Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I could not imagine Nell moving down here without shrieking her lungs out, but then realized I should be very glad to hear her shrieking, as it would mean she was alive and we had found her.

  The notion that our quest might soon be over made my fingers itch for pen and paper, but it was better that I carried the cane. I held it before me at a diagonal, so its top or bottom should warn me of any impediment in the dark.

  At last the passage widened into what could be termed a room.

  We all stopped and let Quentin take a soft-footed tour of the space, sweeping his lantern high and low to illuminate the details of the space.

  Of course there came the chilling screech of tiny nails over the stone and earthen floor. The light caught the flash of pointed snake tails whipping out of sight…not snakes, but the furless extremities of rats.

  The lantern also passed over a surprisingly familiar form: a simple wooden table.

  The table proclaimed human occupancy, and that was a more chilling sight than the retreat of a legion of rats.

  Quentin quickly shuttered his lantern until only an illuminating sliver remained. Its thin thread of light drew swiftly but silently near us.

  “It’s best I scout ahead,” he whispered. “We don’t know who, or how many, may be down here. You say the tunnels are extensive, Irene?”

  She nodded, her face barely visible in the faint light.

  “We’ll be left in the dark,” Bram objected in a careful whisper.

  “I have lucifers,” Irene replied, “but I’d rather Quentin came back safe and sound with the lantern. Go ahead, but be back in five minutes, or we will have to raise a clatter looking for you.”

  He nodded and moved away in uncanny silence, the crescent of light soon dying.

  “How will we know when five minutes have passed?” I asked my unseen cohorts in a discreet whisper.

  “More’s the point, how will Stanhope know?” Bram whispered in turn.

  “He is used to estimating time without consulting a watch, as am I. In fact, I need only think myself through the first aria from Cinderella and I will keep perfect time.”

  We all fell silent then, listening for the slithering return of the rats. It was all very well for Irene to make time with voiceless arias, and I suppose Bram Stoker’s stage sense might help him pass the long minutes, but I had nothing except my imagination to occupy me, and it was far too excellent a one to let loose for too long in the dark.

  After more like fifteen minutes than five, of a sudden I heard a scrape right beside me.

  I edged away just as the lantern shutter opened not a foot from my face.

  “It’s quite all right,” Quentin said quickly, still whispering. “The place seems deserted now.”

  “Now?” Irene said just as quickly.

  He nodded and I noticed that his usual genial expression had been completely erased by the lantern’s harsh light, or by something else. What had replaced it was an expression of tense excitement.

  “These subterranean tunnels,” he went on, opening the lantern shutter wide enough to create a path for the rest of us to follow, “have been King Rat’s kingdom for decades, but His Majesty has had some human competition just lately. It could be from your last expedition in the caverns, Irene.”

  “We didn’t leave much trace,” she said, watching the edge of the lantern light for any of King Rat’s returning subjects.

  “But surely your adventure in the place alerted others to its presence,” he went on.

  “Not very many, only the villains of the piece, who numbered two, with a handful of henchmen who were later captured and imprisoned in Prague Castle, which has dungeons deeper than a hundred years, and the victim.”

  “What would keep the victim silent?”

  “The ignominy of being a victim,” she said shortly, clearly unwilling to give specifics.

  “I had played a bit part at the end of that act,” Quentin said, “but I quite understand your need to keep the full denouement secret. I am often in the same position.”

  “Am I,” Bram Stoker asked, “going to be defrauded of another ripping good story? I can’t just make everything up, you know. True stories are a great inspiration to the fiction writer.”

  “Don’t worry,” Quentin reassured him. “The scene ahead would inspire a Verne or a Poe.”

  “Or a penny dreadful?” I asked. When silence greeted my question, I explained, “That’s what we call sensational fiction in the States, because it can be bought for a penny and really is rather dreadful.”

  “Imagine what poor pay the writers get,” Bram put in. “I can’t say that my scribblings have earned much more than that.”

  “Be grateful that you have such a solid position with Henry Irving and the Lyceum,” Irene advised.

