Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Chapter 9

Part II - The Thieves

I.

London to Purfleet

1944

The sun rose, and Horace awakened on the floor of the cellar. His limbs were so weak that he could barely stand, yet he remembered only fragments of the previous night’s assault. He stumbled past the corpse of Katherine Holmwood and stared at the closed lid of the box, afraid to contemplate what lay inside.

What have I done? His mistress lay dead at his feet, and though his own hand wielded the knife, Horace was certain that his thoughts had not been his own. The thing in the box (Horace could not recall its appearance, but he envisioned something akin to a hairless rat), had guided his actions, and God only knew what mischief it would do when the sun set. Perhaps I should burn the whole thing, he thought. There was a twenty-liter can of petrol in the gardener’s shed, and fire would destroy It – whatever It was – and cover the evidence of last night’s crime. Instead, Horace let his eyes be drawn to the box, and a wave of pity washed over him. It wants you to have these feelings, a part of his mind warned, just as it guided your hand when you used the knife. He turned away from the closed lid, sickened by his own thoughts, and crawled up the cellar stairs.   

He returned to the basement at sunset. The clothes that he laid on the stones were old but well-kept. “These were Lord Godalming’s,” he said, and in the darkness beyond, Horace sensed, rather than saw, a pair of misshapen lips twist upward into a smile – like a malevolent child with a new toy, it was pleased with the gift. Horace waited patiently and did not struggle as it forced his head to one side and drank from the wound in his throat.

The following morning, he was barely able to stand, but he stumbled upstairs to the kitchen and forced himself to eat. If things continued on their current trajectory, he would fade away and become a ghost, and though the notion was oddly pleasing, he had more than his own well-being to consider, and it would do no good to lie in the cellar until sunset. The bread and soup made him retch, but the food was bland enough to be tolerable, and he managed to keep everything down. The groundskeeper’s lorry was at the far end of the property, and he filled the tank with petrol. Horace felt dizzy and slightly ill in the sunlight, but he forced himself to focus on the task at hand. He waited upstairs by the front window as the sun’s glow faded in the west and stared at the parked lorry outside. Horace could sense movement It crept up the stairs, but he did not turn, for if he turned to face It, he would lose all reason and bare his throat without thinking. Tonight, he needed his strength.

“We need to leave before someone finds us.”  In the dead air behind him, there was only silence, and Horace wondered if it comprehended his words. It waited, perhaps considering whether to drain the remnants of his lifeblood, but there was no dead hand upon his shoulder, no lips upon his throat.

“Where?”  The voice was a dry rasp, the breath of tombs.

“The Lady owned another house, an old place where no one has lived for years. We can stay there.” 

In the following days, no one noticed when the sailor went missing, and when his headless body was found in the Thames estuary, no one checked the grounds of Carfax Abbey for evidence. The next week, Horace met a prostitute on the waterfront, and when she fell asleep afterward in the upstairs room, he locked the door behind him and went downstairs to watch the sunset. He used an axe for his final task, and her remains went into the silted-in pond in the back. He (Horace no longer thought in terms of It) wandered the grounds at night, and Horace followed, watching from a safe distance as and glancing across the stone wall toward the ruins of Jack Seward’s old house. In the daylight hours, a smell lingered in his hair and clothes – old sweat mingled with bad breath and decay – that Horace could never fully banish. A third body went into the pond with the others, and when Horace filled in the grave, He used a long fingernail to draw a circle, its diameter slightly larger than the grave itself, and mumbled something in an unfamiliar language. A portal, Horace thought. It was an odd notion, but strange ideas frequently entered his head after the death of Katherine Holmwood.

He grew uneasy after the third disappearance, and his fear was not merely of the policeman that patrolled beyond the gate or the odd stares that he received during his occasional forays into the city. Someone is watching us, Horace thought. The house should have been a perfect hideout, but it felt wrong, as if they were trespassers on the doorstep of a great and terrible king. A few days later, he arranged a passage across the Channel on a small boat. With the Allied invasion of France came opportunities for illicit trade, and the smuggler assured him that Royal Navy patrols will cause no problems. “It’s easy,” he said. “Just stay clear of the big boats and slip a few pounds to the right people – they’ll look the other way.”  Horace paid extra and admonished his new friend to enjoy an extra pint before the beginning of their voyage.

