The Van Helsing Legacy: We Shall Not Sleep

FOUR

FOUR

December, 1919

Mrs Harker had arrived when we got back. She greeted me with a kiss and Uncle Joe with a firm handshake and a few polite words of memorised Dutch. Uncle Joe replied in kind while she leaned around us to stare long and hard at his box. She said nothing about it, but her lips turned thin and hard; she had never approved of her son keeping his wife in the dark about the things that go bump in the night, and she balked at the rest of us being required to perpetuate the deception. I agreed with her and had told Quincey as much on more than one occasion, as, I believe, had Chessie and everybody else, but it wasn’t the right time to hit Clare with any more difficult information.

The children’s pale faces flickered, ghost-like, at the head of the stairs and vanished again silently. Little Jonathan and Ian were five and three, respectively, but children know things. Whatever measures Clare thought she had taken to keep them from worrying had probably worried them all the more. They knew that something had gone wrong and that the grown-ups wouldn’t tell them what, which always meant something especially bad.

I could sympathise. But I was one of those grown-ups, too, and I knew that my only options were to frighten them with the truth or offer comforting lies, and, like everyone else, I chose silence.

It was silently understood that someone would keep Clare out of the way. She was brave and would insist on helping, but she was uninformed, and ignorance is a killer. Probably Doctor Seward, whenever he arrived. His weak lungs would make it hard for him to go trekking around in the cold in search of a lost man, but he could keep an eye on Clare and provide a masculine presence that might convince the police to treat the matter as more than hysterical female nerves.

It wasn’t long before events played out in exactly that way. Chessie and I formed a pair, and Uncle Joe and Mrs Harker formed a pair, and we set off to scout out the possibilities. It seemed sensible to check Quincey’s office, so we started there. Half an hour wasted. He was not at his favourite public house, and had not been seen there last night, either, when a man might plausibly seek a pint after supper. We returned to the house to report to Clare. Mrs Harker and Uncle Joe likewise reported no results. They said they had been scouring the neighbourhood for dropped cigarette butts of his preferred variety, but Chessie and I both knew they had been searching for other traces, as well. Drops of blood. Signs of struggle. The marks of heels dragged through the film of mud in the sides of the street. That they had found none of those things was not positive, not really, but it reassured me, all the same.

It did not reassure Clare. She shook, but she had already exhausted all of her tears; her single sob was dry.

I followed Chessie into the kitchen and warmed both of us with a cup of tea.

The police had been back, Doctor Seward said. A different constable who listened attentively and wrote things down and told them firmly that his own son had never come home and he would be damned—pardon me, ma’am—if he let someone else’s boy get back only to go missing. Never you fear, ma’am, there’ll be all the men you could want out here in a jiffy.

Doctor Seward smiled grimly over his own teacup. ‘I appreciate his optimism,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t seem to have thought that the entire bloody force might yet only be able to find a body in a ditch.’

I winced. Chessie blanched, and for the first time, a few tears escaped her. She patted them away before they could smear her makeup.

‘Doc,’ she choked, but got no further. We both knew he had his reasons to be ghastly.

I dabbed at my nose, still stinging from the transition from the cold outside to the warmth within.

‘We were going to go check the churchyard at St Bridget’s, next,’ I said with a glance over my shoulder to make sure Clare was still elsewhere. ‘It seems to be where all this area’s bogeys come from.’

‘You think he was chasing something?’ he asked. That did not seem to have occurred to him, despite Uncle Joe’s presence, and he looked interested.

‘That would be the nicer possibility.’

He shrugged. ‘Unless it got him.’

That was too much.

‘Do you mind?’ I snapped. ‘There’s no need to be horrible. Until I see a body, I’m going to assume Quincey is alive, and I’ll thank you to do the same, for Clare’s sake.’

The kettle began to rumble, and Chessie rose to add water to a new pot.

I was less than half his age, and he wasn’t impressed.

