Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Chapter 11

Part II - The Thieves

I.

Germany

1944

The German public knew that Reinhard Heydrich had died of his wounds in 1942, but the details of his passing, including the disappearance of the body and the spree of murders that accompanied his last night on earth, remained closely guarded secrets. The SS ordered a thorough review of the circumstances surrounding his death, and a single man was entrusted with the task, a man who had proven himself trustworthy with the bloodiest aspects of the war in Poland and Russia. The investigator found that certain files had been removed from the Party’s archives in Munich, and a search of his house in Prague turned up nothing.  His investigation stalled for nearly a year until, with Germany’s misfortunes began to accumulate in the fateful summer of 1943, he found the answer. Reinhard Heydrich owned a hunting lodge in Moravia, and there, beneath a loose cornerstone in the mantle, he found a treasure trove of papers, including lengthy passages copied from an old diary. The names – Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood, Lucy Westenra, Quincy Morris – meant nothing to him, but the investigator read through the papers and copied the information into his notebook.  A second document identified Otto Skorzeny, an old comrade from the Eastern Front, as a potential eyewitness, and he filed the information away for future reference.  He worked carefully to collate names, dates, and places, and over the next few months, Acwulf Kiel began to understand what had happened. Reinhard Heydrich had conjured a vengeful spirit, and his death, along with the murder of a dozen of Germany’s finest soldiers, was merely the tag end of a much longer thread.  

By 1944, the intelligence reports from London became scarce and their quality declined as the fighting progressed toward its bloody denouement. In the west, the Wehrmacht continued its flight in the face of the Americans and British, and not even a wave of rocket attacks in London could slow the allied advance. In the east, the news was even more grim as Soviet troops ground down the German armies, and anyone who had survived the Eastern Front knew that the coming retribution would be terrible. On July 20, a group of Wehrmacht officers detonated a bomb in the Fuhrer’s bunker, hoping to sue for peace in the west. At one time, the betrayal would have filled him with fury, but Acwulf found himself untroubled by smaller concerns.  He monitored the radio traffic from London and studied each transmission with the devotion of an acolyte. His investigation of Heydrich’s death had been mostly forgotten within the upper echelons of the Third Reich, but he remembered, and that was sufficient.

In August, German spies in London reported a minor item regarding the murder of an English noblewoman named Katherine Holmwood and a series of disappearances along the Thames estuary. Acwulf checked his notes and bided his time, scarcely daring to entertain the idea sprouting in his mind. In the Ardennes, an entire squad of German soldiers was found dead, and the circumstances of their demise were eerily familiar, for each body was exsanguinated, and the head of each corpse was twisted with sufficient force to sever the spine. Acwulf pored over Heydrich’s own notes and had spent countless hours studying the lore of the undead. A vampir could be killed by decapitation, and if such a creature existed, perhaps he severed the spinal cord of each victim to prevent their return.

One final gambit convinced him of the truth.

A hidden library at Wewelsburg contained various books of occult rituals, mostly half-baked lore fit only for titillation of the faithful, but he had Heydrich’s own notes for guidance. “He learned his secrets in the Scholomance, deep in the mountains on the shores of a hidden lake, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. He has the aid of necromancy – the divination of the dead.”  Acwulf carefully studied the text, tracing out the runes and noting the dimensions of each shape, and when the bodies were brought from the Ardennes to an SS field morgue in Büren, he was ready. He performed the ritual, sweating in the night air as he recited an odd mixture of Latin and Gothic phrases and a transliteration of some unknown tongue, its hissings and glottals sitting in his mouth like curdled milk. When everything was finished, he caressed the corpse’s cheek and whispered a single question into the dead ears –

“Who did this to you?”

II.

Budapest

1956

“Tatiana? Put me through to Serov. Yes, I know what time it is in Moscow, but he’ll take my call.” 

Yuri Andropov squeezed the receiver with white knuckles as a thousand miles of relays snapped closed. Two Hungarian comrades dead in the last three days, and no one has a fucking clue about the perpetrator’s identity. The Hungarians are losing control of their own city. The other end of the line buzzed agitatedly, like a nest of disturbed wasps.