  “I suppose so, but it’s not as solid as one might think,” Bram grumbled. “Adherents of Irving are always coming around trying to worm their way into his regard, and employ.”

  “Then perhaps you will have a future as a private inquiry agent,” Irene answered. “If you like the work.”

  At that moment the narrow walls ceased to contain Quentin’s lantern light, and it spilled out full width into the large chamber we entered through a natural stone archway wide enough for us four to stand abreast.

  And so we stood, and gaped, our senses assaulted by a vast space that had recently entertained far more than rats.

  Scents of wine and urine and something else both sweet and sour or sweet and rotten, I should say, overwhelmed our nostrils.

  Our eyes fell upon dozens of candle stumps lying hither and yon in pools of hardened wax where they had been cast, their flames allowed to drown in their own melted forms.

  Bottles also strewed the floor, a few tall and glass-green as would hold wine, most squat and pale, crude crockery bottles of an unknown source and containing an unknown spirit.

  In the chamber’s center charred logs resembled the ruins of a miniature cathedral. Other, unburnt logs lay around the edge of the roughly circular space, almost like seats for an arena. A pile of the same logs was heaped a few feet away from the remains of the fire.

  All in all, one imagined a crowd of people gathered around the fierce and immense flames that had charred such mighty logs to blackened splinters. One saw smoke rising and filling the room with its murky fumes before choking the several tunnels that led away from this chamber.

  “It looks like they spilled more wine than they drank,” Bram said as he moved behind Quentin over the uneven ground. “Look at all the drops sprayed on the stone, the ground, the logs.”

  Irene had bent down to pick up one of the crude pottery bottles. She lofted the jar like some rare amphora from an ancient civilization.

  “There was red wine in those bottles, too?” Bram asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Irene wafted the narrow open mouth beneath her nose and sniffed delicately, as if it were a rare and costly Paris scent. “Red Tomahawk mentioned this on the exposition grounds in Paris. A ‘strong firewater’ he did not know. Quentin, have you ever seen or smelled the like?”

  He came over to grasp the empty bottle and inhale its vanished essence. “Something spiritous still soaks the pottery, yes. But I have been too long in the land of Islam, where alcoholic beverages are forbidden. It is beyond me.”

  “Bram?” Irene offered him the lowly pot.

  He, too, imbibed the odor, then shook his shaggy head. “I usually indulge in the local ales when I travel. This is stronger stuff.”

  “If only Sherlock Holmes were here,” Irene mused. Her thumbnail picked at the lip of the bottle and a bit of candle wax flaked off and fell on the floor.

  “Well,” said I in some umbrage. “Aren’t you going to let me in on this sniffing party?”

  Irene gazed upon me as if she had forgotten my presence. “Of course, Pink. The bouquet is all yours.”

  I took the clumsy thing in both gloved hands. Unlike the rest of them, I bet I had seen its like before, though not on th
is continent. I closed my eyes, tried to shut out the ugly reek of the wretched acts that had gone on in this cavern, and passed the opening under my nose, back and forth, sniffing. The remaining odor was faint, but stringent, raw.

  I finally threw my head back. “I don’t know what they call it in civilized places like Europe, but where I come from it’s called rotgut and moonshine and, to Red Tomahawk’s people, firewater. It’s homemade raw liquor, the kind that will never get a label for anything but making a man drunk fast and hard.”

  The other three just stared at me.

  “What would all these crude bottles of American spirits be doing here?” Bram finally asked.

  Irene took the bottle from my hands and gazed upon it. “Because, like myself, it is—and it isn’t—American, perhaps?”

  34.

  Dance for Your Supper

  My heart used to jump in my dancing days when Bram asked me for a waltz. I knew it meant triumph, twirling, ecstasy, elysium, giddiness, ices, and Hirtation!

  —A DANCING PARTNER OF BACHELOR BRAM STOKER, 1873

  Once again I was unsuccessful in discouraging the loutish servant from spilling more red wine into my goblet, but despite the scanty attendants the dinner continued to be almost worth the dreadful company.

