Dracula's Ghost: Apocalypse - Chapter 1

Part I: First Voyage of the Ceres

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Part I: First Voyage of the Ceres

At home there tarries like a lurking snake, Biding its time, a wrath unreconciled, A wily watcher, passionate to slake, In blood, resentment for a murdered child.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook, or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words?

Job 41:1-3

The seas and the aspect of the stormy ocean affright me. And lately I beheld broken planks on the seashore; and often have I read the names upon tombs, without bodies there buried.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Book XI

I.

Pripyat, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

1989

He reached the outskirts of Kiev after a month of walking and followed the river northward, moving largely at night and avoiding the checkpoints, though the few soldiers that he encountered paid him little heed – in the era of glasnost, the rambling journey of an old man aroused little excitement. Still, he was in the country illegally, and if the authorities discovered the truth of his quest, his arrest and imprisonment were a near-certainty. He lingered for two days at the fringe of the exclusion zone, carefully timing the passage of each patrol, and on the morning of the third day, Rupert Holmes slipped into the city.

He spent the day exploring the deserted city, fascinated by the broken windows and flaking paint. Dry leaves had drifted into vacant buildings, their decay forming a fresh layer of soil, and in one apartment, he found grass growing eight stories above the earth’s surface. The buildings were ugly in typical Soviet fashion, but saplings forced their way upward through crumbling sidewalks and moss grew on schoolhouse walls. In the amusement park, the wooden tracks of a roller coaster lay half-rotten, and the unused Ferris wheel loomed over the city like a dead sentinel.  Three years ago, there were people here, he thought. 

To the southeast lay the ruins of Chernobyl. 

Photo by Mads Eneqvist on Unsplash

A casual observer would have been astonished to discover his age, for Rupert Holmes would be one hundred years old at summer’s end. The vigor of youth was gone and the Reaper drew closer with each passing day, but Holmes was grateful for the encroachment of senescence. When I was four years old, I was bitten by a vampire, he remembered. At forty-four, I was killed by an assassin’s bullet and returned to life with the blood of a dead man. The man that gave him that life had died a second death in 1956, but Holmes’s own hourglass continued to empty in a slow trickle – he could easily pass for a youth of sixty.

Now it’s coming to an end, he thought, but I have one final journey ahead.

II.

Highgate Cemetery, London

She paid her respects at the graves of her parents and laid a wreath at her brother’s plot before wandering the cemetery, feeling the afternoon sunlight upon her skin as she pondered those who had gone before. There had been Rudolf Diels, the half-mad former Nazi – killed in a hunting accident, his grave lay upon the Rhenish Massif, with no marker to denote its place, and Sarah wondered whether the missing headstone had been his wish or the decision of the authorities in Bonn. Sigmund, a brief acquaintance and former lover, still rested in Budapest. He had died in 1933, and sometimes, on the darkest nights when sleep would not come, Sarah felt a morbid tinge of gratitude that he had passed onward before the war, before the Holocaust and the descent of his beloved Germany into madness. Sigmund had been a police officer, a German Jew who, had he survived a little longer, would have been dismissed from the civil service. Her husband, whom she had married with such high hopes before her sickness had driven a wedge between them, had no grave, for he had gone down at sea. In a different world, perhaps, they would have lived together in a happy, ordinary life.

In a different world, you would have died in Romania, or in that cemetery in Budapest. None of us survive save for the grace of God, or the whims of fate.

The years since 1956 had been good ones, and she had recovered from her ordeals through the passage of time and the ministrations of Alexandr Plekhanov, and if the memories remained, their significance receded like the recall of a nightmare upon waking, and the dark urges that oppressed her after 1933 vanished completely. She continued to age slowly, and at eighty-five years old, Sarah Spencer retained the vitality (and appearance, she noted with a touch of satisfaction) of a woman in late middle age. But something is wrong. She had traveled from Amsterdam to London on impulse, driven by an odd compulsion to visit the graves of her father and mother.

She left the cemetery and entered the forest, and though it was cooler in the shade, Sarah began to sweat as she walked. When she reached the mausoleum, she felt an odd tingling on her skin as she peered through the iron gate that guarded the threshold. This is where it happened, she thought as dread settled over her like a pall. She was buried here. Her father had removed every reference to Lucy Westenra from the official records, for had Scotland Yard opened her tomb, Jonathan Harker and his friends would surely have been arrested for murder. A residue of sick fear lingered at the spot like a dark fingerprint left upon the ether. And they were so close to the truth, she thought, for Lucy was murdered.

