Department 19 Read online

  He’s not really angry with me. It’s something else. He looks scared.

  Frankenstein released Jamie and told him to stand up straight. Jamie did so, grudgingly, as the old man arrived before them.

  “Victor,” he said again. “Can you explain to me why there is a civilian teenage boy inside the most classified building in the country? I hope you can, for your sake.”

  Frankenstein stood straight as a board, towering over both Jamie and the old man.

  “Admiral Seward,” he said, from above their heads. “This is Jamie Carpenter. I pulled him out of his house as Alexandru Rusmanov was about to tear out his throat, sir. His mother is missing, sir. And I didn’t know where else to take him, sir.”

  Seward did not appear to have heard anything after Jamie’s name. He had recoiled, visibly, when he heard it, and now he was looking at the boy with a look of complete surprise.

  “Jamie Carpenter?” he said. “Your name is Jamie Carpenter?”

  “Yes,” replied Jamie. He was beyond confusion now, and when Frankenstein barked at him to say sir, he added “Yes, sir” without objection.

  Admiral Seward was rallying, his composure returning.

  “Ordinarily, I would tell you it is a pleasure to meet you,” he said to Jamie. “But this is not an ordinary night, nor has it been an ordinary day by the sounds of it. And you . . .” He trailed off, then regrouped. “I would like to see you in my quarters, Mr. Carpenter, when this matter is resolved. Victor, will you escort him?”

  Frankenstein agreed that he would, and then the helicopter landed outside the hangar doors, and everything started to happen very quickly.

  As its rotors began to wind down, a door slid open in the sleek metal side of the chopper, and a black-clad figure jumped down onto the concrete and waved an arm, beckoning the scientists and doctors forward. As white coats rushed across the landing area, the soldier reached up into the belly of the helicopter and helped a man in a biohazard suit down to the ground. The hood of the suit had been removed, and the arm was torn open. Blood, sickeningly bright under the yellow-white lights of the helicopter, shone through the hole. The soldier threw the man’s other arm around his shoulders and half walked, half dragged him toward the hangar.

  Admiral Seward strode out to meet them, his voice loud above the rapidly declining helicopter.

  “Report,” he demanded.

  “Sir, his pulse is weak, his leukocyte count is through the floor. Sir.”

  As the soldier gave his summary, the scientists in their biohazard suits arrived beside him, pushing a stretcher. They unwound the injured man’s arm from the soldier’s shoulder and lifted him onto it.

  Admiral Seward turned and watched as the scientists, almost running, wheeled the stretcher back across the hangar and through a heavy metal door marked with yellow warning triangles, then turned his attention back to the helicopter, from which more figures were emerging.

  A second soldier and a woman in a biohazard suit leapt down from the chopper and pulled a plastic-covered stretcher out after them, extending its wheels and rolling it toward the hangar door. Even from his vantage point at the back of the hangar, Jamie could see that this stretcher wasn’t empty. There was a dark shape lying under the plastic, spotted with red.

  “Stand aside,” Seward yelled as the stretcher approached the crowd of gawking men and women. “Clear a path, for God’s sake.”

  He strode around in front of the stretcher and led it toward a pair of double doors, directly past Jamie. He stepped forward to take a look and felt his heart lurch. Lying beneath the plastic sheeting was a teenage boy, his skin pale, his breathing so shallow, it was almost nonexistent, a huge wad of bandages pushed gruesomely deep into a wide hole in his throat.

  Jesus, he’s my age. What happened to him?

  Then the boy was gone, rushed toward the hangar exit by running doctors. Jamie stared after the stretcher, fear crawling up his spine as reality crashed into him.

  That could have been me.

  There was a commotion out by the helicopter. A second stretcher was being unloaded from the chopper’s belly, and this one was also occupied.

  Jamie pushed forward through the crowd of soldiers and scientists, meeting the stretcher as it arrived at the vast open hangar doors. He looked down, then took a stumbling step backward, his heart in his mouth.

