Angels of Music

by Kim Newman

  ‘I know about you, Miss Kratides… Sophy, if I may. I have made a study of the shadow-people of Europe. There are more and more of us, haven’t you noticed? I think myself lucky you were the one who found me… for you are uniquely likely to understand what I have been doing as Die Fledermaus. The wretches I bled out cheated justice – they were the murderers and I their executioner! I worked long and hard to punish them as was fit.’

  She did know what he meant… but she also knew you didn’t have to put on an attention-attracting costume and invent an entirely new means of murder when the world had enough knives and bullets to settle things with less fuss. Falke might be a genius, but he was also mad.

  A pity.

  ‘You work for a man in a mask,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come and work with me? I’ve accomplished all I set out to do when I began this, many years ago… but I shan’t stop. Others are out there, unpunished. Les Vampires, for a start. And those respectable men – the politicians, churchmen, newspaper proprietors, soldiers – who have as much blood on their hands as the lowest thieves and ponces. Not just in Paris, but in Vienna, Madrid, London, Rome. So many fat throats and swollen veins, awaiting the vampire’s kiss. Think of what we could achieve together. Think of who we could kill!’

  She hesitated. Her pistol and knife were on top of the piano.

  ‘Would I get wings?’ she asked. ‘Like yours?’

  She remembered him flapping away from the Countesses, soaring above the Gare du Nord.

  ‘If I am a bat, my dear, you shall be a bird,’ he said. ‘Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night.’

  Dr Falke was eager, embarrassingly boyish. With the last of his old friends dead – and what had that all been about? – he was a merry widower. Suddenly freed from a marriage long gone cold, he was casting about for unsuitable new adventures with a younger partner. Sophy wondered if he’d actually talked honestly with anyone in the last twenty-five years. Especially a woman.

  Somehow, she knew this was about a woman.

  She glanced at the open-eyed d’Aubert, legs kinked to fit into the tub, uniform soaked with blood, angry sucker-wounds in his neck, mirthless grin showing his teeth.

  Falke saw her dart that look and knew she would turn him down. He was mad, but not foolish.

  ‘A shame,’ he said, advancing with his vampire-machine, angling the two spiked tubes at her neck. ‘But it’ll be over soon. If you don’t fight, I think you’ll find it relaxing. The first needle delivers a blood-thinning agent which is also a mild, merciful euphoric. It’s humane. And I shall play, of course. Beethoven for Raoul. Mozart, I think, in memory of the Pamina you shall never be.’

  What was it about music and maniacs? Was this just a Paris thing?

  She tried to stand, but he got his foot on her stomach, pinning her to the couch.

  She flailed, pushing away the vampire-machine, which was convulsing again. The razor-tip of a tube cut across her palm and blood welled.

  Falke was calm, regretful, determined. He was enormously strong – twenty-five years of medicine balls and barbells, she’d be bound.

  Whatever happened to Sophy, this would not end here. Erik would not let her death drop. Nor would La Marmoset or Unorna.

  She was prepared. Her brother had been tortured for weeks and not yielded. She could endure minutes of agony without giving in to terror.

  ‘What do you call a bat without wings?’ she asked.

  He seemed briefly intrigued, then shook his head in irritation.

  ‘A rat,’ she said. ‘Just a rat.’

  His face froze, as if she had slapped him. Good. He could still be shamed into anger. When punishment came, he would feel it.

  Falke ground his shoe into her stomach and aimed the skewer-tipped tubes at her throat. Sophy was aware of her own rapid heartbeat, the pulse of blood, a pounding in her ears.

  Then Falke stopped, stricken. He dropped his infernal contraption into her arms, took his foot off her and staggered back against the piano.

  He was seeing a ghost.

  Sophy sat up, throwing the vampire-machine away like an awkward cushion, and turned.

  A figure stood in the doorway. Demurely dressed, in a style a quarter of a century out of fashion, she was young and pale. Her hair was tied back and parted in the centre. She smiled sadly. Her smile opened to show sharp teeth and her eyes flashed red.

