A Taste of Blood Wine

by Freda Warrington

  "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!

  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 tr
uly 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…

  But what was this? A dull silver line arcing through the darkness. The edge of an axe.

  Karl's hands wielding the axe. Karl's eyes fierce, mad with revulsion and pain and cruelty. Surely the others must stop him! But they only stood and watched, gazing down as soullessly as Niklas.

  The blade swept down. Kristian felt the savage wrench of pain, felt the blood bubbling in the wound, choking him. Saw the insane glaze of Karl's eyes, those terrible amber eyes as the axe hacked down again and again. Heard his own spinal column crack, the tendons recoil; felt his own head bounce back a little with the blow and come to rest still staring upwards.

  He gazed at his executioners. Now he realised that their eyes were full, not of love, but of twisted hatred. Had he always misread them?

  Traitors, all of them. Traitors.

  And he parted his lips, and he saw their faces hang with absolute horror as his severed head spoke. The words came out thick and slurred. "This—is how you love me? Even you, Ilona, Stefan? And you—Karl?"

  Then the silver line came hurtling towards his forehead, and the blackness split apart and swallowed him.

  ***

  They scattered and buried Kristian's body in the earth of the tunnel floor, working swiftly in a charged silence. Charlotte felt one step removed from the horror of it, but she was trembling from head to foot. The feelings of the others cut the air like a web of glass. Not jubilation. Grief. It infected her too. This had to be done but no one wanted it, such a terrible thing.

  At length they emerged from the ice-house into the sloping mass of trees that concealed it. Night lay on the garden of Parkland Hall and moonlight iced the leaves. Without speaking, Stefan and Pierre shared their blood with Karl, to help revive his strength. And Charlotte looked on as Karl and Ilona gazed at each other, embraced briefly, almost savagely; parted again. Then Karl left them and came to Charlotte.

  His face was shadowed, moonlight silvering one cheekbone and catching bronze sparks in his eyes. She had no idea what he would say, could not tell whether his eyes held love or regret. She stared at him, unable to move towards him or away. And she saw doubt in his face and realised that her thoughts were clear in her eyes. I don't know that I can ever trust you again. I can exist without you. If you are going to reject me again, I shall reject you first!

  How pale he looked. At a loss, somehow. Their positions had changed subtly; she was no longer a girl hopelessly in awe of him. Yet his beauty still brought aching tears to her throat, made everything else seem futile. That would never change. To stop loving him was impossible.

  He said, "Every time we meet, it seems I have to ask for your forgiveness."

  "Are you—are you asking for it now? You convinced me completely that you no longer loved me. It wasn't even the first time. It almost destroyed me and if it ever happened again I think it would destroy me. I don't know whether I can take that risk."

  "Charlotte, it almost killed me to do it! The only way I could take Kristian away was to pretend that he'd won. The only way I could save those he'd threatened was to pretend I didn't care about them. And I had to convince you of it, because if I had not, Kristian would not have believed me either. You understand, don't you?"

  He held his hand out to her. She clasped it, but didn't move any closer. How cold their fingers were. She believed him, but part of her still held back. "Yes, I understand."

  "I know what Kristian did to you, beloved, and I am so sorry. But I had to destroy him before I had any chance of saving you."

  "Ilona let me out."

  The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "I know. God, what a mess, all of this. I only sent the message in the hope that you would realise what I intended to do. I didn't expect you to come here… because I didn't think you would be able to. And I thought I should die with Kristian, you see."

  "Oh God," she said, and gave in. He drew her into his arms and they clung to each other for an age. Only the soft movement of the trees around them, and the footfalls of the other vampires, tired of waiting for them, moving away and v
anishing into the Crystal Ring. Karl and Charlotte were alone.

  "Never do that to me again," she whispered. "Not for any reason."

  "Dearest, there will never be any need. We may have only a few virtues, but the greatest of them is constant love."

  Arms linked, they began to walk slowly through the gardens as they had once walked before, in another existence. Moonlight silvered the lawns, the fountains and statues; the shadows were jewelled with wondrous colours only vampires could perceive. This garden would always be their own, sacred to them.

  Charlotte asked, "But how long had you planned it?"

  "It was in the back of my mind since we escaped from the manor, but I never consciously planned it. I only decided to take the chance at the last minute, because I simply could see no other answer. I didn't know it would work; he might have guessed, or he might have been unaffected. At best I thought we'd both die, but the ghosts took a more thorough revenge on him than on me. And I drank his blood. I think that saved me… No, you saved me. His blood gave me the strength to escape, but without you I would not have had the will." Karl looked up at the sky. "I did not want to kill him, Charlotte," he said quietly. "I only wanted him to leave us alone. I took no pleasure in his death."

  "I know," she said.

  "I loathe myself for it, in a way. He was so desperate to trust me that it was almost pathetic. But I let him trust me. Now I know how it feels to betray someone with a kiss."

  "Oh, Karl, don't. It was terrible, but what choice did he give you?"

  They walked on, passing the fountain where Charlotte had once sat in solitude while Madeleine's party went on without her; where she had first opened her heart to Anne and begun to fall in love with Karl. The memories were all around her, a cocoon of spun silver.

  "Kristian was always lost at heart, I think," said Karl. "He never felt part of life. He had no real inner life of his own so he fed vicariously on other people's."

  Charlotte said, "Did you love him?"