The Fifth House of the Heart (10 page)

There were boot marks in the dust in both directions. Jean-Marc had run east, Gander west. The rest of the men were clomping up the stairs. Sax followed Gander, plunging into the darkness after his assistant manager's fast-receding back.

VII

The darkness became impossible. Gander lit a wooden match and held it low to the floor, sweeping it back and forth. He hurried onward, burned his fingers, and lit another. Then he stopped, raising a hand like a slab of beef ribs to halt Sax in his tracks.

“Claret,” he said.
Blood.
Gander held the match over a strew of glistening red beads in the dust. The boot prints they'd been following ended at a doorway. The blood was at the foot of the door, which was firmly shut. Gander hissed through his teeth and shook the match out. Rather than light another one, he reached for the doorknob. Sax's hand shot out and held Gander's in place.

“Don't,” Sax said. At the other extreme of the corridor, which was as long and high as the aisle of a cathedral, the Frenchmen were bash
ing doors open at random and rushing into the rooms. A little light fell into the hallway then, but dim and blue, as though cast through a bank of snow. There must have been twenty bedrooms along the corridor, and innumerable smaller chambers between them; many of the doors did not open directly into the hallway but into secondary corridors that linked together suites of rooms. Sax wanted to shout to the others, warn them. But he didn't know of what. And he couldn't bring himself to raise his voice in that place, which was more tomb than house. Instead, he whispered to Gander.

“Do
not
open this door.”

“But, sir,” Gander said, and Sax felt the massive paw flex on the doorknob. Sax renewed his own grip.

“Don't. Something is going on.”

“Aye, bloke's bleedin' to death on other side of this door,” he said.

“Where the hell is everybody?” Jean-Marc shouted in French. Then he repeated it in English. Of his ten men, only five remained in the cavernous hallway. The rest were lost somewhere in the warren of rooms on either side.

“No one go into any of the rooms!” Sax shouted in French. No point in maintaining he didn't know the language—or in being quiet. “There's blood here. I think we're being attacked.”

As if to punctuate Sax's statement, there followed a scream from one of the rooms—a raw, throat-tearing howl of fear and pain.

“There,” said Jean-Marc. He drew a small, flat automatic pistol from his jacket. Two of the men beside him produced blackjacks from their pockets. The three of them ran to a doorway even farther down the hall.

Sax addressed Gander again. “Now: let's open the door slowly, and don't be standing in front of it,” he whispered. “Someone must be in there. Secret passages and so forth, yes? We need to defend ourselves.”

Gander ignored Sax and threw the door open. He and Sax pushed themselves back against the wall on either side of it, then Gander risked a look. There was only a narrow, empty hallway, lined with old portraits. They went farther in, leaving the noise of the French contingent behind.

Sight and sound were swallowed up. There was a scrap of light to the left. Gander went to it and found another doorknob. He twisted it and shoved this door open, jumping back so that he collided with Sax.

“Take care, you great oaf,” Sax said, winded. They craned their necks around the deep frame of the door to look into the room beyond, from which murky daylight was leaking. There was more blood on the floor, and on the walls, and now they could see there was blood in the hallway at their feet—an explosion of it that had reached as far as the main corridor. There seemed to be no source, as if the victim had simply burst apart into liquid.

Gander emitted a low, descending whistle. Sax took in the spacious room without consciously considering it: all original furnishings, presumably, the carpet woven in imitation of the architectural ornamentation. That wasn't what impressed Gander.

Everything
sparkled with blood. It made a disturbing counterpoint to the rich décor, as did the shattered remains of an enormous chandelier that had fallen all the way to the floor on its length of wrought golden chain. Crystal baubles were strewn across the carpet, mingling with the blood like diamonds with rubies. Both Sax and Gander assumed the victim was beneath the chandelier. But Sax saw nothing there except wreckage.

A hot, wet droplet fell on his cheek. He raised his eyes to the deeply coffered ceiling. There was something there in the shadows above them. Sax nudged Gander and pointed with his chin.

