Soldiers dragged Johann and Karl out of the basin and over to Lahnstein. The two men still seemed caught up in their own worlds and were barely able to stand. Foam stood in the corners of their mouths as if they were rabid dogs, and their eyes were like dead caves. Lahnstein took a step back with fright.
“My God, look! The devil is possessing them! Pray that our almighty Lord—”
Suddenly, one of the guards groaned and slumped to the ground. Behind him, the pockmarked priest staggered to his feet, the bolt still in his stomach. But it would seem he hadn’t given up the fight yet. He stumbled forward, grabbed Johann, and lifted the bloodied dagger to his throat—the same dagger that had been used to stab John. The priest’s face was deathly pale but he stood upright, as if evil was breathing new life into him. The soldier at his feet gave one last twitch before he died.
“Get back!” shouted the pockmarked man. “Everyone, get back!”
Lahnstein made a signal, and the soldiers moved back.
“I know you need the doctor alive,” said the priest with clenched teeth, holding the numbly staring Johann in front of him like a human shield. “He is of no use to you dead. So let me pass!”
Without taking the dagger off Johann’s throat, he made his way through the ranks of soldiers.
“Where do you think you’re going?” jeered Lahnstein. “You won’t get far with your injury. You’re a dead man. My men are posted by the gate. There is no way out of this castle.”
“Oh yes, there is. Believe me—I know this castle well. I have had many years to study it.” The priest was now walking backward with Johann in his arm until he stood at the crypt’s back wall. Holding the inert doctor tightly with one arm, he reached behind himself with the other. Only then did Greta notice an embellishment in the rock, an old, weathered wolf head that was no larger than a child’s fist. The priest turned the knob and a hidden door swung open behind him.
“My dear Gilles always made sure he had a way out,” said the priest with a smile. “We sometimes brought children in this way before we amused ourselves with them. Au revoir! ”
He slipped into the darkness beyond and pulled the doctor along. The heavy door slammed shut behind them.
“After him!” roared Lahnstein.
Hagen hurled himself against the door, twisting and turning the wolf head, pushing it, rattling it, but nothing happened. Swords and pikes didn’t achieve anything because the slit was much too tight. Evidently, the door could be barred from the other side.
Johann and the priest had vanished, as if the stony monster of Tiffauges had swallowed them up.
And Greta was alone with her grief and her horror.
17
FOR A LONG WHILE, JOHANN WAS TRAPPED IN A STATE between reality and insanity. Every now and then he wondered if he was still alive or if this was hell—if Tonio had finally taken him. It was a not-entirely-unpleasant sensation of hovering in a space without time, where memories raced past him as colorful images.
Bathing in the well. Father Jerome, smiling, handing me the dagger. Karl beside me, naked like me, stroking my manhood. A red-haired scoundrel who turns into John Reed and then back into a scoundrel. I stab him down. Greta screams. “Murderer, murderer, murderer.”
He couldn’t tell which memories were real and which were figments of his imagination. But whatever the case, they didn’t concern him. They were the concerns of another man he didn’t know.
The first thing he recognized as real was the hard stone floor he was lying upon. And the cold. He felt so cold. He was shivering all over, moving his hands through the darkness, feeling the dust on the ground. Then he heard heavy breathing.
Someone was with him.
Was it Karl? John? Or perhaps . . .?
“Greta?” he whispered. “Is that you? My . . . my daughter?”
Someone chuckled. It was a man’s rattling laughter that turned into a coughing fit.
“You . . . you fool,” said a hoarse voice. “Your daughter is going to burn. You might see her again soon—in hell.”
The man laughed more of his creepy laughter. Johann opened his good eye and looked at the ceiling of a square chamber built of stone. Pale morning light streamed in through narrow slits in the wall. He turned his head and saw Father Jerome, his face white as a sheet. He was pressing his hands against his stomach, where his robe was wet with blood. A broken piece of wood stuck out from the fabric.
Johann wondered if he was responsible for the priest’s injury; he didn’t know.
“You don’t remember what’s happened, do you?” Father Jerome laughed once more with a throaty, rattling sound. “Do you want to know?”
“I . . . I am at Tiffauges,” said Johann quietly as the memories returned. He realized that he was completely naked. “I wanted to find Tonio del Moravia, whom you call Gilles de Rais, your master. He cursed me with this disease and I finally wanted to face him. But he wasn’t at Tiffauges.”
“No, he wasn’t, damn it! But we would have taken you to him. The black potion, the bath, the sacrifice—all was ready.”
“The sacrifice!” Johann sat up, forgetting all about the cold. “Oh God, Karl! I was supposed to kill Karl.”
“Once you’d had your fun with him, yes. Gilles would have enjoyed that.” The priest giggled. “You never know what the black potion is going to do to someone—what sort of well-concealed tendencies it’s going to bring out.”
Johann felt ashamed when the images returned to him—the kissing, the stroking, the pleasant moans. But then he remembered how he had viewed Karl afterward, what he had thought of him, and shame about those thoughts outweighed everything else.
“You nearly traveled to the master,” said Father Jerome. He, too, sat up slowly now and leaned against the stone wall. He was still pressing his hands to his wound, trying in vain to stop the
