Polar (Book 1): Polar Night (10 page)

Chapter 22

Danny headed for Rex's Tavern,
an age-old bar which was conveniently located right down the street from the police station, as soon as he and Terry landed back in Fairbanks. Still edgy from his trip to what he now believed really was a haunted asylum, he wasn't ready to be alone in his dreary apartment.

He parked his car and headed inside Rex's, immediately grateful for the warmth of the place, and the welcome noise of country & western music coming from the old jukebox in the corner of the room. Everything about Rex's was cheap and tacky, from the sticky wood-paneled bar to the tables and chairs made of logs to the fake moose head wearing a straw hat on the wall behind the bar. The only thing of quality in the whole place was the alcohol that Rex poured with an expert hand.

Danny walked to the bar and perched on his favorite stool, looking around as he waited for Rex to finish with another customer. He was surprised to see most of the tables full. Apparently lots of people in Fairbanks weren't in the Christmas spirit. Or perhaps they had just had enough of the family togetherness by this time on Christmas night.

“What can I get you, Detective?” Rex asked as he placed a small square napkin on the bar in front of Danny.

“Scotch,” Danny said. “And you might as well plan on keeping them coming.”

“Rough holiday?” Rex asked.

“A strange one. I've been working so I wouldn't call it a holiday anyway.”

Rex nodded. “I can relate.”

“I didn't expect you to have such a crowd here,” Danny said.

“I always do on Christmas. Holidays make lots of people want to drink.”

Danny chuckled. “True enough.”

He watched as Rex headed to the other end of the bar to pour another beer for a woman Danny was fairly sure he recognized. He had probably seen her in here before. Everything about her demeanor suggested she was a regular. Briefly, Danny wondered if he had ever slept with her. He was ashamed to admit it, but it was hard to say one way or the other.

He realized that except for Tessa, Rex was the only person Danny had formed any kind of relationship with since he'd come to Fairbanks. He chided himself for being so pathetic. His only friend was a bartender who looked as old and haggard as the bar he owned. But Danny couldn't deny it was just the way he wanted it. No entanglements, no responsibilities. And above all, no attachments.

As Rex returned to fill up his scotch, Danny retraced the steps of his day in his mind, unable to stop thinking of the tall, ice-cold Russian he was certain was hiding something in his Arctic wasteland. It suddenly occurred to Danny that Rex's last name was
Chistiakov, a Russian name if ever he'd heard one. If he remembered correctly, Rex had come to Fairbanks from the deeply Russian city of Sitka.

“Rex,” he said. “Didn't you tell me you came here from Sitka?”

“I did,” Rex answered. “What of it?”

“That's Russian, right?”

“Used to be. It was the capital when Alaska was a Russian colony.”

“Your folks Russian?”

Rex put down the glass he was wiping clean. “Yeah. They came to Sitka from Russia. Why the questions?”

“I'm just curious. I met a Russian tonight and it got me thinking.” Danny took a sip
of his scotch. “You don't know the guy who runs Snow Creek up in Coldfoot by any chance, do you? Name of Nechayev?”

“You think I know every Russian in the state??”

“No, no. I just wondered. I know you know most of what goes on around here.”

Rex nodded. “I've heard of that place up there, but I don't know who runs it. Supposedly it's haunted.”

“Yeah. After being there I think it's safe to say it is.”

“Is that where you were today?”

“It is.”

“You've gotta be nuts. Who the hell goes up there this time of the year?”

“Not many people, I can tell you that.”

Rex chuckled. “So, you saw some ghosts up there, huh?”

“More like heard them.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“I'm not. It was the creepiest damn place I've ever been in my life.”

Rex couldn't hide his laughter. “Well I don't doubt it on a night like this. Christ Danny, what the hell sent you up there?”

“Just working on a case.”

“Hmm,” Rex said. “So the stories about that place are true then?”

“I don't know all the stories, but I'd guess they probably are.”

“Well I shouldn't doubt it. You get up in the Arctic, there's no telling what's up there.”

Danny's ears perked up. “You've heard stories of weird things up there?”

“Nothing specific, really. My folks just loved all those tall tales and legends, that's all.”

“Legends about what?”

