by Tim Lebbon
Mulder took out the photographs they’d taken from the police station. “Mr. McEllroy did any of these girls come to see you in the past month?”
McEllroy studied them while finishing his drink. “That one,” he said, pointing at the photograph of Tracy Sullivan, the first victim. “She was obsessed. She thought Callum was real. That I knew him and should introduce them. Apparently they were soul mates.”
“When was this?”
McEllroy shrugged. “Few weeks ago. I was pretty wasted at the time. I just slammed the door in her face. Only reason I remember is the red hair.”
“Are you aware of anyone around here who likes to dress up as Callum James?” asked Mulder.
He shook his head. “No one that I know of.”
“And there’s no movie being filmed? Any book trailers, that kind of thing?”
“Christ, no. It’s bad enough now. You think I want a movie out there as well?”
Scully closed her notebook and smiled politely. “Thanks for your time, Mr. McEllroy,” she said. She handed over her card. “Give us a call if you think of anything that might help.”
*****
Back in the car, Scully stared out the window, watching as McEllroy flopped down in his couch. “Do you believe him?” she asked.
“That we’re living in a culture obsessed with pop culture, instant celebrity, and simplistic answers to complex relationship issues? Sure.”
“You know what I mean. Mulder, I think McEllroy should be our prime suspect here. When word of this gets out the publicity for him will be huge. His sales will go through the roof.”
“His sales are already through the roof. And he said himself he doesn’t want any more publicity.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s true. I think he’s our man. He admitted that at least one of the girls came to see him. Plus, he’s not exactly... stable.”
“Who can define stable, Scully? The guy’s a creative genius. And he took a crap load of drugs back in the day. I think he’s doing pretty well, all things considered.”
“Mulder, you’re not being objective. You’re letting the fact that you’re a fan interfere with your thinking.”
He grinned. “I’m not. I hear you. I do. He’s definitely a suspect, but that wasn’t him on the cell phone footage. The figure who abducted those girls looked to be over six feet tall. McEllroy barely stood taller than you.”
Scully sighed, then stifled a yawn. “We’re not going to get anything more done tonight. I say we get something to eat and turn in. We can head out to the woods tomorrow. Check out the crime scene.”
Mulder nodded.
*****
Mulder was awoken the next morning by a frantic banging on his door. He sat up, befuddled with sleep. Reached out for his gun, then blinked and poked Scully in the back. “Someone at the door,” he mumbled.
Scully grunted and pulled the blankets higher around her shoulders. Mulder blinked at the clock. 06:20.
“Agents Mulder and Scully?” called a voice from the hallway. Mulder thought he recognized it. Acting Sheriff Goodman. “You need to get out here,” called Lester. “The missing girls have turned up.”
*****
When the Sheriff said the girls had turned up, Scully had felt a flicker of hope.
She should have known better. Hope was not something you cultivated in this job. Realism, yes. Pessimism, sure—if you weren’t careful. But hope? No.
The girls had been dumped in the town square during the night. By the time the bodies had been discovered, they were covered with snow, and any footprints that might prove useful long since gone.
She stared at the first body that had been lifted onto the medical table. (The other two bodies were waiting outside in the police cruisers. No morgue in Castle Bluff.) It was Briony Duncan.
Scully hadn’t had time to perform proper autopsies yet, but she didn’t need to. At least, not to determine the cause of death.
“Exsanguination,” she said to Mulder. “Total.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows. “Total?”
“As near as.” Scully pointed to a bruised area on her inside thigh. Two puncture wounds were clearly visible. “The blood was drawn from the femoral artery.”
“Any signs of struggle?”
Scully shook her head. “Which leads me to believe the victims were drugged.”
“Or under some kind of glamor?”
Scully sighed. “No, Mulder. Drugged. Agent Peters took some tissue samples to Washington for me. It shouldn’t take long to hear back. I told them to test for rohypnol, ketamine, or zolpidem.”
