The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  When she reached the landing on the staircase he switched the recording to forward and then peered closely as she strolled along, seeming to look into every room in search of diversion, just like everyone else in The Russia House. Everything about her appeared casual, nonchalant even, until she came to the final room on her right hand side. Her glance was that little quicker than into the other rooms, and her pace that almost imperceptibly more lively afterwards.

  Whatever she was looking for was in that room.

  He called up the images of that room and recognised immediately what she had seen. The vampires. Posing with a hookah, so insecure in themselves they did not dare to be seen for what they were, almost sweating to create their disguising glamour. Yet she had known them at a glance.

  Rasputin despised vampires, although the truth was that he despised everything and everyone as worthless, empty vessels shouting against the night in the hope of driving away the terrors out there they could not see rather than taking up weapons and testing themselves against the monsters.

  What was the worst that could happen to them if they dared? They could die. By comparison with what he could do to them if he put his mind to it, death would be getting off lightly. These vampires, however, he despised more than most because he was beholden to them. That was why they were enjoying The Russia House without payment. Rasputin hated being beholden to anyone, would tolerate the situation no longer than was absolutely necessary.

  Sitting back on the sofa, he realised his minions and the girl were still there. He waved them away, noticing a shiver run down the girl’s back and a tremble in her first two strides. What had he done to her without being aware of it? Spoiled her for her boyfriend, quite possibly. Well, that was satisfaction of a minor sort.

  Reaching out, he changed the image on a single screen to show a small, dark room, a cell without bars at the window because there was no window, what would have been called an oubliette in older, happier days; somewhere an enemy could be left, forgotten, to suffer at leisure.

  The faint light increased to reveal a tall, slender figure lying on a thin pallet on a dirty floor, his hands chained together on his chest, his feet manacled to a metal post as thick as his arm at the base of the mattress that rose from floor to ceiling, not quite five feet. His filth-streaked face was clearly visible.

  Rasputin jumped to his feet, understanding why he was tormented by that grit of recognition. Remembering his prisoner’s face when he had first come into his possession six months past, he realised that while he might not have seen the woman before, she had to be the wretched creature’s twin. Glancing from the still image of her on the stair to the moving one of the figure in the cell, there could be no doubt. He sucked in a hissing breath through his teeth, scarcely able to believe it.

  In six months of questioning, of exquisite torture at his hands – the hands of the most proficient torturer in history, even if he did say so himself – the vampire had never suggested he had a sister. In all that screaming and sobbing, all that pleading and cursing, all the rage and promises of the very slow death that was all the future held for Rasputin and everyone who had anything to do with him, the ancient vampire had never told him anything useful, certainly not that there was another one like him in London. He felt a minor, grudging respect for the strength of the creature, which was quickly washed away by the thrill that consumed him at the prospect of pursuing prey that was worthy of his attention.

  He snapped his fingers. Ivanov appeared in the doorway.

  “Bring the vampires to me,” Rasputin ordered.

  A hungry grin of anticipation disfigured Ivanov’s face. “Right away, master.”

  A few minutes later the door opened and the five vampires entered, headed by a tall, blonde woman who appeared to look down her nose at the world, even when she was looking up. She glanced around the room, contempt in her eyes, until she caught sight of Rasputin sitting there, looking at her through his mirrored glasses. The contempt turned to fear in a twinkling, although he posture did not change.

  An almost skeletal child scampered at the woman’s heels on her hands and feet, a vampire’s snack on a golden chain; although Rasputin could tell she had been turned to add savour to the nourishment she provided. He did not know how he knew - just that he did, and that was sufficient. If the woman was very clearly a West End girl, the man who followed her was equally plainly an East End boy, strongly built, filling his suit, thick necked and bullet headed with undying anger in his eyes.

  When it came to a fight, any reason might be reason enough for him to turn violent. He was a brute and would never become more than that, no matter how long his vampire life lasted. Rasputin disliked vampires as a species almost as much as he despised the weaker humans, but the likes of this one made his palms itch with the desire to end him as suddenly and surely as he might any dumb beast.

  Without anyone noticing, he folded his hand together and surreptitiously scratched. Behind the brute walked a tall, aesthetically sculpted coloured man who Rasputin judged to have originated in the East Indies, rather than the West, perhaps even Holland. His pale eyes shone in his polished face, framed by tight, coal black and shiny ringlets. Rasputin allowed he was a good looking man, if you liked that kind of thing, which he did not. The mere idea of ‘male beauty’ made his stomach churn.

  He wore a well-tailored suit with a dazzling white shirt and a Brigade of Guards tie he could not possibly be entitled to wear. Under his arm he carried a slim, somewhat battered book. It had to be poetry.

  What was it with vampires and poetry? Were they constitutionally incapable of appreciating real art, like opera? He wore a pair of pale grey coloured lenses, which hid his almost colourless eyes. He might look physically younger than the others, but Rasputin could tell he had been a blood drinker much longer.

