The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  ‘So where are you?’

  Winter hesitated. For a second he saw the kiosk and Gately’s apartment as two points on a vast copper-wire web, quivering through the city. A web of cable that infiltrated bricks and stitched itself between buildings. A tremor on a single, humming strand would alert the spider at its heart.

  Time to end this conversation.

  ‘Thank you, Bernard.’ Winter replaced the phone on the cradle. A coin clattered into the refund tray beneath the dial.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ asked Alessandra as he stepped from the kiosk.

  ‘I don’t know. But you had an awful lot of chaperones at the hotel tonight. Three of them, at least. That’s either overkill or an ambush.’

  ‘You think they were expecting you?’

  ‘Not sure. If it was an ambush then we’ve been compromised from the beginning. Maybe before I even got to Budapest.’

  Winter lit a Woodbine and exhaled. Tonight was a mess.

  * * *

  They left Pest and crossed Liberty Bridge to the Buda Hills. The city was quiet at this hour but the dark slopes of the western bank had a deeper silence. Gellért Hill lay ahead of them, a bluff crag of dolomite rock that reared over the Danube, crowned with dense vegetation. Winter spotted turrets beneath the wild bushes. It seemed to be some kind of castle or hillside fortress.

  Alessandra led the way along the embankment road. They moved quickly and hugged the roadside shadows as the river smacked its concrete banks behind them. The occasional passing car found them in its headlights but they kept walking, their faces turned from the road. Eventually they crossed into an unlit side street that clung beneath the hill.

  A prefabricated cabin stood against the base of the rock, electric light bleeding through its sides. Some kind of workman’s refuge, Winter guessed, given a concrete mixer was parked a little way down the road. There was a thick padlocked chain slung across the door.

  Alessandra reached for the opal locket at her throat and neatly prised it apart. A small silver key spilled into her palm. She inserted the key into the lock and turned it, catching the weight of the falling chain in her other hand.

  The door opened, and a waiting man acknowledged their arrival with a curt nod. He was dressed in drab, earth-spattered overalls and his lean, cautious features were sharpened by the bare bulb that hung from the cabin’s ceiling.

  ‘János,’ said Alessandra, greeting him just as briskly in return. ‘This is Tobias.’

  ‘Not my name,’ insisted Winter under his breath. He was frankly tired of pointing this out.

  She turned to him, her expression suddenly cold. ‘Listen to me. This is going to be hard enough as it is but these people are here to meet Tobias Hart. That’s who you are tonight. Otherwise they’ll kill you. Do you understand?’

  János looked between them, his eyes suspicious. ‘This is the man you said you would bring?’ He had switched the conversation to Hungarian but Winter had a working knowledge of the language.

  Alessandra nodded. ‘He has a cover. He’s being cautious.’

  János said something else then, but Winter struggled to make sense of it. It was a phrase in Hungarian he had never heard before. A nonsense phrase. It sounded like ‘the king of tiny wings is waiting…’

  Keeping Winter in his eyeline, János took a torch from the table tucked inside the cabin’s entrance. Motioning them forward, he drew back a heavy sheet of tarpaulin, exposing a broad black fissure in the rock.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, speaking English now.

  They stepped through the crack, feeling the air cool as they entered a limestone tunnel. János’s torchlight bobbed ahead of them, illuminating gnarled rock walls sweating with moisture. A footworn path led them deeper into what was obviously a natural cave system. Winter remembered that the hills of Buda were riddled with hollows, some of which reached as far as the city’s cellars. He watched as insects chased the torch’s glow.

  The route was long and mazy. At points the trail made them edge past jagged outcrops of rock. At other times they bent nearly double to squeeze under low limestone overhangs. The only sound was their breathing and the intermittent ping of water. Winter sensed they were walking through the heart of the hill itself.

  His eye was caught by something as they followed the path. A succession of crude white crosses, chalked on the rock walls. And there was a word, too, also etched in chalk, the letters streaking as the limestone wept. Megváltás. It took him a moment to place it. Salvation. Winter wondered if it was an act of worship or a plea for protection.

