Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  She stood, placed the gun upon the table before her, and pulled a heavy black wool cloak from the chair behind her onto her shoulders.

  “I suppose, though, that you deserve the privilege of seeing Jack the Ripper at last, especially Miss Huxleigh, who has been flirting with the fiend for some time.”

  My mind reeled insanely through the possibilities. What Tatyana enjoyed calling “flirting” meant only that I had brushed shoulders with the actual killer and had never known it. Was it Kelly, secretly bound and hidden in the caverns below? Colonel Moran even? A man who had hunted heavy game was being outpaced by a world which was rapidly depleting the supply of such beasts. Had he descended to the mad stalking and butchery of helpless women? Was that why he was such a docile servant to Tatyana, rather than a colleague?

  Or…was the Ripper the least likely suspect? Bram Stoker, also a secret tool of this terrible woman because of the knowledge of his secrets she held. Or even…I had cherished this suspicion, rather illogically, but perhaps my instincts were better than I knew…had Sherlock Holmes jumped the tracks of the straight and narrow, his raging cocaine habit and lonely ways finally driving him to madly seek and kill the women whose intellects and bodies he spurned equally? Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing had made the matter plain, from what Irene and Pink said of his disgusting work, Psychopathia Sexualis: ordinary men often hid extraordinary obsessions and appetites that they could not control.

  There was no doubt that devils walked among us and perhaps more closely in my own footsteps than I knew.

  My last glance was at Godfrey. His expression was calm. There was no way anyone sane could suspect Godfrey of Ripper tendencies. I had one true ally, as I have always had, and we would stand shoulder to shoulder no matter what shocks and threats this night brought. As he had said to me earlier, so I swore silently back to him, “either both, or none,” but I added another phrase of my own, “or if only one, then you.” At least Irene was not here to risk herself, and I was free to risk myself.

  When Tatyana pulled the monk’s hood over her hair, I felt a chill of apprehension that such a warm garment was never meant to impart. There had been three identically cloaked figures watching from the sidelines during the Paris atrocities: Tatyana, Colonel Moran…and who else? The third of that sinister party couldn’t have been James Kelly, for he had spied me from the mob of insane worshipers and rushed forward. So who had it been? Did we have another mortal enemy among this lot whose identity we did not know?

  Or…cruelest of ironies, had it been Bram Stoker and had his innocent arrival here been only a ruse to lull us into revealing our escape plans? Such a notion was fiendish, but it was possible, especially if Mr. Stoker were Jack the Ripper.

  Steps ground the stones behind us. Colonel Moran returned attired in a cloak like Tatyana’s, still flourishing the lethal cane. That made two of the three watchers of that night present. With him came a dozen men as well as three women clad in white robes of rough cloth, with no hoods. They had the look of peasants rather than Gypsies and in age went from youth to middle age. The women wore garlands of flowers around their heads, reminding me of Ophelias fit for drowning. All of them, men and women, had fixed eyes with a glazed expression, as if they had been drugged as I had been, only not so effectively. From outside I could hear the violins and cries of men and dogs: a Gypsy campfire guarding the gate.

  This flock was to be our shepherds. I glanced at Godfrey and Mr. Holmes, but sensed no desperate attempt at escape brewing. Bram Stoker acted as confused as I, not quite believing that we were to retrace our steps into the bowels of the castle.

  As it was, our ears told us that we were pincered between two assembling mobs of people who had no reason to help us and may have had many private needs to prey on us, those below and those outside.

  Tatyana let her firearm vanish into the folds of her black cloak and came toward us. I saw the bright yellow blot of her abandoned book lying on the dark table like a square of sunshine cast through a window, save there was only dark pressing at the library’s many tall apertures. The smoke from the Gypsy fire outside slithered into the room, woody and choking. I wished I knew more of Midsummer’s Eve. It sounded a benign event, but so did All Saint’s Eve, and look what had been made of it!

