The Golden (19 page)

Chapter
Fifteen

I
t took Beheim the better part of an hour to retrace his path to the
tunnel mouth where he and Giselle had encountered Vlad. He made his
way tentatively at first, but with increasing confidence—he was
determined not to be taken by surprise again. Once the element of
surprise had been removed, he did not believe that the vermin who
inhabited the depths of Banat would be any match for him. >From
time to time he heard delirious shouts and laughter reverberating in
the distance, and as he drew near the tunnel mouth, glancing to his
left along a cross corridor, he spotted a reflected glow of
torchlight. He headed toward the light and soon turned into another
corridor whose far end was stained by a flickering ruddy glare. A
faint babble of voices carried to him, as did the scent of blood.
There might be, he estimated, as many as thirty people gathered
together. Enough to present a considerable danger, should they be of
unified purpose. But he continued on, driven equally by a red desire
to confront Vlad as by any hope of finding Giselle.

When he reached
the source of the light—a half-open door, massive slabs of oak
bound with iron bands—he peeked into a room so narrow it might
have been an incredibly elongated closet. Sixty feet long or more,
with a high arched ceiling, lit by torches set in iron brackets. The
space had been hewn from the rock on which the castle was founded,
the walls of glistening, unmortised black stone decorated with
brightly colored caricatures of bone-white, cadaverous men and women
with cruel carmine mouths and ridiculously elongated limbs and
exaggerated fangs. Evil cartoons posed in attitudes of menace, each
fifteen feet high or thereabouts. Images so vividly rendered, they
seemed capable of coming to life, of peeling up from the rock and
committing two-dimensional violences.

There were not
so many people in the room as Beheim had presumed. Only a dozen or
so, all dressed in hooded robes like that worn by Vlad. Most of them
were crowded about Giselle, who was shackled to the wall, naked and
apparently unconscious, her skin washed orange by the torchlight.
Fresh bruises dirtied her thighs and arms. Vlad was standing beside
her, his hood thrown back, talking with a plump gray-haired woman.
Every few seconds he would touch Giselle on the shoulder, the hip, in
a casual fashion that made Beheim think he was using her as an
example in his conversation; whenever he smiled, his teeth glittered
with unnatural brilliance, and this enhanced the ratlike aspect of
his bearded face. Several other people were idling about, examining
the murals, now and again casting glances toward Giselle, as if they
expected something to happen. Beheim feared the torches, but he knew
that if he were going to act, he would have to do so quickly, before
they set about whatever it was they intended.

Footsteps
sounded farther along the corridor.

Someone walking
at a rapid pace toward the room.

Laughter came
from even farther away, deeper in the labyrinth of corridors.

Beheim flattened
against the wall, and when a burly robed figure drew abreast of him,
he seized the man from behind and broke his neck with a quick twist,
choking off his outcry. He hauled the body farther into the darkness,
into a niche that might once have been used for a sentry post. There
he stripped off the man’s robe and, ignoring its foul odor,
pulled it on over his head. As he was adjusting the hood to hide his
face, two more men came striding along the corridor, chatting
happily, and entered the room. Beheim stood straining his ears. After
waiting a few minutes more to allow for any further late arrivals, he
himself entered, stepping in among the small crackling fires and the
rich stink of blood.

Gone was every
trace of his benign regard for mortals. He felt nothing but anger and
contempt. As he passed in among them he glimpsed mottled faces and
dull eyes and gaping mouths. Several members of the assemblage, he
noticed, were sporting makeshift fangs: curved tubes of crudely
forged metal that fitted over their canines. This aping of the Family
intensified his loathing. They were aroused, he realized. Titillated.
Anticipating some gory delight. A primitive version of the Decanting,
perhaps. And in their arousal, whatever craftiness served to keep
them alive had been subsumed beneath a veneer of lustful perversity.
He had been concerned that they would know him at once, that he would
have to strike before he was prepared. But they had not the slightest
intimation of his presence. Sheep would have been more alert,
chickens more sensitive to danger.

