Count Karlstein Read online

  “She’d been beheaded—oh, it was terrifying, Miss Davenport—a little girl carrying her own head—her cloak was all pulled up high around her poor bare neck—I couldn’t see no head on her shoulders at all, but there it was, in her arms—oh, I shall never forget it, not till my dying day….”

  I thought for a moment that the girl had lost her reason. Ghosts carrying their own heads, indeed! But there had to be some kind of natural explanation. I questioned Eliza more closely.

  From her answers it appeared that someone, whether or not the girls themselves, had gone past the woodcutter’s hut only five minutes before; that there were two of them; and that they might easily have been the girls, if they were not so in fact. Obviously, we would have to follow them and find out. I took my pistols—both of them—and set out. Eliza, trembling, came with me.

  But, of course, we found no trace of them. Snow in plenty; darkness in abundance; an excess of undergrowth; but no girls. Disappointed, but hardly surprised, I led the way back to our camp—only to hear voices there and to see a villainous-looking figure brandishing a flaming branch, intent (as I thought) upon setting fire to all our possessions. Which was foolish of me, I admit. I shot him; or, rather, shot the branch out of his hand, and then took my other pistol, ready to issue a stern warning.

  And then Eliza took charge.

  “Maxie!” she cried, and threw herself forward at the intruders.

  “Eliza!” came the joyful reply, in the voice of the man Grindoff, and in a moment they were embracing.

  “It’s all right, Miss Davenport!” called Eliza, breathlessly. “It’s Max!”

  “So I see,” I answered. “Grindoff, my man, I apologize for shooting at you. It was foolish of me. You are not hurt, are you?”

  “Startled, ma’am, but not hurt,” he said, as I stepped into the camp.

  There was another person standing there—a girl of about fourteen, in a thin cloak. I had seen her before, in Castle Karlstein; I looked at her with great curiosity. Grindoff introduced her as Hildi Kelmar and told me all that had happened. The girl contributed, and it was clear from her first sentence that she was a much better witness than he was: clear where he was muddled, cool where he was indignant, intelligent where he was…well, less so.

  “What do you think happened to the girls?” I said to her.

  “What do I think, miss?” she said. “I think that Miss Charlotte’s got out, and I think she’s gone down to the village looking for Miss Lucy, and I think they’ve found each other and gone back up to the mountain guide’s hut, where I took ’em first. If only they’d stayed there, miss!”

  “Quite, quite,” I said. “I agree. Something of the sort must have happened. It is a shame, Grindoff, that you did not go up to the castle as I directed—”

  “I wish I had, now, ma’am,” he said. “But I honestly thought Doctor Cadaverezzi would make a better job of it, like.”

  “He sounds a remarkable man, indeed,” I said, though I considered privately that if he had been that remarkable, he would not have exposed Lucy to the danger of being captured. “But he has disappeared, you say?”

  “Vanished into thin air, ma’am,” he said. “It’s just like his illusion of the Disappearing Dervish. What happens is, this little Dervish—clockwork he is, and a proper marvel—anyway, the doctor sets him going, whirling about on a solid table, and then—”

  “Yes, yes. Perhaps when Doctor Cadaverezzi rematerializes from the dimension into which he has temporarily retired, he will be so kind as to demonstrate the Disappearing Dervish to us. In the meantime, there seems to be no alternative but to follow the girls to the mountain guide’s hut. Is it very far, Hildi?”

  “A couple of hours’ walk, miss,” she said, looking at me doubtfully. I understood that look perfectly: it said, You’re old and fat and you won’t make it. I took it as a challenge.

  “Let us go, then,” I said, rising to my feet. “If anyone is tired, then he or she need not come. One volunteer, after all, is worth ten pressed men.” I spoke with perfect confidence. Each of them privately shared Hildi’s opinion. Each of them, therefore, would have been ashamed to see me set off, and stay behind themselves. So, naturally, all three volunteered to come with me.

  “Excellent,” I said comfortably.

