The Historian

The Historian Page 79

Barley and I sat looking at each other across my mother's postcards. Like my father's letters, they broke off without giving me much understanding of the present. The main thing, the thing that was burned into my brain, was their dates. She had written them after her death.

"He's gone to the monastery," I said.

"Yes," said Barley. I swept up the cards and put them on the marble top of the dressing table.

"Let's go," I said. I looked through my purse, took out the little silver knife in its sheath, and put it carefully in my pocket.

Barley leaned over and kissed my cheek. It surprised me. "Let's go," he said.

The road to Saint-Matthieu was longer than I'd remembered, dusty and hot even in late afternoon. There were no cabs in Les Bains - at least none in sight - so we set out on foot, walking swiftly through rolling farmland until we reached the edge of the forest. From there the road began to climb the peak. Entering the woods, with their mix of olive and pine, their towering oaks, was like entering a cathedral; it was dim and cool and we dropped our voices, although we hadn't been saying much. I was hungry, in the midst of my anxiety; we hadn't even waited for the ma?tre d's coffee. Barley took off the cotton cap he was wearing and wiped his forehead.

"She wouldn't have survived such a fall," I said once through the constriction in my throat.

"No."

"My father never wondered - at least not in his letters - if she was pushed by someone."

"That's true," Barley said, replacing his cap.

I was silent for a while. Our feet on the uneven pavement - the road was still paved, at this point - made the only sound. I didn't want to say these things, but they welled up in me anyway. "Professor Rossi wrote that suicide puts a person at risk for becoming a - becoming - "

"I remember that," said Barley simply. I wished I hadn't spoken. The road wound high now. "Maybe someone will come by in a car," he added.

But no car appeared and we walked faster and faster, so that after a while we panted instead of speaking. The walls of the monastery took me by surprise when we came out of the woods around the last bend; I hadn't remembered that bend, or the sudden opening at the peak of the mountain, the huge evening all around us. I barely remembered the flat dusty area below the front gate, where today there were no cars parked. Where were the tourists? I wondered. A moment later we were close enough to read the sign - repairs, no visitors this month. It was not enough to slow our footsteps. "Come on," Barley said. He took my hand and I was deeply glad for it; my own had begun to tremble.

The front walls around the gate were ornamented with scaffolding now. A portable cement mixer - cement? here? - stood in our path. The wooden doors under the portal were firmly shut but not locked, we discovered, trying the iron ring with cautious hands. I didn't like breaking in; I didn't like the fact that there was no sign of my father. Maybe he was still down in Les Bains, or someplace else. Could he be searching the foot of the cliff as he had years ago, hundreds of feet below, out of our range of vision? I began to regret our impulse to come straight to the monastery. In addition, although true sunset was perhaps an hour away, the sun was dropping swiftly behind the Pyr¨¦n¨¦es to the west, slipping visibly behind the highest peaks. The woods we'd just come out of were already in deep gloom, and soon the last color of the day would drain from the monastery's walls.

We stepped inside, cautiously, and went up into the courtyard and cloisters. The red marble fountain bubbled audibly in the center. There were the delicate corkscrewed columns I remembered, the long cloisters, the rose garden at the end. The golden light was gone, replaced by shadows of a deep umber. Nobody was in sight. "Do you think we should go back to Les Bains?" I whispered to Barley.

He seemed about to answer when we caught a sound - chanting, from the church on the other side of the cloister. Its doors were shut, but we could hear distinctly the progress of a service inside, with intervals of silence. "They're all in there," Barley said. "Maybe your father is, too."

But I doubted this. "If he's here, he's probably gone down - " I paused and looked around the courtyard. It had been almost two years since my visit here with my father - my second visit, I now knew - and I couldn't remember for a moment where the entrance to the crypt was. Suddenly I saw the doorway, as if it had opened in the nearby wall of the cloisters without my noticing. I remembered now the peculiar beasts carved in stone around it: griffins and lions, dragons and birds, strange animals I couldn't identify, hybrids of good and evil.

