The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  The woman continued seamlessly. ‘They would separate the hearts from the bodies. A traditional defence against vampires but rarely one that lasts. And yet a single thorn of Golgotha, placed in an undead heart, would ensure that its owner would never rise again. Once this was done, the hearts were sealed in obsidian jars and placed far from the bones.’

  ‘It was a very effective form of pest control,’ added Fabienne, with a dark little smile.

  Winter began to make sense of the past few weeks. ‘So that’s what we were trading in London. A vampire’s heart. No wonder the bloody thing was still beating.’

  Fabienne nodded. ‘They are extremely sought after and there are many who are scouring Europe for them. But not every heart contains a thorn. Much of the time we are chasing rumour or superstition. The heart Jack Creadley was selling belonged to the Vicomte de Frontenac. A high-born vampire, yes, but not necessarily one who was worthy of a thorn of Christ. Still, we take an interest in every heart that appears on the market. We must pursue every possibility, however slim.’

  Winter gestured at the map, indicating the ragged shadow that hugged the French coastline. ‘And these gemstones mark the location of the true hearts? The ones that were originally buried with the thorns?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the Glorious, in harmony. ‘Once we finally possess a thorn of Golgotha we shall embed it in a bullet. A holy bullet, with a holy purpose. One that will remove a significant darkness from this world.’

  ‘That’s the contract you’re offering me?’ asked Winter, bluntly. ‘Find the thorn? Kill the man?’

  ‘What we’re offering you is one million pounds. In cash.’

  Winter considered the proposal. One million pounds. It was an insane sum, enough to ensure he would never find himself slumming with gutter life like Jack Creadley ever again. Never be scraping by on the fringes, sliding from one sordid, illicit job to the next. He could leave that shabby hole in Battersea, escape London, escape it all, before the desperation hardened into something unbreakable. One million pounds. It sounded like a chance at life.

  But there was another consideration, beyond the blood money. This contract would place him directly into the orbit of Don Zerbinati. The Russians already had a bead on him, that much was certain. He was clearly part of the agenda of the reactivated Operation Paragon. What did Soviet Intelligence want with him? This path promised to bring him closer to the answer – and if it didn’t, a timely kill would at least rob the Russians of their prize.

  He looked up to see Libby’s cautioning hazel eyes.

  ‘You’re British Intelligence, Mr Winter. Let’s get back to London. Put this all together.’

  ‘Faulkner hired me for one job,’ Winter reminded her. He pointed a thumb at Alessandra. ‘Get this woman out of Budapest. That’s what I’ve done.’

  ‘You know this isn’t over.’

  ‘They sent you to Venice to intercept whatever I was chasing. They don’t trust me. That’s obvious. I don’t owe them anything anymore. You can tell that to Faulkner.’

  Libby shook her head. ‘I’ll tell him later. For now I’m sticking with you.’

  ‘I don’t need you to play guardian angel, Miss Cracknell.’

  Libby held his gaze. ‘I’ve got a job of my own to do, mate. I was assigned to keep tabs on you. And by the sound of it this Don Zerbinati is worth a dossier. Even if it’s an obituary.’

  ‘I’m not doing this in the name of British Intelligence,’ insisted Winter. ‘I’m working alone.’

  ‘No, you’re working with me,’ said Alessandra, decisively. ‘We began this together and we shall end it together. I shall help you to kill this bastard Zerbinati.’

  Winter turned to the Glorious. He saw two expectant sets of eyes, grey pupils ringed by gold. They were waiting for his decision.

  ‘In cash, you say?’

  14

  The cliffs of the Côte d’Albâtre stood like chalk battlements against the sea. Gannets wheeled above them, snatches of motion against the grey weight of Atlantic sky.

  Winter looked across the headland as the car clung to the coastal road. It was barely dawn but morning was already carving through the dark. The shingle beaches seized the silver light for themselves, swarms of quartz glittering beneath the rugged crests of rock. Everything else was held in shadow: the inlets, the harbours, the outlines of gun emplacements left from the last war, as much a part of the Normandy landscape now as the neat crosses of the D-Day cemeteries. Light and shadow, caught negotiating; it was as if the day was sketching itself into being.

