Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  One such man was an old codger named Lord Francois Etienne de Harsigny, who for some reason, liked to be called Lance. Lance was fifty-two and should not have been alive. He only had one foot and one eye, suffered from gout, and always smelled of gangrene and poppies. The foot he lost in the Battle of Crecy. I don’t know when he lost the eye, but I suspect its absence was indirectly what caused the loss of his foot. To compensate—for the foot at least—he would strap the boot from his armor onto the stump. It didn’t do him a damn bit of good when he walked but it helped when he rode. Harsigny served as castle regent in 1356 while Lord Coucy was yet again away to battle.

  On one disturbingly cold winter’s morn, Lord Harsigny bade my presence in the main hall for a matter of grave importance. The hall was where the lord of the castle served as de facto judge and jury for local disputes among the peasantry. When I arrived, I found a local smithy weeping over the body of his wife.

  “Lord Venice,” Harsigny called when I entered. He called me Lord Venice in public out of respect, for I had no actual title. Serge was my common name at the time. “Attend.”

  I went straight to the smithy, a pleasant man named Albert with whom I’d had many dealings in the past. Albert was a tanner. He made an excellent leather waistcoat, one of which I was wearing. “Albert,” I asked, “what has happened?”

  He looked up at me, mute with grief, and lifted the cloak from his wife’s body. Something had torn her throat out.

  “What say you, Lord Venice?” Harsigny asked.

  It has been said that the Dark Ages were the worst time to be an intellectual, and while the argument has some merit, I’m living proof that there will always be room for the learned, provided one shops one’s talents long enough. Harsigny called for me because I was the only man in town who was well versed in logic, and because I knew my history better than most, for obvious reasons. Not that Lance was a fool by any stretch.

  “Where did you find her?” I asked Albert.

  “Outside the walls,” Albert whispered. “She had gone to the well near dusk at my behest. When she did not return…”

  “Albert, the well lies within the walls. And you found her outside?”

  “Yes, Lord Venice.”

  “When was this?”

  “We found her this morn after looking within the keep for much of the night.”

  I examined the wound more closely. Her head lay at an unnatural angle, tilted to her left. There were teeth marks. Some kind of animal had done this. But there were no other marks on the body, which made no sense. Animals don’t kill for sport; they kill to eat. Why hadn’t she been eaten?

  “What would have made her leave the walls at dusk?” I asked Albert.

  “She would not have!” he insisted.

  “No,” I agreed. “I suppose not.”

  It would have been easier on all of us if she had, but he was right. Only the foolish or the extremely well armed drift beyond the keep walls at night, especially in winter when the wolves are hungry and desperate enough to consider going after a person. But no wolf had ever dared stray so far inside as to reach the well, and no wolf was strong enough to drag an adult woman such a distance—by the throat—alone. Nor, I suspected, would any wolf have the inclination to do so.

  “We need to see where she was found,” I told Harsigny. To Albert, I asked, “Can you show us?”

  * * *

  We rode to the gates, in part because Harsigny rode everywhere (he’d stable his horse in his quarters if he could) but also because of the air of importance men on horseback tended to carry. It was a serious inquiry and the villagers—all of whom were by then well aware of the murder—needed to understand that we were taking it seriously. Otherwise I’d have gone alone and walked, which is what poor Albert had to do. His wife’s body was left in the care of the castle staff, where a priest had been called and the preparations for her funeral pyre were being made. (It was too cold to bury the dead in the winter in Picardy.)

  Before we reached the gates, I stopped at the well.

  We were fortunate that it hadn’t snowed during the night. I dismounted and left Albert to hold my horse. Harsigny remained on his steed and walked along beside me. “Wolf?” he asked quietly.

  “I can’t imagine how,” I admitted. A crowd had followed us through the town, forcing us to speak in hushed tones.

  “I agree,” he said. “Perhaps were it a child…”

  I crouched down near the well. A lone bucket rested on its side, next to an area of kicked up snow.

  “There,” Harsigny said, pointing. “The imprint of a head.” I saw no such imprint. “You are too close to the ground to see it, Serge.”

  I went to the area he described and brushed back the kicked-up snow to find a fresh bloodstain, frozen and glistening.

  I looked in the direction of the gates. There was no trail, or rather, not the right kind of trail.

  “She wasn’t dragged, Lance,” I said quietly. “She was carried.”

  “Impossible. You saw the wound. No man did that.”

  “I agree. But no animal walks on hind legs and carries a twelve-stone body in his arms either.”

  “Few men could do so,” he pointed out.

  “True. Come, let’s see where they found her.”

  * * *

  The spot was barely thirty steps from the gate. The snow still held the shape of the woman’s body. It appeared she’d been summarily dropped and then abandoned. Unfortunately, any tracks that might have been useful within the area had been trampled over when the villagers first found her. Still, I walked a wide circle looking for something to help resolve the scene.

