The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  They ate that evening together, even Min and Nilu, in the combined dining, living, and kitchen area of the cottage. The team was gathered around the long refectory table Sax had gotten from an abbey in the mid-1970s. The chairs didn’t match, and they were of various heights, not necessarily arranged according to need. Rock was in one of the taller chairs, Nilu in a shorter one. They didn’t appear to be the same species, the chairs or the sitters.

  Sax knew he had to break the ice quickly; he was dealing with as ill-assorted a group of misfits as ever he had met, except possibly the Kinks. He was at a further disadvantage because the Kinks, frequently at each other’s throats, were a rock band, while his group was going to have to defeat a monster with its own more lethal interest in throats. Luckily, if there was one thing Sax knew well, it was breaking the ice. The trick was food and drink.

  The meal was of that extemporized type that people accustomed to impromptu entertaining are adept at assembling. There was a pile of baguettes, fresh, tender bread with a sharp crust from the local boulangerie; a huge slab of butter in butcher paper; olive oil in a flask; pepper in a mill; sea salt in a dish. On a plank, big pieces of local cheese, white and yellow, at room temperature so they were fragrant and soft. A dish of fruit and nuts. White Alsatian wine in mismatched bottles without labels, straight from the local farms. Cold beer.

  Sax fried sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil with pine nuts, garlic, butter, and a fistful of dried herbs grown on the property, and tossed this into a big pottery mixing bowl full of hot, toothy strozzapreti pasta, served with Parmesan cheese grated reverently by Paolo.

  In the same pan, Sax seared chopped peppers, onions, and mushrooms in butter, glugged in a good measure of white wine, lowered the heat, and laid perch fillets and sprigs of thyme over the top of the vegetables. He allowed the fish to steam beneath a heavy iron lid, then brought it directly to the table in the pan with the steam billowing up under the basket lamps that hung from the beams.

  It was very little real effort to prepare all this food—he could serve anything from five to twenty people with it. Best of all, it impressed the hell out of Paolo, who stood by wanting to help the entire time, all but salivating on his priest’s collar. The seduction was proceeding apace. Sax wore his frilly Provençal apron to the table. Let them laugh. Let them! He wanted to establish who was the boss, and that his mincing ways nowise detracted from the seriousness of their purpose. He bade everyone eat.

  “Smells good,” Rock said. But nobody started eating; it was as if the internationally accepted signal to begin had been forgotten. The hesitation was made even more uncomfortable by Paolo’s aspirated prayers with head bowed and hands clasped. Nilu sat staring and motionless in her chair beside Min—although Min had kidnapped her, she was also the only familiar thing in the universe right now from Nilu’s standpoint. Min surveyed the smoking dishes before her with suspicion.

  It was Gheorghe who broke the silence. “Does anybody but Father here”—he pointed at Paolo—“know what name is this kind of pasta?”

  “It’s strozzapreti,” Sax said. “Why?”

  “Is mean ‘strangle priest’ in Italian. Ahahahaha.”

  Gheorghe’s laugh sounded mechanical and entirely mirthless, like the clanking of the Louvre’s radiators, but he seemed to enjoy it. He heaped his plate with food.

  “I will be sure to chew carefully,” Paolo said.

  Sax was gratified to see Min start to eat. She began with the fish, which was at least a familiar ingredient, and once that failed to kill her, she ate an astonishing quantity of pasta. Eventually she pushed herself back from the table, folded her arms across her belly, and puffed her cheeks out with a phoo, as if she had just accomplished some feat requiring athletic effort. Her breath blew the fringe of hair up off her forehead.

  Nilu, taking Min’s cue, attempted to find anything she was familiar with to eat, settling on the walnuts and fruit. She had little appetite, probably hungover from the tranquilizers, but she did nibble. Sax was glad to see that. He hadn’t had any appetite during his period of vampire infection in the 1960s, and lost so much weight people assumed he was a junkie like most of his friends.

