The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  Linz was heading, David now knew, for the grand escalier, and bloody footprints on the marble floors confirmed it.

  As did his rasping cry from below-“Rigaud! For Christ’s sake, Rigaud!”

  But when David ran past the hall where Rigaud had last been seen, his door was firmly shut and there was no light emanating from under it.

  At the top of the staircase, David caught a glimpse of Linz’s black slippers, racing around the bottom of the stairs and off toward the armor hall. He was still trying to call out, but his voice was hoarse and barely carried.

  David lunged down the stairs, nearly losing his balance on a smear of wet blood, before skidding into the entry hall and pivoting.

  He couldn’t see Linz anymore, but he knew which way he’d gone, and he ran after him, the short sword still clutched in his hand, as something long and sharp suddenly grazed his shoulder and thwanged into the wooden frame of the door.

  Linz was standing halfway down the hall, doubled over from throwing the spear, huffing and puffing with his hands on his knees. But his face was contorted with rage, his eyes bulging, and his thatch of brown hair, shorn close on the sides, sweeping low over his forehead. His left arm was shaking, as if from a palsy, and David had the ghastly impression that he had indeed seen this face before.

  And Ascanio had said: You know who he is, don’t you?

  Linz cursed and whirled around, grabbing a battle-axe and shield from the wall. His robe flapping open, and the Medusa swinging on its chain, he was done with running and advanced on David.

  “ Sie denken, sie konnen mich toten? ”-You think you can kill me?-he challenged, as David deftly dodged the first swing of the axe. David backed up, and the next swing crashed into a suit of armor, knocking it off its pedestal and sending the pieces careening across the floor.

  David tried to parry with the short sword, but Linz banged it aside with a shove from the shield. By the moonlight pouring in from the windows, David could see the fury in his eyes, and the manic gleam

  … of pleasure.

  “ Niemand kann mich toten! ”-No one can kill me!-he exulted.

  Linz rushed at him, the shield raised, trying to knock him off his feet, but David dodged the attack and the axe crashed into another suit of armor.

  The man was breathing hard, the weapon was heavy, and David stepped back as Linz turned again, like a maddened bull, searching for his enemy.

  “ Ich will tausend Jahre leben! ” he exploded-I will live a thousand years!-and the very marrow in David’s bones froze.

  It was the voice he had heard in newsreels, scratchy and amplified and bursting with hate. It was the face, with its blazing eyes and chin raised in defiance, that had inflamed a nation and engulfed the world in war. The madman who had conjured up the fires of the Holocaust.

  In that instant, David understood just what creature had managed to slink from its bunker in Berlin to claim the gift of immortality. And why, for fear that his courage might fail him, or his belief might falter, he had not been told.

  But now he knew, and he felt as if an electric current had suddenly coursed through his veins, down his arm, and into the very blade he held. When the monster charged again, his hatchet raised, David nimbly stepped to one side, and before the man could turn he swung the razor-sharp edge of the sword into the back of his neck.

  The monster crumpled, a geyser of blood erupting, but the chain of the Medusa had kept the sword from cutting clean through.

  Finish it, David heard in his head. You have to finish it.

  Pulling the sword free with one hand, and yanking the head back with his other-even now, the eyes were boiling with rage and hot spittle was flying from the lips-he chopped again. But the head still clung to the body.

  Finish it.

  Clutching the head by a thatch of its blood-slick hair, he hewed at the stump as if it were an unyielding branch. And though he wielded the sword, it felt as if the blade was acting on its own, hungry to complete some ancient labor. Another blow, and the body at last collapsed in a heap.

  David felt as if time had stopped. All he could hear was the pounding of his own heart, booming like a bass drum. His breath burned in his throat. His gory prize-mouth open, eyes agog-dangled by its hair from his hand. Gradually, he came back to himself, like a man emerging from a trance. The sword clattered to the floor. And then the head dropped, too.

