Fright Night: Hellbound, page 4
Lucia, on the other hand, had moved into an apartment with a man whom she figured she could change if she spent enough time with him. A younger man with a temper and a tongue to match. She could not change him, nor his short fuse or wandering hands. He spent more time in bars than he did at home, and then, on one occasion, when she did find him at home, it was with another woman in their bed.
She let him have her Moreno wrath for the first and last time, and sent him packing.
And then she sent herself packing, because this shoddy studio apartment in Harlem wasn’t doing it for her. She knew that her father owned the apartment over the bar, an apartment that had been used up till now for storage purposes. Six months before her father died, Lucia moved into that apartment, clearing all clutter and selling all old and no-longer-useable equipment.
It was good that she was away from Brook Avenue, away from the darkness, from the voices that imposed their will upon her if she didn’t listen. Here, all was quiet, all was calm, and she was free to be the person she wished to be. To be able to break tradition in public, cutting her hair short, wearing American dresses, singing in Harlem supper clubs. She enjoyed this new part of her. And yet, she stuck with the old ways in the quiet of her apartment, still lighting her candles.
In time, she learned how to create a door that would keep the dead on the other side so that they wouldn’t intrude upon her as much. But they came to her anyway, sometimes sharing their plight of loneliness, sometimes asking for her help, and sometimes not knowing that they had died.
Although she did not have any explicit memory of the tin shed and the demon she’d come across (for some terrors are so scarring that the brain pretends to have forgotten them, while forgetting none of the lessons that came with the terror), she was never off guard when practicing the old ways.
When her father died, and when she was done burying him next to her mother, there was no formal handoff. Just the estate lawyer giving her an envelope and keys. She’d inherited the bar and the apartment above it, following Walter’s purchase of it many years before.
The first order of business was to rename it to reclaim it. No longer would the singular S be the name and marker of this place, even though it was built solely for those who knew how to find it.
It would be called Sanctuario, and once she was done finishing its remodeling, she’d open its doors to the world once more.
For something was already on its way.
Chapter 2
Amsterdam
1977
At first glance, the city did not feel like it belonged on earth.
With its tilting canal houses, cobbled lanes, and the clatter of bike bells cutting through the soft lapping of water against stone, Amsterdam played a symphony where both the old and new harmonized with each other.
A symphony of gabled rooftops and spires like the Westertoren rising above them, watching over bridges arched like eyebrows above the Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, and Herengracht.
Glass-roofed tour boats glided past houseboats that were festooned with flowerpots. The scent of weed smoke and stroopwafels wafted from the Nine Streets, where the bakeries, eateries, and cafes of this city were found right next to quaint antique stores and bookshops.
Trams hummed along the Damrak toward the Dam Square’s royal palace and the Nieuwe Kerk, while a little farther down, the Rijksmuseum’s archway framed cyclists and pedestrians alike as they moved past Rembrandt’s painted ancestors, and the Van Gogh Museum spoke in colors of beautiful psychosis.
Pigeons pecked about the bronze of Spinoza near the old Jewish Quarter, and somewhere near Vondelpark, jazz poured out of an open window above a bar where the barkeep poured Heineken as if it were balm for all the many ails of the soul.
It was a city that did not tolerate inhibitions. And you could tell by the way people breathed freely as they drank, as they smoked marijuana on street corners, eyeing the dancing women in red windows.
While there were no laws explicitly passed to allow such lasciviousness, the lawmakers and the upholders of law did nothing to stop it. When the police were not busy turning a blind eye, they were participating in the debauchery themselves.
Jerry loved the city for what it was: a welcome respite from the cultureless wasteland that was America, a different flavor of European life, one that was not found in the streets of London or Munich.
A well-travelled man with quite the diverse cultural palette, he appreciated Amsterdam for what it was and hung over it like a cloud of smoke, casting his presence over the tall and narrow canal houses of the old city center, watching the tourists floating down the canal, making note of the city’s bustle, his sharp senses registering everything.
Amsterdam was not yet aware of his malevolent presence. When something out of the ordinary transpired, such as the sudden disappearance of a prostitute from a window in the back alley, the town assumed that yet another lady of the night had moved on.
But in the winter of ’69, the town started to talk about the Shadow on the Herengracht. No sooner did night fall than men and women started to vanish with increased frequency, and what the detectives and the fearful public did not know was that one human body could feed a vampire for up to three days, but the taste of cold blood was not necessarily appealing.
The city folk, wanting to ascribe it to some ordinary phenomenon, blamed drugs, the Polish immigrants, or, if not either, mental illness claiming the lives of the morbidly depressed.
Professor Haden Moore, an expert on the subject of theology, religious iconology, and symbology, a man who had lived long and traveled wide, recognized the pattern of disappearances, having read about it in Vatican archives and Sumerian texts, having witnessed this controlled chaos before, where creatures killed methodically and then cleaned up after themselves.
He had not dyed his hair gray sitting in the sun, after all. Before he wore these tweed jackets with elbow patches, before he delivered lectures on kabbalah, the ten sephirot, and helped differentiate between the Catholic and Orthodox icon traditions to indifferent students, Haden was a man the Vatican called whenever it had questions that had no answers written in any of the books they possessed.
