So, the chapters I'm working on are coming along really well. I pretty much know exactly how many chapters I have left to write and what is going to happen in those chapters, so I felt it would be fine to post another chapter before Monday, especially since the last one was rather short, especially compared to what I've been writing lately. O.o
Please enjoy and let me know how it's coming. I love hearing from you guys. :)
Chapter 20: Staffing a House
Alexis curled up in the chair in the basement, reading until her eyes ached and her stomach growled. With her phone upstairs in the office, she had no idea what time it was. She could only assume it was early morning, so delivery was out of the question. She should have shopped for some groceries, but she'd discovered that the refrigerated room didn't work. Yes. The place had an entire room for a refrigerator. It wasn't a big room, but still… One more thing to add to the list of stuff that needed repairs.
With a sigh, she closed the notebook she was reading and set it on the table that Alucard had placed next to her chair. She put her arms up in a stretch and winced as a pain shot through her hip. Her last pain pill had worn off. Yet another reason she needed food. The meat and cheese part of her leftover pizza from that afternoon wouldn't be any good, but she could at least eat the crust. That would make her stomach stop growling and let her take her pill so she could get some sleep. Wondering where Alucard was, she levered herself out of the chair and headed out the door and up the stairs.
Her hip throbbed as she struggled with the stairs. The muscle holding her knee bent at an angle trembled with fatigue and pain. On the top step, it gave out, making her foot drop and hit the stone. She hissed as red hot pain radiated down from her hip, a thrill of adrenaline skittering down her spine. She paused for a moment to let the worst of the pain fade and continued across the foyer to the small office. She breathed a sigh of relief as she set her crutches aside.
The chair jarred her hip again as she sat down and she hissed with the new flare of pain. She realized she hadn't gone this long without a pain pill since leaving the hospital.
She shifted in the chair so her weight didn't rest so much on her right hip and waited for the pain to fade to a bearable level. After a couple of minutes, it eased off and she reached toward the box with the leftover pizza. Flipping it open, she glanced around for her purse and realized she had taken it down to the basement…and left it there. Damn it!
"Alucard!"
She didn't bother to raise her voice too much. She'd come to the conclusion that his hearing was acute enough that he could probably hear her murmur from any place in the house, especially with no other noises in the house but those she made.
He appeared in the doorway, decked out in duster, hat and orange lenses. He didn't say a word as he reached up to slide the glasses down his nose. One red eye widened as he cocked an eyebrow at her.
Alexis shifted and gave him an irritable look.
"My pain medicine is downstairs in my purse. Bring it to me. I'm not climbing down those stairs again."
Both red eyes widened and Alexis narrowed her eyes at him, expecting him to refuse. She had every intention of bawling him out if he did. Either he wanted her to command him or he didn't.
A wide grin bloomed on his face at the steely look in her eyes. He bowed and turned with a flare of his duster as he headed for the basement.
Alexis sat back and closed her eyes, willing the pain away as she waited for her vampire to come back.
-ssSSss-
After eating the crusts of pizza and letting the pain pill kick in, Alexis made her torturous way back downstairs and fell into bed. She slept like the dead, but in a good way. If she dreamed, she didn't remember it and she woke to her phone's alarm feeling refreshed and rested. She needed a pain pill again, though.
Rising, she used the light from her phone to find the door. To her relief, she found the bar set off to the side. She could let the vampire sleep.
Her first order of business, after visiting the bathroom, was to call out for lunch. After that, she pulled out the papers Mr. Allen had provided and called the staffing agency he had recommended.
The cordial voice that answered the phone left her mind momentarily blank. She'd intended to ask for a butler, but it suddenly occurred to her that the whole 'servant' concept that Alucard was used to wasn't the same in the current day and age. Most people did for themselves these days, even the relatively wealthy. Did they even call them butlers anymore?
"Hello?"
"Ah…err. I'm sorry. I'm looking for some, ah, help. Your company was recommended to me by a Mr. Allen."
The line fell quiet for a few moments and Alexis wondered if she'd been disconnected.
"Hello?" She heard what might have been a sigh but she couldn't say for certain.
"What kind of 'help' are you needing?"
"Oh! I'm sorry. That would help, wouldn't it?" With a wince, Alexis realized she was babbling and made a concerted effort to get herself under control. "I just moved into a big house. A really big house. It's been closed up for a while. I need some help getting it cleaned up, organized, repaired and, err, staffed, I guess." She'd never had to worry about staffing a house, before…or anything else, for that matter. Too weird.
