The Fifth House of the Heart (35 page)

Sax was transfixed.

“Get back here,” he heard a voice say from a great distance.

“What the hell are you doing?” the same voice said, now in his ear. Sax was confused. He turned and saw a vast man with a frightened face atop a neck almost as large in diameter as the Ming Dynasty Longquan celadon garden seat upon which he abruptly sat down.
Rock
, Sax recalled. His name was Rock.

“I'm sorry,” Sax said. “I lost my head.” He waved his cane around at the splendors in the great hall. Rock didn't see what he saw.

“It looks like Jay Z's crib in here, man, and that's cool, but I didn't come this far just to get killed in an attractive environment, know what I'm saying?” Rock lifted Sax up and hauled him bodily back to the doorway. Sax wiped his eyes and shook Rock off once they were back in the doorway, where Min was covering the way out with her own shotgun. Sax observed she was sweating profusely, and blood dappled her bandaged side. Rock was always perspiring; Sax was under the impression Korean women never did. Then he realized he was sweating, too, and mopped his face.

“You don't realize what you're seeing, I think,” Sax said. “The ransom of bloody Zeus in Olympus. This makes King Tut's tomb look like a box lunch. I forget our business, however. I see no evidence of our hostess anywhere. But that might be what we want, over there.”

Sax indicated the enormous fireplace. Beside it was built an elevator in the early Art Deco style, brass and chromium tubes framing thick glass ribs that formed the car. It was designed to rise up in the open air to the heights of the great hall; at the very top, there was a
hole framed into the ceiling. The rails on which the elevator ascended continued on up above.

“She's waiting for us up there?” Rock said, not sure if he was asking or making a statement.

“She wouldn't want a gunfight down here, I assure you,” Sax said, and hobbled around the perimeter of the room, discretion at least dictating they stay in the shelter of the gallery above. He tried his best to ignore the items of interest they passed, and made it all the way to the fireplace before he came to a halt, frozen in place.

“Not again,” Rock said.

“I know her. I've met her,” Sax said.

He felt a kind of fear that was new in his experience. It came from far away in his own past, mocking him.

He had
always
survived at the pleasure of this monster. He just hadn't known it until now.

There was a magnificent painting on the chimneypiece above the hearth, its frame a vast rococo fantasy in gilt and plaster, later than the artwork within. There was no mistaking the hand of the master who'd painted it. It was a biblical scene, deep shadows and soft natural light with the figures emerging from the darkness. Plain, honest faces, and proud kings.

It was Caravaggio's lost masterpiece
The Magi in Bethlehem
.

Sax had spent some time talking to the woman who claimed to own it, one drunken night in Paris in 1965. She was pale and attractive and she had a long German title after her name.

He was, he now understood, about to meet her again. Edie Sedgwick would not be attending this time.

Sax paused at the door of the elevator and looked back.

“We're coming back down,” he said, with genuine resolution in his voice. “We're coming back down and taking all this. Mine. Every single bloody bit of it.
Mine.
”

T
he elevator rose with perfect smoothness. There was a plate on the frame that read
G. Eiffel, 1922
. Only the best for this vampire—and the great engineer had died the following year.

Min had taken the stairs, although limping; Rock was with Sax, shotgun trained on the elevator door. Sax was trembling, but the cosmic pitch of fear he had experienced on the way into the castle had been replaced by something more like the doomsense of the condemned man. It was a chilly resignation he felt, almost of already being dead. This was not a castle perched atop the mountain—it was his tomb.

He had already been sentenced to this death in 1965, when the vampire had conversed with him, and Andy Warhol and Charlie Watts and all the rest of the fascinating people had been there.

She had chatted with Sax particularly, of course, because he was an unscrupulous sharpie in the matter of furniture and antiques, and that was something she needed to get her patrimony back. In 1965, it had only been twenty years since her hoard was piled into boxcars and sent down the railway. She had probably been considering Sax as a confederate to help get the stuff back.

