Kate eased herself slowly down the steps, candle held high in one hand, her Colt Sheriff’s revolver in the other. Echo followed, one step behind. The air coming up from below was damp and musty, filled with the smell of cold earth. Outside it began to rain, and both Kate and Echo could hear the sound of it hitting the slates of the cathedral roof high above them.
They went round four turns in the stone stairwell before they reached the bottom, exiting into a large vaulted chamber. The roof and walls were brick, whitewashed, and the floor was nothing but packed earth. The whitewash on the walls was peeling, showing great stains of rusty mold. At the far end of the chamber was an arched doorway.
Going through the doorway, they found themselves in a long corridor, barely wide enough for a single person to pass through. The ceiling here was also vaulted, the roof overhead lost to the faint light of the candle. It was a crypt, and Echo had expected to find niches with coffins or sarcophagi but there were none; the walls were flat, curving upward to the fanlike vault.
Finally the corridor came to an end and the two women found themselves in what appeared to be the central chamber of the underground vault. The room was circular, and from it four broad, dark passages led off in four directions, north, south, east and west. Around the walls of the round room there were large alcoves, each one filled with a large stone sarcophagus. Each one of the huge vaults had a name set into a stone rectangle in the wall. Kate read them, one by one, walking in a circle. “Seton, Heeney, Carrigan, Mooney, Lynch, Hargous, Leery, Dominic. Irish, each and every one.” There was one empty alcove, but the name was already etched into the stone: Hughes. “Dagger John’s already got his bed ready, I see.” Kate grinned. Of all the niches it was the only one decorated with cherubs, twin obelisks and a pediment on which rested a marble orb carved with the archbishop’s signature cruciform with a dagger point. Kate shivered slightly. “Damp place to spend eternity,” she muttered.
“Where is Toussaint?” Echo asked.
“I suspect he’s somewhere out of the way so all these godly Irish won’t have to spend the time before Judgment Day with a man of color.”
Kate turned and stood with Echo in the middle of the room. “Four directions,” she said. She pointed left and right. “Those’ll be the short passages, leading to the sides. The other two obviously stretch the whole length of the cathedral.” She shrugged. “You choose.”
Echo turned on her heel, frowning. “Which passage would lead to the cemetery?” she asked.
Kate turned around again, trying to orient herself. She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking, then opened them. “That way,” she said, pointing to the northern corridor. “Why?”
“Because if the crypt proceeds beyond the church, that will be the direction they’d build. Also, I saw a house at the far end of the graveyard. Probably the archbishop’s residence. If he’s anything like the churchmen in my country, he’ll have a passage between there and the church to keep him dry on rainy nights like this.”
“Smart girl.” Kate smiled. “North it is.”
They headed into the north passage, and both Kate and Echo saw immediately that there were rows of paraffin lamps on hooks close to the ceiling, the curving roof above them marred with soot. Using the candle Kate lit them one by one as they went along. Two women exploring down here alone was dangerous enough, but doing so trusting to the light of a single candle was simply foolish.
After fifty yards the corridor seemed to come to an abrupt end, the vaulting becoming ragged and the walls decrepit. There were scorch marks on the stone foundations as though there’d once been a fire. A roughly built low-ceilinged passage curved off to the right. Kate took the last paraffin lamp in the main corridor down from its hook and handed the candle back to Echo. She crouched down, shining the lamp on the earth floor. It was marred by fresh footprints.
“He came this way,” murmured the Pinkerton agent. “You were right.” In the silence of the crypt Echo distinctly heard the sound of Kate’s thumb pulling back the hammer of the short-barreled Colt. “Come on.” They stepped into the corridor and suddenly Echo knew that they were now beyond the confines of the cathedral and were traveling beneath the graveyard. Behind and around them, deep in the soil, were the bones of the dead.
Glancing upward, she could see that the low, flat ceiling over her head was dark with soot. The passageway, leading to either another chamber of the crypt or the archbishop’s residence, was well-used.
After making their uneasy way forward for another hundred feet or so, they came to a branching of the passage. One corridor continued north, while the branch to the right, even narrower than the one they stood in, headed east.
“What do you think?” Kate whispered.
“This one must lead to the archbishop’s residence,” said Echo. “I think we should go to the right.”
“Agreed,” said Kate. “Very quietly, now.”
They swung to the right, the crumbling brick walls of the tunnel brushing their shoulders, trails of cobwebs and even the pale venous roots of trees and vegetation in the ground breaking through the roof and brushing against their heads. The smell was different here as well; there was a dampness and a foul stink that could only come from the corrupted flesh in rotting coffins that were buried all around them. Within fifty feet Kate saw a faint light ahead. She turned and gestured to Echo for quiet. Echo nodded, her fingers dropping to her boot top and feeling for the silver-topped knife she’d taken from her father’s possessions.
