The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  It became evident within an hour or two that Abingdon had his own sort of criminal career, but it only involved women. Picking the locks to their undergarments, stealing within, and escaping with their hearts was his modus operandi. He tried it with Min first, as she helped Abingdon and Rock unload the bread truck, transporting his gear into the barn. She was invulnerable to masculine wiles, having buried her need for intimacy alongside her family.

  Emily was next. She flirted with him while he assembled his portable forge, but she, too, was inaccessible. She found him very attractive, but must, with New York caution, have known the difference between very attractive and too attractive, and Abingdon was right on the line. She preferred the clumsy but sincere passes she got from her economist colleagues.

  As it was, there was a great deal of banter, some coarse double entendres, a lot of lifting and hauling, and by late afternoon they were out of beer and there was a fully operational blacksmith’s shop in the middle of the barn. The forge was designed to vent without sparks, but one never knew; Abingdon would have preferred to set the thing up outdoors, but the weather didn’t look very promising, and if he burned the barn down, it was only Sax, after all. He’d be forgiven. What Abingdon really wanted to know was if Sax would forgive him for slipping his gorgeous young niece the Abingdon Knob.

  Once the forge was arranged, he brought out his metals: sheets, bars, and rods, as well as glass jars full of powders and shavings that glittered in many colors. He had a safe bolted into the floor of the bread truck containing gold and silver as well.

  “Fucking alchemist, me,” he explained to Min, and winked, and she thought there must be something in his eye. He had his attention back on Min now because she was attractive in an ugly-sexy kind of way and because Emily had gone into the maison to see about the mysterious Indian woman lying in bed with a fever.

  Once Emily set eyes on Nilu, she didn’t leave her side again for hours, until the sun was long down and Nilu seemed to fall into a somewhat more restful sleep than the eye-rolling, thrashing state in which she had spent most of her day. Emily had initially asked Min what was the matter with Nilu; Min said, “Vampire bite,” and left the room.

  At that moment, Emily’s trip to see what her mad uncle was doing had lost its whimsical flavor. For the first time, the truth of the matter hit her, almost a physical blow. Here was a real victim.

  Her original concern had been for Uncle Sax’s soundness of mind. She was genuinely concerned. He’d told her the story of the vampire-slaying hammers with such conviction. It was obvious he thought it all to be true. But it couldn’t be. It was preposterous. She’d almost believed him for a while that afternoon. He was a persuasive man. But the hard light of day soon put her to rights. Vampires didn’t exist.

  Then she noticed he was scuttling off to unnamed appointments when they were scheduled to have tea together. She’d visited his flat and found a notebook lying open on the coffee table he hated; she caught a glimpse of timetables and flight information intermixed with phrases like VAMPIRE ALLOY and Mercenary? Bring weapons. He’d seen her looking at it and tossed a volume of Tom Poulton drawings on top of the notebook to conceal it. She might not have believed his story, but it was clear her uncle did. And it looked very much as if he intended to do something about it.

  Then he’d announced he was going to his place in Alsace-Lorraine for a few weeks, don’t wait up for him. Typically he’d have told her all about his plans as he was making them. This time he’d hidden them from her. Something was very much up, and she suspected it was senile dementia. Why not drop in and make sure he wasn’t wandering around in his bathrobe eating soap? It couldn’t hurt. Emily had always sworn to herself she’d take care of him. Nobody else was as close to him as she was. He could afford the best old-age care, but there should be somebody to see it was done properly, and that he was allowed to keep his dignity as a human being. Maybe it was time to begin that care.

  So she booked herself a flight to France and discovered her uncle had indeed assembled a band of colorful misfits for whatever quixotic adventure he had in mind. But he himself was nowhere to be found. She had passed an entertaining hour or two amongst them before anyone mentioned there was a sick woman in the house. They seemed rather matter-of-fact about it. Mercenary, in a word. Like it had said in Sax’s notebook. She thought she’d better go have a look. Even as she entered the bedroom in which Nilu suffered, she had still believed it must be a hangover or the flu.