“Ivan? I need – yes, I know the sun’s not up yet. Did you get my memo about the English spy?” There was a moment of silence on the other end as the KGB chief rummaged through his papers. “Yes, that one. Of course, it’s not the same man – Jonathan Harker would be in his eighties by now. Still, our source in Berlin assures me that it’s his daughter that escaped custody at Yaroslavl…”

The voice on the other end of the line rose to a fever pitch of agitation. The presence of any foreign prisoner in the gulag was a tremendous liability, and heads would roll for the breach of security, but that was Acwulf’s problem.   Sarah Spencer had been arrested in East Berlin and transferred into the custody in the Soviet Union, where she had proven a notoriously recalcitrant prisoner. They should have shot her and saved themselves the trouble. Ironically, the information Acwulf’s report guaranteed both her cooperation and her survival, for Sarah Spencer would be sentenced to a long prison term, but in a few years, the Hungarians could send her home in a prisoner exchange. After all, a mother will do almost anything to save her son.

“Yes, I’m aware of what happened to the guards, but I need her alive. Don’t worry about what I know, just get me a transport from Kiev to Budapest. Yes, you heard me correctly – they slipped through your cordon weeks ago, and my source tells me that you’re looking in the wrong place. No, the situation in Budapest is not good. I remain hopeful that we can defend the city without resorting to military force, but there is no guarantee.”  There. If things spun out of control and Moscow sent in the tanks, he would be on record expressing his doubts about a peaceful solution.

Yuri Andropov hung up the phone and spent the next two hours encoding a message to Acwulf. When he was finished, he headed downstairs. Half of the embassy is sick with the flu, he thought as he passed the empty desk of his secretary. If the rash of illness became any worse, he would be doing all of the work himself.

III.

London

It was raining, a desultory London drizzle that perfectly matched his own mood, when Archie reached the cemetery. He paused at the grave of his uncle. Jonathan Quincy Harker, killed on the first day of the Somme. I wonder if he even fired his weapon in anger. In his own war, from the first desperate days of 1940 to the final push into the Third Reich, Archie had assumed that he would not survive and that his own grave would rest next to his uncle’s. Or perhaps there would only be a plaque to commemorate my lost body, he thought. Archie bowed his head at the tomb of his grandfather and ran his fingers across the inscription.

Jonathan Harker, 1868-1933

Mina Murray Harker, 1873-1924

A whole family memorialized together, he thought. Father, Mother, son, and surrogate daughter were gathered in the stone garden, while his own mother went… Certainly not unremembered, he thought, but never quite ready to take her place among the honored dead. And perhaps she won’t have to – if one takes Otto Skorzeny at face value. The old Nazi’s story was his first concrete lead in three years, but Skorzeny had no reason to tell the truth, and doubts over the trip to Budapest gnawed at Archie’s bones. What then? The voice of Rupert Holmes answered in his memory.

Follow the path and find out where it leads.

Paying a final respect at the grave of his grandfather, he set off to find his mother.

IV.

Romania

“And how is your daughter now?” The Securitate had kicked in the peasant’s door following a tip from an informant, and Anghel Suta studied his expression from the far side of the desk. You left your village for an entire week, and our investigation finds you in the vicinity of Lake Snagov.  What were you doing there?

“Her fever broke the next day. I know that I shouldn’t have –”

“That’s good,” Suta said, cutting him off. “You will want her to be healthy when she enters the orphanage. Of course, we will also question your wife, and I’m sure that she will have more information to add.”

“Please.”

“Tell me again where you went.”

“Into the mountains, about a half-day’s walk to the north.”

“How many times?”

“Just once, I swear…” 

“Do you recognize these men?”  Anghel Suta spread out the photographs, and four corpses stared back at the peasant.

“No…”  The peasant gazed at the photos, fascinated by the dead eyes, by the wounded throats. “I’ve never seen these men.” 

“Of course not.”  Suta’s index finger stabbed at the empty air. “We are not finished here. This will go on for days and weeks until we have documented every single scrap of the truth. For the time being, however…  In which direction did your co-conspirator walk when he left the village?” 

“He isn’t my…” The peasant exhaled in defeat. “North. He followed the road north deeper into the mountains.”

