The stillness was palpable. High up, ancient tapestries hung on the walls, and flags, tattered and torn, moth-eaten or snatched from old battlefields, swung limply from their poles.
They reached the main landing and turned left, heading for the next staircase that would take them to the floor above. As they climbed, they listened for sounds, for any token of a human presence. No one stirred. But Ethan could not rid himself of the feeling that someone unseen was watching them, that someone was stalking them even as they climbed.
It soon became apparent that, from the second floor upwards, the castle broke up into its separate sections — a tower here, a turret behind it, a bartizan perched on its flank. A full investigation would leave them hopelessly lost in a maze of corridors, staircases, and hidden passages. They oriented themselves by a mixture of guesswork and calculation, and finally started down a corridor that would, they hoped, bring them to the lit room and whatever was waiting for them in it.
Ethan chose the third room along and switched off his torch. Ilona followed suit. Controlling his breathing, he took out his pistol in readiness before he turned the knob and pushed the door open.
They stepped into darkness, like birds flying into sudden night. Of course, it was always possible that, if this had been the room in which the light had been burning, someone had turned it off. Ethan switched his torch on again, and behind him Ilona did the same. He had not known what to expect, and it took several moments before a meaningful picture emerged: a leather sofa, two leather armchairs, a fireplace, and a desk covered with papers and sundry items, including an old-fashioned bakelite telephone. There was something old about the room and its furnishings. It wasn’t just that the room was part of an ancient structure. What struck Ethan was the atmosphere. The room did not seem to have been left disused, for there wasn’t a trace of dust anywhere; but it had nothing of the truly modern about it. The air held more than a trace of warmth, as though someone had sat in here before an open fire not long ago. Ethan stepped across to the fireplace; yes, there were fresh embers in the grate, and when he used a poker to stir them, they glowed cheerily for half a minute.
Ilona went to the desk. It was scattered with the usual equipment: a tub filled with pens and pencils, a couple of glass paperweights, a blotting pad. Next to these nestled a pair of embroidered shoes from Persia or India, she could not be sure: old trophies from the days Transylvania was part of the Ottoman Empire. She moved the torch to the other side and, moments later, she hissed at Ethan, calling him across.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing to some photographs in silver frames.
They were not family photographs. One showed a tall man sitting next to Adolf Hitler. Another showed a man and woman standing, one on either side of Heinrich Himmler. There were other photographs of the same three people with what Ethan took to be other representatives of the Third Reich. One showed a man in a fez wound with white cloth in conversation with Hitler.
Drawing back from the desk, they let their torches play across the walls, and here they picked out more portraits and photographs of places: two castles, one of which Ethan recognised as the Burg Almásy in Burgenland; several churches, not all of them Romanian; and landscapes of what looked like oases in a desert, possibly the Sahara.
‘The Sahara…’ he whispered.
‘A holiday, perhaps?’
He shook his head.
‘My grandfather,’ he said, more to himself than to Ilona. ‘We’re on the right track,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘We’re in the right place.’
16
Dracula’s Bride
The corridor rolled away, its further end always out of reach of their torches. Alerted by the pictures in the first room they had entered, Ethan and Ilona paid more attention to the corridor walls. There were no portraits up here. Instead, a series of pictures in black and gilded frames depicted an assortment of themes. One showed a dove with golden rays fanning out from its wings and body, like the Holy Spirit in a religious painting; another a chalice from which a dove’s wings emerged, and a cross where the bird’s head would have been, and above it a second dove descending. A heavy black frame held what might have been an eighteenth-century print of a sphinx crowned by a five-pointed star. Next to it hung a framed flag about two feet by one, a red swastika flanked by four red fleurs-de-lis, all on a yellow background. Under the flag was a handwritten caption, ‘Burg Werfenstein, 1907. Liebenfels’. Religious and occult subject matter predominated.
They opened door after door, finding cold rooms in darkness. There was no need to investigate each one. Time was running out. It would not be long before someone noticed their presence and came to see what was going on.
The seventh door opened onto a very different scene. An oil lamp burnt on a table near the window. A dull fire glimmered in the grate, shedding a modicum of warmth into the chilly air. Bar a low truckle bed, the room was bare of furniture. A woman lay on the bed, huddled beneath a blanket.
It took slow moments before Ethan recognised her. Matted short black hair, frightened green eyes, pale cheeks turned green. She was staring at him, all the time cringing away from him, and it was plain to see that she was terrified and that she did not recognise him.
‘Sarah,’ he said, his voice soft, to avoid alarming her. ‘It’s me, Ethan. I’ve come to take you out of here.’
The terror did not wholly leave her, but her first reaction was simply a blank stare, as though worlds and ages had come between them, not the short time that had passed since her abduction or the brief passage from England to Romania.
He turned to Ilona.
‘Ilona, will you take off your heavy jacket and your scarf, and let your hair down? Let her see you’re a woman, show you mean her no harm.’
Ilona did as he asked, and approached Sarah slowly, smiling and speaking in a reassuring voice. At one point, she thought Sarah was about to scream, but she went on smiling and holding out her hands.
‘I’ve not come to hurt you,’ she said.
Sarah flinched as Ilona came to her and put out one hand to touch her cheek.
‘It’s all right, Sarah,’ she said. Ilona had to fight back her own sense of unease, having no idea what had reduced this young Englishwoman to her present state.
Suddenly, a hand darted out from beneath the thin blanket, and Sarah clutched Ilona by the wrist.
‘Don’t let them hurt me,’ she said. ‘Keep Lukacs off me, don’t let him do that to me again.’ She dragged the words from her throat, then her voice died away and she was convulsed by sobs.
Ilona sucked her breath in hard. She scarcely dared ask who had done this to the woman. She moved in close and got an arm round Sarah, pulling her tightly to herself. It was a sort of bonding. Ilona had never been raped, but more than one of her friends had been, and she knew what it did.
‘Sarah,’ she said, ‘we’ve come to take you away from this place. We won’t let anyone hurt you again. Ethan’s here… Your friend.’
Ethan ventured closer. He could not imagine what they’d done to her. Was Aehrenthal still here? Or his ugly sidekick Lukacs? Could they sneak Sarah out without alerting her kidnappers?