"I see. Let me get some information from you."
After handing over the address, her personal information and a credit card number, the agency agreed to send a temporary estate manager over to help get the house in order. By the end of the conversation, Alexis could hear the disdain rolling off the receptionist's tongue. Was it that obvious she had no clue what she was doing?
She hung up the phone feeling a little dejected. Maybe the estate manager wouldn't be quite so snooty. It wasn't her fault she was out of her depth, here.
Tightening her hand around the phone, Alexis grit her teeth and pushed the dejection away. She would get this figured out. Everyone had their learning curve. The snooty receptionist could just get over herself.
While she waited for the knock indicating food had arrived, Alexis had called for the refrigeration technician to come look at the unit and called the plumbing company to see when they would be out again. The person that answered the phone pulled her file and started rambling on about digging under slabs, backflow, rusted pipes and stop gap measures. By the time she got off the phone, she felt like she'd had too much information crammed into her head in a much too small space of time. The distraction of food came as a welcome relief.
As she ate, she flipped through more of the journal she was working on. It was almost better than a novel, except that Abraham Van Helsing had used some strange phrases and sentence structure. If she recalled correctly, he was from Amsterdam, so English wouldn't have been his native language. That made sense.
He told a very different story than that in the novel. Oh, Dracula still turned Lucy into a vampire…or more accurately, a fledgling, and Van Helsing staked her. That much was the same, and apparently Jonathan Harker's journals from his time in Transylvania were accurate. Well, as accurate as they could be when influenced by the mind of a madman. The novel never mentioned that Harker had been one of John Seward's patients, albeit in a private setting. Van Helsing mentioned several times that Seward had consulted with him about his 'functionally mad' patient.
Alexis found herself chortling over Van Helsing's entries about Jonathan's threats to take the whole incident public when Abraham decided to keep and study the vampire they had subdued rather than killing it as Jonathan wanted. She also found it interesting that the close relationship between Jonathan and Mina portrayed in the book was decidedly one-sided in reality and they had never married. Mina had disappeared from England shortly after Van Helsing captured Alucard and Alexis couldn't find any further mention of her after that. She almost felt sorry for Harker and his unrequited love, except that he obviously had gone public with the story, and apparently had Stoker rewrite the events to reflect what he wished had happened. Self-aggrandizement at its best.
She couldn't help but wince as she read Abraham's account of capturing and holding the vampire.
Journal of Abraham Van Helsing
December 16, 1893
Still, the creature refuses to speak. I have so many questions, but it does nothing more than snarl and hiss. The holy water continues to be an effective deterrent and disciplinary tool, but the welts it leaves are slow to heal. The creature needs blood, but feeding it gives it strength which we have trouble controlling. Bickersdyke's wounds from the last time we allowed the creature to feed continue to fester and I do not know if he will live. I begin to think that only the long voyage bereft of blood and crossing that vast body of water weakened the monster enough for us to defeat it. I shudder to think what might have happened had it paused to feed before its mad rush to the castle. We might, even now, be little more than bones moldering in the Transylvanian earth.
Later
Seward has informed me that Bickersdyke is dead. That is the third death my decision to keep the monster has caused. May God have mercy on my soul. I must find a way to control the creature. Nothing works but total starvation and incarceration. At this rate, my research will stall indefinitely and I will be forced to destroy the thing entirely. If it comes to that, too many men will have died in vain, although I suppose dear Quincey would not believe his death to be wasted. He wanted nothing more than the monster's destruction, after all.
I have recently come into a book that delves into the mysteries of alchemy. Perhaps I shall find answers there.
December 17, 1893
The men have taken the news of Bickersdyke's death hard. They are calling for the monster's destruction and I find it difficult to justify denying them. I have convinced them to give me a week to find the answer. In the mean time, I have driven an Ash stake through the creature's heart and taken the head. As before, the body fails to crumble into dust as every other vampire I have destroyed did, so I know it still lives. At this point, I begin to wonder if anything can destroy this one. Its resilience is beyond all reasonable expectation.
I have begun reading the alchemical texts and I have hopes that the key to controlling the creature and make it safe lies in the words of the Ripley Scroll. I only hope there is time before the men decide to see if fire will destroy the monster and my efforts become moot.
