Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Chapter 1

Part I: Old Ghosts

Part I: Old Ghosts

Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for one either—trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally. You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. Therefore I say to the Israelites, “None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood.” 

Leviticus 17:11-12

I.

London to Vienna and Beyond

1933 - 1937

She made the pilgrimage every year, enduring her husband’s silent disapproval and her own ailments to pay homage to the dead. The journey carried her on a meandering northward route through London, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen before depositing her at Danzig. From there, she travelled overland, stopping overnight at Prague en route to her final destination. She hated the journey, for travel by sea left her weak and nauseous, and not even the tulips of Amsterdam or the icy wind of the Baltic, which made her shiver and left her arms covered in gooseflesh, could improve her ill humor. “A month’s round trip at sea for a week’s holiday,” Arch complained in the early days. Back then, the illness held her more loosely, and she could better conceal the dark urges that lingered in her mind. Later, she would remember those days with a tinge of sadness – in the early days, there was no fear in her husband’s eyes.

That fall, the London papers were rife with speculation of an Anschluss between Germany and Austria, and she retreated to her room for a fortnight, weeping in the darkness as the old memories burst forth, a flood tide that threatened to engulf her completely. She commanded her body to rise and go to the river – you will heal there, or you will die – but her legs remained stubbornly resistant to movement. Her husband avoided her, and even her teenage son lingered only briefly, delivering tea and holding her hand when the bad feelings made her cry.

The letter from Cologne arrived at midday, and she read through the pages twice. When she was finished, Sarah Spencer rose, bathed, and changed into clean clothes. She went to the river and immersed her feet and legs, sighing a little as the running water chilled her skin. The news pained her, but the Nazis had committed outrages all over Germany, and similar crimes were sure to follow once Vienna was in their grasp. At least he is safe, she thought. The longer distance was a surmountable problem, and if the peace in Europe held, adding ten days to her journey would not multiply her woes, for the substance of her problems had been addressed.

At least now, he will be out of their reach.

II.

Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany

1956

They say you’re the best spy in Germany.

Rudolf Diels had officially retired in 1953, and after surviving the War (the first war, he reminded himself) and the Third Reich, he would have expected to fill his days with gardening, autumn trips to his hunting lodge, and periodic trysts with a young mistress. Instead, the nation began to experience its first green shoots of prosperity after decades of privation, and the West German government had asked him to stay on as an adviser – it paid to have an experienced hand at the tiller.  He had endured a week of meetings with the British delegation, boring declarations of Anglo-German cooperation and serious discussions of security and trade. Diels found that he liked the British, for their experience of running an empire imbued them with a courtesy and professionalism that he found lacking in the ham-fisted approach of the Americans. He had shaken hands with the youngster on the second day, and at the end of the week, Archie Spencer sidled up to him in the rose garden.

Photo by Leonardo Ziaja on Unsplash

They retired to his office, where Diels poured two whiskies, adjusted his glasses, and sat back to hear the Englishman’s story. Archibald Jonathan Quincy Spencer didn’t have the look of a war hero about him. Tall and gangly, the youngster (at fifty-six, Diels could hardly think of him otherwise) had inherited none of his mother’s beauty, and the freckled face struck Diels as more apt for a schoolboy than a man in his thirties. Still, if one believed even half of the stories, his war record was astounding. Participated in the evacuation of Dunkirk at sixteen, a freelance commando throughout occupied Europe, and participated – so it is rumored – in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Diels found the last item significant for the bombing in Prague, inconsequential as a military action, had shaken the Third Reich to its core and had, in all likelihood, saved his own life.  What, Diels had asked, could he do for his new friend?

“My mother has vanished, and I need you to find her.” 

Perhaps I should have retired for real, he thought. He was no longer young – the brown hair of his youth had turned gray and his waistline had thickened with the doughy fat of old age – but  Diels liked the boy, and he had agreed to take the case over a second round of drinks. All the same, he felt a twinge of unease. Rudolf Diels was skeptical of both human goodness and coincidence, and the sudden unraveling of a thread from the fabric of his past was not wholly reassuring.

III.

50 Miles South of Madrid

The winters were pleasant enough, and though summer would be merciless toward his pale complexion, Otto Skorzeny was alive and free, and that was enough. He had not expected to survive the war, but when the Allied prosecutors exacted vengeance on a prostrate Germany, he had been acquitted of the most serious charges. Skorzeny did a little time in prison, provided the odd tidbit of information to the Allies, and slipped over the fence of his internment camp in 1948. He made his way to Cairo, where a combination of oil money and the ongoing war with the new state of Israel made for a lucrative career, but there was no future in Egypt. After a few years, Soviet military advisors began pouring into the country, and Skorzeny knew that it was time to leave – Otto Skorzeny had served on the worst parts of the eastern front, and the Russians had long memories. Spain, at least, was a friendly country, and he was comfortable here.