  Conversation began in earnest about halfway through the meal when the subject of vampires, inevitably, came up. All of them had experience with the creatures and knew they existed. That tiresome argument did not need rehashing.

  But their experiences were varied, and they described them.

  Min explained Nilu’s presence, she the silent, shell-shocked victim with the vampire’s poison in her blood; of her own background, Min said only that of her family, she was the last one left to fight. Rock revealed a philosophic nature, describing his own role as a soldier of fortune who had finally found an enemy he could fight without the complication of shifting moral sands. Men were no less deadly, but vampires were fair game. He wanted a “clean win”—the destruction of a vampire was all good.

  Gheorghe didn’t want to discuss anything. Rock urged him on, tossing a loose volley of banter across the table. There weren’t any lawyers in the room, right? No cops. Gheorghe (or George, as they anglicized his name) was amongst friends, unless he tried to steal Rock’s shit from his room. Gheorghe smiled and laughed his gallows laugh and eventually drained a glass of beer (even the roughest Europeans would pour beer into a glass, Sax had observed), and wagged his hand from side to side to stop Rock’s flow of patter.

  “Bine. You know the zmeesc, the dragon, yes? One time, I steal the eggs from inside the dragon’s nest. After that, I go back to men shooting with guns. Is safer. Ahahahaha.” He poured himself another glass of beer but only watched the bubbles rise. He did not drink it for some time.

  It was Paolo’s turn. The monk explained simply that he was a servant of God, and it was his job to defeat the evil ones. It was only his specialty, like missionary work or beer brewing.

  As Paolo’s story lacked much interest, all eyes were bent upon Sax.

  At any other time, Sax would have basked in the attention like a cat under a heat lamp. Tonight, it was less comfortable for him. Their lives would be marked by his ambitions. The reasons he gave, the story he told this evening, would have to carry them into the darkness that waited. He considered telling them of the second time he had met a vampire. On that occasion it had been deliberate, which made it a model in some ways for the present escapade. But if this operation went as badly as that one had, they were doomed.

  1989

  Czechoslovakia

  I

  Sax bravely marched into the deadly cave when his hired thugs were afraid to move a muscle. It was all downhill from there: the cave and his good fortune.

  The jump across the Czechoslovakian border had been unnerving, but not due to any real physical danger. Sax had already developed his acute loathing for bureaucrats, and with the Velvet Revolution in full swing, Warsaw Pact governments were toppling like dominoes—so there were a great many bureaucrats looking for something to do. In addition, there was a heavy NATO presence on the Western side, with a lot of commanding officers who had risen through the ranks during the Cold War now deeply concerned the tide of freedom would rise up high enough to wet the shoes of their jobs. They were bureaucrats, too, but with tank battalions.

  Luckily the borders were chaotic, and many stretches had been stripped of barbed wire and left unguarded, so Sax’s primary team was able to enter the country through West Germany without much difficulty. Bribes were paid, of course. But Sax was accustomed to that. And they had all sorts of forged documents in case anyone required them.

  They met with the secondary team, the local men who would be doing the physical work, outside Prague, and then the convoy headed into the deep country in three ex-Soviet trucks—it seemed that surplus war materiel and vampire hunting went well together.

  “Right, those of you with guns and things, you go in first. I’ll keep lookout,” Sax commanded. He was standing at t
he mouth of the cave, pale December sunlight at his back. Nobody moved. “I hired you lot to do the heavy lifting,” he added. When the rest still didn’t move, he swore under his breath. Then he fixed them all with his manliest gaze, one after the other. It was clear they weren’t going into the cave without their feckless leader. He must act. He could almost smell the precious metals. So Sax marched into the chilly darkness, bold as pink buttons.

  In an ironic twist of fate that was the only amusing thing about the entire debacle, when rumors of the ensuing exploits leaked out, the story always began with how Sax had marched fearlessly into the deadly cave when his hired thugs were afraid to move a muscle. In fact, the reason his head was held stiffly up and his shoulders were thrown back square and proud was because he was semiparalyzed—so petrified, he couldn’t move his spine. Fifteen paces, he’d told himself, and I turn around and scamper back. But he’d sorely miscalculated how far fifteen paces would carry him, particularly with the defiant stride he’d affected. He was all the way to the slab in front of the crypt before the countdown ended. It was too late. Now he must pray the men followed him, or he’d have to treat them to the sight of a man soiling his trousers just as fast as he could run.

