The Golden
Page 14
It was not the sun he recalled from his youth, not that warm, lovely golden-white burn. It was larger, much larger. Monstrous. A warped yellow round with a purplish corona and a surface mottled with incandescent whorls and boils of hideous fire. And so he did not at first recognize what he was seeing, but instead thought how similar it was, this grotesque orb, to the moon that he had imagined the murderer had seen atop the turret. Even after realizing it must be the sun, that the green swatches were, indeed, pine boughs, that the blue ceiling was the sky, and that he was surrounded not by stone walls but by hills and cool air and light…even then he did not credit his senses. Sunlight would burn him, blacken his bones. And then he thought it must be killing him at that very moment, that he must not be feeling the attendant pain. Perhaps his senses had been seared away, perhaps he was beyond all feeling.
He began to tremble. Hot urine spurted down his thigh. It seemed he was falling toward the sun, or else it was growing larger yet. The flares of its writhing corona stretching out to ensnare him, bubbles of fiery plasma bulging toward him and bursting as from the surface of a vile, molten soup. He let out a whimper and tried to burrow into the earth, digging up clods and swatches of grass. Breath whined in his throat. He rammed his head at the ground, wanting to batter his way into the black earth. When this failed, he turned onto his back and stared about in abject horror at the landscape.
He was lying on a tufted mound some ten feet from the castle wall, about fifty feet below a gaping hole—obviously the terminus of the pipe down which he had slid; in many places the mortar had eroded from between the granite blocks so that the entirety of the wall was mapped with cracks and fissures, making it appear that the structure was on the verge of crumbling. To his right, the hillside—ranked with dwarfish pines—fell away sharply into a valley. Pine boughs overhung the spot where he lay, and whenever the wind pressed them down, it was as if intricate green paws were groping, trying to scoop him up. Something tiny and black was circling the depths of the sky, tilting back and forth on currents of wind, lending perspective to his view. The castle wall went up and up, a mile or more of gray ruin, and the sun, an evil eruption burst through from the other side of the sky, was pushing closer, and the woods hissed with wind, lisping the noxious secrets of the day, and that stupid winged thing was mindlessly circling and circling, and talons of pale cloud were uncurling, fraying into nonsense script, and the pines, shaking their burly tops like green beasts just emerged from a river, were attempting to uproot themselves and lurch forward in an attack. There was too much light, too much movement, too much of everything. The profusion of sights and sounds disoriented Beheim, kindled a fire in his mind that he could not extinguish. All the familiar constructions of his thought and expectation were burning, breaking apart, tumbling in showers of sparks down into a chaos of light, and unable to restore an internal order by means of reason, ignoring the pain in his legs, he leaped to his feet and ran, covering his head with his hands. He ran without regard for direction, simply bolting, praying that he might stumble into some benign darkness, a hole, a crypt, a cave. He darted in among the pines, avoiding patches of sunlight as if they were pools of yellow poison. But as he negotiated a steep defile bordered by an outcropping of boulders, he slipped on the carpet of needles and went sprawling, winding up crumpled on his side, panting, and once more gazing directly into the sun.
Fatigue made him wise. He was not dying, not burning. Somehow a miracle had occurred, and he had lived. There was no point in running any farther. Yet he could not overcome his terror of the boiling, fuming thing overhead, nor could he stanch his uneasiness with the world revealed in its light. For a long while he lay pinned by a beam of sunlight, expecting at any moment to be incinerated. Finally he drew up his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and with his back against one of the boulders, he sat hunched and miserable, harrowed by the warm sun that fingered his scalp and shoulders. He searched inside himself for a reservoir of strength, something that would shore him up and permit him to think, to analyze, to get a grip on this patently ungraspable situation. What could have happened to cause this? What had he done—or what had been done to him—to so abrogate the laws of his being? And he wondered as well how—despite the hours he had spent remembering the life of a day, despite the poignancy of his nostalgia—how he could ever have longed to experience the sun again. It must be, he decided, a benign illness of the eye that allowed humans to regard the thing without blanching. Even its minor side effects were perturbing: the air rippling and inconstant, rife with translucent eddies and drifting opaque shapes; specks of dirt floating up like pepper grains in a clear fluid; patterns of pine needles on the ground shifting about like thousands of muddled hexagrams rearranging themselves. Watching all this motion, both real and apparent, he felt vertiginous, sick to his stomach. Everything was too bright, wrong in its obscene welter of detail. The patchy grooves of pine bark exposed by ugly light rather than made cryptic and simple by moonshadow; the blotchy mineral complexion of the boulders; the diseased intricacy of pine cones; the gray-green infections of moss. It was alien, unnatural, ruled by that hellish fire in the sky, the source of all wrongness, and he was reminded again of the scene atop the turret, his hallucinatory impressions he had received of the murderer.
