The Pierced Heart: A Novel (31 page)

And then there is a knock at the door and the tension that has been winding tighter and tighter between them snaps like a severed spring.

“Freiherr—”

It is the man in spectacles, and he is insistent. The Baron throws Charles a venomous look and strides to the door. After he and the servant have conferred in lowered voices, he gestures back towards Charles as he leaves, saying, loudly and in English, “See that he is escorted off the premises. And then release the dog.”

The man holds the door open, and Charles hesitates, but then follows him out of the room. As he descends the stairs he sees that the Baron is leading a young man into the library, a young man in a long coat and carrying a leather bag. Charles cannot see his face. But there is something—some vague memory that snags at him.

Out on the causeway the air is fresh and clean after the suffocating atmosphere inside, and he stands a moment taking deep breaths down into his lungs, and wondering what the hell he is going to do next.

And he may not be the only one. I imagine you might very well be wondering why Charles seems to have capitulated so easily. Why he did not stand his ground, just then, and refuse to leave until he had seen the girl he has travelled so far to find. After all, he would have been more than a match for the Baron’s nervous assistant, had he chosen to take him on. No, there is some other reason for his wavering. Something, perhaps, in what the Baron said to him, that gave him pause. About that break-in at the Vine Street morgue and how only a fool would do such a thing. And that is, in truth, the strangest, most
inexplicable part of the whole affair, the one element of the case that Charles cannot fit into his new theory. Because if he’s right, and it’s science that is at the heart of this—if it was a thirst for knowledge that killed those girls, and not a thirst for blood—then Charles has to accept that the Baron’s logic holds. However insane Von Reisenberg’s theories, however callous his exploitation of those girls, he would never have imperilled his great discovery by taking so great a risk.

The moon is bleaching the world black and white, and the only colour in the landscape is the yellow glow of the lamp burning in the window of the little chapel at the foot of the causeway. The light casts long shadows across the gravestones, across the ancient memorials crumbling into decay, and that one tomb that is so much newer than all the rest, watched over by its exquisite carved angels and wreathed about with fresh flowers. Charles frowns.
Fresh
flowers? Then he starts down the causeway, slowly at first and then with quickening pace. He pushes open the wooden gate and wades through the damp and springy grass to the grave. The flowers are luminous in the light, spiked and star-like, their heavy odour pungent in the air. Pungent, and unmistakeable. For Charles knows suddenly what these flowers are, and why they’ve been placed here. But it’s only when he reads the epitaph on the stone that the final piece falls into place at last. For this is not the first time he has read this surname. It is the same one that is printed on that little slip of white card two inches by three that he still has, even now, in the pocket of his coat:

And now he knows. Knows who that young man is who has just entered the castle behind him; knows why those girls were found mutilated
in the way they were, and why Rose’s dead body had to be mutilated in its turn, even in the police morgue, and even at such a terrible chance of discovery; knows why Dora Holman’s corpse was dug up and dismembered, and why the young woman buried in this very grave was taken from her coffin and beheaded, barely a week after she died. It was an act not of butchery but mercy, not cruelty but love. Because the young man who did it was her own brother.

What was it he said to Charles that day, in the serene and sunlit surroundings of the King’s Library? “
Those who resort to such methods act only in pity and compassion. To permit the souls of those they love to rest as true dead, and take their place among the angels. Or so such simple people believe.
” Charles can still see the smile that accompanied those last words, the smile of the educated, the enlightened, the man of science. But that was all a façade. It is not just the simple peasants on the Von Reisenberg estate who believe the Baron to be
nosferatu;
Abraham Van Helsing believes it, too. Believes it so wholly and so zealously that he is prepared to desecrate the body of the sister he adored to save her immortal soul.

