Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Chapter 2
Part I: Old Ghosts
I.
Flossenbürg Concentration Camp
February 1945
In 1933, Adolf Hitler combined all Prussian police agencies into a single organization, the Gestapo, and appointed Rudolf Diels as its first commander. Diels, a holdover from the last days of the Weimar Republic, had dutifully joined the Party and ingratiated himself with Hermann Goering, Hitler’s number two man in the new Reich. He had taken pride in following the law, but if a few legal niceties were elided from the justice system, his conscience did not trouble him. After all, sedition had been a crime in the Weimar Republic, and if the residents of Buchenwald or Ravensbruck found justice to be harsh, Diels believed that it was also fair.
All of these things were on his mind as the prison gates closed behind him.
His cellmate’s hair was gone on top, and what remained hung nearly to his collar in limp strands. The shirt and trousers were draped loosely about the body as if he had lost weight, and he used his suit coat, which Diels appraised to be of good quality, as a crude blanket.
“Who’s there? They took my glasses, and I’m quite useless without them.”
“Rudolf Diels.”
“Ah!” The prisoner beamed, and his smile revealed the white teeth. “The Prince of Darkness comes calling once again! How did you end up here?”
“That,” Diels said, “is a long story.”
“I doubt that.” His cellmate chuckled. “The Fuhrer has been on quite the rampage since that bomb detonated in his bunker, and with the execution of the plotters, they’ve moved on to those who might be connected. What do you believe – can they finish our trials before Berlin is flattened by American bombs or Russian infantry? I think not.”
“You think we’ll be liberated?”
The stranger’s laugh was full-throated and hearty. “I think we’ll be hanged – some of us at least. Can’t have Hitler’s enemies outliving the Reich.”
“Well, it’s good to be jailed with an optimist.” Diels lit two cigarettes and passed one to his companion.
“I’m surprised they let you keep those.”
“One of the guards recognized me,” Diels said. “A small kindness for the condemned, I suppose.”
“It’s a good sign if you’re hoping to survive.” The prisoner closed his eyes as he savored the smoke.
“How so?”
“It means that you’re a small fish – no special orders from Berlin regarding your treatment. The guards can afford a little kindness, and in the rush to finish the executions, you might slip through the cracks. Do you have any highly-placed enemies who want you dead?”
“Not anymore.” Diels thought of Reinhard Heydrich as he took a long draw from the cigarette.
“What’s on your mind, Rudolf?”
A jumble of thoughts rushed through his mind. I am afraid of dying. I see what is loosed upon the world, and I fear my part in its creation. I regret leading Sigmund to his doom in Vienna. He said none of those things.
“I never thanked you for helping me,” he said finally.
“As if I could have done otherwise. Of course, you did return the favor – my interrogators could have saved themselves a lot of work if they had your old files.” He clapped Diels on the shoulder. “And don’t worry – I think you will survive.”
“And you believe that you won’t?”
“Not a chance.”
In the end, his cellmate had been correct, for they executed him on April 9. Fourteen days later, Diels walked free when the Americans liberated the camp.
II.
London
1956
“How was the flight?”
“My head aches, and my poor joints protested for the entire trip.” Rudolf Diels grimaced. “Never got used to flying.”
“Me neither.” Archie Spencer poured drinks for them both. “I rode in a lot of planes during the war and endured more than one crash.”
“You have the papers that we discussed?”
“They’re in the study. Take all the time that you need.”
“My first question, Herr Spencer –”
“Please. All my friends call me Archie.”
“Of course. My first question, Archie, is how did you get my name?”
“You came up in a conversation with Rupert Holmes.” Archie saw the blank look on his face and continued. “He was a family friend and something of a wartime mentor. I have to be careful about tripping over the Official Secrets Act, but if there was mayhem to be had … you can draw your own conclusions. He mentioned once that you knew my mother.”
“All right,” Diels said. “Then let’s get started. Walk me through everything that happened, and don’t leave anything out.”
III.
Romania
The castle was old, a squat ruin that lay at the end of a long plateau. It had a long history, much of it buried beneath the surface, but the engineer had been schooled in the technical institutes of Bucharest and Moscow, and history was not his concern. His team had been sent into the mountains by the Securitate, the secret police of the Socialist Republic of Romania, to coordinate the search for armed bandits that hid in the mountains.