“Traveling on foot and carrying this box, which – if one accepts your claim – is filled with nothing but dirt?” 

“Yes.”  He paused, and Suta waited patiently for the final act of betrayal. “I don’t think he has gone far.” 

“Why not?”

“Because he only travels at night.”

V.

London

Archie Spencer spent a great deal of time away from home, and after finding his residence unoccupied on two separate occasions, Evangeline decided to take matters into her own hands. She retained the instincts of a petty criminal, even after the death of her husband (he wasn’t my husband, she thought through gritted teeth), and the old newspapers piqued her curiosity. She removed the hairpin from her scalp and straightened it into a makeshift pick. Test it first, just to be sure. To her surprise, the door swung inward.

She crossed the threshold and cast a nervous backward glance into the street. Evangeline was hungry for more information about Jonathan Harker’s connection with Quincy Morris, but she moved with the nervous steps of a cat – for three years, the spectre of New Orleans haunted her movements, and it paid to be aware of her surroundings. Her muscles tensed as she stepped into the foyer.

In the office, a series of photographs were scattered across the desk, and Evangeline paused to examine the old prints. Quincy Morris crossed the ocean, and we never heard from him again. That event, three decades before her own birth, had shaped her life. We were rich once, before Josiah Morris ran our fortune into the ground. Before I married a no-account grifter who nearly got me killed.  Jonathan Harker was entangled somehow in her great uncle’s disappearance, and by extension, so were Archie Spencer and his mother. She recognized Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood from the news articles and glanced at another print of a handsome woman with a baby. There’s a lot about you in the papers, Mister Harker, and none of it looks good. Perhaps that explained Archie Spencer’s fortune. She reached the next photo, and her breath caught in her throat – Arthur Holmwood and another man posed against a stone wall with shotguns. Arthur’s light-colored waistcoat was matched with a ridiculous top hat, and he wore trousers tucked into long boots.  The second man, dressed in a black duster and Stetson hat, grinned at the camera beneath his heavy mustache. Evangeline stared at the photo for a long time.

“He looks like you, doesn’t he?”  A hand touched her shoulder. “I hope my picture’s not in there somewhere – always hated having my photo taken.”

It’s him. She had killed him in New Orleans, but her would-be assassin had found her in London, and when she turned, thing she would see would be the lifeless eyes and murderer’s grin. How did he know?

VI.

Kiev Oblast, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

They walked all night, and Plekhanov maintained a steady pace as they made their way through the marshes. They had drifted on the boat for seven days, traveling downstream from the Berezina to the broader channel of the Dnieper, before disembarking near of the confluence with the Pripyat. Plekhanov grew more agitated with each passing day. We need to go west, not south. Anything less merely delayed the executioner’s bullet, yet she was content to meander toward her mythical aerie in the Carpathians. Doubts crept into his mind with the morning twilight, Plekhanov found himself tempted leave her behind. Be serious. If you abandon her, you’ll both be dead in a week. And it was true, as if lovemaking and bloodshed bound them together in some profound way. Separated from each other, they would fade to ghosts among the wildflowers of the Pripyat marshes. But that isn’t all, is it? The loyalty that bound him to her was more than calculated self-interest or the allure of her body. The sun rose in the east, and they found a patch of dry ground to serve as a bed. Her lips brushed his ear, and Plekhanov turned away until desire overcame reluctance. Afterward, they lay entwined in the leaves, sleeping fitfully as the marsh birds twittered and the wind whispered in the treetops.

He opened his eyes as the noonday sun burned overhead. Beside him, Sarah lay on the ground, one arm thrown across her face, sleeping like death itself. Plekhanov flexed his legs to ease the stiffness of last night’s walk and listened to the forest. The Germans had never mastered the art of stealth, and their wartime patrols were announced by a constant snapping of twigs, the creak of leather harnesses, and the hissing whisper of “Verdammter Russe.”  Red Army patrols were scarcely better, and any soldiers that followed them into the marshes would make their presence known with the rumble of tanks and trucks. The marshes were utterly silent.