A week later, Sax played his part in the destruction of the vampire Corfax in the Loire Valley. This creature would have decided against requesting Sax's services at that time, of course. And she might even have thought,
Someday when he's old, I'll lure him here and destroy him.

That day had finally come.

The elevator stopped moving, the door folded back, and before them was the secret lair.

T
hey were in the room above the great hall. It was the summit of the castle, beneath the peak of the tallest roof. It had once been five or six stories of private chambers, composed of board floors laid across the
beams that spanned the space. The boards were long gone, and now it was just a single echoing volume beneath the peak, crisscrossed by massive timbers where the levels had been.

The steep angle of the roof was duplicated inside the enormous chamber, giving it the aspect of a natural cavern; there were thousands of whispering bats in the highest rafters to lend vitality to the effect. The air stank abominably of bat urine and dung and noxious chemicals. Sax knew bats were supposed to be useful, but he hated all of those small hairy creatures—bats and rats and mice. Horrid wriggling things with tiny teeth and knobby claws like miniature human hands. He hated rats the most, ever since he met them in a tunnel in 1965 while fleeing for his life. He'd attempted to make it into a proper phobia, but it had always remained simple loathing.

There were two levels remaining in the vast chamber. Sax and Rock stepped with care onto the lower level, the floor that was also the ceiling of the great hall below. Above them was a rectangle hanging in space thirty feet above, the second level, suspended on the beams with a twenty-foot margin of open space around it on all four sides, accessible only by a single iron catwalk from the narrow parapet that circled the wall at the same height. It was an island in the air.

The floor under their feet had been paved with linoleum. The walls at this level were clad in sheets of white glass or plastic, lit from behind, so that their pallid light cast angular shadows in unnatural directions. The stone walls emerged above the upper catwalk encircling the room. Dr. Caligari would have loved it.

What most struck the eye, after the sheer height of the room, was the mass of equipment that formed a labyrinth inside it: hulking iron cabinets, studded with rivets the size of mushroom caps, covered in dials and meters and huge levers from which mighty rubber-clad cables and coils of copper tubing ascended. From the walls sprouted mazes of pipe and plumbing. There were pyramids of fuel and chemical
drums, some modern, some so old the metal was blistered and sweating. There was a great humpbacked machine with masses of copper wire wound around a core inside it, a generator of some kind, from which ran cables thick as pythons. Amongst the runs of plastic-clad wire, there were benches littered with handmade brass instruments. Everything was a combination of antiquated and modern science, flung together according to need.

Of the vampire, there was no sign.

“You understand what's next, traditionally speaking,” Sax murmured. “We wander around until we find what she wants us to find, and then she appears behind us without warning, makes a speech, and kills us both.”

“I got that,” Rock said. Sweat was running in gleaming cords down his skin.

“So if we're going to do her in, it's got to be while she's making the speech,” Sax added. It sounded rather silly to mention it at this point. “Be on the lookout for something to distract her.”

“What if she doesn't make the speech?” Rock whispered.

Sax considered it. “Then shoot me first, will you?”

“I surely will. You got me into this,” Rock said. He might have been reconsidering his role in the mission, but it was too late to turn back. They advanced around the laboratory, keeping beneath the ring of walkways on the wall above, their backs to the translucent material that covered the stone walls. There could be no attack from behind that, at least, because there was nothing behind these walls except a thousand-foot drop.

The visibility within the laboratory was poor. It was all in glimpses, seen through Expressionist juxtapositions of technology from the age of steam to the present day. Ahead of them, a spiral staircase in perforated iron rose up to the catwalk. Sax and Rock, moving slowly sideways as if traversing a ledge, reached the stair without incident, and
then it was time to make a decision. If they went up, they were entering the trap of all traps. If they did not, they were in a waiting game with a creature that had nothing but time.