  —

  We arrived at the mountain guide’s hut just as the moon was setting. Dawn, clearly, was not far off, and little Hildi was leaning on my arm (though she did not realize it). It was a wild, deserted spot, on the very edge of the heights; an awesome prospect revealed itself to us: a mighty glacier, vast banks of pure snow, jagged cliffs, and tumbled rocks. It was all silvered by the dying moonlight, and an intense cold struck through us like a spear; not only a physical cold, either, but the cold of fear. How could anyone survive in this wilderness? I prayed that the girls would have had the sense to stay in the hut this time—always supposing that they had not perished on the way and we had missed their frozen bodies.

  So it was with considerable trepidation that I opened the door; and our disappointment, on seeing the place empty, was almost too much to be borne. Still, I determined that we should not despair. I told Grindoff and Eliza to search the hut; there would probably be nothing there, but it would keep them occupied. Meanwhile, I took my telescope and went outside to look for any traces of the girls.

  I saw their footprints in the snow—but that was hardly surprising, since I knew they had been there. I saw another set of footprints, which I took to be Hildi’s—and called her out, to check. They were. And it was she who pointed out to me that there were more prints—the girls’—all around the hut.

  “It must have been after I left here, miss,” she said. “They must have come out to look around. They haven’t half trodden it about!”

  It was true: the snow for some distance around the hut was disturbed. To my relief, there seemed to be no other prints but theirs. Hildi had moved a little further up the mountainside, and I saw her suddenly dart forward and peer closely at the ground. Then she turned and beckoned.

  “What is it?” I said as I arrived at her side—but she had no need to answer, for there, clearly printed in the snow, were two sets of prints.

  “They’re gone!” she said.

  “Up the mountain, too. Oh, how vexing. How very vexing.”

  “They can’t have been gone long, miss,” she said.

  Just then Eliza came hurrying out of the hut, waving a piece of paper.

  “Look! Look, Miss Davenport! Look what we’ve found!”

  It was a note, in a handwriting which I recognized as Lucy’s. I had tried, during the time in which she was in my care, to persuade her to form her letters with some degree of elegance, but in vain; she suffers, as do so many others, from the delusion that neat handwriting is dull while scrawled handwriting is interesting and attractive. I cannot understand this idea. Fashion, again. I consoled myself with the reflection that at least I had taught her to punctuate. The note read:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  Tormented by Fate, cheated of Hope, and exiled by the Cruelty of one from whom we should have expected Kindness and Friendship, we have resolved to offer ourselves up to the Powers of the eternal snows, in the sure knowledge that there can be no less Mercy among the crags and glaciers than among the tapestries and paneled walls of our late dwelling place, CASTLE KARLSTEIN.

  Farewell forever.

  I read this aloud to the others as we sat round the fire and then laid it down—with, I confess, great weariness.

  “What are they playing at?” said Grindoff. “I don’t understand it, miss. What are they running away for?”

  “I told you, Max!” said Hildi. “Zamiel!”

  He shook his head. “I’m fair wore out,” he said. “It slipped me mind altogether. Fancy forgetting that….”

  “Zamiel?” I inquired. “Enlighten me, pray.”

  So Hildi did. She recounted all that she had heard; and then Grindoff repeated what he had heard Count Karlstein say to
his secretary, that watery individual, in the alley beside the Mayor’s house.

  “I see,” I said. And then I sat back and closed my eyes, the better to think.

  Many parts of central Europe—some parts of Britain—have their legends about the Wild Hunt. Windsor Park, so it is said, is haunted by Herne the Hunter; it is an ancient and very interesting superstition. Superstition? Does that mean I did not believe in it? Oh, no. A closed mind is a dead mind. If I did not believe in it, Count Karlstein certainly did, and was going to base a particularly malevolent action on this belief. I saw no reason to assume that any of this was nonsense, and several reasons to assume that it was true. But for every malevolent force there were remedies—charms, protections, call them what you will. I tried to recall what I had read.

  But the question that presented itself constantly was, of course, what was to be done? A bargain had been struck, it seemed. Count Karlstein had agreed, in return for some favor that he had either received already or would receive in the future, to provide a victim or victims for Zamiel the Demon Hunter. They were to be delivered to him at midnight on All Souls’ Eve—which, as I saw by first opening my eyes and then consulting my Gentlewoman’s Tropical Almanac, was the very day that was now dawning. I closed my eyes again and recommenced my survey of the problem.

