Dracula's Ghost: Apocalypse - Chapter 4
Part I: First Voyage of the Ceres
I.
Dracula
1893
The woman grows weaker with each passing night as the flesh wastes away from her arms, and her cheeks, once rounded and full of color, become shrunken and pale. Such a dainty little child, he thinks. So easily hurt. He finds her weakened state exciting, but he is no fool, and it does not escape his attention that Lucy’s condition has aroused the first stirrings of opposition. Three men – her fiancé and a pair of spurned lovers – call upon the services of a fourth, a sorcerer or scientist whose English is as accented as his own. The sorcerer/scientist thinks to befuddle him with magical charms and holy symbols, but he was also a scientist, as the term was understood in his own time. He has carefully studied English spiritual and religious customs to gauge the nature and seriousness of any potential rivals – or supporters – and for the most part, their magicians are charlatans who perform parlor tricks with bells and tables and thrown voices. Even their more esoteric practices, such as the various forms of occult Hermeticism that flourish within London, do little more than scratch at the surface of the deeper world.
Not all of them. From the madman in Purfleet, he smells more than garden-variety insanity, and he wonders how deeply the fool has delved into the underworld. Renfield’s mind shouts I am yours with every setting sun, and he is already considering how the madman can be used. The dead cannot cross a threshold of their own free will, and the notion of an invitation to the asylum, of feeding on the blood of a hundred maniacs… perhaps when he is stronger.
For now, there is the woman to attend to.
Lucy… His mind calls out to hers, and Lucy moans in her sleep. He approaches the window, but the old man is in her bedroom with one of the spurned lovers. Fools, he thinks. A dispute over a woman should have been settled with blood and honor; instead, they gather meekly at her bedside. The old man approaches the window, and he retreats – in his own good time, he will deal with them all. For now, he will wait.
Until tomorrow night, my dear.
II.
Amsterdam
1989
“Given the Jewish connotations of his name and the rumors that swirled around his state of mind…”
She pored over the journal all morning as she drank cup after cup of strong coffee, and though its contents were pure nonsense, Katrina was oddly impressed by the tale – Abraham Van Helsing had brilliantly mingled the disinterested observations of a scientist with an old man’s terror of the powers of darkness. The script was neat and legible, and she wondered idly what a publisher in London or New York would pay for such a good story. We prevailed through the grace of God, but His mercy manifested itself neither in miracles nor in divine visitation, but through the bonds of friendship, knit together by joy and grief and abject terror. A lone man could not have triumphed against the forces of the evil one, but arrayed together – Jonathan and Mina Harker, Arthur Holmwood, Jack Seward, Quincy Morris, and myself – we emerged victorious in a battle which, were it not destined to remain hidden for the sake of the living, would rival the tales of the great heroes of old. The story was marred only by Abraham Van Helsing’s grief for his dead son – a tidbit that stirred bleak memories of a conversation with her father. “Your Opa once told me that his father killed one of his own cousins. He seemed quite proud of the fact, and when I asked him about it, Jos went off on one of his tirades about the Jews. It’s a miracle that either of us turned out sane.”
Indeed it is, she thought. Her mother had emigrated to France in 1969, and as a child, Katrina imagined her sipping wine in a Paris café, planning to return in another week, or another month. Only when she grew into adolescence did she wonder whether the family’s shame had become too heavy to bear. Eric Van Helsing had been closed-mouthed about her departure. “It doesn’t matter, Kat – I’m here for you.”
You were wrong Papa – it matters a great deal. She shook her head. Fucking Jos. Perhaps that was why she found the journal so enticing, for if Abraham Van Helsing had uncovered a dark secret in London, perhaps her lineage was worth more than a dead Nazi and an absent mother. The whole thing was ridiculous, of course, and she saw her bemused acceptance of the tale for what it was – a small compensation for the scars of her childhood… But why write his dead son into a work of fiction? Katrina wondered what it would take to confront such a creature, to seek out its lair and destroy it. She read from the journal for another hour, and though she was scheduled to remain in Amsterdam for the rest of the week, her mind was made up by midmorning. Taking a pad and pencil, she made a series of notes – Purfleet, Hillingham, Hampstead Heath. Walking in the footsteps of Abraham Van Helsing would be a welcome diversion, and one that would doubtless cure the excitement that had seeped into her bones and reveal the story as nothing more than a flight of fancy. “The vampire can command, and take the form, of the meaner animals – the wolf, the owl, the rat…”
Still, she had to see for herself.
III.
Amsterdam
Tall and narrow, the house was a relic of the city’s golden age, though it lacked the low-hanging chandeliers and ornate tapestries of its neighbors – the current owners had little use for historical verisimilitude. Likewise, the furniture was well-built but plain, and the décor of each room – freshly cut flowers, bookshelves of English and Russian texts, a tea set displayed in a locked cabinet – spoke of comfort rather than wealth, as his mother preferred. Archie poured a drink and eased onto the sofa. Five minutes later, he heard the turning of a key in the lock.
