Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Chapter 3
Part I: Old Ghosts
I.
West of London
August 1944
If German planes and invasion fleets were no longer a threat, flying bombs and rockets continued to wreak havoc throughout the city, and it was understandable that a single murder – even the murder of a prominent citizen – failed to garner public attention. The Allies crossed the Channel in June, and in July, Adolf Hitler was targeted for assassination by a group of his own military officers. The events of the larger world were moving too quickly for the city to take notice of a single death on the city’s southwestern edge. As the Allies advanced on Paris, the postman who serviced the country estate noticed that the gate was ajar, and the Home Guard forced their way through the front door. They found nothing but empty rooms and dust until they reached the cellar, where the odor hit them with an impact of a German bomb. The squad leader, a veteran of the first war, would later insist that the smell of the enclosed room was worse than anything he had encountered in the trenches.
Katherine Holmwood lay at the far end of the cellar, her throat cut and her limbs bloated from putrefaction. A small amount of blood stained her nightdress and spattered the walls, but the constable who responded to the crime remarked not on the quantity of blood, but its absence. Suspicion centered upon the Lady’s valet, but there was little corroborating evidence beyond his absence and the Home Office’s inability to confirm his last known whereabouts. In the city proper, the Metropolitan Police noted an especially vicious air attack – Hitler had released a barrage of V2 missiles in the aftermath of the Normandy landings – and speculated that the culprit was killed by a German rocket. We’ll find him under ten tons of bricks when they clean up the rubble. A few tabloids ran stories with dark hints of improprieties between the dead noblewoman and her servant, but the story died quickly, and the rumors never gained traction. Londoners cleaned up the rubble and buried their dead, and when the valet remained missing, the police quietly shelved their case for lack of evidence. The missing blood, however, continued to bother them.
In December, a review of Katherine Holmwood’s papers unearthed the sale of an old ruin in Purfleet with the charming name of Carfax Abbey. Police searched the house and found nothing, and the buyer’s material circumstances – she had a sizeable fortune of her own and no need for money or property – ruled her out as a suspect. The Home Office never discovered that the house was later resold to a trust managed by a retired civil servant named Rupert Holmes; had they known, they would never have guessed the significance of the sale.
On the other side of the Channel, the remnants of a German squad were found dead in the Ardennes, their grievous wounds a sharp contrast to the nearly bloodless snow. The German officer who investigated the killings omitted the details from his own report, for reasons clear only to himself. The same officer would later discover an old journal among the possessions of a Soviet war correspondent who was killed in the assault on Berlin, but the walking corpse of the Third Reich cared nothing for his find. By April, he was following the trail of bodies that meandered southward from the bombed ruins of Warsaw. Violence, hunger, and disease continued in the lands now ruled by Joseph Stalin, but he pursued his quarry with the keenness of a bloodhound, sniffing out the scent among the endless hordes of starved peasants and executed dissidents. He knew nothing of the events in London.
Only in Romania, at a lonely outpost in the Carpathians, was the full picture visible.
II.
Romania
1956
Anghel Suta studied law before the war upended his life. Imprisoned in Caransebeș by the Germans, he made his way to the Romanian Communist Party, and then to the Securitate. As Nazi occupation gave way to Communist rule, Romania became notorious among the eastern bloc nations for its brutality, but the arrests, imprisonments, and executions did little to quash the armed resistance that maintained its hold in the Carpathian Mountains. The Securitate’s viciousness was matched by its reputation for incompetence, but Suta took pride in his own ruthlessness, for such qualities were essential in times of struggle – if the bluntness of his methods produced resistance among the proletariat, its relentless pressure would wear down the bandits, just as flowing water eroded the stones in a riverbed. Stalin understood as much, he thought, even if his heirs proved unworthy of his mantle. As the nation became worn out by violence, the great man’s supporters in Bucharest began to equivocate, blaming disgraced elements of the Party for the excesses of the early years. Disgraced elements, Suta noted drily, that had already been executed.
