The Rook: A Novel

by O'Malley, Daniel

  Two reactions warred within Myfanwy. The first was fear at the thought that Alrich must be the traitorous member of the Court and that he had stalked her here and would kill her. The second was outrage that the universe would do this to her on her only night off.

  Bewilderingly, and possibly as a result of the unaccustomed alcohol, the second reaction won.

  “Oh, come on!” shouted Myfanwy, slamming her glass down on the bar and spraying water and ice everywhere.

  “Rook Thomas?” said Alrich, looking completely composed in the face of her anger.

  “What in the hell are you doing here?” she raged. “And where are they?”

  “Who?” asked the Bishop calmly.

  “Your bodyguards!” She looked around frantically for people dressed in purple who were possibly ready to produce Grafter weapons and kill her.

  “Myfanwy, I do not have any bodyguards.”

  She stared at him. “Say what?” she said weakly.

  “I do not have any bodyguards with me.”

  If there are no bodyguards, then he’s out here, in the night, with no backup. Myfanwy reached out toward Alrich with her powers and was not terribly surprised to find they did not work. Of course they wouldn’t, she thought. Not on him. He doesn’t need backup to dispense with me. Even this club full of civilians probably wouldn’t stop Alrich. He could shred them all in a few moments and think nothing of it. Still, he hasn’t torn me in half yet, so can I assume he’s not the traitor? She evaluated her options.

  Option 1: Fight.

  Without powers that work on him, it’s pointless. He could punch a hole through my torso without spilling his beverage.

  Option 2: Flight.

  Even if I could make it to my car, he could still probably catch me. And if he’s not the traitor and I run away, it will make for some embarrassing staff meetings later.

  Option 3: Scream for help.

  If Alrich is a traitor, see violent results from Option 1. If Alrich is not a traitor, see social awkwardness from Option 2.

  Option 4: Engage in polite conversation.

  It may help me gather information as to whether Alrich is the traitor. Also, possibly buy me more time to stay alive.

  Myfanwy elected to pursue Option 4.

  “So, um, Alrich, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I was out in the city,” said Alrich carelessly. “And I smelled you in the air.”

  “You smelled me,” said Myfanwy weakly. She resisted the urge to sniff her pits.

  “Yes,” said Alrich. “Your scent was hanging in the air, and I was curious as to what Myfanwy Thomas would be doing out tonight. I was especially intrigued when I tracked you to a nightclub of dubious reputation.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re out and you don’t have any bodyguards. And something’s different about you…” She stared in shock at the curtain of hair that hung over his shoulders. “Did you dye your hair blond?” Myfanwy took a step backward, suddenly noticing Alrich’s getup. “And what are you wearing?” she asked, looking at the tight leather trousers and the mesh shirt. “You look like sex in boots.”

  “This from the girl who wore that crimson gown to the reception,” said Alrich, raising an eyebrow in amusement.

  “Yes, well, um,” Myfanwy floundered. “At least I didn’t wear it tonight,” she shot back, and he burst out laughing.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” he said.

  “All right, but make it something weak. Apparently, I have a terrible head for alcohol.”

  Bishop Alrich

  Is a vampire.

  Despite this, I would urge you not to brandish any holy symbols at him during Court meetings. Quite aside from the fact that they won’t work, it’s very bad manners and would make for an inconvenient break from the meeting agenda.

  With that key point of etiquette established, I can move on to the dossier.

  Alrich emerged into this world in 1888, in a mansion in London.

  Picture a room draped with tapestries, with thick carpets on the floor. There is a massive fire burning in the fireplace. The wood burns with a sweet, foreign smell. In the center of the room, standing on a plinth of gold and copper, there is an egg. Big enough to hold a grown man in the fetal position, the egg is made of a semitransparent material that is a dark brown-red in color. Its surface is not smooth but jagged and bumpy. In fact, as you look at it, you are put in mind of nothing so much as scabbing. If you look closer, you can see that there are the marks of fingers on it, suggesting that it has not been laid but sculpted. If you peer very closely, with the firelight shining through the egg, you can vaguely see a figure inside.

