“She’s out there right now,” he said, and crouched down, running his fingertips over the crushed grass, which was dappled in the blood of our mounts. He looked up at me gravely. “We can get her tonight, maybe even before dark. But we have to go now.”
We packed our rations and ammunition and left our non-essentials in the cabin. We are setting out on foot.
CHAPTER 22
Page from the Journal of Professor Van Helsing, written by Coleman Morris
Van Helsing pushed this book at me before he left and told me to write down what happened, so I am doing so, as there is nothing much else for me to do.
It is the night of September 3rd now, and I am writing this by firelight, about four miles northeast of the old sod house where the bitch killed our ponies.
It wasn’t hard tracking her from the cabin through the tall grass. She left a good swathe through it that I believe even Alvin could’ve followed. There was blood on the stems here and there, so I knew I’d hit her this morning as she ran. Probably not much more than a grazing shot, or there’d be more blood. But she is slowing.
For the past three days she’s covered a lot of distance. Now she’s going at a pace even we can follow.
We struck a sandy wash a little after morning and then the trail got more scant, but thanks to the blood on the stones it wasn’t impossible. We followed that winding wash for a good five hours. To old Van Helsing’s credit, he never once slowed or asked for a rest. I don’t know how much of what he told me about Quincey is the truth, but having seen what I’ve seen in his company, and comparing it to the grit he showed today, I can’t help but wonder at this world and that there are men like Van Helsing in it.
He has shown me that there is a lot of possibility in this old life, not the least of it that my brother Quincey could change from a no-account shirker with a looking glass under his eyelids, to the kind of man who could stand up with his friends and show a lot of John Bulls and Dutchmen and goddamned vampires what it means to be a Morris. The kind of man I am proud to call my brother.
I wish I could have lived up to what he did over there, but I’m just a cattleman, not a soldier or an Indian fighter or some vampire killer. And I sure proved that I am no werewolf hunter either.
We came across a shallow creek that cut across the dry wash and stopped to rest. It was about dusk. I have been on my share of hunts along with Paw and Quincey and Aurelius, but I never stalked anything with the sort of sand to turn on me, and it showed when I threw my common sense out in the ditch and set my rifle aside to splash some of that cool creek water on my dry lips.
That mean bitch didn’t spare the time it takes a fly to scat, but came down on me like the wrath of God on Sodom. I had just touched my fingers to my lips when the wind got knocked from me, and I found myself floundering like a drunkard face first in three inches of water with the stones biting into my cheek and her claws hooked into my shoulders.
She was heavy as a bull buffalo and by the angle and feel of my gun arm, she’d busted it clean when she’d jumped on me from the lip of the wash, where she must’ve been crouched behind a rock or shrub I’d missed. I couldn’t fight her off. I felt a pain like hot hell in my shoulder, and heard the bones cracking.
Then I heard, through the snarling and splashing, Van Helsing’s gun.
The bitch let out a yelp and pushed off of me and was gone. When I pulled my face out of the water, I saw her tail end splashing off down the creek as quick as an antelope. She was huge, with wiry black hair up and bristling between two sharp ears, but she was running with a limp, favoring her back right haunch as she rounded a bend and was gone.
Van Helsing tended me best he could, given that we’d left most anything he might’ve used back in the cabin with the saddles. My arm wasn’t broken at all, but my shoulder was. She had bit me like a fanged mule, leaving a big open pit of blood and meat and splintered bones where yesterday I’d had a patch of skin the size of a green buffalo chip. It took a half hour for Van Helsing to set it right and bind it up in a sling for me to carry it in. By that time I was pale and tired and cold and hoarse from yelling for him to get after her.
As it was I swapped my rifle for his ledger and handed him my cartridges.
“I cannot possibly...” he began.
“Just up the creek, old man,” I told him. “She’ll be waiting for you, and you know it. Give me your revolver.”
He did.
“When it’s done, fire three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Like that. Then I’ll know whether to use this or not,” I said, gesturing at his revolver. I don’t intend to wait for her to come back down the creek for me.
He understood.
I wished him luck, and he was gone.
About an hour has passed, and I haven’t heard any shooting. I don’t know what that means. I hope he at least takes that bitch with him. If not, I’ve got his pistol, with all six beans in the wheel in case she comes back. If she does, only five of them are for her.
From the Journal of Abraham Van Helsing
September 4th
When I found her, she was crouched in a hollow depression near the creek bed. She was naked, huddled with her arms cradled against her body. The long black hair was hanging down and laced with a collection of burs and thistles picked up in her flight like the souvenirs of a whirlwind tourist. Her long lithe limbs were painted with mud and her wide mouth, smeared with Coleman’s dried blood, grimaced as I came with the rifle, hunched over under the weight of fear and curiosity and dread at what she knew I must do.
It was a feat of tracking unworthy of the quarry. The creek ran down from her, and I could see her blood clearly in the water before the sun faded and the moon was high. I was surprised to find her human.
“So,” she said, in a cracking voice. “Now you have found me, Abraham.”
“In truth,” I said, “I had hoped to find you dead.”
“To save you the task of seeing the life fade from my eyes? You are a coward.”