And yet someone is here. His ears had registered a sound that his waking mind could not recall – a snapping twig, perhaps, or a distant human voice. Plekhanov stood, studied the ground at his feet, then moved slowly forward as he repeated the mantra that had saved him countless times during the war. Step forward, count to ten, take another step. Every ten steps, stop and count to sixty before moving again. By near-imperceptible degrees, he advanced – ten meters, then twenty, then fifty. Somewhere ahead, he told himself, a peasant was wandering the marshes, perhaps looking to supplement his diet with fish or hare, and Plekhanov wished desperately for the bark of a hunting dog or the report of an old fowling piece – anything to ease the dread that tingled at the base of his spine. Step forward, count to ten –

“Hello, comrade. Don’t make any sudden moves, and I won’t have to shoot you.”  The thief stood ten meters to his left and held a Kalashnikov in one heavily tattooed arm. Plekhanov gave an uneasy glance toward their campsite, and the thief grinned, perhaps reading the worry on his face.

“Do you think she likes you?”

Plekhanov shrugged. “I’m not sure that she likes anyone.” 

“They told us she was dangerous, but no one believed it until we found the bodies in the river.”  He gestured with the rifle. “We’re going to walk to the nearest road. My instructions were to deliver her alive, and if she likes you as much as I think, she’ll cooperate if we have you.” 

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Then you pay for the bodies in the river, and we send what’s left of you to the KGB. Now, move.” 

Plekhanov’s shoulders sagged in defeat. The thief fell in behind him, and they began walking.

VII.

London

“Don’t be frightened, it’s just me.” Rupert Holmes’s smile was pleasant, but for the first time, she noticed a certain coldness about the eyes. Evangeline Morris sank into the chair as he perused the photographs on the desk.

“You know Archie?” 

“Oh, yes. We served together in the war, and I was a friend of his grandfather’s before that.”  Holmes paused to light his pipe. “It seems that our young friend has traveled to Budapest to seek out his mother.  An unfortunate decision – I suspect that he has placed himself in some danger.”

“You came to warn him?” 

“No. There is nothing that I can do for him at the moment, and the matter in which we find ourselves entangled is graver than the life of one man. In fact, I was looking for you.” 

The matter in which we find ourselves entangled. Evangeline removed a photo from the stack.

“My great uncle vanished a half-century ago, and my grandfather lost everything we had. My grandmother…”

“Her heart was broken, wasn’t it?”  Evangeline flinched, but if Holmes caught her expression, he gave no sign. “I think it affected him deeply, though he gave few outward signs.” 

“If you knew him,” she said, trying to guess Holmes’s age, “he must have lived to a ripe old age. What did he tell you about my grandmother?” 

“He tells me very little,” Holmes said, “but I know more of his life than anyone. It’s complicated, but let’s take a walk, and I’ll explain what I can.” 

VIII.

Cologne

Cristofor celebrated the afternoon mass and spent time in veneration of the Blessed Sacraments before returning to his office. He had eaten little and slept poorly since their return from Hof, but the creatures that haunted his nightmares imbued new weight to his priestly duties, a sharp delineation of good and evil that he had not felt since the war years. He opened the door and found Rudolf Diels sitting at his desk.

The German was a mess, his cheeks unshaven and his body adorned in a rumpled suit that, by all appearances, had doubled as last night’s bedclothes. If he slept at all, Cristofor thought, noting the dark circles beneath his eyes. The yeasty scent of liquor hung suspended in the air, and Diels twirled an unlit cigarette between thumb and forefinger. He passed a sheet of paper across the desk, and Cristofor examined the string of numbers before returning the document with a puzzled expression.

“It’s a book code.”  Diels placed the cigarette between his lips and fumbled for a lighter. “Archie Spencer and I settled on the King James version of the English bible. First book of Samuel, twenty-eighth chapter – the first two numbers are the verse, second two numbers are the letter’s position within the verse. Crude but effective, unless one knows the key.” 

“What does it say?” 

Diels closed his eyes and inclined his head backward. “It says, ‘Message from Otto Skorzeny. Sarah is alive at the Russian embassy in Budapest. Leaving tonight.’  That message was sent from London two days ago.”

“And you think that Skorzeny’s motives are… not altruistic in nature.”

“After what happened in Hof?”  Diels paused, breathing deeply. “I think he’s leading the boy into a trap.”

“All right,” Cristofor said. “What do you propose to do about it?”