He stood at the water’s edge and stared at the floating corpses. Each man bore a large wound to the throat, and the flesh appeared to have been torn rather than incised with a blade. One could argue that this was no bandit attack, for they shot or stabbed their victims, and these injuries resembled the attack of a wild animal. Suta knew better, for aside from the nibbling of fish, no flesh had been consumed. A very clever wolf or bear, he thought, to dump four bodies in the river without taking a single bite of his meal.
“Did you send a team to their last known location?”
“Yes, but we found nothing.” The lieutenant stared at the waxy mess at their feet. “When they failed to report, an entire platoon searched for two days and found only forest – no signs of our team’s passage and no signs of bandit activity.”
“Put men in the surrounding villages and let me know what you find out. Someone knows something.” Suta’s belly began to rumble, for he had not eaten all day. “I’m hungry.”
“Of course, sir. What would you like?”
“Do you have any fish?”
III.
Cologne
The weather was mild, so they ate at a café on the bank of the Rhine and watched the river flow toward the Baltic Sea. Behind them, the twin spires of the cathedral dominated the city skyline, and Rudolf Diels remembered how those spires had been used as a landmark by American and British planes, a monument of peace that enabled the flattening of the city by Allied bombs.
“Is it true that they used to call you the Prince of Darkness?”
Father Cristofor Albu was approximately his own age, with center-parted hair that was just beginning to gray around the fringes. His deep-set gray eyes were partially obscured by the heavy brows and lent gravitas to his countenance. Put a beard on his face, Diels thought, and he could have passed for a monarch. He shook Diels’s hand, and the grip was surprisingly strong.
“More of a minor Landgraf, really.” Diels smiled, though the mention of his old nickname was a bad portent. “But if you came to do battle with the forces of evil, perhaps it’s best to start small.”
To his surprise, the priest grinned at the joke.
“All right then, Herr Landgraf of Darkness – what can I do for you?”
“Do you know this woman?” Diels slipped a photograph across the table. “I found some letters of yours among her possessions.”
“The Englishwoman?” Cristofor’s bushy eyebrows arched upward. “I never met her, but I wrote to her about a childhood friend who disappeared in 1933.”
“That’s an odd question for a German priest to ask an Englishwoman.”
“Don’t play games, Herr Landgraf. I think you know what happened in 1933.”
“Lots of things happened in 1933,” Diels said, “but I assume you’re referring to Frau Spencer’s kidnapping in the Mediterranean. I have a passing acquaintance with the matter.”
“I would imagine so.” The priest removed an envelope from his coat and slid the packet across the desk.
Diels stared at the tarnished medallion and recognized the badge number immediately. Sigmund Friedrich Wilhelm Foch, killed in the line of duty in Vienna. Sigmund’s body had not been repatriated to the Reich, for the Nazis would never have allowed a dead Jew – not even a hero of the Great War – to be buried among the Volk. At least, Diels thought, he had taken steps to protect his friend’s body from the long reach of Reinhard Heydrich.
“Where the hell did you get this?”
“The shootout in Vienna caused quite a stir,” the priest said, “though it’s largely forgotten in the aftermath of the war. My friend was searching for the same woman that your officer died to protect, and Gabriela disappeared shortly afterward. I was looking for information about her fate, so wrote to Sarah Spencer. She responded with a strange missive about ghosts and monsters and a sinister German, a man who died several years later in Prague.”
“She gave no hint of where she had gone?” he asked, and the priest shook his head.
He sipped at his tea and considered the priest’s story. Reinhard Heydrich had been searching for Jonathan Harker’s castle, and Diels had carefully photographed the coordinates that had been mailed to Berlin by an anonymous correspondent. If Sarah had returned to the Carpathians, he was out of luck – his files had been ransacked just before his dismissal from the Gestapo.
“Do you suppose that Sarah could have gone back to Romania?”
“Now?” The priest scoffed at the idea. “It’s a closed society – no one goes in, and no one gets out. And even if she could get in, in God’s name, why would she want to?”
