Dracula's Ghost: Apocalypse - Chapter 13
Part II: And the Sea Gave Up Its Dead...
I.
Van Helsing
1893
The Orient Express pauses in Munich, and Van Helsing grows wistful, for he sojourned in the city as a younger man, and the passage of time and the encroachment of old age are bittersweet. Give thanks for old age, he thinks, remembering the curse of the ageless. As the train continues east, the foothills of the Alps are visible outside his window, and occasionally he catches a glimpse of higher mountains in the distance. Arthur, Jack, and Quincy spend their days enjoying the dining car and their evenings smoking and sipping whisky in the lounge. He joins them occasionally, and though Van Helsing does not smoke and drinks nothing stronger than wine, it pleases him to see their happiness, for they may all shed tears before the end of their journey. Jonathan Harker spends most of his time with Mina, and Van Helsing, remembering the shell of his own wife, understands the younger man’s priorities better than the others.
“Mina talks in her sleep,” Jonathan tells him, his face pale and drawn. Van Helsing is unsurprised, for Mina has experienced a terrible shock, and he expects that her sleep would be disturbed. Still, with her own mind relaxed, he wonders if she could let slip some fragment of the enemy’s plans. What, he asks, does she say?
“She says, ‘I can give the old man vengeance for his son.’ Do you have any idea what it means?”
A long moment of silence passes, and for the first time since his arrival in London, Abraham Van Helsing is tempted to lie to his friend. It is nothing, merely the fragment of a dream. Instead, he acknowledges the truth with a somber nod.
“It means that our enemy knows where I am weak. Say nothing to Mina about this.”
They spend the next day together, and though Mina’s presence lifts his own spirits, Van Helsing’s thoughts are distracted by the memory of his son, of the void in his own existence and the wound that cannot be healed in this world. Mina seems well enough, but he worries, for he remembers how Lucy wasted away…
II.
London
1989
Evangeline Morris frowned as she read the telegram from Gdansk, her third in as many days. On this journey, as on her maiden voyage in 1975, the Ceres had operated with a simple instruction for captain and crew – scuttle the ship and escape in the lifeboats if people began to vanish at sea. It was not her instruction, but his – a final, fatal check on his deadly appetite. Evangeline had spotted the flaws in this plan almost immediately. The lifeboats. One needed only to sabotage their means of escape, and the crew would choose to remain, preferring the possibility of nocturnal disappearance, its cause unknown, to the certainty of death at sea.
Something has gone badly wrong, she thought. Evangeline checked the Baltic weather and found nothing of significance, so the signal was not an advance warning of a storm. They could have been boarded by a naval vessel or coastal defense ship, but the Ceres was in international waters, and she discounted the possibility accordingly. Pirates? Evangeline scoffed at the notion, for there had been no marauders in European waters for two centuries. The only other possibility is that Quincy has murdered the crew.
Their partnership required extraordinary trust, and Evangeline had always proceeded with the assumption that some core of intelligence and humanity lay hidden beneath the monstrous exterior of her dead grandfather. “He admires you,” Rupert Holmes once told her, “And in his way, I suspect that he regards you with something like affection. But never forget what he really is – and always remember that he has his own agenda.”
III.
Aboard the Ceres
I never signed up for this, Penkovsky thought. He was no stranger to violence, and the murder of the ship’s crew had been presented as a fait accompli – he could make peace with the killers, or share the lot of the victims. The girl, living and breathing before his very eyes, was a different story, and he stared in disbelief as Iosif took aim. The woman cowered in the corner of the wheelhouse, and in the extremity of her fear, Penkovsky discovered something within himself which he scarcely dared name – something that Sergei and Iosif lacked.
Alex Penkovsky swung, and the shot went awry as his fist crashed into Iosif’s face.
IV.
Katrina stomped with one foot as Sergei grabbed her wrist, and though the Russian grunted as she broke the small bones in his instep, his grip did not ease, and a sharp pain lanced at her shoulder as he rotated the arm. A cry of agony welled in her throat, but the move brought his forearm within inches of her face, and Katrina sank her teeth into his wrist. On the other side of the wheelhouse, Iosif lay on the floor, staggered by Penkovsky’s blow. Katrina cringed as Sergei drew back a clenched fist, but Penkovsky lunged, driving the smaller man to the deck, and wrapped a pair of meaty hands about his throat. Where is the gun? Katrina stumbled for the pistol as Iosif, his own senses recovered, began to move. She dove gracelessly, sprained one wrist as she fell, and cried out in frustration as her fingers clutched at the empty air. Outside, the last vestiges of daylight bled away from the western sky.
