by Ben Tripp
Sax had spent, he had to admit to himself, every moment of his waking life on a campaign to look good in front of other people, to use his weaknesses as strengths. Even going so far as to not once, but twice, and now three times, confront vampires—and he’d faced other horrors as well. It was a preposterous overcompensation. He was a coward, so he occasionally did something that appeared to be brave—but invariably did it with as little courage or grace as possible, running for his life at the soonest opportunity.
The first time he’d stalked a vampire, he had not known he was doing so—nor the dangers he confronted. He’d been abjectly humiliated by his own total failure of courage in the matter. The second time he had chosen a far lesser monster to confront and still was humiliated, and damn near lost his leg. Now here he was at an advanced age, tottering along like some gray Dorothy in a deserted Emerald City on the way to confront the Wizard, who he knew was something far worse than a man behind the curtain. Even as he made his way through that cold castle, doing this very brave thing for which there would almost certainly be no living witnesses, he suspected he was only doing it to salvage his pride.
Min and Rock by unspoken agreement took up positions in front of Sax and behind him, switching periodically, keeping their eyes fresh as they watched for anything at all besides stone and moss. They were at the base of the keep. It rose up, despite the already immense height of the rock upon which they stood, to what appeared an equally great height. Sax did not dare look up at it for fear he would develop vertigo and fall down. If he was going to walk to the gallows, he wanted his steps to appear firm. Sax was confronting his oldest enemy, he now understood. And his oldest enemy was not the vampire. It was himself.
They circled the keep and found the entrance. It was not an imposing door, although there was a time-effaced shield above it carved into the stones of the wall that was grand in scale and fierce in workmanship, despite the softening that centuries of harsh weather had brought to it. Two tiny windows, a foot tall and ten feet deep in the masonry, looked like the blinkered eyes of a deformed skull surmounting the doorway. Which meant they were walking into a toothless stone mouth. A cheerful thought, Sax mused, and went in first. He paused on the threshold. Only an hour until dawn. The urgent drive through the night had taken them four hours, Rock keeping the accelerator to the floor except at the border crossing, where they didn’t want to look like fugitives. Sax wished there was some truth to the idea that vampires couldn’t live in daylight. In fact the only thing it did was give them sunburn.
“Remember, caution is the best weapon you have,” he said, and meant it. “She’s got cameras and things, but they’re nothing. Her real weapon is sheer bloody ruthlessness. She won’t have a submachine gun or anything like that. They never do. She’ll wait for us to do something stupid, and then we’re for it. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Rock said. “I’m definitely feeling mortal as a motherfucker right now.”
“Min?” Sax said. There was a look in her eyes he didn’t like. In her mind, she was already fighting. That was exactly what the vampire would want. Precipitous action. Haste. There lay destruction. Min made a guttural noise in response to Sax’s question, but he needed her to say the words.
“Min. Repeat after me. I will not take the bait. You understand what bait is, yes? Like for a fish?”
“I know what is bait,” she said. Whatever Sax had to say, she was going to do what she was going to do. She had her hand pressed to the wounds in her side, Sax noted.
“Rock, will you please take the lead? And Min, after me.” He could at least slow her down.
Sax went inside. There was a naked electric bulb overhead in a fixture that dated, Sax estimated, from the 1930s. Before the war. Rock’s head hardly cleared the steel light shade as he squeezed past Sax, filling the corridor that led into the keep. There were further lamps suspended at intervals from an armored cable stapled to the ceiling.
They proceeded into the bowels of the castle, which was silent, cold, and still. They moved as fast as they dared, meeting no obstacles or opposition. There was no furniture in any of the rooms that opened out from the corridor. This was the lower part of the castle that had been uninhabited, according to their reconnaissance; these rooms would once have been crammed with fighting men and their families, the floors covered in rushes, furnished with simple pieces hewn from the wood of the local forests. Some of the chambers would have stored food, arms, and fuel for fires. The fortress had always been isolated and ugly, but it had once been bursting with activity as well, a kind of robust life that was not lonely.
Now it was a dead shell. The thresholds of the doors and the steps in the spiral staircases that rose up in niches on either side were worn concave by centuries of constant use. Few feet had disturbed the stone since the vampire came. Sax wondered when that was. A hundred years? Two hundred? Was Shakespeare alive when this place fell victim to the monster, its squires and pages taking ill, its knights and ladies at last hastening out of the halls rather than sicken and die themselves? Were there false vampires, screaming and biting until dispatched with crossbows?
She was waiting for them in one of these rooms, smiling that mirthless grin that vampires wore.
They came to a steel door, of modern manufacture. There was a security system mounted within it; Rock pointed out the pattern of bolt heads where the electronics would be fixed inside the panel.
“The spider’s lair,” Sax muttered.
“It’s probably locked,” Rock said. “We haven’t got cutting gear. We’ll have to go back.”
“Ya-gol,” Min said, and grabbed the handle of the door. It swung open on well-greased hinges.
“This is too easy,” Rock said.
“Of course it is,” Sax whispered. “She’s expecting us.”