  I stopped when I reached a particularly deep set of prints. They were driven into the permafrost, nearly deeper even than Harsigny’s armored horse, and at an angle that pointed toward the wall. It was, I reflected, the same angle one might see if one stood atop the wall and fired an arrow directly into the ground.

  It was quite obviously impossible, but it looked as if someone had leapt from the wall.

  Harsigny rode up to me. “I’m of a mind to declare this the act of a wild animal,” he said. “We could arrange a hunting party, catch a wolf or two and be done with it.”

  “Aye,” I agreed. “That would settle things down. Until it kills again.”

  He looked at me appraisingly with his one good eye. “Yes, that would complicate matters. What are you thinking?”

  “I am thinking that in order to determine what really happened to our leather smith’s wife, we need to ask the person who witnessed it.”

  “You think there was a witness?”

  “The body was left here, no? It wasn’t eaten, or buried, or burned, or taken to the woods. It was just dropped. Whoever killed her and moved her to here was interrupted.”

  “We must find this person!”

  I nodded. “Let me conduct my own inquiry. Quietly, when not followed by half the village. It would be for the best.”

  * * *

  Lord Harsigny was preeminently a man of his age. He did not deal well with deception, intrigue, or skullduggery in general. Any such deceit was, above all, a sin, and it was the duty of nobility to set an example for the peasantry by not engaging in it. (His church, meanwhile, had built a hierarchical structure that—at that time—depended a great deal on deception, intrigue and skullduggery, but I was never one to identify hypocrisy when doing so might get me killed.) Thus, I knew he would want nothing to do with my “investigation,” which required that I go about the town disguised.

  I had two reasons for this. One, it’s hard to get anything done properly with a small crowd following you around, as always seemed to happen when I, or anyone else who resided in the castle, ventured out. Two, no crowd would fully appreciate the manner of person I expected to find.

  Not to say that I was putting on a putty nose or any such thing, but I did trade in my furs for less expensive clothes: old boots, a grimy pair of pants, a torn shirt, and a hooded cloak on loan from a stable hand.
Fully attired, and with the cloak secured, I looked more or less like everyone else in the town.

  I waited until late in the day before leaving the castle proper and slipping out through the stables. Not surprisingly, there were few people about. The idea that there was a wolf out there that dared venture past the gates and was strong enough to drag an adult woman from the well had more or less guaranteed I’d be walking the alleys alone. Also, it was terribly cold, much colder than in the morning, although my lack of proper clothing may have contributed to that particular opinion. I had to keep the hood closed up tight to protect my face from frostbite, and since the cloak stank of turnips, this was not entirely pleasant.

  I reached the wall near sunset. My area of concern was on the town side of the wall. The snow there was almost perfectly virginal, which helped a great deal.

  At just about the same point on the wall where the heavy impression outside the gates had been made, I found a matching set. These were not nearly as deep and the angle was fairly straight but the evidence was clear, provided one’s world view allowed for such a thing. Somebody had stood in that spot and jumped to the top of the wall.

  I knew of a few beings that could have made that jump—and the complementary one on the other side—and most of them preferred to come out only at night.

  Working from the embedded prints, I was able to locate the trail that led up to them. They were made by someone who was running. Someone with small feet. Small, unshod feet.

  I followed the path backward. It snaked through the untrammeled part of town behind the huts and beyond the main thoroughfares, making it easier to locate, but a frustratingly drawn-out process nonetheless. And with the sun failing and snow on the horizon, I was worried I’d soon lose the trail.

  Abruptly, it came to a stop. I’d walked more than halfway back to the castle—albeit a roundabout way—and found the tracks ended at a heavy imprint similar to the one outside the wall. She—or he, although I was convinced I was dealing with a she just based on foot size—had jumped to that point from somewhere.

  The best guess was a small enclosed barn thirty paces away. It was a bit taller than most of the buildings around it, so it probably had a loft of some sort, and possibly even a trap that led from the loft to the roof. Theoretically, my prey could have simply used the barn rooftop as a launching point after jumping from another rooftop, but these were not the finest of structures. Traveling roof-to-roof would more often result in one crashing through thatch and into someone’s living room. (Okay, they were one-room hovels, but you get my point.)

  I walked around the barn once and found no footprints leading to or away from it outside of my own, so it hadn’t been in use since at least the last snowfall about a week ago. Horses need to be tended to daily, thus, no horses. Then whose barn was it, and what did they use it for?

  I creaked open the door, and with a whiff of the inside air, I had my question answered. It was a tannery. Albert’s tannery, presumably, as he was the only tanner in town. I slipped in and shut the door behind me.

  It was perfectly dark inside. And I’d stupidly neglected to bring a lantern with me.

  Nobody born in or around the twentieth century can fully appreciate how absolutely paralyzing nighttime was before the invention of the light switch. If we wanted to see after sunset we risked death by fire or asphyxiation. If we didn’t want to see, we risked banging our shins on something made of stone or getting eaten, neither of which was good. Hence, we mainly just got a lot of sleep. I was somewhat worried about the getting eaten problem, especially if I was right about what was sharing the barn with me.