“Oh just supernatural shit. They heard it growing up from my grandparents and they loved sharing the stories with me.”

“You ever hear anything about vampires?” Danny asked.

“What on earth makes you ask that?”

“Just curious.”

“Well now that you mention it, yeah. Those legends were big in Russia and Eastern Europe in my grandparents' time. The undead and all that. People coming up out of their graves and slinking around in the night.” Rex paused as if searching his memory for long-forgotten tales. “I remember my mother telling me stories about vampires who were the sons of witches.”

He glanced at Danny, who was smirking over his glass of scotch. “You’ll notice, I said witches, not bitches.”

“Probably one and the same.”

Rex chuckled. “I guess so. Anyway the Russians believed that to kill the vampires, you had to nail their bodies to the insides of coffins or else burn them so there was nothing left but dust.” He poured another glass of scotch for Danny and shook his head. “I’ll tell you what, my mother scared the hell out of me with those tales.”

“I guess so. Not exactly Cinderella.”

“No. Fairy tales were a lot different back in those days.”

“You think they were true? The legends, I mean, not the fairy tales.”

“Danny, how much scotch have you had? Did you get a head start before you came here?”

“Why?”

“What the hell are you thinking, asking about these old folk tales?”

“I told you, I'm curious.”

“Well, I never thought about them being true. But at the same time, I figure something must have been going on in those times to make people come up with the stories in the first place. I've lived long enough now that I don't think anything would shock me.”

Rex nodded towards the door of the bar and the windows. “You see the Northern Lights out there tonight?”

“No, I didn’t notice,” Danny said, puzzled by the change of subject. “Why?”

“Just look at them. All those lights dancing all over our night sky. Nobody really knows what they are. I know they give some explanation about the sun particles and all that but that doesn’t really explain it. Not the magic of actually seeing it, anyway.”

“So?”

“So it’s just an example to me that sometimes there are things you can’t explain and that don’t go by the rules we think we know. Who knows what caused people to come up with all those old legends, but I wouldn’t automatically discount anything in this crazy ass world of ours. Those tales were probably all bullshit, but at the same time, who the hell knows?”

Danny nodded. “True enough. After being up there in the Arctic tonight I’m not sure I can discount anything.”

“I'd suggest you go home and sleep off whatever you've got going on in that head of yours. It’s obvious this trip up there did a number on you.”

“I think you're right. I need to sleep it off.” Danny noticed the woman at the other end of the bar trying to get Rex's attention. “And, I think my friend down there wants a refill,” he said. “It's on me.”

Danny opened his wallet and left money on the bar for Rex before downing the last of his scotch and leaving the tavern.

Chapter 23

He walked outside and was
immediately confronted with the spectacular Aurora Borealis, more commonly known as the Northern Lights. He wondered how he had managed to not even notice the lights before heading into the Tavern. Had he really become so numb that he wasn’t even moved by a spectacle such as this?

Rex was right, of course. The lights were spectacular. A curtain of red, yellow, and green lights blanketed the sky. No fireworks display could ever hope to compete with this phenomenon that was as natural as the air and the sea.

Danny had read some articles about the Northern Lights when he had first moved to Alaska, in a series that had been featured in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. He had chuckled when reading about the old Eskimo belief that the Lights were spirits playing ball in the sky, or the dead carrying torches to guide the newly deceased into the afterlife. The Point Barrow Eskimos had considered the lights evil, and carried knives at all times for protection and to keep the lights at bay. Still other tribes considered the lights an omen of war or pestilence.

When Danny looked at the lights now and watched the dancing ribbons of red and green, he didn’t chuckle. It was easy to see how the lights had inspired both awe and fear. And who was he to scoff at anything at this point? After what he had heard up in Snow Creek, and considering the fact that he was actually entertaining the idea that Aleksei Nechayev was something other than human, he no longer felt he was qualified to judge anyone.

He got into his car and drove away from the tavern, the lights display illuminating his rear-view mirror and casting a glow over the interior of his car. He had told Rex he was going to sleep, but he had no intention of doing so. No amount of scotch would put him to sleep now. There was too much he needed to learn.

