It was still raining the next day as Carrie climbed out of the taxi at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street. She paid the driver, climbed out of the cab, popped her ARCHAEOLOGISTS: THE COWGIRLS OF SCIENCE telescoping umbrella and crossed at the lights. She climbed the wide set of steps up to the neogothic facade of the block-long Metropolitan Museum of Art and went through the doors into the immense vaulted lobby.
Her wet sneakers squeaked as she crossed the marble floor and checked her umbrella. It was late and the museum was already emptying out. Carrie flashed her pass at the cashier, crossed the immense echoing hall to the main corridor and turned to the right. She went through the whole medieval wing without a glance at the stupendous array of paintings and artifacts, finally emerging into the glass-walled, glass-ceilinged Sackler Wing at the far northern end of the museum.
There was an array of stunning Egyptian sculpture on her right but the real point of interest in the glittering, ultramodern hall was the Temple of Dendur, a gift to the United States from Egypt for their help in rescuing artifacts during the construction of the Aswan Dam and the eventual flooding of the Nubian Plain.
The temple as it stood in the museum was in two parts, a high rectangular gateway that was once surrounded by a mud brick wall, and the entrance to the temple itself, a long, truncated rectangle fronted by two huge pillars. At one time the temple had been built into the side of a hill overlooking the Nile, the river now represented by a long reflecting pool in front of the granite stage that covered half of the Sackler Wing’s football-field-sized floor. There were lights set into the glass ceiling, but at this time of day the temple was lit with natural light flooding in through the enormous slanted window that filled the entire north wall of the building. Outside, even in the pouring rain, a group of kids were playing touch football on the grass field outside the wall while a stream of cars plugged the length of the Eighty-fifth Street extension across Central Park.
The sound of the rain on the huge window was a pleasant thumping drone that was somehow comforting inside the big, austere room with its ancient temple. Suddenly Kate found herself thinking of the sound of the rain on the roof of the old lady’s house above the old cemetery, and not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours she wondered whether she’d been foolish for coming to the Met alone. She had argued her point about the temple being a public place to Slattery, but the truth of it was that a quick scan showed there were no more than half a dozen people in a room the size of the main concourse at Grand Central, and most of them seemed to be wandering toward the exit.
“Crap,” she said softly. She wasn’t a cop, she didn’t have a gun and what use would a gun be anyway if she was actually meeting a vampire. Even if that wasn’t likely, the person she was meeting believed he was a vampire and that was even worse. “Crap,” she muttered again.
“Hardly that,” said a tall man who’d suddenly appeared beside her. “The Egyptians might have given your country something a little more interesting, like the temple of Horus of Miam at Aniba or the Temple of Amun at Wadi es-Sebuam, but one shouldn’t complain.”
Carrie turned, her heart beating like a trip-hammer in her chest. The man standing beside her at the reflecting pool was at least six foot three and was dressed from head to toe in perfectly tailored black. Hugo Boss or Armani.
“Brooks Brothers,” the man said, apparently reading her mind. “I’ve shopped there since my first visit to New York.” He had an accent she couldn’t quite place, something soft and foreign, barely there at all. She stared at him.
His skin was pale, his nose long and aquiline, his cheeks a little hollow, his chin square. His hair was long, falling to his shoulders and as black as ink. His eyes, the lids a pale taupe, were an extraordinary shade of green.
“It’s you,” whispered Carrie. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
“That would depend on who I’m supposed to be,” he said calmly.
“If you’ve shopped at Brooks Brothers since your first visit to New York, when would that first visit have taken place?”
“Late spring, 1863,” the man responded. “I was actually heading for Montreal but there was a little problem off Cape Race and I wound up here instead.”
“You don’t look a hundred and forty-five years old,” said Carrie. For a man who thought he was a vampire, he didn’t look crazy at all.
“I age well,” said the man, his smile gentle. “People tell me it’s in the blood.”
