In 1891, Abraham Van Helsing and a small number of his friends faced Dracula, the world’s first vampire. They chased him across Europe, to the mountains of Transylvania, and the castle that bore his name. Not all of them returned — but Dracula was destroyed.

Other vampires remained, though, and so in 1892 Van Helsing and the other survivors were asked by Prime Minister William Gladstone to found the Department of Supernatural Investigation.

The Department, which was originally based in a townhouse in Piccadilly, was charged with protecting the British Empire from the growing threat of the supernatural.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the men and women of Department 19, as it became known, fought in every corner of the globe, holding back the rising tide of darkness, often at enormous personal cost.

In a top-secret location, there stands a highly classified archive that records the long history of humanity’s war with the supernatural. The papers within it list the names of every man and woman lost in the line of duty, and contain detailed accounts of every act of bravery.

Beyond the men and women of the Department, these are accessible only by the Prime Minister and the Chief of the General Staff.

These are the Department 19 files.

ROME, ITALY

14th DECEMBER 1918

Valeri Rusmanov strolled through the sick, bleeding city with a wide smile on his ancient face.

He was arm in arm with his wife Ana, who wore an expression of beatific pleasure on her beautiful features. They had eaten dinner in a restaurant in the narrow backstreets behind the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, huge bowls of slippery white pasta smothered with a thick veal ragu the colour of drying blood, and were strolling contentedly along Via Milano towards the Fontana di Trevi, in search of dessert. All around them thick coughing rattled through the night, a continuous percussion of illness and pain, while the dead and dying lay slumped in doorways and piled in stable yards.

The Italian capital, like the rest of the world, was in the grip of a pandemic.

The panicked, fearful public called it Spanish flu, because the neutral southern European country’s press were the only publications reporting on the devastation the pandemic had unleashed; the rest of the European newspapers were still operating under wartime censorship and forbidden from printing the grisly, terrifying truth. The virus had actually originated in the deep wilderness of northern China, a strain of such viciousness that it had laid Valeri himself low for almost an entire day after

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