The feet were large and heavy, as were the hands. But the hands were stranger still, for the dead man’s fingers were of a curious length, even the thumb and the little finger, both of which were almost as long as the ring finger. And Varanus also noted with great confusion that the size of each digit did not diminish in length quite so rapidly as it should have. The body’s proportions were more like those of an ape than a man.
Whatever deformity had struck this man, it had distorted the tips of his finger bones as well. While the flesh had gone, it seemed the man’s nails had grown backward sometime during his life, fusing with the bone—or perhaps the opposite was true, and spurs of bone had grown outward to replace the nails. In any case, long protrusions now jutted out from the tops of the skeleton’s fingertips, almost in the manner of.…
“Claws, liebchen,” Korbinian murmured in her ear. “They almost appear to be claws, do they not?”
“Impossible,” Varanus whispered back, but the observation, and in particular the way Korbinian said it, made her shiver.
Varanus turned to examine her dead ancestor’s face, and his skull leered back at her with its eternal grin. Here too the deformity had made itself known, for the skull was thick and heavy, especially in the brow and the jaw.
How hideous a man he must have been in life, Varanus thought. Not only was the skull overlarge and ill-proportioned, but as Varanus leaned in for a closer examination, she saw that both the upper and lower jaw had partly grown outward, forward from the skull.
No doubt the result of excessive inbreeding. There could be no other explanation.
As she leaned down to better examine this peculiarity of the jaw, Varanus had occasion to notice the skeleton’s teeth. What she should have noticed first was the very strength of the teeth, for they were large, whole, and set almost perfectly in the mouth—quite a feat for the time when the man had lived. But while this observation registered in some part of Varanus’s mind, it was cast aside in favor of something else, something that in an instant made Varanus’s stomach clench with revulsion.
The teeth, though strong, had grown incorrectly, like the rest of the body. They were long as well as thick, and they all ended variously in points or sharp edges, like incisors or canine teeth. Such a thing must have been a deformity, Varanus thought: the result of a disease of the mouth or ill treatment. And yet, they could only have occurred naturally, for they were arrayed in a manner too uniform and regular, each tooth sized and shaped to suit its place in the mouth.
For one moment, Varanus thought of Alfonse des Louveteaux and of how he had looked on the night she had killed him. She thought of the sharp teeth inside his mouth when he had smiled.
Fangs.
She remembered the pain of his long fingernails when they had torn through her flesh.
Claws.
And for one moment she allowed herself to entertain the horrible thought, the dreadful realization, that the skeleton of the late John Varanus seemed the perfect transition, the physiological middle-ground, between Alfonse des Louveteaux and the monstrosities that he and his cult had worshipped.
The missing link between beast and man.
Varanus felt sick. She tried to look away from the offending parts of the body, but wherever her eyes turned, they fell upon another malformed piece that offered such suggestions as she could not allow herself to think upon. For in truth, the whole body was nothing but one great suggestion, a collective insinuation about the man and about the beasts and about the connection between the two: a connection that Varanus now saw had tainted her family as well, for the body before her was no profane des Louveteaux, but a Varanus. The truth of it was written in the stone above the sarcophagus and in the bones that lay within.
“It cannot be…” Varanus said, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “It cannot be.… It is impossible.…”
“Liebchen,” she heard Korbinian say.
“Impossible…” Varanus repeated.
She slowly felt all sense of reason slipping away, like sand flowing through her fingers. She wanted to shake herself, to right herself, to turn her thoughts to something—anything!—other than the churning morass of ideas that now circled in her mind. But she could not. She stood and stared and mumbled to herself, even as a little voice inside of her shouted for her to stop!
“Liebchen!” Korbinian repeated, his voice a yell that no one else could hear. “Liebchen, stop this! You are stronger than this!”
Varanus felt him grab her by the arms and turn her toward him. She looked up into his eyes, shuddering in his grasp, and in their warmth she felt the dizzying seduction of madness slowly slip away. It was only a little, but it was enough.
“Korbinian, my love,” she whispered, “do you see what I see?”
“Yes,” Korbinian said.
Varanus turned her gaze back toward the body.
“It is an abomination,” she said. “It is a lie! It must be a lie!”
“It is the truth, liebchen,” Korbinian said. “For you have seen it with your own eyes. Do they deceive you?”
Varanus stared at the skull, which still sat bathed in the light of her lantern, smiling at her with its toothy grin.
“I wish to God they did,” she confessed. “I do not understand it.” Then she swallowed and said, “I do not wish to understand it.”
“You must, liebchen!” Korbinian replied in earnest, gripping Varanus’s arms tightly. “You must!”
“No, I cannot!” Varanus insisted.
“You must!” Korbinian shouted, gripping her arms even tighter as he turned her by force toward the body, to the hideous thing that was both man and monster, both real and unthinkable, both alien and her own kin. “Look upon it and know what it is!”
Varanus struggled against him, fighting as he forced her down: down toward the pile of bones, down toward the leering skull and its rows of teeth, down toward the empty eye sockets that stared at her as surely as if they still held eyes. For they knew her, these dead bones. They knew her as one of their own, just as she knew them, and they meant to claim her, to take her in the grasp of their blasphemy and drag her into the abyss.
