In terms of actual distance, Gramercy Park was only two blocks from the tumult, noise and concentrated filth that Echo Van Helsing had encountered on her drive down Broadway from the Sturtevant Hotel, but two blocks might just as well have been two hundred blocks given the separate worlds they occupied.
The small park had been donated to the city by its original owner, Samuel Ruggles, with the single condition that no commercial enterprise be permitted on the facing streets or in the park itself. The park, a simple square of trees and shrubs and carefully groomed gravel pathways, was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence, and only those people who owned one of the sixty-one lots on the square had the keys that allowed them access.
A number of illustrious people lived on the privileged square, including James Harper, onetime mayor of the city and well-known publisher, at Number 4; Edwin Booth, world-famous actor and present manager of the Winter Garden Theater at Number 16; Roosevelt, the glass manufacturer, at Number 18; and a number of other city notables, including the Henrietta Haines School for Young Ladies at Number 10, thought to be the finest place in New York for the education of the gentry’s daughters.
The park was a quiet place except for a brief period every morning and afternoon when the girls from Miss Haines’s school played there with their hoops and jacks and balls. Carriages came and went, but there were no carriage houses or stables within the square itself, and any manure or other objectionable material was quickly removed by a small army of gardeners and caretakers employed for that purpose.
Local tradesmen delivered foodstuffs, coal, firewood and any other commodity, and the negro tubmen and other night-soil workers employed by the owners of the houses on all four sides of the small, prestigious neighborhood came and went in the back gardens of the residences with the dawn and with the greatest discretion.
In the winter, snow was removed almost as soon as it fell, in the autumn leaves were raked up as rapidly and in the summer the gardeners ensured that the grass and shrubbery within the park itself were always kept well watered. A pair of constables from the Eighteenth District Patrol House on East Twenty-second Street were fully employed with a beat encompassing the park and its environs, and there were rarely disturbances beyond an occasional drunkard meandering off his course in the small hours of the morning.
For the most part, the illusion of perfect propriety and dignity was kept, and it was here, on the south side of the square, that Enoch Bale had purchased his new residence for the price of a ruby that had once graced the now-severed neck of Her Grace, Claire of Saint Mauris, Marchioness of Laubespin, and a diamond brooch rumored to have been worn by his distant relative, the equally unfortunate Countess Erzebet Báthory, the so-called Vampyr Princess of Čachtice—absurd, of course, since the woman was barely a countess let alone a Princess of the Blood.
There was a certain irony in the history of the stones, since Number 14 Gramercy Park was undoubtedly a house of the dead. Designed twenty years before by a forgotten architect, it was one of four essentially identical four-story townhouses built of locally quarried brownstone. All four had a lower half story for kitchens and servants and four floors above. Each house had a simple stone porch and a granite-lined entranceway. Number 14, by a peculiar reason having to do with Ruggles’s original survey, was possessed of a lot that went all the way back to East Nineteenth Street, while the other properties on the south side of the park were not so deep.
The first owner of Number 14 was a portly, unhappy man named Norburn who invested heavily in Mexican gold mines and lost everything to Santa Anna and his hordes when the Mexican-American War was declared. Norburn committed suicide by hanging himself from the front-parlor chandelier. The chandelier separated from the ceiling under Mr. Norburn’s ponderous bulk, but his effort was not wasted, as the central spike at the chandelier’s center struck the dazed, half-strangled man in the center of his forehead, crushing his skull completely and skewering what was left of his head to the polished cherrywood floorboards.
The second owner, Dr. Charles Allnutt, fared a little better and lived in the house for almost ten years. Allnutt, a successful society physician, was a friend and medical consultant to the Astor family and, like them, was one of the first to enjoy healthful summer holidays away from the city on Mackinac Island, a tiny speck of land where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet.