  Then she realized the girl was near death. She could feel it—something uncanny in the room, like possession, like ghosts. The vampire thesis abruptly gained a deal more credibility than it had enjoyed before.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and took Nilu’s cold, wet hand. The air left Emily’s body. She had to tell herself to breathe. There were no marks on the sick girl’s neck, no double punctures of mortician’s wax with artful droplets of blood running from them as in the glorious old vampire films Emily had watched on cable when she was small (not at Uncle Sax’s place, though, because he possessed no television).

  But did vampires really bite people on the neck? Did they fear garlic, or crucifixes? Suddenly the vague pop-cultural creature with a red-lined cape and swallowtail coat became absurd. She had come here not expecting there would be anything real about it. Even meeting the team, she had thought it must be one of those strange experimental theater happenings that had been popular in the early 1970s when drugs were no longer enough and people required scenery and role-playing before they could get off. She should have known better. After all her smug self-satisfaction that she alone understood her uncle best, she had, in this time when he was most serious, most earnest in his entreaties, failed to take him at his word. He would be terribly hurt by that. He would know. Her mere presence, after all his dire warnings, would be enough. Even you, he would think when he saw her: even you.

  Emily stayed there by the bed and thought things over. It began to seem more plausible. Rock brought her tea at intervals during her afternoon vigil; she expressed some of these thoughts to him, although not her concerns about Sax’s feelings being hurt. Nobody would believe it was possible to do.

  “Yeah, vampires,” Rock replied when she asked if it was true. He spoke more quietly than usual, sitting on a petite chair beside the bed. Both of them were looking at Nilu. “I saw my first one in that border fight with Iran nobody wants to talk about. We blew up this old ruin and there were tunnels under it. I went down in there with a team of three. The other cats bought it one by one, and there was no way to figure out what was killing us. It was like a shadow came to life. Backup couldn’t get to me by the time I was alone, because we didn’t have radios, because we were never there, you understand.”

  Emily shook her head. “Am I living in a world full of people who know vampires are real, and somehow I just missed it? This is hard for me to—”

  “I think about half the people on earth who have ever seen one and lived to tell about it are right here on this farm. You’re in rare company.”

  “So why are you alive?” Emily said, bidding him finish his story.

  “Well, I’m down the hole alone with this thing, right? So I said to myself, ‘If you don’t live, nobody’s going to know what killed you.’ And for some reason, that bothered me a lot. I guess I was just feeling sensitive that day. So I decided to keep a grenade in my hand with the pin out, and if the thing got me, obviously I’d let go of the grenade and we’d both go to hell together.

  “When the thing finally showed itself, it was in this underground room with a well in the floor. It came after me and it was like—I mean, I pride myself on a certain level of physical fitness. But this thing picked me up like it was my grammy when I was three years old. But it didn’t look like my grammy much. I don’t know if you know about vampires. I guess not. Did you know they take the shape of their prey? Happens real slowly. Couple hundred years, they start looking like what they eat. For
a long damn time, this one had been living on spiders.”

  Rock stopped speaking and stared down at Nilu. He was rubbing his forearms as if it was chilly in the room, shaking his head.

  “But you survived,” Emily prompted.

  “It was about to put the bite on me with this—I guess it was its mouth—so I stuck the grenade in there and when it let go of me I shoved it down the well. That worked pretty good. I quit the soldier business as soon after that as I could, and decided to take up gardening or something, but here I am. You get bit by vampires more ways than one. It’s like there’s something crawling under your skin, you know? You got to dig it out.”

  Emily had no idea what to say to any of this. It was insane, like learning magic was real. But then, what was electricity? What was gravity? Just magic with a name. She sought for something to say but only nodded.

  Rock left the room, his mood now subdued by memories. Emily’s thoughts returned to her uncle Sax.

