Echo Van Helsing had arrived back at the hotel very late. Returning to her rooms, she found a note from Matthew saying that he was traveling with his new cricket-playing friends to somewhere called East Hampton on Long Island, where they were to have a match. He expected to be gone for several days and hoped it would not be an inconvenience. Rather than being inconvenienced, Echo felt relieved that her little brother would not be caught up in the terrible events that seemed to be unfolding.
She undressed, put on her nightdress and fell into bed, exhausted and horrified by the thought that Draculiya might not simply be an aberration but the terrifying avatar of a whole race of beings. Her father had thought the Vampyr virtually ageless, created out of some hideous witch-borne incantation lost in time, an anomaly without ancestors or heirs, but according to Kate Warne he was merely one of many who had been preying on people like wolves on sheep and had been doing so for a very long time.
Sleep refused to come, tired as she was, so she got up and walked over to the windows. Her mind filled with images from the day she went to the window and stared out across the city’s rooftops and chimneypots. Somewhere out there was the creature that had murdered her father as well as his cohorts, the creatures that had savaged the young woman she’d seen on the cold slab in the Bellevue Hospital death house. Standing there, fatigue dragging at her like heavy weights upon her shoulders, she realized that even if she found Draculiya, the job would not be done.
Finding the creature would not be proof of what he and his fellow beings really were, and without that proof and its declaration from the very rooftops she looked out upon, there would be no way to bring about the desperately necessary complete and absolute extermination of Draculiya and his wretched kind. Weeping softly, she returned to her bed and this time sleep finally came, dreamless, bleak and utterly dark.
She awoke, restless and uneasy, to the sound of rapping at her door. It was Kate, looking as though she’d slept the clock round, a cigar fuming between her teeth and carrying a heavy-looking portmanteau that she plumped down on the sofa in the outer parlor of the suite. She was wearing a plain black suit today, with a shiny black silk half-topper on her head. Clutching her nightdress around her, Echo stared blearily at the Pinkerton agent.
“I know it’s not the thing to say in polite company, but you look like hell, Miss Van Helsing.” Kate puffed broadly on the cigar, and the blur of smoke that began to fill the room made Echo feel slightly nauseous.
“What time is it?”
“Past noon. Time to be up and about. There’s been another killing.”
“What?”
“Your nasty friend’s been at it again. Him or one of his friends. A man this time. Maddersly, the prizefighter. The Metropolitans found him in an alley by the Bernheimer Brewery. Or at least most of him. He’d been beheaded, rather gruesomely, and one of his wrists had been slashed down to the bone. They found the head spiked to an iron fence a block farther on.”
“Dear God,” whispered Echo.
“I doubt God had much to do with it.” Kate snorted. “The coppers think it was for the money since his pockets were turned out, but it was our man all right.” Kate dropped down on the parlor sofa and pulled open the portmanteau. She began pulling out articles of men’s clothing. The clothes were all dark colored and plain except for a starched white shirt. “I’ve brought you another suit to wear and a fresh shirt. Get yourself dressed; I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
“I have to bathe.”
“Then hurry it up,” said Kate. “I’ll fetch us some lunch while you’re doing it.”
It was almost two o’clock before Kate Warne and Echo Van Helsing left Sturtevant House. Kate had hired a gig from a nearby livery stable, which was waiting by the curb. She tipped a coin to the waiting black boy holding the bridle under the watchful eye of one of the hotel doormen and climbed up into the driver’s position. The boy offered his cupped hands to Echo, who stepped up into the passenger seat beside Kate. The Pinkerton agent twitched the reins and clucked to the dappled pony standing between the throughbraces. With barely a glance over her shoulder at the traffic moving up and down the avenue, she expertly turned the little carriage about and almost immediately had them heading south toward the lower part of the city.
Echo shifted, still not entirely comfortable in her trousers and feeling very exposed in the narrow seat. Thankfully her bust was small enough to be easily bound with a length of muslin Kate had brought for just that purpose, but Echo still felt sure that someone would soon see through the disguise. She said so to Kate, but her companion only laughed.
“Worried about being taken for a femme Damnée? This is New York, Miss Van Helsing. No one notices anything beyond their own noses unless it will make them a dollar, most would be too discomfited to mention it if they did notice and, most of all, Miss Van Helsing, nobody really gives a damn.” She shook the reins to hurry the dapple gray a little more, then patted Echo on the shoulder. “It’s the most important thing I’ve learned since joining the agency; people see what they want to see. Look like a young man about town, and that’s exactly what the rest of the world will see.”
They moved down Broadway, the small horse trotting energetically around slower vehicles. They eventually reached Union Place, a pretty square surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence and an enclosing fence with a large bronze statue of a man on horseback in the center. Someone had set the pole of an immense American flag in the figure’s outstretched hand. The park was surrounded by hotels, grand-looking row houses and a variety of commercial establishments.
