Hunting the Hunter

“I….” A hissing sigh.

“Can do this.”

“But I want….”

“This.”

∙∙∙

Was she halfway through a door? Or a book? Lighting her way? Or about the set the pages afire? Was she holding a candle or a stick growing a leaf?

Walter shook his head at the print hanging on the wall and moved on. Why was he in this gallery looking at surrealist art? What value did it add to his life?

Maybe he was “broadening his horizons,” lured in by the exhibit’s name, “The Seven Spectral Perils.” More likely, he’d admit to himself, he was people watching and telling himself stories about the people he observed.

There was the young couple, barely his age, who were there as an excuse to their parents. “Oh yes, Mum, we’re going to an art opening.” It was probably a good thing the girl’s mum didn’t know that what her daughter really meant was, “Oh yes, Mum, we’re going to a gallery where this clean cut boy is going to pull me behind a statue and do things for which a professional would charge extra.”

Over by the Third Peril were a dowager and her young male companion. He was beautiful. She had once been. This evening before they left her opulent London flat, he had swallowed his revulsion and earned that Savile Row suit he was wearing.

“Do you think he closes his eyes and thinks of his lover when he’s with her?” asked a deep voice, unexpectedly close to his ear.

Walter whipped his head around to confront his own reflection in a pair of red tinted lenses. Lenses worn by a tall man with long black hair that lay across the shoulders of his white suit in a stark contrast too perfect to be accidental. As was his presence here after Walter had seen him at the pub the week before.

“You were watching them, yes?”

The man had a faint accent, a subtle sharpness, maybe German? He smiled down at Walter and the young man’s fingers twitched with warring urges to violence, or perhaps to touch that shining fall of hair to see if it was as soft as it looked.

Ridiculous.

Walter dropped a mask cool disinterest over those thoughts. “Do I know you?”

“You may call me Doru, and we have a mutual acquaintance.” He nodded again toward the couple. “I saw you watching them. I also enjoy studying people.”

“Which mutual acquaintance?” Walter asked, not looking away to the woman and her kept man.

“Mihaela.”

The vampire girl who Arthur was sure was stalking him had sent another of her kind to him? Walter’s expression clouded with suspicion.

“She sent you after me?”

Doru shook his head, eyes unreadable behind the tinted lenses. “No. But we spoke. She told me that the Angel of Death was a reasonable man and I was curious. I do enjoy studying people, but it is rare indeed when I can speak with one who knows what I am and knows no fear.”

What he was. This one passed well. His teeth were white and, as far as Walter could see, fangless. His skin, though pale, carried a faint pink undertone not common to the undead. This vampire had fed recently.

If Walter were to touch his skin, would he be warm? What would his eyes look like?

What stupid questions. Stupid for myriad reasons.

“You have hunted tonight,” he challenged.

“I have,” the vampire answered calmly. “No innocent fell to me.”

“You are like her, then? Mihaela?”

Doru laughed at his question. “We have known each other since I was a child,” he said, still smiling.

Walter considered that idea. Did the little girl play with this man when he was a little boy? Did she seduce him into vampirism?

If she had, she had waited until he was a man, not a child.

“Why do you two not keep each other company? Why seek me out? I am death for your kind, not someone with whom to have late night chats.”

The vampire’s smile faded and he shook his head. Without seeing his eyes, Walter wasn’t sure how to interpret his expression. “We know each other too well. We are not enemies, but we cannot be together the way you ask. And so we are, both in our ways, alone, surrounded by those who can never know us.”

Perhaps that was what drove vampires to monstrosity. From personal experience, Walter knew that it was easy to be a monster in a vacuum. Without someone to keep as a moral compass, it was easy to get lost in the joy of the hunt and the kill.

Without Hellsing to provide an outlet, the gallows would probably have been his fate.

“So you come to the one human who does not fear you or your kind.”

“I come to see for myself the one of whom Mihaela speaks so highly. Now tell me, do you think that young man thinks of his lover when he attends to his companion there?”

Walter realized they’d come full circle and were now back where they had started.

He looked back at the couple and noted the way the young man’s eye wandered, and not to the art on the wall, nor to any of the attractive women there. It seemed his tastes ran rather differently, if the attention he paid to one of the waiters’ backsides was any indicator.

“Probably.” Walter turned away from the couple and the vampire and went to examine another of the Seven Spectral Perils. A fading sunflower. A cocoon or an eye in its center. Set out as a plate or perhaps the main dish between a knife and fork. All on a sort of apocalyptic orange-yellow background.

Somehow he could picture it hanging in some vampire’s lightless cellar chamber in a mockery of the sun the creature had forsaken.

“I would not pay this sort of money for Marilyn Monroe’s pants! And you want it for prints? Not even the originals? That’s robbery, sir!”

Walter turned to see the source of the rude outburst and observed a portly “gentleman” accosting the gallery’s owner with his complaints.

“How dare you pass this tripe off as art? Look at this!” The man waved a pink hand at the Seventh Peril. “My two year old nephew has made art better than this.”

Doru joined Walter and murmured, “What do you think is this man’s story?”

Walter dipped into his waistcoat and pulled out a cigarette case. “You make a study of humans. You tell me,” he challenged while he went about appeasing his nicotine habit.

“He’s a chartered accountant, of course,” Doru said after a moment’s thought. “He takes these opportunities to have the power he has nowhere else in his life. Except…” He paused and smiled slyly, “At home.

“He’s unmarried. Has never even been kissed, in fact. He is a collector. What do you think he collects?”

Walter looked at the choleric little man and shrugged. “Coins? He’s an accountant in your story.”

“Dolls,” Doru said, smile broadening. “He collects porcelain dolls and keeps them in a locked room with the window boarded over. He goes into that room every night and he tells them about his day, about the imaginary slights he suffered, about the horrible vengeance he will wreak upon the world.

“And in his mind, they applaud.”

Walter raised an eyebrow and laughed quietly. “That is an unexpected interpretation.”

The exchange between the angry patron and the gallery owner was escalating and shortly a pair of the waiters came to escort the gentleman out in a not-entirely-gentle manner.

Walter burst out laughing, attracting a few disapproving stares, but he just couldn’t help imagining the man going home to tell his dolls all about it.

“I think we should leave it with that.” Walter tilted his head up at the vampire, still smiling faintly. “I have seen all I wish to see here.”

Part of that was a lie.

∙∙∙

Rufus Statham slammed into his house, slammed the door closed, slammed his hat down on the rack, and then carefully, oh so carefully, unlocked the special door.

Behind that door his lovelies awaited his return.

The light always burned in there. They didn’t want to be alone in the dark and he couldn’t blame them.

Rows of shiny eyes stared unblinkingly at him from porcelain faces and Rufus felt the angry knot in his chest start to release. They would understand. They appreciated him.

There was Jessica, and Elizabeth. Dorothy and Amelia. Sarah and Rebecca.

And…

And that one wasn’t one of his. He would never buy one so large and with red eyes.

∙∙∙

“How was the gallery?” Arthur asked when Walter reported in.

“I didn’t understand the art,” Walter answered honestly. “But it was still interesting. I wonder more about the mind behind such fanciful creations than the art itself.”

Hadn’t the boy been more light-hearted once upon a time? Twenty was too young to be so serious. Arthur couldn’t help but feel responsible because Hellsing was his organization, but someone of Walter’s temperament was fortunate to find a legal outlet. “If it makes you think, then it has fulfilled its purpose. And did you see anything else interesting this evening?”

Walter answered without thinking. “No, sir. Unless you count the man who made a racket about the expense of the art.”

Or the vampire who had made him laugh?

AN: Doru is a Romanian name meaning "longing."