'There was only one thing in the sky with Albright.'
'I didn't say Richthofen wasn't a fearsome devil.'
An examination had shown Albright was completely dry, veins and arteries collapsed. Thorndyke, the specialist who performed the autopsy, reported the body was drained not only of blood but of every drop of liquid.
'Captain Albright was pulled out of his SE5a and killed in mid-air. I've never come across that before.'
'There's nothing new, Edwin. Even in this great modern murdering game.'
The House lights dimmed and the pianist tried harder. He wounded a theme from Swan Lake as the curtains parted. The stage was bare, except for a cane chair and an open steamer trunk.
A vampire woman walked out, a transparent moth-wing cape draped over her leotard. She was the Isolde of the posters. She had a hard face, not pretty. The shape of her skull showed at cheeks and temples. Fang-teeth stuck out of her mouth, wearing grooves in her underlip and chin.
The music continued and Isolde walked up and down the tiny stage, not even dancing. The audience was quiet.
'We are more and more interested in the Château du Malinbois,' said Beauregard, watching Isolde with half a glance. 'Strange stories are in circulation.'
Isolde spread out her long, lank hair with black-nailed hands. Her neck was painfully thin, prominently veined.
'The pilots all knew the place,' Winthrop said. 'Richthofen is an obsession with them. He's the man to beat.'
'Over seventy victories.'
'It would be a relief to see him downed.'
'Strange: the soldier who pulls a howitzer lanyard or works a machine-gun often kills as many in a few seconds as our Red Baron has during the entire war. Yet it is the flier who gets the press. Cavalry Captain Baron Manfred von Richthofen. He has the Pour le Merite, of course, the Blue Max. That's the Hun Victoria Cross. And more lesser decorations than a man can list.'
Isolde undid the collar of her cape and let it float away. She was unusually skinny. Each rib showed like the slat of a fence.
'Watch this, Edwin. It's ugly but you'll learn something.'
The vampire solemnly took a knife out of the trunk and held it up. It seemed entirely ordinary. Isolde stuck the point into the hollow of her throat, dimpling the skin but not drawing blood, and ran it down the front of her leotard, slicing. Fabric peeled away from her chest. She had no noticeable breasts, but her nipples were large and dark.
Winthrop had no more than the normal experience of Paris frivolity, but the drab Isolde seemed to him underdeveloped to gain much following as an ecdysiast. The popular girls of the Folies-Bergere were far more substantial than this poor creature, pigeons to her sparrow.
She shrugged and the upper half of her singlet slipped over her shoulders, falling to her waist. Her skin was unblemished but had a greenish undertone. Isolde put her knife to her throat again and repeated her cutting, this time slicing a red line down her sternum, to her stomach. There was very little bleeding.
'She's not a new-born,' Beauregard explained. 'Isolde has been a vampire for over a thousand years.'
Winthrop looked closer. He saw nothing that suggested the fabled strength and power of an elder. With her fixed fangs, Isolde looked forlorn, almost pathetic.
'She was guillotined once.'
Isolde clamped the blade between her thin lips and used both her hands. She worked the edge of her self-inflicted wound with with her nails and peeled back the skin of the right side of her chest. As she moved, exposed muscles bunched and smoothed. With her whole hand under her skin, she loosened the covering of her shoulder and slipped it off like a chemise.
The audience were rapt. Winthrop was disgusted, as much at the spectators as at the performer.
Beauregard was not watching the stage but watching him.
'We do not understand our limits,' Beauregard said. 'To become a vampire is to have the potential to stretch the human body out of its natural shape.'
As Isolde turned, skin ripped down her back. Red-lined folds hung loose. With only her nails and a few slices of the knife, she methodically flayed herself.
A group of Americans, misled as to the nature of Isolde's exposure, stormed out, protesting loudly. 'You're all gooney birds,' one shouted.
Isolde watched them go, easing the skin off her right arm as if it were a shoulder-length glove.
'Some vampires, Edwin, have no more power to shift their shape than you or I. Notably those of the bloodlines of Ruthven or Chandagnac. Others, including those of the Dracula line, have capabilities that have never been tested to their limits.'
Isolde tore at herself, face impassive but gestures savage. Her skin hung in scarecrow tatters. Winthrop's stomach queased but he kept nausea down. The theatre stank of blood. It was a mercy there were few vampires in the audience; they might have been maddened. The performer detached scraps of her white skin and tossed them to her crowd.
'She has her disciples,' Beauregard said. 'The poet, Des Esseintes, has written sonnets to her.'
'It's a shame de Sade never turned. He'd have relished this.'
'Maybe he saw her in his day. Isolde has been performing for a long time.'
Her torso was a glistening dissection, bones visible in wet meat. She held up her skinned right arm and licked from elbow to wrist, reddening her tongue. Arteries stood out, transparent tubes filled with rushing blood.
Many of the audience were on their feet, pressing close to the stage. At the Folies, they would be cheering and whooping, making a display of gay goodfellow abandon. Here, they were intent and silent, holding breath, eyes on the stage, shutting out their comrades. How many of these men would want it known that they were patrons of the Raoul Privache?
'When she was guillotined, did someone stick her head back on to her body?'
She bit into her own wrist, gnawing through the artery, and began sucking. Blood rushed through the collapsing tube and she swallowed, gulping steadily.
'No, they buried her,' Beauregard explained. 'Her body rotted but her head grew another. It took ten years.'
She paused for breath and sneered at the audience, blood speckling her chin, then redoubled her attack. As she sucked, her extended fingers twisted into a useless fist.
'Of course, some say she hasn't been the same woman since.'
'How far can she go?'
'Can she consume herself entirely so that there's nothing left? She hasn't yet.'
Isolde's raw flesh changed colour as she sucked the blood out of it, but her face flushed, bloated.
'I think we've seen enough,' Beauregard said, standing.
Winthrop was relieved. He did not want to be a part of Isolde's audience.
They stepped into the corridor. Dravot stood by the door, reading Comic Cuts. Beauregard and the sergeant were old comrades.
'Danny, are you looking after our young lieutenant?'
'I do my best, sir.'
Beauregard laughed. 'Glad to hear it. The fate of the Empire may rest on him.'
Winthrop could not shake Isolde from his mind.
'Shall we take the air, Edwin?'
They left the theatre. It was a relief to get out into clean cold. The snow did not settle, leaving slushy residue on the pavement. Winthrop and Beauregard strolled, Dravot following about twenty paces behind.
'When I was your age,' Beauregard said 'this was not the world in which I expected to grow old.'
Winthrop had been born in 18%, after the Terror. To him, vampires were as natural a part of the world as Dutchmen or deer. From his father, he understood what every Englishman of Beauregard's generation had lived through, the mental adjustments everyone was forced to make during the Terror.