Castle Rouge (58 page)

“So drunkenness is the state religion in Russia,” I said.

Colonel Moran laughed sharply at my comment, but before I could bask in support from an unlikely quarter, Tatyana moved far too close for my comfort.

“Right again, Miss Huxleigh.” Her basilisk eyes stared into mine and through me. “For nearly four hundred years Imperial banquets have begun with bread and
voda
. Bread and water. Bread and what we and the world now call vodka. But most of it is
samogon
, a brew made by the people for their own use. Thus vodka is the drink of both czars and peasants.”

“It should be the drink of sewers,” I said. “It tastes abominable.”

“And when did
you
taste vodka?” she asked, bemused.

“When your servant Medved poured some down my throat, but I was able to spit most of it out.”

“Interesting.” She cocked her head like a bird who was hearing a worm say something astounding. “He was drunk of course. He almost always is; that’s why I find him so amusing.”

“In civilized lands, we do not laugh at the inebriated.” This was not quite true. I understood that the music halls laughed a good deal at the drunkard’s expense, but I had never attended a music hall so could afford to take a superior position.

Tatyana laughed at me. “Russia is not a civilized land. Thank God, I suppose? The peasants have nothing much to laugh at, save the inebriated. And the Irish”—here she glanced at Bram Stoker—“know much of both peasantry and inebriation, yes?”

“The report of our national inebriation is much exaggerated, Madam,” Mr. Stoker said with great dignity. I had indeed never heard that he was anything but a sober man. “I will cede the honors to the Russians, on your testimony.”

“I will take those honors.” She leaned out the archway of one window and called out a throat-sticking arrangement of guttural sounds.

In a moment a man in a wide-sleeved robe had tossed a pale jar up to our outpost. The Colonel rapidly stepped forward to catch it, but our Gypsy companion forestalled him, holding the prize high above his head for a moment as if he refused to surrender it.

Sherlock Holmes had been so dormant since his foiled escape attempt that I was as surprised as anyone by his snake-fast strike in snaring the bottle.

He gave his mute’s grin and shook the bottle by his supposedly useless ear, then shrugged to indicate that he couldn’t hear the contents shift. With a bow, he ceded the bottle to Colonel Moran, but I suspected a point had been made.

“I could use a drink,” Colonel Moran muttered, tapping the jar’s narrow end against the stone whilst turning it expertly.

Wax dropped away like falling leaves, a process the Gypsy Holmes and I watched with equal fascination. Only now were we seeing the source of the wax traces we had tracked from Paris to this forsaken spot in Transylvania, where we were indeed forsaken ourselves and probably observing our last sights on this earth, unfortunately the height of human perversion.

Yet I was grateful that I would go to my death with at least that niggling mystery of the wax solved.

The Colonel pulled a small collapsible steel cup from his pocket and filled it with the clear liquid that poured from the jug.

“Tatyana?”

She nodded and sipped. He sipped in turn, then glanced at the rest of us. “Shall I offer tastes all ’round?” he asked her. “I know you are fond of educating the ignorant.”

“Indeed, at least to those willing to use a common cup, which I suspect will not include Miss Huxleigh.”

“I am a battlefield veteran,” the Colonel said harshly. “We know that raw liquor is a great purifier, for throats and wounds. Nothing safer to drink in any clime.”

“Agreed,” said Mr. Stoker. “I’ll try the whiskey of another land.”

The Colonel filled the cup again and handed it to the huge Irishman, who tipped it back in one swallow.

He laughed. “Raw liquor indeed, Colonel. Not so smooth as my favorite rye whiskey, but clean and sharp.”

“Mr. Norton?” the Colonel asked next.

“Why not?” Godfrey took the refilled cup, eyed the company, and tossed it back in two considered gulps. “Reminds me of the Blue Ruin, the gin of the common folk in London,” he explained to Tatyana. “We don’t have true peasants, for Englishmen have had a place in law since the Magna Carta, but we do have many poor souls who need to forget hard toil.”