  The chef himself appeared from the kitchen to serve the main dish, braised venison in brandy bechamel sauce, as he announced in French-accented English. He was the expected portly fellow, of late middle age, with an unfortunate sprinkle of dandruff in what was left of his dark hair, which made me nervous of the salt.

  Yet I must admit that I attacked the main course with a will. After the days of Gypsy stew it was heavenly, and I managed to devour it, in a ladylike manner, without my usual qualms for the poor deer sacrificed to our appetites. It is so hard to eat hearty when one is constantly thinking of the once-living source of the food.

  The salad featured roots and leaves I was entirely unfamiliar with, and I only picked at that, aware of how common herbal poisons are.

  The servant seated at our table did not trouble to use implements but caught both meat and vegetable up in his hands as if eating them in the field where they had been harvested.

  By now Godfrey’s fevered conversations with the old man were done, and he was forced to attend to Tatyana’s comments.

  Colonel Moran watched their conversational duet with unmistakable ire. Seeing Godfrey from a distance, especially looking past the peasant lump that sat two seats down from him, reacquainted me with his great physical attractions, as well as with the true nobility of his manner and expression.

  My heart sank. Not only would Colonel Moran but hate Godfrey the more for his very virtues, but they would make Tatyana covet him the more.

  There. I had named the greatest danger: Tatyana and her covetous infatuation with Godfrey, which I had first witnessed in Bohemia more than a year ago, but had been too thick to quite understand.

  I thought back to my recent conversation with Godfrey, when I glimpsed how evil can arise out of supposed good, how love can turn to hate, how one can come to despise and destroy the very thing one most craves because that is the only way to own it forever.

  Tatyana, I saw, desired to own Godfrey forever, perhaps because he was the one man least likely to be owned, least of all by her, unlike her fine French chef and her brutal servant and her Gypsy thugs and her half-tame heavy game hunter.

  And, I saw, the game of winning Godfrey, of controlling Godfrey by coercion, would soon lose its zest. Then her game would be to see that no one else on earth could aspire to know and love him. That meant Irene, first and foremost, but it also meant myself, to whom he was the dearest brother in the world and all I had left of the one parent I had ever known, my kind and gentle dead father.

  It struck my overwrought mind that the library table had stretched as long as a medieval banqueting table; that Tatyana and Godfrey and the strange old man were far figures in a crystal ball that looked equally to past and future.

  I had never felt so helpless, not since I had lost my position and housing and very soul in London years before. Then Irene Adler had noticed my plight. She had plucked me from the streets of the city and into the theatrical whirl of her endless optimism.

  Despite all this, I was just a dismissed Whiteley’s girl, a failed governess, an orphan, a fool who thought I had learned a thing or two of a world I did not much like in the past decade.

  Would that I were a daredevil girl reporter, that I were Irene or a Pinkerton and could pull a cocked pistol from my pocket, could overturn the table with a flick of my wrist, could do something, anything, to change the moment and its inevitable outcome.

  Somehow I found myself standing.

  A chair leg had caught in my trailing robes. My abrupt motion flung the heavy chair backwards. The sound of wood smashing to the stone floor still reverberated.

  Everyone, startled, stared at me: the chef, the colonel, the old man, the peasant, Godfrey, Tatyana. Even the Gypsies, whose bows were wavering into silence on their catgut strings. I myself seemed to be some vibrating string, frozen forever in making the wrong note. As usual.

  I have no idea what I would have said or done next, save that I was as incensed as I have ever been in my life. Then the wild screech of a single Gypsy violin echoed to the high stone ceiling like a animal in its death throes…like a woman screaming in a back alley in Whitechapel or Paris or the Old Town of Prague.

  How eerily a violin can evoke the human voice! This one ran up and down the scale of inhuman agony until other tortured chords joined it. Finally the tempo picked up, and the atonal racket of tattered vocal cords became a raucous, unfettered melody reeling around the huge room.

