Castle Rouge (42 page)

“A very two-edged people,” Irene commented. “Our problem now is not Gypsies but duplicating Nell’s utterly instinctive discovery of the tomb entrance. As I recall, she was working her way around to the other side, complaining of the ungiving stone—”

For this I could not blame Nell. The ungiving stones of the cramped graveyard had butted against my boot toes many times on the way here. Quentin handed the lantern to Bram, whose great height allowed him to cast the widest beam of light. We all began feeling our way around the tomb, tapping the stone for hollow sounds like the three blind mice in the nursery rhyme.

Irene and Quentin used the butt ends of their pistols to rap the stone. It sounded like we were attending an open-air séance. With all the talk of vampires and Gypsies and Golems, I admit I was as uneasy as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs, especially when my hand inadvertently rested on a sort of stone knob. Surprised enough to slip on the dark ground, I was forced to grasp my makeshift handhold even harder and started to feel it escape my grasp.

In a moment I was stumbling forward, the ground falling away from me with every step. My feet were stuttering into the hard, cold dark. I was only able to give one shameful startled squeak before I was silenced by the struggle to keep myself upright.

Luckily, that miserable squeak was heard.

A shaft of lantern light fell upon me from above. I saw that I was in a narrow stone passage. The sharp cliff I had been rushing unwillingly down was a crudely hewed set of stairs.

“She has found Nell’s route,” Irene crowed softly from above. “Quick! We must follow before the secret mechanism lets the door fall shut on us.”

I heard the welcome sound of boot soles clattering down behind me and stopped myself only by running directly into the end wall below with both my gloved hands.

Stronger hands plucked me away from the wall and supported my elbows while I caught my breath. Bram Stoker.

“That so-called stairwell is narrower, darker, and steeper than the below-stage exit beneath the vampire box at the Lyceum,” he said, patting my shoulder before he released me to stand on my own power again.

It was hard at such a moment to imagine Bram Stoker as a Ripper candidate.

Quentin and his lantern had managed to bypass us all in the narrow space. Now he stood waiting to lead our party into the unknown dark.

“I can’t believe,” Irene said, shaking her head at me, “that you were able to duplicate Nell’s entirely accidental entry to this secret crypt.”

“Crypt?” I asked, looking about uneasily.

“There are burial niches in the walls, but they are mostly empty,” she answered.

Mostly?

We spoke in whispers, for the hard stone surroundings echoed our every breath, it seemed.

The light from Quentin’s lantern beamed both backward and forward in odd, shattered swaths. I glimpsed our party’s faces eerily lit, familiar features drawn down into gaunt and sinister shadows, and glimpsed the arched penumbra of a niche here and there.

At last we moved forward on level, if not smooth, ground, our shoes shuffling over stone and packed earth and loose bits of…gravel, I suppose. Or bone.

I could not imagine Nell moving down here without shrieking her lungs out, but then realized I should be very glad to hear her shrieking, as it would mean she was alive and we had found her.

The notion that our quest might soon be over made my fingers itch for pen and paper, but it was better that I carried the cane. I held it before me at a diagonal, so its top or bottom should warn me of any impediment in the dark.

At last the passage widened into what could be termed a room.

We all stopped and let Quentin take a soft-footed tour of the space, sweeping his lantern high and low to illuminate the details of the space.

Of course there came the chilling screech of tiny nails over the stone and earthen floor. The light caught the flash of pointed snake tails whipping out of sight…not snakes, but the furless extremities of rats.

The lantern also passed over a surprisingly familiar form: a simple wooden table.

The table proclaimed human occupancy, and that was a more chilling sight than the retreat of a legion of rats.

Quentin quickly shuttered his lantern until only an illuminating sliver remained. Its thin thread of light drew swiftly but silently near us.

“It’s best I scout ahead,” he whispered. “We don’t know who, or how many, may be down here. You say the tunnels are extensive, Irene?”

She nodded, her face barely visible in the faint light.

“We’ll be left in the dark,” Bram objected in a careful whisper.

“I have lucifers,” Irene replied, “but I’d rather Quentin came back safe and sound with the lantern. Go ahead, but be back in five minutes, or we will have to raise a clatter looking for you.”

He nodded and moved away in uncanny silence, the crescent of light soon dying.

“How will we know when five minutes have passed?” I asked my unseen cohorts in a discreet whisper.

“More’s the point, how will Stanhope know?” Bram whispered in turn.

“He is used to estimating time without consulting a watch, as am I. In fact, I need only think myself through the first aria from
Cinderella
and I will keep perfect time.”

We all fell silent then, listening for the slithering return of the rats. It was all very well for Irene to make time with voiceless arias, and I suppose Bram Stoker’s stage sense might help him pass the long minutes, but I had nothing except my imagination to occupy me, and it was far too excellent a one to let loose for too long in the dark.

After more like fifteen minutes than five, of a sudden I heard a scrape right beside me.

I edged away just as the lantern shutter opened not a foot from my face.

“It’s quite all right,” Quentin said quickly, still whispering. “The place seems deserted now.”

“Now?” Irene said just as quickly.

He nodded and I noticed that his usual genial expression had been completely erased by the lantern’s harsh light, or by something else. What had replaced it was an expression of tense excitement.

“These subterranean tunnels,” he went on, opening the lantern shutter wide enough to create a path for the rest of us to follow, “have been King Rat’s kingdom for decades, but His Majesty has had some human competition just lately. It could be from your last expedition in the caverns, Irene.”

“We didn’t leave much trace,” she said, watching the edge of the lantern light for any of King Rat’s returning subjects.

“But surely your adventure in the place alerted others to its presence,” he went on.