  Her appearance affected Dr Falke more than being shot in the chest.

  ‘Caralin,’ he said, falling to his knees.

  The apparition advanced, gliding across the room.

  ‘But you’re dead,’ he whimpered. ‘I know you’re dead. I ‘killed you!’

  The woman stopped, standing over Falke.

  Sophy saw who it really was.

  XV

  WE NEED A woman,’ said de Rosillon.

  ‘Are you banished from that corner opposite the gates of the flower factory?’ asked Raoul. ‘Stand there with even a half-full purse when the shift changes and you have your pick of green-fingered lovelies…’

  Arsenic dye used in the manufacture of artificial flowers stained the hands. The factory girls were literally poisonous, though Michel Falke knew every student in Paris had availed himself of that corner.

  ‘You think only of low things,’ said de Rosillon, exciting jeers from Le Gang de Schubert. They knew the young Count all too well. ‘I don’t mean we need a woman in the general sense of bed-warming… we need one because Uncle Franz wrote many fine pieces with soprano parts. If our repertoire is to expand, we must find a woman who can sing.’

  It was true. Falke thought of ‘Viel tausend Sterne prangen’, for soprano, alto, tenor, bass and piano. If they were serious, Le Gang should find a woman or women.

  This was about Gio Jones, though.

  The fat young baritone was their only first-rate voice. De Rosillon rankled at the way Le Gang must revolve around him. Anatole was a soloist to equal Jones but couldn’t match him when they sang together. The star gave the satellite performance shakes.

  From the piano, Falke looked askance at the squabbles of the singers. But he thought de Rosillon was right.

  It was proposed that they each look out for likely prospects.

  ‘If she’s a beauty, so much the better,’ said de Rosillon. ‘Give the audience something to look at besides your wobbly belly, Gio.’

  Jones preferred audiences who shut their eyes and just listened.

  In response to de Rosillon’s needling, Jones belched. Very loudly, and not at all musically.

  * * *

  A disappointing evening. The much-vaunted song thrushes of Madame Ondine’s Academy for Young Ladies were all croakers. Their choir might as well gather around a pond in the moonlight.

  Falke returned glumly to the Café Musette de Saint-Flour, informal headquarters of Le Gang. The woman hunt, begun as a semi-joke, was bogging down in earnest.

  Having made the grand proposal, de Rosillon wasn’t going to do anything as radical as stir himself and pitch in. He decided his function in the endeavour was to assess the candidates put forward by the others. Raoul roped in several chanteuses who could be heard over shrieking patrons in inns and cabarets. They all fell at the first fence – unable to prop a score the right way up on a stand, let alone read music. Garron was beaten in the street by a schoolteacher after his stuttering approach to a gaggle of convent girls was misinterpreted. And Jones was against the whole idea, of course.

  ‘Michel, you’re late,’ said Raoul as he arrived.

  ‘No joy at Madame Ondine’s,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Raoul. ‘We have found our prize… Hurry in, hurry in, and meet your countrywoman, la belle Caralin.’

  The others were squeezed into their usual nook, as was a newcomer.

  She was an insubstantial girl, especially next to Gio. Later, thinking back, Falke couldn’t have described her. Her image in his mind was watery. Everything about her seemed neither one thing nor the other. He couldn’t even have
said what she was wearing.

  But he heard her sing – and that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Astoundingly, Jones – who had actively not been looking – found Caralin, though Falke never got the details of it straight.

  Was she some relation of the family in whose house he was lodging… or another boarder? She was Austrian, as Raoul had said, but from Styria – a savage, forested region remote from his native Vienna. He couldn’t place her accent or her station. She was in Paris for her health, but he never knew her to see a doctor. Prone to spells of weakness and lassitude, she rose above her infirmities when singing.

  More than once, Falke was asked what was actually wrong with Caralin and had no answer. It was something like consumption, but not consumption itself. When she coughed into her kerchief, there was sometimes pinkish discharge – but no blood. To look at her, you’d not think she had blood in her.

  Which was how the story started, he supposed.

