The Van Helsing Legacy: We Shall Not Sleep

ONE

ONE

Early spring, 1914

Sir Hannibal eyed the boy on the table. Young man, he corrected himself. Peacefully etherised, the patient seemed younger than he really was. His hair had grown longer during his confinement, and it curled in obsidian-dark spirals behind his head, like Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. Its darkness emphasised his unearthly pallor. He had been pale before, but it had been every bit of six months since he had last seen sunlight, and he glowed spectrally in the fragrant golden light of the beeswax candles.

His weird eyes were closed, and beneath the feathery fan of thick, dark lashes, the mask obscured his nose and mouth, its wire frame preventing the ether-damp cloth from coming into contact with his skin. Brightwell let another drop fall onto the stockinet.

Hannibal painted the final few letters onto the patient’s chest and stood away to view his handiwork. He had briefly worried that he would run out of space and they would have to roll the patient over to get at his back, but the entire inscription fit neatly onto the front of him, albeit with entire phrases scrunched together unaesthetically. That was fortunate. Rolling him over might have smudged something.

‘This will work,’ Green murmured in Hannibal’s general direction. It was not a question, but it still failed to be the least bit reassuring.

‘We’ll find out,’ Hannibal replied. He retreated, not turning his back on the eerie tableau, until the backs of his thighs struck the edge of the ratty old sideboard that they had dragged down for the purpose. He set down the pot of paint and the brush, pressing his fingertips into the scarred wooden tabletop for a moment to steady himself.

‘I meant it had better, Ralston,’ Green hissed, ‘or the Chancellor will have you out. Me, too, probably.’

‘If it doesn’t work, I’ll try something different. If I knew exactly what had been done in the first place—’

Green’s impatient gesture upset one of the candelabra, and the heavy iron rumbled against the flagged floor. An almost imperceptible spasm tightened the patient’s eyelids. Brightwell’s hand shook as he let another drop fall. Green caught the stand and steadied it, and the rumble died away as he brushed at the speckling of beeswax that had fallen on his plaid sleeve.

‘You won’t be given time to keep experimenting indefinitely. Barbara…’

Hannibal flinched. ‘That’s exactly why I have to, though. She got us this opportunity. I won’t waste it.’

Green shrugged and mimed washing his hands as he left the little room.

‘What about you?’ Hannibal rounded on Brightwell, and the other man’s mouth puckered. ‘Do you think I’m tilting at windmills?’

‘Generally, no. This, though…’

‘You thought it was a brilliant idea when I proposed it.’

‘Innovative, certainly. And it could have been a brilliant idea. But then Barbara…’

‘That seems to be the general consensus.’

Brightwell shrugged, too, and set down the phial of ether and the dropper as he passed by the sideboard. ‘It won’t matter much, though, if you kill yourself at the first try. If it starts going wrong, just stop. You won’t honour her memory by throwing caution to the winds.’

And he left Hannibal alone with the candles and the ether and the unconscious boy.

The floor was cold, and the candles did not provide much heat, though they illuminated the space nicely. Hannibal buttoned his cardigan up to his throat, his fingers suddenly clumsy. They had not faltered even for a moment while he traced lyrical veins of Latin across the boy’s white skin in paint mixed from holy oil and the soot of burnt incense. He had not trembled as he drew a white circle on the floor around the table, whispering the names of angels into the stone.

He quaked, now.

If it started to go wrong, there would be no stopping. Either he would be strong enough, or he would die. The forces he was about to invite into the room did not care which.

He crossed back to the table, reached underneath to trip the catch, and levered it upright, securing it in the new position. The patient’s head lolled forward onto his chest with a soft groan and a sudden tension in the muscles of his neck, but the mask stayed in place, secured by cotton laces that disappeared into his dark hair. The tension left him as the drug reasserted its hold. Heavy leather straps fixed him to the table at the wrists, shoulders, hips and ankles. With his arms stretched to his sides, secured to the table’s steel wings, he seemed crucified.