The narrow passageway turned abruptly to the right, clearly to avoid the flank of an enormous granite boulder, then straightened again for a few yards. Without warning the passage came to an end and Kate and Echo stumbled out into the light.
The chamber was small by the standards of the main crypt room beneath the church, but it was still impressive, domed in a single arch of unwhitewashed stone, lit all around with an array of paraffin lamps. Across the room was an exit, rough and framed in heavy timber. Beside the exit was a heavy metal chest and on top of that a leather satchel, some long object wrapped up in a cloak, a bowl, a flask and a tin cup. In the center of the chamber was a high, jet-black, polished granite sarcophagus ten feet long and four feet wide. On the side of the enormous stone object, carved in simple, upright letters, was the phrase they’d seen above the steps leading down into the crypt itself: HIC TOUSSAINT REQUIESCAT: Toussaint rests here.
On the polished top of the sarcophagus was a folded gray blanket, and on the blanket, laid out like the dead, was the half-naked body of a man. He was tall, his hair long and black and spread out around his face. His eyes were closed and he was very pale. The skin of his torso was covered with a sheen of sweat that seemed almost luminescent. His chest and flat belly were perfectly hairless, muscles taut and powerful wherever they were visible. The shoulders looked incredibly strong, the arms sinewy, the hands powerful, laid calmly at his sides as though he was prepared to be sewn into his winding cloth. His hands were the hands of a pianist or a priest, the fingers lean and strong.
The body was that of a warrior, and like a warrior’s body it was scarred. Scarred countless times, scarred incredibly and impossibly, long thin scars as though from a sword across his ribs, heavier scars writhing like worms up from his hips. Grooves torn across his chest as though from a glancing musket ball. There was a perfectly circular puckered scar at midchest that looked as though a bullet had blown directly into his heart. Half the wounds looked as though they could have been fatal, but all had healed. It was the body of a dead man, but the soft rise and fall of his chest showed that he still clearly lived.
“Dear Christ in Heaven,” whispered Echo. “It’s him! It’s Draculiya, the man who murdered my father!”
The young woman rushed forward, dropping the candle. She stumbled as she reached down into her boot for the silver-handled knife and pulled it free. Screaming, she raised it high above her head, the black blade gleaming in the light from the paraffin lamps. Hidden by her gripping hand, deeply etched into the silver were the words COCHILLA MORTAJA, shroud piercer. The fiercely sharp volcanic glass blade had supposedly been part of the actual weapon that had dispatched the Aztec vampire god Xipe Totec, a creature that wore the flayed skin of a man and was also known as Yoalli Tlauana, the Night Drinker. According to her father, the obsidian had been a gift from the Aztec emperor Montezuma to the conquistador and conqueror Hernán Cortés. By her father’s estimation, the blade was one of the few things that could actually kill a Vampyr, and from the appearance of Draculiya’s partially clothed body, more than one had tried.
Her quest finally ended, Echo reached the sarcophagus and prepared to plunge the needle-sharp black blade into the creature’s heart. Still screaming incoherently, tears of rage streaming down her cheeks, she gripped the knife in both hands and raised it above her head.
The Vampyr’s eyes opened and stared up at her without fear. Without any fear at all, only curiosity. Horribly, clutched by some terrible vertigo that made her sway where she stood, Echo felt herself almost falling into the jade green pupils, the irises blazing like the corona of some distant and eclipsing sun. From the far side of the room, at the wood-framed exit, came the sound of a voice. Fu Sheng, the Chinaman.
“Hold,” he called out clearly, a revolver in his hand. He stood in the narrow exit, bowler hat fixed squarely on his head, long queue down his back, his arm unwavering as it pointed the pistol. If he was any kind of a shot, Kate thought, he could blow out her brains before she had a chance to raise her own weapon, or worse, kill the young Van Helsing girl.
An instant passed. Somehow, still falling into the deep green pools of the Vampyr’s eyes, Echo managed to break free of their hypnotic grasp, and with a deep, terrible sigh she brought the blade down in a killing blow meant to pin the creature’s still-beating heart to the top of Pierre Toussaint’s granite tomb.
Snake quick, the Vampyr’s arm came up and his hand grasped her wrist in an incredibly powerful grip, wrapping around her arm like a stone manacle. The point of the obsidian blade hovered no more than half an inch above the dead white skin of his terribly scarred chest.
“I did not kill your father,” said the Vampyr. “And the one who did now holds your brother, Matthew, hostage.”