“Shit!” he said, suddenly jolted by comprehension, having made a connection between what had befallen him and the Golden’s death.
The murder might have been done in the daylight. No, it must have been done then! That would explain the retardation of the rigor.
Had he reached this conclusion under ordinary circumstances, he would have laughed at it, and he would further have rejected the validity of what he had imagined atop the turret regarding the murderer’s state of mind; no matter how accurate such intuitions had been in the past, he would have believed it impossible that a vampire could have withstood the sun’s rays. But he was living proof that a vampire could survive direct sunlight. And it had been a vampire who killed the Golden, not a servant emulating his master’s lust for blood. Beheim’s perceptions of the day as a perversion of darkness confirmed this fact, validated the impression of the murderer’s perceptions that he had gained at the scene of the crime.
But how, he asked himself, how could this have happened?
He took a deep breath to quell his uneasiness and began to consider the events of the past hours. An answer—the only one possible, it seemed—soon came clear. The liquid he had drunk in Felipe’s hidden study. It must have been a drug that enabled one to walk abroad in daylight. The list of dosages and Felipe’s journal entry supported this assumption. And there was something else. The fact that the windows of the study had been without shutters. Even were it a place that Felipe frequented only at night, no one of the Family could have borne for very long the presence of a shutterless window unless made confident by some other form of protection. Otherwise an accident might occur, one that would leave them helpless and exposed to the sun. He had been an imbecile not to see this before.
Panic flared in him again.
How long an immunity did the drug guarantee? He had to return to the castle…and quickly!
Then he remembered the flask he had taken from Felipe’s study.
It was still there, still tucked into his shirt pocket.
So frightened he was unable to breathe, he fumbled with the silver cap, unscrewed it, and put the bottle to his lips; but then, recognizing that he exhibited no ill effects, he refrained from drinking.
He was going to survive, he told himself; he had only to stay calm and take his time.
Nothing had changed. The first order of business was still to return to the castle. Of course, even were he able to get back inside, he would find himself in the same situation as before. But armed with the knowledge of Felipe’s researches, with the evidence of his experience, he might be able to influence the Patriarch to allow him to continue his investigation. There was hope for him now.
And what of Giselle, what hope for her?
Coming out from the shade of the pines and under the bloated eye of the sun was no less disturbing than before, but he mastered his fear and walked briskly toward the castle without looking up. He had little difficulty in scaling the wall, and as he neared the mouth of the pipe, that circle of sweet darkness, he began to feel secure and, if not wholly confident, then at least somewhat capable. He hauled himself up onto the lip of the pipe and dared another glance at the world of light and heat he was abandoning. As his gaze swept across the ground below, he caught sight of something nestled in a depression between two hillocks not fifty feet from the spot where he had landed. Something wrapped in a black widow’s shawl, something with pale twisted sticks protruding from a bloodied skirt—legs, he realized, badly broken legs.
An old woman, perhaps.
A servant, the one whom the Patriarch had charged with the care of the Golden?
Who else could it be?
He did not feel sufficiently secure to risk climbing back down and examining the corpse; he wanted darkness and quiet and still air, and though he realized how slovenly and unprofessional this was, he could not endure the thought of staying outside another minute. At any rate, he no longer believed he could win this game through a process of deduction. How could he trust any clue the body might provide? There would probably be none, but even if there were, it might have been planted. No, the thing to do would be to use the corpse to his advantage.
And that could be managed.
Despite everything against him, if he could survive this next bit, he believed he would be in a position to make moves of his own, to send others scurrying for cover. He was no longer governed by the rules of evidence or the necessity for supporting witnesses. He was in effect a Columbus of the daylight, a voyager in uncharted seas. Who would doubt the integrity of his witness? If the murderer could remove or plant his clues, could not he do the same? If anyone sought to debunk his evidence, by displaying such knowledge they would implicate themselves in the crime.
It was really quite a simple game. Now that he had stepped off the board and taken note of its parameters, he saw how primitive were its conceptions, how clumsy and unschooled its players, how overly dependent they were on the tactic of fear.
He forced himself to take a final look at the sun, holding on to the idea that this was the world he would someday inhabit, that he would have to learn to bear whatever horrors it presented.
It seemed to hurtle toward him again, but he did not cower from it this time, though his genitals shriveled and his stomach knotted. The thing resembled, he decided, the underside of a yellow jellyfish with purplish tentacles and serious internal disorders. Thinking about it in that way, diminishing it, made him feel easier. He wondered if there was truly any beauty here, the remembered beauty of soft warmth and summer winds and thistles drifting through the air, the harmonious buzz of dragonflies, the universe in which small children played with hoops and lovers blithely wandered. Or was what he saw now the reality? Had all previous seeing been blighted by a lovely curse, the world’s coarse truth hidden from mortal eyes? Could he ever learn to resurrect those old perceptions?