  That last of them was a girl, seemingly in her early to mid-twenties, ever so slightly dishevelled – her hair a bit of a black bird’s nest, her tights twisted on her legs, her lipstick too thick and broad on her lips, her eye shadow smudged. She looked around as though seeing somewhere entirely different, and seemed to be singing a repetitive song. Then she saw Rasputin. Her eyes flamed, her nostrils flared and her fangs appeared, for a moment before she realised she was supposed to be afraid of him rather than the other way round.

  For that moment Rasputin himself felt a delicious thrill of fear. The insane were so unpredictable, so full of the possibility of entertainment.

  They assembled in front of him, having the sense to wait until he spoke. He gestured towards the monitors, which all displayed the same image, the woman in full sail down the staircase.

  “Recognise her?” Rasputin wondered.

  “Never seen her before,” the tall woman – who called herself Lucyfer, of all things – said. East End Boy shrugged.

  “He appears vaguely familiar,” remarked the poet, stepping closer to the screen, taking off his spectacles and peering closely at the man standing next to the loud woman, who looked bewildered. “I do believe I have seen him before.”

  “Had you seen him close to you would not be here,” Rasputin observed. The vampire turned to stare at him and then stepped back, replacing his spectacles.

  “I know who she is,” muttered he dizzy one, her voice scarcely carrying further than the reach of her arm. “She’s like… like…” She appealed to Rasputin. “You know who I mean!”

  One of the images changed to a still shot of Cyrano in the cell, his face clearly visible. The vampires were struck dumb. Even the child glanced from face to face, shuffling on her hind quarters, ignorant of what was going on but aware it was something ominous.

  “Another one like him,” Rasputin said, using the equable, pleasant voice of his that could make even his hardiest acolytes fill their pants where they stood. “Yet she is not here. Why?”

  The vampires, who still almost believed that they had nothing and no-one to fear because they had overcome Cyrano, looked at each other for guidance. “We did not know
she existed,” the woman said.

  “Why was that?” Rasputin wondered. “I understood you… creatures were aware of all others like you in any city.”

  “It isn’t like that,” she protested. “Other vampires like us, yes, we can sense them, and anyone else younger than us, weaker than us. But they are old, much older than us. They have powers we do not have now but will acquire one day, if we live that long.”

  Rasputin shook his head. “That is not something I have ever heard, and I have made something of a study of your kind.”

  The coloured boy stepped forward. “They are more than four hundred years old, much older than we are. They have a glamour way beyond anything we can wield. She could be standing in this room and we would not know it.”

  “You might not,” said Rasputin, with that smile of his again, “but I should.” Which was a lie. He had only become aware of her presence in his club by being attracted to her behaviour on a recording. While she was actually there he had been completely unaware of her. Which disturbed him, even if he would never admit it.

  “So, what do you intend to do about her?” he wondered, his smile unwavering. The smile had sapped them of the will to say anything, or the ability to think of anything to say, or both. “Well?” His smile abruptly developed an even greater sense of threat. He knew they were well aware how precarious their position was; that they stood on a precipice looking down at a flow of lava far below and feeling a strong hand between their shoulders, about to push..

  “We will find her, of course.” The words escaped his mouth so quickly they seemed to be all the one word to him. He swallowed and collected himself. “We will find her,” he repeated, “and we will bring her to you.”

  Rasputin’s smile changed to one that bordered on the benign, inviting even, and more thoroughly terrifying than any expression he had worn before. He leaned forward, allowing his spectacles to slide down his nose to reveal his eyes, at which they could not bear to look.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  The vampires fought each other to get out of the room first. The child was knocked over and trampled, howling piteously. Rasputin sat back in his seat and wondered exactly how he was going to destroy those ghastly things.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was very nearly dawn and The Russia House was empty of everyone except the last of the staff clearing away and taking the money to the accounts office on the fourth floor. Before long they would be gone, and the building would be empty until the day shift came, the cleaners and the caterers, the accountants and the impresarios auditioning new acts.

  It was a long time since Rasputin has concerned himself with the entertainment his club provided, or even the profits that would flow overseas before the banks they used closed that day. He only cared about the other business flows the club provided, the opportunities for blackmail and extortion that were recorded in the secret rooms every night.

  The public rooms of The Russia House were famous – or notorious – for their occasional eruptions of debauchery and what could only be hinted at in the gossip columns. In the private rooms, however, what the lurid minded imagined the rich and famous got up to when they had a good time did actually happen, although he was assiduous in ensuring that the one and only rule of the house was applied to absolutely everyone, which was that whatever they got came with a price, and that price was paid to Rasputin.

  This was his favourite time of the day in The Russia House, when the walls themselves seemed to take in a long, deep breath and hold it for a while, then exhale, stretch their aching muscles and relax. There were several Russia Houses – in Paris, Berlin, Prague, even Moscow itself – and they all had their individual attractions. Yet the only one that seemed to him to be alive was this one, in London, the oldest building even if it was the youngest club. But then there were times when Rasputin felt as though the city itself was a living thing in the way no other city was, and not a friendly being at that.