“How is she?”
“No change in her condition since yesterday.” Alexandr Plekhanov shrugged and looked away. “The doctors ruled out heart attack or stroke, but they want to check for…” he tapped his forehead. “Opukhol’ golovnogo mozga – a growth on her brain. Mostly she sleeps, but I feed her a little when she is awake. It is good that you came when you did.”
“I’ve been worried about her,” Archie said. “There was something on her mind for the last few weeks, and I was hoping to find out what it is.”
“If you really want to know,” Plekhanov said with a deep sigh, “she came to London last month while you were away. I think something happened while she was there, because she has been restless and agitated ever since.”
“She didn’t tell you what was bothering her?”
Plekhanov shook his head. “Your mother can be a very stubborn woman, but I have my suspicions – do you remember what happened in Budapest?”
“Not really.” Archie poured two fingers of liquid into his glass and shuddered as the vodka went down in a single swallow. “We were running through the fog, and there was… something – but I was knocked cold and lost a good five minutes. We’ve been over this before, and I don’t believe that she’s mad, or lying, but the whole story is hard to accept.”
“Of course,” Plekhanov said. “It’s hard to accept what you haven’t seen with your own eyes, but I have seen – and I think it is happening again.”
The Russian was dead tired, and when he went upstairs to rest, Archie was tempted to finish the liquor. Instead, he put the bottle away – he needed to be at the hospital that afternoon, and it would do his mother no good for her son to show up in a drunken stupor. “When I was a girl, your grandfather used to tell me about spiritualism. Absolute rubbish, he called it, all hidden trumpets and mechanical knockers.” The memory, a fragment of conversation with his mother, flickered in his brain. “I asked him once if he had ever encountered anything real, anything beyond this world, and he grew quiet and changed the subject. By the time I discovered the truth, I had no one to guide me.” The Enlightenment had driven a stake through the heart of the old superstitions, and Jonathan Harker, who viewed the seances of his time with a gimlet eye, would not have fallen for the primitive lore of an older world. Would he? His mother was comatose, possibly dying, and Archie had no one to guide him.
He did, however, have a signpost.
That damned house. Carfax Abbey was intimately tied to the Harker family’s past, and Archie had urged Evangeline to sell the place when, in 1975, the council at Purfleet had offered her a reasonable price. It always comes back to that damned house.
III.
Brasov, Romania
The orphanage was better than most, for the heat worked and there was nearly enough food. Better is somewhat relative in our sad little country, Suta thought. He sat across the desk from the director as Lieutenant Bud stood guard at the door in accordance with the colonel’s instructions. “Look menacing and pay attention to his reactions.”
“How long have you been at your current position?”
“Two years,” the director answered in a shaky voice. “You have to believe me, I had no idea…”
Suta waved an arm, cutting off the director in mid-sentence.
“For the moment, I don’t have to believe anything.” Suta’s eyes wandered ominously to the portrait of Nicolae Ceausescu that hung upon the wall. “A girl that was under your care has vanished, and the President has taken an interest – a very direct and personal interest – in her case. My suggestion would be that you tell me everything that you know, so that we can locate her and return her to her family. Otherwise, your next meeting may be with the Securitate interrogators in Bucharest.”
Suta leaned forward and took stock of the man behind the desk. In truth, he suspected that the girl was already dead, but he dangled the possibility of life for tactical reasons. Give him a little hope, and he’ll concoct a version of the truth that deflects the blame away from himself. The director’s own eyes flickered from Suta to Lieutenant Bud, who returned his pleading expression with an impassive stare. The director took a deep breath.
“The American. It had to be him.”
“The American,” Suta repeated, glancing toward Lieutenant Bud. “I didn’t know that Americans lived in Romania.”
“It’s true! I saw him in the company of Petre Corbu, the maintenance man, and I suspected that they were moving things on the black market. I didn’t think –”
“Why did you think that?” Suta asked, cutting him off.
“Because he supplied Corbu with American cigarettes – Kent brand.”
“I see.” If he searched the director’s desk, Suta assumed that he would find several packs of the American’s cigarettes. “I’d like to speak with this maintenance man of yours.”
“I haven’t seen him in a week.”
“Then give me his home address.” Suta let the silence hang as the director squirmed in his chair.
“Tell me something colonel – am I under arrest?”
“No.” At least, not yet. “But look at things from my perspective – every Romanian citizen is required to report any and all conversations with foreigners to the police within twenty-four hours. Add that to the contraband and the missing child, and I’d wager that you’re looking at a long prison sentence… if word of your misdeeds reaches Bucharest. If you prefer to stay on the right side of a prison cell, then tell me something useful, and make it good.”
