In the kitchen, they found a well-fuelled hurricane lamp. "We had better not light it until we are in the cellar," said Karl, "in case someone sees the light moving across the window."
Someone outside. Oh God. An image of herself breaking a pane and crying for help… but it was too late for that. She moved stiffly to the cellar door and opened it. The latch felt heavy and clammy, shedding rust on to her fingers. Karl went through and she pulled the door shut behind them.
Blackness enveloped them, thick and stringy as cobwebs. Karl struck a match, and lamplight flared and spilled down the steps.
Where the beam fell, a four-legged shadow slipped across the steps. It no longer seemed cat-like but elongated, sinister. Neither of them commented, but Karl put his hand on her shoulder.
"You're trembling," he said. "I thought you weren't afraid of being here."
She could not answer. In the lamp glow, against the shadows, he looked so completely what he was. "Shall I go first?" she said. "I think I can remember which way to go."
"If you feel safe with me following you." He spoke drily, but as she looked at him, something black as night and thorn-sharp passed between them. Knowledge that if he grew desperate enough for her blood, his word not to harm her might mean nothing, and she would not be able to stop him. He would not be able to stop himself. No, she did not feel safe. This danger had always hovered between them, but something in this place froze it to its stark essence.
She took the lamp from him and began to walk down the steps. A miasma of damp, dirt and mould sucked her in, like stagnant water; chilling, repugnant. She found herself beginning to recite the Lord's prayer, stopped herself. How dare I ask God to help me?
It did not help that she had been here before. Familiarity only made her more sensitive to the atmosphere, the nuances she'd missed before.
The pillars that arched up into the low roof made the cellar cavernous, labyrinthine. She led Karl through a maze of barrels, jars and ancient storage chests, all coated in centuries of grime and mildew. Shadows leapt and contorted in the lamp beam; rats and insects scuttled unseen over the debris on the floor.
Ghosts, reverberations of pain from a lost time; whatever dwelled in this place, she could feel them all around her. She could feel the wordless whispers flowing from the walls, but now they were imbued with malicious anger. It might have been naïveté that had made her assume they were harmless… But no, she was sure that their mood had changed, that something was drawing their hostility. Have we intruded once too often?
"What are you looking for?" Karl's voice in the stillness made her jump. "Another door?"
"No, a trap in the floor," she said raising the lamp. "I thought it was here somewhere. It's hard to remember."
"Shall we try there?" Karl pointed into a far corner, where the beam did not fall. It gave her a strange sensation to realise that he could see in the dark. Charlotte pushed on through the murmuring shadows as if through a nest of spiders; holding her breath, her skin crawling.
Suddenly the light spilled over the edge of a hole, half-hidden behind a pillar. The trap door that had once covered it had rotted away.
The steps looked steep and forbidding, the walls slick, mottled, unpitying as an oubliette. How much simpler this had seemed when she was a child. Now she felt gutted by fear. A mile was such a long way, underground. As she hesitated, she felt the light touch of Karl's hand on her back.
"Go down a little way," he said. She obeyed, almost losing her footing on the narrow treads. She saved herself, only for the screech of metal on stone to set her heart pounding again.
Karl was hauling a chest across the opening above them to conceal it. The easy strength of the action astonished her, but the sense of being sealed underground was disturbing. Lamplight danced coldly on the wooden base of the chest and on the narrow walls.
Seeing her worried expression, Karl said, "I can move it again, if we have to come back this way."
You could… but I couldn't, she thought. She turned and began to descend as quickly as she dared. The wall felt furry and damp under her hand; there was the sharp scent of earth. Thick cobwebs broke over her fingers. Karl was so quiet behind her that once she turned with a stab of panic, thinking he was no longer there.
"It's all right," he said, realising what was wrong. But in the lamplight he looked supernaturally pale, his eyes too intense, too deeply coloured.
The stairs led deep underground, curving at the base into a small, low-roofed chamber. It felt as claustrophobic as a cave; the stonework was crumbling and drifts of soil lay across the floor. The inky mouth of a passageway yawned before them.
Charlotte stopped, her chest so tight she could hardly breathe. Whispers swirled around her like fog, more in her head than in her ears, turning her cold and giddy. So hard to think. Karl seemed calm, but his gaze moved over the walls and the curved ceiling, distracted. No need to ask if he could feel the presence of evil; he seemed electrified by it. More affected than she was… and that was weird, frightening.
Charlotte remembered how she had groped her way along this tunnel, following the left-hand side of the wall. It would be all right. Yes.
Once she had steadied herself, she walked into the tunnel with Karl at her side. The light sketched grainy, dancing shadows on the stone. There was something poised in the air, like a held breath; something flattened into the walls, watching, waiting. Inimical. She wished Karl would say something; yet she knew that to speak would make it worse, like invoking demons.
The passage dipped and rose and meandered, so they could never see far ahead. The air hung thick and clammy as earth. An oddly clotted shadow ahead of them… she halted as the beam illuminated a pile of barrels and planks that lay heaped in their path, blocking the tunnel.
She felt a twinge of dismay, but it passed. She remembered squeezing through a narrow gap, not knowing what the barrier was or whether anything lay beyond.
"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 nothi
ng, 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 attempt 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 hi
s 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.
A Taste of Blood Wine Page 29