"Yuh. Uh-huh. Arlene and I. Arlene ran through the kitchen. Wasn"t looking. Mrs. Kutchner-Mrs. Kutchner dropped a stack of plates-"
Max shut his eyes, bent his head forward, yanking at the roots of his hair in anguish.
"Mrs. Kutchner shouldn"t tire herself. She"s unwell. Indeed, I think she can hardly rise from bed."
"That"s what-that"s what I thought. Too." Rudy"s voice at the bottom of the porch. He was beginning to recover his air. "It"s not really all the way dark yet."
"It isn"t? Ah. When one get to my age, the vision fail some, and dusk is often mistake for night. Here I was thinking sunset has come and gone twenty minutes ago. What time-?" Max heard the steely snap of his father opening his pocket watch. He sighed. "But it"s too dark for me to read the hands. Well. Your concern for Mrs. Kutchner, I admire."
"Oh it-it was nothing-" Rudy said, putting his foot on the first step of the porch.
"But really, you should worry more about your own well-being, Rudolf," said their father, his voice calm, benevolent, speaking in the tone Max often imagined him employing when addressing patients he knew were in the final stages of a fatal illness. It was after dark and the doctor was in.
Rudy said, "I"m sorry, I"m-"
"You"re sorry now. But your regret will be more palpable momentarily."
The quirt came down with a meaty smack, and Rudy, who would be ten in two weeks, screamed. Max ground his teeth, his hands still digging in his hair; pressed his wrists against his ears, trying vainly to block out the sounds of shrieking, and of the quirt striking at flesh, fat and bone.
With his ears covered he didn"t hear their father come in. He looked up when a shadow fell across him. Abraham stood in the doorway to the hall, hair disheveled, collar askew, the quirt pointed at the floor. Max waited to be hit with it, but no blow came.
"Help your brother in."
Max rose unsteadily to his feet. He couldn"t hold the old man"s gaze so he lowered his eyes, found himself staring at the quirt instead. The back of his father"s hand was freckled with blood. Max drew a thin, dismayed breath.
"You see what you make me do."
Max didn"t reply. Maybe no answer was necessary or expected.
His father stood there for a moment longer, then turned, and strode away into the back of the house, toward the private study he always kept locked, a room in which they were forbidden to enter without his permission. Many nights he nodded off there, and could be heard shouting in his sleep, cursing in Dutch.
"Stop running," Max shouted. "I catch you eventually."
Rudolf capered across the corral, grabbed the rail and heaved himself over it, sprinted for the side of the house, his laughter trailing behind him.
"Give it back," Max said, and he leaped the rail without slowing down, hit the ground without losing a step. He was angry, really angry, and in his fury possessed an unlikely grace; unlikely because he was built along the same lines as his father, with the rough dimensions of a water buffalo taught to walk on its back legs.
Rudy, by contrast, had their mother"s delicate build, to go with her porcelain complexion. He was quick, but Max was closing in anyway. Rudy was looking back over his shoulder too much, not concentrating on where he was going. He was almost to the side of the house. When he got there, Max would have him trapped against the wall, could easily cut off any attempt to break left or right.
But Rudy didn"t break to the left or right. The window to their father"s study was pushed open about a foot, revealing a cool library darkness. Rudy grabbed the windowsill over his head-he still held Max"s letter in one hand-and with a giddy glance back, heaved himself into the shadows.
However their father felt about them arriving home after dark, it was nothing compared to how he would feel to discover either one of them had gained entry to his most private sanctum. But their father was gone, had taken the Ford somewhere, and Max didn"t slow down to think what would happen if he suddenly returned. He jumped and grabbed his brother"s ankle, thinking he would drag the little worm back out into the light, but Rudy screamed, twisted his foot out of Max"s grasp. He fell into darkness, crashed to the floorboards with an echoing thud that caused gla.s.s to rattle softly against gla.s.s somewhere in the office. Then Max had the windowsill and he yanked himself into the air- "Go slow, Max, it"s a... " his brother cried.
and he thrust himself through the window.
"Big drop," Rudy finished.
Max had been in his father"s study before, of course (sometimes Abraham invited them in for "a talk," by which he meant he would talk and they would listen), but he had never entered the room by way of the window. He spilled forward, had a startling glance of the floor almost three feet below him, and realized he was about to dive into it face first. At the edge of his vision he saw a round end table, next to one of his father"s armchairs, and he reached for it to stop his fall. His momentum continued to carry him forward, and he crashed to the floor. At the last moment, he turned his face aside and most of his weight came down on his right shoulder. The furniture leaped. The end table turned over, dumping everything on it. Max heard a bang, and a gla.s.sy crack that was more painful to him then the soreness he felt in either head or shoulder.