  Silent, like lambs, we allowed ourselves to be herded below again.

  The white-robed ones had gathered torches from the hall and held them high, thus surrounding us with a crown of fire. We glided together down the halls and passages and a series of steps.

  I was struck suddenly by the scrape of our shoes on the stone…only ours, our party and Tatyana and the Colonel. The robed ones’ feet were silent. Barefoot.

  That one odd fact unnerved me more than anything. We were on the level above the noises that had first driven us back upstairs when suddenly Mr. Sherlock Holmes whimpered like an animal and went sprinting off into the dark, charging through the robed figures like a dark-coated wolf scattering sheep.

  “Tiger!” Tatyana ordered. “Fetch back that mute fool!”

  As the Colonel thundered off in pursuit, I glimpsed his face in the torchlight. It held an expression of unholy satisfaction. If Mr. Holmes had been a wolf among sheep, this man was a charging rhinoceros among wolves.

  I felt a qualm for our escaped member, no matter how cowardly his action. Perhaps he fooled himself that he could bring reinforcements if he escaped, yet he struck me as too enamored of his own powers to turn craven and run. Tatyana lifted and aimed her pistol. At me.

  “Gentlemen. If either of you does likewise, I shall shoot Miss Huxleigh in the head.”

  Bram and Godfrey said nothing, but I could feel their sturdy forms pressing against mine like shields. Such a gesture was well intentioned, but it forced my arms against my sides so that I would be much impeded should I wish to extract and use James Kelly’s long-bladed knife.

  I began to sense the roots of Irene’s annoyance with social chivalry.

  And I knew right where I would go with said knife if all was lost: the little robber girl would head straight for the Ice Queen so that Kay was free to rejoin his searching Gerda.

  I do believe that I could now do, in the right cause, what I had never imagined I could, but what Jack the Ripper had accomplished night after night in Whitechapel and beyond.

  We heard thumps and scuffling down the darkened corridor. In a moment the Colonel’s black-draped form propelled a cringing, gibbering man back into our midst, making the sad, seal-like sounds of the mute. If ever I had cherished a wish to see Sherlock Holmes humbled, playing this pathetic role was not the form I had desired.

  I assumed that he was exaggerating his submission to disarm his opponents, who still took him for a callow Gypsy not worth regarding as an opponent merely because he lacked the use of a sense most of us take for granted.

  Still, I could not be sure about him, even that he was not one of them. Only Godfrey and I were who we thought we were. He seemed to harbor a similar thought, for he glanced down at me just then and nodded slightly.

  By now the smoke from below was drifting upward, as were sounds of rioting and revelry. Odd how similar they are, cries of joy and cries of rage. Mobs are mobs whether threatening or celebrating. Or doing both at once.

  Now I knew how condemned prisoners felt being marched down the prison corridors to the execution yard where their deaths would inflame the onlookers.

  The end of our journey was only another flight of stairs away. Godfrey and Bram had peered down this last tunnel of darkness, but I had not.

  I set my jaw and kept an eye on the steps so ill-lit by the torches, now being rubbed by the slither of many bare feet as well as our booted ones. Of we three, Irene and Pink and me, only my path had always been set on this path. I would walk down it and meet my fate.

  47.

  Nameless Practices

  Case 17. Lustmurder

  The murderer, known as Jack the Ripper, has never been found. It is probable that he first cut the throats of his victim
s, then ripped open the abdomen and groped among the intestines. In some instances he cut off the genitals and carried them away; in others he only tore them to pieces and left them behind.

  —RICHARD VON KRAFFT-EBING, PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

  Halfway down the last set of steps our “honor guard” of white-robed figures pressed close until we found ourselves moving down a narrow passage that forced us to go in single file.

  It was strange, that insistent, mute shepherding, when from just below came the clamor of excited voices in tongues impossible to translate or even identify.

