The Pierced Heart: A Novel (6 page)

Charles sits back and casts his knife clattering on the plate. “But surely you can disprove such nonsense—show them that the phases of the damn moon have nothing whatsoever to do with her illness—”

“If I could do it, I would, believe me. When I first came here I had the same thought as you. I had all the exuberance of a young man newly qualified. I will edify them, I thought, I will single-handedly banish the evil of centuries of ignorance. And so, for those first months, I kept a diary each time I was called here, chronicling Agnes’s condition, but the longer I made my notes the clearer it became: There is no question about it. The fits are indeed worse when the moon is approaching the full. That is why I was called here yesterday, and why I will return this evening, and for the next two nights, until this month’s menace is past, and Agnes returns once again to that silent, whimpering creature who is a danger to no-one.”

They sit, not speaking, until there are sounds overhead and the doctor is shaken from his reverie.

“I have given you my apology, but not my explanation.”

“Please, Dr Sewerin, you need trouble yourself no further. The morning is growing late and I must return to the castle.”

“
But that is exactly why I must explain
,” says Sewerin, with surprising vehemence. “When I instructed you so impolitely to leave the room, it was not through any lack of appreciation for the help you were offering—God knows, for my own part, I should have welcomed it. No, it was because I knew what effect your arrival—your very presence in that room—would have on old Frau Hirte, who is herself in fragile health. You must have seen it, surely?”

“I took it merely for a quite understandable fear of strangers—a wish to keep her daughter’s condition private—”

“And that is indeed part of it. But
you
represent a far greater fear—a far greater dread. You are an educated man,” continues Sewerin, pouring more coffee, “and therefore, no doubt, well able to
understand the many scientific advances the Baron has made. But you must also appreciate that such things are beyond the comprehension of the people hereabouts. And the way the Baron behaves—it is inevitable that it should arouse suspicion.”

“I’m sorry, I do not understand.”

“He is seen often walking by moonlight, and more than once in the graveyard just beyond the castle walls. Some say they have glimpsed him there in the company of young women—some of whom have later disappeared, or sickened to a pale and inexplicable death. It is whispered that he is a necromancer and
nosferatu
, one of the accursed cohort of the Undead, and that he preys upon these young women, bringing their immortal souls to the same forsaken condition as his own.”

Charles stares at him. “But surely, she cannot possibly have believed that
I
—”

“She saw the mark upon your neck. She thought you, too, were an Undead.”

Charles’s hand is at his throat at once. “But it’s just a scratch—I don’t even know how I got it.”

Sewerin shrugs. “I did not say it was rational. Only that it is what these people believe.”

Charles gets to his feet and walks to the window, hardly knowing what he does. So much makes sense now. No wonder the old woman started back from him as if from a fiend; no wonder those people at the farmstead crossed themselves when they heard the Baron’s name.

“Only last month,” continues Sewerin, “another young woman disappeared when she and her brother were on a visit here from Holland. One morning the young man discovered the window open and his sister’s bed empty. She was found some hours later at the foot of the castle battlements, her body broken and the marks of teeth about the neck. The work, no doubt, of some wild animal, but you can imagine the terror that spread like wildfire hereabouts. And her body was scarce cold in the ground when the corpse of a local child was discovered
horribly mutilated only a few yards from the grave. Within a few days the tomb had been opened and the corpse desecrated in the most horrible manner.”

There is a pause.

“Where did they come from?” says Charles eventually.

“I do not take your meaning.”

“The Dutch girl and her brother.”

Sewerin looks puzzled. “From Delft. But why should that—”

“When I was with the Baron last night he received an urgent message calling him away. The man who brought it was not a servant, and was clearly agitated. I heard him mention
‘Leiden’
—”

Sewerin opens his mouth to reply but is drowned out by the sound of hammering on the door, and when it bangs open a moment later Charles recognises the coachman from the castle. He stands there, stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands together, even though the day is not cold and the sun has risen.

