Dracula's Ghost - Apocalypse: Chapter 8

Part II: And the Sea Gave Up Its Dead...

Table of Contents

Part II

And the Sea Gave Up Its Dead…

I pressed for vengeance: this the god’s command

That I, in ire for home and wealth despoiled,

Should with a craft like theirs the slayers slay:

Else with my very life I should atone

This deed undone, in many a ghastly wise

For he proclaimed unto the ears of men

That offerings, poured to angry power of death,

Exude again, unless their will be done,

As grim disease on those that poured them forth—

As leprous ulcers mounting on the flesh

And with fell fangs corroding what of old

Wore natural form; and on the brow arise

White poisoned hairs, the crown of this disease.

He spake moreover of assailing fiends

Empowered to quit on me my father’s blood,

Wreaking their wrath on me, what time in night

Beneath shut lids the spirit’s eye sees clear.

The dart that flies in darkness, sped from hell

By spirits of the murdered dead who call

Unto their kin for vengeance, formless fear,

The night-tide’s visitant, and madness’ curse

Should drive and rack me; and my tortured frame

Should be chased forth from man’s community

As with the brazen scorpions of the scourge.

Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them…

Revelation 20:13

I.

Van Helsing

1893

Abraham Van Helsing stands at his friend’s side as Quincy Morris weeps over Lucy’s coffin. Mein Gott, such a tangle of romance. Arthur Holmwood has been led quietly from the room so that Lucy’s other suitor can mourn her death, and that Arthur is accompanied by Jack Seward, a third lover of the departed, is so comical that he stifles a fit of laughter. Dear Isaak, what fools we all are. They had dinner and drinks last night, and when Arthur and Seward retired for the evening, Quincy Morris had opened up to him. Van Helsing had nursed a glass of wine as they talked, and the Texan had downed a quantity of whiskey that would have killed most men.

“I have a son in Texas, the product of an illicit union with my brother’s wife.” Perhaps Quincy expected him to be shocked by this confession, but Van Helsing, who had seen too much in recent days to trouble over the sixth Commandment, merely nodded.

“That is why you are here?”

“My father sent me away. He gave me a little money and told me to keep in touch, but I was no longer welcome in his home. My brother doesn’t know, or perhaps he doesn’t care. God knows he’s faithless enough to her.”

Quincy wipes his eyes as he rises from the coffin, and Abraham Van Helsing wonders whether the Texan’s devotion to Lucy is representative of a deeper loss, the denial of a family that was doomed from the outset. Let him mourn for now, he thinks. Herr Morris is still young, and the girl’s memory will fade with time.

The next morning, he takes the train to Exeter after sending Arthur Holmwood away from London for a few days. The previous night, he had remained awake as Arthur slept, and he had caught a glimpse of something in the darkness beyond the window – a flash of white not unlike a woman’s burial dress and two pinpricks of light that burned like hot coals. Red eyes in the darkness, he remembers. Before leaving, he sends Holmwood and the American back to Arthur’s country house with a terse order for Quincy – “Keep him occupied, and do not return to London until I call for you.”

Van Helsing takes to Mina Harker immediately. This fact does not surprise him, for he has read Lucy’s correspondence, and Mina’s intelligence, wit, and character shine through every page. Indeed, he half-expected to find not a girl of twenty but a woman approaching middle age, for Mina seems grown beyond her years. For the sake of propriety, he inquires about her husband, and when Mina says that he is out, Van Helsing is relieved, for this means that they may talk freely.

“Tell me about Lucy’s incident at Whitby.”

Mina recounts the story of finding Lucy half-conscious in the cemetery and catching a brief glimpse of something, shadow or ghost, at Lucy’s side. “Perhaps I imagined it all, for I was worried for my fiancé, and subsequent events have colored my memories with a dark tinge.” Mina is quiet for several moments, and Van Helsing realizes that she has released something into the morning air, a secret heretofore carefully guarded. As gently as possible, he asks about her husband’s state of mind. She is silent for a long while before speaking.

“I have been since yesterday in a fever of doubt; do not think me foolish that I have half-believed some very strange things.”

Even before she presents her husband’s papers, Van Helsing realizes that he has stumbled across the answer to Lucy’s illness.

He returns to London as afternoon yields to evening, and later, as he waits in the darkness of the cemetery, his musings turn to the ruin of his own family. Isaak, God rest his soul, would be around the same age as Lord Godalming if he had lived, and the doctors say the boy’s death pushed his wife from grief to insanity. Hanna never recovered. He says little to Doctor Seward and nothing at all to Lord Godalming, but in his reverie with Quincy Morris, Van Helsing had spoken of his son – perhaps the wine loosened his tongue more than he realized.

