The Dirty Streets of Heaven

soon, just to make sure Sam and Monica were all right, if nothing else. And I knew it wouldn’t hurt me to get away from the Countess for a while. Any objectivity I might once have had about her was long gone, and even though there was still so much I didn’t know about her and so many reasons for me not to trust her, I couldn’t help looking at her as she slept and feeling a clutch in my chest I hadn’t felt for a long time. In fact, I didn’t think I had ever felt quite like this. That would have been scary enough with any woman, but with this one it seemed damned near suicidal.

As if she could read my troubled thoughts, Caz began to twitch a little in her sleep, then to whimper. She rolled over and pushed feebly at something that wasn’t there, then scrabbled at her pillow in a way that reminded me so much of what she’d done to my cheek a couple of hours earlier during our struggle that I reached up to touch the tender, healing scrapes.

“No,” she said faintly, “no, no!” She was struggling harder now but the nightmare still seemed grip her tightly. I sat down on the bed next to her and gently lifted her eyelids with my fingertips, still mistrustful enough to think it might be a trick, but her pupils did not contract, which they should have done even in a dim room. Instead she grabbed at my hands, slapped at them and fought against me, but so weakly I could tell that she was still deep in her oppressive dream. Her cries became more articulate, and now tears ran from her shuttered lids and down her cheek.

“Caz!” I said, shaking her. “Caz, wake up! It’s just a nightmare. You’re having a bad dream.” I couldn’t believe I was saying something like this to one of Hell’s minions, but I couldn’t just sit by and watch her suffer either. Nothing I did seemed to help, though, and at last I pulled her out of the bed and stood her on her feet, holding her tight to keep her from falling. This seemed to drag her back to some kind of consciousness, although I regretted the decision almost immediately because as soon as she got her balance she attacked me with nearly as much savagery as before, although this time it was clear she didn’t know who I was. I defended myself, doing my best not to hurt her, and after a short struggle she became less frenetic in her movements. She came slowly back to herself as though surfacing from deep waters.

“What…?” She looked around at what must have been the familiar sights of her windowless room, then down at her own slim, naked form. “Why…?”

“I really hope you remember why you don’t have any clothes on, Caz, because if you don’t I’m going to have a tough time convincing you.”

She looked up at me, her eyes troubled. “Don’t ever joke about that, Bobby. We’re here. Of course it all happened. I just didn’t know why I was…” She shook her head.

“You were having a nightmare. I tried to wake you up, but I couldn’t.”

Her eyes suddenly filled but did not overspill. It was precisely those tears, which should have set all my alarm bells jangling, that finally made me stop doubting her. They had been so fast to rise-surely nobody, not even a trained actress, could come thrashing up from sleep and make a real physical body jump through hoops that way. “It wasn’t a nightmare,” she said. “It was a memory.”

She climbed back into the bed, pulling the covers up to her waist. With her youthful, wide-eyed face and long white-gold hair cascading over her naked shoulders she might have been a portrait of Alice that Reverend Dodgson would have kept locked away and shown to no one-not even God.

“It was him. I was dreaming about him,” she said, closing her eyes with a shudder.

“Eligor?”

She laughed. “No, the first ‘him’ in my life. The man who owned me. The man I killed.” I didn’t say a word-I didn’t dare-but she must have sensed something in my silence. Her eyes opened, and she gave me a crooked grin. “You didn’t think I got sent to Hell by mistake, do you? Believe me, Bobby, I earned every single moment of my damnation.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But if you do, I’ll listen.”

“There’s not a lot to say. It was a long time ago. He was an important man, the hrabia-the count, we’d say now. His name was Pawel, and his family owned most of the land around Lublin.”

“Poland.” Now I finally understood that whisper of middle-European under the British schoolgirl diction. “When was this?”

“Do you really want to know?” She smiled, but it was a bitter one. “I hope you like older women. Much older. Let’s put it this way-you know about the Renaissance? Well, it was before that.”

I didn’t say anything. Something was happening here, something as powerful and inevitable as a storm, but I had already decided to hunker down and let it wash over me.

“They gave me to him,” she said. “That’s how they did things in those days. I was scarcely fifteen years old. Practically an old maid!” She laughed. It hurt to hear it. “And Count Pawel looked every inch the part. He was tall, handsome, a brave soldier, and a firm ruler. He was also twisted inside, twisted and bent and broken.” She shuddered. “He still is. Even in Hell he’s considered dangerous.”

“You have to…see him?”

She shook her head. “Any business between us is long over. He’s happier persecuting the dead than he ever was on Earth. But for a while, when we were both alive, I was his favorite plaything.”

“You don’t have to-”

She lifted a hand. “I want to. You…you deserve to know the truth. But come and sit next to me. It would be nice to have someone near.”

I sat beside her and took her hand. I could sense she didn’t want to be looked at, so I leaned back and stared at the ceiling and the draperies as they swayed gently in the breeze of the air-conditioning.

“He was a monster. Some are discovered, but some are never known except by their victims. He was one of those sort; the subtle, clever kind of monster. Never killed anyone powerful, never tormented anyone who could fight back-although, since he was a high nobleman, he had a wide array of victims to choose from, of course.

“With me it was different. Yes, he raped me over and over, but that was nothing unusual for the time. I was his wife, and he owned me. A little thing like reluctance bordering on terror only added savor for him, and as my terror grew so did his enjoyment. He went out of his way to find things that would frighten me and hurt me. And he hurt others in front of me, especially women…and girls. The servants were no more than furniture-no, they were no more than animals. Either way, they were possessions, and unlike Elizabeth Bathory or Gilles de Rais, he was just careful enough with his crimes that no one ever felt the need to stop him.

“And if God had not punished me enough, I also had to live with his mother Justyna, the dowager countess, a harridan who never killed anyone but in her own way was every bit as cold and cruel as her son. Worse, in some ways, because she understood some of the subtler cruelties only other women know how to use. She employed them gleefully, too. My family were only minor nobility, and she never thought I was good enough for her Pawel.

“I gave that monster and his bitch mother two heirs, both boys, and I lived each day of my life in dread. If any of the servants showed me any sympathy or kindness beyond the strict performance of their duties Pawel or his mother went out of their way to punish them. Justyna all but snatched my own boys away from me and raised them herself to be certain they grew up to be Pawel’s sons and nothing of mine…” She trailed off, then took a deep breath and resumed.

“And one night it was finally all too much. I won’t trouble you with details, but my husband had recently killed a sweet little servant girl I favored, and only that day I had seen her buried in our churchyard. He came to me that evening and, as he took me, showed me a lock of her hair that he had cut from her head in the coffin, and which he had put into a locket to give me, ‘So that you may keep your little peasant girl with you always,’ he told me. So that I would remember always how he had snatched her from me and killed her, was what he meant. So I would know that he could take from me anything I cared about-and that he would always do so.

“I don’t know what happened to me, except that I simply couldn’t take any more. When he fell asleep I slit his throat with his own knife. As he thrashed in his own blood, I stabbed him over and over in his chest and back and face, and continued to stab him long after he was dead. Then, covered in dripping red like some horrible phantom, I went and dragged the two boys out of their bed-they could scarcely have been six and seven years old- and brought them in to see the wreckage of their father. I was laughing hysterically and could not stop. ‘Here’s a present from me so you’ll remember him always!’ I kept saying, or so I’m told. They ran away in terror, but not before I tried to kill them both as well, wanting now to dam the whole river of Pawel’s cursed blood once and for