“There’s a way through,” she said. Where the barrier met the wall, there was a thin space between the curve of a barrel and the stonework. Hardly large enough to let an adult through, but in determination she handed the lamp to Karl and edged sideways into the gap. The weight of wood and stone squeezed her ribs, pressing the breath out of her lungs. Then she was through. Karl passed the lamp along the floor and followed her with fluid ease.
Beyond the barrier, the temperature fell. Charlotte was perspiring and shivering unconsciously, too nervous to be more than half-aware of it. The left-hand wall, along which she had felt her way before, was flat, but on the opposite side there was an archway leading to a small round chamber. She raised the lamp uneasily.
Iron-grey stones and shadows. A chair and a table, cracked with age; and on the table, a heavy black book.
For some reason the sight of the book terrified her. Words came into her mind from nowhere, ledger of Death. She looked at Karl but he was staring at it too, his face dead-white, his eyes red as rubies.
“Don’t touch it,” he said. “We must go on.”
She turned away and walked on into the tunnel. There were bright flames of fear licking her throat. The moment they’d seen the book; that was the moment the phantom voices rose into the level of hearing. They were chattering, insistent, pressing on her. Don’t think of it, don’t think of anything, just walk.
Suddenly Karl said, “It’s cold. Don’t you feel it?”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she said truthfully.
He reached out and touched her cheek. His fingers were so icy she started. “Your skin is hot,” he said, staring at her.
God, he’s freezing! she thought, pulling away by reflex. Why should he be concerned about the cold? I thought nothing could harm him. Only the cold of the Crystal Ring, he said…
“Don’t you know what is here?” he said intensely.
She wasn’t sure whether he meant, Tell me or, Haven’t you guessed? “Emptiness,” she whispered. “As if someone died here and left not their spirit so much as their pain. Like my mother… “
She trailed off. Karl said nothing, and his silence unnerved her. The coldness began to penetrate her clothes. Last time, she had experienced these lost spirits as sad, desolate, yet guileless. Letting a child pass by unharmed. There had never been this bitter rage, sharp as a knife at her throat. And such a sense of loss; grief that made her want to weep with fear, a void that sucked the heat out of everything that touched it.
As they rounded a bend in the tunnel, Karl was walking ahead of her, seeming so deeply disturbed that he had forgotten she was there. As she hurried to keep up, he stopped abruptly and she almost fell over him.
“Mein Gott,” he breathed.
“What is it?” She could see nothing, only the grim corridor diminishing into a web of blackness. She moved forward, holding up the lamp. The light slid into an alcove on the right, through a low entrance and into a circular chamber that contained what seemed a tangle of strangely gleaming firewood. Then she realised what she was seeing, and she clung to Karl’s arm in shock.
Human bones.
Shiny brown with age, skeletons lay crumbled and shored up in the chamber. There were half-buried skulls grinning at nothing, pelvises like bizarrely knotted driftwood, femurs worn down to sponge and coral. She lifted the lamp, saw ribcages jutting up like shipwrecks, vertebrae scattered as if from a broken necklace.
Near the entrance, a skull as brown as polished oak lay with its face pressed sideways into the dust, jaw hanging open in a scream that went on forever. And she could hear it. She could hear the skull screaming.
She backed away, trying to block her ears. The lamp swung against her arm and burned her. Hopeless anyway, there was nothing she could do to shut out the clamour.
“Dear Christ,” she said. “To think I walked past this and never knew. What is it, a burial chamber?”
Karl turned to her. She wanted him to steady her, but his eyes looked glazed in the half-light. Distant, almost ill. “No. A vampire.”
“What?”
“These were the victims of a vampire,” he said.
The statement bewildered her. It took her a moment to form a question. “How do you know?”
“I can’t explain; I simply feel it to be the truth. A vampire lived here, under the ground. He lured his prey here, drank their lives, and hoarded their bodies. These bones are those of his victims, and the pain we feel in the air—their pain.”
The distant chill of his voice and eyes were terrifying. “But he’s not still here?”
“No,” said Karl. “He is long gone, I think.” As if in response to his words, the tunnel seemed to vibrate with a long, echoing groan of distress.
Charlotte had a sudden vision of a spidery creature in rags, sitting at the table, entering the details of his victims in a ledger of doom. Then she knew. It was Karl’s presence that had disturbed the spirits. They knew what he was. What did they want, revenge?
“We have to go past them,” she said. “I know it’s horrible, but the quicker we go the sooner we’ll be out of here.”
Karl only stared at her with ice-glazed blankness.
“Did you hear me?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s so cold.” He touched her arm and she saw that his hand was shaking. “We should go back. Too cold… “
Fear swept over her; fear of what was happening to him. She tried to speak, but the anguished murmuring of the dead swelled into a crescendo and swept her words away.
A wail of tormented rage poured from the walls, the floor, and from the remains of the victims who had been left to rot here, unburied, unblessed. Her brain was spinning in white webs of terror. Not ghosts but the opposite, an absence of energy, hundreds of souls sucked dry and gasping to be filled again, their agony swelling and contracting like a giant heart whose beats dragged at her mind as they rolled over her.