  Someone seized the fallen chair behind me and swept it away. I felt the tug on my train as a cat might a pull on its tail.

  Before I could turn to look, Colonel Moran was standing before me, his bare hand extended. “A dance,” he said, not asking, but ordering.

  I looked immediately to Godfrey, who had risen to my defense.

  The awful Tatyana was standing, too, making herself his dancing partner even as I was pulled into the room’s empty center by the spy once known as Tiger.

  It was a wild waltz we embarked upon. I had never done more than take a sedate turn around the schoolroom with my older girl charges.

  Now I was the center of a maelstrom, whirled in a constant eddy of music and motion by the naked hand of Colonel Sebastian Moran at the waist of my gown.

  Godfrey had not been given time to don his gloves after dining, like a gentleman, either. Tatyana’s hand rested in his bare palm, and he had no choice but to pilot her through the great galloping steps of a frantic waltz.

  At least Godfrey set the pace and direction in his enforced dance. I was swept to and fro, the room spinning around me like the panorama building I had been so anxious to see at the world exhibition in Paris and that also had been my swift undoing.

  Worse, my unbound hair slapped my face like both blindfold and whip. I remembered playing an inadvertent game of Blind Man’s Buff with Allegra’s Uncle Quentin a decade before and wished I were in his gentle hands here instead of the relentless grip of the Colonel, who was staring at me with bulging eyes, his teeth set in a fierce gated grin.

  All the while the only music was the grinding and wailing of the cursed violins and the dull chime of a few listless tambourines.

  I could see Tatyana playing a trick I had witnessed before, pulling the pins from her hair as she danced until it was as loose as a Gypsy girl’s. Like mine.

  Before I had been frightened. Now I was mortified. I glimpsed the old man and the dwarf sitting alone at the table as I was spun past again and again.

  This was worse than my captivity in the box, for then I had been drugged into submission. Here I was to be danced to death.

  The music stopped without warning.

  The Colonel released me as suddenly.

  I still swung, like a bell on a rope, and finally stopped, watch
ing the floor spin beneath my feet, afraid to look up and see the chamber rotating like a top seen from the inside out.

  I heard a pair of hands clapping.

  “Medved!” Tatyana cried. “Dance, Medved, dance! Play, fools, play!”

  Just as I heard shuffling footsteps approach, the violins leaped into bow-bending action again. I swear the bagpipes of Scotland are as melodious as a flute compared to Gypsy violins in a frenzy.

  Bare, hot hands seized my left hand and my waist. I jerked my head up, fighting the dizziness, glaring at the Colonel…and saw instead the inhuman hulk of a servant Tatyana had invited to swill among us like a hog.

  Bits of soup and meat dotted the front of his crude shirt. His dark and dirty brown hair was an uncombed tangle far worse than mine. I felt my gorge rising before he even jerked me left and then right in a bearlike pantomime of a waltz.

  The moment reminded me so much of the awful, seasick instants inside the nautical panorama, when the sweet thick scent and taste of chloroform masked my mouth and the demented killer James Kelly had come staggering toward me with his mad eyes gleaming with unholy light….

  This brute servant’s eyes held that selfsame mad gleam, as intent as two candle flames burning blue with intensity.

  At least he did not whirl me in tight, swooning circles as Tiger had. He stomped first left, then right, dragging me with him, his huge boots pinning my hem to the floor now and then and threatening to topple me over in a heap.

  I tried to slip out of his hot-handed grip, and it would loosen for a moment as he stared down at his booted feet as if they belonged to someone other.

  “Dance, Medved, dance!” Tatyana urged from some unseen distance.

  The violins rose higher and higher in some frantic Gypsy tune.

  The oaf suddenly put both hands at my waist and lumbered us around and around.

  Then he stopped, let me go, let me stagger backwards a few steps and leaped to capture me again. This time there was no semblance of a dance. He was grinning and nodding, lifting my hair from my neck, his greasy hands touching my unprotected skin, pushing the neckline of my gown down, fumbling at the front of my bodice as if I should accept it.