Written in the Blood Read online

  Naked, she opened the bedroom door and walked out into the hall, the cool air raising on her skin a rash of goosebumps that faded as quickly as it had appeared.

  The Aviary waited on the second floor at the back of the house, accessed via a landing off the building’s central staircase or through an adjoining antechamber. Etienne had no desire to meet her visitor on the stairs. Instead, she walked along the third-floor hall from her bedroom, bare feet sinking into the carpet, and let herself through the last door on this side of the landing. Unlike the other rooms in the house, all of which had been renovated, this room and the one immediately below it remained as they had been found.

  Paper curled from its walls. Flaking paint peeled from woodwork. At its centre waited a spiral staircase of cast iron, corkscrewing down into the antechamber below. Etienne descended, the metal rungs cold against her feet.

  The walls and ceiling of the antechamber were stained, decrepit. Cobwebs shivered in corners. The single window was grey with dust; beneath it stood a neglected dressing table and stool. Five wooden wardrobes lined one wall. Along another, three more angled mirrors, and the door that led to the Aviary.

  Etienne placed her fingers on its handle and paused, listening. The room beyond was silent, but she would struggle to hear him even if he stood right on the other side.

  Contemplating that, she found herself jolted by another emotion, one that had not visited her in years: fear.

  She closed her eyes.

  Ridiculous. What’s happened to you today?

  Outside, thunder rumbled, as if somewhere in the city skyscrapers were toppling.

  Perhaps it’s the storm, she thought. Perhaps it’s just that.

  Etienne opened the door. A moment later, her spiking heartbeat already beginning to slow, she stepped across the threshold.

  Strange, in a way, that she still called this room the Aviary. No birds sang in its cages; no wings beat a draught upon the air. When she had purchased the house all those years ago, this part had been uninhabitable, untouched since its Victorian resident had expired following a prolonged dive into insanity. Down in the cellar she’d found, wrapped in bandages, a portrait of the man. His pale face loomed from the canvas, hair pasted to his scalp, eyes bulging in paranoia. Several times Etienne had thrown the painting away. On each occasion, unable to explain why, she had rescued it.

  Elsewhere, she discovered evidence of the man’s dark obsessions. The Aviary was boarded up when she arrived. She tore down the planks herself, using a claw hammer to prise them away from the jamb. When she found the door locked, and its key absent from the bunch she’d inherited, Etienne hacked through the wood with an axe, bursting into a room as resistant to reason as the mind of a lunatic.

  Against the far wall stood a row of ebonised display cases, similar to those she’d seen in the Natural History Museum over on Exhibition Road. Dust caked the glass like a skin, and when she wiped it away she saw the eyes of perhaps twenty birds staring out at her.

  They had been preserved, but badly: bodies overstuffed, beaks broken, glass eyes imprecisely attached. As Etienne smeared her hand further along the dust-felted windows, she revealed a taxidermy project more peculiar and twisted than anything she could have imagined. The animals lurking inside those cases had never walked naturally upon the earth. Parts of them had; that much was obvious. But the woeful specimens that greeted her possessed a carnival-show horror. They were hybrids, abominations: creations sewn together by a misfiring mind. Here, the head of a cat attached to the body of a chimp. Beside it, the shrivelled head of a new-born lamb fused to the body of a snake; crude bat wings had been stitched all the way along the snake’s torso.

  In one corner of the room Etienne saw a heap of animal bones, reaching as high as her waist. And, hanging from the ceiling, the birdcages. They reminded her of lobster pots, although these had been fashioned from iron or brass. In some perched the skeletons of parrots, their bones held together with wire. Other cages contained heaps of tiny, air-dried carcasses – vaguely feathered husks that had presumably lain there since they’d fallen from their perches a century earlier. The floor was spattered with old droppings. On shelves, collections of bird skulls.

