The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  “Take care, you great oaf,” Sax said, winded. They craned their necks around the deep frame of the door to look into the room beyond, from which murky daylight was leaking. There was more blood on the floor, and on the walls, and now they could see there was blood in the hallway at their feet—an explosion of it that had reached as far as the main corridor. There seemed to be no source, as if the victim had simply burst apart into liquid.

  Gander emitted a low, descending whistle. Sax took in the spacious room without consciously considering it: all original furnishings, presumably, the carpet woven in imitation of the architectural ornamentation. That wasn’t what impressed Gander.

  Everything sparkled with blood. It made a disturbing counterpoint to the rich décor, as did the shattered remains of an enormous chandelier that had fallen all the way to the floor on its length of wrought golden chain. Crystal baubles were strewn across the carpet, mingling with the blood like diamonds with rubies. Both Sax and Gander assumed the victim was beneath the chandelier. But Sax saw nothing there except wreckage.

  A hot, wet droplet fell on his cheek. He raised his eyes to the deeply coffered ceiling. There was something there in the shadows above them. Sax nudged Gander and pointed with his chin.

  The ceiling featured two domes deeper than the rest of the ornamentation; from the farthest one had descended the fallen chandelier. The nearest one, only a few feet into the room, contained the mutilated remains of Hector, his limbs splayed out like some huge, gruesome spider crushed under a boot. He was caught in an immense four-jawed trap, springs of iron studded with long black teeth snapped shut around his remains. It was so powerful it had blown him to pieces. He was held together only by scraps of flesh and what appeared to be a sheet of canvas tangled up in the iron jaws. His eyes had popped out when his skull was crushed; they dangled now, straight down, swaying in a sudden rumbling vibration that passed through the structure of the building.

  In unison, Sax and Gander took a step back toward the doorway. Gander knelt to look at the floor.

  “Man trap,” he said, expressing what Sax thought was so obvious it might as well have gone unsaid. Gander pointed out a deep impression on the rug shaped like a cross inside a circle, six feet wide, right in front of the sweep of the door. “That bit of canvas up there must have been thrown over it, like. Bloke steps in, puts his foot down amongst the folds, and snap it goes, like.”

  Sax swallowed. “Yes, and the chandelier acted as a counterweight to pull him up. My God.” Something else occurred to him: “Gander . . . I think this entire floor might be littered with these things.”

  “We won’t go barging into any more rooms, then.”

  “I mean, not just these. There could be all sorts of, ah, mechanisms, knives in the walls, trapdoors.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s retrace our steps, shall we? Perhaps we can wait outside for the other gentlemen.”

  With that, Gander was ready to agree. They made their cautious way back into the bedroom hallway, then to the main corridor. At first Sax thought the excitement and fear had confused him and he’d gotten turned around somehow, or possibly they had taken a new route and were in another, previously unseen space. It ought to have extended westward for a great distance. Instead, there was only a blank wall.

  “Have we gone the wrong way?” Sax said.

  “No,” Gander said. “New fuckin’ wall. Our foot marks come out from under it.”

  “Did you notice that sort of vibration thing a minute ago?”

  “Must have been this.”

  “Somewhat of a mousetrap situation.”

  “A maze for rats,” Gander observed. He didn’t seem much excited by this bizarre turn of events, but his voice had taken on a funereal quality. “I suppose we’d better find an alternative way out, then.”

  “I expect,” Sax said, “that is exactly the intention of our captors. However, I fail to see what else we can do.”

  “We could go out the window,” Gander said, his voice brightening. “Knot some of those hangings together and shin down the front, like.”

  “I’m not going back into that room,” Sax said. “How do you know there isn’t something else lying in wait for us?”

  “Some other room, then?”

  “I fail to see the difference. We’re in mortal danger, Gander. If you want to go dangling from the windows, that’s your prerogative, but I have a suspicion that anyone who took the trouble to engineer man traps and portcullises inside the building will also have thought of that rather obvious method of egress, don’t you?”

