Yours Very Truly, Abraham Van Helsing · 9:53pm May 17th, 2021
Trying to do a story a day for a little bit, just to stretch some muscles. I do a lot of longform iterative stuff, and I sincerely believe you learn more from finishing a piece than anything else. So, I'll be trying to finish a lot of things very quickly, to get better practice in at weaknesses I can already identify - commitment, consistency, and idea generation - and going back over them later to see strengths and other weaknesses I need to focus on better.
Here's my day one.
I approached the old man’s study. He’d been hard to find, and if he’d been a younger man, I would have had no way to find him. He was heavy with his history, now, far too much to move. There is a brass nameplate on the door, deliberately blank. I wave through the frosted glass window that makes up the top half of the door.
The door is locked. I have no key but the picks I have brought with me. I spend a minute fussing with it before I can open the door. The handle feels hot even through the thick leather of my glove, and I am careful not to disturb the line of salt at the threshold.
Van Helsing leans back in his chair, and it is impossible to tell if the creak comes from him or the wood. Or both. I close the door behind myself, and see the looping coils of electric wire around the handle.
“I invited myself in.” I stammer. My voice is not as steady as my hands. “I thought you might trust me more, that way.”
He smiles. He takes his ivory teeth from the seltzer beside him, and works it into his scarred mouth. He leaves his glass eye in the preserving jar next to it, which leers at me. I am grateful not to have to see him put it in.
“You are new to this, then?” Van Helsing croaks, shaking his head. “Still believe the old myths. Dangerous ones.”
“Yes.” I agree. “That’s why I’ve come to you.”
He leans back, complacent. “You took the trouble to work the lock, rather than break down my door. That makes me trust you. I am worried, though.”
“Why, Professor?”
He smiles sharply. I notice that his false teeth have been filed to points. “To have been tracked down by one with such a limited imagination. You would know vampires can send minions, yes? If they could not cross my threshold uninvited - and I must tell you that they can - they would simply send someone who could.”
“Of course. That’s why I waved, through the glass. So you would know me a friend.”
Van Helsing stares at me. He makes a sound like a cough, and I realize he’s trying to laugh, but it hurts his ribs too much. “You waved! Of course, you waved.”
I suddenly feel very small. “You think I am simple.”
“No.” Van Helsing shakes his head. “I have known many simple men and women. Creatures of cunning and instinct. Listening to muscles faster than their minds. They have been some of the finest hunters I have known. I think you are naive.”
“I- yes. I believe I am.” I admit it. “I have been told I am too trusting, but I don’t understand what that means.”
“A large heart makes for a wide target.” Van Helsing reaches for a pipe that is older than I am, and fresh tobacco. He looks at me with his one good eye - and I see how clear it is, none of the milky whiteness I expected of him at this age, and I am so startled that I almost do not get what he is asking of me.
I reach into my pocket for dry matches, and light his pipe for him. “Thank you.” As he puffs it, the tremors in his hands still. I make to move away, but he grabs my wrist - faster than I can blink, and holds me close to him with such a grip. His thumb presses into the meat between my tendons, and my fingers splay uselessly “How did you find me?”
There is no anger in his voice. I realize he could still snap my arm like a twig, and is choosing not to. “If you let me go, I can show you.” My voice is not nearly as steady as his hands, either.
He releases me. This close, I can see the clear outline of a holster against his ribs that was hidden by the loose fit of his clothes. The taut crossbow leaning against his writing desk, behind the umbrella.
I loosen my trenchcoat and start pulling letters from it, maps, documents. The Professor takes his umbrella and taps a cork board beside his desk with it, and I find a wooden cup of pushpins at the bottom of it. I start to sort my papers as neatly as I can upon it.
As I work, his old hand grips the back of my coat. He wiggles a finger through a hole in it. I feel more than I see it. “This was not the work of a moth.”
“No sir.”
“Bullet?”
“Yes sir.”
“I cannot help but remark that it appears to be in the back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A deserter?”
I laugh. “No, sir. It went clean through, sir. It has a partner at the front, sir. I left my medals at home, sir, I hope you don’t mind, but I find them ghastly things.”
I turn, and appreciate the raising of an eyebrow at me. “I see.”
“A big heart might make for a wide target, sir, but it helps if you can run like the blue devil.”
“It does, a bit.” He hums appreciatively. “If I might be so rude to ask…?”
“The Great War. The Liège sir.”
“Belgian?”
“Yes sir.”
“I couldn’t place the accent. Not French…”
I laugh. “A fan of Miss Agatha Christie, I see?”
He furrows his brow. “Who?”
I wipe my face to seriousness again. “Nevermind, sir.”
He dismisses it with a wave of his hand. “You were a soldier?”
