We need a woman,' said de Rosillon.
'Are you banished from that corner opposite the gates of the flower factory?' asked Raoul. 'Stand there with even a half-full purse when the shift changes and you have your pick of green-fingered lovelies…'
Arsenic dye used in the manufacture of artificial flowers stained the hands. The factory girls were literally poisonous, though Michel Falke knew every student in Paris had availed himself of that corner.
'You think only of low things,' said de Rosillon, exciting jeers from Le Gang de Schubert. They knew the young Count all too well. 'I don't mean we need a woman in the general sense of bed-warming… we need one because Uncle Franz wrote many fine pieces with soprano parts. If our repertoire is to expand, we must find a woman who can sing.'
It was true. Falke thought of ' Viel tausend Sterne prangen', for soprano, alto, tenor, bass and piano. If they were serious, Le Gang should find a woman or women.
This was about Gio Jones, though.
The fat young baritone was their only first-rate voice. De Rosillon rankled at the way Le Gang must revolve around him. Anatole was a soloist to equal Jones but couldn't match him when they sang together. The star gave the satellite performance shakes.
From the piano, Falke looked askance at the squabbles of the singers. But he thought de Rosillon was right.
It was proposed that they each look out for likely prospects.
'If she's a beauty, so much the better,' said de Rosillon. 'Give the audience something to look at besides your wobbly belly, Gio.'
Jones preferred audiences who shut their eyes and just listened.
In response to de Rosillon's needling, Jones belched. Very loudly, and not at all musically.
A disappointing evening. The much-vaunted song thrushes of Madame Ondine's Academy for Young Ladies were all croakers. Their choir might as well gather around a pond in the moonlight.
Falke returned glumly to the Café Musette de Saint-Flour, informal headquarters of Le Gang. The woman hunt, begun as a semi-joke, was bogging down in earnest.
Having made the grand proposal, de Rosillon wasn't going to do anything as radical as stir himself and pitch in. He decided his function in the endeavour was to assess the candidates put forward by the others. Raoul roped in several chanteuses who could be heard over shrieking patrons in inns and cabarets. They all fell at the first fence – unable to prop a score the right way up on a stand, let alone read music. Garron was beaten in the street by a schoolteacher after his stuttering approach to a gaggle of convent girls was misinterpreted. And Jones was against the whole idea, of course.
'Michel, you're late,' said Raoul as he arrived.
'No joy at Madame Ondine's,' he said.
'It doesn't matter,' said Raoul. 'We have found our prize… Hurry in, hurry in, and meet your countrywoman, la belle Caralin.'
The others were squeezed into their usual nook, as was a newcomer.
She was an insubstantial girl, especially next to Gio. Later, thinking back, Falke couldn't have described her. Her image in his mind was watery. Everything about her seemed neither one thing nor the other. He couldn't even have said what she was wearing.
But he heard her sing – and that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Astoundingly, Jones – who had actively not been looking – found Caralin, though Falke never got the details of it straight.
Was she some relation of the family in whose house he was lodging… or another boarder? She was Austrian, as Raoul had said, but from Styria – a savage, forested region remote from his native Vienna. He couldn't place her accent or her station. She was in Paris for her health, but he never knew her to see a doctor. Prone to spells of weakness and lassitude, she rose above her infirmities when singing.
More than once, Falke was asked what was actually wrong with Caralin and had no answer. It was something like consumption, but not consumption itself. When she coughed into her kerchief, there was sometimes pinkish discharge – but no blood. To look at her, you'd not think she had blood in her.
Which was how the story started, he supposed.
Joining Le Gang de Schubert was good for Caralin and better for Le Gang. She lost her ghostly pallor and seemed less fragile. The fellows competed for her attention, though not exclusively as suitors. Caralin was at times their pet, like a six-year-old, but occasionally acted like their great-grandmother. She needed to be protected from the world. They were in thrall to her, almost in awe of her.
But Falke still couldn't say what her hair colour was.
She wore it parted in the middle, though. And her smile stayed with him.
'I'm going to ask Caralin to move in with me,' said Raoul.
Falke was surprised. He had thought to ask her the same thing.
