But of course he had no need to blink. He heard the usual double-thud, of falling knife and head, and he saw the head go tumbling into the wicker basket.
The executioner’s tall assistant lifted it out carefully, by the short dark hair; the red flow drained out visibly for the crowd to watch.
The raw neck spurted red, adding its stain to the day’s previous spatterings, before the headless body was withdrawn.
Radu, looking on, had to squint into uncomfortable daylight. But he was focusing his entire attention on that face, and had no trouble at all in making certain that it was Radcliffe’s. Unable to contain his joy, Radu spun round slowly, once, twice, performing a little dance of triumph.
* * *
Since yesterday Melanie had known, through a certain private line of communication, that this was the day when the man she had come to love must escape, or perish in the attempt.
Today Philip Radcliffe, following in her father’s unwilling footsteps, was to be taken to the scaffold. But she did not go, could not have forced herself to go, to the place of execution. Legrand had assured her that her presence there would be neither wise nor useful. And to be there, a witness, watching the worst happen, would have been unbearable.
Instead she put in another day of waiting at the museum, spending part of the time in the modest living quarters she shared with her son, part in the workshop where there was always plenty to keep her busy. She waited under the greatest tension imaginable. Someone had promised to bring her a report.
But before any report could reach her, there came a warning.
Men, armed soldiers, agents of the Committee of Public Safety, were coming to the museum to arrest her. She had barely time to hide.
Quivering with fear, cowering in a storeroom among wax figures and listening from her improvised hiding place to men’s raised voices only a few steps away, she heard that they were going to look for her in the cemetery, too.
Eleven years ago, in 1783, at a time when the childhood playmates Melanie Romain and Philip Radcliffe had already been separated for about eight years, Curtius had modeled a life-size figure of Benjamin Franklin, who had then been in residence on the edge of Paris. The effigy had been placed on display with those of other celebrities in his museum. And Melanie Romain, grown woman and mother, found herself hiding behind it now.
Melanie, fourteen years of age at the time of Franklin’s sitting, had been an assistant to the artist, beginning to learn the art and craft of modeling, at which she was later to excel.
And the young girl had received some grandfatherly attention from Franklin, who would have expressed his sympathy on seeing that she was in a family way. And especially when she introduced herself as the childhood playmate of one of his favorite illegitimate children, the old man, with his lifelong susceptibility to feminine attraction, was said to have, scattered around the world, more than one or two offspring who were not openly acknowledged.
She would have appealed to Curtius to use whatever influence he possessed to free Franklin’s son. But by the time Radcliffe was arrested, Curtius the good republican was much too ill to help, or even to understand.
* * *
When the men who had come to the museum to arrest her had given up and gone about their other business, calling to each other in loud voices and stamping their boots, she remained prudently in hiding and did not emerge until after the museum had closed for the day, when Marie signaled her that it was safe.
This new threat meant that Melanie would have to move on, earlier than planned, to where the next step of Legrand’s plan called for her to be—move on, and hope for the best.
“What word of Philip? In God’s name, tell me!”
But there was no word as yet. Meanwhile, where was little Auguste? Melanie could only hope that her son had gone ahead of her, following Legrand’s instructions, and that the hunters were not after him as well.
Making hasty preparations for her own flight, she asked Marie: “And how is Uncle Curtius today?”
Too ill to know or care much about the affairs of the world. I think maybe he suspects something out of the ordinary is going on, but he doesn’t really want to know about it.”
* * *
Radu, pleasurably reliving over and over again the memory of Radcliffe’s head falling into the red wicker basket, had immediately taken himself away from the place of execution, out of the bright morning sun and into the deepest shade that he could find, savoring what he thought to be his triumph.
Exhausted by strain, weakened by sun-glare, he went into what he considered the best-hidden of his Parisian earths, meaning to rest until sunset, or even later. He had won, he had beaten his hated elder brother. Whatever happened now, there was no hurry about taking care of the details.
* * * * * *
Emerging from his earth near midnight, Radu took time to go and sit on the frame of the now otherwise deserted guillotine. The night had turned chill and rainy, after the bright, hot day, and all the crowds had gone.
Radu sat there apostrophizing the death machine, from which he had pulled back the oilskin cover. Tenderly he stroked the heavy blade. He murmured, in one of the old languages that he had learned in childhood: “It almost breaks my heart to see so much blood going to waste. To decay, and the breeding of flies in the hot sun.”
With a little moan of satisfaction, he leaned forward and ran his tongue over the blade—yes indeed, it was still the wooden one, he noted. And no one had got around to cleaning it as yet. Old Sanson would be angry if he knew of such abuse of his equipment.
This, Radu would be able to tell anyone who asked, was how he fulfilled, at least symbolically, his vow to taste the blood of Philip Radcliffe.
There was an aftertaste of something strange, mixed with human blood … orange juice?—something like that. More likely some kind of vinegar, blended with unidentifiable substances and used as a cleaning fluid. Some attempt at cleaning had been made, then, but an abysmally poor job. The vampire spat.