Thirsting not for her, but for Karl.
Charlotte dropped the lamp. Total blackness enveloped her, and the cold that bit into her was deeper than winter.
“Karl!” she cried.
Nothing. Then she moved, felt something against her foot, realised that he was lying stretched out on the tunnel floor. In panic she bent down and touched his face. He did not respond, and his lifeless skin leeched the warmth from her hand like frozen metal.
***
The manor was a black bulk of shadow against the night sky, one upper window gleaming with fire and candlelight. David settled down for the remainder of a cold night, watching for shapes moving against the light. He could see nothing. There was only a tantalising fireglow to tell him that Charlotte was in there—a few yards away, but unreachable. He and Inspector Ash had gone round and round the house, hoping to find a way in, but the only way was to force a door or window.
“Which leaves us with the same problem, sir,” Ash had said. “Whether we enter by stealth or force, it would put Miss Neville in immediate danger. All we can do at this stage is wait.”
“I’m well-trained in that, at least,” said David.
He was trying to stop himself dwelling on what suffering von Wultendorf might be causing Charlotte. No use in tormenting himself in that way. ‘Edward always had too much imagination and it’s no good for a soldier, he thought; no good in a situation like this. Watch the doors and windows, keep hoping for a break in the deadlock. That’s all we can do.
He had good men with him—estate men, including the head groom and the foreman, Ash and his force—yet he felt alone, solely responsible. It was hard not to keep asking himself, How the hell did I let this happen? I should have done this, or this, to prevent it…
Anne was a few yards behind him, distributing hot drinks. He was still annoyed with her for coming up here when he had told her not to, for being so damned stubborn about it.
“You’d better go straight back to the Hall,” he had said. “They need you there.”
Anne had seen straight through his attemp
t at diplomacy. “Don’t be so bloody condescending! Elizabeth’s holding the fort, she doesn’t need me. I want to be with you.”
“For goodness’ sake, Anne, this is no place for you.”
Anne looked at him, her dark eyes sombre with determination. “It’s no place for Charlotte, either. She’s my friend, David, almost as much my sister as yours.”
“Well, I’ll let you stay a little while, at least,” David had said grudgingly, then wondered why she turned away without showing any gratitude for this concession. Inside, he was glad she was there, glad of her support—but he thought, It won’t do, she’ll have to go home.
The impenetrable walls of Charlotte’s prison loomed through the trees and he thought, This feels like the bloody War again. And it was too true to be a joke; the sense of futility, of waiting blindly for disaster, was the same.
***
“Karl,” Charlotte whispered. The darkness was in motion as if thousands of people were jostling past her, all invisible, insubstantial, weeping and muttering with unearthly voices. “Please answer me. Karl!”
He was so still and cold that she was sure he was dead. He’s not breathing. He said vampires don’t need to… should he be breathing or not? She was almost out of her mind with terror. But when he spoke it was a worse shock still; heart-stopping, as if a corpse had sat up in its coffin.
“Ich kann nicht… kalt, zu kalt… “
“Can you hear me?” She pulled at his arm. “What’s wrong, what’s happened to you?”
“Charlotte,” he said hoarsely. “So cold. I cannot move.”
“You must! We’ve got to escape!”
The sound was turning her limbs to water; a multi-voiced sobbing and groaning, full of echoing discords. She discerned a ghastly looping repetition in it; one scream in particular swept up the register, again and again, to end in a strangled gasp. It set her nerves shrieking. She was certain that if they lingered, the void would drag them down into itself, beyond help, beyond light.
“Help me,” he said, raising a stiff arm towards her. She seized his hand, drew his arm across her shoulders and braced herself, struggling to haul him to his feet. He tried to help himself, but he was like a dead weight. He had always been so strong, so composed, that his weakness horrified her. At last he was on his feet, leaning almost his full weight on her. But he was slender, and she could bear him.
“The lamp,” she said. “I can’t see a thing without it.”
“I can see,” said Karl. “I will guide you.”
It was all he could do to walk, even with Charlotte’s aid. Wherever his body touched hers, cold radiated from him and her teeth chattered as the warmth left her. They moved with painful slowness, while all around them rolled the emptiness, yearning to steal back what had been stolen. Fugitive colours writhed across her eyes and she felt as if she were swimming against a tidal wave of darkness—sinking into it as if the earth itself were made of quicksand.
Then Karl stumbled and collapsed, pulling her down with him.
“I am sorry,” he gasped. “I can go no further. Go on without me.”
“No, I’m not leaving you. It can’t be far now. Please try.”
A short silence, in which the voices of the dead seemed to be retreating across the gulf of time from which they had come.
Then Karl said, “I can’t move. I am frozen.”
“What can I do to warm you?” she asked frantically.
A longer pause. “Nothing.”
She traced her hand along his face and neck. His eyes were closed, his cheeks smooth and lifeless as quartz, but she felt the movement of his throat as he swallowed. And she knew. Her hand rested on his collarbone, turning icy as her heat sank into his flesh. Eventually she said, “Would it kill me?”
She could not see his eyes opening, but she could feel his gaze on her. “What are you saying?”