  The Demon Huntsman was going to appear in the hunting lodge at midnight, there to receive his tribute. It was clear that no particular victim was specified, for Count Karlstein had been heard to say that if Lucy and Charlotte were not available, Hildi would do instead. What would happen if there were no one there at all when midnight struck? Clearly, Count Karlstein would be held by the demon to have failed in his duty. Hence the man’s insane anxiety.

  And would not the wrath of the demon then recoil upon Count Karlstein himself? That was less clear. It might be that any human beings in the forest nearby—peasants, woodcutters, and the like—would be in danger; and that the demon, having satisfied his hunger, would leave Count Karlstein alone. Without more information on the habits of demons, I was unable to say for certain.

  I then turned my attention to Count Karlstein himself, and what I knew of his relation to the girls. He was a cousin of their unfortunate mother’s. She had died, together with their father, Sir Percival, in a shipwreck; it had been my melancholy duty to inform the girls of their loss and to make the arrangements for their journey to Switzerland. Count Karlstein was their only living relative. He had at first, I recalled, been reluctant to receive them into his home, but the persuasion of the family lawyer—a most excellent gentleman called Haifisch—had changed his mind; and I had seen them off on the first stage of their journey with some anxiety.

  Something was stirring in my memory, as I knew it would if I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  Haifisch—Karlstein—the girls…I should have to go to Geneva.

  I sat up, opened my eyes, and clapped my hands to awaken the others. Hildi’s red-rimmed eyes turned toward me, and the ghost of a snore was suddenly cut off by its perpetrator, Grindoff, who sat up briskly and yawned so wide that I fancied for a moment that I heard his jaws creak.

  “What is it, Miss Davenport?” said Eliza sleepily.

  I explained, in detail. They agreed: there was nothing else for it. So we set off, in our different directions—and in as much haste as we could manage to summon. The affair was more serious now. Previously, it had been a matter of two lost children; now it was a matter of life and death. There was no time to lose.

  I suppose that if you fell from a mighty cliff and had the good fortune to land on a ledge a little way down, shaken but unhurt, you would feel your Despair give way to relief; and I suppose that if that ledge were to crumble beneath you and precipitate you further into the abyss, your first Despair might well be redoubled; and if that were to happen yet again, you might well wonder whether some evil power were taking a personal interest in your affairs. Thus I felt, when I ran out of the police station after Doctor Cadaverezzi’s arrest.

  Fleeing from Castle Karlstein, we had foolishly left the mountain hut and lost each other. Charlotte had been captured straight away, by that maggot in human form, Arturo Snivelwurst; but I had found Doctor Cadaverezzi, and safety. (And I had enjoyed being a Princess, too. I think it is a role that I might be good in: that of actress, I mean, or strolling player, or mountebankess.) Then came the danger again—Count Karlstein spotted me in the tavern. Then came safety—Hildi, raising the false alarm of fire, enabled us to get away. Then, yet again, danger—and poor Doctor Cadaverezzi was arrested. (Although, if I knew him, he would not stay arrested for long. I had known him only a short time—merely a matter of hours—but in that time he had impressed me with the force of his Genius in a way that no one, not even Miss Davenport, had done before. I felt as if his mind inhabited a larger, freer, more glorious Universe than this one, and though I tried to reproach him for his misdeeds, I knew that they were nothing beside the glory of his Imagination and the unbounded radiance of his spirit. Ah, well. I had heard—as Charlotte, for instance, had not—the most intoxicating of all sounds: the applause of the public….)

  But we were cruelly disappointed now. It was not difficult for us to decide what we should do; we reached the mountain guide’s hut in less than an hour, but there was no point in staying there, since Hildi, we knew, would be captured by the count and tortured to reveal all she knew. She would hold out as long as she could, but eventually the rack and the thumbscrews would overcome her and, fainting, in the last extremity of Anguish she would gasp out that this had been our hiding place. Then the count would hasten, snarling, to the kennels, unleash the ferocious hounds, and…

  So there was nothing for it but to climb the mountains. Italy, after all, lay on the other side.