“You stay here,” Sax whispered. Or rather, his voice was so faint it
sounded
as if he was whispering. In fact he couldn't have spoken any louder if he'd tried. The fear inside him had adhered to itself and accumulated into an icy ball. He felt as if he were physically filled with snow. He was trembling, his system most of the way to shutting down. It was only will that kept him breathing and moving.

Rock was circling away now, eyes on the upper reaches of the chamber, and in a few moments, he was lost to Sax's sight amongst the machines. Sax turned his own eyes upward and ascended the iron stairs, one halting step at a time. It was an exhausting journey. He would have had difficulty with the climb even without the burden of dread he was hauling up with him; the open lattice of the iron stairs promoted vertigo, and the entire construction shook slightly with every step, swaying.

Now he could see the tops of the infernal machines arrayed on the lower level, marvels of technology laden incongruously with mountains of guano, corroded where the polyuric bats in the rafters had voided down for many decades upon them. Now he could see into the aluminum races that bore the thick bundles of modern data and power cables. He began to grasp something of the plan of the space, how the passages between the machines all converged upon a central mass, like the densest part of a city skyline, clustered with strange engines and ducts and pipes that rose up to meet the suspended island above.

Then his eyes were level with the floor of the upper platform. He saw the three-inch thickness of the boards, the ebonized beams as big around as the belly of an ox, freighted with bat shit like a fall of heavy stinking snow. The pipes and cables and tubes rose through the floor to
meet in a strange tower in the center of the platform.

Sax's legs were trembling with the effort of climbing the stairs. He resisted the urge to look down. In his coat pocket he had the only weapon he'd been able to convince himself to bring, the ampoule of silver sulfide suspended in acid that he'd liberated from amongst Abingdon's effects. He was of two minds how he would use it: he could, of course, dash the stuff in the vampire's face. That seemed a very poor plan as it would likely infuriate the creature rather than kill it, thus hastening Sax's own demise. His only other idea was to swallow the stuff and hope it killed him before the vampire did. He was beginning to wish he'd brought a firearm, a stick with a point on the end, or even a hat pin. Anything weaponlike, rather than this little bit of glass with a stopper in it, no larger than a roll of quarters.

Sax placed his foot on the catwalk. It made a soft but unmistakable clang, and he closed his eyes in repentance and put his weight on the fragile bridge across the open air to the heart of the laboratory.

She
was there.

He saw her now that she moved, in the middle of the web of technology she'd woven for herself. She was looking at him.

The creature was just the same, her platinum hair piled high, her figure as long and thin as a fashion illustration, and somehow as unlikely in proportion: her legs seemed never to end, her head was suspended atop a neck so long it appeared too frail to support it. She was wearing a white laboratory coat; on her it was elegant. She stared, and that joyless smile was on her lips.

Sax could see there were several monitor screens behind her, one of which was divided into eight sections, each showing a different black-and-white image from around the castle. Min was clearly visible in one of the octants, moving carefully up a wooden stair that would once have been the only way up into the attic from the great hall. She was favoring her injuries. The vampire had been following their prog
ress, as Sax knew she would.

There was a tank behind the monster, a great long thing of murky glass bound with bronze hoops. Inside the tank was what appeared to be blood, dark and ropy with strands of coagulation. Something humanoid floated inside it. The tank was mounted on chains. Sax saw that the chains rose up to a system of pulleys under the roof. There was a panel there mounted on rails, probably to open the roof to the night sky. That must have been the source of the mysterious light they'd seen.

Sax felt himself falling, although he wasn't, and the sensation was so vivid that he reached out and took hold of the thin iron railing along the catwalk. He was experiencing a particularly pure form of panic that left the nervous system in a continuous state of anticipating death, of which falling is the most oft-experienced.

Sax wondered what he should do. Had he come here of his free will, or was this all the outcome of some subtle chemistry of mind control, at which vampires so excelled? Could the seeds of this moment have been planted in his mind by the monster half a century before? He felt he should say something.