by Sarah Rayne
Dear God, have I killed him? thought Hilary, hesitating. Please don’t let me have killed him. Self-defence, Sister Hilary? Was that last blow necessary? I can’t wait to decide. I’ll confess it all later. I’ll thrash it out with Reverend Mother, with the bishop, with the Pope if necessary, but please God, please Mary and all the Saints, let me get away!
She dragged her clothes back into place and was across the room in three steps. The dwarf lay where he had fallen, and Hilary saw with a surge of triumph that the creature’s trousers still gaped open, and that his genitals were hanging out, already an angry dull crimson where she had kicked him. Good! thought Hilary viciously, and in the same breath: self-defence.
She slipped through the door, closing it quietly behind her and went out into the quadrangle.
This was the dangerous part, because if she met anyone now she would certainly be captured again. But if she could reach the far side of the castle, she would be able to melt into the mountainside. She sent up another prayer of thanks for the darkness.
She stood for a moment, trying to get her bearings, seeing that the bulk of the castle was directly ahead of her, knowing she must somehow get beyond it and down the mountain track to the road. And then what? I can’t think. I might have to walk for hours until I find a farmhouse or a village or somewhere I can raise help. The word Debreczen dropped into her mind. Debreczen and Michael. What had the inn been called – The Red Angel, was it? Could I find it? Oh dear God, could I possibly get to Debreczen and Michael? Or could I find a telephone and ring him? What about money? Could she reverse the charges? What did they call that out here? Was her sparse German up to asking for a reverse-charge call?
The thought of Michael was so enormously warming that Hilary thought she would not care if she had to walk until she dropped from exhaustion if it meant reaching him.
She went across the courtyard and under the curving stones of one of the arches, the soft-soled shoes making no sound at all.
And then she was at the side of the castle, and she was in the deep shadow it cast. There was a kind of narrow passage between the blackened wall of Csejthe and a long, low building. Stable block? Yes, quite possibly. There was a rather weatherbeaten door, wide enough to admit a car, and it was partly open.
Beyond the half-open door, in the thick shadows of the place that once had housed horses, was the dented BMW.
And someone had changed the punctured wheel.
It was another of those moments when you suspended logic and when you went by blind instinct. Hilary was distantly aware of thinking that one of the servants must have changed the wheel and driven the car up here. They would not have dared to leave it on the road where it might have attracted attention.
Her heart was thudding painfully as she sped down the narrow walkway and reached for the driver’s door, and tiny beads of sweat were trickling between her shoulder-blades. The keys? Please God, if ever I prayed to You, I am praying now. Let the keys be here. Let whoever drove it up here have left the keys inside.
She opened the door gently, wincing at the click it made. There was the sudden reassuring scent of good leather. German technology. Please God, the keys . . .
And there, swinging from the ignition with an air that was almost jaunty, were the keys.
As Hilary gunned the engine and drove out of the stable block and straight down the mountain path, she was murmuring aloud the words of the Deo gratias.
Chapter Fifteen
Michael was seated on his own in the coffee room, rather morosely drinking brandy and turning over various plans, when he heard the purr of the BMW.
Hilary.
He was out of the coffee room at once; grasping at the wall for ballast, and then snatching at the fastening of the outside door. Cold night air streamed in, mingling with the petrol fumes of the car. Michael had a brief, vivid vision of how the exhaust fumes would look: smoke like thin fog pouring into the dark night. And then a voice said, ‘Michael!’ and Hilary tumbled across the paved yard and fell straight into his arms.
She was apparently composed, but she was dreadfully cold. Michael tightened his hold on her instinctively, and there was a moment when his body betrayed him, responding with sudden hard urgency. He put her from him, gripping her hands, trying to hear, trying to sense – oh God, let me have my sight just for five minutes! – trying to know what was wrong.
She was not precisely crying but as her cheek brushed his he felt tears. His mind registered the lack of the brief veil she had always worn. She is dressed ordinarily. This is the person existing beneath the religious armour. He set his own guard firmly back in place and turned as he heard Tobias bustling out, exclaiming to know what had happened, ushering them both inside and calling for hot coffee laced with brandy, and the preparing of a room.
