Patricia Vanhelsing And The Witch Cabinet

By Alfred Bekker

Patricia Vanhelsing And The Witch Cabinet

A Patricia Vanhelsing novel

by Alfred Bekker

 

The volume of this book corresponds to 107 paperback pages.

 

My name is Patricia Vanhelsing and - yes, I am actually related to the famous vampire hunter of the same name. However, I cannot tell you exactly why our branch of the family changed its spelling from "van Helsing" to "Vanhelsing". There are the most different theories within my relatives. To be honest, none of them seems particularly plausible to me. But shouldn't there also be secrets that ultimately cannot be explained? One thing you can believe me for sure: The supernatural has always played a special role in our lives.

In my case it was a curse and a gift at the same time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alfred Bekker
• Release date: May 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393168003

Alfred Bekker

Alfred Bekker wurde am 27.9.1964 in Borghorst (heute Steinfurt) geboren und wuchs in den münsterländischen Gemeinden Ladbergen und Lengerich auf. 1984 machte er Abitur, leistete danach Zivildienst auf der Pflegestation eines Altenheims und studierte an der Universität Osnabrück für das Lehramt an Grund- und Hauptschulen. Insgesamt 13 Jahre war er danach im Schuldienst tätig, bevor er sich ausschließlich der Schriftstellerei widmete. Schon als Student veröffentlichte Bekker zahlreiche Romane und Kurzgeschichten. Er war Mitautor zugkräftiger Romanserien wie Kommissar X, Jerry Cotton, Rhen Dhark, Bad Earth und Sternenfaust und schrieb eine Reihe von Kriminalromanen. Angeregt durch seine Tätigkeit als Lehrer wandte er sich schließlich auch dem Kinder- und Jugendbuch zu, wo er Buchserien wie 'Tatort Mittelalter', 'Da Vincis Fälle', 'Elbenkinder' und 'Die wilden Orks' entwickelte. Seine Fantasy-Romane um 'Das Reich der Elben', die 'DrachenErde-Saga' und die 'Gorian'-Trilogie machten ihn einem großen Publikum bekannt. Darüber hinaus schreibt er weiterhin Krimis und gemeinsam mit seiner Frau unter dem Pseudonym Conny Walden historische Romane. Einige Gruselromane für Teenager verfasste er unter dem Namen John Devlin. Für Krimis verwendete er auch das Pseudonym Neal Chadwick. Seine Romane erschienen u.a. bei Blanvalet, BVK, Goldmann, Lyx, Schneiderbuch, Arena, dtv, Ueberreuter und Bastei Lübbe und wurden in zahlreiche Sprachen übersetzt.

Book preview

1

The face framed by a black beard was rigid and cold. The dark brown eyes looked frozen...

I have never seen a wax figure that looks so lifelike, said the young man, raising one eyebrow.

Mr. Webster made them from the photographs you gave us of your ancestor, Mr. McInnis... said the somewhat detached woman in her mid-thirties, whose blue eyes seemed to register his every reaction precisely.

McInnis turned his eyes around to her.

Fascinating, he said. I only hope it was worth the effort, Lady Blanchard.

A thin smile played around the full lips of the woman. There was a flash of lightning in her eyes, and for a fraction of an instant her gaze expressed something like contempt.

I'm sure you'll be pleased, Lady Blanchard then said. As she did so, the delicate fingers of her right hand played with a dark red ruby which she wore on a chain around her neck.

She looked up at the stocky, inconspicuous-looking man who had hitherto kept himself in the background. He was a little over fifty and had an expressionless face. His hair was thinning. The only interesting thing about him were his eyes...

His gaze was intense and attentive.

And one could suspect that despite his pale, somewhat colourless appearance, he was a highly intelligent head. However, he seemed to have learned to keep to himself in the background.

Dr. Graves? Lady Blanchard turned to him with a question.

The addressed person raised his shoulders slightly.

"Now that the financial arrangements have been made satisfactorily... Provided your strength allows it, Lady Blanchard.

That's no problem! she replied.

McInnis looked from one to the other and then nodded.

Agreed!

The man who called himself Dr Graves took a piece of chalk from an old-fashioned dresser. Then he circled the waxwork and painted a series of strange signs on the floor. They looked like archaic characters from some ancient culture... In some of the signs, the connection with animal symbols was obvious.

Finally, Dr Graves was done with it.

The signs were arranged in the shape of a triangle around the wax figure.

