The Fifth House of the Heart (30 page)

There was a silence that curled up like cigarette smoke into the air between them. Traffic rumbled past on the road. Motorists came and went, rubbing their arms as they dashed through the cold to their cars. It was ordinary life in Germany outside the windows of the SUV, but it had the quality of a movie projected on a screen. Nothing seemed real.

“And?” Rock said.

“And,” said Sax, “while I'm talking to the vampire, you lot set off the explosives, rush in, and kill it.”

“You make the joke,” Gheorghe said.

“No,” Sax said.

“What explosives?” Rock said.

“The details weren't fully formed in my mind. I was thinking some sort of mixture of TNT; liquid diallyl disulfide, which of course is a distillate of garlic . . . and roofing nails.”

T
hey had no plan, and therefore, no purpose in Germany any longer.

They didn't know how to keep safe. Staying in hotels seemed like suicide, after the destruction of the camper. The vampire had either hunted them down by smell or somehow gotten hold of their itinerary. The latter possibility worried Sax the most. He had been calling the farmhouse at intervals, spelling out what they were doing to keep that blasted Emily from worrying about him.

This vampire was clever, and not the recluse Sax was expecting. She had something like a social life, what with all the hundings, the
human familiars, and the Russian Yeretyik hanging about. She clearly knew about Sax and had been several steps ahead of him the entire time. He'd been played, in fact, for a fool. The creature must have been allowing him to get close, poke around her lair, just for the sheer sport of it. Something to occupy her time. It was not at all out of the question that she had put a tap on the telephone at the farmhouse and was listening to everything Sax said.

When Sax relayed this line of thinking, all three men were of one mind: they were damn well not getting back into a small airplane destined for a known airfield where an ambush could be arranged. Sax had the brilliant idea that they might drive all the way back to France. It would take the rest of the day, and they could come up with a new plan while they drove. Rather than sit at a restaurant where they might be observed, gripped by paranoia as they were, the men decided to grab lunch at a Nordsee restaurant, specializing in take-out fish items; Rock and Gheorghe had been happy to go to the McDonald's down the street because then they didn't have to get out of the vehicle, but Sax could not stoop so low. He made Rock go inside to pick up the Nordsee order, however. The entire world was swarming with hidden Russian vampires with ruined, purple-scarred skulls waiting to get him. He didn't dare get out of the vehicle.

They ate and drove and the air in the SUV was overheated and stale and Gheorghe began a campaign of silent, aggressive flatulence, after each episode of which he would laugh his hahahaha mechanical laugh, and then Sax and Rock would smell it a few seconds later and there would be much complaining and rolling down of windows to let the freezing air blast the stench out. So they were never entirely warm. The trip would take them five hours at a good pace. They were heading back to the farm in Petit-Grünenwald, tails firmly between their legs.

15

France

Paolo was in love with Emily.

He didn't want to admit it to himself. There was too much going on—the world had crowded in upon him too suddenly. He knew what he was experiencing was simply temptation wrapping itself around his cerebral cortex and squeezing—the devil, if one wished to put it in those terms, using the tools at his disposal to capitalize on Paolo's weakened state. Paolo didn't entirely buy the concept of the devil as a cloven-hoofed entity that personally moved in people's lives; God was that way, but God was the creator. The devil was just a character, a personification of certain immutable problems in human nature.

It had been easier for Paolo to ignore the sudden blooming of this emotion inside him while he was in charge of Nilu's care. He had focused on that project with desperate attention, keeping the poor suffering girl drinking water, and when that failed, melting ice into her mouth. At last, overriding Sax's orders in the name of saving a life, Paolo had called Fra Giuseppe in Rome and begged him to come at once. Now that brother Giu was in the
maison de maître
with his
thin, pimply assistant, Fra Dinckel, tending to the victim, Paolo had been consigned to ice-fetching duty. He had time to think about his emotional state again. Fra Dinckel was an officious youth, evidently delighted at the opportunity to stand over someone on death's doorstep and look pious and disappointed. His job was to read from the Bible in Latin, which he did in a high, reedy voice with a German accent. It was like listening to a fly trapped in a bottle. Paolo couldn't stand to be in the room for long.

Fra Giu was tireless. He was plump, silver haired, with a nose that looked like something to be stored in a root cellar for winter stews. His hands worked swiftly, feeling for the hidden wounds upon Nilu's neck. Paolo had not been able to find them, but Giu did. At the base of the throat, on the right side. He had asked Paolo if by any chance the girl was baptized; Paolo did not think so. Fra Giu had frowned with his short, thick eyebrows folded in half over his eyes. He was trying to save someone at a great disadvantage, as her soul was already in hock. That was how he put it:
dato in pegno
. He assembled a breathing apparatus, regulator, tubes, and mask, and installed them on a tall oxygen tank that was parked on a trolley by the bedside.