“You really expect me to believe that?” Carrie said. The man’s stare was incredibly powerful. She looked away for a moment. Horribly, it seemed that they were now alone in the enormous temple complex. She looked in the other direction. The football players were gone and so was most of the traffic she’d seen passing; it was down to a trickle. It seemed darker too. She looked down at her watch. It was after seven. She been here for more than two hours and she didn’t remember anything. It was impossible, but it was fact.
“Now do you believe it?” said the man in black.
“I’ll scream,” said Carrie. She took a step back.
“No one would hear if you did,” said the man. “And there’s no reason for you to do so anyway. I mean you no harm, believe me.”
“This is crazy! The museum’s closed!”
“I have an arrangement with the guards,” he said. “I come and go as I please.”
“This can’t be happening,” said Carrie, the pounding of her heart making her breath come in short little gasps. It was hysteria, mass hypnosis, some kind of poison gas. It was David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear. It couldn’t be true.
“It is,” said the man. “Watch.” He reached out and let his fingers gently brush her hand. Suddenly they were standing on the granite slab beyond the pool, the temple close enough to reach out and touch. They’d traveled across the entire huge room in the blink of an eye.
“How…?”
“Time is elastic,” said the man softly. “It can be folded and stretched, walked through like a picture gallery, seen through a glass. Elastic but unchangeable. A force, like gravity.” He reached out again, took her palm between his thumb and forefinger, gently pressing it into the warm stone of the temple’s slightly sloping side. “Feel,” he said. “This place stood by the Nile for two millennia. Look out. There is the museum wall, but once it was a broad river under a burning sun. A man stood here with a dressing adze and smoothed the stone, and another came after him with a stone-etching chisel and carved this row of papyrus stalks, and a thousand years later one of Napoleon’s men carved his initials and the date A.S. JUILLET 14 IEME, 1798. Two hundred years after that the temple sits in a glass box in Central Park while the rain pours overhead. In its first two thousand years I doubt these stones knew rain more than once or twice, and now they regularly witness snow. Imagine it.”
“Who was A.S.?” Carrie asked. “You sound as though you knew him.”
“I knew him. I know him still. In those days he called himself Adamo Selva. He was, among other things, Napoleon’s astrologer.”
“You know your history—that’s for sure,” said Carrie, her heart slowing as she began to believe the man beside her, dressed all in black.
“I am history,” he answered. “One of Nine, almost the last of my kind.”
“So I’m supposed to believe that you’re Bram Stoker’s Dracula?”
“Draculiya,” he corrected. “And Bram Stoker never knew me, nor I him, though I saw the play once on Broadway in 1924 with Lugosi playing me. He was far more frightening than I was.”
“You know how insane this sounds?”
“Of course,” the dark man answered. “It’s the twenty-first century; no one believes in vampires anymore.” He touched her hand again, a single finger stroking the ball of her thumb, the sensation feather light, and suddenly the temple was gone entirely. Her eyes opened and she found herself surrounded by rich black leather in the rear seat of a limousine, the dark man at her side. She turned and looked out the window. There was nothing to see but darkness. No lights. They weren’t in Manhattan any longer. Ahead of her was a rosewood bar and beyond that the opaque black glass barrier dividing the driver’s compartment from the rear.
“Where are you taking me?” said Carrie. Oddly she felt not even a hint of fear, almost as though she’d been drugged. What was happening to her could not be happening to her, but it was and somehow that was all right. The dark man turned to her, the green eyes cool.
“Your friends followed you to the museum. They were shadowing you, no doubt to ensure no harm came to you. I decided we were better off without them.”
“Max? Diddy?” Carrie asked sleepily. The dark man’s voice flowed over her like soothing water.
“That’s right.”
“You didn’t say where we were going.”
“Home,” said Draculiya. “We’re going home.”
“Where’s that?” Carrie murmured sleepily.
“Dracula’s castle—where else?”