“Sarah.” The sound of her own name struck her with the force of a hammer blow, and Sarah’s knees buckled under the impact as her lungs struggled for breath. She lay sprawled in the leaves, and a paralyzing chill settled into her bones as the blue sky of afternoon yielded to starless night. A cacophony of voices sounded in her head, but she heard only the utterance of her own name, from a voice that she recognized immediately.

“What do you want, papa? What’s so bloody important that you call an old woman out of retirement?”  Sarah listened for an answer, but the shade of Jonathan Harker said nothing more, and she lay on the forest floor as the sun shone brightly overhead, her body resting with the casual ease of a Sunday picnicker, her mind filled with foreboding. She lay still for a little longer, then returned to the East Cemetery, the resting place of her father, her mother, her brother. Sarah’s finances were in order, and Archie and Alexandr got on well enough – son and common-law husband would look after each other as needed. She longed in that moment to hear Archie’s voice, to rest her head upon the shoulder of Alexandr Plekhanov, but in a little while, she would be gone, and both son and lover would go on without her.

You always knew this day would come, she thought.  Not today, and perhaps not tomorrow, but it was only a matter of time.

III.

London and Purfleet

She preferred the south of France, but Evangeline Morris spent most of her time in the city, though the climate suited her less as she aged. The beneficiary of a sizable inheritance in 1956, she had built a larger fortune through a series of shrewd investments, and by 1989, she was one of the richest women in the city. Despite her wealth (and because her investments were not always aboveboard), she lived modestly, and the dwelling in Hampstead betrayed few hints of her net worth. It sat on the corner of a tree-lined street, a comfortable Victorian that suggested the prosperity of a successful merchant or solicitor. The ground floor and chimney were constructed of red brick, and the upper level was painted white and finished with cement plaster.  Its roof was a series of asymmetrical, slightly rambling gables, and on the second floor, a large bay window projected outward from the wall in a semicircular arc.  The walkway was secured by an iron gate, and the gatepost was marked by a tarnished brass nameplate: Hillingham. Evangeline had purchased the house in 1970, paying substantially above the property’s market value, and made various repairs in the following years, rewiring the outlets and replacing a creaky oil furnace with a newer gas-fired model. Notwithstanding her upgrades, it retained the atmosphere of an earlier time, and a traveler from 1893, had he shown up at her door, would have felt quite at home there.

She owned another property in Purfleet, a ruined estate named Carfax Abbey.

She left the city at noon and performed her monthly inspection, passing through the heavy gate (repaired in 1960 and reinforced after the disaster of 1975) and stopping to inspect the pond at the rear of the house. That pond had been little more than marshland in 1956, and she had cleaned out the whole thing, watching intently as the excavator did its work and wondering if the workers would find bones as they dug through the soggy earth. There had been no bones, but the water gave her comfort, a wellspring of life in a dead place, and she checked the dam for soundness and verified that water flowed freely through the impoundment. Satisfied with the condition of the pond, Evangeline unsnapped the padlock that secured the front door.

She explored the empty rooms one by one, searching for signs of vagrants as the ghostly cries of old tenants – the cry of a woman’s anguish, a madman’s gibbering – whispered in the hallways. Something evil had reached its high-water mark here, and Evangeline marveled that those long-dead Harkers and Morrises had survived at all, had prevailed through acts of courage so rash that they bordered on foolishness. Perhaps Archie felt the same, for his family was entangled with the sordid history of the place, and her continued stewardship of the property left a sour taste in his mouth.

“You should sell the place,” he told her once. They had been lovers then, before the events of 1975 drove them apart. “Better yet, knock it down and salt the ruins.”

She lingered only briefly at the old chapel, for though Evangeline had no fear of empty cemeteries or dark forests, the chapel gave her the creeps, even in daylight. A good site for a city park or housing estate, they said. Evangeline had frustrated the condemnation proceedings with a horde of solicitors, but the case had moved with a speed that was, considering the typical plod of English officialdom, alarmingly swift. Her loss had been a near certainty until two council members and their solicitor, in an action so thoughtless that she struggled to comprehend it after fourteen years, had proceeded to the estate at sunset with padlocks and a heavy chain. A publicity stunt, she thought. Official foolishness for the next morning’s paper. Archie had been livid.