Rudy sprawled a yard away from him, sitting on the floor, still grinning a little foolishly. He held the letter half-crumpled in one hand, forgotten.
The end table was on its side, fortunately not broken. But an empty inkpot had smashed, lay in gleaming chunks close to Max"s knee. A stack of books had been flung across the Persian carpet. A few papers swirled overhead, drifting slowly to the floor with a swish and a sc.r.a.pe.
"You see what you make me do," Max said, gesturing at the inkpot. Then he flinched, realizing that this was exactly what his father had said to him a few nights before; he didn"t like the old man peeping out from inside him, talking through him like a puppet, a hollowed-out, empty-headed boy of wood.
"We"ll just throw it away," Rudy said.
"He knows where everything in his office is. He will notice it missing."
"My b.a.l.l.s. He comes in here to drink brandy, fart in his couch and fall asleep. I"ve been in here lots of times. I took his lighter for smokes last month and he still hasn"t noticed."
"You what?" Max asked, staring at his younger brother in genuine surprise, and not without a certain envy. It was the older brother"s place to take foolish risks, and be casually detached about it later.
"Who"s this letter to, that you had to go and hide somewhere to write it? I was watching you work on it over your shoulder. "I still remember how I held your hand in mine."" Rudy"s voice swooping and fluttering in mock-romantic pa.s.sion.
Max lunged at his brother, but was too slow, Rudy had flipped the letter over and was reading the beginning. The smile began to fade, thought lines wrinkling the pale expanse of his forehead; then Max had ripped the sheet of paper away.
"Mother?" Rudy asked, thoroughly nonplussed.
"It was a.s.signment for school. We were ask if you wrote a letter to anyone, who would it be? Mrs. Louden tell us it could be someone imaginary or-or historic figure. Someone dead."
"You"d turn that in? And let Mrs. Louden read it?"
"I don"t know. I am not finish yet." But as Max spoke, he was already beginning to realize he had made a mistake, allowed himself to get carried away by the fascinating possibilities of the a.s.signment, the irresistible what if of it, and had written things too personal for him to show anyone. He had written you were the only one I knew how to talk to and I am sometimes so lonely. He had really been imagining her reading it, somehow, somewhere-perhaps as he wrote it, some astral form of her staring over his shoulder, smiling sentimentally as his pen scratched across the page. It was a mawkish, absurd fantasy and he felt a withering embarra.s.sment to think he had given in to it so completely.
His mother had already been weak and ill when the scandal drove their family from Amsterdam. They lived for a while in England, but word of the terrible thing their father had done (whatever it was-Max doubted he would ever know) followed them. On they had gone to America. His father believed he had acquired a position as a lecturer at Va.s.sar College, was so sure of this he had ladled much of his savings into the purchase of a handsome nearby farm. But in New York City they were met by the dean, who told Abraham Van Helsing that he could not, in good conscience, allow the doctor to work unsupervised with young ladies who were not yet at the age of consent. Max knew now his father had killed his mother as surely as if he had held a pillow over her face in her sickbed. It wasn"t the travel that had done her in, although that was bad enough, too much for a woman who was both pregnant and weak with a chronic infection of the blood which caused her to bruise at the slightest touch. It was humiliation. Mina had not been able to survive the shame of what he had done, what they were all forced to run from.
"Come on," Max said. "Let"s clean up and get out of here."
He righted the table and began gathering the books, but turned his head when Rudy said, "Do you believe in vampires, Max?"
Rudy was on his knees in front of an ottoman across the room. He had hunched over to collect a few papers which had settled there, then stayed to look at the battered doctor"s bag tucked underneath it. Rudy tugged at the rosary knotted around the handles.
"Leave that alone," Max said. "We need to clean, not make bigger mess."
"Do you?"
Max was briefly silent. "Mother was attacked. Her blood was never the same after. Her illness."
"Did she ever say she was attacked, or did he?"
"She died when I was six. She would not confide in a child about such a thing."
"But... do you think we"re in danger?" Rudy had the bag open now. He reached in to remove a bundle, carefully wrapped in royal purple fabric. Wood clicked against wood inside the velvet. "That vampires are out there, waiting for a chance at us. For our guard to drop?"
"I would not discount possibility. However unlikely."
"However unlikely," his brother said, laughing softly. He opened the velvet wrap and looked in at the nine-inch stakes, skewers of blazing white wood, handles wrapped in oiled leather. "Well I think it"s all bulls.h.i.t.