  Staring straight up at the distant ceiling of the hangar, her face set in a grimace of pain, was the girl from the park, the girl who had attacked him only hours earlier.

  The girl whose face he had seen in the window the night his father had died.

  He gasped with shock, and she turned and saw him. She smiled. “Jamie . . . Carpenter,” she said, her voice cracking, but sounding oddly as though she were trying to smile through the pain. The stretcher lurched to a halt, and the scientist pushing it stared at Jamie.

  “How does she know you?” he asked, his voice dripping with suspicion and more than a little fear. “Who the hell are you?”

  Jamie looked blankly at him, trying to think of how to answer such a question, but then the girl spoke again, in a voice too low for Jamie to hear.

  He leaned down toward the plastic tent.

  “What did you say?” he asked. Behind him he heard Seward’s voice asking what was happening, and then Frankenstein saying his name, his voice loud and urgent. He didn’t care. There was something beautiful about the girl’s brown eyes, even through the heavy plastic sheeting, and he leaned even closer and repeated his question.

  “Your . . . fault,” the girl said, then broke into a wide smile, all traces of pain suddenly gone from her face.

  A hand gripped his shoulder, and he knew without looking that it belonged to Frankenstein. But before he had time to move, the girl sat upright, dizzyingly fast, with the plastic tent still covering her, and threw herself at Jamie.

  She crashed into him, chest high, and he was knocked flat on his back. His head thudded against the concrete floor, sending a bright pillar of pain shooting into his brain. The girl landed on him, straddling his waist, the awful smile still on her face. Jamie saw Frankenstein grab for her neck with his gloved hands, but she swung a plastic-coated arm and sent the huge man sprawling backward. The backs of his legs collided with the fallen stretcher that had been occupied by the girl, and he went over to it, his head smacking hard on to the ground.

  Jamie saw this happen through a thick fog of pain, his eyes trying to close, a deafening high-pitched sound ringing through his head. The girl lunged forward, still covered in the plastic sheet, opened her mouth, then buried her face in his neck.

  Jamie felt the sharp points of her fangs through the plastic sheet, felt her mouth squirming for purchase, and opened his own mouth and screamed, until the girl sat up and placed her hands around his throat, cutting off the air supply to his lungs.

  I can’t breathe. She’s going to strangle me.

  He looked up dimly at the hideous plastic-coated apparition that was killing him. The girl was bleeding again, dark red spots pattering the inside of the sheet, and she was howling and screaming and tightening her grip on his neck with every passing second. He could hear voices yelling from a long way away, and he saw two more figures—he couldn’t make out whether they were soldiers, scientists, or something else—grab the girl and try to pull her off him. Both were sent sprawling by casual flicks of the girl’s left arm, which left his throat for a millisecond before returning to exert its deadly pressure.

  “Shoot her,” he heard someone shout in a voice that sounded like it was coming from underwater, and there were a series of loud cracks, like fireworks. The girl bucked and jolted, and blood soaked the inside of the plastic sheet, some of it spraying through the holes the bullets had torn and landing on Jamie’s face in a fine mist. But still she did not release her grip.

  Jamie’s head was pounding, his vision darkening, his chest burning. He needed air now, or it would be too late.

  As he felt his eyes beginning to close, something h
uge flew across his narrowing field of vision. There was a loud crunching sound, and suddenly, blissfully, the pressure on his throat was gone. He opened his mouth and took a giant, terrified breath, his chest screaming, his pounding head thrown back as oxygen flooded into his desperate lungs.

  There was an incredible commotion in the hangar above and around him, but he barely registered it as he realized with savage, victorious elation that he wasn’t going to die.

  Not now, at least.

  His vision was clearing, the thumping noise in his head starting to recede, when a dark shadow appeared above him and knelt down. Jamie looked up at the shape crouching over him; the image came into focus, and he stared into the face of Frankenstein.

  “Can you sit up?” he asked, his voice surprisingly gentle, and Jamie nodded.

