Incarnation (30 page)

“How terrible,” I murmured. Fully aware as I was that had anyone believed the girl, our efforts to find Mordred might have ended there and then, I could not help but pity her. To be condemned to believe that reality is a phantasm of one’s own disordered mind seemed a cruelly refined torture.

As I was struggling to come to grips with the existence of such poor souls, Stoker had been occupied more productively. He turned to us. “Over here. I’ve found a staircase.”

He had indeed, half hidden behind a pantry. In the great
houses, staff went unseen through concealed passages and up and down hidden steps. Apparently, the same was true in Bethlem.

Electric lights attached to the wall illuminated a metal staircase built for practicality without the least evidence of the grace and effort put into the public aspects of the building. A dank odor rose from below, floating upward on currents of cool, damp air. I smelled stone, soil, and . . . the river. Just as Mordred had described.

“Quickly,” I said. The heels of our boots clattered on the steps as we began our descent. Left to my own devices, I would have covered the distance in several long leaps. Marco no doubt would have been right behind me, but Stoker was not a young man and the years spent laboring behind a desk had not prepared him to keep pace with a halfling and a Protector. Though he strove to do so manfully, it was clear that the exertions of the day were catching up with him.

Finally at the bottom, Marco called a halt on the not very believable grounds that he needed a brief rest. As the Irishman took the opportunity to regain his breath, I closed my eyes and reached out to Mordred.

For an instant, I thought that I sensed him, but the impression was so fleeting that I could not be sure. Either we were in the wrong place after all or Mordred could not respond. He might be too weak to do so or he might no longer exist. Yet if he was gone, surely I would sense that. So great an alteration in the fabric of reality could not go unnoticed, could it?

“Anything?” Marco asked.

Grimly, I shook my head. We proceeded with care through the steel door at the bottom of the stairs and into the narrow corridor on the other side. Unlike the sunlit floors above, the
only illumination came from electric lights in cone-shaped metal shades dangling from the ceiling. They swayed on currents of the dank, clammy air.

Barred doors with small mesh-covered windows lined both sides of the corridor. I peered into one, saw a figure huddled on the floor in a corner, and looked away hastily. Judging by the neatly scripted white name cards set in slots beside most of the doors, what Marco had referred to as the “steerage” section of Bethlem was well occupied. I did not expect to come across one helpfully labeled Mordred, King of the Vampires, but I will not deny that I kept an eye out just in case.

A little further on we came to the laboratories.

If I had possessed any preconceived idea of what such facilities looked like, it fell far short of the reality. What shall I say of those chambers of scientific advancement wherein the most rational labored to uncover the secrets of the human mind? Shall I describe the gleaming equipment with which they were furnished? The surgical tables equipped with restraints and set under banks of lights? The carts laid out with scalpels, forceps, clamps, drills, and an array of other instruments the purpose of which I did not care to guess? Shall I extol the impeccable cleanliness and order of the slate-topped workbenches and glass cabinets filled with neatly labeled supplies? Saline. Hydrochloric acid. Albumin. Ether.

Or perhaps I should describe the smell. The air was filtered. Looking up, I saw that it blew from vents near the ceiling. All hints of the river were gone. The only aroma was chemical, with formaldehyde the overriding note. That was easily explainable by the shelves of specimens floating in liquid—entire brains or parts of them, spinal columns, eyes with the nerves still attached.

“What in the name of God are they doing here?” Stoker said.

Marco turned away from the preserved remains of an embryo that appeared almost but not quite human. He looked particularly grim. “I rather doubt that God has any part in whatever goes on here.”

“God may not,” I observed, “but Sebastian de Vere does.” I gestured to the rows of books, most bearing his name. This was his doing, I was certain of it.

However unclear it was what contribution, if any, such laboratories could make to the study of human sanity, it was odd that they were not in use in the midmorning of a workday. Nor, now that I thought of it, did I hear any of the screaming that Mordred had mentioned.

It fell to Marco to provide the answer. “Visiting hours. They aren’t taking any chances.”

When we entered the next lab, I saw exactly what he meant. This one was filled with cages stacked along two walls and occupied exclusively by primates of various descriptions. I cannot claim to be able to identify them all, but I saw monkeys, chimpanzees, and several species of larger apes, all remarkably docile as though they had been drugged.

“Mordred was certain that he was hearing humans screaming, was he?” Stoker asked. He was pale and sweating as he looked at the caged animals. I did not have to wonder why. The size of the cages allowed for almost no movement. All the primates were hunched over, similar to the patient I had seen. Many had scratched and otherwise worried their fur so they were bald over much of their bodies. Despite being drugged, or perhaps because of it, all looked wracked by suffering.

“I believe so.” My voice seemed to come from far away.
I was caught by the poignant gaze of a gorilla that curled its hands around the bars of its cage as it stared at me. Electrodes protruded from its skull. I had to wonder if we would find humans in a similar condition.

The Irishman was still muttering about the need for laws against such things when we returned to the corridor. A pulse beat in Marco’s jaw but his eyes spoke fury. It was left to me to say what we all knew.

“We are wasting time.”