“I don’t know. The rumor was that her grandfather went there once and found… something. Heydrich, at least, believed the story, and he wanted her grandfather to reveal what he knew.”
“But why would she return?” the priest asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I see.” Father Cristofor Albu stared into space, thinking. “The Church still holds the notion of supernatural evil, but frowns upon the old superstitions, tales believed only by the elderly or the gullible. Still, this woman’s letter was very dark, and I’m afraid that she gave the impression of a woman that was… not well. Perhaps I would understand better if you explained what her grandfather saw.”
“Finish your coffee and let’s take a walk,” Diels said. “Perhaps there’s nothing to those old legends, but I’ll tell you what I know. One last question – did Sarah help you find your lost friend?”
“I’m afraid not.”
IV.
Trans-Siberian Railway
They rode the truck to Krasnoyarsk, an overnight journey on rutted, muddy roads. Talking was strictly forbidden, and a pair of guards watched them for the entire journey. The sun was rising over the railyard as they boarded the train, and Plekhanov fell asleep to the rhythmic clacking of iron wheels upon the rail.
The thief’s gold tooth glints in the sunlight, and the tattoos on his forearm ripple as he shoves Plekhanov aside. They have been sent to clear a logjam on the river, and the thieves have followed them – this far from camp, there is no one to interfere with their plans. A second thief hangs back, his eyes on Plekhanov.
He stirred awake and watched the taiga pass through the louvered wall of the cattle car. The air was frigid, but he enjoyed the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the outside world. Plekhanov faced a lifetime of exile, but away from the gold mines and logging camps, he could almost believe himself free. Almost. The authorities could always find new charges or extend his sentence if they found it convenient. Or they could shoot me on a whim, he thought, glancing at the prisoner on the opposite wall.
The thief grins as he approaches the woman, and Plekhanov grips his axe, desperate to remember the manner of man he had once been. He had been brave, or at least ruthless, before his arrest and humiliation, but in his new life, anything more than passive obedience – to the thieves, to the guards, to the Party itself – leads only to death. The thought that races through his mind at this moment is certain to result in his destruction.
The engineer applied the brakes as they approached an outpost, and the train began to slow. They would be fed, and if the guards were especially kind, they might receive an extra blanket against the frigid air. Plekhanov eased himself upright, his own thoughts still in a distant logging camp, with its mosquitoes and squalor and backbreaking labor, and with his impotent rage as the thieves closed in on their prey.
On the opposite wall, his doomed companion slept, unconcerned.
V.
Cologne
Father Cristofor Albu’s legs ached as he made his way back to the cathedral, but he was grateful for the exertion, for the fatigue in his body offset the anxiety in his mind. I hope you know what you’re getting into.
He had spent the war years in Budapest, celebrating Mass by day and smuggling a pitiful remnant of Jews out of the city by night. Arrested by the Germans and badly beaten, Father Albu had commended his spirit into the hands of the Blessed Mother when the Red Army occupied the city in February 1945. He had requested a transfer to Bucharest or Alba Iulia when the war ended, but the Church had sent him westward instead. Perhaps it was for the best, for a return to Romania could have ended in his martyrdom. Instead, he performed his duties for the Archbishop, assisted with repair of the damaged cathedral, and tried to put other questions, such as the mystery of Gabriela de Cel, out of his mind.
They had been childhood friends and outcasts, he as part of Romania’s Catholic minority, and she as… what, exactly? Rumors of sorcery and devil worship clung to the family like a bad odor, but to him, Gabriela had been an ordinary girl. He had begun his journey into the priesthood at seventeen, but they had never fully lost touch. Gabriela would show up on the doorstep of his church with questions or odd requests – everything ranging from the theology of natural law to the logistics of cargo transport. Her questions were always accompanied by a donation, and Father Albu was certain that she asked at the behest of another.
“So you had a girlfriend.” Rudolf Diels grins at him, and Cristofor finds himself blushing. “So much for priestly celibacy.”
