The Golden (18 page)

It was not the
sun he recalled from his youth, not that warm, lovely golden-white
burn. It was larger, much larger. Monstrous. A warped yellow round
with a purplish corona and a surface mottled with incandescent whorls
and boils of hideous fire. And so he did not at first recognize what
he was seeing, but instead thought how similar it was, this grotesque
orb, to the moon that he had imagined the murderer had seen atop the
turret. Even after realizing it must be the sun, that the green
swatches were, indeed, pine boughs, that the blue ceiling was the
sky, and that he was surrounded not by stone walls but by hills and
cool air and light . . . even then he did not credit
his senses. Sunlight would burn him, blacken his bones. And then he
thought it must be killing him at that very moment, that he must not
be feeling the attendant pain. Perhaps his senses had been seared
away, perhaps he was beyond all feeling.

He began to
tremble. Hot urine spurted down his thigh. It seemed he was falling
toward the sun, or else it was growing larger yet. The flares of its
writhing corona stretching out to ensnare him, bubbles of fiery
plasma bulging toward him and bursting as from the surface of a vile,
molten soup. He let out a whimper and tried to burrow into the earth,
digging up clods and swatches of grass. Breath whined in his throat.
He rammed his head at the ground, wanting to batter his way into the
black earth. When this failed, he turned onto his back and stared
about in abject horror at the landscape.

He was lying on
a tufted mound some ten feet from the castle wall, about fifty feet
below a gaping hole—obviously the terminus of the pipe down
which he had slid; in many places the mortar had eroded from between
the granite blocks so that the entirety of the wall was mapped with
cracks and fissures, making it appear that the structure was on the
verge of crumbling. To his right, the hillside—ranked with
dwarfish pines—fell away sharply into a valley. Pine boughs
overhung the spot where he lay, and whenever the wind pressed them
down, it was as if intricate green paws were groping, trying to scoop
him up. Something tiny and black was circling the depths of the sky,
tilting back and forth on currents of wind, lending perspective to
his view. The castle wall went up and up, a mile or more of gray
ruin, and the sun, an evil eruption burst through from the other side
of the sky, was pushing closer, and the woods hissed with wind,
lisping the noxious secrets of the day, and that stupid winged thing
was mindlessly circling and circling, and talons of pale cloud were
uncurling, fraying into nonsense script, and the pines, shaking their
burly tops like green beasts just emerged from a river, were
attempting to uproot themselves and lurch forward in an attack. There
was too much light, too much movement, too much of everything. The
profusion of sights and sounds disoriented Beheim, kindled a fire in
his mind that he could not extinguish. All the familiar constructions
of his thought and expectation were burning, breaking apart, tumbling
in showers of sparks down into a chaos of light, and unable to
restore an internal order by means of reason, ignoring the pain in
his legs, he leaped to his feet and ran, covering his head with his
hands. He ran without regard for direction, simply bolting, praying
that he might stumble into some benign darkness, a hole, a crypt, a
cave. He darted in among the pines, avoiding patches of sunlight as
if they were pools of yellow poison. But as he negotiated a steep
defile bordered by an outcropping of boulders, he slipped on the
carpet of needles and went sprawling, winding up crumpled on his
side, panting, and once more gazing directly into the sun.

