“Surely no man could be so contemptible,” murmured Felicia, and again Callender felt a flush of shame. Could they know? He remembered a line from an old play his uncle had dragged him to see, about conscience creating cowards, and he kept his peace. Yet it disturbed him to realize that neither Sebastian Newcastle nor Felicia Lamb had spoken a word to him, outside of perfunctory greetings, until the subject of rifling corpses had arisen. He looked desperately for a diversion, and found one he could hardly have hoped for, when Felicia’s Aunt Penelope began to scream.
His eyes followed her pointing finger, then widened in shock when he saw what she had seen first. It was the old woman in gray, half hidden among the murderers. She rose. Her wrinkled face turned toward the dim gaslight, and her eyes gleamed as a small smile twisted her wizened features. A gigantic shadow rose behind her as she stood, and Callender stumbled backward as Aunt Penelope collapsed into his arms. They both would have fallen to the floor but for the cold, rigid bulk of Mr Newcastle. Callender felt New-castle’s hand close on his flailing wrist, and suddenly he was less afraid of a walking effigy than he was of the icy presence behind him. He saw in flashes the cold face of Newcastle, the rigid and contemptuous countenance of Felicia, and the wrinkled features of the old woman that glided toward him. All of them were pale.
“Madame Tussaud!” said the guide, scuttling back in a broad gesture that was equally composed of bowing and cringing. “I didn’t expect you here!”
“You all but announced me, Joseph. And where else would a crone like me find her friends except among the dead? You may leave early tonight, Joseph; I shall be hostess to our guests. There is one among them who interests me.”
Joseph virtually fled, and Callender whipped his head around from the disappearing form, expecting to find the eyes of the old wax-worker focused on him, but he saw at once that Madame Tussaud was blinking intently at Sebastian Newcastle.
“Have we not met, sir?”
“I hardly think I could have encountered Madame without remembering her.”
“You are gracious, but are you truthful?”
Madame Tussaud’s English, however fluent, still betrayed her French upbringing, and there was something foreign in Newcastle’s speech as well, but Callender could not identify it.
“You have a memorable face, I think,” said the old woman.
“Now you flatter me,” said Newcastle.
“That was hardly my intention, but your scar, if I may be so blunt, is all but unforgettable.”
“I apologize if it affronts you.”
“No, sir. It is I who should beg you pardon, but I think I remember you. One who has lived eighty-seven years, as I have, has seen much. And it seems to me that I recollect a man with a face like yours, or at least talk of him. But that was so many years ago that the man could hardly have been you.”
Sebastian Newcastle contented himself with a bow. The Dead Room was so dark, and their faces so indistinct, that Callender could hardly tell what the two of them were thinking. More than anything, he was aware of the way Felicia’s eyes shifted back and forth between the two. What really shocked him, though, was the sudden recovery of Aunt Penelope, who pulled herself out of his arms and demanded to know whether the two of them were acquainted or not.
“There were stories in Paris, when the Revolution raged,” said Madame Tussaud, “about a magician, one who had found a way to keep himself alive forever.”
“No doubt there were many such stories in a time of turmoil,” said Newcastle.
“Of course,” agreed Madame Tussaud. “And the man I speak of would have been older then than I am by now. This was more than fifty years ago. It can be no more than a coincidence.”
“Men say that there are such things,” said Newcastle.
“He was a Spaniard,” said Madame Tussaud, “and I would have given much to model him in wax, but that is all behind us now. Will you look at my relics of the Revolution? I paid dearly for them.”
“How so?” asked Felicia. Fascinated by the exchange between the others, Callender had almost forgotten her.
“With the blood on my hands, young lady, and with memories that will last as long as this old body holds them. I was apprenticed to my uncle, and the leaders of the Revolution ordered me to make impressions in wax of heads fresh from the basket of the executioner. Fresh from the blade of that!”
Madame Tussaud thrust her arm out dramatically. Her trembling finger pointed toward a looming silhouette of wooden beams and ropes. Even in the dim light, the slanted steel blade at the top gleamed dully.
