The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (9 page)

“It’s always a pleasure,” I said and leaned in to kiss Alice on her cheek. I saw the antennae of some insect or another wave out of her mouth for a second.

“No, it’s not,” she said with another giggle, and I had to admit she was right.

“Until next time,” I said, and then I left the gallery and the library and went confused into that good night.

I took a taxi to Heathrow, where I lifted a couple of wallets from weary travellers whose trips were about to take a turn for the worse. I used the credit card in one to buy a new shirt and pants. I put my old clothes in the store’s bag and threw the bag in a garbage can. I tried to stay away from the airport’s cameras and their face recognition software. By now the Royals had no doubt been alerted to my presence in the country by the incident at the library, if the trick with the Witches hadn’t already tipped them off. I didn’t want to make it easy for the Black Guard to find me. One encounter with them in a lifetime was enough. In fact, one in several lifetimes was enough.

I used the credit card from the other stolen wallet to buy a ticket on the next flight to Paris. I tried to sleep on the plane but couldn’t. Would you have been able to sleep after being killed, then waking to find yourself in some strange library with a dead man, and then resurrecting with a book that somehow isn’t a book, all the while racing against the clock to stop your dead daughter from being murdered again by a mysterious ghost of some sort or another?

I didn’t think so.

We landed in Paris in that time between the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning. I took a taxi to a street near the Montparnasse cemetery. The taxi driver looked at me in the rear view mirror a couple of times but didn’t say anything. I imagine he thought I was just another fare with a fetish for graveyards. If he only knew. I wanted to visit the dead, all right, but not that particular group of dead.

I had him drop me off at a random point on the street and I waited until he drove away. Then I went down the sidewalk, to the entrance of the catacombs. The entrance is in a simple stone building that used to be one of the city’s gates. I remember going through that gate on a rainy night a few lifetimes ago. On important business, no doubt, although I can’t remember that part of it. I just remember being wet and cold. The gate was a ticket booth now, and the catacombs were a tourist destination. The way things always went.

I expected the door to be locked, and I was prepared to pick the lock or kick the door down, but it was open despite the time. There was even a woman at the ticket booth.

“You are here for the event?” she asked in English. I guess I didn’t look French to her. It was probably the lack of a cigarette or wine bottle in my hand that gave me away.

“The event is exactly why I’m here,” I said, having no idea what she meant. The catacombs were supposed to be closed right now. But one had to be flexible when travelling in France. The French make their own hours, as many a tourist has discovered the hard way.

She handed me a ticket and I handed her some money, and down the stairs I went, into the darkness under the city. At the bottom of the stairs I passed through a stone archway that marked the beginning of the ossuary. There were words carved in the stone.
Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Mort
. Stop, this is the empire of Death. Indeed.

On the other side of the archway, the bones began. The walls were lined with them, and they filled the ancient chambers. Hell, they
were
the walls and ancient chambers. Tens of thousands of the dead, and that’s just in the catacombs that are open to the public.

And the public were down here too, even though they shouldn’t have been. There were people crowding the already crowded tunnels, standing around with drinks in their hands and shouting over the music that was playing somewhere farther along. I would have thought it some sort of Walpurgisnacht if I hadn’t bought a ticket to get in. So I figured it was just a regular sort of party among the dead. I guess the revellers didn’t realize they’d be down here soon enough.

All these people complicated things a little, but not enough to change my plan. Such as it was. I went through the catacombs, looking at the locked gates that led to the side tunnels, the ones where the public wasn’t supposed to go, until I found the one I remembered, thanks to Alice restoring my memory. It was a simple enough lock to pick—I could do it with the contents of my stolen wallets—but I didn’t exactly want to show off my skills in front of all these people. So it was time for some acting.

I leaned against the gate and pretended to vomit a little, then spat a bit on the ground. It had the desired effect. The people around me swore and moved away, down the tunnel in either direction. No one wants to be near a sick man in an underground sepulchre. I continued to pretend to puke and used my newfound privacy to open the lock. I took a quick look around to make sure no one was watching me at the moment, then slipped through the gate, closing it behind me.

I went around a bend in this new tunnel empty of partiers, and then I was in a simple chamber. There were more skulls and bones piled against the walls here, but these ones were covered in dust. No one had been here in years, maybe even decades.

Maybe not even since I’d put them all here.

They weren’t the bones of ancient Parisians, like all the others in the catacombs. They were the remains of forgotten saints I’d bought or stolen from specialized collectors and stored here in a rare fit of forward thinking back around the early part of the last century. I’d had a feeling I’d need them one day, and that day was today.

There were no markings on any of the bones, nothing to distinguish them from each other or to identify who they’d once been. So I just grabbed the nearest skull and set to work sucking the grace from it.

The thing about saints is they are actually people who have been touched by God, or at least one of the angels. But as far as I can tell, it’s all random. They’re given grace and then left alone, to wander the world trying to earn their gift or at least wonder what it meant, until the grace runs out and they’re just like everyone else again. Why them? I don’t have any answers. I doubt even the angels have any answers.

