The old Chris-Craft didn’t look old at all as it cruised slowly through the heavy fog, the man who called himself Enoch Bale seated at the polished wooden wheel. He piloted the boat carefully, listening for echoes. Every few minutes an island would appear out of the thick mist like a dark ship, tall pines like naked masts stripped of their sails, standing like ghosts in a dead-calm sea. Some of the islands had names and Enoch Bale told them to Carrie, his voice calm and formally polite: Atlantis, Twilight, the Rock, Toothpick Manzanita and Eagle Wing.
There was a long period after that where the water was empty and Carrie felt as though she’d been carried to the end of the world, but finally she saw the spires and battlements of a castle rising through the edge of the fog, and off to one side, the glow of a small blinking channel light.
As they came closer, the island resolved itself out of the foggy curtain. It was no more than a hundred yards long, bare rock at one end dropping steeply down to the still water, the other end crowned with old blasted pines, ravaged by winds and storms, bent and almost bare with age, but living still. In the center of the island, high on a bare stony bluff, was the castle.
It was something out of Stevenson or Poe and certainly not of the world Carrie knew. It was enormous, a high square of quarried stone with spired bailey towers at each corner. At the front of the castle was an outer barbican complete with drawbridge, the crenellated curtain walls notched for archers on the fire-step parapets, the windows nothing more than narrow slits. There was a small, square wooden dock and a zigzagging set of stone steps that led up to the castle gate.
The fog twisted around the castle in ragged skeins, but even from the water it was clear that the place was in a terrible state of disrepair. The conical roof of one of the bailey towers was a shattered ruin, the leading of the roof gone, stone tiles shattered and broken, the huge oak beams exposed like a rotting skeleton. Large sections of the barbican had crumbled and the iron portcullis stood half raised, its rusted bars like broken teeth. Someone had used a can of white paint and scrawled IVY RIDGE ’89 in three-foot-high letters on the barbican tower. It was a bleak place. Old. Forgotten. Worn.
Enoch Bale the Vampyr throttled back the engine, then switched it off. They glided the last few hundred feet in silence. When they bumped into the rope fenders, the Vampyr stepped out, grabbed the forward line and tied them off. Once again he extended his hand to Carrie and once again she took it.
“You live here?” Carrie asked.
“When it suits me,” he answered, then smiled. “Perhaps it reminds me of home.”
Carrie realized that she was still holding the Vampyr’s hand and dropped it. She wrapped her arms around herself. The air was oddly warm for such a fog, but she’d felt a sudden chill run up her spine and she shivered. She looked up at the castle. For a second she thought that the front tower had repaired itself and that lights were shining from the slit windows in the curtain wall. She heard laughter and the babbling hum of conversation. A woman dressed in a medieval gown with a tall conical headpiece appeared beneath the portcullis, a man in a knight’s jupon standing beside her. Both of them had champagne glasses in their hands. They faded in the fog, and then were gone. The castle was in ruins once again. She blinked and felt the grating vertigo snatching at her again. She swallowed bile behind gritted teeth.
“George Wolf used to give costume parties in the castle’s heyday,” said the Vampyr, watching her. “They were very popular with the summer gentry. Billy Murray sang at one of them.” She heard a high, crooning voice coming faintly from somewhere high up the bluff, echoing inside the castle walls:
I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Yankee Doodle do or die.
A real live nephew of my uncle Sam,
Born on the Fourth of July.
I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart,
She’s my Yankee Doodle joy.
Yankee doodle came to London,
Just to ride the ponies.
Say, I am a Yankee Doodle Boy.
The song faded slowly, like smoke. Carrie shivered again and gathered her arms more tightly around her. “I’m going to die here, aren’t I?” she said, her future suddenly as clear as glass.
The Vampyr answered with a wistful smile. “Death, like life,” he said, “is only a state of mind.” He reached out and touched her cheek softly, then took her by the hand. “Come,” he said, and she went with him to the stone steps and began the climb up to the ruined castle.
Carrie and the Vampyr, Enoch Bale, climbed up the long stone stairway that led up from the floating dock at the water’s edge, eventually reaching the short path that led up to the barbican. They paused there for a moment, and through the wisps of clinging fog Carrie saw that the rusted portcullis was flanked on either side by two great stone dragons, tails twisted, each with three enormous leering heads, eyes bulging, curved fangs holding back great stone tongues.
“The one on the left is Zmey Gorynych, supposedly killed by my ancestors; the other is his brother, Tugarin, who escaped. To kill them you must cut off all three heads or they will grow back again.”
“This is all crazy,” whispered Carrie, staring at the great granite beasts.
“I can’t dispute that,” said the Vampyr. He strode beneath the rusted, half-open portcullis and Carrie followed.
