"They say,” he began, “that those Turks were dispatched in an infamous fashion, involving a fireplace poker."
"Oh?” said Sharps. “The Commissioner said something to the effect of their throats being cut."
"No doubt, no doubt, lest they protest aloud at the outrage being performed upon them,” the baron said. He looked at his sister. “What, are you not amused?"
"I hardly think this is suitable dinner-table conversation,” she replied.
Sharps turned the talk to lexicography, and Tötösy drew out his guest about his travels on the continent. Sharps's tales of scholarly vagabondage from Paris to Stamboul drew forth reminiscences in kind from Tötösy, and even Sophia smiled.
Soon, after port and cigars, Sharps said, “May I see the library now?"
"Of course."
The baron himself lifted the large silver candelabra from the table and led the way.
The library was vast, dark paneled and high arched, with shelves lining three sides, their topmost reaches accessible from balconies and by means of ladders. Leather chairs stood beside the hearth. Lamps glistened on the polished tables. Over the fireplace, deep-graven in the mantle stone, stood a motto in antique Romanian: Within these volumes even death may die.
"Here,” said the baron. “Our work is laid out for us."
Paper and pens and bottles of ink adorned every table. Lead pencils and gummed labels stood between boxes of file cards.
"Shall we begin?"
"We shall."
Sharps pulled the nearest book from the nearest shelf, and wrote on a sheet of cream-laid paper: “Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex. Volume one, Louvain, 1599. Delrio (Martin Antoine). Quarto. Green tooled leather binding. 292 pages. Title page with ten woodcuts showing scenes from Exodus...."
Little chance, he thought, of the Grey Book's lost pages surfacing here, among these mostly conventional volumes.
Outside the leaded windows the moon rose. Time passed. A clock struck, then struck again. At last, near eleven, the baron stood from the table where he had been working, inscribing bibliographic information in a small, neat hand.
"Well begun is half done,” he said. “May I offer you a brandy and see you to your room?"
Sharps raised the cut-crystal glass that the baron offered him to his lips. Beneath the burn of the brandy he tasted the bitter hint of laudanum.
Baron Tötösy was looking at him eagerly, his own glass in his hand. “To life!” Sharps said, and drained the glass.
"Life!” the baron echoed. “Now, to your room."
"Yes."
They went back through the halls and up the stairs. In an upper passageway lit by candles in wall sconces they met Sofia.
"Freiin,” Sharps said, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. As he did so, she bent forward and placing her mouth close to his ear whispered, “Save yourself. It is too late for me."
Sharps straightened and—speaking loudly enough for the baron to hear—said, “Am Morgen."
They arrived at his room. The baron courteously held the door.
"Sleep well,” he said. “Do not dream."
The door shut. The lock clicked. Sharps waited a moment, his ear to the door, hearing the sound of retreating footsteps. Then he pulled the chamber pot from beneath the bed and knelt before it. “When in Romania do as the Romanians,” he said, and put his finger down his throat. He retched as quietly as he could until his stomach was quite empty.
"Vomo, vomere, vomui, vomitus,” he whispered, then stood and turned toward the door.
"Do not attempt to lock a man in if you have left the hinge pins on the same side of the wall,” he muttered, and set to work.
Once in the hall, with the door propped back in an approximation of its former state, Sharps took off his shoes and tied their laces together, placing them around his neck. Then in stocking feet he advanced, staying next to the wall to minimize squeaks from the floorboards. He turned left and went down the stairs, retracing the steps that he had followed twice before.
Thus he proceeded toward the musicians’ gallery that overlooked the dining room where he had eaten that evening. The light of the full moon cast a silver glow wherever it fell, making all the darker the shadows in which he lurked.
