House of Corruption (35 page)

He had taken an oath to serve Christ and, just as Reynard said, he was indeed more concerned with the opinions of disbelieving colleagues than the truth. He had lied to himself; for as much as he sought to know the unknowable, he had first made an oath. All else should have been secondary. He sought signs and wonders through his discoveries and now, at the bottom of a well, he was as guilty as all those scholars of Cambridge whom he had condemned. He had always been looking for evidence, when in reality he should have trusted his faith.

Of course Lucinda no longer feared him. He was useless, faithless, a hypocrite of the first order. He was as cursed as Jonah, just as swallowed up by darkness. Lucinda knew any man who put his own interest before friends, before the Lord, had no power to confound her. The monks of Saint Dismas, he presumed, had given their lives against her. He expected to do better?

“Lord God,” he prayed.

His voice echoed into the nothing above his head. He prayed for forgiveness, for power to confront such evil as could be found in this house. He prayed to be free from the belly of this dark place—spit out and given a second chance. He prayed until he no longer felt the cold.

The well water began to move. Savoy blinked and wiped at his face. Water sloshed against the rim. A shadow emerged beneath the water, tentative, groping at the edge of the slimy hole as if blind and grasping for purchase. First a head, than an arm.

Savoy strained to see, cursing his bad eyesight. The shape pulled from the hole like a newborn, grasping up, up, hands seeking the air. Savoy reached down and took a hand into his own.

Clammy and cold, the flesh melted away in Savoy’s grip. A ruined face rose from the waterline, the eyeless sockets dripping slime, flesh oozing off pale bone. Savoy tore his hand free and flattened against the wall, horrified. The dead thing reached, gripped his legs, and jerked him into the water.

Savoy submerged. He thrashed, fought against cold fingers wrapping around his throat. Water poured between his lips and he opened his eyes to see a blank, dead face, terrible in its stillness. He tore free toward the air, but its hands gripped his shirt and pulled him down near the bottom of the well. Savoy kicked, thrashing.

Something heavy hit the water, something new. His hands reached and felt the prickly feel of hemp. He gripped it. The rope tugged and he held fast as he was pulled from the water. He kicked at the hands grabbing at his legs, his arms quivering, burning against the pain.

He could not let go. He would not.

Slowly, foot by foot, he was pulled upwards. He wrapped his hands around the rope. Where the hemp clutched his flesh the skin began to redden, purple. Blood seeped where friction tore him open. He refused to let go. With his feet he leaned against the wall of the shaft, steadying himself, expecting strength to give and he would fall back into that dead thing’s embrace. He was an old man, a weak man, but the terror kept him clutched to that rope.

At the lip of the hole, the rope burned through his hands and Grant caught him at the shoulders. Both collapsed. Savoy coughed until water and bile fell from his lips and he retched, his body shivering with revulsion. He no longer felt his burning arms and fingers. Adrenaline, he guessed. Adrenaline saved an old man’s life.

A hissing moan rolled from the well.

Grant helped him to his feet. “Time to leave.”

They ascended to the upper basement. They warmed and dried themselves in the boiler room, opened bottled goods from the supply room to slurp down peaches and dried apples. Savoy fashioned a makeshift satchel from a leather bag and swath of rope and stuffed the bottom with rags. He filled it with a box of Lundstrom matches, a pair of leather gloves, a small oil lantern and other items he saw fit.

With a crowbar Grant cracked open a cabinet and discovered crates stamped with
caution
in both English and Chinese. Canvas sacks held coils of fusing. Barrels contained moist, browning bundles like clumps of old bedding. “Gun cotton,” he said, “and there’s enough gelignite here to punch a hole in a mountain.” He opened another crate and slid free a paper-wrapped stick of dynamite. “Mining supplies. They’d still have a kick, I’d warrant, but it’s awfully wet.”

“In their basement?” Savoy asked.

“I’ve seen worse.” Grant considered the lot, then motioned for Savoy to follow him. “I think you should see something.”

Sliding the crowbar into his belt, Grant led Savoy back into the boiler room. He pushed at a section of wall and it moved inward, revealing a passage and a stone stair that dropped into the dark. Savoy lit the lantern and they descended a long time. Halfway down, they came upon a gaping head of stone, three times their height, and the stairs continued through its open mouth as if into the bowels of some fossilized god. His puffy cheeks, heavy lids, drooping earlobes, strong forehead, and intricate crown reminded Savoy of Siam and its exotic temples.