  More logs are added to the fire, and the heat in the room rises until you can feel the sweat prickling your shoulder blades and trickling down the small of your back. Soon the air is hot in your throat, and then you see that, like yourself, the egg has begun to sweat. Beads of ruddy fluid, like dirty blood, are materializing on the surface, and the shell itself has become a little more transparent.

  As you watch, you notice that the egg is softening, changing shape. It is flexible. And then, near its top, a hand tipped in talons tears through the shell, sending rivulets of blood and albumen leaking down the surface and onto the pristine carpets.

  All the while, you know you cannot make a sound.

  The hand rips the now-leathery shell down, pulling chunks back inside. The material tears entirely, and a torrent of the fluids spills out. The thing inside emerges awkwardly, its mass of hair tangled, and its skin dyed bright by the birthing fluids. It slips, its limbs giving it problems, and falls to its knees on the carpet. As you watch in horror, it throws back its head and screams.

  The sound is not human.

  After long minutes, it finally stops screaming. And then, unbelievably, it begins to tear at the egg and eat the pieces. You have stood strong throughout this whole occurrence, but this is too much. You can feel your gorge rising, and you have to get away. You move out of your hiding place, and it cocks its head at you, then moves hesitantly in your direction. You tear away one of the tapestries, behind which a window is concealed, and throw yourself desperately through the glass, out into the snowy night.

  As you flee, you risk a look back through the falling flakes and see a figure standing in the window, watching you.

  These were the circumstances of a vampire hatching as described by Eleanor Thurow, an agent of the Checquy who was gifted with chameleonlike abilities and an inquiring mind. It was not actually Alrich’s hatching but that of his sibling, Pitt. Alrich was born one week later.

  At that time, the Checquy did not officially believe in the existence of vampires. The organization’s formal position was that vampires were nothing more than the villains of gothic novels, poorly adapted from Eastern European folktales. Pawn Thurow, however, had spent some time in Eastern Europe among the folk, and while she had not actually seen a vampire, she’d heard anecdotes. Very convincing anecdotes. When she returned to Britain, she had asked some mild questions and received sharp responses.

  One Rook had actually sneered in Pawn Thurow’s face, declaring in front of several witnesses that “only the most credulous and naive of minds could believe such ridiculous and unlikely fantasies,” which must have been pretty rich coming from a man whose entire lower half consisted of a sort of sparkly fog. In any case, Pawn Thurow was undaunted by the scorn of her (nominal) superiors, and she embarked on a private project to track down an example of a vampire.

  What Thurow had done was in the best traditions of the British Empire: she had simultaneously discovered a species and gone to war with it. Thus, the official position of the Checquy on vampires went almost instantly from “Don’t be ridiculous, you silly girl, there’s no such thing!” to “Right, they do exist, and they appear to be killing us.”

  Thurow had tracked down Alrich and Pitt’s creator after months of detective work. I’ve read her journals (which is where I found the above description), and she appears to have been a
very dedicated and clever woman. She was also no stranger to dangerous situations, since her abilities and temperament had made her ideal for infiltration and close surveillance. This was a woman who had stood unseen and watched, disapprovingly, as the head of a cult that worshipped emotion tried to sire the personification of hatred with an adoring disciple. After shooting both the would-be parents (in flagrante delicto), she slipped through the congregation of horrified onlookers and opened the gates of the compound to the Checquy soldiers.

  Also, earlier that year, she had spent several months on the street pretending to be a prostitute. This had been done as part of a loaner program with the Metropolitan Police, who at the time were seeking the notorious murderer of several unfortunate sex workers. It’s worth noting as an aside that even the Checquy never figured out who Mr. The Ripper was or whether there was some sort of supernatural aspect to the whole thing.

