The Fifth House of the Heart (22 page)

They found a low arch in a brow of exposed stone, right at the top of the swamp. The water babbled from it as if excited to have completed the long journey beneath the rock. Now the men formed a line and began jabbing at the silt in earnest—if anything was to be found, it would be here, where the gold was piled up against the sediment. Sax was in the middle of the pack, as eager as the rest—it was only a swamp, after all. Karloff had been dead for twenty years. This very thought was in his mind when his own stick sank into something rather more rubbery than expected. There was a great frothing burst of gas from beneath the silt, and the monster rose up, screaming.

A
lezh paid Prince K
ř
esomysl one final visit. The prince did not know him; his soul had gone. He was unrecognizable now, so hideous in mind and body that even Alezh knew him not. Alezh did not tell his master of his intentions but left a cauldron filled with squirming toads and frogs and efts to occupy the prince's attention, and to serve as his last feast. Then Alezh went out of the buried mansion and ordered that the great wall be built across the cavern, and the stout door framed in the entrance. His men cut mighty stones and placed them there,
and all the while the prince did not show himself, nor make any sound, so that they thought the banquet of wet creatures had been poisoned.

But it was not so. When the work was finished, Alezh went into the cavern to pay his last respects, for the mansion was now truly a crypt in which Prince ­K
ř
esomysl must sleep forever, with no way out. He knelt before the ironbound door and wept, and it must have been that the prince heard his cries, for the door was suddenly burst apart, and so the men at last saw what their ruler had become. The prince fell upon his loyal Alezh and cruelly slew him, and the laborers drove the monster back into the crypt with their torches and sealed the entrance with a stone too large for any creature to breach, however monstrous.

Each man described what he had seen in his own way, but all of them agreed that the thing that had once been Prince K
ř
esomysl was now a giant toad with human limbs, and that his white-fleshed mouth was so large it could bite off and swallow up the head of a man with one gulp—for indeed, that was what happened to Alezh.

S
ax wet himself, but immediately fell backward into the swamp, so nobody noticed.

When he had still been researching the legend safely back at home, he had suspected there were grains of truth in the story of Prince ­K
ř
esomysl—the treasure, for one thing. But the monster, for another. The beast in the story sounded very much like a description of the most debased form of vampire, those that lived in isolated places where their only food was low creatures whose form they would gradually take. So it was: this creature had obviously subsisted on frogs, fish, and other slimy things. For many centuries, if it was the prince himself, which Sax did not doubt.

Scholars of vampire anatomy with whom Sax had conferred said such a malnourished vampire was not very dangerous, as long as you kept out of its mouth; they generally lacked the reflexes of the canine
or humanoid versions and were completely without intelligence. Only the latter part proved to be accurate. This thing had the strength of a bull. The men, stuck as they were in the sucking silt, couldn't flee, so instead they beat the apparition with their iron bars and broke branches across its back. It clawed and struck them, and knocked more than one man senseless, but they opened many wounds in the tissue-thin skin of its flanks.

Bobek took the opportunity to slosh his way back to the boats; Sax thought he was trying to escape, and found himself outraged at the cowardice of it.
Nobody
escaped, if it wasn't he himself. But Bobek returned with a bottle of vodka, stuffed his cloth cap in the neck of it, and set it alight. The flaming missile hit the monster squarely and exploded. It burst into flames. The warty skin bubbled and split, the huge yellow eyes rolled wildly and turned red. The monster bellowed like an avalanche, and then turned about and hurled itself down the waterway beneath the stone, the water hissing as it sank below the surface. The fire was extinguished, but not before they'd seen the thing churning away down the tunnel at tremendous speed.

As it wasn't possible to flee the swamp on foot, they had all retreated as far as the boats. Not that they'd offer much protection from Moby-Frog if it came back for more.

“Have we got blasting caps?” Sax asked as a couple of men picked him out of the mire and dumped him into the boat with the injured.