  Etienne threw open the windows, letting in air and light. She took out the museum cases and their residents, burning them in the garden. The bone pile and the shelves with their papery skulls disappeared. She instructed her workmen to paint the walls, floorboards and ceiling a brilliant white, but she didn’t remove the birdcages. She emptied them of their dead, cleaned and painted them, and snapped off each of their doors. After that she hung them back up, perhaps a hundred of them. With the Aviary’s windows open, their metal chains and bars clinked as they swung against each other in the breeze.

  Today, however, the windows remained closed, and the birdcages were still: silent and empty prison cells from which the dead had taken flight.

  A rattan screen zigzagged the width of the room, dividing it in two. Waiting nearby, a single chaise longue, upholstered in gold fabric. The only additional colour on this side of the screen came from the hundreds of tiny birds delicately hand-painted on to the walls: scarlet macaws, iridescent toucans, flashing kingfishers; no more than a single example of any individual species, each one rendered in a size no longer than her finger.

  Etienne moved to the chaise longue and sat. She pressed her knees together. Through the gaps in the rattan screen, she saw that the room’s partitioned side was unoccupied. At its centre stood a single Louis XV armchair. Unlike the chaise longue, it was upholstered in blood-red silk.

  A door opened. A draught set the bird cages jangling. The door closed and she heard footsteps. A creak from the springs of the blood-red chair.

  Etienne sensed him, now. Sensed his darkness; his rage; his white-knuckle self-discipline. She knew that the face he wore in her presence was not his own; other than his name, it was all she knew of him, despite the length of their acquaintance. Masking one’s features like that among fellow hosszú életek was a gross breach of etiquette, but his deceit seemed to trouble him not at all.

  ‘Salut,’ she murmured, listening intently for any tension in her voice. She found none.

  ‘Salut.’

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘It’s been four and a half months.’ There was a playfulness to his tone. The vaguest hint of mockery, too.

  Etienne knew exactly how long it had been. Before their last meeting, she hadn’t seen him in six months. Before that, a year. The frequency of his visits was increasing, and she wondered what that meant – if not for her, for him. ‘You’ve been well?’

  She could hear the smirk in his voice. ‘You care about that?’

  ‘I prefer you to be happy.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  From the way his tone changed, she knew that the smirk had soured into a sneer.

  ‘You still have the photographs?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s one of them you want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The mother or the daughter?’

  A pause as he considered. She thought she heard him lick his lips. A dry rustle, like leaves in a drain. ‘The daughter.’

  She nodded. ‘You know how much that will cost?’

  The smirk was back. ‘Oh, I know exactly how much it will cost, Etienne.’

  Her forehead puckered into a frown. Rarely had he demonstrated such animosity so early in his visit, but she dismissed it. ‘You remember the Bellicoso?’

  ‘One of my favourites.’

  ‘Wait for me there. I’ll be along shortly.’

  Chair legs scraped on wood. A door opened. The birdcages clashed like distant cymbals.

  Back in the antechamber, Etienne sat at the warped dressing table. Outside, wind flung a fistful of raindrops against the window, the sound like pebbles dropped on a snare. Lightning flickered. Once, twice.

  She opened the table’s slim drawer and reached inside to pull out the photographs – a stack of mismatched images a
s fat as two playing-card decks slapped together. Most of the photographs were in colour, but some were black and white or sepia, brittle and faded.

  A rubber band held them together. Etienne slipped it off and began to sort through the images: a blurry shot, sun-faded and cracked, of a bikini-clad woman on a beach; a monochrome image of a serious-looking woman standing outside a terraced house, the photograph torn in half to remove the face and torso of the man whose arm snaked around her; a line of Parisian dancing girls in feathers and heels, one of them circled in black ink; a daguerreotype of two young sisters in profile, black hair scraped into tight buns.

  Etienne sorted through them. Every image bore a name and a date on the back. Many of these women were long dead. Some had escaped the men who sought them. Some had simply disappeared. But each picture told a story of violence or tragedy or obsession. In many ways these women were Etienne’s caged birds, and she wondered whether in some way she helped to set them free.