Now it was the middle of the night, and Radu felt well rested and wide awake. He would sit here and gloat a little longer, and then make his way to the wax museum. Vlad, evidently devastated by defeat, was keeping out of his way; and Radu had an idea as to how he might improve upon his triumph.
* * *
He strode forth this time with a confidence that even prompted him to sing in his beautiful voice. Even if Vlad caught him again, and defeated him, there was no way the older brother could wipe out what he must see as a stain on his honor brought on by this defeat.
He remembered something one of his aides had asked him, before that last fight in the countryside: “Why is your brother’s honor of any importance to you?”
And Radu had replied: “Because it is of the utmost importance to him.”
* * *
Philip Radcliffe was not awake, and he was dreaming.
He had just been decapitated—and yet he hadn’t.
In his strange mental state, he could, for the moment, consider dispassionately the fact that the blade had inexplicably failed to whack off the vampire’s head—or almost failed.
Somehow, in Radcliffe’s feverish dream, only a thread of neck still held. This strand of tissue was broken manually, by one of the new vampire’s enemies, and the victim’s head was thrown at last into the coffin with his body.
There he soon recovered consciousness, and he understood that reunion was quite possible—after all, other vampires had been decapitated before him, and had survived.
It seemed to Radcliffe in his dream that the heads and bodies of a whole day’s output of victims had been thrown indiscriminately into a giant tumbril, and the whole bloody mess hauled away for burial. By now the medical schools of Paris were sated with disconnected heads and bodies, and could be prevailed upon to accept only a few choice specimens, those with something extraordinary about them.
The body’s hands went on patiently groping for and trying on one head after another.
Meanwhi
le, the vampirish brain lived on, thought, raged, experienced pain and sometimes pleasure, while still connected to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The eyes could turn in their sockets, blink, and change their focus. Breathing was never a necessity for him. Meanwhile, as he had hoped, the trunk and limbs retained enough affinity with the disconnected brain to take the necessary actions.
Groping through the charnel pit, the strong white hands at last found the proper head, only after rejecting several, and with an awkward movement lifted and tugged it into place … and the head had been put on backwards…
* * *
… and with that extra touch of horror, the nightmare was finally over, leaving its victim sobbing, cold sweat mixing with the cold rain that fell from heaven on his face.
Philip Radcliffe was finally, thoroughly, waking up. He had no trouble now distinguishing dream from reality, and he knew that his trip to the guillotine had been no dream.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jouncing along inside the gutted and rebuilt vehicle, Radcliffe tentatively decided that it must once have been a school bus. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, because about half the seats had been ripped out, as if at random, and the interior, like the outside, had been repainted in a dull camouflage pattern, mostly olive drab.
The best thing Philip could find to hope for at the moment was that he was being taken back to Mr. Graves—but he knew that wasn’t what was happening.
* * *
Every look these people gave him, every word they said, every nightmarish minute that passed seemed to bring some new confirmation of Graves’s warnings. These people, with their foul language and their waving weapons, fit to perfection the role of friends and helpers of the mysterious Radu, the shadowy monster against whom Graves, on tape and off, and Connie had so often and so solemnly warned their coddled prisoners.
The cruelty of these people, to him, to animals, to each other, was a continuing shock.
Now he remembered, in bitter contrast, how patiently and persistently Mr. Graves and Connie and the others had kept trying to convince him that their fantastic tale was true.
Over and over Phil now kept telling himself that there was at least one bright spot in the situation—at least June hadn’t fallen into this horrible mess with him.
Someone across the aisle between seats offered him a drink of water, then as soon as he reached for the canteen, pulled it away with a giggle, continuing to watch him with bright speculative eyes.
When chance brought about a pause in the steady drumfire of cursing and taunting, most of it not directed at him, in what seemed to pass for conversation in this group, he spoke up to demand: “Where we going?”
The old bus lurched along at a good speed, bouncing, roaring as if at the injustice of its fate in being slowly beaten apart by the rough road, which alternated with intervals of roadless land. No one bothered to answer Radcliffe. It was as if they had already disposed of him and he was dead.
After a minute or two of silence he tried again: “It’s all right, you can just let me out here. I’ll hitchhike.”
“Sure you will,” said the woman who was sitting next to Radcliffe, in a remote voice. Another man and woman showed their crooked teeth.
Another minute or two went by before Radcliffe, licking his dry lips, gave way to a wholly unreasoning impulse and suddenly lunged at the nearest door handle. Half the people in the forward seats did not even bother to turn their heads. His arm was caught and pulled back. Weapons were once more displayed.
One of his fellow riders, who a moment earlier had been whistling a cheery tune, suddenly broke it off and began muttering obscenities, whipped out a pair of handcuffs and manacled Radcliffe’s hands behind him.
