The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  The interior of the cave was divided into rooms, the walls arranged between the massive pillars that held up the ceiling. They corresponded in plan with a great house of the period in which the crypt was built, featuring small rooms arranged around large ones down the center. There were three large rooms, the first at the end of the passageway, the second at the back of it, and the third at the back of the second.

  Once Sax was through and hadn’t been attacked by the Toad King, the men poured down the tunnel after him, competing to see who could find something valuable first. They had strict orders not to touch or move anything, but in all the excitement they had apparently forgotten this.

  “Pasti vraždy—booby traps!” Sax shouted as the men began ducking into the small side rooms and he heard things falling about. All of the men emerged again; a couple of them had copper basins and candlesticks in their hands. They set these carefully down. Sax had memorized a few phrases he thought might be useful.

  “I told you what happened last time,” Sax continued. “There’s the same feeling here. Search the place, but move carefully, and report anything you find that looks unusual. Remember, everything in here is valuable, even the paneling. If you treat it with care, you might not get killed. Everybody wins.”

  According to legend, there was once a prince in Bohemia who loved buried treasure. Křesomysl was his name. So obsessed was he with finding the buried hoards that many farmers were recruited to the work of digging instead, and so many fields went fallow, and many villages went hungry. But Prince Křesomysl did nothing to relieve their suffering, saying instead that the men must earn their bread by bringing up not barley from the ground, but gold. Although the men toiled and delved until their muscles cracked, they found nothing, and many of their families starved to death during the cruel winter.

  Then one of the men, hardly more than a boy, was digging deep beneath the soil when his pick broke through the floor of the tunnel beneath him. When he lowered his rushlight into the opening, he saw great riches there. The young man rushed up out of the mine and told the master who oversaw the work, and the master told Alezh, an officer of Prince Křesomysl. The officer told the master delver to show him the man who had discovered the treasure, and told the man to show him the treasure itself. Once they were all down the tunnel, Alezh slew both master and youth, and placed guards at the entrance to the mine. Then he went to fetch the prince.

  They moved as a group, pushing deeper into the cave-mansion. Nobody touched anything now. Sax didn’t know if they’d merely gotten lucky so far or if vampires weren’t in the habit of turning their homes into weapons—it might only have been Madame Magnat-l’Étrange who went in for that sort of thing. But the less that happened, the better he liked it—and the more worried he became. It had been too easy by far. The doubt still nagged him: Why had nobody broken in here in all the centuries since the crypt was sealed? Why were there no rats?

  He hated rats, but there ought to have been rats. For some reason he thought There ought to be rats to the tune of “Send in the Clowns,” the Sondheim number. He was becoming hysterical. So far, he’d managed to carry himself in front of the other men, simulating a leader fairly well, but as they approached the back of the second great room, his fear became too intense. He considered pretending there was something wrong with his shoe, but he was concerned they’d stop to wait for him and he’d end up in front again. So he feigned to take an interest in the architecture of the ceiling, which required he stand back a little way for a better view. A brilliant plan—Sax was dead last when Bobek reached the final door. The trouble was, there were only ten men, so if something came galloping through it, Sax didn’t stand a chance of escaping.

  “If the treasure is here, it’s in there,” Bobek said, unnecessarily. Sax thought he might be stalling as well.

  “I haven’t seen any indication of traps in here,” Sax said, as if disappointed. “My primary concern now is the state of the ceiling. It doesn’t look as if it’s properly stuck on anymore. We had better proceed with caution.”

  Nobody argued with that, particularly the men who didn’t speak English. Everyone got the general idea. Bobek and another man stood at the sides of the door and pretended to be worried the ceiling might come down; all the rest moved back, creating a broad open space in the middle of the floor.

  “Right-ho,” Sax said, and Bobek depressed the heavy iron latch on the door. It swung inward on croaking hinges and a different kind of atmosphere wafted out like ghost shrouds. A damp, bilious exhalation. The men were breathless, tense, holding themselves rigid. All lights were aimed at the opening, so when the door swung out of the way there was a clear view beyond. It wasn’t another paneled room, but what amounted to the backyard of the subterranean house—the stone walls there were raw, unmarked by tools. It was the rear of the cave as nature had formed it. In the middle of the undressed rock of the floor stood a stone well, from which issued the sound of flowing water.

  Prince Křesomysl did not lose a moment once he arrived at the mine. He took up the rushlight and strode deep beneath the soil, down the tunnel the young man had dug. At the bottom he found the pick, and took it in his hands and smote the stone floor with all his might. Again and again he swung the pick, and soon had made an opening large enough to admit a man. Alezh cried for him to be cautious. The prince allowed a rope to be tied about his middle but would not otherwise delay, and in his greed would admit no other man to the hidden chamber. So he descended into the hole and out of sight. Only his rushlight could be seen, glinting off the long-forgotten hoard of gold. For a long while, there was no sound but the occasional cry of delight as the prince discovered some new wonder in the cavern below.