“Date rape drugs?”
Scully nodded. “That could also explain the lack of vasoconstriction. If the victims were drugged there would be no fear. No adrenalin pumping through their bodies to contract the blood vessels.”
“But how does that explain the draining of the blood?”
“There are any number of methods if the victims were drugged. Drawing the blood with syringes, for example. That would also explain the puncture wounds. The killer could have injected some kind of anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing.”
“So you’re still saying this was done by human hands?”
“Yes. There’s nothing here to indicate any supernatural or unexplained forces at work. Mulder, I believe we have a serial killer on our hands. Someone who read about these missing girls from the fifties and is now copying those murders himself. He might even possibly suffer from haematodipsia.”
“A sexual thirst for blood?” Mulder shook his head. “I don’t buy it, Scully.”
“Why? What better place to satiate such a thirst but a town that thinks it has its own personal vampire? It’s the perfect cover. In fact, an even better cover for someone who suffers from such a condition would be to build a career writing about vampires.”
“This is a vampire, Scully. I’m not saying it’s Callum James, but it’s definitely some kind of blood-sucking predator.”
“Fine. You go look into that aspect and I’ll perform the autopsies.”
Mulder turned away.
“Mulder.”
He paused.
“Just don’t stick a stake through anybody. At least not until I get the lab results back.”
*****
Mulder headed over to the B&B to find Tom sitting behind the reception desk reading an Anne Rice novel.
“Terrible thing,” said the old man. “With the girls, I mean.”
“It is. Listen, I want to ask you something. The attacks back in the fifties. How did they stop?”
“Ah, now if you book my tour you’d find that out right at the end.”
“Don’t really have time for that, Tom.”
“No. I suppose not. Well, the vampire was hunted down by a foreign fellow. Named Stefan Kurzweg. He’d been living in the town for a year or so when the attacks started.”
“Was there any proof he’d killed the vampire? A body? A pile of ash?”
Tom smiled in satisfaction. “No. Just his say so. Which is why I think it’s the same vampire.”
“What happened to Kurzweg?”
“He stayed in town. Died in 1986.”
Mulder nodded thoughtfully. “Thanks, Tom.”
*****
Mulder hesitated outside the B&B, wondering if he should tell Scully. But what was there to tell? Nothing that would change her mind.
Instead, he took out his phone and put in a call back to Washington. He gave his ID and security codes and asked to be put through to the Directorate of Intelligence, finally managing to track down Emily Doyle, someone who he and Scully had worked with before.
“Hey, Doyle. It’s me. Need a rush job.”
“Why, I’m fine, Mulder, thanks for asking,” she said sarcastically. “How are you, Mulder?”
“Sorry, Doyle. In a rush. I need you to get me anything you can on Stefan Kurzweg. Died in eighty-six in a place called Castle Bluff.”
“That’s it?”
“Afraid so. Did I say it’s u
rgent?”
“I think you did, yeah.”
“Because it is.”
He heard Doyle sigh. “I’ll get on it.”
He hung up and looked around. The streets were deserted, the discovery of the three girls sending everyone inside their homes. Scully was right about one thing. McEllroy was somehow connected to this. It had to be more than a coincidence that the vampire was hunting here, where the writer of the Dusk books lived.
Mulder decided to question him again. Hopefully this time the man would be sober enough to talk.
*****
As Mulder pulled up to a stop outside McEllroy’s house his phone rang. Doyle.
“What d’you have?”
“Hello, Doyle. How are you, Doyle?”
“Hello, Doyle. How are you, Doyle? Now what do you have?”
“You really need to work on your social skills, Mulder. Okay, it seems your Mr. Kurzweg led a very interesting life.”
“How so?”
“First off, he worked in the Nazi weapons program. You know anything about Operation Paperclip?”
Operation Paperclip was the program hatched up by the Office of Strategic Services in the aftermath of the Second World War. German scientists and technicians were brought over to the States to work on various government projects, mainly so that Russia didn’t get their hands on them.