He shrugged. ‘I prefer to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised than expect the best and be crushed.’

I saw his point. Didn’t agree with it, but I did see it. There was no purpose to continuing the argument.

‘I’m going to take a look at the churchyard,’ I said. I set my cup aside and reached for the gloves I had left on the table top.

Chessie pouted. ‘I still can’t feel my feet. Just a few more minutes?’

I hesitated. ‘You don’t have to come,’ I conceded. She began to protest, but I waved her off. ‘It’s full daylight out. If there are any creepy crawlies lurking, they won’t come out until later. I promise I’ll come back and get help before delving into any crypts, or anything. But the more places we can cross off the list, the faster we can get to something else.’

She frowned, tugging at one pearl earring, her rouged mouth puckering. ‘Well and good, Meggie,’ she said, ‘but what if it wasn’t a creepy crawly?’

‘The more regular sorts of bad ‘uns don’t hang around in churchyards much,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ll take a stick, though. And anyway, it’s very close. I’ll be back in a tick.’

That probably sounds like a terrible idea, but I did know what I was about, where creepy crawlies are concerned, thanks to Uncle Joe’s training, and I was pretty good at clobbering angry dogs and threatening drunks with the lead-filled cane I kept in the Bullnose. It was a man’s stick, my father’s, but nobody had ever commented on that fact. I didn’t expect to use it, though. More and more, I was beginning to fear that nothing at all had gotten Quincey, that he had done himself. My stick was no good against a man’s inner demons.

The weight of it was comforting, though. I told Uncle Joe where I was going—he was familiar with my abilities and did not object—and bundled myself up into my cardigans and coat, scarf and hat, hefting the stick in a leather-gloved hand, and set off toward St Bridget’s.

Somebody had to go check the churchyard, of course, but I did not really expect to find Quincey there. There were no recent graves at St Bridget’s, nothing less than a hundred years old. They were the graves of shoemakers and butchers and seamstresses. They had died of gout and influenza and old age and childbirth. Nobody buried there had been murdered. I didn’t think there were any suicides. There was no anger or fear in those dead. The few who did occasionally rise were more confused than anything and were usually perfectly content to go back to their rest. Among the unquiet dead, fear and anger were power. Without such fuel, a revenant was more a nuisance than a threat. One only needed to speak a quiet prayer to send it back into the earth. Nobody reposing beneath the soil of St Bridget’s could have bested Quincey Harker.

But, well, there were travelling nasties, too, things that brought their anger with them. It was a possibility.

That was my excuse.

The truth was that I needed time to think. I had been surrounded by voices since four o’clock that morning, and my few quiet moments had required my attention to be on driving. My brain was fuzzy for want of sleep, and my stomach was growling, and I needed a moment without people.

The street was quiet as I followed the square bell-tower of the church. Its grey stone was speckled with white and yellow lichens and veined with ivy, bare of leaves at the moment, the graves encircled by a tidy iron fence and canopied with plane trees and one beech. Time had tugged the stones this way and that, and they stood all crooked, but the grass was neatly trimmed, and in warmer seasons, pink and yellow roses brightened the yard.

I lifted the latch and pushed through the gate. The old hinges chirped at me, almost a welcoming sound. If there were any wakeful dead choosing not to rise and make trouble, I assumed they would probably be glad of the company.

‘Halloa,’ I called softly. There wouldn’t be an answer. Anything that could reply wouldn’t come out until after sundown. ‘Halloa, everyone.’ But the impossibility of a response didn’t stop me talking to the empty churchyard any more than it stopped me talking to my Bullnose or to photographs or to my books.

‘Nobody’s seen Quincey lately, have they? You know Quincey; he comes around to check on you lot every now and again.’

I followed the winding path beneath the trees, pulling out a handkerchief as the cold inspired my nose to start dripping again. The brisk air burned, but it was stimulating. My head felt a little clearer, even if my nose was a little stuffier.