  Then there was a terrible scream, and the din of a struggle. The officer Alezh bade his men pull up the rope. At first it jerked and dodged like a fishing line with a prize catch upon it, but at last they hauled up the prince, who was covered in blood and senseless, so that they feared him slain. He was conveyed up to the surface and laid out in a nearby cottage, where the doctors despaired of his life, for an animal had cruelly bitten him in three places, and the wounds would not heal.

  The prince, however, didn’t die, and claimed that he could not do so until he had lived with the great treasure in his possession for long enough to satisfy his heart. Instead he remained between life and death for a long while, and only recovered his strength in small degrees. But he was never the same. His appetites changed, and his character, and soon the people of his court were so concerned they ordered the cavern of treasure explored, to find what animal had attacked him.

  A team of soldiers went down into the cavern, which had hitherto been sealed, and explored the treasure chamber. Amongst scattered riches upon the stone floor they found a thing of indescribable ugliness, which the prince had run through the heart with his sword; the blade still stood in its ribs. The soldiers who found the monster were terribly afraid, and did not remove the sword from its body, but conveyed the monster into the sunlight, and burned it there beside the entrance to the mine, and it is said that the smoke of the fire choked them and they perished. It is also said that the prince ordered them murdered because they had set eye upon his hoard of treasure.

  By this time, the prince was eating a dozen toads at every meal, and would touch nothing else.

  They lowered one of the battery torches down into the well. Sax was no longer at the back of the party—he had some sympathy for the legendary Prince Křesomysl, whose greed had led him to destruction. But the prince had been brought up with that medieval sense of self-sufficiency and probably believed in God, so he’d gone it alone. Sax was grateful to have plenty of strong arms at his back. He himself lowered the lamp on a rope until they could see, about thirty feet below the floor, that there was black water at the bottom. Not still water, but agitated, bubbling.

  “Give me a bit of paper or something,” Sax said, and dropped the proffered cigarette wrapper down past the lamp
. The wrapper alighted on the water and swirled in place for a moment, then was sucked away and disappeared through a gap in the foot of the well. “There’s a channel down there. Bobek, have you the map? See where this might flow. I have a feeling this tomb isn’t sealed off after all.”

  “There’s a bažina, a swamp, half a mile to the south of here where the ground is low. Half a mile of water is as good as half a mile of rock. Nothing to fear there; fish can’t climb wells.”

  Sax, who had put a great deal of time into researching vampires since the French adventure nearly twenty-five years ago, realized he didn’t know if they could survive underwater, and if they could, for how long. It also occurred to him that the creature reputed to haunt this particular cave was described as an amphibian. He was not encouraged.

  “Let’s close the door back up and make a proper survey of the contents of this place. Set up the camera and make photographs. If there’s no treasure here, it’s worth more as an archaeological site . . . damn it.”

  There was no treasure.

  Some excellent late-medieval furniture, including a couple of items Sax couldn’t identify—one might have been a sort of primitive bidet, in which case it was a unique survival, to his knowledge—but nothing worth the price of the expedition. He might have to resort to plan B and write the whole thing off on his taxes. The museum this stuff ended up in would be well pleased, though.

  Once the photographs had been made and an inventory written up, Sax discreetly examined the men, and thought a few of them had rather heavier pockets than before, but he didn’t want to press the point. Let them nick a few trinkets. It might satisfy them enough so they wouldn’t try to steal the petrol out of the trucks before the expedition was back in civilization.

  He’d been watching them for a couple of minutes when he noticed that one of the men was missing.

  “Where’s the tall one with the mackintosh?” he muttered to Bobek.

  “He is pissing in the well,” the man said, as if this was a folk custom.

  “When did he go back there?”

  “Minutes ago.”

  “Unless he’s got the bladder of an elephant, he ought to be back by now. Go check, will you?”

  Sax had almost forgotten he was afraid; now it felt as if ice was melting down his scalp and into his collar. Bobek stumped back through the mansion, indifferent.

  Then Bobek didn’t come back, either.

  “Chaps, somebody go see what’s happened to the rest of the party,” Sax said, his voice wobbling. “Not just you,” he added when one man turned to go. “Bring three.”

  Now the fearful glances went around again. He could see the concern on their faces. What did the American teplouš think was happening? His mood was contagious. If something had happened to Bobek, it would be up to Sax to set the pace. The pace he had in mind was a three-minute mile. The men picked up their iron wrecking bars and headed for the back door. They returned quickly.

  “Gold,” said the one with side whiskers. “Found gold.”

  The strange appetites of Prince Křesomysl could no longer be concealed. At first, only the closest of his officers and courtiers knew of it, but there are no secrets where there are servants. Someone had to catch the frogs and toads, and someone else had to put them on a covered dish. Nor could the change in the prince’s appearance be hidden. He no longer rode out across his lands, or appeared at the gates, or even at the door of his hall. Rumors flew on whispering wings across his domain. Some said he had contracted gangrene from his wounds, and others that he had leprosy, and others said he’d been cursed. None guessed how terrible his affliction really was.

  To make matters worse, the prince’s cruelty was not forgotten, although since the treasure was found he had ceased to compel the peasant farmers to dig beneath the earth, instead of planting barley upon it. The death of the young man who had discovered the treasure was a subject of much speculation; none knew what had happened to him, or to any of the men whom the prince had slain to protect his secret. A hungry winter had sharpened many appetites, not just for nourishment, but for justice as well.