It was callous, I know. But there was nothing to be done for the animals, not then. Their only hope lay in our getting to the bottom of whatever it was that de Vere was doing and making sure that it was stopped for good.

But first we had to find Mordred, and to that end I had no idea what to do. The basements were cavernous, fading off in both directions under the vast reaches of Bethlem. Hundreds of people might easily be confined in them.

With no idea of how to proceed, I asked, “What was here before the hospital?” London was a very old city. It was a rare scrap of ground that hadn’t been occupied by a parade of hovels, markets, townhouses, churches, and the like through the centuries.

After a few moments’ thought, Marco said, “There was a Priory of St. George in this area, hence St. George’s Fields, but it was destroyed centuries ago during the Reformation. Why do you ask?”

I reached out a hand and ran the tips of my fingers over the nearby wall. The building we were standing in had been built decades before, but it was still young by London standards. And like the foundry that had stood until so recently where Mordred’s manor had been, something had been there before it.

Slowly, I said, “Where there was a priory, there would have been a vault. Isn’t that so?”

The two men exchanged a glance. “If there was,” Marco replied, “then it was likely left intact when this building was constructed. Doing anything else would have risked an outcry about the desecration of bones.”

“You think Mordred could be in such a place?” Stoker asked. His distaste for the possibility was clear, but I could not relieve him of it.

“I think de Vere would want to conceal him as thoroughly as possible, not only from prying human eyes but also from others as well. How better than in a forgotten tomb?”

By then, I was at least half convinced myself that such a place existed even though as yet I had no real evidence of it. I was that desperate to find Mordred. In running my fingers over the wall, I had felt again the brief flicker of awareness that I had experienced earlier. But, like the fading coda that brings a musical composition to its end, the final notes were sounding. Soon they would be extinguished forever.

“We should split up,” I said. “That way, we’ll be able to search farther before visiting hours end and staff members return.”

Stoker looked less than taken with the idea of being on his own in such a place, but he straightened his shoulders and nodded. “Perfectly right.”

Marco, whose first instinct was to protect even the half-vampire hybrid he still remembered as a human young woman, was less enthusiastic. But I didn’t give him time to object.

“Good. Mr. Stoker, you and Marco can take the north wing. I’ll take the south. Whoever finds anything should call out.”

I had no intention of leaving the Irishman to his own devices, but neither did I want his company. The mere possibility that he might write another book—or worse yet already be working on one—made me reluctant to risk supplying him with any new material.

Marco took a bit more convincing before he agreed. I cut that short by the simple expediency of heading off on my own. Over my shoulder, I said, “If you find anything, don’t try to approach Mordred on your own. There’s no telling how he would react.”

The thought had occurred to me that if the vampire king still existed, after so long and arduous a confinement he was likely to be very hungry.

CHAPTER 23

I
started down the corridor extending away to the south as I tried to decide where to begin. If the vault existed and de Vere was using it, there would have to be an entrance that was relatively convenient but also easily concealed. Surely that ruled out the labs, as they were obviously designed to accommodate dozens of scientists and technicians. The labs suggested that de Vere enjoyed far more than mere privileges at Bethlem. He had sufficient power to do as he liked within its walls.

Which meant . . . what, exactly? Since my incarnation, I had experienced a heightening in physical strength and stamina, as well as of all my senses. But I cannot claim that any of that translated into enhanced intellectual ability. I was no smarter than I had been as a young human woman. Insights did not come to me with blinding clarity; I had to work for them.

And so I did, standing there in the dismal corridor, until after what seemed far too long but was no more than a few moments, it occurred to me that the answer was directly in front of me. There were hundreds of cells, all appearing from the outside to be virtually identical. If an entrance to the vault was
concealed within one of the cells, no patient would be present to discover it accidentally or to interfere with de Vere’s own comings and goings. This heartened me briefly until I recalled that although the majority of cells were occupied, even to search those that were empty would take more time than I was likely to have.

That left only a few other possibilities. Halfway down the south wing, set between rows of cells, I came across a series of chambers each innocuously labeled Treatment Room. There were a dozen in all and at first glance they appeared to be similarly outfitted with large steel tubs and chairs equipped with electrical prods to administer shock therapy. The pity I felt for the young sensitive returned even more forcefully as I considered what helpless patients were made to suffer.

But I had not yet seen all the torments inflicted on them. The last room on one side was different from the others, being smaller and bare of any furnishing or equipment other than a large tank positioned in the center of the floor. A lid on the front of the tank could be opened to allow a person to enter and lie down. Once the lid was closed, the interior would be entirely dark. No chink of light would show through the carefully welded seams and the metal framework around the lid. A drain at the bottom indicated that the tank was meant to be filled with water. There was even a heater to maintain a steady temperature. The dial was set at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, the normal temperature of the human body. I looked more closely, noting that the tank itself was constructed of heavy steel. Not only would there be no light inside, or sensation of heat or cold, there would be no sound.

I had found the “sensory isolation chamber” Stoker had mentioned. Straightening, I stared at it in dismay. How long
could a human mind remain intact while being denied all contact with the world? How soon before sanity dissolved and consciousness was driven inward to a landscape where madness reigned? More to the point, what possible benefit could come from such “treatment”?