“Not very many, only the villains of the piece, who numbered two, with a handful of henchmen who were later captured and imprisoned in Prague Castle, which has dungeons deeper than a hundred years, and the victim.”

“What would keep the victim silent?”

“The ignominy of being a victim,” she said shortly, clearly unwilling to give specifics.

“I had played a bit part at the end of that act,” Quentin said, “but I quite understand your need to keep the full denouement secret. I am often in the same position.”

“Am I,” Bram Stoker asked, “going to be defrauded of another ripping good story? I can’t just make everything up, you know. True stories are a great inspiration to the fiction writer.”

“Don’t worry,” Quentin reassured him. “The scene ahead would inspire a Verne or a Poe.”

“Or a penny dreadful?” I asked. When silence greeted my question, I explained, “That’s what we call sensational fiction in the States, because it can be bought for a penny and really is rather dreadful.”

“Imagine what poor pay the writers get,” Bram put in. “I can’t say that my scribblings have earned much more than that.”

“Be grateful that you have such a solid position with Henry Irving and the Lyceum,” Irene advised.

“I suppose so, but it’s not as solid as one might think,” Bram grumbled. “Adherents of Irving are always coming around trying to worm their way into his regard, and employ.”

“Then perhaps you will have a future as a private inquiry agent,” Irene answered. “If you like the work.”

At that moment the narrow walls ceased to contain Quentin’s lantern light, and it spilled out full width into the large chamber we entered through a natural stone archway wide enough for us four to stand abreast.

And so we stood, and gaped, our senses assaulted by a vast space that had recently entertained far more than rats.

Scents of wine and urine and something else both sweet and sour or sweet and rotten, I should say, overwhelmed our nostrils.

Our eyes fell upon dozens of candle stumps lying hither and yon in pools of hardened wax where they had been cast, their flames allowed to drown in their own melted forms.

Bottles also strewed the floor, a few tall and glass-green as would hold wine, most squat and pale, crude crockery bottles of an unknown source and containing an unknown spirit.

In the chamber’s center charred logs resembled the ruins of a miniature cathedral. Other, unburnt logs lay around the edge of the roughly circular space, almost like seats for an arena. A pile of the same logs was heaped a few feet away from the remains of the fire.

All in all, one imagined a crowd of people gathered around the fierce and immense flames that had charred such mighty logs to blackened splinters. One saw smoke rising and filling the room with its murky fumes before choking the several tunnels that led away from this chamber.

“It looks like they spilled more wine than they drank,” Bram said as he moved behind Quentin over the uneven ground. “Look at all the drops sprayed on the stone, the ground, the logs.”

Irene had bent down to pick up one of the crude pottery bottles. She lofted the jar like some rare amphora from an ancient civilization.

“There was red wine in those bottles, too?” Bram asked.

“I don’t think so.” Irene wafted the narrow open mouth beneath her nose and sniffed delicately, as if it were a rare and costly Paris scent. “Red Tomahawk mentioned this on the exposition grounds in Paris. A ‘strong firewater’ he did not know. Quentin, have you ever seen or smelled the like?”

He came over to grasp the empty bottle and inhale its vanished essence. “Something spiritous still soaks the pottery, yes. But I have been too long in the land of Islam, where alcoholic beverages are forbidden. It is beyond me.”

“Bram?” Irene offered him the lowly pot.

He, too, imbibed the odor, then shook his shaggy head. “I usually indulge in the local ales when I travel. This is stronger stuff.”

“If only Sherlock Holmes were here,” Irene mused. Her thumbnail picked at the lip of the bottle and a bit of candle wax flaked off and fell on the floor.

“Well,” said I in some umbrage. “Aren’t you going to let me in on this sniffing party?”

Irene gazed upon me as if she had forgotten my presence. “Of course, Pink. The bouquet is all yours.”

I took the clumsy thing in both gloved hands. Unlike the rest of them, I bet I had seen its like before, though not on this continent. I closed my eyes, tried to shut out the ugly reek of the wretched acts that had gone on in this cavern, and passed the opening under my nose, back and forth, sniffing. The remaining odor was faint, but stringent, raw.

I finally threw my head back. “I don’t know what they call it in civilized places like Europe, but where I come from it’s called rotgut and moonshine and, to Red Tomahawk’s people, firewater. It’s homemade raw liquor, the kind that will never get a label for anything but making a man drunk fast and hard.”

The other three just stared at me.

“What would all these crude bottles of American spirits be doing here?” Bram finally asked.

Irene took the bottle from my hands and gazed upon it. “Because, like myself, it is—and it isn’t—American, perhaps?”

34.

Dance for Your Supper

My heart used to jump in my dancing days when Bram asked me for a waltz. I knew it meant triumph, twirling, ecstasy, elysium, giddiness, ices, and Hirtation!

—
A DANCING PARTNER OF BACHELOR BRAM STOKER
, 1873

Once again I was unsuccessful in discouraging the loutish servant from spilling more red wine into my goblet, but despite the scanty attendants the dinner continued to be almost worth the dreadful company.

The chef himself appeared from the kitchen to serve the main dish, braised venison in brandy bechamel sauce, as he announced in French-accented English. He was the expected portly fellow, of late middle age, with an unfortunate sprinkle of dandruff in what was left of his dark hair, which made me nervous of the salt.

Yet I must admit that I attacked the main course with a will. After the days of Gypsy stew it was heavenly, and I managed to devour it, in a ladylike manner, without my usual qualms for the poor deer sacrificed to our appetites. It is so hard to eat hearty when one is constantly thinking of the once-living source of the food.

The salad featured roots and leaves I was entirely unfamiliar with, and I only picked at that, aware of how common herbal poisons are.