Exhausted by strain, weakened by sun-glare, he went into what he considered the best-hidden of his Parisian earths, meaning to rest until sunset, or even later. He had won, he had beaten his hated elder brother. Whatever happened now, there was no hurry about taking care of the details.
* * *
Emerging from his earth near midnight, Radu took time to go and sit on the frame of the now otherwise deserted guillotine. The night had turned chill and rainy, after the bright, hot day, and all the crowds had gone.
Radu sat there apostrophizing the death machine, from which he had pulled back the oilskin cover. Tenderly he stroked the heavy blade. He murmured, in one of the old languages that he had learned in childhood: "It almost breaks my heart to see so much blood going to waste. To decay, and the breeding of flies in the hot sun."
With a little moan of satisfaction, he leaned forward and ran his tongue over the blade—yes indeed, it was still the wooden one, he noted. And no one had got around to cleaning it as yet. Old Sanson would be angry if he knew of such abuse of his equipment.
This, Radu would be able to tell anyone who asked, was how he fulfilled, at least symbolically, his vow to taste the blood of Philip Radcliffe.
There was an aftertaste of something strange, mixed with human blood… orange juice?—something like that. More likely some kind of vinegar, blended with unidentifiable substances and used as a cleaning fluid. Some attempt at cleaning had been made, then, but an abysmally poor job. The vampire spat.
Now it was the middle of the night, and Radu felt well rested and wide awake. He would sit here and gloat a little longer, and then make his way to the wax museum. Vlad, evidently devastated by defeat, was keeping out of his way; and Radu had an idea as to how he might improve upon his triumph.
He strode forth this time with a confidence that even prompted him to sing in his beautiful voice. Even if Vlad caught him again, and defeated him, there was no way the older brother could wipe out what he must see as a stain on his honor brought on by this defeat.
He remembered something one of his aides had asked him, before that last fight in the countryside: "Why is your brother's honor of any importance to you?"
And Radu had replied: "Because it is of the utmost importance to him."
Philip Radcliffe was not awake, and he was dreaming.
He had just been decapitated—and yet he hadn't.
In his strange mental state, he could, for the moment, consider dispassionately the fact that the blade had inexplicably failed to whack off the vampire's head—or almost failed.
Somehow, in Radcliffe's feverish dream, only a thread of neck still held. This strand of tissue was broken manually, by one of the new vampire's enemies, and the victim's head was thrown at last into the coffin with his body.
There he soon recovered consciousness, and he understood that reunion was quite possible—after all, other vampires had been decapitated before him, and had survived.
It seemed to Radcliffe in his dream that the heads and bodies of a whole day's output of victims had been thrown indiscriminately into a giant tumbril, and the whole bloody mess hauled away for burial. By now the medical schools of Paris were sated with disconnected heads and bodies, and could be prevailed upon to accept only a few choice specimens, those with something extraordinary about them.
The body's hands went on patiently groping for and trying on one head after another.
Meanwhile, the vampirish brain lived on, thought, raged, experienced pain and sometimes pleasure, while still connected to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The eyes could turn in their sockets, blink, and change their focus. Breathing was never a necessity for him. Meanwhile, as he had hoped, the trunk and limbs retained enough affinity with the disconnected brain to take the necessary actions.
Groping through the charnel pit, the strong white hands at last found the proper head, only after rejecting several, and with an awkward movement lifted and tugged it into place… and the head had been put on backwards…
… and with that extra touch of horror, the nightmare was finally over, leaving its victim sobbing, cold sweat mixing with the cold rain that fell from heaven on his face.
Philip Radcliffe was finally, thoroughly, waking up. He had no trouble now distinguishing dream from reality, and he knew that his trip to the guillotine had been no dream.
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: