None of it had been easy, she acknowledged. It had all been quite difficult, in fact, Clair mused as she stumbled on an uneven stone step. But gracefully correcting the balance of her trim but curvy figure, she descended downward.
Clair frowned at both the smell of damp mustiness, like very old leaves rotting, and the thought of the difficulty she'd had in bribing Baron Huntsley's footman. The footman hadn't wanted to give her the information she needed to prove her conclusions—which meant the baron's staff was either extremely loyal or extremely terrified. Clair would bet on the latter. And she was not a person prone to betting, except for charity, or on an occasional hand of whist with her aunts. Or every now and then a horse or two.
Clair pursed her pouty lips, thinking. Here she was, a solitary female alone in the house of a supposed vampire. Maybe she was a bit more of a gambler than she'd thought.
Glancing cautiously about her, Clair felt the strongest sense of menace yet. She almost shuddered at what lay ahead of her, and the frightening possibility that the coffin might spring open, the vampire popping up with fangs bared like a rabid jack-in-the-box.
"Quit trying to scare yourself silly!" she scolded the shadows. "You have your theory to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. No matter the danger from the undead. You have your research to publish," she said. "You can't let a little thing like a bloodsucking monster stop you. You are first and foremost a Frankenstein."
She often talked to herself, discussing her conclusions and her strategies. "No Frankenstein has ever gone unpublished," she continued. Then, wrinkling her brow, she realized that wasn't quite true. Her great-uncle Aaron had remained unknown. Of course, he had believed he was a ghost. He often regaled Clair with the exploits of his hauntings, but also used being a ghost as an excuse for not publishing. He would tell Clair that everyone knew ghosts could not be expected to write anything visible to the human eye. Then she and her great-uncle would have quite the debate, which would always end when she perversely brought up the fact that everyone had heard of ghost writers.
The sudden sound of bells clanging in the far distance overloaded Clair's senses. Heart palpitating rapidly, she shivered. It was midnight. The witching hour.
" 'Ask not for whom the bell tolls,' " she quoted, whispering to herself and tasting fear. She had not realized that the taste of fear was metallic.
Quickly she scanned the darkness, sensing something she could not define. Cold air stirred in currents around her. The darkness felt oppressive, like a great dank weight resting upon her chest. She felt as if Fate crouched nearby, watching with jaundiced eyes, waiting for her to make a mistake.
Moving her candle in a clockwise circle, Clair once again searched the shadows. There was nothing, yet she couldn't help feeling as if something wicked this way came—and right at her! But only dark silence met her fears. She was alone, wasn't she?
Biting her lower lip, Clair nervously squared her shoulders and continued her descent. She couldn't quit now; she had put too much time into her research. Her meticulousness had unearthed the unearthly living and feeding in London.
Yes, Clair in fact believed that a whole nest of vampires were in hiding here, though no deaths had been attributed thus far to such creatures. However, her assurance in her theories and her eventual scientific jackpot made Clair's journey into the unknown much more palatable. She knew that many Nosferatu hid among the English aristocracy's ton, in the perpetual dark of night and the perpetual motion of the affluent. For what better place to be than among those who seldom went to bed before dawn? Vampires couldn't select a more perfect place to thrive than among the upper crust of English society, who so loved the night, its decadence and lechery.
"Yes," Clair muttered. "London is the perfect place for the bloodthirsty fiends. Like it or not, Baron Huntsley, here I come."
Clair had never met the baron face to face. Her interest in him had been stirred to frenzy when she met a stranger on the train, both of them staring out the rear window, watching the night flash by. The younger woman, a Miss Hitchcock, had served the Huntsleys for several years as a maid. And on the train the maid regaled Clair with the baron's exploits. Some Clair had heard before. She'd known the baron was handsome and wealthy, his cunning for making money almost magical. He owned estates in the north of England and several also in northwestern Wales—rather a north by northwest arrangement of land holdings. A notorious womanizer, the baron was said to love the hunt better than the actual conquest. It was, however, the other tales the maid confided that kept Clair spellbound and aroused her suspicions.
Now, a year after that fateful train trip, Clair had gathered enough background information to warrant a scouring expedition into the baron's estate, though she'd decided to move when he wasn't in residence. And that piece of information had been delivered two nights before, after her great-aunt Abby's predictions with tarot cards. It had accompanied the icing on her suspicions' proverbial cake, when Clair's great-aunt had dramatically stated that the ominous Baron Huntsley was a creature of the night. And so the last damning piece of evidence had fallen at Clair's feet—or, to be precise, on the card table—at the same time Clair discovered her opportunity: the ton believed Huntsley would be attending the Amberton Ball, an affair to last until dawn.
Clair grinned, wanting to pat herself on the back. "While the vampire's away, the scientist will play," she whispered as she reached the bottom of the stone steps.
A heavy wooden door loomed to her left. Cautiously, Clair inched it open. The bottom scraped against the hard stone floor and the sound echoed off the walls. Her heartbeat did a staccato dance in her chest.
"You can do this," she said. "Be the brave Frankenstein I know you sometimes are." Gathering her courage like a warm coat against brutal wind, she prepared to enter the room which she believed held Baron Huntsley's coffin.
She knew she must be brave and must loose caution to the winds in the search for truth. No matter the danger or the hardship, she must march onward and prevail. "The truth at all costs," she reminded herself. It was the Frankenstein family motto, and mottoes must be upheld—else why have them, she reasoned quietly.
Still, sneaking about in the dark in the minutes just past midnight, the witching hour, looking for the coffin of a vampire, might be throwing a bit more than caution to the winds. In fact, some people might just call it pressing her luck. She knew her aunt Mary felt that way. Unlike her great-aunt Abby, who, eccentric and mad as a hatter, was always remarking, "Off with their heads." Of course, Abby was Queen Elizabeth this week, and that was one of her favorite Queen Elizabeth lines.
Clair entered the room, thinking to herself, "I shall prevail."
Scanning the looming blackness, she nervously sucked on her lower lip, moving her candle to her left hand while her right hand grasped the rather large silver cross around her neck. A bit of wax dropped on her skin and she gasped slightly at the pain as she moved slowly into the eerie room. Candlelight danced across the damp stone walls, highlighting the large marble crypt in the corner.
"Aha! I have it!" she announced joyfully, her eyes dancing with both pride and excitement. The vault room was exactly as she had pictured in her overactive imagination: dark, dank, gloomy, with a hidden treasure… her treasure! Some might consider it hideous, but not Clair. She found the coffin absolutely, magnificently marvelous. She was a genius. But then that was never in doubt, with her Frankenstein genes, she thought cheerfully.