“A hunting accident. They said that he was not paying attention, that he walked in front of the gun as his cousin took aim at a rabbit.”

“But you don’t believe it, do you?” Quincy’s eyes are bloodshot, and the pungent smell of alcohol lingers on his breath, but the slurring of drunkenness is absent from his voice.

“Perhaps it is true.” Van Helsing shrugs, his demeanor carefully noncommittal. “But Isaak was not a careless boy, and his cousin…”

“A bad man?”

“Perhaps.” He searches for the proper English to convey his thoughts. “A madman, perhaps, like those in Seward’s care. But not a lunatic who raves and soils himself like our friend Renfield. Someone who goes mad quietly.”

It would be so easy, Van Helsing thinks. The American keeps a Bowie knife in his belt and a brace of pistols by his bedside, and in their shared grief, in their quest for justice for poor Lucy, it would be so easy to ask a simple favor, one that would balance the scales for the murder of another innocent. No. Abraham Van Helsing makes a silent promise to God that he will say no more of his son’s death – they have other work to do.

To his right, he catches a glimpse of something – a flash of white like he had seen beyond Arthur’s window. It vanishes, moving quickly in the direction of Hampstead Heath, and Van Helsing follows, moving with care lest he stumble across the monster in the dark. In the distance, he hears a sharp cry, and his heart sinks as a remembered bit of conversation takes on a horrible new significance.

Lucy always wanted children of her own.

II.

London

1979

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? He follows the news carefully, watching for odd happenings in the east, but he sees only stories of the American hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From Romania, he hears nothing. He wills himself to be patient, but uncertainty gnaws even at the dead; tomorrow, or next year, or next century, the enemy will move upon him, and if he is caught unprepared, he is doomed.

He misses the eye less than he expected.

As he passes through the cemetery, Quincy pauses by the graves of Jonathan and Mina Harker. If they can see him from the next world, they surely curse his actions as blasphemy, but he does not care – only one thing matters. He passes through the overgrown forest, down the path, past the stone angel that guards the door of the mausoleum. A whiff of carrion wafts through the bars of the doorway, and a grim smile spreads across his lips.

Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.

III.

Romania

1989

“Do you know who this is?” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Don’t act so surprised. Surely you didn’t think you could skulk about the country without being noticed – especially given the nature of your assignment.”

“No sir. And I know who you are.”

“Good.” Iulian Vlad smiled, for his counterpart betrayed no hint of fear or obsequiousness. And if I were in his shoes, I’d be scared shitless. “Then you can guess why I’m calling.”

“You want an update on our progress –”

“Don’t waste my time, boy – if I wanted a report on the case, I’d call your boss. Guess again, and get it right this time.”

“You want to ask about Colonel Suta.”

“Better.”

“I don’t know what to say, sir. He’s a loyal servant of the President, a Party member in good standing, and a good military officer.”

“Of course he is,” the Director General replied, “but one can’t be too careful about these things. You understand that the colonel is in a rather shaky position, don’t you? Our President demands answers on the missing child, but if the Party’s loyal servant was to dig too deeply, he might uncover other things, which could be used against us by the Western intelligence services – and that is something that I could not allow.”

There was silence on the line, and he let it hang for a long while. He doesn’t believe it any more than I do, he thought, but that was of no account. The little fish swim about the pond, hiding from the bigger fish. The important thing was to let the young lieutenant know that his boss, and by extension, the lieutenant himself, had attracted the attention of a very large fish.

“I don’t understand.”

“I think, boy, that you meant to say, ‘I will serve in whatever capacity the Party deems fit.’ Did I hear you correctly?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good – then repeat it back to me.”

“I will serve in whatever capacity the Party deems fit.”

“Excellent. You keep that in mind, and when I call you again, have something good for me.”

IV.

London

1989

He arrived early in Highgate, and if Evangeline Morris was surprised by the unannounced visit, she betrayed no hint of displeasure at his appearance. They drank tea and chatted about nothing in particular – he was considering a move to Edinburgh, she was thinking of retiring to Marseille or Nice, for the chill air of London no longer suited her. Archie considered asking about Rupert Holmes – a hundred years old, and he rattles along like an old machine that refuses to break down – but thoughts of Holmes’s longevity made him uncomfortable, an echo of his mother’s uncanny vitality. He took a deep breath.

“The Van Helsing girl was coming to London. Have you seen her?”

