The Golden (4 page)

“You
cannot fail
me
,” said Agenor, clasping Beheim’s
right hand with both of his and fixing him with a searching look. “I
have already failed, I have lost the Patriarch’s ear. He
considers me an old fool, a scribe with the delusions of a Cassandra.
But you can compensate for my failures, Michel. It’s in your
grasp to kindle victory from the ashes of my defeat. Do not fail
yourself. That is my charge to you.”

Chapter
Four

T
he body of the Golden lay naked and pitiful atop the eastern turret
of Castle Banat. The girl’s eyes were iced shut, and a cracked
red glaze covered the blackish stones beside her. Mutilated, Agenor
had said, but that word had not prepared Beheim for the savagery of
the wounds. There was a ragged hole in the side of her neck large
enough in which to insert a fist, and there was a similar wound in
her belly. Lesser yet no less grievous wounds marred her face,
breasts, and thighs. Though the body was frozen, Beheim could detect
signs of lividity and rigor, which meant that she must have been
killed during the waning hours of the previous night, a time during
which it had been sufficiently warm to permit the inception of decay.
Still, he was surprised that these processes were not further
advanced. There must, he concluded, have been a cold snap during the
day that had retarded them. Yet even if this was the case, it did not
seem sufficient to explain the relative lack of decomposition.
Perhaps there had only been a brief warming period just before dawn,
and then the freezing cold had set in at first light. That would pass
for a theory, but it likely could not be proved, as it was probable
that none of the servants had ventured outside in daylight, all
keeping close watch over their masters, guarding against treachery.

The girl’s
waxen hands were posed in clawlike attitudes, her mouth open in a
silent scream. No hint of her freshness and beauty remained, apart
from the sheen of her blond hair and the faint tantalizing scent of
blood that arose from the stains painting the turret stones. Whoever
had done this, Beheim thought, would have been bathed in blood. And
despite Agenor’s conjecture that several people had been
involved, in Beheim’s opinion there could have been only one
murderer. This sort of violent excess demanded the intimate
circumstance of the sexual act, it spoke to an ultimately private
sinfulness. He had never known killers acting in concert—vulnerable
to the shame of witness, even that of an accomplice—to be so
uninhibited in their slaughter.

Closing his
eyes, calling into play the mental skills that had been in part
responsible for his meteoric rise with the Paris police, he merged
with the past, using all the telltales, all the tiny bits of evidence
and atmospheric constants, to empathize with the murderer, to intuit
his state of mind and how it had been to kill, to return to the
moment of the crime, to the turret the way it had been the previous
morning. A bloated yellow moon hung in the east above the mounded
hills that surrounded the castle, illuminating impenetrable thickets
and short, squat oaks with dwarfish branches, creating deep bays of
shadow in the folds of the earth. Winded silence. Then the turret
door creaking open, and a dark figure, a man—or perhaps it had
not been a man! Beheim thought for an instant that he sensed the male
shape of the murderer’s hunger, the muscularity of his madness,
but then a hint of something, a delicacy of movement, a hesitancy,
made him think otherwise. Yet for the sake of conjecture, he dubbed
the murderer a man. Tall. A tall man leading the girl out into the
chilly air. Her pale hair feathered in the breeze. Her filmy
nightdress molded to breasts and abdomen and columned thighs. Her
expression was dazed, her movements somnambulistic. She felt nothing
of the cold, under the potent compulsion of the vampire’s
stare. The murderer turned her to face him, then bent to her neck and
drank. Her head lolled; crescents of white showed beneath her
half-lowered lids. After a long moment the vampire lifted his head,
his mouth crimsoned, supporting the girl with one arm. The taste of
the blood had dizzied him. Never such a maddening flavor, such a
surge of heady ecstasy. He could not help but drink again, and soon
ecstasy became a red, raw need, a primitive exultation. It was as if
a hole had opened in his mind, a tunnel from which poured a flood of
debased, animal desires. Soon he was no longer drinking, he was
tearing at the frail tissues with his fangs, seeking to mine the
source of the fiery pleasure that was consuming his intellect, his
soul, wanting only to dig and claw and rend until he could kiss the
open artery and drain it of its perfect yield. The girl fell, and he
fell atop her, a black humped shape leeched to her spasming body. He
tore at her belly, her cheek, he bit and snapped without aim or
comprehension of anatomy, ripping away at the fleshy walls
imprisoning the bloody narcotic juice. And . . .