  The slab was an immense chunk of rough-hewn stone, devoid of workmanship, but hacked from the living cave wall in a very big hurry some six centuries before. The crypt surrounded the slab, and a very nasty one it was, too. According to Sax’s information, the cave was shaped like an hourglass lying on its side, wide at the entrance and innermost depths, and very narrow in the middle. The crypt had been formed by erecting a wall of cyclopean stones across the narrow part of the cave, with an entrance in the center of the wall about five feet high. The entire surface of the crypt had been carved with a crude motif of snake-tongued demons dancing around a ten-foot-tall satanic face, the mouth of which corresponded with the entrance. Some wag had even made the pupils of the devil’s eyes into lamp niches.

  The folktale Sax had found, and which had led him to this place, said that the crypt had originally been equipped with a proper oaken door bound with iron. When the subject of the legend escaped, it burst the door apart “as easily as a clay pot.” When the monster returned, the opening was sealed with “a mighty stone tablet,” which certainly described the one Sax was looking at. But he couldn’t look at it any longer. The entire congregation of devils carved on the wall was obviously laughing at him, eager to witness his fate if he stepped another inch closer.

  So Sax turned around, radiating imperious irritation, and glared back at the cave entrance. The men shuffled and looked at their feet.

  “Bring your tools,” he barked in a faint whisper.

  Despite the lack of authority in the command, it worked. The men picked up their iron bars and shovels, their backpacks full of vital equipment like rope, hammers, and vodka, and started picking their way down into the cave. Some of the big box torches flared on, and now they could properly see the interior. It was a massive cave, broad and tall, and did indeed taper like an hourglass, at least on this side. The rock was black, dry, scored with fissures. The fine dust in the air tasted of match heads.

  “Just get this slab aside, here. Lean it up against the wall with those pieces of canvas behind it. I don’t want to damage the carvings. No sense upsetting the archaeologists.” He was back in charge. As the men moved in and began arguing over the easiest way to shift the stone, Sax rather elaborately realized he was in the way, and that one of his bootlaces needed tying, and so ended up off to one side and somewhat closer to the exit than anyone else, in roughly the pose of a sprinter at the starting blocks.

  As it transpired, the slab was moved with relative ease, grating against the wall with a tooth-grinding sound. The lower part of it had been cut in an arc, so it rolled like a wheel until an opening was exposed that a man could fit through without difficulty. Sax noticed that the men who weren’t applying wrecking bars to shift the slab were instead shining their lights on the ever-widening gap, making it bright as the moon. They wanted to see as far into the crypt as possible, as early as possible, so they’d know to run for it in good time. This meant the men with their shoulders to the stone were completely blinded and had to stop for a few minutes to let their eyes readjust to the darkness.

  That wait was when Sax’s previously formless concerns began to take coherent shape. While the others passed around vacuum flasks of lukewarm instant coffee, he paced about as if impatient to get moving again, not just to hide how badly his limbs were shaking. He recalled how he had vowed never to dabble in the supernatural again after the adventure in France. Then the inevitable erosion of will had occurred. He heard whispered stories of treasure hunters who had met terrible creatures and prevailed, to the great benefit of their bank balances. He had thought, I am one of those! But as the fortune merged into his other fortunes, as the last of the sound articles from that time passed into the hands of his clients, he began to pine for another such big score.

  Then, hanging about with the Roman brass, he’d learned a few things about vampires that only encouraged dangerous thinking. He learned there were many kinds of vampire, including weak ones. And the odds were, when you heard about a vampire, it was probably bullshit to begin with. So he’d talked himself into it. He could handle a weak vampire, especially if it was imaginary.

