Written in the Blood (22 page)

Katalin’s.

Cheeks streaked with soot and blood, eyes reflecting the scarlet heart of the inferno within, she opened her mouth and begged him to help her.

Izsák punched the side of the cabin. ‘I can’t get in, Katalin! I can’t get in!’

‘Yes, you can. Please, Izsák. Please!’

The planking beside his face burst into flames, frying the skin of his cheek. ‘What can I do?’ he shouted. ‘What can I do?’

‘Izsák, don’t you dare let me burn!’

He beat his fists on the burning wood. Slammed his elbow against the porthole glass.

‘
Izsák, don’t you let me BURN!
’

He couldn’t get in. And, because of that, Katalin would die. He watched the reality of her fate dawn on her, and saw her face grow slack. The fire was all around him now. If he didn’t go soon, didn’t fall backwards into the Danube and let it quench his flesh, he’d be dead too.

But still he couldn’t leave her. He’d failed Katalin, but he wouldn’t abandon her. An eruption of smoke concealed her. When it passed she was watching him still, with those unforgettable
hosszú élet
eyes.

He had known that this evening he would lose her, but not like this. Not like this.

Katalin closed her eyes. Her hair, piled on top of her head in dark ringlets, burst into flames. Face haloed by that furious light, she burned like a torch.

Izsák screamed as the fire consumed her. Still screaming, he lost his footing on the deck, pitching into the waiting river. Its cold embrace, extinguishing at once the heat in his flesh, was so shocking after the ferocity of the flames that he believed his heart would seize in his chest. It was a welcome thought. Perhaps if his heart didn’t fail he would drown instead. He opened his mouth, tried to suck water into his lungs. But his body refused. Izsák felt his legs kicking, betraying him, pushing him up to the surface.

An hour later he was walking the streets, feet carrying him without the need for conscious thought. At first he wandered without purpose, but after a while he noticed that some vague homing instinct was drawing him steadily towards Tansik House.

Izsák saw other fires sprouting in the city, but it was only when he arrived at the doctor’s mansion that he realised the burning of the
Örök Hercegnő
had not been an isolated act.

A ring of strangers surrounded the gates outside Tansik House. They carried rifles, all of them, and he saw they had dragged two carts in front of the entrance to stop anyone from entering or leaving.

The gas lamps, which earlier that evening had illuminated the building’s palatial façade, were dark. No music drifted from the house. But screaming did. Half the building was on fire.

In future years, the events of the State-sponsored
hosszú életek
cull would be remembered by those who survived it as the
Éjszakai Sikolyok:
the Night of Screams. To Izsák, looking on, it represented a window into hell, and the end of everything he had known

People were dying inside Tansik House, and dying noisily.
These
voices, raised in futile supplication, belonged not to the
hosszú életek
youth, but to its patriarchs and matriarchs. They died just the same; Izsák could not have helped them if he had tried.

He turned away, mind numb, slouching back in the direction he had come. Only when the screams began to fade did he realise where he was heading.

The home of Révész Oszkár Szilárd. His uncle.

Izsák had seen the man once in the seven years since his father’s death. The
tanács
had denied Szilárd the chance to bring Izsák into his home, and they had been unyielding in their decision to keep the two apart, rulings for which the boy would never forgive them.

After ten minutes of walking he found the house, mercifully untouched by fire. But something was wrong here, too. At this time of night usually at least a few windows glowed with light, but the front of the building was dark.

Hurrying across the courtyard, Izsák discovered the front door swinging free. He went inside, heart hammering anew. He had seen so much death over the last hour. He wondered whether the night held yet more horror.

Pausing in the entrance hall, Izsák waited as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. To his right, the main staircase, rising into darkness. Immediately in front of him, the passage leading to the kitchen where, all those years ago, he had sat on a stool and eaten the chimney-shaped
Kürt
ő
skalács
that Szilárd’s cook heated over the fire. He had not thought of the woman in years, yet now an old memory confronted him.