As a hyper-gifted man with a photographic memory and deep understanding, he had already consumed most of the books that he could get his hands on in the Secret Archives when he had interned there in his youth. And that was just his internship. What followed was an illustrious career in understanding the darker realities that thrived on this planet and hunting them.
Haden Moore, despite his seemingly close ties with the Vatican, was no priest. His name was never mentioned on official rosters, and yet, when a convent in Lyon went silent for forty days, it was Haden that the Vatican sent to investigate.
When an ossuary in southern Italy began growing new bones, it was Haden who put an end to that necromancy. He was the non-exorcist that the church never wanted to admit they employed, but had no choice but to do so when push came to shove.
He did what he did best. And his job was to make problems disappear without fuss. With a knack for persuasion and enough charm to boot, he could convince men to join his group of vigilantes to hunt and take down the things that went bump in the night.
Hunter Haden was the nickname they had for him, but he referred to himself as a professor. He believed in observation, in the repetition of patterns as they repeated across centuries and continents.
Monsters, for instance, did not just operate on instinct. They followed, even in their chaos, rules and rhythms. Their feeding habits held signatures that never changed. And Haden had made it his life’s work to trace them.
And unlike the actual hunters, who charged in with silver and fire, Haden waited, sitting in dark pews and counting the wolves that howled during certain hours.
He’d catalogue weather anomalies and connect them to disappearances. He collected newspaper clippings from the remote towns in Tinjan, Peru, Madagascar, and pinned them on a corkboard. He knew the names of men who had no birth certificates, whose lives predated official record-keeping, but who were still out there, somehow still breathing.
A modest man in his craft, Haden charged a handsome fee, not for his own luxuries but for the recruiting of people, for the purchase of weaponry, and for renting abodes as he rid the earth of the ghouls that haunted it.
He worked simply and primitively, finding modernity to be nothing more than a complexity. And so, he relied upon maps, newspaper clippings, and the grimoires he had retrieved from monsters gone by to give him clues. Master charts of patterns that, once realized, could predict the next outbreak before it started.
Haden had gotten close to the truth so often that the Vatican had pulled him back time and again, lest his findings suggest that some monsters were not in hiding. That, instead, they were evolving and learning to adapt, avoiding detection in a rapidly modernizing world.
By the late 1960s, the Vatican’s interest in Haden had fizzled out. They kept tabs on him, certainly, but there were fewer and fewer calls from Rome. Haden’s role as a professor at the University of Amsterdam was a soft retirement of sorts, one in which he could live a quiet life surrounded by books and solitude.
The city’s calmness, its orderliness, were something that spoke greatly to Haden after spending a life that had little of either. Here in this city, people did not hold to superstitions. They believed in infrastructure and treated religion as folklore and nothing more. Or so Haden had observed.
The classes he taught each week were on ritual symbology, medieval apocrypha, and cult doctrines of old. His students were a mixed bunch, most of them indifferent to the subject matter and only choosing to attend his classes because he passed them easily, which bumped their GPAs a few points up.
However, some students clung to his every word as if it were gospel, and he was kind of irritated with them by now. They did not respect the electric bell as it rang in the halls. Instead, when the lecture finished, they flocked around him, asking him questions that belonged in tomorrow’s lecture. He had considered buying a broom to beat them with.
Lisa Vicenza, twenty-one, a blonde-haired girl from Italy, was one of those pestering students who always looked like they were on the verge of a religious epiphany. He admired her spirit, but did not have the heart to tell her that there was nothing but disappointment at the end of this road. The answers that she sought in religion were not altogether that neatly packaged for someone like her.
What did it matter anyway? She was going to graduate in the fall. And then he’d have the next batch of students. This Lisa would be replaced by some Julia or some Matilda, and…
Oh, who am I kidding? I have a good life here, thought Haden as he sipped his morning cup of bitter coffee and looked outside the window of his canal house. He could technically own the canal house if it came to it, but it had five stories, and he didn’t really need the other four. So he rented it, likening himself to Sherlock Holmes, given how nosy his landlady was as well. She was always climbing the flight of stairs with a tray of baked goods.
Ms. Grisham, a woman who spoke fluent German and French, never really explained why. When she was not busy pestering the good professor, she was behind the counter at the bookstore below, selling secondhand paperbacks to tourists and broke academics alike.
It was barely five in the morning, and Professor Haden Moore, resting both elbows on the window sill, his torso out, could see that Ms. Grisham, sixty-five years young, was busy and about, throwing bread into the Prinsengracht for the flock of ducks that were swimming idyllically while they still could, while the water was not disturbed by the constant boats.
It did his health well to take in the morning air, really feel all the breeze freshened by the leaves of the lindens and elms, and drink his coffee with, ironically, a cigarette. But men of Haden’s ilk were cut from a different cloth. The cigarettes had not done his health any harm up until now, and he was certain that they were only going to invigorate him, not debilitate him in his twilight years.
