A Coldness in the Blood Read online

  The lowering thundercloud had begun to fulfill its promise, right when a brisk shower could be most helpful. Maule would have no need to be mindful of what sort of tire tracks he might be leaving on this land, for they were all going to be washed away.

  He drove a little closer, then parked his car and got out, sniffing the air. The enigmatic building was now plainly no more than an abandoned farmhouse that seemed to grow a little smaller the nearer he approached.

  Even before disposing of the burden in the trunk, Maule, out of curiosity and in search of the best place to sleep, entered the building. He had been invited into this dwelling years ago, and needed no renewed invitation.

  Almost as soon as Maule stepped out of Tamarack’s car, the urge for sleep, for near-oblivion, was very strong. But he steeled himself to fight it off a short time longer.

  Struck by a strong intuition, or inspiration, of a kind he had learned centuries ago not to ignore, he climbed a shadowy spiral of stairs, seemingly compounded equally of stone and darkness. Moments later, standing on a flat and solid-feeling castle roof, he yielded to a sudden inspiration and erected his spear like a lightning rod, point upward, propping the weapon in place with balks of wood that he found lying providentially at hand. Dark clouds were swirling overhead in a most satisfactory manner, promising some summer pyrotechnics soon.

  “Like Ahab, I will charge my weapon with the lightning,” Maule murmured to himself, as a few heavy drops of rain came spattering. He suspected he might be facing a monster every bit as powerful as Moby Dick.

  Now the restful delights of deep trance beckoned, and today they also promised information; but before he could allow his mind to be engulfed, there were the details of a more or less routine task to be completed. This meant disposing of the car, which had borne Tamarack’s body in life, and held it still in death. Along with the car must go that very body, which had served as vehicle for his soul.

  Back in the castle courtyard (if he tilted his head slightly, he saw instead the front yard of the farmhouse) Maule opened the trunk. He needed to make sure the larger of his plastic bags was still where he had put it, and that the contents were unchanged; he had now entered a domain where certain transformations unthinkable in mundane time and space could not entirely be ruled out.

  It still seemed to him a good idea that master and machine should disappear from human sight together, going deep into a swampy pool between two jutting shoulders of limestone, just where the broad river curved at its nearest to the high-perched house. It cost the visitor a few grunts of moderate exertion to maneuver the heavy automobile into the right position atop the crag, and after a few more muttered words he sent it on its way. The effort of course left tire tracks and other marks on the high land; but he thought these would not long endure.

  As soon as that task was accomplished, he reentered the castle. He thought he could detect a faint, comforting glow of welcome, from the walls around him and the land beneath.

  Now he could almost fully relax. The distilled experience of half a millennium had refined his instincts until he thought they could—almost—always be trusted.

  As a preliminary to restful trance, Maule turned off his own cell phone. Any incoming calls would have to wait, and the device would be of no help in an interior communication with his earlier self, which had now become his immediate goal.

  For a time he continued to prowl restlessly through the dwelling, which continued its subtle alterations around him as he moved. He was intent on selecting the precisely best spot to settle in for peaceful sleep. The maximum possible shielding from sunlight was desirable. Meanwhile he continued his interior preparations, which he hoped would allow him to proceed with his research whilst he was asleep. Long experience had proven that this was the most effective way for him to search the more remote corridors of his own memory.

  When he had made his selection, he spread out the garment bag containing some of his native earth, and stretched himself out on it with a sigh.

  Maule had achieved the peaceful, dreaming trance he sought.

  He intended to use a form of self-hypnosis to track down and extract the memory that was nagging at him—exactly where and when had he earlier encountered something very similar to the crushed white statue and its repulsive contents?

  And when he had successfully attained the proper kind of trance, it came to him.

  No sooner had the dream begun than he recognized the setting, and the time. On some level it seemed he already knew what was going to happen, but having come this far, he wanted to see all the details play out.

  The time was a warm day in the early autumn of a year before the middle of the nineteenth century, long before he had thought of calling himself Matthew Maule. The place was a bedroom in a certain French chateau. There had been no intruding monster on that day—unless one could describe a jealous husband in those terms. And that the vampire had had any problem at all was really his own fault, for having the effrontery to persist in a risky assignation in broad daylight.

  To state the case more precisely, the man who would one day be known as Matthew Maule, then well over a century younger and a hundred years less wise, had been overtaken by the rising sun in a room where he should not have been, occupying a bed in which he should never have fallen asleep. Yes, he had foolishly lingered on even past sunrise. No good berating his past self on that score now; he knew he ought to have known better.

  The onset of daylight of course froze him in man-form. Who can say why he overslept that day? But that morning the burning light outside somehow lured him into perversely dozing. The doze could never have turned into a restful sleep, of course—not in that bed, which lacked any trace of his native earth. Still his eyes were closed and his consciousness drifting. The sudden thunder of horses’ hooves, startlingly close outside the window, took him unpleasantly by surprise.

  Madame de Ferret beside him had also been shocked to wakefulness, and her voice was thick with quiet terror. “It is the count, my husband! My God, I had thought him in his room and fast asleep!”