After all, the smuggler would not survive to see England again.  

II.

Hof

1956

Rudolf Diels stared through the café window into the late morning drizzle toward the church spires to his left. To his right, the clock tower chimed out ten bells. A happy place of schnitz and schlappenbier, he thought. The Czech border was ten kilometers to the east, and in the war’s aftermath, the city’s population had swelled from the flood of refugees from the Sudetenland. Farther north lay the German Democratic Republic, and a smaller stream of refugees braved the machine guns and barbed wire to make their way to freedom. He ordered Herrengedecks for each of them, and though Diels read the question in his companion’s eyes – a little early for a drink, isn’t it? – the priest gave a nod of appreciation.

“Do you like the town?”  Cristofor asked.

“Not really,” Diels said as he sipped his beer. “Too many reminders of the past.” 

“It’s not all bad. Lichtenberg died here on the way to Dachau.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It is.” The priest downed the liquor in a single swallow. “Would you trade your soul for a few more years of life?”

“Most gave up their souls for a lot less,” Diels said.

“I heard that you didn’t.”

“There are plenty who would say otherwise,” Diels said. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

Cristofor answered with a shrug of resignation. He had quietly accepted the news of Gabriela’s death, but Diels sensed a deep undercurrent of emotion beneath the stillness. Perhaps she wasn’t your mistress, but you had feelings for her, didn’t you?

“Rudolf, why did you ask me to come?” 

“Egon wasn’t Bavarian, and I can’t imagine why he would end up in Hof. Skorzeny says that he lived near a church, and my best guess is that we’ll find him in a local cemetery.” 

“Maybe, if he was telling you the truth, but you don’t need me to pore through a bunch cemetery records.”  Cristofor finished his drink, and Diels ordered another round. “Seriously, what’s going on?” 

“Someone is here,” Diels said, “or Skorzeny wouldn’t have sent me. I think we’re being set up.” 

“In that case, let’s head back to Cologne –”

“No.” Diels cut him off. “If someone has taken an interest in Sarah Spencer, I would like to know why. That’s why we’re going to find this church, and we’re going to talk to… whoever the hell shows up.”

“You do realize that I can’t help you if you’re planning anything violent? In fact, I’ll have to oppose any efforts to hurt or threaten another. Of course, you knew that already, so let me ask again – what am I doing here?”

You’re here because an Englishman lost an old diary, Diels thought. Jonathan Harker’s story was nonsense, and Diels had not grown credulous with the passage of time, but a baker’s dozen of men had gone missing in 1933. So I brought a priest.  Perhaps he disobeyed the church’s rules by pining for a dead girlfriend, but we use what we can under the circumstances.

“I might need your help with an odd bit that came up during the investigation,” he said. “I’m sure it’s nothing important.” 

“Where do we start?”

“The first thing that we need to do is to find the abandoned church. Finish your drink, and let’s get moving.” 

III.

Budapest

The Nazi Party archives in Munich had been captured by the Americans, but the most sensitive files were housed in Berlin, and the Red Army had carted those back to Moscow. There were substantial gaps in the record where files had been destroyed or hidden away. Some of them, Yuri Andropov thought, were taken by enterprising Germans as bargaining chips. Useful if you want to start a new life as a Soviet agent. Andropov found it scandalous that the KGB saw fit to employ a former Nazi, but Acwulf often succeeded where others failed, and the files on Reinhard Heydrich were one such success.

The architect of the Final Solution had been assassinated by British spies and Czech partisans in 1942, and if Stalin had known that Heydrich’s tomb was empty, he would have spun a tale in which Hitler’s butcher was spirited off to Washington after faking his own death. Andropov knew better, for he had taken the measure of the Americans, but the odd details of Heydrich’s death interested him less than the connection with Jonathan Harker.  The English spy (“the same man who slipped through your fingers last year,” Mikoyan’s voice echoed in his mind) had used that name, and though Andropov was certain that their prisoner had used an alias – by all appearances, the real Jonathan Harker was long dead – even a false name was something to build upon. After all, the Germans had tried to recruit Harker for something, and perhaps that explained his daughter’s arrest in 1953. Deported from East Germany to the interior of the Soviet Union, Acwulf’s report said, and available for further interrogation in Budapest. Acwulf even claimed that Harker’s grandson had been a wartime intelligence agent, and three generations of spies would make for good propaganda, even the German’s recommendation was somewhat farfetched. How would one lure a British citizen to Budapest for arrest and trial?