“Tell me that you don’t know.” He had been pale with shock. “Look into my eyes and tell me that you don’t know what happened.”

“I’m as mystified as you are,” she had said, and it was true. A month later, the solicitor’s office was ransacked, and every scrap of paper related to the condemnation was spirited away. Of that, she knew plenty, for Evangeline had burned the papers in her furnace, but the deeper mystery remained. She and Archie had kept in touch – they were too joined by the past for a complete severing of relations – but the flame of romance was doused, and their acquaintance continued on strictly formal terms.

She secured the padlock on the front door, then paused, studying the feather that lay at her feet. A Eurasian pygmy owl, she thought. Commonly found in Central Europe to Siberia, with breeding populations as far south as the Carpathians. Odd to see one here.

Evangeline hurried to the car, leaving the feather behind.

IV.

Bucharest, Socialist Republic of Romania

It was unusual for an army staff officer to be called to the presidential palace, and Colonel Mihai Suta wondered if the summons was a sign of trouble. Loyal in his outward actions, Suta’s relationship with the Party in his inner life was more complicated, for he was old enough to remember the bloody purges of the 1950s, and like many party members, his family had included both victims and perpetrators. In 1965, during his mandatory two years of military service, Romania’s new leader had declared an end to the violence, and the promise that he held for the country was so enamoring that Suta had decided to stay in the army. And look where it got us.

He passed through a guarded doorway and stood at the desk of Iulian Vlad, Director General of the Securitate. The Director General sat behind a large desk, and the walls of his office were adorned with photographs of former Directors General, going all the way back to Gheorghe Pintilie. The old drunk, the colonel thought, and if Nicolae Ceausescu had ever done a good deed, expelling Pintilie from the Party and undoing the excesses of the 1950s – including those carried out by Suta’s own uncle – surely counted.

“Colonel Suta.” Iulian Vlad offered a hand, which Suta took in his own. “I’m so glad to make your acquaintance.”

“Director General,” the colonel said. Iulian Vlad was an old-timer who had begun his career in the secret police at the tender age of twenty, and though his hair was mostly gray at fifty-eight, his body remained trim, and he moved with the vigor of a much younger man. The Director General stared at the colonel through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.

“Your uncle was Anghel Suta, correct?”

“Yes sir.”

“A good man,” the Director General replied. “One of our most feared agents before his untimely death.”

He remained at attention, his weight shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another, as Iulian Vlad shuffled through the papers on his desk. The Securitate had been busy of late, for though the news was not reported on the state television network, Suta knew of the developments in Poland and Hungary. In East Germany, there was even talk of opening the border and uniting with the west, of joining the pieces that had been split asunder in 1945. Only in Bucharest, where the dreams of Lenin had calcified into rigor mortis, were those changes resisted. That’s because Ceausescu’s as batty as the fanatics that worshipped Stalin, Suta thought.

“Colonel?” The director of the Securitate had caught him daydreaming, and Suta blushed. “President Ceausescu has an important mission, and you have been selected as the best man for the job – are you paying attention?”

“Yes sir.” He stiffened his posture, dreading what might follow. “I am honored to serve the President in any capacity.”

“That’s good.” The Director General blinked through his glasses, and for an instant, Suta could imagine him as an ordinary bureaucrat, a nonentity who spent his workday poring over statistics of agriculture or industry – How much wheat did we produce last year? How much steel? The illusion vanished, and he remembered that the Director General held sway over his career – and his very life. “A child has gone missing from an orphanage…”

He left the Presidential Palace an hour later and stood outside, grateful for the fresh air. Sweat had soaked through the fabric of his uniform, and Suta felt slightly queasy after his visit to the inner sanctum of Romania’s security organs. Lucyna Wilk. Unraveling the mystery of her disappearance had been tasked to him, and when the colonel balked at the assignment – surely, this was a job for the local police, or for the Securitate itself – Iulian Vlad had produced a photograph from his desk drawer.