Michael said, in a voice that he barely recognised as his own, ‘Tobias, there is no need for histrionics. The lady is simply exhausted and cold . . .’
At his side, Hilary said, ‘That’s true. A small crash in the car . . .’ Sick dizziness engulfed her, and she staggered and half fell against Michael.
‘And some food if you would be so kind,’ said Michael, his arm about her again, and Tobias, tutting at the terrible people in the world who could crash into a lady’s car and leave her to drive on shaken and distressed, went off into the kitchens.
Hilary said, ‘I should love something to eat.’
‘Would you like to wash and tidy up first?’
‘Oh – could I . . .?’
‘My room’s upstairs,’ said Michael, groping in his jacket pocket for the key. ‘Number Four.’
‘Comb and hairbrush?’
‘Vanity, Sister Hilary?’ He felt the brief, answering smile, but he only said, ‘Comb and hairbrush and anything else you want are there. Use whatever you need. The water will be hot if you want to take a shower. And then come back here and tell me everything.’ He reached for her hands. ‘Should I get a doctor? The police?’
‘I – no.’
‘Truly, Hilary?’
‘Truly, Michael.’
‘All right. Shall I come up with you?’
He caught her momentary hesitation, but in the same heartbeat, she said, ‘No, I shall be all right.’
‘Come back quickly.’
‘You will – be here?’
‘I will be here.’
She looked at him, and for a moment almost believed that the vividly blue eyes could see. Intimacy, warm and strong sprang up, and then Hilary released her hands and went swiftly up the stairs.
The water in the tiny bathroom adjoining Michael’s room was piping hot. Hilary threw off her clothes and stepped into the shower cubicle, soaping herself vigorously with Michael’s soap. The shower was something of a novelty after the cold stone-floored bathrooms of St Luke’s where the water was hardly ever more than lukewarm and there were cracks in the porcelain.
The hot spray felt good. It stung her skin with hundreds of tiny needlepoints, scouring it of Janos’s fumbling hands, sluicing away the despair and the dank evil of the castle. The soap smelt expensive. There was a plastic bottle of shampoo on the ledge, and Hilary hesitated and then shook out a caramel-scented handful. After the carbolic and lye soap of the convent, it felt sinfully luxurious. She concentrated on the good soap and the cleansing water, and on getting dry on the huge, thick towels left on a warm brass rail.
It was going to be very difficult to douse that intimacy that had sprung up downstairs. Was it only because I fell into his arms, cold and exhausted? Was it – this was disconcerting – was it because I am no longer dressed as a religeuse? Oh, face it, said Hilary to Hilary, the intimacy has been there for some time now. It will have to be resisted.
But when Michael had pulled her against him, he had felt strong and warm . . . There had been the faint masculine scents of aftershave and clean hair . . . And now I am using his towels and his soap . . . Oh God, I must stop this!
She towelled her hair vigorously and brushed it into sha
pe, frowning in the mirror. It curled into little damp curls, the colour somewhere between auburn and chestnut. She could just remember her mother having the same colouring. She and Sarah had inherited it. It had been all either of them had had left of their mother.
She thought that on the whole she did not look so bad. She was pale and there were dark smudges beneath her eyes, but considering everything, it was not bad. Vanity again, Sister Hilary?
Warmth and light met her as she entered the coffee room. The innkeeper – Tobias was it? – was setting down a bowl of steaming soup on a hastily laid table. Hilary could smell the rich fragrance. There was a platter of thick crusty bread and butter alongside.
‘And I have brought for you some of our best pâté,’ said Tobias, indicating a generous wedge of smooth, creamy pâté, flanked with tomatoes and cucumber. ‘Together with smoked cheese and a terrine of broccoli. Here is rye bread – very sustaining. And here –’ another of the huge beams – ‘one of my wife’s apricot strudels.’
