The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  “You got fucked up pretty comprehensively,” Rock said, seeing the curtain of blood streaming from Sax’s chest.

  “On me it looks good,” Sax said, and wondered if it was at all witty. But the delivery wasn’t quite there, because the pain in his chest had finally arrived with a ten-piece mariachi band and he was losing his ability to endure.

  “Okay, you two get out of here fast as you can. Min’s gone. I’ll follow you once I light this place up,” Rock said.

  Sax felt a renewed energy. This was all wrong.

  “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “That vampire is still alive. We let her crawl around, she will find a way to get herself back in action. You know it and I know it. And that thing up above, too. And she might have more hundings locked up in the goddamn basement. Only one way to sterilize this place and that’s to burn the mother down.”

  “Rock, listen to me,” Sax said, his voice sounding like it was coming from a telephone held five feet from his ear. “Downstairs, that room we went through? It contains probably one hundred million dollars’ worth of art. Or ten times that. You can’t even put a price to it. There’s another hundred million dollars in artifacts, and several thousand objects of literally incalculable worth. There are things down there, masterpieces that will enrich humanity for the rest of time.”

  There was diesel fuel getting into Sax’s wound. The sting of the oil was almost worse than the pain of the injuries itself. Emily was sagging badly. There wasn’t any time to argue.

  “Old man,” Rock said. “This stuff in here been lost to mankind for hundreds of years, am I right?”

  “Thousands, some of it.” Sax was fading.

  “It’s just gonna be lost some more, is all. Think of it that way. ’Cause I am not leaving this castle until there’s nothing left.”

  Rock hit the DOWN button and gave Sax a gentle push. Sax fell into the elevator.

  “Don’t do it,” Sax said. The car was starting to move.

  Rock smiled. “Bat shit and diesel, man. Think about it. Fertilizer bomb. You think it’s gonna make a noise?” Then he laughed, and tugged the elevator door shut, and was lost to sight as the car descended below the level of the floor.

  Emily had to drag Sax bodily out of the great hall filled with priceless treasures. He reached up to the Caravaggio. He felt the brushstrokes, those tiny hard feathers of paint daubed on by the hand of one of the greatest artists who ever lived.

  There was a heavy thud and the entire castle shook. Dirt and dust spilled down from the ceiling. Objects rocked on tables and in cabinets, disturbed in their sleep. Sax could hear after the explosion the thin rattle of the glass in cabinet doors, the cabinets themselves of incredible value, the objects within beyond price. Emily pulled him through the trove.

  There was a second explosion and an iron chandelier fell from the ceiling, whirling down through the soaring airspace, crashing brutally into a handsome belle epoque vitrine, probably by François Linke, which contained a selection of violins. Probably all Stradivari. It didn’t matter now. They were reduced to splinters.

  There was a third explosion, and without warning, a huge timber in the ceiling split in half and Sax saw a mass of laboratory equipment slide into the gap that appeared in the floorboards overhead. Flaming fuel poured through the opening and spilled down into the glorious profusion of man’s works below. Sax could not look. He turned away and obediently followed Emily, who had regained much of her strength if not her agility—she was limping extravagantly—to the corridor that would lead them outside.

  Sax did not look back again into that chamber of wonders. In fact, he discovered he could not see properly, and he wondered if his eyes had been injured. Then he knew what it was: he was blinded by tears.

  One hand pressed to the terrible wound in his chest, Sax hobbled double time down the maze of corridors, following Emily, his hand in hers. He had almost lost her, the person whom he valued most in all the world. An immense, rumbling blast shook the floor with such violence they were thrown off their feet. Emily pulled Sax up. The corridor filled with choking dust and an acrid smell of carbon smoke. Stones fell from the walls. There was a continuous, grinding vibration, an earthquake, and even as they ran, the castle felt as if it were changing shape. Gravity began to play tricks. The highest tower of the great keep must have been collapsing, and with it would come down most of the rest.

  They came to an intersection where their own footprints already marked the floor, Emily’s right big toe leaving the distinctive blood marks. They’d gone in a circle. Sax was completely winded, so he stopped and bent double with his hands on his knees, gasping in lungful after lungful of the dust-thick air.

  “Uncle Sax, the Russian carried me straight down from the helicopter on the roof. They shoved me in that horrible freezer. I’ve never seen the rest of the castle. I’m lost.”

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. We go,” he said, coughing and clutching at the gelatinous wound in his chest, “straight on, then take a left and an immediate right. There will be a long passageway. At the end we go left again, and the exit will be at the end of that. It’s not too terribly far. Run.”

  “Run without you?” Emily said.

  “Yes, go on. I’m done,” Sax said. “Take my shoes.” His spirit had been broken when the tower collapsed on all that human glory in the great hall. The future contained nothing worth living for. He had destroyed it all by his own infernal meddling.

  “Uncle Sax, knock it off. You’re just tired,” Emily said. She used such a patronizing tone of voice that Sax became annoyed, and when he became annoyed, he wanted to live again. If only so he could bear a grudge.

  “Right,” he said, and started to follow her again. The smoke was getting thicker in the hallways. Something crashed down nearby and shook the floor. Sax was dizzy. He placed his hand against the groaning wall.

