The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  “I mean it was a long way off, but yeah,” Rock said.

  “I’m concerned she might be one of the vampire’s familiars.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for her.”

  “I’ll keep out my pecker for her,” Gheorghe said, and laughed, and then, when Rock failed to join in, he added, “You know is pecker, right? Is a word you use for the pula. The Johnson? Hahahahaha.”

  Still nobody laughed.

  While they waited for a suitably late hour, Rock and Gheorghe discussed possible points of entry into the castle. They sat up front, Sax lying on the bench seat in back. Sax had not yet told anyone what his real plan was, so the rest of the team was working under the assumption that they would have to mount some kind of ingenious burglary-style assault on the fortifications. He hoped they’d find a way. Then he could forget his awful plan. He called the farm on his mobile phone to check in.

  “Are you staying warm, Uncle Sax?” Emily asked.

  “Yes yes yes. Has Abingdon tried anything with you?”

  “You mean like mating?”

  “If you must put it thus.”

  “Yes he has, Uncle Sax.”

  “And?”

  “And he hasn’t succeeded. Anyway, what business is it of yours? You have enough to worry about. What I’m worried about is this woman Nilu. She’s terribly sick. She needs some kind of medical attention right away.”

  There was something in her tone of voice that sounded like apology. Sax started with that. “Why do I have the feeling you’ve already dragged a doctor into this?”

  “Not just any doctor, Uncle Sax. This one is from the Vatican. Or next to the Vatican. Paolo was trying to explain his sort of enclave thing isn’t actually on Vatican property—it’s across the street or something? He’s very sweet, you know. Paolo’s like a—well, like a saint, as they say. He’s been feeding Nilu ice cubes for hours now, just to keep her hydrated.”

  “Yes yes yes yes yes. What about the doctor,” Sax said, his impatience growing rapidly.

  “Well, he’s one of the same brethren or brothers or what have you as Paolo is, from the same sect. He’s a vampire doctor. I mean, he treats vampire victims. He’ll be here any minute now.”

  Sax considered the ramifications of this. The more involvement the Church had, the more of the spoils of war they could claim. They would get a bigger piece of the action, which meant a smaller piece for Sax—which, if he was going to risk everything and die, hardly seemed appropriate.

  But then again, if the castle was impregnable, it hardly mattered, did it? He wasn’t going to get anything at all, and neither was the Vatican. So the joke was on them. Much as the joke would probably be on Sax when the vampire tore him apart and it turned out there really were pearly gates in the clouds and Saint Whatsisname at the concierge’s desk sent him down the back staircase to hell with a pitchfork up his bum.

  “Uncle Sax? Are you still there?”

  “Make sure Min tells the doctor everything she knows about the vampire that bit the girl, will you? And make sure Paolo doesn’t try to get Nilu back to his hospice place, wherever that is, because Min won’t put up with it. The last thing I need is a fight amongst ourselves.”

  “Understood. How’s it going there?” Emily asked. Somehow the way her voice brightened, the hint of admiration in it that Sax found so alarming, made him hesitate. He wanted to tell her the thing might be impossible, regardless of whether anybody stole his stupid old clock or killed his night watchman. People got murdered all the time. Just as senselessly. He had the whole argument laid out. But it was like so much burned newspaper in his mouth. The words were gone.

  “It’s going quite well,” Sax said.

  He got off the phone as quickly as he could.

  Sax would not have thought he could sleep in the cold van, lying with a sleeping bag thrown over him, knees hooked up, one arm twisted around behind his head for a pillow. But he fell into a doze without knowing it, and dreamed of the castle, and the redhead, and Rock chasing first her, then Sax, along the battlements with the sheer cliff below them, stark naked, a purple-black pula the size of a moray eel projecting from his groin, Gheorghe’s laughter, Hahahahaha, in his ear.

  When Sax awoke, the van was moving, jolting along the forest road, heading down the ridge toward the castle grounds. It was midnight.