Yuri Andropov read through the report a final time, making various annotations in the margins, and when he was finished, he locked the document in his filing cabinet. He was already late for the meeting with the embassy’s health officer, and today’s session was more important than usual.

Another embassy employee had fallen ill.

IV.

Near Minsk

Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic

If you want to predict the future, look to the past. Plekhanov hid in the low brush and watched the evergreen trees on the far bank of the river. The KGB would have combed through his prison files for any clue to his whereabouts, and if their agents were any good, they would be watching the river. Let them watch, he thought. The Germans tracked me through these woods for three years and never caught me.

“Where are we?”  Sarah Spencer placed a hand on his arm.

“The Berezina. Napoleon lost an army on this river, and Hitler lost another one. Soviet tanks trapped the Germans on the east bank, and those that weren’t killed outright were mopped up by partisans. Poke around the brush, and you’ll find old bones.”

“How do we get across?” 

“Can you swim?”  The expression on Sarah’s face answered his question. “We’ll look for a railroad bridge or steal a boat.” 

Sarah picked a wildflower, and Plekhanov marveled as she turned the stem between her long fingers. Her palms were callused, but the skin was unmarred, almost radiant, and the muscles of her arms retained a healthy tone. Three years in the gulag was sufficient to waste most zeks to little more than skin and bones, but Sarah Spencer had survived, even thrived, in the unforgiving land.

“You never told me how you ended up in our happy little country,” he said.

“When Joseph Stalin died, I came to Moscow for the funeral.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Of course not.”  She tossed the flower at his head.

Clouds passed overhead, bathing her skin in an alternating series of sunlight and shadow. She watched the sky, and Plekhanov had an uncomfortable sensation an interrogation room. The prisoner sat before him and measured out her words through exhaustion and hunger. Does she give a full confession, or does she give just enough information to buy a little food, a little rest? The image repelled him, and he sat in silence.

“Something bad happened when I was younger.” She closed her eyes, as Plekhanov often did when remembering the war. “But also … There was a man who helped me.” 

“You became lovers, didn’t you?”  She let the question hang for a moment, then nodded.

“Did you love him?” 

“I don’t know. I was married at the time, but we were alone and afraid, with no one but each other to turn to. I was with him when he died, and for a long time, I couldn’t visit his grave. That’s where I was going when I passed through Berlin.”

Plekhanov let her words pass without comment. A partial confession brought no relief from the interrogator, but he was no prison guard, and he would not wring the truth from her. Still, another question weighed on his mind.

“How does anyone kill like you do?” he said quietly.

Sarah’s gaze drifted upward, watching the clouds, and Plekhanov wondered if he had given offense.

“The… thing that happened to me, it gave me a sort of power. I’m stronger than most men, and I don’t feel pain or fear like other people. I age slowly – I am fifty-two years old, and I’ve barely changed in twenty years. I am strongest between sunset and sunrise, weaker during the daylight hours, and even then, I am more than a match for any man.”

“And yet, you can’t swim.” 

“No. I don’t understand it, but I can’t abide running water. And…”  Sarah hesitated.

“And what?”

“This thing that I have? Eventually, it will kill me.” 

V.

Hof

The rector of the parish church served tea and conversed with Cristofor in Latin. Diels tapped his leg and watched sun’s position through the window, anxious to be finished with the whole thing. Even if Otto Skorzeny was telling the truth, Egon could be anywhere by now, and there was nothing to suggest that he had returned to Germany at all. The rector disappeared into his office and returned five minutes later with a crudely drawn map.

“What did he say?”

The priest grinned. “There’s an old church near border fence. It was damaged by an errant bomb and never rebuilt.”

“All right,” Diels said. “Let’s have a look at the place.”