  She had only one defense against the hurt she knew he would feel. In her suitcase, as a kind of rabbit’s foot to bring luck—or so she viewed it at the time—she had brought along Simon, the vampire hammer. It was her ticket to the show. That might be something to mollify Uncle Sax. At least it showed she was listening, if not altogether believing. But the people she found herself amongst were the real thing. Vampire hunters. She hadn’t entirely believed it when they were assembling the forge down in the barn, but she did now. They all seemed indifferent, that’s what it was. That was the thing that made her a convert. None of these people were acting phony-tough or talking up the strange nature of their mission—they were just doing what needed to be done, as if it was painting a fence or planning a ski trip.

  Emily’s head whirled. She hadn’t realized until this moment just how much she hadn’t believed her uncle was really on a vampire-­hunting mission. That there was a woman in the bed beside her sick with something unknown to modern medicine was not proof enough. So many things went misdiagnosed. During her watch over the woman, she had asked Rock why they didn’t get her to a real doctor. Rock had shrugged and said, “Hospital’s no good for what she got,” and moved along with his day. Then Emily had seen something that cemented the truth of the situation in her mind.

  Because there, in the pretty bedroom with small blue flowers on the white wallpaper, Emily had noticed—sharing a doily with a carafe of water—the sharp wooden stake that lay on Nilu’s bedside table.

  “Uncle Sax,” Emily said, and hugged him. He felt terribly old and tired. His eyes were hopeless when he looked at her, and his arms remained hanging at his sides.

  “What were you thinking?” he said, and trudged toward the barn to greet Abingdon.

  Sax went to bed as soon as he possibly could. That left Paolo to explain to the group what had transpired in Germany that day. As Nilu was in Sax’s bed for the duration, soaking the mattress with sour sweat, Sax moved himself out of the maison and into the cottage. The farm was now fully occupied: Rock, Paolo, and Emily had the remaining bedrooms in the big house, while Gheorghe and Sax had the two bedrooms in the cottage, Abingdon happily slept in his van (“If one of those blokes snores, my door is always open,” he pointed out to Emily, in case she couldn’t sleep), and Min was bunked up in Château le Tétanos, the concrete fort up on top of the hill.

  Sax lay in the bed beneath the low-beamed ceiling of the cottage’s attic, and stared at the knots and fissures in the massive timbers. They reminded him of the cracks in the ugly rock upon which squatted Castle Mordstein.

  Sleep would not come for Sax. He wished his brains would stop shouting at him, but there it was. Sleep seemed to have lost interest in him. He had gotten all these young people together, his beloved Emily had shown up out of the blue, they were saddled with a woman from the other side of the world who would soon be dead from vampire bite, and they had spent a fair amount of Vatican money. It was all for nothing.

  Castle Mordstein could not be entered by stealth. His team could probably get helicopters with Roman assistance. Sax was sure the Pope would have his own fleet of them, and the Swiss Guards might dress up in fifteenth-century costumes but they were crack soldiers; they were bound to have fighter jets and tanks and all sorts of things. The problem was, you couldn’t lower a bunch of men on ropes into a castle in the middle of Germany and have it go unnoticed, least of all by its occupants. The German authorities might even get interested. But a full-scale assault had never been his plan. Vampires were solitary creatures, and this one, from what Sax could gather, was alone, without its mate—probably brooding over his remains, as they liked to do.

  Although if by chance it was the same vampire Min had seen spirit away the Russian fiend in Mumbai, all bets were off. The creature might have been assembling its own team, somehow. Rare as it was amongst vampires, highly monogamous as they were, she of Castle Mordstein might have taken a new lover. Particularly if she’d killed her old lover. In that case they were up against two of the beasts. But Min had told him what she’d done to Nilu’s attacker. Sax had no reason to doubt the clinical description of the violence Min had performed on the creature; it was the longest speech she’d made since he met her, delivered while she stood in the doorway of the bedroom looking at Nilu’s feverish body.

