Written in the Blood (16 page)

Etienne sorted through them. Every image bore a name and a date on the back. Many of these women were long dead. Some had escaped the men who sought them. Some had simply disappeared. But each picture told a story of violence or tragedy or obsession. In many ways these women were Etienne’s caged birds, and she wondered whether in some way she helped to set them free.

Towards the centre of the pile she found what she was looking for – a cluster of five glossy photographs fastened together with a paperclip. She returned the rest to the drawer and laid out those she had selected in a line across the scarred wood. Five faces stared up at her. Four belonged to the same woman, and three of those – larger and better preserved than the rest, suggesting that they had been displayed at one time in a frame – showed her at an earlier stage in her life: dressed as an angel in a school play; posing on a sports field with hockey stick and ball; splashing around in the sea with an older man, his face so similar that he must have been her father.

Beside these photographs, two smaller images, scuffed and stained, as though they had been kept for years in someone’s wallet. The first showed the same girl, older now, perhaps in her late twenties. She sat on the grassy slope of a hill. She was smiling, but she looked weary. Behind her, sunlight glimmered on the surface of a glacial lake.

Etienne turned the photograph over and stared at the name written there: the mother, this woman. She placed the image down and picked up the last photograph. This one showed a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old. She sat astride a bicycle, smiling for the camera.

The daughter.

Etienne turned the image over. On the back she found two dates scribbled in ink. The first was the girl’s birth date. The second, written by a different hand, recorded her age when the photograph had been taken.

She worked the numbers in her head. If the girl still lived, she would be twenty-four by now. Bending closer, Etienne studied her face, examining her bone structure, the gap between her eyes, the curve of her jaw, the rounded protrusions of her cheekbones. And then she held the image away from her and imagined how that face would change as it aged: from eight-year-old girl through to twenty-four-year-old woman.

Returning the photograph to the table, Etienne rested her hands on her thighs, palms up. She closed her eyes. Emptied her lungs. When next she took a breath she felt a prickling sensation upon her lips, as if someone had begun to tattoo her. The needle pricks spread out, leaving a smaller, narrower mouth in their wake. Like a moving rash of bee stings, the points of pain crept across her face and she felt her muscles pulling, tightening, stretching. They quested upwards, towards her eyes, and when they encircled them Etienne felt her fingers curl and twitch as twin spikes of agony lanced her.

Gritting her teeth, she felt her spine shift and arch. She hissed as her breasts contracted, a stranger’s lips curling back over her teeth. Her shoulders cracked, two loud crocodile-jaw snaps in the silence. She felt the tattooist’s needles reach the end of her nose, the tips of her earlobes. The strange electric pain hesitated there, and then she felt her nostrils narrow and lift, the lobes of her ears fatten.

She opened her eyes, stared at what she found. Tilted her head to one side. Licked her teeth. Pouted. Smiled.

Rising, she went to one of the wardrobes and opened it. Inside, she allowed her hand to trail over the garments that hung there. She selected a simple cotton shift dress. In its fabric and its styling it resembled something a young woman from a working family might have worn a century earlier. She stepped into the dress, not bothering with any underwear, and then into leather sandals.

Back at the dressing table, she selected a bottle of Guerlain’s Jicky and touched the scent to her throat and wrists. After a final examination in the three full-length mirrors, she climbed the spiral staircase back to the room above and let herself onto the landing. On the far side of the stairwell waited the doors to six rooms, all individually named:
Feroce
,
Chiuso
,
Bellicoso
,
Sostenuto
,
Duolo
,
Capriccioso
. Each one was decorated to accommodate the varied appetites of her guests.

The
Bellicoso
lay at the end of the hall. She followed the balcony railing around to the right and walked down the thick carpet to the last door. It was in this place and others, doing this work, that Etienne had made her fortune. She did it, she told herself, not just for the riches her exploits brought her, not just to satisfy that itch lurking at the heart of her. Some of her visitors were good souls driven half-mad with grief for deceased wives. She helped to ease their loss. The rest of her clients were driven by darker compulsions, and the decor in some of the rooms she passed reflected their tastes. In those cases, she helped the women – far less qualified than she – who would quench those desires, willingly or unwillingly, should she choose not to make this her task.

Etienne paused at the final door. Glanced at the wooden plaque with its scorched black lettering.

Bellicoso
.

From the skylight two storeys above her head, lightning flickered out a serpent tongue. Thunder rolled.

Heart accelerating once more in her chest, no longer from fear but a sudden thrill of anticipation, she opened the door and entered the room.