“The guillotine,” gasped Aunt Penelope.
She swayed toward it slowly, like a woman in a trance, and stared up at the sharp edge as if she expected it to shudder down and smash into its base at her approach. She lowered her eyes gradually, then bent over to examine the displays at the foot of the guillotine. She looked to Callender like a housekeeper examining the choice cuts in a butcher shop.
The waxy heads stared up reproachfully, their indignation three-fold: bad enough to have been cut off, worse yet to have been captured in wax, but unsupportable to be displayed to gawkers at a penny apiece. Aunt Penelope seemed to wilt under their gaze. She made a strange sound.
“I don’t feel well at all,” she said. “I think I should go home.”
“We should all go,” said Callender.
“No, no, my boy, I wouldn’t think of it. Mr Newcastle is Madame Tussaud’s old friend. You take me, and let the others stay.” Aunt Penelope began to sway toward Callender’s arms again, a habit which was becoming increasingly annoying.
“It’s very good of you, Reginald,” added Felicia with sweet finality. “I shall be quite safe here with Mr Newcastle.”
Callender was sorely tempted to disagree, but he sensed the futility of argument. There was very little choice for anyone who wanted to look like a gentleman except to carry the old fool out and find her a cab. He tried to maintain his composure while he backed clumsily out of The Dead Room and the three who stayed behind smiled at him; he might not have succeeded if he had seen Aunt Penelope winking at her niece.
“Evidently age brings wisdom even to a woman such as she,” Newcastle remarked.
“She’s such a dear, really, even if she does rattle on sometimes. She knew how much I wanted to remain a little longer, and Reginald would have been bound to cause a scene of some sort.”
“Then you wish to see more of my handiwork?” asked Madame Tussaud.
“No,” Felicia replied at once. “I mean yes, of course, but, I really wanted to hear more about the gentleman you spoke of, the one who was so like Mr Newcastle.”
“He might have been an ancestor, perhaps,” suggested the man with the scar.
“And are such wounds as this passed on from father to son?” asked the old woman. She reached up and caressed Newcastle’s cheek. “I could wish to make a model of such a face.”
“For your Dead Room, Madame?” Newcastle asked.
“Mr Newcastle is no stranger to the dead,” Felicia said. “He speaks to them. He is a spiritualist.” She felt that she had to say something, even though a mixture of common courtesy and uncommon fear kept her from posing the question she longed to ask. There was some sort of understanding between these two, and she was impatient to share it. “This gentleman from Paris,” she said at last. “Do you remember his name?”
“He was a Spanish nobleman . . . Don Sebastian . . . can you help me, Mr Newcastle?”
“I believe I can. Of course I have made a study of such things. His name was Don Sebastian de Villanueva, but I also recall that any claim he had to immortality was false. Was he not reported dead?”
The old woman thought for a moment. “A girl was found, driven quite out of her wits, who said she saw him shatter like glass, or vanish in a puff of smoke, or some such thing, so I suppose he is dead. Then again, a master of the black arts might be capable of such tricks, if he found it convenient to disappear for a time. . . .”
“Quite so,” said Sebas
tian Newcastle, and Felicia Lamb shivered. From somewhere nearby she heard the tolling of a bell.
“The hour grows late,” said Madame Tussaud, “and I am an old woman. I must ask you to leave me alone among my friends.”
“Indeed, Miss Lamb,” said Newcastle. He drew a silver watch from his waistcoat and glanced at its face. The watch was shaped like a skull. “The time is late, the museum is closed, and a man in my position must never be accused of keeping a young lady out till an indecent hour. We must take our leave. Goodnight, Madame.”
The waxworker curtseyed, the medium bowed, and Felicia felt herself being hurried from The Dead Room, but as soon as she was through the door, Newcastle paused.
“Please wait here. I must return for a few seconds. I neglected to pay our guide for our tour.”
Madame Tussaud was waiting for him in the shadows by the guillotine. “Don Sebastian,” she said.
