Angels of Music (21 page)

Falke gripped the spar of wood.

‘What…’ said Raoul.

The lantern was dropped and the pistol discharged.

A pool of burning oil spread and Falke was blinded for a moment.

Where was Raoul?

Someone lay on the uneven ground beyond the fire.

Falke went to help him. It wasn’t Raoul but de Rosillon, with his collar torn off. He had red scratches in his neck.

Falke’s heart clutched with terror.

* * *

‘Michel… Michel…’

He heard his name called.

‘Caralin,’ he cried. ‘Caralin.’

He walked away from de Rosillon towards the voice, only he wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from and got turned around.

He wasn’t even sure it was her.

He tripped over an iron grille and felt cold air coming up from it.

A strangulated sound rose too.

Fire from the dropped lamp lit up the basement. Falke saw through the grille.

A fat white face, glistening with drops of blood, was pressed close to the bars. Gio Jones, with a great chunk bitten out of his neck, shaking with pain. His fingers wrapped around the grille like white worms.

‘Her,’ he said, ‘her…’

Then his fingers relaxed and, with a sigh as if all the air in him were escaping at once, he fell down into a deeper darkness. Falke heard a thump as he landed on stone.

He found Anatole a few moments later, sat in a lopsided chair, throat slit like a pig’s, a pool of blood in his lap. His eyes were rolled up, showing only the whites. His coat had been ripped off and his shirt torn away, exposing his shoulder and chest. His skin was covered with little rat-like bites that bubbled blood.

He heard a musical laugh behind him… and was struck a blow on the head.

* * *

He was woken up by water on his face.

It was raining on him.

Dawnlight was in the catacombs too. He must have been out for hours.

He felt his throat. The collar was gone. He could find no wounds.

Had he been spared?

He got to his feet, unsteady. He found Raoul’s improvised stake and used it as a walking stick.

‘Michel,’ shouted someone.

A man’s voice. He was relieved.

‘Raoul? Where are you?’

‘In the shadows,’ he replied. ‘I can’t come into the light.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Come here, Michel… here…’

His head throbbed, from the blow and after-effects of drink.

What had happened? De Rosillon, Gio and Anatole were dead. Only he and Raoul had lived through the night.

And Caralin.

Where was she? Where had she been all this time?

‘I’ve found her,’ said Raoul, as if reading his mind. ‘Down here, where the dark is deepest.’

Falke went to his friend. He saw an outline in the murk. Raoul’s face, eyes bright.

A lucifer flared and Raoul lit a candle. He was standing by an open trapdoor.

He indicated that they should go down a level.

Falke followed the candle as it descended. They went down a narrow, sloping passage walled with wet stone blocks. Iron rings were set into the stone at intervals.

The passage fed into a crypt.

All around were coffins in niches or open tombs. Only a few scraps of bone remained inside.

‘What happened?’ asked Falke.

‘She killed them,’ said Raoul. ‘Killed them and drank their blood.’

‘Caralin?’

‘Who else?’ said Raoul, bitterly. ‘Admit it, you knew all along… When she was away, the vampire was active. Her strange pallor, that thing with her voice, the way she gets in your head and turns you around. The place she comes from! Styria – well-known as the hunting ground of Mircalla Karnstein. Her very name…’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Falke.

Raoul stood over a tomb, holding up a candle.

‘You don’t,’ said Raoul. ‘Then look…’

Caralin lay in the tomb, hands folded on her chest, blood on her mouth.

Falke felt fire in his head.

‘She killed our friends,’ said Raoul, ‘but what she did to us is worse… she’s
changed
us.’

Candle flames danced in Raoul’s eyes. He opened his mouth to show new fangs.

* * *

Only one thing was to be done.

Falke speared Caralin through the chest.

She groaned and her eyes popped open… She coughed and a bloody rag came out of her mouth.

As he worked the spar through her, he saw her hands and feet were bound with stout string.

Her eyes were angry, then empty.

Raoul swore, and spat out his fangs.

‘Why didn’t you stop him, you fool?’ shouted de Rosillon, stepping out from behind a screen.

‘He was too quick,’ said Raoul, aghast.

Anatole dashed in and tried to pull out the stake, which was stuck too tight.

‘That’s hardly any use,’ said de Rosillon.

‘What’s happened?’ said Gio.