In the distance, to his right, he heard what could be a low chanting. As he drew nearer to the source of the voices—he recognized the language as being late Latin—a light appeared bobbing before him, as of a candle being carried in hand. He pressed himself back into the shadows beside a suit of armor, on the opposite side from the direction of the light. It moved, it approached; and before long, Sharps could see that the light belonged to Sofia, who was walking slowly down the hall, clad only in a shift and a dressing gown, and shielding the flame of the candle with her hand.
The candle flickered in a sudden breeze as she passed by his hiding place. She turned toward him, then gasped and stepped back.
"Fräulein,” he said in a low tone.
"Herr Sharps!” she whispered. “You startled me. Why are you not asleep?"
"A misspent youth,” he replied. “Unwise practices during my undergraduate days lent me a certain tolerance for opium. But tell me: Is Herr Tötösy actually your brother?"
Sofia gave a low laugh. “Not by birth, if that is your question. He is using you, just as he is using me."
She began to walk along the passage, away from the voices. At least two men, perhaps three, perhaps more, were chanting.
"How is he using you?"
"This place,” and she gestured with her hand to take in the hall and the rooms, and the entire burg, “belongs to me, and to my family. I was raised here. Unless I accompany him he cannot enter these walls. He seeks something here, though what it is, I cannot tell. That is your purpose in his plans."
They arrived at a stairway. Sofia led the way down. The tapestries were black in the moonlight.
"What is my part?"
"Come to the library; I will show you."
They silently made their way through the darkened rooms, past hearths grown cold. In the library Sofia touched her candle to a lamp.
"There is a document, from my grandfather's time or before,” she said, “that he desires to read. But he does not know the tongue. He believes that it points to great treasure. Here is what he plans: one day, whilst pretending to catalog the books,” and here she pulled a book from the stack that the Baron had been working on, “he would open one and pretend to find there a sheet of parchment. ‘Oh, look,’ he would say. ‘What do you make of this?’”
Here she pulled a sheet of parchment from the book and laid it on the table by the lamp. “Once you had read it to him, assuming you could, then your part here, and mine, would be at an end and he would dispose of us."
"How inhospitable."
"Indeed so, Herr Sharps. I rely on you. I did not dare hope ... until...."
Sharps was looking over the document. “Hmmm. Yes."
The parchment was quite old, the hand antique. The language appeared to be a rare form of Gothic. Seek first in the crypt, there the tomb lies.... The words filled him with dismay.
"I will need to get back to town, to consult my books."
"There is a secret passage in the wine cellar,” Sofia said. “We will escape."
"So we will,” agreed Sharps. He took a moment to put back on the shoes he had earlier removed—once outside, silence would be less important than protection against hazards underfoot. Then Sofia caught up the lamp and led the way through the dining room to a set of stairs behind a door. They descended into musty gloom.
The wine cellar itself was as vast as any of the rooms above. Rack after rack of dusty bottles stood against the walls and in ranks down the center. Sofia walked toward the far wall.
Then came a sound on the stairs. Both Sharps and Sofia froze, hardly daring to breathe. Sharps reached out his hand and picked up a bottle of wine. The bottle was made of thick green glass, with a satisfying heft to it; like most of the others in its rack,
it had been wrapped for protection at some point in a twist of vellum. Improvised weapon in hand, he stood beside the doorway where the stairway from above debouched into the wine cellar, and waited.
Sofia gestured to him to come; he shook his head “no."
Another soft footfall on the stairs, the gleam of a lamp descending. A man stepped through the doorway, a dark-lantern in his hand, his eyes fixed on Sofia.
Sharps hit him beside the ear with the bottle. He went down hard as the bottle shattered. Sharps snatched up the still-burning lantern and looked down. It was the coachman.
"Have you killed him?"
"I think ... wait a moment, what's this?” Sharp's eyes fell on the vellum that had formerly enwrapped the broken bottle. The sheet had fallen away when he dropped the bottleneck to seize the coachman's lantern. Now it lay half-unfurled on the stone floor, revealing lines of Latin text in an early Renaissance hand.