The visits ceased in 1933. Cristofor had taken a leave of absence from his post in Graz and wandered the Carpathians, searching for traces of his missing friend. In the small farms and villages that dotted the foothills of the Carpathians, the peasants gestured toward the mountains and put out two fingers to ward off the evil eye, but no one would discuss the whereabouts of the missing woman. Cristofor was eventually recalled to Graz, for the church found it unseemly that he neglected his priestly duties to seek a lost woman, but not before he found the truck.
It lay at the end of a disused road, a big flatbed used for transporting cargo. The tires were flat, and the body was dissolving into rust, but the cab was mostly intact. Inside, Cristofor found a few scraps of paper bearing the insignia of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Gabriela was searching for someone kidnapped by Adolf Hitler’s thugs. The road itself had been blocked by deadfalls, and noting the lateness of the hour, Cristofor decided to return later for a more thorough search. Instead, his duties, and then the war, had intervened, and there were no more signs of Gabriela.
“She wasn’t my girlfriend. Do you really believe that the Englishwoman’s disappearance is connected to these events in Romania?”
“I don’t know.” Rudolf Diels frowns. “At this point, I don’t have any real leads.”
“So the Landgraf of Darkness is following a hunch.”
“No. The Landgraf of Darkness is drunkenly searching for his lost housekey. He has no idea where he misplaced it, but he searches under the streetlamp because the light is better there. Perhaps I dropped my housekey in the sewer, but your letter to Frau Spencer pointed me to a streetlamp in my very neighborhood.”
“And what did the bishop say?” Cristofor wonders if Sarah Spencer, her mind unbalanced, jumped from a London bridge, but the old spy’s request is nigh-irresistible.
“I told him the West German government needs a Romanian speaker to assist with a sensitive matter.” Diel’s expression becomes sober. “Your missing friend is connected to my case, and if we unravel one mystery, perhaps we will solve the other. Will you help?”
VI.
Budapest
Vladimir Korzh left the embassy at midnight and began the ten-block walk to his apartment. His cover story fit his background, for he had been trained as a civil engineer, and in the official records, he worked as a technical advisor to the Soviet Embassy. In reality, he was employed by the KGB, though his duties consisted of paperwork. Korzh maintained a running tally of the suppression of dissidents – those arrested, sentenced, released, or executed – for a weekly report to Moscow. The work was dull, but Korzh was forty years old and had no use for excitement. The younger agents could dream of hunting spies and subversives, but he would be content to survive until his own retirement. Tonight, he walked north toward the park. The streetlights were out again, but away from the concrete canyons of the embassy complex, he could see the sky, and the starlight made him feel a little better. Even if I have to walk past that damned statue, he thought, and a shiver ran through his body.
During the purges, he had served in the NKVD and had worked as a guard on one of the endless transports that crisscrossed Siberia. They dumped trainloads of prisoners in the goldfields and logging camps, and it was common to arrive with a trainload of prisoners and find the camp empty – the previous month’s arrivals would be dead of starvation or hypothermia. The colonel in charge of his regiment required every guard to serve as an executioner, and for one bloody month, it had been Korzh that placed his pistol against the head of each unfortunate prisoner. They got what they deserved, a deep recess of his mind insisted. They were all traitors. Korzh pushed the thought away, but even with Stalin three years in his grave, old habits were difficult to break. The colonel was arrested in 1939, and Korzh wondered for a time whether he would follow his superior to the burial pit, for turnover in the ranks ensured fewer witnesses to Stalin’s crimes. And then you lost your taste for blood, the voice in his head whispered, and he quickened his pace, anxious to be home. I never had a taste for blood, he thought. He had joined the NKVD for a meal and a paycheck and had served the Party with just enough effort to avoid suspicion. Unlike others, Korzh did not revere the Great Leader and held no illusions about the character of Joseph Stalin.
You liked killing them, didn’t you?