  The truth was, in the old legend he’d found, there was a lot of nonsense. There was a better-than-even chance the whole monster aspect of it was rubbish concocted to keep out treasure hunters and curiosity seekers. But now, for the first time since he began planning the exploit six months before, he saw the story in a different light.

  He’d expected to find the crypt had already been looted. The cave was all but unknown; he’d found it mentioned in a handwritten fifteenth-century manuscript that had likely never been copied. The approach to it was unmarked by footpaths; it stood in a part of the countryside which was unprofitable for farming and too far from paying work to be worth living in. But people got everywhere. A landless peasant seeks shelter from a storm, or some teenagers want a place to screw in privacy—a big, dry cave would never go unexplored. Although the entrance was choked with bushes through which the men had been obliged to hack a path, it wouldn’t always have been so.

  So his first reaction on seeing the crypt was still sealed was delight. Tempered with fear, but delight nonetheless. The crypt, if it had been disturbed at all, had been entered and exited with care. That might mean there would still be artifacts inside—if the story had any truth to it, that is. An entire mansion’s worth of furnishings, and a fortune in gold packed in cedar chests. The cave was so dry that anything behind the crypt door should have been beautifully preserved.

  But once the spike in hope wore off, he started wondering about a couple of things. As he paced, the questions got more alarming. The bushes—there hadn’t even been a fox path through them. And there was no animal dung, no bird droppings, no bones inside the cave. No bats. Not even any beetle shells. Why did nothing live in the cave? And why was the crypt still sealed? Had there really never been anyone in there to discover it in all those centuries? He hoped it was something to do with carbon monoxide or radioactivity. A good old not-supernatural form of death.

  The men were ready to proceed. They collected their gear and shone lights into the crypt.

  “Have a look,” Bobek said. He was the foreman of the laborers—or gang leader, depending how you thought of it.

  Sax didn’t want to look, but he would have to do so if he was going to hang on to any shred of respect from these brutes. He had a second team some three miles away at the narrow lane that ran nearest the cave; they were men he’d known for years and were well prepared for mutiny. That’s why they were with the trucks. Nobody got out of that place with the loot unless Sax was stepping alongside, whistling cheerfully. Actually whistling. It was a signal: if he didn’t whistle, there was a problem. He wouldn’t trust these local men with a p
lug nickel. He was thinking of the second team, and wondering why he hadn’t brought at least one of them along to give him courage, when he stepped up to the exposed slice of the entrance and peered inside.

  He expected a great shaggy claw would spring out of the shadows and tear off his face, but there were no shadows. “Hand me that light,” he said, and pointed the nearest torch down the tunnel behind the slab. It must have been the thickness of the wall—ten or fifteen feet deep, the tunnel was, a low passageway that led straight back to a square of absolute darkness, no matter how he moved the light about. The back wall of the cave must have been considerably farther in. So the inner chamber was deeper than the outer one.

  Something about that darkness—it chilled his guts. The way it soaked up light, no dust or mineral glinting in it.

  “Who wants to go in first?” he asked the men. He already knew the answer to that.

  It was a curtain. That’s why the light hadn’t been able to find anything deeper in the cave. Across the far end of the passageway, hung from a wooden rod, was a curtain of very brittle black velvet. It turned to dust in his fingers when he shifted it aside. He choked on the minuscule, prickly fibers whirling in the air, and waved a breathing space through them, and shone the light into the crypt itself. What he saw almost took his fear away. It certainly gave his avarice a substantial boost.

  The legend was exactly correct, and had even left some interesting details out. The cave hadn’t just been furnished like a mansion—it had been walled like one. There was wooden paneling over the walls; the floor was of marble and the ceiling had been plastered and painted with heraldic designs. All around the perimeter walls there were windows carved directly into the stone of the cave. They were fitted with leaden frames. But instead of looking out on mountains, fields, and forests, they stared back into the cave: the windows were glazed with mirrors, not clear glass. All the mirrors at eye level had been smashed, revealing coarse stone behind them.