The Fifth House of the Heart (27 page)

“It's your funeral,” Sax agreed.

Rock winked and made an imaginary pistol of his fingers, shooting Sax in the chest with it. Then he slid the side door of the van shut, closing out the frigid night air, and his huge frame was hustling double time across the frozen field after Gheorghe. Their shapes merged for a brief moment with the gravel road, reappeared silhouetted dimly against the field on the other side, and then they were gone beneath the trees that covered the hill.

Sax settled in, wearing all of his newly purchased cold-weather gear: hat, gloves, jacket, silk drawers beneath moleskin trousers, and a pair of boots that looked like running shoes. It was all horribly unstylish but warm: gloves, boots, and jacket all filled with those thin miracle insulations that take the place of a mattress's worth of eiderdown. They'd bought these things immediately after they rented the camper in Chemnitz.

Eventually the patient, inexorable cold got through the clothes, and Sax pulled a sleeping bag up around him. He didn't feel like sleeping anymore. The silence and chill seemed to press up against the camper with a palpable mass, as if he was not parked under some trees in Germany, but rather at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

He felt the presence of the vampire. Even if it was thousands of miles away, it left a kind of psychic stink behind. Sax wondered how the others were getting along.

He checked his watch, a gold manually wound Vacheron Constantin from 1954, a sound article. The timepiece had originally been
given to Peter Fonda by Marlon Brando. Fonda himself had handed it to Sax during the filming of
Easy Rider
; he'd been doing a scene involving a costume watch, and neither of them remembered it until the mid-1980s, when Sax was clearing out one of his many wardrobes and found the timepiece in the pocket of his old fringed and beaded deerskin jacket. After all that time, Fonda said, the watch had chosen its master. Sax could keep it.

It didn't run particularly well in the cold. Sax had forgotten that.

His companions would be somewhere well up that precipitous road with its hairpins and switchbacks, probably not even short of breath because they were both fit, active men, which Sax regarded as a kind of rebuke. He hadn't been fit or active even when he was fit and active—that is, not like these men were, who scaled mountains in the dark. They had those veins on their forearms that radiated out from the inside of the elbow, an effect Sax always admired but never achieved. Sax found he was thinking of men's arms without the slightest tickle of erotic impulse; he didn't know if this was because of his advanced age or because the cold had reduced his penis to the size of a caraway seed.

At three in the morning, Sax dozed off for a while, a drop of liquid dangling from his nose. He awoke disoriented, the windows of the van opaque as candle wax. Something had jolted him alert.

He wiped at the condensation with the corner of the sleeping bag. It was frozen. He had to fish out a credit card from his wallet to clear the glass enough to see. Nothing seemed to have changed in the landscape, except the moon was peeping through the clouds at intervals now, casting ghosts of light down across the hills, throwing silvery highlights and crisp shadows across the scarred face of the cliff.

Sax strained his eyes into the darkness, trying to discern anything that might have been the cause of his awakening.

There was a sound. It was faint, at the top of the register he could hear, like the squeal of automobile brakes somewhere far distant.
Then he saw lights up under the cliff. They appeared in pieces, as if the beams had shattered in the cold and now the fragments were tumbling down the mountain. After a few minutes they resolved themselves into a pair of vehicle headlights moving through the trees along the hidden road that zigzagged down the slope. The vehicle was moving as slowly as a man could walk, and Sax wondered if it represented a search party looking for his companions. If so, the search team might see the camper, even at a distance. It was not intended to look like it had been parked to avoid detection. Now Sax thought that was a bit too clever. They should have hidden it thoroughly and covered it with branches.

There was a pair of binoculars tucked up on the dashboard. He retrieved them, cleared the condensation off the glass again, and watched the headlights. It was not a satisfactory arrangement. And he couldn't hear. But he also couldn't figure out how to lower the windows without turning on the engine, which Sax thought might be the swiftest way he could possibly devise to call attention to himself. So instead he popped the sliding door open in the side of the camper.