“Madame,” he replied. “I trust you to keep my secret.”
“You can hardly expect to keep it much longer from that girl, you know.”
“It matters little. She will become a disciple. She wishes it.”
“And has she said as much?”
“She need not speak for me to know.”
“And have you many such disciples after half a century in London?”
“None,” said Don Sebastian. He gazed at the wax figures around him. “But I have my dead, like you, and also those who will pay to see them. A small income, but my needs are simple.”
“I think you need something that you cannot buy with gold, do you not?”
“Gold will buy more than than you think, sometimes. And when it will not, I feed as lightly as I can, so that my prey knows nothing more than a few days of weakness, soon forgotten. And I never drink from the same fountain twice. I rarely forget myself enough to dine too heavily, and if I do, well, there is a remedy for that.”
“A physic made of wood, perhaps?”
“You are wise, Madame.”
The old woman shuffled over to a rocking chair that sat in a corner. “If eighty-seven years have not made me wise, sir, then what can I hope for?”
“I had forgotten myself, Madame. Twice I have been driven back into the world of spirits, and so my years on earth have been scarcely more than yours.”
“And did you never find peace?”
“Once, when an ancient world came to an end, its gods took me to their paradise, but after some centuries a spell of my own devising drew me back to earth again, to your Paris. And since I know how many less pleasant realms there are where spirits dwell, I am content to remain here.”
The old woman settled back in her chair. “Then I wish you good night, sir, and bon voyage.”
“I have forgotten one thing,” said Don Sebastian. He raised his arm, and a shower of golden guineas streamed from his empty hand into the basket that contained the wax remains of Marie Antoinette.
“Very prettily done sir,” said Madame Tussaud, “but I hope you have not damaged that head!”
“I would not dream of such a thing, Madame. You are an artist!”
VI. A Visitor from India
Reginald Callender sat in his uncle’s study with the last bottle of his uncle’s brandy on the desk in front of him. He still thought of what little was left here as his uncle’s, since he himself had inherited nothing. And most of what remained in the house was gone now, sold to a furniture dealer to raise a bit of ready money. Callender had no head for business, just enough to know he had been cheated, but he hardly cared anymore. The laborers who came to loot the house had left him his bed, and the trappings of this one room where he had hidden while they gutted his birthright.
He had no idea what time it was. The thick velvet curtains kept out the sun, and he had already pawned his uncle’s watch along with everything else pilfered from the coffin. His crime, if it was one, had brought him discouragingly little. He poured himself another drink. The glass was dirty, and the bottle was dusty from its sleep in the cellar. He wondered how such things could be cleaned. This, along with such mysteries as the cooking of food or the washing of clothes, were as enigmatic to him as the secret of what lay beyond the grave. He could only smoke and swear, drink and dream, but even two of these required money he did not possess.
And his dreams, infuriatingly enough, were of Sally Wood. He cursed himself for this. Now, if ever, his self interest demanded that he devote himself to dancing attendance upon Felicia Lamb, who clearly held his fate in her small hands. Yet it was Sally’s heavy-lidded, full-lipped face that rose before him in the gloom, offering him not so much her beauty, and certainly not her love, but rather the sense of power that surged through him when he held her moaning in his arms. She could make him feel like a man again, and not the quivering, drink-soaked wretch he was becoming while he watched his fiancee and his fortune slip away. Still, to see her might be to risk everything: better to have another drink instead.
His trembling hand nearly dropped the bottle when he heard a heavy pounding from somewhere in the house. He sat frozen in his chair, baffled and suspicious, until the sound came again and he realized it was someone knocking loudly on the front door. He attempted to ignore it, but the visitor was so insistent that Callender finally dragged himself to his unsteady feet and went out into the hall. Stripped of its furnishings, the empty house reminded him of Sebastian Newcastle’s, and it was the scarred and sinister medium that Callender half expected to greet on the doorstep.
Instead, it was a stranger, a beefy, red-faced man with graying hair and clothing that was not only a decade out of fashion, but seemed to have been cut to suit a man slimmer by several stone. He carried a small travelling bag in his left hand, and looked ready to knock again with his right when Callender pulled open the heavy oak door.