“Do you recognize this man?” Suta’s blood had grown cold as he studied the features of the thin face. “He is one of my own, but in the informal system of Romanian politics, he has the President’s ear, and I can’t simply have him arrested. That’s why I need an outsider to investigate the case, and – I sincerely hope – prove that the Securitate has no involvement in his crimes.”

A child is missing, and the Securitate already knows – or claims to know – who is responsible. The suspect’s culpability mattered less than his loyalty to the regime or to Suta’s ability to convince the President to discard a favored spy. Convince Ceausescu that he is a liability, and you will be favored with promotions and good fortune, Suta thought. If not, you are likely to end up in a shallow grave, where no one will find your body. That was why Iulian Vlad had called him into his office – the Securitate would take credit for success, but any failure would fall upon his own head.

Forget about the Securitate and forget about the Party. Suta felt defiled by the politics of the whole thing, but he boiled the Director General’s words into simple imperatives, a series of commands that cleared his own conscience. Find out what happened to the missing girl, then do whatever needs to be done.

V.

London

The townhouse in Brixton dated to the turn of the century, a two-story brick affair whose back lot bordered a small park. Archie Spencer noticed a smattering of neighbors on the surrounding streets, but the cul-de-sac that was the official address of Rupert Holmes was mostly empty, a remnant of the prior decade’s economic devastation. For years, Archie had been making periodic checks on the house at Holmes’s request, and the old man’s instructions were always the same. “Check the front door and make sure no one’s knocked out the windows or burned the place down. And keep out of the shed.”

Right – check the house, keep out of the shed. Archie unlocked the front door and let himself inside. The interior of the townhouse was tidy, but a fine layer of dust coated the furniture, and the larder contained nothing but crumbs. No one has been here for months, he thought without surprise – Holmes was a wanderer who rarely tied himself to one location. Still, Archie frowned at the sight of that desolate space – the old man could have supplemented his retirement by leasing the property to the Irish or Jamaican immigrants that migrated to Brixton at the war’s end, but he preferred for the house to remain empty. Maybe he’s afraid of what they’ll find in the shed.

He could not remember exactly when they had met, but Rupert Holmes had entered his life in the dark years that followed the death of Jonathan Harker. His mother could barely care for herself in those days, and his father, Archibald Spencer the elder, had been increasingly absent as the delusions took hold of Sarah’s mind. Rupert Holmes had been a guide and mentor, a family friend who took the boy under his wing, and he had seemed old even then, as all adults appear to young eyes. Archie did not fully trust his memory, but… He had to be nearing fifty. Now Archie was sixty-five, and Holmes appeared scarcely older than himself.

The back lot was perhaps twenty feet by twenty and populated by dead grass, and the shed lay at the far end of the lot. Got a few bodies buried in there, Rupert? Squat and ugly, the shed reminded him of the old house in Purfleet, and Archie would later insist that he had acted without intention – the secrets of Rupert Holmes had always been safe with him – but as thoughts of Carfax Abbey percolated through his mind, a Rubicon of sorts was crossed. Archie did a quick search of his keyring and unlocked the door. My God, is that what I think? The glass bottles were mementoes of a failed mission, a task stillborn through a bureaucratic snafu. That error had likely saved his own life, for the First Airborne Division had suffered a costly defeat at Arnhem, and if he had been north of the Rhine when the battle commenced, Archie would almost certainly have been shot as a spy. He closed the door, moving slowly to ensure that he did not rattle the bottles that rested on the shelves, and fastened the lock in place. Rupert Holmes would die someday, and Archie pitied the solicitor who would inherit the care of his estate. Good luck cleaning up that mess.

VI.

Purfleet

1975

“Are you sure this is legal?” Charles tucked the prybar under one arm as he closed the metal gate.

“We’ve been over this already.” Cecilia smiled, but her features were drawn and pale in the light of the electric torch. “The American woman asserts that she has title to the estate, but there was a clear break in ownership in 1893, and our position is that the house is unclaimed property under UK law – we have as much right to be here as she does. And once we go before the magistrate, she will have no rights at all – we’ll take the property through eminent domain. Isn’t that right, Nigel?”

“Factually, everything you said is true,” the solicitor nodded, “but the magistrate may frown upon us for locking Miss Morris out.”