  Joining Le Gang de Schubert was good for Caralin and better for Le Gang. She lost her ghostly pallor and seemed less fragile. The fellows competed for her attention, though not exclusively as suitors. Caralin was at times their pet, like a six-year-old, but occasionally acted like their great-grandmother. She needed to be protected from the world. They were in thrall to her, almost in awe of her.

  But Falke still couldn’t say what her hair colour was.

  She wore it parted in the middle, though. And her smile stayed with him.

  * * *

  ‘I’m going to ask Caralin to move in with me,’ said Raoul.

  Falke was surprised. He had thought to ask her the same thing.

  He wondered if Gio, Anatole and de Rosillon had the same idea.

  Looking back on it, Caralin wasn’t with any of them – and had given no indication that she might be – but gave each the impression they were making slow, steady progress to union beyond the regular congress they had with flower girls… something deeper, more lasting. Spiritual, as well as fleshly.

  ‘I believe she’s special, Michel. When she sings, she’s like the sirens who tempted Odysseus.’

  ‘What colour are her eyes?’ Falke asked his friend.

  Raoul was puzzled, almost irritated. ‘Why, eye-coloured of course.’

  As he struggled to recall the face of a woman he loved, Falke wondered whether Caralin’s eyes might not be red.

  ‘Ho, fellows,’ said de Rosillon, joining Falke and Raoul in their nook. ‘I’ve a notion to ask Caralin to move in with me. What do you think?’

  ‘I believe she’s moved in with Gio,’ said Falke, who had no grounds for saying so.

  De Rosillon was aghast.

  ‘Gross-Fat Jones! Surely not.’

  ‘He likes ladies to close their eyes when he sings.’

  ‘He’d like them to wear a blindfold when he’s bouncing on top of them, I’ll be bound,’ said Raoul. ‘Doesn’t mean they will.’

  Garron came into the Saint-Flour Musette.

  ‘What’s this about Caralin and Gio?’ Raoul demanded of him.

  Garron shrugged.

  ‘I was thinking of…’ he began.

  ‘We did too,’ said Falke.

  ‘Oh well. Just a fancy.’

  * * *

  Falke couldn’t remember asking Caralin to move in with him.

  But she did.

  When they were together, she blotted out everything else. She consumed him. He’d been in love before… this was more like brain fever.

  He knew his friends hated him.

  At one time or another, they all said, ‘Do we even need the piano?’

  Schubert wrote a great many pieces for unaccompanied voice or voices.

  Though they were beyond Schubert now. Beyond music.

  He still found Caralin hard to describe. When she was with him, he couldn’t imagine anything else. When she wasn’t – and where did she go? – he was too distracted with worry to concentrate.

  If he tried to sketch her, he just found himself drawing the Mona Lisa with a thinner face.

  The others met in secret to talk about them.

  Whenever he arrived late, they fell silent.

  The music was never right. They found it harder to select pieces, and quarrelled whenever they attempted a song.

  Caralin never took sides.

  Even when Falke was arguing for something, she didn’t support him. That part of Le Gang was none of her concern.

  She fell ill and disappeared. For three weeks, Falke haunted infirmaries, convents and hospitals, searching for her. He even visited the Morgue.

  He subjected Jones’s landlord to a barrage of questions he couldn’t answer. The man had no idea who Caralin was. Now, Gio denied there had ever been a connection. He said it was d’Aubert who found her.

  Raoul referred him to Anatole.

  Anatole thought it was Falke…

  ‘She was your girlfriend, remember? We thought she’d be like one of Raoul’s popsies but then that voice came out…’

  While Caralin was missing, Le Gang worked together to find her. That she was gone altogether was worse than that she was with Falke.

  On their rounds, they found the hospitals of Paris busy with a mysterious disease that was striking down children, the elderly, the weak. Scratch-marks on throat or chest, like bites; pallor, anaemia, bad dreams, spells of sleeping. Most but not all recovered, and those who died succumbed to other conditions they became too weak to fight off rather than the ailment itself.

  Falke was in a panic that Caralin was a victim.

