Immortality

***
Five

The house of Herr Doktor Van Helsing was small and sparsely furnished with one small oil lamp burning in the study, that apparently the man he knew as Dorian Gray had left there in anticipation of their return. They descended from the carriage that they had hailed hastily just a few streets from the party of the Countess Dupré, who Van Helsing could not say he regretted missing his opportunity to meet. Dorian Gray had a latchkey, and he let them both inside.

There was little furniture inside, save the vast bookcases filled with texts that in turn filled the air with the musty, secretive smell of old books. There were no rugs on the scuffed wooden floors and the wallpaper, perhaps once quite exquisite, hung in dank tatters. The stairs creaked awfully and there were no pictures on the walls. The small upstairs bedroom appeared to be the only room in the house in which Abraham had spent any time, being as it was strewn with books and papers, plates with moulding half-eaten meals and discarded items of well-worn clothing.

"I don't know where he was taken," said Dorian suddenly, and Van Helsing looked at him as the dim light from the lamp picked out his face in shadows; even in that shadowed form he seemed quite innocent, somehow free from all airs of the sinister that Van Helsing knew to be present in himself. "There was a carriage waiting by the door; my own had left when Abraham was brought out and bundled inside."

"How many men?" asked Van Helsing, striding over to the desk and leafing briefly through a sheaf of crumpled, aging papers.

"Two. Tall, broad-shouldered, though they were away so quickly that I didn't have a good view."

Van Helsing sighed and picked up another haphazard sheaf. "Does he have enemies?" he asked.

"I should assume that you know more than I, if you could only remember."

"Do not play games with me, Mr. Gray - you will find I have a short temper."

Dorian smiled, setting his porcelain mask on a tabletop as he seated himself and crossed his long legs at the knee. "Dorian, please," he said, taking a delicate silver case from his inside jacket pocket and extracting a cigare He He struck a match that lit up his eyes for a moment and lit the cigarette from it. Van Helsing could hardly believe the man was so calm.

"Dorian," he said, the name feeling strange on his lips. "Does my brother have enemies?"

"Of course - doesn't every man?" He inhaled from his cigarette and blew out a plume of thin smoke. "Your brother, however has more enemies than friends, I'm afraid. He really has the most appalling manners. But I don't know of any enemies he has in Paris. Or, indeed, in France as a whole."

"Then who could have done this?" Van Helsing asked, wrenching open a drawer.

"There really seems no way to know with any certainty."

"If you had to guess."

Dorian stroked briefly at his goatee as if in contemplation and Van Helsing watched him over the top of a new sheaf of papers; they all seemed to be the same kind of thing - notes on anatomy, biology, sketches of surgical implements. Before Dorian had spoken again, he's come to the conclusion that Herr Doktor Van Helsing was a doctor of medicine.

"I really couldn't say," Dorian said at last. "Though your brother and I are quite intimate friends, this is hardly the general topic of our conversations. Though," and he paused here, as if for effect, "one would assume that if such intense enmity existed, there would be some proof of it."

Van Helsing nodded curtly and rifled through the second drawer, giving himself at least two stinging paper cuts in the process. "Then there ld bld be something here," he said. Dorian inclined his head in agreement.

Soon the fevered rifling gave way to a more organised manner of search, and at that point Dorianned ned him. The two flung off their cloaks and settled into two tattered armchairs, reading through the papers of Abraham Van Helsing by the light of the oil lamp and the few candles that they were able to find. It all seemed a mingling of unfinished medical texts, letters to and from bankers and lawyers, and anonymous sketches of scenes from a dozen countries or more. Gabriel recognised the writing from the letter, all in the same spiky hand, but they were getting nowhere, only tired and cold.

Gabriel wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, ploughing through a tall stack of papers that he'd found in the bottom of the wardrobe. For a second he glanced up at Dorian, who was working through a bundle of scrolls from under the bed; his eyes were drawn to him almost inexplicably, watching as he sat there silently reading, his long tapered fingers plucking at the cracking scrolls and from time to time pushing a loose strand of hair back behind his ear. He seemed almost familiar in his gestures, and almost naïve. He was, Gabriel concluded, neither.

