The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

  “Welcome, cousin,” he said in a dry, somewhat nasal voice. “Do you bring greetings from Lord Agenor?”

  This perplexed Beheim, but he was too frightened to consider what it might mean. Against the gloomy backdrop of an old dark tapestry and worn carpet, the two vampires were aglow with vitality, with a tangible emotional charge, seeming to outshine the lanterns, which cast a smoky yellow light throughout the room.

  “Your pardon, my lord,” Beheim said. “As you know, the Patriarch has ordered me to investigate the murder of the Golden—”

  “And that, of course, is what brings you here.”

  Felipe spoke these words in a mocking tone, and Beheim, encouraged by the fact that they had not attacked him, said, “Why else?”

  “Why else, indeed?”

  Dolores shook off Felipe’s arm and shrilled, “How can you allow this insult? Kill him now!”

  Felipe tipped his head to the side as if considering this. “No,” he said calmly. “There’s something more interesting.”

  “Lord,” said Beheim, “you misunderstand my motives! I’ve come here tonight not to humiliate you, but to put to rest all suspicion concerning your guilt.”

  Beheim broke off his protestations as Felipe came a pace forward and lifted his arms like a priest supplicating a god; then he brought his arms down slowly as if suppressing some invisible resistance. The arcs his fingertips described became visible as black lines, thin slashes in the fabric of reality, creating the outline of an oval at whose center Felipe was standing. The blackness of the lines began to mist, to spread and fill in the oval, making it appear that a doorway was opening into the heart of night, a darkness so palpable, it bulged from its confines as might a volume of black gas restrained by a transparent membrane.

  “Do you know the Mysteries, cousin?” Felipe asked, stepping aside so that Beheim’s view of the oval was unimpeded. It floated a few feet off the ground, impossible yet undeniable, a horrid black interruption of the real some four feet high, like the maw of a huge disembodied worm that had burst through the wall and the begrimed tapestry into the midst of the room. “I’m sure you are familiar with some, but this one, I’d wager, will be new to you.”

  “Listen, I beg you!” said Beheim, terrified, his eyes drawn to the black oval. “I was sent here by Lady Alexandra. She offered evidence implicating you in the murder. I had no choice but to investigate.”

  “Liar!” Lady Dolores’s dark face darkened further, suffusing with blood; she turned to Felipe. “How can you permit him to spew such poison?”

  “Keep quiet!” He went a few feet toward Beheim, who retreated into the doorway of the study. “Even were I to believe you, it would not lessen your offense. You have entered my apartments without invitation, you have by your own admission made a tacit accusal of murder. I have no qualms about killing; I harvest my food as it pleases me. But I am no slaughterer of tradition. And I care not whose charge you bear, I will not tolerate such dishonorable treatment. I do not credit your tale concerning Alexandra, but because I know who has inspired this breach of trust and common decency, I am moved to be merciful.”

  “I assure you, lord, I’m telling the truth!”

  “No, you are not. You are simply a point in an argument between Lord Agenor and myself. A point ill-taken, I might say.”

  “I know of no business between you and Lord Agenor.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lady Dolores asked Felipe. “Are you and Agenor involved?”

  “Agenor thinks we are,” said Felipe impatiently. “Though I have told him we are not.”

  Frightened as he was, Beheim nonetheless did not fail to notice the discrepancy between Felipe’s journal and his words.

  “Then why does he continue to press you?” Lady Dolores insisted.

  Felipe shrugged. “Who can say? Perhaps he has taken me at my word. Otherwise I doubt he would have sent a thief to steal from me. At any rate, he has always been mad, and now he wishes me to validate his madness with my chemicals.”

  He pushed Lady Dolores—who appeared bewildered by this response—to one side, and approached to within a foot of Beheim. Beheim was captivated by his cruel, too pink lips, his reddened eyes with their black target pupils, the sickly polish of his skin, the handsome features reduced to a brutish fixity by arrogance and willfulness.

