The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  “A vampire. What else could he be?” Call shrugged, as though it was the most obvious of obvious facts.

  She shook her head. “We had no idea what the word meant. We had never heard it before. He told us that his given name was Paulus Antoninus Drusus, and that he had served as a centurion in the Ninth legion, the Legio Hispania, when he died…”

  “You did not know what a vampire is yet you just accepted he died and somehow was still living?” Something squirmed in the recesses of Call’s memory, in those filing cabinets filled with interesting, intriguing but essentially useless information that he kept in the endless rooms where he hardly ever went.

  “Paul could be very persuasive when he chose to be,” Roxane smiled, remembering again those happier, younger days. “If he said he died, then he died. That he was very obviously alive was just a minor problem. After all, if you are going to lie why choose something as outrageous and incredible as that. Of course it was impossible, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.”

  A bright light suddenly shone in those gloomy mental recesses. “The Legio Hispania, wasn’t that supposed to have marched north into Scotland, into Alba, and simply vanished?”

  She smiled. “The same. He told us that the legion marched north on a wild goose chase, believing they were marching into Alba, or Caledonia as they called it, populated by wild barbarian Picts who would be no match for their disciplined Roman steel, because barbarians never were - when, in fact, they were marching into a hell behind the mist that was populated by monsters beyond their wildest imagination. ‘We marched into the mist and never emerged’ was how he put it. ‘I alone returned to the world of light and human beings but I do not believe I ever left the darkness’. He would never tell us what happened there, just that he was ‘changed, changed from what I was into what I am now, what I always shall be’.”

  “Changed into a vampire.”

  She shook her head. “’Vampire’ was never a word Paul the Roman used. He simply told us he had been given the gift of life and he offered that gift to my brother.” She looked aside then, an unreadable expression flickering across her face, of bitter memory hundreds of years old, resentments unburied, enduring disappointment. “I had convinced myself he loved me, me, the coquette in a court of coquettes and cock teasers. You would have thought I should have known better than to believe my fantasies, having lived even as short a time as I had in Elizabeth’s court, where love and loyalty existed only in the passage of smoke before mirrors and everything and everyone was negotiable. Only when my brother insisted he would not join Paul in his unnatural state unless I was brought along on the journey did he put his teeth to his wrist and offer us both his transforming blood.”

  In his years as a vampire hunter and killer, Call had never had the change from human to vampire described to him. While he had never been any sort of a committedly religious man he knew enough of the varying beliefs and rituals of the faiths to comprehend how intensely, obscenely sacrilegious this must seem to any Christian.

  “Once the agony passed we were in paradise. We were young. We were wild. We were even more confused than when we had been alive. It was only a short while afterwards that father chose the losing side in a particularly absurd intrigue and went to the scaffold. Just to emphasize the lowliness of his birth, they did not even disembowel him first, just hanged him straight off. Without his money to protect us it would have been the fire for both of us, had they caught us, so we made a diplomatic retreat.”

  She described the next couple of centuries as being spent travelling around Europe, moving from place to place deliciously just ahead of suspicions and pitchforks, improving their powers and indulging themselves in the flowering of culture as only they could who did not need to concern themselves with the day to day exigencies of putting food on the table and a roof over their heads. Anything they needed they simply stole before vanishing into the night a step or so ahead of suspicion.

  “The longer we existed among human beings the more we enjoyed their society and the less we liked what we had to do to live on. Paul had not told us that we might come to love our food, if he ever knew. In fact, he told us precious little before we took to the high road. We had to make our own way. Fortunately for our sanity, we discovered that the longer we lived the less we needed blood to survive. Life was not without its longeurs or its excursions, but mostly it was more than tolerable. Then, in an instant, it became entirely intolerable and we had to depart.”

  “Oh. What happened?”

  She shook her head, eyes closed, as she remembered. “Stupidity, that is what happened. We decided we were bored to distraction and needed to create companions for ourselves who would comprehend and share our condition.”

  Call shivered as she fell silent, a cloud before the sun and not moving despite the boisterousness of the wind that drove the other clouds. Eventually she began to speak again.