  He pushed himself up with his elbows and looked around the vast hangar. Scientists and doctors were clustered around the fallen soldiers, but almost everyone else was staring at him, concern and fear mingled on their faces. A rush of panic shot through him, and he looked for the girl that had attacked him.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Frankenstein said, as though he could read Jamie’s mind. “They’ve got her.”

  He pointed to the left, toward the open doors. Jamie turned his head to look, and smiled weakly at what he saw.

  Two soldiers were holding up the girl. The whole left side of her face was swollen, her arms and legs dangling limply above the ground. As Jamie watched, a scientist slid a hypodermic needle into her neck and depressed the plunger, sending a bright blue liquid into her jugular vein.

  Two doctors picked the stretcher up from the ground, righted it, and wheeled it over to the soldiers, who lowered the girl on to it. The doctors zipped the plastic sheet back into place, as Jamie stared at the figure beneath it. The girl’s chest was slowly rising and falling.

  “She’s not dead,” he said, softly. “But they shot her. I saw the bullets hit her.”

  “She’s not dead,” confirmed Frankenstein. “She’s something else.”

  8

  THE LYCEUM INCIDENT, PART II

  Beneath the Lyceum Theatre, London

  June 3, 1892

  The valet descended first, hand over hand down a rope, a lamp hanging from his belt. The hole was pitch-black, but the flickering gas light was strong enough to pierce the edges of the darkness, and he touched down gently.

  “Twelve feet, no more,” he shouted up to his master. He heard the old man instruct Stoker to find fifteen feet of ladder, smiled, then surveyed the area with his lamp.

  He was standing in a round chamber, built of large white stones that had been turned a speckled gray by years of dust and darkness. Four arches were set into the walls of the chamber, the stone crumbling in places but holding steady. The same could not be said for the passages that led away from three of the arches; the roofs had long since given way, collapsing into piles of broken masonry that blocked the way completely. The fourth passage was clear, and its stone floor was scuffed with footprints.

  The wooden feet of a ladder thudded to the ground behind him, then Van Helsing and Stoker made their way down, one after the other, holding lamps of their own.

  “What is this place?” asked Stoker, his eyes widening as they adjusted to the gloom.

  “Catacombs, or cellars, or possibly something else entirely,” replied Van Helsing, peering at the stone walls, and the valet felt a shiver dance up his spine. He had never heard his master sound uncertain, not at any point in the two years he had served him.

  The old professor approached the arch of the one passable corridor and looked down at the footprints in the dust.

  “This way,” he said, as he stepped into the passage.

  The space between the stone walls only allowed for single file, so Stoker followed Van Helsing, and the valet followed them both, his hand buried in his jacket pocket, gripping something tightly.

  Van Helsing led them through the stone corridors, pausing at junctions and tipping small pools of flaming oil on to the dusty floor, markers that would hopefully lead them back to the ladder.

  The passages were pitch-black, lit only by the flickering orange of the lamps. At the edges of the light, rats scurried into cracks in the ancient stone, their pink tails leaving thin lines in the thick dust. Heavy, intricate webs hung between the walls, ropy strands of silk that caught in the men’s hair and brushed their faces. The dark brown spiders that had woven them squatted in the highest spirals, thick-bodied creatures that Van Helsing didn’t recognize, although he kept this information to himself. The stone floor was uneven, cracked and subsiding, and the going was slow. Twice the valet had to reach out and grab Stoker’s shoulder when a slab moved under his feet, preventing the night manager from turning an ankle, or worse.

  This was no place to be carrying an injured man.

  It was difficult to gauge the passage of time in the darkness, but after a period that could have been as much as an hour or as little as ten minutes, the glow of light became visible in the distance, beyond the arc of their lamps. The three men headed toward it.

