by Various
It was Patch who had brought them the news. He had woken them at dawn with his shouts of “Hoy!” much to the annoyance of the professor’s neighbors. Yet even at that early hour they had nearly been too late to inspect the site.
When they arrived, the bodies had already been moved from the court into the avenue. The normal din of costermongers and their customers was subdued now as the man’s sheeted corpse was loaded onto the back of a wagon. The woman’s body had been turned on to her back, and her eyes were being photographed at close range. Simon Peasbody, a detective from the Yard, was supervising. Professor van Helsing distracted him with questions while Molly and Angelique pulled back the coarse linen and examined the bodies. A quick look was all they were able to obtain before the crowding of curious onlookers forced them away. Even so, they saw enough.
“The marks are there,” Molly said. “The fangs of the beast have drained them both.” Her thin face, which remained pale no matter how much sun she was exposed to, was even grimmer than usual. Molly Carrington had been an Anglo-Catholic novitiate before having been cast out for defiling the church; she had scooped a hatful of holy water from a baptismal font to fling at a vampire. Now she fought against evil in a more unorthodox, but certainly more effective, way. Her hatred of all things unholy and the undead in particular was a whip constantly driving her.
“The bodies still have blood in them,” Angelique said. “They will not rise again in three days.”
Molly looked closely at her. “You sound disappointed. Surely you do not wish the curse of the undead upon these poor people.”
“No, of course not. Still, those newly risen tend to seek the one that turned them. They might have led us to—”
Angelique paused. For a moment the wan light of the morning sun seemed to pale even more; her vision grew dark around the edges, and instead of Molly’s concerned face, she seemed to see another more sinister countenance.
“Angelique! Are you ill? Speak!”
Angelique blinked. Gradually the street around her swam back into focus.
“I’m fine,” she told Molly. “A bit of lightheadedness; that’s all. Nothing that can’t be cured by a plate of kippers and kedgaree.”
Molly looked unconvinced, but before she could respond, they were interrupted by the approach of van Helsing and Peasbody. The Professor was shaking his head at the detective and saying heatedly, “Optograms indeed! How can anyone believe such tripe in this modern day?”
Peasbody looked bored. Angelique knew him to be a prissy and officious man who went about constantly swathed in the clinging scent of various pomades. She could smell the one he had used today, a faint paraffin odor. As stiff as one of Madame Tussauds’s waxworks, and about as bright, she thought.
“Indeed, Professor,” Peasbody said. “And how would you go about finding the murderer?”
“Fingerprinting. Specifically, the Gabon Method. It is the only dependable way to identify a criminal. Even in twins the patterning is different.”
Peasbody elaborately stifled a yawn. “I am aware of the process, thank you. But it has not yet been established as being useful in criminal investigation.”
“Bah,” the Professor said. “Perhaps you should avail yourself of the good offices of that fellow over on Baker Street. What’s his name? The one your colleague Lestrade is always popping off for advice.”
Peasbody drew himself up haughtily—like a paraffin penguin, Angelique thought, and had to smother her laughter. “Forensic photography,” the Yard man said to van Helsing, “is a well-known practice, and, given the importance of this case, I see no reason for the Yard to deviate from procedure. Good morning.” And, with a slight nod toward Angelique and the others, he turned away.
“Officious idiot,” van Helsing muttered. He frowned massively at Angelique as if she were somehow responsible for Peasbody’s dismissal of his suggestion.
“I’m sure Scotland Yard will recognize your genius eventually, Professor,” Gordon said. Van Helsing looked suspiciously at him, uncertain if he was being mocked.
“So who’s the toff?” Patch inquired, nodding toward the wagon.
“The past tense is more appropriate,” the Professor replied. “He was Phillip Menzies, Viscount of Kentington.”
“That explains why the Yard’s involved,” Molly said. “Vampires drain these poor souls down here every day, and no one gives a tinker’s damn. But let one of their own be attacked, and—”
“Exactly so. This demon must be found, before there is a panic.”
