It felt like coming home.
What kind of man was I that I would ever have come to a place like this?
thought Frankenstein, wretchedly.
This is a place for the worst the world has to offer, the things that live in the shadows, in the darkest corners of the night.
The monsters.
“I’ve been here before,” he said, slowly.
“Of course you have,” said Latour. “I told you as much.”
“I know you did,” replied Frankenstein. “But even if you hadn’t, I would have known. I can feel it.”
“Do you remember the things you did here?” asked Latour. “The things that we did together? Do you remember Lord Dante?”
Frankenstein searched his shattered mind for answers, but found none. He shook his head with frustration.
“Not to worry,” said Latour, a smile of unbridled pleasure on his face. “I’m quite certain he remembers you. Come with me.”
Latour led him behind the seats, round the sloping left-hand wall of the theatre, to a wooden door. The vampire knocked on it once, and then pushed it open. He nodded towards Frankenstein, who walked forward, to the place he had always been destined to return.
Jamie Carpenter got up from his chair and walked slowly around the cell, his mind whirring. Valentin Rusmanov watched him, a gentle smile on his ancient face.
I don’t believe him
, thought Jamie.
I can’t. It was my fault that Frankenstein died. I’ve always known it was.
But the vampire’s words wouldn’t leave him, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that they were untrue. And in the very back of his mind, the sly, wheedling voice that usually told him the things he didn’t want to hear was whispering to him.
Maybe you just wanted to believe that. Maybe it was easier to think it was your fault than to believe he sacrificed himself for you.
That made no sense to Jamie; why would he have carried around such a heavy weight of guilt voluntarily? But as the voice kept whispering and Valentin’s words churned over and over, he was forced to admit to himself that he
had
used the belief that he was to blame for Frankenstein’s death as fuel to keep him going, to keep him moving forward; it was the indignant fire at the heart of his desire to prove himself to everyone, the thing that kept him searching, kept him trying to atone.
That doesn’t have to change,
whispered the voice.
He died so that
you could live. You can still honour him, honour his sacrifice, and show everyone that he didn’t make the wrong decision. But maybe you need to put down the guilt, before it becomes too heavy.
“Jamie?” asked Valentin. “Are you all right?”
He stopped pacing, and turned to face the vampire.
“Why did you say all that?” he asked.
“All what?”
“About it not being my fault about Frankenstein. What were you trying to do?”
“I wasn’t trying to do anything,” said Valentin. “I was merely giving you my honest opinion.”
Jamie stared at him for a long moment, then walked back to his chair. He lowered himself into it, his eyes never leaving Valentin’s face.
“I told you I wanted to talk about my grandfather,” said Jamie. “Not about Frankenstein. I don’t want to talk about him any more.”
“Usually, I would agree without reservation,” replied Valentin. “The mere thought of him, of his discoloured, uneven skin, his second-hand blood, turns my stomach. But I’m afraid he and your grandfather are inextricably linked. So I may not be able to avoid mentioning him altogether. Is that going to be all right? I really don’t want to upset you again.”
A wicked smile curled at the corners of Valentin’s mouth, and a red-hot pillar of anger surged through Jamie.
Calm. Be calm. Don’t let him get to you. Don’t give him what he wants. Calm.
“That’s fine,” he replied, as neutrally as he was able.
“Marvellous,” said Valentin, the smile still in place. “It’s difficult to know where to start, to be completely honest with you. There isn’t really a vampire society out there, at least not in the way that
I think some of your colleagues believe there is. There are vampires who live together in groups that I suppose one could charitably refer to as social, there are vampires who operate as family units, as husbands and wives and children, and there are individual vampires who enjoy each other’s company, just as humans do. The latter is the situation that I have spent my life in; I live alone, in New York, discounting my dear Lamberton of course, but I regularly socialise with the same men and women of my kind. In some cases I have been doing so for almost a century.”
“All right,” said Jamie. “I get it. Why are you telling me this?”
Valentin sighed, clearly disappointed.