Barley and I both looked at the church, but the doors stayed firmly shut, and we crept across the courtyard to the crypt doorway. Standing there a moment under the gaze of those frozen beasts, I could see only the shadow into which we would have to descend, and my heart shrank inside me. Then I remembered that my father might be down there - might, in fact, be in some kind of terrible trouble. And Barley was holding my hand still, lanky and defiant next to me. I almost expected him to mutter something about the odd things my family got into, but he was taut beside me, poised as I was for anything. "We don't have a light," he whispered.

"Well, we can't go into the church for one," I pointed out unnecessarily.

"I've got my lighter." Barley took it out of his pocket. I hadn't known he smoked. He flicked it on for a second, held it above the steps, and we descended together into darkness.

At first it was dark indeed, and we were feeling our way down the steepness of the ancient steps, and then I saw a light flickering in the depths of the vault - not Barley's lighter, which he relit every few seconds - and I was terribly afraid. That shadowy light was somehow worse than darkness. Barley gripped my hand until I felt the life draining out of it. The stairwell curved at the bottom and when we came around the last turn I remembered what my father had told me, that this had been the nave of the earliest church here. There was the abbot's great stone sarcophagus. There was the shadowy cross carved in the ancient apse, the low vaulting above us, one of the earliest surviving gestures of the Romanesque in all of Europe.

I took this in peripherally, however, because just then a shadow on the other side of the sarcophagus detached itself from deeper shadows and straightened up: a man holding a lantern. It was my father. His face looked ravaged in the shifting light. He saw us in the instant we saw him, I think, and he swore - "Jesus Christ!" We stared at each other. "What are you doing here?" he demanded in a low voice, looking from me to Barley, holding up the lantern in front of our faces. His tone was ferocious - full of anger, fear, love. I dropped Barley's hand and ran to my father, around the sarcophagus, and he caught me in his arms. "Jesus," he said, stroking my hair for a second. "This is the last place you should be."

"We read the chapter in the archive at Oxford," I whispered. "I was afraid you were - " I couldn't finish. Now that we had found him, and he was alive, and looked like himself, I was shaking all over.

"Get out of here," he said, and then caught me closer. "No. It's too late - I don't want you out there alone. We have a few more minutes before the sun sets. Here" - he thrust the light at me - "hold this, and you" - to Barley  - "help me with the lid." Barley stepped forward at once, although I thought I saw his knees shaking, too, and he helped my father slide the lid slowly off the big sarcophagus. I saw then that my father had propped a long stake against the wall nearby. He must have been prepared for the sight of some long-sought horror in that stone coffin, but not for what he actually saw. I lifted the lantern for him, wanting but not wanting to look, and we all gazed down into the empty space, dust. "Oh, God," he said. It was a note I had never heard in his voice before, a sound of absolute despair, and I remembered that he had looked into this emptiness once before. He stumbled forward, and I heard the stake clatter on the stone. I thought he was going to cry, or tear his hair, bent over that empty grave, but he was motionless in his grief. "God," he said again, almost whispering. "I thought I had the right place, the right date, finally  - I thought - "

He did not finish, because then there stepped from the shadows of the ancient transept, where no light pierced, a figure completely unlike anything any of us had ever seen. It was so strange a presence that I couldn't have screamed even if my throat hadn't immediately closed. My lantern illuminated its feet and legs, one arm and shoulder, but not the shadowed face, and I was too terrified to raise the light higher. I shrank closer to my father and so did Barley, so that we were all more or less behind the barrier of the empty sarcophagus.

The figure drew a little nearer and stopped, its face still shadowed. I could see by then that it had the form of a man, but he did not move like a human being. His feet were clad in narrow black boots indescribably different from any boots I'd ever seen, and they made a quiet padding sound on the stones when he stepped forward. Around them fell a cloak, or perhaps just a larger shadow, and he had powerful legs clothed in dark velvet. He was not as tall as my father, but his shoulders under the heavy cloak were broad, and something about his dim outline gave the impression of much greater height. The cloak must have had a hood, because his face was all shadow. After the first appalling second I could see his hands, white as bone against his dark clothing, with a jeweled ring on one finger.

He was so real, so close to us that I could not breathe; in fact, I began to feel that if I could only force myself to go nearer to him I would be able to breathe again, and then I began to long to go a little closer. I could feel the silver knife in my pocket, but nothing could have persuaded me to reach for it. Something glinted where his face must have been - reddish eyes? teeth, a smile? - and then, with a gush of language, he spoke. I call it a gush because I have never heard such a sound, a guttural rush of words that might have been many languages together or one strange language I had never heard. After a moment it resolved itself into words I could understand, and I had the sense that they were words I knew with my blood, not my ears.