  I slipped a tinderbox from my pocket and felt around for a lantern. Luckily—perhaps in anticipation of the light switch—Albert had one hanging by the door.

  I put down the lantern and kneeled beside it, trying to spark a flame.

  “What are you doing?” whispered someone from above. “Are you mad? Can’t you smell what’s in here?”

  I stood up unsteadily, for fear that I was about to get pounced upon. “I know it smells awful…”

  “And it can burn.”

  The voice was coming from the loft. It was a woman’s voice, soft and melodic with the accent of a peasant, which certainly fit the surroundings.

  “Then why is the lantern here?” A fair question, I thought.

  “Albert and Louisa are not stumbling fools. They light it outside in the moonlight and then close it before entering.”

  “And you?”

  “I do not need it. I can see fine.”

  “I imagine you can.”

  She fell silent, which was bad because it meant I couldn’t tell where she was any more.

  “Are you here to kill me?” This time her voice came from the ground, to my left. She’d moved closer and I hadn’t heard a thing. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a voice reminding me how incredibly foolish it was to corner a vampire.

  “You already know I’m not.”

  “No,” she agreed. Now she was behind me. I wanted to turn around, but I also really didn’t. “Turnips,” she said.

  “It’s borrowed. I’m usually a much better dresser.”

  I felt her step closer to me and tried very hard to remain calm and keep my heart rate down, especially after she pulled back my hood and began smelling my neck. “You know something about what I am?” she purred.

  “I know a great deal about what you are.”

  “And you are afraid. I hear it in your heart.”

  Damn that heart. “I’ve been better,” I admitted. Yes, I know I said vampires don’t frighten me. So, sometimes they do.

  “You tracked me from the wall.”

  “Yes.”

  She licked my neck. I didn’t know whether to be mortally terrified or incredibly turned on. I opted for both.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “A woman was killed.”

  Her finger traced my earlobe. Wow.

  “And you think I may have been responsible, yes?”

  “No. I think you saw what was responsible. You were on the rooftop when she was attacked at the well, I imagine. I think you ran from here to the wall and… interfered with it.”

  She stepped away from me and I exhaled.

  “This is true,” she admitted. “Her name was Louisa. You should use her name, Master Turnip. She was kind to me.”

  Haltingly, I turned around and pushed open the door, admitting some moonlight. She remained in the shadows just beyond the doorway. “Did you kill the thing that took her?” I asked.

  “I fought it. But it soon realized I was no easy prey, and fled. I would have followed but… it was barely sunset. It ran west. You see?”

  I understood. In the winter the sun tended to dip below a rise at the edge of our little hill at sundown. She daren’t have risked following it over that rise.

  “The people in this village call me Lord Venice,” I said, extending my hand. “Or Serge.”

  She extended hers. I bowed formally and kissed her hand. Even vampires appreciate a little class.

  “I am Eloise, milord Venice,” she said, with a light curtsey. “The villagers have no name for me.”

  She stepped into the light.

  Eloise was dressed in rags, her pale flesh exposed in many places, although not in any really fun places. Her feet were bare—as I’d expected—but clean. Her unkempt black hair cascaded down her back, extending as far as her waist. And her large black eyes were mystifying. She was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, which is saying something.

  “Tell me, Eloise,” I rasped, my throat suddenly quite dry, “what was it? What was the thing you saw?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It walked like a man, but… I have never seen anything like it before.”

  “Perhaps I have,” I said.

  “You know much of the world, don’t you, Master Serge?”

  “More than you can imagine.”

  “I can imagine a great deal.”

  I
smiled. “I’m sure you can. Now, I’m going to need a favor from you, Mademoiselle Eloise.”

  “Are you?” She smiled back, all mischief and melody.

  “Yes. I am afraid that thing will come back again. I need you to help me hunt it down and kill it before that happens.”

  * * *

  The following day brought snow to our little Picardy hilltop, forcing most of the locals inside to huddle beside the fire and do whatever it was we all did before network television. (I myself tended to do a great deal of reading, but the illiterate majority? No idea.) I was busy for much of the day in the armory, preparing myself for the hunt.

  “I should go with you,” Lance said for the umpteenth time as he watched me run through the process of loading a crossbow with one hand. This was not easy, just in case you’re curious. Twice I nearly ended up with a bolt through my lower thigh.

  “I’ll be fine,” I insisted.

  He grabbed the weapon from me. “Rest the butt against your hip, damn you. Like this.” He illustrated his point. “You see?”

  “How about if I just load it with two hands?”

  “On horseback? You plan to rein your horse with your teeth?”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  “I should go.”

  I sighed. “Do you trust me, milord?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then believe me when I tell you this. I need to hunt this thing without you. It’s not that I question your valor or your skill. But I am protecting you. There are some things in this world that man is not meant to see.”

  What I didn’t say was that I was far more concerned with what was joining me on the hunt than what it was we were hunting. Historically, people don’t much care for vampires.