Night, and a crippled servant hovers beside his bed. A cold finger mimics a knife, drawing a line across his throat.

A voice, so close that its tongue wets his ear as it whispers in the darkness: ‘All dead soon, little one. All the Long Lives burned in a pile. Bones and ashes. Bones and ashes. Then we take back our city.’

The whispering stops and he hears a second voice, echoing through time. It belongs to the cook, to the woman who feeds him scraps of pastry when she’s feeling generous. ‘Miksa, come away,’ she hisses. ‘There’ll be a time. It isn’t now.’

He remembered something else, too. The evening he escaped, he had tried to leave his uncle a note. But something had frightened him and he’d fled into the night. How costly might that moment of cowardice, so dismayingly characteristic, turn out to be?

The cook and the cripple had been forced to wait seven years, but their time – and the time of all in the city who resented the
hosszú életek
– had come tonight; of that Izsák had no doubt.

He found Szilárd in the study. His uncle had been nailed to the floor, wrought-iron spikes hammered through his wrists, his arms, his shoulders and his ankles. He lay in an ocean of blood, cheekbones shattered, ruined eyes sunken in their sockets like soufflés that had failed to rise.

Izsák gagged at the sight, at the cruelties the man had suffered. He was about to leave when his uncle’s chest heaved and his lungs filled with air.

‘
Is someone there?
’ the old bear asked. Too frightened to speak – too traumatised by Katalin’s death, by the sounds and the smells of all the burning and killing he had witnessed – Izsák took a step back towards the door.

You’re going to leave him like that? Your own flesh? You’ll creep away and leave him to die alone?

You failed Katalin. Now you’ll fail your uncle, too?

He closed his eyes.

‘Please,’ Szilárd whispered. ‘Whoever’s there. Help me die, will you?’

Izsák hesitated in the doorway. He did not want to look at the ruined thing nailed to the floor. He did not want to acknowledge the awful, broken voice that addressed him.

‘Uncle,’ he moaned. And now that he’d broken his paralysis, he found he was able to walk through the blood and crouch at the man’s side.

Szilárd’s chest swelled, its thatch of hair matted with blood. ‘Izsák?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re alive.’

His words came in a rush. ‘They killed everyone at the
végzet
, sir. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know who they are, but they’re burning all the people, murdering them.’ He surrendered to a sob that shook his entire body. ‘Katalin’s dead. She’s gone.’

Szilárd coughed, a gravy spray of something dark and thick. ‘I’m sorry, boy.’

Reaching out, Izsák laid his hand on his uncle’s chest, trying to calm his mind. He’d never healed anyone before, and Szilárd had lost a lot of blood, but if he . . .

‘Stop that.’

‘But if we don’t do something you’ll—’

‘Die. Yes, Izsák.’ His uncle took a rattling breath. Blood leaked down the side of his face. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. Don’t interfere. It’s far too late for that. Listen. You don’t have much time. Check the fireplace. You’ll find a purse halfway up, on the right-hand side. Now, go. Godspeed. Get out of here before they come back.’

Ignoring the man’s words, Izsák left his hand where it was, feeling the coldness of his uncle’s flesh beneath his fingers. He closed his eyes, began to push, thought he felt a—

‘
I said get out!
’ Szilárd roared.

Ripping his hand away, Izsák scrabbled backwards until his head cracked against the side of his uncle’s desk. He hugged himself, face contorted in grief.

On the floor of the study, nailed to the wood as if he commanded no greater respect than a common moth in a lepidopterist’s archive, Révész Oszkár Szilárd uttered a curse at the ceiling, spasmed once and died.

C
HAPTER
20

Oxford, England

A
n hour after speaking to her mother in Calw, Leah Wilde arrived in Oxford, squeezing her hired Mercedes into a tight parking space outside a terraced row of town houses a few minutes’ walk from Balliol College.

It had been raining back in London, but the clouds had receded as she drove west, and now a red sun set fires blazing across the limestone façades of the buildings.