And most saints die the same deaths as the rest of us: anonymous, unloved, having lived lives that didn’t matter and didn’t change anything. Just because you have a gift doesn’t mean you know what to do with it. Or that the world will let you do anything with it.

That’s what I tried to tell myself, anyway, as I hunkered down in the underground chamber and sucked the grace out of the bones like some sort of animal, until there was nothing left in any of them and I wept at what I had become.

When I was done, I wiped the tears from my face and slapped myself a bit, as I had so many times before. I forced my feelings back down into the catacombs inside me and returned to the party. I pushed my way through the crowd until I found another forgotten tunnel barred by a locked door. This time I didn’t bother with picking the lock. I used some of the saints’ grace to open the door and then lock it again behind me, so none of the revellers could follow and get lost in these true catacombs.

I took the new tunnel into the darkness. The music and laughter faded behind me until I was alone again. Well, alone except for all the anonymous dead. So I guess we’re never truly alone, are we?

I climbed some stairs up to a stone slab that I shoved aside enough to squeeze through the opening. I exited the catacombs into the Montparnasse cemetery. I sat there for a moment, breathing the cool night air and staring up at the starless sky overhead. I felt like I had when I’d first crawled out of Christ’s burial cave all those ages ago. Alive. I wished I could go back to that time and erase all the memories in between. But if I couldn’t redeem my past, maybe I could at least redeem my future by saving Amelia.

I pushed the slab back in place so it looked just like another grave again rather than a secret entrance. I won’t reveal exactly which grave it is, but it’s near Samuel Beckett’s final resting place if you’re really interested in that sort of thing.

While I worked I became aware of the sounds of people in a nearby part of the cemetery. I moved between the gravestones until I had a better view. Two of them, a man and a woman. Lying with each other on top of one of the graves. Maybe they were part of the group partying in the catacombs, maybe they’d just met here for a romantic night out. There was a bottle of wine on the grave beside them, after all.

I went on my way, careful not to disturb them. We all have our own ways to find grace in life.

I returned to the airport, where I convinced a currency exchange machine to give me some money in return for some pieces of newspaper. And all it cost me was a little of that new grace I had. I caught the next flight to Copenhagen, using a round-trip ticket. I wasn’t planning on flying back to Paris, but I wanted to throw off anyone who might be tracking me.

I rented a car at the Copenhagen airport and drove into a mist that looked as if it could be hiding the Witches. But it was just another day in Denmark. Less than an hour later, I parked the car outside the castle Elsinore. That wasn’t its real name, of course. These days it was officially known as Kronborg castle, on the shore of the Oresund sound between Denmark and Sweden. It was a grand affair, surrounded by a moat and fortifications and even the bustling city of Helsingør. But once upon a time there had been another castle in its place, and before that another castle, and so on. It was one of those places.

At one time in its history it had been known as the castle Elsinore, and it had been a very strange place indeed then, populated by people and things who have long since moved on. Word of the strange happenings in its court reached across the lands and even the seas, all the way to England, where the name Elsinore found its way into a certain play. I needed to find out if anything else had made its way into Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
from the castle.

I wandered from the parking lot to the castle along with all the other tourists, buying a ticket at the admissions booth with my stolen credit card. I paused on the bridge to take in the moat and pretend to marvel at the walls and towers. They looked like they were in better shape now than they had been back in the days when the castle was occupied by soldiers and royalty instead of tourists and retail workers. I noted the security cameras I could see and tried to guess the locations of the ones I couldn’t see. I knew it was just a matter of time before one of them caught me, but I wanted to delay that as long as possible.

There was a group of people forming inside the courtyard of the castle. A man dressed in an overly theatrical and not at all historical doublet and pants stood near a sign advertising a
Hamlet
tour of the castle. The man held a fake skull in one hand, showing it off to the people in the crowd, who couldn’t take enough photos. It was just another tourism board attempt to cash in on the popularity of
Hamlet
, but I walked away from there as fast as I could. I was afraid the man was going to start acting out the play and I’d wind up dead again before I’d found out anything useful. If there was anything useful at all to find here.

I wandered through the rooms of the castle, just another lost tourist. I made my way from the great hall, with its beautifully tiled floor and walls lined with paintings no doubt stolen from some other castle, to the chapel and its ornately carved pews. I lingered a while in the royal bedrooms, eyeing the beds and wardrobes and even more paintings for any signs of something supernatural. There was nothing. It was just another museum. In fact, it was even more mundane than most of the museums I knew. Nothing had come to life during my visit, after all.

But I wasn’t done yet.

I went down into the tunnels below the castle. In their time, they’d been a mix of dungeons for the prisoners and sleeping quarters for the soldiers. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two back in the day. Fewer people wandered about down here, perhaps because of the cramped quarters, or the chill, or the dim lights recessed in the walls, or all of those combined. And that suited me just fine. I tapped the lights as I went, burning them out with little sparks of grace and leaving darkness behind me. I wanted to be alone down here, and no tourists were going to explore pitch-black catacombs that went who knew where.