“No,” she said, and there was genuine surprise in Evangeline’s face. “But why would I? Your mother paid for her education, and now you’re calling me in a panic because she’s returning to a city where she has lived for years. What’s the deal, Spencer – afraid I’m hiding her in the basement?”

“No,” he said. “I’m afraid because she’s looking for a vampire.”

Evangeline Morris was exceptionally skilled at concealing her thoughts, and the expression that passed over her face was so subtle that, had he been a trifle less attentive, Archie would have missed it entirely. She knows, he thought, and as the veil that covered her emotions fell seamlessly into place, he was struck by another revelation. And she believes.

“Do you think she’ll find anything?”

“Do you?” The brown eyes avoided his own.

“An interesting question,” Archie said. “One can believe in all sorts of odd or unusual things – fairies, sprites, angelic visitations – with no effect on one’s daily life. But my grandfather’s story lures people in, and the results are not always healthy. I think she is wandering onto dangerous ground.”

“Because of your mother.”

“And Rupert Holmes,” he said. “And scattered dreams of a monster in Budapest, an old man with leprous skin and shining eyes. I took a blow to the head and was knocked cold, but ever since, I’ve caught occasional flashes of that face – His face. What about you, Em? Have you seen anything to suggest their existence?”

“No,” she said, holding his gaze this time. “I’ve seen nothing at all.”

They drifted to other things, and Archie wondered whether their discussion was a mutual deflection of sorts, a means of directing the spotlight away from Katrina Van Helsing.

“How do you like the Netherlands?”

“It’s quite lovely,” he said. “I was supposed to go there during the war but never made it.”

“Of course not.” She grinned and jabbed him with an elbow. “Busy comforting a lovely maiden in Paris?”

“Hardly.” Archie laughed. “Holmes and I were supposed to parachute into the country to kill a German staff officer, but the mission was called off. Have you ever heard of RDX? It’s a solid explosive, very stable, and a few pounds can cause a lot of damage. We ordered ten pounds of RDX, but there was a bureaucratic mix-up, and instead, they gave us ten gallons of picric acid in water. It makes a lovely explosion in its own right, but it’s difficult to carry when parachuting out of a plane and dangerously unstable if mishandled. Gave us a half-dozen grenades as well, the bloody morons, said we could use those to detonate the jugs, but we had seen enough by then.”

“So they called off the mission, and the maidens of Paris celebrated your return. What did you do with the explosive?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s long gone by now,” he said.

He declined her offer of brunch and left, passing from tree-lined residential streets to the narrower throughways of Hampstead’s business district as he walked to the tube station. Archie found the bustle of cars and pedestrian traffic oddly relaxing, for it kept him from dwelling on his question to Evangeline Morris. “Do you think she’ll find anything?” He thought of his mother as he took his seat – the onset of her illness in 1933, her disappearance, her longevity. And her violence, he remembered, shuddering a little. Archie closed his eyes as the train began to move, and a fleeting vision of the monster from Budapest intruded into his consciousness. Was it really him? Do I believe? Archie found that he did.

Dracula is alive, he thought as the train moved southward, a metal coffin entombed beneath a thousand tons of concrete. And somehow, he is responsible for my mother’s illness.

V.

Aboard the Ceres

Alex Penkovsky never expected to become a pirate, but he had always fancied the word, for it lent an air of romance to the drudgery of his day-to-day life. Drafted in 1981, he had suffered a year of hellish combat in Afghanistan before returning home to Sevastopol and finding work on a fishing trawler. Life at sea suited him, for no watcher monitored his speech, no political officer read from the works of Lenin during his mealtimes, and if existence was harsh – Penkovsky had seen one crewmate stabbed and another thrown overboard – he had an autonomy unknown to ordinary citizens and could think and (within limits) speak as he wished. Fishing gradually yielded to smuggling, and by the fourth year of Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure at the Kremlin, he had achieved what passed for prosperity in the Soviet Union. But this? The German had found him in a dismal seaside tavern, and though something about the man’s demeanor was off-putting, perhaps because Penkovsky’s own grandfather had been killed in the assault on Berlin, the offer had been impossible to resist. Glasnost was opening the Soviet Union to western trade, and when consumer goods began flowing from America and Japan, he would be out of work for good.

“I need to steal a ship.”

“Stealing a ship is easy, but ships have crews. What do you plan to do with them?”

“Seaman are pragmatic, and a display of force will convince them to give up with no loss of honor. However, don’t worry yourself about that – pick whatever men are needed to handle the ship, and I will take care of the rest.”