He wondered if Gio, Anatole and de Rosillon had the same idea.
Looking back on it, Caralin wasn't with any of them – and had given no indication that she might be – but gave each the impression they were making slow, steady progress to union beyond the regular congress they had with flower girls… something deeper, more lasting. Spiritual, as well as fleshly.
'I believe she's special, Michel. When she sings, she's like the sirens who tempted Odysseus.'
'What colour are her eyes?' Falke asked his friend.
Raoul was puzzled, almost irritated. 'Why, eye-coloured of course.'
As he struggled to recall the face of a woman he loved, Falke wondered whether Caralin's eyes might not be red.
'Ho, fellows,' said de Rosillon, joining Falke and Raoul in their nook. 'I've a notion to ask Caralin to move in with me. What do you think?'
'I believe she's moved in with Gio,' said Falke, who had no grounds for saying so.
De Rosillon was aghast.
'Gross-Fat Jones! Surely not.'
'He likes ladies to close their eyes when he sings.'
'He'd like them to wear a blindfold when he's bouncing on top of them, I'll be bound,' said Raoul. 'Doesn't mean they will.'
Garron came into the Saint-Flour Musette.
'What's this about Caralin and Gio?' Raoul demanded of him.
Garron shrugged.
'I was thinking of…' he began.
'We did too,' said Falke.
'Oh well. Just a fancy.'
Falke couldn't remember asking Caralin to move in with him.
But she did.
When they were together, she blotted out everything else. She consumed him. He'd been in love before… this was more like brain fever.
He knew his friends hated him.
At one time or another, they all said, 'Do we even need the piano?'
Schubert wrote a great many pieces for unaccompanied voice or voices.
Though they were beyond Schubert now. Beyond music.
He still found Caralin hard to describe. When she was with him, he couldn't imagine anything else. When she wasn't – and where did she go? – he was too distracted with worry to concentrate.
If he tried to sketch her, he just found himself drawing the Mona Lisa with a thinner face.
The others met in secret to talk about them.
Whenever he arrived late, they fell silent.
The music was never right. They found it harder to select pieces, and quarrelled whenever they attempted a song.
Caralin never took sides.
Even when Falke was arguing for something, she didn't support him. That part of Le Gang was none of her concern.
She fell ill and disappeared. For three weeks, Falke haunted infirmaries, convents and hospitals, searching for her. He even visited the Morgue.
He subjected Jones's landlord to a barrage of questions he couldn't answer. The man had no idea who Caralin was. Now, Gio denied there had ever been a connection. He said it was d'Aubert who found her.
Raoul referred him to Anatole.
Anatole thought it was Falke…
'She was your girlfriend, remember? We thought she'd be like one of Raoul's popsies but then that voice
came out…'
While Caralin was missing, Le Gang worked together to find her. That she was gone altogether was worse than that she was with Falke.
On their rounds, they found the hospitals of Paris busy with a mysterious disease that was striking down children, the elderly, the weak. Scratch-marks on throat or chest, like bites; pallor, anaemia, bad dreams, spells of sleeping. Most but not all recovered, and those who died succumbed to other conditions they became too weak to fight off rather than the ailment itself.
Falke was in a panic that Caralin was a victim.
Then she came back, healthy. Healthier than before, it seemed. She almost had roses in her cheeks.
He was too relieved to press her about where she had been and what she had done. Whatever it was, it had been good for her.
The Professor made a dramatic entrance into their lives.
With Caralin away and the mystery illness on their minds, Anatole saw Van Helsing was giving a course of lectures on 'diseases of the blood and soul'. He suggested they sit in. At that time, they were all worried about her health.
When she came back, they were still drawn to the lectures.
Van Helsing had theories about the bites and the loss of blood.
Raoul asked pertinent questions. The Professor theorised that in this matter the search should not be for a disease but a culprit. A creature was behind the outbreak, and – worse! – was a thinking being who knew what they were doing.
The word 'vampire' was mentioned.
The epidemic, suddenly, was over. No more bitten children.
Le Gang did not set off to engage the forces of darkness, but shifted from music to mystery. There was no denying the thrill of it.
