Written in the Blood Read online

  Cringing at the worm of fear curling in his gut, Izsák followed. Pig’s room was two doors down from Béni’s. As they approached, banishing the shadows with the swinging lights of their lamps, Izsák saw that the boy’s door was ajar, presenting a perfect rectangle of darkness.

  Pig never slept with his door open. And he never suffered from the kind of night terrors that would lead to a scream like the one they’d heard. Something awful had happened – might still be happening.

  Izsák heard more doors unlocking. The creak of hinges. Frightened eyes blinking in the gloom.

  From out of the slab of darkness marking the threshold to Pig’s room looped a tiny winged missile. It banked towards them, buzzing, and tinked off the glass of Béni’s lamp. Waving it away, the boy glanced over his shoulder to check that Izsák still followed. He found his friend’s eyes, nodded. Then he crept closer to Pig’s door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Izsák whispered. A fist-like pressure gripped his throat. He could barely force out his words.

  ‘We have to check on Pig,’ Béni shot back. ‘He’s only . . . szar, what’s that stink?’

  Izsák noticed it the same moment he heard his friend’s words. A death smell, rich and thick, bloomed from the darkness, as if the bloated corpse of some Danube suicide had been fished from the river and dragged inside the boy’s room.

  He felt his stomach lurch in revulsion. His mouth flooded with saliva. He shuddered, desperate to rid his nose of that stink. ‘Béni,’ he hissed. ‘Béni.’

  Ignoring Izsák’s plea, Béni lifted his lantern and stepped into Pig’s room, leaving nothing but a diminishing half-circle of light to mark his passage.

  Heart slamming in his chest, Izsák edged closer. He did not want to see this. He wanted to run, lock himself away. Squeeze his eyes shut until this was over. But Béni was inside, now. He could not abandon him.

  Pausing beside Pig’s doorway, Izsák took a shallow breath, almost gagging from the foulness it carried into his lungs. Then he craned his neck for a look.

  Inside, the drapes pulled across the window had banished the moon’s weak glow. Béni sat on the floor. Beside him, his oil lamp provided a shimmering halo of light. In his lap, he cradled Pig’s head.

  The larger boy was shivering, weeping. Mucus ran from his nose. ‘Not want,’ he said, tongue thick in his mouth. His face contorted. ‘Not want, not want, not want.’

  Izsák crept closer. Even though the stench was at its strongest here, it was already beginning to recede, the last traces burned in the flames of their lamps. ‘What happened, Pig?’

  ‘Not want! Not want!’ the boy screamed, lurching upright. His eyes had lost all their colour, leaving two black orbs feathered with crimson. ‘Toll Man come. Toll Man! TOLL MAN NOT WANT!’

  Movement in the doorway at Izsák’s back. He whipped around and saw the twins, Magdolna and Rózsika, their disembodied faces floating like hunter’s moons. Neither girl spoke, staring past him at the figures clustered on the floor.

  Now he heard approaching footsteps, someone running down the hall. Trusov appeared, red-faced and breathless. When the man saw Béni on the floor, holding Pig in his arms, his eyes widened and he stiffened, glancing back into the hall behind him. It took him only a moment to recover. ‘Out,’ he snarled. ‘All of you. Back to your rooms.’

  Béni frowned. ‘Something scared him, sir. He’s terrified. I don’t—’

  Trusov burst between the twins and surged into Pig’s room. Grabbing Béni by the hair, he yanked the boy to his feet and kicked him into the hall. ‘I said back to your rooms!’ he shouted. Turning on Pig, he pointed at the bed. ‘Get in. Get in, you fat, useless balfácán.’

  Pig stared, eyes teary and uncomprehending. Trusov grabbed a fistful of his nightshirt and dragged him on to the bed.

  ‘NOT WANT!’ Pig screamed. ‘NOT WANT! NOT WANT!’

  Spittle shining on his chin, Trusov slapped the boy’s face. Pig thrashed and Trusov slapped him again, so hard he left a scarlet handprint. This time the blow had its desired effect. Pig lay rigid.

