A Sharpness on the Neck

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jouncing along inside the gutted and rebuilt vehicle, Radcliffe tentatively decided that it must once have been a school bus. He couldn't be absolutely sure, because about half the seats had been ripped out, as if at random, and the interior, like the outside, had been repainted in a dull camouflage pattern, mostly olive drab.

The best thing Philip could find to hope for at the moment was that he was being taken back to Mr. Graves—but he knew that wasn't what was happening.

Every look these people gave him, every word they said, every nightmarish minute that passed seemed to bring some new confirmation of Graves's warnings. These people, with their foul language and their waving weapons, fit to perfection the role of friends and helpers of the mysterious Radu, the shadowy monster against whom Graves, on tape and off, and Connie had so often and so solemnly warned their coddled prisoners.

The cruelty of these people, to him, to animals, to each other, was a continuing shock.

Now he remembered, in bitter contrast, how patiently and persistently Mr. Graves and Connie and the others had kept trying to convince him that their fantastic tale was true.

Over and over Phil now kept telling himself that there was at least one bright spot in the situation—at least June hadn't fallen into this horrible mess with him.

Someone across the aisle between seats offered him a drink of water, then as soon as he reached for the canteen, pulled it away with a giggle, continuing to watch him with bright speculative eyes.

When chance brought about a pause in the steady drumfire of cursing and taunting, most of it not directed at him, in what seemed to pass for conversation in this group, he spoke up to demand: "Where we going?"

The old bus lurched along at a good speed, bouncing, roaring as if at the injustice of its fate in being slowly beaten apart by the rough road, which alternated with intervals of roadless land. No one bothered to answer Radcliffe. It was as if they had already disposed of him and he was dead.

After a minute or two of silence he tried again: "It's all right, you can just let me out here. I'll hitchhike."

"Sure you will," said the woman who was sitting next to Radcliffe, in a remote voice. Another man and woman showed their crooked teeth.

Another minute or two went by before Radcliffe, licking his dry lips, gave way to a wholly unreasoning impulse and suddenly lunged at the nearest door handle. Half the people in the forward seats did not even bother to turn their heads. His arm was caught and pulled back. Weapons were once more displayed.

One of his fellow riders, who a moment earlier had been whistling a cheery tune, suddenly broke it off and began muttering obscenities, whipped out a pair of handcuffs and manacled Radcliffe's hands behind him.

One of the rattier-looking villains abruptly astounded him by starting a song, in which about half the others promptly joined in. They were singing in French, of all things—the ca ira?

Ah! ca ira, ca ira, ca ira,

Les aristocrates a la lanterne…

Years ago, Radcliffe had memorized the song for one of his language classes in college. In the present situation it was so incongruous that he wanted to laugh. But who had taught these donkeys French? The singing was raucous and out of tune. Though Philip would have felt helpless if required to conduct a conversation in the language, his memory retained bits and pieces of it from his classes in high school and college. Enough to derive the sense:

That's just the way it is,

We're going to hang all the aristocrats…

Still uselessly erupting with sporadic protests, Radcliffe was driven a few more miles, up a winding road and into a narrow valley in the foothills.

It was around mid-morning, with the sun definitely getting warm, when the driver pulled onto a patch of bare, rutted ground before the house, and stopped.

This time no one had made any effort to keep Phil from seeing where they were going.

Their destination turned out to be an old two-story frame house, starved of paint and maintenance for years, probably once some rancher's home. The dwelling seemed miles from any other house, and was almost hidden in the midst of a small grove of cottonwoods and Russian olives. A barn a little bigger than the house, standing some twenty or thirty yards behind it, had fallen even more completely into disrepair.

A battered pickup truck and a late-model sports car with a New York license were parked near the little cluster of buildings. A small stream, temporarily a small torrent fueled by spring snowmelt in the high country, came thundering down past the cluster of buildings, making a steady background noise, a lot of racket for a small amount of water.

Philip was dragged out of the converted bus, and shoved stumbling into the house. People who had been in the house greeted those returning in the van. The latter were crowing and babbling, suddenly moved to boast in triumph of their capture. Radcliffe wasn't at all sure why, but it seemed he was considered something special, more than just a chance acquisition.

He was roughly searched by several people in succession, as if none of them trusted the others to do a proper job, and his valuables confiscated.

The place was a mess, and it seemed that a sustained effort had been going on for some days to turn it into one. The walls were stained by unknown causes and daubed with graffiti. The windows were dirty, with a third of the glass knocked out, and much of the furniture was broken. A woodburning stove, iron door open and housing a summer population of carefree spiders, stood in the middle of the main room.

Radcliffe's latest set of captors spoke among themselves in awed tones of someone they called the Master, whose arrival they were awaiting eagerly, but with some trepidation. But the Master would surely be pleased to see who they had captured for him.