I found a statue in one corner of the underground chambers. A Danish warrior seated on a throne, slumbering away. He was ready for action, though. A sword rested on his lap and a shield leaned against his throne. He even wore a helmet while he slept, as if ready to spring into battle the second he awoke.

The official lore was he was a king who went by the name of Holger Danske, and he was resting here in the basement of the castle until Denmark needed him again. As was usually the case, the real story was a little different.

The myths had gotten the name right, at least. But that was about it. He wasn’t a king, and he wasn’t waiting here to protect Denmark from some future threat. He’d been one of Arthur’s knights, but he’d been long gone by the time I encountered that ragtag bunch. He’d been seduced by Morgana at some point earlier and had become just another one of the fey. I’d seen him in her court a few times during my dalliances with her, drinking his way into forgetfulness as fast as he could, just like the others. She’d left him sleeping here after she’d grown tired of playing with him, and he’d gradually turned to stone over the ages. It was one of those faerie things.

I stepped close and breathed grace into his face and then moved back and waited. It took some time for him to stir, but eventually he did. He blinked his eyes a few times and then lifted his head. He looked around the room until his gaze fell upon me.

“Has Morgana finally forgiven me then?” he asked, and his voice was like rocks grinding together.

I didn’t know what he had done to offend Morgana and I didn’t care. All I cared about was the fact that he thought Morgana even remembered him. I knew he couldn’t love her as much as I possibly loved her, so why would she even bother herself with him? I shook my head to clear it of such thoughts.

“She may yet forgive you if you can reveal the secrets of Elsinore,” I said.

“Elsinore,” Holger said. “I know the word and yet. . . .”

“It’s the castle where we are now,” I said. “It was one of the castles, anyway.”

“I was in Morgana’s court,” he said, slowly looking around. “It was a place like no other. . . .”

“It’s certainly that,” I said. “But now it faces a danger like no other. A curse of some sort that is connected to the play
Hamlet
. I need to know if it’s also connected to Elsinore. The real Elsinore.”

“I will fight for Morgana,” Holger said, reaching for the sword in his lap with the speed you’d expect of a statue. “I will fight for my love, the greatest queen of all.”

“Save it for Denmark,” I said, gritting my teeth. I had half a mind to challenge him to a duel for her love, the curse be damned. “Just tell me any strange things you might have noticed in the centuries you’ve been here. Like, say, a haunting.”

Holger fell silent for a time, and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep once more. Then he sighed. It was a sound like a landslide.

“There is nothing haunting this place but loneliness,” he said. “I am alone here with my memories. My sleep is without dreams. If there was anything else here that was in any way connected to Morgana, I would seek it out. I would know it like I once knew her.”

I felt for him in that moment, because I understood. I knew as well as he did what it was like to be in the thrall of Morgana.

“I’m sorry,” I said, because there was nothing else I could say.

He looked back up from his sword, at me again. “You think you are the chosen one,” he said. “You think you are worthy of her love.”

“I’m not really worthy of anyone’s love,” I said, which was more or less the truth. But what I would give to be Morgana’s chosen one. . . .

“Maybe you will save her court from this curse you speak of,” Holger said, “and maybe you won’t. If you don’t, someone else who loves her will. And one day she will tire of you like she tired of me. She will hide you away like she hid me. And then you will slumber for all eternity. For there is no escape from the faerie queen. She has never allowed such a thing and will never allow it.”

“I am not like you or any of the others,” I said.

“Not yet, perhaps,” Holger said. “But given eternity, a man cannot help but fail.”

“I’ve already covered that more times than I can count,” I said. And then, because I didn’t want to hear him talk about Morgana any more, I laid my hand on his shoulder and took the grace back out of him. His head slumped slowly down again and his eyes closed as he fell silent once more. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I went back up to the castle proper and retraced my steps until I was in the courtyard again. The man in the theatre garb with the skull was gone, but there were just as many sightseers wandering around as before. It would have been easy to lose myself in the crowd, but I didn’t try to hide. Instead, I found one of the cameras I’d spotted before and walked directly in front of its field of view. I didn’t try to hide my face. I wanted to be seen.

I thought there was a good chance that someone else had figured out I was interested in
Hamlet
by now. Between the Witches and my death onstage at the National Theatre, there were enough clues for those whose business it was to keep an eye out for such things and understand what they meant. A shrewd servant of the Royals might think the castle would be a good place to watch for me. I wanted them to know they were right. I wanted them to send the Black Guard after me in the castle here. I wanted them to discover my return flight to Paris and send the Black Guard there. I wanted them to send the Black Guard anywhere but where I was heading next.

I was going back to England.

If I was to understand what was afflicting
Hamlet
, who better to ask than the author?

I was going to resurrect William Shakespeare.