“If you’re telling me I deserve this, you’re right!” Charlotte drew away, beginning to detach herself from Anne. From the anguish. Now it was Anne’s eyes that were full of pain, her own that were tranquil. Like Karl’s; the veil between the Crystal Ring and the human world. “I never meant to hurt you, or anyone… yet I have. But I shall always love you, Anne. You look at me as if I’m a fiend, but do you think I could take a drop of your blood?”
Anne started, as if the thought had not even occurred to her.
“I’d rather die,” Charlotte went on softly. “Karl never laid a finger on anyone here—except Edward—yet he has torn this family apart and drained them of happiness. And so have I. This is what vampires do, isn’t it? Tell Maddy and David I’m sorry.”
Charlotte turned away, put on her coat and hat and quietly let herself out of the front door. She leaned against it for a few seconds, calmed by the cool summer air on her face, while the grief that speared her from skull to feet was so familiar now that she could hardly feel it. Disaster. It all felt so unfinished, to part in this mutual rancour, without reconciliation. They have the capacity to heal… It’s me who can’t change. Will I feel like this forever? Long after they have forgotten me and are nodding contentedly by their firesides, will I still be this torn, cold thing that can’t die?
She walked across the wide drive to the gate, and outside in the tree-lined street she found Pierre, Stefan, Niklas and Ilona waiting for her. And Stefan put his arms around her and hugged her. She didn’t know why. It was hard to believe he had once seemed so threatening, when now he seemed so sweet. She returned the embrace but it was not him she wanted, it was Karl.
“Why are you here?” she said dully.
“Oh, Charlotte,” said Stefan. “Never try to explain yourself to humans. It takes a very special mortal to understand a vampires. We came to Schloss Holdenstein after Karl went there with Kristian. Didn’t you know?”
“Should I have done? I was locked in a cell, I didn’t know anything!” she said, thinking, What does this matter?
“You went away before we could speak to you. Karl gave me a message for you.”
A flash of lightning in her chest. “What message?”
Stefan lifted his shoulders. “I don’t understand it. He said, ‘Tell Charlotte to remember the manner of our escape.’ “
“That’s all?” Her nerves were alight, her numbness replaced by frustration. “What does it mean?”
“We thought you would know.”
She shook her head. “But why would Karl leave me any message at all… unless he was trying to tell me his surrender to Kristian was a pretence?”
“That’s what we wondered,” Stefan said softly. She looked at them each in turn. They seemed to be expecting something of her. But can I trust them? Or are they asking me to betray Karl?
“Don’t raise your hopes, chérie” said Pierre. “It may be his way of saying goodbye. I tell you, I have never seen Karl behave like that before. I have seen him angry, upset—I have done my share of provoking him—but I have never seen him lose his dignity. Kristian would have known if he was faking it. The moment he gave in, Kristian forgot all about punishing us. No point, if Karl didn’t care any more. Karl didn’t even care what Kristian did to you, Ophelia.”
Charlotte flinched. “But why do you care about this? Why did you help me become one of you in the first place? I thought you were all loyal to Kristian!”
“Ah, trying to work out whose side we are on?” said Ilona. “No one’s but our own, dear!”
Stefan said, “Don’t you know his favourites are the ones who are most difficult? Look at us. None of us have ever followed Kristian’s line. We have all grown a little sick of having to pretend. Kristian demands love with menaces; Karl wins love simply by existing. You have that gift too, Charlotte. We think it is time things changed.”
Charlotte hung onto the words of the message, the only hope she had. Then she thought, Not the manner. The manor!
Frost crystallised on her heart. My God, he wouldn’t go there again, he wouldn’t risk death, not even…
Oh yes, he would. I know him. He would.
A flash-fire of crisis, dazzling as sun on snow. She looked at the others, thinking, Can I trust them? I don’t know, but I must, I have no choice. She said guardedly, “I think I know where Karl has gone. If I am right, he has put himself in great danger. Will you come with me?”