“You’re hurting me!” she cried.
“But liebchen,” Korbinian said, speaking to her from where he stood on the other side of the sarcophagus, “I am not touching you.”
Varanus shivered and gasped, choking for air she did not need. Her mouth tasted something bitter. Her nose smelled corruption and ashes.
It was the adrenaline.
Slowly she looked down and saw that it was her own hands gripping her arms so painfully. She suddenly found that she could not let go, despite the pain she felt from her own overpowering grasp.
“Help…” she pleaded.
Korbinian was at her side in a flash, so swiftly that she did not even see him move. Gently, he placed his hands upon hers and pulled them away from her arms, first one finger, then another, until finally Varanus let go.
Stroking her cheek, he asked, almost sadly, “Liebchen, why would you imagine that I would hurt you? You know that I would never do such a thing.”
Varanus slowly rested her head against his chest and felt him envelop her in his arms. So gentle and tender. He would never have harmed her. Truly, she had danced upon the edge of madness to have envisioned such a thing. And it frightened her to have done so.
She tried to look at the offending thing in the sarcophagus, but she could not. Pulling away from Korbinian, she reached out blindly and grabbed the lantern.
“I cannot think on this,” she said softly. “Not after all that has been revealed to me since my coming here. I cannot bear to infer what such a revelation means, and yet my thoughts will not allow me to do otherwise.”
Korbinian pulled her into his arms again and softly kissed her hair, just as he had done when he was alive and she was upset.
“Then put it out of your mind, liebchen,” he said. “Set it aside until some other time. I will be the keeper of it and will not let you
forget it forever.”
“I wish that you would,” Varanus said. “I wish that such a thing were possible.”
But she could set it aside in some dark corner of her memory. For it was like a file among so many other files. Now it sat open upon the desk of her mind. It needed to be placed away somewhere safe, in some cabinet of thoughts where it would not readily spring to light.
Thoughts could be organized, compartmentalized. Lord Iosef had shown her how. The older Shashavani used it to fend off the madness of knowing too much. Why shouldn’t she do the same?
“You will not hide it forever,” Korbinian told her, gazing into her eyes. “Not something like this. It will haunt you, and you know that. In your quiet moments, in your unbidden thoughts, it will be there. You cannot hide it, nor can you hide from it. Not forever.”
“Not forever,” Varanus said. “But for now. By God, I beg not to think on it for now.”
“Anything interesting?” Ekaterine called to her.
Varanus jumped, startled, and looked over her shoulder. Korbinian was gone, and she saw Ekaterine walking toward her, cheery as ever.
“You’ve been here a while,” Ekaterine added. “Something quite exciting?”
“No,” Varanus said quickly.
She grabbed the corner of the sarcophagus lid and quickly pulled it back into place, sealing away the ill-formed creature reposed within.
“Oh?” Ekaterine asked.
Varanus forced a smile and shrugged.
“The inscription says he died in battle,” she said, “but it is empty. I thought it was odd.”
“Another one gone beneath the earth, eh?” Ekaterine asked. “No doubt meeting his maker in the soil of some foreign field.” She looked at the inscription above the sarcophagus. “’Towton,’” she read. “Hmm, sounds terribly exotic. It’s probably in Kent.”
Varanus sighed and shook her head, focusing her thoughts on Ekaterine: her cheery smile, her delighted laugh, her insufferable insistence that the English were strange and foreign. And slowly, with effort, she felt her thoughts of Ekaterine flow over and supersede the memory of what she had seen.
“You just like the word ‘Kent’, don’t you?” Varanus asked.
Ekaterine nodded excitedly and said, “Yes! It’s like ‘bustle’! Such an absurd word!”
“I suppose it is,” Varanus said.
“Did you know,” Ekaterine asked, taking Varanus by the arm, “that these catacombs go deeper still?”
“What?”
“It’s true,” Ekaterine said. She pointed toward the far end of the hall, which now sat in darkness. “There is a passage at that end with steps leading down into God knows where! I cannot imagine why someone would want to dig even deeper in this place, and yet they did so!”
Varanus felt a creeping dread slowly rising through her. Deep places put her in mind of France, of the night of her son’s kidnapping, of the cavern beneath the des Louveteaux house filled with men and with beasts that resembled—
No! she shouted inside her mind, as the jumble of recent and not so recent memories began to surface.
“I thought we could investigate,” Ekaterine said, excited at the idea.
Varanus made a face at the thought and then quickly smiled to counteract it.
“No,” she said, “I think we have had enough stomping about in old tombs for one day. Besides, it will have grown late by now. God knows what hour it is, and I forgot to bring a watch.”
Ekaterine sighed, a little disappointed, but replied:
“You are right. If we miss dinner, there shall be Hell to pay for it. Well…Cousin Maud at any rate.”
“Isn’t that rather the same thing?” Varanus asked.