For all his lies, and all his cruelties, the Baron was telling the truth when he insisted the girls left his presence alive. And yet he condemned them to death as surely as if he had killed them with his own hands. For the scars he left on their bodies marked them, in Van Helsing’s eyes, as Undead, as those who cannot die, and who can only be prevented from preying on the flesh of the living by the severing of the head and the piercing of the heart. Charles’s mind is racing now, as all becomes finally clear. Van Helsing must have been following the Baron for months, ever since his sister died and he found on her neck the marks he saw as vampire’s teeth. First to Whitby and then to London, and now, again, to Castle Reisenberg, tireless in his pursuit of the young women he believes the Baron has despoiled, unflinching in his determination to free them from the curse of a deadly eternity. And how bitter the irony that this mission of mercy has made him a murderer—a more monstrous predator than even the Baron Von Reisenberg has been.

Was Van Helsing still in Austria, when Charles first journeyed to the castle, and did he make it his business to find out who Charles was, and what business had brought him here? And did he follow him in London and contrive that meeting in the King’s Library, in the hope that Charles would put the evidence together and warn the police that a vampire was abroad in the very heart of the metropolis? And when that warning miscarried, did Van Helsing turn in desperation to the
Daily News
, knowing no newspaper could resist such an extraordinary story? And now Charles’s blood runs cold at the thought of the bag he just saw in the young man’s hand. A bag large enough to conceal all the tools he needs for his butcher work. And it will not be the Baron alone he has come for, but all those he believes he has corrupted—

Lucy, dear God,
Lucy
—

And now he is running, scrambling up the causeway wet with dew and coming to a slithering stop at the castle gate, his heart pounding, not just from exertion but fear. It is not the demon of his memory, not the hell-hound red in eye and maw, but it is a brute all the same. A vast mastiff with a spiked collar, steaming and stinking in the night air. It starts towards him, snarling, but Charles is prepared this time; he takes his gun from his coat and as the shot rings out the dog falls dead, the hot blood streaming down towards Charles’s feet. By the time he gets to the castle door the sound has brought a rush of servants out into the courtyard—as many as Charles has ever seen in this preternaturally quiet and people-less place. But it’s Bremmer he lights on—Bremmer who
speaks English
.

“You have to let me in,” he cries, as two of the stable-hands lay fists upon him. “That man who just came here—he’s the brother of the girl who died, isn’t he—the girl from Delft—”

Bremmer hesitates, then nods.

“He means the Baron harm—he’s been planning this for a long time—”

And then the air is split with an ear-rending scream and Charles breaks from his captors’ grasp and pushes past Bremmer into the hall, throwing open the door of the library with a crash. There are books all over the floor, priceless volumes strewn broken-backed, stands upended, glass cases smashed. But the room is empty. He strides back out and races up the stairs, feeling his old injury ache, as if reawakened by the beast that gave it, to the door beneath the tower he has found unlocked only once before.

Until now.

He pushes the door open gently, hearing voices. Not the low hoarse tones of the Baron, but another—younger, stronger, angrier. Charles’s breathing is so loud he can scarcely make out the words, and he begins hesitantly up the steps, unsure whether surprise will be his ally or his downfall. It is dark in the space he emerges into, lit only by a single lamp, and stifling in a way he cannot understand until he reaches out a hand and finds the walls have been lined with some sort of dense cloth. In the centre of the room, there is something hanging from the ceiling, looming in the shadows, and creaking as it turns back and forth in some unseen current. For one heart-faltering moment he thinks it is a body, but then his eyes adjust and he can make out heavy loops of coiled wire. And directly beneath them Abraham Van Helsing, his back to the door, bent over something out of Charles’s line of sight. And as for the Baron Von Reisenberg, he is lying on the floor unmoving, his mouth forced open and gaping with star-like flowers, his eyes rolled back white in the glassiness of death.