  The light grew brighter and brighter, illuminating more details on the stone walls as they approached. At head height, carved into the wide slabs of the narrow passages, were the grotesque faces of gargoyles, their mouths open wide, forked tongues protruding between triangular teeth, their eyes staring out from wrinkled, finely worked skin. Stoker muttered to himself as they passed them, his hip flask now almost permanently attached to his lips. The valet watched with mixed emotions. He did not want to have to rely on a drunken man if, as seemed increasingly likely, they found trouble at the end of this labyrinth. But nor did he have any desire to answer the night manager’s questions, or placate his fears. If the brandy was keeping him quiet and putting one foot in front of the other, the valet supposed that was sufficient.

  As they neared the source of the light, it became clear that it was shining through an ornate arch, much larger than the passage they were traveling along. Indeed, as he looked, the valet could see that the walls and ceiling were now tapering gently outward, widening the corridor in a way that was extremely disorientating. Stoker stumbled, yet again, and the valet gripped the man’s shoulder and righted him. The night manager murmured thanks, and they pressed on, until they walked under the towering arch and entered hell.

  The arch opened into a square cavern, lit on each side by a pair of flaming torches. The lower walls were covered in carvings: gargoyle faces, humanoid figures, and long rows of text, chipped out of the stone in a language the valet had never seen before. On a stone slab in the middle, her arms and legs bound with rope, her skin so pale it was almost translucent, was a girl.

  “That’s her,” whispered Stoker. “Jenny Pembry.”

  Van Helsing quickly crossed the room and began examining the girl, while Stoker and the valet stood frozen under the arch, taking in the horror that surrounded them.

  In the four corners of the room were the missing employees of the Lyceum Theatre.

  To their left was the trumpet player, the fraying remains of his dinner suit hanging from his decaying corpse, which had been propped against the stone corner. His legs and arms were missing, and the skin that remained on his face was a green so dark, it was closer to black. Stoker turned back into the passage and retched, his hands on his knees, while the valet approached the body. As he neared it, he saw pages of sheet music had been crammed into the dead man’s mouth.

  In the next corner was the understudy, clad in what remained of her Queen Titania costume. Her tiara, rough metal painted gold, shone horribly above the decomposing flesh of her face. Her legs had also been removed, and her ballet shoes placed on the floor before the ragged stumps, a practical joke of vicious cruelty. Her eyes were gone, although the valet could not tell whether this had been deliberate or the inevitable consequence of her final resting place.

  In the final two corners were the missing chorus girls, arranged so they faced each other. They were
less decayed than the others, and their death agonies were still visible on their faces, their teeth bared, their eyes wide. Both girls were naked, their torsos grotesque patchworks of cuts and stitches, done with what the valet realized to his horror were lengths of horse hair from a pair of violin bows that lay between them. They were horribly, unnaturally pale, their veins invisible.

  All four of the bodies, the valet realized, had a pair of ragged puncture wounds on their necks.

  “She’s still alive,” said Van Helsing.

  At his master’s voice the valet turned away from the horrible fates that had befallen the chorus girls and approached the altar. Stoker followed, unsteady on his feet.

  On the slab, Jenny Pembry was barely conscious, moaning and turning gently against the ropes that held her fast. The valet pulled his knife from his belt and sliced through the ropes. Van Helsing gently lifted the girl down and passed her to Stoker, who held her at arm’s length, his face blank with terror.

  “Hold her, damn you!” barked Van Helsing. Stoker flinched and drew the chorus girl tight against him.

  “She’s been bled almost dry,” Van Helsing told the valet. “Recently, too. The jugular blood is still warm.”

  “Where’s the conductor?” asked the valet, his voice low.

  “I don’t know,” replied Van Helsing. “If he’s in one of other tunnels, we will need more light, and many more men. If he’s—”

  A drop of blood landed on the valet’s shoulder.

  The valet examined the dark material of his jacket, then slowly both men looked up into the roof of the cavern.

  Harold Norris hung upside down from the stone roof of the chamber, twenty feet or more above them, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes closed, like a grotesquely swollen bat. His mouth and chin were dark with Jenny Pembry’s blood, and as the three men stared upward, drops of crimson fell softly onto the dusty floor between them.