The shot surprised her, and Katrina’s first thought was that Iosif was an exceptionally careless marksman, for the shot missed Sergei’s head by mere inches. Penkovsky groaned in pain as the bullet passed through his right lung, and he collapsed atop his opponent, his strength vanquished. Iosif extended his arm, but the second shot never came – Sergei spoke a few words in Russian, and to her surprise, the killer lowered his weapon.
“Not good to kill our captain,” Sergei grimaced as he spat blood onto the deck, “because I don’t know srat about boats. You, on the other hand… The Baltic is cold, so you’ll probably lose consciousness before you drown, but it must be an awful fate – to fall into the sea with no land for a hundred miles.”
A cold wind blew across the deck, and Katrina thrashed futilely in Iosif’s grasp as he dragged her toward the rail. She felt an overwhelming dread at the prospect of death – the plunge from the ship’s deck, the frigid water seizing her muscles, the utter hopelessness as the ship vanished into the darkness. Dear God, at least let it be quick… But death did not come. As they passed into the open air, Iosif released her, and she fell to the deck with such abruptness that she made no attempt to skitter away from her captors. Katrina looked up at Iosif and Sergei, who stared, slack-jawed, at the dead man who emerged from the hold.
V.
Alex Penkovsky staggered from the wheelhouse as blood leaked from the hole in his torso. He had taken a bullet before, a memento of his year in Afghanistan, but this wound was likely fatal, and any attempt to rescue the woman was as doomed as he. Still, he had a fighting chance, for Sergei and Iosif stood amidship with their attention directed away from him. Penkovsky followed their gaze, and his heart sank as he saw what was waiting in the shadows. It would have been better if Iosif’s bullet had killed me.
A resurrected Oleg watched the killers from the doorway of the hold, but it was the other shape – lurking at one corner of the deck and blending so thoroughly with the shadows that Sergei and Iosif had passed within feet of its hiding place – that sapped his final reserves of courage. Georgy’s throat was torn out, Penkovsky thought, and the glimmering eye of the black-clad wraith fell upon him as the lips parted in the briefest smile. His throat was torn out, and he bled to death on the deck. A sour smell wafted on the sea air as Oleg advanced upon the killers, and the pallid fiend shifted its position slightly, waiting for the opportune moment to spring the ambush. Penkovsky opened his mouth to cry out a warning but found that he had no voice.
The woman saw, and her scream was high and ululating.
Iosif turned to face the new threat, but Oleg scrabbled across the deck with astonishing swiftness as the woman retreated toward the rail. The vampire seized a handful of hair, and the killer stumbled like a tottering child as his head was jerked to one side. A spray of blood, nearly black in the glow of the ship’s lights, coated the deck as Sergei drew a pistol from his belt, his demeanor utterly calm, and fired two shots into the vampire’s skull. He fired again as Oleg collapsed to the deck, then emptied his pistol into the prostrate body of Iosif. Sergei Kozlov made a slow turn as he scanned the area for further threats, and his eyes locked briefly with Penkovsky’s as he tucked the pistol into his belt, his attention focused on the woman who crawled toward the wheelhouse.
The thing in the shadows was nowhere to be found.
VI.
Gdansk
“Wake up, Holmes.” Jimmy nudged his shoulder, and Holmes winced at the residue, coffee and old tobacco, that lingered on his tongue. “Ship’s moving again.”
“Moving?”
“Oh yes.” Jimmy gestured to a series of crudely drawn points on the map. “Her course is a little erratic, but the Ceres is definitely moving under her own power.”
“How long before they reach Gdansk?”
“At her current speed, I’d say eighteen to twenty hours.”
We can’t bring her into Gdansk, Holmes thought. He stared at the map and traced the outline of the Baltic coast with one finger, seeking a compromise between proximity and isolation. “How far to this location?”
