Printed beneath the cover
If you burn my diary to hide the truth, I will haunt you. If you burn my diary because you were an orphan like me, and if this diary is all that remains of the House of Ashtoreth, then I don't mind.
The last pages, clumped and splitting from one another in chunks. Some could not be peeled apart.
woke us up, punished us, bed wetters or not, and ordered us back into our beds. They accidentally dropped one girl out the window. She didn't die. They haven't called a doctor yet.
Smeared words. Then
They're not even trying anymore. They tie them in chairs, so all they do is stare and drool and rock themselves with the little pee pots sitting under them for most of the day. The babies who can't be tied down are put in cribs in the room without light switches, and we're the only ones who visit them. But we can't clean them and take care of them. And there's no light switch in there, and they're always screaming and they twist and rock and do things with their hands, I don't know what it is. There's electricity, we've all checked, but we're not supposed to use it. But we also can't use candles. Only the new sisters can use them now. They used the candles to burn our hair and our ears.
My hair is growing back, but my ears won't get better.
Blood soaked through the ink, darkened and obscured it. The next page parted from the dried blood, and showed white paper and clear print.
They're banging their heads against the wall at the front of my bed. I can feel it when I put my fingers against the wall. It was never this bad before. I still say it's getting worse. Writing by the window-light is better than lying and listening. More are screaming now, which means the sisters will be give us the straps. I still have the bruise that bled on my shoulder. I still have to sleep on my stomach.
But it's happening more often. It was twice last night, and three times last Thursday. The night isn't as safe now. I can't look forward to it anymore, I've decided. The new nuns never go to sleep. They never take breaks. And they lick us when we bleed.
A girl's crying in our room now, and she'll be waking the others up soon, so Good Night Diary. Till tomorrow night.
Seras Victoria had found parts of the book stuck to the floor, melded to the wood in a pool of dried blood. The binding had been torn, and all she'd found were the last and first sections. The last mostly consisted of blank pages. The first was the cover with the warning, or possible curse, underneath. The fledgling now sat on a dark wooden stairway, set apart from the gunfire. Master was killing the little ghouls. How they had become ghouls, though so young, Seras was glad the diary had not explained.
But with the horrid stench, of ammonia and vomit, mixed with the alluring scent of blood, children's blood, tortured children's blood that she could somehow find appealing; Seras heard the children hitting their heads against the walls of her skull. She gripped the broken diary tightly, and pulled in her knees to hide her face as she hugged herself. Curled like this on the dark and filthy, insect and rat ridden stairway, she sat alone.
Her gritted fangs withheld a whimper, but a sob broke free, and blasted through the stifling air. Her eyes were damp, but no tears could form. It was becoming harder to cry as the months went along, dry months, bloodless months. Months during which she went without Sir Integra's… order to take a necessary droplet or two, of her blood. Whether Master knew of it, she was unsure. Integra had informed her that he had lost the privilege years and years before her arrival. How that had happened, Seras had envisioned a thousand plausible stories.
She calmed in the crisp and somewhat damp air. There was no snow, not even rain falling outside, but in the Scottish hills, several kilometers from any densely populated center, the isolation of individual and shared sufferings and sorrows frosted over, grew cracked, jagged, sharp, and bitter.
As she sat holding herself, Seras heard footsteps that reached the bottom stairs, beyond the curve of the wall. And they climbed towards her. These heart thudding beats of some advancing entity frightened the girl, and she stood up, peering towards the curved wall, towards the sound, while slowly edging up the stairs with hesitant steps. The broken diary clasped in one hand as she held her rifle in the other, the strap drooping from her neck, she waited. When her horror finally materialized, with the familiar weight of the hard, creaking tread finally resurrecting the memory in her mind, Seras leapt up the stairs, rounding the curve, and slipped and stumbled onto the flat debris dusted hallway. Sprinting, she heard the pounding beats of the heavier, faster dash up the stairs behind her. Seras ran into a wall and pushed herself down a branching corridor when the paladin reached the end of the stairs. The rifle and her yellow uniform twisted his blunt-toothed grin, and his glee shone clearly in the gloom, as he ran after her.