  Another moan rolled down the hall. Earlier, Izsák had thought it shared the same source as the scream but now he realised he’d been wrong. It came from behind him, this sound – back along the hall past his own room.

  Béni climbed to his feet. ‘Give me your lamp.’

  Izsák did not want to relinquish it. From where his errant spark of bravery came he could not say, but instead of handing over the light he raised it higher and padded back the way they’d come, towards the source of that dreadful lament.

  He heard his breath rushing in and out of his lungs, a sound like forge bellows, and smelled that graveyard stink, growing stronger once more, so cloying he could taste it on his tongue: maggot-bitter, an invisible cloud of putrefaction and decay.

  A bluebottle buzzed him. Moments later, another one swung out of the darkness and landed on his wrist. Prickly and fat, it threw off a grotesque shadow as it skittered across his skin.

  Repulsed, Izsák shook it off. And then, up ahead, he saw a ghost materialise from the gloom, a funeral shroud hanging from its skeletal frame – although, he acknowledged, it wasn’t really a ghost at all. Something just as wretched, even so: the resident ghoul of Tansik House.

  Etienne.

  The moment she recognised him, the girl pointed across the hall to another empty doorway.

  ‘János,’ she said, voice husky. Her hair was mussed, and there were bruises around her throat. Trusov’s brutish work, no doubt. ‘It’s in his room.’

  ‘What’s in there, Ets?’ he whispered. ‘What have you seen?’

  ‘It took him.’

  Béni gripped his shoulder. ‘Either go and see, or I will. But let’s not wait.’

  Izsák stared at the open doorway of János’s room, at the shadows that lapped at its edges, recoiling from the rotten dead-man smell wafting out of it. Something waited for him there, inside that room; something that would prove the world was infinitely more hostile than his experiences of it so far.

  It would change him, if he investigated that darkness. He wasn’t sure he could cope with its revelations.

  Let Béni do it, then. He offered, didn’t he? Give him the damned lamp, let him risk his own neck. Get back to your room and lock the door. Pull the bedclothes over your head and maybe you’ll wake up from this. Maybe you’ll—

  No.

  He would not. János was his friend, one of only three or four people in his life he could trust.

  Going to the door, moving fast to outrun the cowardice that threatened to overtake him, Izsák thrust the lamp inside, watching the shadows flit to the far corners.

  A solitary pillow lay twisted on the bed. Its covers had been dragged halfway across the room. The back of János’s chair, where the boy usually draped his clothes, was bare.

  On the floor, cowering away from the lamplight, curled a wretched shape. It shivered and twitched, fingers clutched to its face.

  Not János. Someone else.

  Izsák didn’t want to get any closer, didn’t trust that thing, whatever it was. He was already within its reach, should it dart out a limb and snatch at him.

  He raised the lamp higher and the room’s occupant moaned. Kicking its legs like a grossly overgrown spider, it managed to scissor backwards into a corner. Izsák’s light found a gap between its fingers and revealed a glimmer of white eye.

  ‘Careful,’ Béni hissed.

  Ignoring his friend, Izsák edged closer, seized by the sudden, inexplicable conviction that this tormented soul, cringing away from his lamp, presented little immediate threat. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he murmured, taking another step. ‘I won’t.’

  Scrabbling to its haunches, the figure snapped out a hand. Béni cried out in alarm, but Izsák saw that it held its palm outwards; a simple gesture, intended to shield itself from their eyes. He took another step into the room, and when the light cast from his lamp banished the last of the shadows he saw for the first time what shelte
red there, and gasped, appalled.

  An old man crouched in the corner, squinting up at them with blood-tinged eyes. His skin was grey-white, the pallor of woodland fungus. In places the flesh on his face seemed to have parted from his skull. It hung in loose folds. One cheek had slid so low it had exposed a crescent of moist red bone below his eye. Two flies were glued to its surface, their proboscises lowered.

  ‘Where’s János?’ Béni shouted from the doorway. ‘What have you done with him?’