And what a strange friend for his brother he was! Such a man, in his fine clothes, with his fine hands and manners, compared with... suddenly it came on him that aside from the worn clothes and the state of the small house, and a name, he had no real basis for comparison.

"How old is he?" he asked, from his armchair by the desk.

"Hmm?" murmured Dorian. "Oh, fifty or so, I should think. He has grey hair, you know, and rather piercing blue eyes. One feels he can see to one's soul."

"He's a good man?"

"Some would say so. Gabriel, do you imagine that this could be of some importance?"

Dorian held out a page and Gabriel took it, feeling slightly uneasy at Dorian's free use of his Christian name. The paper was on one side an untidy doodle like a map with no names, but on the other was, in Abraham's spidery black hand, albeit somewhat of a scrawl even by his standards, an address. That of Frau Maria Kurtz, in the German capital Berlin.

"It's the only clue we have," he said, and that was true; so far it was the sum of their findings. And there were simply too many books in the house to check through them all.

Gabriel folded the sheet and tucked it into his pocket before he hauled himself from the chair with a groan. What happened next exactly was so much the blur he wasn't sure how it happened; somehow he tripped, went to the floor and took most of the open top desk drawer with him. It split with an almighty cracking of wood and then lay in splinters on the floorboards all around him. And there, lying on his stomach in a muddle of splinters and beside the smaller half of the drawer front, was a book.

"Well that was certainly unexpected," said Dorian, brushing a few stray splinters from his otherwise pristine suit. "I suppose the drawer had a false bottom. We should have thought of that."

Gabriel sat up with a groan and picked up the book; he pulled himself to his feet and dusted himself off then turned the book over in his hands. It had gilt edges to the pages and was bound in plain black leather, a plain silver lock on the side holding it shut. He rummaged through the splinters on the floor, hoping that the key might also be there, but all that he found was a heavy silver pocket watch that needed winding. He tucked the watch into his pocket and with a quick glance at Dorian who was watching him intently, he forced open the book.

The pages were faded and yellow as though they belonged to an older volume, and he was almost afraid to touch them they seemed so old. The hand was a thick black calligraphic that, despite the pen and the aging, seemed to bear a remarkable resemblance to that of Abraham Van Helsing. Of course it couldn't be, and he put the thought out of his mind, which became even simpler when he realised that the language must be a medieval form of Latin. It was a pity, he thought, that he didn't speak Latin. Outside the realm of the odd 'requiescat in pace', that is.

"Do you know Latin?" he asked Dorian as he closed the book with a twinge of guilt over the broken lock.

"I fear I have forgotten all that I knew," came the reply. "And at any rate, my Latin was never up to standard."

"I have a friend who can help." He pulled on his cloak in a rather dramatic swirl and tucked the book into his inside pocket, by the scrawled address. "I'll leave for Germany tomorrow. I appreciate your help, Mr. Gray. Now if you'll excuse me..."

"What time?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What time are you leaving? And my name is Dorian."

"You don't think that you're..."

Dorian smiled. When Dorian smiled his face seemed alive with all the virtues of the God-fearing world; it was a thoroughly magnetic force that brooked no refusal. "I'm going with you, Gabriel," he said in a tone that almost mocked him for ever having dared to believe otherwise. "I can assure you I have just as much interest in the recovery of your brother as yourself; perhaps even more so as you cannot even remember his age, let alone much more of him." He stood and pulled on his cloak, picked up his mask from its seat on the table. "And besides, I may be of some use to you. What time are you leaving?"

"I'll be setting out be eight o'clock," Gabriel replied, trying to persuade himself he had not been persuaded by a smile. He told himself that Dorian might yet be of some use. "Meet me at the station, and try to pack light."

Dorian nodded curtly and then they left. They passed by the shelves heavy-laden with books, down to the front door that they slipped through and out into the very early morning. Dorian locked the door behind them and each man vanished his separate way out into the dark.

***