She panted in terror, though the air was unnecessary. Finding an opening, Seras dove through a doorway, which only led her into a spacious bathroom, with rows of identical sinks and faint light coming from high crusted windows. The fledgling searched for a door, frantically checking the walls. The tearing of flesh stopped her, and drew her eyes to the dark corner, where blood had congealed in a sink and begun to rot. Flies buzzed their evil static tune and feasted upon this gore, while below the sink, two small ghouls were hunched over a third unfortunate ghoul, who moved her head to look at Seras with eyes white like scarred glass marbles.
The mouth opened and closed, emitting no sound. Her throat had been torn out by small bloody teeth. The other ghouls were not interested in Seras, having enough dead flesh to satiate them. But it was when they turned toward her and left off her meal, that Seras sensed the presence that loomed like a shadow cast across her back. The girl turned and slowly backed away, until she found herself pressed against a row of sinks.
If Alexander Anderson had intended to kill her, he would have. But the child ghouls had put him off his hunt; the rancid sight obliterated his hunger. He watched their glazed and starving eyes, and pale bloody hands that reached towards him as the girls stood, unbalanced, and hobbled or slowly walked towards him. While the third on the floor pushed and pulled herself over the tiles, greased with her own body's contents, organs trailing as her functioning leg and trembling hand allowed her mobility. So that she too might seek out the living flesh.
The sight of these three stole all heat from the priest's heart, so there was no bloodlust for the Hellsing fledgling, but a cold and pervasive hatred for the root of this evil. He did not bother with the fledgling, allowing her to run from the room, her hand clinging to her face in horror. In her other, as she ran down the halls, she held onto the diary. Seras was somewhat more composed when she finally caught up with her master. He was returning, having noticed her fearful flight.
"Father Anderson! He's-!"
There was no surprise in the Nosferatu's face. And he let her speech run itself out, and then went along to the bathroom, though he was certain that the priest would have moved on to the targets he had left behind.
The decapitated heads each contained a bayonet between a pair of dead, no longer starving, eyes. Seras staggered out of the room, her master watched her deteriorate into sickness and nausea, her dry eyes aflame. Her voice trembled as she croaked, "I don't want to look at dead babies. I don't want to see them."
Alucard examined the bodies left by the priest, arranged peacefully, side-by-side, a small rosary wrapped around their thin wrists and tucked into their cold hands. The heads had eyes gaping, but that was the nature of the ghoul. Even truly dead, their eyes could not be shut. They would stare back at the world until they rotted.
He left them for the flies that already buzzed over them, those that had moved on to the corpses from the bloody sink.
"Can we leave?" Seras' question did not hide its pleading note, as her reddened eyes squinted up at her master when Alucard stepped through the doorway. She was crouched on the floor, her back against the wall. The fledgling stood and followed her master when he stepped down the hall. She sighed as she took this silence to be his answer, and they retraced their steps, heading for the ghoul infested portions of the House of Ashtoreth. "Master, will you fight with Father Anderson if we come across him?"
A crimson eye containing a constant, breathing flame, peered down at her. "Do you want me to kill him?"
The question sounded so bizarre, so foreign, Seras thought she had not understood him. She had no means of processing it at first.
Despite their less than friendly past, Seras was averse to requesting someone's death, or even appearing to. And yet this was the paladin who might have killed her tonight, if he had not been distracted. She hung her head, holding her rifle up with the diary pinned against it. The sound of her boots was much louder than her master's tread. And this difference soothed her and allowed her to think properly. "Haven't you been trying to do that all along?"
She was somewhat surprised to find that he was still watching her, having waited for her answer. He looked ahead then, his stride unchanged. "Yes and no. If he had died easily at the start, I wouldn't have minded. But he did not. And he has his own inherent potential, and gains more experience each time he comes across a new vampire."