  “Just weary,” he said. “I’m coming along.”

  There was a noise issuing from behind them, the way they had come.

  “Do you hear that?” Sax asked. It was a squeaking, scratching sound. As if a hundred rusty bicycles were approaching, dragging straw brooms.

  “What is that?” Emily heard it, too.

  “I hear,” he said—for he recognized the scuttling sound and knew it must be (as his mind was on, having recently mused upon his fear of rats, rats) rats—“rats.”

  “Rats?”

  “Rats. Lots of rats.”

  They tried to run, but loped and staggered and lurched along instead. There was a hot, ashy wind blowing now from behind them; there must have been a raging fire back there.

  They went as fast as they could but the rats were much faster. A tide of the things, the color of filth, came rushing down the corridor, from wall to wall, a foot deep, boiling like sewage. The rats flowed over them, leaping onto their clothes, tiny scratching paws tearing. Emily danced and screamed as they scrabbled over her bare feet. Sax fell and threw his hands up over his face with his knees drawn up to his chin, and he would have screamed if he could have opened his mouth but he dared not. He was buried in rats, buried beneath their squirming, rushing, screeching thousands, his wounds nail-dug, his hair tangled in braided tails and wriggling limbs. It was a foretaste of hell.

  Then the animals had passed, and the corridor contained only himself and Emily and a strew of twitching, crippled rats that had been mangled in the stampede.

  Emily was still on her feet, making a strange eeping noise in the back of her throat. She picked Sax up and threw her arm around him, and they kept on going along the route Sax described.

  By the time they emerged from the keep into the cold dawn air, they could hear the roar of the flames devouring the castle, advancing through the corridors like an all-consuming army. They made their way through the twists and turns outside the keep, and went beneath the inner gatehouse. Sax looked back. T
he great jutting fortification was gone. A pillar of flame tossed its shaggy head and roared where the keep had been, a triumphant fire dragon devouring its kill. Only the lesser tower atop which the helicopter had landed was still there. And even as they watched, the fortification slumped on its inward side, lost its shape, and plunged into the blaze. The helicopter fell after it and was consumed like a brittle insect.

  The sky was murky with first light, the glow of sunrise a wound in its belly. A mighty black fist of smoke rose up against it. Sax and Emily kept on moving, and five minutes later they passed beneath the portcullis into the road, and were no longer within the walls of Castle Mordstein.

  They were met by the men of the Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi, Special Branch, Fra Paolo at their head.

  The monks were all clad in cassocks and combat boots, strapped with bandoliers of ammunition, and laden with guns. On the narrow track was parked a Centauro wheeled tank destroyer and a field ambulance. It looked as if they’d gotten permission to invade Germany after all. At least fifty monks were standing there behind Paolo, who had been on the verge of advancing into the castle when Sax and Emily came reeling out of the gates. Sax collapsed and had to be carried to the ambulance. Paolo threw his arms around Emily, not caring how it looked to the rest of his men. Then he tenderly guided her to the medics as well.

  Inside the ambulance, however, it was Sax’s wounds that made Paolo weep. Emily kept herself out of the way while a monk examined her injuries; for his part, Paolo sobbed, his tears falling on Sax’s face, and held his hand and made everything difficult for the medical crew, most notably Fra Giuseppe, who was bustling around with his usual unflappable efficiency, minus the chanting from poor deceased Fra Dinckel. Another monk was handling that chore, and he had a faint voice and besides was up in the cab where they couldn’t hear him anyway.

  “Latin,” Sax croaked. “It’s all Greek to me.” Then he finally did faint, and properly, too.

  19

  * * *

  New York

  Sax had never so intensely looked forward to spring. He wanted to have done with the cold, harsh winter that had finally broken over the world. No more mountains of frozen garbage, no more filthy snow piling up around Gramercy Park. And with spring came his opportunity to get out of the accursed wheelchair.

  His health had not been good after the vampire had bitten him, of course, because anytime a deep, diseased bite wound is trodden upon by ten thousand rats, the injury will tend to get infected. But in addition, there had been vampire-related complications. He now had the saliva of two vampires in his system. This caused a certain amount of unpleasantness that eventually landed him, upon Paolo’s insistence, in the Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi’s hospice in Nimes, where he found himself one of only four patients in an eighty-bed ward.

  One of the other inmates died of injuries received when excavating a cellar hole in northern China that turned out to be the resting place of a nasty, subnormal ghoul; another one, a child of eight years, survived the injuries incurred when she was bitten by a hyena-shaped hunding in Tanzania. The girl was very cheerful about the whole ordeal and when she went home, Sax was lonely and bored. The remaining patient in the ward was Nilu. The order had transported her from the remains of the farm in Petit-Grünenwald to the hospital, and she had recovered steadily. Fra Giu’s field bloodletting technique was apparently impeccable. But Nilu was very quiet.