The voice was so strong that he cried out, certain that the words had been spoken aloud. Korzh saw no one but knew, knew with dread certainty, that he was being watched. Someone had followed him into the darkness, a monstrous creature with a whispering voice and great burning eyes. Ahead, the great statue loomed over the Varosliget, and the architect of the Soviet Union maintained his eternal vigilance against spies and oppressors. Against those who pull the trigger with insufficient fervor. The damned souls of his victims would be waiting at its base, ready to point out the traitor with dead fingers. Korzh began to run.
Something flitted past him in the darkness.
He tripped on a loose cobblestone, and pain radiated from his wrist to his shoulder as he fell. His right eye began to swell, but Korzh barely noticed the injuries. Out of the darkness, a shadow descended onto him like a great bird of prey, and a thought flashed through his head. The Leader truly had returned, and he had been selected for a great honor, a prize written in blood and pain.
The last thing he remembered was the stench.
VII.
London
1934
She had been home for nearly a year before she realized that something was wrong. There had been nightmares, vivid and terrifying, from the beginning, but she had expected no less. Her father’s absence was a gaping hole, but the void was no different from that left by her mother’s death a decade earlier. Her relationship with husband began to suffer – Arch Spencer had been a rock of stability after the tumult of her childhood, but his very steadiness now became a liability. How could she explain the castle, her father’s death, the rising of the dead?
How could she explain Sigmund?
Things became worse in the year after her father’s death. Sarah’s appetite vanished, and she began to exhibit curious symptoms, nighttime insomnia and an odd lethargy, something akin to narcolepsy, in the daylight hours. Sleep returned after a month, but her dreams became more intense and took on the quality of hallucinations. She was in Vienna again, cradling Sigmund’s dying body. She was in the old castle, pursued by ghouls in German uniforms. She saw her family, Jonathan, Mina, and John Quincy, laid out for burial in an old chapel, and its doors slammed shut behind her as they opened their eyes and sat up. Sarah began to experience wide swings of her own temperament, periods of white-hot rage alternating with blackest despair. And always, there was that voice, the whisper of Quincy Morris in the back of her mind.
“You have to find him, Sarah. He’s somewhere in London, and you have to find him before it’s too late.”
VIII.
Romania
1956
The monks ended their midnight prayers, and the abbot paused to secure the doors before retiring. Repression of the church had been harsh but inconsistent since the war’s end, and the monastery had remained open. The authorities in Bucharest could hardly be bothered with a half-dozen monks deep in the Carpathians, but he rarely went to bed without wondering when the police would be at their door with clubs and guard dogs. The abbot clicked his tongue in irritation as he peered through the spyhole – someone was standing outside. Perhaps he’s here to arrest us. After a moment’s hesitation, he unbolted the door and stepped into the darkness.
“Are you with the police?” May I help you would have been more polite, but the hour was late and he was disinclined to hospitality. If they were going to haul him away, it was best to get things out in the open.
“Me?” The visitor laughed politely. “Hardly. I’m merely a poor scholar seeking answers. I was hoping to borrow a few of your books – I would, of course, return them in a few nights.”
“Our books aren’t for loan,” the abbot said. “Come back tomorrow and you can visit our library.”
Something – an owl, or perhaps a bat – fluttered through the trees overhead. Messengers for the dead, if one believes the old superstitions. It was an odd thought, but the abbot found something in the man’s countenance vaguely disconcerting – the eyes glittered in the starlight, and he smiled with hard white teeth. That smile, he thought, would frighten even the torturers in Bucharest. In the back of his mind, a small voice whispered that he would have been better off to have left the door closed, to retire to bed without greeting the stranger on his doorstep.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” the dark man said. “I need information, and I need it quickly. Perhaps you could tell me what I need to know?”
They talked for another hour, and the abbot retired to his bed. When the monks found the package the next morning, a gift of cured meats, wine, and tobacco, they agreed that the visitor was clearly in the pay of the secret police, for such luxuries were a rarity for ordinary Romanians. The abbot granted the possibility, though he continued to wonder why the Securitate would visit an isolated monastery to discuss the history of old Wallachian rulers.