  Presently the tunnel broadened, giving way to a crudely furnished anteroom. Lights were strung from wooden beams, lashed to a generator. A haze of moths hovered around the dim bulbs, their wings magnified by the shadows.

  ‘Alessandra. At last.’

  A woman was waiting for them. She was in her fifties, short and sturdily built, dressed in a rollneck sweater and jeans. Her hair was dotted with grey and a stubby cigarette hung from her mouth. She had worn, determined features, the kind that had been earned by conflict.

  Alessandra turned to Winter. ‘This is Judit Majoras. She’s in command here.’

  ‘Command?’ he asked. ‘Is this a military operation?’

  The woman appraised him, as wary as János. And then she removed her cigarette and offered a firm, dry handshake.

  ‘Mr Hart. I’ve led the Hungarian resistance for over twenty years. It may not be a military operation as the British judge it, but then who could ever live up to your nation’s glorious standards?’

  ‘Well, I hate to break it to you but I hear the war’s over.’

  Majoras didn’t smile. ‘Enemies change. Ideologies change. Resistance is what endures. We resisted Szálasi and the national socialists. Now we resist the communists. It’s what our country demands of us. You British need to go back a long way to know what occupation feels like in your soul.’

  ‘I’m not here for a revolution. I was sent to get this woman to the West.’

  ‘Your priorities are changing. Get used to it.’

  Majoras picked a tattered manila folder from a desk and handed it to Winter. ‘Take a look at this. I imagine it’ll be familiar.’

  Winter opened the file and flicked through a sheaf of documents. It was a blur of Hungarian, endless tightly typed pages, many of them stamped in assorted shades of governmental ink. Then he found the photographs, black-and-white glossies slid between the sheets of A4.

  ‘My God.’

  He had seen autopsy pictures before. They were always hard to take, however detached you tried to be. These were worse than most. The starkly lit bodies were closer to skeletons than corpses, the flesh crumbling like fruit to reveal bone and sinew. The limbs were oddly elongated, the long, spindling fingers reaching almost to the knees.

  There was something else. Each body had a hole smashed in its ribcage. Their hearts had gone.

  ‘What am I looking at? Are these post-mortem reports?’

  ‘You know what they are,’ said Majoras, impatiently. ‘You collaborated with the Russians during the war. You were part of Operation Paragon, the Allied mission that recovered the body of Prince Bernhard from Kriegstein Castle.’

  Winter frowned, genuinely puzzled. ‘Prince Bernhard?’

  ‘You’re looking at him,’ said Alessandra, indicating the top photograph. ‘He’s not quite the catch he was in the eighteenth century.’

  Winter stared at the image, uneased by the eyes. They had the familiar agonised blankness of all corpses. Somehow photochemical film seemed to preserve the moment a soul was torn from a body. You saw it in battlefield shots, the ones they kept out of the papers.

  ‘What’s happened to his heart?’

  ‘Oh, the undead rarely remain intact,’ said Majoras, dryly. ‘God knows the research would be so much easier if they were. But you know this. Your part in the war is a matter of record. Special Operations Executive officer Tobias Hart. Twice decorated for gallantry. But never quite a hero. I b
elieve they tried to burn your file shortly after VE Day.’

  Winter continued to examine the photographs. These weren’t post-mortems. They were lab reports. Someone had taken a scalpel to these cadavers in the name of science. Had he really been part of it, twenty years ago? Once again he had a sense of being taunted by another man’s life, just beyond the reach of his memory.

  Shattered ribs. Stolen hearts. In that moment he could hear the low, rhythmic pulse of the package he had collected from that locker in St Pancras.

  He turned to the next picture. It was a flimsy dental X-ray, the skull frozen in monochrome, faintly spectral. Winter studied the mouth. The canines were long and pronounced, curling like tusks from the gums. They swept down, scraping the lower jaw. He had an inkling of what these bodies were now.

  ‘The undead? Are you telling me these are vampires? That these things also exist?’

  Majoras exhaled, her patience gone. ‘Enough,’ she declared, crushing her half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray. ‘I need your knowledge, not this performance.’

  Winter looked to Alessandra. ‘You should have warned her. I can’t be expected to remember any of this.’