The door let into a short hallway, fifteen feet deep, the thickness of the bearing wall through which it passed. No secret passages here: This was solid rubble laid for strength, not subterfuge. The hallway was of smooth stone, like the parts of the castle through which they had already passed, but there was no dust here. Min forged ahead; Sax and Rock followed. No door at the far end of the hall. They reached the opening without being killed.
Beyond the hall—riches.
They had found the vampire’s hoard.
The narrow way opened out into the great hall, the core of the keep, six-sided, its walls plastered and figured with scenes of pageantry and pleasure. The frescoes had been rendered at least a thousand years ago, judging from the technique and the costumes of the subjects. The colors were faded but still warm. The walls rose up, punctuated by iron braziers to hold bundles of rushlights, to a gallery that encircled the room, with a deeper choir for minstrels at one end and the massive chimney at the other, beneath which was a hearth that could hold an entire tree, if one wished to burn it. The walls continued upward to a ceiling of immense beams, jointed together like a wagon wheel, their surfaces covered in heraldry and notchwork. The shields and devices of hundreds of knights had been painted there, forming great flowers of intricate and warlike design that gleamed starry in the lofty shadows. The bones of the room had gone unchanged for a millennium at least. But time had not stood still. A collection had been assembled.
The enormous volume of space was crammed with masterpieces of every period hanging over the frescoes on the walls. The stone floor was scattered with carpets of exquisite design, deep and fine. There were sculptures for which the Louvre would sacrifice half its icons, and artifacts of exquisite craftsmanship—from the entrance, Sax’s eye picked out an elephant howdah that must have been fifth century, now resting on the floor with pillows beneath its canopy and heaps of leather-bound folios beside it, a kind of reading niche. So many of the things were in immaculate condition. They had been removed from the world when they were young and slept here ever since, untouched by time. Half the treasure appeared to be forgeries, they were so perfect. T
he furniture, of every period, looked as if it should still smell of shellac and paint.
Shimmering silks, Chinese and Japanese, were thrown carelessly over the arms of chairs and sofas. Sax could see something that looked very much like a robe of the Han Dynasty, but even with a vampire, it was hard to imagine such a thing in private hands—it was twenty-two centuries old, tossed across the seat of a Roman backless couch, itself probably from the second century AD; the only reason he recognized the style of the piece was because there was a reconstruction of one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This one was original, and far finer. Such objects no longer existed.
Sax’s mouth was dry, his heart batting like an exhausted moth. The wealth was beyond estimation. His own warehouses were nothing but trinket shops compared to this.
He forgot where he was, and what peril lay somewhere behind these walls, and he staggered, leaning heavily on his cane, across the sward of carpets. He passed a William & Mary gateleg table laden with porcelain: The table alone was worth sixty thousand dollars, and it bore a careless arrangement of Kangxi vases in blue and white, each worth seventy thousand, beside a couple of big Qianlong famille moon flasks, their colors as delicate as springtime, for which Sax could easily get seven hundred thousand the pair, if he could bear to part with them; and next to the table stood a Japanese Imari lantern in porcelain and gilt, five feet tall, a mere trifle worth something like thirty thousand until you threw in the First Dynasty Egyptian crown sitting atop it, the value of which was incalculable. Sax felt as if his sanity was at stake now. That was the freight of just one table. There must have been forty such tables scattered around the great hall, not to mention the shelves and cabinets and curios, each one stuffed with priceless artifacts to which he would have very dearly loved to have given a price.
Sax was transfixed.
“Get back here,” he heard a voice say from a great distance.
“What the hell are you doing?” the same voice said, now in his ear. Sax was confused. He turned and saw a vast man with a frightened face atop a neck almost as large in diameter as the Ming Dynasty Longquan celadon garden seat upon which he abruptly sat down. Rock, Sax recalled. His name was Rock.
“I’m sorry,” Sax said. “I lost my head.” He waved his cane around at the splendors in the great hall. Rock didn’t see what he saw.
“It looks like Jay Z’s crib in here, man, and that’s cool, but I didn’t come this far just to get killed in an attractive environment, know what I’m saying?” Rock lifted Sax up and hauled him bodily back to the doorway. Sax wiped his eyes and shook Rock off once they were back in the doorway, where Min was covering the way out with her own shotgun. Sax observed she was sweating profusely, and blood dappled her bandaged side. Rock was always perspiring; Sax was under the impression Korean women never did. Then he realized he was sweating, too, and mopped his face.
“You don’t realize what you’re seeing, I think,” Sax said. “The ransom of bloody Zeus in Olympus. This makes King Tut’s tomb look like a box lunch. I forget our business, however. I see no evidence of our hostess anywhere. But that might be what we want, over there.”
Sax indicated the enormous fireplace. Beside it was built an elevator in the early Art Deco style, brass and chromium tubes framing thick glass ribs that formed the car. It was designed to rise up in the open air to the heights of the great hall; at the very top, there was a hole framed into the ceiling. The rails on which the elevator ascended continued on up above.
“She’s waiting for us up there?” Rock said, not sure if he was asking or making a statement.
