Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Prologue

Götterdämmerung

Götterdämmerung

They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

East Prussia, January 1945

They fought for two days, and by sunrise on the third day, the German lines were shattered. The Red Army poured through the breach like a flood tide, and though they found no soldiers – only women, children, and old men guarded the frontier – the absence of fighting men did little to slake their bloodlust. In truth, the correspondent could hardly blame them.

He had been attached to the unit for six months, writing for Pravda and Isvestia and making good use of his own rifle as needed. As Hitler’s war machine crumbled, he rode westward in an American jeep, sent dispatches back to Moscow, and killed Germans at every opportunity. Twenty million. The number went unreported in the Moscow papers, for the figure would have raised uncomfortable questions about the decisions made by the Soviet government in the opening days of the war. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the carnage known by the common soldiers. Twenty million – perhaps even more, he thought, and when an old man was clubbed with a rifle butt or a woman was hauled away by drunken soldiers, the correspondent felt no pity. Twenty million Soviet citizens had been shot at the edge of mass graves, starved in prison camps, or carted off to the gas chambers. Now, as the Red Army closed in, their enemies would drink the cup to its bitter dregs.

A stench of carrion wafted on the breeze as the sun set, and from somewhere nearby, a woman wailed for her lost child. Stupid bitch. Her keening would attract the attention of the soldiers, and a gunshot would silence her cries forever. His infantry detachment had been reduced to brutishness by four years of war, and they were not inclined to mercy or forgiveness – especially now. The disappearances have them on edge. The correspondent lit a cigarette and watched the vanishing sunlight. Missing soldiers were common in wartime, and he had seen more than one man vanish in a red mist after stepping on a landmine. Others deserted and made their way eastward, scouring abandoned collective farms for any sign of their long-dead families. Still others, poor fools with big mouths and little sense, made careless remarks and were whisked off to the gold fields of Kolyma or the logging camps of the taiga, and those who remained, perhaps fearing the taint of their comrades’ heresy, avoided their memory.

Photo by Sekwang Chia on Unsplash

These men, two in the last three nights, were simply gone. The soldiers blamed German women for luring them into the darkness or speculated about a death ray that reduced a man to atoms. The correspondent’s favorite story was of the assassin, a tall, thin man who skulked in the shadows. Snipers took potshots at the phantom, and one man even claimed, to no apparent effect, to have thrown a grenade. Hitler’s doctors, the soldiers claimed, had replaced his eyes with cat’s eyes. That’s why they shine in the dark. He rolled another cigarette. When he returned to Moscow, he would have to ask whether it was possible to replace a man’s eyes with cat’s eyes. If you survive the war. They were closing in on Berlin, but it was too early to dream of home –

The woman’s cry became a scream, full-throated and fearful, and the cigarette fell from his fingers. Close your heart to pity, he thought desperately, but this was not the recrimination of a maiden accosted by a soldier or the anguished cry of a mother for her dead child. The abject terror in that voice was unlike anything he had experienced, and the correspondent’s feet moved of their own volition. He found himself running, impervious to the danger that lay ahead, as if a deeper imperative had awakened some forgotten capacity for humanity.

The outbuilding, a small dairy where the Germans kept milk and cheese, lay at the rear of a destroyed cottage, its interior lit by a lantern’s glow. The correspondent’s eyes took in the sight as he stepped across the threshold – the torn dress and splayed legs, dead eyes opened wide, and the ghastly wound in her throat. His breath came in shallow gasps as he tried to make sense of the grim tableau. Neck wounds bled profusely, and he knew from experience that her clothing should have been saturated with gore. Instead, blood ran from the wound in a slow trickle, and the linen dress was mostly unmarked. He backed away from the corpse, his eyes probing the darkness, and his foot nudged something in the dirt.

The correspondent picked up the old journal and ran his fingers over the leather binding. A treasured possession, he thought. Paper was in short supply at the front, and if he could not make use of the pages for his own work, perhaps it would serve as kindling. Tucking the journal into his pocket, the correspondent made his way back to the front line.