Bullll-s.h.i.t." Singing a little.
The course of the discussion unnerved Max. He felt, for an instant, light-headed with vertigo, as if he suddenly found himself peering over a steep drop. And perhaps that wasn"t too far off. He had always known the two of them would have this conversation someday and he feared where it might take them. Rudy was never happier than when he was making an argument, but he didn"t follow his doubts to their logical conclusion. He could say it was all bulls.h.i.t, but didn"t pause to consider what that meant about their father, a man who feared the night as a person who can"t swim fears the ocean. Max almost needed it to be true, for vampires to be real, because the other possibility-that their father was, and always had been, in the grip of a psychotic fantasy-was too awful, too overwhelming.
He was still considering how to reply when his attention was caught by a picture frame, slid halfway in under his father"s armchair. It was face down, but he knew what he"d see when he turned it over. It was a sepia-toned calotype print of his mother, posed in the library of their townhouse in Amsterdam. She wore a white straw hat, her ebon hair fluffed in airy curls beneath it. One gloved hand was raised in an enigmatic gesture, so that she almost appeared to be waving an invisible cigarette in the air. Her lips were parted. She was saying something, Max often wondered what. He for some reason imagined himself to be standing just out of the frame, a child of four, staring solemnly up at her. He felt that she was raising her hand to wave him back, keep him from wandering into the shot. If this was so, it seemed reasonable to believe she had been caught forever in the act of saying his name.
He heard a sc.r.a.pe and a tinkle of falling gla.s.s as he picked the picture frame up and turned it over. The plate of gla.s.s had shattered in the exact center. He began wiggling small gleaming fangs of gla.s.s out of the frame and setting them aside, concerned that none should scratch the glossy calotype beneath. He pulled a large wedge of gla.s.s out of the upper corner of the frame, and the corner of the print came loose with it. He reached up to poke the print back into place... and then hesitated, frowning, feeling for a moment that his eyes had crossed and he was seeing double. There appeared to be a second print behind the first. He tugged the photograph of his mother out of the frame, then stared without understanding at the picture that had been secreted behind it. An icy numbness spread through his chest, crawling into his throat. He glanced around and was relieved to see Rudy still kneeling at the ottoman, humming to himself, rolling the stakes back up into their shroud of velvet.
He looked back at the secret photograph. The woman in it was dead. She was also naked from the waist up, her gown torn open and yanked to the curve of her waist. She was sprawled in a four-poster bed-pinned there by ropes wound around her throat, and pulling her arms over her head. She was young and maybe had been beautiful, it was hard to tell; one eye was shut, the other open in a slit that showed the unnatural glaze on the eyeball beneath. Her mouth was forced open, stuffed with an obscene misshapen white ball. She was actually biting down on it, her upper lip drawn back to show the small, even row of her upper palate. The side of her face was discolored with bruise. Between the milky, heavy curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s was a spoke of white wood. Her left rib-cage was painted with blood.
Even when he heard the car in the drive, he couldn"t move, couldn"t pry his gaze from the photograph. Then Rudy was up, pulling at Max"s shoulder, telling him they had to go. Max clapped the photo to his chest to keep his brother from seeing. He said go, I"ll be right behind you, and Rudy took his hand off his arm and went on.
Max fumbled with the picture frame, struggling to fit the calotype of the murdered woman back into place... then saw something else, went still again. He had not until this instant taken notice of the figure to the far left in the photograph, a man on the near side of the bed. His back was to the photographer, and he was so close in the foreground that his shape was a blurred, vaguely rabbinical figure, in a flat-brimmed black hat and black overcoat. There was no way to be sure who this man was, but Max was sure, knew him from the way he held his head, the careful, almost stiff way it was balanced on the thick barrel of his neck. In one hand he held a hatchet. In the other a doctor"s bag.
The car died with an emphysemic wheeze and tinny clatter. He squeezed the photograph of the dead woman into the frame, slid the portrait of Mina back on top of it. He set the picture, with no gla.s.s in it, on the end table, stared at it for a beat, then saw with horror that he had stuck Mina in upside down. He started to reach for it.
"Come on!" Rudy cried. "Please, Max." He was outside, standing on his tiptoes to look back into the study.
Max kicked the broken gla.s.s under the armchair, stepped to the window, and screamed. Or tried to-he didn"t have the air in his lungs, couldn"t force it up his throat.
Their father stood behind Rudy, staring in at Max over Rudy"s head. Rudy didn"t see, didn"t know he was there, until their father put his hands on his shoulders. Rudolf had no trouble screaming at all, and leaped as if he meant to jump back into the study.