  The old man spasmed. One of the bluebottles riding below his eye vibrated its wings, a sound like meat ripping. ‘Nnnn . . .’ he tried to say, and then he vomited, a biscuit-coloured stream of foul-smelling liquid. He retracted his hand, crossing his arms across his chest.

  He spasmed again, more violently this time. The back of his skull cracked against the wall. ‘G . . . Gone,’ he stammered. ‘N . . . N . . . Not long. Not . . . long.’

  Izsák was shaking now, too. Not from fear, but from a despair so deep it gnawed at his heart. He felt tears spring into his eyes.

  The merciful course of action would be to find a weapon and club this wretched creature until it lay dead at his feet. But while Izsák’s uncharacteristic injection of bravery had led him so far, it would not, he knew, allow him to obey that thought.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, wanting to reach out a hand, yet nauseous at the very contemplation of it.

  The old man shuddered, collapsing onto his side. He gasped once and let out a rattling breath, like air rushing from a punctured coffin. He did not move again.

  Rigid with dismay, the two boys watched his fingers uncurl, as if in death he offered each of them some parting gift.

  Behind him, Izsák heard quiet sobbing. He turned, and found Etienne standing in the doorway. The fact that the sobs came from her, a girl he’d never seen display an ounce of emotion despite the years of abuse inflicted on her, made them infinitely more piercing: the most harrowing sound he had heard since the rifle shot that had split his father’s skull apart and changed his life forever. Stumbling over to her, Izsák put an arm around Etienne’s neck and drew her close.

  For two days afterwards, clouds massing over the Danube emptied sheets of rain onto the city’s streets. Water boiled in Budapest’s gutters and carried debris in a sloshing torrent to the great river.

  Katalin visited him at midnight on the third evening after János’s taking, as a crisp wind blew the rainclouds away towards the west. He heard her coded tap in the darkness, and sat up in bed as she slipped into his room, a heady cloud of lavender.

  The moon picked out the crease in her brow. ‘Your door was unlocked,’ she said, padding across his floor in bare feet.

  ‘Trusov took our keys.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘The morning after János disappeared. We went down for breakfast, and when we came back after lessons they were gone.’

  Her mouth dropped open. ‘I have to tell my father. If—’

  ‘No. You can’t, Katalin. He mustn’t hear anything from you about this. You’ll bring trouble on us all.’

  ‘You can’t sleep behind an unlocked door.’

  ‘What choice do I have?’

  ‘Izsák, please. You saw what happened.’

  ‘I saw something. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘All the more reason to take precautions. You have to find a way to block your door at night.’ She cast around the room, taking in the wardrobe, the washstand, the bed. ‘Budge up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you deaf? I’m not going to molest you.’

  She stripped back the covers, revealing his pale legs. Flushing with embarrassment, Izsák pulled down his nightshirt and slid closer to the wall. Katalin climbed in beside him, the bedsprings creaking, and he felt the heat of her body against his own. The girl’s scent, so close, was dizzying.

  ‘It’s happened before. Hasn’t it?’ he asked, needing to break the silence that had formed between them.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Just a guess. Something Béni said once. That there’d been others here, and that they’d gone. He didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘It’s végzet in a few days, Izsák. I don’t know why, but when they come, it’s always at this time of year.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s just one, like a few nights ago. Other times, more of them.’

  ‘Who comes?’

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me or not?’

  She bit her lip. ‘Father calls them the gyermekrablók. But you might have heard them called something else. Lélek tolvajok.’

  Izsák’s skin prickled. He had heard the term before, somewhere in his past. He didn’t know what it signified, exactly, but he remembered it was synonymous with loss. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered.

  She told him.

  Afterwards, they sat in silence, watching the moon trace a path across the sky. At some point during her story, Katalin’s hand had moved beneath the covers and taken his own. Now, she moved her thumb back and forth along his index finger, seemingly unaware of the effect her touch had upon him.

  While he felt sickened at what she had revealed, a small part of him rejoiced at the intimacy the incident had sparked. And then he thought of Pig, rocking himself back and forth – TOLL MAN NOT WANT! – and that small measure of happiness decayed into guilt.