“And that’s why we’re here.” Cecilia patted Nigel’s shoulder. “Evangeline Morris has made a sizeable fortune through rather unusual means. What is she hiding that she is so unwilling to give up the old house? Drugs? Pornography? Terrorism? When we find what’s inside, and I’m convinced that we will find something, we’ll secure the property until the police can investigate.”

If we find anything at all, Charles thought. Parliament had allocated a redevelopment grant to the city in 1973, and the empty house and overgrown lot had become something of an obsession for the Council. Money and property meant construction, and construction meant jobs – and even more money – flowing into the city. And some of us – he shot a glance at Cecilia – have dreams of riding that money and prestige to a seat in the House of Commons. Charles was as determined as the others to secure the ruins of Carfax Abbey, but here in the blackness of midnight, he wondered if their obsession had gotten out of hand. The front door was secured with a padlock, and they used the prybar to break the hasp. A musty smell, dust mingled with animal dung, assailed his nostrils, and in the distance, he heard a flutter of wings as owls or bats took flight at their approach.

“How old is this place?” he asked.

“The oldest sections probably date to Edward the First,” Nigel said, “although it could be even more ancient. The original structure could have been a military garrison, or the stronghold of some minor noble…”

Or a prison, or a torture chamber, Charles thought. Perhaps we’ve discovered the home of Jack the Ripper. The bones of the old wreck seemed positively to vibrate with age, and he found himself wondering who had laid the first foundation stones. There were settlements in the area dating to the Romans, and the Saxons had arrived as the Latin tide receded, leaving a trail of blood and fire in their wake –

“Charles! Nigel!” There was a shout from the opposite hallway. “Come here!”

They passed into a larger room, and Charles played the torchbeam across the floor – the stones had been removed in several places and replaced in a different pattern. A burial site. He shined the light on the chapel walls but saw no crucifix, no icon dedicated to an old saint – if God had ever dwelt here, he had abandoned the place long ago. Cecilia stood at the threshold of an open passageway.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The opening in the wall.” Cecilia pointed to the void in the stones. “It wasn’t there when I came in, and when I turned around…”

“A secret passage?” Nigel raised a skeptical eyebrow. “It seems unlikely – you must have missed it in the dark.”

“Come on.” Cecilia ignored the solicitor as she passed through the opening. “Let’s see what’s inside!”

The passage led to a narrow staircase, and though the air was dry and cool, Charles began to sweat as they descended. The stones beneath his feet felt oily, treacherous, and each downward step was fraught with peril – a wrong move could send them plunging to the bottom. And what happens if Cecilia’s right? If a hidden door closed behind them, they would be stuck here for days or weeks – or perhaps forever. The staircase terminated in an alcove, and a wooden box rested on the floor.

“Good Lord.” Nigel stared at the crate, slightly aghast. “Is that a coffin?”

“That’s no burial from the Middle Ages.” Charles studied the wooden surface in the glow of the torch. “It looks like something that would be used in a potter’s field.”

The box was sealed with a series of iron bands, and Cecilia felt about the edges. “Let’s open it and see what’s inside.”

“What?” Charles retreated until his back touched the stone wall. “I’ll do no such thing!”

“You said yourself that it’s out of place, and we’re looking for evidence of wrongdoing. I want to know what Evangeline Morris is hiding, and I say that we have a look – if you’re afraid, then give me the prybar, and I’ll do it myself.”

He looked to Nigel, pleading silently for a word of support, but the solicitor was as hypnotized by the box as Cecilia, and Nigel gave a halfhearted nod. He stepped forward with the prybar, and in his final moments of remaining life, Charles was aware that he moved almost against his will, like a sleepwalker moving senselessly down a path ordained by fate, as if in crossing the threshold of Carfax Abbey, they had surrendered their own will to something base, which controlled his movements like a marionette on strings. The lid came away slowly, and Cecila knelt at his side, her eyes wide with expectation.

He saw with perfect clarity at that moment, when their fate was already sealed – the dark sleeve, the ruined face, the hand that grabbed Cecilia’s throat. Nigel dropped the torch, but he had a last panicked vision of her face, already turning purple as a door above them closed with a rasp of stone upon stone and It spoke, its voice dry and rusty from years of disuse.

“I’m so happy to make your acquaintance.”