“Not a good one, sir. Ensign Alldrich Allaire, sir.”
“Ensign?”
“A rank for someone who is good at neither following nor giving orders, sir.” I smile at the truth of it. “War is no place for a pacifist. You wanted to know how I found you?”
He looks up at the board. “These are the locations of my hunts.”
“Yes, sir. I noticed that you worked all across Europe for a long time, and even further East, until the War. You worked closer to this location. This narrowed my search down to your publishers, sir, but you restricted yourself to mail correspondence. I had thought the trail cold, before I turned to bishops, florists, antiquarians. Such things as wild rose and silver crucifixes require an address of delivery.”
The Professor nods. “I have not bought such things in a long time.”
“No. But asking for such things drew me to others who still do, and who sang your praises to the heavens.”
He straightens in his chair, but does not say anything. He waits, and he listens. He is a man clearly made uncomfortable hearing something he does not know, has no answer to. Itches for one. I was warned against meeting my heroes, but my heart soars that he is everything I had hoped him to be.
“A Mister Hutter led me to you. He says to tell you that he still lives.”
The old man sinks back into his chair in relief. “He still lives. I heard about the loss of his wife.”
“As does Count Orlok, Hutter tells me. Though it is gravely wounded, and will need to rest for many years.”
“The Carpathian?”
“I could not tell you, sir. I only know the name.”
“Of course.” The old man sighs, “Of course. No, Mr Allaire, I can see that you are not a simple man at all, and that I was right not to mistake you for one.”
I smile sheepishly. I cannot suppress my pride. “Doctor Allaire, thank you, Professor.”
“A doctor? So young?”
“I am almost thirty, sir.”
He laughs. “You all look like children to me.”
“I certainly feel as much.”
“A doctor. A soldier. A detective.” The professor intones. “The more I learn about you, the more I am confused as to why you have come.”
“Europe cannot support an aristocracy any longer. Times are changing, Professor, and I know that you are a man of science before a hunter. Count Dracula, Count Orlok, castles and peasants. But- are you familiar with Arnold Paole?”
“The Serb? Vampiric soldier-of-fortune?”
“Yes!” The Professor smirks at me, and I realize just how much of a child I must look to him. “At Liège, I found a German officer, sir, who I can assure you had no blood, no pulse. I found him three times in the no-man’s land, in three different places, dead of three different mortal wounds. Always the same man. When looking for an explanation, I learned of Paole, and from there, of you.”
The Professor is silent. He takes a silver-handled cane from the same umbrella pot with the crossbow in it, and holds it white-knuckled tight. “I see. You are sure about the German? You did not ‘run like the blue devil’ past three similar looking officers?”
“To, sir, never past. I was a medic, sir, and I was thorough.”
“Even with an enemy?”
“I never cared to think in such terms, sir.”
He looks at me with that one clear eye. The loose skin on his forehead pinches from the intensity of his furrowed brow, giving the impression of his skin doubling in thickness around the creases of his eyes. “Even the ones who shot at you?”
“Just people I met in poor circumstances.”
He smiles, and he nods in an imitation of the laugh he would make if he still had the lungs for it. “Thorough, then. I understand. You were saying, about aristocracy?”
“Castles, serfs. Such things could sustain these creatures for a long time without interference. But, we see in Russia-“
He grimaces. “Yes. I am aware. Perhaps if Mr Lenin had been less well-lettered, I would not feel such bitter disappointment.”
“Of course. But we see such relationships as landed gentry will not last the century.”
His sharp eye swivels to mine again, and pierces me. “Won’t they? No. They must. At the height of the Revolution, France claimed for all an end to monarchs. Yet they persisted, in Germany, in England, in Spain…”
“In Russia?”
He grunts. “There we see the difference. They persist, because they learned. They must become subtle, to survive. They…” His eye widens again, and he stands suddenly, jerkingly, like a man only realizing he is drunk. Then it is gone, his weight is balanced on that silver-headed cane, and he paces across the study to a bookshelf. I am surprised to see how little is of vampires. The book he has open before him is old and French.
I do not need to ask what he is thinking, for it is the thought that compelled me to come here.
“They become factory owners. Military officers. Bankers, with the patience to wait on the compounding of interest.” He thinks, drums his fingers on the book. “The occupations of cities.”
“My conclusion as well. It is why I had to find you.”
“Why?”
“People must be warned! They will listen to the great Van Helsing! The right people will listen. Times are changing. The urban vampire will flourish, much as coal power has darkened the trees, and brown moths take the place of white. And they are becoming better at walking among people. They have learned to adapt and hunters have not!”
I am out of breath. I realize I have been shouting. The Professor does not reproach me for it, merely looks thoughtful and frustrated. “I will write what I can. Would they not listen to you?”