It made sense at the time, Penkovsky thought as the stolen vessel sliced through the waves of the Øresund. Perhaps you heard only what you wanted to hear. He had brought along a pair of deckhands to run the ship, but the remaining crew members were not seamen at all – they were hired thugs who carried silenced Makarovs and Kedr machine pistols. He had waited in an empty warehouse with the deckhands, and when the mercenaries returned from the vessel (one man, Penkovsky noted, had flecks of blood on his shoes), they opened a bottle of vodka and drank for the rest of the day, not speaking of what had transpired that morning.

About two hours of daylight remained as the ship, freed of her moorings, made her way along the coast. We’ll dump the bodies when we’re out of sight of land, he thought. By tonight, they would sail into the wider expanse of the Baltic, and in another forty-eight hours, they would arrive in Gdansk, where Penkovsky would collect his payment. First, you need to secure the cargo, he remembered. A set of rusted iron bands lay at his feet, and Acwulf’s instructions on their use had been explicit to the point of pedantry. “You will find a wooden box or crate inside the hold. As soon as you have possession of the ship, use these to bind its outer circumference. Do not open the box, and do not look inside under any circumstances.” In the aftermath of the morning’s bloodshed and the afternoon’s vodka, he had forgotten about the bands, and as he sat at the wheel of the stolen vessel, Penkovsky took perverse delight in his own disobedience.

It's my fucking ship now, he said to himself as the sun faded behind him. It’s my ship, and I’ll secure the cargo whenever I damned well please.

VI.

Târgoviște

The warehouse was located just outside the fenceline of a Stalinist-era steel mill, and they surveyed the entrance as smoke belched from the mill’s coke ovens. The door had not opened for the last four hours, and no light shone through the dirty windows.

“It looks empty.” Colonel Suta peered through a pair of field glasses. “Are you sure that he’s here?”

“Petre Corbu made three trips to Târgoviște last month,” Lieutenant Bud replied, “and I found this address when I broke into his apartment.”

“So the American could be living here, or it could be something different. Did anyone see you at Corbu’s place?”

“Doesn’t matter if they did,” the lieutenant said in a deadpan voice. “I walked up to his front door like a member of the Securitate would, and anyone that spotted me will want to forget I was ever there.”

“Good work. Just don’t get so proficient that the Securitate offers you a job.” Albert Bud flinched at this, and Suta changed the subject. “Tell me again about the American.”

“Early forties, thick brown hair that hasn’t been cut in a while.” Lieutenant Bud repeated the description, a clue unearthed at a facility in Cluj-Napoca. “They said he looks like one of the drug users in capitalist countries – he’s wasted away, and he stares at you with dead-looking eyes.”

“And for some tinned beef and a few packs of cigarettes, they let him walk away with a child in tow.” Suta spat into the dust. “They’ll swear that he provided adoption papers, which they will have misplaced, because they know that no one will check if a few kids go missing. Anyhow, I don’t think the American is here.”

“Maybe he’s moved on.”

Or maybe he’s dead, Suta thought. He went to the trunk of his car and returned with a sledgehammer. “Let’s have a look.”

Lieutenant Bud battered at the doorframe as the colonel stood to one side. He had given his subordinate an overview of his conversation with the Russian, but Suta had left out a few details. How does one explain that our main suspect is actually a Nazi fugitive who, by all appearances, is nearly ageless? And how would he explain his discovery to the Director General or, God forbid, the President himself? And do you really want to know what’s behind that door? The latch gave way, and they pressed through the open passage.

“Good Lord.”

Lieutenant Bud reeled back, gagging, as the smell hit them with the force of a hammer blow. The body lay in the center of the room, so badly decayed that Suta was unsure of the corpse’s identity until he saw the pack of cigarettes, now soaked with putrescent liquid, protruding from one shirt pocket. American cigarettes – Kent brand. The concrete around Petre Corbu’s remains was decorated with a circle of runes, and flies crawled about those strange hieroglyphs such that the letters themselves seemed half-alive. With some difficulty, Suta fought back the wave of nausea that threatened to engulf him.

“The good news,” he said, “is that we’re on the right track if someone went to the trouble of killing him.”

“Colonel?” A blood-spattered object lay at the corpse’s feet, and Lieutenant Bud retrieved it as one might pick up a dead rat. The photograph was barely three weeks old, and the colonel gaped at the image of his own face.

“What do you think it means?”

“I think it means that we no longer have the advantage of surprise.” Suta took in the scene – the liquefying corpse, the bloody runes, the photograph – one final time before turning for the door. “Someone knows who we are.”

VII.

