The Fifth House of the Heart (24 page)

Sax settled in for the drive, Paolo conscientiously piloting the car along at precisely the speed limit, to the irritation of the German motorists who kept passing them flat out. It was approximately forty kilometers to their destination. They could make that, even at Paolo's pace, in less than an hour. Which would give Sax that long to figure out what they should do next. He hadn't a clue.

They'd been driving for twenty minutes when, with a great rush
of noise, Sax's left ear finally popped, the pressure equalizing with the sound of a huge, wet kiss. He'd been more than half deaf in that ear since the small Cessna got to cruising altitude. As if his ear was the key to all Sax's discomforts, the faint queasiness that had also dogged him vanished, his mood improved, and he became hungry. They stopped at the nearest
Mittag-Haus
for lunch, and Sax once again encouraged Paolo to gluttony, this time with
Sauerbraten mit Spätzle
.

They emerged into the wan afternoon sunlight. At that time of year in Germany the sun never properly got started, ascending only halfway into the sky at midday before beginning its long, slow decline into night. It was cold and the wind was picking up, blustering in from the northeast. Sax took a look at the wire stand laden with touristic brochures set up outside the restaurant door; antique shops often advertised in this way, and thus he could see what sort of rubbish the lesser merchants were peddling. He studied the brochures—and then all the remaining hair on his head stood straight up.

“Paolo,” Sax said, snatching up one of the pamphlets.

“
Sì, signore
,” Paolo said, his voice strained by the freight of food in his stomach.

“What did Bächtold say about a ‘stone of murder'? Was that
exactly
what he said?” Sax had his auction face on, betraying no special interest in the colorful accordion-folded slip of paper before him.

“Ah, he said,” Paolo said, struggling to recall despite the influx of calories fuddling his brain, “that ‘she will come down from the stone of murder.' Like that.”

“Did he by any chance,” Sax said, speaking with great care, “use the exact word
Mordstein
?”

“Yes.
Yes.
That is precisely what he said,” Paolo replied, brightening. Sax thrust the brochure into Paolo's hands.

“Only Mordstein isn't a stone,” Sax said. “It's a castle.”

T
hey drove straight to the castle Mordstein, not a long journey. Sax was nearly hysterical with excitement and kept demanding Paolo go faster, pointing out each time they were passed by another vehicle the relative age and infirmity of the driver. Paolo was patient.

Sax eventually burned himself out and slouched in silence, glaring at the brochure that listed the scenic castles of Lower Saxony. The thing that struck Sax as most bizarre was that Mordstein had a visitor's center. If that were true, it would be the first vampire's lair ever to feature a gift shop.

He speculated that Mordstein was only the drop-off point for the stolen goods, and Herr Bächtold had had his simple mind destroyed there in the parking area by vampiric telepathy, such as he had himself experienced when he encountered Madame Magnat-l'Étrange. In that case, Mordstein itself would be another dead end. The monster could have been anywhere at all, certainly nearby, but thoroughly concealed. There were a thousand noble houses and castles and caves and secret places all through this region. Mordstein wasn't suitable. Vampires didn't hide in plain sight. It wouldn't work.

But it
would
work.

The entrance to the property was off a secondary road; there was a gray stone wall that split the landscape and vehicles entered through a quaint medieval gatehouse with turrets and drawbridge. Looming up above them across leather-colored fields was a range of jagged black-­forested hills amongst which a black river snarled. The road wound through fallow ground, then entered the eternal shade of the trees and made its pilgrimage by serpentine ways amongst the ruins of what had once been a village, the structures collapsed and mossy, nothing left but green stone.

Then above the hills came glimpses of their destination. It was something from Grimm, a place of lost children and talking wolves. There above the spines of the trees loomed a crag of stone that jutted
up like a monstrous black jawbone crowded with rotten teeth. It was clad to the shoulders in a carapace of shaggy black evergreens with the look of gallows crows clutching a tombstone, but the final eminence, rising up at a sickening height above the forest, was a riven claw of stone atop which hunched Schloss Mordstein.

The castle sprang from the brow of the cliff in spires of black slate and frost-colored stone, the bulk of its carcass a single square keep, narrow and tall. Bristling from this vertiginous finger of masonry were turrets, and pressed close around it were battlements thrown up to expand its size and defensive capabilities over a thousand years of warfare, until the entire summit of the mount was covered in fortifications like mussels clinging to an icy rock. Even the cliffs were pressed into service, scored with hewn steps that tottered down sickening steeps to lesser structures, slate-roofed blocks that pressed their bellies to the precipice and hung above empty, wind-screaming space.