“I am not a hunter. My only colleagues are then men of science and medicine, and they chastise me for believing in old myths.” The Professor winces, though I hold him no ill will for the reprisal from before. “Folklore has no place in the enlightened era. Learned men such as yourself-”
“Such as ourselves.” He gently corrects, and I feel my chest swell to bursting.
“Such as ourselves are a rarity among these who deal in vampires. And only you have the pedigree among both scholars and hunters. And the only others who take me seriously, it seems, believe I am speaking in coded language about…”
“About?”
I stare at my feet in shame. “About Jews, sir.”
He laughs, holding a handkerchief to his mouth, but this one he cannot suppress. He bends double around the book he holds to his chest. “Jews?”
I turn bright red. “I try to insist that I am not an anti-semite, sir, but…”
“Aren’t you?”
“No, sir.” I am as firm on this as a fortress. “And though I am a pacifist, sir, any man who believes me to share in their prejudice will be in sudden need of new teeth.”
“Good God,” Van Helsing wipes a tear from his eye. “What an age we live in. When the eugenicists can get a peer review and vampires are consigned to fiction. But we only need look to the persecution of John Snow to see deadly ignorance from learned men.”
I shuffle my feet awkwardly. I had not said as much, because the truth of the matter makes me too sad to say. That colleagues could believe such things, when any surgeon worth their salt should see for themselves that our differences disappeared at the point of incision.
Van Helsing nods. “Yes. I will write the letter you ask of me. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, young Doctor, and for working so hard to get it. Even I had fallen into the routine of finding culprits through family trees and land titles. A simpler time.”
“Thank you.”
He moves back to his writing desk, and pauses. “My hands are not what they used to be. Would you be so generous as to write this, for me, if I would sign and dictate it?”
“I would be honoured, Professor.”
The old professor hovers over my shoulder and reads to me, in the sharp and clear voice of a practiced lecturer. Though the words we write are dire, it remains the happiest moment of my life. When he directs me to light an oil burner to melt wax for his seal, my stomach is butterflies. When he hands me the stamp to press for myself, they erupt in flight.
He shakes my hand firmly when it is done, the letter sealed in my coat pocket. He says I must visit him sometime for tea. Of course I would love to.
I sneak out of his country manor just as I crept in, careful to reset every trap and trigger I dismantled on my way to his study. At least, all the ones I noticed. I wonder how does he not behead himself every time he goes to the bathroom, at this age?
I promise myself I will ask over tea. There must be a trick to it.
It is a week later. I am in an Amsterdam cafe when I read the news that Van Helsing is dead. A home invasion. It breaks my heart that the death of a man so accomplished is buried on page forty seven of De Telegraaf . I have learned the admiration I held for this man may have been more niche than I had feared. A week hammering the doors of every major publishing house in the city would not find one press interested in printing it.
I am not surprised to read that he was found mangled by the traps in his home. I am about to resign myself to the grim notion there was no trick to it when I catch that the crime is being investigated by the captain of police himself. Why? For a man so unworthy of front page news? With no suspicion of homicide?
The contents of the letter still in my pocket whisper to me to consider what a captain of police is.
I tear his name from the paper and hurry to the national library. Is there a registry I might look through? Where must I go to find one? No, useless.
I make my way to the offices of De Telegraaf again. They are familiar with me now, they think of me as that crank whose letter they will not publish. I am not here about the letter. I am here about the chief of police. Do they have a photo of him? I must see it.
I repeat myself to the clerk, this time with a fistful of guilder in my hand. I am rewarded for trying to be less naive.
I am informally brought into the papers’ archives, and discreetly handed a photograph.
It is the face of something I have seen three times before, in the no-man’s land. He was a captain then, too.
My veins run cold ice as I realize just how much of a child I was, not realizing that if Mr Hutter could find me… Van Helsing had realized, too, and had simply been too polite to scold me. I understand his reaction, now.
Before, I had not considered the hunt to be my calling. It is not in my nature. But if these things can adapt their nature to their circumstances, then so must I.
If I had gotten a man I admired so greatly killed over this letter, then I will do whatever it takes to publish it. And I can think of no better place to start than dragging his killer out into the daylight.
Cool stuff. After Castlevania I'd nearly forgotten that Vampires typically employ subterfuge.
A very good bite-sized read!
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And even in the context of that series, there's still a fair bit of trickery involved (whether the reason a non-Belmont is in the castle, or enemies pretending to be injured women before they strike)
Adapt or die. With vampires, it seems like they've already made their choice, but what is undeath but trying to have your cake and eat it too? (And newspaper publishers are right up there with police captains in the modern hierarchy.) Brilliant little story. Thank you for it.
Oh, interesting; thanks for sharing, and good luck with the writing!