“She took an unlabeled bottle from her cupboard and poured us glasses of a clear brown liquor. The bottle had long weeds floating in it, which Ranov explained were herbs, for flavor. Brother Ivan declined, but Ranov accepted a glass. After a few sips he began to question Brother Ivan about something in a voice as friendly as nettles. They were soon deep in a debate we could not follow, although I frequently caught the wordpoliticheski.
“When we had sat listening for a while, I interrupted for a moment to get Ranov’s help in asking Baba Yanka if I could use her bathroom. He laughed unpleasantly. He was certainly back in his old humor, I thought. ‘I am afraid it is not so nice here,’ he said. Baba Yanka laughed, too, and pointed to the back door. Helen said she would follow me and wait her turn. The outhouse in Baba Yanka’s backyard was even more dilapidated than her cottage, but wide enough to hide our quiet flight among the trees and beehives and through the back gate. There was no one in sight, but we strolled when we reached the road, went quietly into the bushes, and scrambled up the hill. Mercifully, there was no one around the church, either, which already lay in deep shadow. The fire pit glowed faintly red under the trees.
“We didn’t bother to try the front door, where we could be seen from the road; instead we hurried around the back. There was a low window there, covered on the inside with purple curtains. ‘That will lead into the sanctuary,’ Helen said. But the wooden frame was only latched, not bolted shut, and with a little splintering we got it open and crawled in between the curtains, closing everything carefully behind us. Inside, I saw that Helen was right; we were behind the iconostasis. ‘Women are not allowed here,’ she said in a low voice, but she was looking around her with a scholar’s curiosity as she spoke.
“The room behind the iconostasis was dominated by a tall altar covered in fine cloths and candles. Two ancient books stood on a brass stand nearby, and hooks along the walls held the gorgeous vestments we had seen the priest wearing earlier. Everything was terribly still, terribly quiet. I found the holy gate through which the priest appeared to his congregation, and we pushed our way guiltily into the dark church. There was a little illumination from the narrow windows, but all the candles had been extinguished, probably from fear of fire, and it took me a while to locate a box of matches on a shelf. I selected a candle for each of us from one of the candelabra and lit them. Then we made our way with great caution down the stairs. ‘I hate this,’ I heard Helen murmur behind me, but I knew she didn’t mean she would stop, under any circumstances. ‘How soon do you think Ranov will miss us?’
“The crypt was the darkest place I’d ever been, all its candles firmly extinguished, and I was grateful for the two spots of light we carried. I lit the extinguished candles from the one I held. They blazed up, catching a sparkle of gold embroidery on the reliquary. My hands had begun to shake pretty badly, but I managed to take Turgut’s little dagger in its sheath out of my jacket pocket, where I had been keeping it since we’d left Sofia. I set it on the floor near the reliquary, and Helen and I gently lifted the two icons from their places-I found myself averting my eyes from the dragon and Saint George-and propped them against one wall. We removed the heavy cloth and Helen folded it out of the way. All this time I was listening with every fiber of my body for any sound, here or in the church above, so that the silence itself began to thrum and whine in my ears. Once Helen caught my sleeve, and we listened together, but nothing stirred.
“When the reliquary lay bare, we looked down on it, trembling. The top was beautifully molded with bas-relief-a long-haired saint with one hand raised to bless us, presumably a portrait of the martyr whose bones we might find inside. I caught myself hoping that we would indeed find just a few holy shards of bone, and then close the whole thing up. But then there was the emptiness that would follow-the lack of Rossi, the lack of revenge, the loss. The reliquary lid seemed nailed down, or bolted, and I couldn’t for the life of me pry it open. We tipped it a little in the process, and something shifted inside, gruesomely, and seemed to tap against the interior. It was indeed too small for anything but a child’s body, or some odd parts, but it was very heavy. It occurred to me for a horrible moment that perhaps only Vlad’s head had ended up here after all, although that would leave a lot of other matters unexplained. I began to sweat and to wonder if I should go back up and hunt for some tool in the church above, although I wasn’t very hopeful of finding anything.
“‘Let’s try to put it on the floor,’ I said through gritted teeth, and together we somehow slid the box safely down. There I might be able to get a better look at the hasps and hinges of the top, I thought, or even brace myself to yank it open.
“I was about to attempt this when Helen gave a little cry. ‘Paul, look!’ I turned quickly and saw that the dusty marble on which the reliquary had rested was not a solid block; the top had shifted a little with our struggle to move the reliquary off it. I don’t believe I was breathing anymore, but together, without words, we managed to remove the marble slab. It was not thick, but it weighed a fortune, and we were both panting by the time it was leaning against the back wall. Underneath lay a long slab of rock, the same rock as the floor and walls, a stone the length of a man. The portrait on it was crude in the extreme, chiseled directly into the hard surface-not the face of a saint but of a real man, a hard-faced man with staring almond eyes, a long nose, a long mustache-a cruel face topped with a triangular hat that managed to look jaunty even in this rough outline.
“Helen drew back, white lipped in the candlelight, and I fought the urge to take her arm and run up the steps. ‘Helen,’ I began softly, but there was nothing else to say. I picked up the dagger and Helen slipped a hand into some part of her clothing-I never did see where-and drew out the tiny pistol, which she put an arm’s-length away, near the wall. Then we reached under the edge of the gravestone and lifted. The stone slid halfway off, a marvelous construction. We were both shaking visibly, so that the stone all but slipped out of our grasp. When it was off we looked down at the body inside, the heavily closed eyes, the sallow skin, the unnaturally red lips, the shallow, soundless breathing. It was Professor Rossi.”
Chapter 72
“Iwish I could say that I did something brave, or useful, or caught Helen in my arms to make sure she wouldn’t faint, but I didn’t. There is almost nothing worse than a much-loved face transformed by death, or physical decay, or horrifying illness. Those faces are monsters of the most frightening kind-the unbearable beloved. ‘Oh, Ross,’ I said, and the tears welled up and ran down my cheeks so suddenly that I couldn’t even feel them coming.
“Helen took a step closer and looked down at him. I saw now that he was wearing the clothes he’d had on the night I’d last talked with him, nearly a month ago; they were torn and dirty, as if he’d been in an accident. His tie was gone. An ooze of blood filled the lines of one side of his neck and made a scarlet estuary on his soiled collar. His mouth was slack and swollen around that faint breath, and apart from the rise and fall of his shirt, he was still. Helen put out her hand. ‘Don’t touch him,’ I said sharply, which only increased my own horror.
“But Helen seemed as much in a trance as he was, and after a second, her lips trembling, she brushed his cheek with her fingers. I don’t know whether it was worse yet that he opened his eyes, but he did. They were still very blue, even in that murky candlelight, but the whites were bloodshot and the lids swollen. Those eyes were horribly alive, too, and puzzled, and they moved here and there as if trying to take in our faces, while his body stayed deathly still. Then his gaze seemed to settle on Helen, bending over him, and the blue of his eyes cleared with tremendous force, opening as if to take her in whole. ‘Oh, my love,’ he said very softly. His lips were cracked and thick, but his voice was the voice I loved, the crisp accent.