The Van Helsing Paradox

by Evelyn Chartres

  Edith was smiling as though caught in a pleasant daydream. Was Edith looking right at her? Did she know something that Clara did not?

  Clara was not certain of much right now. This was a new situation which would bring about a new set of challenges. However, she had a hunch that this particular series of lectures would not only prove to be memorable, but would also be invaluable.

  Sure, the old wounds left by Jack might resurface, but that would only harden her soul. In the end, this was a necessary step to take. In the future she would be sure that the tables were turned on them.

  Besides, she had also found a kindred spirit in Edith. That meant Clara only needed to persevere, toughen up, and face the world waiting to strike her down. After all, there were a few years of schooling left before she had to face the world.

  SALT THE EARTH

  1913

  Clara sat down at her favourite bistro and let out a peaceful sigh. People flowed all around her, busy with their own affairs. Alas, that also included the waiter, who was otherwise occupied by flirting with two young ladies at another table.

  She did not mind per se, although she had hoped that someone would notice her dress. It was a long red number which hugged her body and had a row of buttons that ran down the front. It certainly managed to turn a few heads back at the Tower, but Parisians tended to be more accustomed to cute girls and their dresses.

  God, she enjoyed the ability to wear trendy clothing! Her ability to blend in demanded that she tap into current trends and fashions. That was one of the perks of being a senior student and Clara intended to enjoy every moment of it.

  Below the brim of her hat, Clara saw the clear blue sky. She scanned the many shops, bars, and restaurants which brought back a flood of memories. For the most part, this neighbourhood had not changed since her first visit. The buildings were immutable, a testament to the builders who laid the foundations over a century ago.

  Everything was here, save for a certain cabaret; that site was still empty and relegated to open storage for the neighbouring businesses. The adjacent buildings still showed signs of fire damage on their sides. Odd how everyone who passed by was oblivious, although the fire was bound to be considered ancient history now.

  Clara sighed; this annual pilgrimage of hers invariably led her to linger on her memories of Jack. She often considered what might have happened if he had been a normal boy out to steal her virtue.

  Her thoughts moved to his last words and how the poison he spouted had salted the earth. Nothing else would grow on that field now; oddly enough, an act which helped her become a formidable hunter.

  It was fortunate that the impact of this anniversary lessened with every passing year. This time, she was mostly blasé about it and hoped that the cute waiter would strike out. Clara would make sure to get some mileage out of him.

  “Miss Grey,” a young girl said.

  Clara turned and found a little girl with red pigtails and freckles. The sight of her left Clara momentarily confused; it was not every day that a character walked out from the pages of a book. Of course, the acolyte’s uniform did much to kill the fantasy, but Clara chose to play this one out.

  “How can I help you Miss Shirley,” Clara said on a lark but got nothing more than a vacant stare.

  “You’ve been ordered to report back,” the acolyte said.

  Her imagination had distracted her, Clara should have asked why anyone from the Tower was in Paris. Especially an acolyte that young; they rarely went anywhere without an escort.

  “Oh,” Clara said while her eyes narrowed.

  “Yes, Miss. There’s been an incident,” the girl said.

  “Oh,” Clara said faintly.

  * * * *

  Carrots led the way while Clara followed. Until the girl provided her with a proper name, the nickname would have to do. The young girl was certainly a straight shooter; she was not even swayed by the hustle and bustle of a major city.

  When Clara had been that young, she could not resist the temptation to explore. Even now, that desire was just below the surface of her conscious mind, begging to be freed.

  While the word incident had been used, the severity must have been misreported. An incident would not require her to report back. Was it a death? It was not every day that someone from her order died.

  Well, not daily, although a few times a year was accurate. Hunters were not normally recalled for a death; frequent use of the Terminus risked exposure. So what was important enough to take the risk of having her recalled?

  Clara kept these thoughts concealed along with the emotions that inevitably followed. It took a great deal of willpower to keep cool when one’s head was swirling, but Clara would not let an acolyte see anything more than cold professionalism. That much was expected from older students.

  “Almost there, Miss Grey,” Carrots said.

  Clara nodded; she already knew where to find the gate.

  “Love your dress,” Carrots said just before walking into a restaurant.

  Clara waited until the kitchen staff were out of earshot before replying, “Thank you.”

  “Must take a while to put on?” Carrots asked.

  Clara momentarily looked down at the row of a hundred or so buttons that led from her collar to the very bottom. It did take time, but so did many aspects of being a lady.

  “The price of fashion,” Clara said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Carrots replied.

  “You will,” Clara countered, certain that this girl would grow up to be a beautiful woman.

  “We don’t all make it past our first day of freedom,” Carrots said bluntly.