The old man regarded his eldest son in silence. Max stared back, head half out the window, hands on the sill.
"If you like," his father said. "I could open the door and you could effect your exit by the hallway. What it lacks in drama, it makes up in convenience."
"No," Max said. "No thank you. Thank you. I"m-we"re-this is-mistake. I"m sorry."
"Mistake is not knowing capital of Portugal on a geography test. This is something else." He paused, lowering his head, his face stony. Then he released Rudy, and turned away, opening a hand and pointing it at the yard in a gesture that seemed to mean, step this way. "We will discuss what at later date. Now if it is no trouble, I will ask you to leave my office."
Max stared. His father had never before delayed punishment-breaking and entering his study at the least deserved a vigorous lashing-and he tried to think why he would now. His father waited. Max climbed out, dropped into the flower bed. Rudy looked at him, eyes helpless, pleading, asking him what they ought to do. Max tipped his head towards the stables-their own private study-and started walking slowly and deliberately away. His little brother fell into step beside him, trembling continuously.
Before they could get away, though, his father"s hand fell on Max"s shoulder.
"My rules are to protect you always, Maximilian," he said. "Maybe you are tell me now you don"t want to be protect any longer? When you were little I cover your eyes at the theater, when come the murderers to slaughter Clarence in Richard. But then, later, when we went to Macbeth, you shove my hand away, you want to see. Now I feel history repeats, nuh?"
Max didn"t reply. At last his father released him.
They had not gone ten paces when he spoke again. "Oh I almost forget. I did not tell you where or why I was gone and I have piece of news I know will make sad the both of you. Mr. Kutchner run up the road while you were in school, shouting doctor, doctor, come quick, my wife. As soon as I see her, burning with fever, I know she must travel to Dr. Rosen"s infirmary in town, but alas, the farmer come for me too late. Walking her to my car, her intestines fall out of her with a slop." He made a soft clucking sound with his tongue, as of disapproval. "I will have our suits cleaned. The funeral is on Friday."
Arlene Kutchner wasn"t in school the next day. They walked past her house on the way home, but the black shutters were across the windows, and the place had a too-silent, abandoned feel to it. The funeral would be in town the next morning, and perhaps Arlene and her father had already gone there to wait. They had family in the village. When the two boys tramped into their own yard, the Ford was parked alongside the house, and the slanted double doors to the bas.e.m.e.nt were open.
Rudy pointed himself towards the barn-they owned a single horse, a used-up nag named Rice, and it was Rudy"s day to muck out her stable-and Max went into the house alone. He was at the kitchen table when he heard the doors to the cellar crash shut outside. Shortly afterwards his father climbed the stairs, appeared in the bas.e.m.e.nt doorway.
"Are you work on something down there?" Max asked.
His father"s gaze swept across him, but his eyes were deliberately blank.
"Later I shall unfold to you," he said, and Max watched him while he removed a silver key from the pocket of his waistcoat, and turned it in the lock to the bas.e.m.e.nt door. It had never been used before and until that moment, Max had not even known a key existed.
Max was on edge the rest of the afternoon, kept looking at the bas.e.m.e.nt door, unsettled by his father"s promise: Later I shall unfold to you. There was of course no opportunity to talk to Rudy about it over dinner, to speculate on just what might be unfolded, but they were also unable to talk afterward, when they remained at the kitchen table with their schoolbooks. Usually, their father retired early to his study to be alone, and they wouldn"t see him again until morning. But tonight he seemed restless, always coming in and out of the room, to wash a gla.s.s, to find his reading gla.s.ses, and finally, to light a lantern. He adjusted the wick, so a low red flame wavered at the bottom of the gla.s.s chimney, and then set it on the table before Max.
"Boys," he said, turning to the bas.e.m.e.nt, unlocking the bolt. "Go downstairs. Wait for me. Touch nothing."
Rudy threw a horrified, whey-faced look at Max. Rudy couldn"t bear the bas.e.m.e.nt, its low ceiling and its smell, the lacy veils of cobwebs in the corners. If Rudy was ever given a ch.o.r.e there, he always begged Max to go with him. Max opened his mouth to question their father, but he was already slipping away, out of the room, disappearing down the hall to his study.
Max looked at Rudy. Rudy was shaking his head in wordless denial.
"It will be all right," Max promised. "I will take care of you."