Judging from what Radcliffe was able to overhear, one or two of the Master's devotees had never actually seen him yet, but they knew every detail of a largely fictitious reputation that had grown up around him. And they were looking forward to meeting him, as to the high point of their lives.

So far Phil had encountered only about half a dozen members of this gang. But judging from certain clues dropped in their conversation, more were coming when the Master did, and they might well have the band of Mr. Graves outnumbered. These people gave the impression of being less competent than the rubber-masked league of the Radcliffes' original kidnappers, but far more dangerous.

On the heels of that thought followed the discouraging one that maybe Graves's people weren't really as competent as they seemed. Otherwise they wouldn't have let him get away.

"What do we do with him?" one of the more frightening men asked another, nodding at Philip.

"Do with him? Nothing." The speaker seemed vaguely horrified at the thought. Then he seized on the one idea that had evidently been firmly impressed upon him. "We keep him safe until the Master comes back."

"How soon is he coming?"

Two or three of the gang were ready to offer their opinions on that subject, but it soon developed that no one really knew. Obviously they were a little worried about the Master, whom they all feared, whoever he might be. The possibility of his quick return seemed in a way as disturbing as that of his continued absence.

One of them asked Philip, in an offhand way, where he had been for the last few days.

He gave the first answer that came into his head. "Resting up."

"That's good, 'cause you're gonna need it. We were looking for you on the road a couple days ago, sonny. We was driving all over hell, sniffin' round after you, but you didn't show up. Where were you, anyway?"

Still it seemed that none of them really cared about the answer. Philip got away with letting the question slide.

"The Master sure wants to see you."

"We been looking for you a long time already."

"Where've you been the last few days?" This was a different questioner, who seemed not to have heard what the first one had just said.

This time Phil didn't bother answering.

"Cat got your tongue? No, not yet. Soon, though, soon." That evoked a widespread tittering of laughter.

* * *

This house, with its two floors plus attic and basement, was obviously much older and several times larger than the mobile home from which Radcliffe had escaped. This habitat of Radu's servants was also dirtier, grimmer, and much less hospitable. Grease-stained pizza boxes still holding decayed remnants of last week's meals lay scattered about, along with an extensive menu of paper wrappers, attracting energetic flies. The whole fast-food litter suggested that some place where a lot of people lived was not that many hours away. A frightened and dazed-looking cat went wandering from room to room, ignoring the garbage as if it had smelled it all before.

The kitchen sink gave evidence of a contest among inmates to see who could go longest without washing dishes. At least one wall in each room had been defaced with obscene pictures and scribblings, some of which Radcliffe took to be gang symbols.

The one class of objects the group did not seem to be careless with was their collection of firearms and knives.

At the sink he helped himself to water, taking a long drink directly from the faucet. He expected at any moment to be stopped, but no one tried to do so, or even seemed to notice.

Philip, listening to a renewed debate as to whether to tie him up, found some abandoned detergent and a scrubber under the sink and adopted the job of washing dishes. Under the circumstances he had no objection to making himself useful.

There was no hot water from the faucet, but he soon had a pot heating on the propane stove. Meanwhile Philip was thinking that if these people could be persuaded to let their prisoner cook, he might have some hope of poisoning everybody. But there didn't seem to be any rat poison available, and mighty little detergent.

Two gang members, a man-woman couple who had been sent to town to buy supplies shortly after Phil's arrival, came back after an absence of four or five hours with a weird variety of canned goods, beer and wine, boxes of crackers, and a greasy bagful of Big Macs.

"Anybody follow you?"

"No way." The couple gave contemptuous reassurance.

The incoming cargo included a couple of heads of lettuce, looking incongruous among the other stuff. Philip had no suspicion at this point of the reason for their purchase.

Scattered here and there through the big house was considerable evidence of drug use: discarded syringes, a smell in the air—actually, in certain rooms, a clinging haze. Half of the inhabitants were coughers, smoking tobacco cigarettes.

Rock music, alternating with rap records of a particularly debased kind, was playing more or less constantly in the hideout. The prisoner listened dazedly to one performer after another declare at great length what he was going to do to the next ho and bitch that he encountered. Certainly there were at least two radios; no one ever listened to them or turned them off.

Half a dozen cans, containing substances more or less edible, and brought in by the recent shoppers, were opened—the litter on the floor testified that a great many had been emptied over the past week or two—and food of a kind offered to Philip when some of the others sat down to eat. He settled for a bag of Pop Tarts. The cat, with the air of a gourmet, was sorting through the garbage in a corner.

At this point someone had the idea of searching Radcliffe all over again. Naturally enough the results this time were disappointing. His money had already disappeared casually into people's pockets. And the argument over what to do with his credit cards had evidently been settled somehow; certainly the bits of plastic had vanished also. His watch was taken.