  Stooping, he retrieved from the expanding pool of blood the thing he had come so far to find. Looping the Medusa around his neck, he stood up again, like Perseus astride the slaughtered Gorgon, and went to rescue his companion-and tell him it was indeed finished.

  Chapter 40

  Once she was sure that the car had been swallowed up for good, Olivia had stumbled, soaking wet and missing one shoe, up the muddy bank. But she knew that if she didn’t find some dry clothes or some cover fast, she’d freeze to death while waiting for David and Ascanio to come back.

  She didn’t even allow herself to think that they might not return.

  She made her way across the cold, hard ground to the cement dock, then back to the spot where the Maserati had been parked. Unless her attacker had followed them on foot, he must have left a car hidden somewhere nearby. But the woods were dark, and it was slow going over the rough, uneven terrain. Her blouse and pants were still dripping, and her one shoe kept her off-kilter. She followed the trail as well as she could, taking advantage of every spot of moonlight to plot her course, and eventually she spotted the back bumper of a car hidden among the trees close to the road. She started to run toward it before realizing that there might be an accomplice inside.

  Wiping the wet hair back from her eyes, she inched forward, keeping among the foliage, until she was close enough to see that it was a little, beige Peugeot, with no one in it. It was pointed out toward the road, just as she had done with the Maserati. Everybody, she surmised, had been preparing for a quick getaway.

  Now if only it was unlocked.

  And it was, with the key still sitting in the ignition. She turned it on and started the heat going at full blast. Then she surveyed the interior, which looked as if somebody had been living in it. Cigarette butts crammed the ashtrays, cardboard coffee cups littered the floor, and clothes were spilling out of an open duffel bag on the backseat. She quickly rummaged around in it and found a heavy fisherman’s knit sweater. Peeling off her wet blouse, she pulled it on over her head, then a pair of woolly white socks that came halfway up her shins. The heat was going strong and she had stopped her shivering altogether.

  But her curiosity was greater than ever. Who was this man who had been so relentlessly tracking them? She popped open the glove compartment for the car registration papers and found instead a brochure from the rental agency, with his completed application inside.

  “Escher,” she read, “Ernst Escher.” The name meant nothing to her, and though he’d paid with a credit card from a Swiss bank, he listed his address as a post-office box in the States. Chicago, in fact-where David, of course, was from.

  Had he been following David’s trail all the way from America? On his own? Or at someone else’s behest?

  On the passenger seat, there was another rucksack, which she quickly unbuckled. This one looked like a doctor’s bag inside, stuffed with prescription pills and bottles, along with a BlackBerry and a burgundy Austrian passport, with its distinctive gold coat of arms.

  She flipped the dog-eared passport open. The pages bore dozens of stamps, for every place from Liechtenstein to Dubai, but the picture in front was of a weaselly-looking little man named Julius Jantzen. The same man who had drugged their drinks. He was thirty-eight years old, five-foot-six, unmarried, and although his current address was Florence, Italy, his birthplace was listed as Linz, Austria.

  Hitler’s hometown, she thought.

  She wondered if this Jantzen character wasn’t still out there in the woods somewhere. She tossed the passport back into the bag, steering the Peugeot out of the trees and back toward the dock. S
he parked it out of sight again, with the motor off and the lights out.

  And was surprised to find that her hands and feet were becoming numb. Inside her, despite the warm interior of the car, she felt a cold and hollow spot growing. She was going into shock, she dimly recognized. While she’d been fighting for her life and struggling to find safety, she had been operating on sheer survival instinct and adrenaline. But now, now that she was temporarily-and provisionally-safe, now that she was warm and dry and no gun was grazing her cheek, her heart was still racing, her breath was coming in short, shallow bursts, and her mind was grappling with the trauma she had just undergone.

  She had escaped dying by the skin of her teeth.

  And she had killed a man in the process. Not a good man, not some innocent, but a man, nonetheless.

  She had killed him-and nearly died herself.