Charles turns in apology to Sewerin. “It seems my presence is required.”

Sewerin bows. “I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I hope our paths will cross once more before you return to London.”

Charles moves towards the doctor and offers his hand, and as Sewerin takes it he draws close for a moment and drops his voice. “I advise caution, Herr Maddox, and care. I believe that what you overheard was not what you assumed. The word
leiden
, in German, means ‘affliction.’ Or ‘suffering.’ ”

Charles looks him in the eye for a moment, then nods briefly. He follows the coachman out into the morning air.

Charles sits at the carriage window as they make their way back to the castle at a canter, equally puzzled at why the Baron should be so eager to retrieve him, and how he can have known where to search. The idea that he may have been watched, or even followed, is initially ludicrous, but by the time the coach slows down at the foot of the causeway, Charles is not so sure: If what Sewerin told him is true, he can well imagine why the Baron would not want Charles—or the Curators—to discover it. The horses are already straining up the slope when Charles remembers the story about the graveyard and slides down the glass to look. Up above, on the roof, something catches the sun and flashes in the light, but the graveyard is buried deep in the shadow of the castle, and the lamp is still burning in the little chapel window. And Charles can see now, even at this distance, that there is one grave far more recent than the rest, its watchful stone angels unweathered by age, its old earth newly turned and untouched by green, and a scatter of white flowers that are only now fading to brown decay.

When Charles gets down from the carriage at the castle door there is no-one to meet him, and after lingering for a few minutes in the hall he returns to his room to find lunch has been left, and the fire is burning. And on the table, by his wine, a note in a thin and cramped hand.

Charles takes off his coat and sits down on the bed. Then he leans back against the pillows and puts his arm behind his head. An echo in flesh, if he did but realise it, of the waxen woman lying sleeping and unsleeping far below.

When he wakes the room is in shadow and the fire low. He scrambles to his feet, aware immediately of an ache in his neck and a stiffness in
his back. He can’t believe he’s slept into evening, but the sky is dark, and he can hear, far off, the grind of thunder. He’s hungry now, even if he wasn’t earlier, and gulps the food on the table like a man famished, before going to the window and throwing open the shutters. Unfallen rain hangs heavy in the clouds, and the air crackles with sulphur, even though the storm is still miles away. Charles is rather idly wondering why that should be—some strange atmospheric phenomenon? The direction of the wind?—when there is a distant flare of blue lightning. And then there is another flash and a heavy roof-tile hurtles spinning down and smashes into splinters on the courtyard below, only this time the light is directly above him, somewhere to his right. Charles leans out as far as he can, and thinks he catches a movement on the parapet. He looks down at the windowsill and realises that it’s wider than he thought—hardly a balcony but wide enough, just, for him to get a footing. But he’d be mad to try it without some sort of anchorage. He looks back into the room and lights on the tasselled cord holding back the curtains. He ties one end quickly to the bedpost and the other round his waist, then ventures out—with some trepidation—onto the ledge. The stone isn’t just narrow but slippery, and Charles slithers twice as he turns slowly round to face up towards the roof. The rain is plunging down now and sheeting headlong into his eyes and mouth, but as the lightning flares again Charles sees the scene above him with the acuity of fever or a diseased dream. On the edge of the parapet, a few yards from the tower, the Baron is outlined against the sky, a dark shape against the greater dark, his long coat whipping and cracking about him like the wings of some vast crow, his silver hair plastered black against his skull. Charles tries to call to him—tell him he is recklessly risking his life—but his words are lost in a detonation of thunder and a bolt of lightning that explodes in a boom of white electric glare. And when the darkness descends once more, the Baron has gone.