  “I want you to comprehend the fate that awaits you, cousin, for it is uncommon both in its essentials and its merciful character.” Felipe indicated the black oval with an eloquent gesture, and—the gesture apparently being the agency of a further magic—the blackness was lent depth and form, so it seemed that Beheim was peering into a vacant eye socket that afforded a view of an emptiness figured by pale phantoms, winged entities too vague and fleeting to identify. There was a faint rushing hiss, like a wind driving grit against a windowpane. He felt cold and frail, as if standing upon the edge of a gulf into which one could fall forever.

  “Hermeto DiLanza, a convert of my daughter, Alexandra,” Felipe said blithely, “she whose reputation you sought to injure, he was the Columbus first to sail the waters you now survey. In passing from life to life upon his night of judgment, he chanced to brush past this particular darkness, and recognizing it to be uncharted territory, sensing an advantage to be had, he told no one of his discovery and set himself thereafter to laying bare its potentials. Sadly for poor Hermeto, his researches did not go unnoticed.” He picked up the ceramic figurine of a fancily dressed dancing lord and lady from an end table next to Beheim. “Were I to allow my children to carry out unlicensed research, I would undoubtedly lose their respect. Thus I accosted Hermeto one evening while he was exploring the abyss you see before you by merrily pitching his servants into it. I thought it only fair that he follow them.”

  He tossed the figurine into the oval. On breaching the surface, it was suspended for an instant, the surrounding blackness displaced, splashing out around the depression it had created with the sluggishness of mercury, of some liquid heavier than water, a few droplets flying into the air, hovering there briefly, like peepholes punched through into an ebon sky, then falling back as the figurine receded, spinning slowly, comic in its stiff gaiety, yet somehow a sad and terrible image, those two painted courtiers with their embroidered silks and rouge-dappled cheeks wheeling down into the absence of everything, into the utter dark. Just before the figurine vanished, one of the pale winged shapes came swooping near.

  Death, Beheim thought; he had never before glimpsed this place, this particular Mystery, but knew it to be part of the black country he had traveled during the time of his judgment, and the prospect of entering it, of enduring even a shadow of the pain and fright he had then endured, made him feel faint and unsteady.

  “Intriguing, is it not?” said Felipe, considering the figurine’s passage. “I have never gained a satisfactory understanding of it, yet I think of it as a pool on the plain of death in which things are suspended from judgment. Everything it absorbs continues to live after a fashion. If you were as attuned as I to the vibrations of the ether, you might sense the vital signals of Hermeto and his servants…and of the creatures that torment them. I am ignorant of their natures, these creatures, though I believe they may be an evolutionary stage of the spirit to which Hermeto and his fellows will one day aspire.” He gave Beheim a cheerful grin. “You see, I am not condemning you to death. A new transmogrification awaits you. Or else I may someday discover how to retrieve what I have stored there. In that case, I will reclaim you from the deep. Doubtless you will have an intriguing tale to tell. So!” With another florid gesture, he invited Beheim to enter the black oval. “Come now, cousin. What’s the point of delay?”

  Beheim, half under the spell of the unearthly sight before him, half-seduced by the sonorous quality of Felipe’s voice, suddenly became aware of the immediacy of the danger and sprang toward the alcove, toward the Lady Dolores, who blocked his path. He swung his fist at her, a backhanded blow with all his weight behind it, but she caught his hand, ga
ve it a wrench, knocking him off balance; then, using her grip as would a hammer thrower, she slammed his head against the wall. White light splintered in his eyes, and the top of his skull felt aglow with pain. He tried to shake off the effects of the impact, to struggle to his feet, but Lady Dolores knelt beside him, her hand on his chest, pushing him back. Her dark, predatory beauty had evolved into the animal, eyes dead black, runners of saliva bridging between her fangs and lower teeth. Felipe stood at her shoulder, looking on placidly.

  “I don’t believe she cares for you,” he said. “If you prefer, I’ll simply have her tear you apart.”

  “Don’t…please,” said Beheim, slurring the words, unable to focus. “I…I can’t…”

  “Of course you can, cousin.” Felipe grabbed his jacket and yanked him to his feet. “There, you see! You only thought you couldn’t.”