Years passed. Van Helsing presented them with cases – hauntings, manifestations, unusual animal attacks. Raoul took the lead, but the others had useful interests and skills. Falke had a knack for designing and making gadgets which he used to frighten some of his friends while he was in Germany in the summer of 1851, in relation for a similar prank three years early. He was of good humor. Together They dispelled their ghosts without leaving his digs, as he showed how such and such a phenomenon was most likely created by deliberate trickery.
De Rosillon had funds to equip a coach for ghost-hunting expeditions, Anatole a swot's ability to delve in libraries and public records for lost explanations, and Gio made a formidable figure when it came to scaring off pranksters.
Most matters Van Helsing placed before them turned out to be criminal enterprises dressed up with phosphorus paint and hidden doorways. The Black Coats, the best-resourced secret society of the Second Empire, liked to scare people away from their smuggling or coining enterprises with fabulous beasts and frightful spectres. Le Gang had many a battle with the Coats, even earning the respect of the official police. Raoul was certain of a place in Vidocq's old office after graduation.
In other – more troubling – cases, smashing a mirror or pulling back a curtain only revealed a deeper mystery.
Van Helsing assured them that there were such things as ghosts and vampires.
Caralin became sickly again. She couldn't sleep and went out late at night, without even bothering to make an excuse.
Falke – hating himself for thinking it – was certain she was with one of the others – any of them, all of them – when not with him.
He quarrelled with Raoul, his closest friend, then begged forgiveness and asked for his help. He was desperate, he said, desperate and desolate.
'About what?' asked Raoul.
He could not answer.
Caralin gave Falke no cause to doubt her, but…
In a graveyard where strange lanterns had been seen, de Rosillon made some foolish remark which prompted Falke to beat him senseless. Raoul, Anatole and Gio stood by and watched, making no move to intervene – as if hoping their friends would kill each other so they could have better chances with Caralin.
When he was exhausted and de Rosillon unconscious, Falke turned to find Caralin gone.
This time, she didn't come back for three months.
The disease, which Van Helsing insisted was the spoor of a vampire, returned.
Some victims reported nocturnal encounters with a beautiful woman. She lured children off pathways and subjected them to mesmerism. They woke up with torn clothes and deep scratches.
De Rosillon, bumptious again, said that happened to him all the time. Only his wallet was usually missing too.
Children remembered the musical voice of the vampire, but gave varying accounts of her. Small girls thought her old and bent, almost a crone. Budding lads described a wanton, voluptuous hoyden. A few listless, haunted victims recalled a wan maiden, scarcely more than a child herself. All mentioned her
voice
– but couldn't quote anything she had said.
Le Gang set out to catch the vampire.
Van Helsing lectured about famous female vampires… Elisabeth Bathory, the Lamia of Ancient Greece, Mircalla Karnstein.
On their nightly expeditions to derelict cemeteries and disreputable parks, Le Gang found many suspect women – mostly demimondes loitering in dark places. As de Rosillon said, they specialised in bait-and-battery, inveigling customers into the bushes for a quick poke then having a confederate bludgeon the poor clods for their valuables.
Few of them went after children, though.
With Caralin gone, Falke applied himself to the vampire hunt.
On Van Helsing's recommendation, he read Dom Augustin Calmet's two-volume Traité sur les apparitions des Esprits, et sur les vampires ou les revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie Etc.(1746). Picking through lore and legend, Falke tried to find hard facts. He sharpened stakes and contrived spring-loading mechanisms for firing them across rooms and through inch-thick boards. He designed a metal collar, with inset silver crosses, as a defence against vampire attack.
Even the others thought he was taking it too seriously.
'It's just some new pox,' Raoul said. 'And de Rosillon's footpad fillies.'
Falke was convinced. There was a vampire in Paris.
'It's Caralin, isn't it?' Raoul said. 'When she's not here, you go mad… not as mad as when she is here, but mad all the same.'
Falke denied it.
Caralin came back, healthy again. She would answer no questions.
Van Helsing said the vampire was still at large.