The west wall of the building was partially collapsed, and the attached cemetery was a wasteland of broken tombstones. It reminded Diels of the abandoned villages of 1918, their inhabitants driven out as the Allies pressed the Germans into headlong retreat. The Wehrmacht had played a desperate bloody endgame there, and those empty spaces – a maze of looted houses, fallow fields, and abandoned churches – featured prominently in his postwar nightmares. Somewhere beyond the treeline lay the barbed wire and guard towers that marked the Czechoslovak border. A seed sown in 1914, which reached full bloom in 1945, he thought. The wooden door of the church was standing ajar, and to the west, the sun was low in the sky.

“I have a question.”  Diels gave an uneasy glance toward the open door. “If a church gets blown up by a bomb, is it still consecrated ground?”

“It depends,” Cristofor said. “If they abandoned it completely, they would have removed the Blessed Sacraments and any relics. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”  Just wondering what moves in when God moves out.

They passed through the doorway and stood in the gloom as their eyes adjusted to the shadows. Beyond the atrium, the west wall and a portion of the roof had fallen in, and a few rays of fading sunlight illuminated the narthex. A small sapling pushed its way through the stone floor, and the atmosphere felt stale despite the opening in the wall. Diels fought the urge to return to Hof, or back to Cologne – to be anywhere other than this place. I’m sorry, Herr Spencer, but I looked everywhere and found no trace of your mother. He did not believe Jonathan Harker’s tales, and everything that had followed – the lost expedition, the rumors that swirled about the death of Reinhard Heydrich, the disappearance of Sarah Spencer – were nothing more than legends.   All the same, Diels slipped the pistol from his waistband. At the far end of the narthex lay a rectangular box of roughly hewn planks. A series of iron bands, pried apart by a crowbar or chisel jutted out from the lid like misshapen teeth.

“What do you suppose we’ll find there?” Diels asked. “Gold? Silver? The Fuhrer’s private diaries?”

“More likely a century of old church records,” Cristofor said.

“Suit yourself. Let’s open it and see.”  They lifted the lid, and Diels’s breath caught in his throat.

The dead man lay in the box, dressed in a single-breasted jacket and dirty shirt that, Diels guessed had once been white. He wore no tie, and the stiff collar was open at the throat, its top two buttons missing entirely. The jacket itself was unbuttoned, and he noted the suspenders that held up the trousers – they were loose, as if the wearer had lost a substantial amount of weight in the last few weeks of life. Cobwebs and dust adorned the old garments, but the condition of the body itself defied explanation. Clean him up, and he could be sleeping, Diels thought crazily. A spider crawled across the hand and disappeared into one dark sleeve.

“Iron bands on a coffin.”  Cristofor had gone deathly pale. “It’s an old charm to keep the dead in their grave.”

Rudolf Diels stared in disbelief as the body in the coffin began to move.

It began with the fingers, a reflexive, arthritic clenching and unclenching of the hands. The eyes opened, and in semidarkness of the church, shadows gathered between the forehead and cheekbones, accenting those eyes and lending an owl-like appearance to the face. Those orbs gathered and reflected the dim light in glistening scarlet, and when they fell upon Diels, he felt a profound wonder at the gaping void that returned his stare. A pale hand grasped the edge of the coffin as the corpse pulled himself upright and heaved one leg over the edge of the box. A rancid odor emanated from the body as its movements stirred the surrounding air.

“I found what was in the box,” it rasped. “We can’t travel while the Germans are bombing the city, but we need to leave before the police find us.”

“The war has been over for eleven years.” Diels barely heard the sound of his own voice.

It stepped closer, and the corners of its mouth lifted to reveal a pair of yellowed fangs. Diels was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been, yet a heaviness settled into his limbs and he found himself unable to move, as if his body was not fully his own.  A wave of revulsion washed over Diels as the dead hand touched his skin, but the pistol, now forgotten, dangled uselessly from his fingers.

“Move, Rudolf!”

The vampire lunged with astonishing quickness, but Cristofor jerked at his collar, and Diels stumbled backward, slipping through the dead embrace as he fell. He pushed himself upright, but his own movements were clumsy and slow, like the first steps of an awkward child. Cristofor was more agile, and the priest sidestepped its grasp as his own hand slipped into his coat. They retreated, and it advanced on them with a spiderlike jerking of arms and legs as it forced them backward toward the wall. We’ll never make it, Diels thought, glancing toward the open doorway as his hands probed the darkness for his pistol.  