The Master won't be interested in this. We can have it.

* * *

They left him his recently acquired wedding ring, because even in a few months it had become a very tight fit, and it soon became obvious that they didn't want to risk spilling any of Philip Radcliffe's blood, even scraping the skin of his finger, without the Master's permission.

"He owns your blood," one of them explained to Radcliffe, seeing the prisoner's uncomprehending look.

He didn't argue the point.

The discussion as to whether to tie Radcliffe up, or lock him in the cellar, or both, rambled on inconclusively.

While the crew were still waiting for the Master to come back—though no one seemed really to expect his awesome presence until after dark—someone suggested that they show their unwilling guest the guillotine. Immediately the others cried approval.

They were sadistically eager to observe Radcliffe's reaction to the machine, and dragged him out of the house, across a yard where he was beset by snarling dogs, and into the barn.

Most of the space inside the barn formed one large room, as big as the interior of a small house, with a few disused animal stalls at the farther end and a dangerous-looking built-in ladder ascending to an open hayloft above. There was a lot of space available, and the bulk of it had been converted into a kind of workshop. There was one electric wire, a long shop cord strung carelessly over ground and floor, but it had probably been used only for power tools. After-dark illumination was going to be provided by two or three self-fueled Coleman lanterns.

Bats, small motionless dark pods, small bulges suggesting the shapes of folded wings, were hanging by their feet under the high, peaked roof. A couple of pigeons cooed sleepily.

There in the center of the open space, on a floor of decades-old concrete, stood what was undoubtedly a guillotine. The unique shape, immediately recognizable, stood some fifteen feet tall, and most of it, at least up to the level where a tall man could reach with a paintbrush, had been painted bright red. The lower surfaces, up to a little above the level of the plank and the lunette, bore brownish stains that might have been old blood.

"What'd you think of that?" The questioner really wanted to know.

It was hard to find an answer… a man who wants to cut off your head…

One of Radcliffe's captors, one of those who seemed to have comparatively little trouble in speaking in coherent sentences, told him that the machine before him was an exact replica of the one used in Paris, France, during the Terror. Someone else broke in to argue that no, this was the original, the very one that had taken off the heads of the king and queen and pope.

The bandit looked at Radcliffe anxiously, with the air of one who was proud to show off his intellectual attainments to someone who could understand them—but at the same time he wasn't quite certain that he'd got it right.

To Radcliffe the machine appeared amazingly tall, and quite authentic. This was the very instrument, one character solemnly affirmed, with which their Master had vowed to chop off his, Philip Radcliffe's, head.

A tall young woman, tattoos on her bare arms, told him: "After that, the cats will probably have your tongue. Your blood, though, that's another matter altogether." She squinted at him judicially. "I think that most of your blood will be out of your body before your head comes off."

"What's your Master's name?" the prisoner asked on impulse.

"None of your business."

He thought of mentioning it—Radu—but then decided that there was nothing to be gained by doing that.

Radu's assistants fussed over the solidly built, authentic-looking guillotine, and again expressed their hopes of pleasing their demanding Master.

"He'll be real happy when he sees what we built for him. All the care and effort we put into it."

They bragged of how they had made all the parts of the guillotine somewhere (they were coy about revealing exactly where) and trucked it here, disassembled. Then they had set up the device in the old barn. Signs of fresh repair work suggested it had been necessary to patch the roof and run in a long power cord from the house.

All of them were eager now to give their prisoner a demonstration of how the machine worked.

For some reason it was thought necessary to tie Philip into a chair first. He didn't protest; certainly this was better than being strapped to the plank and tilted into the guillotine. Then an inspiration came, and he persuaded his keepers to untie him, by complaining that the cord was so tight that his arm was bleeding inside his shirtsleeve. He'd observed that these people were very worried about the chance that even a drop of his blood would be spilled.

The complaint brought him immediate attention, and a loosening of the rope. The villains stripped up his sleeve as far as it would go, then sliced it very carefully with a surgically sharp knife, and looked at his arm. Then they looked at him, in outrage because he'd lied. Actually the bonds had been tight enough to leave marks, though there was no real bleeding.

For all their feverish anticipation of the Master's arrival, every one of his disciples missed the event when it took place, a few minutes after sunset. As had been the case earlier with the comings and goings of Mr. Graves, Radcliffe had been able to hear no sound of aircraft, motorcycle, car, or even horse. There was just the sudden presence, standing in one of the barn's farthest recesses, of a remarkably handsome young man wearing a Greek fisherman's cap and a dark suit jacket over a dark T-shirt.

"Radu," said Philip Radcliffe, aloud and quite involuntarily. Half-untied as he was, he started. He was the first, or very nearly the first, to notice who had just come in.