“Around eight hours, but why the hell would we send her there?” Jimmy scowled. “There’s no port, and the Ceres has a full load. You planning to ditch the ship and lose the cargo?”
That’s exactly what I’m planning, Holmes thought. If Quincy had murdered the crew, bringing the ship into port would be a deadly mistake.
“Listen to me carefully,” Holmes said, “because if we pull this off, I’m going to pay you so much money that you’ll never have to work again. I need you to get us here –” he jabbed at a point on the map – “and I need a boat. I don’t know much about these waters, but I’m guessing the Ceres will run aground before she makes land. Is there any way to contact the ship?”
“We can hail her on the sideband,” Jimmy said, gesturing to the tangle of radio equipment, “but there’s no guarantee that she’ll answer.”
VII.
“You little bitch.” Sergei’s face contorted with rage as he wrapped a hand around her throat. “This was your doing, wasn’t it? You brought us here, to the middle of the ocean, to be eaten by these things!”
The woman tried to speak, and he tightened the pressure on her neck. The crew were dead, the captain was gravely wounded, and Sergei doubted that he would see dry land again, but he would deal with her – he would throw the woman overboard and watch her sink beneath the waves. If the fates are kind, she will drift for hours, perhaps days, before she succumbs to cold and exhaustion. She hooked one foot around the railing, but he was stronger, and the woman’s upper body began to yield against his weight. One more push, and her center of gravity will be over the water. From there, it would be a simple matter to grab her leg and –
“Sergei.” Quincy Morris was dressed in a black coat and wide-brimmed hat, and a single bloodshot eye glowered from the recesses of the face. “A standard bale of cotton cloth contains seventeen cubic feet and weighs five hundred pounds. If one arranges the bales to create a hollow space, one may conceal an item – for the sake of argument, let’s say a second coffin – at its center. The man that hired you to murder my crew thought to entrap me, and it must be maddening to die for his mistake.”
The woman slid to the deck as Sergei released his grip, and a wave of pain shot upward from the fractured bones of his foot as he shifted position, planting himself firmly to the deck’s surface. The intruder smiled, and though Sergei was frightened by the sight of the long teeth, his attacker was no larger than an ordinary man. Throw him over your hip and see if he can swim. He cleared his mind as the unblinking eye bored into him, and when the dead hand reached for his neck, Sergei grasped the upper arm and twisted his body, seeing each move in his mind as he leveraged the weight into his right hip. Its forward momentum now worked to his advantage, and he envisioned the black-coated horror flying through the air as its fanged mouth opened in surprise and the single red eye bulged with fear, its body caroming off the metal rail as it sailed downward, gaining speed as the water’s surface loomed below…
Sergei was jerked from his feet as Quincy Morris, rooted like a stone statue, tugged at his arm. His head struck the deck, and the Russian tasted blood as the pain of a broken humerus radiated through his torso. There was a grating sensation of bone on bone as Quincy Morris hoisted him upright, and he cried out through clenched teeth.
“A fair attempt, but you should have thrown yourself instead. Drowning is a hard death, but it’s better than the end that you meet now.”
Quincy’s features began to shift and twist, and when he saw what lay beneath the façade, Sergei began to scream, the desperate wail of a rabbit caught in the maw of a wolf. A few drops of blood spattered the deck as the head darted forward, and when it was finished, Quincy Morris flicked the husk of Sergei Kozlov over the rail, and the body floated on the surface for several minutes before it sank, mercifully, beneath the waves.
VIII.
How far to Gdansk? The pain in his chest grew worse with each inhalation, and each release of breath was accompanied by a hacking cough. Without immediate care, the gas would fill his pleural space and he would suffocate, but Penkovsky had seen the dark man sink his teeth into the skull of Sergei Kozlov, and he doubted that he had more than a few minutes left. First Sergei, then the woman, then he will kill me. He had no gun, but there was a knife in his belt, and he would choose his own ending. His fingers encircled the wooden handle.
“Ceres…” He jumped as the radio came to life. Penkovsky answered, and there was a moment of silence on the other end before a second voice answered in accented Russian.
“Who the hell is this?”