Once through the dark portal, Carrie found herself in the castle courtyard. She could see the sliver of a crescent moon through the scudding clouds overhead. The courtyard was empty except for a single tree, a huge oak, half as high as the castle walls surrounding it. The tree was dead, struck by lightning long ago, its great trunk split into three clawing spikes like the heads of the dragons guarding the gate. Below the ruins of the tree there were the remains of an old well, its circular wall crumbled.
From where she stood, Carrie could see just how much the castle had decayed. Sections of wall had tumbled down, piles of stone spreading out to reveal the ruined interior of rooms. Stone stairways led nowhere, the far bailey towers were open to the elements and most of the flagstones in the courtyard were cracked or broken, weeds and grass growing up through the spaces in between. There was no music here, no singing and no costumed guests. All of that had clearly been her imagination. This was dry dust, one past trying to emulate a more distant one, all of it for nothing, all of it gone the way of all things.
She turned to the so-called Vampyr, ready to tell him she’d had enough and that whatever drug he’d given her was wearing off.
“This is all bullsh—”
“They’re very near,” the Vampyr said. “We must be careful, now.” They stood in what had once been the castle’s great hall. Faint moonlight slipped in through the narrow, deep-set windows. No fire burned in the massive hearth; there were only ashes. A thick coating of dust shrouded all the furniture, cobwebs stretching from the huge hanging iron chandeliers in ragged strands that stretched down to the table far below. The stuffed severed heads of a score of animals stared blankly across the room at one another, their glass eyes glazed by time. Wolf’s gruesome hunting lodge menagerie.
The Vampyr reached beneath the great stone mantel of the fireplace. He drew out a massive gleaming sword, the same sword he’d carried into the tenement only a few moments before. With the sword there was a smaller weapon, a dagger with its blade encased in a shining silver scabbard. “Is all this a dream?” Carrie asked.
“No,” answered the Vampyr. He handed her the dagger. “It’s real enough.”
“Why have you given me this?” she asked, sliding the blade partway from its sheath. The hilt was heavily carved and silver; the blade was shining black. Obsidian. Volcanic glass created in some ancient fire, its edges so sharp that scalpels made from it were used in modern cardiac surgery.
“No Vampyr can kill another. The death blow must come from someone with a human heart.”
“You expect me to—”
“They’re here,” said the Vampyr, and suddenly they were everywhere.
They had come in through the windows and down the chimney of the great hearth in the hall like a horde of insects or like bats and ravens with black beating wings. Somehow they had been beaten back, and Carrie and the Vampyr managed to climb up the stone stairs to the roofless upper bailey, then out onto the fire step. Looking over the castle wall, Carrie had seen that the ground below was a moving, slithering wave of them, slipping out of the water, their ancient uniforms dripping, faces gaunt, eyes bright, bones showing through torn cloth, black blood oozing from timeless wounds.
“Sweet Jesus!” Carrie said softly. “What are they?”
“The unbelieving dead. Damphyr, come to help their master,” the Vampyr answered.
Carrie stared. “Not you?”
“No,” said the Vampyr, shaking his head. He pointed along the parapet. Overhead there was a sudden streak of lightning, and thunder crashed. “Him.” She turned and stared at the terrible apparition that stood before them. “Adamo,” the Vampyr said. “You’ve come at last.”
“Welcome.”
The lightning cracked enormously once again, filling the air with sudden ozone and raising the hairs on Carrie’s neck. Below them the already shriven oak burst into flames as lightning struck it for the second time in almost a hundred years. The old branches began to blaze like wooden bones.
“Draculiya,” said a voice. “You’ve brought my old sword again.” He glanced at Carrie. “And another damsel.”
He wore an expensive tailcoat and a top hat. He had a ginger beard and carried a silver-headed ebony stick, every inch the London gentleman of the late nineteenth century. His face was fuller, the weak chin covered by the beard. He looked for all the world like someone out of a BBC version of Sherlock Holmes.
“Adam Worth,” said Carrie, suddenly making the connection.
“The very same,” said the man with a horrible smile. The jaw unhinged, and he leered at her with a gaping, bloody-mouthed grin. He turned to Enoch Bale, who stood with the sword upraised. “She looks familiar to me.”
“Well she might,” said the Vampyr. He took a step forward. Worth stepped back, taking him very near the edge of the fire step.
“A long way down for some,” he said.
“It’s over, Adamo.”
“That old song.” The mouth dripped. “My old sword.”
“No more of your horrors. You’ve done enough harm.”
“Don’t be silly,” the drooling horror said. “I’ve only just begun.” The laugh grew into a screaming crow of triumph. “This is my hour!”
“This is your end.”
When it came, it came without warning and without fanfare, ten thousand years of dead, dreamless life erased in a single slashing instant.