‘It looks lovely,’ said Hilary, sitting down at the table, suddenly conscious of ravenous hunger. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘If you would wish for something more – perhaps a hot meal – my wife could prepare an omelette – ham, cheese – it would be no trouble. I regret we have not the hot dishes served earlier—’
‘Truly this will be more than sufficient,’ said Hilary. ‘It is very kind of you to go to such trouble at this time of night.’
She glanced across at Michael, who seemed to pick up her thoughts. He stood up, and said, ‘We are indebted to you, Tobias.’ There was the rustle of paper money. ‘And if we could be undisturbed for a while? The lady will wish to recover from her ordeal . . .’ Hilary saw the note slide effortlessly, unembarrassingly from Michael’s hand to Tobias’s. Sympathetic understanding flowed from Tobias, and he said, with immense dignity: ‘I do not expect any guests to arrive at this late hour, Herr Devlin. Already it is close to eleven o’clock. Everyone is in the bar . . .’ A shrug. ‘A beerdrinking competition, you understand. Vulgar songs and laughter, but all good for business.’ He pointed to the door. ‘There is a key to this room. I shall leave it on the inside for you.’ He glanced from Hilary to Michael. ‘Also I shall leave the brandy decanter,’ he said, and made good his exit.
The coffee room was warm and safe. Even when the fire burned up, the shadows it sent across the panelled walls and the oak-beamed ceiling were no longer the surreal nightmare phantoms that had chased her down the treacherous mountain path. Hilary, drinking the soup, which turned out to be mushroom and very good indeed, felt the cold knot of panic and terror dissolve a little.
Michael sat opposite to her, the fingers of one hand curled loosely about the stem of his brandy glass. The firelight had turned his dark hair to copper and his eyes were in shadow. His eyes . . . He felt cautiously for the brandy decanter and there was the chink of glass against glass, and the sound of liquid being poured. ‘Enough?’
‘Dear God, yes.’ Sister Veronica would have had a fit at the thought of a nun swigging brandy, but Hilary was still icy cold and the brandy could surely be regarded as medicinal. Didn’t people say that in fun? Purely medicinal, they said, accepting huge measures of brandy and whisky.
And the unaccustomed spirit set up a little core of warmth deep inside her. It was possible to sit up a little straighter, and to arrange her thoughts. When Michael said, ‘And now tell me all about it,’ Hilary took a deep breath and began to speak.
The fire had burned lower, and the level in the decanter had sunk considerably by the time Hilary stopped speaking. They had moved from the table and the remains of Tobias’s excellent supper, and were sitting before the fire on a small settle with faded chintz covers.
Hilary sipped the brandy in her glass, occasionally darting a look at Michael’s face. It was impossible to know what he was thinking. Once or twice he had frowned. Once or twice he had interposed a brief question, not disturbing the flow of her story, simply asking for clarification. Where were you then? Was that before or after you saw the girl killed? Hilary, unaware that Michael had slid almost automatically into the interviewer’s persona where you did not interrupt the subject’s concentration but simply led him or her forwards, responded easily.
She had no way of knowing how he had received her story. Even to her own ears it sounded too extraordinary for belief. It sounded like something out of – what did they call it? – pulp fiction. I’m living in the pages of a paperback novel. Did he believe me? His eyes are still in shadow, and even if they were not . . . She suddenly ached to reach out and touch the untidy black hair.
Michael had listened intently to the remarkable tale, thinking that any other woman would have laid stress on the horror and the fear, and would certainly have described her emotions. I was terrified, I was appalled. I have never felt so frightened.
Every other woman in the world would unconsciously have asked for praise over the escape from the creature, Janos: wasn’t I clever? Wasn’t I brave?
Hilary told the story exactly as it had happened, clearly and chronologically, without back-tracking because a bit had been missed, which so many people did.
And she told it unemotionally. This is what happened. This is what he, they, the castle, looked like. This is what they did to me. When she described the candlelit table and the corpse-creatures, Michael made an abrupt gesture and then was silent.
The half-hour after midnight was chiming softly somewhere when she finished speaking. Michael was distantly aware that the revelries from the bar – Tobias’s beer-drinking contest – had long since stopped. The inn’s old beams creaked gently and rather comfortingly as they expanded in the heat, and once a log fell apart in the hearth, sending showers of sparks cascading upwards.