Satisfied Nilu was getting some proper air, Giu rummaged in his doctor's bag, an orange nylon thing with a hundred compartments filled with modern medical supplies as well as stoppered jars of ancient remedies, herbs, and poultices. He took out a black pouch containing four small vials and one large one. He began mixing these powders in a saucer, dropping in small measures of water to make the stuff into a paste. Paolo knew what that was: a silver acetate solution in the big bottle, assorted sulfides and salts in the others. Some combination of them would soften the vampire's adhesive saliva seal on the neck wound.

Lovelorn Paolo was now starting to wonder if the devil was amongst them. In the clanging of Abingdon's hammer on the forge in the barn,
he heard the sound of
il diavolo
's cloven hooves ringing on the frozen ground. The sulfurous stink of the smoke was the very reek of hell. The Bible seemed to be coming to life all around him, his fevered imagination finding similarities between his present circumstances and the book that formed the foundation of his life. It was everywhere: even in the unfamiliar words mumbled and moaned by Nilu in her delirium, a tangle of Hindi and Malayalam and English, he heard the Confusion of Tongues that beset Babylon. Yet he bathed her brow and prayed for her.

Now Fra Giu used cotton swabs to dab his mixture on the place he had located on Nilu's pale greenish-brown neck. He warned Fra Dinckel to get back and bade Paolo come with a towel to receive the discharge in it. Giu saw Emily in the doorway. She had been watching, arms folded across her breasts.

“Do you know,” he said, “every vampire leaves behind a discharge in its victim? It keeps the other vampires away. It says,
I am taken
. Tastes like the
escremento
to other fiends. That discharge, it must come out. You do not wish this thing to see.”

He looked at the open doorway behind Emily and tried to shoo her away with his eyebrows.

“You want a little privacy?” she said. Her voice was music to Paolo.

Emily wished them luck and went downstairs. She wasn't interested in the gruesome side of things.

Paolo tried to occupy his mind with the struggle to save Nilu, but his thoughts would always double back to Emily when he wasn't paying attention. They would start giggling and pointing and whispering about her again. Certain instructive passages from the Song of Solomon kept invading his mind's eye:
Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
Other lines as well.

Paolo dragged his mind back to the present. He held a white bath towel cupped around Fra Giu's hands against Nilu's neck. Fra Giu
muttered a prayer and Paolo joined in. Dinckel's voice rose higher and higher, chanting from the Book. Giu had the correct mixture at last, he thought. It stank of onions. He warned Paolo to be ready and with the swab painted the liquid onto the wound, and now at last Paolo saw it begin to open.

It was like a small smiling mouth, bloodless folds of skin parting. Giu kept swabbing, each stroke of the cotton tip dissolving the salivary glue another few microns deeper into the wound. And then he was through, and the pressure of the blood beneath did the rest of the work. A jet of foul, gelatinous liquid the color of liver spurted out with stinging force into the towel and spattered the men. It stank like urine and pumped and foamed, shooting in loops and gobbets until the towel was streaming and Paolo had to fold it around itself and toss it aside and put another one in its place. When Fra Giu thought enough of the stuff had spurted out, he sealed the wound with a clamp resembling an eyelash curler. He left this device in place and began to assemble an intravenous drip, hanging the bag from the finial of the lampshade on the bedside table.

“Saline and holy water,” he said.

Paolo took the rancid towels into the bathroom and ran water over them in the tub, once he figured out how to operate the complicated old-fashioned taps. Then he washed the slime from himself and went downstairs with much trepidation.

There was beautiful Emily, so American in her straightforwardness, but never bold like her uncle. She was so tempting! He tried to concentrate his thoughts upon the gory spectacle he'd witnessed upstairs but it was useless, as if he had been drugged so he would only think of this woman. It put Paolo in mind of Proverbs 5, which said,

My son! to my wisdom give attention, To mine understanding incline thine ear,

To observe thoughtfulness, And knowledge do thy lips keep.

For the lips of a strange woman drop honey, And smoother than oil is her mouth,

And her latter end is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a sword with mouths.

Her feet are going down to death, Sheol do her steps take hold of.

“Sharp as a sword with mouths,” he said out loud. Emily looked up from her book of vampire lore. There was a collection of them at the cottage; she'd previously assumed they'd been left by a morbid houseguest.

“What?” she said. “How is Nilu?”

Paolo wanted her with an ache he felt in his guts. He was out in the world, soaked in it with all these delicious dinners and comfortable beds and women sleeping in the next room with their smooth brown limbs thrown across the pillows, and the influence of such immersion in the world was getting to him, like salt water blistering the skin after a day at the ocean. His defenses were for the first time in his life (or since he was a teenager, at least), being tried—and they were worthless.

“She will live,” Paolo said. He filled a couple of ice cube trays with water and shoved them roughly into the freezer. Then he threw some clean dish towels over his arm, found some shallow bowls in a cabinet, and carried them upstairs.