It later turned out that the holidays spent there by New York’s highest society were more than simply good for the general constitution. Allnutt, as an enterprising New York Herald reporter discovered, was also performing illegal operations on young ladies of elevated social position and somewhat lower morals, including his own seventeen-year-old daughter. The daughter died, the story appeared in the New York press and Dr. Allnutt and the remainder of his family vanished into the far west without ever returning to the house.
The final owner before Bale of the plain-faced narrow house on Gramercy Park was a shipmaster named Andrew Barclay. His tragic story was the simplest and most unhappy of all. Barclay had been a mail-ship captain with the Inman line for a number of years, and in that time he had amassed both a fortune from bonuses and cargo shares as well as a family.
After living at Number 14 for a little more than a year, and with two of his young daughters, Emily and Rose, enrolled at the Miss Haines School, Barclay had been offered a position as master of the brand-new liner, SS Phantom of the Anchor Line, an Inman rival. The benefits were too generous to ignore, so he accepted the position and to celebrate decided to take his wife, Elizabeth, son, Andrew Jr., and the two girls on the vessel’s maiden voyage from New York to Glasgow. On September 18, 1862, the ship left New York Harbor and was last seen off Bird Rock in the Gulf of St. Lawrence three days later. Then, in imitation of her ill-omened name, the ship and all its passengers, including Andrew Barclay and his entire family, simply disappeared, swallowed by the fog and sea, never to be heard from again.
Number 14, now in the hands of Captain Barclay’s friend and lawyer, Mr. Tobias Strong, mourned vacantly, shutters bolted, curtains drawn, furniture shrouded in ghostly drop cloths waiting for the next visitor to its dark interior. It was here, in this deeply shadowed and unfortunate place, that Enoch Bale now slept and dreamed, transforming the passing daylight hours into more welcome night.
In his dreams he traveled as he once had in his distant past, from his first remembered home beyond the Balyanos Pass, where the wide Tatros River flowed, to later days in the stolen midnight armor of the Knight of the Seven Castles, Nicholas Callisto, carrying the Great Sword Fragarach, the Sword of Air, the Whirlwind, reaping like Death’s own scythe.
What days those were, and what nights and lessons learned! The first true lesson for his kind and the last: that the world was made up of only sense and memory—the taste of blood, first on the sword’s edge, then on the tongue, the stink of fear, the sight of death and the hot breath of descending angels, their wings as black as shadow, their streaming hair blotting out the sky. And above all the memory of it to feed you through the unrolling years, decades, centuries, filling you with the same desperate desire and eternal ambition: to feel and taste and see it all again.
In his dreams he rode Abderus, one of the flesh-eating Mares of Diomedes, and together they roamed from the Karpitans, where they fought against their dread enemies the Cumons, all the way to the ford of the Harbachtal and beyond to the mountains of the Tromelei. These were the days between the Old Gods and the New, when his kind were like an army in the world, but those times faded at last when the Old Gods finally were swept away and reason began to rule the land. Draculiya and his kind, once lords and masters of the earth, were hunted down and destroyed, all in the holy name of this white and savage god who showed no mercy, especially in death.
Then came the final battle on the slopes of Slieve Gullion, where the hag-witch Calliag appeared and cursed the last of his family, and forever more the tears shed that terrible day were known as Calliag Szikes To, Calliag’s Lake of Sorrows. On that day the Ten Vampyr remaining dispersed across the world, leaving nothing of themselves behind, vowing never to meet again until the Old Gods returned and time came to an end. Six hundred years or six thousand since that evil day on the dark, volcanic mountainside, but in his dreams it was always only yesterday, and the dreaming, as it was for all of the Ten, was his only salvation. Without those dreams his only memory would be the loneliness of a shadow life everlasting.