  That statement really caught Clara off guard. In that moment, she realised that this exchange had been an elaborate distraction.

  “Why?” Clara wondered.

  They came to a door at the end of the kitchen’s storage area. On the other side, there was a small courtyard leading to three other buildings. The abandoned one on her left led directly to the Terminus.

  Clara eyed Carrots and realised that the girl was deathly pale, even for a fair skinned redhead. Clara remembered a lecture that covered many of these details. It had been memorable only because it explicitly refuted the existence of such things.

  “How did you find me?” Clara asked.

  At first Carrots was quiet as though she were not expecting any questions.

  “She wanted me to find you,” Carrots said.

  “Who?” Clara asked.

  While waiting for an answer, Clara pulled a few pins from her hair that anchored her hat. Her derringer dropped into her waiting hands; it was light and entirely familiar to the touch.

  Instead of replacing her hat, Clara kept it in hand. Meanwhile Carrots’ corporeal presence lost cohesion; so much so that Clara saw right through her.

  “Rest now, young one,” Clara said and for a moment Carrots appeared to smile.

  Clara moved her attention to the door and listened intently. For now, it was silent as a tomb, which did little to reassure her.

  At the moment, she had the advantage of daylight to cover her advance. Vampires would not attempt an attack in broad daylight, even with the cover of ample shade. The risk was simply too great.

  Her instincts told her something was wrong. After all, spirits were not roused from the grave for idle chatter.

  “Well, no sense in delaying the inevitable,” Clara muttered.

  With one swift kick, the door flew open. The light of day strained her eyes, but she was able to make out a lanky figure standing at the edge of the building’s shadow.

  Clara hesitated, at least until she caught that orange glow in its eyes. Without a second thought, she threw her hat at the figure, brought her derringer to bear, and squeezed both triggers.

  Even loaded with half-powder charges, the weapon roared and obstructed her vision with smoke. Clara did not wait for the smoke to clear. Instead, she reached for her crucifix and charged.

  Clara took three steps before the creature
fell to its knees and collapsed. Only then did she see that a portion of its skull was missing and observed black ichor pooling on the ground.

  “Ghoul,” Clara said.

  Without a moment’s notice, a door from an adjoining unit blew wide open. A new figure was barreling down on her. The squeal it made would have filled her with dread if her training had not taught her to ignore such stimuli.

  “Another?” Clara asked.

  Clara stood her ground even as the seven-foot tall creature raced towards her. Clara averted its gaze to avoid falling under its spell, and waited for it to be nearly within arms-reach before kneeling. Her position forced the creature to trip and sent it soaring overtop. A moment later, Clara heard its body impact against the wall.

  Once she dropped her arm, Clara noticed that her sleeve was stained with black ichor. Her blade had caught a piece of that thing during their brief interaction.

  “That’s never going to come out of this fabric,” Clara said.

  She approached the second attacker and without hesitation cut a deep gash through its throat. A spurt of ichor splattered against the wall, but the tide soon subsided once the creature’s lungs filled with fluid.

  Clara was confused. Ghouls followed death. It was unheard of for their kind to seek out the living for their meal or for that matter to hunt in packs.

  “She wanted me to find you,” Carrots said.

  Clara’s thoughts were disrupted when the cooks appeared at the doorway. One nearly dropped his butcher knife when the Ghoul’s stench reached them.

  Clara expected to talk her way out of this situation, but they all seemed clueless. The human mind often chose to cast aside things that were deemed an impossibility. That’s the reason Ghouls were able to survive without being discovered.

  “Is everything alright, mademoiselle?” a moustached man asked.

  Clara concealed her crucifix and blackened sleeve. Her smile was warm and genuine, a distraction while she scanned the courtyard in search of an excuse.

  “Mais oui,” Clara said. “I tripped on a crate and ran into the wall.”

  At first they seemed sceptical, but the smell kept them from getting any closer. Fortunately that odour also provided her with an excuse.

  “Must have been an old crate filled with rotten eggs,” Clara said. “Oh dear, looks like I broke a nail!” she whined.

  “Pierre!” a man in the back row exclaimed just before he slapped the armed cook. “You idiot!”

  The cooks’ civility devolved until they retreated from sight. Fortunately, men tended to keep their quarrels concealed from the fairer sex, although she was sure that there would be a black eye or two after the dust settled. At least she had the opportunity to deal with this mess.

  “I was called here,” Clara said.

  To give her a moment to think, Clara picked up her derringer and hat. The smell was really overpowering and her eyes nearly teared up. Still, there was something amiss, so on a hunch Clara held her breath and closed her eyes.

