Department 19: The Rising (7 page)

Operator Brennan stared at Turner with a look that suggested he had more he wanted to say, but he held his tongue.

“Fine,” said Admiral Seward. “Paul, keep at them, but I don’t think you’ll have much luck, as you said. I spoke to the SPC this morning and they assured me they’re doing all they can, so let’s—”

“All they can?” said Jamie, without thinking. “Apart from not losing the remains in the first place, you mean?”

Seven pairs of eyes swung in his direction, and Jamie swallowed hard.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just frustrating. Nobody knew they had them, so there was nothing we could do to make sure they were safe.”

“I knew the SPC had the remains,” said Seward, coolly. “As did the other Directors. What would you have had us do?”

Jamie looked at the Director for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir.”

Seward’s face softened. “I don’t like it any more than you, Lieutenant Carpenter. Clearly, there are lessons to be learnt from what has happened, for all of us. But we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, to the best of our abilities. So, on that note, and because I’d like to keep this meeting as short as humanly possible, if there is nothing—”

“I don’t like it either,” interrupted Operator Brennan, scowling at Jamie. “I don’t like any part of this. And I still don’t see why some kid who isn’t even old enough to wear the uniform gets a say in this just because his surname is Carpenter.”

Jamie felt his face flush with anger. He opened his mouth to reply, saw Seward do the same and was surprised when someone beat them both to it.

“Mr Brennan,” said Professor Talbot. “Have you ever seen a Priority Level 1 vampire?”

“What does that have to—”

“This young man,” continued Talbot, glancing at Jamie, “has not only seen one, but faced it down and destroyed it. Compared to every vampire
you
have ever seen, Operator Brennan, Alexandru Rusmanov might as well have been a different species; a natural disaster made flesh, like a hurricane, and Mr Carpenter destroyed him. He is the only living soul to have destroyed a Priority 1.
That’s
why he’s here. Because what Alexandru was to normal vampires, so Dracula will be to Alexandru if he is allowed to rise, and I for one will want Mr Carpenter on our side if that happens. Is that clear enough for you?”

Jamie looked at Professor Talbot, stunned. He had not expected his defence to come from the most unknown quantity in the Department.

Sometimes I forget about Alexandru. He had my mum, so for me it was simple. I forget how big a deal it is to everyone else.

“There you have it,” said Admiral Seward. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Anyone else have any more questions they want to ask, or speeches they’d like to make? No? Well, thank heaven for small mercies.”

He stood up from the table, and the rest of the group followed his lead.

“I would remind you, one more time,” said the Director. “Everything that has been said here is only for the ears of the men in this room. Any violation of this very simple instruction will be considered a court-martial offence. I ask you all not to force me to make good on that promise. Dismissed.”

STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE

Matt Browning shoved his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. He had been in front of his computer for more than thirty of the last forty-eight hours, and his eyes were killing him.

He walked out of his bedroom, stuck his head into his little sister’s room, waited until he heard the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, then made his way downstairs to the kitchen. As he passed the door to the front room, he heard his father swear at the television, berating an offside decision he had clearly not agreed with. At the table in the small dining room that was attached by French doors to the back of the living room, he could hear his mother on the phone to her sister, talking with quiet animation about a minor celebrity who had left her equally minor celebrity fiancé at the altar. It was evidently quite the scandal.

In the kitchen, Matt poured himself a glass of water and leant against one of the counters. He doubted that anyone in the world knew as much about vampires as he had learnt in the two months since he had been returned home.

Matt knew, as he sat in the back of the car with the blacked-out windows that was taking him home, that the first few moments of his return were going to be crucial. If he was going to be believed, if his parents were going to accept, as the doctor at the base had, that he could remember nothing of what had happened to him, then he was going to have to play his hand perfectly.

The doctor was so pleased with his recovery from the coma that his apparent amnesia had been almost an afterthought. Tests were carried out, a great number of them, but Matt realised quickly that the doctor had been convinced that he would emerge from his coma with significant brain damage, and that lent him the courage to lie with conviction. He picked a point four days before the incident in his parents’ garden, and stuck resolutely to his claim that he could remember nothing since then. He feigned frustration, and concern for the state of his memory; he summoned tears of apparent confusion and fear, while the doctor had held his hand and told him it was all going to be all right.