The two men peered at each other through a foggy gray that Callender dimly recognized as dusk, and at last the stranger spoke.
“Reggie?”
Callender, who was still at least sober enough to know his own name, did not find this an edifying remark.
“I know who I am, sir, damn your eyes, but who in blazes are you?”
“Don’t you know me?”
“I’ve said as much, blast you! Go away!”
The man in the fog looked genuinely hurt. “But it’s your cousin!” he said. “Nigel! Nigel Stone!”
Callender swayed in the doorway and blinked at his visitor. “Stone? From India?”
“That’s right, and home at last. How’s Uncle William?”
“Dead.”
“Dead? Oh dear. Sorry.”
“Yes,” said Callender. “You’d better come in.”
Callender swayed in the doorway and stepped unsteadily back inside. His cousin followed him into what Callender now realized was almost impenetrable blackness. Nigel Stone paused for a minute trying to get his bearings.
“My dear fellow! The place has been stripped bare!”
“Yes. Yes. It was the servants.”
“Servants?”
“Yes. Servants. While I was at the funeral, they and their confederates stole all they could and carted it away.”
“Good Lord. Beastly things, servants. Some of the brown fellows where I was would rob you blind if you didn’t keep an eye on them. A blind eye, eh? Almost a joke.”
“It’s not funny to me, cousin.”
“No. Of course not. Sorry.”
“You’d better follow me into the study. This way.”
The first thing Stone saw in the room was a brandy bottle flanked by two candles, stuck in their own grease to the surface of a massive desk. Callender sat down in a chair behind it and picked up his glass. In his haste to get his own seat, he neglected the courtesy of offering one to his cousin.
“Tell me, Cousin Nigel, how is business in India?”
“Not so good, I’m afraid. That’s why Uncle William summoned me.”
“Oh? Just how bad is it?”
“Bloody damned bad, if you want to know, my d
ear fellow. Haven’t a farthing.”
“Nothing left at all?” asked Callender. His eyes glistened in the candlelight as he drained his glass.
“Oh, there’s a few boxes of textiles that I had shipped back with me. They should be here in the morning, but that was all I could save. It took the last penny to pay my passage home. No, I’m a liar. I still have half a crown. See?”
“You idiot!” Callender leaped out of his chair and lunged across the desk. He grasped Stone by the collar and hauled him forward, snuffing out a candle and sending the bottle smashing to the floor. Stone was too startled to do more than grunt at first, but when his cousin began to slam him against the desk, the older man broke free and pushed his drunken assailant across the room. Callender fell to the floor and lay there sobbing, both arms crossed over his face.
His cousin stood leaning on the desk, breathing heavily and wishing desperately for a drink from the broken bottle. “Empty anyway,” he muttered. “Look here, Reggie! Are you all right?”
He moved hesitantly toward the quivering form on the carpet. “It wasn’t my fault, really. It’s conditions. You don’t know what it’s like there. Rebellion, robberies, and murder. The whole country’s filled with madmen and fanatics. I was lucky to escape with my life!”
Callender sat up so suddenly that his cousin started back. “What is your life to me?” he wailed. “It’s money that I need!”
“Really? What do you mean, old fellow? You must be rolling in the stuff. You’re his heir, ain’t you? I’m sure he didn’t leave me anything, after all I’ve lost!”
Callender looked at Stone oddly. “What? His heir? Yes, of course I’m his heir.” He laughed harshly. “But the money . . . the money isn’t here yet. It’s all tied up with those damned lawyers, and it may be weeks before I see any of it. You can see what a state I’m in.”
“You really don’t look well, my dear fellow,” said Stone, helping Callender back to his chair. “I’m sorry to hear this, you know. Bit of trouble for both of us. I was really hoping, well, that I might be able to stay here for a while, just till I can get myself back on my feet, as it were. . . . I can lend you half a crown. . . .”
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 69
