by Hill, Will
“Do you want something else?” she asked, eagerly. “I’ve got some biscuits.”
“I’m fine, Mum, honestly. I can’t stay long.”
Her face fell. “Are you going on a mission?” she asked.
Yet again, Jamie fought back the urge to laugh. It was ludicrous to hear his mother talking about missions, although no more ludicrous than the fact that she was now a vampire, the result of Alexandru Rusmanov’s last attempt to hurt the Carpenter family, or the fact that she had fought against Valeri’s army during the attack on the Loop, committing acts of violence that were so out of keeping with her gentle nature.
“I am,” he replied. “I can’t tell you what it is, though.”
“Is it dangerous?” she asked, nervously, holding a packet of Rich Tea biscuits in her hand.
“They all are, Mum,” he replied. “Forget the biscuits. Come and sit down.”
She nodded, replaced the packet on the table that had once stood in their kitchen, and sat down next to him on the sofa.
“Are you OK?” he asked. “Have you got everything you need?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay,” he said. “I’ll come down and see you tomorrow, OK? I promise.”
“You said that two days ago,” she replied. “And the day before that too.”
Jamie felt heat rise in his cheeks. But this was not the anger that had filled him as he talked to Frankenstein; this was the dull bloom of shame. He had promised his mum he would come and see her two days ago, and the day before that, and a great many days before that as well. Somehow it always slipped his mind; things happened, and he forgot. She never complained, or made him feel bad about it; she had never even mentioned it, until now.
“I know,” he said, softly. “And I’m sorry. It just… gets a bit crazy up there sometimes.”
There was a long moment of silence. The expression on his mother’s face made Jamie want to cry; it was so full of unconditional love.
No matter how often I let her down, he thought. She always forgives me. I don’t deserve her.
“Do you ever get scared?” asked Marie, her tone gentle. “It’s OK if you don’t want to tell me.”
The question cut right through him. He considered lying to his mother, but quickly decided against it; he had promised himself that he wouldn’t, regardless of what it might mean he had to tell her.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not usually. But right now…”
Marie frowned. “I heard you and Valentin talking about some new vampires. Are they worse than the usual ones?”
“I haven’t seen them in the flesh,” replied Jamie. “But yes, it sounds like they’re pretty bad.”
“Do you have to go?” she asked.
Jamie nodded.
“Can’t somebody else deal with them? Why does it always have to be you?”
“It’s not just me, Mum. Everybody is going out.”
“It really must be serious,” said Marie. “Promise me you’ll be extra careful?”
Jamie smiled. “Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll come down tomorrow so you can see I’m OK. I promise.”
She smiled at him, and he suddenly felt as though his heart might break. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, love,” she said. “I’m not trying to make your life harder, I’m honestly not. It would just be nice to see you now and again. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry, Mum,” he repeated. “I really am. I’ll come down tomorrow.”
“OK,” she said, squeezing his hand briefly. “I’m sure you will.”
He felt a lump rise in his throat and got to his feet. She floated up with him and he hugged his mother again; she gave him a tight squeeze, then floated off across the cell and began to make tea for herself. Jamie watched her for a moment, his heart aching, then walked away down the corridor.
Marie Carpenter listened as her son’s footsteps echoed away.
When he reached the airlock, she let out the breath she had been holding, a tremulous expulsion of air that was close to a sob. It hurt her to know that Jamie was in danger every day, but what hurt her even more was that she saw him so rarely; she had thought that the only upside to the terrible series of events that had befallen their family would be that she got to spend time with her son, the way they had before Julian had died, leaving her a widow and Jamie a fatherless teenage boy. But he was always busy, and he never came to see her when he said he would, and she tried so hard not to show him how much it hurt her, to not be a burden, or give him anything else to worry about when all he should be concentrating on was keeping himself safe. Sometimes she got so angry with herself; she tried to focus on the fact that he had bigger concerns than coming to see his mum, tried to just be proud of him and support him, but she couldn’t help it.
She missed her son.
“Am I interrupting?”
Marie spun round and saw a tall, strikingly handsome man standing casually on the other side of the ultraviolet barrier. He was dressed in a beautiful dark blue suit and his skin was incredibly pale, almost translucent; it seemed to shimmer beneath the fluorescent lights.
“Of course not, Valentin,” she said, with a wide smile. “It’s lovely to see you, as always.”
The ancient vampire smiled back at her, then slid through the UV barrier as though it was the easiest thing in the world. Marie had tried to do it herself, after the first time Valentin had come to see her, and burned her arm an agonising black. She was quicker now, however, gaining speed and strength with the assistance of her new friend, and she thought the day that she could step safely out of her cell might not be too far away. He appeared at her side, and his proximity made her feel like it always did; as though someone had turned her internal thermostat up by a couple of degrees without warning her.
“Did I hear you mention tea?” he asked, his smile dizzying.
“You did,” she managed. “Go and sit down.”
He stayed where he was for a long moment, then floated gracefully across the cell and settled on to the sofa.
