Department 19 Read online

  “Be absolutely quiet,” whispered Van Helsing. “We must not wake him.”

  “What. . . what has happened to him?” asked Stoker, his whisper slurred by alcohol.

  “There is not sufficient time to explain it to you now. We must leave here at once and return better prepared. We are no match for him if he wakes.”

  The valet was still looking up at the conductor. The face that hung above him was gentle, kind even, lined with wrinkles and topped with a mane of gray hair. Norris was wearing his evening suit, the jacket spreading out around him like wings, the white collars of his shirt stained brown with blood.

  “Boy!” hissed Van Helsing.

  The valet looked around, shaken from his thoughts. His master and the night manager were standing under the great arch that led into the chamber, waiting for him. He crossed the cavern slowly, anxious not to make any sound that might awake the sleeping monster swaying gently above his head. He had almost reached his companions when Stoker, his eyes wide with fear and incomprehension, turned and ran down the passage.

  He made it only two steps before a stone slab shifted beneath him, and he pitched sideways. Van Helsing made a futile grab for his jacket but gripped only air. The night manager thumped into the wall of the corridor, which collapsed around him in a shower of rubble and a great cloud of choking dust. And in the roof of the cavern, Harold Norris opened his crimson eyes and let out a deep, animal growl.

  The conductor was upon them before any of the men had chance to react. He fell like a dead weight into the middle of the cavern, pivoting impossibly barely inches from the ground to land in a deep crouch. He burst forward from this position with dizzying speed, crossing the distance to the arch in the blink of an eye, barreling into them like a snarling hurricane. He gripped Van Helsing around the throat and threw the old man into the middle of the chamber. Van Helsing crashed to the floor, skidded into the side of the altar, and lay still. The valet made to pull his hand from his pocket, but was much, much too slow. The conductor descended on him, a dark thing from hell, his eyes a deep red flecked with black and silver, his face splashed with Jenny Pembry’s blood, two long fangs standing out from his mouth.

  The valet felt himself lifted from his feet, and then he was in motion, soaring through the air into the cavern. He saw his master lying below him, blood pooling beneath his head, and had time to regard the onrushing stone wall with something approaching dispassion.

  I’m going to hit that, he had time to think.

  And then he did.

  Stoker lay among the crumbled stone of the wall. His back was in agony where he had fallen across the section of the wall that had remained standing, and his nose and mouth were thick with foul-tasting dust. He felt hands reach through the hole in the wall and grasp the lapels of his tunic and breathed a sigh of relief as he was pulled forward into the passage. Then the dust cleared, and he found himself looking into the smiling, inhuman face of Harold Norris, and he threw back his head and screamed.

  “Quiet your screeching, you drunken wretch,” hissed the conductor. Stoker was horrified to hear that this monster spoke in the same gentle voice that Norris had used night after night to conduct his players. “If I tear the tongue from your head, you will wish you had done as I say.”

  Stoker forced himself to stop screaming, clenching his teeth together, even though the face inches from his own made him feel as though he were teetering on the edge of madness. He forced himself to speak, to say something, anything that might see him escape the same fate that had befallen the others who had found themselves in this old place of dust and death.

  “Harold . . . it’s me, Bram. Don’t hurt me, please. Please.”

  The conductor laughed and opened his mouth to reply when his eyes suddenly snapped wide and a sharp wooden point emerged through the fabric of his dress shirt. Norris looked down for a fraction of a second before he exploded in a fountain of blood, spraying the night manager from head to toe and covering the cloak and hat of the valet who was standing where the conductor had been, his arm thrust forward, the hand at the end of it clutching a pointed wooden stake.

  “What should be done with him?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. It is possible he will not remember any of this.”

  “Is that a chance we can afford to take?”