Falke saw red paint on his friends’ necks, wounds made of flaps of fabric gummed on.

‘Michel’s killed a vampire,’ said de Rosillon.

‘Caralin?’ said Gio.

‘Yes, her. Who else?’

* * *

He could not get what Raoul had told him out of his head.

She had changed them, he said. Caralin had made vampires of them.

That – like everything else – was supposed to be a joke, a prank on him. But it felt true. In the catacombs under the Hôtel d’Autriche, he became a monster.

Raoul’s fangs were from the joke shop, but the chill in Falke’s heart was profound. He could feel his bones rearranging.

Nothing for it but to put her into the Seine, de Rosillon said. No one else knew her in Paris. She never mentioned any family. She’d be just another unknown woman.

She was smiling as she slipped under the waters.

‘I suggest we all leave town for a while,’ said Raoul. ‘Let things simmer down. It was a ghastly mistake, and we’ll have to live with the consequences…’

‘I shall sing a mass for poor Caralin,’ said Gio. ‘Several.’

‘This can’t come out,’ said Anatole. ‘We’d be ruined. Michel would have it the worst. Disgrace, prison, the guillotine. We have to help him. It’s for his sake.’

‘I agree,’ said de Rosillon. ‘We must help Michel.’

‘In time, we can come back,’ said Raoul. ‘And put this unfortunate incident behind us. A student prank that turned out to be not so funny, eh? It’s the time of our lives when such things are
de rigueur
.’

Garron, the best actor and most honest man in
Le Gang
, was sent to tell Van Helsing they had destroyed the vampire. Cringing with shame, he reported that the Professor believed him. He was not sure about Madame Van Helsing, but she would keep quiet to preserve her husband’s reputation. It was in nobody’s interests that this story got out.

So, the vampire was done away with… and
Le Gang de Schubert
was dissolved.

It would be twenty-five years before Falke came back to Paris… as the monster they had made of him. To avenge Caralin, he would revive the fear of the vampire in the city that ignored her in life but made her a totem – and an icon – in death.

D
R
F
ALKE WAS
so terrified by the apparition that Unorna could feel the psychic backwash from outside the room. She went cold with
someone else’s
fright.

This house was permeated with fear and rage, and shame and cruelty. It had shouted at her in the courtyard, before La Marmoset picked the front door lock. It was worse inside. How could others
not
feel it? Most people didn’t, she knew… it was as if they were deaf or blind from birth and never understood the sense they were missing.

For all its horrors, the house in Rue des Martyrs had no ghost.

Not until now…

La Marmoset, the dead-alive image of
L’Inconnue de la Seine
, came as a shock to the man they knew to be the vampire murderer… but Falke had expected her for years. He had even been piqued that the dead woman cared little enough to haunt him. Along with terror was strange joy, a
hope
of some outcome beyond imagining.

Falke had confessed to killing Caralin Trelmanski. He wouldn’t be the first murderer to stay in love with his victim. Did he see this revenant – La Marmoset wearing that sad smiling face – as a chance to take back what he had done?

No, it was stranger than that. Falke’s story was more of a tangle.

From what Madame Van Helsing said and the scraps of clues La Marmoset put together, Unorna had an idea of what had happened twenty-five years ago to drive the man mad.

Even now, with a corpse in the bathtub and a good friend barely saved from a hideous death, she felt sorry for Falke. He wasn’t a true vampire, just a tinkerer with an inescapable mania for revenge. Against his friends, whom he held responsible, but against himself too – for willingly believing what he was led to believe, for acting out of a deep-seated urge to kill the woman he loved. Unorna understood that the black seed was in him all the time. That he thought Caralin a vampire was an excuse, not a motive. The impulse to hurt or kill was there already.

Michel Falke sat on his piano stool, just staring.

La Marmoset glided across the floor – taking tiny steps under her long dress – and reached out. He gripped her wrist and pressed his cheek against her hand.

Unorna stepped into the room.

Sophy was wrapping a torn strip of cloth around her scratched hand. She was otherwise unharmed.

The corpse in the bathtub was Inspecteur d’Aubert.

‘What do we do with him?’ Unorna asked.

Sophy drew a thumb across her throat.