Alexis shuddered as she imagined Alucard decapitated and staked, but still alive, perhaps even still aware. She hated the way Van Helsing referred to Alucard as a thing rather than a thinking being. He seemed to view the count as a particularly intelligent animal. He'd tried to tame that animal, with a very Victorian approach: beat it until it obeys. Naturally, that didn't work very well for the cunning, sentient vampire. Thankfully, he had worked out a far more effective and permanent method of controlling the monster that didn't require ongoing torture: the Hellsing seal.
Alexis set the binder aside as she finished her last bite of lo mein. She understood Alucard's references to his 'master', now. How long had he been free of the servitude? He'd said the house had been closed up for forty years. Assuming that was when he'd been freed from this 'seal', he'd been a slave for almost a hundred and fifty years. And yet, he'd spoken fondly of his last master. She couldn't imagine he could have any affection for this man that wrote about him with clinical indifference, like he was an overly spirited workhorse that had to be broken to harness.
At least Van Helsing had set the seal on him. Some of the methods he had described to control the vampire prior to the seal and their results made her shudder. She would have called the man a butcher, except that he seemed to truly want to understand the vampire. He expressed frustration and disappointment each time the creature rebelled. Maybe if he'd thought of Alucard as a thinking being, capable of emotions like rage, hatred and pride, as opposed to the dumb animal he treated the vampire as, he would have had more success. One thing the novel got right…Van Helsing believed Alucard had a child's mind and a particularly spoiled one at that. The man didn't seem to be able to wrap his brain around the possibility that Alucard could think like a man, never mind that he had arranged passage between Transylvania and England twice, dealt with solicitors to procure property and had written numerous letters. Of course, it didn't help that in the early months of captivity, Alucard had refused to speak in anything more than snarls, growls and hisses. Not that she could blame him.
A knock at the front door interrupted her musing thoughts and she reached for her crutches to hobble out into the foyer. Bright sunlight filtered through the front windows, winning past the dust and grime to paint hazy squares of light on the fuzzy floor. She really couldn't wait to see what it looked like, clean.
Swinging herself across the room, she pulled the massive front door open. A man stood on the front stoop, dressed in a crisp black suit and starched white shirt. He had dark brown hair, liberally streaked with silver, especially around the temples. Lines graced his forehead and the corners of his eyes, just enough to give him character. Alexis imagined he might be one of those men who grew more handsome and distinguished with age. She smiled. This must be the estate manager.
"Hi. My name is Alexis. Alexis Montreve." She held a hand out, bracing her crutch under her arm and leaning on the other one.
"Rodney Ellis, madam." He took her hand and gave it a firm shake.
"Please, come in." Alexis gripped the handles of her crutches and carefully maneuvered backwards so he could step through the door. He made a face as his brightly shined shoes stirred up dust on the marble floor. "So, as you can see…it needs some help. The place has been closed up for decades. We've already called for repairs on the plumbing, electricity and the refrigerator. I'm honestly not sure what else might need fixing and the structural inspection mentioned some things that needed help there, too. Of course, the place is a mess but…well…as you can see, I'm somewhat out of commission for the moment. I think I'd be a hazard with a broom, right now."
A small smile twitched at the corner of the man's mouth, but he quickly got it under control.
"Yes, madam. I can arrange for the cleaning and any decorative changes you would like to make, as well as arranging for a full inspection of the house so that all necessary repairs can be completed. How many staff members were you planning to employ?"
Alexis sighed and bit her lip.
"I was actually hoping you could help with that. I've never owned a place this size. I hardly know where to start. It's really just me and my…friend. I doubt we'll use much of the place, so I can't imagine we'll need much."
"I see." He looked up at the cob webbed chandelier and seemed to make a decision. "I will have some cleaning staff sent over to get started on repairing the state of the…err…mess, as you call it. I can also arrange for an inspector. In the mean time, you and I can sit down to discuss the needs of the house and prepare a plan of action."
"That sounds great."
-ssSSss-
Her new employee insisted that she call him by his last name, Ellis. Anything less formal was inappropriate and he insisted on calling her Miss Montreve. That just felt weird. She wasn't sure she liked the formality, but as the old saying went, when in Rome…
It didn't take long for him to call in the request for cleaning staff and equipment. He verified that she was willing to pay overtime if necessary and she agreed. If they really had as much money as Alucard said, it wouldn't be an issue.