“My name is Alex Penkovsky,” he said. A sense of hope flooded his body, not of rescue, but that someone would know his fate. “I was hired to steal this ship… the rest of the crew are dead.”
“I would bloody well imagine.” There was another long silence, and Penkovsky wondered if he had been abandoned to his fate. “If you want to survive, change course and sail directly south. You have about six hours before you reach land.”
Six hours? I’ll be lucky to survive the next six minutes, Penkovsky thought, yet his hands worked of their own volition, adjusting the heading and increasing the power to the throttle. He found a map and traced the route with a bloody fingernail. Take care of the ship. It was a lesson drilled into him through years of sea life – the needs of the ship were more important than his own, for an individual sailor might die in a hundred ways, but if the ship perished… He heard footsteps on the metal deck as the girl entered the wheelhouse, badly shaken but unhurt. Penkovsky glanced at what followed and quickly looked away. He’s almost human, if you don’t stare too closely. A strange lassitude settled over his mind; like a condemned prisoner, he was utterly helpless, and it made no difference whether he met his fate with courage or cowardice.
“Good evening, Alex.” To his surprise, the monster addressed him in Russian. “The last time that someone murdered my friends, I extracted payment in ways so unpleasant that you could not hope to understand… Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I was only hired to steal a ship.” He found it difficult to speak through the pressure in his chest. “I didn’t know what would happen to the crew.”
“How kindhearted.” The bloodshot eye remained locked upon his face. “Give me one reason why I should not kill you right now.”
“Because we are six hours from the nearest land.” Penkovsky’s laughter dissolved into a wet, hacking cough. “And you’ll never get there without me.”
IX.
The remaining bodies went into the sea, and the evening slowly passed as Katrina stood at the rail and stared into the darkness, her mind numb from shock. Twice, she checked on the captain, and though he was lucid, his face grew paler with each visit. Quincy Morris vanished into the hold or lingered near the bow of the ship, but she kept away, and the dead man did not approach her or acknowledge her presence. Quincy Morris. Katrina had puzzled over the secret for an hour before the answer, buried within the journal of Abraham Van Helsing, had come to her in a flash of insight. There was my uncle, a group of Englishmen, and one American. At two o’clock, she went inside and brewed coffee on the ship’s hot plate. Alex Penkovsky remained upright and kept one hand upon the wheel, but his stare was fixed, and for one dreadful instant, Katrina thought that he had passed away at his post. Then his head turned, and he spoke a few words in Russian, the slurred mumbling speech of a drunkard.
“The ship’s heading.” Katrina jumped at the sound of Quincy’s voice. “If he passes out, he wants you to steer toward that heading until we reach land.”
“Me?”
“Oh, yes. I don’t expect him to survive until morning.”
“Can’t you do anything for him?” She offered a cup of hot liquid to Penkovsky, who declined with a shake of his head.
“I could,” Quincy said, “but some cures are best left unused.”
X.
Ustka, Poland
Slowinski National Park was a broad wetland, its interior covered in pine forest and its seaward edge lined by barrier islands, a series of tall dunes formed by the movement of wind and water. The park was largely inaccessible by road, and the motor launch on which they rode had been purloined from the nearby wharf. Jimmy had given him a disapproving look, and Holmes made a silent promise to return the boat undamaged. The younger man took the wheel and steered them toward the open sea, his eyes averted from the seabag at his feet. He doesn’t like it, Holmes thought with a touch of sadness – Jimmy had served as a deckhand on the Ceres in 1975.
“It shouldn’t be long,” Jimmy said. “Another hour, and the ship will be here.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s easy,” Jimmy chuckled. “It’s a simple question of heading, speed, and last known position.”
“If they don’t change course for Gdansk,” Holmes said. Or drift away on the current.
XI.
Aboard the Ceres
They sat in the wheelhouse as his breathing grew more labored, and though they spoke little – Penkovsky could manage only a few words of English, and she knew no Russian – he was comforted by her presence. Outside, they heard the dull rasp of a heavy object dragged across the deck, but neither dared to venture out to investigate.