Darkness waited inside. Heavy drapes were drawn against the day. On either side of a four-poster bed candles sputtered in wall brackets: two yellow circles of smoky light. She noticed the bitter aroma of an extinguished cigar, the citrus scent of cologne. And underneath those, an electric odour of excitement, of barely controlled fury.

In one corner was a wingback chair, and sitting in it, a long shadow. It gripped the chair’s arms with spider-dark fingers.

When Etienne ventured closer, clutching her hands together in a parody of womanly surrender, she saw a face stretched wide, and caught a glimmer of teeth.

‘
Leah
,’ the shadow said, rising.

She moved towards him. Glancing away to the bed, she saw what he had placed there, and realised that today was going to be one of
those
visits, and that the soundproofed walls of the
Bellicoso
would do well to keep its secrets and smother her screams.

Her stomach twitched and fluttered, a butterfly net filled with captives yearning to be free.

Because she knew it would please him, she allowed a single tear to roll down her cheek. ‘Jakab,’ she replied, bowing her head.

C
HAPTER
15

Budapest, Hungary

1876

I
zsák woke to screams. His eyes snapped wide in the darkness, breath frozen in his throat. Curling his fingers around the bed sheets, he gripped them for anchorage, his entire body tense.

Was he alone in here? Yes. He thought so. A lumpen shadow in one corner was simply his coat hanging from its peg.

On the floorboards, the moon had painted four oblongs of pale light. Izsák slipped from his bed and stepped into one of them. After a moment’s pause, he moved to his desk. It stood piled with papers, writing instruments and the tiny metal parts of a dismantled model steam engine: washers, pipework, flywheel, a badly oxidised firebox, all in a neat row; the accumulated clutter of his three years at Tansik House.

Beside the engine parts stood an oil lamp and matches. Fingers shaking, Izsák struck a match, eyes closed against the flare. He lit the lamp, lowered its glass chimney and dialled up the wick. He was about to pick it up when he heard a moan float down the corridor outside. Such misery bled from it, such pitiful horror, that Izsák found himself cowering from the sound.

He did not want to go out of the room.

Then don’t. Stay here. What do you think you’re doing, anyway? You’re a coward; always have been. Cowards don’t investigate danger. They make sure their door is locked, and they wait until the danger has passed.

But his door was already locked; he was sure of that. He’d been fastidious about securing it every night since Katalin’s warning to him all those years ago. From here he could see the sharp shadow of the key’s iron circle, twisted to the ten o’clock position that had become his habit.

The same night he’d received that advice from Katalin, he’d asked the doctor’s daughter a question:
What kind of place is this?

Even now, he remembered her response:
A bad place
. During the years he had been resident at Tansik House, Izsák had found no reason to dispute Katalin’s words.

He picked up the lamp, angered by that mocking voice inside his head. He
was
a coward. But the rooms adjacent to his own contained the only friends he had. They might need him.

And what of Katalin? She would likely be asleep in the north wing. Izsák doubted that the screams, even as sharp as they’d been, would have carried so far. Whoever was out there, whoever was behind this, could be searching the building for her even now.

Forcing himself to act, shaking a carnival of shadows from his oil lamp that danced like demons on the lemon-yellow walls, he crept to the door. Reached for the key.

Outside, he heard another key turning. The sound came from Béni’s room, to the left of his own. Spurred on by it, Izsák let himself out into the hall.

A second bobbing light swelled towards him, and he nearly shrieked. Abruptly he saw whose face rode above the lantern glow. ‘
What’s happening?
’ he hissed.

Béni’s lamp, lighting him from below, had robbed his face of its usual humanity. The boy grimaced, magnifying the effect. ‘Sounded like Pig. Let’s go.’ Without waiting for consensus, he turned away and moved down the hall.

Cringing at the worm of fear curling in his gut, Izsák followed. Pig’s room was two doors down from Béni’s. As they approached, banishing the shadows with the swinging lights of their lamps, Izsák saw that the boy’s door was ajar, presenting a perfect rectangle of darkness.

Pig never slept with his door open. And he never suffered from the kind of night terrors that would lead to a scream like the one they’d heard. Something awful had happened – might still be happening.

Izsák heard more doors unlocking. The creak of hinges. Frightened eyes blinking in the gloom.

From out of the slab of darkness marking the threshold to Pig’s room looped a tiny winged missile. It banked towards them, buzzing, and
tinked
off the glass of Béni’s lamp. Waving it away, the boy glanced over his shoulder to check that Izsák still followed. He found his friend’s eyes, nodded. Then he crept closer to Pig’s door.