“I’m telling you because the consensus in Blacklight, and the other Departments like it, seems to be that there is some kind of unified organisation of vampires out there in the night, with leaders and goals and strategies, working towards the downfall of humanity. Which, I’m afraid to tell you, is ridiculous. Most of the vampires out there live their lives as they alone see fit, often taking great pains to avoid others like them. There are two things you need to understand: firstly, that the vast majority of vampires don’t know nearly as much as you think they do about you and your friends, and your compatriots around the world. Secondly, that everything I’ve just described will change, for the markedly worse, if Dracula is allowed to rise to his full strength.”
A shiver ran up Jamie’s spine at the mention of the first vampire, but he was determined not to allow Valentin to dictate the conversation.
“I understand,” he said. “And I want to talk about Dracula. But you said you were going to tell me about my grandfather, and yet you seem to be talking about everything apart from him.”
“The point, my impatient little friend,” said Valentin, “is that
even though word does not travel as widely and quickly through the vampire ranks as your superiors would like to believe, there are those of us who tend to be more aware of what is going on in the world than others. I have always been such a vampire; I have made it a priority to be aware of any developments that have the potential to impact on the life I lead. The formation of your little group, after Dracula’s defeat, was such a development.
“My brother Valeri encountered Quincey Harker and his friends in Rome after the end of the First World War, and barely escaped with his life. So I began to take an interest in what was happening in London, from the perspective of self-preservation; as a result, when your grandfather appeared in my home threatening to blow it sky-high unless I allowed him to murder one of my guests, his name was already familiar to me.”
Jamie felt a surge of pride rush through his chest, pride in the bravery of a man he’d never met. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for his grandfather, standing in the middle of a room full of vampires, the only thing stopping them from tearing him to pieces the whim of the creature that was sitting two metres away from him.
“Why did you let him go?” asked Jamie. “You could have killed him before he had time to trigger the explosives. I’ve seen how fast you are.”
“You might be right,” replied Valentin. His voice was soft, and his eyes were slightly glazed, as though his mind was no longer in the cell with Jamie, but in a ballroom many miles and years away.
“But I couldn’t know that for certain. His thumb was on the trigger of the detonator; even if I had killed him, he might have pressed it involuntarily. I had no more wish to be blown to pieces then than I do now, to say nothing of the damage that would have
been done to my home. And even in the 1920s, an explosion of that size on Central Park West would have drawn questions that would have been tedious to answer. But more than any of that, what I told him was the truth; I admired his conviction, his apparently genuine willingness to die to accomplish his mission, if that was what it took.”
“So you let him go,” said Jamie. “And he took Frankenstein with him?”
Valentin nodded. “He wouldn’t go without the monster, so I let him take him. A friend of mine was very disappointed; she had plans for him. But yes, I let them both go.”
“When did you see him next?”
The vampire didn’t answer immediately; a small smile crept on to his face, as he cast back through memory.
“We met for the second time in 1938,” he said, eventually. “In Berlin.”
John Carpenter was sitting outside a café on Potsdamer Platz when one of the three most dangerous vampires in the world lowered himself into the seat opposite him.
He had just finished a hearty supper of schnitzel and potatoes and an equally hearty bottle of Riesling, and was enjoying an aromatic Turkish cigarette, letting the perfumed smoke billow fragrantly around his head before floating away on the warm evening breeze. The London newspapers were reporting that Germany was heading back into a state of deprivation, that wages were tumbling and unemployment was rising once more, that the economic recovery the National Socialists trumpeted endlessly via their propaganda ministry was little more than a sham.
Carpenter had seen and heard a number of disquieting things in his three days in the German capital – the absence of a political opposition,
the whispered rumours of camps in the east where dissidents and undesirables were allegedly being shipped on trains that ran at night, the aggressive, almost comically blustering anger of Chancellor Hitler as he held forth on the many, many enemies he perceived Germany to be facing – but deprivation had not been one of them. The capital was awash with luxury, with food, cars, fine clothes and equally fine wine, although he had heard that the same could not be said away from Berlin.
The previous evening an earnest socialist poet had told him that as near as Potsdam, the city twenty-five miles to the south for which the square he was sitting in was named, the citizens were quite literally starving.
The farms are failing,
she had said,
and what is produced is brought to Berlin. The rest of the country is being left to die.