The priest made his confession that evening and though his conscience nagged at things left unsaid, he could hardly admit his plan to defy the Church’s orders. If things are as simple as Diels claims, we should be back in a week. Cristofor knew the city from his wartime service, and Diels had access to diplomatic passports and a cover story – they were visiting to tend to the spiritual needs of the West German embassy staff. But with Rudolf Diels, nothing is ever simple.

He removed the Bible from his bookshelf and skimmed the text. When Saul saw the army of the Philistines, he was afraid, and his heart trembled greatly. He inquired of the Lord, but the Lord did not answer him, not by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets. Cristofor had learned the story as a child. Saul said to his servants, “Seek out for me a woman who is a witch, so that I may go and inquire of her.” His servants said to him, “There is a witch at Endor.”  He skimmed the text again. Saul had visited the witch under cover of darkness, where she had conjured the spirit of the dead prophet. Samuel’s warning to the king had been dire - “tomorrow, you and your sons will be with me.”

Cristofor placed the book onto the shelf and sat at his desk. He was generally skeptical of signs and portents, favoring instead the logic of Aristotle and Aquinas, but the text filled him with foreboding. Twelve men went into the mountains and only two returned. He spent the next hour writing, and when the ink was dry, he sealed the papers in an envelope. If anything happened to him in Budapest, there would be a record of his final acts.

The witch of Endor, he thought. The woman who calls forth the dead.

IX.

London

They meandered through Wormwood Scrubs then turned north toward Hampstead Heath. Evangeline tried to keep up with Holmes’s story – Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood. Something about an old madhouse, and a town on the seacoast – Exeter? No, Whitby. For God’s sake, what does it matter? Jonathan got sick, and when Mina went looking for him, something happened to Lucy. Exactly what had happened, Holmes refused to say. Lucy, the woman with three suitors. Holmes’s eyes took on a peculiar shine at every mention of her name, a man reliving the unpleasant memory of an old lover. Lucy was attacked at midnight, and she slowly wasted away. Attacked by who?

“By the man who purchased Carfax Abbey,” Holmes said, and she jumped, startled that she had spoken aloud.

“And her ghost haunted London after her death.”  She intended the words as a joke, but her own voice was jagged, her laughter forced. “What are you not telling me?” 

“Mrs. Morris, have you ever seen something that you could not explain?”

“Oh, yes,” she whispered. I blew out his heart with the shotgun, and he got up and walked away.

“In due time, and I hope that day never comes, you may see things that you would not have believed possible. For now, it is imperative that as the living descendant of Quincy Morris, you retain possession of Carfax Abbey.” 

“Why?”

Rupert Holmes leapt over a stone wall, surprisingly graceful for a man in his… Forties? Fifties? – and extended a hand to her. A stone angel guarded the tomb, its features worn from sixty-three years of London weather. She paused to examine the plaque, its bronze green with age. Lucy Westenra.

“Because if Lucy’s killer is not brought to justice, your assistance may be needed.” 

VIII.

Czechoslovak Border

10 miles west of Bad Kötzting

He reached the top of the low ridge and rested among the fir trees, flushed and panting from the exertion of the climb. The folded hills of the Bavarian Forest lacked the grandeur of the Alps, but Archie found them quite pretty. More importantly, he preferred to remain concealed among the trees until he was certain of his destination. Archie had spent the night in Paris, and the next morning, he had taken a train to Munich, where he had telephoned the number provided by Otto Skorzeny. “The border runs along the mountains west of Bad Kötzting. On the other side, a car will be waiting to take you to Budapest.”

It’s a perfectly reasonable plan, Archie thought. All you have to do is to place your life in the hands of a war criminal, illegally cross the border of a hostile country, and trust their secret police to take you to your mother. If this had been wartime France, if he had contacts on the far side of the border, Archie would have made his own way to Budapest, but Skorzeny left him with few alternatives. If he refused the German’s offer of assistance, then Sarah Spencer would disappear for good, her body discarded in a nameless burial pit or thrown into the Danube.