  Alessandra gave a pained look to Majoras. ‘He says he’s suffered extreme trauma. His memory is lost. I don’t think he can help us.’

  ‘No one forgets what this warlock bastard has been through.’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Winter, ‘I can’t give you what you need. I have nothing to do with these corpses. Now let me do what I’ve been hired for. Let me bring this woman to the West.’

  Majoras listened to his words, the lines around her mouth deepening with disdain.

  ‘Perhaps your memory will improve once you meet our honoured guest.’

  She led them to a roughly tooled door at the far end of the chamber. There was a thick key in the lock and it turned with a scrape of rusted iron. Majoras waited for Winter to walk through, watching his expression change as he saw what the door had been hiding.

  7

  They were in a church. A church of living rock.

  Candles filled the hollows in the limestone walls, casting a milky, quivering light across the makeshift nave. Other recesses held sacred ornaments, hardwood saints and a pale alabaster Madonna. There were even stained-glass windows knocked into the rock itself, the moon gleaming through the faces of Jesus.

  The cave reared over this strange little chapel, its dank, pitted walls dwarfing the statue of Christ’s crucifixion that hung above the altar. There was a hush and a stillness here. The banks of limestone felt porous with history.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked Winter.

  ‘Saint István’s Cave,’ said Alessandra, matter-of-factly, as candlelight shuddered around them. ‘The home of a hermit saint. The monks of the Pauline order consecrated it in the twenties.’

  Majoras nodded. ‘When the communists took our country they raided this church. The brothers were arrested, the entrance to the cave sealed with concrete. The monastery’s superior was condemned to death by the State Protection Authority. 1951, would you believe. Even this half of the century gives us Christian martyrs. Perhaps one day he’ll get to be a saint too. I’m sure that’ll be a considerable comfort.’

  ‘I take it you’re not a religious woman,’ Winter observed.

  ‘The war burned my faith from me, Mr Hart. But this place is useful.’

  Winter felt a sudden disturbance in the stillness of the cave. Something swept past him, close enough to skim his skin. An agitation of tiny dusk-grey wings, moving as one. It was a rush of moths, chasing into the church from the tunnel. They settled on the statue of Jesus.

  ‘Oszkár,’ called Majoras, her voice breaking the calm of the chapel. ‘I’ve brought someone to meet you.’

  The shadow of the crucifix fell on a high-backed wooden chair, set directly in front of the altar. As Winter stepped deeper into the cavern he saw that there was a figure in the chair, sat with its back to him. A man, completely motionless. He had a military-issue haircut, the sides sheared close to the skull, and there was a threadbare bandage looped around his head, stained with old, dark blood.

  A length of plastic connected the man to a pouch of liquid mounted on a trolley. The fluid was a watery red in the candlelight. It seeped its way through the tube, slowing and stopping then starting again, as if the man were sipping it into his system.

  Winter walked around the chair, his steps measured and cautious. The figure was wearing a grimy blue uniform, the jacket buttoned to the throat. There was a red-and-white armband on the left sleeve. It bore the pointed insignia of the Arrow Cross Party, Hungary’s very own Nazis. A militia man. A soldier.

  The other sleeve had been rolled to the elbow. The tube punctured the forearm, delivering the thin red liquid directly to the veins.

  The man’s hands were strapped to the chair, his wrists bound with barbed wire. Winter was intrigued to see garlands of holly threaded between the coils of metal, the leaves intertwining with the twists. The hands themselves were chalky and covered in cracks. There was some kind of break in the flesh on the right hand, just below the knuckles, as if the skin there had simply crumbled. It looked like the shattered hand of a porcelain doll.

  The surgical bandage twisted around the man’s face, leaving him blind. A matching pair of small gold crucifixes had been stitched into the cloth, one upon each eye. Below the bandage part of the face had also collapsed, leaving the left cheek a sunken hole. If the man was even breathing it was impossible to tell.

  Winter was almost convinced he was looking at a cadaver, just like the ones in the photos. But then the right hand rose and began to tap the arm of the chair.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  The finger repeatedly struck the wood. At first the taps seemed random, disjointed. And then the nail found a rhythm and followed it.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  ‘Do you not recognise your own heartbeat? The soft drumming of your mortality?’