I heard a whimpering then, and thought it was her. I moved closer, cautiously. Her bare shoulders, like molded alabaster in the silver of the moon, did shake, but I could see her downturned lips. They were pressed together, and no sound could escape, though tears ran from her furious eyes.
She lowered her head, and seemed to touch her chin to her chest. I heard her make some light, cooing noise. Then she turned her hateful eyes on me again, and their expression was like the flanged head of an iron spear in my heart. She flung her head proudly, and her hair fell behind her shoulders.
“I didn’t want them to die by you,” she said, her voice trembling. “But I couldn’t do it. The human in me couldn’t do it. If I was a wolf...” but she broke off.
Curled in her arms and pressed against her breasts were two small forms. One was a thin babe with tightly clenched eyes, working furiously and alternately grabbing the long strands of its mother’s hair. And in the crook of her other arm, which was glistening with her own blood, there was a whimpering ball of fur, its white muzzle nuzzling at her nipple, its oversized paws kicking, its black pointed ears twitching, yet in the tight slits of its newborn eyes, every bit the sibling of the human child.
I said nothing, but looked again into Callisto’s eyes.
“I had another litter once,” she said. “Years ago, in the Caucasus. Their father was proud, strong. His voice was like a siren’s song and led the chorus of the pack. The way it traveled down the mountainside...it was like he had sent his soul out into the world to look about.” her eyes were far off, but then they snapped back, fixing me like thumbscrews again. “Men like you came to our den with fire. I was young then, and not entirely a wolf. I escaped. But when I saw the Slavs stretch their pelts on the drying racks, I swore I would never again leave a child...or a mate...to the hunters. Do you know how they killed my children, Abraham? There was a branch outside the den. One they had gnawed so many times in their games...one of the hunters took it up, and broke open their tiny heads. They didn’t even kn
ow enough to be afraid...just like these.”
She glanced down at the pup and the infant. They were as oblivious to me or to the agony in her voice as any hungry whelp.
I thought of Plenty Skins’ dream, and his parting words.
“How badly are you hurt?” I asked.
“If I die, it will be from your bullet,” she said. “The one who killed Sigmund, he did not hurt me.”
So the blood on the grass we had followed to the creek had been birthing blood. How long had she fled while in labor before she had burrowed this half den in the bank to drop her litter? It was miraculous the babies had survived.
I took a step closer to her.
She pressed herself against the dirt wall, shifting to shield her offspring.
“You won’t take them,” she snarled. “Not for your filthy science.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t take them.”
I pointed the rifle down the creek and fired. Once. Twice. A third time.
She stared at me.
I cannot fully explain my thoughts as I turned away. I cannot say why in the end I could not finish the task. Had it been Coleman in my place and I left bleeding in the dry river bed listening for those three shots that meant my life or death (and Callisto’s), I am sure I would have heard them and have no doubt that they would have been genuine.
But what had driven me here? Revenge for my friends? Surely that was an element. Outrage? Madness? Jealousy? Love? Knowledge? All of these must have held some truth.
But for what then, did I turn aside from my vengeance? What in Callisto Terovolas’ bizarre existence did not offend me to my core as had Dracula’s and his wives’?
I know only that whereas the beautiful eyes of the vampire had been black as holes, the soul which peered at me through this were-woman’s haze of rage was a mother’s. I knew that the incessant sound of the suckling of her brood, wolf and human, was not unlike that of any other child. That sound, which seemed louder even than her angry words and my own murmuring sang to me in that moment. It stirred something in my heart, like a familiar scent or turn of phrase, which makes one think of better days.
It reminded me of my own son, whose existence is now almost lost to my memory, along with a blurred summer day in which I can yet see as though through unfocused eyes. I can nearly glimpse the silhouette of my dear wife, featureless and yet radiant in the loving glow of the birthing Natal sun, rocking gently in a creaking rattan chair with a small, soft bundle pressed against her chest.
It is an old memory. Long before the Zulu came. Long before those hated lances struck my child down like seeking adders. Before Dracula, or the undead, or werewolves, or madmen, or any number of abominations both human and inhuman which I have encountered since.
It is a memory from that day before I was driven from my own personal Eden, when I was simply Abraham. Not the Daktari, or the Professor, or the Dutchman. Merely Abraham, back in the days when King Laugh was the shrill, joyous sound my son made as he bounced upon my knee.
“You got her,” Coleman said to me, smiling as I came into the firelight, very tired.
“Yes,” I answered, settling down to inspect his wounds. “She is gone.”
Finis
Professor Van Helsing’s journal entries regarding his Texas excursion end here and resume following his return to Europe and a strange series of events involving the ill-fated vessel The Demeter some months later.
These events shall likely be organized and collected in a future volume, as warranted by public interest and allowed by the efforts of the editor, though not necessarily in chronological sequence, owing to the completeness of some notations delineating certain periods of the professor’s career over others.
There are copious documents regarding Van Helsing’s early years in Natal (complimented by my own writings of the time) and his experiences with Lawrence and Carter at the Tanis dig in 1911 for example, whereas his entries regarding the unexplained occurrences on a Dutch ship bound for Java with Helen Blavatsky in 1857, and an early sojourn in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast region are both rather sparse, as of this writing.
