of the unearthly sight before him, half-seduced by
the sonorous quality of Felipe’s voice, suddenly became aware
of the immediacy of the danger and sprang toward the alcove, toward
the Lady Dolores, who blocked his path. He swung his fist at her, a
backhanded blow with all his weight behind it, but she caught his
hand, gave it a wrench, knocking him off balance; then, using her
grip as would a hammer thrower, she slammed his head against the
wall. White light splintered in his eyes, and the top of his skull
felt aglow with pain. He tried to shake off the effects of the
impact, to struggle to his feet, but Lady Dolores knelt beside him,
her hand on his chest, pushing him back. Her dark, predatory beauty
had evolved into the animal, eyes dead black, runners of saliva
bridging between her fangs and lower teeth. Felipe stood at her
shoulder, looking on placidly.

“I don’t
believe she cares for you,” he said. “If you prefer, I’ll
simply have her tear you apart.”

“Don’t . . .
please,” said Beheim, slurring the words, unable to focus.
“I . . . I can’t . . .
Felipe grabbed his jacket and yanked him to his feet. “There,
you see! You only thought you couldn’t.”

He shoved Beheim
across the room, lifted him by the collar and the seat of his pants,
and with irresistible strength, swung him toward the oval, stopping
his momentum so that Beheim’s face was only inches away from
the blackness. Beheim felt a cold pressure on his skin, a gentle
probing, as if the oval sensed his nearness and was testing him,
becoming familiar, the way a blind man touches another’s face
in order to know its conformation. He thrashed about, desperately
trying to escape Felipe’s grip, but Felipe only pushed him
forward a few inches so that his head entered the blackness. For a
moment he could neither see nor breathe, nor could he feel anything
of his body other than a freezing numbness that had fitted itself
like a mask to his face; but then, either his eyes adjusted to the
darkness or by some other unfathomable process the darkness was
translated into images in his brain, and he saw a vista of folds like
those of an immense curtain, radiant yet black, resembling a negative
of the aurora borealis, and drifting among them, structures that put
him in mind of outcroppings of quartz, geometries of pallid obelisks,
crystal cities. He heard a warped resonant booming, as of a drunken
voice heard through a wall by another drunk; then, from the farthest
reaches of his vision, a flash of heat lightning thinned into a
razor’s edge of blinding white as wide as the sky and sliced
through the blackness toward him, setting all the folds to rippling,
the crystals to bobbling, as if a sword had been swung through a
medium of black gauze and water. Only it was not a sword, he realized
as it drew near, widening, acquiring detail, but a swarm of hideous,
glowing creatures, all different, yet having a unity of malformed
character, pig rats and cockroach lions and dog spiders and crab
worms and more, swelling to fill the field of his vision, thousands
upon thousands of them, an infinity of dire visage and form. As they
dove toward him it seemed he had grown to a great size, the size of
the sky itself, for rather than swarming over him, burying him
beneath a crawly tonnage of light, they shrank and struck into his
flesh, driving needles into his cheeks and forehead, points of such
searing pain that he imagined each to be sparkling, delineating a
constellation of pain tattooed across an enormous dark face. And then
he was back in Felipe’s rooms, his body convulsing, still held
helplessly aloft.

“What did
you see, cousin?” Felipe asked with mild curiosity.

Beheim was
burning with cold, shivering, his teeth clattering.

“Take your
time, dear boy,” said Felipe. “I’m in no hurry.”

Still shivering,
Beheim tried to collect his impressions, to embroider them with
invention, for he would have employed any deceit in order to delay
being thrust back into that freezing alien blackness. But just as he
was preparing to tell a totally unfounded tale of his experiences,
Lady Dolores screamed and Felipe let him fall to the floor.

“Put it
down,” said Felipe sternly. “And come here to me.”

Though he was
not certain who was being addressed, Beheim knew by Felipe’s
shift in tone that it was not he. He struggled to his knees, fired by
the hope that someone had come to his aid. Lord Agenor, perhaps. Or
Alexandra. But it was Giselle who had entered the apartment, her
bloodless face stamped with fear. She was holding a burning torch
close to the hair of the Lady Dolores, who cowered from the flames in
a corner of the alcove.

“Come to
me,” Felipe repeated.

Giselle’s
hand wavered.

Lady Dolores’s
stare was full upon her, and Beheim knew it would be a matter of
moments before she was overcome by one of them or the other. He came
to his feet and, eluding Felipe’s grasp, stumbled across the
room. He snatched the torch from Giselle’s hand, keeping it
well away from his body, his mind shriveling with fright at the
nearness of the dancing flame, the crackling flower of death, but
willing in his desperation to risk burning. He held the torch inches
above Lady Dolores’s hair, exulting in her terrified gasp.

“I swear
to you,” Felipe said to him. “I’ll hold your heart
in my hands.”

Beheim waved the
torch at Lady Dolores, eliciting a shriek. “Keep back!”
he said to Felipe. “Go into the study.”

Felipe let out a
snarl but retreated a few steps.

“Quickly!”
Beheim said; Giselle pressed against him, clinging to his arm.
“Follow him,” he told her. “Lock him in.”

“First
Agenor steals from me, and now he sends a thief,” said Felipe,
continuing his retreat. “Tell him I’ll suffer no more
humiliation at his hands. Not for the sake of any cause. I’ll
hunt him through the light of Hell itself if necessary.”