  Paolo hung about to keep him company when he could. They had long conversations about anything except vampires. Paolo told Sax of the aftermath of the adventure. Castle Mordstein was ruined, and even the lower castle was badly damaged by the tons of rubble that had fallen over the cliff. The official story, as disseminated by the authorities, concerned an electrical fire that had consumed the luckily uninhabited landmark. The monks, reduced to fire-control duty, later examined the wreckage and found a few articles of astonishing worth that had survived the inferno, although they found far more evidence of things lost forever. They never found any corpses. The destruction had simply been too complete. And there was no way to shift all the rubble, because there was nowhere to put it.

  Nilu gained strength. Eventually she began to speak. Sax learned she was worried because she had no future.

  “That monster took my life away,” she confessed to him one evening.

  “I know the feeling,” he said.

  “I have lost my dreams,” she added. “I still have nightmares, but I do not mean those dreams. I mean my hope for the future.”

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” Sax said, flapping his hand as much as the intravenous drip would allow. “You’re young and beautiful, and very special things happen to people who survive vampire attacks. Once the vampire is destroyed, you get a whole new life.” He couldn’t believe he was saying this. It sounded like he’d break into song next.

  “The monster killed my aatma, my soul.”

  “That, young lady, is the one thing they cannot do. It’s what they hate most about human beings, I think. We have all the soul in the world and they cannot extinguish it. That’s why vampires don’t make art, write music or poetry. They can’t mourn their dead because they are never properly alive. All they can do is exist. They can’t be. Not like us. Not like you. You’ll see.”

  The following evening, Nilu picked up the conversation again. “I have been thinking about what you said. You are correct, I still have my soul or I could not grieve.” But her delicate features were furrowed with worry.

  “You can tell me anything, you know,” Sax offered. “The only secrets I can’t keep are my own.”

  “I can’t go back into making films,” Nilu said, after a long, thoughtful pause. “I don’t know what to do with myself after this. I care nothing for my ambition any longer.”

  “Ah,” said Sax, and felt the old mercenary spirit rise within him. “They haven’t told you, I take it, about the hush money.”

  “Quiet money?”

  “Money to be quiet, precisely. You see, the Vatican keeps an insurance account against such situations as yours. They’ll pay you an annuity of something like twenty-five thousand euros a year for the rest of your life to remain silent about your ordeal. Don’t take their first offer—it’s always terribly low.”

  Nilu nodded thoughtfully, and thereafter her spirits improved. Money might be the root of all evil, but it’s also the source of most meals.

  Nilu, in turn, had touched on something that gnawed at Sax himself.

  His own fire had gone out. He wasn’t interested in antiques anymore. Something inside him had broken. The acquisitive urge was gone. As she improved, Sax was failing.

  His business, in any case, did well enough without him. Word had gotten out that he’d nearly been killed in another one of his shadowy escapades. It gave him tremendous cachet. Many of his clients thought he was secretly breaking up the last of the Nazi hoards. Others believed him to be a spy along the lines of Jim Thompson—the CIA agent, silk merchant, and man of the world who lived in Thailand and one day disappeared in the Malaysian jungle. That was closer to the truth: Sax had known the man, and he knew what had happened to him. Vampires, of course. Thompson wasn’t an ordinary CIA agent, after all. A bit of the special branch himself. And a very fine decorator. Sax still had a small Cambodian bronze from him.

  In any case, nobody believed Sax’s story that he’d fallen down a manhole in Paris, although they were amused by the double entendre. But they couldn’t visit him at the hospital, either. So he became despondent while the vampire fever gradually overtook him, his health failed, and he came to understand that he was going to die, not in a spectacular show of destruction, but in bed like the old desiccated trout he was. Nilu was well enough to walk, at last, and she came around to Sax’s bedside on her last day and put her hands on his feet and lowered her head to them and said, “Thank you, Uncle,” and then she was bundled o
ff back to India. Sax wept deliciously with self-pity that day.

  Sax’s condition steadily worsened. Weeks crawled past with no improvement. He was isolated. Emily was busy at home, Paolo away on some business for the order. Sax’s only company was the funereal monks who worked at the hospital. Then Paolo returned with Fra Giu. Sax found he was ridiculously happy to see the young man again, although he didn’t like the worried look in Fra Giu’s eyes. There was something on Paolo’s mind, but he didn’t mention it until the older monk was out of the ward.

  “How is your niece?”

  “Emily? Haven’t you spoken with her?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Paolo said, and reddened. Sax realized the two of them had never been at his bedside at the same time, like Superman and Clark Kent.

  “If you can face vampires, surely you can talk to an American woman without my assistance.”

  “I nearly— The temptation. I can’t,” Paolo said. “I haven’t recovered yet. Please convey my best wishes to her.”

  “Tell her yourself,” Sax said. “She said she’s coming here soon.”

  “I am ashamed.”

  “Did you make advances upon her?” Sax asked, highly amused despite the discomfort of his fading health.

  “No, I did not,” Paolo said.

  “You probably should have. I’ll convey your apologies,” Sax said. “But only if I don’t die first.”

  Fra Giu later explained to Sax that he didn’t need to die, but he might very well die, and what first needed to be done was a proper bloodletting. It was the same procedure done on Nilu, but with a much better transfusion system and sterile conditions. Sax had a 50 percent chance of surviving, depending on how much of the infected vampire matter was in his bloodstream.