  Assuming Min’s inventory of wounds was accurate, she’d left the Russian in a terrible state. So one powerful vampire and one weak vampire might be in the castle. That still fell within the outer limits of Sax’s original plan. But he had imagined the fiend would be holed up in some more conventional fastness, such as a château or mansion. They liked their comfort and they preferred splendor. It was the usual thing for vampires to do, if they had their wits about them. The diseased ones, like the specimen Sax had dispatched during his midlife crisis, would live in whatever primitive conditions they found, as long as there was only one way in and out.

  But here was a very clever vampire indeed, and it was living more like an eagle, hidden up there on its rock in the sky. One way in and out there, certainly. A postcard Sax had bought featured an aerial photograph of the place. A thin ridge of rock ran up to the summit of the cliff, and that ridge had been carved just flat enough on top for a cart track. On either side of the track was a plummet to oblivion of between three hundred and eight hundred feet in height; the entire peak of the rock was similarly defended by cliffs.

  The best you could hope for at any point around the castle perimeter was to fall sixty or seventy feet, survive with shattered bones on some ledge on the cliff face, and die of exposure a few hours later. The castle had been so thoroughly expanded out over the summit of the mountain that there was, furthermore, no small margin to creep along, looking for a climbing route up the masonry; in most places, the walls actually overhung the rock beneath it.

  There might be secret passages. Sax was sure there would be. Vampires loved that sort of thing, and the knights of the thirteenth century wouldn’t have settled up on a crag like that without leaving themselves an escape hatch somewhere below. But he didn’t anticipate they would find it. There might be a cave or tunnel entrance inside the lower castle or by the river somewhere, even submerged beneath the water. It could take years to search the whole mountain. And the vampire wouldn’t merely stand by and wait for them. It would respond to the threat of human curiosity, the trait of mortal men that had killed more vampires than bravery.

  Sax tried and failed to clear his mind. He wondered what Gheor­ghe thought of all this. That young criminal knew vampires existed, but he might never have come up against one as formidable as this. Sax could hear the Romanian in the next bedroom rolling around, thumping his pillows. He probably wasn’t used to a good bed. Or he might himself have been sleepless, torn between the desire to steal Sax’s silverware and run for it, and his interest in seeing where this mission led.

  Sax studied the beams and tried not to think about vampires and castles that couldn’t be invaded, but the impossibility of
a stealth approach to the place taunted him. His plan, his entire scheme, revolved around recruiting a few people who were very good at sneaking and killing. Find an undefended window, a faulty latch somewhere, slip inside the grand old house in dark of night, locate and destroy the vampire, and by dawn have half the furniture out on the lawn waiting for the removal company to come and truck it all away, that overpriced clucking ormolu clock included. As it turned out, they would need siege engines, aerial support, mountaineers, and a good deal more courage and ingenuity than Sax had found in himself over the decades.

  On top of everything else, Sax brooded, he was afflicted with gas, probably from the German cabbage at lunch. As the flatus wafted around the room, he wondered if that might be an approach: gas the castle from below. Fire canisters of nerve gas up in through the few windows of the main keep and kill or stun whoever was inside. Then they could raid the place from the narrow road that led up the ridge, no need for climbing cliffs and so forth. Straight up the cart track to the top and in through the front gates. Although gas wouldn’t necessarily work on creatures that breathe only once per minute. If you wanted to kill a vampire, it typically had to be done face-to-face.

  Then a glimmer of understanding shone out in the darkness of Sax’s brain. He had an idea.

  It was a stupid, bad, awful, wretched idea.

  It taunted him, turning cartwheels and jabbering at the edge of his conscious mind, like an ape just outside the ring of firelight in some prehistoric contest between proto-man and his simian relatives. He shied rocks at the idea to make it go away, but it would not. At last, exhausted, Sax allowed himself to acknowledge the inspiration. He invited it into the firelight. He looked the thing over. It was just as terrible as he had thought. Better to pack everything (and everyone) up and go home, leaving his slain night watchman unavenged, his clock unreturned, his latest fortune unmade, his reputation lost. The monster could continue its filthy work and someday, in the blink of an eye in vampire time, Sax would die, and he would not have done the one good deed he was called upon to do. The monster would never know nor care.