  He shoved Beheim across the room, lifted him by the collar and the seat of his pants, and with irresistible strength, swung him toward the oval, stopping his momentum so that Beheim’s face was only inches away from the blackness. Beheim felt a cold pressure on his skin, a gentle probing, as if the oval sensed his nearness and was testing him, becoming familiar, the way a blind man touches another’s face in order to know its conformation. He thrashed about, desperately trying to escape Felipe’s grip, but Felipe only pushed him forward a few inches so that his head entered the blackness. For a moment he could neither see nor breathe, nor could he feel anything of his body other than a freezing numbness that had fitted itself like a mask to his face; but then, either his eyes adjusted to the darkness or by some other unfathomable process the darkness was translated into images in his brain, and he saw a vista of folds like those of an immense curtain, radiant yet black, resembling a negative of the aurora borealis, and drifting among them, structures that put him in mind of outcroppings of quartz, geometries of pallid obelisks, crystal cities. He heard a warped resonant booming, as of a drunken voice heard through a wall by another drunk; then, from the farthest reaches of his vision, a flash of heat lightning thinned into a razor’s edge of blinding white as wide as the sky and sliced through the blackness toward him, setting all the folds to rippling, the crystals to bobbling, as if a sword had been swung through a medium of black gauze and water. Only it was not a sword, he realized as it drew near, widening, acquiring detail, but a swarm of hideous, glowing creatures, all different, yet having a unity of malformed character, pig rats and cockroach lions and dog spiders and crab worms and more, swelling to fill the field of his vision, thousands upon thousands of them, an infinity of dire visage and form. As they dove toward him it seemed he had grown to a great size, the size of the sky itself, for rather than swarming over him, burying him beneath a crawly tonnage of light, they shrank and struck into his flesh, driving needles into his cheeks and forehead, points of such searing pain that he imagined each to be sparkling, delineating a constellation of pain tattooed across an enormous dark face. And then he was back in Felipe’s rooms, his body convulsing, still held helplessly aloft.

  “What did you see, cousin?” Felipe asked with mild curiosity.

  Beheim was burning with cold, shivering, his teeth clattering.

  “Take your time, dear boy,” said Felipe. “I’m in no hurry.”

  Still shivering, Beheim tried to collect his impressions, to embroider them with invention, for he would have employed any deceit in order to delay being thrust back into that freezing alien blackness. But just as he was preparing to tell a totally unfounded tale of his experiences, Lady Dolores screamed and Felipe let him fall to the floor.

  “Put it down,” said Felipe sternly. “And come here to me.”

  Though he was not certain who was being addressed, Beheim knew by Felipe’s shift in tone that it was not he. He struggled to his knees, fired by the hope that someone had come to his aid. Lord Agenor, perhaps. Or Alexandra. But it was Giselle who had entered the apartment, her bloodless face stamped with fear. She was holding a burning torch close to the hair of the Lady Dolores, who cowered from the flames in a corner of the alcove.

  “Come to me,” Felipe repeated.

  Giselle’s hand wavered.

  Lady Dolores’s stare was full upon her, and Beheim knew it would be a matter of moments before she was overcome by one of them or the other. He came to his feet and, eluding Felipe’s grasp, stumbled across the room. He snatched the torch from Giselle’s hand, keeping it well away from his body, his mind shriveling with fright at the nearness of the dancing flame, the crackling flower of death, but willing in his desperation to risk burning. He held the torch inches from Lady Dolores’s hair, exulting in her terrified gasp.

  “I swear to you,” Felipe said to him. “I’ll hold your heart in my hands.”

  Beheim waved the torch at Lady Dolores, eliciting a shriek. “Keep back!” he said to Felipe. “Go into the study.”

  Felipe let out a snarl, but retreated a few steps.

  “Quickly!” Beheim said; Giselle pressed against him, clinging to his arm. “Follow him,” he told her. “Lock him in.”