“St Michael Princeps gloriosissime caelestis militia, defende nos in proelio.”   Later, Diels would wonder whether the flash of light, the static crackle of electricity, had been real, but in that instant, the emanation from the crucifix was palpable on his exposed skin, and he blinked to clear the afterimage from his retinae. Cristofor’s voice was a reedy quaver, and his outstretched hand trembled, but the monster howled at the priest’s incantation as it stumbled backward. It retreated deeper into the vacant church, toward the broken wall, as its teeth champed with the frustration of unsatisfied hunger. Its eyes locked upon Diels for a final instant, then the vampire scrabbled through the breach and disappeared into the darkness.

There was schnaps in the car, and Diels took a long pull before handing the bottle to the priest. The liquor soothed his nerves a little, and he let his eyes drift shut as a flood of sensations washed over him – red eyes, the touch of a clammy hand, the stench of decaying flesh. Diels opened his eyes again.

“What the hell was that?”

“Do you know what a vampire is?”  Cristofor said. “In Romania and the Balkans, the peasants used to believe that certain people – witches, those who had died unbaptized or been excommunicated – would return from the dead. I heard the stories when I was a child and dismissed them as old superstitions.” 

That much I understand well enough, Diels thought. “Yes, but what was it doing in Hof?”

“Your friend in Madrid sent you here, and I suppose he thought you would come alone.”  The priest took another swallow of liquor. “It’s an odd way to assassinate someone… unless they hate you so much that killing you is not enough.”

Jesus Christ. Diels had expected no love from Otto Skorzeny, but the notion the notion that someone would leave at the mercy of that thing defied comprehension.

“The whole thing started with Reinhard Heydrich,” Diels said. “He got his hands on an Englishman’s diary and led an expedition to Romania in search of a… I figured there was nothing to the story, even after he lost an entire team of men.”

“Who else knows?” 

“Otto Skorzeny, for one. He gave me the story about Hof, but he couldn’t have arranged the meeting – he can’t return to Germany. Beyond that?” Diels shrugged. “So many died in the war that if anyone else suspected the truth, they probably carried the secret with them.” 

“Perhaps he didn’t know,” the priest said. “Before we do anything else, we need to come back in the morning, after the vampire returns to his coffin. We need to destroy his body so he cannot rise again. In the meantime…” 

“In the meantime?” Diels asked.

“We pray that he doesn’t murder anyone.” 

VI.

Near Minsk

Three men are in the gulag, she thought. The first has arrived late to the factory and is arrested for slowing down the victory of the proletariat. The second arrives early and is arrested for wanting to be favored over his fellow workers. The third arrives on time and is arrested for having a watch from the West. The old joke, one of Plekhanov’s favorites, ran through Sarah’s head as she watched the setting sun.  We all make mistakes, she thought, and sometimes those mistakes are paid for in blood.

Their hiding spot was surrounded by running water on three sides, thick brush on a narrow peninsula where the river bent around some unseen obstacle. They had been exhausted at sunrise, and Sarah had fallen into a deep sleep without considering their surroundings. At least the encroaching darkness offered concealment, for she felt naked and vulnerable in the afternoon sunshine. She listened for another moment, then shook Plekhanov awake.

“Someone is coming.” As she spoke, Plekhanov squinted into the gathering shadows. “Two, maybe three men, about a hundred yards behind us. I don’t think we can slip past them.” 

“Let’s get in the water.”  Plekhanov gave her arm a gentle tug, and she edged toward the bank. Muddy water lapped the edge of the channel, a good two-meter drop below them.

“No, Alexandr, I can’t swim!” 

“I’ll hold your head up, we just need to hide until they pass –”

“No!”

“Hold onto my neck, I’ll keep you out of the water.”  They could hear voices in the underbrush now. “We need to move quickly!”

Sarah took another uncertain step toward the water. Just hold onto his neck and don’t scream, no matter how great the pain. They’ll pass by in the darkness, and then we can move on.