Radu was simply standing there, hands down at his sides, looking at them all. When his followers finally noticed his presence and began a murmuring movement toward him, he raised one pale hand in a curious gesture that seemed half warning, half benediction. The advance stopped instantly, and silence fell.

"Philip Radcliffe," said the beautiful young man, as if simply returning a greeting, and smiled his winning smile.

Casually he approached the place where Philip sat half-bound before the guillotine. The people who had been arguing and fussing over his bonds stepped back.

Philip looked up into eyes of gentian blue, under hair of raven black. The man smiled, revealing frankly pointed teeth, a jarring note like something out of Hollywood.

"I knew your namesake, long ago," said Radu. His voice was gentle, almost whispering. He put one finger under Philip's chin, and raised it gently. "I thought that I had seen him dead, and tasted of his blood, in 1794… but it turned out that I was wrong about that. So now I must have yours."

He shifted his position by a step or two, so that now he was looking down on Philip from a different angle. "You do not seem surprised. Someone has been telling you the story." And he raised his eyes to his supporters, seeking information. The looks he got back were blank, or frozen with fear and fascination.

Once more the vampire dropped his gaze to Radcliffe's. "To settle the vexing question of your ancestor's fate to my own satisfaction, I investigated the genealogy of your branch of the Radcliffe family during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

It had taken Radu some time and effort to make sure, he explained now, but in the end there could be no doubt—somehow the beheading he'd thought he'd witnessed had been a fake. "And I think I know now how that was accomplished."

Philip Radcliffe, bastard son of Benjamin Franklin, had survived the Terror in France, and—as Radu's subsequent research demonstrated—had returned to America with his French bride, Melanie Remain, to settle in the state of Virginia, where he founded a substantial family and eventually died in 1861 at the age of ninety-two.

Radu's words trailed off slowly, and he fell silent. He was looking at the guillotine.

The world seemed to be dissolving in horror and unreality around Philip Radcliffe. Tied down, unable to move more than one hand, he was surrounded by smiling and giggling enemies, all their attention now focused for a moment on the object they had brought him out here to see. The full-scale instrument of two hundred years ago, or so nearly so that it made no difference. Spruced up with a fresh coat of bright red paint.

"Demonstrations," said Radu at last, stroking a pale hand up and down one upright of the massive frame. "I wish to see how well it works. Just how reliable it is."

Murmuring their eagerness, his slaves got busy. The heavy blade, sharpened edge gleaming a little in the lantern-light, was hauled to the top of its track on a new rope. On the first trial, with nothing in the lunette, the blade fell with a startling crash, to be caught by the slot in the lower frame. The fall of the knife had a distinctive double sound, because the heavy metal bounced up and fell again.

On the second trial it became evident that parts of the death machine were not always going to work smoothly. When a head of lettuce, recently brought from town, was set in the lunette, the blade when triggered began to fall, then heart-stoppingly became stuck halfway down. As soon as someone touched the machine with the idea of making an adjustment, the blade recovered itself, plunging the rest of the way at the impulse of a very slight vibration. The jarring impact sounded just as heavily as before, and the lettuce fell in two, divided as neatly as if by some fine kitchen tool.

The second subject of the day's demonstration—Radcliffe was not sure who had made the choice—was the live cat. Sensing evil intent, the beast clawed and bit one or two people before they could get it under control. Two or three of Radu's breathing acolytes, ignoring their bleeding scratches—it seemed that no one, including themselves, placed any value on their blood—held the animal's four limbs in a practiced way, as if this were not the first time they'd done this trick, and pushed its snarling, screeching head in through the little window at the front end of the machine.

Once more the blade came down, putting an abrupt end to living noise. The sound of its fall was only subtly different than before, but it was to stay with Radcliffe for a long time. Somehow the smallness of the jet of blood was a surprise, a mark of the pettiness of evil that would spend its energy to kill a cat.

Someone at once snatched up the fallen head from the barn floor, and tossed it into Radcliffe's lap. Another apprentice vampire, heedless of crimson splashes, held up the dead cat and tried to drink the blood which had not yet entirely ceased pumping from the vessels in its neck.

Philip felt a wave of dizziness, gray faintness threatening to blot out the world, amid the sound of laughter. Coming and going, like the pulsing roar of blood in his own head, there came from outside the steady noise of the swift white water of the mountain stream.

But no, he wasn't going to faint, not quite. No such luck. He raised his eyes, trying to look anywhere but at the machine, or at the man who was chewing on the dead cat's neck—and had to bite his lip to keep from crying out.

Because at the nearest of the barn's high windows he could see, in outline against the darkening twilight sky, the head and shoulders of a human figure. The figure was holding some kind of tool or weapon in one hand, and the watcher held his breath, for now from some unknown outdoor source there came a tiny flash of light, revealing the familiar features of Mr. Graves.