Something rustled in the corners of the room, on the edges of Hannibal’s awareness, but he concentrated on the boy.

Beneath the mask was a classically beautiful face, like the work of a Renaissance master. It looked very young in anaesthetised sleep, innocent. Beatific. Very different from when he was awake. Wholly different from the white, mercilessly attractive apparition rising languorously from beside Barbara’s cooling corpse in that squalid room in Geneva. That was an image that would never leave Hannibal’s nightmares. The lambent, naked body with its serpentine grace, lazily uncoiling like a cobra, arms spreading wide to invite them all to the same death Barbara had enjoyed. And every one of them, to a man, fighting the eager, quivering urge to accept.

It would have been easy to loathe the boy. He was not like other monsters, the ones born to it or forced into it by circumstances beyond their control. This one weighed his options and turned his back deliberately on the human race. Hannibal was familiar with the stories of men and women like his patient. There had been a scattering of them throughout history. They hungered for power and learned to take it however they could, by feeding on the soul and blood and flesh of ordinary people. This one had chosen his path.

But there remained the question of the scar, the ugly, Y-shaped mark so very like the incision left by an autopsy. It was the only blemish on that beautiful, alabaster body. Who had been rooting around inside him? It hardly seemed likely that a power-mad devil would submit to vivisection of his own volition. What had they been looking for? And what had they left behind?

There remained the question of the family. It was an old line, and well-known in some circles, each generation slightly more depraved than the last. What were the odds of that? Hannibal had never believed that morality was an inherited trait. In a world where criminal fathers invariably produced criminal sons, there would hardly be a place for a justice system, and there would be no place at all for free will. No, if this boy was evil, it could not be because he was born that way. His repulsive family must have instilled in him that contempt for his fellow man, that insatiable hunger. But that would not be enough. Children were always rebelling. Slavers’ sons became war heroes. Ministers’ sons became pimps. No child of that family had ever gotten fed up and fled into the light of the wide world, seeking something different. Perhaps they could not run, could not escape, could not even see the flaws in their warped little reality. Perhaps they were trapped. Or perhaps they did run, sometimes. Perhaps those who tried never made it out.

The infuriating thing was that he could not know. Maybe the family was just congenitally evil, and even if something really had been done to the boy, be it a curse or a seal or a lobotomy, it had left no mark, unless it was the scar. Without knowing, Hannibal could only guess at how to fix it, or if it even could be fixed. All of this—the inscription, the delicate scent of beeswax, the book and bell that still lay on the sideboard—was nothing but an elaborate guess, and one that could kill him, if he got it wrong.

It would be so easy to loathe the boy, with his murderous loveliness and his cankerous pedigree. It would be easy to abandon the entire project and quietly euthanise the patient. If Barbara had been a closer friend, no doubt he would have given in to the temptation.

But he concentrated on the boy’s peaceful expression and held fast to the belief that no one is born evil, and he gritted his teeth and squared his shoulders and drove the hatred out of himself. It would not serve him in the trial to come.

Time.

He had confessed his sins during the day, the popish custom uncomfortable at first, but strangely freeing once it was completed. In some ways, he was ready to concede, the Catholics did know what they were about. He had been surprised to find a papist priest who would hear the confession of an Anglican, more surprised still when he mentioned the fact and was told that anybody at all was welcome in a confessional. Somehow, in all the years his work had taken him among them, that had never come up.

His soul felt wiped clean. He did not quite believe that a cassocked man in a box had the power to forgive him, but there was no denying that speaking the things aloud to an understanding fellow human, a creature of faith striving for the light, had lifted some of the shame and worry he had not known he was carrying. The peace of mind would be necessary.

His hands slid into the basin of water on the sideboard, cupped, and carried a shimmering palmful to his face. He ran his damp hands over the crown of his head, wetting his greying hair, splashed another palmful on his breast, shivering as it soaked through his cardigan and shirt, then stepped out of his slippers and sprinkled the basin’s last contents over his bare feet.