  Then she came back, healthy. Healthier than before, it seemed. She almost had roses in her cheeks.

  He was too relieved to press her about where she had been and what she had done. Whatever it was, it had been good for her.

  * * *

  The Professor made a dramatic entrance into their lives.

  With Caralin away and the mystery illness on their minds, Anatole saw Van Helsing was giving a course of lectures on ‘diseases of the blood and soul’. He suggested they sit in. At that time, they were all worried about her health.

  When she came back, they were still drawn to the lectures.

  Van Helsing had theories about the bites and the loss of blood.

  Raoul asked pertinent questions. The Professor theorised that in this matter the search should not be for a disease but a culprit. A creature was behind the outbreak, and – worse! – was a thinking being who knew what they were doing.

  The word ‘vampire’ was mentioned.

  The epidemic, suddenly, was over. No more bitten children.

  Le Gang did not set off to engage the forces of darkness, but shifted from music to mystery. There was no denying the thrill of it.

  Van Helsing presented them with cases – hauntings, manifestations, unusual animal attacks. Raoul took the lead, but the others had useful interests and skills. Falke had a knack for designing and making gadgets. They dispelled their first ghosts without leaving his digs, as he showed how such and such a phenomenon was most likely created by deliberate trickery.

  De Rosillon had funds to equip a coach for ghost-hunting expeditions, Anatole a swot’s ability to delve in libraries and public records for lost explanations, and Gio made a formidable figure when it came to scaring off pranksters.

  Most matters Van Helsing placed before them turned out to be criminal enterprises dressed up with phosphorus paint and hidden doorways. The Black Coats, the best-resourced secret society of the Second Empire, liked to scare people away from their smuggling or coining enterprises with fabulous beasts and frightful spectres. Le Gang had many a battle with the Coats, even earning the respect of the official police. Raoul was certain of a place in Vidocq’s old office after graduation.

  In other – more troubling – cases, smashing a mirror or pulling back a curtain only revealed a deeper mystery.

  Van Helsing assured them that there were such things as ghosts and vampires.

  * * *
>
  Caralin became sickly again. She couldn’t sleep and went out late at night, without even bothering to make an excuse.

  Falke – hating himself for thinking it – was certain she was with one of the others – any of them, all of them – when not with him.

  He quarrelled with Raoul, his closest friend, then begged forgiveness and asked for his help. He was desperate, he said, desperate and desolate.

  ‘About what?’ asked Raoul.

  He could not answer.

  Caralin gave Falke no cause to doubt her, but…

  In a graveyard where strange lanterns had been seen, de Rosillon made some foolish remark which prompted Falke to beat him senseless. Raoul, Anatole and Gio stood by and watched, making no move to intervene – as if hoping their friends would kill each other so they could have better chances with Caralin.

  When he was exhausted and de Rosillon unconscious, Falke turned to find Caralin gone.

  This time, she didn’t come back for three months.

  * * *

  The disease, which Van Helsing insisted was the spoor of a vampire, returned.

  Some victims reported nocturnal encounters with a beautiful woman. She lured children off pathways and subjected them to mesmerism. They woke up with torn clothes and deep scratches.

  De Rosillon, bumptious again, said that happened to him all the time. Only his wallet was usually missing too.

  Children remembered the musical voice of the vampire, but gave varying accounts of her. Small girls thought her old and bent, almost a crone. Budding lads described a wanton, voluptuous hoyden. A few listless, haunted victims recalled a wan maiden, scarcely more than a child herself. All mentioned her voice – but couldn’t quote anything she had said.

  Le Gang set out to catch the vampire.

  Van Helsing lectured about famous female vampires… Elisabeth Bathory, the Lamia of Ancient Greece, Mircalla Karnstein.

  On their nightly expeditions to derelict cemeteries and disreputable parks, Le Gang found many suspect women – mostly demimondes loitering in dark places. As de Rosillon said, they specialised in bait-and-battery, inveigling customers into the bushes for a quick poke then having a confederate bludgeon the poor clods for their valuables.