  The tapping had synchronised with the thud of Winter’s heart.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  The man in the chair smiled beneath the bandage. ‘You have some splendidly rare antigens in your blood, whoever you are. But you’ve gone and spoiled them, haven’t you?’

  The upper lip drew back, trembling. There was a glimpse of broken teeth.

  ‘Yes, you’ve allowed contamination. There’s another presence in your blood. A darkness. A toxicity. What were you thinking?’

  If the words unnerved him Winter was determined not to show it. ‘You sound quite the connoisseur, Oszkár.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just a humble expert, I assure you.’ The man in the chair laughed and it sounded like cloth tearing.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  Only the chair cast a shadow.

  Alessandra came and stood next to Winter. Sensing her presence, the captive tilted his head, the crucifixes stamped to his eyes glinting in the candlelight.

  ‘Oh, but of course. This explains it. A succubus. A daughter of Lilith, the first, forgotten wife. What a damned bloodline you demons have, and so freely shared with the living.’

  The bandaged gaze stayed upon her. It felt as though the buried eyes were boring through the gauze and the crosses.

  ‘Tell me, does it still hurt that your mother was cast out of Eden for not knowing her place as Adam’s vassal? Eve proved to be far more obliging.’

  Alessandra took the taunt with a smile. ‘I imagine you must have a mother, Oszkár. But like you she must have been dug up.’

  Again there was the parched laugh. The fluid shifted in the tube, drawn into the veins.

  ‘Who is this man?’ asked Winter, turning to Majoras.

  ‘This little snot is Oszkár Várkonyi. An officer of the Arrow Cross. A fascist and a revenant. I can never quite decide which is worse. We found him in the great siege of 1944, gone to ground in the eastern suburbs, drinking the blood of Budapest’s wounded.’

  ‘I could hardly drink the blood of the dead,�
�� hissed Várkonyi. ‘Please, grant me some standards.’

  Impassively, Majoras reached for the tube and squeezed it in her fist. The plastic bulged as the flow of liquid was staunched. Várkonyi spluttered, his hands flexing beneath the straps that bound him.

  ‘This is all you have, you graveyard vermin. And if I choose, you don’t even have that.’

  Winter indicated the bag of fluid. ‘What is that stuff? Blood?’

  ‘It’s a synthetic substitute, close enough to keep him… well, hardly alive, given the bastard’s undead, but enough to ensure that his body remains functioning. It’s a weak proxy, though, not one of the high-grade surrogates. You can see the effect it’s had on his body. The breakages in the skin where the tissue’s deteriorated. It’s really a fascinating case study.’

  ‘Be kind…’ Várkonyi was pleading with her now, his voice rising, unnervingly childlike. ‘Please. I’m sorry. Let me taste the sweetness again.’

  Majoras made a play of considering the request. Finally she released her grip on the tube. Várkonyi sighed in relief as the liquid trickled its way back into him.

  ‘They depend on blood for so much of their power. It’s more than a biological thirst, it seems. At their full might these creatures can summon a pestilence. Rats, crows, bats, even wolves. Deprived of blood the best this filth can manage is moths. Proud of your little army, aren’t you, Oszkár?’

  Winter glanced at the statue of Christ. The fuzz of insects covered the cross, their wings flittering anxiously. ‘Why are you keeping this man here? Some kind of specimen for your research, I take it?’

  Majoras shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t dignify him with a scalpel. We keep him here to prevent others from learning what they can. Even in 1944 the Russians were hunting for his kind. A body dragged from the grave is one thing, but to have one of these beasts sat breathing in front of you… well, it’s a gift, isn’t it?’

  There was a fundamental cruelty to this setup that bothered Winter. ‘My God. He’s been your prisoner for over twenty years.’

  ‘We had to keep moving him through churches in the city, drag him onto holy ground. It burns what soul remains inside him, keeps him weak and in pain. When the communists sealed this cave it gave us the perfect place to hide him, away from their eyes. But yes, it’s a commitment. Resistance is commitment.’