Good evening. I congratulate you.

At this my father seemed to come to life again. I don't know how he found the strength to speak. "Where is she?" he cried. His voice trembled with fear and fury.

You are a remarkable scholar.

I don't know why, but at that moment, my body seemed to move toward him slightly of its own volition. My father put his hand up at almost the same second and gripped my arm very hard, so that the lantern swayed and terrible shadows and lights danced around us. In that second of illumination, I saw something of Dracula's face, just a curve of drooping dark mustache, a cheekbone that could have been actual bone.

You have been the most determined of them all. Come with me and I will give you knowledge for ten thousand lifetimes.

I didn't know, still, how I could understand him, but I thought he was calling out to my father. "No!" I cried. I was so terrified at having actually spoken to that figure that I felt my consciousness sway inside me for a moment. I had the sense that the presence before us might be smiling, although his face was in darkness again.

Come with me, or let your daughter come.

"What?" my father asked me, almost inaudibly. It was at this moment that I knew he could not understand Dracula's words, and perhaps could not even hear Dracula. My father was answering my cry.

The figure appeared to think for a while in silence. He shifted his strange boots on the stone. There was something about his shape under the ancient clothes that was not only gruesome but also graceful, an old habit of power.

I have waited a long time for a scholar of your gifts.

The voice was soft now and infinitely dangerous. We stood in a darkness that seemed to flood us from that dark figure.

Come with me of your own volition.

Now my father seemed to lean toward him a little, his grip still on my arm. What he couldn't understand he could apparently feel. Dracula's shoulder twitched; he shifted his terrible weight from one leg to another. The presence of his body was like the actual presence of death, and yet he was alive and moving.

Do not keep me waiting. If you will not come I will come for you.

Now my father seemed to gather all of his strength. "Where is she?" he shouted. "Where is Helen?"

The figure rose up and I saw an angry gleam of teeth, bone, eye, the shadow of the hood swinging over his face again, his inhuman hand clenching at the margin of the light. I had the terrible sense of an animal crouched to pounce, of a leaping toward us, even before he moved, and then there was a footfall on the shadowy stairs behind him, and a flash of motion that we felt in the air because we could not see it. I raised the lantern with a scream that seemed to me to come from outside myself, and I saw Dracula's face - which I can never forget - and then, to my utter astonishment, I saw another figure, standing just behind him. This second person had apparently just come down the stairs, a dark and inchoate form like his, but bulkier, the outline of a living man. The man was moving rapidly, and he had something bright in his raised hand. But Dracula had sensed his presence already, and turned with his arm out, and pushed the man away. Dracula's strength must have been prodigious, because suddenly the powerful human figure collided with the crypt wall. We heard a silent thud, then a groan. Dracula was turning this way and that in a kind of horrible distraction, first for us, and then toward the groaning man.

Suddenly there was again the sound of footsteps on the stairs - light ones, this time, accompanied by the beam of a strong flashlight. Dracula had been caught off balance - he turned too late, a blur of darkness. Someone searched the scene swiftly with the light, raised an arm, and fired once.

Dracula did not move as I'd expected a moment earlier, hurtling over the sarcophagus toward us; instead he was falling, first backward, so that his chiseled, pale face surfaced again for a moment, and then forward and forward, until there was a thud on the stone, a breaking sound like flung bone. He lay convulsed for a second and at last was still. Then his body seemed to be turning to dust, to nothing, even his ancient clothes decaying around him, sere in the confusing light.

My father dropped my arm and ran toward the flashlight's beam, skirting the mass on the floor. "Helen," he called - or maybe he wept her name, or whispered it.

But Barley was pushing forward, too, and he had caught up my father's lantern. A large man lay on the flagstones, his dagger beside him. "Oh, Elsie," said a broken English voice. His head oozed a little dark blood, and even as we watched in paralyzing horror, his eyes grew still.

Barley threw himself into the dust next to that shattered form. He seemed to be actually strangling with surprise and grief. "Master James?"