The Golden Read Online Free PDF Page B

was all wrong somehow, what he had done, what he felt and
saw, everything was wrong. Too much light, light exploding in his
skull, streaming from his eyes, from the girl’s wounds, from
the slashed meat of her breasts, bloody light piercing upward to
stain him with guilt, to taint all his life. A hot fluid rose in his
gorge, and he gagged. His stomach emptied redly. There was a weird
singing in his head, a screeching like fingernails raked across
slate. He tried to stop his ears, but could not muffle the sound,
and, disoriented, frightened—of what, he did not know—dripping
reddened bile from his chin, his heart hammering, he fled into the
darkness of the castle . . .
    Beheim came
alert to discover that he was gripping the turret wall, gazing out at
the Carpathian hills, at—to his considerable surprise—a
smallish silvery moon quite different from the bloated yellow
monstrosity he had imagined. He had an apprehension of someone
standing behind him, but on wheeling about, he found only the body of
the Golden . . . though the air remained thick with
presence. He savored that presence, hoping to isolate its
particulars, certain it was a mental track left by the murderer, a
clue as tangible as a bloodstain or a boot mark; but it faded
quickly, and he was unable to gain any further knowledge. He tried to
assemble his various impressions of the murderer into a portrait, but
the figure in his mind’s eye remained as featureless as a
silhouette cut from black paper. Likely a man. An arrogant sort, yet
with a fair degree of conscience. Drunk to the point of hallucination
on the blood of the Golden. Driven to murder, then shamed to nausea
and flight. That was all.
    He knelt to
examine the body. A fragment of black thread caught beneath a broken
fingernail was the only evidence it yielded. Hardly telling. What man
among the gathering had not been wearing black? Steeling himself,
Beheim shifted the body. The flesh had frozen to the stones and made
a horrid sucking noise as it was lifted away. There was very little
of interest hidden beneath it. More blood, and scraps of the ripped
nightdress. He inspected the scraps, but having no microscope, he was
unable to learn anything from them. Feeling helpless, frustrated, he
got to his feet and began moving cautiously about, peering at the
moonlit stones. Once he had thoroughly explored the illuminated
portion of the turret, he got down onto his hands and knees and
searched the shadows alongside the wall, probing the cracks with his
fingernails. He had covered nearly half of the area when he spotted a
shard of broken glass. Not far away lay more splinters and pieces of
glass, among them the neck of a small bottle to which a silver cap
was affixed. It was, he realized on closer inspection, an extremely
old bottle, likely an antique, and judging from the size, it had
probably held perfume. A fanciful capital letter was engraved upon
the cap, but time had worn it almost completely away, leaving only a
flourish intact, and Beheim could not determine what the letter had
been. U or N , perhaps. Possibly a V . He turned
the cap over and over in his hand, then pocketed it and continued his
search. But there were no further discoveries.
    Three clues. The
bottle cap, the blood—somewhere in the castle would be hidden
bloodstained evening clothes—and the fact that the culprit had
been a man. Not much of a basis upon which to begin an investigation.
Beheim knew he would need luck . . . luck and a great
deal of hard work, most of that to be accomplished by the Family’s
servants. He would set them to searching for the bloody clothing at
once, and to seeking the owner of the bottle cap; he would study the
results of Agenor’s initiative concerning the whereabouts of
Family members during the early hours of the morning.
    But what could
he set himself to do?
    There was
something troubling about his re-creation of the crime . . .
something about the hallucination in particular. The way