“It looks,” Sax said, when they left the car for the “photo op” spot marked by a signboard, “like the place all the gargoyles in Europe came from. They flew out of those slit windows and spread out and perched in the night on all the high places, and when the sun came up, they turned to stone.”

“Shut up,” Paolo said.

Sax shot a look at his companion to see if he was joking. He was not. Paolo understood the gravity of the situation. If the vampire was up there on that spur of rock in the sky, they would need an air force to invade it and an army to occupy it. What they had was a soldier, a burglar, a psychopath, and a false priest. Sax didn't even enter into the equation, or rather, he certainly didn't plan on doing so. Nilu might make a good excuse: he could claim he needed to keep an eye on her while everyone else scampered around up above doing aerialist tricks against the icy blowing sky.

W
hen they reached the castle, there were a few dutiful Germans wandering around looking at things, but it was not a peak day for tourism in general, being freezing cold with a wind that worked its numbing fingers around one's neck.

The tourist destination was not the castle itself, the tower on the crag, but rather the later, more fairy-tale-looking revetments that had been built at the foot of the cliff several hundred years after the original fortification was complete. This knightly retreat, in addition to the fortifications that secured the lower slopes, had a fine manor at its center with elegant windows, decorative chimneys, and plastered towers with oxblood-colored half-timbering to offset the severity of its walls of stone. It was charming yet imposing. It looked, Sax thought, like an excellent spot for one of Jean-Marc's luxury hotel projects, if he had still been around.

This lower portion of the Castle Mordstein was where visitors came. There was no hotel, but a restaurant, a shop for souvenirs and books, and an interpretive center had all been fitted into the manor house's ground floor. As noted on quaintly lettered notice boards in the gift shop, to the fortress on the crag, the
große Schloss
, there was no access. It was strictly
Privatgrundstück.
Not that many would care to visit. From the foot of the cliff it rose up so steeply and high that it appeared, through an optical illusion akin to that seen at the base of skyscrapers, as if the lofty towers were perpetually toppling over onto the lower part of the castle, or
Unterschloss
, and the viewer would soon be crushed beneath tons of brutal rubble.

Paolo took many pictures with his phone. Then, while Sax browsed the gift shop and purchased everything he could find that contained information about Castle Mordstein, Paolo wandered away from the prescribed paths and got a sense of the off-limits portions of the castle. As he later reported to Sax, he found a gravel road for employees to
enter from the back by the river, and a footpath that twisted its way up the forested slope that appeared as if it would eventually connect with the ridge from which the crag rose. Each way was heavily signposted with warnings to turn back:
Betreten für Unbefugte verboten
and all the rest of it.

The lower slopes were steep but not impassable. Some distance down the gravel road there was a fork and a second road turned off beneath the trees, but where it went, Paolo didn't know. There was an enormous signpost at the fork that read
VERBOTEN
with skull and crossbones and a drawing of large rocks falling on a stick figure.

On his way back to the parking lot, he had been discovered by a man in blue coveralls pushing a barrow; the man told Paolo he had gone to the wrong place, go back. Paolo mimed having to urinate, and shrugged and kept on walking. The man in coveralls didn't pursue the matter. Security, it seemed, was informal, driven less by secrecy than insurance liabilities. For his part, Sax was impressed when he heard of Paolo's improvised dishonesty. It gave him hope for the monk.

As Paolo was rejoining Sax in the parking lot, he had seen a very handsome red-haired woman staring at him from atop one of the fortification walls. She wore a down parka with her hair flaming out of the hood and her eyes were definitely upon him. It was no wonder laymen were always getting in trouble, Paolo admitted—the world was a teeming sea of attractive women with bold eyes.

T
hey drove over the last little hill before the French farmhouse. The car's wheels rumbled on a cow grate and woke Sax, who had dozed off again; he blinked and looked around him at the darkness and said, “Back already?” and propped his cane between his knees. Home at last. One of his homes, anyway.