‘What are you doing?’ Izsák whispered. A fist-like pressure gripped his throat. He could barely force out his words.

‘We have to check on Pig,’ Béni shot back. ‘He’s only . . .
szar
, what’s that stink?’

Izsák noticed it the same moment he heard his friend’s words. A death smell, rich and thick, bloomed from the darkness, as if the bloated corpse of some Danube suicide had been fished from the river and dragged inside the boy’s room.

He felt his stomach lurch in revulsion. His mouth flooded with saliva. He shuddered, desperate to rid his nose of that stink. ‘Béni,’ he hissed. ‘
Béni
.’

Ignoring Izsák’s plea, Béni lifted his lantern and stepped into Pig’s room, leaving nothing but a diminishing half-circle of light to mark his passage.

Heart slamming in his chest, Izsák edged closer. He did not want to see this. He wanted to run, lock himself away. Squeeze his eyes shut until this was over. But Béni was inside, now. He could not abandon him.

Pausing beside Pig’s doorway, Izsák took a shallow breath, almost gagging from the foulness it carried into his lungs. Then he craned his neck for a look.

Inside, the drapes pulled across the window had banished the moon’s weak glow. Béni sat on the floor. Beside him, his oil lamp provided a shimmering halo of light. In his lap, he cradled Pig’s head.

The larger boy was shivering, weeping. Mucus ran from his nose. ‘Not want,’ he said, tongue thick in his mouth. His face contorted. ‘Not want, not want, not want.’

Izsák crept closer. Even though the stench was at its strongest here, it was already beginning to recede, the last traces burned in the flames of their lamps. ‘What happened, Pig?’

‘Not want!
Not want!
’ the boy screamed, lurching upright. His eyes had lost all their colour, leaving two black orbs feathered with crimson. ‘Toll Man come.
Toll Man!
TOLL MAN NOT WANT!
’

Movement in the doorway at Izsák’s back. He whipped around and saw the twins, Magdolna and Rózsika, their disembodied faces floating like hunter’s moons. Neither girl spoke, staring past him at the figures clustered on the floor.

Now he heard approaching footsteps, someone running down the hall. Trusov appeared, red-faced and breathless. When the man saw Béni on the floor, holding Pig in his arms, his eyes widened and he stiffened, glancing back into the hall behind him. It took him only a moment to recover. ‘Out,’ he snarled. ‘All of you. Back to your rooms.’

Béni frowned. ‘Something scared him, sir. He’s terrified. I don’t—’

Trusov burst between the twins and surged into Pig’s room. Grabbing Béni by the hair, he yanked the boy to his feet and kicked him into the hall. ‘I
said
back to your rooms!’ he shouted. Turning on Pig, he pointed at the bed. ‘Get in. Get
in
, you fat, useless
balfácán
.’

Pig stared, eyes teary and uncomprehending. Trusov grabbed a fistful of his nightshirt and dragged him on to the bed.

‘
NOT WANT
!
’ Pig screamed. ‘
NOT WANT! NOT WANT
!
’

Spittle shining on his chin, Trusov slapped the boy’s face. Pig thrashed and Trusov slapped him again, so hard he left a scarlet handprint. This time the blow had its desired effect. Pig lay rigid.

Another moan rolled down the hall. Earlier, Izsák had thought it shared the same source as the scream but now he realised he’d been wrong. It came from behind him, this sound – back along the hall past his own room.

Béni climbed to his feet. ‘Give me your lamp.’

Izsák did not want to relinquish it. From where his errant spark of bravery came he could not say, but instead of handing over the light he raised it higher and padded back the way they’d come, towards the source of that dreadful lament.

He heard his breath rushing in and out of his lungs, a sound like forge bellows, and smelled that graveyard stink, growing stronger once more, so cloying he could taste it on his tongue: maggot-bitter, an invisible cloud of putrefaction and decay.

A bluebottle buzzed him. Moments later, another one swung out of the darkness and landed on his wrist. Prickly and fat, it threw off a grotesque shadow as it skittered across his skin.

Repulsed, Izsák shook it off. And then, up ahead, he saw a ghost materialise from the gloom, a funeral shroud hanging from its skeletal frame – although, he acknowledged, it wasn’t really a ghost at all. Something just as wretched, even so: the resident ghoul of Tansik House.

Etienne.