The rocking of the waves gradually lulled the girl to sleep as Penkovsky focused on the horizon. Russians, he thought, slept less soundly than their western counterparts, for the latter had known no hardship since the last war, and even then, their suffering had been only a shadow of the horrors experienced in the great hinterlands of the Soviet Union, where privation and murder had ruled since the time of his own grandfather. How does anyone sleep when monsters hide in the darkness? Penkovsky tried to answer, but his own eyes began to drift, and finally he yielded to unconsciousness as the sun peered over the horizon and a sliver of coastline became visible in the distance.
XII.
Katrina jerked awake, and her first sensation, before realizing that the captain was dead, was a wave of joy, for in the distance, she heard the high-pitched whine of an outboard motor. The engine of the Ceres sputtered and died as she cut the power to the throttle, and she went outside to wait, her only companion the wooden box that lay on the deck.
XIII.
They secured the boat to the larger ship, and Holmes waited as Jimmy scaled the ladder that hung from the rail. He was grateful for the help, for though his body retained its unnatural vitality, his consciousness felt tired and worn, an old rope stretched to its breaking point, and he doubted that Quincy Morris would be able to count on him for much longer. The sound of voices interrupted his thoughts, and Holmes reluctantly boarded the Ceres. The box was placed at the foredeck, and they lowered it with the assistance of a block and tackle. Katrina Van Helsing appeared unhurt, but Holmes noted the flecks of blood on the upper deck, an empty shoe, the dead man in the wheelhouse. Holmes took the knife from his bag, a long kukri bequeathed to him by Jonathan Harker, and sent the others outside while he finished his work – the dead man’s throat was unmarked, but if the Ceres remained afloat for any reason, he wanted to be sure that nothing followed them to shore. When the task was finished, he searched the rest of the ship and found nothing. At last, they were away, motoring toward shore and leaving the abandoned hulk of the Ceres to its fate as the first rays of true sunlight broke on the horizon.
All that remained was the item that they had brought aboard in Jimmy’s seabag.
They were halfway to shore when the bomb exploded in the hold. The Ceres began to list, and as water poured into the hold and her center of gravity shifted, the ship began to pitch-pole, her bow nearly vertical as her stern vanished beneath the waves. Finally, a bare five minutes after the integrity of her hull was compromised, she sank, leaving no trace beyond a few items of flotsam and a spreading fuel sheen on the water’s surface.
XIV.
Romania
They found him at sunrise, unconscious, lying on the shoulder of the highway that led into the mountains. The medic patched his wounds, and the Major gave him a cup of hot tea. Might as well show him a little kindness, the Major thought, for the Securitate interrogators were already on their way. The prisoner licked reflexively at his lips, and his right hand wandered to the bandage on his neck.
“All right, private. Tell me what happened. Where are the others?”
“The others are dead.”
The major paused to consider the prisoner’s words. In the mountains, resistance to Communist rule had been long-lasting and bloody, and the television broadcasts constantly warned the citizen to be alert for traitors and counterrevolutionaries, but he knew the value of state propaganda – Romanians had long ago ceased taking the broadcasts seriously. Still…
“An ambush?”
The prisoner shook his head. “Children. The children did it.”
“Let me tell you something,” the Major said, frowning. “A twelve-man patrol does not simply disappear, and certainly does not vanish at the hands of a group of children. The Securitate are on their way, and their questioning will not be as gentle as mine, so –”
The prisoner’s response was a laugh, a sardonic bark that erupted from deep within the wounded throat. The Major rose from his seat to slap the man for his impertinence, but the haunted look in the prisoner’s eyes stopped him.
“I’m not afraid of the Securitate. Not anymore.” Their eyes met, and when the private held his stare, he was tempted again to deliver a blow.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Of the girl and her friends. Of Him.” The private fingered the bandage that covered the wound on his neck. “Even that… When you’re afraid, you fear what might happen, but the fear is a means of escape – it provokes your body to flight, and maybe, if you’re lucky enough and quick enough, you will escape. I don’t have that luxury anymore. Ever seen an injured rabbit just before it’s torn apart by the dogs? It trembles and squeaks and shits itself, but it makes no move – it knows what’s going to happen next, and it knows that the end won’t be pleasant. That’s me now. The girl put that mark on my throat, and soon enough she’ll be back for me.”
“You’re making no sense,” the Major said. “Stop speaking in riddles and tell me plainly. Where is the rest of your squad?”