It had been, by Sax's standards, an extremely busy day. The return
trip from Castle Mordstein had been unremarkable, but it was a great deal of traveling, and the plane back to France had been buffeted with stomach-churning turbulence. Paolo turned the nose of the car into the farmyard, which was outlined by hedges and a low wall of rubble. The headlights swept over these details and just as quickly forgot them, and then they were pulling up in front of the barn. There was much activity there. Light shone through all the gaps in the walls, and the doors, partway open, embraced a glare of bright, hot color.

“Our metalsmith is here, I suspect,” Sax said, and made a noise of satisfaction in the back of his throat. He thanked Paolo for driving, by which he meant,
Thank you for putting up with a crotchety old man all day
, but which he couldn't possibly say as it would diminish his carefully cultivated image as a crotchety old man. Then he got out of the car with his cane in one hand and his sack of guidebooks in the other, and hobbled toward the barn.

As he approached the barn, Sax heard the bellowing
whoosh
of the portable forge Abingdon took with him to all the festivals, clanging steel, and laughter. He smelled hot iron and the stink of bituminous coal smoke. For a grand moment he felt like the general at the head of an army, about to set off on a campaign that would be written in history books. Then a human outline appeared in the doorway of the barn, a woman's silhouette, and she emerged from the hot brightness into the cold blue moonlight and Sax's bubble of good spirits burst and disappeared.

13

France

Paolo's eyes fairly sprang from his head. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life had just stepped from within the barn doorway and put her slender arms around the old man's neck.

“Hello, Uncle Sax,” she said, and smiled.

E
mily had arrived at the farm that morning, just before noon, at the same time that Sax and Paolo were touching down on the airstrip outside Chemnitz five hundred kilometers to the northeast. She had with her an old-fashioned and impractical box suitcase of canvas and leather that Sax had given her for her tenth birthday, as well as a proper Cordura nylon roll-aboard thing without any charm. She was dressed in navy wool peacoat, roll-cuffed jeans, and paddock boots, her hair an explosion of black curls held behind her ears with a red cotton paisley-printed headband. When she opened the door and called into the
maison de maître
to see if anyone was in, Emily was startled by the sudden appearance of a
short Japanese-looking woman only partially concealing a big carving knife against her side.

“Who are you?” Min asked in her toneless suspicious voice.

“I'm Saxon's niece,” Emily said, using the semiformal version of Uncle Sax's name because it sounded more important.

Then Rock emerged from the back of the house, where he and Gheorghe had been watching
le foot
on television. He took one look at Emily, still in the doorway blocked by the small but feral Min, and did a double take.

Emily caught the reaction. A lifetime as a biracial woman had taught her that most people automatically put her in whatever category suited their prejudices—she was high yellow to ill-disposed black people and an octoroon to ill-disposed whites. But Rock smoothly offered to take Emily's suitcase, apologized for his inability to speak French, asked her if she knew any Arabic, and when she replied she was American, he asked her if she'd like a cup of coffee, because he had made some.

So far, so good. Then Gheorghe had emerged from the back of the house in socks and T-shirt. He saluted Emily with the beer in his hand.

“I'm Emily Saxon,” Emily said, introducing herself to everyone at once. “I'm Sax's niece from New York.”

“So he is not the only surprise in Saxon family,” Gheorghe said.

Rock shook his head. Emily ignored the remark and squinched up her eyes, unsure how to pose the question uppermost in her mind. “Are you— Look, this is going to sound stupid, but are you—the ­vampire-hunting team?”

A
couple of hours later, right around the time Paolo was translating Sax's question that would drive Herr Bächtold to scream and claw at the walls of his cell, Abingdon arrived in his converted bread truck
with gaudy paintings of hammer and anvil on one side and a knight
à cheval
on the other. In this vehicle he traveled the festival circuit; kept his forge, tools, and armor safe; and often as not, slept in the back. Or didn't sleep, but reclined, indoctrinating a fair disciple into the mysteries of the metallurgist's hammer, as he put it. Abingdon was composed of lean, raw muscle, his fair skin always chapped with wind, sea, sun, or sheer diabolical heat from the forge. His shaggy red-blond hair looked like flames. There was an impressive white scar across his forehead from side to side where the edge of a shield had struck him during a melee before a cheering crowd. His heavy-lidded eyes and easy smile got him into endless trouble, and he didn't want it to end.