  Van Helsing and the valet sat in a dark booth in the corner of the Lyceum Tavern, deep glasses of brandy on the table before them. The valet had supported Stoker and dragged him back through the tunnels and out into the orchestra pit, while Van Helsing did the same with Jenny Pembry. The valet had collapsed the passage before climbing the ladder out of the ground for the final time.

  It had been slow going. Van Helsing had received a deep cut to his head when he collided with the altar stone, and he needed to stop twice to rest on the journey back to the surface. Thankfully, the chorus girl was mercifully light, and although she seemed almost catatonic, she had been capable of putting one foot in front of the other.

  They had put her in a carriage and instructed the driver to deliver her to the house of a physician friend of the professor’s, with a note Van Helsing had scrawled on the back of a discarded program for the evening’s performance of The Tempest.

  The night manager had mumbled and muttered to himself as they hauled him back through the stone corridors and was now sitting between them on a red leather bench, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling steadily as he slept.

  “You realize what this means, boy?” asked Van Helsing.

  “Yes, master. I do.”

  “It means that Transylvania was not the end of this business.”

  The valet said nothing.

  “You played your part extremely well tonight,” Van Helsing continued. “Without you, this matter may have ended very differently.”

  The valet watched as his master’s lined, weathered face broke into a rare smile.

  “It is possible,” he continued, “that we may make more of you than just a valet, Carpenter.”

  9

  A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

  Frankenstein walked Jamie down a long gray corridor until they reached a white door with INFIRMARY stenciled on it in red letters. There was a rush of cold air as the giant man pushed it open and led Jamie inside.

  Rows of empty beds ran down one side of the spotlessly clean room. Lying unconscious on one of them was the man who had been carried from the helicopter. The wound in his arm gaped horribly wide, and his face was ghostly pale. A steady stream of blood ran down a plastic tube from a hanging bag and disappeared into his uninjured arm.

  At the far end, three frosted-glass doors were set into the wall, marked X-RAY, CT SCANNING, and THEATER. Through the one marked THEATER Jamie could see a frenzy of movement and hear raised voices and a steady mechanical beeping. There was a figure lying on a table, surrounded by white shapes and blocky rectangles of machinery. As he watched, a spray of blood, bright, garish red, splashed against the glass of the door, and Jamie’s stomach turned.

  Then the door marked X-RAY was flung open, and a middle-aged man in a white coat hurried toward them, his face red and flustered. When he reached them, he stopped, took a PDA from his pocket and poised the stylus over it.

  “Name?” he asked.

  Jamie looked up at Frankenstein, who nodded.

  “Jamie Carpenter,” he replied.

  Surprise flashed across the doctor’s face, and Jamie wondered absently why his name seemed to provoke a startled reaction in everyone who heard it.

  But it was a question for another time. He was so tired he could hardly see straight, his legs felt like they were made of wet clay, and it had taken an enormous effort to simply say his own name correctly.

  “What are your symptoms?”

  Jamie opened his mouth but could shape no further words. He looked helplessly up at Frankenstein, who took over.

  “He is suffering from post-traumatic shock, his throat is severely bruised from attempted strangulation, and he is physic
ally and mentally exhausted. He needs to rest. Immediately.”

  The doctor nodded at this and, with surprising gentleness, took Jamie’s arm and led him to the nearest bed. Jamie sat on the starched white sheet, staring up at Frankenstein, dimly aware that he was complying with the doctor’s requests to open his eyes for examination, to follow a finger from left to right, to breathe in, hold it, and breathe out as the cold metal of the stethoscope was placed on his chest. The doctor examined his neck, where purple bruising was starting to rise in ugly, violent ridges, then placed a needle in his arm, attached a saline drip, and asked Frankenstein for a word in private. The two men walked quickly over to the door and began to converse in rapid whispers, Frankenstein casting his eyes over at Jamie every few seconds.

  Jamie stared at him, his sluggish mind trying to frame the questions he wanted to ask the huge man. He found he was unable to do so; the words ran away from him like sand through his fingers. When the two men finished their conversation and made their way back toward him, he was only able to manage two.