He began the downhill trek, moving faster as gravity lent speed to his aching legs. If Skorzeny was lying, then Archie knew that he was walking into a trap. That’s the beauty of the scheme, isn’t it? The story of his mother’s disappearance was just plausible enough to ensure that he would walk the path laid out for him, heedless of his own misgivings. Perhaps Rupert Holmes could have untangled the knot – Archie was certain that the old man would have been halfway home by now, detouring to Madrid before his return to London. Just pop in, cut the throat of your tormentor, and you can be back in England for afternoon tea. If only…

To his right, a twig snapped. Archie froze in place as the soldier returned his stare. He was already running before his conscious mind registered the danger, dodging hidden stones and low-hanging branches as he sprinted away from the line of approaching soldiers.  They knew I was coming, he thought, or they would be shooting by now. His legs ached with the effort, but hiding would serve no purpose – he needed to lose his pursuers and find a way across the border before they flooded the area with troops.  A bullet passed his head with a sharp crack, but Archie had faced death during the war, and he knew the difference between a warning shot and deadly aim. Keep going, he panted.  They were falling behind, and five more minutes of good effort would put him out of sight.

He reached the bottom of the slope and passed into a clearing, where an entire company of soldiers waited beside a pair of military trucks. Archie stopped as they raised their weapons, and a pair of troops manacled his hands and feet. Someone placed a hood over his head, a bayonet prodded his shoulder blades, and he began walking, a shuffling half-step that chafed his ankles against the metal bands. Archie counted fifty paces before someone forced his head downward, and Archie half-fell into the back seat of the waiting car. An engine sputtered to life, and he began to move.

If I survive this, I’m returning to Madrid for a word with Otto Skorzeny.

And if you don’t?

That’s tomorrow’s problem. For now, rest.

They drove, and Archie could not tell whether they traveled for minutes or hours. The ordeal left him drained, and though his rough treatment was orchestrated to elicit fear, he found himself dozing.

X.

Kiev Oblast, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

In 1933, I was bitten by a vampire. She had not dared to utter the truth to Alexandr Plekhanov, but the words repeated in her mind, the malignant earworm of a broken record. And now, somewhere in the darkness, a monster is waiting to devour me. Sarah rose with the setting sun and brushed a rotted leaf from her face. Plekhanov was not at her side, but she felt no fear at his absence, for traces of his scent were detectable in the evening air. She followed those as the light faded, and odors of sweat, oil, and tobacco mingled with Plekhanov’s trail as she meandered over the swampy ground. Three - no, four men - and a dog, spread over the marsh. They must have found the boat and used the dog to follow our trail. At the end of the trail, the odors vanished in a cloud of diesel smoke, and she stood in the center of the road, pondering.

“Hello there!”

Sarah Spencer made a slow half-turn, taking in the hollow cheeks, the missing tooth, the undernourished frame. He had been hiding in the trees, waiting for her, but she did not bother to feign surprise – she had been aware of his presence for the last ten minutes.

“Where is Alexandr?”  she said. The boy appeared to be about eighteen, and his arms were mostly free of ink. The lowest ranking member of the group, left behind for a menial task.

“Not here.” She met his gaze with indifference as he examined her body. “Come with me, and I’ll take you to him. Better yet, we can fuck, and I’ll tell them that you never came. You can go where you like, and no one will know better.” 

“But I would know, wouldn’t I?”  Somewhere in the darkness, a monster is waiting to devour me. She let the smile play across her lips, and the boy shifted nervously as she stared into his eyes. Sarah’s heart began to beat faster, and a tingle of excitement wormed through her belly. At last, the boy understood and turned to run, but it was already too late.

She walked all night and reached the outpost at sunrise, tired but satisfied with the night’s work. Sarah approached slowly, squinting a little against the dawn twilight, and placed the bag at her feet. The perimeter guard was a striking youth with black hair and the bluest eyes she had ever seen, and she waited patiently as he shouted for the others. Somewhere in the darkness, a monster is waiting to devour me. My mind and body become more like my enemy’s with each passing sunset, and the endgame will be my freedom or my doom. Plekhanov would be on his way to Budapest by now, but with the proper incentives, perhaps they would be mindful of his well-being. Sarah ignored the rifles pointed at her chest, and when they were close enough, she kicked at the bag.  Its contents spilled onto the bare ground, and they stared at the severed heads, unwilling to look into her own eyes as the dead faces of the thieves returned their gaze.