The riverbank collapsed beneath their feet.

VII.

Plekhanov cried out, and the world spun wildly as he reached for her arm, overbalanced, and toppled. Sarah’s own cry was a keening wail as she plummeted to the water and sank beneath the muddy surface. He struggled to move toward the deeper water of the channel, toward the spot where Sarah had fallen, but a fist clubbed at his temple, and Plekhanov was pulled toward dry ground as another man dived into the water. A man emerged from the water, the limp form of Sarah Spencer held beneath one meaty arm, a moment later. She’s dead, he thought, but her chest slowly began to rise and fall as they rolled her onto her back. Plekhanov stared at the shaved heads and tattooed arms.

Thieves. Plekhanov spat into the dirt. They were scattered throughout the gulag, a loose confederation of tattooed criminals whose origins predated Communism and whose depredations were subtly acknowledged with a wink and nod from Moscow. “There is no crime in the Soviet Union,” Plekhanov remembered from the lessons of his primary education. “In the bourgeois democracies, criminals are pre-political revolutionaries, acting against their oppressors in accordance with nature.” For any comrade unlucky enough to fall afoul of Article 58, the Soviet penal code for political criminals, the thieves were a nightmare – a man’s possessions, his body, his very life were at their mercy. The worst abuses ended with Stalin’s death, but…

“It’s a good thing for you that she’s still with us.”  A thief kicked at Sarah’s limp form. “I’d rather feed you to the fish, but they said she’d behave if didn’t kill you.” 

“What are you going to do with us?” 

“Bring you to justice, like good Communists.”  The knot of men laughed. “We’re going to take a little trip to Minsk. If you don’t give us any trouble, maybe you’ll arrive in one piece.” 

Plekhanov offered no resistance as the thieves tied their hands and feet. Sarah’s head lolled on her shoulders as they hoisted her upright, and Plekhanov wondered how much water she had taken into her lungs. Wherever they were going, he doubted that she would survive the journey. My God, she sank like a stone.

VIII.

Budapest

When I was seven years old, they came in the night and took mama and papa.

Anna Igumnov opened her eyes and sat up, the dream of the orphanage fresh in her mind. They had arrested her parents when she was seven years old, and Anna had lived in the orphanage, a dismal blockhouse reserved for the children of traitors and class enemies, until her sixteenth birthday. The timeline of the dream was all wrong, however, for Vladimir – already twenty-one at the time of her parents’ arrest – had been present in her dream. She had asked him once about life as a camp guard, and to his credit, he had refused to obfuscate for the sake of her feelings. “You do what you’re told, and you don’t ask questions if you want to survive.”  After 1937, she had never seen mother or father again.

Her eyes widened in the darkness. Vladimir Korzh was standing at the foot of her bed.

His face glimmered in the darkness, bone-white and bloodless, and pinpricks of light glittered in the dark circles of his eye sockets. A streak of red smeared the corner of his lips, and Anna wondered if he had cut himself.

“They told me you were dead.”

“Not dead, Annushka. I searched for you, but they took you away.”

“I was…”  Ill? She tried to remember what had happened. And why did they tell me you were gone? She remembered crying all night in her room, overwhelmed by loss, and yet she had seen him less than a week ago. He came to my window.

“You miss your mother and father, don’t you?”  Korzh was closer now, and his eyes seemed to fill the room. The wound on her throat, so small that the doctors had barely noted its presence, began to ache.

He came to my window, and I invited him inside.

“I can take you to them.” 

I invited him inside and then…

Memories danced at the threshold of her consciousness, of sharp teeth, of pain and fear. He came in the night, just as they came for mama and papa. She had been afraid of him, so very afraid, but now, the fear seemed distant, unimportant. I’m so glad that you came back. Vladimir would let no harm come to her, and the ghouls who had taken her mother and father would trouble her dreams no longer. Sleep now. The darkness folded about her in a cold embrace.

Sleep now, and when you awaken, everything will be all right.

IX.