She exchanged a laugh with Ekaterine, and the two of them walked back toward the priory and the tunnels. As she went, Varanus felt a sense of unease fall across her like a shadow. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and for a moment she felt an almost overwhelming compulsion to turn around and stare into the darkness.
It was irrational nonsense. The place was getting to her, and that realization alone was enough to make her ignore the crazed warnings of her senses.
She did not turn even when she fancied she heard the sounds of something hard scraping on stone. It was a faint fragment of a noise, and anyway Ekaterine did not hear it, so it could not have been true.
But at the top of the stairs, the whispered voices in her mind finally won her over, and she glanced back for a single parting look. She almost regretted it, for at her first glance, she half-fancied she saw, there in the looming darkness, two spots of pale blue glistening in the reflected light.
Varanus blinked, and when she opened her eyes again, they were gone.
Damn my mind for playing tricks, she thought as she walked back through the priory crypt. An imagination unchecked is a horrible thing and a traitor too.
Chapter Twenty-One
London
Luka spent the night in a cell. With nothing else to do, he slept, though only lightly. Though he still walked in the shadow of death, he was Shashavani and could make due with but little rest. He was impatient to be released, which would not happen until daytime. But he could not imagine there would be any impediment. The men had attacked him without cause. They had admitted as much. And in defending himself, he had still avoided killing them. That had been a significant concession on his part. Hopefully, the police would appreciate it as such.
When morning arrived, he was not released. Instead, men came and began asking him questions that had no discernable purpose to him. Where he lived, what he did, how long he had resided in London—his accent being foreign, they assumed he was not native born. In particular, they asked about his whereabouts on certain nights over the past month. Luka knew what they were after, and he was infuriated by the insinuation.
He gave his answers carefully and ambiguously: drunk in a tavern here, in a dosshouse there. Places where he hoped men of his description might have been seen. He could not tell the truth. That might lead the police to investigate Osborne Court, which he could not allow.
The police went away dissatisfied, and he was put back in his cell for the night. Luka was irritated and impatient. He had expected to be set free by now, yet still he was locked up. In their raving, the drunks had managed to turn the suspicion of the law against him. It was probably all routine—there was no telling how many men they had investigated for the crimes—but in that routine, Luka’s valuable time was being wasted. He had far more important things to do than convince the police he was innocent of a crime he’d had nothing to do with in the first place.
Perhaps he should have killed the drunks after all. He tried to be a man of peace, but life continued to remind him that violence was the ultimate remover of obstacles.
* * * *
The following morning, Luka awoke from a mild slumber, aware that something was afoot. He felt tension in the air. Something had happened, but no one felt the need to explain the matter to him, and he felt no need inquire. If it was important, he would hear word of it before long. The more immediate matter was when he would be granted his freedom, and the perpetual delay continued to annoy him.
But in the afternoon, a man came to visit him in his cell. It was one of the inspectors who had interrogated him the day before, a heavyset man with a moustache and sidewhiskers.
“Open the door,” the inspector said to the guard on duty. “Let him out.”
Luka stood and brushed himself off. When the door had been opened, he walked into the corridor and said:
“Good day, Inspector. More questions for me?”
“No,” the inspector said. “You’re to be released. You’re not our man.”
About damn time, Luka thought. It had taken them long enough to realize that.
“What finally made it clear?” he asked. “The fact that I was not in Whitechapel on the nights of the murders?”
“We have no proof of that, Mister Lucas,” the inspector said. “You ha
ve proven nothing to my satisfaction.”
Luka was not surprised. Lacking the truth, his alibis had been extremely frail.
“What then?” he asked.
The inspector paused for a moment, then he shrugged and said, “You will learn it from the papers soon enough. The killer struck again last night, while you were here. So obviously it was not you.”
Luka frowned and studied the inspector carefully. It was a horrible thing to make a joke of. And, he realized, the man was not joking.
“I see,” he said. “Dear God, that is horrible.”
“Horrible indeed,” the inspector said.
“I am pleased for my freedom, but I wish it had come under other circumstances,” Luka added. He put his hands in his pockets, his face still set in a scowl at the thought of it. Looking at the inspector he said, “But surely you don’t need to be here for my release. Why have you come if not to question me further?”
“To satisfy a point of curiosity,” the inspector said, “before you vanish into the underbelly of the city—which I have no doubt you will do. Tell me, when those men attacked you, you were armed with two pistols.”
“Yes,” Luka said. “Legally purchased and owned.”
“Of course,” the inspector said, though he sounded a little dubious about it. “Surely you knew those men meant to kill you.”
Luka shrugged and replied, “Well, I knew that they thought I was a Jew, and they thought I was the killer, and they were drunk, so I suppose my death was not an unlikely outcome if they had their way.”
“But you did not shoot them,” the inspector said. “Why? In the dead of night? You likely could have escaped without being caught. You must have thought of it.”
“I did,” Luka said. He shrugged. “But they were armed with firsts and sticks, and shooting them did not seem sporting. Again, you will recognize that I did not kill them, even when they were in my power. That must speak for something.”
“It does,” the inspector said. “Hence my curiosity.”
A Cautionary Tale for Young Vampires Page 29