He unpacked the radio transmitter, an old German unit salvaged from the war years, and adjusted the antenna. This particular location had been chosen for its line-of-sight range to both Sibiu and Râmnicu Vâlcea, and the castle itself had been an accidental find. The engineer found it strange that the old wreck did not show up on maps or aerial surveys – the plateau was open ground, and any structure should have been visible from a plane.
He typed a code using the telegraph key and waited for a response. Nothing. Perhaps the battery was bad, or a vacuum tube had shaken loose on the hike through the mountains. Perhaps this place doesn’t want to be found. It was an odd notion, and the engineer found it amusing. He replaced the battery and disassembled the box but found nothing out of order. The sun felt warm on his face, and perhaps that was the problem. There must be some atmospheric phenomenon I’ve overlooked. He would try again after sunset, and perhaps he would have better luck.
At the edge of the plateau, an owl perched in the treeline. The engineer continued to work, taking no notice as the eyes followed his movements.
IV.
London
Rudolf Diels finished with Sarah Spencer’s papers and went outside to hail a taxi. After several minutes of embarrassment (Diels thought in marks and pfennings, and English currency was a mystery to his German mind), the driver took him to Highgate Cemetery. He wandered the tombs until he found what he was looking for (Jonathan Harker, 1868-1933 and Mina Murray Harker, 1873-1924). A smaller grave (Jonathan Quincy Harker, 1895-1916) and cenotaph (In Memory of Amy Johnson, 1903 – 1941) completed the set.
He had grilled the boy extensively over the particulars of his story. Sarah Spencer had been an ordinary woman, but if the kidnapping had frightened her, it had also demonstrated her courage and resourcefulness, and she had survived where others had perished. Like Sigmund, Diels thought, and his mood darkened. Sigmund Foch, Diels’s protégé and keenest bloodhound, had aided her escape, and something in his reports left Diels wondering, as if his interest in the young woman was more than professional duty. Reinhard Heydrich had never sought the woman for her own sake, and his real target now rested in the grave at Diels’s feet. So much bloodshed for the sake of an old fairy tale. Or so he had believed in 1933 – a double murder in Ploesti and a name on an old storage tank had half-convinced Diels that there was more to Jonathan Harker’s tale than mere fancy. He had provided a final gift to Heydrich, a set of coordinates on a map, hoping that his enemy would disappear into the forests of the Carpathians. Instead, Reinhard Heydrich had returned unharmed, though rumors persisted of men who suddenly vanished from the Party’s membership rolls. Two other events coincided with Heydrich’s expedition – Sarah Spencer’s reappearance in London and the death of her father. Diels had known nothing more until today’s interview with Archie Spencer.
“She never fully recovered from her ordeal in Romania and took a bad turn after the murder of a friend in 1944.”
“What do you know of Romania?”
“Only what I heard from Rupert Holmes. He said very little and told me I would figure out the rest on my own when I needed it.”
The elusive Rupert Holmes, he thought. Diels was well-acquainted with Germany’s wartime records (as Bonn’s informal spymaster, it paid to know what one’s new allies had been up to), and he was fairly certain that the name appeared nowhere. Jonathan Harker had paid him a large sum of money in 1933, and after the war, Sarah Spencer had transferred a fair amount of money and property to a trust, of which Holmes was the executor. If Rupert Holmes were half the man that Archie hinted, he certainly had the skills to arrange for Sarah’s disappearance, but the younger man strongly vouched for his loyalty.
Two items remained. In 1934, a priest had written to Sarah Spencer from Graz, searching for information about a missing woman. “Gabriela de Cel… a childhood friend of mine…” The same priest had posted a second letter from Cologne in 1946, and both letters had gone into his briefcase, a solid lead for later follow-up.
V.
Archie Spencer had tried his hand at espionage, but he found postwar service in Warsaw or Prague, a deskbound guard against an enemy who paid scant attention to poor Albion, to be singularly unappealing. He had come of age at the end of a parachute with a Tommy gun strapped to his torso, but Stalin’s henchmen were too busy consolidating their wartime gains to play cat-and-mouse with an English civil servant. That’s why Diels found your suggestion so amusing, he thought. You look too much the schoolboy to pass for a spy.
