by John Saul
Rather, it was the man seated on the chair, upon whose shoulder the woman’s hand rested.
She was almost certain it was the man she had known as Anthony Fleming.
The train slowed to a stop in the town of Birtin, and as she wrestled the luggage off the rack above her seat, Caroline searched the platform for the man who should be waiting for her. She had found Milos Alexandru on the Internet; he ran the largest of the antique shops in Birtin, specializing in the carved wooden furniture for which the region was famous, and had assured her through email that while he couldn’t identify the people in the portrait, he could most certainly identify the chair. It had been made in a village outside Birtin as a wedding chair, and was now in a museum in Birtin itself. Caroline had told him nothing of the letter, preferring to talk to him in person. Now she saw him—she was certain it had to be he. Milos Alexandru was a small, birdlike man, dressed formally in a wool suit and necktie, peering as anxiously at the train as Caroline was at the platform, and when she got off the car he instantly hurried toward her.
Two hours later, after Alexandru had gotten her settled into the hotel, let Caroline buy him lunch, and insisted on showing her everything in his shop, she was at last in the museum, gazing at the chair in the old photograph. “It was made in Gretzli,” he explained. “They were famous for wedding chairs all the way up to the end of the last century. The nineteenth century, I mean to say. Every one of them was different, carved for the town where it was to be used. That one is considered the finest they ever produced—even after three hundred years, there’s not a flaw in it. No checking at all—the wood must have been dried for a decade or two before a chisel ever touched it. And the workmanship! Notice the angels on the arms, blowing on trumpets—you can almost hear them, can’t you? And the panels that make the back of the chair—did you ever see such workmanship?”
In the thick oak of the chair’s back an arboreal scene was carved in deep relief, the trunks of the trees cut so perfectly she could almost feel the bark, the leaves so detailed she almost imagined them rustling in a breeze. But as she studied the carving, it began to take on a feeling of familiarity. Then, when she saw a tiny figure—a figure of a demon—clinging to one of the branches, she knew. The scene carved in perfect relief on the back of the wedding chair was identical to the scene that had been painted in equally perfect trompe l’oeil on the ceiling of the lobby in The Rockwell. Her eyes were still fixed on the carving when she heard Alexandru sigh heavily.
“Hard to believe it is all that is left, is it not?” Caroline looked at him quizzically. “The town,” Alexandru went on. “Gretzli—that chair is all that is left.”
Caroline was certain she must have misunderstood. “You’re not saying the town isn’t there anymore—”
The antique dealer’s head bobbed. “That is exactly what I’m saying! They burned it! Burned it themselves, over a century ago. Except for the wedding chair and a few other pieces, everything is gone.”
“But why?” Caroline asked, but even as she formed the question, the strange words in the letter from Ilanya Vlamescu were already echoing in her mind.
“No one knows, actually,” Alexandru replied. “Oh, there are all kinds of stories, but none that one can believe if you know what I mean. There were rumors of vampires, and some sort of epidemic that killed all the children. And then there were the grave robberies.” Warming to his subject, he made a dismissive gesture. “Just medical students, of course—there was a lot of that sort of thing going on back then. But they were a superstitious lot out in Gretzli, and one story led to another. Then, when the children started dying, people began leaving. Just loaded up carts and went away. That only made things worse, and after awhile the few people who were left turned on each other. Finally one night a house caught on fire. It seems as if they should have been able to put it out, but apparently they could not.” He shook his head sadly. “By the end of the night, the village was gone.”
“Where was Gretzli?” Caroline asked ten minutes later as they were leaving the museum.
Milos Alexandru pointed toward the north. “Not far—no more than five kilometers. But there is nothing to see, really—everything burned. Everything except the wedding chair. Someone pulled it out of the church and left it in the middle of the road. Thank God for that, at least.”
It was late in the afternoon and getting cold when Milos Alexandru pulled his tiny Yugo to a stop in a narrow lane that wound through the trees. “Gretzli was right up ahead,” he told Caroline. “I can not drive any further—there is a rock in the middle of the road. But if you like, I can walk with you.”
“It’s all right,” Caroline assured him as she got out of the car. “I’ll just be a few minutes—I just want to see it.” Leaving the old antique dealer in the warmth of his car, she set off along the road, and just past the rock he’d mentioned she came to the place where once had stood the village of Gretzli. Alexandru was right—all that remained of the town was a clearing in the dense forest, and even that was beginning to disappear as young trees had taken advantage of the opening to the sky. Here and there vestiges of the ruts that had once been the village’s main road were still visible, as were a few low mounds that might once have been the foundations of small houses. For almost half an hour she prowled through the area, looking at everything, but seeing nothing.