She spent the afternoon with Ellis, learning about the basics of estate management. He answered the door when the cleaning staff arrived as well as the repair technicians when they showed up. Before long, the distant echo of industrious activity and murmuring voices made the place feel more lived in than it had since she'd stepped through the door.
Ellis helped her decide on a basic staff of butler, housekeeper and groundskeeper with part time maids and cook, as needed. Alexis nodded as she looked at the salary recommendations he gave her.
"If you wish to have employees that live on-site, it is not considered appropriate to reduce their salary for room and board. The room and board compensates for their services around the clock. You would also need to give them at least one day off per week."
"That makes sense."
Alexis hadn't even realized that live-in servants existed in this day and age. Although, if she thought about it, she realized that she had always assumed that people like the royal family would have such staff, but they were royalty. She felt as comparable to them as a sparrow was to a kite. She still hadn't wrapped her mind around the idea of having people work for her. She felt even more shocked when one of the cleaning staff showed up with a list of household necessities that were lacking and Ellis began making a shopping list that he intended to go out and take care of.
"You will need to establish an account for your staff to use for household necessities and provide them the necessary cards to access the funds. I assume you have not established any such account?
"Well…no."
"As I thought. I suggest contacting your bank and arranging for that while I'm gone. I will pay for this through the agency for now and it will be added to your bill."
"Ah…yeah. That sounds great."
"Very well. I will return."
She sat, shell shocked and blinking at the wall of the office for several minutes after he left. It felt like so much to take in. Her life had been turned upside down in a matter of days and she wasn't sure she had any right to complain about it. Not with the direction it seemed to be headed in.
Mentally shaking herself out of her daze, she reached for her phone.
-ssSSss-
Alexis pressed the 'end' button on the phone and growled under her breath. They wouldn't set up a new account for her over the phone. She would have to go into one of the bank branches to sign off on the paperwork. She didn't want to leave today, not with all the people in the house. It would have to wait until later. Maybe she could go on Thursday when she had a follow up appointment with her doctor. She should probably take that time to meet with Mr. Allen as well. Since Alucard had put all of this in her name, she needed to understand what, exactly, she now had access to. She should probably see if they could recommend any classes in managing this kind of estate and fortune as well. Despite her comments about maxing out the credit card, she really didn't want to ruin the windfall, but she'd never had access to even a fraction of this kind of money. The temptation to run out and spend it burned through her, but she refused to squander it away. Alucard wouldn't thank her for that.
With a sigh, she reached up to rub the bridge of her nose. This was all getting complicated very quickly and she needed another pain pill.
Leaning across the desk to reach for her purse with the prescription bottle in it, she paused when a distant scream echoed through the foyer. She scowled, craning her head to peer through the office door into the foyer. It already looked better, but where had the sunlight gone?
A second, longer scream came from the direction of the basement stairs.
"Oh, shit!"
She'd forgotten to warn the cleaning staff and repair technicians to stay out of the basement. She grabbed her crutches and shoved herself to her feet, wincing as pain flared out from her hip. That was starting to get old, fast. She cursed her lack of mobility as she awkwardly maneuvered out of the office and swung herself toward the basement stairs.
"Don't hurt her, Alucard! Damn it, you better not have ghouled her!"
She clattered down the stairs, hissing as she stumbled and took more weight on her injured leg than she meant to.
"Alucard!"
Like magic, he was there, catching her against his chest as she overbalanced and almost went tumbling down the stairs. She blinked up at him.
"Damn it, she better be okay."
A wide grin split his face.
"That depends on how you would define 'okay'. She is not dead, ghouled or turned. However, I wouldn't lay odds on her ever stepping foot in this house again."
Alexis sighed. She should have warned everyone. Alucard didn't like her touching his coffin. She could only imagine what he'd do if a total stranger touched it or invaded his personal space, especially if he'd just woken up. The woman was probably lucky to be alive. Alexis could only hope she was still sane.
"I suppose I'll have to 'rescue' her. Where is she?"
"Cowering in a corner corridor."
"Take me to her."
"As you command."
A/N: Heh, so that's my take on the Dracula story. I never really liked that book and had an inordinate amount of fun undermining the whole thing. *grin* And, that part with Van Helsing dealing with his new slave is a bit of a nod to maroongrad's stories. If you haven't read her stuff, you really need to. They're awesome. :)