He stationed
himself behind two men at the rear of the gathering, some twenty feet
from Giselle. She was chained so that her head obscured the crotch of
one of the huge, pale cartoons on the wall, making it appear that her
face and hair were a clever form of pubic decoration. She moaned and
tried unsuccessfully to lift her head. Drugged, he supposed. Seeing
close at hand the full extent of her bruises, imagining how she had
been used . . . this hardened his anger. How these
things stank! Their blood was a vile carrion fluid, their bones were
black sticks mortaring a spoilage of poisons and stringy meat. They
were brutes, animals, incapable of anything other than the grossest
of perceptions, the most rudimentary judgments.

There were
whispers and rustlings as Vlad turned to Giselle. Then silence. He
spoke softly to her, gave her a light slap. Her eyelids fluttered but
remained closed. Vlad grinned at his audience and shrugged—in
his manner, he reminded Beheim of the buffoonish, third-rate
illusionists who had sometimes appeared during intermissions at the
Opéra Comique. His canines, too, were fitted with a pair of
metal fangs, and in a show of mock ferocity, he clicked them together
and let out a hissing exclamation. The audience tittered; several of
the women pretended to be shrinking away from him in fright. He
turned again to Giselle, stroked her hips as might a lover; then,
with another sidelong, grinning look at the onlookers, he sank his
counterfeit fangs into her neck. She stiffened, her fingers splayed;
yet she did not wake. A line of lovely ruby-colored blood escaped his
lips, eeled down her neck and onto her breast.

Afraid for her,
but feeling mostly a sense of proprietary violation, Beheim placed
his hands on the necks of the two men in front of him, squeezing
gently as if in affection. As they turned to look at him, their faces
betraying puzzlement, he squeezed harder. There was a grating sound,
like gravel being crushed beneath the wheels of a cart: the vertebrae
at the bases of their necks grinding into a rubble of bone. He stared
at them fiercely, wanting to stain their last seconds with his
hatred. They quivered like rabbits in his grasp. Borne along by the
momentum of turning to his left, freed of skeletal constraints, the
head of one of them made nearly a complete revolution, so that—as
his eyes rolled up—his final sight was of a corner of the
ceiling to his extreme right.

Beheim flung the
bodies aside and confronted the others, who had fallen back to either
side of Vlad and Giselle. The room was so narrow, barely a few feet
wider than his outspread arms, they had no hope whatsoever of
escaping him. As they huddled together, clutching at one another and
making puling noises, they seemed as foul and anonymous as roaches.
In some basement of his thought he recalled who they were and knew
that—although pitiable—they were not very different from
himself; but that knowledge was meaningless, rather like the
knowledge one might have of the principles of combustion when one
strikes a match, intending to burn down a house full of sleepers.
What he chiefly knew was that they were his enemies, that no quarter
should be given them. He had grown beyond them in every way, most
particularly in the refinement and scope of his emotions, and it
seemed his fury could no longer be gauged in terms of human reaction,
but was an evolution of anger, a monstrous flame of an emotion that
filled his brain as light might fill the glass sleeve of a oil lamp.
It was so grand, such a symphonic sweep of feeling, he could scarcely
contain it. He imagined how he must look to them, taking the Lady
Dolores for his model, picturing his own mouth stretched wide,
linkages of saliva strung between his fangs, and he preened before
them, letting his breath hiss out, wanting them to experience fear in
all its subtle increments, to anticipate the richness of pain,
waiting for them to become desperate and attack.

It was a
paunchy, heavyset man with a sallow complexion who finally tried
Beheim, snatching up one of the torches from the wall and swinging it
at him with a great
whoosh
and flurries of sparks. Beheim
knocked the torch aside, caught him by the throat and drew him close.
Curiously enough, the man relaxed. His eyes ranged across Beheim’s
face with an innocent, awed curiosity like that an infant might
display when straining to see a dim figure leaning over his crib.
Beheim had never experienced such a raw feeling of presence. The
man’s essence seemed to billow about him like a rising fog,
damp and turbulent and rife with clammy secrets. He was ordinary
looking, with grizzled cheeks and unhealthy dark pouches of skin
beneath his eyes and a scatter of inflamed eruptions mapping his chin
and neck; yet at the same time he was wonderfully vital, aglow, as if
every ounce of life were being sweated out of him by the pressure of
the moment. Beheim was, for a brief moment, fascinated. Then
fascination gave way once again to disgust, and he slung the man
headfirst into the wall, crushing the top of his skull. He could feel
the suddenly created absence of the death, like a tunnel punched
through the air into a dimension of slow reverberation, and silence
like a chill fluid welling out into the breach. And the scattered
energies of those things that could not be sustained beyond death,
the petty colors of the ego, the scant, last-remembered things, all
the excess baggage of the man’s life, these he felt on his skin
as barely perceptible flutterings, like ashes on a hot wind.