  Sax’s face was hot. He was not only very frightened but angry. What was needed was the assistance of some proper brains, not this precocious product of a North Country secondary school. Hurling oneself out of windows seemed like an obvious solution to the present dilemma. Sax wanted it to be that simple. It wasn’t.

  Gander thoughtfully pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think the Nazis put all this in.”

  “Focus on the problem at hand, shall we?” Sax said, his voice getting higher in pitch. “Defenestration is not the worst idea. It can’t be more than a thirty-foot drop from that window to the stones below. Otherwise, we can go that way”—here he pointed down the length of hall that led deeper into the building—“and hope there’s some way out. There could be a secret passage of some sort, for example. It all depends on time.”

  “What do you mean?” Gander said, staring at Sax in the darkness with eyes like tiny blue marbles.

  “Whoever arranged all this . . . do you imagine they’re just going to let us roam around in here? They’ll come for us. Then we’re really for it. We have to get moving.”

  Sax and Gander came to another doorway like the one in front of which they had first seen the blood. Gander opened it, both men prepared to spring out of the way. Instead of an inner hallway, it opened directly into a large salon, with communicating doors that led to bedrooms at either end. The salon was exquisitely appointed, as with every room in the place. There was a spinet piano by one of the two large windows. The floor had no shrouded traps in it that Sax could see, no lumpy heaps of canvas lying about as if forgotten by a careless workman. That simply meant the danger was better hidden.

  “I hate to suggest this,” Sax said, sincerely, “but I think perhaps we should throw the Louis XIII chair just to your left—yes, that one, very fine piece—into the center of the room and see what happens.”

  Gander didn’t do things by halves. He kept his mass back in the doorway, picked up the chair, and bowled it into the room. It tumbled and bounced and knocked over a small tripodal gueridon table. Nothing else happened. Gander grunted and tiptoed halfway across the room until he reached the chair. Then he picked it up and threw it again. Still nothing occurred.

  “Don’t get killed,” Sax recommended. He remained firmly in the doorway. Gander had reached one of the curtained windows now. He picked up the chair again; one of its arms had broken and hung by a length of bullion trim. Gander wrenched the arm free and used it to hook open the ponderous curtains that obscured the window, keeping himself as far from the opening as possible. Again, nothing happened, except the curtains parted. The window behind them was eight feet tall from stool to head jamb. It consisted of a pair of diamond-pane casements that could swing out on hinges. The shutters outside would prevent the casements from opening, but the shutter latches were on the inside; there didn’t appear to be any impediment to escape. Gander rubbed his hands together.

  “Don’t you move!” Sax barked. Gander’s arms froze in midreach. His back hunched as if he’d been struck. Sax risked advancing a few feet into the salon, sweat running freely down his neck. “Come back here. Bring that poor chair.”

  Gander did as he was told, watching Sax’s face as if expecting to be punished. When Sax said nothing, he turned to face the window and they both stared at it, yearning to get out into the sunlight tha
t glowed through the shutters. Sax took the arm of the chair from Gander and threw it at the window. The arm bounced off the glass.

  “You throw like a little girl,” Gander observed. With that, he raised the remainder of the chair above his head and launched it. It crashed through glass and lead alike, and punched out several slats in the shutters. The shutters remained closed. The chair sagged in the ruins of the window but remained suspended there above the floor.

  “We seem to be in the clear,” Sax said.

  An instant later, there was a rapid thumping sound as of an anchor chain running through a hawsehole; the top of the window casing split apart, and an enormous iron blade came roaring down out of the wall. The guillotine slashed through the chair, splitting it in half as if it were made of cake. With a deafening crack, the blade sank into a channel in the windowsill. Where moments before there had been an opening to the outside world, there was now an iron plate that completely sealed the frame. The room was dark and the air filled with fine, choking dust.