He picked up the bell. It seemed heavier than it had when he had set it down there. There was nothing special about it but a silver body and a sweet, clear voice. He rang it once in each corner of the room and stood still and silent, eyes closed, breathing the honeyed air until the note faded into the oak walls.

Now the book. There was nothing special about that, either, except his connection to it. There were older, more valuable volumes in the Academy’s library. There were more valuable volumes in bookshops across London, in fact; books did not become interestingly old until they had seen many decades more than this one. Its cloth cover was peeling, pages yellow and full of spilt tea and blots of mustard and breadcrumbs. It was a Bible, of course, a school prize for Scripture knowledge. At eight years old, it was the first prize he had ever won, and at that age, he could not imagine a nobler accomplishment. The knighthood had come as a pleasant surprise.

He kissed the cover.

The rustling in the corners grew louder. That was a good sign. If something was there, paying attention and concerned, it could only be because his efforts were touching on something forbidden.

Now, finally, the boy. Carrying the Bible with him, Hannibal positioned himself before the upright table, loosened the laces holding the mask in place, and threw it aside. The smell of the ether cut a sharp path through the perfume of the candles. The patient was young, in excellent physical condition despite his long confinement, and full of uncanny power. Hannibal estimated no more than fifteen minutes before he regained consciousness, but not fewer than ten. He placed the Bible at the foot of the table and returned to the sideboard one last time for a fresh brush. The brush was necessary because he did not dare touch the boy’s bare flesh. Barbara had touched him. Barbara had died.

He spat into his hand, wet the brush in the spittle, and traced a cross on the patient’s forehead.

‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’

He dipped again and traced a cross on the patient’s lips.

‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’

Once more, between the ribbons of Latin covering the patient’s chest, at the intersection of the three branches of the scar.

‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spritus Sancti.’

He touched his own forehead, his own lips, his own heart, and knelt on the cold floor with the Bible between him and the crucified monster.

The rustle became voices. What is this? What’s it doing? We don’t take kindly to thieves.

It would be easy to euthanise the patient. There was a syringe ready on the sideboard. That would be a different type of mercy, but a mercy still. Things like this one should not live. Hannibal looked up into the patient’s face.

The eyes were open, all pupil without a sliver of colour to separate the black from the white, without a trace of the usual ether-redness. Fixed on him. The peace had fled, innocence turned to ice.

The bottom dropped out of Hannibal’s stomach as something moved inside him, reaching out longingly for the beautiful young man. There was no fighting that want, that echo of the monster’s terrible hunger. It coiled in Hannibal’s gut and began to squeeze.

What’s it doing? I think it’s forgotten what it was doing.

No, he had not forgotten.

He pressed clenched fists into the tops of his thighs, concentrating on the feeling of his nails slicing into his palms.

‘I have come to do battle for this man’s soul.’

The whispers in the corners ceased and then began to chatter all at once.

The ice in the patient’s eyes glinted with curiosity. ‘Why?’ he croaked. ‘Do you even suppose I’ve got one?’

He didn’t answer, instead taking hold of the tailor’s receipt tucked between the pages of the Bible, and flipped to the page he had marked. ‘“The Lord is my firmament, my refuge, and my deliverer. My God is my helper, and in him will I put my trust. My protector and the horn of my salvation, and my support.”’

There was silence once more.

‘“Praising I will call upon the Lord: and I shall be saved from my enemies.”’

Do you have that much trust, Hannibal Timothy Ralston? When Peter became afraid, he sank, and you are no apostle.

‘“The sorrows of death surrounded me: and the torrents of iniquity troubled me.”’

Oh, they do, indeed. And the sorrows of hell encompass you: and the snares of death will prevent you.

‘“In my affliction I called upon the Lord, and I cried to my God: And he heard my voice from his holy temple: and my cry before him came into his ears.”’

Very well. You think your voice is loud enough to be heard on high? Let us see how you can scream, Man.