  In any case, Thurow’s secondment to the Metropolitan Police Service had sharpened her investigative skills. Her discovery of the vampire involved a great deal of patient, camouflaged standing in private rooms and offices listening to the conversations of those who would notice the effects of a vampire. Her research took her from local police stations to the chambers of Episcopal palaces to a boarding school whose students were suffering from a peculiar strain of anemia.

  Eventually Thurow’s investigation led her to a mansion near Regent’s Park. She entered and found the house bare except for the two rooms that contained the aforementioned eggs, which were housed in palatial splendor.

  It was clear to Pawn Thurow that there was something peculiar going on in the house, but she was not immediately certain what it was. Remember, most of her ideas about vampires were based on fiction and folklore (Dracula would not be published for another nine years), and nothing added up. She searched all the rooms and found neither coffins nor anything sleeping upside down in any closets. There was no freshly turned earth in the cellars. To her bewilderment, she found a cross hanging proudly on the wall in the mansion’s chapel. Despite all her searching, she could find no sign of whatever creature had produced the eggs. So she made the decision to remain, cloaked, within the house and wait for nightfall.

  It’s not the decision I would have made, but then, I’m not habitually armed with a pair of revolvers and a quiet determination to prove my superiors wrong.

  I also know a little more about vampires than she did.

  In any case, Thurow selected one of the rooms that contained an egg, activated her camouflage ability, and waited patiently. Seven hours later, the sun having vanished, a tall man entered the room and carefully laid a fire. Thurow described him in her diary as “striking, with long white hair and a face that seemed drawn back from his nose.”

  The man lit the fire, piled it high with aromatic woods, and scattered sweet-smelling oils upon the flames. And then the hatching described above began. I have no idea why the parent vampire at the window did not pursue Thurow when she fled the house—perhaps it needed to tend to Pitt; perhaps it thought dawn was too close. Whatever the reason, it gave Pawn Thurow time to return to Francis House (then headquarters for the Rooks) and frantically report that she had found a vampire, had seen another one born, and believed there would be a third born soon.

  Only when she mentioned the neighborhood this was all taking place in were her superiors moved, worried that some influential and wealthy families might be at risk. Checquy forces were dispatched skeptically to the mansion, only to find it on fire. Pawn Thurow was eyed warily, patted on the head, and told to go home.

  Eleanor Thurow went home fuming and wrote furiously in her journal.

  She failed to turn up at work the next day.

  A Retainer was sent to Thurow’s home, and found her nailed upside down to her bedroom wall.

  An immediate search of her house was conducted. Her journals were discovered and brought back for inspection. Her corpse was taken down carefully, examined, and found to be missing more blood than one would have anticipated, even taking into account the… drippage. Upon this discovery, the Checquy operatives pounded a stake into her heart, cut off her head and crammed it full of garlic, and then gave her a good Christian burial.

  I would love to know how that jackass of a Rook was going to explain to his troops that the woman he’d sneered at had been right, but the next day his body was found sliced in two, lengthwise. It seems that Thurow’s intrusion upon the hatching had prompted some sort of vendetta, and by bolting back to the headquarters, she had given the vampire a trail to follow to the Checquy. With that began a nighttime war of attrition.

  At first, it was one death each night. Not in any pattern—one night it was a Rook, the next a Retainer, the next a Pawn who worked as a clerk. As a means of sowing panic, it was very effective. Checquy operatives in London were petrified and became unwilling to leave the organization’s strongholds. The facilities, however, proved not to be as secure as everyone believed. Corpses were found, some of them drained of blood, inside Checquy buildings. One per night.

  Eleven days later, the number of killings doubled. Despite the increased security, every night two Checquy corpses were found. People began sleeping in groups and rules were instituted, obliging Checquy members never to be alone. Every morning, there was a frantic head count, and every morning, two people were found to be missing. Sometimes their bodies were found together, sometimes in different rooms, sometimes in entirely different buildings. Corpses were found in hallways, in offices, and in the most secure chambers of the Checquy. The unpredictability only increased the fear.