Just being here was enough to resurrect a welter of memories and emotions. She had heard her mother’s stories of growing up in Oxford, had listened to Hannah recount how happy she had been until the day her father phoned her at school and asked her to walk out of the gates as fast as she could; Jakab had found them, her mother was dead, and their lives had changed forever.

Tragic that a place famed for its enlightenment and human endeavour could have become the stage for such savagery. Even so, as soon as Leah had seen that Luca’s list would take her to England she had known she would end up visiting the city. After what her mother had told her on the telephone, the diversion here seemed even more important.

Professor Emeritus Patrick Beckett lived in a converted first-floor apartment in one of the Victorian houses along the terrace. Leah found his name beneath a bell and rang it. Moments later a device on the door clacked and its lock released. She let herself into a hallway that probably hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in thirty years.

An uneven floor of red and white tile was home to a collection of strangled umbrellas and a console table overflowing with curling telephone directories. To the left a staircase, covered by a frayed grey carpet, rose at a steep angle. Bolted to the wall beside it hung a newly installed stairlift, its red vinyl seat and smooth metal track a jarring counterpoint to the rest of the decor. Leah followed the stairs up and to the right, where she encountered a yellowing front door.

‘It’s open!’ The voice – high-pitched and wavering, hallmark of the very old – was the most cheerful Leah had heard in weeks. ‘I’m in the snug! Second door on the right! If you see a sheepish-looking cat out there you can throttle him for me. Wretched thing just peed on my foot.’

Leah pushed open the door into a hallway so piled with books that she had to shuffle through it sideways to avoid knocking over any of the stacks. It felt both incredibly claustrophobic and wonderfully homely all at once, although the smell, a cocktail of moth balls, cooked porridge oats, rancid cat litter and old books, made her nose wrinkle. A ginger cat stalked towards her, tail held high and eyes averted, as if offended by the accusation it had just endured.

She found the door to the snug, opened it, and from within heard a stack of papers collapse and fan out across the floor.

‘Don’t worry about that!’ cried the voice. ‘Come in, come in!’

Leah slid around the door, which had wedged itself rigid over the toppled pile, and entered the strangest little room she had ever seen.

Precariously balanced stacks of reading material rose like papery stalagmites from the carpet. Old maps hung from the walls, along with a collection of what looked like English Civil War weaponry. A rusting unicycle leaned in one corner, next to a set of dust-caked juggling balls and skittles. A black and white television perched on a table, an old VHS player balanced on top. The mantelpiece held a Gurkha knife, a Newton’s cradle, a sepia photograph of a fierce-looking woman and a row of Japanese puzzle boxes.

Patrick Beckett sat in an easy chair by the window, his feet propped up on a cowhide pouffe. Despite the ramshackle state of his apartment, the old professor was dressed smartly, in tweed blazer and open-necked shirt. In fact, Leah noted, the only element of his attire that seemed incongruous was the pair of bright pink leg warmers covering his trousers from ankle to knee.

Beckett looked painfully thin, but she did not believe age had done that to him. From what her grandfather had told her of the man, the professor had always displayed a bird-like intensity, mind flitting from subject to subject, body as restless as his thoughts. On the way here, she had calculated that he must be in his late eighties by now; she wouldn’t have guessed it by looking at him.

Beckett followed the direction of her gaze, appearing to notice his woollen accoutrements for the first time. His mouth fell open. ‘Ah. Aha! Probably looks a bit daft, come to think of it. But they’re just the ticket. Better than throwing away money on gas, wouldn’t you say? These old buildings, the heat just escapes through the walls. Sorry about the mess. If I’d known you were coming, I would have tidied up a bit.’

He raised eyebrows like two glorious white hamsters clinging to his forehead. ‘Actually, I did know you were coming. It’s Leah, isn’t it? Leah Wilde, that’s right. My word, I can see Charles in your face as clear as Jupiter.’ Beckett frowned, scratched his head. ‘You’re a good deal prettier, I should add – nothing masculine about you at all, that’s not what I meant. I’m very pleased to meet you. Can I ask, did you happen to bring along . . .’