The creature turned away from both of them and trod one more step, taking him to the very edge of the parapet. Twenty feet down was the ruined end of a stone stairway. Carrie watched as he crouched, gathering himself for the leap. He straightened, arms held out before him, but he was a single heartbeat late. With two steps the Vampyr reached him and so did Carrie. The huge sword swept around, lopping off the creature’s head in a single spurting stroke as Carrie plunged the obsidian dagger between the other Vampyr’s shoulders.
The screaming demon head of Adam Worth spun out into the abyss and the body plunged downward, impaling itself on the broken fiery limb of the burning oak tree like a butcher bird’s prey upon a thorn. The head struck the cobblestones in the courtyard, the skull splitting open with a rotten, bursting sound. Something black spilled out like sand or ash and then whirled away and vanished.
The Vampyr stared down into the courtyard, watching as the flaming tree consumed the terrible burden of Worth’s decapitated corpse. A foul stench rose in a noxious cloud and was swept away on the breeze. After a moment the Vampyr turned away, went to the parapet and took the sword by the pommel. Swinging it around his head in a huge arc, he let it go, flinging into the air in a long, high curve. It straightened as it fell, slicing through the thinning fog, striking the dark water without a ripple and disappearing. He turned back to Carrie.
“Is it done?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” said the Vampyr. He inclined his chin and for the first time Carrie saw that she was still clutching the obsidian dagger, the black blade thick with something foul-smelling and glutinous. She lifted the blade slightly in her hand.
The Vampire smiled at her, wistfully again. “There are worse things,” he said quietly.
“Worse than dying?”
“Worse than living forever. Alone. Worse than the terrible sleep that slows my life to a standstill yet speeds me to dreamless eternity.”
She held the blade toward his chest. She knew that she could kill him now, this creature from the same past as the thing burning to ashes in the flaming tree, but something held her hand at bay. “You could stop me. You know that. You could do it easily.”
“I would not,” he answered simply.
“What happened in the tenement?”
“Worth had crucified young Matthew, fed on him. Adamo managed to escape. We saved Matthew, at least for a time. Though eventually Echo had to…end his life for the sake of whatever remained of his poor soul.”
“How did Barnabus Coffin die?”
“He came to Minetta Street, searching for Kate. Adamo must have been hiding in the sewer there until he was sure we were gone for good. He would have been hungry by then. He would have needed to feed.”
“The murders now?”
“Adamo returned. He liked nothing better than provoking his Damphyr minions. He corrupted the man Trusell, offered him eternal life, offered Lincoln the power he craved. I came back to stop him.”
“And your fate? You haven’t spoken about what happened to you.”
“I found Fu Sheng. The sleeping death came over me as it always does eventually. Fu Sheng kept it at bay with his medicines until a place was found for me to rest. The very crypt we had stayed in at the old cathedral, as a matter of fact. When I woke again, I left New York, I thought forever.”
“Echo?” Carrie asked. “She lost her father, her brother, even you.”
“After Matthew died she left New York and went with Kate back to Chicago for a time, but the memories they shared were too painful for her. After leaving Kate Warne, Echo never spoke of what happened again. She married and settled in a little place called Hazel Dell, Illinois.”
“My great-great-grandfather came from Hazel Dell, Illinois.” Suddenly she saw. “Are you trying to tell me…?”
“That you are Echo Van Helsing’s direct descendant? Yes.”
Carrie stepped forward, the dagger raised. She moved until she was standing no more than a foot away, the black blade almost on the Vampyr’s heart. Her own heart thundered and she could feel the heavy pulse beating in her throat. She thought of the boy Matthew on his horrible cross, remembered the clotted blood and the punctures in his neck. Thought of Echo, alone.
“Is it always like that?” she asked, taking a half step closer. So close she could almost hear the ponderous, powerful beating of the pale creature’s heart and knew that he could hear her own.
“No,” he said. “It can be very gentle. Peaceful, in fact.”
She saw him on a raft in the cold waters off Cape Race, a dying Irish boy in his arms. She turned aside and walked to the edge of the parapet. She threw the dagger as hard as she could and didn’t even wait to see it fall. She turned back to the Vampyr. Raised her head, bared her neck without any hesitation.
“Show me,” she said.
“There can be no turning back.”
“I want to know. Past, present and future.”
“As you wish,” he said. He put his hand behind her neck and brought her gently forward, the set of his jaw changing fractionally, the long, steel-hard fangs descending.
“Make me see!” Carrie whispered, and closed her eyes.
Later they rested on the crumbling stones of the abandoned castle and watched the pink early light of dawn come up in the east.
“I want to know it all,” said Carrie, sharing the eternity of time and sadness that now joined them. “I want to know everything.”
“Listen, then,” said the Vampyr. “Listen while I tell you a story.”