Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

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Van Helsing’s Journal: September 17th.

I cannot sleep nor can I close mine eyes, for every time I do so the most terrible images flicker in front like some infernal daguerreotype. The horrors I have borne witness to are such that my sanity scream like the inmates of Bedlam. Yet there is worse I must bear than the memory of ancient evil. That which I saw, I cannot bring myself to write about, in part because I cannot fully make sense of all which has befallen me since I awoke in a hospital bed seven days ago; but more so because my heart is broken, and a melancholy weigh me down.

The Good Lord has taken my Susannah and freed her from this mortal coil; that is the best of news even though it pains so. Dr. Hughes informs me she pass peacefully in her sleep the first night I was in Bath. But there is more, much more — news which once received a day after I returned to London nearly drove me back into the arms of unconsciousness.

My little Lily has been stolen away by a thief in the night. Gone. Disappeared. Vanished as breath to the wind.

I know who is responsible, and that terrible knowledge is harder to carry than the fact of her abduction. I can only pray what fate has befallen her has been swift and painless. Yet feeling so impotent, and the realization that I cannot act — for I can prove nothing and have no mapped avenue to follow — fills me with both despair and righteous anger. Yet anger must be the tonic for my soul if I am to survive and grow strong and illuminate the darkness so we, as men, may better define the light.

I will not crumble like the sea wall that is worn away by the ocean — in this incidence, a sea of evil.

I shall not write of that which I recall following Lord Manfred’s masked soirée; in part because my recollections resemble potsherds uncovered by the archaeologist: tarnished, incomplete. And more so because what I do recall is shameful and disturbing, and to dwell upon these recollections will only confine me to a cul-de-sac of regret, shackled by guilt and hopelessness.

This I know: I have been a pawn in an evil game designed to eat away at my faith in God, to break my sanity and spirit.

I was found, in the Royal Victoria Park, at dawn the morning after the party, by a delivery boy, seemingly attacked by a thief, for I was bereft of money and my gold watch. Two days I lay unconscious in Bath’s finest hospital before I awake. Confused, I did not contradict the theory of my state proposed by the Bath constabulary. My requests to have the Baroness visit me came to naught as, according to her local maid, she suddenly returned to London on receiving news her son had taken sick. Attempts to locate the Baroness at her Belgravia house proved equally fruitless; the abode was empty and shows no sign of having been lived in for some time. As for the burghers of Bath, they claim no knowledge of Lord Manfred’s whereabouts save that he, too, departed the city for “a destination on the continent” the day following the ball. When men such as a mayor and his powerful friends have been compromised as I suspect, they have secrets which impede truth; I shall find no help there.

As the Lord God Almighty is my witness, I shall not rest until I have brought them both to justice. Not Man’s justice, for as a lawyer I know only too well there is one law for the rich, another for the poor; no, the justice of Van Helsing.

I know now the path I must follow. As I have long suspected, in part supported by my occult studies, far stranger things walk on Earth than we dream of in Heaven and Hell. The evils men do are, in the main, petty evils, but evils nonetheless; mine eyes have seen the testimony of a greater Evil which feeds on the little evils of men, encourage those evils, cultivates the soil in which dark blooms grow.

Why did they let me live? To torture me? As Manfred says “to corrupt the Good”?

The arrogance of Evil!

This proves he is a fool.

Evil is an absence of love; a desire to erode our moral fibre, to bring unnecessary pain and suffering to our condition so that we may despair of God and lose our faith in a Higher Purpose. A desire to destroy that which is Good, to corrupt and break and trample into the dust the Lord’s greatest gift: Love. If I have sinned, my sin has been weakness — a cowardliness which held me back from love, for those who do not love fully do not live as God intends. I loved Susannah as a father, but as a father I should have loved little Lily. Even so, had I taken her into my house would she be safe and sound now, sleeping the innocent sleep only children are afforded? I cannot say. All I know is I will never know because I was weak, and afraid of mine own weakness.

No more.

Where there be monsters, I shall smite them down. Where there is darkness, I shall be the beacon of light. Where there is absence of love, I shall be sustenance.

Evil beware.

He stared at me sadly over his steaming cup of coffee, and I saw then how the terrible weight of his responsibility had crushed his spirit. Instead of fathering hope and life, instead of saving lives, he had given birth to the most destructive force known to mankind. There had been no irony when, as Fat Man exploded, he had said, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” For eight years he had tried to deal with that terrible knowledge.

“How are things at the Bureau?” my friend J. Robert Oppenheimer asked, pulling his pipe from his pocket. “How’s Trevor?”

“Quite well. He asked me to send his best,” I replied, watching him pack the pipe bowl with a pungent tumbleweed of Balkan Sobrane tobacco.

The waitress suspiciously eyed the back booth in which we sat. Not because of the cloud of thick, sweet smoke now pluming above Robert’s head, but I sensed it was my presence that made her uncomfortable. Even though we were only a few miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico, and since 1947, shortly after I moved away, the locals had grown used to strange sights, and even stranger goings-on, having a large, red creature seated in your diner was certainly unusual. Beneath my duster, I tightened my curled tail lest it slip below the hem. Some women, I have discovered, frequently found the tail to be more than they could handle.

“They’ve taken away my clearance. I’m persona non grata,” he said into his cup. “But I can’t be a party to it anymore. They’re not going to stop. It’s all about bigger and better bombs. And they don’t want me as a conscience. My opinions are uncalled for.”

His angular features were pinched. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see he was in pain.

“But that’s not why I asked you to come… I’m acting as middle man. Do you remember Jamie MacDougal?”

I nodded.

I remembered him well. A spry Scottish-American research scientist. MacDougal and Trevor Bruttenholm had spent many an evening playing chess during the year we lived at Roswell. As I had come to look upon Brutteholm as my father, at that time Jamie MacDougal had been like an uncle.

“He’s here, stationed at Los Alamos. Very hush-hush. Now I’m considered a liability, I can’t have any contact with him. But somehow he managed to get a note to me, requesting I contact you to see if you’d come.” Robert puffed slowly, savouring the rich aroma.

“I’m here. So what’s the problem?”

“His son’s disappeared.”

A half-crescent moon rode high in the sky like a severed quarter as I walked the arroyo running parallel to the road where young Malcolm MacDougal had last been spotted. I was five lonely miles outside of Los Alamos, heading southwest into the foot hills of the Jemez Mountains. I was searching for a stream, for there I hoped to find a woman who would lead me to the boy.