Abingdon instantly made friends with Rock; Gheorghe didn't altogether trust him—or anyone—but he knew a fellow rogue when he saw one. The difference between Abingdon and a clever grifter was primarily his doctorate, and he didn't hang the diploma in the back of the old bread truck. Still, they had something in common, as Gheorghe often went on the continental circuit himself, to fairs and festivals, performing as part of a troupe of jugglers and acrobats. He was a skilled but indifferent performer, being more interested in what opportunities for larceny were available in whatever town hosted the event.

It became evident within an hour or two that Abingdon had his own sort of criminal career, but it only involved women. Picking the locks to their undergarments, stealing within, and escaping with their hearts was his modus operandi. He tried it with Min first, as she helped Abingdon and Rock unload the bread truck, transporting his gear into the barn. She was invulnerable to masculine wiles, having buried her need for intimacy alongside her family.

Emily was next. She flirted with him while he assembled his portable forge, but she, too, was inaccessible. She found him very attractive, but must, with New York caution, have known the difference between
very attractive and too attractive, and Abingdon was right on the line. She preferred the clumsy but sincere passes she got from her economist colleagues.

As it was, there was a great deal of banter, some coarse double entendres, a lot of lifting and hauling, and by late afternoon they were out of beer and there was a fully operational blacksmith's shop in the middle of the barn. The forge was designed to vent without sparks, but one never knew; Abingdon would have preferred to set the thing up outdoors, but the weather didn't look very promising, and if he burned the barn down, it was only Sax, after all. He'd be forgiven. What Abingdon really wanted to know was if Sax would forgive him for slipping his gorgeous young niece the Abingdon Knob.

Once the forge was arranged, he brought out his metals: sheets, bars, and rods, as well as glass jars full of powders and shavings that glittered in many colors. He had a safe bolted into the floor of the bread truck containing gold and silver as well.

“Fucking alchemist, me,” he explained to Min, and winked, and she thought there must be something in his eye. He had his attention back on Min now because she was attractive in an ugly-sexy kind of way and because Emily had gone into the
maison
to see about the mysterious Indian woman lying in bed with a fever.

O
nce Emily set eyes on Nilu, she didn't leave her side again for hours, until the sun was long down and Nilu seemed to fall into a somewhat more restful sleep than the eye-rolling, thrashing state in which she had spent most of her day. Emily had initially asked Min what was the matter with Nilu; Min said, “Vampire bite,” and left the room.

At that moment, Emily's trip to see what her mad uncle was doing had lost its whimsical flavor. For the first time, the truth of the matter hit her, almost a physical blow. Here was a
real
victim.

Her original concern had been for Uncle Sax's soundness of mind. She was genuinely concerned. He'd told her the story of the vampire-slaying hammers with such conviction. It was obvious he thought it all to be true. But it couldn't be. It was preposterous. She'd almost believed him for a while that afternoon. He was a persuasive man. But the hard light of day soon put her to rights. Vampires didn't exist.

Then she noticed he was scuttling off to unnamed appointments when they were scheduled to have tea together. She'd visited his flat and found a notebook lying open on the coffee table he hated; she caught a glimpse of timetables and flight information intermixed with phrases like
VAMPIRE ALLOY
and
Mercenary? Bring weapons.
He'd seen her looking at it and tossed a volume of Tom Poulton drawings on top of the notebook to conceal it.
She
might not have believed his story, but it was clear her uncle did. And it looked very much as if he intended to do something about it.

Then he'd announced he was going to his place in Alsace-Lorraine for a few weeks, don't wait up for him. Typically he'd have told her all about his plans as he was making them. This time he'd hidden them from her. Something was very much up, and she suspected it was senile dementia. Why not drop in and make sure he wasn't wandering around in his bathrobe eating soap? It couldn't hurt. Emily had always sworn to herself she'd take care of him. Nobody else was as close to him as she was. He could afford the best old-age care, but there should be somebody to see it was done properly, and that he was allowed to keep his dignity as a human being. Maybe it was time to begin that care.

So she booked herself a flight to France and discovered her uncle had indeed assembled a band of colorful misfits for whatever quixotic adventure he had in mind. But he himself was nowhere to be found. She had passed an entertaining hour or two amongst them before anyone mentioned there was a sick woman in the house. They seemed
rather matter-of-fact about it. Mercenary, in a word. Like it had said in Sax's notebook. She thought she'd better go have a look. Even as she entered the bedroom in which Nilu suffered, she had still believed it must be a hangover or the flu.