  “We could not get you to awake,” Gheorghe said when Sax came up between the front seats for a cup of coffee from a flask.

  “I’m old, that’s why,” Sax said, scalding his mouth.

  “Man, I hope I got your kind of snap when I’m old,” Rock said, and clapped Sax on the shoulder with a hand the size of a tractor seat. “Hell,” he added, “I hope I’m around next week.”

  At Sax’s direction, Rock turned onto the narrow way that led along behind the lower fortifications. They took the fork of the road partway up the hill, along the same route the BMW had taken. There was no indication it was a private road, and the surface was blacktopped and in reasonable condition. They were certainly within the grounds of the castle, but the camping gear provided a plausible excuse for being there, if they were apprehended by the police. Sax found he was rehearsing what he would say to the authorities in his head. These are my sons, he would explain, introducing his companions. Different mothers.

  Rock steered the van across the grass of the fields by the road and parked it beneath the trees, well out of sight. It was not obviously concealed, merely hidden; that was the effect they wanted. Gheorghe decamped immediately and stood in the dark, testing Sax’s fancy set of night-vision goggles. Rock hauled out his backpack, relaced his boots, and wished Sax luck while he waited for them to return. He warned Sax to turn on the heat once in a while so they didn’t return in the morning to find him frozen to death.

  “Should we synchronize our watches or anything?” Sax asked, suddenly realizing he didn’t want to be alone. The nose of the van faced the lower castle, and up above the windshield in the dark sky was the upper castle on its crag. Sax didn’t want to look at them.

  “One minute this side or that side of the hour won’t make any difference,” Rock said, and again clamped his massive hand on Sax’s shoulder. “We volunteered for this, man. Whatever happens next, remember we chose to do this.”

  “It’s your funeral,” Sax agreed.

  Rock winked and made an imaginary pistol of his fingers, shooting Sax in the chest with it. Then he slid the side door of the van shut, closing out the frigid night air, and his huge frame was hustling double time across the frozen field after Gheorghe. Their shapes merged for a brief moment with the gravel road, reappeared silhouetted dimly against the field on the other side, and then they were gone beneath the trees that covered the hill.

  Sax settled in, wearing all of his newly purchased cold-weather gear: hat, gloves, jacket, silk drawers beneath moleskin trousers, and a pair of boots that looked like running shoes. It was all horribly unstylish but warm: gloves, boots, and jacket all filled with those thin miracle insulations that take the place of a mattress’s worth of eiderdown. They’d bought these things immediately after they rented the camper in Chemnitz.

  Eventually the patient, inexorable cold got through the clothes, and Sax pulled a sleeping bag up around him. He didn’t feel like sleeping anymore. The silence and chill seemed to press up against the camper with a palpable mass, as if he was not parked under some trees in Germany, but rather at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

  He felt the presence of the vampire. Even if it was thousands of miles away, it left a kind of psychic stink behind. Sax wondered how the others were getting along.

  He checked his watch, a gold manually wound Vacheron Constantin from 1954, a sound article. The timepiece had originally been given to Peter Fonda by Marlon Brando. Fonda himself had handed it to Sax during the filming of Easy Rider; he’d been doing a scene involving a costume watch, and neither of them remem
bered it until the mid-1980s, when Sax was clearing out one of his many wardrobes and found the timepiece in the pocket of his old fringed and beaded deerskin jacket. After all that time, Fonda said, the watch had chosen its master. Sax could keep it.

  It didn’t run particularly well in the cold. Sax had forgotten that.

  His companions would be somewhere well up that precipitous road with its hairpins and switchbacks, probably not even short of breath because they were both fit, active men, which Sax regarded as a kind of rebuke. He hadn’t been fit or active even when he was fit and active—that is, not like these men were, who scaled mountains in the dark. They had those veins on their forearms that radiated out from the inside of the elbow, an effect Sax always admired but never achieved. Sax found he was thinking of men’s arms without the slightest tickle of erotic impulse; he didn’t know if this was because of his advanced age or because the cold had reduced his penis to the size of a caraway seed.