  “Cor,” said Gander.

  “Let’s not bother with the windows,” Sax said.

  They moved down the hallway, now keeping their shoulders against the walls so the middle of the floor remained clear. Death could come from anywhere: a cloud of poisoned arrows or scythes in the ceiling. There was a suit of armor in a niche. Gander was almost forced to carry Sax past it, because Sax was absolutely convinced it would attack them.

  When they got by unscathed, Gander returned to the effigy and wrenched the halberd out of its gloves: a stout, pole-handled combination of hook, spear, and ax, it would make a fine deterrent to anyone except a gunman. There was a sword suspended from a frogged belt at the armor’s waist. Sax dragged the weapon from the scabbard. It was heavy. He felt no safer with the notched old blade in his hand; in fact, he felt grotesque. There couldn’t be a man on earth less likely than Sax to give someone a prod with a sword. Still, he could use the weapon to poke around for further booby traps. He followed Gander and his poleax into almost total darkness.

  Sax’s mind was calculating all the while. His fear, his anger, were all laid on at the surface. Down below, the imperturbable thinking machines were hard at work, and they were starting to show results. As the companions groped their way along the hall, Sax considered the maze they were in. He knew what the building looked like on the outside and had a fair idea of how many windows there were, the thickness of the outer walls, the height of the stories, and the dimensions of the overall structure.

  Downstairs the layout was simple enough, and he understood that. The big, open rooms and high ceilings precluded certain arrangements of hidden chambers or stairways; there was a limit to what one could achieve within a stone-and-timber structure. The main salon was beneath their feet, if Sax was figuring their position correctly. He had no confidence in this whatsoever, but it would have to do. If he was correct, the corridor would pierce a load-bearing wall just ahead of them. The portcullis that blocked their access in the opposite direction had come down out of a similar wall.

  There was a good chance they would be crushed like beetles by another of these when they passed through the bearing wall, or by some other evil trap hidden within the thickness of the masonry. Bearing walls in a building of such size could be eight feet thick or more: plenty of space to conceal all manner of death-dealing machinery.

  Sax thought of the blade that descended from the window frame. He was certain no local ruffians had built that thing. It was part of the original design of the château. He considered how amusing a family of high blood would have found it to employ the guillotine, that weapon of the common people, to execute would-be trespassers in their domain. These defenses might have originally been built to foil an external attack mounted by the peasants. It was clever: make the architecture do the work of a defending army.

  All of which suggested to Sax that there had to be a concealed passage somewhere close at hand. What good were such brutal, automated defenses, if not to buy time for the inhabitants to flee? It was some small comfort to consider that he and Gander might find an escape route—not outward, but inward, into the heart of the place. He prayed to his unconvincing notion of a deity that it might be true.

  They flung themselves through the space demarcated by the thickness of the bearing wall. Wood paneling clad the piers; there was only the slightest intrusion of architecture into the hallway—an arch overhead. When no traps sprang and killed them, Sax ventured to explore the woodwork with the point of his sword. Gander lit a fire with a match and a scrap of tapestry he tore from the wall. Sax was almost, but not quite, at peace with the destruction they had so far wreaked on the contents of the château. It was a terrible loss, even the chair Gander had been chucking about. But Sax could not erase from his mind’s eye the hideous shape of the man pulverized by iron jaws up in the ceiling of the bedroom. He didn’t want to meet a fate like that. Or any fate.

  “If there’s a secret panel,” Sax said at last, “I can’t find it.” They had pressed and pushed every knob in the carved paneling, twisted the nearest sconces and candlesticks; Gander had even stumbled his way back through the darkness to manipulate the suit of armor, in hopes some switch might be concealed within it. Nothing changed. They stared at each other in the smoky, red light of the fire. Gander had wrapped the tinder around the end of the halberd for a torch. It threw frantic shadows on the walls, like ravens mating in flight.

