his eyes a deep red flecked with black and silver, his face splashed with Jenny Pembry’s blood, two long fangs standing out from his mouth.
The valet felt himself lifted from his feet, and then he was in motion, soaring through the air into the cavern. He saw his master lying below him, blood pooling beneath his head, and had time to regard the onrushing stone wall with something approaching dispassion.
I’m going to hit that, he had time to think.
And then he did.
Stoker lay among the crumbled stone of the wall. His back was in agony where he had fallen across the section of the wall that had remained standing, and his nose and mouth were thick with foul-tasting dust. He felt hands reach through the hole in the wall and grasp the lapels of his tunic and breathed a sigh of relief as he was pulled forward into the passage. Then the dust cleared, and he found himself looking into the smiling, inhuman face of Harold Norris, and he threw back his head and screamed.
“Quiet your screeching, you drunken wretch,” hissed the conductor. Stoker was horrified to hear that this monster spoke in the same gentle voice that Norris had used night after night to conduct his players. “If I tear the tongue from your head, you will wish you had done as I say.”
Stoker forced himself to stop screaming, clenching his teeth together, even though the face inches from his own made him feel as though he were teetering on the edge of madness. He forced himself to speak, to say something, anything that might see him escape the same fate that had befallen the others who had found themselves in this old place of dust and death.
“Harold… it’s me, Bram. Don’t hurt me, please. Please.”
The conductor laughed and opened his mouth to reply when his eyes suddenly snapped wide and a sharp wooden point emerged through the fabric of his dress shirt. Norris looked down for a fraction of a second before he exploded in a fountain of blood, spraying the night manager from head to toe and covering the cloak and hat of the valet who was standing where the conductor had been, his arm thrust forward, the hand at the end of it clutching a pointed wooden stake.
“What should be done with him?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It is possible he will not remember any of this.”
“Is that a chance we can afford to take?”
Van Helsing and the valet sat in a dark booth in the corner of the Lyceum Tavern, deep glasses of brandy on the table before them. The valet had supported Stoker and dragged him back through the tunnels and out into the orchestra pit, while Van Helsing did the same with Jenny Pembry. The valet had collapsed the passage before climbing the ladder out of the ground for the final time.
It had been slow going. Van Helsing had received a deep cut to his head when he collided with the altar stone, and he needed to stop twice to rest on the journey back to the surface. Thankfully, the chorus girl was mercifully light, and although she seemed almost catatonic, she had been capable of putting one foot in front of the other.
They had put her in a carriage and instructed the driver to deliver her to the house of a physician friend of the professor’s, with a note Van Helsing had scrawled on the back of a discarded program for the evening’s performance of The Tempest.
The night manager had mumbled and muttered to himself as they hauled him back through the stone corridors and was now sitting between them on a red leather bench, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling steadily as he slept.
“You realize what this means, boy?” asked Van Helsing.
“Yes, master. I do.”
“It means that Transylvania was not the end of this business.”
The valet said nothing.
“You played your part extremely well tonight,” Van Helsing continued. “Without you, this matter may have ended very differently.”
The valet watched as his master’s lined, weathered face broke into a rare smile.
“It is possible,” he continued, “that we may make more of you than just a valet, Carpenter.”
9
Frankenstein walked Jamie down a long gray corridor until they reached a white door with INFIRMARY stenciled on it in red letters. There was a rush of cold air as the giant man pushed it open and led Jamie inside.
Rows of empty beds ran down one side of the spotlessly clean room. Lying unconscious on one of them was the man who had been carried from the helicopter. The wound in his arm gaped horribly wide, and his face was ghostly pale. A steady stream of blood ran down a plastic tube from a hanging bag and disappeared into his uninjured arm.
At the far end, three frosted-glass doors were set into the wall, marked X-RAY, CT SCANNING, and THEATER. Through the one marked THEATER Jamie could see a frenzy of movement and hear raised voices and a steady mechanical beeping. There was a figure lying on a table, surrounded by white shapes and blocky rectangles of machinery. As he watched, a spray of blood, bright, garish red, splashed against the glass of the door, and Jamie’s stomach turned.
Then the door marked X-RAY was flung open, and a middle-aged man in a white coat hurried toward them, his face red and flustered. When he reached them, he stopped, took a PDA from his pocket and poised the stylus over it.
“Name?” he asked.
Jamie looked up at Frankenstein, who nodded.
“Jamie Carpenter,” he replied.
Surprise flashed across the doctor’s face, and Jamie wondered absently why his name seemed to provoke a startled reaction in everyone who heard it.
But it was a question for another time. He was so tired he could hardly see straight, his legs felt like they were made of wet clay, and it had taken an enormous effort to simply say his own name correctly.
“What are your symptoms?”
Jamie opened his mouth but could shape no further words. He looked helplessly up at Frankenstein, who took over.
“He is suffering from post-traumatic shock, his throat is severely bruised from attempted strangulation, and he is physically and mentally exhausted. He needs to rest. Immediately.”
The doctor nodded at this and, with surprising gentleness, took Jamie’s arm and led him to the nearest bed. Jamie sat on the starched white sheet, staring up at Frankenstein, dimly aware that he was complying with the doctor’s requests to open his eyes for examination, to follow a finger from left to right, to breathe in, hold it, and breathe out as the cold metal of the stethoscope was placed on his chest. The doctor examined his neck, where purple bruising was starting to rise in ugly, violent ridges, then placed a needle in his arm, attached a saline drip, and asked Frankenstein for a word in private. The two men walked quickly over to the door and began to converse in rapid whispers, Frankenstein casting his eyes over at Jamie every few seconds.
Jamie stared at him, his sluggish mind trying to frame the questions he wanted to ask the huge man. He found he was unable to do so; the words ran away from him like sand through his fingers. When the two men finished their conversation and made their way back toward him, he was only able to manage two.
“What happened?”
Frankenstein sat down on the bed next to him. Jamie heard the steel of the frame creak and felt himself slide an inch toward the monster as his huge weight tilted the bed. The doctor was attaching a second bag to the IV drip as Frankenstein spoke to him.
“Now is not the time for explanations,” he said. “You need to rest, and there are things I need to do. I will