  At three in the morning, Sax dozed off for a while, a drop of liquid dangling from his nose. He awoke disoriented, the windows of the van opaque as candle wax. Something had jolted him alert.

  He wiped at the condensation with the corner of the sleeping bag. It was frozen. He had to fish out a credit card from his wallet to clear the glass enough to see. Nothing seemed to have changed in the landscape, except the moon was peeping through the clouds at intervals now, casting ghosts of light down across the hills, throwing silvery highlights and crisp shadows across the scarred face of the cliff.

  Sax strained his eyes into the darkness, trying to discern anything that might have been the cause of his awakening.

  There was a sound. It was faint, at the top of the register he could hear, like the squeal of automobile brakes somewhere far distant. Then he saw lights up under the cliff. They appeared in pieces, as if the beams had shattered in the cold and now the fragments were tumbling down the mountain. After a few minutes they resolved themselves into a pair of vehicle headlights moving through the trees along the hidden road that zigzagged down the slope. The vehicle was moving as slowly as a man could walk, and Sax wondered if it represented a search party looking for his companions. If so, the search team might see the camper, even at a distance. It was not intended to look like it had been parked to avoid detection. Now Sax thought that was a bit too clever. They should have hidden it thoroughly and covered it with branches.

  There was a pair of binoculars tucked up on the dashboard. He retrieved them, cleared the condensation off the glass again, and watched the headlights. It was not a satisfactory arrangement. And he couldn’t hear. But he also couldn’t figure out how to lower the windows without turning on the engine, which Sax thought might be the swiftest way he could possibly devise to call attention to himself. So instead he popped the sliding door open in the side of the camper.

  Cold air rushed in. As chilly as it was inside the camper, it was far worse outside. Then the small store of heat inside the camper was gone, and the whole world was equally frigid. Sax began to shiver. He jammed the binoculars against the doorframe and kept them stable enough to watch.

  The headlights were halfway down the hill now. Sax could just make out the small figure of a man walking along between them, in front of the vehicle, which he discerned was some kind of medium-weight truck with a big box on the back. With the door open, he could hear, too. Tiny snatches of voices, shouting. Not in alarm, but calling to be heard by someone distant. He could hear the clashing of the gears as the truck kept its speed low on the steep grade. Then he heard the shrill noise again. It wasn’t brakes. It was some kind of whistle, brandished by the man on foot.

  Sax took his eyes from the binoculars. The rubber cups of the eyepieces were freezing his face. He massaged some life back into his eyelids and was about to resume his vigil when he saw another man loping across the dark field, chased by a scudding patch of moonlight.

  Or at first it seemed like a man.

  But the figure was moving far too fast for that. He was running at the speed of a horse, in great bunching strides that sometimes used not just his legs but his arms, hunched, apelike. As swift as the silent figure was, he could not outrun the moonlight, and as the pale photobathic rays swept over him, Sax saw it was not a man at all.

  It was a hunding. The debased form of the vampire—no less deadly, but certainly more beast than man. Not anything like the Czech monster, which had strength but no wits. These were cunning hunters.

  The thing was big, pale, its shoulders matted with fur or bristles that stood erect. Its torso was long and deep, its chest not broad but keeled like a dog’s, and its limbs hinged differently from those of a man. Its arms were long in the wrists and short above the elbows, and it ran on its toes with its heels halfway up the calves of its legs. The head that projected from the long, thick neck was man-shaped, upright, but the nose and jaw projected past the sloped forehead. Even at a distance, there was no mistaking the thing for human, now the light was upon it. The moon hid its face again and the monster was an indistinct, lunging shadow once more, charging across the frozen meadow.