There was one brief, terrifying moment when the nurse suggested a polygraph test to assess whether there might be recoverable memories, to check whether, in effect, Matt was lying without meaning to. But the doctor rounded angrily on her, and told her that the boy had been through enough. The nurse, chastened, apologised for the suggestion, and Matt breathed a little easier.

He stood on the doorstep of his parents’ small house for several minutes, the letter he had been told to give them in his hand, as he prepared himself to give his performance. Then he rang the doorbell, and waited until his father answered. In the end, very little was required of him; he had barely begun a stuttering, rambling apology when his father interrupted it by wrapping him into a crushing bear hug and dragging him inside the house.

Greg Browning carried him into the kitchen, set him down, then flopped into one of the battered plastic chairs. His eyes were bulging and he was clutching at his chest, and for one terrible moment Matt was sure his father was having a heart attack. Then a great sob burst from Greg Browning’s mouth, and the tension in his body evaporated as he began to cry. He grabbed for the phone, tears pouring down his cheeks, his gaze fixed on Matt as he found the handset and dialled a number with trembling fingers; it was as though he feared that if he averted his eyes for even a second, his son might disappear again. Then a voice answered the phone, and Greg’s face had crumpled into a blubbery mess of tears and snot as he told his wife that their son had come home.

Matt’s mother arrived the following morning, on the first train west. Matt assumed, although he didn’t say anything out loud, that she and his father had been fighting, and his mum had gone to visit Matt’s aunt in Sheffield. She carried his sister through the front door, yelling Matt’s name until she saw him, and fell silent. The look on her face was indescribable, to Matt at least; the sight of it had brought instant tears to his eyes. Then his mum started to cry as well. She put his sister carefully down on the sofa, then wrapped her arms round him so tightly that he wondered whether she was ever planning to let him go.

That evening, the three of them sat in their front room, and had the only conversation they would ever have about the night he had been lost. Sticking to his story was easy; his parents were so overcome with relief that he had been returned to them that they never even entertained the thought that he might know more than he was saying. When they were finished talking, Matt’s dad silently handed him the letter he had brought home with him.

“You should see this,” he said.

Matt took it from his father, unfolded it and read it.

Mr and Mrs Browning,

The incident in which your son sustained injury remains a matter of the highest national security. You are hereby instructed not to discuss the incident with any other party; doing so will be considered an act of treason, and appropriate action will be taken. Acceptance of this letter constitutes acceptance of this instruction.

Your son has received all appropriate medical care, and his recuperation is progressing well. If he develops further medical problems, you should inform medical personnel that he suffered a myocardial infarction due to sudden rapid blood loss. You should not discuss with anyone the circumstances surrounding his injury.

Matt handed the letter back to his father, and told them he was going to bed. And the very next morning, his parents began the long process of trying to forget that any of it had ever happened.

He didn’t even blame them, not really; the girl, the helicopter and the men in the black uniforms holding guns did not fit into the small lives his parents had carved out for themselves in their quiet corner of the world. He supposed they had known, in some abstract way, that there were things out there beyond the end of their suburban street that were wild, and dangerous, that might defy explanation, but they had been perfectly happy for such things to stay where they were. Football, and reality TV, and lager, and celebrity magazines – these were things they could understand, could hold on to and relate to. Not girls who healed before their eyes, then tore their son’s throat out on their back lawn, before soldiers told them it had never happened, the implicit threat obvious to all.

The darkness the world contained had been thrust upon them; they had not looked for it. And now that the darkness had receded, now that their son had been returned to them and they had been able to largely rebuild the lives they had been living before, they were gradually allowing themselves to believe it had never happened at all. He understood their position, and didn’t judge it. It was fine for them.

It was not fine for him.

Matt’s brain swooped and swirled round new ideas, gravitating hungrily towards anything he didn’t know; it was an all-consuming thirst for knowledge, for all knowledge, from how his mother’s Dyson worked to what would happen if you were able to stand on the event horizon of a black hole. In his mind, there was no distinction between the two; knowledge was knowledge, every bit of it as valuable and satisfying as the next.

To call him intelligent would be insufficient; Matt Browning was possessed of an intellect so powerful it would technically be classified as genius. He was as skilled at hiding this intelligence from his family as he was from the bullies at school, who he knew would target him even more viciously if he revealed how much cleverer he was than all of them. He yearned for a time, which he fervently believed would one day come, when he would no longer need to hide who he was, when his intellect would be admired rather than reviled.