And then Van Helsing moves and Charles realises with horror that what he is standing over is a dissection table—the same one, surely, that the Baron had with him in London, the same one those girls must have lain on, half insensible, as the Baron bled them. But now it is Lucy Causton who is lying there, dressed only in a thin nightgown high at the neck, her wrists tied to the sides of the bed. Van Helsing moves again and Charles watches him attach a leather strap about her
left ankle, adjusting the tightness with the precision of a surgeon. And beside him, on the floor, is the leather bag, open now to reveal knives, a hammer, and a thick wooden stake. The girl’s hearing must be extraordinarily acute, for though Charles has made no sound she lifts her head slightly and their eyes meet. She is white with terror, but she makes no movement as he gestures her to silence and he begins to move towards her. But then a board creaks and Van Helsing turns. Turns, and sees, and knows.

“Ah, Mr Maddox. I wondered if you would be joining us. You are rather earlier than I expected.”

“Don’t do this, Van Helsing. Stop now before you spill more innocent blood. I know what you think—what you believe—but the Baron was not a vampire. A monster, yes. But it was science that made him so, not necromancy. The girl is blameless—as much his victim as your own sister.”

Van Helsing laughs. “Your ignorance is matched only by your arrogance. I saw that at once, when we met that day in the Library. That English condescension, that haughty disdain. You think yourself so superior, do you not, so modern and so wise? And yet you are as blind as a child, duller of wits even than the uneducated people hereabouts whom you treat with such scorn. They know better than you of the truth of the
stregoica
. They know there are such beings as vampires—that there are mysteries which we can only guess at, and which even your so-called science cannot explain. Even had I not the corroboration of my own unhappy experience, the records of the past give proof enough. And you have even less excuse, for have you not seen the evidence with your own eyes? For all your pride in your capacity for observation, have you never asked yourself why Von Reisenberg should shun the light of day? Why no-one has ever seen him eat the food of man? Why his teeth are so elongated and so sharp? Why all mirrors have been removed from his domain?”

Charles shakes his head. “I know that would seem to prove what
you say, but there are medical conditions that we still do not understand—illnesses that render the sufferers sensitive to light, and cause their gums to bleach and recede—”

Van Helsing laughs hollowly. “A ludicrous hypothesis, and yet because you deem it ‘scientific’ you are prepared to give it credence. Oh I admit that at the first I, too, was a sceptic—my education had taught me to scoff at such things, just as
you
scoff. But you have not lost a sister—you have not loved her since she was a little child, and seen her prey to sleepwalking and the terrors of the night, and heard the doctors say there was no hope. You have not taken her under your protection, and travelled with her half a thousand miles in the hope that a change of air might effect a cure. You have not seen her sicken thereafter day by day, growing pale and paler still, until her breathing was painful to see. You have not found her lifeless body, and seen the marks of teeth about her throat. I
saw them
, I tell you, and there was no mistaking what they were—those little round holes edged with white that do not heal—”

“No,” interrupts Charles, starting forwards, “you are wrong—those marks—they were made by a scarificator—a medical instrument. He used it to bleed them, for the sake of his experiments. He had some great theory about the energy of the universe—”

Van Helsing is laughing now. “And you dare consider
me
deranged!”

“I know it sounds insane, but he genuinely believed he had made a momentous advance—that the sufferings of young women like your sister were due to their special sensitivity to moonlight, a sensitivity stemming from a dilution of the blood. That’s why those girls in London looked so pale—that’s why they had those wounds—”

Van Helsing shakes his head. “It is not I who err, Maddox, but you. This instrument you claim he used, where did he obtain it?”

Charles opens his mouth to speak, but then falters. Van Helsing smiles thinly. “It was in London, was it not, when he visited your so-called Great Exhibition?”

Charles swallows, then nods.

Van Helsing’s contempt is glacial. “You set such store by your capacity
for logic, and yet your reasoning will not withstand even the most basic examination. For if he purchased that instrument in London, how do you account for the marks I saw on the neck of my own Mina more than three months before? How do you account for what I saw on the throat of that young woman in Whitby?”

Charles sees the girl start. “I knew I had seen you before,” Lucy says, looking up at Van Helsing in the pitiful eagerness of doomed hope. “You were at the abbey that day—you raised your hat to me—I thought you so gentle, so
gallant
—”