 He re-read the note, a handwritten script on yellowed paper.

Rudolf Diels.

Reinhard Heydrich.

We need to talk about old friends. Acwulf.

Talk about what? he thought. Rudolf Diels had been a late convert to National Socialism, and though he had shown promise in the early days, he  had fallen hard by the end of 1933. Diels had thrived in the war’s aftermath, but Skorzeny would have expected as much – the dishonorable ones always found a way to turn defeat into victory. He served the West German government now, a bureaucratic nonentity of middling rank and a lackey of his American masters. Reinhard Heydrich, on the other hand… The man who ousted Diels had died in the war, and the defeat of the Third Reich had tarnished his memory. Otto Skorzeny saw no reason to dig up old bones, even for the sake of a friend. Of course, there was another connection between the two men…

Skorzeny had barely survived the expedition to Romania, and he had not spoken of the disaster for twenty-three years. Diels had interfered in that operation more than once, and Skorzeny wondered whether the whole disaster had been engineered in Berlin, an exceptionally bloody spate of bureaucratic infighting. He had killed a woman there, a dark-haired hellcat whose body he had left in the current to some Carpathian river, and her spectre frequently haunted his dreams. But how would Acwulf know about any of this?

And if Acwulf knows the truth, who else knows?

IV.

One Hundred Miles North of Krasnoyarsk

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

For the first five years of his imprisonment, Alexandr Plekhanov had remained a committed revolutionary. Born in the aftermath the Russian Civil War, he had learned the inexorable logic of existence from an early age. In the decadent countries to the west, the rich devoured the poor and the strong devoured the weak, but the Soviet Union had turned this logic on its head – the poor devoured the rich, and the weak became strong through an act of collective will. Now, he stood at attention as the NKVD man (KGB, he reminded himself, they are called KGB now) read his file. To celebrate his imminent freedom, the prison had allowed him to wash and had swapped out his rags for a clean uniform. “Your file has been reviewed, and an amnesty has been granted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union…” The words rolled from the officer’s tongue, a speech learned by rote and doubtless repeated hundreds of times over the last month. Plekhanov thanked the officer, careful not to address the guard as comrade – prisoners, by definition, were not comrades and had no right to use the word with honest Soviet citizens. When the labor camp was finished with him, he would serve the final two months of his sentence in Moscow, then another train would take him to exile in Kazakhstan or Vladivostok. He knew – they all knew – that it would be more efficient to finish his sentence in the labor camp, but Plekhanov did not question the system. In the Soviet Union, it was necessary to go west to reach the east.

An intelligent, precocious child, he had studied the teachings of Lenin and Stalin as a youth, with the latter man growing ever more prominent as his studies progressed. His faith did not waver when famine struck the countryside, and when the purges came, he dutifully pronounced the anathema against friends or schoolmates as their families were arrested. Plekhanov was eighteen years old in 1941, when Adolf Hitler’s tanks rolled across the frontier, and he was sent to the front with a rifle and three rounds of ammunition. Unfed and poorly trained, with their best generals executed during the purges, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. He was captured on his third day at the front and taken to a prison camp in occupied Ukraine. His captivity lasted barely a week before he slipped through the barbed wire and joined a partisan band in Minsk. The partisans matched the Nazis for sheer ruthlessness and carried out a brutal campaign against that bought precious time for the Red Army to rebuild itself. It was a heroic campaign that, against all odds, he survived, and the Soviet Union had smashed the German war machine.

And none of it made a fucking difference. The Soviet Union, with twenty million dead and barely able to feed itself, expended a heroic effort of its own. Every survivor of the German camps was identified, arrested, and denounced as a traitor, for loyal citizens did not give themselves up to be captured. Sentenced to a twenty-year term, Plekhanov’s faith had endured until 1950, when he had awakened with an empty stomach, an aching back, and the certainty that his wartime sacrifices counted for nothing. He would die alone, and his name remembered only as a traitor who had sold out the motherland in her hour of greatest need. The revelation had produced no fear or bitterness, only the profound sadness of mourning.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”  Plekhanov snapped to attention as the guard scowled at him.

“I said that your train leaves in the morning. Now get out of my office.”

“Of course. Thank you, comrade.” 