Fatigue made him
wise. He was not dying, not burning. Somehow a miracle had occurred,
and he had lived. There was no point in running any farther. Yet he
could not overcome his terror of the boiling, fuming thing overhead,
nor could he stanch his uneasiness with the world revealed in its
light. For a long while he lay pinned by a beam of sunlight,
expecting at any moment to be incinerated. Finally he drew up his
knees, wrapped his arms around them, and with his back against one of
the boulders, he sat hunched and miserable, harrowed by the warm sun
that fingered his scalp and shoulders. He searched inside himself for
a reservoir of strength, something that would shore him up and permit
him to think, to analyze, to get a grip on this patently ungraspable
situation. What could have happened to cause this? What had he
done—or what had been done to him—to so abrogate the laws
of his being? And he wondered as well how—despite the hours he
had spent remembering the life of a day, despite the poignancy of his
nostalgia—how he could ever have longed to experience the sun
again. It must be, he decided, a benign illness of the eye that
allowed humans to regard the thing without blanching. Even its minor
side effects were perturbing: the air rippling and inconstant, rife
with translucent eddies and drifting opaque shapes; specks of dirt
floating up like pepper grains in a clear fluid; patterns of pine
needles on the ground shifting about like thousands of muddled
hexagrams rearranging themselves. Watching all this motion, both real
and apparent, he felt vertiginous, sick to his stomach. Everything
was too bright, wrong in its obscene welter of detail. The patchy
grooves of pine bark exposed by ugly light rather than made cryptic
and simple by moonshadow; the blotchy mineral complexion of the
boulders; the diseased intricacy of pine cones; the gray-green
infections of moss. It was alien, unnatural, ruled by that Hellish
fire in the sky, the source of all wrongness, and he was reminded
again of the scene atop the turret, his hallucinatory impressions he
had received of the murderer.

“Shit!”
he said, suddenly jolted by comprehension, having made a connection
between what had befallen him and the Golden’s death.

The murder might
have been done in the daylight. No, it
must
have been done
then! That would explain the retardation of the rigor.

Had he reached
this conclusion under ordinary circumstances, he would have laughed
at it, and he would further have rejected the validity of what he had
imagined atop the turret regarding the murderer’s state of
mind; no matter how accurate such intuitions had been in the past, he
would have believed it impossible that a vampire could have withstood
the sun’s rays. But he was living proof that a vampire could
survive direct sunlight. And it
had
been a vampire who killed
the Golden, not a servant emulating his master’s lust for
blood. Beheim’s perceptions of the day as a perversion of
darkness confirmed this fact, validated the impression of the
murderer’s perceptions that he had gained at the scene of the
crime.

But how, he
asked himself, how could this have happened?

He took a deep
breath to quell his uneasiness and began to consider the events of
the past hours. An answer—the only one possible, it seemed—soon
came clear. The liquid he had drunk in Felipe’s hidden study.
It must have been a drug that enabled one to walk abroad in daylight.
The list of dosages and Felipe’s journal entry supported this
assumption. And there was something else. The fact that the windows
of the study had been without shutters. Even were it a place that
Felipe frequented only at night, no one of the Family could have
borne for very long the presence of a shutterless window unless made
confident by some other form of protection. Otherwise an accident
might occur, one that would leave them helpless and exposed to the
sun. He had been an imbecile not to see this before.

Panic flared in
him again.

How long an
immunity did the drug guarantee? He had to return to the castle . . .
and quickly!

Then he
remembered the flask he had taken from Felipe’s study.

It was still
there, still tucked into his shirt pocket.

So frightened he
was unable to breathe, he fumbled with the silver cap, unscrewed it,
and put the bottle to his lips; but then, recognizing that he
exhibited no ill effects, he refrained from drinking.

He was going to
survive, he told himself; he had only to stay calm and take his time.

Nothing had
changed. The first order of business was still to return to the
castle. Of course, even were he able to get back inside, he would
find himself in the same situation as before. But armed with the
knowledge of Felipe’s researches, with the evidence of his
experience, he might be able to influence the Patriarch to allow him
to continue his investigation. There was hope for him now.

And what of
Giselle, what hope for her?

He trotted
toward the east turret, which loomed above the pine tops, and as he
went he concluded that the safest method of reentering the castle
would be to return the way he had exited it. Vlad and his accomplice
would likely have removed the barriers from the pipe, assuming him
dead. If he could scale the wall, using the cracks for finger- and
toeholds, and retrace his steps, perhaps he would be able to find
Giselle. He could not afford to waste time in a prolonged search, but
he would very much like to encounter Vlad again.