One of the rattier-looking villains abruptly astounded him by starting a song, in which about half the others promptly joined in. They were singing in French, of all things—the ça ira?
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,
Les aristocrates à la lanterne…
Years ago, Radcliffe had memorized the song for one of his language classes in college. In the present situation it was so incongruous that he wanted to laugh. But who had taught these donkeys French? The singing was raucous and out of tune. Though Philip would have felt helpless if required to conduct a conversation in the language, his memory retained bits and pieces of it from his classes in high school and college. Enough to derive the sense:
That’s just the way it is,
We’re going to hang all the aristocrats…
Still uselessly erupting with sporadic protests, Radcliffe was driven a few more miles, up a winding road and into a narrow valley in the foothills.
It was around mid-morning, with the sun definitely getting warm, when the driver pulled onto a patch of bare, rutted ground before the house, and stopped.
This time no one had made any effort to keep Phil from seeing where they were going.
Their destination turned out to be an old two-story frame house, starved of paint and maintenance for years, probably once some rancher’s home. The dwelling seemed miles from any other house, and was almost hidden in the midst of a small grove of cottonwoods and Russian olives. A barn a little bigger than the house, standing some twenty or thirty yards behind it, had fallen even more completely into disrepair.
A battered pickup truck and a late-model sports car with a New York license were parked near the little cluster of buildings. A small stream, temporarily a small torrent fueled by spring snowmelt in the high country, came thundering down past the cluster of buildings, making a steady background noise, a lot of racket for a small amount of water.
Philip was dragged out of the converted bus, and shoved stumbling into the house. People who had been in the house greeted those returning in the van. The latter were crowing and babbling, suddenly moved to boast in triumph of their capture. Radcliffe wasn’t at all sure why, but it seemed he was considered something special, more than just a chance acquisition.
He was roughly searched by several people in succession, as if none of them trusted the others to do a proper job, and his valuables confiscated.
The place was a mess, and it seemed that a sustained effort had been going on for some days to turn it into one. The walls were stained by unknown causes and daubed with graffiti. The windows were dirty, with a third of the glass knocked out, and much of the furniture was broken. A woodburning stove, iron door open and housing a summer population of carefree spiders, stood in the middle of the main room.
* * *
Radcliffe’s latest set of captors spoke among themselves in awed tones of someone they called the Master, whose arrival they were awaiting eagerly, but with some trepidation. But the Master would surely be pleased to see who they had captured for him.
Judging from what Radcliffe was able to overhear, one or two of the Master’s devotees had never actually seen him yet, but they knew every detail of a largely fictitious reputation that had grown up around him. And they were looking forward to meeting him, as to the high point of their lives.
So far Phil had encountered only about half a dozen members of this gang. But judging from certain clues dropped in their conversation, more were coming when the Master did, and they might well have the band of Mr. Graves outnumbered. These people gave the impression of being less competent than the rubber-masked league of the Radcliffes’ original kidnappers, but far more dangerous.
On the heels of that thought followed the discouraging one that maybe Graves’s people weren’t really as competent as they seemed. Otherwise they wouldn’t have let him get away.
* * *
“What do we do with him?” one of the more frightening men asked another, nodding at Philip.
“Do with him? Nothing.” The speaker seemed vaguely horrified at the thought. Then he seized on the one idea that had evidently been firmly impressed upon him. “We keep him safe until the Master comes back.”
“How soon is he coming?”
Two or three of the gang w
ere ready to offer their opinions on that subject, but it soon developed that no one really knew. Obviously they were a little worried about the Master, whom they all feared, whoever he might be. The possibility of his quick return seemed in a way as disturbing as that of his continued absence.
One of them asked Philip, in an offhand way, where he had been for the last few days.
He gave the first answer that came into his head. “Resting up.”
That’s good, ’cause you’re gonna need it. We were looking for you on the road a couple days ago, sonny. We was driving all over hell, sniffin’ round after you, but you didn’t show up. Where were you, anyway?”
Still it seemed that none of them really cared about the answer. Philip got away with letting the question slide.
The Master sure wants to see you.”
“We been looking for you a long time already.”
“Where’ve you been the last few days?” This was a different questioner, who seemed not to have heard what the first one had just said.
This time Phil didn’t bother answering. “Cat got your tongue? No, not yet. Soon, though, soon.” That evoked a widespread tittering of laughter.
* * * * * *
This house, with its two floors plus attic and basement, was obviously much older and several times larger than the mobile home from which Radcliffe had escaped. This habitat of Radu’s servants was also dirtier, grimmer, and much less hospitable. Grease-stained pizza boxes still holding decayed remnants of last week’s meals lay scattered about, along with an extensive menu of paper wrappers, attracting energetic flies. The whole fast-food litter suggested that some place where a lot of people lived was not that many hours away. A frightened and dazed-looking cat went wandering from room to room, ignoring the garbage as if it had smelled it all before.
A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) Page 28
