Part 8 (1/2)

Afterwards, when she left me alone, my heart was too full to sleep. So I have written it all down, and the sun is now high in the morning sky.

I pray Arkady has told the truth, that his agent shall watch over us by day, for exhaustion at last overtakes me. To sleep . . .Chapter 7 The Diary of Abraham Van Helsing 22 NOVEMBER 1871.

Can any more tragedy befall us? Within a week, I have seen my father dead and my family torn apart, all of them lost to me in one fas.h.i.+on or another.

After Stefan's fantastical departure and return, and Mama's even more impossible tale of a family's supernatural curse, I found myself trapped in a restless mind that could neither entirely believe nor entirely disbelieve. Logic a.s.sured me that madness was not contagious: how, then, could my mother and brother both have fallen prey to the same delusions?

But the thought that I should, based on secondhand reports, let the only family I have known be scattered to the winds-this evoked great anger in me. I was angry, too, that those dearest to me should have taken leave of their senses in a way that brought us all suffering, and so soon after Papa's death. In all fairness, though, mixed with my rage was an undercurrent of bitterness that owed itself to another source of pain.

I saw the look he gave her, and she him, when he returned.

So it was that this morning, after hearing Stefan's wild story and Mama's insistence that we all leave, I lost my temper and left at once for my hospital rounds -a full hour early.

Noontime found me in a still disagreeable state; so much so that for the first time in memory, I failed to return home for dinner. I had no office appointments, but any unscheduled patients who might come would be turned away, unless Stefan rose from his bed to tend them. I had no concern, I told myself, for any of them.

Let them worry about my whereabouts, I thought, full of righteous self-pity; and I refused to eat dinner at all, as though this might punish someone other than myself. Indeed, I wallowed in my misery with a great deal of satisfaction, allowing all the jealousy submerged from my boyhood to surface-thinking of how Mama had always favoured Stefan, how she and Papa had spoiled him, never demanded from him what was demanded of me, the elder.

Oh, my brother, if I had only put aside my selfishness and believed you!

I remained at the hospital until the afternoon (and was extremely annoyed when no one from home sent a message inquiring after me), when I made a leisurely round of my homebound patients.

I went to the boarding-house where Lilli was situated last, for she was, she said, always loneliest in the evenings. It was late afternoon; the sun had just set, but even then I had no intention of returning home. Had I not made the terrible discovery-an omen, I think now -perhaps I might not have returned home at all that night; perhaps I might have gone to an inn.

Her landlady told me in hushed tones that Lilli had worsened in the night and had eaten nothing that day but remained in bed sleeping. After knocking softly on the door, I entered her room quietly-but I need have taken no pains, for the poor dear woman had been dead some hours. I can see how the landlady took her to be asleep, for Lilli lay there quite sweetly, with eyes and mouth closed, and hands resting neatly atop the quilt as though the mortician had already done his work. But her skin-waxen and unnaturally pale, as yellowish-white as her spa.r.s.e ivory hair-was cool to the touch, and rigor mortis had begun to set in.

An omen, yes. I sat down in my customary place beside her bed and wept a moment; then I dried my eyes and told the landlady to summon the mortician. I might have been generous and offered to fetch him myself, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by an urgent anxious desire to return home.

Indeed, as I made my way out into the bleak winter evening, the grey of dusk rapidly darkening to black, both my pace and pulse quickened as the odd sense of dread increased.

The sight of home did nothing to a.s.suage my unease: rather it only increased it, for as I neared, I saw that not a single light shone in any window. Indeed, the lamp that Mama lit every night in antic.i.p.ation of my return was dark; the sight chilled me more than the cold night wind.

I bounded up the front steps and threw open the door. The house was utterly dark; to my right, the drawing-room hearth, which should have been blazing by this time, was cold.

But more ominous than these was the soft keening that issued from upstairs-high-pitched, inhuman, full of such abject misery that I responded to it without thought, taking the steps three at once until I arrived at its source.

The door to my own bedroom was flung open. Bitter cold greeted me as I entered; the sash had been thrown open, and the white curtains billowed in the wind. I rushed to close it and lit the lamp.

Upon the floor at the foot of our bed sat the source of that infernal nocturne: my wife, her collar unb.u.t.toned, gaping open to reveal the frilless camisole beneath, her long hair free and tousled, framing a stark white face broken by three dark depthless pools- mouth and eyes.

At the sight, I sank to my knees in pity and horror beside her, for I knew I looked again upon a madwoman, on my poor darling Gerda as I had first seen her, in a sanitorium cell.

Wild and wide and full of unspeakable anguish those eyes were, so far gone into that dark, h.e.l.lish country that when I laid my hands gently on her shoulders and called her name, she neither saw nor heard me -only continued emitting that high piercing wail, her lovely face contorted in a rictus of despair, her gaze focussed on an invisible terror.

All my questions, all my attempts to comfort, went unanswered, unheard. Helpless, I rose to investigate, knowing that if she could not explain the event that had triggered her relapse, I should have to deduce it.