  “There has to be a secret way out of here,” Sax said, and believed himself for once.

  Maybe the space was concealed not in the transverse wall they were examining, but in a bearing wall that ran parallel to the corridor. That would mean the gimmick was in either the left-hand or right-hand passages alongside the main corridor. Sax was reaching the limits of his frustration. The disaster had begun less than an hour ago; an hour before that, they had started loading furniture into the trucks. So it was not even noon, and the situation had become one of murder and destruction. When night fell, would he and Gander still be creeping around dark passageways, or would they have been killed by some hidden rat trap scaled up for human victims? Or would those who knew the place steal through the secret ways behind them and slit their throats in the darkness? Sax needed to stop thinking, but he could not. He tried to focus his mind on the problem at hand.

  “Gander,” he said.

  “Gorn,” Gander replied, his pink face wobbling in the firelight.

  “Have you any cigarettes?”

  “You smoked ’em all yesterday, sir.”

  “Terribly sorry. Gander?”

  “Sir.”

  “I’m sorry about all this, really.”

  “Can’t be ’elped,” Gander said. Sax was grateful. If their positions had been reversed, Sax might have strangled himself by now. He took a long breath and let it out slowly, the air shuddering between his lips.

  “Right,” Sax said.

  They sat in silence, backs against the wall. The château was quiet around them, but it was the muffled quiet of massive enclosure through which sound cannot penetrate, not the silence of empty space. The important distinction between a tomb and a graveyard, Sax thought. Then—

  “Douse the light,” Sax whispered, gripping Gander by the meat of his upper arm. Gander wrapped the burning rags in his cap, snuffing them out. The stink of scorched wool made Sax want to cough, but he held his breath against the leaping of his diaphragm. He dragged his assistant into an alcove.

  There had been a sound.

  It was now absolutely dark where they crouched; the faintest pallor showed the way they had come, but to eyes not adjusted to the darkness it, too, would have been invisible. Sax was clutching Gander’s arm with such force his fingernails ached, but he didn’t let go.

  There it was again. A high, thin squeal, the sound of wood on wood. Somewhere back the way they had come, someone was opening a door.

  A light glimmered beneath
one of the doorways halfway along the right-hand side. The door eased ajar in careful increments. A glow of candle flame was cast through the opening, yellow and oily. The light hung there, warping. Then a slender arm emerged, bearing up a candlestick. It hovered in the air, then drifted forward.

  A woman emerged. It must have been a trick of the light, but Sax could have sworn he was looking at Therese Minette Vrigne du Pelisande Magnat-l’Étrange from the portrait downstairs.

  She turned her head slowly upon its axis, like an automaton. But her eyes were active, glossy and black. Her nostrils arched. She was sniffing at the air. Her eyes studied the shadows in which the men were huddled.

  She didn’t see Sax or Gander, apparently, because she turned away. Her floor-brushing dress swayed down the corridor in the opposite direction, the old silk rustling with the sound of dead leaves. Moments later, she pressed her ear to another door. Satisfied, she opened it, again with great care. She disappeared into the space behind the door, and the yellow, fatty light went with her. The door closed and it was dark again.

  Sax released Gander’s arm. Something convinced him the candle was made of human fat.

  They had to do something. The woman might come back. They could dash out her brains, Sax supposed, or flee in the opposite direction.

  Or—they could exit the way she had entered.

  Half a minute later, feeling along like blind worms, they found the door through which the woman had arrived. Sax located the doorknob and turned it and the latch sprung quietly. He knew the trick for opening creaking doors without the creak, because he hated that sound, and old cupboards always creaked. He pressed one hand against the hinge side of the door and lifted up on the doorknob; pressing and lifting, he swung the door open silently. He took Gander’s wrist and led him into the even deeper darkness, where the veins inside the eyes lit up for lack of sight. If there was a trap inside the space they entered, they would die of it; there was nothing else they could do.