Romania

He awakened in the darkness and stared about the room. Something followed us across the lake. It was an odd thought, but the dark waters featured prominently in his nightmares, lurid dreams in which something beckoned from the rocks of the old monastery. In the gray world of the nightmare, he paddled for the safety of the far shore, but the oars slipped from his hands and vanished beneath the surface as the boat was pulled backward, moving toward danger of its own accord like a fish drawn on an invisible line. The peasant would reach for his brother only to find a corpse in his place, the face eaten away by worms and fresh blood trickling from the wounded throat –

There was a soft rap on the door, and the peasant took a deep breath. The dead cannot cross running water. He went to the door, where his visitor stood beyond the threshold.

“Are you going to invite me inside?”  The black-clad man smiled, and the peasant shook his head.

 “I don’t want to disturb my family. Besides, it isn’t here.” 

“Where is it?” 

He led his guest to a small gravedigger’s shed at the edge of the cemetery. Deeper in the mountains, small bands fought a guerilla war against the Securitate and their masters in Bucharest, and that conflict ensured a continual supply of wooden boxes for the graveyard. He had used one of the boxes and saved the burlap for himself.

“How will you get that to… wherever you’re going? And what do I say if someone discovers the truth?” 

“I will walk, of course. And if the Securitate comes knocking, I’m easy to find if they want to meet me.”  The peasant marveled as his visitor hoisted the box onto one shoulder, for it weighed at least a hundred kilograms. “Thank you again for your assistance.” 

The peasant returned to his bed, thankful to be finished with the whole business. What’s the old story? The dead can’t cross the threshold of a home without being invited inside.   

X.

London

1937

They made small talk as Horace served tea and cakes, and when the preparations were complete, Katherine Holmwood dismissed the servant with a nod.

“What the devil is so important about that old house anyway? My late husband bought the place on your father’s advice, some sort of property investment, and then it stood idle for years.” 

Sarah took a deep breath, remembering the discussion with Rupert Holmes. Your father left her a copy of his old papers, a sort of last-ditch insurance in case we died in Romania.  Whether she read them, or believed them, is anyone’s guess. In the last four years, Katherine Holmwood had betrayed no hint of knowledge regarding Jonathan Harker’s death, so Sarah adjusted her own story to omit the more fantastical details. She had not known Quincy Morris (“That was before my time, when Arthur was engaged to poor Lucy – did your mother ever tell you of her?”), but it was just like Arthur and Jonathan, God rest their souls, to arrangements for departed friends. The tea was not half-finished before they agreed to the sale.

“Your father had a good heart, Sarah. Our relationship was not always a good one, but I miss him.”  She broke off with a polite laugh. “Listen to me – an old lady, rambling about the past. Still, I miss them – your father, Jack Seward, Arthur… I miss them all.” 

“So do I, my Lady.”  Sarah thought of her father, whispering his love before diving through the window of an old castle. “So do I.”

XI.

Hof

1956

The body hung in the cellar, its hands and feet trussed by a length of rope and its face adorned by a grotesque clown’s mask. Diels’s right hand gripped the handset as he dialed the police switchboard with his left. Calling the police was a risk because the Gestapo had been watching him for months, biding their time for a pretext to bring him in. The line buzzed, and a woman’s voice answered.

“Send someone to the church at Hof,” he said. “There’s a body hanging in the cellar.”

“Suicides are not our department, sir. Bring the body to the nearest station, and do not waste police resources. There is no reason to tie up the courts when so many real criminals roam the streets.” 

The line clicked as he was disconnected, and Diels stared at the corpse. An odd memory flashed through his mind as he stared at the immaculate uniform, the long musician’s fingers. They say that Comrade Heydrich played the violin with such intensity that it brought tears to his eyes. He wondered what happened to the phone, and whether he should call the hospital instead. A man of culture and exquisite taste, and yet he died young while you survived.

“Heydrich was a murderer,” Diels whispered. He found it difficult to speak, for the telephone cord had wrapped about his neck, and his own hands and feet were bound by a length of rope.  He could not move, and as the corpse’s fingers began to twitch and the clown mask slipped from the face, Diels’s tried to scream as his final gasp of air was cut off. After several seconds of agony, his thrashings burst the wall of sleep, and Rudolf Diels woke from the nightmare. He lay sweating in the bed, and in the semi-lucid interval between sleep and waking, he wondered if the Gestapo were waiting beyond his door.