The vampire’s eyes widened, but it was unable to move as Setrakian lay the necklace over its head, resting it upon the creature’s shoulders.
The silver collar weighed on the strigoi like a chain of hundred-pound stones. Setrakian pulled over a chair just in time for Dreverhaven to collapse into it, keeping the vampire from falling to the floor. The creature’s head dipped to one side, its hands shivering helplessly in its lap.
Setrakian picked up the book—it was, in fact, a sixth-edition copy of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, backed and bound in Britannia silver—and dropped it back into his portmanteau. Sword in hand, he returned to the bookcase toward which the desperate Dreverhaven had lunged.
After some careful searching, wary of booby-traps, Setrakian found the trigger volume. He heard a click and felt the shelf unit give, and then shoved open the swinging wall on its rotating axis.
The smell met him first. Dreverhaven’s rear quarters were windowless and unventilated, a nest of discarded books and trash and reeking rags. But this was not the source of the most offensive stench. That came from the top floor, accessible via a blood-spattered staircase.
An operating theater, a stainless-steel table set in black tile seemingly grouted in caked human blood. Decades of grime and gore covered every surface, flies buzzing angrily around a blood-smeared meat refrigerator in the corner.
Setrakian held his breath and opened the fridge, because he had to. It contained only items of perversion, nothing of real interest. No information to further Setrakian’s quest. Setrakian realized he was becoming inured to depravity and butchering.
He returned to the creature suffering in the chair. Dreverhaven’s face had by now melted away, unveiling the strigoi beneath. Setrakian stepped to the windows, dawn just beginning to filter in, soon to trumpet into the apartment, cleaning it of darkness and of vampires.
“How I dreaded each dawn in the camp,” said Setrakian. “The start of another day in the death farm. I did not fear death, but I did not choose it either. I chose survival. And in doing so, I chose dread.”
I am happy to die.
Setrakian looked at Dreverhaven. The strigoi no longer bothered with the ruse of moving his lips.
All my lusts have long since been satisfied. I have gone as far as one can go in this life, man or beast. I hunger for nothing any longer. Repetition only extinguishes pleasure.
“The book,” said Setrakian, daringly close to Dreverhaven. “It no longer exists.”
It does exist. But only a fool would dare to pursue it. Pursuing the Occido Lumen means you are pursuing the Master. You might be able to take a tired acolyte like myself but if you go against him, the odds will certainly be against you. As they were against your dear wife.
So indeed the vampire had a little bit of perversion left in him. He still possessed the capacity, however small and vain, for sick pleasure. The vampire’s gaze never left Setrakian’s.
Morning was upon them now, the sun appearing at an angle through the windows. Setrakian stood and suddenly grasped the back of Dreverhaven’s chair, tipping it onto its hind legs and dragging it through the bookcase to the hidden rear quarters, leaving twin scores in the wood floor.
“Sunlight,” Setrakian declared, “is too good for you, Herr Doktor.”
The strigoi stared at him, eyes full of anticipation. Here, finally for him, was the unexpected. Dreverhaven longed to be part of any perversion, no matter the role he might play.
Setrakian remained in tight control of his rage.
“Immortality is no friend to the perverse, you say?” Setrakian put his shoulder to the bookshelf, sealing out the sun. “Then immortality you shall enjoy.”
That’s it, woodworker. There is your passion, Jew. What have you in mind?
The plan took three days. For seventy-two hours, Setrakian worked nonstop in a vengeful daze. Dismembering the strigoi upon Dreverhaven’s own operating table, severing and cauterizing all four stumps, was the most dangerous part. He then procured lead tulip planters in order to fashion a dirt-less coffin for the silver-necklaced strigoi, in order to cut off the vampire from communication with the Master. Into the sarcophagus he packed the abomination and its severed limbs. Setrakian chartered a small boat and loaded the planter onto it. Then he sailed alone deep into the North Sea. After a struggle, he managed to put the box overboard without sinking the boat in the process—thereby stranding the creature between land masses, safe from the killing sun and yet impotent for all eternity.
Not until the box sank to the ocean floor did Dreverhaven’s taunting voice finally leave Setrakian’s mind, like a madness finding its cure. Setrakian looked at his crooked fingers, bruised and bleeding, stinging with the salt water—and clenched them into tangled fists.
He was indeed going the way of madness. It was time to go underground, he realized, just as the strigoi had. To continue his work in private, and to await his chance.
His chance at the book. At the Master.
It was time to repair to America.
The Master-Part II
THE MASTER WAS, above all things, compulsive in both action and thought. The Master had considered every potential permutation of the plan. It felt vaguely anxious for this all to come to fruition, but one thing the Master did not lack was conviction.
The Ancients would be exterminated all at once, and in a matter of hours.
They would not even see it coming. How could they? After all, hadn’t the Master orchestrated the demise of one of them, along with six serfs, some years ago in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria? The Master itself had shared in the pain of the anguish of death at the very moment it occurred, feeling the maelstrom pull of the darkness—the implacable nothing—and savoring it.