“The Gypsy must know this drink,” Tatyana said.

He nodded eagerly, then pantomimed tossing back a cup. The Colonel murmured
memento mori
, a Latin phrase that made Godfrey’s mouth tighten, then refilled the cup.

Unlike the others, Mr. Holmes sipped the brew, grinning at each of us between sips, like the simpleton he was playing.

I couldn’t help wondering how much he liked the bottle, this man who regularly took, according to his physician friend, “a seven-percent solution” of cocaine. From the careful, birdlike way he imbibed the vodka, I concluded that liquor was not one of his vices.

I did have the oddest impression that he was
analyzing
the brew, using himself as a human chemical process. It made me wonder if he was acquainted with vodka and its variations already. And to wonder how, and why, and when.

While we had been indulging daintily in ancient Russian drinking material, the people below had been gulping the stuff down. No longer were they dancing a recognizable round. They reeled and screeched, sang and fell, laughed and cried, men and women together. And then they began to grope each other.

I watched with the unmitigated disgust of the truly sober.

Into the cacophony of accordion and song and hands slapping knees came a sudden sharp report, like a rifle.

I glanced at the Colonel, but his sinister cane was not in evidence. Another report echoed even as I stared at him.

Looking below, I saw a nest of dark serpents undulating among the dancers, lashing them to faster gyrations.

“
Khlyst
also means ‘whip’ in my language,” Tatyana said, gazing raptly below.

I watched in horror as the white gowns, some girdled in crimson ribbons, ran red about the shoulders, back, and arms. I remembered the drops of spilled “wine” we had spied upon the rocky cellar and catacomb floors of Paris.

Most of all I recalled the sentence writ in blood, in French, on the cellar wall
…The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing…
only Irene had pointed out that form of the word Juwes in that construction was the feminine one. And Sherlock Holmes had concluded that the blood came from a man who had been whipped along the length of the graffito, using his own blood to inscribe the letters.

Although I had not drunk from the common cup the water of Russian life, my senses reeled. Everything I was witnessing I had seen the aftermath of, not once, but again and again.

The candle stubs, tossed aside as they were being so now, while the great central bonfire was lit to take their place. The flakes of wax and droplets of blood sharing common ground on the cavern floor.

I saw shredded robes slipping off shoulders slick with sweat and blood as men and women came together in an orgy that history had likely not seen since the days of the Romans.

Godfrey caught my head in one hand and turned my face into the darkness of his shoulder.

Despite the shelter, my mind combined images from the past few weeks…the twisted remnants of the Paris courtesans on the Prince of Wales’s amorous device in the French brothel…the illustrations and descriptions of the gutted women of Whitechapel that Irene and I and Pink had put together from newspaper reports…the naked dead bodies displayed daily at the Paris Morgue…and the one real dead body I had seen placed into a waxwork vignette at the Musée Grévin in Paris…the dead flower seller in Neunkirchen…the tale of the brutalized Madonna and hideously murdered child in Prague…the severed breasts left on Mary Jane Kelly’s table in the spare Whitechapel room that held what was left of her literally flayed and eviscerated body, a breast excised before a mob like this and my very eyes under the Paris Exposition grounds….

The dark of Godfrey’s shoulder, however welcome, was no escape.

I lifted my head even as his fingers tightened onto my upper arm like a claw.

Some of the men lifted a huge, crude cross of logs bound into a figure “X” against the cavern’s back wall.

The black-robed figure had come to stand between it and the snapping, crackling, roaring fire.

He held a pale jar in one hand and thrust his head back to drink…and drink…and drink until he had emptied the entire jar and cast it down before him to shatter.

…pottery shards and pieces of wax on a cellar floor
.

He began to speak in no language I knew, but his voice was strong and flowing, like lava, and the people before him swayed left and right even as they continued to twine each other (in unspeakable acts that I luckily knew so little of) like a nest of snakes.

They answered him in many tongues and some of them were not of this earth. And still they writhed as one, sacrilegious mass.