Bobek rummaged around and found a tin box with a skull and crossbones on it. “Here.”

“I hate to risk destroying any treasure that's drifted this far,” Sax muttered, “but I think we'd better seal this end off. It's going to head back to that underground bachelor pad and climb up through the well. We need to destroy the thing, then we can see about the valuables.”

“We don't need to explode,” Bobek said. “Make sticks sharp, put
the points at the hole. If that thing tries to come out, it stabs itself.”

“Very sensible,” Sax said, because it was. This Bobek chap was all right. Four men stayed behind to perform these offices, cutting down dead limbs and sharpening the ends to long points of the type preferred for slaying vampires. Meanwhile the rest of the party, Sax not in the lead, scrambled up the rock at the margin of the swamp and began the hike overland through the darkness, back to the cavern.

III

They had sealed the entrance to the crypt behind them, which was only sensible, as their activity might have attracted attention. It only took one curiosity seeker to spoil the whole thing. Now the question was whether to open it and attack the vampire, or have done with it and leave the thing in there, perhaps delegating the destruction of the monster to the authorities. But in those days, in that part of the world, there
wasn't
an authority to deal with this: the Communists had forbidden the Church from any presence behind the Curtain, so there wasn't any infrastructure in place for such a mission. Anyway, Sax was in danger of losing his shirt on this one. The more entities that got involved, the less of the profits would go to him.

So he pretended to be in charge, and called for the men to get their shovels ready—a shovel was just an ax with the blade sideways—and be prepared to hack the thing if it came through. They were eager to comply, because their fear had turned to excitement—this was a hunt now. These men were on the cusp of a new society, the burden of Communism thrown off. They would be free to prosper. They sure as hell weren't going to let a giant, scorched frog stop them from getting
a head start on the prospering bit.

Two of the biggest lads pried the slab of stone aside. The stench of roasted meat wafted out of the gap. Their prey was inside. They shone their lights in and saw no sign of the monster, but there wasn't much of a view down the narrow entry passage, so the bolder of them scrambled through the gap, armed with shovels and crowbars. Sax hadn't made any suggestions since he recommended they open the entrance. The rest was the men acting on their own initiative. Which suited Sax fine. He was less worried about the vampire than he was about how he was going to keep his own crew from killing him and taking all the treasure away. The men he trusted, the ones at the trucks, didn't expect to see him until morning anyway. By then, the vampire might be dispatched, and Sax along with it, both bodies chucked down the subterranean well.

He was fretting about this when the fountain of blood sprayed out of the entrance to the crypt.

There hadn't even been a cry of fear. One moment, the men were chattering excitedly, jockeying for a view into the tomb; the next, they were lurching back, blinded by jets of gore spewing through the gap. Then the slab itself shook, struck furiously by something behind it. It cracked, and the top half teetered. A second blow and the stone fell apart. The monster crawled through.

Had the men stood their ground as they had at the swamp, all might have ended sooner and better. As it was, the thing sprang out—its hind legs were phenomenally overdeveloped—and took two men down like wickets. It locked its jaws on one of them and took away fifteen pounds of meat, organs spilling from the crater, the man's cries of agony cut short because he was drowning in his own blood. Then the thing sprang again, caroming off the ceiling of the cave, and crushed a third man to the ground. They all heard his bones snap like wood. It was each man for himself, fleeing and stumbling up toward the mouth
of the cave with the electric torches making more confusion than light, whirling around, catching glimpses of pandemonium.

The monster was a mass of roasted black flesh splitting apart to reveal white tissue beneath, all sauced liberally with blood, human and vampire. One of its eyes had burst, leaving behind a crater the size of a grapefruit, but the other saw only too well in the darkness.

Sax was escaping like the others when the monster picked him as a target.