  Madame was thrown at once into a state of absolute terror, but she proved equal to the occasion.

  And now, swift eager feet in heavy boots were thudding along the stone-floored corridor at ground level outside the bedroom. There were the windows, to be sure, offering a possible way out, but the unhappy vampire felt himself trapped by the searing rays of direct sunlight, as a lesser being might have been caught in the steel jaws of some great trap. But short of confronting the husband, and getting past him by force or guile, there was simply no means of escape available.

  Given the circumstances, any attempt to prevail by guile seemed unlikely to succeed.

  Casting a hasty squint at a curtained window, the tardy lover saw to his displeasure that the day was promising to be bright. Any long exposure to even intermittent sunlight would be uncomfortable at best, and might prove fatal. Even if he could manage to get out of the house without a hue and cry of pursuit close on his heels, the best he could expect would be long hours of a bitter ordeal, trying to find shade and shelter in the nearby woods.

  No doubt the count (if in truth the man had any real right to such a title; twenty-first-century Maule still had his doubts) had been given reason to be suspicious of his wife’s behavior, long before her most recent lover came on the scene. Neither could it be denied that the husband in this case was justified in taking a certain measure of offense at his rival’s behavior—but like other creatures who are too proud for their true station in life, he carried his reaction to extremes.

  By the time the jealous husband actually entered the room, the vampire, who could move very fast, was in milady’s closet, every stitch of his clothing bundled under one arm, and with the door closed after him. Actually his own preference would have been to leave open the closet door, since it posed no real barrier to his discovery. Leave it open, and trust to the shelter of a small angled recess inside, just because an open door so strongly suggests that there is
nothing and no one behind it worth covering up. But Madame had sprung out of bed almost as quickly as her lover. She pulled on a wrapper as she rose, and with an extension of the same movement pushed the door shut after him. If her husband was not in time to actually observe her in the act of doing so, he saw her turning away from the closet in an attitude strongly suggesting what she had just done.

  But the lady’s nerves were very good, so far. “You are very late,” she said to him. “Or is it very early?”

  Schedules were not what the husband had on his mind at that moment. “Madame, there is someone in your closet.” His tones were hoarse, and coldly furious rather than excited. The man in the closet felt his heart sink at the prospect of having to do the poor fool harm, should a personal contest between them become inevitable. Strange, irrational schemes danced through the vampire’s mind: Maybe he could arrange a challenge to a duel, and bear without wincing the brief and harmless pain of a leaden bullet in his heart. After that, he should have no trouble convincing a nineteenth-century physician that he was dead. At the moment, deliberately losing a duel was about the happiest outcome of the situation that he could foresee.

  “No sir.” Madame’s courage and determination vibrated in her firm voice. The heart of the listening vampire sank even further as he contemplated what steps he might have to take to shield her from the consequences of his own folly in oversleeping.

  In the next moment, it seemed that the Count had paused, rethinking his first impulse to yank it open. “If I open the closet door then, either way, our union is at an end.”

  The wife began a murmured protest, which the husband soon cut short. “Hear me, I know how pure you are at heart, and that your life is a holy one. You would not commit a mortal sin to save your life. Here, take your crucifix.” There had of course been a rather ornate and valuable one, hanging on the wall. “Swear to me before God, on your crucifix, that there is no one in there; I will believe you, I will never open that door.”

  At the moment, the chances of a peaceful, outcome seemed too small to be worth estimating. Monsieur the count, if such he truly was, had murder in his heart.

  Solemnly the wife let her pale hand rest upon the crucifix; in his mind’s eye the vampire could see it, shaking slightly. Her voice at least was steady: “I swear to you that there is no one in my closet.”

  “Very well.” There was silence for a few seconds, and then the husband, speaking in a different voice, turned to the maid, Rosalie, who had come in after him, and ordered: “Fetch Goron.”

  On hearing those words, the first impulse of the man in the closet was to relax just a trifle, for the count’s tone suggested that he might be summoning a dog. In all his centuries since becoming nosferatu, the man in the closet had never encountered a four-legged watchdog, however fierce or strangely named, that he could not charm quickly into sleeping, or at least adopting an attitude of tolerance.

  A few minutes passed in hopeful silence. But when Goron arrived, he came striding on two heavy and very human feet. In another minute, the directions that Monsieur began to give him were not reassuring. The fellow was directed to get his barrow, and bring here, into the bedroom, materials left over from a recent construction project at the other end of the house. Goron, whatever his usual job, was being assigned a project for a stonemason.

  Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one’s point of view—some building materials, left over from a recent addition on the other end of the house, happened to be readily available—probably their presence had even inspired the count with his plan. Rosalie was directed to fetch water, required for mixing mortar.

  Had that particular vampire been at all susceptible to fear, he would have begun to feel it then. Oh, not for his personal safety—no pair of clumsy breathers were at all likely to hurt him much, unless they came armed with wooden arrows, spears, or bullets, or with certain exotic poisons, and took him completely unawares. But he foresaw unpleasant complications. Surely the lady would soon be forced to give way in this war of wills and words that she was having with her husband.