  “You’ve seen the movie, the one where the impossibly old medieval knight tells the treasure hunter to ‘choose wisely’. We did not choose wisely. We made as unwise a choice as we could and it almost cost us everything. We chose a man and wife, a young doctor and his nurse, Bavarians from Munich. We took them to be as stable, dependable and content to exist as they appeared to be. We should have been better advised to choose a giggle of Italian convent girls. Johan and Margaretta were as stable as nitro glycerine, as dependable as… well, as Italian convent girls and as content to live quietly as a troupe of Cambodian lady boys. They would have put all of Paris to the flames had we not stopped them when we did, rather than just the quarter of Montmartre they razed. We put an end to them and fed their bodies to their own flames, and then left the city in such a hurry we had never known before, resolved never to be so self-indulgent in the future and to look only to each other to satisfy our need for blood. So, we returned to London and settled down to the quiet life we more or less enjoyed until Rasputin came to town.”

  She looked down on him and smiled, her story told. Call looked up at her for a while, trying to read her expression - nothing there because of her glasses. Her eyes, the mirror to her soul, reflected only his own features. He closed his eyes for what seemed like most of his lifetime.

  “Have you created any more vampires since you returned to London?” His voice was little more than a whisper that should have been drowned out even by the distant sound of the traffic and the noise of the breeze in the nearby trees.

  She laughed, although it was as bereft of joy and humour as a January wind down from the North Pole. “We might be slow learners, Robert Call, but when we do learn…” Her voice petered out as a realisation crept up on her. “Are you asking me to turn you?” she said, eventually, her voice just as quiet as his.

  That possibility had never occurred to him and was, at one and the same time, the most thrilling and appalling prospect he had ever heard.

  “Dear God, no!” he responded after a sufficient pause to tell her that what he really meant, but lacked the conviction to say was ‘Dear God, yes!’ Only if he did succumb to that hitherto unrealised temptation he knew that, sooner or later, he must come into conflict with the vampire hunter who would take his place, and that was Meghan. He could not possibly inflict that upon her. He might be a junk dad to her because of his calling, not even a weekend father to his children, but that wasn’t her fault. If he had to die to spare her that misery then he would, singing a joyful song.

  “Have no fear,” Roxane laughed. “I shall not force myself on you.” The desire to do exactly that was such she could hardly speak because of the yawning, boiling, needy void inside her. Getting to her feet, she reached down to take his hand. “Come on. We have work to do.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  They arrived at The Russia House just in time to see the velvet rope being removed from the doors and the first of the queue being allowed inside, or turned away as the case might be.

  The Hotel Dorset was on the side of the road opposite The Russia House, some twenty metres to the
west, and the room they took on the fourth floor overlooking the High Street gave them a perfect view of the comings and goings from the doors. The receptionist had not batted an eyelid at Roxane’s demands, any more than she remarked on their lack of luggage.

  The Dorset was well used to seemingly strange requests, and ‘discretion’ ran through its philosophy as immutably as ‘accept only cash or a very good credit card’. Dorset staff only noticed what they were invited to notice. Since The Russia House had opened, business had improved markedly, particularly among photojournalists wanting the previously unfashionable rooms on the High Street.

  “When do you intend to go in?” he wondered, sipping on an eye-wateringly pricey gin and tonic from the minibar. He was not paying the bill.

  “Before it gets dark,” she replied, standing at the window, peering between the vertical blinds down into the street. “Before any vampires get there.”

  Which seemed logical enough. He took another sip on his drink and contemplating telling Gordons and the local Consumer Affairs Department that the Dorset was padding its profits by watering its gin. He was surprised by how calm he felt. They were about to go – possibly literally – into the lion’s den and he felt no apprehension, hardly even any anticipation. He was confident Roxane would take care of everything.

  In which case, he thought, why was he there? She had no need of him. He’d done everything he had agreed to do. He had found her brother. He would be perfectly entitled to walk away now. He should walk away. There was no need for him to be there taking risks. He’d only get in the way.

  He knew that was not true. He was not going along with her because their next few hours were safe but because they would be dangerous, because she might have need of him. At this moment, that possibility of need was the essence to which his nearly forty years of life had been distilled, the requirement to put his life at risk because a centuries old vampire – incomparably more potent and knowledgeable than him – might possibly need his assistance to rescue an equally ancient vampire which he was almost duty bound to try to destroy.

  He knew he should be consumed by self-loathing, burned up by it from the inside out, but he wasn’t. He might tell himself that he was falling in love with the human being who was still hidden somewhere within her – he had told himself exactly that – but he knew that was casuistry. He wasn’t interested in the human being who had been Mary Rose Mercer. He was falling in love with the vampire Roxane. That was all there was to it.

