Disclaimer: I do not own any characters and concepts from the movie Van Helsing. It is the property of Stephen Sommers. This is an amateur effort anf no infringement on copyright laws was intended in the thinking, writing, and/or posting processes of this story. It is for entertainment purposes only.
Chapter 3: Nightmares
Gabriel Van Helsing's life began for him four years ago on the Vatican steps on one of the rainiest nights in Italy. His earliest memory was looking up into the sky as blurry faces moved in and out of his vision. His back was in agony and he could smell the blood dripping from what he could only assume were some of the worst wounds he had ever suffered from. They were the only scars that stayed on his body, those two large mounds of scar tissue that had grown and failed to fade over the years, still marred by the stitches used to slow the bleeding.
He remembered looking in the crumby mirror in the badly lit room provided for him at the wounds, one on either side of his spine, looking as if the flesh had simply been ripped from him by a force he could not recall.
For him, the four years he had been with the Vatican were the only four years of his life. There was nothing before it, no residual memories of a long forgotten past that would appear whenever his memory was sparked by pictures or sounds or smells. There was just an empty darkness that would greet him when he pushed himself to recall something from what seemed to be centuries of lost time.
He barely noticed the changing landscapes around him as the train sped from station to station. Even as passengers walked to their cabins for a night of rest he remained awake, looking out the window with unseeing eyes. The trees thickened from oak and willow to pine and cedar, the cold winter months approaching so quickly he could smell it in the air. It was the scent of crisp and cold air as the rotting leaves were left under a blanket of white, decorative frost.
Europe was growing and changing with the times. Cities that were once small villages were growing exponentially, their populations growing so fast buildings were springing up overnight it seemed. All sense of time was lost to him as he looked out the windows of the train car, avoiding sleep because he knew what would come with sleep.
Sleep would bring the nightmares into his mind like storm clouds. They would billow in his unconscious thoughts during the day, but the second he left the waking world they would move in for the kill, bringing along with them what he could only describe as a past tainted by blood and death, the feelings of anguish and agony as he would fight and kill for an unseen purpose.
He tilted his fedora down on his face to block out the light streaming in through the window, the train car filled with an orange and pink brilliance that burned at his retinas and left multi-coloured lights in his vision. He didn't feel like sleeping, but almost immediately after his eyelids grew heavy, and the urge to stray from consciousness was growing stronger as he slowly slid into the depths of the imagination.
It was like a hunter waiting for his prey, as the subconscious rushed in to ravage him with nightmares tales of loss. His senses would come back to him gradually, often starting with the feelings. It was cold and wet. He could feel his clothes pasted to his skin by rainwater, hugging him too tightly. Following that would be his sight, often times blurry. It would take seconds before his eyes would refocus and finally distinguish shapes and colours amidst the dark and dreary world he found himself in. The smells would be salty like the ocean, rushing into his lungs and filling with some comfort. He felt for a moment he was returning home.
Home? Where was that? He wasn't sure. Feelings, he had determined were usually right and could most often be trusted, but he wasn't sure why he felt so comfortable in his dream place where it was always raining and there was always the shadow of evil that followed him everywhere.
"Gabriel..." His hearing would come back with the sound of the rain and horse hooves hitting cobblestone, followed by the ghostly whisper of his name by a alto female's voice. It would summon him to the house not far from where he found himself, a place that gave him mixed feeling. On the one hand there was the comfort from the home, the sense of belonging and family within the high cast iron gates that surrounded it. Inside was a menagerie of flowers. Red roses grew in tall bushes on either side of the gate and around the fence. Water lilies floated in the small pond to the left of the path leading up to the mahogany front door, where a brass lion head allowed the visitor to knock before entering. The house was built of grey stone with black trimming and a balcony that looked over the street on the left. Gabriel knew he had been there before, standing outside the gates of the home with the same feelings that he was feeling at that moment, the sense that he belonged there, and something from within called his name.
At the same time, however, he was met with the feelings of great evil growing from within the walls of the home. It radiated like flames, warding off any who could feel it growing and festering from the inside out until it permeated his whole being. He could feel his hands grow cold and legs grow stiff, his stomach tying itself in knots as he watched the black shadow of death leave its mark upon the house.
"Gabriel..." The voice summoned him once again, begging this time, sounding more eager than it had before. He pushed open the gate, hearing it close behind him with an agonizing squeak. It shut with a noise so loud it nearly made him jump.
"We really should get this fixed." The man said. The woman in the garden laughed, spinning around playfully amidst the overgrown bushes of flowers. Her long blonde curls danced through the air shimmering with the sun as their struck it. "And don't say it's perfect because it's not. There's plenty of work to be done."
"It's always work, work, work with you, isn't it?" She stopped spinning, hands on her hips, smiling sweetly with a rosy glow to her cheeks. "Come on and just look at this house! It's beautiful just the way it is." He walked over to her, looking into her green eyes and smiling a little, glancing back at the house.
