an enormous mug of black coffee that he had stopped to collect from the officers’ mess as they made their way up through the base. Jamie had poured a plastic cup of water from the dispenser in the corner of the office and was looking expectantly at the monster.
Frankenstein tipped the coffee to his lips, eyeing the teenager over the rim of the mug. Eventually, he spoke.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you, so if you’ve got questions just ask them.”
“OK,” replied Jamie, settling himself into his chair. “When did you first meet my dad?”
Frankenstein tilted his head, stared at the ceiling, and cast his mind back.
“I met him the day he joined us,” he said, eventually, “1979, that was. We knew he was coming-the birthdays of descendants always get around. It’s a big moment. You’ve seen how seriously Blacklight takes its history; a new descendant is that history, in the flesh. And Julian was something special, we knew that before he even arrived.”
“What was special about him?” asked Jamie. He had leaned forward onto his elbows as the monster talked.
“He was famous, inside the military and out. When he passed his Admiralty Interview Board-”
“What’s that?” interrupted Jamie.
“It’s what you have to pass if you’re going to be an officer in the Marines.”
“Hold on. The Marines? As in, the Royal Marines?”
Frankenstein sighed. “Yes, Jamie, the Royal Marines. Your father scored off the scale at the Interview Board, and word got around the military about it. Then he broke three Commando-course records, and people started to really pay attention to him. And by then, he was playing rugby for England, so he was already-”
“He was doing what?” exclaimed Jamie.
“This will be much easier,” said Frankenstein, leveling his eyes with the teenager’s, “if you don’t interrupt me every thirty seconds.”
“Sorry,” said Jamie.
“It’s all right. Julian was a top-class rugby player. He played for England schools, for the under-eighteens, then broke through into the full national team when he was nineteen, his first full year in the Marines. He was capped seven or eight times.”
“Why only seven or eight?”
“He stopped playing when he joined Blacklight. But when he turned up here on his twenty-first birthday, he was already well-known. There was no Internet in those days, but his name had been in the papers, and everyone was excited to meet him. He arrived with your grandfather John, and he was met by Peter Seward, who was the director at the time. I’ve never seen those old men so proud, so excited about a new recruit.”
Frankenstein looked at Jamie, a pained smile on his face.
“Tell me,” said Jamie, quietly. “Don’t stop now.”
“It was an incredible time,” Frankenstein said after a pause and a deep gulp of coffee. “Quincey Harker had stepped down as director a decade earlier, and Peter Seward had taken over. He didn’t really want the job, but he was Quincey’s closest friend, and when Harker retired to look after his wife, Seward saw it as his duty to carry on his friend’s work. And he did a good job of it, a damn good job, even though he would never believe it. He oversaw the changing of the guard, from the generation that dragged Blacklight up after World War II, to the new generation who would take it forward again.” He smiled, a genuine smile full of nostalgia.
“Legends walked these corridors: Albert and Arthur Holmwood; David Harker, who was Quincey’s oldest son; Ben Seward, who was the director’s son; Leandro Gonzalez; David Morris, your friend Tom’s grandfather; and your own grandfather, of course. John Carpenter was Peter Seward’s closest friend in the Department after Quincey left; they retired at the same time, in 1982, convinced that Blacklight was in safe hands.”
“Was it?” asked Jamie. His eyes were wide as he listened to the monster’s story.
“For a while,” said Frankenstein. “When your father joined, a new generation were starting to come into their own, centered around Stephen Holmwood, who was Arthur Holmwood’s son. He was a truly brilliant man, a once-in-a-generation intellect: He spoke six languages by the time he was fifteen, he played cricket and hockey for England schoolboys, and was a Cambridge blue. He didn’t join Blacklight when he was twenty-one, which caused an enormous scandal. His father begged him, but he was determined to finish at the university, which he did. Then he won a Rhodes scholarship to Harvard and went to America for a year. He came home in 1965 and joined Department 19 when he was twenty-three.”
Frankenstein looked at Jamie. “Stephen could have done anything he wanted. He could have been prime minister. But he chose Blacklight.”
Jamie’s head was pounding; he felt as though he had been holding his breath since the monster had started talking. He breathed out, took new air into his lungs, sipped his water, and trained his attention back on Frankenstein.
“So there was Stephen and his brother Jeremy and their cousin Jacob Scott, whom you met yesterday. Ben Seward was still around, and his son Henry, who’s the director now, joined a few years after your father. George Harker was there, and Paul Turner, who married Henry Seward’s sister, and Daniel Morris, Tom’s father. And Julian, of course. These men were the future of Blacklight, with Stephen Holmwood in the middle. They rose quickly through the ranks, transforming the Department as they did so. When Peter Seward stepped down in 1982, Stephen was the unanimous choice to replace him as director. And then things really started to happen.”
Frankenstein drained the last of his coffee and set the mug down on the table. “Everything you see around you, this base and everything in it, is the result of Stephen Holmwood’s tenure as director. He petitioned the government to increase Blacklight’s budget, and he sank the new funds into this place. He sent your father on a fact-finding mission to America in 1984 to visit NS9, which is their equivalent of Department
19. He was gone for ten weeks, and he returned home with a report that was the blueprint for the Loop. We expanded, taking the best men from all three branches of the military, widening our sphere of operations, hunting across Europe and beyond, running missions in Africa and Asia for the first time since the war. Stephen worked with the Departments of other countries, sharing data and resources, sending men on exchanges to every corner of the world, organizing and establishing areas of responsibility, so the entire globe came under the jurisdiction of the various organizations.” He grinned, wickedly.
“The vampires were decimated,” he continued. “They had come to believe that if they kept their heads down, they would be safe. But that was no longer true. We pursued them, chasing them from town to town, from country to country even, and we destroyed them, one after the other. There was nowhere for them to hide.” He stopped talking and looked down at the surface of the table.
“What happened?” asked Jamie.
Frankenstein raised his head and looked at him, and Jamie was alarmed to see that the monster’s misshapen eyes were damp with tears. “Stephen died,” he said, simply. “He had a heart attack in 1989. No warning. He just died, at his desk in his quarters.”
“That’s horrible,” said Jamie, in a low voice.
“It was,” said Frankenstein. “It devastated the Department. No one knew what to do; Stephen had been the heart of everything, and suddenly he was gone. There was no director, and the people who were best able to step up and keep us going were the people who were most shattered by his death. So when Daniel Morris put himself forward, everyone was so grateful that they said yes before they’d even really thought about it.”
“Tom told me his father was director,” said Jamie, remembering the conversation in the Fallen Gallery. “He said it wasn’t for very long though.”
“Too long,” spit Frankenstein, and Jamie recoiled. “Dan Morris wasn’t a bad man,” he continued, after a pause. “Far from it, really. He was impulsive, and he was aggressive, and that made him a great operator, but a terrible director. It was difficult for him, to take over in the circumstances he did. It would have been difficult for anyone; Stephen cast such a long shadow. But that doesn’t excuse the risks he took, and the people who got hurt.”
Frankenstein got up from the table and poured himself water from the dispenser. He sat back down heavily in front of Jamie. “We should have seen it coming; I should have seen it coming. But it took a long time for Blacklight to recover after Stephen died, and so for at least a year, no one was paying much attention to what Dan was doing. A night mission here, an overseas operation without proper clearance there. Small things, at least to