Seras was quiet, puzzled and a bit displeased, to some extent, by her master's strange words. "Well, you make him seem like an experiment." She clutched her gun, her grip tightening as her eyes gazed emptily at the space before her. She looked again to her master as he said nothing. "Is that what he is?"
"No."
She thought. "Is that what he is for the Vatican though? The Iscariot seem to only have one Regenerator, when they could have made dozens."
"I doubt they could handle dozens."
She frowned, "At least more than one. They would replace him if he died, wouldn't they?" To her, her master showed no response. But finally he said "Yes, they would try to," but his voice had lowered, and he lifted his Casull.
Seras cringed and retreated as she too noticed the ghouls, and she turned her back to them, jerking with each bullet and at the sounds of the silver projectiles ripping through their targets. Solemnly she picked her way over the mess of bodies, and caught up with her master who had continued walking as he dispatched the undead children.
Alucard didn't look at her. "Why don't you wait outside?"
The girl recoiled, instantly dreading the thought. "I don't want to be alone with Father Anderson prowling about. He almost killed me. Again."
"But he didn't. Again."
"He was going to." Seras insisted, and then trailed off into silence, resuming the same pattern of turning away as her master fired, and then she stepped over the corpses to stay safe, by his side. "Did you know that I spent four years in an orphanage?"
"Walter made a thorough investigation after we brought you back. So yes, I know what happened."
Seras said nothing more as they passed through the halls and cleaned out the rooms. As they stepped into the narrow hallway that led to what appeared to be the kitchen through the open door, the crashing clatter of a pot or pan falling to the floor froze the fledgling mid-step. Alucard walked on.
The kitchen looked almost exactly as it had when it was rebuilt in the early 1950's, after the war. The stove and oven were old, small, quaint, like the rest of the room. But for the lack of food, the filth, and the bloody carcasses of wide-eyed children strewn about the floor, it might have been homey. The ghouls had collected around a pile of mutilated, starved, and desolate bodies, which seemed to have been arranged for them. These had not been turned into little ghouls, but they were being torn apart by the girls they had talked with, comforted, imparted secrets and dreams to. Father Anderson stood at the mouth of another hall leading into the kitchen. He had killed the child ghouls, with one exception. She was small and toppled over bodies, and had difficulty picking herself to continue her advance on the priest. And Father Anderson had been distracted by the Vampire Alucard.
Their exchange of the cool yet molten crimson gaze and the hardened emerald stare behind the priest's blood smeared lenses, left little room for speech. The priest's face was sunken with deadening feelings, sickening feelings, and intense, useless hatred that could not be satiated. The emerald gaze broke away when the small ghoul landed against Anderson's leg, and he flung it aside, his face tightened with pain, while his leg remained unmarked. As she wobbled to her feet and lifted her head, he cut it off. Both the body and the head landed on the tiled floor, and viscous gore, nearly black though not as thick as tar, oozed from her neck.
"And wasn't this savage?"
The glower the priest sent to the vampire struck no chord of emotion in the undead being. Alucard stood immune to the familiar suffering he himself had born, and had seen others bear or else crumble beneath. Father Anderson snarled, "It was Protestant territory. They wore the guise of Catholics, but they were Protestants and raised the children as Protestants. Against the wishes of their dead parents." The priest's head lowered, as though he might need to attack the vampire now in order to defend his claim.
"It was a Catholic run institution, Judas."
"No!" the deep voice barked into the gloom of the kitchen, a single dusty window letting in little light before him. "Ah know that they were Protestants, Demon Spawn. Ah know, and that these were Catholic girls taken in, and left unprotected."
"Your Church is not perfect, Judas." Alucard watched the consistency of the priest's features, unmoved as he stared back at the vampire. But then the man straightened, no longer hunched, bent for an assault. He stood neutral, and listening, though not in agreement with the monster. "So long as it is run by human beings, it will have faults. It will commit treacheries. It will sin against its own name. This," the gloved hands moved, having the priest behold the collection of children's bodies which lay between them, and as the hands rose, Alucard's Casull evident in the poor lighting, Father Anderson knew that the vampire included the priest's blood soaked person, "This has always happened. It will always happen."