  Towards the centre of the pile she found what she was looking for – a cluster of five glossy photographs fastened together with a paperclip. She returned the rest to the drawer and laid out those she had selected in a line across the scarred wood. Five faces stared up at her. Four belonged to the same woman, and three of those – larger and better preserved than the rest, suggesting that they had been displayed at one time in a frame – showed her at an earlier stage in her life: dressed as an angel in a school play; posing on a sports field with hockey stick and ball; splashing around in the sea with an older man, his face so similar that he must have been her father.

  Beside these photographs, two smaller images, scuffed and stained, as though they had been kept for years in someone’s wallet. The first showed the same girl, older now, perhaps in her late twenties. She sat on the grassy slope of a hill. She was smiling, but she looked weary. Behind her, sunlight glimmered on the surface of a glacial lake.

  Etienne turned the photograph over and stared at the name written there: the mother, this woman. She placed the image down and picked up the last photograph. This one showed a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old. She sat astride a bicycle, smiling for the camera.

  The daughter.

  Etienne turned the image over. On the back she found two dates scribbled in ink. The first was the girl’s birth date. The second, written by a different hand, recorded her age when the photograph had been taken.

  She worked the numbers in her head. If the girl still lived, she would be twenty-four by now. Bending closer, Etienne studied her face, examining her bone structure, the gap between her eyes, the curve of her jaw, the rounded protrusions of her cheekbones. And then she held the image away from her and imagined how that face would change as it aged: from eight-year-old girl through to twenty-four-year-old woman.

  Returning the photograph to the table, Etienne rested her hands on her thighs, palms up. She closed her eyes. Emptied her lungs. When next she took a breath she felt a prickling sensation upon her lips, as if someone had begun to tattoo her. The needle pricks spread out, leaving a smaller, narrower mouth in their wake. Like a moving rash of bee stings, the points of pain crept across her face and she felt her muscles pulling, tightening, stretching. They quested upwards, towards her eyes, and when they encircled them Etienne felt her fingers curl and twitch as twin spikes of agony lanced her.

  Gritting her teeth, she felt her spine shift and arch. She hissed as her breasts contracted, a stranger’s lips curling back over her teeth. Her shoulders cracked, two loud crocodile-jaw snaps in the silence. She felt the tattooist’s needles reach the end of her nose, the tips of her earlobes. The strange electric pain hesitated there, and then she felt her nostrils narrow and lift, the lobes of her ears fatten.

  She opened her eyes, stared at what she found. Tilted her head to one side. Licked her teeth. Pouted. Smiled.

  Rising, she went to one of the wardrobes and opened it. Inside, she allowed her hand to trail over the garments that hung there. She selected a simple cotton shift dress. In its fabric and its styling it resembled something a young woman from a working family might have worn a century earlier. She stepped into the dress, not bothering with any underwear, and then into leather sandals.

  Back at the dressing table, she selected a bottle of Guerlain’s Jicky and touched the scent to her throat and wrists. After a final examination in the three full-length mirrors, she climbed the spiral staircase back to the room above and let herself onto the landing. On the far side of the stairwell waited the doors to six rooms, all individually named: Feroce, Chiuso, Bellicoso, Sostenuto, Duolo, Capriccioso. Each one was decorated to accommodate the varied appetites of her guests.

  The Bellicoso lay at the end of the hall. She followed the balcony railing around to the right and walked down the thick carpet to the last door. It was in this place and others, doing this work, that Etienne had made her fortune. She did it, she told herself, not just for the riches her exploits brought her, not just to satisfy that itch lurking at the heart of her. Some of her visitors were good souls driven half-mad with grief for deceased wives. She helped to ease their loss. The rest of her clients were driven by darker compulsions, and the decor in some of the rooms she passed reflected their tastes. In those cases, she helped the women – far less qualified than she – who would quench those desires, willingly or unwillingly, should she choose not to make this her task.

  Etienne paused at the final door. Glanced at the wooden plaque with its scorched black lettering.

  Bellicoso.

