Dracula's Ghost: Apocalypse - Chapter 16
Part III: The Owl and the Dragon
I.
Dracula
1893
It is a myth that the undead seek only the young and beautiful, for they take prey of convenience, like any predator, and to feed upon the living is more than physical sustenance – it is the partaking of a vital essence. The young have hopes and dreams, but the old have grudges, regrets, fears, and some of the darkest medicine comes from those things. He takes both light and darkness, and in the confines of his sleeping chamber, he dreams of both as the flat-bottomed boat sails up the river. The madman from Purfleet was one of the darkest, for his primal urges were given free rein as his diseased brain rotted away. He found the man himself distasteful, like a troublesome suitor too free with his affections, but even the lowest clay can be molded toward the proper use.
Somewhere in his dreams, the Harker woman intrudes, and though he longs to possess her, both to satisfy his own urges and as vengeance upon her fool husband, he finds her visage troubling for reasons that he cannot quite fathom, the whispered reminder of an old curse. He pushes her memory away and sinks more deeply into darkness.
Of Lucy Westenra, he thinks not at all.
II.
Romania
1989
The old road had not been used for decades, and Lieutenant Bud gripped the wheel tightly as they crept down the rutted track. It was treacherous going, for the path had degraded since a group of Germans vanished at its terminus in 1933, and in places, the truck’s wheels danced perilously at the edge of a steep ravine. Go over the edge of that, the lieutenant thought, and no one would find them for years – if ever.
Five miles from the main highway, the convoy stopped, and the men disembarked, checking the straps of their heavy packs and slinging weapons over their shoulders. If they continued down the old road, Colonel Suta guessed that they would end up at the Argeș River, but the mountains grew steeper with each passing mile, and he doubted that the path was safe even for foot travel. He studied the map. From their current position, several hours of climbing would put them at the top of a nearby ridge, and the route would place them within a few kilometers of their final destination, a wide plateau out of place with the surrounding terrain.
In Bucharest, Iulian Vlad called a meeting of his subordinates, and they pored over their own maps, seeking a clue to the traitor’s location. Suta had assumed that their departure from Bucharest would not go unnoticed, and in this, he was correct, for the convoy was observed by an informant on the northward leg of the journey. The Director General dispatched a team to sniff out their trail but found nothing – their subsequent travels were observed by a number of citizens, but no telephone calls were made to Bucharest, and no informant crossed the threshold of the local Directorate. Nicolae Ceausescu’s grip on power appeared as ironclad as ever, but ordinary citizens knew of the events in Poland and Hungary, and they made their decisions accordingly. Perhaps those of a religious bent carried a memory of Belshazzar's feast – mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. The only useful advice came from a mid-level Securitate officer: “Watch Satu Mare.” Heads nodded in agreement, for the Boss feared an invasion from the Polish border, but none of them considered that the idea’s proponent, a quiet ally of Acwulf Kiel, might have other motives for directing their attention northward.
In the presidential palace, Nicolae Ceausescu paced the floor of his office. He had rested poorly the previous night, for his dreams shifted between nightmares of treason and tantalizing visions of Acwulf’s ageless face. He retired periodically to the washroom to study his own visage in the mirror and to ponder the reversal of seven decades of onward-marching decrepitude. Every half-hour, he phoned the Securitate to demand updates as the object of his dreams sat in the forest north of Râmnicu Vâlcea, careful to keep his own body out of the sunlight as he guarded the doorway of an empty bunker. I am changing, Acwulf thought, and a dizzy feeling of anticipation stirred in his belly, for success was finally at hand.
Even the rats, which continued to arrive from the forest, ceased to bother him.
III.
Strait of Dover
The construction around the Chunnel site gave him the idea.
Workers cut through the rock with large drills and tunnel boring machines of awesome size, but the surrounding roadways and ancillary site work were excavated by more traditional means, and Archie watched as bulldozers, American Caterpillars and German Liebherrs, carved out the landscape with curving blades, displacing vast quantities of earth, and the sight of those large machines planted a seed in his mind. Away from the coast, the uplands were less amenable to sculpting, and even the largest bulldozers could not break through the bedrock. For that, you need explosives.
And I know just where to find them.
IV.