It leapt at him, and he saw it coming and threw himself to the ground. It missed him but landed heavily six feet away. It opened shark-wide jaws—and its enormous tongue shot out. The thing was like a glistening white sledgehammer and moved far more swiftly than Sax could react. He twitched out of the path of the hideous organ, but it struck him high up on his thigh. There was another woody
crack
and a fireball of pain blasted through his body, as if someone had fired a rocket launcher at his balls. His leg wasn't merely broken; it was crushed.

The vampire's tongue retracted into its bulging throat like an eel into its burrow. The creature backed up, perhaps seeking a better shot at him. Sax found one of the lamps had been discarded beside him; in desperation he aimed its light at the monster, trying not to vomit from the pain as he kept it fixed in the beam. It might spoil the thing's aim.

“Kill it!” he cried, and struggled to remember the Czech phrase despite his scrambled mind. “
Zabít zví
ř
e!
”

It was the light that saved them. The monster was nearly blinded as it was; the glare finished the job. He kept his torch on it no matter which way it dodged, and then more beams of light joined his, and a rock sailed out of the dark and struck the creature. Cornered, it snarled and raged but made no further attack. The men hurled stones at it, pry bars, anything they had. Then they rushed in with their shovels. It took over an hour, but the men were able to ren
der the thing incapable of defense, smashing its bones, crushing its head; then they chopped it to bits. By dawn, the monster was completely destroyed.

When Sax's most trusted men came to see what was going on, two hours after the deadline of first light had passed, they found Sax and the other wounded lying in the grass outside the cave, having been tended to with what limited medical knowledge the group possessed. Sax, although delirious, knew the job wasn't finished. Before he passed out, he directed his team to gather the remains of the monster in buckets and bring them along.

T
he treasure they raised from the swamp was much older than the legend of Prince K
ř
esomysl. It had been an ancient hoard even then, treasure of Celts and Romans. They found enough of it to fully justify the expense of the adventure, if not the cost in human life. Four men died, and Sax and two others were so badly injured they were despaired of for weeks. But they all recovered, and Sax walked with his cane for the first time, making it into an accessory his many admirers found impossibly sexy. In fact, the period of convalescence lost him a good deal of weight and added some character to his face, so he came out ahead in the looks department.

Archaeologists were still working the underground waterway as late as the turn of the century; the monster had been hiding his treasure in its nooks and fissures for half a millennium, and a great deal of it had washed into the swamp and been carried improbable distances by the currents there. Sax made no claim on anything other than what his crew was able to carry out before the police arrived, which amounted to almost six hundred pounds of gold. It was worth three hundred and eighty dollars per troy ounce at the time. And some of the pieces were of such extraordinary workmanship they commanded much higher
prices than the standard valuations.

To sweeten the deal, the Vatican hadn't been able to make any claim on this treasure, thanks to godless Communism having shut down its local franchises. Enough of it made its way into museums that Sax never felt particularly guilty about what was, if he dared use the word, outright theft. Besides, he wouldn't ever have to work again, not for five lifetimes.

His retirement lasted five weeks. But he vowed he would never, ever have anything to do with vampires again, and that resolution lasted much longer.

Present Day

12

France

It had only been a few seconds since the team had turned to him, expecting to hear about his own exploits in vampire hunting. The memories had blazed through his mind in a sort of snapshot flash. He decided against mentioning the Czech vampire. Instead he drew a breath, held it long enough to study the glass of wine glittering in his uplifted fingers, then spoke.

“I could tell you of my adventures,” Sax said. “You may have heard some of them. Brother Paolo has heard all of it; I'm the talk of the Holy See. However, suffice it to say I got into this business for the worst possible reasons, and out of it again from sheer, unalloyed cowardice. As is obvious from your presence at this table, I have returned once again to the unpleasant work. The reasons why are mine to know. There is wealth, I think, if we succeed. Great riches. There will be a certain amount of glory, as always when a coven is revealed and its constituent monsters slain. I don't care about any of that. I'm far too rich and old and repulsive.”