  From the skylight two storeys above her head, lightning flickered out a serpent tongue. Thunder rolled.

  Heart accelerating once more in her chest, no longer from fear but a sudden thrill of anticipation, she opened the door and entered the room.

  Darkness waited inside. Heavy drapes were drawn against the day. On either side of a four-poster bed candles sputtered in wall brackets: two yellow circles of smoky light. She noticed the bitter aroma of an extinguished cigar, the citrus scent of cologne. And underneath those, an electric odour of excitement, of barely controlled fury.

  In one corner was a wingback chair, and sitting in it, a long shadow. It gripped the chair’s arms with spider-dark fingers.

  When Etienne ventured closer, clutching her hands together in a parody of womanly surrender, she saw a face stretched wide, and caught a glimmer of teeth.

  ‘Leah,’ the shadow said, rising.

  She moved towards him. Glancing away to the bed, she saw what he had placed there, and realised that today was going to be one of those visits, and that the soundproofed walls of the Bellicoso would do well to keep its secrets and smother her screams.

  Her stomach twitched and fluttered, a butterfly net filled with captives yearning to be free.

  Because she knew it would please him, she allowed a single tear to roll down her cheek. ‘Jakab,’ she replied, bowing her head.

  CHAPTER 15

  Budapest, Hungary

  1876

  Izsák woke to screams. His eyes snapped wide in the darkness, breath frozen in his throat. Curling his fingers around the bed sheets, he gripped them for anchorage, his entire body tense.

  Was he alone in here? Yes. He thought so. A lumpen shadow in one corner was simply his coat hanging from its peg.

  On the floorboards, the moon had painted four oblongs of pale light. Izsák slipped from his bed and stepped into one of them. After a moment’s pause, he moved to his desk. It stood piled with papers, writing instruments and the tiny metal parts of a dismantled model steam engine: washers, pipework, flywheel, a badly oxidised firebox, all in a neat row; the accumulated clutter of his three years at Tansik House.

  Beside the engine parts stood an oil lamp and matches. Fingers shaking, Izsák struck a match, eyes closed against the flare. He lit the lamp, lowered its glass chimney and dialled up the wick. He was about to pick it up when he heard a moan float down the corridor outside. Such misery bled from it, such pitiful horror, that Izsák found himself cowering from the sound.r />
  He did not want to go out of the room.

  Then don’t. Stay here. What do you think you’re doing, anyway? You’re a coward; always have been. Cowards don’t investigate danger. They make sure their door is locked, and they wait until the danger has passed.

  But his door was already locked; he was sure of that. He’d been fastidious about securing it every night since Katalin’s warning to him all those years ago. From here he could see the sharp shadow of the key’s iron circle, twisted to the ten o’clock position that had become his habit.

  The same night he’d received that advice from Katalin, he’d asked the doctor’s daughter a question: What kind of place is this?

  Even now, he remembered her response: A bad place. During the years he had been resident at Tansik House, Izsák had found no reason to dispute Katalin’s words.

  He picked up the lamp, angered by that mocking voice inside his head. He was a coward. But the rooms adjacent to his own contained the only friends he had. They might need him.

  And what of Katalin? She would likely be asleep in the north wing. Izsák doubted that the screams, even as sharp as they’d been, would have carried so far. Whoever was out there, whoever was behind this, could be searching the building for her even now.

  Forcing himself to act, shaking a carnival of shadows from his oil lamp that danced like demons on the lemon-yellow walls, he crept to the door. Reached for the key.

  Outside, he heard another key turning. The sound came from Béni’s room, to the left of his own. Spurred on by it, Izsák let himself out into the hall.

  A second bobbing light swelled towards him, and he nearly shrieked. Abruptly he saw whose face rode above the lantern glow. ‘What’s happening?’ he hissed.

  Béni’s lamp, lighting him from below, had robbed his face of its usual humanity. The boy grimaced, magnifying the effect. ‘Sounded like Pig. Let’s go.’ Without waiting for consensus, he turned away and moved down the hall.