“You know what I mean. You’re starving. My blood would warm you, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.” He breathed in and out, human-sounding. “It would help.”
“So would it kill me?”
“Not if I took only a little.”
“Take it, then.”
“It will make you ill, Charlotte.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care if it does.”
“God,” he said very faintly, and groaned. “I can’t ask this of you. If I take too much… “
“I’m not leaving you. Please, Karl. We can’t stay here any longer.”
For the space of a few heartbeats, he paused. Then he lifted his hand, too weak to do more than brush his fingers against the elbow of her coat. Shivering with something worse than cold, she leaned towards him; holding her breath.
“No, give me your wrist,” he said. “Then it will be easier for me to stop.”
Easier… A trace of shock, to realise that from the neck it would be too intimate. Compelling as the physical act of love. Suddenly the thorns were between them, the tension between the desire and the danger… And she was afraid but she wanted it, wanted to give this to him with sensual eagerness.
She gave him her left hand. She felt his bone-cold grip round her palm, not gentle but hungry, startling. The speed with which he pulled her wrist to his mouth shocked her so much that she tried to struggle, to say, “Wait!” But it was too late. She felt two stabs of pain and the word came out as a cry.
She did not know what she had expected. Nothing so painful; a deep, paralysing ache that numbed her whole arm. Nothing so intense. It was horrible, this pain. She tried to pull away but he held her as if in a vice, his mouth tautening on her skin, locking her to him while her energy flowed away with her blood. And he shuddered as if with a wave of exquisite, overpowering relief.
Then she stopped trying to fight and gave in to it, gave herself completely to his need. One thing turned the horror back on itself and that was seeing, feeling, understanding, what the blood meant to Karl. She leaned down until her head rested on his—strange the contrast between the softness of their hair, the hard pull of his teeth in her wrist—and curled her free arm round his shoulders. Cradling him. Yes. Take this warmth from me.
She felt the fragmenting sensation of faintness begin and she knew this could be the beginning of death, that if he could not stop she would simply slide down into unconsciousness and never wake again.
God, such a sacrifice. She hadn’t understood.
Was this what Madeleine had felt, when Pierre fed from her? This cold dark fall from a cliff, no comfort to be found. To be alone forever. She saw clearly now how some could never gather in the threads of sanity and reweave the veil of beliefs that shielded them from death.
But if the blood is given out of love…
This was no violation. She knew the blood meant so much to Karl because he understood how great the sacrifice was. A dark jewel beyond price. To be able to give him this was a pleasure as intense as the repletion he drew from her veins. She held him as he drank, her lips against his hair… falling slowly through a silver cloud of bliss…
She was walking between rows and rows of beds and in each one was the deadly white face of a gassed soldier, tormented with the effort of drawing the next breath, and the next… and the next. “I would breathe for you if I could!” she cried, and stretched out her arms towards them—but she could only move her right hand, her left was pinioned. The pain brought her back to herself.
It seemed a century had passed but they were still in the darkness, Karl’s mouth on her wrist, the faintest groan of relief or ecstasy issuing from his throat. The ghost-voices mourned in the far distance. Charlotte lifted her hand from his shoulder to stroke his silky hair and, without knowing why, she began to weep.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
In the Still of the Night
Charlotte felt the darkness tipping and dropping away beneath her. Through the tingling vertigo she realised that Karl was carrying her, while the voices of the empty souls blew away along an endless corridor… and after a ti
me, she felt him setting her down with utmost gentleness. There was a dimly luminous rectangle before her and warmth flowing on to her; the lukewarm sweetness of the night air, which felt warm after the unnatural cold of the tunnel.
Slowly she became aware that they were in a small stone chamber with a low doorway, open to the night. Beyond, the night sky gleamed like pewter through layers of leaves, and the whispering she could hear now was only the soft rustle of leaves. She began to shiver.
“Charlotte,” Karl said softly. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes. Where are we?”
“I think we are in the ice house that you spoke of. Is it down in the belt of trees that runs along from the hundred steps?”
“Yes. Hidden,” she said, trying to orient herself. It was hard to fight the faintness. Karl held her until the shivering ceased, keeping her wounded left wrist loosely against her chest. She felt only a dull ache in her forearm; worse was her overwhelming lassitude.
“I needed more than you could give,” he said. “I almost did not stop in time.”
She shifted a little so that she could look up at him. His lids were half-lowered, the long lashes shading the gleam of his eyes. And he was looking at her with such affection that she almost began to weep again. “But you have your strength again?” she said.
“Yes. At the expense of yours, beloved. This is one thing I can never ask you to forgive.” She tried to sit up and he helped her, watching her closely. “How do you feel?”
“I saw strange things, but I wasn’t afraid. I don’t think I have gone mad, if that’s what worries you. I feel rather weak. It doesn’t matter.” She probed her left wrist, felt only two tender scars. “My God, it’s healed!”
“The bite does heal swiftly, as a rule,” said Karl. “It helps us avoid suspicion. Ah, Liebe Gott, I would not have done this for the world… “
“I’m glad,” she said. She leaned in towards him and their mouths met; and she tasted her own blood on his tongue, and did not care. “There was nothing to be so very frightened of, after all.”
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