***
At the base of the steep narrow stairs, the dome-shaped chamber seemed smaller and more oppressive than Karl remembered. He stood beside Kristian, looking around at the dripping, encrusted walls, the drifts of soil and masonry where part of it had collapsed. Countless tons of earth and stone pressed down above them. The air was thick with a cloying graveyard stench. Still no voices. The silence was a pent-up scream, taut as a cross-bow.
Opposite, the thin black throat of the tunnel wormed its way through the earth. Karl stared at it as if hypnotised. The tunnel seemed to breathe out a whitish mist, and where it touched his skin it felt like fingers of liquid nitrogen trailing over him. Can’t he feel it?
“This is of no great interest,” said Kristian. His voice, too loud, sheared away down the tunnel and awoke a faint echo. It came back to Karl’s ears as a very faint, anguished wail that went on and on… Kristian, though, seemed not to notice. “This way?”
He strode into the tunnel and Karl followed, walking slowly but with lethal determination. Apprehension crawled round him in a cloud of ice-dust, but he pushed it away, again and again. The wine jars were hunch-backed, alien creatures lurking along the walls.
“There is a barrier of debris blocking the passage,” said Karl, “But there is a way through.”
“Certainly there is a way through,” said Kristian. As they reached the stack of barrels and rubbish that filled the tunnel, he didn’t hesitate to put his massive shoulder to it. Karl knew he should stop him; instead he simply watched, with a strange sense of fatalism, as the barrier creaked and swayed. If Kristian would dig his own grave…
The stack gave way suddenly and crashed down into the darkness. The vibration shook the whole tunnel. Karl sensed a voiceless, impotent anger radiating from the walls, saw a brief vision of a skeleton holding clawed hands up to its own face…
Kristian was stepping over the ruins. An unwholesome chill swept out to meet them, but Kristian seemed oblivious to it. On the other side, he ducked under an archway in the right-hand wall into a small chamber like a monk’s cell. Karl felt it would be fatal to disturb the spider’s den, but he followed. Isn’t this what I want?
The cell shimmered in an iridescent ghost-grey light. There was the aged table riddled with woodworm, twisted stalagmites of candlewax on its surface, soot furring the low ceiling. And on the table, the huge black book. Journal, Ledger of Death, Bible; whatever it was, it seemed the sullen heart of all the pain that lay in this place.
Does he feel nothing wrong, nothing at all? Karl thought incredulously. What power can fill an immortal with such dread?
“You did not tell me about this,” said Kristian.
“I didn’t come in here before,” said Karl, “and I don’t think we should linger here.”
“What is wrong with your nerves, my friend? You are behaving like a human.” As Kristian moved forward and looked down at the book, it struck Karl how much this cell was like Kristian’s own sanctum; the same austerity, just the table, chair, candles… and the Holy Book.
What was Kristian thinking? That the vampire who had dwelled here had been a kindred spirit—or a rival?
“Don’t touch it,” Karl murmured.
Kristian ignored him. He touched the binding—only to snatch his fingers away as if it were red-hot. The five large black prints he left in the dust were like some arcane rune to summon creatures from a lost dimension. He stood very still, his hand poised, staring into the air. Listening.
With a mixed rush of triumph and terror, Karl thought, Ai last! He hears them!
<
br /> At the touch, an uncanny sound began; a harsh thin wailing, piercing as crystal. It shrilled from the walls, the floor, the book itself, as if every surface had soaked up the ghastly deaths, refracted and magnified them before flinging them loose. The pent-up screams came arrowing out of the lightless abyss of centuries; anguish, desolation, and poison-bitter grief.
And with it came a glacial plunge in temperature.
“Almighty God, what is this?” Kristian exclaimed. He came towards Karl, looming whitely over him as if over a victim. “Why is it so cold?”
“You notice it now, Father?” Karl said, self-controlled.
Kristian pushed past him and went out into the tunnel. The multi-voiced atonal lament swelled louder and louder around them, rising and falling. Karl felt the cold dropping softly over him like liquid air, burning his skin. The tunnel seemed a writhing black worm-hole that led down into a netherworld.