“If only I had my camera,” he said.

They passed shallow alcoves gated with rusted iron and cobweb, most filled with piles of cracked bones heavy with dust—mostly skulls, many attached to their spines. When the stair ended, the grotto stretched high above their heads and down low. Savoy gaped in disbelief. Tier after tier of dead dropped before them to end at the black pool and its three standing stones.

“There,” Grant said. “I came from there.”

Savoy wished he held a cross or rosary, a scrap of silver, a portion of the Eucharist or any of his vials of holy water. In his life he had entered many places ripe with evil. Water and stone and old dead in and of themselves were of no consequence, but this place...

Whited sepulchers beautiful outward. Inside lie dead men’s bones
.

He started down toward the pool and focused on the twisted remains of a skeleton. A man’s ribcage and spine blended into oversized limbs and bent claws like some bizarre mismatch at the Museum of Ancient History. Another nearby had a skull of grotesque shape and extension, its jaw bristling with four rows of jagged teeth. At least a half-dozen of the mutated corpses lay scattered throughout the crypt, each different in its size and peculiarity.

At first Savoy did not know what to think, then it struck him—lycanthropy was but a temporary transformation of a man’s physical frame and, in theory, cells and membranes reverted to their original state upon death. These were failed attempts, he guessed, one man’s obsession to master lycanthropy, bought with the currency of innocent lives.

What have you done, Wilhem?

He turned to look elsewhere and stopped, stricken.

“My God,” he said.

The remains of an older man lay on one slab near the bottom, still dressed in ragged clothing befitting a gentleman of means. He had been dead for some time, perhaps a year or more, his face twisted by a rictus of decomposition. The flesh of his neck and shoulder hung off his collarbone like dried leather.

“Who is this?” Grant asked.

“My friend,” Savoy said. “My friend Ernst.”

35

Kiria?

Reynard tried to move, frozen, held fast at his wrists and ankles. He laid flat on his back on a gurney, strapped tight by leather belts. The fleshy crook of his right arm was exposed. He registered multiple stings along his veins; he had been pricked with a hypodermic.

He was in a makeshift laboratory, a mélange of lamps and mismatched sofas and side tables heaped with books. The air reeked of blood and carbolic and ether and sour vinegar. A table to his right held medical instruments and apparatus befitting a chemist, and there were racks of strange mechanical devices and instruments fed by pipes with many dials. He smelled propane and coal-fed steam. Across the room was a fireplace with a cluster of hearth-tools, its mantle capped with bottles of scotch and wine. A hot fire blazed despite the heat, heaped with the ashy remains of grey coke.

The harder he pulled, the tighter the straps squeezed. He tried to ignore his headache, to remember the last few moments before he was—

Lasha.

The doorknob turned with a creak. He closed his eyes and slackened his muscles. Two people entered. One slid a bottle from the mantle, poured liquid into a glass, and swallowed audibly. The other went to the table with fingers tinkling along metal instruments. By the gait and tramp of heavy boots this was not the same man whose voice he heard in the kitchen. He rustled of cotton and silk, smelling of musky cologne, the swish of a longcoat against his trousers.

The other lingered at the hearth, sipped, then clack-clacked in her boots across the floor to sit upon a sofa. The miasma of chemicals and smoke made her scent confusing, impossible to pinpoint. He recognized the cadence of her footsteps.

“Kiria,” he said.

“He is awake,” she said. She went to his side. “How do you feel?”

“Where is Lasha?”

“Our experience must have taken its toll,” she said. “You fell to the floor with some violent seizure.” She looked to the old, wiry man at the table. “The antidote should be ready any time...isn’t that right?”

“Give him wine,” Wilhem said, gruffly.

“I am not your servant.”

“Give him wine and be quiet about it.”

Wilhem slid on a pair of vulcanized gloves, opened a valve and lit a Bunsen burner. He set a beaker upon the flame, allowed it to boil, then poured the grey fluid into a vial filled with blood. The infusion created a dirty sludge. He placed a few drops onto a glass slide and examined them under a microscope; Reynard watched him work, enraged and intrigued at this turn of events. Was he indeed on the verge?