  They had followed the coastal road from Ètretat, some 32 kilometres north-east of Le Havre. The Falaise d’Aval was still visible behind them, the grand arch of rock rearing out of the waves. The sea smashed against it, casting great arcs of spray through the hollow of the cliff.

  Winter returned his attention to the road, watching as the headlights of the hired Citroën DS 21 cut into the early-morning murk. Libby was at the wheel of the shark-sleek, low-slung convertible, her checkerboard cap hugging her fringe and a pair of matching black-and-white driving gloves keeping the chill from her fingers. The needle on the speedometer danced just a little too high for Winter’s taste, and had done for most of the journey.

  Libby’s tongue played between her teeth as she coaxed a little more velocity from the engine, taking the twists of the road so quickly that Winter felt sure the wheels were skimming the cusp of the cliff. He remembered how she had torn through the empty streets of London, that morning Faulkner had persuaded him to come back to all this. Perhaps she had a death wish, as only the young and invincible could.

  Finally he cracked, and felt as old as God as he did so. ‘Slow it down, will you?’

  Libby sighed and let the speedometer dip. ‘Just seeing what she’s got.’

  Winter wondered if she meant the car or herself. He had met kids like her before. They all had something to prove and would push their limits to do so. Operating in the field soon knocked that out of you. Adrenalin, you quickly learned, was a tool, not a drug.

  ‘I think we know what she’s got by now.’

  ‘Pity,’ said a voice from behind them. ‘I imagine it must be an exhilarating sensation.’

  Alessandra sat in the back of the open-top four-seater, her black bob whipped into a state of disarray by the coastal wind. Strands of hair clung to her cheek, fixed by the damp, briny air.

  ‘You’re not missing much,’ said Winter. ‘Just an imminent heart attack.’

  ‘The speed and the wind,’ said Alessandra, with genuine curiosity in her voice. ‘How does it make you feel?’

  ‘Alive,’ said Libby, a little too glibly. ‘Absolutely bloody alive. You should try it sometime.’

  ‘Perhaps you would allow me to share it. Sometime.’

  ‘Maybe I will. If you’re not too weird about it.’

  Alessandra beamed in the rear-view mirror. ‘I would very much like that, Miss Cracknell.’

  ‘You really can’t feel it?’ asked Libby, more thoughtfully. ‘None of it?’

  Alessandra brushed a stray lock of hair from her mouth. ‘Oh, I feel it. I just don’t experience it in the way that you do. But then I imagine your tiny lifespan makes it all the sweeter.’

  ‘Sweet as a nut, darling.’

  Winter saw the speed gauge begin to climb again. ‘Keep it steady,’ he cautioned.

  Libby switched on the radio, summoning a crackly Johnny Hallyday, the long-wave signal stuttering as it reached across the French coast. It was too loud for Winter’s liking and he immediately switched it off again.

  ‘Wanker,’ said Libby, not quite beneath her breath.

  The car sped into a waiting tunnel, one that had been bored through a chunk of cliffside rock. It was sporadically lit, and for long stretches the only illumination came from the determined beam of the Citroën’s headlights. The walls of the tunnel were wet and black and the tiny coin of light in the distance took an age to grow in size, despite the speed they were travelling.<
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  Finally they emerged. The car continued to climb the coastal road for another couple of miles before veering away from the cliff and onto a rougher track. The wheels spat stones as Libby cut into wilder countryside. Here the grass clung to swollen slopes, rippling as the early-morning wind bladed through it. The sky was still a heavy gunmetal grey but Winter could see a sliver of pink through the Atlantic clouds, far out to sea. The day was coming.

  They parked by a wooden signpost that had been hammered into the soil. Pointing the way to Ètretat and the surrounding villages, it stood at a crooked angle, as if bent by a storm and never corrected. The whole area felt abandoned, with no proof of human occupation to break the rolling banks of grass.