Indeed, she wasn’t even certain exactly what it was that she was seeking.
Then, as she was about to start back toward Milos Alexandru’s car, a sensation of déjà vu came over her, a sensation so strong that she turned back, half expecting to see something familiar, something clearly recognizable.
But there was nothing. Nothing except the forest, and the sky, and—
The forest, and the sky!
She looked up, and it happened again—the certainty that she’d seen this before. But this time she knew it wasn’t déjà vu she was experiencing at all.
It was as if she was back in the lobby of The Rockwell, gazing up at the ceiling and the trompe l’oeil that spread across it. The trees and sky looming above her induced the same terrible feeling of foreboding that had chilled her when she’d entered the building for the last time, and for a moment she almost imagined she could see the demons lurking among the branches, waiting to seize the scraps from the feasting men who were sated with blood.
The same demons that had been carved into the back of the massive oaken chair in the museum in Birtin.
As the sunlight began to fade, a faint aroma tickled Caroline’s nose, and she recognized it as the same smell of death that had filled The Rockwell the last time she had been inside its walls. The odor seemed to reach out to her, drawing her closer, closer to the woods.
Finally, when she felt as if the scent were about to overpower her, she knelt, and touched the ground.
Beneath the soft mulch of rotting leaves she felt something cold and hard. Brushing away the mulch, she uncovered a stone tablet. Though it was stained and worn by time and the elements, she could still make out the letters carved deep into its surface:
Lavinia Dolameci
1832–1869
Her pulse quickening, she groped the ground around her and found more stones, all of them laying flat, all of them covered with a layer of decomposing vegetation.
And all of them bearing names. Names, and dates.
Elena Conesici
1821–1863
Gheorghe Birtin
1824–1867
Mathilde Parnova
1818–1864
Parnova! Tildie Parnova? Then the other names began crashing through her mind:
Elena Conesici . . . Helena Kensington.
Gheorghe Birtin . . . George Burton.
Lavinia Dolameci . . . Lavinia Delamond.
She dug more frantically now, digging her fingers deep into the earth, tearing it away as she searched for more of the ancient grave markers.
Now the scent was beginning to boil up out of the ground, and as it grew stronger and strong
er it reached deep into her memory and tore the scars from every wound that had begun to heal during the last five years. The stench of death nauseating her, she dug still deeper, her fingers bleeding, her nails tearing, until at last she found the gravestone she knew was there.
This gravestone, though, bore not only a name, and a date of death, but a portrait as well, a portrait cut as perfectly as the angels that had been carved into the arms of the wooden wedding chair and the demons that had been concealed by anyone who sat in it. Caroline recognized the person in the portrait instantly, for his eyes were every bit as dead in stone as they had been in the flesh of the man she had married.
Anton Vlamescu.
Anthony Fleming.
As the chill of death settled over every cell in her body, Caroline rose from the ground above her husband’s empty grave and turned away, but even as she started away from the empty clearing, she could feel eyes still watching her.
The eyes of the demons in the trees above.
And the eyes of the dead, who no longer dwelt in the graves below.
“No,” she whispered. “It won’t happen. I won’t let it happen!” The cold of death suddenly transmuting into the heat of fury, she reached down, grasped the headstone that had once stood over Anthony Fleming’s grave, and raised it high over her head. “No!” she howled, and this time the word erupted from her throat, resounding through the forest as she hurled the grave marker downward and smashed it onto a granite bolder. The headstone shattered into a thousand pieces as her single scream of rage died away.
The forest fell silent, and when Caroline looked up once more, the trees were empty.
The demons, and all they represented, were finally gone.
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BY JOHN SAUL
Suffer the Children
Punish the Sinners
Cry for the Strangers
Comes the Blind Fury
When the Wind Blows
The God Project
Nathaniel
Brainchild
Hellfire
The Unwanted
The Unloved
Creature
Second Child
Sleepwalk
Darkness
Shadows
Guardian
The Homing
Black Lightning
THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES
PART 1: An Eye for an Eye: The Doll
PART 2: Twist of Fate: The Locket
PART 3: Ashes to Ashes: The Dragon’s Flame
PART 4: In the Shadow of Evil: The Handkerchief
PART 5: Day of Reckoning: The Stereoscope
PART 6: Asylum
The Presence
The Right Hand of Evil
Nightshade
The Manhattan Hunt Club
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by John Saul
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the publisher.
eISBN: 978-0-345-45949-7
v3.0