  Beside him, Katalin snuggled down under the covers, her hair trailing across his pillow.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘If we get caught—’

  ‘I won’t,’ she whispered. She let go of his hand, closing her eyes. ‘But just for a little while. Please, Izsák.’

  How could he refuse her? Upright in the bed, he studied her face, listening as her breathing began to lengthen, thinking about all she had told him.

  In later years he would never be able to explain why he did what followed. After what felt like hours, yet was perhaps only an interval of minutes, he leaned over her sleeping form and kissed her mouth.

  The moment their lips touched, Katalin blinked. ‘I’d been wondering how long it would take you to do that,’ she said. Snaking out an arm, she slid her fingers around the back of his head. ‘I never thought I’d have to wait this long.’

  Izsák stared into her eyes, at the reflections of moonlight that glimmered there. His chest rose and fell against her own.

  Outside, in the hall, he heard a rustle of movement as Etienne passed his door. But whether she was coming or going from her nightly appointment with Trusov, Izsák could not say.

  CHAPTER 16

  London, England

  The sky was darkening to wet ashes as Leah steered her Mercedes hire car out of Heathrow, and by the time she arrived in Central London the beams of her headlights were sparkling in the puddles.

  A week had passed since she’d said goodbye to Luca Sultés in Interlaken, and she cursed herself daily for the number of times he’d appeared in her thoughts since. She’d visited several European cities, and had met six hosszú életek women that the tanács, in their wisdom, had condemned as kirekesztett.

  At the women’s request, she’d agreed to meet each in a public place. Five of them arrived alone; one brought along a partner. Of the six, two rose to their feet and walked away the instant Leah explained the reason for her visit. A third became so instantly abusive that on that occasion Leah was the one to retreat, alarmed at the attention they were drawing.

  Of the remaining three kirekesztett, the woman who had brought her partner along agreed to Leah’s proposal on the spot, tears shining on her cheeks as she reflected on the possibilities she’d imagined had disappeared forever. The other two requested more time to consider, which Leah was happy to grant.

  In a single week, she might have found more volunteers than their programme back in Calw had managed in eight months. And Luca’s list contained yet more names.

  One of those she was on her way to meet now.
Unlike the others, this woman had asked that Leah visit her at home; unfazed, it appeared, by the possibility that the contact was part of some tanács plot.

  Half an hour after leaving the airport, Leah turned onto the stratospherically affluent Mayfair street programmed into the satnav and slowed down until she found the address. She parked in a reserved space and switched off the engine, listening to the rain finger-tap a rhythm against the sunroof.

  The house was huge, a whitewashed Georgian terrace that rose a neck-craning five storeys in height. Its imposing front door, up a flight of stone steps and shielded behind cast-iron railings, was an impenetrable slab of wood – reinforced, Leah guessed, with a steel core that would deflect the attempts of all but the fiercest of assaults.

  The black bubble of a security camera bolted to the building’s façade monitored her as she climbed out of the Mercedes. She tried the gate set into the railings and found it locked. Before she had a chance to press the button on its intercom, she heard a buzz of magnets as the enclosure unlocked.

  Leah swung the gate open and walked up the steps. By the time she reached the top, the front door had opened, revealing a heavy-set man with a jaw that looked powerful enough to shatter bricks. He did not bother to conceal the fact that he was armed. Jerking his head to one side, he motioned for her to enter.

  Breath catching in her throat, palms suddenly damp, Leah entered the marble-floored foyer and heard the door swing shut behind her. ‘I’m Leah Wilde,’ she said.

  ‘You’d better be,’ the man replied. ‘Are you carrying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I need to check.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She lifted her arms and he patted her down, moving his hands along her arms, around her torso and down her legs with a briskness that demonstrated he cared only about discovering a hidden weapon.

  He found none. The pat-down complete, he searched through her hair and when, finally, he satisfied himself that she carried no firearm, no knife, nor anything else she might use to endanger his employer, he pointed her towards a staircase that rose in a jagged square around each of the building’s five storeys.