The Fifth House of the Heart by Ben Tripp Read Free Book Online

so. During that period it had amassed a new fortune, as vampires easily do. With this wealth, it was attempting to reassemble its old glory. Such monsters, after all, might have acquired a piece from Napoléon Bonaparte himself, or Queen Nefertiti, for that matter. There were memories attached to such artifacts. It was the memories they cherished.
    Vampires dwelled in the past. It was one of the things that most distinguished them from human beings. For a vampire, the future is nothing, despite the centuries they can expect to survive. For men, the opposite is true: men live always for the future, of which they may claim so little. Robbed, as a vampire would see it, of its rightful trove of mementos, the creature would work diligently to reclaim every last piece. And for a vampire to work at all was a terrible sacrifice for it. They were lazy creatures, dragons content to sleep on their hoards. It was a compelling motive, Sax believed.
    So it might be a vampire. On the other hand, it could just be some reclusive nouveau richeChinese tycoon buying up a mansion’s worth of clutter to make it look like he had a pedigree. It all came down to the ormolu clock, and whether or not that poor young fellow Raymond Radiguet—poet and novelist, friend of Great Artists—had been killed by a vampire.
    Sax had found a book to address that issue as well. Lives of Paris , it was titled. Radiguet got half a page, including a eulogy written by Jean Cocteau that Sax thought rather lachrymose. Cause of death was typhoid. Which, of course, could be a misdiagnosis, or the doctor might have cited typhoid to spare the deceased’s loved ones the indignity of a less flattering illness. But Cocteau’s words held a clue. In the eulogy to Radiguet was a quote from the poet’s deathbed, spoken in a fever:
    There is a color that moves and people hidden in the color .
    Victims of systematic vampirism died in a fever, boiling with lymph, bleeding within, their flesh broken out in poxy rashes. And hallucinated toward the end. Sax had witnessed it with his own eyes. It would look much like typhoid. Radiguet was only twenty, too dreadfully young, Sax thought. A color that moves. Sax ran the words through his mind. People hidden in the color. He knew something about that.
    Despite the woolen rug across his legs and the lusty clanking of the steam radiators beneath his windows, Asmodeus Saxon-Tang felt a chill spread over his flesh. It was the damp cold of newly turned earth in an autumn graveyard. He felt terribly old and weak and tired. He knew his wild conjectures were right. He might be the only man alive who could put together the scattered bits of information to discover what he’d found.
    There was no vanity behind the thought. In his cleverness, he’d made a fool of himself, and possibly a target. He had exposed himself to the vampire when he outbid the blonde for that accursed clock.What was it Nietzsche had said? When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you .
    Sax could almost feel the eyes upon him, out there in the darkness beyond the brittle panes. He shivered. The telephone rang. Sax leapt at the jangling noise, the convulsion of his buttocks popping him a foot into the air. He clawed the instrument to him and clapped the handset to his ear.
    â€œSaxon-Tang,” he gasped. His heart was pounding.
    â€œIt’s Barry, Mr. Tang. I’m sorry about the late call, but . . .” It was Barry Lions, Sax’s foreman in the New York warehouse.
    â€œBut what?” Sax prompted when Barry failed to continue.
    â€œSomebody broke in,” Barry said. “The night watchman?”
    The night watchman what? Sax urged in his mind. What? Barry was obviously beside himself; he couldn’t seem to get through a sentence tonight.
    â€œThe night watchman what?” Sax prompted at last.
    â€œHe’s dead,” Barry said. “I mean real dead.”
    T he police were out in force