However, organizing a man’s entire life’s work into a readable form is no small task, and day by day I am rewarded with new discoveries, all of which I shall share with the public as per my friend’s wishes.
-J.S.
Compiler’s Afterword:
Beyond the Borgo Pass: The Van Helsing Papers
I, like most of the world, always understood Bram Stoker’s Dracula to be a work of fiction. Seminal in the horror genre, surely, but entirely the product of Stoker’s imagination.
I stopped believing this in or around the summer of 1997, when, between jobs and trying to make the rent on a two-bedroom apartment on Carmen Avenue in Uptown Chicago, I answered a classified ad placed by the University of Chicago in The Chicago Reader for a seasonal position.
This wasn’t academic work, but a reorganizational project of the reference stacks at the university’s Regenstein Library. This still makes it sound overly important though. In effect, I and about ten other part-timers were carrying boxes to and from the basement under the direction of a perennially bored student intern. It was back-breaking work, and tedious, but ultimately not without its reward.
In the course of the job, in one of the Reg’s two basements, I happened across a dust-covered box of unopened packets postmarked from Purfleet, dated 1936, and addressed to the head of the archaeology department.
The label on the box had it earmarked for the library’s Ravenwood Collection, but it had somehow been physically separated and omitted from the catalog. It had sat forgotten on the back of a shelf of totally unrelated material for at least half a century.
I have a curious nature when it comes to old things, and a knack for staying out of the way of supervisors, which was easy in the maze of the Reg with only a disinterested intern to answer to. Though I knew it could possibly cost me my job, I managed to pop one of the manila packets open with my apartment key and shimmy the old yellow papers out for a look on my lunch break, a ritual I would repeat without fail innumerable times on that job.
What I read shook me to my core. I say this without exaggeration.
Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, that stalwart vampire hunter I had seen depicted in countless films and comic books, portrayed by everybody from Peter Cushing to Mel Brooks, was real. It was like finding the logbook of the Pequod written in Ahab’s hand, or reading Joseph of Bethlehem’s name on a Roman census roll from the Augustan Age.
But the figure that emerged while studying these papers (and from fact checking later among the Reg’s microfilm collections and via long years of independent research), was no two dimensional crossbow wielding, fanatical monster hunter, but a substantial man of letters, a serious academic, a contemporary and associate of Flinders Petrie, T. E. Lawrence, Madame Blavatsky, Max Muller, and a host of other scholars I (as a woefully undereducated liberal arts student) would only come to know later as I studied the man himself. He pitted his learning against the supernatural not by choice, but by chance, though his name has become inseparable from that pseudo-scientific offshoot, that embarrassing cousin of natural science now thought of as ‘paranormal investigation.’
Not only was Van Helsing real, but so was Dr. John Seward, Jonathan and Mina Harker, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey P. Morris (whose brother’s grave I once visited at the old Fairview Cemetery during a research trip to Bastrop, and whose Bowie knife, the very same one he sank into Count Dracula’s heart, was anonymously donated to, and is still innocuously displayed at, the Autry Museum here in Los Angeles).
It’s hard to prove this, of course, outside of the papers, as most of the major participants in the Dracula affair faded into intentional obscurity, with the exception of Quincey Morris (who died) and Van Helsing himself, whose total eradication from academic record is almost Egyptian in its totality.
But he did live. One of my prized possessions is a 1907 Dutch edition of Arminius Vembrey’s W
estern Cultures in Eastern Lands, one of Van Helsing’s rare translations, which I unfortunately can’t even read.
If I can confirm the existence of Van Helsing with a little research, then what about the things Van Helsing claimed to have encountered in his travels? Vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. There are things Van Helsing says he tangled with which would make cryptozoologists and theologians alike faint dead away.
Now you see why I say I was shaken up.
But, you might say, the man spent time in a lunatic asylum. Who’s to say he didn’t write all his memoirs as some kind of therapy while convalescing?
Well, mainly because of the corroborative writings by outside parties. The papers collected with Van Helsing’s journal entries (newspaper clippings, personal diaries, correspondences), some provided by the professor, some by Seward, and some gleaned from my own personal research into primary source documents, bear him out every time. It’s unlikely that Van Helsing’s writings are entirely fictional when they are substantiated by so many people from so many diverse backgrounds and stations.
For me, the world became an exponentially bigger place in 1997, squinting in the dim light at old typeface with the musty smell of antiquity in my nostrils.
I knew I had to continue Dr. Seward’s work, see his ambition fulfilled, and tell the world about Van Helsing.
As the forward to this book points out, Abraham Van Helsing’s longtime friend and colleague Seward first intended the initial volume of the late professor’s writing to see the light of day in 1935, seventy-seven years ago.
For whatever reason (Seward suggests active resistance by the academic community, though by this time he was himself embittered toward the establishment), he failed to secure a publisher, possibly in the eleventh hour.
Seward continued to pursue the book’s publication for the next five years, soliciting literary agents on both sides of the pond and mailing facsimiles to many of Van Helsing’s former academic associates in the hopes of gaining professional support.
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