  Her thoughts were flying back and forth between those two poles, like a shuttlecock, and the cold spot in her gut was only getting colder. She had a whole pharmacy in the bag beside her, but she had no idea what to take. She began searching the glove compartment, the storage slots in the doors, and under the driver’s seat, where she finally found what she was looking for. It was an old, dented flask, but she unscrewed the top and took a whiff of what smelled like good Irish whiskey. She took a gulp, then another, and felt the warmth of the alcohol blooming like a rose inside her. She closed her eyes for a second, willing herself to breathe more slowly, and let the feeling diffuse. An owl hooted in the trees, reminding her of her own Glaucus back home. Her cluttered little apartment in Florence had never seemed so appealing.

  And then, glancing at her ashen face in the rearview mirror, she shook her head, as if to physically dismiss all the fears from her mind, and pinched her own cheeks, hard. She could not afford the luxury of a breakdown at that moment. Not while David and Ascanio were still out there. Not while the job was still undone. She knew David. She knew he would not give up. His sister’s life was at stake, and even in the short time they had been together, she had seen what a fierce and unbreakable bond that was. She took another sip of the whiskey, and even though she was not a religious woman-for her, churches were places to tour, not worship-she found herself praying all the same. Not to Jesus or Mother Mary. But to the miraculous powers of the universe, the benign and unseen forces in which she did believe. Olivia’s mind had always been open, and as she stared into the darkness of the trees, she prayed, with a fervency she had never felt before, that she would see David emerge again, safe and unscathed. It would not be fair, she thought, for something so wonderful, something that she had waited so long for, to come to such an abrupt and awful end. A wave of indignation came over her-not an uncustomary sensation for someone of her temperament-and it felt good. She felt like she was coming back to herself. Indignation, in her opinion, was very underrated.

  Chapter 41

  In the bedroom at the top of the turret, David found Ascanio tying a tourniquet around his leg to stop the bleeding; he had snapped a leg off a chair and made a rough splint to hold the broken bone straight.

  On the bed, David saw the shape of a body, wrapped tightly in a blood-soaked sheet.

  Ascanio’s eyes went straight to the Medusa hanging from David’s neck.

  “ Bene,” he said, nodding his approval. He glanced at the bloody sword that David had returned to his belt. “You finished it?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Ascanio gave him a long look, wanting to be sure.

  “You should have told me… everything… before we came.”

  Ascanio nodded, as if in agreement. “We did not think it would be necessary. It could have been too much to hold in your mind.”

  “Never underestimate me again,” David said.

  “I won’t,” Ascanio replied. “You can be sure of that.” Tucking the garland into the backpack, he threw an arm around David’s shoulder for support, and said, “Now let’s get out of this damn place.” Limping alongside him, they descended from the tower, all the while keeping an eye out for Rigaud.

  As they passed through the armor hall, Ascanio stopped above the decapitated body of Linz, which lay in a sticky pool of coagulating blood. The tails of the robe were spread out like a bat’s wings. “Heil, Hitler,” he muttered, kicking the axe away.

  Then, before stepping around it, he asked David, “But what did you do with the head?”

  “I let it fall,” David said.

  “Where?” Ascanio said.

  “Right here,” David said. But it wasn’t there now. Ducking to look under the refectory table, he didn’t see it there, either.

  Which meant that someone-Rigaud?-must have removed it.

  “Come on,” David said, looping a strong arm around Ascanio’s waist and helping him to hop from the room. From the grimace on Ascanio’s face, David could tell that each step was excruciating, but he knew that there wasn’t a second to waste.

  Once they’d made it to the kitchen, Ascanio plopped onto a chair, sweat dripping from his brow.

  “We have to keep going!” David said. “We can’t rest yet!”

  Waving at the stove, Ascanio said, “Quick, turn on all the burners.”

  “What?” David said. “Why?”

  “Just do it, David!”

  And he did.

  “Now, blow out the pilot lights.”

  David blew them out… and suddenly understood. It was another little detail that Ascanio had not shared with him.