  Sax’s blood stopped coursing. He was terrified. The creature was half a kilometer away, and yet Sax’s mind could imagine it scenting him and turning in its tracks, eyes glinting green, and devouring the space between with powerful strides. It could, too. Those monsters were impossibly swift. Then it would tear out his bowels and suck the still-pumping blood from his liver, draining him while he struggled and screamed and eventually died.

  All of this was thirty seconds away, if the monster sensed Sax’s presence. But it seemed intent on the truck up the mountainside, its course straight ahead. The creature galloped across the gravel road, paused to thrust its head into the grass and smell where Rock and Gheorghe had been a few hours before, then probed the air with its nose, searching. The trail was cold. It galloped onward and was lost under the trees a few moments later. Sax heard branches breaking. The thing was clearly in a hurry, abandoning its native stealth.

  Sax eased the side door of the camper shut. The latch fell into place with a clap like a hammer. Sax cringed as he depressed the locking button. When nothing responded to the noise, he went up to the forequarters of the van and locked the front doors. Not that it would keep him alive for more than a second longer if a hunding decided to attack, but there was some pathetic reassurance in door locks. Although they came from the same poisoned flesh as vampires—both were the same, in different phases, depending on their prey—­hundings wouldn’t pause to listen to a fellow’s last words or give him a chance to talk things over. They were only in it for the kill.

  Sax scraped the glass again to give himself a view of the hill and watched the headlights descend the twisted road. The man was still walking in front of it. Sax tried the binoculars again. The man should be dead, if there was a hunding around. Sax found the truck’s lights, twitched the focus lever, and saw something he didn’t know was possible. The man was, indeed, confronted by the hunding, there in the down-raked headlights of the truck. Sax’s view was partly obscured by trees in the foreground, but he could not mistake the white, shaggy back of the beast.

  The man was barely close enough for Sax to discern his features as well. He wore a black hat pulled low, and there was a dark scarf wound around his face to the eyes. He was otherwise clad in a long, gray coat that reminded Sax of Paolo’s cassock. In his hand was something Sax at first took for a wreath, it being quite distant, even with the binoculars; however, when the man uncoiled the object and began slashing at the hunding, Sax understood it was a bullwhip. The monster crouched and threw its claws up over its head and was driven by the man around the side of the truck. Then the creature jumped up into the truck’s enclosed back and the man swung a heavy door shut upon it, closing the hunding in. Sax had never seen anything like it. And he wondered with dread if his companions were still alive out there in the cold night.

  Sax spent the hours until dawn slowly free
zing. He never turned on the heater but bundled himself up like a silkworm. His extremities lost sensation and he had to force his fingers and toes to move at intervals; otherwise, he feared, he might lose them. His ears and nose ached with the cold and the van’s windows were so thickly iced that even the moonlight could barely penetrate.

  He did not sleep again, but breathed into his gloves and wondered if he was the only man left alive out of his party.

  What would he do? He couldn’t drive the camper. He could call Paolo, of course, on his mobile phone, but it would be hours before the man could show up. He did not dare call Gheorghe or Rock, because the last thing they would need, if they were hidden in some crack in the rocks with another hunding prowling around, would be a ringing phone.

  There might well be another such creature. Sax had watched the truck make its way down the hill and saw, just before it reached the flat ground, a second monster lope its way along the tree line. The per­­­formance by the man with the whip was repeated. The area must have been infested. Sax was convinced there must be another one on the roof of the camper, salivating with desire to rip out his guts. It could also be the scraping of a low-hanging bough of the tree under which the camper was parked, but Sax was certain it was anything but that. After several hours during which the noise on the roof failed to change in rhythm or intensity, Sax decided it might possibly be a mere twig. But he also didn’t relax, because that’s what a hunding would want you to think. Only a twig! And then the claws like steak knives would rip into your guts and the thick white fangs— He forced himself to concentrate on the dark landscape before him.

  Eventually the cold was too much. Sax was preparing himself for death, having grown apathetic and fatalistic, his eyes leaking tears that froze on his lashes. His shivering had become continuous and convulsive, expanding and contracting in waves of intensity.