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

FOUR

December, 1919

Mrs Harker had arrived when we got back. She greeted me with a kiss and Uncle Joe with a firm handshake and a few polite words of memorised Dutch. Uncle Joe replied in kind while she leaned around us to stare long and hard at his box. She said nothing about it, but her lips turned thin and hard; she had never approved of her son keeping his wife in the dark about the things that went bump in the night, and she balked at the rest of us being required to perpetuate the deception. I agreed with her and had told Quincey as much on more than one occasion, as, I believe, had Chessie and everybody else, but it wasn't the right time to hit Clare with any more difficult news.

The children's pale faces flickered, ghost-like, at the head of the stairs and vanished again silently. Jonathan and Ian were five and three, respectively, but children know things. Whatever measures Clare thought she had taken to keep them from worrying had probably worried them all the more. They knew that something had gone wrong and that the grown-ups wouldn't tell them what, which always meant something especially bad.

I could sympathise. But I was one of those grown-ups, too, and I knew that my only options were to frighten them with the truth or offer comforting lies, and, like everyone else, I chose silence.

It was silently understood that someone would keep Clare out of the way. She was brave and would insist on helping, but she was uninformed, and ignorance is a killer. Probably Doctor Seward, whenever he arrived. His weak lungs would make it hard for him to go trekking around in the cold in search of a lost man, but he could keep an eye on Clare and provide a masculine presence that might convince the police to treat the matter as more than hysterical female nerves.

It wasn't long before events played out in exactly that way. Chessie and I formed a pair, and Uncle Joe and Mrs Harker formed a pair, and we set off to scout out the possibilities. It seemed sensible to check Quincey's office, so we started there. Half an hour wasted. He was not at his favourite public house, and had not been seen there last night, either, when a man might plausibly seek a pint after supper. We returned to the house to report to Clare. Mrs Harker and Uncle Joe likewise reported no results. They said they had been scouring the neighbourhood for dropped cigarette butts of his preferred variety, but Chessie and I both knew they had been searching for other traces, as well. Drops of blood. Signs of struggle. The marks of heels dragged through the film of mud in the sides of the street. That they had found none of those things was not positive, not really, but it reassured me, all the same.

It did not reassure Clare. She shook, but she had already exhausted all of her tears; her single sob was dry.

I followed Chessie into the kitchen and warmed both of us with a cup of tea.

The police had been back, Doctor Seward said. A different constable who listened attentively and wrote things down and told them firmly that his own son had never come home and he would be damned—pardon me, ma'am—if he let someone else's boy get back only to go missing. Never you fear, ma'am, there'll be all the men you could want out here in a jiffy.

Doctor Seward smiled grimly over his own teacup. 'I appreciate his optimism,' he said. 'But he doesn't seem to have thought that the entire bloody force might yet only be able to find a body in a ditch.'

I winced. Chessie blanched, and for the first time, a few tears escaped her. She patted them away before they could smear her makeup.

'Doc,' she choked, but got no further. We both knew he had his reasons to be ghastly.

I dabbed at my nose, still stinging from the transition from the cold outside to the warmth within.

'We were going to go check the churchyard at St Bridget's, next,' I said with a glance over my shoulder to make sure Clare was still elsewhere. 'It seems to be where all this area's bogeys come from.'