E
mily allowed herself a slight shrug. He was gorgeous, Paolo was. But a little remote.
Must be the celibacy
, she thought, and returned to her book. He was dotted with bloodstains, she had noticed. She hoped Nilu was going to be okay.

O
utside in the barn, Min watched the Englishman laboring at his forge and found herself thinking hazily about taking him for a lover.
It would be an act like exercising or sharpening a knife: something pleasurable and straightforward, without further baggage. And he was obviously one of those horse-cocked Europeans they joked about back in her home country. He was just an erection with a man standing behind it. It might be interesting, difficult as it was to find anything that diverted her besides her chosen mission in life.

The old
dongseongaeja
Saxon-Tang had asked her if she was one of the people who had lost everything, and he had said it in a casual way that was not unsympathetic but that made Min feel like she was ordinary, somehow. Like he knew many such people. Nobody had ever spoken to her like that before, not least because she would break their arms. He was a strange one.

Her thoughts swept back to a time years before when another stranger appeared in the remote Korean countryside where her family was staying for the summer holidays, her parents, both university professors, having an entire month to spend as they wished.

It was a monster, and yet it had appeared to be a man. It had spent some time with them, becoming friends. Vampires often did, savoring their prey.

Then one night it had arrived unexpectedly as Min's family was getting ready for bed. It had brought with it a false vampire that strained against its collar on the end of a leash. The false vampire was a victim the monster allowed to survive, so infected with the vampire's alien biology by repeated feedings that it had developed the thirst for human blood itself. At first, the vampire kept its crazed disciple lashed to a post in the main room of the cabin; the vampire had then fallen upon her parents, whose efforts to resist were like the struggles of children in a flood, and it sucked the blood out of them until they were helpless and weak, barely alive.

Following what must have been a program of entertainments in its mind, the vampire next unleashed the screaming madman upon Min's
sister, three years younger than her, and Min herself, both of whom had been cowering in the corner; they struggled to get away but the man bit Min's sister to death. It took fifteen minutes with blunt human teeth. The vampire watched with fascination. Min had seen its face, the pleasure there. Then, weary of the evening's amusements, the vampire capriciously broke the spine of the false vampire, pulled out his heart, and forced the trembling organ between Min's jaws. Then the vampire tore Min's parents to pieces and left.

Min was suddenly seething with fury. This was what happened. One minute, she was watching Abingdon at his forge, seeing the nicely defined muscles in his sweating back and the big red-skinned arms hammering hot metal bright as sunset into crisp shapes, letting the man charm her. The next minute she was thousands of miles away and fifteen years younger and witnessing the slaughter of her family once again, every blow, torn screaming mouths vomiting rubies, and the rage rushed up like magma in the marrow of a volcano and mixed with the fear and everything was smoke and heat and cinders. Suddenly Abingdon was just a man making weapons, which was all she required. All else was superfluous. Love was nothing. Pleasure was nothing. Even Min herself was nothing, except that she killed the evil in the world.

N
ilu went through five bags of saline. Soon she would be switched to glucose because her body had no fuel in it. Over baguettes filled with meat, cheese, tomato, and butter, Fra Giu explained to Emily the meaning of the procedure they had just performed. The infection was a parasitic organism, after a fashion. The ugly clotted muck that had poured out of Nilu's wound was the product of the vampire's biology: it was attacking and colonizing her blood, which is considered a kind of tissue from an anatomical standpoint. It was anchored at the inside of the bite wound. That was how vampires worked: each one
had an adhesive saliva that sealed the wound after drinking. No other vampire's saliva would break the seal; it was a delicate chemistry. And if a different vampire opened a new wound on the same victim, the blood would taste foul because of the infection. However, the parasitic colony in the victim's blood made it more readily digestible by the vampire from whom the infection came, and was even involved in vampire reproduction. Nilu was two days away from becoming so infected she would be forced, if she had any strength, to begin feeding on blood herself.

Emily was disgusted by all this. She didn't touch her food.

Abingdon, eating heartily, told them he had a good batch of silver alloy to match the sample from the hammer Simon in his crucible, and had begun shaping a new set of hammers on the forge, beating the metal rather than casting it because he lacked the equipment to make the molds. They discussed names for the new hammers. Fra Giu had some saints in mind, Fra Dinckel his favorite popes. Abingdon wanted to name them after his favorite women, and Min didn't care. Paolo declared the hammers should not be named. It struck him as too much like idolatry.

Emily thought Paolo had become unreasonable in the last few hours, very prickly, and he kept getting biblical without warning. A far cry from the charming, relaxed man she had met yesterday. Rather than risk his disapproval, Emily did not suggest the names she'd thought of, which were a combination of Santa's eight reindeer and the Marx Brothers. She liked the abstract idea of plunging a hammer named “Harpo” or “Blitzen” into the heart of a vampire.

“Did you feel the erotic charge in that room?” Fra Giu said, surprising everyone.