"No, it won't." Father Anderson's mouth tightened, his jaw stiff, and his eyes dimmed. "Ah have seen enough tah know that there is an end to all this. It is not an endless void into darkness within which we descend. We've always carried the light of Christ with us."
At the mention of Christ, Alucard had turned aside, sighing, glaring at the ceiling, and then viewing the marred floor. He bent and picked up the fallen frying pan. He turned it over with his hand holding the handle, and after this quiet inspection, during which the paladin was voiceless, Alucard set it quietly on top of the oven. "You and your God. You speak as though he has cemented some divine and righteous path for you, but you let your own power surge into the darkness, and it is your own will that forges the world you change beneath your feet."
Alucard looked over the bayonets the paladin had drawn into his hands. And then the neutral stance, teetering on the brink of physical hostility, but not poised yet for any action.
"So you disagree?" the vampire asked, finding the green gaze that shone with the light of the window. The priest had taken a step forward, and now basked in the veiled light.
"Ah disagree with everythin' you say, Vampire Alucard." His words had been slow, drawn out, laid purposely down for Alucard to pick up, with no question to their meaning. Or his sincerity.
Alucard looked to the blades again, and then to Father Anderson's face, paled by the night's incomplete moon and starlight. "Are you certain?"
Aggression now narrowed the priest's glare, and he growled softly. "Of course Ah am. What do yee take me for? A fool? To be misguided by the Devil?"
Alucard squinted, then sought out the window directly, the hazy perspective it let through. "Am I the Devil? Am I truly the unholy incarnate of evil that you've claimed I am? Answer that Judas. And who is it that tortured your valued Catholic children? Was it I?"
The hissing scowl did not deter Alucard, and the priest did not interrupt him. Anderson stood oddly cooperative, or at least strangely patient.
"I've killed them no more than you have. But I saw only to put them to rest, to release them back into death. You sought out the darkness you saw corrupting their souls, and meant to save them. Did you not?"
Through gritted teeth and fists clenched around the handles of his blades, Father Anderson breathed unevenly. "Of cours' Ah tried. Ah tried and Ah did what was in my power tah. That is my purpose, and that is why Ah am here."
"They commit no sin when they suffer and bear the evils of others. Ghouls bear no fault and retain no agency; they made no action or decision that opened this path to them. In death, their soul is departed. So all we slay is the residual matter left behind, matter that is manipulated by another. Your rosaries provide them with nothing. It only calms your own soul, Judas."
And the priest scowled towards the window, his glasses thick with light, but from the side, his expression was clear. His lined and somewhat haggard face again turned to the vampire, and Father Anderson stepped forward, flipping the blades in his hands, and gripping them readily, raised, and aggressive. "Enough out of yah, Ah've heard enough. Get back to Hell with yee, Demon. Ah'll burn your corpse tonight, that's fur certain."
The clump of pages that fluttered before they struck Father Anderson in the face, dispersed the animosity that had escalated over the bodies. The cover of the diary was thrown next, as Father Anderson looked at the floor, where the pages had fallen onto blood and staring corpses. He caught the hard cover as it soared like a discus, and glared back at the fledgling who stood, tremulous with anger and fear in the doorway. Her master watched, and said nothing, allowing her a temporary place in the moment.
"Read that! You self-righteous bastard! And take responsibility for it, damn it! Damn it!"
Alucard's calm voice floated beside her. "He wasn't here, Police Girl."
Her blonde hair glinted with stray light as she shook her head rapidly, "He can't deny it! Protestant?" she hissed, eyes glistening but unsoftened. "We had nothing to do with this bloody horror. It was you! You and your Vatican!" Her gloved white finger stabbed in Anderson's direction, as he stood, unreadable and still. "It might not be his fault personally," she said, more quietly, retracting her hand. "But- but he shouldn't be able to deny it outright. …And yet, really. What can I do about that? …He's a mad fanatic with his own unbending views."