He left, and another penitent filed past to take his place as he walked through the doorway. The end of his sentence was victory of a sort, but he would never re-enter Soviet society, and the KGB would watch him for the rest of his life. Still, it could be worse – his companion on the ride to Moscow faced near-certain execution when they reached their destination. A shame.

V.

Houston, Texas

Life comes at you fast, Evangeline Morris thought. She made tea as her guest remarked on the weather (“A bit warm for my taste”), his transatlantic crossing (“another year, and they’ll be flying us around like mailbags”), and politics (“Do you think Eisenhower will run again?”) and tried to make sense of his madness.

“Are you sure you have the right person?”

Proud Texans, they called her family. Plenty of folks had drifted westward in the aftermath of the Civil War, a disorganized rabble of criminals fleeing the hangman’s noose, once-proud planters abandoning ruined fields and burned houses, and half-literate grifters, but the Morrises had carved out the land with blood and fire before Texas had been a State. They drove huge cattle herds across the llanos, dodging rustlers and Apaches, and when the war ruined the cotton planters, the Morrises hardly batted an eye. Long before oil was discovered at Spindletop, they were wealthy.

“Your grandfather was Josiah Morris, correct? Born in Arlington Texas in 1859, educated at Harvard –”

“Yale,” she corrected him. “His brother went to Harvard, but my grandfather went to Yale.”

“Of course. Silly of me to confuse the two men.”

That damned oil was what killed the family fortune, for Josiah Morris began to speculate, and their land, cattle, and gold gradually vanished down a series of dry wells. Her grandmother had better sense. Know who gets rich in the gold rush? The men that sell picks and shovels. They fell far, and the crash of 1929 finished what little remained of their assets. When Josiah Morris died two years later, his last mumbled words were of oil wells. Charlotte Morris hung on for another ten years, raising her granddaughter (Evangeline’s own parents had died in 1927) and speaking rarely of her husband. “We would have been better off if Quincy had taken over the family business. He was a wild young man, but smarter than his brother.”

In 1944, at eighteen years old, Evangeline married a no-account drifter from Louisiana named Dustin Thoreaux. He had spent six months on some nameless hellhole in the Pacific, and though his heroism was questionable – they didn’t send the good ones home early – the sight of his uniform swept her off an already desperate pair of feet. They spent the next year running bootleg liquor to Army bases throughout the south and selling black market ration cards in the Midwest, and though Dustin Thoreaux was a philanderer and a violent drunk, he had a head for numbers and a keen instinct for survival. By the time she discovered that he was still married to a woman in Mississippi, they had enough money that it almost didn’t matter.

In 1951, his instincts failed him. Dustin Thoreaux stole fifty thousand dollars from the New Orleans Outfit, and they went on the run. Their odyssey took them across the country, from Colebrook, New Hampshire to Spokane, Washington, but the lure of home drew him back to Louisiana, and that did him in. When he was found dead in a car next to a New Orleans brothel, Evangeline had taken back her maiden name – easy enough as the wife of a bigamist – and purchased a small home in the Houston suburbs. If asked, explained that she was the widow of a veteran.

“What do you know about your great uncle?”  Her guest produced a pipe, and when she nodded assent, began filling the bowl with tobacco.

“Not much,” she said. “Grandma claimed that he had good business sense.”  It wasn’t entirely true, but there was no reason to drag Josiah Morris through the mud in a stranger’s presence.

“As I was saying, due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, your great uncle’s assets were held in trust, and the trustee failed to locate his nearest living relatives – an error that I wish to remedy. When all assets – land holdings, stock certificates, cash, etc. – are taken into account…”

She scarcely dared to breathe. “How much money are we talking about?”

“Two million pounds,” the Englishman said. “And it’s all yours.” 

VI.

Edinburgh and Beyond

1953 - 1955

In the quiet years following the death of Joseph Stalin, Rupert Holmes rented a small flat overlooking the Firth of Forth, using the name of Arthur Morris, and spent his free time fishing in Loch Tay (bathing in the current on each excursion) or hiking the Cairngorms. A bit of conscience nagged him for leaving London, but Archie Spencer was a grown man, perfectly capable of fending for himself.  Someone had taken Sarah Spencer (Holmes doubted that she had wandered off on her own), and perhaps they were seeking Holmes himself, but it was unlikely that anyone would trouble the boy.