“We went out on a routine search, on the hunt for spies and saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries – a worker out after curfew or a farmer praying in the unapproved manner – to capture and turn over to the Securitate. At any rate, we left the trucks at the lower end of the valley and walked from there – a five-mile foot patrol to where the highway begins to ascend into the mountains.”
“And you saw no one?”
“Of course we saw no one,” the private said. “It was one o’clock in the fucking morning –”
The slap echoed in the small room like the pop of a gunshot, but the private did not flinch. Corporal punishment was an accepted part of military discipline, but the lower-ranking enlisted usually cringed at the delivery of a blow – this man did not react at all. It took all of the Major’s discipline to face the prisoner, to not look over his shoulder to measure the distance between his chair and the locked door. This man could kill me, he thought. He could beat me to death in this room, and the only thing stopping him is that the thought hasn’t occurred to him yet. He forced his breathing under control.
“You will address me respectfully, in accordance with your rank – do you understand?” The prisoner made no answer. “Please continue.”
“We saw no one until we were nearly at the turnaround point.” The private spoke as if there had been no insult, no slap. “We reached the point where the road begins to ascend, and she was there, standing in the middle of the highway as if she had been waiting for us.”
“Who? Describe her.”
“A young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, dressed in good clothes, like one would expect to see on the child of a mid-level Party member. Funny thing – I looked, and for a moment, I was sure she was floating a few centimeters off the ground. The lieutenant approached and spoke to her, but I knew that it was me that she came for – she looked into my eyes, and it was like… I’m too young to have a daughter that age, maybe a younger sister. The lieutenant tried to question her, but I’m sure that she spoke only to me.”
“I see.” Privately, the Major wondered whether the private had gone mad, but psychological examination of prisoners was under the jurisdiction of the Securitate. And they will decide his sanity or madness based on pure expedience. He nodded for the young man to continue.
“She told me that she was lost and alone, but I didn’t believe that. It’s like the propaganda that you here on television about counterrevolutionaries with sex disorders, do you know what I mean? They lurk on streetcorners searching for young children, and they lure them in with a story – ‘I have food or chocolate or gasoline at my house, do your parents need gasoline?’ – and kidnap them for nefarious ends. She was like that – her words were nothing more than a ruse, something to draw me in. Of course I knew the truth, deep down inside, but I didn’t care, because I knew that she was telling me something else.”
“What was it?” The Major was surprised to find himself leaning forward in his seat, for there was something compelling about the private’s story, like the revelation of a dark secret.
“You’ve seen my personnel file.” A broad smile spread across the prisoner’s face. “I was almost rejected by the army – ‘socially maladjusted’ is what the penal code calls it. I did six months of hard labor at fourteen and another nine months at sixteen because I like to hurt people. I could have had a great career in the Securitate if I could read well enough to recite the Party line – take a closer look at their inner circle, and I think you’d find a lot of people like me. She knew this – knew every last jot and tittle – and underneath her façade of being lost and alone, of searching for her parents – that was what she promised me. That I could be what I always was, unfettered by the rules of society.”
The Major nodded slowly, buying time. The private had taken a battery of IQ tests as part of his training, and he had scored in the lowest rungs – fit for cannon fodder and little else. And yet, he talks like a man with a great deal of intelligence. He decided to wrap things up, for he expected to glean little else of use, and anything that he discovered would need to be provided to the Securitate. And I prefer to interact with them as little as possible.
“So what happened,” he asked, “and why are you so afraid?”
“She kissed me.” The private continued to smile, but for the first time, there was a hitch in his voice, an averting of the eyes. “That’s where I got the wound – she looked at me with her red eyes and kissed me with those sharp teeth, and her friends came out of the forest and kissed the others. Kissed them until they were dead, and when they were finished, the rest of my patrol rose in a body and followed her into the woods. Followed Him, because he is the one that they serve. That’s why I’m afraid.”
The Major blinked twice. “I’m not sure that I understand.”
“I thought I was a hard man,” the prisoner said, “but last night I looked into the face of something truly evil. I’m so afraid, but if she comes back tonight, I won’t be able to resist her – or him.”
“And who is he?”
The Major waited for an answer, but the prisoner said nothing more.