Without his parents’ knowledge, he had submitted an application to Cambridge the previous autumn, and received an unconditional offer to attend after a phone interview he had also kept secret. He was due to begin his studies in less than a year, and it had become the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that kept him getting out of bed every morning. Until the girl landed in their
garden, and he woke up in a hospital bed, with his throat bandaged and his head full of vampires.

He was now consumed by a burning need to understand what had happened to him. It felt like his entire view of the universe had suddenly been revealed to be a peephole in a hotel room door, a door that had suddenly been flung open in front of him, making him realise how tiny his understanding had been, how small his world really was.

From an encyclopaedia page he learnt about the origins of vampire mythology, learnt the cultural and social theories that had been applied to the idea of such a creature in the centuries since Bram Stoker had crystallised the legends and folk tales of eastern Europe. He read scientific theories, proto-feminist theories, theories of vampires as a metaphor for AIDS, deconstructionist theories, Freudian and Jungian theories, and an American professor’s theory that vampires represented the nascent anti-Semitism in the western world.

He read
Dracula
, marvelling at its epistolary structure even as the story thrilled him; he held his breath as Van Helsing staked poor doomed Lucy Westenra, as Renfield’s madness offered clues to the Count’s whereabouts. He felt his heartrate surge as the heroes chased Dracula into the Transylvanian mountains, felt triumph as the evil monster was stabbed through his undead heart, and a terrible sense of loss as Quincey Morris made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his friends.

He read what felt like hundreds of adolescent vampire websites, where teenage girls called themselves Raven and Bloodwynd and wrote excruciatingly lustful prose about pale, mysterious, uniformly beautiful boys who could make them live forever with a single kiss from their wine-red lips.

He read blogs by people who genuinely believed they were vampires, people who claimed to drink blood and eat no food, who claimed to be able to influence people and animals to do their bidding, and even on occasion claimed the ability to turn into a bat or a wolf. These had piqued his interest for a short while, until it became clear that in almost every case the author was either desperately lonely or mentally ill, in some cases obviously quite severely.

He read dozens of websites created by people who believed vampires were real, believed it with such longing and such desperate hope that he found their sites almost painful to read. He scoured page after page of alleged sightings, of shadows in graveyards and alleyways, of people who appeared to be casting no reflection in a shop window at night, of neat pairs of circular puncture wounds, of strange men and women with pale skin who appeared to float above the ground.

He read, and read, and read, and he found nothing that in any way resembled what had happened in his garden, or the place he had spent a month of his life.

Matt finished his water and placed the glass on the draining board. He was physically exhausted but, as usual, his brain would not stop whirring. He was sure that somewhere out there was what he was looking for, something that would reinforce what he had been through; he just had to find it. He would get some sleep, and start again in the morning.

He walked back up the stairs and into his bedroom. His computer monitor glowed in the dark, and he was about to reach over and turn it off when he saw an instant messenger box in the bottom right corner of the screen. He clicked on it, watched it expand into the middle of the monitor and read the contents.

Matt’s heart leapt in his chest. He quickly clicked REPLY, but whoever had sent the message was no longer online. He clicked the link in the subject line, and his browser filled the screen, loading a white page with four lines of text and a grey box with a SUBMIT button next to it. He read the text, trembling slightly with excitement.

Matt could hardly contain himself.

This was the most promising lead he had found in almost two solid months of searching, a page that told you to hide your whereabouts before entering it, that insisted you leave if you had not been invited.

Why would they want us to hide our IP addresses, unless they’ve got information they don’t want anyone to be able to trace?

Matt closed the window, then opened a new one and typed in the URL of a site that allowed you to browse the internet under a fake IP address; he had used it in the past to watch TV shows that were restricted to the US, and within a minute he was safely behind a dummy IP that would make him appear to be a user from Charlotte, North Carolina. He pasted the link from the message into the browser and hit ENTER. The same white page with the warnings
and the empty white box appeared; this time he entered the string of letters and numbers that had been sent to him, clicked SUBMIT and waited. The page loaded, and Matt audibly gasped in the darkness of his bedroom.

The site that opened up in front of his eyes had no title, had wasted no time on fancy designs or technology, but its purpose was immediately obvious; it was a site devoted to the belief that vampires were real, and at large in Britain. At the top of the page was a greeting, and a warning.