"Until of course the floorboards break and we have no second floor." She opened her mouth to protest and hit him playfully, taking his hands in hers and spinning around again as if she were dancing.
The cloth on her skirt twirled around her, hovering from the ground for a moment before dropping back down on the wet grass. She came closer to the man.
"Always work, work, work, with you, isn't it Gabriel?"
Van Helsing jerked awake, his hat tumbling off his head and onto the floor. His heart was pounding so quickly he could imagine it jump out of his chest at any moment, breaking through his rib cage and dropping onto the floor. His breath was quickened and every sense was heightened, working faster than he ever experienced before. Night had finally come, the world around the passenger car dark and eerie, the stars looking further away than they ever had before. The moon was a faint blue colour to it, sending long streams of blue light down to the earth and causing his shadow too look much more frightening than he assumed it was.
His reflection in the window of the car looked almost corpse-like with sunken cheeks and eyes sockets. His dark hair flowed around his neck and shoulders, curling around his clothed collarbones and stopping just past his shoulder. The shine was lost to it now and it hung in one solid thick black mass all the time. His brown eyes were darkened by the moonlight, causing the pupils to disappear into the black irises while the whites were coloured blue. He looked like death itself with his large hat and long coat, sitting in the moonlight and looking out the window.
Gabriel had seen too much death in his lifetime to truly feel for it anymore. The innocent were what he cared about, namely those who had done nothing to deserve such torment as they received. Anna did not deserve such a death. She did not deserve such an end as the one he had given her.
Good God, Gabriel, you're going to drive yourself mad with an attitude like that, he thought to himself, angrily closing his eyes for a moment and holding his head with his hand, rubbing his temples irritably. Traveling was the hardest part of every mission. He was stuck in a boxcar as he waited to hunt down some of the most powerful creatures on the earth.
He had never hunted a witch before. Most had been wiped out during the witch hunts in the fifteenth century and the Craft had become a dead thing since. He had been put against vampires though, too many by this time to count. Werewolves were becoming a thing of the past, although within his first two years at the Vatican he had hunted and killed too many to count. Ghosts and spirits were a rare occasion, although it wasn't a surprise to be dispatched to take care of an angry poltergeist that could not leave a family alone.
But witches were something entirely different, or at least he got that impression from the way Carl talked about them. Faeries were an unknown area of magic to him and what he assumed was the rest of the world. He had never heard the word in his life before, although there was a large amount of time that he could not recall. He had heard about them in fairy tales and storybooks or in public squares where entertainers would provide a good story for a waiting audience. Most often they were ugly and disgusting creatures who lived beyond the moors and only came out to eat children or tell prophecies that would lead to the downfalls of Kings.
Morgan le Faye looked as if she would do neither. The portrait was in his mind old, and the cracks from age were finally showing in his mind almost like wrinkles, as if she had grown up but only in the painting. The slide did not show much, but he could see her having black hair and fierce dark eyes, ones that could steal the souls off the people she chose. But she looked human enough, and imagining her eating the bones of children was, to him, absurd.
"Do you have any family Mr. Van Helsing?" She looked at him through the rain, his hat much too big for her head. Her curls were softened by the fallen rain, stuck to her face and neck. He sighed deeply.
"I hope so. It's what keeps me going." He replied, still looking at her eyes, seeing the fire inside her tamed for mere moments it seemed. She was beautiful even in the rain, her features cooled and softened with the falling droplets of rain. He could stand there forever, he knew that. It was one of the few moments he had ever found peace.
But her death followed him. The way her eyes opened wide as the breath was forced from her body by his massive form. The sound of her bone cracking as he came down on top of her pounded inside his skull. He could hear her breath forced from her lungs as her heart immediately stopped mid beat. Everything seemed to stop for a moment. The whole world could have been destroying itself but all that mattered was her, frozen forever, the princess who died, in his mind, too soon.
Author's Notes: I apologize for the length! I promised long chapters and here I am offering a little more than a thousand words (which to me is a little shameful, sorry, I have high standards). Thank you all for your reviews! Also, another note, the memories I have given and will give Gabriel Van Helsing are not the real storyline of Abraham Van Helsing. I realize that I should have tackled reading the original Dracula first, but I am unfortunately swamped with reading from all the English courses I am taking. Most of the information is inspired by the book The Lord of the Vampires by an author who's name I forgot. It tells the story of the real Dracula with Bram Stroker's characters added in. I apologize to anyone who disagrees with this method of writing and I am very sorry that I cannot give you what Bram had in mind for the real Abraham Van Helsing but I promise to pick up Dracula whenever I can!
Oh, and lastly, it seems that Carl is a very liked character. I wasn't planning on adding him into the story but if people would like to see Carl come back just say so in your review! Thanks to everyone who reviewed and I hope you enjoyed this chapter!