Graves then stood up and looked for a moment into the face of the wax figure. Then he turned to McInnis.

Are you ready?

Yes.

Lady Blanchard joined him. Her steel-blue eyes watched him for a moment.

Close your eyes, Mr. McInnis.

Then what?

Think of your late uncle. Concentrate on him... Try to recall his image...

McInnis took a deep breath.

I will try to...

Lady Blanchard raised her hands and touched McInnis at the temples with her ring fingers.

Philip Graham McInnis, I call you back to our world from the realm of shadows, Lady Blanchard then murmured. Her gaze became fixed.

She seemed tense.

The veins at her temples came out a little and pulsated.

Lady Blanchard's eyes changed in a ghastly way. The blue of her eyes began to glow strangely and then spread until not a single white spot remained.

I call to you from the realm of the dead...

Then she muttered a sequence of incomprehensible words, very rich in consonants, whose meaning must have been forgotten for eons. These sounds sounded raw and archaic - like a ghostly message from ancient times.

Her completely blue eyes looked almost blind.

As if mechanically, she now muttered these hard sounding syllables to herself and thus put herself in an almost trance-like state.

And then she thought she could feel his presence...

Philipp Graham McInnis - the uncle of the man whose temples her fingers just touched.

He's here!, it went through her. His spirit...

But she also felt the reluctance of this dead man to return to the world of the living. He wanted to return to the darkness of nothingness.

I need you to...

She would force him, if necessary by summoning up all those mysterious forces that lay dormant within her.

Her face became dark red.

She mobilized all the mental energy she could muster...

And then she knew she had done it.

Open your eyes, Mr. McInnis, she said quietly.

McInnis obeyed and was initially startled when he saw Lady Blanchard's completely blue eyes, which gave her finely cut, extremely pretty face a demonic look.

Lady Blanchard smiled in a way that McInnis found ambivalent. Then she pointed to the waxwork...

McInnis couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the wax figure, which was modeled after his late uncle, suddenly start to move. His arm was raised. The eyes...

The figure came a clumsy looking step forward.

The knees remained straight while first the right and then the left foot was put forward. The movements looked like a toy robot, while the shape and face looked completely human - albeit motionless and frozen.

An eerie kind of life was now dwelling in her...

The bearded face turned around a bit. The movement was jerky and wooden.

The lips of the wax figure remained rigid.

And yet a voice was heard.

A voice of thought.

Why? Why only?

McInnis stood there with eyes wide open and shook his head silently.

It's him!, it flashed through him. My uncle...

Shivers seized him. He had been looking forward to this moment for so long and had always imagined how it would be... Nevertheless, he now felt a kind of shock.

It was hard to believe, but the ghost of his deceased uncle was now trapped in that wax figure and breathed his ghostly life into it...

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would hardly believe it, it went through McInnis' mind.

The waxwork turned its head in McInnis' direction.

Again the ghostly voice of thoughts could be heard, if that was the right word for it. For it was certainly not the ears of those present that perceived these words.

I don't want... What have you done?

McInnis almost felt something like pity at these painful words.

McInnis took a deep breath.

As if through cotton wool he then heard the voice of the inconspicuous, stocky man who had called himself Dr. Graves.

You can talk to your uncle now, Mr. McInnis, he said coolly.

2

It had been a terribly hectic day in the editorial office of the London Express News, and I was glad when I finally got home in the evening.

Since the early death of my parents, I lived in the villa of my great aunt Elizabeth Vanhelsing, who took me in like a second mother.

Her Victorian villa had remained my home until today. I lived on the top floor, while Aunt Lizzy had filled most of the rest of the venerable and rather winding house on the outskirts of London with her so-called archives.

Elizabeth - I called her Aunt Lizzy - had always been very interested in everything that had to do with the supernatural in any way. And so she had assembled an immense collection of obscure writings. Books with occult content and descriptions of strange rituals were among them. Some of the ancient, half-decayed folios, some of which Aunt Lizzy had restored by herself with great attention to detail, were real rarities. In addition, Aunt Lizzy also collected every newspaper article or press report on the subject, so that she probably owned one of the largest private archives in the United Kingdom dealing with the supernatural.

Their spectrum was wide. It ranged from occultism, necromancy to parapsychological borderline phenomena.

Aunt Lizzy had always kept her scepticism despite her enthusiasm over all these years.

She knew only too well that the