  One night, the prince was discovered outside his castle by the trusted Alezh, who had shown him the mine. The prince was senseless upon the ground, smeared with blood. Alezh helped him into the hall and bathed the prince with his own hands, although it filled his heart with horror to touch the flesh of his master. He burned the prince’s garments in the hearth. The next morning, a peasant child was reported to have been torn apart by wolves, and her entrails devoured.

  At last, it was clear that something must be done. The prince himself knew that he was beyond help, and for the first time, he was afraid for his mortal soul. He ordered a suitable cavern to be discovered, far from the knowledge of men, and a palace to be built within it suitable for a prince, with a vault spacious enough to hold a vast treasure. According to the stories men told, not one laborer or builder who undertook this project remained alive, but all met with accidents, or were beset by thieves, or died in one way or another. Then the prince left his hall, and his castle, and dwelled in his cavern, where only the officer Alezh knew him to be, and there he lived for many years, and his domain was ruled by his son, who was young enough that he knew not what had befallen his father.

  Then the peasants of the villages in the region of the cavern began to die, some torn apart by animals or sickened by a mysterious pestilence, and others simply vanished. The loyal Alezh, now old and heartsick from the burden of his own sins, knew he had one more task to complete before his duty to the prince was over.

  In hindsight, Sax had always known the mission would end up somewhere even worse than a cavern. Bobek showed him a gold coin with some unknown king stamped upon one side; it had been half buried in the dust, and the man had discovered it while peeing down the well. Bobek had an idea then, and had lowered his light down the well until the lens of the lamp was touching the water. It lit up the water from within, and they could see the bottom. It sparkled with more coins.

  With all the men present, they lowered the smallest amongst them on ropes until he was waist-deep and standing in the water. The man had to be offered an extra two shares in the reward in order to convince him to go down there, but once he was in the water, he lost his fear, scooping up double handfuls of black silt studded with gold coins, like the muck along a shoreline is studded with clams. But he couldn’t find more than this. A treasure, perhaps, but a minor one.

  “You know, Bobek, I think we might want to learn precisely where this comes out. I think our little hoard may have moved itself.”

  II

  The light was waning as they pushed the flat-bottomed skiffs out into the stream. They ought to have waited for morning, but the men were nearly frantic to go on, and Sax didn’t want to wake up to discover they’d already sought out the sedimentary delta formed by the outlet of the stream and absconded with the loot.

  Most of these men had lived their entire lives behind the Iron Curtain, so they hadn’t seen the classic Universal horror pictures of the 1930s. Otherwise they’d have recognized the signs immediately: The black, unwholesome water belching beneath the poles as they pushed the boats along. The twisted limbs of the drowned trees. The rank fog that flowed down from the uplands and blotted out the rotten reed beds around them. The warning croak of a lonely raven. Sax had seen these pictures; he knew. The scene lacked only Boris Karloff.

  Still, they punted along through the rustling reeds, navigating the twisted waterways of the swamp. It was full dark, and their lamps were casting a mournful glow in the fog, when Sax’s boat (regretfully the one in front) grated on sand. They had found the silt deposit carried to the swamp by the underground stream. The men let themselves over the sides, careful because the gooey muck underfoot wanted to swallow them, and they wallowed upstream for a hundred yards, poking the slime with sticks and pry bars.

  They found a low arch in a brow of expos
ed stone, right at the top of the swamp. The water babbled from it as if excited to have completed the long journey beneath the rock. Now the men formed a line and began jabbing at the silt in earnest—if anything was to be found, it would be here, where the gold was piled up against the sediment. Sax was in the middle of the pack, as eager as the rest—it was only a swamp, after all. Karloff had been dead for twenty years. This very thought was in his mind when his own stick sank into something rather more rubbery than expected. There was a great frothing burst of gas from beneath the silt, and the monster rose up, screaming.

  Alezh paid Prince Křesomysl one final visit. The prince did not know him; his soul had gone. He was unrecognizable now, so hideous in mind and body that even Alezh knew him not. Alezh did not tell his master of his intentions but left a cauldron filled with squirming toads and frogs and efts to occupy the prince’s attention, and to serve as his last feast. Then Alezh went out of the buried mansion and ordered that the great wall be built across the cavern, and the stout door framed in the entrance. His men cut mighty stones and placed them there, and all the while the prince did not show himself, nor make any sound, so that they thought the banquet of wet creatures had been poisoned.

  But it was not so. When the work was finished, Alezh went into the cavern to pay his last respects, for the mansion was now truly a crypt in which Prince ­Křesomysl must sleep forever, with no way out. He knelt before the ironbound door and wept, and it must have been that the prince heard his cries, for the door was suddenly burst apart, and so the men at last saw what their ruler had become. The prince fell upon his loyal Alezh and cruelly slew him, and the laborers drove the monster back into the crypt with their torches and sealed the entrance with a stone too large for any creature to breach, however monstrous.