Wilkens had herded the vampire back into his cell by the time they arrived. He stood in the centre of the cell and did not glance their way as Roias returned Ardeth to her own prison. “Get the suit off, Your Highness. You’re not going to any parties for a while,” Wilkens ordered mockingly. The vampire did not move for a moment, then one hand lifted woodenly to unfasten the cloak.
Ardeth willed herself not to look, not with Wilkens and Roias there, but her curiosity was too much for her and she risked one surreptitious glance from beneath lowered lashes. The vampire’s skin had a smooth, matte gleam beneath the lamps. She saw the pale tracings of scars across his chest and stomach. He looked like a man; arms, chest, legs all finely proportioned, muscles shifting in silver planes of light as he moved. Even his genitals looked human. What did you expect, girl? she asked herself, returning her eyes to a fixed gaze at the floor. That they shrivelled up and fell off when he became a vampire? But she hadn’t expected him to look so human, and so vulnerable, though he himself gave no indication that his nakedness made him uncomfortable.
She kept her eyes on the floor until the rustle of material indicated that he had dressed again in the pants and torn shirt he had worn earlier. Wilkens held the cattle prod in front of the vampire’s chest and Roias fastened the leg-iron about his ankle. “You were very good tonight, Your Highness. For that, we won’t even give you a dose of the old ultrasound,” Roias said casually, leaning brazenly on the vampire’s cell door. The vampire gave no sign he had heard them. He retreated to the cot and sat there, staring at a point past Roias’s head.
“You see,” Roias said, to Ardeth, “we can make him do anything we want. And we can make you do anything we want too. Remember that.” Ardeth wished she could mimic the vampire’s complete dissociation from her captors, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she nodded as quickly as she could. Wilkens laughed and Roias clapped him lightly on the shoulder. She could hear their laughter echo back as they climbed the stairs.
They sat in the semi-darkness, Ardeth on her cot, the vampire on his. When she let her trembling breath return to normal, Ardeth thought she could hear the faint rasp of the vampire’s own breathing. She inhaled deeply to blot out the sound. It didn’t blot out her images of the movie. She thought that it would run forever through her mind, an endless tape loop of horror. She saw the final image projected on her eye-lids, Suzy laid out across the table, clad only in her skin and her blood, the red-streaked tablecloth, the roses of blood on the cake. And the vampire wearily wiping his crimson mouth.
Ardeth glanced at the vampire carefully. He was sitting absolutely still, head bent slightly. It wasn’t until she saw his hands, clenched together so tightly the knuckles had bleached to the colour of bone, that she realized he was even truly conscious. There was no pretending he was an escaped lunatic, not any more. The solid, undeniable reality of him terrified her. Her universe had been very ordered, the line between reality and fantasy clear and unmistakable. Now that line had been moved, no shattered forever and she was left in a world without foundations.
This would be endurable, she thought suddenly, if only I could understand it. All her life she had believed that if she could comprehend something, from a historical fact to her own emotions, she had some sort of mastery of it. In desperation, she had spent the last day refusing to think about her situation, as if that would somehow change it. But now, perhaps if she could make some sense of the madness she was trapped in, she could restore her bearings in the world.
But here, in the darkness of her prison, there were only questions. Did Conrad’s murder have anything to do with her situation? Who was the “other man” they had referred to—and could it have been Tony? Who were Roias and Wilkens and did they have anything to do with Armitage? If so, what? Who was the vampire and what did he have to do with the answers to the other questions?
Ardeth wrapped her arms around her knees and stared out into the darkness. Thinking seemed, momentarily, to blot out her painful, almost physical awareness of the creature in the cell beside her. Maybe it would be her defence, her refuge after all. Maybe it would shield her now, protect her from the embodied death so close to her.
She started with Roias. Surely not all the films produced here were snuff films. Most must be legitimate pornographic films, available by mail, in video stores and by the secret chain of VCR owners that served as the conduit for such things.