“George Washington,” said Kate. “He’s supposed to be pointing toward the enemy, but he’s actually pointing at Wall Street. Wise fellow. He knew who the real enemy was.”
They drove around the park and its parade ground and continued south along University Place, narrower than Broadway by far and lined with hotels, office blocks and manufactories of one kind or another. They finally came out on another, much larger square or parade ground, fixed at the near side with an enormous stone building, towered and turreted like a castle but with a looming arched front in the way of a cathedral, complete with a great window of stained glass. To Echo it looked very much like a much larger though somewhat less ornate version of King’s College Cambridge, a place where she’d once gone with her father when they were in England.
Echo stared as Kate guided the gig around to the far side of the great gray building. “What is this place?” she asked.
“The University of New York,” said Kate. She pulled back on the reins, drawing the gig to a halt. She swung down from her seat and tied the reins to an iron ring post by the curb. Scores of young men trotted along the sidewalk, all dressed identically in dark, serious suits and wearing top hats that served to make them all look like junior clerks in a countinghouse. They moved in groups, heads together, discussing matters of utmost importance as though the fate of the world might hang on each and every word.
Echo found herself smiling; it was the same the world over, the sight repeated in Oxford or Cambridge or Leiden or Paris, the same furrowed brows, the same restrained excitement, and all of it with an overwhelming sense of the dramatic as though the students were all being watched by some omnipotent professor, some Socrates or Plato who was observing them and judging their every pearllike opinion. It was also plain from looking at them that she and Kate were dressed almost identically.
The two women walked down a stretch of graveled pathway toward a pair of narrow doors just as they burst open and another chattering group of students appeared. Kate and Echo stood aside and let them pass, then went up the three short steps and in through the doors.
Echo found herself in a dark foyer. A long, gloomy corridor led off directly ahead, and there was a narrow, winding iron stairway to their right. Echo could hear the faint booming sounds of laughter and running footsteps in the distance. Kate headed up the iron stairway, with Echo on her heels.
They climbed up several floors, then followed a long passage flanked by closed doors and small rooms to a second circular stairway even narrower than the first. They climbed again and eventually reached an empty stairwell fitted with a single door. Slightly out of breath, Echo stood beside Kate Warne as the Pinkerton detective knocked. At first there was no answer. Kate knocked again. The knock was followed by a long silence and then the muffled sound of a man’s voice.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.”
Kate smiled and cleared her throat, then spoke in response:
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
An instant later there was the sound of a key turning in the lock and the door opened. Echo found herself looking at a very short man dressed entirely in black. He had stringy brown hair that reached to his shoulders and a narrow face that looked more like a skull with a thin layer of parchment stretched over it. The hair, oddly, had a streak of white in it two inches wide and only on the left side. A silk ribbon tie jerked and danced beneath a yellowed cardboard Pembroke collar and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like something alive. He looked to be in his early thirties.
The eyes in their deep sockets were a strange gray-blue color, and one shoulder twitched every few seconds as though he was shrugging something away. His long fingers were ink stained and twisted and turned as though they were beings apart and trying to escape from the young man’s thin, skeletal wrists. Echo had seen saner-looking people in Dr. Seward’s asylum at Carfax, that gruesome place where the insect-eating lunatic Renfield was imprisoned. Renfield, once Draculiya’s companion.
“Katie!” said the man, grinning widely and making his face even more skull-like. “And a friend as well!”
“Percy Dunninger, meet Miss Echo Van Helsing. Echo, this is my particular friend Percy.”
“Charmed,” said the excruciatingly thin man. “Do come into my chambers.”
Kate and Echo stepped into the room beyond the door, which Dunninger carefully locked behind them. The room was tall and octagonal, and any windows had long ago been blocked by the oak bookcases that stood around the walls. At one angle of the octagon there was a small stage, complete with curtains and a canvas backdrop painted with a bucolic country scene of hills and trees and grazing cows and sheep. It looked old.
Around the miniature stage there was a balustrade-like barrier that would have been at home in a courtroom. To the left, taking up another angle of the octagon, was a blackboard. In an alcove there was a single long table set out with half a dozen chairs and a small desk, and behind the table there was a narrow cot. A single, very ornate candelabra dangled on a chain from the ceiling, and eight identical gas jets flared in sconces on the walls around the room. High in one corner a large stuffed raven was perched on the moldings, staring down at them, its single visible glass eye like a glittering speck of shiny coal.
The rest of the room was filled with an impossible clutter of dusty junk that seemed to include everything from a gigantic bat modeled from sticks and paper that hung from the ceiling next to the candelabra to some sort of large steam-driven device of wheels and gears that thankfully appeared to be inert for the moment. Directly under the candelabra was a small, delicate-looking games table covered with a green cloth. In the middle of the cloth a silver tea service sat on a tray. Four plain chairs had been arranged around the table. Dunninger graciously pulled out a chair for Echo and then one for Kate before seating himself.
