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party. This was, after
all, only a murder, no matter how unusual its perpetrator. In Paris
he had solved crimes of violence that had initially offered even less
hope of solution. Full of resolve, he turned toward the turret door,
but as he moved back into the darkness of the castle, his confidence
was dispelled by the irrational fear that behind him the silver and
proper moon had waned, and hanging in its place, like a cancer in the
sky, was a bloated, disfigured sphere of sickly yellow, an emblem of
derangement and unholy fever, of a new fire in the blood, of
mysteries and terrors yet undiscovered, whose dread particulars he
could not presuppose.
    Chapter
Five
    T he interior design of Castle Banat had been contrived not with
practical considerations of fortification or habitation in mind, but
according to a series of peculiar architectural fantasies created by
an Italian artist who had been one of the Patriarch’s lovers
some six hundred years before, and its insane enormity reflected the
scope and complexity of the problem that confronted Beheim. Vast
chambers as large as entire castles themselves were spanned by
bridges—some of them drawbridges—that led to doorless
walls; hundred-foot-wide stairways ended in midair, and there were
chambers that opened onto gulfs in whose murky depths stranger
edifices yet could be glimpsed. Windowed towers sprouted from the
most unexpected places and rose toward dim vaulted roofs, and here
and there were enormous wheels such as those used to raise and lower
a portcullis, only the majority of these had no purpose whatsoever.
At any point one could look up to see—in the light of the
wrought-iron lanterns that hung everywhere—seemingly infinite
perspectives of arches and stairways, with thick loops of chains
hanging down like vines, and pulleys and ropes with no apparent
function, and lofty stone porches embellished with nymphs in
bas-relief and bearded faces with great iron rings depending from
their mouths. On one level a body of black water spread from a shore
of bolted iron plate, horrid statuary rising from its depths, showing
frilled heads and taloned hands. Pigeons that had never flown under
the sun nested in crannies and on ledges, and soared through the
heights, fouling the surfaces beneath with their droppings, and there
were other beasts aside from the sculpted gargoyles and dragons that
stood guard over the supreme emptinesses of the bridges: rats,
centipedes, serpents, and, most notably, degenerate men and women who
had once served the Patriarch but had in the end been loath to accept
the risks of blood judgment and now, still too much in love with the
possibility of eternity to leave, lived like vermin in the depths of
the castle, fleeing at shadows, stealing garbage, traveling—it
was rumored—along secret ways that permitted them access to
even the most sacrosanct areas of the castle, and performing brutish
ceremonies that were gross imitations of those practiced by the
Family. The size of the place was such that it had its own weather.
Clouds could form in the heights; rain fell from time to time. A man
standing athwart one of the bridges would appear no more than a speck
to someone below. This insane scale, along with the bizarre design
and ornamentation, seemed redolent of a monumental conceit and folly.
Indeed, certain of the internal structures had been designed as
ruins: crumbling stone piers with ferns sprouting from their cracks;
shattered fountains in the shape of griffons’ heads and
gigantic infants and various other creatures, from which water
spilled into ponds or gutters or mere crevices in the floor; a spiral
staircase with a holed railing; faceless statues and iron beams
protruding from a gapped wall. Throughout could be felt the chill,
brooding presence of the Patriarch. It was as if he had built an
immense skull of grayish black stone to contain the bleak materials
of his personality, and while Beheim found the wealth of baroque
invention