In his dreams he was a warrior, not a wraith; a hunter, not a wanderer searching for a soul that was no longer his to own. In his dreams he was the dream of everything, but with the passing time the dreams passed too. Some of the Ten faltered and chose to live in the other world, and the bastard, ill-gotten breed of Damphyr was born, half true to the blood, half human, relentless but not eternal, and cursing the true Vampyr for their other, more secret powers. Of these the Outcast, the Other, was the most fiendish, the one who had made the Ten into the Nine and who knew no rule but his own and followed no law except slaughter.
In his dreams the half-caste Damphyr began to triumph, breeding and breeding again in a perversion of the ancient ways, nine by nine by ninety-nine until they seemed to be almost anywhere, disguised and sinister, waiting for a time when pretence would be unnecessary and they could rule the world. Along the centuries more than one had tried and a few had almost succeeded, and their ascension sometimes seemed almost inevitable, for there was very little left to stop them. The sleeping Vampyr Draculiya knew in his dreams that only six of the Nine were left, two consumed in their own balefires by intent, and the last, his old companion, Saint Germain, Prinz Ragoczy, by the brutal hand of a man much like his own nemesis. The Vampyr-vadász, the late and unlamented Abraham Van Helsing, inexorable vampire hunter. All in his memory, all in his dreams.
“Lord.” The voice came out of the shadows in the room, familiar. “Lord,” said the voice a second time.
“Fu Sheng?” Enoch Bale opened his eyes, the dreams shredding away like old cobwebs and tattered shrouds. A hundred pasts became the present.
“Yes, lord.”
He remembered then. Chang Fu Sheng had fled London well before him to prepare for his arrival in the New World. Only the night before he’d found his servant waiting, alone in a gaming house on Baxter Street between the Bowery and the docks. A basement opium den full of lonely sailors far from home.
Enoch Bale searched the darkened room with his eyes, the furniture anonymous beneath the sad muslin veils that covered every piece. It was dusk, and the bars of light seeping through the shuttered windows were pale and dying with the sunset. Almost night again. Dusk filled the master chamber on the second floor like the inside of an old tomb.
“I have news, lord,” said his servant, standing close to the bed. He was dressed in his usual dark tailcoat with shirt and tall collar so bone white and starched they seemed to glow. The face above the collar was the texture and color of ancient parchment. The hair, sleek and oiled and tied back in a long queue, was black, shot with streaks of wolfish gray. The servant was old, older even than his lord and master knew. Men of his race and name had served him since the Mongol hordes swept across the steppes back in the time of the Great Khan himself. This Chang could be the fifth generation of his clan or the fiftieth; there was no way to know.
“Tell me,” said the Vampyr.
“They are here, lord,” said the Chinese man in his soft, faint voice. “The trail is almost invisible, but there have been mistakes, a definite spoor.”
“Killings?”
“Yes, lord.” Chang Fu Sheng nodded. “Savage ones.”
“Women?”
“Yes, lord, so far only women.”
The Vampyr nodded. It was always the same. The Damphyr would settle somewhere and begin to prey on the surrounding populace, usually beginning with prostitutes and other forgotten castaways of society. The longer they remained, the bolder they would get. Enoch Bale sensed something in the servant’s demeanor.
“Is there something else, old friend?”
“Yes, lord,” said the old man, hesitating.
“What is it?” The Vampyr slid his legs off the bed and sat up. It was almost fully dark now; the night smelled of fading bergamot and wormwood. Faint scents from the fenced-in park, perhaps, or a distant memory of another time and place.
“There is Another, lord. Nearby.”
“One of the Nine?” The Vampyr asked. It was impossible. It was part of the vow and sacrosanct. No one of his brethren would dare to break the covenant. “I don’t believe it.”
“It is not one of the Nine, lord. It is the Outcast, the Other.”
“The Tenth of Nine,” said the Vampyr. “The Forgotten One.”
The Vampyr stood. A memory stirred. Something in the scent of the flowers outside.
“What does he call himself now?”
“Adam, lord. He has taken the name Adam Worth.”
“Adamo!” the Vampyr whispered into the darkness. “Adamo!”