“But those voices, what are they?” said Kristian.
“Ghosts, Father.”
“There are no such things!” Kristian stared around him, bewildered. “It’s freezing. I never felt anything like this, outside the Weisskalt!”
“I told you, an unearthly cold… Come with me. I’ll explain.”
Kristian let himself be led, not realising that Karl was taking him into the heart of the peril. He rubbed his hands together, like a mortal on a winter’s day.
“Godless, this place!” he exclaimed.
“That’s what they thought, too, the people who died here,” Karl said thinly. “Look.”
They stood at the entrance to the charnel house. The air heaved and thrummed with shuddering waves of pressure, an arctic gale.
His voice low and strained, Kristian said, “There is nothing—nothing for immortals to fear in a few bones.”
But these were bones heaped on bones, gleaming with sickly ochres, with the browns of dried blood and tarnished brass. Screaming skulls, skeletal hands pointing in accusation. Ah, you. You consigned us to this hell. You woke us to drink our revenge. From them flowed an amorphous wave of pain; open-mouthed, mindless, ravenous pain.
Kristian tried to turn away. Karl stopped him. Although he felt his lips stiffening with frost, black fear shivering through him, he detached himself from it and said, “But think. All of them slain by a single vampire. Imagine the slow accumulation of their agony in these walls.” Karl’s voice fell to a whisper. “They have become a vacuum; something nature abhors… just as she abhors us.”
In an eerie way, the sudden breaking of Kristian’s nerve was the most horrifying thing of all. He lurched away from Karl and ran into the darkness with his hands over his ears.
Karl raced after him, caught him, bore him down to the cold earth. Kristian tried to escape into the Crystal Ring but Karl went with him and dragged him back. Between the two realms they hung, struggling; but the wraiths were in both, inescapable. At last Karl hauled him back to Earth and pinned him there.
“What in God’s name are you trying to do?” Kristian cried, writhing under him. “Karl! Let me go, we must escape!”
But Karl clung to Kristian with a deathly dispassion, as if he had become nemesis on the lost souls’ behalf. He endured the hellish suction although he felt his energy bleeding away, his limbs turning to granite. A searing polar coldness drenched him, worse than the Weisskalt because it was malevolent, voracious. But Kristian was weakening faster.
“Karl, help me. Don’t leave me here.” Kristian held one long arm outstretched in the frigid air; his face was creased with helpless pain. Karl was staggered by his own heartlessness as he observed Kristian’s suffering. My master. My spiritual father, he thought. This is how I betray you. Too easy to lull your suspicions with a few soft words and vulnerable looks. Because to die with you is better than letting you live!
“No. I won’t leave you.” And he wrapped his arms around Kristian and held him tight as the scorching black coldness froze them.
It seemed to Karl that the skeletons were reassembling themselves and standing up. The motes of energy they had sucked out formed luminous flesh to clothe their bones. In transparent skin and swathes of opalescent ice vapour, they walked out into the tunnel and circled the two fallen vampires, pointing at them, laughing, screaming, plucking at their clothes and trampling them with sharp feet. Gradually Karl perceived an endless repetition in their motion, a hideous dance that would loop on itself for eternity…
The revelation spilled over him. He spoke into Kristian’s ear, as if the wraiths were speaking through him. “That vampire did not only drink their blood. He took their life-force, as you do. And in the end they turned on him and destroyed him… like this. Just as they are destroying you now.”
“I need warmth, Karl.” Kristian’s voice was honed thin with anguish. “Your wrist, I must have your blood.”
And he was suddenly straining to fasten his teeth in Karl’s flesh. Karl held him off easily, and then he thought, Yes… that. And he bit into Kristian’s neck and began to draw the sluggish fluid out of his veins.
Like slushed ice it made his teeth ache and it was shockingly bitter and sour, like a child’s first taste of schnapps. And then it stung with pinpricks of fire. He could only take a mouthful or two at a time, but he felt his own chill retreat a fraction.
“What are you doing?” Kristian whispered.