Unorna wasn’t sure she was ready to go that far. Sophy already had the beginning of a retinue of ghosts – smoky, indistinct, unindividuated. Her kills, either spirits or memories. The more ghosts there were, the more likely it was that Sophy would sense them. She wasn’t as spirit-blind as La Marmoset or Madame Van Helsing. Eventually, she would feel their unwelcome touch.

There were consequences beyond the legalities. Murder was not good for what was called
karma
in the East. Unorna had qualms about coldly executing this murderer, though he would doubtless go to the guillotine if handed over to the police and courts. She didn’t want Sophy or La Marmoset to add to burdens which could become crushing. Killing his friends hadn’t made Falke better. He was more a wretch now than before.

‘There must be another way,’ she said.

La Marmoset stood back from Falke.

He slid off the stool and rat-scurried across the floor, reaching for a peculiar black device: a leather bag with steel-tipped tentacles.

‘Don’t let him use that,’ said Sophy, sharply. ‘It’s the vampire-machine! It’s how he kills them.’

Too late! Falke hugged the thing to himself, and jammed two spikes into his own throat. The bag began churning and writhing. Some device inside was pumping.

A dribble of blood came from a long, trailing tube.

Unorna and La Marmoset tried to wrestle the device off him, but he held on tenaciously.

Even Sophy joined the effort.

Falke coughed, spitting blood. The spikes were fish-hooked deeply into his neck.

They managed to get Falke off the floor and onto a divan.

‘There must be a switch,’ said La Marmoset.

She tugged at tubes, but the contraption kept working. The floor was slick with blood.

Unorna sensed other presences in the house. Not ghosts, but perhaps not fully living people, either. Shadow-folk… masks.

She heard a susurrus of hissing.

In the doorway stood the Countesses Dorabella, Clarimonde and Géraldine. They wore flimsy, immodest gowns and were barefoot, but it was obvious they were dangerous.

They might file their teeth and sharpen their nails. Or else they grew fangs and claws.

Quick as cats they were, and just as nasty when crossed.

‘Stand down, Angels,’ said Countess Dorabella. ‘We’re here for him.’

La Marmoset turned to them. The face of
L’Inconnue
gave them pause.

‘It’s just a woman, dressed up,’ said the Countess Géraldine. ‘That detective.’

Sophy had a gun in her hand. The Countesses laughed at that.

‘
Les Vampires
hired us too,’ said the Countess Dorabella. ‘We are neglected by a brute of a husband, and must lower ourselves to paid employment. They set you to catch the murderer and us to hunt the Black Bat of the Rooftops. It turns out our quarries were the same.’

‘We found him first,’ said the Countess Géraldine.

‘We found him best,’ said Sophy.

‘We will take him from you,’ said the Countess Dorabella. ‘He is ours.’

‘We’d like to see you try,’ said La Marmoset.

All three Countesses hissed through bared teeth at that. Unorna saw they were strong, heartless and determined.

And out for blood…

So, she decided to give it to them.

She picked up the gushing outflow tube of the vampire-machine and aimed it like a hose. A jet of blood squirted across the room. She played it across the Countesses’ faces. It got in their mouths, their eyes and their hair. It striped across their gowns, which clung stickily to them.

The effect was extraordinary.

The Countesses’ eyes seemed to come alight with red flame. Suddenly, they were mad – like kittens doused with burning oil. They shrieked and tore at each other, licking and biting and frothing.

La Marmoset and Sophy hauled the shaking Falke upright. Unorna was able to direct the fountain blood more squarely on the Romanian women.

Savage Carpathian she-wolves would have served each other more mercifully.

The Countess Dorabella had the Countess Clarimonde’s eye out; the Countess Géraldine’s mouth was clamped around a red weal on the Countess Dorabella’s upper arm, teeth worrying the wound; the Countess Clarimonde had her talons out and was shredding the back of the Countess Géraldine’s gown.

Falke, incidentally, was a dead weight.

Nothing more could be done for him… or to him.

‘There’s a way out through the roof,’ said Sophy.

They left Falke and the Countesses in their bloody mess and hurried upstairs.

La Marmoset took off her wig and peeled away the face of
L’Inconnue
. For a moment, Unorna saw her real face – unmemorable as it was – but as she walked along the passage she applied paint and freckles to create a new mask. An unfamiliar woman emerged – a secretary or shopgirl.