Cold air rushed in. As chilly as it was inside the camper, it was far worse outside. Then the small store of heat inside the camper was gone, and the whole world was equally frigid. Sax began to shiver. He jammed the binoculars against the doorframe and kept them stable enough to watch.

The headlights were halfway down the hill now. Sax could just make out the small figure of a man walking along between them, in front of the vehicle, which he discerned was some kind of medium-weight truck with a big box on the back. With the door open, he could hear, too. Tiny snatches of voices, shouting. Not in alarm, but calling to be heard by someone distant. He could hear the clashing of the gears as the truck kept its speed low on the steep grade. Then he heard the shrill noise again. It wasn't brakes. It was some kind of whistle, brandished by the man on foot.

Sax took his eyes from the binoculars. The rubber cups of the eyepieces were freezing his face. He massaged some life back into his eyelids and was about to resume his vigil when he saw another man loping across the dark field, chased by a scudding patch of moonlight.

Or at first it
seemed
like a man.

But the figure was moving far too fast for that. He was running at the speed of a horse, in great bunching strides that sometimes used not just his legs but his arms, hunched, apelike. As swift as the silent figure was, he could not outrun the moonlight, and as the pale photobathic rays swept over him, Sax saw it was not a man at all.

It was a hunding. The debased form of the vampire—no less deadly, but certainly more beast than man. Not anything like the Czech monster, which had strength but no wits. These were cunning hunters.

The thing was big, pale, its shoulders matted with fur or bristles that stood erect. Its torso was long and deep, its chest not broad but keeled like a dog's, and its limbs hinged differently from those of a man. Its arms were long in the wrists and short above the elbows, and it ran on its toes with its heels halfway up the calves of its legs. The head that projected from the long, thick neck was man-shaped, upright, but the nose and jaw projected past the sloped forehead. Even at a distance, there was no mistaking the thing for human, now the light was upon it. The moon hid its face again and the monster was an indistinct, lunging shadow once more, charging across the frozen meadow.

Sax's blood stopped coursing. He was terrified. The creature was half a kilometer away, and yet Sax's mind could imagine it scenting him and turning in its tracks, eyes glinting green, and devouring the space between with powerful strides. It could, too. Those monsters were impossibly swift. Then it would tear out his bowels and suck the still-pumping blood from his liver, draining him while he struggled and screamed and eventually died.

All of this was thirty seconds away, if the monster sensed Sax's presence. But it seemed intent on the truck up the mountainside, its course straight ahead. The creature galloped across the gravel road, paused to thrust its head into the grass and smell where Rock and Gheorghe had been a few hours before, then probed the air with its nose, searching. The trail was cold. It galloped onward and was lost under the trees a few moments later. Sax heard branches breaking. The thing was clearly in a hurry, abandoning its native stealth.

Sax eased the side door of the camper shut. The latch fell into place with a clap like a hammer. Sax cringed as he depressed the locking button. When nothing responded to the noise, he went up to the forequarters of the van and locked the front doors. Not that it would keep him alive for more than a second longer if a hunding decided to attack, but there was some pathetic reassurance in door locks. Although they came from the same poisoned flesh as vampires—both were the same, in different phases, depending on their prey—­hundings wouldn't pause to listen to a fellow's last words or give him a chance to talk things over. They were only in it for the kill.

Sax scraped the glass again to give himself a view of the hill and watched the headlights descend the twisted road. The man was still walking in front of it. Sax tried the binoculars again. The man should be dead, if there was a hunding around. Sax found the truck's lights, twitched the focus lever, and saw something he didn't know was possible. The man was, indeed, confronted by the hunding, there in the down-raked headlights of the truck. Sax's view was partly obscured by trees in the foreground, but he could not mistake the white, shaggy back of the beast.