But there were no other sounds. They were shut into a small warm circle of firelight and all about them the inn and its occupants slept.
Michael said, at last, ‘Those corpse-creatures—’
‘Yes?’ This is it, Hilary thought. He can’t believe any of it. It was absurd to think he could. He’ll start to talk about the car crashing, he’ll ask whether I might have hit my head on the windscreen. He’ll be gentle and kind but rather sorry for me and I shan’t be able to bear it.
Michael said, ‘I saw them as well,’ and Hilary’s heart leapt. She turned her head to look at him, and said carefully:
‘Truly?’
‘Yes. Just before I was blinded. It must have been the same castle . . . Yes, of course it must. About an hour’s drive from here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then whatever hit me, hit you,’ said Michael, slowly.
‘Janos—’
‘Yes. The castle was in ruins,’ he said, frowning in an effort of memory. ‘Smoke-blackened – yes, I remember that! Inside was a long table – the kind you’d see in mock-ups of medieval banquets . . .?’
‘Yes.’ Hilary’s hands were clenched so hard that the knuckles were white. She stared at him, and Michael said:
‘And the shrivelled creatures seated around it . . .’ He stopped. ‘I thought they were dead,’ he said abruptly. ‘I thought they were mummies, that there must be some kind of air exclusion, a vacuum . . . Later I thought it was an hallucination,’ he said, softly.
‘They were alive,’ said Hilary, and shivered. ‘They killed the girl for her blood and – smeared it over their skins.’ She stopped, staring into the golden depths of the brandy in her glass. ‘And they were strengthened because of it,’ said Hilary, and heard with horror the black echo: and the Spirit of the Holy Ghost was upon them. ‘I saw it happen,’ she said a bit too loudly.
Michael said, thoughtfully, ‘Something in the blood that – that rejuvenates them? No, it’s too far-fetched for words.’
‘What about the other way round?’ said Hilary. ‘Something in them that the blood rejuvenates.’
‘Some obscure medical condition? That’s shrewd of you,’ said Michael. ‘But there’s a third possibility: simply that t
hey believe the blood rejuvenates them.’
‘I don’t . . . oh, of course. Self-hypnosis.’
‘Stranger things have been heard of. You ought to know. Aren’t there proven cases of stigmata appearing on religious fanatics? People who concentrate so obsessively on Christ’s wounds on the cross that they actually bleed from the hands and feet?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Hilary tried to concentrate. ‘Those corpsethings believe that the blood makes them live on. And they believe it so strongly that it has some effect. It couldn’t be true, of course,’ she said, half to herself, as if arguing the matter out. ‘No, of course, it couldn’t.’
‘Life through the blood? The original Dracula myth?’
‘Didn’t Bram Stoker base Dracula on an actual person?’ said Hilary, thoughtfully.
‘Vlad the Impaler, yes, it’s the modern theory. A fourteenth- or fifteenth-century feudal baron with a remarkably sadistic nature. But what if . . .’ Michael stopped, and gestured impatiently for the brandy decanter again. ‘This may very well be in vino veritas,’ he said, after Hilary had poured a modest measure into both their glasses, ‘and I have the feeling there are going to be an awful number of “what ifs” before we’re through. But what if this – this blood ritual dates back several hundred years? What if it’s been going on quietly all by itself undiscovered? Maybe for centuries? What if, once upon a time, someone out here believed that immersing in blood could bestow unnaturally long life . . .’ He stopped again and grinned self-consciously. ‘You notice I jib at the word “immortality”?’
‘I do. I like the “once upon a time”, though.’
‘What if,’ said Michael, ‘Stoker stumbled across the something – the someone?’
‘Did he travel out here?’
‘I don’t know. He must have done. To have written Dracula he must have seen the terrain. It’s the kind of thing we could easily find out.’ He relapsed into frowning silence, and Hilary contributed a ‘what if’ on her own account.
‘What if Stoker came across the castle and those creatures and their claim to – immortality? That was your next logical thought, wasn’t it?’