“Only what you did to all the others, Father,” Karl said softly.
“You deceived me. You lied!” Kristian gave a long drawn-out groan that went through Karl like an arrow of pity. But Karl could not afford pity. He watched his own ruthlessness as if from outside, with amazed horror.
He heard his own voice saying, hard and cruel, “I never told you a word of untruth. I warned you that we might die. How does the cold feel, beloved Father? Is this how our victims suffer, do you think?”
Only then did Kristian truly seem to accept that he had been betrayed. He had seemed a marble temple, unassailable until an earthquake shook him to pieces and brought him crashing down at last. It was horrific, his collapse; like that of a child abandoned by its parents. A strange reversal of their roles.
“No, you would not betray me,” Kristian said through stiffening lips. “Not you, Karl. I only ever loved you. I know I hurt the others, I know I made them suffer… I was punishing them for not being you. A thousand times I could have tormented and destroyed you, Karl, but I did not. I never hurt you! My only sin has been to love you too much. And for that, you destroy me?”
“An ironic fate, I agree,” Karl said coldly. “But we’ll die together. Poetic justice.”
The disembodied voices were dying away, back into the walls, back into their abyss. Sated, it seemed. Kristian seemed small and desiccated, suddenly. A black eagle, crushed and tattered. His eyes were closed, rolling a little under the lids, but he did not speak again.
Die, damn you! Karl cried to himself. Then, One word, Kristian. One word to remind me that I am right to do this…
“All this, for love?” he whispered. “When the simplest gesture of kindness was beyond you. Yet was it your fault you knew no better?”
Karl wept, but his tears froze. His sight was fading. Light too was energy, and they took even that. Blackness rolled in.
It seemed that vampires as well as mortals had their veil of protective illusions. The wraiths, with no true self-awareness, were bearing him away with them into the heart of the dark cosmic machinery of which they were a part. He stared down into a gulf of half-seen horrors, falling towards the obscure source of terror… that there is no rest in death…
Yet there were bright figures walking towards him through the slanting valley of shadows. Angels with beloved faces, come to preside over his fall. Sweet Ilona. Pierre, Stefan and Niklas… and dearest of all, his beloved, endlessly betrayed Charlotte. Light…
***
It never once occurred to Charlotte, as she led her companions through the old ice-house and down into the subterranean passage, that the presences might harm them
too. All she could think about was Karl. When she finally thought of it, she realised that the tunnel was eerily quiet; no voices moaning from the inky walls, the air no colder than a winter breeze on her skin.
And there they were, twined together in the darkness, like the roots of two trees that had grown together and fossilised. Karl and Kristian. Charlotte stopped, unable to stifle a cry.
Were they dead? If the supernatural void had taken Kristian’s life, it could not have spared Karl.
“Karl!” she called, not daring to go any closer. Steel ropes squeezed her.
To her shock, one of the figures began to rise and come towards her. He moved as stiffly as a skeleton animated by some numinous force; spectral, terrifying. For a moment she did not even know which of them it was. Then she saw it was Karl and the horror of everything almost annihilated her; the way he had rejected her, the leaden indifference in his gaze—and now this. The eldritch cold light in his face. She shrank away from him.
“Charlotte, help me,” he said hoarsely, one hand held out to her like a frosted branch. Then he saw the others with her. His eyes moved over Stefan, Niklas, Pierre, rested on Ilona. He spoke as if sapped of all strength, all choice; throwing himself on their uncertain loyalty. “I am not sure whether he’s dead or not. I must be sure. Help me… help me to make an end of him.”
***
Kristian’s universe had contracted to a speck of blackness and he found no God at the centre. He was numbed against the frigid air that had splintered him; adrift in the torpor of having his life-energy stolen by the dead, his blood taken by Karl.
Yet he was still alive. He saw their shapes in the darkness; Stefan and Niklas, his gilded angels; Pierre who, beneath his cynicism, adored him; his beautiful, wayward daughters, Ilona and Charlotte.
They had come to save him. If only he could call out to them, bless them…
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