Something was
wrong.

A bright terror
pervaded his thoughts. He glanced up. The moon was burning, burning,
a blazing monstrosity that appeared faceted one second, then rippling
as if seen through a film of heat haze. The sky had gone a poisoned
color, and the entire world glowed as if irradiated by an unearthly
force. The blood affecting his vision, he decided. It must be the
blood, the drunkenness. Or could it be something else? He thought it
might be something more than the blood, but he couldn’t
remember. Then he saw what he had done to the girl.

Revulsion warred
with a sense of pride in his power, his feral rule. He felt
dizzy . . . not the exhilarating dizziness of moments
before, but sick and vague and besotted. Everything was too bright.
Blood glistening like a slick flow of lava across the stones, light
steaming up from the spills, the puddles, from cracks between the
stones. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him, and he staggered to his
feet. It was all wrong somehow, what he had done, what he felt and
saw, everything was wrong. Too much light, light exploding in his
skull, streaming from his eyes, from the girl’s wounds, from
the slashed meat of her breasts, bloody light piercing upward to
stain him with guilt, to taint all his life. A hot fluid rose in his
gorge, and he gagged. His stomach emptied redly. There was a weird
singing in his head, a screeching like fingernails raked across
slate. He tried to stop his ears, but could not muffle the sound,
and, disoriented, frightened—of what, he did not know—dripping
reddened bile from his chin, his heart hammering, he fled into the
darkness of the castle . . .

Beheim came
alert to discover that he was gripping the turret wall, gazing out at
the Carpathian hills, at—to his considerable surprise—a
smallish silvery moon quite different from the bloated yellow
monstrosity he had imagined. He had an apprehension of someone
standing behind him, but on wheeling about, he found only the body of
the Golden . . . though the air remained thick with
presence. He savored that presence, hoping to isolate its
particulars, certain it was a mental track left by the murderer, a
clue as tangible as a bloodstain or a boot mark; but it faded
quickly, and he was unable to gain any further knowledge. He tried to
assemble his various impressions of the murderer into a portrait, but
the figure in his mind’s eye remained as featureless as a
silhouette cut from black paper. Likely a man. An arrogant sort, yet
with a fair degree of conscience. Drunk to the point of hallucination
on the blood of the Golden. Driven to murder, then shamed to nausea
and flight. That was all.

He knelt to
examine the body. A fragment of black thread caught beneath a broken
fingernail was the only evidence it yielded. Hardly telling. What man
among the gathering had not been wearing black? Steeling himself,
Beheim shifted the body. The flesh had frozen to the stones and made
a horrid sucking noise as it was lifted away. There was very little
of interest hidden beneath it. More blood, and scraps of the ripped
nightdress. He inspected the scraps, but having no microscope, he was
unable to learn anything from them. Feeling helpless, frustrated, he
got to his feet and began moving cautiously about, peering at the
moonlit stones. Once he had thoroughly explored the illuminated
portion of the turret, he got down onto his hands and knees and
searched the shadows alongside the wall, probing the cracks with his
fingernails. He had covered nearly half of the area when he spotted a
shard of broken glass. Not far away lay more splinters and pieces of
glass, among them the neck of a small bottle to which a silver cap
was affixed. It was, he realized on closer inspection, an extremely
old bottle, likely an antique, and judging from the size, it had
probably held perfume. A fanciful capital letter was engraved upon
the cap, but time had worn it almost completely away, leaving only a
flourish intact, and Beheim could not determine what the letter had
been.
U
or
N
, perhaps. Possibly a
V
. He turned
the cap over and over in his hand, then pocketed it and continued his
search. But there were no further discoveries.

Three clues. The
bottle cap, the blood—somewhere in the castle would be hidden
bloodstained evening clothes—and the fact that the culprit had
been a man. Not much of a basis upon which to begin an investigation.
Beheim knew he would need luck . . . luck and a great
deal of hard work, most of that to be accomplished by the Family’s
servants. He would set them to searching for the bloody clothing at
once, and to seeking the owner of the bottle cap; he would study the
results of Agenor’s initiative concerning the whereabouts of
Family members during the early hours of the morning.