Gdansk
Acwulf Kiel could not be everywhere at once, and he had placed four men at the shipyard to take the box from the Ceres – safely banded to prevent the escape of its occupant – and deliver it to Romania, where the pretender to his master’s throne could be presented for appropriate punishment. These men, like the Russian pirates entrusted with the ship’s capture, had no real idea of the danger that they confronted, and thus, none were prepared for what followed.
Quincy Morris walked the streets at sunset, and shortly after midnight, he located the warehouse in which Acwulf’s men awaited. Three corpses were discovered the following morning, and when the autopsies were performed, the pathologist was baffled, for the grisly wounds testified to the manner of death, but there was no blood at the scene and little more than spatter on the victims’ clothing. The officers who investigated the crime, hardened detectives from the Ministry of Public Security, met in bars for weeks afterward to speak in hushed tones, and their consumption of beer and starka was never quite sufficient to blot out the nightmares that followed.
The fourth man survived.
From his ravings, the doctors concluded that the killer had interrogated him at some length, drawing out his agonies with a series of injuries that were not-quite fatal. He had gone into cardiac arrest on his way to the hospital, and though the doctors had saved what remained of his life, they questioned the value of their efforts, for he would never see or walk again, and his mind was irretrievably broken.
V.
London
I made a cut on my hand, and I let my blood drain into the box…
The phone rang well before sunrise, and she was waiting by the door when he arrived. Evangeline welcomed him with a surge of (happiness?) that surprised her with its intensity, and she stared into his eyes, not daring to speak. Archie did not have the ageless grace of his mother, and if Evangeline found him enchanting – some inner flame had drawn her like a moth, and the intervening years had not dimmed its brightness – she remained wary, wondering what Archie knew of her secret. We met in the old chapel at Carfax Abbey, and Rupert Holmes produced the bag, something that he had carried since his escape from the far side of the Iron Curtain. It was filled with ordinary dirt, but I remember a few fragments of what appeared to be charred bone.
He stepped across the threshold (be careful what you let through the front door, she thought), and for an instant, Evangeline considered leading him to the bedroom, just as she had done in the old days. Instead, they went to the sofa. A scent of alcohol lingered about him, and Archie’s face bore the haggard countenance of a man who had slept poorly. She drew him closer, one arm about his neck, and he rested his head upon her shoulder.
Holmes emptied the contents of the bag into an old crate and made an incision in the palm of his hand. “In 1933, I died and was returned to life by your grandfather’s blood and by the foolish act of a young woman.” Once, I would have scoffed at the idea, but by then, I had seen death followed by rebirth, and I knew better than to laugh. Holmes offered me the knife, and at first, I didn’t understand…
“There is great power in the bonds of kinship – if you are willing.”
“… an evil place.”
“What?” She startled awake, unaware that she had been dozing.
“Carfax Abbey – I said it’s an evil place. You know that don’t you?”
“I know,” she whispered, “and I’m responsible for what happened there.”
“No.” Archie Spencer sat up, and his fingers entwined with her own. “What happened before… the house did it – not you.”
“But?”
“But it’s all connected – that damned house, my mother’s illness, your dead grandfather, Holmes – one bloody Gordian knot that none of us can cut through. It’s killing my mother, but if she can no longer live, she can’t die either.”
“Then what do I do?”
My blood mingled with his, with the contents of the box, and I waited for a long time, afraid of what I would see – I wanted a miracle, and I wanted nothing to happen at all. Holmes built a fire, and I wrapped myself in a blanket and fell asleep. When I awakened, the fire was dying, but there was enough light to guide my feet. Holmes must have heard me stir, for he lit a kerosene lantern and joined me at the box. I was so afraid that my breath caught in my throat, but as Quincy Morris opened his eyes and sat up, I caught a look in his eyes, a quick flash of recognition. He passed through the chapel and into the darkness beyond the front door, and as far as I know, it was the last time that he set foot inside Carfax Abbey.
Archie remained silent until her patience grew thin.
“Come on, Spencer – don’t be coy with me. Do you think I should sell the place?”
“No, Em.” He kissed her, and a quiver of excitement tickled at the base of her spine. For the first time in years, she felt young again, alive in a world bursting with possibilities. “I think we should destroy it.”