Charles edges back down into his room, and then turns to scan the courtyard below. But as he suspected, there is no body, no corpse. Then on some impulse he cannot explain, he opens the door and goes down
to the gallery. But as always, it seems, the hall is deserted and only one small lamp burning below. Charles is just about to start down the stairs when he notices that one thing, at least, is not as it was when he last passed here. The little door he noticed before—the door he saw the Baron appear from and then carefully lock—is now standing open. Charles looks around, then moves as swiftly and silently as he can towards it. It’s the entrance to a staircase, and Charles realises that it must give access to the tower rooms. He hesitates, then pushes the wooden door a little wider and starts up the steps, only to stop a moment later. He can hear voices. One, the Baron’s. The other, a girl’s. Light, young, and almost—hard as this is for Charles to absorb—
joyous
. They speak in German, but it seems more formal than a casual conversation—in fact, the only comparison in Charles’s experience is the question and answer of the catechism classes he attended for a little while as a boy. But that was before Elizabeth was taken; before his mother lost interest in everything, even her own son, in the abyss of her grief. He listens awhile longer, and concludes it must indeed be some form of interrogation, though what the subject can possibly be, Charles has no idea. Sometimes the girl replies with confidence, and receives affirmation in return; at others, her voice is less sure. No more than ten minutes have passed since the Baron was clinging to the roof in the rain, and yet his voice drones on now, soft, and hoarse, and low. Charles is starting to wonder if the man was ever on the roof at all, or whether the strange atmosphere in this strange house is starting to play tricks with his mind, but at that moment the voices cease, and there is the sound of footsteps coming towards him. Charles considers for a split second standing his ground and confronting the Baron, but some instinct tells him not yet, not yet. So he turns and retreats the way he came, and there is no trace of him remaining when Von Reisenberg emerges and, once again, locks the door watchfully behind him.

It is not till near two that the storm abates, and a good while after that before Charles slips into a fitful and fretful sleep. He dreams again of
Molly, but she is not, now, in the kitchen in his uncle’s house, but a cold mimicry of life among the Baron’s female figurines. He reaches to touch her face, but it is as if his hand is pushing through thick water—as if he, too, is imprisoned in immobility—but then he is recoiling in horror as the eyes in the fake face brim suddenly with living tears. And when he looks down at her body he sees that she, too, has been flayed to lay bare the unborn child, but these painted wounds gape with real blood-sodden flesh, and the baby—his baby—throbs in her open womb, dying, as she is dying—wax, as she is wax—

He sits up with a strangled cry. The sweat rolls down his back, and his hair is wet against the back of his neck. He takes great gasps of air, willing his heart to slow, his breathing to abate. He has no idea how long it is before he notices there is a line of light slanting across the floor and realises that the door to his room is open, though he’s sure he bolted it before he went to bed. Then the light is gone and the room is drowned in dark. A dark he has never seen so deep before. Dark so absolute that he can see nothing, not the outlines of the furniture, not even the tiny sliver of moonlight between the shutter and the sill. He sits, motionless, alert now to every tiny sound in the room, and his senses start to distrust themselves as the fizzing silence mingles with the sound of—what? Bare feet on the thick carpet? A hand drawing back a damask drape? And then he shudders as if stung. An icy finger is running, slowly, teasingly up his bare arm, so lightly it scarcely feathers his skin, but so piercingly it’s as if a needle of fire is threading his veins. He puts his hands out wildly, blindly, but encounters nothing, touches no-one. Then he hears the sound of laughter—playful, mischievous laughter—that seems to echo all about the room. He makes to get up but finds himself constrained. Something is binding his wrists, holding him down. He tries to wrench his hands free, but feels a cord dig against his skin. And now his arms are being drawn back behind him—he struggles but the grasp is too strong, and his wrists are forced hard against the wood of the bedstead and he hears the rustle of satin being tied. And now he is in no doubt. A woman is
climbing onto his lap and tearing open his shirt with frozen fingers. He can smell her scent, feel the caress of silken ringlets and the tip of a hot wet tongue slipping across his chest and down, down, down. And then there are lips at his throat that sharpen into teeth, and a cold hand that stifles his breathing, and the low murmur of a man’s voice, speaking words he cannot understand.