I knew that I witnessed utter abandonment, sin on an unthinkable scale, but I could not see the specifics of the acts, as if some benign force had blinded my eyes to exactly what I saw, though my mind and heart were not so sheltered.

This was horror. This was the world I believed in, inverted. If it was not Satanism, it was a close neighbor to Hell.

And yet I must know. I had walked too far into the dark to shut my eyes at its triumph over the light.

The man in the black cloak threw back the hood as he drank the second jar of vodka, the water of life, and apparently death as well.

I saw revealed this time not the hawkish features of the old priest, but the stolid young features of Medved, his pale eyes blazing in his peasant face like holes into Hell.

I stared at the jar at his lips, unable to accept that merely twenty-four hours before he was urging this same raw spirit upon me.

He smashed the empty bottle to bits at his feet, then bent to pluck a burning brand from the fire. He turned and scratched a large symbol into the cavern wall, the burnt stick marking the stone like charcoal.

It was a Chi-Rho!

As he turned back to the fire, a girl clutched the tatters of her white robe around her and rushed up to him with a pottery jar, kneeling to offer him another full measure.

He took the jar and drank from it even as he drew up the girl, tore what was left of her robe from her, and bore her down to the ground beneath him.

I saw what could have been myself.

Other girls rushed toward him, covered him like leeches, until they formed a knot of slippery bloody skin and bones and tangled robes.

The accordion wheezed as if trying to push air back into Hell, people screamed and swooned and entwined with each other and began shaking and spitting out alien words as if giving voice to all the imps of eternity. It was agony and ecstasy. I knew I was hearing what had first been heard on earth when the Disciples had shut themselves away after Jesus’s death…speaking in tongues. For the Disciples the gift had come from the Holy Spirit.

I could see no Holy Spirit in this mountain cavern. I could only see and hear the Evil One in human guise, which, come to think of it, was the only way he ever displayed himself.

I was shaking with disgust and fear, and Godfrey’s heart was an avalanche beneath my ear. Bram Stoker was struck to stone, confronting a horror story beyond his ability to write it. Sherlock Holmes also stood transfixed, unable to take his eyes from the scene below, which I suspected appalled him almost as much as it appalled me.

I looked at Tatyana. Her expression was rapt, like a saint being assumed into heaven. She wished to be down there. She wished to be a maiden in a wreath writhing on the floor with a half dozen men. She wished to be Medved, inciting and leading and drinking and taking. She wished to be a mad dog.

Colonel Moran, I saw, was of two minds: the natural thirst for violence of the hunter slaked, the civilized club man both accepting the alien, even savoring it, yet instinctively, fascinatingly repulsed by it.

I felt a throb of sympathy for him. I admitted in myself a fascination with the inhuman. Yet no ghost in any story, however carefully wrought, could compete with the reality of the
Khlysty
. I understood that all this evil was done in the supposed name of God, and that this was not an utterly uncommon condition in the world every day, though never so extreme.

And I remembered the recent incident in my bedchamber, and the mesmerizing approach of Medved, who had played the Devil, the demon, more than once in the past few weeks. For the first time, I saw myself as Eve in Eden, under the fruited tree, noticing the serpent.

48.

Unholy Spirit

Jyger! Jyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

—
WILLIAM BLAKE
, 1794,
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

If Tatyana had wished to terrify and dispirit us, she had been wildly successful. We would all meet whatever death she chose, rather than face the rituals of that faceless mob.

In horror we watched a man brought forth, willingly, and laid out on an “X” of crossed logs, his wrists and ankles tied to the extremes of each board.

It was a moment’s work to tear the whip-shredded robes from his body.

I had seen once (and never looked again, as I was sure this was not recommended viewing for a parson’s spinster daughter) Michelangelo’s evocation of a naked man as upon an invisible wheel, with his limbs stretched out so that a perfect circle could be scribed around him. I was sure the Renaissance artist had intended this to be a tribute to the Deity’s inimitable plan for all of life and humanity, the eye that is upon the sparrow and yet makes of man a geometry pleasing to all nature and science.