Immortality

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Six

It was not until the morning, an hour or so after the two men had boarded their train headed east into Germany, that it came to Gabriel to ask about Van Varenberg. Unsurprisingly, Dorian could not place the name, and so he let the conversation, one-sided as it was to Dorian's advantage, shift to a grand dissection of the arts.

It seemed that Dorian was in a way an artist - Gabriel had wondered what it was that his unsettling companion really did, and aside from presiding over a prodigious fortune handed down to him through his family, he played the piano. He played Chopin nocturnes on his knees as he talked inexhaustibly about the development of the modern piano, about practice, about composition, the art of interpretation and the stirring effects that true music could have on the soul of a listener. Gabriel could not remember ever having attended a concert; in fact, the closes he had come to doing so was sitting in on a rehearsal of a cathedral choir in Rome. He couldn't say that he disliked music, though - he just didn't have the passion for it that some others seemed to. He had always, as far as he knew, been far too occupied in other directions to pay much attention to music.

The sound of Dorian's voice alone could almost have swayed him. Sitting in their car as the train rattled along, he listened, rapt. Dorian Gray was a truly fascinating man. And how he wished that he'd left him in Paris.

They slept that night in their compartment, backs to the wall and feet up on their respective seats. The rocking of the train almost made Van Helsing seasick, and in the morning he woke feeling queasy, though whether from the train or his nightmares he couldn't tell. He could almost still smell the burning, and glancing over at the opposite seat to find Dorian gazing at him with those curiously disingenuous brown eyes did not serve to help matters.

They walked down to the dining car, Dorian carrying a curious silver-topped cane that he definitely had not used the nights before, and ate a light breakfast, staring out at the snow-speckled countryside in silence. It was a minor miracle that the lines had not been disrupted, though considering the way that Dorian was staring at him, he'd decided that he'd be surprised if both of them made it to Berlin alive.

They made it to Berlin. It was still relatively early but the streets were fairly busy as they left the station and attempted to find a carriage that would take them to Maria Kurtz. The air was almost freezing, turning their noses pink with the cold, and Gabriel stopped to pull his long green scarf from his travel bag. It didn't match his expensive wool coat or any of his outfit at all in fact, but he could honestly say that he couldn't care less, as long as his throat was kept warm.

At last, just as he was wondering how long it would take for them to die from the cold, a carriage that they hailed actually slowed and then stopped beside them. Dorian gave the driver the address in rather good German and they stepped up inside. Van Helsing pulled off his flimsy dress gloves and pulled on his thick black leather pair instead. Dorian didn't seem at all bothered by the cold.

Berlin, as they rode through it, seemed not quite so opulent as either Paris or London. Dorian attempted to make small talk, wondering aloud how Berlin had used to be. Gabriel almost told him but bit back his answer at the last moment. He quite simply could not have known the things he had been about to say. Lately it seemed that the lines between his dreams and true reality were blurring even more than usual.

The address on the page proved to be that of the city's university. Dorian paid the driver and they walked inside; a quick enquiry at the administration office and they found that Maria Kurtz was an assistant to Professor Johannes Volkstein, of their theology department. The helpful clerk also gave the two perfect strangers the number of and directions to her office, which they followed immediately, lugging their travel bags along.

They climbed a winding spiral staircase with a smooth old metal banister, up and up until they reached a floor with three numbered doors. Maria Kurtz's room was numbered 317, the brass figures on the slightly tatty door tarnished dud dull. Gabriel stepped forward and knocked, the knuckles of his left hand rapping on the door through his leather gloves.

There was a long pause, during which Gabriel felt he almost held his breath, and then a voice called from within: "I'm busy. Call again later."

Gabriel glanced at Dorian, who shrugged his shoulders; even that small gesture seemed elegant. Then he knocked again, taking off his gloves to knock a little more loudly, with a little more persistence.

Another pause, heavy and uncomfortable. Then that same female voice called: "I can't see you now. Go away!"

Gabriel was glad that he spoke German. "Frau Kurtz?" he called. "We need to speak with you. It's urgent."

But his plea met with silence, stony and unbroken. He glanced again at Dorian, simultaneously annoyed at himself for seeking his approval and annoyed at Dorian for the fact that he was watching him with those wide, appraising eyes. Dorian blinked languidly and leant back against the wall, his cane in his hand and his bag deposited on the scuffed boards of the floor by his feet. Gabriel tried the door and found it locked. As Gabriel was learning seemed his natural demeanour, Dorian seemed to be vaguely amused by this.

"Break down the door," he said simply, tilting his head and rubbing absently at his throat with one recently bared hand. "We need to see her."

Gabriel hated to think that he might be following Dorian's orders, but he did break down the door; he braced himself and ran at it from what little distance he could attain in the cramped corridor, and struck it squarely with his right arm and shoulder. The door gave, and Gabriel spilled forward into the room.

There was a woman, perhaps fifty years old or more, seated at the desk beneath the window, illuminated by what little muted light reflected from her highly polished desktop and surrounded on all sides by shelves and shelves of books. And behind her loomed a great tall man, gaunt and greying, in a coal black suit. He had a gun to Frau Kurtz's temple.

The first thing that the strange man did was shoot Frurtzurtz, spraying blood and brain and fragments of skull over a bookcase to her left. And then he turned his gun on Gabriel, who, all credit to his almost preternatural reflexes, dived to the floor just in time to avoid being caught somewhere in the torso by a loud pistol shot that due to the dive missed him with acres to spare. He looked up just as the man rounded the edge of the desk, tipping Frau Kurtz's dead form down onto it as he did so. He aimed again, coolly, and Gabriel scrambled for his gun. Sickly, he realised that it was in his travel bag. There wasn't room to carry it in his good clothes.

Then Dorian stepped into the room. Both Gabriel and the gunman turned in their surprise to see him standing there in the doorway, a look of perfect calm upon his face. The gunman seemed oddly entranced for a moment before he swung around his gun and fired twice into Dorian's chest; he staggered back into the corridor, and fell.

The shooting gaverielriel the time to scramble to his feet, but that was all. The gunman turned to him, fixing him in his sights from across the room with cold grey eyes. He seemed almost soulless, almost skeletal, just a thin layer of skin stretched tight over his bones. There was no feeling in him as his finger moved on the trigger. Gabriel felt a trickle of cold sweat run down the line of his spine. He's been such a fool to allow himself to be caught like this, to allow Dorian to die on top of that. The loss of him seemed cruel somehow, perhaps even more so than the thought of his own death. He braced himself.

A flash of steel followed closely by a rush of blood that sprayed out and touched the toes of Gabriel's worn boots. The man fell, clutching at his gushing, gaping throat, thumping to the floor to lie there in a growing pool of his own blood. Dorian smiled at him, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket on which to wipe the man's blood from his blade. He then replaced it in its sheath, his cane.

"Someone will have heard the shots," he said. "We have to leave." He turned and did just that, two bullet holes showing in the back of his coat. Quickly, Gabriel frisked the dead gunman, pulling papers from his pockets and stuffing them into his own. He picked up the gun, grabbed his back and left the room, and followed Dorian away.

Whatever it was that his brother was mixed up in, Gabriel suspected that the presence of this armed man did not bode well for his continued well-being. Or his own, for that matter; he was considerably more adept in dealing with the supernatural that with armed men. But Dorian, he thought as they ran, down the little spiral staircase and out of the building, onto the city streets - Dorian, it seemed was another matter entirely.

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