  We were herded onto a sort of balcony, almost like a minstrel’s gallery in a medieval hall. Our niche jutted out like the prow of a ship. Through its trio of Gothic windows bereft of glass we could see the cavern floor below. Because the cellar, or chapel, however vast, was upheld by low arches and thick pillars, its height even in the loftiest center was less than twenty feet. Our niche, clearly installed for the purpose of overlooking the area below, was only eight feet above the stony cavern floor. Nor was it designed for more than three or four watchers, so our party of four prisoners and two guards pushed against the bay of windows that formed both watching and listening post.

  The cloaked figures of Tatyana and Colonel Moran pushed through the crude single door to our perch, sealing us in.

  For the moment that fact did not disturb us. We were all held spellbound by the gathering below, by the multitude wearing white robes with rainbow-colored girdles, men and women, the women marked only by their long streaming hair and the wreaths of flowers in it.

  While such a gathering in a woodland could be mistaken for a village maypole assembly or even, to the imaginative, a fairy circle, here in this dark, stone-formed cavern of a chapel their presence seemed more sinister.

  I was startled to hear strains of music…Not Gypsy violins, as I had thought, but something mellower. I searched the scene of milling human tumult and finally found the music’s source: a man working an accordion like a servant pumping a bellows.

  I cannot think of a less sinister musical instrument than the good-natured, sweet-toned accordion. It is impossible to make one sound melancholy, in my opinion. Yet, deep within this mountain where solid stone stopped any sound and threw back faint echoes of itself, I found the accordion music resembling the slow, mournful cadence of a great church organ, perhaps one playing at a funeral.

  This solemn note was only slightly heard under the clamor of the agitated voices.

  I mainly heard the rough laughter of men as they gathered to smack the heads of their sealed pottery jugs against large logs that two or three men would hold upright. It sounded like a convocation of carpenters, but I saw the wax that closed the bottles flaking off, and as soon as the seal was gone, the great logs would be hauled to the cavern’s center where wood was forming into the great wheel of a bonfire-to-be.

  I spied a black robe moving among the white: the third figure from the sidelines at the cavern under the Paris exposition!

  Was this Jack the Ripper, if James Kelly was not?

  I watched closely as it bent and bowed to present the jugs for opening and then turned to pass them among the flock with a measured deliberation that reminded me of a priest administering communion. He was tallish, and his deep hood often hid his features, but he did not seem loath to let the people recognize him. Many did, nodding with respect as he passed among them. Respect!

  I watched with disrespect, glimpsing a sharp aquiline nose, a gaunt cheek, the brush of heavy eyebrows shadowing sunken eye sockets, thin but weather-roughened red lips, and quite white, strong teeth. Except for the teeth it was the face of age, and every feature was vaguely familiar to me, but not as a whole.

  At last the figure finished distributing the jars of liquor and paused to throw back his head and take a long swallow himself.

  The hood ebbed halfway down his skull. I saw the thick white hair that thinned toward his face, the pallor of age intensified by the black clothing. It was Count Lupescu! In village circles the man known as the local priest.

  This made a certain demented sense, if one could imagine a regularly ordained minister participating in such a pagan travesty of Christian observance. This man, whatever his true name and role, had a head like a great bird of prey, taut and alert, as I had seen in engravings of Spanish Inquisition churchmen, or paintings of religious fanatics like the friar Savonarola. All Roman Catholics, I might add, since Church of England clergy do not tend to torture and burn in the performance of their duties. (The long-ago witchcraft trials do cause me a moment’s hesitation, but that was a worldwide phenomenon with which England was unfortunately tainted before good sense took the high ground again.)

  Apparently these peasant flocks are very easily led astray, though who can blame them when even their clergy succumbs to Satan?

  Even the garlanded women who had at first looked so charming and pure of heart were now gulping from the pottery jugs that passed to every hand.

  “I expected Gypsies,” I whispered to Godfrey, “and more of those maddening violins.”

  He nodded. “I as well. Apparently the Gypsies are useful for transportation but not much else.”