“How have you been keeping?” Kate asked.
“Quite well, quite well,” said Dunninger, his smile fixed. “Never too old to learn, as Mr. Morse often told me.”
“Mr. Morse?” Echo said.
“Samuel,” offered Dunninger.
“The telegraph,” explained Kate.
“I built it,” said Dunninger.
Echo was confused. “Samuel Morse, the man who invented the telegraph? Morse code?”
“I built it,” Dunninger repeated.
“But you just said—”
“Morse invented it, but he was no mechanic, I assure you,” explained the strange-looking man. “I built it for him.”
“You’re an engineer?”
“A bit of everything,” said Dunninger. “Ask Katie.” He smiled. “Mixed paints for my friend Winslow, helped Mr. Draper with his photographic device, drilled the barrels for Mr. Colt’s revolver, cut nibs for poor old Edgar Poe, may he rest in peace.” At this Dunninger glanced up at the raven roosting on the corner molding. It squawked loudly, its beak jerking open, and began to speak in a sinister, scratching voice:
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the raven “Nevermore.”
Kate burst out laughing at the demonstration, but Echo just stared at the large black bird, awestruck and horrified. “How is this possible?” she whispered. “Surely the creature is dead!”
“As a coffin nail,” said Dunninger. “The bird is a clockwork automata, of course. Squawks like that every twenty minutes or so until it winds down. A foolish trick I learned from Mr. Heller a few years back. Common enough among the quack spiritualists that seem to haunt some of New York’s most esteemed parlors these days.”
“Mr. Heller?”
“Robert Heller the magician. I was briefly his engeneur.”
“Ingénieur? His engineer?”
“Engeneur. French word. He described the illusion he wished to create, and I provided the necessary technical expertise. Like this.” He laid his hands flat out on the table an inch or two away from the silver tea set. Suddenly the tray and the tea set began to shake and rattle all by themselves, making a fearful clatter. High above them the perching raven began to cry mournfully, and a strange, otherworldly vapor rose up around the table. Finally the table itself began to rise and heave back and forth a few inches in the air. Then, as suddenly as it started, the strange incidents came to an abrupt stop. During the whole process, Dunninger’s hands never moved off the table.
“The spirit vapor is actually a release of a vessel of carbon dioxide hidden within the table, based on the experiments of Thilorier some thirty years ago. The shaking is a clockwork mechanism similarly hidden within the table and operated by a switch close to my knee. The raven quoting Mr. Poe’s poem is nothing more than simple ventriloquism.”
“And the levitating table?” Echo asked, fascinated.
“The simplest of all.” The thin man raised his arms and showed her the two long metal struts hidden within his sleeves. “The armatures fit into slots in the table’s edge and support its weight easily. All simple tricks, easily explained.”
“This is marvelous!” Echo laughed. “You should be on the stage!”
“I think not, Miss Van Helsing.” He flushed. “I am something of a private man and no performer. The university is my life.”
“You teach here?”
“I’ve been a student here for more than thirty years,” the thin man answered.
“He means it,” put in Kate. “He was born here.”
Echo stared. “Born here?”
“There is some thought that my father was one of the convicts from the penitentiary at Sing Sing used for labor to build this place and that my mother was a housemaid,” explained the strange-looking man. “I was a foundling.” He smiled grimly. “Personally, I think my origins might have been a little more elevated.”
“I’m sorry?” said Echo, not understanding.
“He means that his mother may well have been one of the university housemaids but his father was more likely one of the professors or one of the students.” She grinned at Dunninger. “The other possibility, and more to the point, I think, is that a student was the father, and the mother was wife or daughter to one of the professors.”
“An anonymous trust was established for my upbringing and education,” said Dunninger. “The trust was in the care of a certain professor of law who was in turn the protégé of a certain wealthy family in the city, the name of which is writ large on Wall Street and elsewhere in the business of much larger trusts.” Dunninger cleared his throat. “Not that it matters. This building and the knowledge it contains have been mother and father enough for me.”
Echo had no idea what Dunninger was talking about, but Kate seemed to. “What has Kate told you of my problem?” she asked, changing the subject away from Dunninger’s supposed origins.
“Something to do with vampires, as I understand it.”
“You believe in their existence, then?” Echo asked, surprised.
“Vampires are a myth,” said the man without equivocation.
“Then how can you help me?”
Dunninger waved his hands around the room. “Once upon a time this was the meeting room of a secret society at the university called the Euclidians. Do you know who Euclid was?”
“A Greek mathematician and philosopher,” answered Echo promptly, feeling slightly patronized.