He thought little of it—scraps of old parchment turned up everywhere, from the bindings of incunabula to the seals on jars of jam, and most of the texts were mere commonplaces—but he scanned the page rapidly all the same. Then he picked it up from the floor and angled the lantern to look at it more closely.
"This is part of the Liber Pallidus,” he said. “I recognize the opening lines. But the passage does not continue in the same fashion as the texts I know."
"Come quickly!” Sofia said. “He will wake up at any moment. We will be discovered!"
But Sharps was at the wine rack, pulling out another bottle wrapped in vellum. He unwrapped it. “Yes!” More of the unknown, intermixed with material from the later texts. He stuffed the sheet into his pocket, and reached for yet another vellum-wrapped bottle. “I was right! Aldus Manutius was working from flawed sources when he set the Liber Pallidus into type—the Regensburg Codex and the San Marco Manuscript are both incomplete! These are the pages that have been missing from the Grey Book since at least 1540!"
He put the lantern on the floor to allow himself to more rapidly take the bottles from the rack and stuff the vellum into the pockets of his coat. So rapt was he with securing those documents, only glancing at them to see what they were, not daring to take the time to read, that he scarcely paid attention when a large gray wolf came bounding down the stairs, or when it melted into mist.
But when it reformed in the shape of Báró Tötösy, Sharps turned toward him and said, “Ah, yes. I rather expected you."
"You should have gotten away when you could,” Tötösy said, advancing.
Sharps pulled a penknife from his pocket and lunged forward, thrusting the penknife into the left side of Tötösy's chest.
The baron laughed. “Have you learned nothing from all your books in all your many languages?"
"Perhaps not,” Sharps said. He stepped back and lunged again, this time burying the blade in the right side of Tötösy's chest. “But I did learn that strigoi have two hearts, so perhaps that might count for something."
The baron fell. Against the far wall, Sofia stood screaming.
"Oh, for heaven's sake,” Sharps said. “We have work to do. Could you carry the lights?"
After he had secured the last of the manuscript pages, he searched the coachman, finding a ring of keys in the man's waistcoat pocket. Then he pulled Tötösy's lifeless body up onto his shoulders and started up the stairs. Sofia followed him, carrying both the lamp and the lantern.
"Where's the closest door to the outside?” Sharps asked.
She pointed, wordlessly. Sharps nodded and went in that direction. Along the way he paused, shifted his load, and pulled a sword from a display of crossed swords and shield beside a dark fireplace. Then he resumed his course.
Soon they came to a door. Sharps lowered the baron's body to the ground, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. Then he grabbed the body by the ankles and pulled it out onto the grass and into a patch of moonlight.
He stood holding his borrowed sword loosely by the pommel, its point on the ground. “The strigoi vir,” he said, “is a living sorcerer. After death, should the body be exposed to the direct light of the moon, it transforms into the strigoi mort, the undead or living dead, even more powerful and wicked."
The body twitched and moved, rolling first to its knees, then standing. Sharps struck off its head with the sword. The head rolled away and the body collapsed back onto the earth.
"Fortunately,” he said, “it is simple to kill."
He turned to the woman and held out his hand. “Miss Sofia? If you would accompany me?"
She stepped forward, her features full of amazement. “How did you know—?"
"Really,” Sharps said, “did you think that I don't read the documents that I study?"
"No, I...."
In that moment, a dark-cloaked figure stepped out through the doorway from the interior of the building, a sword in his hand.
Sharps raised his own blade and came to the position of guard.
"Do you fence?” said the newcomer.
"Yes—I learned in my Bruderschaft in Heidelberg,” Sharps said. Then he laughed. “But come, put up your sword, Herr Oberst Commissioner Haidekker. You are no longer in thrall to the strigoi."
"And you are no longer under arrest,” Haidekker said, throwing back his hood. “My coach is at hand. Will you accompany me?"
"With the Freiin,” he said, and offered her his hand again.