The ceiling featured two domes deeper than the rest of the ornamentation; from the farthest one had descended the fallen chande
lier. The nearest one, only a few feet into the room, contained the mutilated remains of Hector, his limbs splayed out like some huge, gruesome spider crushed under a boot. He was caught in an immense four-jawed trap, springs of iron studded with long black teeth snapped shut around his remains. It was so powerful it had blown him to pieces. He was held together only by scraps of flesh and what appeared to be a sheet of canvas tangled up in the iron jaws. His eyes had popped out when his skull was crushed; they dangled now, straight down, swaying in a sudden rumbling vibration that passed through the structure of the building.

In unison, Sax and Gander took a step back toward the doorway. Gander knelt to look at the floor.

“Man trap,” he said, expressing what Sax thought was so obvious it might as well have gone unsaid. Gander pointed out a deep impression on the rug shaped like a cross inside a circle, six feet wide, right in front of the sweep of the door. “That bit of canvas up there must have been thrown over it, like. Bloke steps in, puts his foot down amongst the folds, and snap it goes, like.”

Sax swallowed. “Yes, and the chandelier acted as a counterweight to pull him up. My God.” Something else occurred to him: “Gander . . . I think this entire floor might be littered with these things.”

“We won't go barging into any more rooms, then.”

“I mean, not just these. There could be all sorts of, ah, mechanisms, knives in the walls, trapdoors.”

“Oh.”

“Let's retrace our steps, shall we? Perhaps we can wait outside for the other gentlemen.”

With that, Gander was ready to agree. They made their cautious way back into the bedroom hallway, then to the main corridor. At first Sax thought the excitement and fear had confused him and he'd gotten turned around somehow, or possibly they had taken a new route and
were in another, previously unseen space. It ought to have extended westward for a great distance. Instead, there was only a blank wall.

“Have we gone the wrong way?” Sax said.

“No,” Gander said. “New fuckin' wall. Our foot marks come out from under it.”

“Did you notice that sort of vibration thing a minute ago?”

“Must have been this.”

“Somewhat of a mousetrap situation.”

“A maze for rats,” Gander observed. He didn't seem much excited by this bizarre turn of events, but his voice had taken on a funereal quality. “I suppose we'd better find an alternative way out, then.”

“I expect,” Sax said, “that is exactly the intention of our captors. However, I fail to see what else we can do.”

“We could go out the window,” Gander said, his voice brightening. “Knot some of those hangings together and shin down the front, like.”

“I'm not going back into that room,” Sax said. “How do you know there isn't something else lying in wait for us?”

“Some other room, then?”

“I fail to see the difference. We're in mortal danger, Gander. If you want to go dangling from the windows, that's your prerogative, but I have a suspicion that anyone who took the trouble to engineer man traps and portcullises inside the building will also have thought of that rather obvious method of egress, don't you?”

Sax's face was hot. He was not only very frightened but angry. What was needed was the assistance of some proper brains, not this precocious product of a North Country secondary school. Hurling oneself out of windows seemed like an obvious solution to the present dilemma. Sax wanted it to be that simple. It wasn't.

Gander thoughtfully pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think the Nazis put all this in.”

“Focus on the problem at hand, shall we?” Sax said, his voice get
ting higher in pitch. “Defenestration is not the worst idea. It can't be more than a thirty-foot drop from that window to the stones below. Otherwise, we can go that way”—here he pointed down the length of hall that led deeper into the building—“and hope there's some way out. There could be a secret passage of some sort, for example. It all depends on time.”

“What do you mean?” Gander said, staring at Sax in the darkness with eyes like tiny blue marbles.

“Whoever arranged all this . . . do you imagine they're just going to let us roam around in here? They'll come for us. Then we're really for it. We have to get moving.”