  Seventeen days after Eleanor Thurow witnessed the birth of Pitt, the death rate went up again. Three deaths every night, and this time the deaths were different, more calculated. People would wake up to find that the person they had been sleeping beside was staring at them with dead eyes. Guards would turn to ask their partners a question, and find them lying on the ground with their throats torn out. One woman was drowned in the blood of her secretary.

  Then one morning, the head count revealed that no one in any London facility had died. It was checked and double-checked. The relief must have been overwhelming—there were spontaneous celebrations in the hallways. But over the course of the day, panicked messages came from the Checquy offices in Cardiff and Cheltenham, and from an inn in St. Bees where a Checquy researcher was on holiday.

  For the next week, Checquy operatives all over the country were killed.

  Finally, after thirty-three days and seventy-two deaths, the Lord and Lady of the Checquy woke up in their heavily fortified bunker to find their bodyguards mesmerized into comas and a vampire looking down at them. Heller, the parent vampire, introduced himself and stated that over the previous few weeks, his younger spawn had become quite impressed with the scope of the Checquy. In the course of acquainting himself with the reach and purpose of the organization (and, although Heller didn’t say it, killing its members), his younger spawn, Alrich, had become somewhat enamored. Would the Lord and Lady be willing to accept him into their service for a time?

  Are you startled by this abrupt change in direction?

  So were the Lord and Lady.

  But you don’t rise to the head of the Checquy if you can’t adjust your thinking fast.

  Alrich entered into the Checquy as a Pawn amid a labyrinthine mass of agreements and arrangements. Of course, the killing of Checquy operatives ceased, and the other two vampires vanished without a trace. Alrich’s sleeping place was unknown to the Checquy, and each evening he would present himself at Francis House for his assignment. Initially, it was awkward, partly because no one knew exactly what his capabilities were and he was not obliged to submit to any sort of testing, and partly because no one knew how many Checquy colleagues he had killed. There was also the not unreasonable fear that he might suddenly decide to resume chomping down on people and draining them of blood. By that time, there wasn’t anyone in the organization who hadn’t lost an acquaintance to the predations of the vampires.
There was a fair amount of hostility toward the new recruit as a result of this, although no one was stupid enough to try to take revenge.

  For the first few months, Alrich worked alone, mostly in combat situations. Some assassinations, handed out by a recently elevated and extremely nervous Rook. A few outbreaks in which he was sent in to quell monsters. He was a weapon—one that people were afraid to use. And then he was assigned a partner, a man named Rupert Campbell who bled fire and who had recently lost his wife (to childbirth, not to vampires—even the Checquy isn’t that tactless). Campbell had been a very good operative, but now he was lost, almost suicidal, and a drunk. Two embarrassing agents, together. I’ve no doubt the Court rather hoped they would destroy each other. Instead, Alrich found a friend and mentor, and Campbell found something to distract him from his despair. Together they accomplished outstanding things.

  If you want the details, you can read Alrich’s official file, but I feel it is enough to say that, as a result of their exploits, both of them rose to the rank of Bishop. And Alrich has stayed there, while Campbell died in 1929.

  Alrich possesses a deep and detailed knowledge of the Checquy and the nation—after all, he’s been working for us for well over a hundred years. He is a terrifying and effective combatant, but it is his formidable intellect that makes him the organization’s most valuable asset. He represents a vast body of corporate knowledge (I’ve been prevailing upon him to commit it to paper for several months), and he handles his role brilliantly.

  Practically everything we know about vampires is the result of having Alrich on staff, but he is famously close-lipped, and he has still never been tested. We don’t even know how vampires are made—it was one of the conditions Alrich set for his entry into the Checquy, that he would never be questioned about the procedure and that he would never be asked to create a new vampire. I mean, we know they come out of eggs, but that’s it. We don’t know where the eggs come from, or what material is inside them. Is something put in there to be changed? A corpse? A living person? A baby? Maybe there’s nothing put in there, and Alrich just grew. Maybe he was a normal person once. He will not say.