  “Do you recognize any of those tongues?”

  “They sound familiar for the region: German, Bohemian, Transylvanian. Dozens of dialects run amok in this remote portion of the world, Nell, where almost every village is its own little country.”

  As the pottery jars passed from hand to hand and mouth to mouth, so did lighted candles. A widening circle of the white-robed people began to dance and sing, but the others sat around them in circles, some on logs not yet assigned to the central pile. I began to suspect what was in the heavy boxes that had been carried here over the past weeks. I had imagined unconscious bodies like my own, but instead the freight was far less sinister: man-size logs for the fire.

  In one sense, the sight of this festival singing and dancing could have been charming, even inspiring. But the jars of liquor that made the rounds both among the spectators and the dancers added a note of frenzy that increased both sound and motion.

  I couldn’t help making a disgusted face as I recalled those fiery contents splashing into my own mouth and nostrils.

  Bram Stoker murmured as much to himself as to us, “It is a Midsummer Eve festival but why indoors like this? The solstice ritual celebrates nature. Why is this one held so far away from light and air?”

  “Because,” Tatyana’s voice came from behind us, transformed by a kind of triumphal joy, “you are privileged to observe one of the world’s most hidden spiritual traditions, quite literally an ‘underground’ sect that is extending its reach, centered as it is now around the leadership of a truly extraordinary figure of supernatural power.”

  “You do not strike me as one much interested in spiritual attainments,” I answered.

  “Always so correct, Miss Huxleigh, if not always right. I am ever intrigued by the delusions that drive mankind. Religion is the most powerful, I believe, and its power can be measured by how closely it treads toward evil, rather than what is generally assumed to be good.”

  “As I thought: devil worshipers.”

  “You thought wrong for once. Or is it only once? Perhaps after tonight you will reconsider the accuracy of your rectitude, Miss Huxleigh. No, these people are the Khlysty. You will notice the similarity to the word khristy, or Christs. This sect is Christian.”

  “No Christian I know imbibes raw liquors during services.”

  “No? What of the sacramental wine?”

  “Wine is not strong spirits.”

  “No, but it is considered the literal blood of your Lord.”

  “Only by the Church of Rome.”

  “The libation here takes its name from the word for water in my language, voda. What is more worthy for religious use than the water of life?”

  “The same phrase is ‘whiskey’ in my language,” Bram Stoker put in. “Which is Irish, of course, though none but the old speak it the
se days.”

  “Is it really?” Tatyana sounded enchanted. “The convolutions of English, or Irish, always amaze me. My voda was also made from rye grain, as your whiskey is. It was used as a disinfectant at first but even then the people used it for religious purposes. I am speaking of six hundred years ago. A ceremonial cup that held a gallon of it would be passed around, not these paltry clay bottles, and anyone who abstained was considered impious beyond saving,” she added with a malicious glance at me.

  “So drunkenness is the state religion in Russia,” I said.

  Colonel Moran laughed sharply at my comment, but before I could bask in support from an unlikely quarter, Tatyana moved far too close for my comfort.

  “Right again, Miss Huxleigh.” Her basilisk eyes stared into mine and through me. “For nearly four hundred years Imperial banquets have begun with bread and voda. Bread and water. Bread and what we and the world now call vodka. But most of it is samogon, a brew made by the people for their own use. Thus vodka is the drink of both czars and peasants.”

  “It should be the drink of sewers,” I said. “It tastes abominable.”

  “And when did you taste vodka?” she asked, bemused.

  “When your servant Medved poured some down my throat, but I was able to spit most of it out.”

  “Interesting.” She cocked her head like a bird who was hearing a worm say something astounding. “He was drunk of course. He almost always is; that’s why I find him so amusing.”

  “In civilized lands, we do not laugh at the inebriated.” This was not quite true. I understood that the music halls laughed a good deal at the drunkard’s expense, but I had never attended a music hall so could afford to take a superior position.