Then she realized the girl was near death. She could
feel
it—something uncanny in the room, like possession, like ghosts. The vampire thesis abruptly gained a deal more credibility than it had enjoyed before.

She sat on the edge of the bed and took Nilu's cold, wet hand. The air left Emily's body. She had to tell herself to breathe. There were no marks on the sick girl's neck, no double punctures of mortician's wax with artful droplets of blood running from them as in the glorious old vampire films Emily had watched on cable when she was small (not at Uncle Sax's place, though, because he possessed no television).

But did vampires really bite people on the neck? Did they fear garlic, or crucifixes? Suddenly the vague pop-cultural creature with a red-lined cape and swallowtail coat became absurd. She had come here not expecting there would be anything real about it. Even meeting the team, she had thought it must be one of those strange experimental theater happenings that had been popular in the early 1970s when drugs were no longer enough and people required scenery and role-playing before they could get off. She should have known better. After all her smug self-satisfaction that she alone understood her uncle best, she had, in this time when he was most serious, most earnest in his entreaties, failed to take him at his word. He would be terribly hurt by that. He would know. Her mere presence, after all his dire warnings, would be enough.
Even you
, he would think when he saw her:
even you
.

Emily stayed there by the bed and thought things over. It began to seem more plausible. Rock brought her tea at intervals during her afternoon vigil; she expressed some of these thoughts to him, although
not her concerns about Sax's feelings being hurt. Nobody would believe it was possible to do.

“Yeah, vampires,” Rock replied when she asked if it was true. He spoke more quietly than usual, sitting on a petite chair beside the bed. Both of them were looking at Nilu. “I saw my first one in that border fight with Iran nobody wants to talk about. We blew up this old ruin and there were tunnels under it. I went down in there with a team of three. The other cats bought it one by one, and there was no way to figure out what was killing us. It was like a shadow came to life. Backup couldn't get to me by the time I was alone, because we didn't have radios, because we were never there, you understand.”

Emily shook her head. “Am I living in a world full of people who know vampires are real, and somehow I just missed it? This is hard for me to—”

“I think about half the people on earth who have ever seen one and lived to tell about it are right here on this farm. You're in rare company.”

“So why are you alive?” Emily said, bidding him finish his story.

“Well, I'm down the hole alone with this thing, right? So I said to myself, ‘If you don't live, nobody's going to know what killed you.' And for some reason, that bothered me a lot. I guess I was just feeling sensitive that day. So I decided to keep a grenade in my hand with the pin out, and if the thing got me, obviously I'd let go of the grenade and we'd both go to hell together.

“When the thing finally showed itself, it was in this underground room with a well in the floor. It came after me and it was like—I mean, I pride myself on a certain level of physical fitness. But this thing picked me up like it was my grammy when I was three years old. But it didn't look like my grammy much. I don't know if you know about vampires. I guess not. Did you know they take the shape of their prey? Happens real slowly. Couple hundred years, they start looking
like what they eat. For a long damn time, this one had been living on spiders.”

Rock stopped speaking and stared down at Nilu. He was rubbing his forearms as if it was chilly in the room, shaking his head.

“But you survived,” Emily prompted.

“It was about to put the bite on me with this—I guess it was its mouth—so I stuck the grenade in there and when it let go of me I shoved it down the well. That worked pretty good. I quit the soldier business as soon after that as I could, and decided to take up gardening or something, but here I am. You get bit by vampires more ways than one. It's like there's something crawling under your skin, you know? You got to dig it out.”

Emily had no idea what to say to any of this. It was insane, like learning magic was real. But then, what was electricity? What was gravity? Just magic with a name. She sought for something to say but only nodded.

Rock left the room, his mood now subdued by memories. Emily's thoughts returned to her uncle Sax.

She had only one defense against the hurt she knew he would feel. In her suitcase, as a kind of rabbit's foot to bring luck—or so she viewed it at the time—she had brought along Simon, the vampire hammer. It was her ticket to the show. That might be something to mollify Uncle Sax. At least it showed she was listening, if not altogether believing. But the people she found herself amongst were the real thing. Vampire hunters. She hadn't entirely believed it when they were assembling the forge down in the barn, but she did now. They all seemed indifferent, that's what it was. That was the thing that made her a convert. None of these people were acting phony-tough or talking up the strange nature of their mission—they were just doing what needed to be done, as if it was painting a fence or planning a ski trip.