They began walking away from the crime scene. Already the normal sounds of the neighborhood were reasserting themselves: the rattle of sewing machines from a nearby sweatshop, an organ grinder’s sprightly tune, the noisy horseplay of children. Violent death was nothing new in the East End.
Van Helsing looked at Angelique. “How do you suggest we begin?”
“With some questions,” the Slayer replied. “And I think I know where to start asking.”
She pushed her way through the crowd, van Helsing and her friends following. She led them through the crowded, redolent neighborhood, down one twisted lane and up another, until all but the Slayer were completely lost in the warren of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys.
At last they stopped before a side entrance to what appeared to have once been a lower-class lodging house, but which now seemed deserted. “That’s a bit more than strange,” Gordon mused. “The East End teems with people, yet an entire building stands empty?”
“Not entirely empty,” Angelique replied as she kicked the door in.
Within, a long-unused vestibule was barely visible in the dim light. The entrances to still-darker rooms could be seen on either side. The destruction of the door sent lances of morning sunlight down the hall, luminous with dust motes. From within the closest room they heard furtive rustling and uneasy hisses. Angelique, moving forward quickly, caught a glimpse of yellow eyes disappearing into the darkness.
“Professor, illuminate the situation, please,” the Slayer said. Van Helsing brought from an inner pocket another of his many inventions: an ingeniously small but powerful electric torch, which bathed the entire chamber in stark, actinic light. The room was empty of furnishings, anything of value having long since been stolen, and even much of the wainscoting torn away for firewood. Dazzled by the glare were four vampires, freshly risen; she could see the rich dark loam of the grave still caked on their clothes and fingers. For an instant the tableau held . . . and then one of the undead ones lunged toward her, howling, fangs bared.
Angelique nimbly sidestepped the bloodsucker’s rush; it stumbled forward, off balance, and was abruptly stopped by the wooden tip of Gordon’s cane, which speared its unbeating heart. With a sound of muted thunder, it disintegrated. Without looking back the Slayer whipped a stake from a holster concealed by her skirt’s pleating and leaped to confront the next fiend. It hurled a flurry of blows and kicks at her, all of which she blocked with the ease of long practice. She saw an opening and struck, lunging into foll extension with the stake as a fencer might thrust an epee. Her aim was true, and the second vampire followed the first into dusty oblivion.
Two were gone, and two remained. No, make that one, Angelique corrected herself as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Molly skewer the third gravespawn. The expression on her pale face was grim, but her dark eyes glittered with savage satisfaction as her prey crumbled to nothingness. Then Angelique turned toward the last vampire, which crouched snarling in a corner, held at bay by the cross gripped in the Professor’s extended hand. Behind him, Patch took aim with a small but powerful crossbow.
“Stop!” The Slayer’s command echoed in the empty chamber. The others looked at her in surprise. Angelique moved to face the vampire.
“You know who I am,” she said.
The vampire nodded, its fingers kneading the air as if servilely twisting the brim of a doffed hat. “Aye.”
“The one who changed you,” Angelique said. “Describe him.”
“Tell me,” Angelique said, “and we will leave you unmolested.”
She heard Molly gasp behind her and knew without looking that Gordon’s hand was on her arm, restraining her.
But the vampire shook its head. “He’ll know, I tell you. His eyes are everywhere! Even here!”
Angelique saw the thing’s gaze shift to a dark corner of the room. The vampire shrieked in terror, then turned and leaped unhesitatingly toward one of the boarded-up windows, crashing through it directly into the glare of the morning sun. It was dust before it had time to hit the ground.
The five comrades stood staring in shock at the open window and the bright shaft of light.
“It knew,” Patch said. “Lummie, it knew what it were doin’.”
Angelique turned and looked at the thing in the corner that had triggered the vampire’s suicide. The sunlight made it easy to spot. The others looked as well.
It was a rat. As they watched, it scuttled rapidly along the floorboards and disappeared into a hole in the wall.