The director placed his head in his hands, and Suta resisted the urge to fidget. My God, he’s going to confess. Some compulsion had driven him to an act of cruelty, and they would return to Bucharest with a suspect in custody and, he hoped, the location of the girl’s body. It was not the resolution that he desired, but it would provide closure of a sort –
“There are others,” he said quietly. “No one knows how many, but children have gone missing from all over the country – Bucharest, Ploesti, God only knows where else. I’ve heard of a dozen, and my best guess is that there are many more.”
“And you reported this?” Colonel Suta spoke in measured tones to conceal his shock.
“Reported?” The man behind the desk laughed, a jagged titter that left Suta taken aback. “To who? No one in Bucharest gives a shit about a bunch of missing children. Not the Party, not the Securitate, not even the President himself – especially not him.”
They stepped into the street, and Suta adjusted the brim of his service hat. He was no mindless follower of military decorum, but careful attention to his uniform – hatband parallel to the ground so that the visor does not interfere with vision or ride too high on the forehead – gave him an extra moment to recover. They knew, he thought, and the revelation filled him with anger. The Securitate knew all along about the missing children, and they did nothing until the daughter of a Party member vanished.
“What do we do now?” Lieutenant Bud asked, and Suta jumped at the sound of his voice. In his reverie, he had been oblivious to the younger man’s presence.
“Now, we visit every orphanage within a hundred miles. My guess is that he works from some central location and that no children vanish from his home base. Once we narrow down the haystack, we go to the police and demand records for any foreigners living in the area.”
“And then we arrest him.”
“Soldiers don’t arrest people,” the colonel said. “Soldiers kill people. We’re going to find this son of a bitch, and when we do, we’ll make sure that he never harms another child.”
V.
Przemyśl
Polish People’s Republic
The flag flew over the city’s municipal building, white over red, and a tattered poster for the Polish United Workers' Party hung at the fringe of Cathedral Square, its smiling workers defaced by a single word scrawled across the surface – Solidarność. It was a pretty town, its red roofs and stone buildings untainted by the drab concrete of Soviet construction, and though the Ministry of Public Security maintained an office there, its phones had gone unanswered since April – the secret police, like everyone else, knew which way the wind was blowing.
The bodies were discovered in a park at the edge of town, one dressed in a bloodstained tracksuit and a second in a workman’s trousers and checkered shirt. Both men carried papers that identified them as German tourists, but the investigator noted the stainless-steel fillings on the teeth – best dental care the Soviet Union has to offer – and contacted the Ministry of Defense. Photographs of the dead men were sent to the Soviet embassy in Warsaw, but the Russian military liaison was uncharacteristically blunt in his denial. “Not ours. Do you think we give a shit about Poland when our own country is falling apart?”
“Then whose are they?” The military liaison thought for a moment and declared that an answer could be found for the right price. One week and two cartons of American cigarettes later, the investigator had his answer.
“Romanians. Your dead men were working for the Securitate, and with the recent changes in your country, I imagine they were watching for refugees sneaking across the border. Perhaps one of those refugees didn’t want to get caught.”
The police closed the case on the advice of the Ministry of Defense, and though witnesses remembered a third man, an Englishman who spoke fluent Polish, no one connected him to the pair of deaths. It would not have mattered in any case, for he was long gone by that point.
V.
Lake Snagov, Romania
1975
The motorboat’s engine hummed in the darkness, and Acwulf maintained a careful grip on the tiller as he crossed the water. Jailed in 1957, he gave a false name to the authorities, and while the tortures inflicted upon him were brutal, they were detached from his own persona, an interlude of pain that he packed away to preserve his sanity. Six months into his imprisonment, a band of guerillas attacked the prison to free one of their own, and he escaped and fled to the Soviet Union. He returned to Romania in 1961 to begin the long process of working himself into the Securitate, and by 1972, with his own position secure, the real work began. Acwulf cared nothing for the rulers in Bucharest, but he served a greater master, and if He was still alive, Romania seemed the logical starting point for his search. Tonight, he knew that he could be facing death when the boat reached its destination, for the gifts that he brought would do little to assuage the wrath of his master, if he was still alive. If he is still alive… The thought of failure terrified him more than the prospect of his own death. The boat ran aground on the shores of a rocky island, and clouds obscured the stars as something moved in the doorway of the abandoned monastery. Acwulf stood perfectly still as the shape loomed over him, and slowly, he mastered his own fear.
“You failed me.” The words that resonated in his bones did not pass through the air. “Why should you continue to live?”
“Because you will never leave this island if you kill me now.”
“True.” A pair of red pinpricks – eyes – were visible now. “But I have been here for years, and I have had nothing to eat. I am so hungry.”
“Of course.” Acwulf bore no grudge against the jailers who had wronged him, but they had grown old and comfortable without a single thought for the man whom they had tormented. He gestured toward the shapes that lay in the boat.
“And that is why I brought food.”