Grinning, Leah unzipped her bag, pulling out the supplies he had requested over the phone. ‘One pork pie,’ she said. ‘Yes, I checked, and the pastry’s crisp, not soft, just as you specified. One bottle of HP sauce. Four cans of Courage bitter.’

Beckett’s eyes shone. ‘Fine work, Leah. Tremendous. Look, I’d get up, but if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Where’s your kitchen?’

‘Right, yes. Back through there on the left, you’ll see it. And I hate to ask, but when you pop the pie on a plate, could you quarter it? Help yourself to anything you find in the fridge. I think there’s some milk somewhere. Check the date on it first.’

By the time Leah had cut up Beckett’s pie, poured a beer and made herself a cup of tea using the milk she had brought rather than the carton of what resembled cottage cheese lurking inside his fridge, dusk had surrendered to night.

Beckett wasn’t exaggerating about the house. When the wind blew, a draught whispered through his apartment, lifting the curtains she had closed against the darkness. At his urging, she lit a single plate on the gas fire and switched on a lamp in one corner. Sinking into a sofa thick with cat hair, Leah warmed her hands around her mug of tea as Beckett busied himself with pie and beer.

‘So,’ he said, spraying crumbs into his lap, ‘Now that you’re here, maybe you can help solve a mystery that’s been puzzling me for the better part of thirty years.’

‘If I can.’

‘All those years Charles and I were friends, good friends at that, and then one day . . . just gone. Completely disappeared. His wife, too. And his daughter – your mother, I mean. I always thought, for years and years, that he’d get in touch. But I never saw him again, never heard from him. Police couldn’t work out what happened. Or if they did, they certainly never told me.’ The old academic looked up. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Patrick, I’m afraid my grandfather passed away fifteen years ago.’

Beckett put his pie down on his plate and bowed his head. When, after perhaps a minute, he raised it once more, she saw that his eyes were wet with tears.

That he could display such grief at the news of her grandfather’s passing – someone he had not seen in decades – moved her so unexpectedly that she felt a fierce wash of love for him.

‘I suppose I should have expected it,’ Beckett said. ‘But how dreadfully sad, all the same. Your grandfather was an extraordinary man; cantankerous at times, but extraordinary nevertheless. The world’s lost a rare intellect in Charles Meredith. Still, fifteen years ago, you say? It doesn’t explain why he left, or where he lived out his remaining years.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But I doubt you’d believe the answer if I told you.’

‘Ha! You’d be surprised what a man of eighty-seven will believe, given half the chance.’

‘Maybe that’s true. I’m afraid I still can’t tell you, though. Not yet.’

He stared at her, his filmy eyes almost as colourless as rainwater. ‘But you do want something from me, don’t you? That’s why you’re here.’

‘I wanted to meet you, Patrick. My grandfather always talked about you, and there are very few people left who have memories of him. But you’re right – there was something else. You and Charles, you shared a passion for mythology. Folk tales.’

Beckett raised a cautioning finger. ‘The terms aren’t interchangeable.’

‘But you know what I mean.’

He peered at her. ‘Go on.’

‘Years ago, you shared a particular passion, an enthusiasm for an obscure piece of Hungarian mythology, centred around a race of people called the—’

‘
Hosszú életek
,’ the old man breathed, and when his eyes drifted from her face and stared into the fire, a smile tugged at his lips.

Leah shivered. ‘You remember.’

‘How could I forget? Your grandfather came to me about them, well, it must have been almost fifty years ago. Ha! I don’t remember what got him started, but he asked my advice and I pointed him in the direction of a few sources – stories and the like – that I’d collected during my travels. Then, of course, all those years later, he published that paper on them. By gods, it was the most incredible thing. It read more like a history than anything else.’ He brushed crumbs from the sleeve of his blazer. ‘Still gives me goosebumps to think of it.’