“I surrender,” Sarah Spencer said.

XI.

Romania

“Are you planning to shoot me?” 

The prisoner stood in the middle of the road, cut off by a dozen agents, but he made no move to comply with their orders. Perhaps his strength made him overconfident, for the box rested on his shoulder as if it weighed nothing, and his indifference was slightly unnerving. In Suta’s experience, arrest was typically greeted with obsequiousness or, more rarely, bravado. I’m not going to shoot you, he thought, gritting his teeth at the prisoner’s impertinence. I have a basement cell in Sibiu, and I’m going to place you in a dark hole until we wring every scrap of information from your broken body. And when we’re finished, I’m going to watch you swing from the end of a rope. As a dozen rifles were aimed in his direction, the prisoner laid the box at his feet. At the edge of the road, an owl landed in the trees, and the prisoner smiled at the new arrival.

“Give me your name, citizen.” 

“Me?”  He spread his hands in mock innocence. “I’m no one in particular, but if it pleases you to know my name, I am Quincy Morris. Now, if you will excuse me, I will be on my way.” 

“First, we’re going to see what’s in the box,” Suta gestured at the prisoner’s feet, “and then you’re going to give an account of yourself. Step back and lie on the ground.” 

“I think not.”  He met Suta’s own stare, and the eyes, large and tinged with red, were quite pleasant, even welcoming. A second owl alighted in the trees, next to the first, but Quincy Morris took no notice. “I think you will be happier if you turn around and go back the way you came. I would also be grateful if you would see to the release of my friends – it appears they were arrested by some mistake.” 

Yes, Suta thought. The idea entered his mind uninvited and settled pleasantly into his thoughts.  We should do exactly that. He would have to answer to Bucharest for his failure, but if he looked into the red eyes and listened to the gentle wingbeats as more owls landed in the trees, it became clear that Quincy Morris was a reasonable man with a perfectly acceptable request. Indeed, when he looked into the eyes, Anghel Suta found it difficult to comprehend that anyone could suggest otherwise –

“Sir?”  Someone grasped his arm, breaking the spell. “Are you all right?” 

What was I thinking? Suta blinked to clear his mind. “Shoot him now.”

They hesitated for an instant, then one man – Suta thought it was Serghei – tightened his finger on the trigger. Later, in the final moments before his own death, Suta would remember how the hands of Quincy Morris appeared to move not at all. The pistols, a matching pair of large revolvers, simply appeared, and the gunshots were fired in such rapid succession that Suta wondered whether they were under attack by an entire band of armed men. Four bullets passed through Serghei’s forehead, removing the top of his skull, and blood sprayed from the shattered head as he fell. Serghei lay in the dirt, his only movement the spasmodic jerking of his feet, then the guns blazed again, and two more men lay lifeless in the road. Now Suta’s own hands were moving as he struggled to free the pistol in his belt, but the man, the fiend, paid him no heed, and –

Oh, God, no…

The form of Quincy Morris vanished, and he saw the flash of brown, streaking toward Ladinus like an arrow shot from a bow.  The owl struck him full in the chest, and Ladinus cried out, a high-pitched warble of terror, as the beak ripped away his jugular vein. Then there was no owl, only Quincy Morris, standing over the prostrate body of the dying man. Quincy’s eyes caught him again, and for an instant, Anghel Suta could have sworn that he caught a touch of pity in those red orbs. The pistols appeared once again – pop, pop, pop – and another three men lay dying. Anghel Suta’s own pistol fired now, the gun jumping in his hand as his feet moved backward, and though he was certain that each bullet struck home – he was an exceptional pistol shot – the tall man (Bird of prey? Monster?) gave no sign of hurt.

Suta blinked, and the man – or bird, he could no longer distinguish one from another – advanced, and two more fell, one groaning as he clutched his spilled intestines, and another lying still, his head several feet from the bleeding stump of a neck. The tongue protruded from its open mouth and its open eyes stared vacantly at his own. Suta forced himself to look away from the head and concentrate on his quarry. Where the fuck is he?

