the level where a tall man could reach with a paintbrush, had been painted bright red. The lower surfaces, up to a little above the level of the plank and the lunette, bore brownish stains that might have been old blood.

'What'd you think of that?' The questioner really wanted to know.

It was hard to find an answer… a man who wants to cut off your head

One of Radcliffe's captors, one of those who seemed to have comparatively little trouble in speaking in coherent sentences, told him that the machine before him was an exact replica of the one used in Paris, France, during the Terror. Someone else broke in to argue that no, this was the original, the very one that had taken off the heads of the king and queen and pope.

The bandit looked at Radcliffe anxiously, with the air of one who was proud to show off his intellectual attainments to someone who could understand them—but at the same time he wasn't quite certain that he'd got it right.

To Radcliffe the machine appeared amazingly tall, and quite authentic. This was the very instrument, one character solemnly affirmed, with which their Master had vowed to chop off his, Philip Radcliffe's, head.

A tall young woman, tattoos on her bare arms, told him: 'After that, the cats will probably have your tongue. Your blood, though, that's another matter altogether.' She squinted at him judicially. 'I think that most of your blood will be out of your body before your head comes off.'

'What's your Master's name?' the prisoner asked on impulse.

'None of your business.'

He thought of mentioning it—Radu—but then decided that there was nothing to be gained by doing that.

Radu's assistants fussed over the solidly built, authentic-looking guillotine, and again expressed their hopes of pleasing their demanding Master.

'He'll be real happy when he sees what we built for him. All the care and effort we put into it.'

They bragged of how they had made all the parts of the guillotine somewhere (they were coy about revealing exactly where) and trucked it here, disassembled. Then they had set up the device in the old barn. Signs of fresh repair work suggested it had been necessary to patch the roof and run in a long power cord from the house.

All of them were eager now to give their prisoner a demonstration of how the machine worked.

For some reason it was thought necessary to tie Philip into a chair first. He didn't protest; certainly this was better than being strapped to the plank and tilted into the guillotine. Then an inspiration came, and he persuaded his keepers to untie him, by complaining that the cord was so tight that his arm was bleeding inside his shirtsleeve. He'd observed that these people were very worried about the chance that even a drop of his blood would be spilled.

The complaint brought him immediate attention, and a loosening of the rope. The villains stripped up his sleeve as far as it would go, then sliced it very carefully with a surgically sharp knife, and looked at his arm. Then they looked at him, in outrage because he'd lied. Actually the bonds had been tight enough to leave marks, though there was no real bleeding.

For all their feverish anticipation of the Master's arrival, every one of his disciples missed the event when it took place, a few minutes after sunset. As had been the case earlier with the comings and goings of Mr. Graves, Radcliffe had been able to hear no sound of aircraft, motorcycle, car, or even horse. There was just the sudden presence, standing in one of the barn's farthest recesses, of a remarkably handsome young man wearing a Greek fisherman's cap and a dark suit jacket over a dark T-shirt.

'Radu,' said Philip Radcliffe, aloud and quite involuntarily. Half-untied as he was, he started. He was the first, or very nearly the first, to notice who had just come in.

Radu was simply standing there, hands down at his sides, looking at them all. When his followers finally noticed his presence and began a murmuring movement toward him, he raised one pale hand in a curious gesture that seemed half warning, half benediction. The advance stopped instantly, and silence fell.

'Philip Radcliffe,' said the beautiful young man, as if simply returning a greeting, and smiled his winning smile.

Casually he approached the place where Philip sat half-bound before the guillotine. The people who had been arguing and fussing over his bonds stepped back.

Philip looked up into eyes of gentian blue, under hair of raven black. The man smiled, revealing frankly pointed teeth, a jarring note like something out of Hollywood.

'I knew your namesake, long ago,' said Radu. His voice was gentle, almost whispering. He put one finger under Philip's chin, and raised it gently. 'I thought that I had seen him dead, and tasted of his blood, in 1794… but it turned out that I was wrong about that. So now I must have yours.'

He shifted his position by a step or two, so that now he was looking down on Philip from a different angle. 'You do not seem surprised. Someone has been telling you the story.' And he raised his eyes to his supporters, seeking information. The looks he got back were blank, or frozen with fear and fascination.

Once more the vampire dropped his gaze to Radcliffe's. 'To settle the vexing question of your ancestor's fate to my own satisfaction, I investigated the genealogy of your branch of the Radcliffe family during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.'

It had taken Radu some time and effort to make sure, he explained now, but in the end there could be no doubt—somehow the beheading he'd thought he'd witnessed had been a fake. 'And I think I know now how that was accomplished.'

Philip Radcliffe, bastard son of Benjamin Franklin, had survived the Terror in France, and—as Radu's subsequent research demonstrated—had returned to America with his French bride, Melanie Remain, to settle in the state of Virginia, where he founded a substantial family and eventually died in 1861 at the age of ninety- two.

Radu's words trailed off slowly, and he fell silent. He was looking at the guillotine.

The world seemed to be dissolving in horror and unreality around Philip Radcliffe. Tied down, unable to move more than one hand, he was surrounded by smiling and giggling enemies, all their attention now focused for a moment on the object they had brought him out here to see. The full-scale instrument of two hundred years ago, or so nearly so that it made no difference. Spruced up with a fresh coat of bright red paint.

'Demonstrations,' said Radu at last, stroking a pale hand up and down one upright of the massive frame. 'I wish to see how well it works. Just how reliable it is.'

Murmuring their eagerness, his slaves got busy. The heavy blade, sharpened edge gleaming a little in the lantern-light, was hauled to the top of its track on a new rope. On the first trial, with nothing in the lunette, the blade fell with a startling crash, to be caught by the slot in the lower frame. The fall of the knife had a distinctive double sound, because the heavy metal bounced up and fell again.

On the second trial it became evident that parts of the death machine were not always going to work smoothly. When a head of lettuce, recently brought from town, was set in the lunette, the blade when triggered began to fall, then heart-stoppingly became stuck halfway down. As soon as someone touched the machine with the idea of making an adjustment, the blade recovered itself, plunging the rest of the way at the impulse of a very slight vibration. The jarring impact sounded just as heavily as before, and the lettuce fell in two, divided as neatly as if by some fine kitchen tool.

The second subject of the day's demonstration—Radcliffe was not sure who had made the choice—was the live cat. Sensing evil intent, the beast clawed and bit one or two people before they could get it under control. Two or three of Radu's breathing acolytes, ignoring their bleeding scratches—it seemed that no one, including themselves, placed any value on their blood—held the animal's four limbs in a practiced way, as if this were not the first time they'd done this trick, and pushed its snarling, screeching head in through the little window at the front end of the machine.

Once more the blade came down, putting an abrupt end to living noise. The sound of its fall was only subtly different than before, but it was to stay with Radcliffe for a long time. Somehow the smallness of the jet of blood was a surprise, a mark of the pettiness of evil that would spend its energy to kill a cat.

Someone at once snatched up the fallen head from the barn floor, and tossed it into Radcliffe's lap. Another apprentice vampire, heedless of crimson splashes, held up the dead cat and tried to drink the blood which had not yet entirely ceased pumping from the vessels in its neck.

Philip felt a wave of dizziness, gray faintness threatening to blot out the world, amid the sound of laughter. Coming and going, like the pulsing roar of blood in his own head, there came from outside the steady noise of the swift white water of the mountain stream.

Вы читаете A Sharpness on the Neck
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