My first deduction stung like a viper's bite: the bed was not made, as it always was shortly after she rose. The quilt had been thrown carelessly to the floor, the sheets tangled, the pillows scattered and bearing the impressions of heads that I knew did not include my own.

This distressed me mightily, but it was nothing compared to what followed-for I glanced up from that incriminating sight to check my little son's crib, wondering whether he had been witness to the moral outrage that had occurred here.

The blackest terror I have ever known seized me as my gaze fell upon my little son's crib, draped in shadow.

Empty. G.o.d in Heaven! Empty . . .

But surely he was in the house, I told myself, though I had never seen him elsewhere but at his mother's side. I knelt down and grabbed my wife's arms, shook her. ”Little Jan! Where is he? Where is he? With Omar Gerda never saw, never heard. I scrambled to my feet and shouted my son's name into the darkness, searching foolishly for him beneath his crib, his bureau, his toys.” When that proved futile, I rose and hurried downstairs-pausing on my way to knock on Stefan's closed door and call out; receiving no reply, I threw open the door and found only emptiness.

With horror, I dashed to the end of the hallway and Mama's room, calling out for her as I threw open the door.

To my utter relief, I saw my mother lying on the bed, sleeping soundly; but when I lit the lamp and spoke to her again, I found she was in a deep stupour from which she could not be roused. I even took her hand and gently slapped it, only to receive no response.

I rose, glancing round the room for my little son, and found of him no sign. In an utter panic, I ran down the stairs, from room to room, looking even in cabinets, closets, the unlikeliest places.

Gone. Gone, nowhere in the house. But of course, he could not be. What child could have lain quiet, listening to his mother's screams?

In the end, I ran outside into the cold and shouted his name down the street . . .

Only to hear it echo back at me in the evening stillness. And in that dreadful moment when I knew him gone, I longed to join my wife's descent into madness.

I might have stood out there forever, mindless of the winter wind, but Gerda's renewed keening galvanised me. I was numbed by shock, pushed beyond all limits; the strain of the last few days and the pure horror of what had just occurred so taxed my mind and heart that all thought, all emotion abruptly ceased.

In a state of cold, blank calm, I walked inside and with impossibly steady hands poured a gla.s.s of Papa's port for my wife.

I ascended the stairs a shattered man.

Thus I returned to Gerda's side. But my wife would not stop her grieving to take the wine; only when I raised it to her lips would she drink.

As she did, I comforted her as I would an infant, smoothing the hair back from her feverish brow with my cool hand, patting her back, whispering rea.s.surances. Though she still did not see me, though her gaze was still fixed on some awful memory, she quieted at last, and I grew bold enough to ask again, ”What has happened? Where is the baby? Where is Stefan?”

Her eyelids fluttered, and her parted lips began to move. Certain of an answer, I began to withdraw the wine-but suddenly she raised an arm, with such swift force that the gla.s.s was overturned. Port spilled down onto her skin, onto her camisole, staining its snowy whiteness like dark, sweet-smelling blood while she screamed, pointing at the window.

”Gone! She-she took them both!”

I turned in the direction of her stricken gaze and saw the impossible: a white face, hovering like a suspended mask outside the gla.s.s pane, and clearly masculine (though my wife accused a female, in my confusion, I paid no heed). For a moment, I was honestly frightened, for this seemed a truly supernatural feat, but then common sense seized me.

This was certainly a burglar with a ladder, and no doubt the man who had stolen my poor child, perhaps with hopes of ransom. And now he thought to come for my wife. . . .

Full of outrage, I rushed to the window and threw it open, thinking to injure (and thus capture) the criminal by giving the ladder a mighty shove.There was no ladder, no face, no criminal, only cold wind and black night.

Bewildered, I shut the window once more and turned back towards my wife, only to discover that the man with the gleaming white face and hands stood between us.

The sight of him provoked renewed screaming from my wife. I hurried to her side and held her, covering her with a blanket to ease her trembling, s.h.i.+elding her with my body from this intruder.

He made no advance but said in a low voice so strangely powerful that I heard it easily over Gerda's shrieks: ”Abraham. I fear I am too late.”

He was a handsome man of indeterminate age, with jet-dark hair and eyebrows, and features that struck me as oddly familiar. I opened my mouth to shout at him, to demand his ident.i.ty and purpose and the whereabouts of my son and brother, but to my total astonishment, the words that issued from my lips were: ”Do I know you?”

”Perhaps,” said he, ”but there is no time. They have taken Stefan, and wherever he is, he sleeps now. Tell me what you know.”

”He is one of them, just like her-and she has taken them! Taken Stefan and Jan!” Gerda shrieked, tearing away from me to lunge at the stranger, and pummelled his chest with her fists. The blanket slipped from her shoulders, exposing the camisole most immodestly, but she was too distraught to notice or to care.

He made no effort to defend himself from her blows, nor did they seem to discomfit him in the least -but her words overwhelmed him with sickly dread. At them, he closed his eyes and whispered, ” Just like her.” Zsuzsanna has been here, then.”