Bram Stoker's HANNIBAL

Chapter 4: The Uncertain Fight

"Th-the English Herr was in a hurry," the driver stammered, actively avoiding any sort of eye contact with the woman driving the calèche.

"You wished him to go to Bukovina."

"N-n-o, I..." he trailed off, mouth gaping like a fish dying on the bottom of a boat.

This man, the driver, with his broad, thick body, powerful shoulders and ham-sized fists, was bone-deep terrified of the woman in the black coat – the sentinel – despite her delicate features and the bird-like, slender outline of her body, her tiny gloved hands. Will marveled at the exchange, too dumbfounded to speak. It all felt like a dream. He expected Abel Gideon to appear at any moment.

"I know too much," the woman said after she let the driver struggle for words for a few moments. "And Count Lecter's horses are swift." As she spoke, she did not smile, but the lamplight fell on her hard-looking mouth, pretty as it was, and the gleam of ivory teeth within. Will felt a shiver of his own quake across his spine.

"Denn die Todten reiten schnell," the driver murmured as he released the still-agitated horses and backed around them, putting the team between himself and the woman.

"The dead travel fast," Will translated under his breath before he realized he'd spoken.

The dark-haired woman's head snapped up and her eyes captured his, holding him in a burning gaze for a long moment. Without his consent, Will's brain began feeding him pieces of the ballad the driver had quoted, Gottfried August Bürge's "Lenore."

Up rose Lenore as the red morn wore

From weary visions starting;

"Art faithless, William, or, William,

art dead?

'Tis long since thy departing."

"Give me his luggage," the woman ordered after a long pause where the only sound was the worried neighs and snorts of the coach's horses. Her order was immediately followed and she descended from the seat in one entirely graceful motion to collect his bags and place them in the calèche. It seemed the driver and the passengers had abandoned their gambit. Will was to go with the sentinel on to Castle Lecter.

Somewhere in the darkness that pressed in on the strange crossroads, Will swore he heard the Ripper laugh, the same little trill he'd emitted the moment Will had burst through the door with his gun up. A chuckle that seemed to say, "Well, you got me, didn't you? Good on you."

Will's brain bucked against the complete unreality of the situation, but he found his body moving. He descended the side of the coach and stepped out onto the road. The woman described as the sentinel, her eyes still balefully fixed on the coach's driver, reached out to help him into the conveyance. Her gloved hand caught Will's arm in a grip of steel; her strength must have been prodigious, and again, so strange coming from such a slender figure.

Will tucked himself into the seat, the place where she'd touched him burning with a kind of icy fire, even through the layers of her glove, his coat, and his shirt. The woman ascended to the seat again with another mesmerizingly swift motion, and shook the reins without another word. The horses turned and Will was swept into the darkness of the Borgo Pass.

He turned to look back, and saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of the driver and other passengers watching him go, crossing themselves. Then the driver clambered back up to his seat and cracked the whip. The coach thundered away, bearing the rest of the people to the safety of Bukovina. As they sank into the darkness, Will felt a lonely chill climb over his skin.