Chapter 16
After so many attempts to get me to take my father’s study, Mama now focuses her efforts on making me get out of it.
But today, thankfully, she just leaves food in front of the door.
No attempts to lure me out, no casual mentions that Inge or Joren dropped by, no tearful insistence that what happened wasn’t my fault.
It’s good, because I don’t have time to argue with her. I’m nearly to the end of my father’s volumes and volumes of journals. The ones I arrogantly dismissed as madness. The ones I now hope hold the key to Diavola. Why she killed him, and how I can kill her.
She haunts my every waking thought, and walks my dreams as though she owns them. I cannot escape her. I also cannot find her. Not without help.
I lean back from my father’s desk and rub my face wearily.
His handwriting is dense and spidery, crawling over the pages with increasing disorder.
The first journal, from the year after Pieter died, was when my father’s forays into the supernatural and occult began.
Back then, he was still approaching everything as a scientist: embarking on a new realm of study with some amount of discipline and academic rigor.
But his studies gradually marched deeper and deeper into fixation.
He collected folktales, ghost stories, historical accounts.
Anything that he felt might lead him closer to Pieter.
Anything that might offer proof of life after death.
Sometimes, he found it. A body he helped dissect that showed no evidence of decay a full week after death.
A woman who could allegedly turn into a wolf at will, hunting along the edges of the Black Forest in Germany.
A village plagued by a dead man—who was sometimes also a dog—following anyone who walked outside after dark.
Calling gently to them, tempting them away from well-worn paths.
When my father visited, he and the local priest dug up the man’s body.
Half of it was perfectly preserved, Papa wrote, and half of it was nothing in a way I cannot explain.
We burned it, and the visitations stopped.
Though he researched ghosts and revenants and spirits, he kept coming back to vampires.
The vast majority of his notes revolved around them.
The science of them, how the bodies kept working, whether there was a way to preserve that immortality without the monstrous aspects.
He listed their features, fixating on the potential in each one.
Shape-shifting into animals, fog, moonlight.
Impossible strength. Inhuman speed. Fear of water.
The need to sleep in their own grave dirt.
The drinking of blood, and the exchange of their own blood in order to turn victims into vampires after their deaths.
Or…to invade their minds and control their dreams.
I keep coming back to that detail. Though I’ve regularly dreamed of Diavola ever since she killed my father, the dreams have been relentless since München.
Sometimes I dream of her when I’m awake.
The touch of her hand on the back of my neck, the smell of her sweet, icy breath, the press of her lips against my cheek.
A vampire’s monstrous powers would also explain the most baffling aspect of all the deaths we investigated: how she made victims do these things to themselves.
Dávid. My Dávid. Dearest friend and fiercest ally.
Throat slit from ear to ear by his own hand.
When I think of it I cannot stop thinking of it, cannot stop picturing it, cannot stop wondering what he felt, how he felt.
What answer he found to Diavola’s question—What happens when you die?
And I know—she said it, but I always knew it—that we all die alone.
But I wasn’t with him, and I can never forgive myself for it.
I betrayed his trust, I didn’t take his counsel, and then I sent him to his death.
I wipe beneath my eyes. This emotional indulgence doesn’t help anything. I owe it to Dávid to be relentless. To never allow myself to rest or pause.
I turn the page. In an effort to at last be as diligent as I should have been in the beginning, I have skipped no journal, skimmed over no line, ignored no cross-reference.
But after all these months, at last, I’m on the journal from the year Papa died.
The story of this particular vampire hunt gets more specific and lengthier than any of the others.
A vampire named Dracula shipped himself from Transylvania to England and then prowled the streets of London.
My father banded together with several men there, and, inexplicably, a female secretary.
It stirs jealousy and curiosity in me, knowing he worked with and respected a young woman.
Couldn’t that have been me? Then again, my father goes on and on about her virtues.
The heart of a woman and the mind of a man.
I can’t understand what distinction he’s drawing.
I’ve seen hearts and minds removed from bodies. There is no gender to either.
But perhaps the fact that I find the sentiment absurd is why he never would have written my praise. I was never what he wanted.
The group also reminds me of my own team and what we tried to do. But the great Abraham Van Helsing’s merry band of monster hunters was more successful, because they knew exactly what they were fighting. Together, they hunted and killed this Dracula.
It all took place in 1890—the year my father died.
I remember the time well, because he was barely home, constantly dropping everything and racing back to London at a moment’s notice.
I graduated from university that September.
Only Joren came, holding flowers. There in place of my mother, who couldn’t leave the home, and my father, who couldn’t be bothered to stay.
But that’s not fair of me. Especially now that I know what he was doing. I try to feel pride in him. To be glad he used his time to hunt a vampire.
His account of stalking Dracula bothers me, though.
My father just…wasn’t very good at it. His methodology was all over the place.
He indulged in wild theories and untested preventative measures while real people were being hurt and even killed.
He should have traveled immediately to Transylvania and gotten firsthand accounts of this Dracula.
Gathered evidence. Learned how to exploit his weaknesses.
Instead, he took notes on the progression of a young woman named Lucy’s infection at Dracula’s hands, imposing only the most half-hearted efforts to protect her.
At the very least, my father could have consulted his wife, a respected expert in infectious diseases.
But he never mentions Mama, and I’m certain she would have told me if he’d included her.
Lucy died under his care. A horrified part of me wonders if that wasn’t the outcome he wanted. If this was the opportunity he’d hoped for, to study the transition from alive to undead firsthand. He certainly didn’t do much to prevent it.
Even then, it took a citywide plague and his secretary Mina’s being harmed for the men he worked with to at last settle on a course of action. Eventually, they drove Dracula back to his home, where they killed him.
I turn the page, expecting my father to move on to something else.
Ideally his history with Diavola. Instead, I find a few angry scribblings about Mina.
And then a lengthy rant about whether or not he can trust his own memory of events, given how badly he desired Dracula’s vampire brides, and how he dreams of them still.
Before he can go into any detail about those dreams, I shut the journal. I’ve wanted to be close to my father my entire life, but I could do without that information.
I pause to nibble on some herring and bread. My coffee has gone cold, but if I go downstairs to warm it on the stove, I’ll be forced to talk to Mama. The idea of conversing with her while the image of my dead father lusting after vampire women is still so fresh in my mind is genuinely mortifying.
But it’s more than that bothering me. The entire account of the Dracula debacle embarrasses me. My father wasn’t very good at hunting monsters, and people died because of it.
My shame grows to encompass me, too. I’m not very good at hunting monsters, and Dávid and Berend are dead because of it. But unlike Papa, I didn’t know I was hunting a monster. How could I have? If he had talked to me, if he had shared this with me…
Maybe he’d still be alive. Maybe we could have learned to properly hunt monsters together.
I could have taken his penchants for research and scientific observation and gently bent them toward actions.
In this version of history, Papa and I hunt down vampires and werewolves and other unfathomable creatures together.
In this version of history, we’re proud of each other.
We trust each other. We know each other.
But it feels impossibly selfish to indulge that imagining.
Every contact leaves a trace. Evil infects everything it touches.
My father’s pursuit of the supernatural has infected my own life since before I realized what it was, and it’s cost the lives of two good men.
Plus my father’s. I’m no longer certain he belongs in the same category of goodness with Dávid and Berend.
“Anneke?” Mama calls, knocking gently on the door.
“I’m working,” I shout, making it the truth by opening the last journal toward the end, hopefully skipping any further details of my father’s lustful thoughts. I’ve been so meticulous before now but I absolutely do not want to read about what he wanted to do with Dracula’s brides.