Death Becomes Him - 19

Trent flew into Toulouse, arriving Sunday morning, the second day of his vacation. A rental car was awaiting him and the very polite and helpful clerk marked the route he needed to take to get to Saux. It was, from what his research had told him, a tiny town with about one-hundred and fifty inhabitants. It was also the closest town to Émilienne Charpentier’s chateau. Presuming of course it was her chateau and that he wasn’t on a wild goose chase.

Thanks to one of the owners of his hotel, who had connections in nearby Tournon, Trent had a hotel room reserved there. He’d been told it was about a ten minute drive from Tournon to Saux. Getting to the chateau would take much longer as it was deep in the mountains with only a narrow road leading up to it for most of the way.      

After checking into the hotel, leaving his bags in his room, Trent took a stroll around the town. Tournon perched on the side of a hill and to Trent’s inexperienced eyes looked as if it had been built in medieval times and hadn’t changed much since then. He found a small restaurant with a patio overlooking the area and ordered a late lunch of salmon and what was billed as a local apple pie. He presumed, with a bit of amusement, that it meant the apples were grown locally, not that the pie was made locally while the rest of the meal came ready-made from somewhere else.

When he was finished with his meal he decided to make the drive to Saux. The road followed a small, bubbling stream, the Pyrenees towering on the horizon in front of him.  The town was just as it had been billed, tiny and also very medieval in flavor. He suspected ‘quaint’ was the perfect word for it. He found the road he needed to take to the chateau, but it was getting late so he returned to Tournon and his hotel.

Early Monday morning he was up and moving again. His plan, such as it was, was to get to the chateau, wait until it was dark and then…

Hell, breach the walls and hope I don’t get attacked by a vampire guard or something? Taken prisoner I could deal with, if it means I’ll get to see Rory. And that—he sighed—presupposes he really is there and that his whole story wasn’t a lie.

Trent was nothing if not practical—usually. Since he knew he’d be gone for the day and possibly, probably, well into the night, he stopped at a small restaurant in Tournon. After eating breakfast he had them prepare sandwiches he could take with him, and bought bottled water as well. Then, as ready as he could be, he took.

By noon he was on his way up to the chateau, heartily glad he had been smart enough to rent a small car. The road lived up to its billing, being both narrow and winding. At some points there were fields on both sides with a creek or a small lake off in the distance. At other times he was driving between towering peaks that made him feel insignificant, and very alone. That feel grew the deeper into the mountains he went. By the time it was late afternoon he wondered if perhaps he’d been misled about how to get to the chateau. He’d entered the coordinates he had into the car’s GPS system, but if they were wrong then he was in for a long, dark drive back down to Saux.

Finally, as he cautiously followed a sharp curve in the road, he saw what he’d been searching for, a narrow lane off to the right. He chuckled when the GPS agreed he was in the right spot and told him that he had another two kilometers to go.

He inched the car up the lane, which was even more twisted than the road he’d just left. His headlights bounced off the trunks of tall trees whose branches arched overhead, making the early evening seem as dark as midnight.

Then, just ahead of him, he saw a stone wall that had to be fifteen feet in height, with an iron gate barring entrance to what was beyond. Pulling off, as much as possible, to the side of the lane he turned the car off and got out. Walking to the gate, he peered through the thick bars.

Dead ahead, perhaps a quarter of a mile from where he stood, he saw the chateau. The pale stone of the outer walls gleamed white in the light from the almost full moon. Turrets rose above it, capped by peaks that made them look almost like arrows ready to be shot into the cloudless indigo sky. No lights showed through the narrow, mullioned windows but the moon glinted off them as if wanting to make it appear the occupants were alive and awake and perhaps having a party to which Trent had not been invited.

Ivy climbed halfway up the pale gray stone walls and around the lower windows. As far as Trent could tell, the chateau was three story’s tall. With a dungeon in the basement where they keep humans prisoner. He chuckled when his imagination took him there, but for all he knew it could be the truth, despite the fact Rory had said modern vampires were as moral as they had been when they were human. Given some people I’ve run into, that might not be saying much.

The chateau was surrounded by a wide lawn, a few trees scattered around the edges next to the stone wall. From the iron gate a narrow driveway wended its way to one side of the building, disappearing around back.