The man was barely close enough for Sax to discern his features as well. He wore a black hat pulled low, and there was a dark scarf wound around his face to the eyes. He was otherwise clad in a long, gray coat that reminded Sax of Paolo's cassock. In his hand was some
thing Sax at first took for a wreath, it being quite distant, even with the binoculars; however, when the man uncoiled the object and began slashing at the hunding, Sax understood it was a bullwhip. The monster crouched and threw its claws up over its head and was driven by the man around the side of the truck. Then the creature jumped up into the truck's enclosed back and the man swung a heavy door shut upon it, closing the hunding in. Sax had never seen anything like it. And he wondered with dread if his companions were still alive out there in the cold night.

S
ax spent the hours until dawn slowly freezing. He never turned on the heater but bundled himself up like a silkworm. His extremities lost sensation and he had to force his fingers and toes to move at intervals; otherwise, he feared, he might lose them. His ears and nose ached with the cold and the van's windows were so thickly iced that even the moonlight could barely penetrate.

He did not sleep again, but breathed into his gloves and wondered if he was the only man left alive out of his party.

What would he do? He couldn't drive the camper. He could call Paolo, of course, on his mobile phone, but it would be hours before the man could show up. He did not dare call Gheorghe or Rock, because the last thing they would need, if they were hidden in some crack in the rocks with another hunding prowling around, would be a ringing phone.

There might well be another such creature. Sax had watched the truck make its way down the hill and saw, just before it reached the flat ground, a second monster lope its way along the tree line. The per­­­formance by the man with the whip was repeated. The area must have been infested. Sax was convinced there must be another one on the roof of the camper, salivating with desire to rip out his guts. It could
also be the scraping of a low-hanging bough of the tree under which the camper was parked, but Sax was
certain
it was anything but that. After several hours during which the noise on the roof failed to change in rhythm or intensity, Sax decided it might possibly be a mere twig. But he also didn't relax, because that's what a hunding would
want
you to think. Only a twig! And then the claws like steak knives would rip into your guts and the thick white fangs— He forced himself to concentrate on the dark landscape before him.

Eventually the cold was too much. Sax was preparing himself for death, having grown apathetic and fatalistic, his eyes leaking tears that froze on his lashes. His shivering had become continuous and convulsive, expanding and contracting in waves of intensity.

Then there was a noise outside the van. Chewing, sax thought, the crunch of tusks on bone. It came closer, and he hoped he could freeze to death in the next ten seconds or so, but he didn't. The crunching resolved itself into footsteps on icy grass. He heard voices. A moment later there was a banging on the side door of the camper.

“Let us in, man, my nuts are gonna fall off,” Rock hissed, and Sax fumbled for what felt like half a minute before he got the lock up and his companions tumbled back inside the van.

A
s they drove around the back of the range of hills, the van's heater blasting at full force, the men discussed the events of the night so far. Sax described the hunding; Rock and Gheorghe had heard the things crashing through the trees, at least three of them, probably more, but never saw one. They believed Sax without question, however. They had listened to the panting and snarling of the monsters and smelled a glandular stench like that of a badger or skunk in the air as they passed by on the slope. The men had taken refuge amongst some rocks on the mountainside when the truck approached, and what with all this
activity they remained in their hiding place until it was time to either move or die of the cold.

They never dared take a look at what was going on, even after a long interval when the truck was a couple of curves below them, because every time they stirred, it seemed, another one of the unknown animals would come loping past. The truck was long gone when they finally agreed it was time to move, and they had confirmed what they suspected: there was only one way up to the castle on this side of the mountain, and that was the road. So they didn't climb any higher but made their way straight down the steep hillside, convinced they were going to be ambushed at every step. But it seemed the business with the truck had left them entirely alone.

It remained only to examine the far side of the castle, the north face, and then they would be out of things to do, unless they could figure out some way to sneak inside the castle for a look around. Sax nixed that idea. Once inside, they were finishing the job. You didn't poke around in a vampire's lair—you went straight for the vampire. Otherwise, at some point, you'd have your back turned. Sax was terribly disappointed about the inaccessibility of the fortress, however. It meant his terrible plan was more likely to be the
only
plan.