chapter 25
“All that is left of Allegra is this.” Alex gestured at the jar with the book in his hands. The cold, damp wind lifted Astrid’s hair as she listened, and he handed the book to her.
“Go ahead, read it,” Alex said. “But the gist is this: In 1822, John Polidori, the doctor who had worked for Lord Byron and broken off with him after Byron began to show signs of vampirism, was supposed to be dead. By this time he had already gone underground and formed the first team that would be known as the Polidorium. But he moved much of his work here, because he was determined to save Byron’s littlest victim, a victim Byron had not vampirized but had injured with neglect. Byron’s daughter, Allegra. Polidori bribed the nuns at the Italian convent where Allegra had been placed, where she was wasting away, and he took her himself.
“Even as he gathered information on vampires and the movements of Lord Byron, Polidori fled the country with the five-year-old Allegra, and brought her to a modest home he built here, on the Brough of Birsay. Here he wrote letters to his growing list of comrades and researched vampires, and watched over the girl as she grew, not for a year or two, but for over ten years. For ten years Polidori stayed right here, studying and working by correspondence.
“Right here,” Alex said again, pointing at the meager foundation in the shadow of the Pictish stones, “was the nucleus of the entire vampire-hunting organization. And then in 1831, he made a mistake. That year, nine years after he had fled, Polidori returned to England to bargain with Mary Shelley, to convince her to put clues about Lord Byron’s plans to rule the earth into the new introduction to her long-awaited new edition of Frankenstein. When he returned, he must have felt very satisfied. He and the now fifteen-year-old girl were living a happy life while he received letters from hunters around the world, and he sent clues as to the whereabouts of Lord Byron and the other vampires whom he would come to call clan lords.”
Alex tried to envision this life as he spoke. Were there many visitors for him and Allegra beyond the mail that came infrequently? Local farmers in other huts, fisherman? Were they part of the community? The short testament did not say.
Astrid was reading, but Alex went on. “It took another year for the catastrophic result of his visit to Mary Shelley to occur. The Scholomance, which Byron had taken over, tracked Polidori back to the Brough of Birsay and dispatched a small force to take vengeance. They did not even touch Polidori, though he begged them to. What they did was worse: They took Allegra.
“After that, Polidori never forgave himself. He returned to Europe and redoubled his efforts. What I know from Sangster is that in the late 1800s he met Abraham Van Helsing and was able to prepare him for the attempted invasion of England by the clan lord Dracula. And Polidori did face Byron again, several times.”
“And Allegra?”
“Never heard from,” Alex said. “Who knows? Killed. Turned into a vampire, and then killed. But Polidori’s greatest mistake was also his gift to the world: the clues he planted in Frankenstein to warn of Byron’s return.”
“I can’t believe she was alive when she was here.” Astrid was struggling with the same thing Alex was, that all this time they had been looking for a corpse, and it was a corpse that in all likelihood would never be found.
“Can you imagine? Polidori glosses over it, but imagine you’ve raised a child as your own, and then see her taken like that—and you know what’s going to happen. If she isn’t killed, she’ll be perverted, poisoned, made to tear the flesh of humans, drink their blood. And you’re powerless to stop it.”
“It’s horrible,” Astrid agreed.
“Yeah, but you know what’s even worse?” Alex continued. “Polidori did all this work while he knew that the vampires were watching him. He could have sent Allegra back to Claire, but he took it on himself to raise her. He put her at risk, even more than Byron had with his neglect. He was fixated on his work, the way all of his organization is still fixated on its work. And what’s most disgusting of all—” He paused.
“What?”
“He left this.” Alex held up the jar. “The one thing we need to stop Byron or Claire from using the Triumph of Death. Hair, DNA, from their loved one. Most likely he even picked this place to live because of the ley lines here, because he thought this would be the place for the Triumph to be set off, if it ever was. So there you are: He’s overcome with grief, and he still thinks to leave us the hair.”
Astrid put down the book. “You’re being hard on him.”
“Only because I know the type.” Alex put the jar into his go package next to the vial gun. He heard them clank together. He felt weighed down by the jacket and the Polidorium, sullied by this work once again. He swallowed back an irrational welling of tears.
Astrid went to put her hand on Alex’s shoulder, and he looked up at her, and if she was about to say something, it was interrupted when Alex gasped.
An enormous red claw was swinging as a nuckelavee rolled up behind her, striking Astrid and then Alex across the head. He saw the earth he had disturbed rising up to meet him.
When he awoke, the Brough of Birsay had been transformed into a world of ice and death.