Angelique looked at Professor van Helsing. He shook his head in bewilderment.
She looked back at the window. “The Master,” she murmured.
IV
“ ‘His eyes are everywhere,’ ” Gordon quoted. “That’s what the vampire said just before it destroyed itself. What could it have meant?”
They were in the laboratory section of what was unofficially known as the Lair, the secret sub-cellar beneath the Professor’s manor house that gave egress to London’s labyrinthine network of sewers and tunnels. Gordon lounged in a somewhat threadbare Morris chair, Patch and Molly leaned against one of the stone walls, and Angelique paced nervously. The Professor stood near a bookcase, leafing through a handwritten journal. On a nearby lab bench a complicated distillation apparatus circulated liquids of various hues through a glass maze of tubes and coils. A large detailed map of Greater London occupied one wall. The room was dimly lit by flickering gaslight.
“As I thought.” Van Helsing’s forefinger stabbed an entry in the diary. “It is all here in my brother’s account of his dealings with the one called the King of the Undead: Count Dracula of Transylvania.”
Angelique stopped pacing. “I’ve heard of him.”
“Of course. If the undead have a potentate, a Prince of Darkness, it would be Dracula. Before his death, centuries ago, he was a national ruler and a potent sorcerer as well. His knowledge of the black arts makes him the most powerful of his kind. His gaze is mesmeric, enthralling. It is said that he can transvect from a man to a wolf, or to a bat, that he can change himself into mist, and”—van Helsing peered at them from over his rimless spectacles—“that he can use, as if they are his own, the eyes and ears of vermin, such as rats.”
“But didn’t your brother help to slay him in his homeland?” Angelique asked.
The Professor shrugged. “It seems Dracula was not quite as dead as Abraham had hoped. And now he has returned to London. This is a very serious matter. It will take all your skill to prevail against him, Angelique. None of us will be safe until he is destroyed.”
Patch sniffed. “Sounds like a tall order, that does.”
“He does appear to be well-nigh indestructible,” Gordon agreed. “Is there no vulnerability in this creature to exploit?”
“Only one,” van Helsing replied. “To gain his dark powers, he had to give up the daylight hours. Instead of simply avoiding the sun like others of his foul breed, he must remain insensible from sunrise to sunset, sleeping in a bed of his native earth.”
Silence, save for the quiet bubbling of heated beakers, followed Professor Van Helsing’s words. Unbidden in Angelique’s mind there arose the memory of her dream: the cloaked silhouette, eyes burning in the shadowed face, the gleam of fangs drawing closer . . .
She shuddered. She was not overly concerned for herself; it was hard to imagine a vampire who could stand against her. But she was worried about her comrades’ safety.
A dozen times she had opened her mouth to tell them about the vivid, unsettling nightmare—and its enigmatic warning—that she’d had the previous night. But each time the words seemed to stick in her throat. She wasn’t sure why she was so reluctant. The Professor had told her many times that a slayer’s dreams could be prescient, warnings of things to come. But she still could not make herself speak of this.
It was Molly who spoke next. “Our course is obvious, then,” she said in response to the Professor. “We hunt this Dracula during the day. We find his lair and send him back to hell.” She pantomimed thrusting a stake.
“Do not be overly confident,” van Helsing said darkly. “Dracula has not survived for centuries by underestimating his enemies; neither should we underestimate him. He may be helpless during the day, but he can bend humans to his will, force them to be his myrmidons. We must be on guard constantly. In fact,” he added, “until this evil has been put down, none of us should be alone for even a moment.”
Once again uneasy silence reigned in the Lair. Angelique saw Patch, Gordon, and Molly look uncertainly at one another, and read their expressions without difficulty: How were they to know that one of them might not already be under Dracula’s thrall?
* * *
Though they were anxious to begin the search, Angelique and van Helsing decided it was best to wait until the next day, as it was already less than an hour to sunset.