  “Nothing,” Clara said in a dejected tone. “Wait,” she said.

  Clara heard a swarm of flies nearby, but there was nothing in sight to attract them. The ghouls’ bodies were too fresh to amass a swarm. That meant there was carrion nearby.

  She walked from door to door until she neared the one nearly torn from its hinges. The sound through that door was more pronounced, so she reloaded her derringer using full-powder charges as a precaution.

  The first thing she noticed was just how clean the Ghoul’s home was. These things tended to live in crypts or in caves, so this was highly out of the norm for their kind. Clara thought that with the exception of a few stray claw marks, the place looked ready to live in.

  Clara came across a pearl encrusted cigarette holder with lipstick smudges at the base. Someone had left this behind recently and it could not have been the ghouls. Lipstick was a challenge to apply when the model did not possess a set of lips.

  Immediately next to the cigarette holder there was a stray blond hair. Clara mused over this discovery, but thought better of it. After all, blondes were not exactly uncommon.

  Clara followed the sound of the swarm and moved deeper into the building until she found a locked door. There were claw marks around the lock, which meant that whatever was inside had been locked in.

  “Why would a Ghoul lock something in? Or were they locked out?” Clara asked.

  With the help of hair pins, Clara unlocked the door with a skill that would make a locksmith envious. With her derringer in hand, she cracked open the door.

  Signs of a brutal attack were immediately apparent. Blood spatter covered the walls and there were blood streaks that led deeper inside the room. Clara saw that this was a library; on a different day, she might have been excited to make this discovery.

  Instead, she followed the blood until she found a shoe, followed by another and a bare leg with a deep gangrenous gouge. Clara gasped. Even through a thick cloud of flies she could make out the pale and delirious Edith.

  “My angel has come to save the day,” Edith murmured.

  * * * *

  “I’ve been told that you made quite an impression when you burst in with Edith on your shoulder,” the Reverend Mother said.

  “Oh?” Clara said, sounding distant.

  Truth be told, Clara had not been looking to make a grand entrance nor a scene. Alas, she could not think of an effective way to deflect that statement without appearing to be insubordinate or a braggart. This was another example of another no-win scenario, Clara thought.

  “They had been domesticated,” the Reverend Mother said when she decided to get to the point.

  “What do you mean, Reverend Mother?” Clara asked.

  “Same as a dog, I suppose,” the Reverend Mother said. “Taught them how to hunt and hide within a heavily populated area.”

  “Was that why their place was so clean?” Clara asked. “Except fo—”

  It was difficult to deal with what she witnessed. The gore, the stench and the flies were all elements drawn together from a poorly written horror story. Even if the minutiae of the scenes was impossible to recollect, the images still haunted her.

  Surely Jack’s room had been just as gory. A dismembered head with gouged out eyes should have evoked a similar response. Still, there was something about this particular scene that made her mind ran through what she witnessed over and over.

  “Precisely,” Augustine said. “They had a fully stocked kitchen and one of the little ones was found in the icebox dead.”

  Clara noted that even the Reverend Mother seemed troubled by this development. She had always assumed that the head of her order was impervious to such news. Surely bad news came often enough to blunt her emotions.

  The sight of the Reverend Mother showing a sliver of emotion was enough to endear Clara. The matriarch of the Tower being human gave her hope that she would not turn into some mindless killing machine. Somehow, that notion warmed her heart.

  “Was the young one a ginger, Reverend Mother?” Clara asked.

  “No child,” Augustine said. “Why do you ask?”

  Clara had not reported the apparition since ghosts and spirits went against all they were taught. To talk about such things might lead them to question her sanity. For now it was best to keep such knowledge close to her heart.

  “What about the cigarette holder and hair Reverend Mother?” Clara asked.

  “Your instincts on that item having been used recently were correct child,” Augustine started with. “They also found a series of broken vases, frames and knick-knacks swept into a closet.”

  So the altercation had been far ranging, and Edith must have put up one hell of a fight. Clara expected nothing less, but it was reassuring to have her suspicions confirmed.

  That also meant they must have been waiting for her to die. Clara shuddered to think about such a death; left there to succumb to the infection. All to add flavour to the meat so that these creatures could feast on her frien
d.

  A nearby door opened, and soon after a nun peeked out. Clara tried to read the emotions from the nun’s deep blue eyes but drew a blank.

  “Reverend Mother,” the sister said. “The child is awake.”

  “Oh good Sister,” Augustine said while looking at Clara. “Shall we go in?”

  “Of course, Reverend Mother,” Clara said with a twinkle in her eyes.

  * * * *

  Edith still looked pale but her eyes were aglow. At first she attempted a smile, but it faded once Clara came into focus.