Rudy carried the lantern, and let Max go ahead of him down the stairs. The reddish-bronze light of the lamp threw shadows that leaned and jumped, a surging darkness that lapped at the walls of the stairwell. Max descended to the bas.e.m.e.nt floor and took a slow, uncertain look around. To the left of the stairs was a worktable. On top of it was a pile of something, covered in a piece of grimy white tarp-stacks of bricks maybe, or heaps of folded laundry, it was hard to tell in the gloom without going closer. Max crept in slow, shuffling steps until he had crossed most of the way to the table, and then he stopped, suddenly knowing what the sheet covered.
"We need to go, Max," Rudy peeped, right behind him. Max hadn"t known he was there, had thought he was still standing on the steps. "We need to go right now." And Max knew he didn"t mean just get out of the bas.e.m.e.nt, but get out of the house, run from the place where they had lived ten years and not come back.
But it was too late to pretend they were Huck and Jim and light out for the territories. Their father"s feet fell heavily on the dusty wood planks behind them. Max glanced up the stairs at him. He was carrying his doctor"s bag.
"I can only deduce," their father began, "from your ransack of my private study, you have finally develop interest in the secret work to which I sacrifice so much. I have in my time kill six of the Undead by my own hand, the last the diseased b.i.t.c.h in the picture I keep hid in my office-I believe you have both see it." Rudy cast a panicked look at Max, who only shook his head, be silent. Their father went on: "I have train others in the art of destroying the vampire, including your mother"s unfortunate first husband, Jonathan Harker, Gott bless him, and so I can be held indirectly responsible for the slaughter of perhaps fifty of their filthy, infected kind. And it is now, I see, time my own boys learn how it is done. How to be sure. So you may know how to strike at those who would strike at you."
"I don"t want to know," Rudy said.
"He didn"t see picture," Max said at the same time.
Their father appeared not to hear either of them. He moved past them to the worktable, and the canvas covered shape upon it. He lifted one corner of the tarp and looked beneath it, made a humming sound of approval, and pulled the covering away.
Mrs. Kutchner was naked, and hideously withered, her cheeks sunken, her mouth gaping open. Her stomach was caved impossibly in beneath her ribs, as if everything in it had been sucked out by the pressure of a vacuum. Her back was bruised a deep bluish violet by the blood that had settled there. Rudy moaned and hid his face against Max"s side.
Their father set his doctor"s bag beside her body, and opened it.
"She isn"t, of course, Undead. Merely dead. True vampires are uncommon, and it would not be practicable, or advisable, for me to find one for you to rehea.r.s.e on. But she will suit for purposes of demonstration." From within his bag he removed the bundle of stakes wrapped in velvet.
"What is she doing here?" Max asked. "They bury her tomorrow."
"But today I am to make autopsy, for purposes of my private research. Mr. Kutchner understand, is happy to cooperate, if it mean one day no other woman die in such a way." He had a stake in one hand, a mallet in the other.
Rudy began to cry.
Max felt he was coming unmoored from himself. His body stepped forward, without him in it; another part of him remained beside Rudy, an arm around his brother"s heaving shoulders. Rudy was saying, Please I want to go upstairs. Max watched himself walk, flat-footed, to his father, who was staring at him with an expression that mingled curiosity with a certain quiet appreciation.
He handed Max the mallet and that brought him back. He was in his own body again, conscious of the weight of the hammer, tugging his wrist downward. His father gripped Max"s other hand and lifted it, drawing it towards Mrs. Kutchner"s meager b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He pressed Max"s fingertips to a spot between two ribs and Max looked into the dead woman"s face. Her mouth open as to speak.
Are you doctorin" me, Max Van Helsing?
"Here," his father said, folding one of the stakes into his hand. "You drive it in here. To the hilt. In an actual case, the first blow will be follow by wailing, profanity, a frantic struggle to escape. The accursed never go easily. Bear down. Do not desist from your work until you have impale her and she has give up her struggle against you. It will be over soon enough."
Max raised the mallet. He stared into her face and wished he could say he was sorry, that he didn"t want to do it. When he slammed the mallet down, with an echoing bang, he heard a high, piercing scream and almost screamed himself, believing for an instant it was her, still somehow alive; then realized it was Rudy. Max was powerfully built, with his deep water buffalo chest and Scandinavian farmer"s shoulders. With the first blow he had driven the stake over two-thirds of the way in. He only needed to bring the mallet down once more. The blood that squelched up around the wood was cold and had a sticky, viscous consistency.
Max swayed, his head light. His father took his arm.
"Goot," Abraham whispered into his ear, his arms around him, squeezing him so tightly his ribs creaked. Max felt a little thrill of pleasure-an automatic reaction to the intense, unmistakable affection of his father"s embrace-and was sickened by it. "To do offense to the house of the human spirit, even after its tenant depart, is no easy thing, I know."