  We were lucky that it was not snowing. The brilliant moonlight showed us every crag, every rocky cliff, every precipice, every glinting carapace of ice. I do not know what a carapace is, but I am sure there were some on the mountain. At first the exhilaration of climbing, even in our weariness, kept us going. The unearthly beauty of the scene—like some Vision from the works of Byron or Shelley—filled our hearts with strange longings. It was easy to believe, in that dreamlike setting, in the Spirits and Phantoms of folklore. We climbed and climbed, until all feeling had been lost from our feet and hands, and until every breath was a sharp pain in our lungs, but we dared not stop. We climbed until the moon set behind the glittering jagged edge of the mountainside, and then we went on climbing in the horrid chill that fell with the darkness—a deeper chill than ever before. But the sky was lightening. Some of the stars in the region to our left were beginning to fade, as the light soaked up the dark blue they rested on—they faded as pearls are supposed to fade if they are not worn. (Although I have never possessed any pearls, my dear mother had a fine necklace of them, which was with her when the ship sank; so that they returned to their element as she left hers, forever! I think there is something malign about jewelry, and I will not wear it for that reason. No! Not even the simplest gold ring. I have made a Vow.)

  And presently, with a grandeur that none who have not seen it can possibly imagine, the sun rose over the Alps.

  We were, at that point, on a kind of small plateau in the ice. To our right, a great sheet of snow sparkled and gleamed, leading up to a vast cliff of dark rock. Ahead of us, in tumbled profusion, jagged lumps of ice, some as small as Charlotte’s Herr Woodenkopf and some as big as a cottage, lay scattered over the surface of the glacier. To our left, the sun, unbearably bright, rose like a stately balloon with a cargo of the original fire of the gods, over a ridge of sharp-edged snow. There were no shadows in this icy world, because instead of hiding the light or keeping it out, the ice magnified it and split it up in the way Sir Isaac Newton did in his famous experiment, which Miss Davenport demonstrated to us one bright morning in Cheltenham, by means of a prism. So, instead of shadows, there were rainbows everywhere.

  Dazzled, we walked on. Charlotte clung to her bewigged
head with one hand and to me with the other, and she stumbled along with her eyes shut, either because she was fast asleep or because the sunlight hurt them. I, too, found it difficult to see. There seemed to be little flickering movements just at the edge of my eyes, and I thought I was becoming Intoxicated or Delirious.

  Then Charlotte spoke.

  “Lucy, I cannot walk another step!” she said. “I’m going to faint.”

  “If we lie down here, we shall die,” I told her. “We shall freeze in a moment and become like the mummy in Signor Rolipolio’s Exhibition.”

  She shuddered and clutched Herr Woodenkopf even tighter to her chest.

  “All wrinkled and horrid?” she said.

  “Very wrinkled and extremely horrid. No, Charlotte, we must keep going.”

  “But we’ll never find a way through that—” she said, pointing at the glacier and squinting with the effort to see what she was pointing at. “We’ll fall into a crevasse, like Otto, in The Secrets of the North, and get crushed flat. We’ll get lost and go round in circles and go mad. Oh, Lucy, I just can’t. We’ve come as far as this—they’ll never find us now—please let’s rest….”

  I was exhausted too, of course, but as the elder I had to pretend not to be. Such is the Responsibility of age and experience. There are no corresponding rewards that I have discovered, but that is by the way.

  “No!” I said. “We must move on. Think of the south, Charlotte!”

  “I can’t….”

  “Of course you can if you try. Think of…orange trees and olive groves and things like that.”

  “I don’t like olives.”

  “All right, think of melons then. Hot things.”

  “Melons are cold….”

  “You’re being very trying, Charlotte,” I said sternly.

  “I am trying,” she said, having misheard me. So I said nothing more but merely tugged her onward. She fell three times, and bruised her legs, and began to cry, and Herr Woodenkopf’s wig came off and had to be put back on, and her dress was soaked and mine was torn, and then I twisted my foot slipping on the ice, and then Charlotte fell for a fourth time and just lay there, still, crying, and I thought: no, no! This is the End. We shall die. We shall die. We shall die….