He had dreamed of entering the Royal Navy before Hitler’s invasion of Poland threw his life into chaos. Rupert Holmes had been his mentor, and when the Kingdom’s spies and operators had been little more than talented amateurs, Holmes had been one of the best, leaving behind a reap of corpses from Dunkirk to Dresden. Including the only successful assassination of a high-ranking Nazi, Archie thought. Covert warfare allowed him a commute of sorts – short, violent episodes in France or the Low Countries punctuated by interludes of rest in London. Those idle periods were important, for they allowed him to look after his mother. They had been happy during his childhood idyll in India, but Sarah Spencer’s kidnapping had broken something in her psyche, and the years after 1933 were punctuated with bouts of insomnia, episodes of deep melancholy, and periodic outbursts of violent fury. His father had seen it too, and Archie suspected that his mother’s illness, more than the outbreak of war, drove his return to the Royal Navy. Arch Spencer’s relief had been short-lived, for three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had been aboard the Prince of Wales when a Japanese torpedo sent her to the bottom with all hands.
During the war, his mother purchased an old estate from Katherine Holmwood. Archie could not understand the appeal of the house, for it was fit for little more than rats, but she began spending more time in Purfleet as peace returned. He looked into the history of the estate and was surprised to find a connection to his grandfather – Jonathan Harker had arranged the sale and acted as agent for the late husband of Katherine Holmwood. Something about the tangled history of Carfax Abbey troubled him, and Archie raised the issue with Rupert Holmes on several occasions. Holmes professed ignorance of the matter, but he had been close to Sarah before the war, and he understood Sarah’s eccentricities as well as any man. Eventually, the opportunity for discussion was lost, for Rupert Holmes departed London a week after his mother’s disappearance. Archie had not seen him for three years.
VI.
Purfleet
His destination was twenty miles from the city center by rail, and Diels became conscious of the fading daylight as he stepped from the train. The railway station was near the edge of the city, and to the southeast, a series of shipyards, oil tanks and warehouses, greatly expanded during the last war, crowded the boundaries of the town proper. Perhaps half of the facilities stood idle, discarded relics of the Crown’s victory, and the town itself was a collection of vacant storefronts and shoddy rowhouses. Rudolf Diels walked north on the main road. A smaller path angled away from the main route, passing through the tidal marshland and sloping gently upward through the trees that occupied the higher ground. He picked up his pace, and with his eyes on the path ahead, Diels nearly missed the gate.
The estate was bounded by a low fence, and Diels imagined that it had, at one time, been quite opulent. Now, the latch on the heavy iron gate was broken, and one panel was held in place by a single hinge. Elaborate scrollwork spiraled up the rusted bars, and a stone gargoyle leered from the top of one gatepost, is mate carried off by looters or worn away by a hundred years of English weather. The gate was topped by a series of barbed pickets, and a new padlock secured the chain that barred his entrance. He found a break in the stone wall and entered the grounds of Carfax Abbey.
The house itself appeared structurally sound, though Diels found the thick walls and barred windows unappealing. A nice place, he thought, if one enjoys life in a dungeon. The pond behind the house was filled with sediment, and he walked its marshy perimeter. It was a good place to hide a body, but Archie Spencer had searched the grounds in 1953 and found nothing. Then what about the house itself? Rudolf Diels studied the overgrown lawn, now a thicket of spindly hardwood, the silted pond, the broken fence. People killed and died for the sake of property, but the ruined manor was virtually worthless and held no sentimental value for the descendants of Jonathan Harker. Nothing to see here, he thought. The boy would be disappointed, for there would be no coded telegram from Cologne this week.
He looked skyward, startled by the amount of color that had faded from the sky. I need to get moving. Twilight faded quickly in winter, and it would do him no good to blunder about in the dark. Diels noticed the cold for the first time, a biting chill that was not entirely the wind. He paused for a final look at the house, and the barred windows stared back like empty eyes, before making his way back to the road.