  “What happened?”

  Frankenstein sat down on the bed next to him. Jamie heard the steel of the frame creak and felt himself slide an inch toward the monster as his huge weight tilted the bed. The doctor was attaching a second bag to the IV drip as Frankenstein spoke to him.

  “Now is not the time for explanations,” he said. “You need to rest, and there are things I need to do. I will tell you as much as I can tomorrow.”

  The doctor turned the valve on the second bag, and Jamie felt a glorious calm settle over him, like a warm blanket.

  “You . . . promise?” he whispered, his eyes already closing, and as he drifted into gentle oblivion, he heard Frankenstein say that he did.

  Frankenstein stood, silently watching the teenager. Jamie’s chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of deep sleep, and his face was peaceful. The doctor had told him that the boy would be out for at least twelve hours, but Frankenstein had ignored him. He found himself unable to look at the swollen purple of Jamie’s neck; it ignited a familiar rage inside him, a rage that, were he to give in to it, could only be satisfied by violence.

  He pushed it down and continued to watch the boy. He had been doing so for a long time when there was a tap on the glass of the door behind him.

  He turned to see Henry Seward looking in at him. The admiral beckoned him with a pale finger, and Frankenstein pushed open the infirmary door and stepped into the corridor.

  “Walk with me to my quarters, Victor,” Seward said. His tone made it clear that it was not a request.

  The two men walked down a series of gray corridors until they reached a plain metallic door. Seward placed his hand on a black panel set into the wall and lowered his face to the level of a red bulb just above it. A scarlet laser beam moved across the admiral’s retina, and the door opened with a complicated series of unlocking noises.

  Henry Seward’s quarters could not have been more incongruous with their gray, military surroundings. As the metal door opened, the scent of hardwood drifted out into the corridor, mingled with the aromas of Darjeeling tea and rich Arabica coffee. The two men stepped inside.

  This was only the third time that Frankenstein had visited the admiral’s private rooms since Seward had taken up residence. He had spent many afternoons and evenings in them when they had been occupied by Stephen Holmwood, and occasions too numerous to mention when the great Quincey Harker had been in charge. But Seward was different from those open, gregarious men; he kept his own counsel and guarded his privacy.

  The door opened onto a wood-paneled drawing room, furnished in a style that was elegant and yet unmistakably official; worn leather armchairs flanked a fireplace that was no longer in use, separated from a mahogany desk by a beautiful Indian rug, now fraying slightly at the edges, that depicted a meditating Shiva, his vast form swathed in clouds. Two doors led from the rear of the room into what Frankenstein knew were a small kitchen and a modest bedroom.

  Admiral Seward lowered himself into one of the armchairs and motioned for Frankenstein to do likewise. Frankenstein squeezed himself into the seat, the leather creaking as he did so. He declined when Seward offered him an open wooden box of Montecristo cigars, and waited for the director to light his cigar with a wooden match. Seward drew hard until the tapered end was glowing cherry red and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the air. Finally, he looked at Frankenstein.

  “How did you know where the Carpenters were?”

  Frankenstein bristled. “The boy is fine, sir, if that’s what you meant to ask.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. But, no, it’s damn well not what I meant to ask. I meant to ask how you knew where the Carpenters were.”

  “Sir—”

  Seward cut him off. “I didn’t know where they were, Victor. Nor did anyone else on this base. Do you know why?”

  “I think—”

  “Because not knowing where they were was the best possible way of keeping them safe!” Seward roared. “If one person knows, then very quickly two people will know, then four, and so on, and so on. If no one knows, nothing can happen to them. That’s how it works, Victor.”

  “With all due respect, sir, it didn’t work tonight,” Frankenstein replied evenly.

  He was looking directly at the director, refusing to defer to him by looking away, and as he watched, he saw the anger in Seward’s eyes fade. He suddenly looked very tired. “Marie is really gone?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Alexandru has her?”