He believed he had found the monster's address on the map. In the centre of a cluster of red crosses marking attacks was the Hôtel d'Autriche, an abandoned palace. Once the Paris residence of Maria Theresa of Austria, mother of the late queen Marie Antoinette – though it was likely the Hapsburg Empress never set foot in the place. It gained a reputation as uncanny in the rational days of the Revolution. Sans-culotte mobs who set up households in former palaces shunned the HÔtel d'Autriche, supposedly frightened off by the headless ghost of the guillotined queen.
Van Helsing prepared for an expedition to the mansion, to find the grave of the vampire and bar her from it. Before facing the monster, he must fast and pray… though Le Gang suspected he also needed to wait for his shrew of a wife to leave the city so he could face evil behind her back.
Raoul proposed they venture to the HÔtel d'Autriche without the Professor.
They would wear Falke's anti-vampire collars. The sly creature they were after preyed only on the weak, the young. She was not expecting men who knew her for what she was.
Caralin was against the proposal. She said abandoned palaces were places to avoid. She coughed a little, stressing the unhealthy air that could be expected.
All other votes went against her.
Even Falke disagreed. Since Caralin's return, he was more convinced than ever that she was deceiving him.
He was sure one – or all! – of the others knew where she had been.
Getting them all to a haunted mansion might help solve the mystery of Caralin. Then, he would take steps.
He must have her free and clear.
At the risk of losing all else.
The Hôtel d'Autriche was in Le Marais, surrounded by high walls and gloomy, marshy gardens. It must have an evil reputation not to be occupied. The district was popular with the landed and wealthy. De Rosillon's people had a hôtel particulier around here.
As befit the respectable people who lived in the fine homes, the streets were well-swept and deadly dull. Anyone who passed on foot or – more likely – in a carriage was quiet. They were eerily like ghosts after the raucous, earthy folk Falke knocked about with in the student quarter.
It struck him that, after graduation, they were expected by their families to live in places like this, go to church on Sundays and marry girls who wouldn't rob them honestly like the flower girls and the tarts of the Quartier Latin did. At once, he saw the future as living death.
When he was a lawyer, would there be vampire hunts? Would there be Caralin?
'Spooked, yet?' asked Raoul, heartily.
'Just the night chill,' said Falke.
Raoul handed him a flask of something they probably used at the flower factory to wash off the arsenic.
The spirits burned his throat going down and made his eyes water.
Anatole and Gio found a way in by hefting a rusty gate off its hinges.
Caralin hung back, but Falke put an arm round her.
'He'll protect you from the monster,' said Raoul.
'But who'll protect you from him?' said de Rosillon. The young Count laughed like a devil. He'd been drinking all day.
'Remember, this thing is dangerous,' said Anatole. 'Professor Van Helsing has made that plain.'
'We're Le Gang de Schubert,' sang Gio. 'Fearless and bold…'
'There's a difference?' asked Raoul.
Anatole was first into the mansion, climbing through a broken ground-floor window. He waved a lantern around. Falke saw decaying plaster and cracked floor-boards.
They all followed.
De Rosillon proposed they split into three teams to search the upper storeys, the extensive ground floor and the basements.
Somehow, Falke was paired with Raoul to search above.
Gio and Anatole were together on this level, and Caralin wound up consigned below with de Rosillon.
Falke saw de Rosillon was delighted at the outcome, which he had contrived.
Was Caralin in it with him?
The fire burned in his stomach. He took another drink.
The expedition upstairs was thwarted. The main staircase had collapsed. Much of the first-floor landing had fallen into the hallway. Looking up, Falke saw stars and felt spots of rain on his face – so the roof was gone too.
Raoul prised a jagged length of wood from a fallen bannister.
'A natural vampire-impaling device,' he said, handing it to Falke.
Falke wondered if he could thrust it through his friend's ribs. His heart wasn't protected by an iron-and-silver collar.
They waited a few minutes. The mansion was quiet.
'Funny,' said Raoul.
'What is?'
'I can't hear Gio clumping around. Usually, you can tell him a mile off. With all these creaky, rotten boards, I'm surprised he's not crashed through to the cellars.'
