The Golden Read Online Free PDF

tantalizing scent of
blood that arose from the stains painting the turret stones. Whoever
had done this, Beheim thought, would have been bathed in blood. And
despite Agenor’s conjecture that several people had been
involved, in Beheim’s opinion there could have been only one
murderer. This sort of violent excess demanded the intimate
circumstance of the sexual act, it spoke to an ultimately private
sinfulness. He had never known killers acting in concert—vulnerable
to the shame of witness, even that of an accomplice—to be so
uninhibited in their slaughter.
    Closing his
eyes, calling into play the mental skills that had been in part
responsible for his meteoric rise with the Paris police, he merged
with the past, using all the telltales, all the tiny bits of evidence
and atmospheric constants, to empathize with the murderer, to intuit
his state of mind and how it had been to kill, to return to the
moment of the crime, to the turret the way it had been the previous
morning. A bloated yellow moon hung in the east above the mounded
hills that surrounded the castle, illuminating impenetrable thickets
and short, squat oaks with dwarfish branches, creating deep bays of
shadow in the folds of the earth. Winded silence. Then the turret
door creaking open, and a dark figure, a man—or perhaps it had
not been a man! Beheim thought for an instant that he sensed the male
shape of the murderer’s hunger, the muscularity of his madness,
but then a hint of something, a delicacy of movement, a hesitancy,
made him think otherwise. Yet for the sake of conjecture, he dubbed
the murderer a man. Tall. A tall man leading the girl out into the
chilly air. Her pale hair feathered in the breeze. Her filmy
nightdress molded to breasts and abdomen and columned thighs. Her
expression was dazed, her movements somnambulistic. She felt nothing
of the cold, under the potent compulsion of the vampire’s
stare. The murderer turned her to face him, then bent to her neck and
drank. Her head lolled; crescents of white showed beneath her
half-lowered lids. After a long moment the vampire lifted his head,
his mouth crimsoned, supporting the girl with one arm. The taste of
the blood had dizzied him. Never such a maddening flavor, such a
surge of heady ecstasy. He could not help but drink again, and soon
ecstasy became a red, raw need, a primitive exultation. It was as if
a hole had opened in his mind, a tunnel from which poured a flood of
debased, animal desires. Soon he was no longer drinking, he was
tearing at the frail tissues with his fangs, seeking to mine the
source of the fiery pleasure that was consuming his intellect, his
soul, wanting only to dig and claw and rend until he could kiss the
open artery and drain it of its perfect yield. The girl fell, and he
fell atop her, a black humped shape leeched to her spasming body. He
tore at her belly, her cheek, he bit and snapped without aim or
comprehension of anatomy, ripping away at the fleshy walls
imprisoning the bloody narcotic juice. And . . .
    Something was
wrong.
    A bright terror
pervaded his thoughts. He glanced up. The moon was burning, burning,
a blazing monstrosity that appeared faceted one second, then rippling
as if seen through a film of heat haze. The sky had gone a poisoned
color, and the entire world glowed as if irradiated by an unearthly
force. The blood affecting his vision, he decided. It must be the
blood, the drunkenness. Or could it be something else? He thought it
might be something more than the blood, but he couldn’t
remember. Then he saw what he had done to the girl.
    Revulsion warred
with a sense of pride in his power, his feral rule. He felt
dizzy . . . not the exhilarating dizziness of moments
before, but sick and vague and besotted. Everything was too bright.
Blood glistening like a slick flow of lava across the stones, light
steaming up from the spills, the puddles, from cracks between the
stones. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him, and he staggered to his
feet. It