“I know of it.”
“He was part of that.”
“Doing what?”
“Classified. Couldn’t access his files. That was literally all I could get.”
Interesting. “Thanks, Doyle.”
“No problem. Although you could have just got this from Scully.”
“Scully?”
“Yeah, she asked me to look into McEllroy’s past?”
“What’s that got to do with Kurzweg?”
“Ah. You guys off on your own missions, huh? Here’s the thing. McEllroy is Kurzweg’s son. He changed his name as soon as he was of legal age.”
Mulder hung up and stared at McEllroy’s house. He was Kurzweg’s son? He checked his gun and climbed out of the car. He knocked on the door but there was no answer.
“Mr. McEllroy? FBI.”
Still nothing. Mulder tried to door. Locked. He looked around, then used the butt of his gun to smash a pane of glass. He reached in and unlocked the door, stepping into the house.
The place was empty. He could feel it. He checked through all the rooms just to make sure, but his instincts were correct. Deserted.
Mulder headed back to the door, then stopped suddenly. He hadn’t seen an office anywhere. Where did McEllroy write his books?
He went through the house again, this time focusing on the floor. He found the trapdoor in the kitchen, pulled it up to reveal a set of stairs leading into the basement.
Mulder climbed down, finding a locked door at the bottom. He kicked it in, gun held in the ready position. The door smashed back against the wall.
“Mr. McEllroy? Are you in here?”
No answer. Mulder reached into the room and found the light switch. He flicked it on, revealing a cluttered office. An old desk, wooden filing cabinets. The walls were plastered with yellowing newsprint and pieces of paper covered with an untidy scrawl.
Mulder scanned the untidy handwriting. Half of them were ideas for Dusk stories, and the other half were raging screeds against society. Mulder approached the desk, riffled through the drawers until he found an old, leather-bound notebook. He opened it up. Not McEllroy’s handwriting. This was much neater, a cursive script written with a fountain pen.
Mulder realized it was a diary. The diary of Stefan Kurzweg.
He started reading.
*****
Scully dropped her scrubs into the bin and took the spatter goggles off. Cause of death was the same in all three cases. Exsanguination. Puncture marks in the thigh. No signs of struggle.
Her phone buzzed. “Agent Scully,” she said, answering it.
“Scully? It’s Peters. Your results are in.”
“And?”
“Negative on all your hunches.”
Scully’s shoulders sagged. “Seriously?”
“Afraid so. But they did find something else you might be interested in. High levels of MDMA.”
Scully straightened up, her heart racing. “Ecstasy?”
“Enough to make an elephant fall in love with all the other elephants and want to open up night clubs with them.”
“Thanks.”
Scully hung up. She tapped her phone against her chin. What had Mulder said about McEllroy? That his drug of choice was MDMA?
She hurried to Sheriff Goodman’s office. He wasn’t there but she logged into the department intranet and tracked down Kim Duncan’s cell phone footage.
She skipped ahead to the point where the glowing figure came into view. It was hard to make out any features, but the figure really didn’t look like an old man with crazy white hair. And Mulder was right. It was too tall. There was no way McEllroy could dress up to look like that.
Which didn’t mean he wasn’t involved. Just that he had an accomplice.
But who? Sheriff Goodman had seen the footage. He knew everyone in town. If it was someone from around here, he would have said.
Scully was staring absently at the shaky footage. It had reached the point where Kim was discovered, the glowing figure whirling around. The view shifted, swinging wildly as Kim turned and ran.
Scully frowned. She paused the footage, then stepped back one frame at a time. She’d seen something... something familiar.
Her finger froze over the keyboard and a satisfied smile spread across her face.
Leaning up against one of the trees on the outer edge of the clearing was a double barrel shotgun. It would have been invisible but for the white glow from the alleged vampire reflecting from the metal. A hand was there as well, resting on the gun. The rest of the figure was cast in shadow, but the hand looked old.