Both stood still and listened.
Falke had to agree. It was odd.
'Let's find them and pack it in,' said Raoul. 'This was one of de Rosillon's foolish notions. We should have learned not to listen to him long ago.'
The notion was not so foolish if de Rosillon's desire wasn't to skewer a vampire but be alone with Caralin…
They looked in every room on the ground floor. In what must have been the ballroom, a rigged-up shack suggested gypsies or tramps had tried to squat here. The camp was cobwebbed and abandoned.
Gio and Anatole weren't to be found.
'They must have gone below,' said Falke.
'What ever for?'
'Perhaps they heard something.'
Raoul looked sober and serious.
'Let's find them all and get back to the Saint-Flour Musette for supper. I don't like this place. Not because it's haunted by vampires, but because it's obviously a death trap. Agree you?'
'Agree I,' said Falke.
The cellar door was open, but they heard nothing from beneath them.
Falke called out. No answer.
'There's light,' said Raoul.
Carefully going down uneven stone steps, they found a lantern propped up on the last stair. Falke thought it was Gio's.
The basements were a vaulted space. They smelled of earth and vile things.
Falke noticed Raoul had produced a primed pistol.
'You keep the stake,' he said. 'I'll trust a lead ball.'
'You didn't bring silver.'
'Waste of money, my friend.'
'I hope you won't regret the economy.'
They zigzagged between columns. The basements of the Hôtel d'Autriche extended under the whole house and beyond. Beneath the gardens was a labyrinth or catacomb which had mostly fallen in and was partly flooded.
'Caralin,' called out Falke.
The name came back at him.
'Anyone?' called Raoul.
The same.
Falke was now seriously jittery.
'The vampire can't have got them all,' he said. 'Not with the collars.'
'Vampires worry me less than other creatures of the night,' said Raoul, striding off with lantern in one hand and pistol in the other. 'This is just the sort of lair the Black Coats like. A hand over the mouth and a dagger in the ribs are as deadly as a vampire's kisses – more so, since I'm sure they're real while I have doubts about Van Helsing's sanity.'
Falke gripped the spar of wood.
'What…' said Raoul.
The lantern was dropped and the pistol discharged.
A pool of burning oil spread and Falke was blinded for a moment.
Where was Raoul?
Someone lay on the uneven ground beyond the fire.
Falke went to help him. It wasn't Raoul but de Rosillon, with his collar torn off. He had red scratches in his neck.
Falke's heart clutched with terror.
'Michel… Michel…'
He heard his name called.
'Caralin,' he cried. 'Caralin.'
He walked away from de Rosillon towards the voice, only he wasn't sure where the voice was coming from and got turned around.
He wasn't even sure it was her.
He tripped over an iron grille and felt cold air coming up from it.
A strangulated sound rose too.
Fire from the dropped lamp lit up the basement. Falke saw through the grille.
A fat white face, glistening with drops of blood, was pressed close to the bars. Gio Jones, with a great chunk bitten out of his neck, shaking with pain. His fingers wrapped around the grille like white worms.
'Her,' he said, 'her…'
Then his fingers relaxed and, with a sigh as if all the air in him were escaping at once, he fell down into a deeper darkness. Falke heard a thump as he landed on stone.
He found Anatole a few moments later, sat in a lopsided chair, throat slit like a pig's, a pool of blood in his lap. His eyes were rolled up, showing only the whites. His coat had been ripped off and his shirt torn away, exposing his shoulder and chest. His skin was covered with little rat-like bites that bubbled blood.
He heard a musical laugh behind him… and was struck a blow on the head.
He was woken up by water on his face.
It was raining on him.
Dawnlight was in the catacombs too. He must have been out for hours.
He felt his throat. The collar was gone. He could find no wounds.
Had he been spared?
He got to his feet, unsteady. He found Raoul's improvised stake and used it as a walking stick.
'Michel,' shouted someone.
A man's voice. He was relieved.
'Raoul? Where are you?'
'In the shadows,' he replied. 'I can't come into the light.'
'What? Why?'
'Come here, Michel… here…'
His head throbbed, from the blow and after-effects of drink.