The Slayer spent the rest of the evening and long into the night training with Gordon in the Lair’s makeshift gymnasium area. Van Helsing and the Watchers Council had spared no expense to see that her prowess in the arts of war was as thorough as it was eclectic. Among many other skills, she had been tutored in Baritsu and the French art of La Canne, as well as fencing, both classic and bayonet.
Gordon participated with gusto in the exercises, adroitly using both his walking stick and the rapier concealed within it to parry her quarterstaff mock attacks. As always, Angelique joyed in the smooth kinetics of her body, her muscles and reflexes working seamlessly at a speed and strength unknown to the strongest of athletes. It had not always been thus.
Before she had been called she had been the third of five children, raised by her mother and uncle; her father had left the country for a new life in the Colonies before she was born. They lived in Shoreditch, renting two rooms for eight shillings a week. At the age of seven she sold matches to help put food on the table, usually no more than a loaf, a penny’s worth of hard cheese, and a penny’s worth of tea. When she was twelve, her uncle lost his job as a boot-machinist. He supported them for a time in a wide variety of increasingly desperate ways, including making artificial flowers and helping to drive herds of cattle through the narrow city streets to the slaughterhouses, but eventually his savings were exhausted and he was sent to debtor’s prison. They never heard from him again, and Angelique had to go to work at a blacking factory to help support the family.
In a way she was lucky, for by being at the factory she escaped the fate of her siblings and mother. The city officials blamed their deaths, as well as the deaths of several other families in the impoverished neighborhood, on a local outbreak of cholera. That gave them the excuse to quarantine the area. But Angelique, like most of the local children, knew more than one way to gain entry to their houses. The removal of some loose bricks disguising a hole in a wall was all it took.
It had not been cholera. Sick people did not smash pieces of furniture to kindling against the walls or stain the floor with spatters of blood. At the time, she didn’t know what kind of horror was responsible, but she quickly learned. When she was called, one of her first acts as a slayer was to clean out the nest of vampires who had orphaned her.
Angelique had no illusions about what it meant to be the Chosen One. A short life with a brutal death at its end had been the fate of nearly all of her predecessors. Indeed it could be argued that the ephemeral nature of the calling made th
e office of the Slayer more effective, because rarely was another activated in the same city—or even the same country—as the last. Thus the power of the Slayer was distributed throughout the world, and, though individuals died quickly, the efficacy of one girl against all the powers of darkness had proven itself surprisingly well over the centuries.
A short life and a brutal death, then. But what of that? Angelique knew that was to be her legacy anyway, like as not. To grow up poor and a woman in the waning years of Victoria’s London was to face a life of hardship and humiliation. With little education and no trade skills, most of her friends wound up going “on the game.” It was that or starve.
Professor Peter van Helsing and the Watchers Council had taken her away from all that. Now she lived in a fine house in Regent’s Park, she wore clothes of fine linen and wool instead of coarse burlap, and she ate food she had hardly known existed in Shoreditch. And her powers as a slayer granted her what even women of noble birth could not have: freedom from the fear of footpads, killers, and others who prey in the dark.
All this, she thought, plus the comfort of boon companions . . . and true love. There was no reason to fear death; compared to her old life, Angelique Hawthorne was already in heaven.
When the training period was finished, she sat beside Gordon. “It might behoove you to learn unarmed combat as well,” she told him. “Suppose you encounter a sword-eating demon some day?”
“He’ll have to eat me along with my blade,” Gordon replied, “and then I shall carve my way back to you through his giblets.” He pantomimed somewhat graphically to suit the words.
“There’s an image to inspire romance,” she said, grinning at him.
He grinned back, then looked serious. “This Dracula . . . the Professor seems very concerned by the threat he poses.”
She felt a stab of unease, but masked it with a light tone. “You know the Professor. Every danger is a harbinger of universal doom. Hazards of the course. I imagine very few watchers are optimists.”
He nodded but did not seem to take much comfort from this. “Still—”