  The image London projected of itself was of being buttoned up to the throat, prim and proper and obsessed with formality and rules to the point of insanity, but he knew from experience that it was an illusion and, like all illusions, rooted in a falsity made to appear true.

  When it came to the creation and maintenance of illusion, he – Rasputin – was a Master, a Leonardo, a Picasso, and because of this he was able to see what lay beneath the illusion. Londoners were as dark and incendiary as anyone, and always had been, even during the heyday of that ghastly fraud, Victoria, a woman who had gone from being an enthusiastic sexual athlete to the widow of Windsor forever in black weeds just because Albert died. Everybody died. Was that any reason to deliberately forget that life was to be squeezed dry of every drop of opportunity and joy, not just left at the back of some unregarded shelf to desiccate in the gloom?

  As he remembered her he smiled as a song went through his head. He had, indeed, known the bride when she used to rock and roll, known her in every imaginable way. Well, London had changed since her day, although not so very much beneath the paint and plaster, the chrome and smoked glass. The public face might often resemble the whited sepulchre she had encouraged it to become, but behind closed doors Londoners knew how to party like no-one else, even the Muscovites - for which fact his bankers were grateful.

  All of that had once been enough of a thrill, a challenge to him to get out of bed regarding the coming day with enthusiasm. Now it sometimes felt as though everything was just too easy. There was no danger to be found, no possibility of failure. Rather than opponents he could respect, antagonists who gave him pause for thought, he found himself faced by flock after flock of sheep, every one bleating ‘fleece me, fleece me, fleece me’. Where was the fun in that?

  He walked down the main staircase, where the ancient vampire had walked only a few hours before, and turned down towards the basements. There were no Cossacks to deny him entry, not that they ever would, not that they were genuine Cossacks either, although – in his experience - those East End boys would give any Cossack who ever rode a horse into battle a good run for his money in the intimidating, scary guy stakes.

  The first two levels of the basements were devoted to the private rooms where guests could indulge themselves in ways they would mostly prefer the outside world knew nothing about, and all for just a little cash up front to Rasputin and sometimes and awful lot more cash to him after the event. Access to the third level of the basement – the level that was only centimetres of concrete above the tunnels that criss-crossed the city in patterns that nobody actually completely comprehended – was by an elevator that opened only to his thumb print and retinal scan. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, he never actually knew which it would be.

  Down there were two tiny rooms, the one in which Rasputin stood looking through a one way mirror into the one in which Cyrano lay chained on his cot. The wizard gazed at the pathetic figure, trying to think of a reason why he still feared him. The vampire was utterly at his mercy, cowed, shackled, weak, and hardly able to open his eyes. Yet still Rasputin was afraid. That was delicious. To Rasputin, fear was like every other emotion, to be savoured, sucked dry, controlled.

  As a wizard everything about Rasputin was illusion, tricks to make men do what he wanted them to do while believing they were doing exactly as they wished. Even his prolonged life was due to his genetic inheritance, living a mostly austere life when he could and regularly taking the tincture his grandmother had prepared from herbs she collected in great secrecy from the Abkhazia countryside.

  They had burned her for a witch while Alexander the Second was still Czar, and he had very little left of her magic potion. His every effort to discover the recipe had been frustrated. Even modern chemical analysis could only tell him that what of it and not the how. However much he tried to avoid thinking about it, however clouded it might be, the end of his road was in sight. Even he would die, one day. This was one of the reasons why the vampire was so significant to him.

  While he was a mas
ter of illusion and unreality, he always knew exactly where that ceased and reality began. Whatever glamour he might be able to marshal was a by-blow of the magic he worked, irrelevant to what he actually was. The vampire, however, was entirely about reality. What was more real than blood, more immediate than life and death?

  However much less Cyrano was now than he had been when Lucyfer and the others tricked him into permitting himself to be detained - he remained a palpable threat, something to make Rasputin’s heart beat faster, harder. If he could still do that, pathetic as he was in fetters, how much more exciting would it be to confront his sister in full command of her powers?

  That would be like standing on the edge of the abyss, feeling the soil crumble away beneath his feet. As those addicts who returned to the tables of The Russia House night after night would testify, it was not the winning that signified anything; that was at best a momentary reprieve. All that was real was the constant possibility of losing everything. That was what gave the food in his mouth its savour.

  The other reason was their first encounter, on the 16th of December 1916 at the Yusupov Palace in Moscow when Cyrano in his guise of Purishkevich had been one of the buffoons who imagined they had murdered him. What they did, in fact, do was put an end to his complicated plans to exert control over the Tsar so that the Bolsheviks might be frustrated.

  As it was, shooting him and tossing him onto the ice of the frozen Volga had been the end of his public life in the capital, causing him to change his appearance from that of a notorious wild man and leave Russia before the red revolution.

  He had never forgiven those who had delivered the motherland into the revolutionaries. Having one of them delivered into his hands all these decades later merely made his revenge that little more piquant. He remained undecided whether he should tell Cyrano he had seen through his disguise before he killed him, or not.