S
ax and Gander came to another doorway like the one in front of which they had first seen the blood. Gander opened it, both men prepared to spring out of the way. Instead of an inner hallway, it opened directly into a large salon, with communicating doors that led to bedrooms at either end. The salon was exquisitely appointed, as with every room in the place. There was a spinet piano by one of the two large windows. The floor had no shrouded traps in it that Sax could see, no lumpy heaps of canvas lying about as if forgotten by a careless workman. That simply meant the danger was better hidden.

“I hate to suggest this,” Sax said, sincerely, “but I think perhaps we should throw the Louis XIII chair just to your left—yes, that one, very fine piece—into the center of the room and see what happens.”

Gander didn't do things by halves. He kept his mass back in the doorway, picked up the chair, and bowled it into the room. It tumbled and bounced and knocked over a small tripodal gueridon table. Nothing else happened. Gander grunted and tiptoed halfway across the room until he reached the chair. Then he picked it up and threw it again. Still nothing occurred.

“Don't get killed,” Sax recommended. He remained firmly in the doorway. Gander had reached one of the curtained windows now. He picked up the chair again; one of its arms had broken and hung by a length of bullion trim. Gander wrenched the arm free and used it to hook open the ponderous curtains that obscured the window, keeping himself as far from the opening as possible. Again, nothing happened, except the curtains parted. The window behind them was eight feet tall from stool to head jamb. It consisted of a pair of diamond-pane casements that could swing out on hinges. The shutters outside would prevent the casements from opening, but the shutter latches were on the inside; there didn't appear to be any impediment to escape. Gander rubbed his hands together.

“Don't you move!” Sax barked. Gander's arms froze in midreach. His back hunched as if he'd been struck. Sax risked advancing a few feet into the salon, sweat running freely down his neck. “Come back here. Bring that poor chair.”

Gander did as he was told, watching Sax's face as if expecting to be punished. When Sax said nothing, he turned to face the window and they both stared at it, yearning to get out into the sunlight that glowed through the shutters. Sax took the arm of the chair from Gander and threw it at the window. The arm bounced off the glass.

“You throw like a little girl,” Gander observed. With that, he raised the remainder of the chair above his head and launched it. It crashed through glass and lead alike, and punched out several slats in the shutters. The shutters remained closed. The chair sagged in the ruins of the window but remained suspended there above the floor.

“We seem to be in the clear,” Sax said.

An instant later, there was a rapid thumping sound as of an anchor chain running through a hawsehole; the top of the window casing split apart, and an enormous iron blade came roaring down out of the wall. The guillotine slashed through the chair, splitting it
in half as if it were made of cake. With a deafening
crack
, the blade sank into a channel in the windowsill. Where moments before there had been an opening to the outside world, there was now an iron plate that completely sealed the frame. The room was dark and the air filled with fine, choking dust.

“Cor,” said Gander.

“Let's not bother with the windows,” Sax said.

T
hey moved down the hallway, now keeping their shoulders against the walls so the middle of the floor remained clear. Death could come from anywhere: a cloud of poisoned arrows or scythes in the ceiling. There was a suit of armor in a niche. Gander was almost forced to carry Sax past it, because Sax was absolutely convinced it would attack them.

When they got by unscathed, Gander returned to the effigy and wrenched the halberd out of its gloves: a stout, pole-handled combination of hook, spear, and ax, it would make a fine deterrent to anyone except a gunman. There was a sword suspended from a frogged belt at the armor's waist. Sax dragged the weapon from the scabbard. It was heavy. He felt no safer with the notched old blade in his hand; in fact, he felt grotesque. There couldn't be a man on earth less likely than Sax to give someone a prod with a sword. Still, he could use the weapon to poke around for further booby traps. He followed Gander and his poleax into almost total darkness.

Sax's mind was calculating all the while. His fear, his anger, were all laid on at the surface. Down below, the imperturbable thinking machines were hard at work, and they were starting to show results. As the companions groped their way along the hall, Sax considered the maze they were in. He knew what the building looked like on the outside and had a fair idea of how many windows there were, the
thickness of the outer walls, the height of the stories, and the dimensions of the overall structure.