Chapter 24

Danny plugged his car back
into the socket outside his apartment and walked inside, immediately grateful for the heat of his living room. He struggled out of his boots, parka, and mittens, and tossed them all on the floor next to his coat closet. He knew he should hang the parka and mittens up as they were wet with snow, but he couldn’t be bothered. He was anxious to get to work.

Danny had never cared much about sleep when he got wrapped up in a case. He winced when he thought of Caroline fussing over his sleeping habits back when they were first together. She had given up soon enough, and eventually had no problem at all with going to bed on her own while Danny typed away on his laptop. He pushed the memory aside now, thinking that he’d stop working on this or any case within two seconds if he had the opportunity to curl up next to Caroline in bed just one more time.

He ran a hand through his mop of brown hair and grabbed his Macbook from his kitchen table. This was one of the few items Danny had not skimped on when setting up house here in Fairbanks. He loved computers, and he refused to buy crap. He had left his old Macbook behind in Chicago, unable to bear the traces of Caroline that he knew he would find all over it. A new hard drive had been as necessary as a new address and a new city.

Danny plopped down onto his sofa and stretched his legs out, settling the computer on his lap. He booted it up and quickly went to the site everyone went to for any information they needed, regardless of how obscure or bizarre it might be. He knew he could find what he wanted on Google.

He typed in vampires, and was immediately deluged with sites about the Twilight franchise, television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, and Anne Rice’s famous vampire novels. None of this was even close to what he needed, but he should have known a search on vampires would turn up fictional creations. After all, wasn’t that what they were? Fictional creations?

Danny got off the couch and headed for his kitchen, where he grabbed a six-pack of beer out of the refrigerator. It was going to be a long night, and he needed refreshments. He plopped back down on the couch and turned his attention back to his Macbook. He stared at the screen, thinking of his earlier conversation with Rex about folktales and legends in Russia and Europe. Okay, he thought. Might as well start there.

Danny’s fingers clicked over his keyboard, and he was soon reading stories of Russian vampires called Upierczi. Apparently, the Upierczi became vampires by murder or suicide and the only way to permanently kill their undead selves was to drown them in salt water. In addition, legend had it that a Russian man traveling at night came upon a vampire heading back to his grave after he had killed two village boys. The man asked the vampire how he could resurrect the boys, and the vampire gave the man a section of his burial shroud and instructed him to burn the shroud in a pot of coals. The boys’ bodies were to be left in the room with the pot, and they would be revived by breathing in the smoke of the burning shroud. Sure enough, the man insisted the boys had in fact been revived. Danny couldn’t help but notice no one but the man who told the story had ever seen the vampire in the first place, and no one else had ever seen the boys’ supposedly dead bodies.

He rolled his eyes and leaned back on his sofa, taking a long swig of beer as he stared at his ceiling. This still wasn’t what he needed. These were nothing but ghost stories told by children around camp fires. Whatever Aleksei Nechayev was, Danny knew without a doubt that he was real.

Danny sat up again and typed more terms into the Google search bar. He paged through various websites, finishing one beer and starting on another, before he finally landed on something that caught his interest.

It was the story of Le vicomte de Montargy, a nobleman in eighteenth-century France who had managed to survive the chaos of the French Revolution. Montargy started murdering his employees following the revolution, in order to avenge the deaths of his noble brethren at the guillotines. The murder spree led to his assassination and, not long after his death, numerous young children died unexpectedly. All were found with bite wounds. For more than 70 years after his death, Montargy was suspected in the ongoing deaths of children in the area. The people in the area insisted Montargy was “undead,” or a vampire.

Danny felt the hair on the back of his neck tingle as he read about the vicomte and his bloody killing spree. The information in English was limited but, thanks to Caroline and her French roots, Danny’s knowledge of the French language was adequate. Caroline’s parents had moved to the US from France before she was born, and Caroline had learned to speak French and English interchangeably when she was growing up. She hadn’t passed this skill on to him, but he knew enough of the language to get by. He could read it even if he had never managed to speak it correctly. He typed in a few French search terms, and found a goldmine of information on the infamous Montargy.

