The Van Helsing Legacy: We Shall Not Sleep [SAMPLE]

ONE

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

-Lieutenant Colonel John McRae

3 May, 1915

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Sad to relate, self-destruction has fearfully increased since the Great War, but it may perhaps be mitigatingly advanced that the reason of the world tottered almost to eternal delirium during the chaos and welter of blood, and the balance is not recovered yet.

-Montague Summers, The Vampire, His Kith and Kin

---

Spring, 1914

Sir Hannibal eyed the boy on the table. Young man, he corrected himself. Peacefully etherised, the patient seemed younger than he really was. His hair had grown longer during his confinement, and it curled in obsidian-dark spirals behind his head, like van Gogh's brushstrokes. Its darkness emphasized his unearthly pallor. He had been pale before, but it had been every bit of six months since he had last seen sunlight, and he glowed spectrally in the fragrant golden light of the beeswax candles.

His weird eyes were closed, and beneath the feathery fan of thick, dark lashes, the mask obscured his nose and mouth, its wire frame preventing the ether-damp cloth from coming into contact with his skin. Brightwell let another drop fall onto the stockinet.

Hannibal painted the final few letters onto the patient's chest and stood away to view his handiwork. He had briefly worried that he would run out of space and they would have to roll the patient over to get at his back, but the entire inscription fit neatly onto the front of him, albeit with entire phrases scrunched together unaesthetically. That was fortunate. Rolling him over might have smudged something.

'This will work,' Green murmured in Hannibal's general direction. It was not a question, but it still failed to be the least bit reassuring.

'We'll find out,' Hannibal replied. He retreated, not turning his back on the eerie tableau, until the backs of his thighs struck the edge of the ratty old sideboard that they had dragged down for the purpose. He set down the pot of paint and the brush, pressing his fingertips into the scarred wooden tabletop for a moment to steady himself.

'I meant it had better, Ralston,' Green hissed, 'or the Chancellor will have you out. Me, too, probably.'

'If it doesn't work, I'll try something different. If I knew exactly what had been done in the first place—'

Green's impatient gesture upset one of the candelabra, and the heavy iron rumbled against the flagged floor. An almost imperceptible spasm tightened the patient's eyelids. Brightwell's hand shook as he let another drop fall. Green caught the stand and steadied it, and the rumble died away as he brushed at the speckling of beeswax that had fallen on his sleeve.

'You won't be given time to keep experimenting indefinitely. Barbara...'

Hannibal flinched. 'That's exactly why I have to, though. She got us this opportunity. I won't waste it.'