The graves I passed were untouched, the soil undisturbed. They had all sunk in decades ago, and the falling leaves of the planes and the beech had filled in the depressions left behind. There was no soil turned up to show that anything with a physical body had clawed its way to the surface, though a spectral body would leave no such sign. There were no marks in the leaves, no spots where the grass had been crushed by a fight or by feet leaving the path.

Nothing grim had happened, here.

Not outside, anyway.

There were a few aldermen buried beneath the stone floor inside, and while I couldn’t imagine any reason a dead alderman might have for making trouble, we might run into some difficulty if we had to rescue Quincey from beneath the floor of a church. Someone would appear to protest our tearing holes in the place. And Clare couldn’t help but hear about it.

The thought crossed my mind that we might find only his body down there. I drove it away. If we found him dead, there would be time for grieving later, but anxiety in the present did no one any good. If I followed that train of thought, I’d very soon be no good for anything.

I reached beneath my scarf to touch the cross that hung there, then the medal for St Michael that hung beside it.

‘Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescat in pace.’

May the souls of the faithful, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

I moved toward the side door of the church to take a peek inside.

The hinges of the gate squeaked behind me.

It wasn’t the sexton. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It was a change in the air or the light, or only the paranoia brought about by the events of the day. I knew, and I was suddenly very aware of the weight of my father’s cane in my hand. My pulse quickened as I turned.

It was the staring man from Baker Street.

He had opened the gate but had not yet come through it, only standing there with one hand in his pocket and the other still on the latch.

‘Amen,’ he said.

I felt my face heat. If he had heard my prayer, he had probably heard me talking to the graves, too. My flush turned quickly from embarrassment to anger, though.

‘You’re following me,’ I said, a little more loudly than I intended. If I had to scream, who would come? There had to be people in the nearby houses, but at this time of day, it was likely to be all women, and mostly elderly, the ones who hadn’t taken on work. They might send for the police, if there were any telephones to be had. How long would it take the police to arrive?

His posture tightened in surprise. ‘Oh. Yes, I suppose I am. Sorry.’

I blinked. I had expected him either to deny it or to agree and then get on with telling me what he was planning to have from me, be it money or something worse. I hadn’t expected to be the one enlightening him.

‘Care to tell me why?’

‘I am now,’ he clarified. ‘I was following your companion. Father Josephus van Helsing? Only, I couldn’t actually work up the nerve to approach him, and now he seems to be in the middle of something important, so…’

He spoke like an Oxonian, but there was a trace of a different accent underneath, something that did not belong to a native English speaker.

Like me, in that regard. I had grown up speaking English as well as Dutch, but had only begun working hard at banishing the Netherlands from my speech five years ago, when the war broke out and Englishmen couldn’t tell the difference between a Dutch voice and an Austrian one.

‘So you decided to follow me, instead?’

He floundered. No one could possibly be that uncomfortable while trying to cause harm. I relaxed my grip on my stick. Slightly.

‘You… seemed more approachable. But I’ve gone about that wrong, haven’t I? I’d hoped you could provide an introduction.’

More approachable seemed to be code for less threatening. I sympathised. Uncle Joe was towering, eccentric, loud, and forceful. Those who didn’t know him thought him a bit mad. Those who did know him knew it was more than a bit.

I sighed and dabbed at my damp nose. ‘I can appreciate that,’ I said. ‘But it’s hard, introducing people I don’t know.’

He finally stepped through the gate, lifting his hat as he drew near me, and I got a decent look at him for the first time. Very tidy, with the mobile, handsome features of a moving picture hero. His dark hair was oiled smooth and retained an indented halo where his hat had rested. Dark eyes, a high, intellectual brow, smooth jaw. About my own age, I guessed, which most likely made him a student, with that accent. I glanced at his hands for signs of ink, but he wore black leather gloves. Everything he wore was of exceedingly high quality, but not flash. On a cloudy day like that one, all those grey tones would make him vanish among the stones of London.