What had happened? De Rosillon, Gio and Anatole were dead. Only he and Raoul had lived through the night.
And Caralin.
Where was she? Where had she been all this time?
'I've found her,' said Raoul, as if reading his mind. 'Down here, where the dark is deepest.'
Falke went to his friend. He saw an outline in the murk. Raoul's face, eyes bright.
A lucifer flared and Raoul lit a candle. He was standing by an open trapdoor.
He indicated that they should go down a level.
Falke followed the candle as it descended. They went down a narrow, sloping passage walled with wet stone blocks. Iron rings were set into the stone at intervals.
The passage fed into a crypt.
All around were coffins in niches or open tombs. Only a few scraps of bone remained inside.
'What happened?' asked Falke.
'She killed them,' said Raoul. 'Killed them and drank their blood.'
'Caralin?'
'Who else?' said Raoul, bitterly. 'Admit it, you knew all along… When she was away, the vampire was active. Her strange pallor, that thing with her voice, the way she gets in your head and turns you around. The place she comes from! Styria – well-known as the hunting ground of Mircalla Karnstein. Her very name…'
'I don't believe it,' said Falke.
Raoul stood over a tomb, holding up a candle.
'You don't,' said Raoul. 'Then look…'
Caralin lay in the tomb, hands folded on her chest, blood on her mouth.
Falke felt fire in his head.
'She killed our friends,' said Raoul, 'but what she did to us is worse… she's changed us.'
Candle flames danced in Raoul's eyes. He opened his mouth to show new fangs.
Only one thing was to be done.
Falke speared Caralin through the chest.
She groaned and her eyes popped open… She coughed and a bloody rag came out of her mouth.
As he worked the spar through her, he saw her hands and feet were bound with stout string.
Her eyes were angry, then empty.
Raoul swore, and spat out his fangs.
'Why didn't you stop him, you fool?' shouted de Rosillon, stepping out from behind a screen.
'He was too quick,' said Raoul, aghast.
Anatole dashed in and tried to pull out the stake, which was stuck too tight.
'That's hardly any use,' said de Rosillon.
'What's happened?' said Gio.
Falke saw red paint on his friends' necks, wounds made of flaps of fabric gummed on.
'Michel's killed a vampire,' said de Rosillon.
'Caralin?' said Gio.
'Yes, her. Who else?'
He could not get what Raoul had told him out of his head.
She had changed them, he said. Caralin had made vampires of them.
That – like everything else – was supposed to be a joke, a prank on him. But it felt true. In the catacombs under the Hôtel d'Autriche, he became a monster.
Raoul's fangs were from the joke shop, but the chill in Falke's heart was profound. He could feel his bones rearranging.
Nothing for it but to put her into the Seine, de Rosillon said. No one else knew her in Paris. She never mentioned any family. She'd be just another unknown woman.
She was smiling as she slipped under the waters.
'I suggest we all leave town for a while,' said Raoul. 'Let things simmer down. It was a ghastly mistake, and we'll have to live with the consequences…'
'I shall sing a mass for poor Caralin,' said Gio. 'Several.'
'This can't come out,' said Anatole. 'We'd be ruined. Michel would have it the worst. Disgrace, prison, the guillotine. We have to help him. It's for his sake.'
'I agree,' said de Rosillon. 'We must help Michel.'
'In time, we can come back,' said Raoul. 'And put this unfortunate incident behind us. A prank that turned out to be not so funny, eh? It's the time of our lives when such things are de rigueur.'
Garron, the best actor and most honest man in Le Gang, was sent to tell Van Helsing they had destroyed the vampire. Cringing with shame, he reported that the Professor believed him. He was not sure about Madame Van Helsing, but she would keep quiet to preserve her husband's reputation. It was in nobody's interests that this story got out.
So, the vampire was done away with… and Le Gang de Schubert was dissolved.
It would be twenty-five years before Falke came back to Paris… as the monster they had made of him and no longer the harmless trickster and slayer of monsters true of untrue. To avenge Caralin, he would revive the fear of the vampire in the city that ignored her in life but made her a totem – and an icon – in death.