  “First Agenor steals from me, and now he sends a thief,” said Felipe, continuing his retreat. “Tell him I’ll suffer no more humiliation at his hands. Not for the sake of any cause. I’ll hunt him through the light of hell itself if necessary.”

  “Get into the study!” Beheim locked his fingers in the Lady Dolores’s hair, twisted her head so that she faced Felipe, displaying for him the full extent of her fear. “Do what I tell you! At once!”

  Felipe continued his retreat. “Do you know what awaits you now, you simple bastard? You—”

  “I’ll give you another second before I burn her,” Beheim told him. “After that you’ll have all the time in the world to threaten me.”

  Felipe stepped back into the study. “The light of hell,” he said again, just before Giselle closed the study door after him and shot the bolt. “Make sure you tell Agenor that. Use those exact words. Not even in the light of hell will he find respite.”

  Lady Dolores had fallen to her knees; her head was lowered, her face hidden by a tangle of black hair. Her pendulous breasts hung free of the robe, which had belled open, and her fingers clawed obsessively at the floor. Beheim delighted in seeing her in this submissive posture.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked her.

  She started to lift her head, but he warned her not to look at him, to keep her eyes fixed on the floor. Then he repeated his question. When she replied that she did not understand, he asked why she and Felipe had killed the Golden.

  “I’ve killed no one,” she said, and then, with fresh malice in her voice, she added, “At least, not recently.”

  “So it was Felipe.”

  “No, he was with me here.” She gave her hair a toss. “You’re an idiot to think we’re involved. What could we possibly hope to gain?”

  Giving the weird black maw at the center of the room a wide berth, Giselle came up beside Beheim and took his arm.

  “Perhaps gain had nothing to do with it,” he said.

  Lady Dolores kept silent, and he made menacing play with the torch.

  “Damn you!” She stared up at him like a madwoman through the disarray of her hair, the whiteness of her drawn face seeming an element of her ferocity, as shocking as ice on the spine. She lowered her head again. “You have no idea of how you’re being used.”

  “And how is that?”

  “I can only guess,” she said. “But the Golden…don’t you see? She was of no consequence. Who would be foolish enough to risk such an act for a taste of her blood? The murder must have been a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

  “I don’t understand how that eliminates you from suspicion.”

  “Think, damn it! What was the next step following the murder? Who made the next move?”

  “If you know, tell me.”

  “Agenor, you imbecile!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He had you appointed to head the investigation, did
n’t he? Do you actually believe that this was due to your investigative prowess? Are you that much of a fool? Agenor is using you to implement one of his schemes.”

  Beheim mulled over the implications of what she had said. “I’m at a loss to understand how this exonerates you.”

  “Who is Agenor’s current adversary?” Lady Dolores tapped her breast. “I am! He has taken this opportunity to aim you at me. And at my lover.”

  Beheim saw that there might be some validity to this accusation, but he said, “My lady, if I were to disregard evidence on the grounds that one of my suspects had enemies who seek to harm him, then I would have no suspects at all. I’m afraid your attempt to undermine my confidence in Lord Agenor is as fundamentally unsound and simplistic as is the stratagem that you have accused him of using.”

  “You are a great fool,” she said. “I wonder if even Agenor knows how great.”

  He decided to try another tack. “When I mentioned that the Lady Alexandra had provided me with information implicating Felipe, you put on a fine show of outrage. But given your relationship with her, I doubt it came as a surprise. What did you have in mind by trying to influence me in this direction? Don’t you realize that I understand how she has succeeded in turning my investigation to her purposes? Perhaps to your purposes as well. It seems reasonable to me that this scheme to implicate Felipe might have been hatched by the both of you.”

  Was that a noise of amusement that escaped Lady Dolores’s lips? He could not be sure, not having seen her face when she uttered it. But the words that followed were scarcely the product of an amused sensibility, and he was unable to determine whether or not she was acting.

  “I will not hear it!” she said, an eager muscle working in her jaw. “I will hear no more of your poison against Alexandra! She is an innocent in this. Speak one more lie concerning her…”