Purfleet

The gate had been repaired, but the stone fence was not especially high, and even an older man (Archie could not quite think of himself as old) could manage his way across. He clambered over the fence and as he made his way to the front door, Carfax Abbey appeared an ordinary house, and Archie was surprised to find that it gave off no particular aura of evil. Its corners were regular angles, with not a speck of alien geometry, and the breeze that blew from the forest to the gates carried no whiff of carrion to his nostrils. If any evil had been done within its walls, it remained firmly hidden from view.

And yet… The old fable ran through his mind. Once upon a time, there was a castle on the edge of London. A monster lived in this castle, and he killed people and turned them into monsters like himself. He attacked my grandmother once… and one of his children attacked my mother. Archie had witnessed no manifestation beyond the odd events of Budapest, but he remembered his grandfather with a penitent’s reverence for the saints, and the life of Jonathan Harker was inextricably linked to the undead. He studied the mute face of the house and thought, for acceptance implied that action would follow. My mother is dying, and Dracula – whatever he is – is somehow responsible. Something must be done about him, but he is a ghost, dwelling in some unknown realm far from reach. He could do nothing about Dracula, but he could do something about Carfax Abbey.

Archie looked up, overwhelmed by a sensation of being watched.

There was nothing in the high windows, but he caught a distinct impression of movement, as if something had ducked from sight with the lifting of his own eyes. Perhaps Dracula himself was watching, Archie thought, but the sun was shining overhead, and if vampires existed, they were sleeping now. Still, the feeling of unease remained with him, and it did not abate as he made his way back toward the stone fence.

VIII.

Aboard the Ceres

Dmitri Pankov made his way to the hold, one hand upon the railing as he descended the staircase into the bowels of the ship. An experienced seaman, he had signed up on the recommendation of Alex Penkovsky and the receipt of a hefty payment that was several multiples of his usual wage. I should have known better, he thought, for no paycheck was worth the trouble that he was in now. When the coastline behind them had vanished, the mercenaries had thrown the bodies of the English crew overboard, and if he complained, Dmitri was certain that he would follow.

Perhaps they’ll kill me no matter what.

The iron bands jangled in his right hand as he passed between the bales of denim, moving slowly toward the wooden box at the far end of the hold. Penkovsky had ordered him to secure the crate, and the killers above had made a joke of his fear. “I think there’s another body down there. Bring it up and feed the sharks – if the rats in the hold haven’t eaten it already.” Pankov wished for a flashlight, for the overhead lamps were barely functional, and several bulbs were missing entirely.

What the hell? A shape, vaguely humanoid in form, lay against the wall, and he advanced carefully, giving the wooden box a wide berth – if the contents of that crate was worth the lives of the crew, Pankov had no desire to know what it contained. His panting breath resounded through the ship’s interior, and in the flickering of the dim lights, he could have sworn that the corpse moved, one arm pulled nearer to the torso, legs drawing protectively into a fetal position. Nothing moved, he told himself – his imagination was simply running out of control, like the overactive mind of a child. His grandmother had survived the siege of Leningrad, when a million people had starved at the hands of the Germans, and she insisted ever afterward that their ghosts cried out from the marshland at the city’s fringes. A child wandering the marsh, as he had done at the age of ten, could hear them, never quite audible but definitely there, crying out for food or water or vengeance upon their tormentors. Even now, Pankov remembered the crushing dread that had gripped his heart, and though his father had beaten him for skipping school, the blows of the heavy belt had barely weighed against the terror of that empty bog and the child’s certainty that they were waiting, rotted and ugly and watching him with hungry eyes –

The corpse let out a low moan, and Pankov nearly fled the hold in terror.

She’s alive, he thought as he regained control of his senses. She must have hidden among the bales when the shooting started. The woman’s presence placed him in a deadly bind, for if the killers discovered her, they would have no compunction about sending her overboard with the others. But if I try to hide her… In the darkness, Pankov heard a low scraping noise, like the sound of an opening coffin.

Dmitri Pankov turned as his right hand crept to the knife in his belt. He wanted to run, to cry out, but his feet remained planted to the deck and the sound faded in his throat as he beheld what confronted him in the steel tomb of the ship’s hold. A series of images flooded his mind – a single eye of blazing fire, alabaster skin that appeared nearly luminescent in the dim light, long dagger-like teeth – as it advanced, and Pankov’s final thought was that his childhood memory had been wrong, for the hungry ghosts were beautiful in their own twisted way.

At the far end of the hold, Katrina Van Helsing buried her face in her hands, unwilling to bear witness as the grim spectacle unfolded.