He had spent years combing through Jonathan Harker’s correspondence, sometimes with Sarah’s knowledge and sometimes not. Quincy Morris had left behind a sizeable fortune, and under different circumstances, his death might have resulted in large sums of money sitting idle in bank vaults across the world. Instead, Jonathan Harker had reinvested the money into stock certificates and real estate holdings between 1893 and 1933, moving the assets through a number of shell corporations. The total waxed and waned, and a substantial sum was lost during the Great Depression, but plenty remained, and Jonathan never spent a shilling of Quincy’s money. Those assets were set aside in a perpetual trust, to be dispersed to the living descendants of Quincy Morris at some unspecified future date. If any can be found, Holmes thought. Holmes, whose discovery of the truth coincided with the death of Jonathan Harker, continued the search, albeit for different reasons.

He traveled abroad frequently and was captured twice – once in Poland and a second time in Hungary. At a secret prison near Warsaw, he was forced into the Vistula as punishment, and the frigid current cleared his mind. On the second occasion, at a desolate outpost near the Romanian border, there was no running water, and the Russian and Hungarian guards took note of his symptoms. Pale, thin to the point of emaciation but with little interest in food. Weak and lethargic during the daylight hours but active at sunset. Generally passive but becomes violent without warning – he had proven as much with a nasty bite inflicted upon a guard. Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to explain his symptoms. He gave his name as Jonathan Harker, and when the opportunity presented itself, he slipped over the fence, moving so silently in the darkness that even the guard dogs did not bark, and returned to Britain.

His name, or the one that he had given to the police, went into a filing cabinet.

VI.

Budapest

The great dictator had been dead for three years, but Joseph Stalin kept watch over the city center from the outskirts of the Városliget. Life was harsh, and if the Soviet Union ruled in all but name, it was still peace, of a sort, after the devastation of the war.

The Kingdom of Hungary had allied itself with the Third Reich, and in 1941, 18,000 Ruthenian Jews were loaded onto railcars and transported to western Ukraine, where they were handed over to the Wehrmacht. Their deaths marked one of the first large-scale mass killings of the Final Solution, but if Hungarian Jews endured a miserable existence, they appeared more likely to survive than their counterparts in Poland or the Soviet Union. When the regent began secret negotiations with the Allies in 1943, Adolf Hitler exacted a brutal vengeance for their treachery. The Wehrmacht occupied Budapest the following year, and a half million Jews, Europe’s largest surviving population, were deported to Auschwitz. Their slaughter, one of the final actions of the Holocaust, was a grim bookend to the war in Europe. Only a few, such as the meagre remnant rescued by a priest who served in a bomb-damaged church, escaped to the Soviet lines. Hitler’s triumph was short-lived, and in 1945, the Red Army moved in.

The independence of the Second Republic of Hungary was guaranteed by the solemn promises of the Allies, but its integrity was undermined almost immediately on the orders of Moscow. Anxious to avoid the wrath of their larger neighbor, the Republic increasingly ceded powers to the Hungarian Workers’ Party, including oversight of the ÁVH – Hungary’s secret police.  The opposition was whittled away by imprisonment, torture, and murder, and by 1948, the Communist seizure of power was complete.

In 1951, they demolished the church to make room for the statue.

The building had been used by the parish priest as a sanctuary, rescuing what few Jews he could find and concealing his fugitives in a small cellar beneath the main structure. The priest disappeared at war’s end – perhaps dead, perhaps fleeing westward – and a new messiah was installed in the pantheon. The idol, a 30-foot statue of Joseph Stalin, towered over the square, and as the arrests and executions grew ever more numerous, the mustachioed generalissimo presided over it all.  

Only the cellar, accessible through a deserted storm sewer, remained.

VIII.

London

1936

Sarah found the unopened letter in Jonathan Harker’s archives, a scrawled missive from 1916. Her eyes wandered over the yellowed pages, taking in the words that Jonathan Harker, still grieving the wartime death of his son, had never bothered to read. Its meaning was clear enough in light of her own experiences, and had she been a different person – herself, for example, prior to 1933 – she might have considered the sender’s plea with more sympathy. You might, she thought, but that woman is a stranger now. Besides, it’s better that she doesn’t know the truth. She gathered up the pages and was halfway to the furnace when a different question rose in her mind. Does he know? The very thought raised possibilities too awful to contemplate. Then toss it in the fire so he never finds out. She took a few more steps toward the furnace, but the old wound on her leg began to itch, a discomfort that sharpened with each advancing step. She began to feel ill and retreated, suddenly unwilling to confront the flames that burned in the cellar beneath her feet.

Sarah retreated to the office and returned the folded letter to its envelope. It galled her, this act of obedience to a dead man, and she tucked the letter at the bottom of a pile of old bills. Perhaps in a few days, or a few years, she would forget of its existence, and the letter could be carried away when she found the courage to discard her father’s papers.