The police commissioner's coach was nearby. The official took the reins while Sharps and the young lady took seats inside. They were away; the bright light of the full moon made the road clear as day. Sofia held Sharps's hand as she sat beside him.
"What was it that made you first suspect?” she asked.
"It was an accumulation of things,” he replied. “But the primary one was that Tötösy had no real need of me for the purpose he gave. The library at the burg is almost entirely conventional—one might almost think that it had been purchased wholesale to fill out shelves left mostly empty by a previous owner. Cataloging it might be tedious work, but would require no great scholarly gifts to accomplish. And if the Baron were lying about that one great thing, how much more might he also be lying about? Then he gave me too much time alone in which to think. The rest followed."
"And what shall become of me?” Sofia asked. Her head rested on Sharps's shoulder. He felt her lips, cold on his neck. He pressed the cross he had made of wood from the clothespress, bound with cord from a shirt's laces, into her forehead until she stopped writhing and lay still.
"You? You'll die and stay dead, like that unfortunate Magyar strigoi you made and controlled,” Sharps said. Then he rapped on the top of the coach. “Herr Haidekker,” he said. “You can turn toward town now. This time you are truly free. And if you don't mind, I'll ride up there with you."
Dawn was breaking as they arrived in Bistrita. They drove directly to the police station, where Sharps accompanied Haidekker to his office.
"I knew that you weren't the criminal,” Haidekker said. “When individuals well-known to be demon hunters are horribly killed, one seeks for the murderer among demons, not among casual tourists.” He shook his head. “The Hasanakis will be missed. They did great work in their own land."
"I think I can offer some insight on how it was done,” Sharps said. “The strigoi vir, Tötösy, took the form of a rat and so ran through the walls, entering their rooms. Once there, using tools that he found, a knife and the fireplace poker, he killed them, before they could identify and kill his mistress.
"Then he, or more likely she, learned that I was present. At first the pair of them considered whether I might be a threat; but then I conjecture that they saw instead an opportunity. They planned to use my knowledge of lost languages and old manuscripts to discover something about their own ancestry, and about where the founder of their line might be found, and how they might rouse him from an uneasy sleep."
"I daresay you are correct,” Haidekker said, as he removed Sharps's passport from his safe and handed it to him. “If so, you
may have saved us from a far greater plague than even the brothers Hasanaki could have imagined. Nevertheless, you will need to leave the country as soon as possible; these events will be hard enough to explain without having to account as well for your presence. I am sorry for your researches."
"My researches will soon be taking a new direction,” Sharps said. His hand brushed his pocket, where the pages from the Liber Pallidus still rested. “It is no great tragedy that I cannot continue to Brasov."
"I am glad to hear it,” said Haidekker. “One last thing, Herr Sharps: Never write or speak of what happened here tonight."
"May I die a howling madman if I do,” Sharps said.
With that he collected his luggage and departed for the railway station. If he hurried, he would be in time to catch the morning train back to Vienna.
[Back to Table of Contents]
If Angels Fight by Richard Bowes
Once again we Americans find ourselves in a Presidential election year and once again we find that some of our contributors are inspired by the niceties (and not-so-niceties) of political protocol during a campaign. Longtime readers might recall past political stories such as Robert Reed's “First Tuesday” and Dale Bailey's “Death and Suffrage” (and check our Website to see which one is reprinted there). Now Richard Bowes draws on his Boston background to spin a story that several of our in-house readers have deemed unforgettable (or maybe they simply said they couldn't get it out of their heads).
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1.
OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, the blue water of the Atlantic danced in the sunlight of an early morning in October. They're short, quiet trains, the ones that roll through Connecticut just after dawn. I sipped bad tea, dozed off occasionally and awoke with a start.
Over the last forty years, I've ridden the northbound train from New York to Boston hundreds of times. I've done it alone, with friends and lovers, going home for the holidays, setting out on vacations, on my way to funerals.
FSF, February 2008 Page 14