The National Socialists were far from John Carpenter’s idea of how a political party should conduct itself, let alone one in a western European state as culturally advanced as Germany; he found Hitler somewhat ridiculous, a rabble-rouser of moderate intellect, and he thought even less of the Chancellor’s chief lieutenants, Himmler and Goebbels, whom he thought the sort of men who should have been kept in positions where their obvious personal shortcomings could cause no harm.
But he had met Field Marshal Göring and Admiral Dönitz on several occasions, and found them to be men of substance, while Prime Minister Chamberlain himself had returned from Germany earlier in the year with the clear message that Hitler was no threat to Britain. John had met the Prime Minister too, on more than a few occasions, and was inclined to believe his assessment of the situation.
Carpenter had been sent by Quincey Harker, the Blacklight Director, to brief Obergruppenführer Heydrich, the head of the SD, the internal security service of the SS, on the supernatural situation in Europe. The request had come from Hitler himself, whom Harker had briefed in 1934, as Heydrich was about to be placed in charge of all the German
security apparatus under a new organisation called the Reich Main Security Office.
Carpenter had delivered the briefing in the new Department’s headquarters on Prince-Albrecht-Straße, then taken tea and black bread with the charming, strikingly blond officer in his rooms on the third floor.
They had talked amiably for half an hour or so, in which time Heydrich had quizzed Carpenter about his experiences in Blacklight, and asked his advice on the establishment of an equivalent German organisation. Carpenter had been glad to offer the advice; it was one of the objectives that Harker had set for him before he left London. Then they had parted ways, and Carpenter had strolled down through central Berlin to the café where he was now sitting, no longer alone.
“Good evening, Mr Carpenter,” said Valentin. “Please don’t be alarmed. I’m not here to fight.”
Carpenter had instinctively grabbed for the stake that hung from his belt, hidden behind a leather pistol holster, and the vampire had seen him do so. He slowly drew his hand back, and replaced it in his lap.
They sat in silence for several minutes, as Valentin ordered coffee and waited for it to arrive. When the waiter placed it in front of him and departed, the vampire took a sip, sighed with pleasure, then smiled broadly at John Carpenter.
“I told you our paths would cross again,” he said. “This is mere coincidence, but I am always happy to be proven correct. How are you?”
“I’m well,” replied Carpenter, cautiously. He felt as though he was drunk; the situation he found himself in was almost too surreal for his mind to process. “How about you?”
“Oh, perfectly fine,” said Valentin. “A little bored, waiting for this all to get under way, but apart from that, I can’t complain.”
“All what to get under way?” asked Carpenter.
“Why, the war, obviously,” said Valentin, studying Carpenter carefully for any sign of mockery. “Surely you feel it too?”
“There won’t be any war,” said Carpenter. “Hitler has promised that the return of the Sudetenland is the limit of his territorial ambition.”
“And you believe him?” asked Valentin, smiling widely. “Oh my. You do, don’t you?”
“Do you have any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“John, men who seek to acquire power as desperately as Hitler are never satisfied. They never wake up one morning and say ‘I have achieved everything I set out to do, I am now replete.’ They are always looking for whatever is next; the next target, the next quarrel, the next victory. Hitler is an angry, violent little man, desperate to leave his mark on this world, and your plucky little island will take arms against him soon enough. I can assure you of that.”
“What’s your interest in this matter, Valentin?” asked Carpenter.
“Entertainment, Mr Carpenter,” replied Valentin, with a smile. “I consider myself a student of the human condition, and nowhere does that condition more clearly reveal itself than during war. You can see the very best and very worst of humanity, at the same time, in the same place. I find it fascinating. And, of course, I was a General once, so I have the remnants of professional curiosity.”
“You were a General?” asked Carpenter. He didn’t want to engage the creature sitting opposite him, but nor did he want to provoke it. “Of which army?”
“The Wallachian armies of Prince Vlad Tepes,” replied Valentin. “A long time ago.”
“The armies of Count Dracula?”
“As he later came to call himself, yes. My brothers and I were his loyal subjects. We waged war across eastern Europe, for more than two decades.”
“With success?”
“Sometimes,” replied Valentin, his eyes haunted by memory. “Other times, less so. Such is the nature of war; it is a shifting continuum. All any player can do is try to remain upright for as long as possible, then try to minimise the fall when it comes. Which it always does, eventually.”