  But Madame showed no sign of yielding. This, the intruder thought, is getting interesting.

  Rosalie was soon back, lugging two full buckets. Interpreting bits of dialogue being exchanged out in the bedroom, the hidden listener soon understood that Goron the stonemason had for some time been hoping to marry Rosalie the maid, and that only financial difficulties had held them back. Now the count in a few terse words was promising to provide the hopeful couple with money to set themselves up in style, most likely in another country, if they carried out his orders now and ever afterward kept quiet about the whole affair.

  There was the repeated trundling back and forth of a handy wheelbarrow, whose iron wheel must have damaged stone and tile floors, though today nobody was protesting. By this means, the assembly of materials took only a few minutes. Then, briskly, without a word of explanation as to why he might want such alteration in the architecture, the count gave his workman orders that at this point came as no surprise to anyone. He was to brick up the closet door. “Be sure you make it solid and thick. There is to be no opening. If there should be, say, a fly trapped in there, he must never be able to get out.”

  The work began at once, while the master of the house stood by and watched.

  Each of the four people in Madame’s room knew what the certain effect of such a construction must be, on any being who happened to be trapped behind it. The stone wall of the old house must have been at least five or six feet thick at that point on the ground level, the closet a mere niche carved from its depth. There were designed tombs and mausoleums whose walls were more yielding and enclosed more airspace.

  But of course the fourth listener, the man in the closet, knew something of great importance that remained unknown to any of the others. A certain vital fact about himself: once the sun was down, he needed no wide doorways; he would be able to pass freely through crevices so small they would screen out the smallest fly.

  When Madame understood that her husband was deadly serious in what he meant to do, she still did not yield in an honest confession. Instead she took the easier way out of her dilemma and fell down in an equally honest faint. The vampire in her closet was listening carefully, waiting patiently with folded arms, leaning against the wall in his little alcove. He could tell that her swoon was genuine, from the changed sound of her breathing and the soft crumpling of her fall.

  The vampire felt sorry for the lady, who, he was sure, had no understanding of her secret lover’s true nature, his extraordinary powers. (In the half-conscious mind of Matthew Maule, now luxuriating in his twenty-first-century trance, there followed a learned discussion, in which he took both parts, on the proper taxonomy of the subspecies Homo dirus—it seemed arguable that the correct name should be Homo sapiens dirus. Maule in his dreaming trance could not decide. He would have to ask some expert at the Field, or perhaps at one of the universities.)

  —but of course such a discussion would have meant nothing to Madame. Listening to the slight clues of her inward struggle, the man in the closet was touched, choosing to think that her terror and shock were on his account, the wretch about to be walled up alive, and not for herself. In sympathy the vampire vowed to himself that he would try to do his best for her in turn.

  As soon as the lady fainted, the maid rushed to her aid, while the murderously angry husband did not stir a step. For the moment he was quiet, except for his rather heavy breathing, but the concealed listener could picture him standing there, arms folded and frowning like a betrayed monarch. The man in the closet could also visualize the build and movements of the sturdy bricklayer, without ever having seen the man. The rhythm of Goron’s strong callused hands, applying bricks and mortar gracefully, did not falter for a moment as he kept on phlegmatically adding one more tier after another. He was one to follow orders, not asking a single question of his master.

  The workman’s breathing had grown rapid with his exercise. The hidden li
stener could not make up his mind whether the mason might be in poor physical condition, his body strained by the exertion of building a wall, or whether he was simply excited, probably more from the prospect of promised wealth than from having a hand in murder.

  Soon the new barrier was high enough to prevent anyone suddenly entering the closet. Doing what little he could, under the circumstances, to ease the awkward position in which his lover found herself, the listener in the closet had been slowly and very quietly putting on his clothes. Having accomplished that, he found the situation almost boring—or would have, except that he was waiting to make certain that the wife was not going to be murdered. To prevent that, he meant to do everything … that could reasonably be expected of him.

  The mason in his labors was necessarily making a certain amount of noise, enough that the intended victim decided there was little point in his maintaining absolute silence. No one was going to hear him if he moved about a little. So while waiting for the denouement of the little drama now playing itself out, he passed the time in examining the contents of the closet.

  And here it was that Fate awarded him (and the dreaming, one-hundred-and-seventy-year-older Matthew Maule) with the object of his search.

  In the closet there were some items of feminine clothing—no, more than some. Actually there were so many in the confined space that he had trouble turning around without entangling himself in sleeves and lace.

  Here on a small shelf were more interesting items. Another crucifix, not as valuable as the one out in the bedroom—the vampire had no trouble picking it up for a closer inspection. Some superstitious folk who thought they knew him would have been astounded to see how casually, yet reverently, he did so.

  Now he had put back the cross, and was toying with an odd little figure he found toward the back of a dusty shelf—it was an item of ancient Egyptian origin, and had been brought back to France by one of the officers who had taken part in Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition at the very end of the previous century.