  Ascanio struggled to his feet, wincing with pain, and threw his arm around David’s shoulders again. The sweet, subtle smell of gas had already begun to permeate the room.

  They hobbled down the stone steps to the old scullery, past the dusty wine racks, and into the hidden escape route carved by the Norman knight. It was too narrow there to walk side by side, so David had to let Ascanio support himself by leaning against the walls. David took out his flashlight to show the way while glancing over his shoulder for any sign of Rigaud.

  The pungent aroma of the gasoline they had poured on their way in wafted up from the floor. When they had reached the oubliette, its scent was joined by the dank river water sloshing at the bottom of the shaft.

  They were only yards from the side tunnel leading down to the Loire when David heard noises coming from the scullery. He flicked off his flashlight and urged Ascanio to hurry.

  “Someone’s coming!” he whispered.

  Ascanio pressed on, dragging his splinted leg, while David crouched low right behind him, staring back over his shoulder into the darkness.

  He heard the sound of racks being shoved aside, wine bottles smashing, and boots crunching across the broken glass.

  And then he saw the pinpoint white light of a flashlight beam, searching high and low.

  They were far enough away that it had not reached them, but it was coming closer all the time.

  “Who’s in there?” a voice called out. Rigaud’s. “Stop where you are!”

  The tip of David’s sword suddenly scraped against the stone wall.

  “Stop now, or I’ll shoot!”

  “It’s here,” Ascanio murmured, ducking through the hole in the wall.

  “I said, Stop!”

  The flashlight beam danced toward them, like a firefly, and in the reflections off the wall and ceiling, David saw Rigaud, holding something in the crook of his arm and running toward them.

  Ascanio’s arm suddenly extended out through the hole, holding a pack of wooden matches. “Light the pack and throw it!”

  David dropped his flashlight, and grabbed the matchbook. But the gasoline trail was several feet behind him now, and he had to creep toward Rigaud, all the while trying to strike a match in the dark. The first one broke in two, the second one was too damp.

  Rigaud had undoubtedly heard him by then, and his flashlight swung directly onto David’s face as the third match caught fire and David touched it to the gasoline on the floor. A ribbon of blue fl
ame shot down the tunnel, and in its light he saw Rigaud drop his flash-light and fumble for his gun.

  But what David truly remembered, just seconds before the blast nearly threw him through the hole, was the severed head Rigaud was cradling beneath his arm. David could have sworn that the mouth was twisted in a silent scream and the steely blue eyes were furious… and alive.

  A fireball had hurtled down the length of the tunnel, then out of sight around the corner, where it collided with the cloud of gas in the kitchen, sending an earthshaking explosion up through the very rafters of the chateau. David and Ascanio, scuttling down the chimney to the river, feared the cliff itself would collapse around them. Dirt and dust filled the air, choking them, and the steps quivered under their stumbling feet.

  At the bottom, they crawled out, coughing and sputtering, onto the rocks and mud of the riverbank. David, after catching a breath, turned to look up at the promontory. Bright orange flames were licking up at the sky, as fire burst like streamers from the windows, and the towers, one by one, crumbled and fell.

  A burning timber caromed off the cliff top and, turning end over end, splashed with a boiling hiss into the Loire.

  “Let’s get out of range!” David said, helping Ascanio up and back toward the old loading dock.

  They climbed along the bank, then into the woods, but just where David hoped to see the Maserati, he saw nothing. For a second, he thought he’d lost his bearings, but then a pair of headlights flashed on from the neighboring trees, and he heard a car door fling open.

  “David!”

  Olivia was running full tilt, in a bulky sweater and a pair of white socks, with her arms out.

  “Help me,” he said, and Olivia threw a supporting arm around Ascanio’s waist. Together, they deposited him, as gently as they could, in the cramped backseat of the Peugeot.

  And then they held each other close, rocking silently in the moonlight. In the distance, David could hear the crackling of the flames, punctuated by the crash of timbers and stone.