At some point, Montargy’s grandson decided to put an end to the rumors and find out the truth about his grandfather. He and town officials opened the family tomb, and found the decayed bodies of the Montargy family. But one body in the tomb was not the least bit decayed. The body of the vicomte appeared intact, his skin fresh and his hair and fingernails immaculate. The terrified and bewildered grandson drove a thorn into his grandfather’s heart and had the body cremated. The child murders ceased.

Danny leaned back on the couch and finished his beer. Could this have really happened? Was Montargy an earlier version of his own Aleksei? He opened another beer and jumped when he heard her voice.

“What are you up so late reading about, Danny?”

“You’re not here, Caroline.”

“I’m not?”

“No. It’s just the French. It reminded me too much of you.”

Danny cursed himself for going to the French websites and reading so much in his dead wife’s family language. He felt his throat closing up. He could hear Caroline coming up behind him at home while he worked and feel her wrapping her hands around his waist. She’d rest her head on his shoulder and look at his mess of notes and documents.

“What are you working on, mon coeur?”

Danny
choked back tears. My heart. The pet name Caroline had called him for as long as he could remember. She had always laughed at his complete inability to pronounce it correctly. His mind drifted back in time.

“What are you working on, mon coeur?”

Danny reached his hand up and stroked Caroline’s cheek.

“
Just this damn case I’ve been stuck on.”

“
You should come to bed. It’s late.”

“
I know but I’m almost done.”

Caroline kissed his cheek and ran her hand up his chest.

“
I worry about you when you get like this, you know. I can’t help it. You don’t eat, you’re hardly sleeping…”

“
I’ll be fine as soon as I get this sorted out.”

Caroline stood up and kissed the top of Danny’s head.

“
Alright then. I’m going to bed. Good night.”

Danny grabbed her hand and held it to his lips.

“
Good night, babe. I love you.”

“
Love you too
,
chéri.” She grinned at him as she headed for their bedroom. “Wake me up when you come to bed.”

Danny grinned back. “I already planned to.”

The sound of howling wind battering his windows brought Danny back to the present and his empty apartment. He stood up and paced the room, forcing himself to focus his mind where it needed to be. On Alaska and Aleksei Nechayev and vampires.

He sat back down and read a bit more about the intriguing vicomte de Montargy, learning that his infamy continued to persist to this day. He even had his own online fan club, and people who claimed to be both descendants of the vicomte and vampires themselves.

Danny thought they all sounded like lunatics, but he couldn’t deny that the original story of Montargy interested him. After what he had encountered in Coldfoot, he wasn’t above believing it was true.

He’d had enough of French though and quickly returned to English websites. Not that they wouldn’t remind him of Caroline too. He had realized quite a while ago that virtually everything reminded him of Caroline. He didn’t see that changing any time soon.

As Danny continued his research, he was surprised to read of vampire sightings and stories in more recent times. In 2002, reports of vampire attacks swept through the African country of Malawi, and mobs accused the government of colluding with vampires. In the mid-1990s, vampiric entities called chupacabras, or “blood suckers” were frequently reported in Mexico and Puerto Rico. In 2004, relatives of a Romanian man feared he had become a vampire and dug up his corpse so they could burn it. In the early 1970s, vampire hunters flocked to Highgate Cemetery in London after reports that a vampire frequented the place. The reports were said to be rumors started by the local press, but many continued to believe in the existence of the “Highgate Vampire.”

Danny felt both comforted and horrified by the various reports. On one hand, he couldn’t believe he was actually reading them and considering the possibility that they were true. But on the other hand, he was glad that he wasn’t the only one who had apparently encountered a creature that couldn’t be explained by ordinary means. He felt some sort of kinship to the various people involved in the tales.

And he also felt like a drunk lunatic. He glanced at his clock and groaned at the time. 3:00 in the morning. Captain Jack Meyer would be blustering about the office and wondering where Danny was in just a few short hours.

He rubbed his eyes and got up from the couch, figuring he might as well hit the sack and get at least a few hours of sleep. He’d finished the six-pack anyway and he’d had enough of vampire tales for one night.

He stumbled to his bed, kicked off his shoes and stripped down to his boxers, throwing his clothes on a chair next to his bed. He burrowed under his heavy blankets and fell asleep as soon as his head touched his pillow. He dreamed of Caroline.