Kiria came with wine, but Reynard refused. “Take these straps off me,” he said.

“Soon.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I trust him.”

“I do hope our Old Father Basta is burning in some corner of hell, don’t you agree?” Wilhem said, perched on his stool like a vulture. He poured more silver liquid into a vial filled with blood and started a fresh slide. “Ahhh,” he said, examining it. “If only you had accepted my daughter’s invitation at the first.”

“Remove these,” Reynard demanded, “and take me to my sister.”

“No. Not yet.”

“Get them off me!”

Wilhem turned on his seat. “Have you no concept of what this day means? My curse will no longer be a burden. Think of it!” He returned to his microscope. “Did you know the ancients who once lived here sought to transform themselves into beasts? On purpose? I do admire their courage. They delved into the deep mystery and drew up power, for here they could
sujan
, make their passions into animal form. Why not then, my grandfather reasoned, learn the secret of unmaking? He spared no expense.”

Reynard wriggled against his bonds.

Not as tight—

“...With birth and death,” Wilhem continued as he worked, “those fragile seconds of transition, there is potential to trap primal energies. Like all good practitioners of science I took what secrets my father uncovered and found the mechanics of their superstition. A pinch of blood, a pound of flesh, and we are baptized into new creatures. My father sought truth through spirit. I have sought it through science, and made it mine.”

Wilhem went to the fireplace. With the tongs he lifted from the coals a dish with a blob of oozing metal. “Your bullet was either extraordinary skill or a miraculous blunder. In all my years I never thought such a thing—”

“And his blood?” Kiria asked.

Wilhem grinned. “Tonight, everything changes.”

Reynard’s anxiety became an itching until he wondered if they had infused the straps with wolfsbane. This was more than a chemical aversion—he needed to get free. Now. He had seen men escape from ropes and chains and straitjackets at the vaudeville, traps far more complex than straps on a medical table. He imagined the technique could not be too difficult with desperation and sweat at his disposal. He wriggled his ankles, moving them against, then away, from their metal clasps. He did the same with his wrists, moving them slow, allowing sweat to grease the insides of the straps. He worked carefully, relaxing when Kiria looked his way.

“You played me,” he said.

“You heard what you wanted to hear,” she said.

“You saw what happened on the
Kalabakang
.”

“That was not his fault.”

“Why serve a man who would abuse your moth—?”

Kiria pressed her hands over his mouth. Wilhem did not seem to hear, crouched over his microscope. His right hand jotted sloppy notes as enthusiasm overwhelmed his penmanship.

“You must forget what I told you,” she whispered.

Her voice, her very manner, was ice. Everything she said, everything he felt for her dissolved in those indifferent eyes. It had taken him weeks to trust her. Only during the sharing of her memories below the earth did he truly believe in her. When he held her close and soothed away her grief he realized he needed her, felt strength knowing she needed him. No one had ever really needed him before. Not even Lasha, though she might have said otherwise, for he knew she could have lived quite happily without him.

As if he, Reynard LaCroix, could have ever considered a life of happiness!

“You lied to me,” he said. “To serve your father.”

“I love him.”

“A monster who violated your mother?”

Wilhem’s pencil fell to the floor. “What did he say?”

“As if you did not know,” Kiria said.

“I’ve no memory of such a thing.”

“You must remember.”

“He may not,” Reynard said. “Under the influence, one’s memory is often—”

She slapped him across the face. “You are no better!” she cried. “Dragging me back to this awful place! How dare you!” She focused on her father. “Now she is dead. She is dead! She is dead because of you!”

“That was her choice,” Wilhem said.

“She did it for you!”

“I claim no responsibility,” he said, without emotion. “Lucinda knows what it means to remain at my side. If she is unhappy, she has no one to blame but herself.”

He turned back to his microscope. Kiria bristled, the color leaving her face until she was white, bloodless. Her teeth clenched until the tension tightened the sinews of her neck, her fists constricting into quivering knots. She advanced on Wilhem. One moment he crouched over the microscope like a bird, oblivious, the next he spun with fluid grace and caught her hand before it could fall. When she tried to slap with her left hand he grabbed her wrist.