‘Once something snared his interest, it consumed him until he mastered it.’

‘Indeed it did.’ Beckett took a long draught from his beer, and settled lower in his chair. ‘I suppose, deep down, I always knew that he’d passed on, but I’m so sorry to hear you confirm it.’

For a while, neither of them spoke, listening to the wind as it twisted through Oxford’s streets.

‘I’m interested in another story,’ Leah said. ‘This one perhaps even older.’

‘My mind isn’t what it was. But if I can help, I most assuredly will.’

‘It’s a related story, I think, which is why I thought of you. Another myth; or folktale, perhaps. The name I’ve heard used is
lélek tolvajok
.’

‘Ah . . .’ Beckett’s eyes closed and his breath spooled out. He was silent for so long that Leah began to think he had drifted off, but then he sat up straight in his chair. ‘The
tolvajok
. You’re quite right, of course. An even older race, judging from the sources that remain.’

‘But originating from the same part of the world?’

‘Indeed.’ His eyes were bright again, alert. ‘You can trace the roots of both back to that area of Central Europe we call the Carpathian Basin – or sometimes the Pannonian Basin. Of course, the
Pannonian
really only refers to the area of lowland that remained after the old Pannonian Sea drained out of the Iron Gates. But for our purposes, there’s no need to retreat five million years to the Pliocene period.’

‘Let’s not.’

The professor nodded, carrying on as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘The
tolvajok
may be ancient, but they’re not millions of years old. No modern complex life-form can claim a residency that long. By complex, I don’t mean in structure. Yes, certain species of jellyfish have been with us for half a billion years or more. And just look at the coelacanth, thought to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous. That is, until a fisherman caught one in his nets off the coast of South Africa. I’m talking about complex in terms of brain structure, although again that’s a misnomer, considering what we’re discussing. But I’m getting distracted. Where was I?’

‘The
tolvajok
. And their origins.’

Beckett lurched forward, licking his lips. ‘Of course I was. Damned mind is going. I’ve been trying those Sudoku puzzles, you know. Waste of time. Anyway, we should start, as always, with the etymology.
Lélek tolvajok
is a Hungarian term. It translates, I believe, into something along the lines of
spirit thief,
or perhaps
thieves
, in the plural. But it’s not the most common name for them, I must say. I’m pretty sure the Slavic alternatives are more prevalent. The Czechs called them the
zloděj těl
. The Ukrainian term is
xmapi
. In the older languages, the direct translations often describe a virus, an infection of the mind.’

‘An infection?’

‘Yes, although that’s not a very helpful description. An infection doesn’t suggest sentience.’

Leah felt the skin on her scalp contracting. ‘A sentient infection?’

‘Of the mind, indeed,’ Beckett continued. ‘Or so the stories go. You might be surprised to learn that the
tolvajok
are the precursor to many of the world’s darker folktales and superstitions. Vampirism, lycanthropy . . . you name it; before the birth of those relatively modern-day creations – throughout the Pannonian Basin at least – you had the
tolvajok
. A living entity, which, exactly like any other parasite, required a physical host in which to live.’

‘But you’re saying . . .’ She frowned. ‘In contrast to other parasites, this one had no body of its own?’

‘Correct. We’re talking about an awareness; pure consciousness, if you like. If it helps, think of our interpretation of the soul. Do you believe you have a soul? Whether you do or you don’t, it’s a device that features regularly in mythology. The only difference, here, is that whereas we generally consider our souls tethered to a single body during our physical existence, the
tolvajok
have no such restrictions. They simply need a host. And when one host starts to die, they go on to take another.’

‘But how could something like that exist?’

Beckett shrugged. ‘You’re talking to a retired philologist, not a scientist. It’s the creation and distribution of the myth that interests me. But since you ask, let me ask you. What, after all, do we really know of consciousness? Historically, it’s been more the preserve of philosophy than science.’