Coming out from
the shade of the pines and under the bloated eye of the sun was no
less disturbing than before, but he mastered his fear and walked
briskly toward the castle without looking up. He had little
difficulty in scaling the wall, and as he neared the mouth of the
pipe, that circle of sweet darkness, he began to feel secure and, if
not wholly confident, then at least somewhat capable. He hauled
himself up onto the lip of the pipe and dared another glance at the
world of light and heat he was abandoning. As his gaze swept across
the ground below, he caught sight of something nestled in a
depression between two hillocks not fifty feet from the spot where he
had landed. Something wrapped in a black widow’s shawl,
something with pale twisted sticks protruding from a bloodied
skirt—legs, he realized, badly broken legs.

An old woman,
perhaps.

A servant, the
one whom the Patriarch had charged with the care of the Golden?

Who else could
it be?

He did not feel
sufficiently secure to risk climbing back down and examining the
corpse; he wanted darkness and quiet and still air, and though he
realized how slovenly and unprofessional this was, he could not
endure the thought of staying outside another minute. At any rate, he
no longer believed he could win this game through a process of
deduction. How could he trust any clue the body might provide? There
would probably be none, but even if there were, they might have been
planted. No, the thing to do would be to use the corpse to his
advantage.

And that could
be managed.

Despite
everything against him, if he could survive this next bit, he
believed he would be in a position to make moves of his own, to send
others scurrying for cover. He was no longer governed by the rules of
evidence or the necessity for supporting witnesses. He was in effect
a Columbus of the daylight, a voyager in uncharted seas. Who would
doubt the integrity of his witness? If the murderer could remove or
plant his clues, could not he do the same? If anyone sought to debunk
his evidence, by displaying such knowledge they would implicate
themselves in the crime.

It was really
quite a simple game. Now that he had stepped off the board and taken
note of its parameters, he saw how primitive were its conceptions,
how clumsy and unschooled its players, how overly dependent they were
on the tactic of fear.

He forced
himself to take a final look at the sun, holding on to the idea that
this was the world he would someday inhabit, that he would have to
learn to bear whatever horrors it presented.

It seemed to
hurtle toward him again, but he did not cower from it this time,
though his genitals shriveled and his stomach knotted. The thing
resembled, he decided, the underside of a yellow jellyfish with
purplish tentacles and serious internal disorders. Thinking about it
in that way, diminishing it, made him feel easier. He wondered if
there was truly any beauty here, the remembered beauty of soft warmth
and summer winds and thistles drifting through the air, the
harmonious buzz of dragonflies, the universe in which small children
played with hoops and lovers blithely wandered. Or was what he saw
now the reality? Had all previous seeing been blighted by a lovely
curse, the world’s coarse truth hidden from mortal eyes? Could
he ever learn to resurrect those old perceptions?

He stared out
over the hilltop, past the valley and the hills, trying to overcome
his fright, to discern some fraction of beauty in the sickeningly
pale sky and its unruly configuration of clouds and sun, seeing only
what struck him as the products of dementia and nightmare. But just
before he turned away, there was a moment—a fleeting moment
almost lost among flutters of panic and shivers of revulsion—when
he seemed not to reinhabit that old childhood world of clean golden
sun and soothing warmth, but to perceive in this place of garish
light and turbulence a raw perfection such as might have existed
during prehistory, a time when a crimson sun beamed down its killing
rays, and giant ferns lifted in silhouette against clouds of mauve
and copper and gold, and grasses seethed with furies of infinitesimal
life, and there were poison butterflies as big as birds and beetles
the size of sewer rats, and the screams of winged reptiles ripped
through the sky, and nightmares with needle teeth coupled in a bloody
rage, and somewhere in the depths of a vast forest, a new monster
lifted its head and—as Beheim did then—gave a cry of
shock and bewilderment, an expression so terrifying in itself that it
abolished fear and reminded him that he was first among all the
terrors of this world.