There was quiet for a breath of time, and Alucard examined the girl, and then glanced at the priest, wary of his sudden turns of whims. That he might disappear in a gust of scriptures. Alucard threw a half glance towards his fledgling, "You. Wait outside. I'll come for you when I'm through."
"Ah." Seras hesitated, about to speak, however, she found her mind blank. "But, I shouldn't leave. Why would I go?"
A black brow rose, and the Nosferatu blinked slowly. "And what would you do against him? …This is my fight. Go outside, and cool your head."
She was reluctant, but obedient, casting doubtful looks at the priest before gradually leaving the room and passing down the hallway. When her footsteps had faded, the vampire ceased to listen for them, and he turned all of his attention over to Father Anderson, who had not changed in the meantime. But no, he was reading what the Police Girl had thrown at him, and he set the pages back on the floor, among the bodies. He raised his blades, again ready.
"You should keep her gift.
The priest grimaced, which the vampire had not expected. And this somehow unwound the man as he broke his stance, and glared about himself agitatedly. He surprised Alucard further by stooping suddenly to snatch up not only the pages, but the hard cover of the torn booklet. And he stuffed them into his pocket, then waited, or seemed to wait, for something.
…
"Man is a source of both evil and good."
"And what do yee claim fur Vampires? Yee mean to claim the same? To claim back your Humanity?" Father Anderson scowled, not able to even smirk as his face was weighed down by deadening, dragging feelings; the persistent dread that hung over his skin like a leaden sheet.
"I can't claim either. Vampires are negated essences that produce little of their own, and only from the stolen substance of those living. The humans who are capable of action, change, corruption, and who may fall from lesser or greater heights, who continue to reign over their souls and their existences, as well as their fates, they carry what you call Humanity. I can claim nothing. For I am nothing, and have nothing, and can give nothing. I can only take what is not rightfully mine, isn't that right, Judas? Do you see me as a thief in the night? A thief and murderer, and worse, a corruptor of innocence. Is that what I am? …What am I?"
"A Monster," but the expression and motion of the priest was less certain for a moment. Then he collected something within himself, and Father Anderson stared back, resolute and rebellious; against or for what or whom, it was not clear.
"When you kill vampires, do you save them? Or do you damn them?"
Father Anderson read nothing but the vampire's question in the pale face, and so spoke low but without hesitation. "Ah damn them. To Hell. To where they belong."
"And so you could never save me. Or a creature like myself." Alucard slipped his gun into his coat, and then looked up once more. He wore a faint expression of frustration, which served to only confuse the muddled priest further, as Anderson hissed suddenly and suspected some trap. He had been lured into a calm he only now detected. But the man amended this fault, and gripped his bayonets before the empty handed vampire.
"Ah wouldn't waste my time wit' yee. You're a Monster. You've already damned yourself tah an eternity of hellfire. Who am Ah to deny you the fate yee've earned for yourself?"
"And if the sins of murderers and dethroned Kings cannot be pardoned, what of your sins? …Judas Priest."
Anderson hissed back, "Creature. Ah've no sins when Ah kill the heathens and the damned already brought before me by the Lord."
"The Lord which made the children at your feet?"
"Ah'll kill yah. Ah will."
"And I'm waiting, dear Judas."
*~*~::..+..::~*~*
Seras Victoria rejoiced to see her master emerge from the front door, and she walked beside him as she pressed her radio and held it near her lips with a smile. "Mr. Bernadotte, we've finished. Could you please bring the helicopter back around? Over."
A static and unhappy voice responded. "There aren't going to be… any more of those itty zombies about? No more of those? Over."
"No. They've all been taken care of. Over."
"Roger that, mignonette. Over."
The girl frowned but put the radio away, thinking of the mercenary, while her quiet master was occupied with his own thoughts.