She couldn’t believe that there was any direct link between Roias and Armitage. But why would men who made porno movies want to kidnap her? It was clear that they had been pursuing her, otherwise how would they have known her name? In fact, kidnapping her had been an afterthought. They had obviously intended to kill her, just as they had killed “the other guy.” She shuddered suddenly, remembering her flight across the hillside, the jagged knife’s cold kiss against her skin. But if Roias and Wilkens didn’t have any reason to kill her, perhaps someone else did. Someone who had hired them to do it because that was what they were good at, that was what they did.
Assuming her suspicions about their deaths were correct, why had Tony and Conrad been killed? The obvious answer was that they knew something they weren’t supposed to. But what on earth would either of them know about porno films? Unless it didn’t have anything to do with pornography at all—but with something else, some other secret they knew. Or that they could know. And there had to be some connection between the deaths and her own predicament—or else how had Roias and Wilkens known her name? That thought led her straight back to the only thing that linked her, Tony and Conrad beyond their status as graduate students—their work for Armitage.
Still, it seemed dangerous to her, to hire three people and then kill or kidnap them. Surely the police would be made suspicious by the sudden propensity of history grad students for misadventure, murder and disappearance. If Armitage had something to hide, surely it would have made more sense to hire only one person to do all the research and then risk only one murder.
Unless, she thought suddenly, the killings had not been anticipated. Perhaps their original plan had been to simply let them collect their fees and gradually forget about the essentially tedious research work they had done. Then something had happened—something that could make the knowledge they had dangerous to the company.
Ardeth shifted on the cot, her eyes still focused, unseeing on the bars. She was close, the scent of her quarry making her heart pound.
If she was right, then the research she, Conrad and Tony had done was connected somehow, despite appearances. If she could find that link, then the puzzle would finally take shape in her mind. But what possible link could there be between sixteenth-century magician-scientists, a Russian dynasty and the ownership of buildings in nineteenth-century Toronto?
One subject was medieval, one continuous and one relatively modern. Two were European, one about North America. Ardeth ran the comparisons through her mind carefully. Two were about people, or families, one was about buildings. No, she corrected herself slowly, not about buildings but about the people who owned them. Still, there had been more than forty-five names on the list she had drawn up, forty-five owners of more than twenty-five buildings. Most of those people were long dead, and many of the buildings long demolished.
But only one of those buildings had recently been bought by a nameless company. Only one of those buildings had burned down, with three men inside. Only one building had long ago been owned by a man whose name tied him to Conrad’s research.
When the answer hit her, she sat up straight and held her breath. She rolled her solution around in her mind for a moment, prodding it for defects, weaknesses. It held, solid and undeniable. The reason for the research, the burning and the signing of death warrants for them all. The name Armitage had wanted—that of a long-forgotten Russian wool merchant who had vanished from the city one hundred years earlier, leaving behind an empty, unclaimed warehouse on River Street.
Carefully, she looked over at the vampire. “You’re Rozokov. Dimitri Rozokov.”
His head came up slowly, like a creature wakened from sleep. In the faint light, she could not see his eyes, only the narrow line of his profile beneath the cindered silk of his hair. “You are, aren’t you?” She turned on her cot to face him, elation suddenly wiping away fear.
“Yes.” His voice was faint, a rusty scrape that hurt her own throat with its dryness. “I am Rozokov.”
“They found you, in the warehouse. Then they burnt it to hide where you’d been.” There was no reply, only the slow susurration of his breathing. “What happened there . . . in the warehouse?”
“I killed one,” Rozokov said slowly, as if remembering something that had happened centuries before. “I woke up . . . so hungry . . . there were men there and I killed one. The others had a machine . . . the pain.” His head bent suddenly, shoulders shuddering beneath an unseen lash.
“Who found you? Was it Roias?” she asked, but he was gone again, eyes blank, features closed as carved marble. She said his name once more, but he did not stir. Before she turned away, she said, softly, “My name is Ardeth,” because it suddenly mattered that he should know.