was barely conscious, moaning and turning gently against the ropes that held her fast. The valet pulled his knife from his belt and sliced through the ropes. Van Helsing gently lifted the girl down and passed her to Stoker, who held her at arm’s length, his face blank with terror.
“Hold her, damn you!” barked Van Helsing. Stoker flinched and drew the chorus girl tight against him.
“She’s been bled almost dry,” Van Helsing told the valet. “Recently, too. The jugular blood is still warm.”
“Where’s the conductor?” asked the valet, his voice low.
“I don’t know,” replied Van Helsing. “If he’s in one of other tunnels we will need more light, and many more men. If he’s—”
A drop of blood landed on the valet’s shoulder.
The valet examined the dark material of his jacket, then slowly both men looked up into the roof of the cavern.
Harold Norris hung upside down from the stone roof of the chamber, twenty feet or more above them, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes closed, like a grotesquely swollen bat. His mouth and chin were dark with Jenny Pembry’s blood and as the three men stared upwards, drops of crimson fell softly on to the dusty floor between them.
“Be absolutely quiet,” whispered Van Helsing. “We must not wake him.”
“What… what has happened to him?” asked Stoker, his whisper slurred by alcohol.
“There is not sufficient time to explain it to you now. We must leave here at once, and return better prepared. We are no match for him if he wakes.”
The valet was still looking up at the conductor. The face that hung above him was gentle, kind even, lined with wrinkles and topped with a mane of grey hair. Norris was wearing his evening suit, the jacket spreading out around him like wings, the white collars of his shirt stained brown with blood.
“Boy!” hissed Van Helsing.
The valet looked around, shaken from his thoughts. His master and the night manager were standing under the great arch that led into the chamber, waiting for him. He crossed the cavern slowly, anxious not to make any sound that might awake the sleeping monster swaying gently above his head. He had almost reached his companions when Stoker, his eyes wide with fear and incomprehension, turned and ran down the passage.
He made it only two steps before a stone slab shifted beneath him and he pitched sideways. Van Helsing made a futile grab for his jacket but gripped only air. The night manager thumped into the wall of the corridor, which collapsed around him in a shower of rubble and a great cloud of choking dust. And in the roof of the cavern, Harold Norris opened his crimson eyes and let out a deep, animal growl.
The conductor was upon them before any of the men had chance to react. He fell like a dead weight into the middle of the cavern, pivoting impossibly barely inches from the ground to land in a deep crouch. He burst forward from this position with dizzying speed, crossing the distance to the arch in the blink of an eye, barrelling into them like a snarling hurricane. He gripped Van Helsing around the throat, and threw the old man into the middle of the chamber. Van Helsing crashed to the floor, skidded into the side of the altar, and lay still. The valet made to pull his hand from his pocket, but was much, much too slow. The conductor descended on him, a dark thing from hell, his eyes a deep red flecked with black and silver, his face splashed with Jenny Pembry’s blood, two long fangs standing out from his mouth.
The valet felt himself lifted from his feet and then he was in motion, soaring through the air into the cavern. He saw his master lying below him, blood pooling beneath his head, and had time to regard the onrushing stone wall with something approaching dispassion.
I’m going to hit that, he had time to think.
And then he did.
Stoker lay among the crumbled stone of the wall. His back was agony where he had fallen across the section of the wall that had remained standing, and his nose and mouth were thick with foul-tasting dust. He felt hands reach through the hole in the wall and grasp the lapels of his tunic, and breathed a sigh of relief as he was pulled forward into the passage. Then the dust cleared and he found himself looking into the smiling, inhuman face of Harold Norris and he threw back his head and screamed.
“Quiet your screeching, you drunken wretch,” hissed the conductor. Stoker was horrified to hear that this monster spoke in the same gentle voice that Norris had used night after night to conduct his players. “If I tear the tongue from your head, you will wish you had done as I say.”
Stoker forced himself to stop screaming, clenching his teeth together, even though the face inches from his own made him feel as though he were teetering on the edge of madness. He forced himself to speak, to say something, anything that might see him escape the same fate that had befallen the others who had found themselves in this old place of dust and death.
“Harold… it’s me, Bram. Don’t hurt me, please. Please.”
The conductor laughed and opened his mouth to reply when his eyes suddenly snapped wide and a sharp wooden point emerged through the fabric of his dress shirt. Norris looked down for a fraction of a second before he exploded in a fountain of blood, spraying the night manager from head to toe and covering the cloak and hat of the valet who was standing where the conductor had been, his arm thrust forward, the hand at the end of it clutching a pointed wooden stake.
“What should be done with him?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It is possible he will not remember any of this.”
“Is that a chance we can afford to take?”
Van Helsing and the valet sat in a dark booth in the corner of the Lyceum Tavern, deep glasses of brandy on the table before them. The valet had supported Stoker, and dragged him back through the tunnels and out into the orchestra pit, while Van Helsing did the same for Jenny Pembry. The valet had collapsed the passage before climbing the ladder out of the ground for the final time.
It had been slow going; Van Helsing had received a deep cut to his head when he collided with the altar stone, and he needed to stop twice to rest on the journey back to the surface. Thankfully, the chorus girl was mercifully light and although she seemed almost catatonic she had been capable of putting one foot in front of the other.
They had put her in a carriage and instructed the driver to deliver her to the house of a physician friend of the Professor’s, with a note Van Helsing had scrawled on the back of a discarded programme for the evening’s performance of The Tempest.
The night manager had mumbled and muttered to himself as they hauled him back through the stone corridors, and was now sitting between them on a red leather bench, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling steadily as he slept.
“You realise what this means, boy?” asked Van Helsing.
“Yes, master. I do.”
“It means that Transylvania was not the end of this business.”
The valet said nothing.
“You played your part extremely well tonight,” Van Helsing continued. “Without you, this matter may have ended very differently.”
The valet watched as his master’s lined, weathered face broke into a rare