But what could
he set himself to do?

There was
something troubling about his re-creation of the crime . . .
something about the hallucination in particular. The way the moon had
looked. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that the moon on
the previous morning had resembled this evening’s moon: small,
silvery, and just past full. And yet to the murderer it had appeared
bloated and huge. Perhaps he suffered from an affliction of the eye.
Or perhaps he had been drunk before tasting the Golden, and thus
already subject to perceptual distortions.

Both
possibilities, he decided, were worth looking into.

Once again he
examined the silver bottle cap. It was unlikely that the girl had
been carrying it—there were no pockets in her nightdress. But
what would the murderer have been doing with a bottle of perfume?
Beheim sniffed the cap. A scent clung to it, though not of perfume. A
harsh acidic odor. Medicine of some sort? A drug with which he had
overcome the Golden’s companion? Yet why would he have bothered
to use drugs when he possessed a natural aptitude for swaying mortals
to his will? And where was the companion? Likely crumpled in some
crevice below the castle, flung there from a high window. More
servants would be needed to search the hillsides; with all the sheer
drops and ravines hard by, the body might have come to rest some
distance from the castle walls. But the bottle, now. What could it
have contained? Beheim rubbed the ball of his thumb across the
remnants of the engraved letter, coming more and more to feel that
the answer to this question would illuminate all other questions. Of
course it was possible the bottle had nothing to do with the murder,
that it had been lying there for some time before the Golden and the
murderer had put in their appearance . . . though not
for long, otherwise there would have been no odor. But he did not
believe this to be so. The silver cap seemed to hold a vibration, a
residual tremor of the violence that had occurred upon the turret.

He glanced down
at the body. Until that moment he had given little thought to the
Golden’s personal tragedy, relating to the case as a breach of
honor and tradition; but now he recalled her beauty, her
gracefulness, and wondered what she had made of all the passion
surrounding her and what sort of woman she had been. Had she known
the particulars of the ritual? Had she been greedy for immortality?
So close. Almost a queen and undying. His mind turned to Giselle,
equally beautiful and informed by the same imperatives. He considered
her childhood in Quercy, her genteel education, her debut in Paris.
None of that could have prepared her for the life she now led. How
she must tremble to live among these dandified, morose lords and
ladies, these blazing-eyed killers with their blood full of dreams
and strange weathers, and thoughts like black spidery stars
shriveling in their brains. How deeply her fear must flow! Fear that
in an instant could be transformed into love, like an underground
river bursting out into the light of day. He considered her eventual
fate. Either dead by his hand or immortal. How would he react to that
first and most probable result? He would be desolate, surely.
Distraught. He would weep. Yet he knew he would find a means not only
of placing her death in perspective, but also of exulting in it, and
that sickened him—this ability to justify every horror in the
name of dark arcana and mystic passions. Agenor was right: The Family
must change . . . and not simply because it would be
the wise thing, the safe and pragmatic thing. And if by bringing the
murderer down, he, Beheim, could be an agent of that change, that
would go a long way toward effecting redemption for what he had done
to Giselle.

He stepped back
from the body, looking out over the worn hills, yet he retained an
image of the Golden’s sprawled limbs and clawed hands, a
featureless image resembling a golden root that seemed to settle in
his mind and melt like butter into the dark matter of his brain,
infusing him with new resolve. Insoluble though the problem appeared,
he was determined to ferret out the guilty party. This was, after
all, only a murder, no matter how unusual its perpetrator. In Paris
he had solved crimes of violence that had initially offered even less
hope of solution. Full of resolve, he turned toward the turret door,
but as he moved back into the darkness of the castle, his confidence
was dispelled by the irrational fear that behind him the silver and
proper moon had waned, and hanging in its place, like a cancer in the
sky, was a bloated, disfigured sphere of sickly yellow, an emblem of
derangement and unholy fever, of a new fire in the blood, of
mysteries and terrors yet undiscovered, whose dread particulars he
could not presuppose.