There was a chuckle around the table at this, although Gheorghe
started looking around at the furnishings as if to determine if he could lay his hands on any of the wealth without dealing with vampires. Sax continued, putting his glass on the table and staring at it as if to summon visions from its depths.

“I was telling Paolo a few days back that there would certainly be bloodshed, pain, tears, and death. This isn't some mindless creature huddled in a cave, looking out at a terrible modern world it cannot comprehend. This is a being of sophistication, means, and cunning. And it has human confederates. Anyway, this topic is somewhat more depressing than it needs to be. I'm here because this thing needs killing. After that, I expect to get paid.”

The others nodded. Fair enough. Sax had stated his position, warned them of the dangers, and not made a fuss. If he awoke in the morning and there was nobody left but Paolo, the others having slunk away in the night, so be it.

With that, he told them the story of the auction, the murder of his night watchman and the theft of the ormolu clock, and of some of his subsequent research; he left out any unflattering details but gave them all enough information so he wouldn't have to explain himself later on when it might be inconvenient. There were no interruptions.

The evening wound down after another hour. To Sax's amazement, Rock insisted on washing the dishes. Sax offered him his apron, but Rock smiled that away. He did a proper job of it, his fingers agile although they were the size of carrots left in the ground too long. He hummed fragments of a tune Sax almost recognized. It might have been Coltrane's
A Love Supreme
.

Min tried to drag Nilu back up the hill. Nilu resisted, yanking her arm out of Min's grasp. Min scowled at her, then at Sax. The meaning of the look was clear.
Do something.

“I have a suggestion,” he said to Min. “I'll keep watch on our young friend here tonight. You get some rest. Deal?”

“No. She is where I see her.”

“Look, Ms. Hee-Jin. I have been around, as should be obvious. I am experienced in these matters. You need rest. This young woman is not going to kill me in the night, because these rugged gentlemen will be all around. I can't use you in the course of my operation if you're not in peak condition. So go get some rest.”

Without further comment, Min went out the back door and through the yard past the barn, and trod up the hill, her breath surrounding her head with plumes of vapor in the light of the new moon.

“Bed for me,” Sax said. “You'd better come along,” he added when Nilu sat back down at the table, hands folded in her lap. She looked terribly alone and hopeless. Paolo, Rock, and Gheorghe settled down in the living room area of the cottage to shoot more bull. They'd crawl off to their various beds when the excitement of the occasion wore off.

Sax felt crushingly weary. It came over him without warning. Something to do with Nilu. This poor girl dragged into a madhouse on the far side of the world, sick with a disease she didn't understand, feeling all the terrible things Sax remembered from when he was ill himself. She would live or die; there wasn't much Sax could do about that, except keep Min from killing her prematurely. He understood it was not within his power to influence that outcome. What he hated was knowing about it. This was something that intersected with his own life. He had breathed the same air as Nilu. He had admired the gleaming blackness of her hair and smelled the sour smell of her unwashed body. He couldn't help himself. He felt responsible.

Nilu followed Sax into the big house next to the cottage and up the creaking stairs. He drew a steaming bath in the
salle de bain
shared by the four bedrooms and switched on the heated towel rack because it also warmed the room nicely, and the night was chilly. During this process, Nilu sat on the side of the bed in the smallest bedroom, her
skin sallow brown against the white quilted coverlet. She must have been intolerably cold in the night at that miserable desolate hospital, Sax thought. He didn't have clothes that would look any good on her, but he did have some things that might fit, up in the attic closet. It was the only room in the house with a working lock: when he rented the house in the summers, he didn't want silly children locking themselves in bedrooms. But the attic closet was to ensure his own personal effects didn't leave with the guests.

Nilu spoke perfectly good English, Sax had gradually determined. It was just that she didn't speak. So he explained she should get in the bath and have a good soak. He told her he had endured something like what happened to her, and how awful he felt for some time afterward. Nothing like a tub to make the aches and pains go away for a while.