“Indeed,” nodded Dunninger, “but more importantly he was the man who first began to theorize in terms of logic. The society believed in the essential purity of logic as applied to all things in life, not just mathematics. I was one of the founding members. You might be surprised to know that Mr. Poe was as well. Here at the university, in fact, we were often known simply as the Ravens, in his honor.”
“What does this have to do with vampires?” Echo asked a little testily. “Especially when you say you don’t believe in them.”
“I said nothing of the sort, Miss Van Helsing. I merely said that the vampire was a myth.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“What is a myth?” Dunninger responded.
Echo shrugged. “A legendary narrative. Usually of heroes.”
“And generally a fact disguised as a fiction. A parable based on some element of truth, yes?”
“I suppose.”
“And magic?”
“What of it?”
“A truth or a lie? A fiction or a fact?”
“Neither. Both. Religion, I suppose,” answered Echo. Talking to the strange man was both irritating and exciting. She could almost see the seething mass of ideas exploding like flashes of brilliant lightning behind the death-mask face. He was hard to keep up with, but she’d had practice with her father.
“Religion indeed.” Dunninger smiled. “And when is religion mistaken for magic?” He replied rhetorically. “When it is misunderstood. To send a message along a wire, to kill a man at a distance from a bullet that moves too fast for the eye to see, to catch lightning in a bottle like the venerable Mr. Franklin. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for less than that. Galileo was branded a heretic and imprisoned for stating the obvious. For myth mistaken for magic, mistaken for fiction, mistaken for simple, foolish fear. The passage of time renders most magic or heresy no more than commonplace information.”
“Do you believe in vampires?”
“I believe in their possibility,” said Dunninger, “since I believe that all things are possible. I believe in the simple logic of their existence. Kate tells me that something like the mythological creature from the old tales is here in New York. Who am I to dispute her word? All is evidence, all is logic. Give me the facts and not the mythology, and we’ll find your fiend.”
“How?”
“Who has he killed, where has he killed and how often?”
“Prostitutes, beggars, down-and-outs. Two flower sellers, a snatcher, an in-and-out playing the sweep game, a boatman, a sally boy and last night a prizefighter. Mostly in the Fourth Ward. At least one that we know of, a prostitute found in a coal tip a few days ago, had her mouth sewn shut with a professional embalmer’s stitch. In all, thirteen identical killings since Christmas.” Echo glanced at Kate. She hadn’t known there had been so many.
“Identical how?”
“Puncture wounds in the carotid artery,” said Echo. “Disguised by tearing of the throat.”
“Tearing?”
“Savage,” said Kate Warne, a sour look on her face. “Like an animal. According to Dr. Sanger at Bellevue Hospital, there was a great deal of blood loss, but not from the major throat wound. The blood had been siphoned away earlier.”
“Before?”
“Yes. He said that if he didn’t know better he’d have thought the victims had been drained with an embalmer’s cannula.”
“Could that have happened?”
“Highly unlikely,” answered Kate. “From what I understand, that sort of thing takes a great deal of time and equipment.”
“Or a vampire’s fangs,” said Echo firmly. “It was my father’s opinion that the Vampyr’s eyeteeth are created much like those of a serpent.”
“A hinged jaw and hollow fangs for the injection of venom?”
“Yes,” said Echo. “It was also my father’s opinion from his research that the Vampyr was capable of injecting some sort of laudanum-like secretion that calms the victim before the blood is drained.”
“You seem to infer some vampire in particular,” said Dunninger slowly, glancing at Kate Warne, who shrugged.
“I am,” said Echo. “His name is Count Vladislaw Draculiya, supposedly a Prince of Walachia.”
“You think he is in New York?”
“I know it. I followed him here after the death of my friend and of my father.”
“Kate?”
“Echo’s father was a scientist. A vampire hunter, by all reports. And well known. He was murdered in London under mysterious circumstances. If Draculiya is a vampire, he is one of many.”
“They would seem to be a breed of singular method and habit,” said Dunninger. He smiled pleasantly and leaned back in his chair. He took out a small clay pipe and a box of Barber Diamonds, then lit up, puffing clouds of smoke toward the candelabra over their heads and staring at the ceiling as though for inspiration.
“He must be found, and soon, before there are any more tragedies like the death of my father,” said Echo.
“Not to mention thirteen others,” murmured Dunninger. “We mustn’t forget them.”
“But how do we find him?”
“Begin at the end and work our way back to the start, I should think,” said Dunninger.
“Bit over my head,” said Kate. “You’ll have to explain.”
“Logic, Katie, my dear. We use simple logic.” The thin man with the skull-like face sat forward in his chair again, the pale blue eyes flashing with a mixture of madness and excitement. “Simple logic and the friends of Euclid. What could be better than that?”
There was a croaking screech from the raven sitting high above them.
“Nevermore!” said the dreadful bird.