  Winter swung his legs from the car and walked to the boot. Libby was already there. She handed him a shovel then took one for herself. Alessandra received a torch, and managed to look simultaneously relieved and disdainful.

  Ahead of them rose a small hill. Piled upon the summit were stacks of stones, assembled as rudimentary burial markers. To Winter there was something primally forbidding about these crude mounds of granite. They looked more like warnings than memorials, markers for the living to keep their distance. This was a cemetery, but one with no sense of ceremony or ostentation, clearly just a dumping ground for the dead.

  ‘The plague reached Normandy in 1348,’ said Alessandra, as they climbed the incline. ‘That year they called it the Black Spring. This is where the village of Saint-Bénézet buried its taken.’

  Libby scanned the wind-hardened terrain. It was empty as far as the horizon. ‘What village would that be, then?’

  Alessandra gave a grim, pinched smile. ‘In the end I imagine there was no one left to bury the dead. In time there was no village left either. But the land will remember.’

  This was the third location they had explored in the past two days, following the trail of gemstones on the coastal map. They had searched the crypt of the church of Saint Aignan in Trévières and, equally fruitlessly, disturbed the ancestral home of an aristocrat in Deauville, rumoured to have hunted vampires for sport in the eighteenth century. There was no trace of the buried hearts, let alone the thorns, and Winter was beginning to suspect they were chasing fables.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ he asked Alessandra, the shovel already feeling like a waste of time in his hand. ‘It’s utterly godforsaken.’

  ‘Forsaken by man, perhaps. I’m sure your God plays a longer game.’

  The earth lay at a tilt, the stone markers packed around a central hump. There were forty or more of them, pitted by centuries of wind and decay.

  ‘Where do we even begin?’ Winter wondered aloud.

  Alessandra moved the torch over the rough-hewn memorials, creating a crush of shadows on the grass. The light settled on a marker that was different from the rest. It was a solid hunk of granite and there was an elementary skull carved upon it, two axes crossed beneath the jaw. A Latin motto was etched upon the stone, the letters like ghosts now. Winter could just about read them by torchlight.

  ‘A solis ortu usque ad occasum.’ He was long out of practice but he managed to piece the meaning together. ‘From sunrise to sunset. Odd thing to have on your grave.’

  ‘How come it’s the only one that gets an inscription?’ asked Libby, looking across the haphazard cluster of memorial stones. The wind had tightened over the hill and she tugged her cap against it. There was something watchful about the bleak grey countryside.

  ‘This must be where they interred the village priest,’ said Alessandra. ‘The poor would have been buried as quickly as possible but they would have made an effort, at least, for the Lord’s representative.’

  ‘You think they buried the heart with him?’ asked Winter. ‘Why here, of all places?’

  Alessandra kept the torchlight on the carved skull. It had a primitive, childlike quality, two coarsely chiselled holes for the eyes, three sunken indentations for the teeth.

  ‘A graveyard for peasants. It would be an insult to a higher-caste vampire. I approve.’

  Winter stuck the edge of his shovel into the ground, directly in the shadow of the stone marker. Libby did likewise. The soil was impacted and refused to break at first but a few more strikes saw it crack into thick, dry clumps. The shovels flung the earth onto the hillside. Alessandra moved the torch to illuminate the digging.

  ‘There’ll be a coffin, right?’ asked Libby. ‘First to hit it buys breakfast. I fancy chips.’

  ‘There are no coffins here,’ said Alessandra, patiently. ‘You will strike bone. Perhaps not even the bones you are looking for. This is a mass grave, girl. There may even be animals.’

  Libby paused to consider this. With a sour expression she carried on digging.

  Sure enough there were skeletal remains in the dirt; segments of fingers and ribs, corners of skulls, poking like bright fossils through the crumble of soil. Winter suspected there were more bodies huddled here than the number of markers gave away. They had been tipped close to the surface too, suggesting burial had been a hasty, indiscriminate business. He wondered who had been left that spring to consecrate the body of the priest.