“How was Jamie?” he asked.
Marie smiled at the mention of her son’s name, and started to talk as she set about making the tea.
11
TIME TO GO HOME
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Johnny Supernova closed the door of his flat behind Albert Harker, then slid the chain into place and turned the deadlock.
He had been in the company of madness before, of all kinds. He had once helped talk a pop star down from the roof of her house in St John’s Wood when she was threatening to jump with her two-year-old niece in her arms, had been one of the first into the bathroom of a party in Camden in which a teenage boy had carved most of the skin from his arms with a razor blade, babbling about the spiders that were crawling beneath his skin. He had seen paranoia fuelled by drugs and fame, violence and horror and abuse of all kinds, sadism, viciousness and, on one occasion that still chilled him to remember it, the blank, empty eyes of a psychopath as she stood beside him at a hotel bar and talked in a dead monotone about the weather.
But he had never, in all his travels through the dark underbelly of the world, seen madness as plausible and self-contained as he had in the face and voice of Albert Harker. What the man had told him was nothing short of lunacy, the fantasies of a child or a conspiracy fanatic, but there had been absolutely nothing crazy about the man’s delivery. He had, in fact, been horribly convincing.
A shiver ran through Johnny as he walked slowly back into his living room and looked at the tape recorder lying on his coffee table. The small black machine seemed disconcerting, almost dangerous, and, for a moment, he considered smashing it to pieces, ridding himself of it, and the story it contained, forever. But something made him hesitate. His last commission had come in almost three months earlier, and the money he had been paid for it was long spent. He doubted anyone would take Albert Harker’s clearly delusional story seriously, but he had learnt never to say never; maybe he could work it up into something ab
out fathers and sons, about brothers and the upper-class obsession with family and tradition.
Johnny picked up the tape recorder and ejected the tiny cassette. He placed it in one of the two slots on the recording deck that stood on a shelf beside the window, inserted a blank tape into the other, and pressed record. His friends and acquaintances were often surprised to discover that Johnny Supernova was extremely diligent where his interviews were concerned; paper notes were scanned and backed up on his laptop, and tapes were duplicated and labelled with his own code, meaningless to anyone else.
The tapes whirred inside the high-speed deck, until a loud beep announced that the copy was complete. Johnny ejected the new tape, scrawled an apparently random combination of letters and numbers on its label, and placed it on to a shelf below the deck containing several hundred identical-looking cassettes. He put the original back into his portable recorder, then made his way to his flat’s small kitchen. He brewed a pot of tea and was carrying it back into the living room, intending to listen to the interview again, when his doorbell rang.
Johnny frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and made a point of keeping his home address a closely guarded secret. There had been too many crazy fans over the years, people who turned up on his doorstep at the end of some weird pilgrimage, wanting to party with him, or in many cases just be in his presence. In the early days, he had invited these men and women in, given them beer and wine, occasionally drugs, and let them hang out for as long as they liked. In later years, he had given them a cup of tea, let them get warm for a few minutes, then sent them on their way. Now he simply told them they had the wrong address and closed the door in their faces.
He set his tea aside, walked down the stairs and out into the communal corridor that served the whole house. Johnny suddenly wished, not for the first time, that he had an entry-phone system; he could have checked who was outside from behind the safety of two heavy locks. But he didn’t. He reached the front door and leant his face close up against the wood.
“Who is it?” he shouted, and felt a stab of shame as he heard the tremor in his own voice. “Who’s there?”
“Metropolitan Police, sir,” replied a flat, metallic voice. “Open the door, please.”
Johnny paused. It was far from the first time the police had been at his door.
“How can I help you?” he shouted.
“We need to talk to you regarding a matter of national security, sir,” replied the voice. “You can help by opening your door.”
National security?
Still Johnny hesitated; something didn’t feel quite right. He wracked his brains, trying to identify the source of his unease; when he failed to do so, he took a deep breath and opened the door.
It was barely clear of its frame before it burst open, sending Johnny stumbling backwards. He lost his balance, twisted round, and planted one hand on the worn carpet of the hallway. By the time he had pushed himself back to his feet, the front door was closed and locked, and two figures in black uniforms were standing in front of him. Their faces were hidden by purple visors that emerged from the black helmets they were wearing; Johnny couldn’t see a single millimetre of exposed skin. One of them stepped forward, raising a gloved hand, and terror exploded through him. He turned and ran for the open door of his flat.
He didn’t make it.
As Johnny stretched for the door frame, intending to fling himself through the gap between it and the door, fingers closed in the hair at the back of his head, then whipped him sharply to the right. His balance left him and his head thudded into the wall. He saw stars and fought to stay upright, his brain screaming a single coherent thought.
Have to get away. Have to get away. Have to get away.