He stared out over the hilltop, past the valley and the hills, trying to overcome his fright, to discern some fraction of beauty in the sickeningly pale sky and its unruly configuration of clouds and sun, seeing only what struck him as the products of dementia and nightmare. But just before he turned away, there was a moment—a fleeting moment almost lost among flutters of panic and shivers of revulsion—when he seemed not to reinhabit that old childhood world of clean golden sun and soothing warmth, but to perceive in this place of garish light and turbulence a raw perfection such as might have existed during prehistory, a time when a crimson sun beamed down its killing rays, and giant ferns lifted in silhouette against clouds of mauve and copper and gold, and grasses seethed with furies of infinitesimal life, and there were poison butterflies as big as birds and beetles the size of sewer rats, and the screams of winged reptiles ripped through the sky, and nightmares with needle teeth coupled in a bloody rage, and somewhere in the depths of a vast forest, a new monster lifted its head and—as Beheim did then—gave a cry of shock and bewilderment, an expression so terrifying in itself that it abolished fear and reminded him that he was first among all the terrors of this world.
Chapter NINE
It took Beheim the better part of an hour to retrace his path to the tunnel mouth where he and Giselle had encountered Vlad. He made his way tentatively at first, but with increasing confidence—he was determined not to be taken by surprise again. Once the element of surprise had been removed, he did not believe that the vermin who inhabited the depths of Banat would be any match for him. From time to time he heard delirious shouts and laughter reverberating in the distance, and as he drew near the tunnel mouth, glancing to his left along a cross corridor, he spotted a reflected glow of torchlight. He headed toward the light and soon turned into another corridor whose far end was stained by a flickering ruddy glare. A faint babble of voices carried to him, as did the scent of blood. There might be, he estimated, as many as thirty people gathered together. Enough to present a considerable danger, should they be of unified purpose. But he continued on, driven equally by a red desire to confront Vlad as by any hope of finding Giselle.
When he reached the source of the light—a half-open door, massive slabs of oak bound with iron bands—he peeked into a room so narrow it might have been an incredibly elongated closet. Sixty feet long or more, with a high arched ceiling, lit by torches set in iron brackets. The space had been hewn from the rock on which the castle was founded, the walls of glistening, unmortised black stone decorated with brightly colored caricatures of bone-white, cadaverous men and women with cruel carmine mouths and ridiculously elongated limbs and exaggerated fangs. Evil cartoons posed in attitudes of menace, each fifteen feet high or thereabouts. Images so vividly rendered, they seemed capable of coming to life, of peeling up from the rock and committing two-dimensional violences.
There were not so many people in the room as Beheim had presumed. Only a dozen or so, all dressed in hooded robes like that worn by Vlad. Most of them were crowded about Giselle, who was shackled to the wall, naked and apparently unconscious, her skin washed orange by the torchlight. Fresh bruises dirtied her thighs and arms. Vlad was standing beside her, his hood thrown back, talking with a plump gray-haired woman. Every few seconds he would touch Giselle on the shoulder, the hip, in a casual fashion that made Beheim think he was using her as an example in his conversation; whenever he smiled, his teeth glittered with unnatural brilliance, and this enhanced the ratlike aspect of his bearded face. Several other people were idling about, examining the murals, now and again casting glances toward Giselle, as if they expected something to happen. Beheim feared the torches, but he knew that if he were going to act, he would have to do so quickly, before they set about whatever it was they intended.
Footsteps sounded farther along the corridor.
Someone walking at a rapid pace toward the room.
Laughter came from even farther away, deeper in the labyrinth of corridors.
Beheim flattened against the wall, and when a burly robed figure drew abreast of him, he seized the man from behind and broke his neck with a quick twist, choking off his outcry. He hauled the body farther into the darkness, into a niche that might once have been used for a sentry post. There he stripped off the man’s robe and, ignoring its foul odor, pulled it on over his head. As he was adjusting the hood to hide his f
ace, two more men came striding along the corridor, chatting happily, and entered the room. Beheim stood straining his ears. After waiting a few minutes more to allow for any further late arrivals, he himself entered, stepping in among the small crackling fires and the rich stink of blood.
Gone was every trace of his benign regard for mortals. He felt nothing but anger and contempt. As he passed in among them he glimpsed mottled faces and dull eyes and gaping mouths. Several members of the assemblage, he noticed, were sporting makeshift fangs: curved tubes of crudely forged metal that fitted over their canines. This aping of the Family intensified his loathing. They were aroused, he realized. Titillated. Anticipating some gory delight. A primitive version of the Decanting, perhaps. And in their arousal, whatever craftiness served to keep them alive had been subsumed beneath a veneer of lustful perversity. He had been concerned that they would know him at once, that he would have to strike before he was prepared. But they had not the slightest intimation of his presence. Sheep would have been more alert, chickens more sensitive to danger.