“Anghel Suta.”  The voice echoed in his brain, and those two words produced more fear than the entire night’s bloodshed. How does he know my name? The remaining men, finally regaining what remained of their own wits, pumped bullet after bullet into the body of Quincy Morris, but he gave no sign of injury, or even of discomfort. Finally, the long revolvers barked three times, and three bodies lay in the road. Pompiliu, a boy of perhaps twenty-one, continued to move, struggling to regain his feet as his arms reached upward toward the stars above. Suta had thought the boy unsuited for work in the security organs, his heart corrupted by bourgeois notions of compassion, but now his own stomach turned as the foot of Quincy Morris rested upon the dying boy’s head. Anghel Suta turned away, sickened, as Pompiliu’s skull collapsed under the boot.

In the trees, the owls continued to watch, undisturbed by the noise.

“That wasn’t bad, was it?”  The pistols vanished beneath the dark coat. “I haven’t fired a gun in sixty-three years, and not a single shot missed its mark.” 

Suta turned to flee as his nerve failed, but Quincy Morris was beside him, his movements impossibly fast in the darkness. A cold hand grabbed his wrist, and Suta cried out in pain as his arm broke at the elbow. The pale features began to meld and shift until the monster that held him retained only the barest the semblance of a man. Suta could barely comprehend the cruelty in that face, as if his own spite had been distilled to its primal essence and reflected back in those eyes. A dozen more owls fluttered overhead as his cries dissolved into whimpering moans.

“You should have listened to me,” it said. Its voice echoed in his mind like footsteps in a dark room. “But perhaps it’s better this way – after all, my friends are hungry.”

As the owls swooped from the trees, Quincy Morris kicked the lid from the box, and Anghel Suta stared at its contents. Nothing but earth, he thought as the owls – dozens of them now – swarmed about his vulnerable flesh. I died for nothing but a box of earth.

XII.

The peasant awakened in the darkness of his cell, suddenly aware that the guard’s footfalls no longer sounded in the hallway. The jail, a holding area for prisoners awaiting transfer to Bucharest, was silent as a tomb. His cell door stood open, and a guard lay dead in the hallway outside. He passed two more bodies as he made his way to the outside, and Quincy Morris emerged from the shadows. The dead man proffered a folded slip of paper and regarded him with unblinking eyes. 

“Your wife and son are safely home. On that paper is an address in Ploesti, and the man at that address can help you across the border to Turkey. Do exactly as he says.” 

The peasant nodded. “The Securitate will be after me.”  

“They’ll figure it out eventually,” Quincy said, “but when the sun comes up, they’ll be too busy with other matters to figure out who has walked out of their cell. By the time they sort through the mess, you should be safely across the border.” 

“Where will you go?” 

“About five miles from here, a little off the road, you can find the bones of an old schoolhouse. During the war, the Germans murdered an entire family there.”  His smile chilled the peasant’s blood.   “I hear that unhallowed ground is haunted by the spirits of those who died violently, but it’s a good place to hide.” 

“Thank you for coming back for me. You did a good thing.”

Quincy Morris watched the peasant depart, then slipped into the darkness. You did a good thing. His mind understood the sentiment, just as he knew that those who died by his hand were mourned by husband or wife, parents or children, but his heart made no such connection – his world was one of predator and prey. Still, he remembered those from before– Jonathan and Mina Harker, Arthur Holmwood, Jack Seward, and Lucy Westenra (especially Lucy, he thought) – with strong emotion, and they (especially Lucy) would have been pleased by his action. Yes, but Lucy is dead. They are all dead, and when their memory fades, you will be no different from Him. Quincy acknowledged the truth, for what remained of his soul had no patience for lies.

And He was waiting for them in Budapest. The trap was already in place, a snare awaiting the leg of an unwary traveler, and Quincy could not discern its mechanism. He intends to settle all accounts with those who wounded him, to wipe the progeny of Jonathan Harker from the face of the earth. He wants his old home back, a place to rest and grow strong again, for this house cannot serve two masters. Very well – let him lay his plans. Quincy had his own scores to settle, and he would have his vengeance, or – if he was defeated – thwart the plans of the enemy. For Jonathan and Mina, for Arthur, for my own wounding, and for Lucy.

Especially for Lucy.