The moment she recognised him, the girl pointed across the hall to another empty doorway.

‘János,’ she said, voice husky. Her hair was mussed, and there were bruises around her throat. Trusov’s brutish work, no doubt. ‘It’s in his room.’

‘What’s in there, Ets?’ he whispered. ‘What have you seen?’

‘It
took
him.’

Béni gripped his shoulder. ‘Either go and see, or I will. But let’s not wait.’

Izsák stared at the open doorway of János’s room, at the shadows that lapped at its edges, recoiling from the rotten dead-man smell wafting out of it. Something waited for him there, inside that room; something that would prove the world was infinitely more hostile than his experiences of it so far.

It would change him, if he investigated that darkness. He wasn’t sure he could cope with its revelations.

Let Béni do it, then. He offered, didn’t he? Give him the damned lamp, let him risk his own neck. Get back to your room and lock the door. Pull the bedclothes over your head and maybe you’ll wake up from this. Maybe you’ll—

No.

He would not. János was his friend, one of only three or four people in his life he could trust.

Going to the door, moving fast to outrun the cowardice that threatened to overtake him, Izsák thrust the lamp inside, watching the shadows flit to the far corners.

A solitary pillow lay twisted on the bed. Its covers had been dragged halfway across the room. The back of János’s chair, where the boy usually draped his clothes, was bare.

On the floor, cowering away from the lamplight, curled a wretched shape. It shivered and twitched, fingers clutched to its face.

Not János. Someone else.

Izsák didn’t want to get any closer, didn’t trust that
thing
, whatever it was. He was already within its reach, should it dart out a limb and snatch at him.

He raised the lamp higher and the room’s occupant moaned. Kicking its legs like a grossly overgrown spider, it managed to scissor backwards into a corner. Izsák’s light found a gap between its fingers and revealed a glimmer of white eye.

‘
Careful
,’ Béni hissed.

Ignoring his friend, Izsák edged closer, seized by the sudden, inexplicable conviction that this tormented soul, cringing away from his lamp, presented little immediate threat. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he murmured, taking another step. ‘I won’t.’

Scrabbling to its haunches, the figure snapped out a hand. Béni cried out in alarm, but Izsák saw that it held its palm outwards; a simple gesture, intended to shield itself from their eyes. He took another step into the room, and when the light cast from his lamp banished the last of the shadows he saw for the first time what sheltered there, and gasped, appalled.

An old man crouched in the corner, squinting up at them with blood-tinged eyes. His skin was grey-white, the pallor of woodland fungus. In places the flesh on his face seemed to have parted from his skull. It hung in loose folds. One cheek had slid so low it had exposed a crescent of moist red bone below his eye. Two flies were glued to its surface, their proboscises lowered.

‘Where’s János?’ Béni shouted from the doorway. ‘What have you done with him?’

The old man spasmed. One of the bluebottles riding below his eye vibrated its wings, a sound like meat ripping. ‘
Nnnn
 . . .’ he tried to say, and then he vomited, a biscuit-coloured stream of foul-smelling liquid. He retracted his hand, crossing his arms across his chest.

He spasmed again, more violently this time. The back of his skull cracked against the wall. ‘
G .
 . . 
Gone
,’ he stammered. ‘
N . . . N . . . Not long. Not . . . long
.’

Izsák was shaking now, too. Not from fear, but from a despair so deep it gnawed at his heart. He felt tears spring into his eyes.

The merciful course of action would be to find a weapon and club this wretched creature until it lay dead at his feet. But while Izsák’s uncharacteristic injection of bravery had led him so far, it would not, he knew, allow him to obey that thought.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, wanting to reach out a hand, yet nauseous at the very contemplation of it.

The old man shuddered, collapsing onto his side. He gasped once and let out a rattling breath, like air rushing from a punctured coffin. He did not move again.

Rigid with dismay, the two boys watched his fingers uncurl, as if in death he offered each of them some parting gift.

Behind him, Izsák heard quiet sobbing. He turned, and found Etienne standing in the doorway. The fact that the sobs came from her, a girl he’d never seen display an ounce of emotion despite the years of abuse inflicted on her, made them infinitely more piercing: the most harrowing sound he had heard since the rifle shot that had split his father’s skull apart and changed his life forever. Stumbling over to her, Izsák put an arm around Etienne’s neck and drew her close.

For two days afterwards, clouds massing over the Danube emptied sheets of rain onto the city’s streets. Water boiled in Budapest’s gutters and carried debris in a sloshing torrent to the great river.