Today was a Sunday morning, and in another hour, Professor Haden would get ready, don his trench coat, fill his pocket with breadcrumbs of his own for the geese and pigeons that flocked around him by the canal, and pick a Vonnegut novel to read in the early hours of the morning.
Next, he’d take a walk through Jordaan with a leather notebook tucked under his arm, a notebook that he’d stop and scribble in every now and then. If the butcher near Dam Square was sitting in the park with his chessboard, Haden would play a match with him. If not, then he’d go to the mailbox and deposit letters to a handful of his old colleagues in different parts of the world. And then he’d come home and rest before his evening tea.
But none of that happened today, and Professor Moore had only taken the first sip from his coffee and the second drag from his cigarette when he witnessed his Sunday (and the rest of his days to come) being mercilessly robbed from him.
It started with a scream from Ms. Grisham, the old landlady who had never married yet knew more about men than a whole block of housewives put together. She screamed so loud that the flock of ducks that were circling the breadcrumbs she had thrown in the water immediately started to quack in alarm and flew off.
There were only five or six people in the street below, all of whom shared in her alarm as she screamed again and pointed a finger at the water, yelling, “Oh mein Gott! There is a corpse in the water!”
The cup nearly fell from Haden’s hand as his eyes followed Ms. Grisham’s finger. There it was, unmistakably, indeed, a body floating upside down in the water, carried down the canal. In the meager light of the rising sun, he spotted the woman’s ripped garment and her ashen hair.
By the time he had reached downstairs, the corpse had floated under an arching bridge. But there were two policemen on the other side, reaching by way of hooks attached to the end of wooden sticks, normally meant for dragging something out of the water.
Haden quickened his pace just in time as the police officers pulled the body of the girl out of the water and placed her upon the sidewalk.
It was Lisa Vicenza, her entire body three shades paler than when he’d last seen her on Friday, eyes closed, lips blue, and two distinct puncture marks on her carotid.
“Back off, sir!” the police officer snapped at Haden, not knowing who he was or under what authority he was standing here. Haden did not argue. Instead, he backed away, his mind beginning to spin gears that had been gathering dust for far too long.
As a small crowd of eye-rubbing citizens and early morning joggers began to gather around the police, Haden heard something.
“Twelfth one this month,” a woman whispered as she clung to her boyfriend’s arm. He patted her head and turned her face away from the dead body.
Haden took hold of Ms. Grisham’s arm and said, “Come along, Ms. Grisham. This is a matter for the police.”
“Oh, how…utterly…horrible,” she whimpered, standing there resolutely.
Above them, above the canal houses and the towers and old building fronts, a pink-hued sun rose, its many shades reflecting in the canal water, shedding soft light on the over-eager theology student.
As Haden escorted his landlady back into her bookshop, he made a mental note of what he was going to do next.
Twelve deaths in a month were no coincidence. How had he missed this? He was a meticulous man. Was it a symptom of age-brought senility that the first eleven murders had flown under his radar? Or was it a different sort of predator, which made it harder to detect the pattern?
Something was here. And if he didn’t confront it, it was only a matter of time before it would confront him.
It was around the evening of the same day that Professor Haden made his move. Between the morning and the evening, he kept himself busy. First, he made a trip to the press office, where an old journalist friend of his by the name of Horcoff sat in the senior editor's office.
A balding man with beady eyes and glasses altogether too big for his face, Horcoff Sigmund was De Telegraaf’s oldest employee, and had seen to his meteoric rise from one office to the other the hard and long way, starting as a photographer, then a copywriter for those fluff pieces in the back of the newspaper, and then toiling around the Netherlands reporting on this, that, and the other, before settling down in Amsterdam and taking the helm of the editorial office.
“It’s not a good day today.” Horcoff shook his head before Haden had fully entered his office. “Not today, Moore.”
“So soon you forget the trenches.” Haden clicked his tongue and shook his head, taking his felt hat off and placing it upon Horcoff’s scattered desk.
“I never,” Horcoff said, raising a finger of self-preservation, then nodding at the picture on the wall, one with a framed picture of Allied soldiers standing victorious in Stalingrad. In the corner of the picture, two men stood with grins on their faces and fire in their eyes. Only now, twenty-six years later, were both those men in this office, their faces bearing grimness instead of grins. And the light that was in their eyes was dimmed by age, yet still burned somewhere in there.
“Then help me out, and tell me why you’ve been holding out on me,” Haden said, his voice slow. “You know I am in town. Have been for some time now. When was I supposed to know that there had been eleven disappearances in the city?”
“Deaths, not disappearances,” Horcoff corrected him. “And like everyone else, you’d have read about it in the news.”
“Except, I’ve been reading the paper every morning, and only three were mentioned. What about the others? What about the fact that you promised me that if something of this sort happened, you’d reach out to me?” Haden knew where to apply the pressure when needed, but this wasn’t pressure application. This was remorse. His friend had grown lax.
“I…” Horcoff sighed. “I have had my arm wrung by, let’s not say who. I can’t quite publish the news, and I was explicitly told not to involve you.”