“Got you.”
*****
An hour later Mulder looked up, blinking in the dim light. He knew the story behind the vampire now.
It seemed that during the war Stefan Kurzweg was a member of the Institute for Occult Warfare, an elite unit of psychics, occultists, and mediums led by Heinrich Himmler. Himmler thought using occult warfare was the only way Germany would triumph.
But this started even before the war. Himmler had heard legends about a vampire that once terrorized the village of Wewelsburg. He signed a hundred-year lease on Wewelsburg Castle, hoping to track down this vampire and turn it to the cause.
Mulder already knew about the castle. Himmler wanted to turn it into a training facility devoted to occult and pagan rituals that would make Germany the rulers of the world. He called it the Grail Castle and spent most of his time searching for occult artifacts like the Spear of Destiny.
But it seemed the castle was also a secret laboratory. Himmler and the IOW did indeed capture the vampire. But they couldn’t convince it to join the cause. So they did what the Nazis did best. They formed a team to experiment on it, tried to turn it into a weapon they could control.
Kurzweg was the leader of that team.
They managed to take away some of the vampire’s weaknesses. The shimmering around the creature was like a shield. Sunscreen. It could come out during the day if it so wanted. They took away its weaknesses to religious symbols. Only problem was, the thing went mad. Utterly insane. It became fixated on Kurzweg. Wouldn’t do anything it was told. Himmler tried to test it as a weapon, released it into a nearby village. It wiped everyone out.
They recaptured it, locked it away in a crypt.
Then the war ended. Kurzweg was recruited to the U.S., but the vampire got loose and tracked him down. This was back in the fifties, when it went on its killing spree through Castle Bluff. Kurzweg managed to lure it into one of the abandoned mines around the town and used dynamite to bring the whole thing down on its head. According to the diary, Kurzweg thought he’d finally killed i
t.
Mulder stared thoughtfully at the wall. The recent earth tremors Sheriff Goodman mentioned. Maybe they shook something loose, allowing the vampire to get free again.
And now it was carrying on where it left off.
So the vampire wasn’t Callum James, the vampire from McEllroy’s novels. McEllroy had taken the idea from his father’s diary.
He took out his phone and called Scully.
“Mulder? Where are you?”
“At McEllroy’s place. Listen, I need to tell you—”
“Not now,” said Scully. “McEllroy’s the one doing it. He’s—”
“You shouldn’t be down here,” said a voice behind Mulder.
Mulder spun around just in time to see the butt of McEllroy’s shotgun coming straight for his head. A flash of pain. A burst of light. He dropped to the floor. Found himself staring at his cell phone.
He could hear Scully’s voice. “Mulder?
He reached out and weakly grabbed his phone. Then he felt someone dragging him. He moved his arm and shoved the phone into his pocket. His thoughts were scattered, but he knew one thing. He had to keep his phone close by.
*****
“Mulder! Mulder are you okay?”
No answer. A moment later the line went dead. Scully stared at her phone in frustration. That was McEllroy’s voice she’d heard.
Mulder was in danger.
She called Director Skinner. “Sir. Mulder’s in trouble. I need an immediate track on his cell phone.”
“I’ll authorize it now.”
“Get them to feed it to my GPS on my phone.”
She hung up just as Sheriff Goodman burst into the office.
“More girls have gone missing!”
“How many?”
“Nine.”
“Nine...” How the hell did McEllroy kidnap nine girls?
“They left notes this time.”
Scully pulled up short. “What?”
“They think that since the other three girls were found, they’d been rejected by Callum. They think there’s still a chance they’ll be chosen as his mate. They’ve gone to look for him.”
*****
Mulder woke up with a hangover so bad it felt like his skull had split in two.
Oh wait. McEllroy. His skull probably had split in two. He tried to raise his hands but realized they were tied behind his back.