‘Gheorghe Apostol,’ he said, extending his free hand.

I took it. He did not shake, just applied firm pressure and let go again, making unwavering eye contact. Expectant. It only took a fraction of a second for expectation to become confusion and then smooth over once more into polite serenity. Perhaps he had just noticed my family resemblance to Uncle Joe.

‘Meg,’ I told him, and then decided to give him my father’s surname, rather than my legal one. ‘Stuyvesant. Father Josephus is my great-uncle, maternal side.’

He smiled, showing off extremely regular teeth. ‘There. We know one another.’

I couldn’t stifle a laugh. ‘Well, superficially, yes. “Uncle Joe, I’d like to introduce you to Mr Apostol, the man who just cornered me in a graveyard.” I think I’ll need something more, if we don’t want this going south fast.’

My laugh made him jump. He seemed thoroughly perplexed by me, and while I wouldn’t mind being fascinating, I didn’t particularly like being baffling. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and then nodded ruefully, still watching me without blinking. I wondered suddenly if he thought I was dangerous. He knew I belonged to the Van Helsing family, and he had to have read That Book; everyone had read That Book, and that was why I used my father’s name, despite not having any legal claim to it. I could imagine thinking those Van Helsings to be a lot of frightening fanatics, if one didn’t know that the book was factually accurate.

I was wrong, though. He did know. His next tentative words proved it.

‘You… You helped him carry his box outside. I suppose you’ve seen what’s in it?’

‘Oh, the usual sort of thing,’ I said airily, watching him now just as closely as he was watching me.

He relaxed a little and nodded again. ‘Ah, right. I was concerned that you… But obviously, you’ve worked with him before, yes? I’ve read all of his publications. And his brothers’. If Josephus is your uncle, then you must be the granddaughter of… Hiram? Or Abraham?’

Oh, Lord, he was a fan. The sort of fan who followed people around London.

‘What did you want with him, exactly?’

‘Oh, yes. I belong to the Monmouth.’

He really seemed to think that explained everything, and it took several lengthening seconds of silence on my part before he tilted his head and elaborated.

‘Monmouth Royal Academy of the Teratological Sciences.’

Teratological. From the Greek: teras. ‘You study monsters.’

A colleague was better than a fan.

‘Yes. One of the Fellows wants to engage Father Josephus in his research. Doctor Green. He sent me.’

‘He couldn’t write?’

‘Initial contact with non-members is always made in person. Sometimes, it’s not safe to put things in writing.’

Well, that was the truth. Mrs Harker had made the mistake of typewriting her friends’ journals and letters, and they had wound up in bound copy in every home in Great Britain, America, and the Antipodes.

He was still scrutinising me, though. Trying to see inside me, almost.

‘Look. Say to him just what you said to me—less the cornering in graveyards—and you’ll be fine. He’s mad, obviously, but not all that scary once you get past the bluster.’ I grinned. ‘I’ll hold your hand, if you need me to.’

The joke passed him by. Wherever he had come from before Oxford, hand-holding seemed to be outside his idiom.

‘I would prefer you didn’t,’ he said with a touch of hauteur.

‘Suit yourself. Come on, then.’

I turned, and he replaced his hat and walked beside me, throwing occasional glances in my direction.

‘I warn you, though,’ I said, ‘we are actually in the middle of something important, and you’ll probably be called upon to help.’

‘However I am able,’ he agreed readily. ‘You’re looking for Quincey. Quincey Harker? Is he missing?’

‘You’re well-informed.’

‘You mentioned him,’ he reminded me. ‘While you were talking to the dead. But yes, the Monmouth has been keeping a file on everyone involved in the 1894 incident. And their descendants.’

‘Uncle Joe wasn’t involved.’

‘He has involved himself since.’

‘And me?’

He spread his hands. ‘I didn’t read the entire file,’ he confessed. After a pause, he spoke again, his voice thoughtful. ‘But I think I will, now.’