“I have never had a bath before,” Nilu said.

“Surely you've bathed,” Sax replied, not knowing what this setback might mean. Sax hadn't been to India in thirty years, but he recalled they had hot and cold running water in those days.

“In a bathtub,” Nilu said.

“Ah.” Sax understood. Sluice baths and showers, but not bathtubs. He ran the water hot and deep, struggling to operate the supernumerary mock-Victorian taps. Although on his knees, he slipped and plunged his sleeve into the water. Nilu laughed. It was a quick, merry one. Sax got back to his feet, knees crackling like fireworks, and fixed her with his best
queen of the world
arched eyebrow. Nilu had one hand pressed over her mouth, but she was still smiling and her eyes glittered with mirth.

“You laugh, but I am made of sugar. I melt in water,” Sax said, and exited the room.

Nilu demurely shut the door behind him, and a minute later Sax heard her sloshing about. He ascended the steep attic stairs, found the light switch after much groping of walls, located the key to the closet
on top of the beam where he left it, and found the clothes he'd been thinking of.

Then he sat on the frail spindle chair outside the bathroom door, cradling his chin in his palm as if with toothache, trying to stay awake. He didn't want to leave Nilu in there unattended in case she fell asleep. Eventually he rapped on the door with his fingernails and then looked in. She had fallen asleep but hadn't drowned.

When she emerged, Nilu was wrapped in a white Turkish-towel robe of hotel caliber—in fact it came from a hotel, one of the small crimes with which Sax spiced his drearier moments while traveling. Standing there in the bulky robe with a sheet of wet hair spilled down her back and her bare brown feet on the tile floor, the girl looked vulnerable and beguiling.

Sax presented her with the clothes—a pink T-shirt with Moominpappa on it, faded overalls of the farmer type, a thick cotton roll-neck sweater, and a pair of frayed espadrilles with straw soles. It wasn't much of a look, but Nilu almost wept with gratitude.

“Thank you, Uncle,” she said. Sax was well pleased.
Uncle
was an honorific in India. That she hadn't been alarmed when he looked in while she soaked was an honor as well. Up to a point. In India, men were forbidden from seeing an unmarried woman in
déshabillé
, especially in the intimate quarters of a bathroom. That was where Sax's particular category of man came in. In India, there was a caste of “third gender” people: homosexuals, eunuchs, transvestites, and all the rest of the glam-rock crowd.
Hijra
was the word, if Sax remembered correctly.
Hijra
s enjoyed special privileges to go along with the abuse, beatings, fear, and rejection that occupied their days. One of these privileges was to be considered harmless around young women.

Then again, perhaps she just didn't give a damn. Once you were bitten by a vampire, rules of decorum seemed pretty trivial.

A
t some time between midnight and dawn, in that long, dark period when only the slow turning of the moon reminds one that the night will ever pass, Sax woke up. He hadn't been sleeping well in any case. The mattress was too soft, the moonlight getting in around the curtains, and besides, his mind was swarming with schemes and outcomes, and he was desperate to get moving—to get to that jail cell in Germany and speak with the hapless burglar. At last he sat up in bed and blinked weary eyes.

There was something in the room with him.

A shape. Dark against the dark wall, something there, human in outline but shrouded, a widow beneath the veil. Sax's flesh crawled. His heart thumped like it was rolling down a corrugated roof. The shape was alive, swaying ever so slightly, a shadow with a will of its own. Then it began to move. Sax's bedroom door was ajar, the crack between door and frame a thin black stripe on deepest gray. Someone had come into the room.

He'd been a fool, of course. The vampire knew he was in Europe. It would be searching for him. It might have found his farm in the countryside. Why not? Vampires did have their familiars, and they were always watching. Too late for precautions now.

Sax shifted his weight. His cane was propped up against the nightstand by his head. He might be able to deliver a painful blow to the dark shape that swayed toward him through the gloom. Club it, shout for help, and if Rock was a light sleeper, Sax might be able to fight off the ripping teeth long enough for help to arrive.