For a matter of
seconds the others remained motionless, uniform in their horrified
expressions, watching the limbs of their dead companion spasm on the
stones, dark blood pooling wide as a table beneath his burst head.
Then they crowded away from Beheim; they turned to the walls, trying
to climb out of reach, to use the shoulders of their fellows for
ladders, prying at cracks, milling together, surging this way and
that like rats in the bottom of a barrel. One of the women screamed,
then a second woman, and Beheim screamed, too, taunting them in part,
yet the cries ripped out of his chest almost as if in sympathy,
making a natural counterpoint to their singing. Another man, a gangly
sort with a crop of gray stubble on his cheeks, snatched up the torch
that the heavyset man had dropped; but before he could take
aggressive action, Beheim struck the torch to the floor and drove his
fist into the man’s face: three short, powerful punches that
obliterated all feature and dappled the robes of those nearby with
gore. He kept hold of the man’s robe, letting him dangle, limp
and lifeless, as inconsequential as the corpse of a game hen. His
right hand was gloved in blood, and he displayed it to the others as
if it were a sword, wanting them to comprehend the sharpness of the
edge, to anticipate its bite. He was shivering with eagerness and
hate. It grew quiet in that glistening, black room. The white
creatures of the murals appeared to be trembling in the unsteady
light; the crackling of the torches and sobbing breaths were the only
sounds. One of the men began to weep. Vlad remained standing beside
Giselle. His eyes darted to the left, the right; his lips were wet
and scarlet, stupidly parted, like a clown’s.

Beheim pictured
himself moving among them, plucking out hearts, tearing limbs,
shattering bones. But recalling the greater circumstance of his
peril, he found the capacity for restraint. He herded the survivors
against the side wall and crossed to Giselle. When he spoke to her,
her eyes opened, but she did not appear to see him. He wrenched the
bolt anchoring her shackles from the wall and caught her up in one
arm; with his free hand, he caught Vlad by the front of his robe and
lifted him. Vlad’s mouth worked, and he made an unintelligible
noise that had the flavor of an entreaty. He made a second try at
speech and succeeded in asking, as he had done on their initial
meeting, for mercy.

“Mercy is
not always a kindness.” Beheim smiled thinly. “But if you
insist, I will be merciful.”

He laid Giselle
down against the wall, well apart from the rest, all the while
maintaining his hold on Vlad. She had lapsed into unconsciousness;
her breathing was labored and her pulse ragged. When he turned from
her, some of the survivors sank to their knees and began to plead
with him. It was easy to ignore them, yet he found that he no longer
enjoyed the sight of the dead, that feelings of self-loathing were
beginning to color his thoughts. Nevertheless, he refused to accept
the full measure of guilt for what had happened. They had violated
Giselle and tried to murder him. He had acted in the interests of
their survival.

“This”—Beheim
gave Vlad a shake, extracting a squeal—“this has tried to
kill me with the sun. And he has failed. Do any of you wish to try me
further?”

They were
silent.

“Good,”
he said. “For it would serve you nothing. I am the first of my
kind to have no fear of light or fire.”

“Not the
first, my lord,” came the voice of a young woman standing to
his immediate right. Quite an attractive piece, he noticed. Pretty in
a country way, with generous features and fair skin and straw-colored
hair. A mole like a drop of ebony figuring the corner of her mouth.
Though she was far more buxom, her face coarser by a degree, she bore
a striking resemblance to the Golden. Beheim was put off by her
attempt to curry favor, but he could not help admiring her
resourcefulness and courage. He told her to come forward, and once
she had obeyed, stopping less than an arm’s length away, he
asked her to tell him what she had seen.