“She wouldn’t want a gunfight down here, I assure you,” Sax said, and hobbled around the perimeter of the room, discretion at least dictating they stay in the shelter of the gallery above. He tried his best to ignore the items of interest they passed, and made it all the way to the fireplace before he came to a halt, frozen in place.
“Not again,” Rock said.
“I know her. I’ve met her,” Sax said.
He felt a kind of fear that was new in his experience. It came from far away in his own past, mocking him.
He had always survived at the pleasure of this monster. He just hadn’t known it until now.
There was a magnificent painting on the chimneypiece above the hearth, its frame a vast rococo fantasy in gilt and plaster, later than the artwork within. There was no mistaking the hand of the master who’d painted it. It was a biblical scene, deep shadows and soft natural light with the figures emerging from the darkness. Plain, honest faces, and proud kings.
It was Caravaggio’s lost masterpiece The Magi in Bethlehem.
Sax had spent some time talking to the woman who claimed to own it, one drunken night in Paris in 1965. She was pale and attractive and she had a long German title after her name.
He was, he now understood, about to meet her again. Edie Sedgwick would not be attending this time.
Sax paused at the door of the elevator and looked back.
“We’re coming back down,” he said, with genuine resolution in his voice. “We’re coming back down and taking all this. Mine. Every single bloody bit of it. Mine.”
The elevator rose with perfect smoothness. There was a plate on the frame that read G. Eiffel, 1922. Only the best for this vampire—and the great engineer had died the following year.
Min had taken the stairs, although limping; Rock was with Sax, shotgun trained on the elevator door. Sax was trembling, but the cosmic pitch of fear he had experienced on the way into the castle had been replaced by something more like the doomsense of the condemned man. It was a chilly resignation he felt, almost of already being dead. This was not a castle perched atop the mountain—it was his tomb.
He had already been sentenced to this death in 1965, when the vampire had conversed with him, and Andy Warhol and Charlie Watts and all the rest of the fascinating people had been there.
She had chatted with Sax particularly, of course, because he was an unscrupulous sharpie in the matter of furniture and antiques, and that was something she needed to get her patrimony back. In 1965, it had only been twenty years since her hoard was piled into boxcars and sent down the railway. She had probably been considering Sax as a confederate to help get the stuff back.
A week later, Sax played his part in the destruction of the vampire Corfax in the Loire Valley. This creature would have decided against requesting Sax’s services at that time, of course. And she might even have thought, Someday when he’s old, I’ll lure him here and destroy him.
That day had finally come.
The elevator stopped moving, the door folded back, and before them was the secret lair.
They were in the room above the great hall. It was the summit of the castle, beneath the peak of the tallest roof. It had once been five or six stories of private chambers, composed of board floors laid across the beams that spanned the space. The boards were long gone, and now it was just a single echoing volume beneath the peak, crisscrossed by massive timbers where the levels had been.
The steep angle of the roof was duplicated inside the enormous chamber, giving it the aspect of a natural cavern; there were thousands of whispering bats in the highest rafters to lend vitality to the effect. The air stank abominably of bat urine and dung and noxious chemicals. Sax knew bats were supposed to be useful, but he hated all of those small hairy creatures—bats and rats and mice. Horrid wriggling things with tiny teeth and knobby claws like miniature human hands. He hated rats the most, ever since he met them in a tunnel in 1965 while fleeing for his life. He’d attempted to make it into a proper phobia, but it had always remained simple loathing.
There were two levels remaining in the vast chamber. Sax and Rock stepped with care onto the lower level, the floor that was also the ceiling of the great hall below. Above them was a rectangle hanging in space thirty feet above, the second level, suspended on the beams with a twenty-foot margin of open spa
ce around it on all four sides, accessible only by a single iron catwalk from the narrow parapet that circled the wall at the same height. It was an island in the air.
The floor under their feet had been paved with linoleum. The walls at this level were clad in sheets of white glass or plastic, lit from behind, so that their pallid light cast angular shadows in unnatural directions. The stone walls emerged above the upper catwalk encircling the room. Dr. Caligari would have loved it.
What most struck the eye, after the sheer height of the room, was the mass of equipment that formed a labyrinth inside it: hulking iron cabinets, studded with rivets the size of mushroom caps, covered in dials and meters and huge levers from which mighty rubber-clad cables and coils of copper tubing ascended. From the walls sprouted mazes of pipe and plumbing. There were pyramids of fuel and chemical drums, some modern, some so old the metal was blistered and sweating. There was a great humpbacked machine with masses of copper wire wound around a core inside it, a generator of some kind, from which ran cables thick as pythons. Amongst the runs of plastic-clad wire, there were benches littered with handmade brass instruments. Everything was a combination of antiquated and modern science, flung together according to need.
Of the vampire, there was no sign.
“You understand what’s next, traditionally speaking,” Sax murmured. “We wander around until we find what she wants us to find, and then she appears behind us without warning, makes a speech, and kills us both.”
“I got that,” Rock said. Sweat was running in gleaming cords down his skin.
“So if we’re going to do her in, it’s got to be while she’s making the speech,” Sax added. It sounded rather silly to mention it at this point. “Be on the lookout for something to distract her.”