Then the shape stepped into a ribbon of moonlight. It was Nilu. Her face was wet with tears, the point of her chin puckered with suppressed grief. What Sax had taken for a black veil was simply her hair, fanned out across her shoulders like the Virgin Mary's wimple. She was clad in one of Sax's old Regency nightshirts from his Colin Firth
period.

The girl crawled onto the bed next to Sax and shook with silent sobs, her back to him. He said nothing, but threw his side of the coverlet over her quaking body. He kept his hand at the base of her neck for a long while, a chaste sort of reassurance. Eventually she slept. Sax lay on his side of the bed, feeling the sheets grow cold, and did not sleep again.

B
y dawn, Nilu's health was failing.

In her sleep, she had begun to shiver, then broke into a sour, cold sweat. She twitched and writhed, murmuring in scraps of argument with imaginary interrogators. Sax saw by first light that her skin had gone from brown to greenish, the difference between “olive skin,” as the phrase is understood, and the actual color olive. He rose without disturbing her further, dressed inattentively, and padded downstairs.

There he found Min asleep in one of the living room chairs facing the stairway, a cleaver across her knees. Her eyes opened the moment he put his weight on the top step. She watched the space behind him. When she didn't see Nilu, she rose to meet him. Min could have used a bath as well, Sax noticed. Her clothes were positively waxy. Her hair had separated into little flat spikes.

“She's very ill,” Sax said. “I need you to take care of her until we get back.” He hoped that giving Min nursing duties would help keep her from killing Nilu instead.

“She was in your room,” Min said.

“Yes, and she didn't bite me,” Sax said. “Don't let her die.”

“Where are you going?” Min gnawed the side of her thumb, scowling up at Sax. She looked taller than she really was, probably because she gave off such ferocious vibrations. Sax saw her knuckles were pale with scar tissue, presumably from punching anvils or whatever it was
martial artists did instead of developing meaningful relationships. Sax observed her and considered his answer.

“Germany,” he said at last. “Not far. Paolo and myself. We shall return this evening, late. I can't tell you more than that, but I will once we get back.”

Min nodded and returned to her chair and closed her eyes. Sax put the kettle on, judged it was too early to make phone calls, and went to wake up Paolo instead. Despite his checking on Nilu, getting Paolo moving around, making tea, and looking at e-mail on the tiny smartphone Sax had never properly mastered, it was still too early when he started making his calls. The sky was washed pink and yellow over slate. The horizon glimmered white, turning the trees along the hills into inky ciphers.

Abingdon answered the phone on the fifth ring, his voice muddy with sleep.

“Oozat?” He coughed into the phone.

“Asmodeus Saxon-Tang,” Sax said, and waited. There was a long pause.

“Fuck me, mate, what dost this fucking ringaling portend?” Abingdon was delighted. Sax could hear it in his voice, genuine pleasure. Gratifying, of course, especially at 6:53 in the morning. There was a muffled female voice in the background on Abingdon's end of the line. Abingdon said something back that Sax couldn't make out, and then his attention was back on Sax.

“Abingdon,” Sax began, as if to remind his listener who he was. “Still bucketing about on horses, shoving bits of wood at your enemies, and so forth?”

“Living fucking history, that is, princess.” Abingdon was a rugged, active man. A professional jouster and blacksmith, he worked the circuit of European history–themed events. Sax had seen him in action, clad in jingling hauberk and plate and a great heavy helmet
on the back of a big, wild-eyed horse, charging down the muddy tilt. He could handle a twelve-foot lance like it was a pencil. Biceps like pumpkins. He didn't just shatter lances and hack his way through exhibition swordsmanship, either: when he wasn't in the arena, he was making iron candlesticks and swords and flails in his portable forge. Tourists loved it. Steel weapons for the gents, huge sweating muscles in a leather apron for the ladies.