  The tip of his shovel struck something hard and broad, concealed in the earth. Probably a skull, he imagined, as he raised a hand to tell Libby to stop digging. Tossing the shovel he moved closer to the ground, using his fingers to scoop away the dirt. The powdery soil crammed itself under his nails and caked his skin.

  ‘I’ve got something…’

  He traced the embedded outline. It felt too smooth, too regular, to be a skull. There were no pits or hollows, just a glassy, unbroken surface. The hearts had been sealed in obsidian jars, wasn’t that what the Glorious had said? Winter moved his hands down, continuing to follow the shape of the buried object.

  His fingers touched what were unmistakably lumps of bone. The torch revealed them to be white knots of knuckle, poking like tiny arches through the soil. He scoured away the last of the dirt. It was a jar alright, and it was held by the fleshless hands of a long-dead village priest. Winter did his best to shake the image of Franzeri’s remains, back in that house in Venice. Again something stirred in his veins. Something quick, and hungering.

  ‘This has got to be it,’ he said, reaching down to prise the jar from the bones.

  The jar slid from the grip of the skeletal fingers.

  And then the skeletal fingers snatched it back.

  Winter stared, unblinking, at the bone hands. They were still now as they cradled the jar once more. Motionless, they could almost convince him they had lain like that for centuries. But he knew he had just seen them move, felt an impossible tremor of strength in them.

  He didn’t take his eyes from the bones as he spoke to the others. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘Get the jar,’ said Alessandra, crisply. ‘Get the jar and we’ll go.’

  ‘They bloody moved.’

  ‘Clearly it has a guardian. Someone buried the heart of a high-born with the lowest of its kind. An even greater insult.’

  ‘These are the bones of a vampire? Protecting something as holy as the thorn?’

  ‘It’s loyal to the heart of its king. An ingenious defence, matching that loyalty to the power of the thing that imprisons it. The thorn is encased in obsidian but it still has the power to keep this creature in the earth.’

  Winter understood the implication. ‘And we’re removing it.’

  ‘We’ll have time,’ said Alessandra, assuredly. ‘It’s slept for six centuries, after all.’

  Winter reached down again. This time the bones clung to the jar, retreating an inch into the soil. Winter tried to break their grip but they tightened possessively across the smooth black surface, closing in a crab-like lock.

  Winter saw one of the fingers uncurl. Quivering, it reared with life and struck the side of the jar. And then it repeated the movement, faster now. Faster and louder. It was creating a rhythm against the obsidian shell.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap
. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  The pattern quickly found a pace.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  He remembered the cave in Gellért Hill. The blind creature in the chair. The one that had found his heartbeat.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, before giving a shout. ‘Move!’

  The ground shuddered beneath them, dislodging other remains. Chunks of bone broke through the soil, caught in the sudden churn of earth. The stone markers began to tumble. Something was stirring in the burial pile, rising through the tightly packed dead.

  Tossing away the torch, Alessandra stepped into the pit. Impatiently she ripped the jar from the priest’s hands then stamped on the maddened bones. The fingers flexed uselessly, curling like pincers.

  There was a disdainful confidence in her voice. ‘You just need to be firm with them…’

  ‘Go!’ said Winter, turning to follow Libby, who was already backing away, the shovel slipping from her hand. He had glimpsed a shape – human but incomplete – thrusting its way out of the pit. A bone-sketch of a man, rising through a hail of dirt that drizzled from its empty sockets and poured through its open ribs.

  They scrambled down the hill, making for the car. Alessandra held the black jar in both hands, pressing it tight against her chest, as if determined to keep it from the entire world. She was just behind the others.

  Light was breaking to the east. Libby was in front, her sights set on the Citroën. Winter reached the foot of the hill then spun to check on Alessandra. The shape was behind her, a blur of bone and rag, its burial shroud rippling like torn flags in the wind.

  It had closed the distance without her realising. The thing had no shadow but the raw crack of its bones signalled it was upon her.

  ‘Winter!’

  His name cut through the air, the last word she would ever say.

  She threw the jar to him.

  He caught it, feeling its hard, icy bulk slam against his fingers.