He threw himself forward, feeling an explosion of pain as a handful of his hair and scalp tore loose, and staggered through the door. He pushed weakly at it, but a heavy black boot had already been wedged against the frame, and it wouldn’t close. He turned and stumbled up the stairs towards his kitchen, his mind reeling with panic. Footsteps thudded on the stairs behind him, horribly slow and calm, and Johnny realised there was nowhere to go. Then hands grabbed at him again; he was pushed through the kitchen and into the living room, where he was thrown on to his battered sofa. He stared up at the black figures. One of them appeared to be looking down at him from behind its impenetrable purple visor, while the other had picked up his tape recorder and pressed play. Albert Harker’s voice instantly emerged from the small speaker.
“… is the biggest secret in the world, a secret that my family and others have kept for more than a century. And I’m telling it…”
The figure clicked the stop button, opened the recorder and took out the tape. It passed it to its colleague, who held it up in front of Johnny’s face.
“This is the recording of your interview with Albert Harker?” it said, in the same empty voice he had heard through the front door.
Johnny nodded. He was literally too frightened to speak.
The figure slid the tape into a pouch on the side of its uniform.
“Where are your notes?” it asked.
He pointed with a trembling finger. His notebook was lying where he had left it, on the arm of his chair. The second figure picked it up, leafed through it, then pocketed it.
Johnny managed to find his voice. “Hey,” he shouted. “There’s other stuff in there.”
“Other stuff?” asked the figure.
“Normal stuff,” replied Johnny. “Work stuff. The Harker notes are only the last two pages. Let me keep the rest. Please?”
There was a long pause. Then the dark figure pulled out the notebook, tore out the last written pages and threw the rest down on to the coffee table.
Johnny was about to crawl across the floor and grab it when a black gloved hand gripped his face and turned his head. The purple visor was millimetres away from his face and he fought back a new torrent of panic.
“Mr Supernova,” said the black figure, and the flatness of its voice made him want to scream. “It would be extremely inadvisable to attempt to publish what you heard today. The unsubstantiated ramblings of a man with both a long-standing substance addiction and a well-known grudge against his family will be of little interest to anyone, and cannot possibly be claimed to be in the public interest. To publish such a story would in all likelihood result in the death of your career, a career that is already ailing badly. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
Johnny nodded rapidly. For a long moment, the visor didn’t move; he could see his own terrified face reflected in the purple surface. Then the figure released its grip and stood up.
“We’re done here,” it said. The second figure nodded, strode back into the kitchen, and opened the door.
A second later they were gone.
He stared after them for a long moment, then burst up from the sofa. He ran across the room, his steps short and unsteady, and clattered down the stairs.
The corridor was empty.
The front door was shut.
Johnny let out a high, childlike sob and slammed his door shut, locking it and sliding the chain into place. He ran back up the stairs, scrabbled at the shelf of tapes beside the window and clutched the copy of the Harker interview in his shaking hands. Gripping it tightly, he slid to the floor, turning his back against the wall. He drew his knees up to his chin and began to weep.
A mile away, Albert Harker walked up on to London Bridge wondering why he had lied to the journalist.
No, that wasn’t right.
He hadn’t lied; everything he had told Supernova was the truth. But he had omitted something from his account of his refusal to join Department 19.
*
On New Year’s Day 1980, Albert’s twin brother Robert had taken him aside, sworn him to secrecy, and told him about Blacklight.
He was as animated as Albert had ever seen him, bursting with excitement at what the New Year had in store for them both. Albert listened, then asked him how he had co
me to know about the organisation he was describing. Robert frowned; it was the look of someone who has got carried away with something and hasn’t thought the potential consequences through.
“Dad told me,” he said, eventually. “On our birthday, when he was drunk. He said it was only one more year until we could start our real lives. I asked him what he meant and he told me.”
“Where was I?” asked Albert. A familiar sensation had begun to creep into his chest, as though his heart was being packed in ice.
“It was late,” said Robert. “You were asleep.”
“So how come you’re only telling me now?”
Robert’s gaze flicked momentarily to the floor and Albert knew the answer before his brother spoke it aloud.
“He told me not to tell you,” said Robert, with the decency to at least look apologetic. “The next morning. He said he shouldn’t have told me and that I wasn’t to tell you. So I told him I wouldn’t. I’m sorry, Bert.”
Albert pushed the hurt aside, something he was vastly experienced at doing, and tried instead to focus on what his brother had said; there was a future in which they would be together, would do something incredible, and exciting, and dangerous. The New Year, which usually brought him nothing but gloom, suddenly seemed bright and full of possibility.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, and smiled. “Although it sounds like you’re going to have to get a lot better at keeping secrets.”
Robert grinned. “So should Dad. You know who he told me works for Blacklight?”
“Who?”
“Frankenstein.”
“Piss off. Doctor Frankenstein is real?”
Robert shook his head. “Not the doctor, the monster. Apparently, he took his creator’s name. Some sort of honour thing.”
“Frankenstein’s monster is real and works with our dad? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Yep,” replied Robert. “And in a year’s time, so will we. Try and get your head round that.”
“I need a drink,” said Albert, then grinned at his brother. “A big one.”