23 September 2026
Wednesday. Preparations. I am to have a room of my own at last, in Melbourne, on Collins Street, and the people who build these places have been building it for weeks in their own workshop, with my approval, which they did not ask for.
My relics are packed. I have checked the inventory four times: the sacred artefacts, every one, wrapped and labelled for the recruits who will carry them. I cannot carry them myself, being dead. It is the great administrative inconvenience of my condition.
Beneath the cemetery they have dug catacombs, and in the catacombs lie the souls the Count judged unworthy of eternal life. He does not let them rest, and he does not let them out. I mean to change both.
I have also written my letter. It begins: if you have found this, I have failed. I write a letter like that before every campaign. It is a precaution, not a prediction, and one day a recruit will prove it wrong.
The builders rate my catacombs a little harder than the Count’s graveyard: seven and a half. I asked for eight. They said half a point was quite enough to be going on with.
— Prof. Van Helsing