  “Your names, Cyrano and Roxane, you said you weren’t born with them. Why did you adopt them?”

  She turned and looked at him for quite some time, as though trying to work out where he had found that question, whether it was the question he was really asking. Eventually she shrugged and smiled. It was as good a question as any other.

  “When we left London we went almost directly to Paris. In those days Paris was an interesting place, as the Chinese might put it. Forget the American Wild West. That was a Sunday School outing compared to Paris. Trust me, I was in both places, and while Paris might be filthy and much more dangerous than Dodge City without a sheriff, it was always Paris. It had the Seine. It had Notre Dame. It had wine. It had those young French men, and those young French women. Added to all of which, it was always teeming with characters like Cyrano de Bergerac.”

  “He was a vampire as well as everything else, was he?”

  “Dear me, no,” she spluttered. “He was many, many things, that wonderfully crazy man, but a vampire..? No. He was like that French actor, the one who went to Russia rather than pay his tax – why any civilised person would go to Russia for any reason at all is beyond me – in that he had so much alcohol in his blood stream that he would have poisoned us had we tasted him. No, no, ours was a social relationship, which in those days meant getting drunk as often and as quickly as possible with wild eyed men who would only be parted from their swords by death, laughing at their every joke and fucking them all relentlessly because for all too many of them it was the last time they tasted human love. Which is the way it always is in wartime, drinking toothsome tavern wenches and being buggered by their brothers. We ate, we drank and we made merry because tomorrow they died.”

  She stood motionless for a moment, seeing other times, other sunsets, then shook her head, clearing the memories.

  “They were all characters, each and every one of them, but I had never met any man who knew as many obscene jokes as Cyrano de Bergerac, and I would have probably learned a few more if I could have followed that bastard French he spoke, half the Parisian we had learned, half some provincial dialect Time had long since forgotten. He loved nothing more than drinking himself insensible while regaling all and sundry with extravagant, impossible stories about the men he’d killed and the women he’d bedded. He and his men made a competition of it, and then one night they made my brother tell a story. My dear brother, always able to resist anything except temptation. So he got to his feet and told this story of a swordsman with the most enormous nose who could drink the Seine dry of an evening and put one hundred enemies to the sword next morning. He was taking the piss out of the soldiers, which he made perfectly obvious when he called this hero ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’. I tell you, there was a silence after that during which I didn’t know whether they would fall about laughing or try to kill him where he stood. Eventually they laughed, and the night ended as they all did, with sore heads and whispered excuses, blaming failure on the wine.”

  She walked over and took his drink from him, pouring it down her throat before giving back the glass, empty.

  “The next morning, Cyrano sought us out and made my brother tell him the story again, this time taking notes. Until then we didn’t even suspect Cyrano had his letters, and I don’t mean being able to write his name very slowly while sucking on his lower lip. Storytellers were a dozen to a centime in those days. Braggadocio flowed like wine in those streets and there was no soldier worth his salt who could not inflate every minor encounter to a replay of the siege of Troy, and almost all of those tales were forgotten the moment they were told. Swordsmen who could write, well they were hen’s teeth. Brother told his tale, with added embroidery, and Cyrano only loved it the more. He could not get enough, so my brother invented more and more, and Cyrano scribbled each and every word. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  She went to the minibar, took out a can of Heineken, and slaked her thirst with it, offering the half-drunk can to Call, who refused.

  “When we left Paris we adopted the names Cyrano and Roxane as a gesture to that wonderful man.”

  Call nodded. It seemed as logical as everything else he had heard her say, easy enough to accept once he believed in vampires, and he could hardly be a vampire hunter if there were no such things as vampires.

  The question had cost him a lot of sleepless nights before he realised that he could not explain gravity, the Higgs Boson or the red shift, but the facts indicated they were real – if ‘reality’ was the correct concept rather than just an arbitrary construct created and then forgotten by some dice playing deity – then the fact that he killed vampires was sufficient empirical evidence to convince him they existed. Just because they were impossible didn’t mean they weren’t real.

  “Okay, so we’re going into The Russia House and bring out your brother. Mind letting me in on the how of it?”

  She reached out and touched his cheek. Her fingers felt soft again, smooth and human. Were they really like that, or was that just the way she had used her glamour to convince him to feel, and what did it matter anyway? “There is nothing to be scared of, Robert. I am scared of nothing, so all you need to do is stay close to me.”