  “It’s safe to assume so at this point, sir. Although I would still recommend we attempt to get confirmation.”

  And find out if she’s still alive.

  Seward nodded. “It may be difficult,” he said, slowly. “There will be a great reluctance to assist Julian’s family, in any way. It won’t matter that Marie and Jamie played no part in what happened.”

  Anger flashed through Frankenstein. “It should matter, sir,” he said. “You know it should.”

  “Perhaps it should. But it won’t.”

  The two men sat in silence for several minutes, the admiral smoking his cigar, the monster wrestling with his anger, a task to which he devoted many of his waking hours. Eventually, Seward spoke again.

  “What have you told him?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Frankenstein replied. “Yet.”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “I’m going to tell him what I think he needs to know. Hopefully that will be enough.”

  “And if it isn’t? If he asks to be told everything? If he asks about his father? What will you do then?”

  Frankenstein looked at the admiral. “You know where my loyalties lie,” he replied. “If he asks me, I will tell him whatever he wants to know. Including about his father.”

  Seward stared at the huge man for a long moment, then abruptly stubbed out his half-smoked cigar and stood up.

  “I have a report to write for the prime minister,” he said, his voice clipped and angry. “If you’ll excuse me?”

  Frankenstein levered himself out of the armchair, which groaned with relief. He walked toward the door and was about to hit the button that released it when Seward called to him from next to his desk. He turned back.

  “How did you know where they were, Victor?” Seward asked. He was obviously still angry, but there was the ghost of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “It will go no further than this room. I just need you to tell me.”

  Frankenstein smiled. He had a huge amount of respect for Henry Seward, had fought back-to-back with him in any number of dark corners of the globe. And though he would not compromise the oath he had sworn, as snow fell from the New York sky and 1928 turned into 1929, he could allow the director this one mystery solved.

  “Julian chipped the boy when he was five, sir,” he said. “No one knew he’d done it, and I was the only person he gave the frequency to. I’ve known where he was every day for the last two years.”

  Seward g
rinned, a wide smile full of nostalgia, which abruptly turned into a look of immense sorrow. “I suppose I should have expected nothing less,” the admiral replied. “From you, or from him. Good night, Victor.”

  10

  THE LYCEUM INCIDENT, PART III

  Eaton Square, London

  June 4, 1892

  Jonathan Harker, Dr. John Seward, and Professor Abraham Van Helsing sat with their host in the drawing room of Arthur Holmwood’s town house on Eaton Square, waiting for Arthur’s serving girl to dispense coffee from a silver tray. She was dressed all in black; Arthur’s father, Lord Godalming, had passed away several months earlier, and the house was still in mourning.

  In the middle of the table lay the letter that had been delivered to Van Helsing early that morning, summoning him to an emergency meeting with the prime minister at Horse Guards.

  “Thank you, Sally,” said Holmwood, when the coffee was served. The girl curtsied quickly, then backed out of the drawing room, closing the doors behind her.

  The men poured cream into their cups, took biscuits from the plate, sipped their coffees, and sat back in their chairs. For a contented moment, no one spoke, then Jonathan Harker asked Van Helsing about the previous night’s business.

  The old professor set his cup back on the table and looked around at his three friends. They had been through so much together, these four men: had stared into the face of pure evil and refused to yield, chasing Count Dracula across the wilds of Eastern Europe to the mountains of Transylvania, where they had made their stand at the foot of the ancient castle that bore their quarry’s name.

  One of their number had not made it home, murdered on the Borgo Pass by the gypsies who had served the count.

  Ah, Quincey, thought Van Helsing. You were the bravest of us all.

  “Professor?” It was Harker who spoke, and Van Helsing realized that he had been asked a question.

  “Yes, Jonathan,” he replied. “I’m sorry, last night’s exertions have left me tired. Forgive me.”