He tried to picture all of those dead girls with their faces ripped off. How many victims were there? Forty? Fifty? More?
One wall, however, displayed just one picture. It was a framed painting of an austere woman.
“Do you see that?” Leroy asked.
Vauvert came closer. He recognized the painting.
“Yeah.”
“Is that some member of the Saint-Clair family?” Nadal asked.
“No,” Vauvert said. “It’s the portrait of a Hungarian countess who also was a serial killer. We think that Judith Saint-Clair kidnapped all these girls because she’s imitating the work of that woman. Her name’s Elizabeth Bathory.”
“Oh.” Nadal was pacing, unable to calm himself. “But why would she do something like that?”
“To please the god of death,” Leroy said. “To ask him for his favors. Look.”
He pointed at the floor. There was a large circle drawn in blood.
And written in the center:
He took measured steps around the circle, examining it.
On the wall opposite Elizabeth Bathory’s portrait, there was a door. It was ajar.
“The stench is coming from there,” Leroy said. “Cover me.”
Prepared for anything, Vauvert raised his gun and pushed the door open with his foot.
70
The light in this room was off, but huge mirrors on the walls repeated reflections in every direction. When Vauvert and Leroy aimed their flashlights, the beams multiplied, seemingly into infinity.
“Shit,” Vauvert said, dazzled.
The beams created shapes and patterns, a three-dimensional pentagram at one moment, another geometrical form the next.
Leroy reached for the light switch. Nothing happened.
“No bulb.” Vauvert pointed to an empty socket dangling at the end of bare wires.
Narrowing his eyes, he tried to distinguish between the real and the reflections. Every movement of the flashlights caused him to doubt his judgment. But he did think that he counted seven mirrors on the four walls.
And he made out a stone trough in the middle of the room.
The image of a foul bathtub crossed his mind.
There was no question about what was in it. The smell coming from it was the stench of carrion, of death. It was acrid, powerful and paralyzing, evoking everything that human beings had been programmed to flee from since the dawn of time. It was the smell of human corruption, the smell of total human destruction, no more and no less.
The blood inscription on the wall declared:
“How disgusting,” Leroy muttered.
The beam of his flashlight swept over the coagulated surface, which looked almost black in places, and stirred up a swarm of flies.
“Oh God almighty,” Nadal said, covering his mouth. He dashed out of the room, and they heard him vomit.
Vauvert, too, covered his mouth as he approached the stone trough. The buzzing of the flies alone was making him nauseous.
“How many gallons of blood in there, you think?”
“Way too many,” Leroy said, wincing. “Holy fucking shit, Vauvert! Look over there!”
He pointed to a pile against one of the walls. It took Vauvert a few seconds to figure out what it was. Only when he made out the bones of a human hand did he understand. Corpses. The bodies had been chopped apart and tossed in a heap in that spot, where putrefaction was slowly melding the thighs, arms, and twisted torsos into a muddle of flesh. A whirl of insects feasted on the remains. Vauvert could not tell how many dismembered bodies there were. Maybe five or six. Maybe even more. Drawing closer, he could distinguish two figures still more or less intact. Nearby, there was a small mound of hair.
His stomach in knots, Vauvert went to the back of the room to unearth the horrors that lay ahead.
Here, one last body was hanging from a butcher’s hook. Both arms had been cut off.
“God dammit. Will this ever end?”
One of the walls caught his attention. It seemed to be covered with a sort of coarse tapestry.
He aimed his flashlight.
This was no tapestry. Not at all.
Human faces, most of them yellowed and shriveled, filled the wall, from floor to ceiling. Some were still vaguely recognizable. Others were lost in decay.
“We found her trophies.”
That’s when he heard the growl.
Then it was a hoarse howling, coming at them from all around.
“What the fuck is that?” Leroy shouted.
71
Spread wide open on the table, Eva moans.
Every fiber of her body is a source of agony.
Yet she keeps moving her wrist, up, down.
She is not thinking about anything but the motion in her right wrist.
She is working the rope against the wooden edge, rubbing it up once, then down.
She tells herself that the rope must be coming apart.
Surely it’s coming apart.
The woman, for her part, is crouched on the floor, absorbed in violent turmoil. Her eyes are rolled back. Saliva bubbling from the corners of her mouth.
Her body convulses and shudders faster and faster as an inhuman growl rises from the depths of her chest. She twists her arms in impossible positions. They look almost like the limbs of animals.
Eva sees that the woman’s mask has turned black, a reversed mirror. Panic stricken, she searches for the reflections of Vauvert and Leroy in the black depths. She finds them.
The growling becomes a roar.
72
“The mirrors!”
It took Vauvert a few seconds to realize that Leroy was talking to him.
“What?”
“Something’s moving inside the mirrors!” Leroy said again, pointing his flashlight at one of them.
The mirror was not reflecting any light at all.
And for a good reason: it had turned black. Its surface was tar-like and pulsating. The inhuman sound was