VII.
Budapest
“There – just beyond the burned-out streetlight. Do you see him?”
The junior lieutenant peered at the streetcorner as a distant clock tower chimed three bells. The streets around the Soviet Embassy were well-lit, a nighttime oasis of light in the darkness of the surrounding city blocks. Soviet promises – electric lights in every city – had not borne fruit for the Hungarian workers, but the Ambassador’s insistence that the gas lights be maintained, and that the Hungarians provide a reliable fuel supply, made his own job easier. Not that it makes a difference, the junior lieutenant thought. At this hour, even thieves and subversives turned in for the night.
But there was something there, an elongated patch of shadow slightly blacker than the surrounding darkness. It could have been a trick of the light, and he was tempted to cuff his subordinate on the ear as a reminder to not waste his superior’s time. Still, the junior lieutenant could not shake the feeling – another foot deeper into the darkness, and the shadow would have merged with the other shadows. It’s taunting me, he thought, daring me to approach for a closer look.
“How many times have you seen… that?”
“This is the third night since I started watch,” the private said. “I never see him – or it – coming or going. One minute, there is nothing, and the next, it’s him. I watched him for two hours last night, and he never moved – just stood there watching until the sun began to rise.”
VIII.
Romania
The storeroom held a vast quantity of junk, its contents distributed randomly in piles, and he rummaged through these until he found what he was seeking. He had no need for weapons, but he treasured those pistols, a matched pair of Colt Peacemakers, as a link to his past. Clean and well cared-for, he thought. Egon had taken good care of the old pistols, cleaning the barrels and applying a thin coat of oil to each. A good man, he thought, and if Egon was not as bright as Gabriela, he had been hard-working and reliable. Quincy Morris tucked the weapons into his belt and paused at the mirror before heading to the library.
The castle was no ordinary pile of stones, for it retained traces of past memories, and Jonathan Harker had spent a great deal of time in this very room. Quincy stood quietly, losing himself in the atmosphere of the barren shelves, and saw a young man approach the table as his enemy pored over a set of maps. He could discern the enemy’s shape well enough – a monster that stared with bulging eyes and spoke through oversize fangs too large for the mouth – but its form and substance remained hidden from the shade of Jonathan Harker, and his dead friend saw only the countenance of a man. An odd series of curving lines connected various points on the map, and Jonathan asked a question that was inaudible to Quincy’s mind.
“Those are ley lines.” The fiend’s mouth croaks out a series of inhuman gibberings, but Jonathan hears plain speech. “Channels of primordial energy that connect one place to another.” The words made no sense to the young man in the castle’s memory, but Quincy Morris understood their meaning perfectly.
Carfax Abbey and the old castle, he thought. Two places connected across time and space. Dracula had fled in 1893, leaving one box behind as the entrance to a portal, and had he regained the safety of his home, Dracula would have opened the portal at his leisure and returned to London to murder them all. Instead, Jonathan Harker had cut off his head, and the box itself went missing. If fate had been with them, someone would have cast the old crate onto a rubbish heap or thrown its contents into the Thames. But fortune had not been with them, Quincy thought, and the box had served its other purpose, a repository for whatever remained of Dracula’s spirit. You can’t know that for certain, he thought, yet he had been sure since the suicide of Arthur Holmwood in 1904. Something of him remains, and he continues to haunt us.
X.
East Berlin
1953
The prisoner was brought to the jail shortly before midnight, barely conscious and shivering. She was escorted by a plainclothes officer affiliated with the Stasi (though the secret police of the German Democratic Republic did not officially acknowledge his status – some of his wartime deeds were known, and the Communists preferred to keep him at arm’s length). The officer explained that she had fallen into a canal, but it hardly mattered, for she appeared half-dead, and the jailers doubted that she would survive the night. By the time anyone suspected that she had been abducted from the west, the officer had departed, ostensibly for another mission. He left behind a single instruction. “If she gives you any trouble, throw her into the river to quiet her down.”
The agent did not return, and after six months, the Stasi contacted Moscow for advice on their foreign prisoner. She disappeared into the Soviet Union, and the Stasi breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be rid of the strange foreigner.