Dracula's Ghost - Apocalypse: Prologue

A Dying Man in a Lonely Room

A Dying Man in a Lonely Room

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Mark 8:36

Who would not sell his miserable soul for a throne?

Robert E. Howard, The Hour of the Dragon

Madrid

1975

The rumors proved false, and Jos was pleased to hear that the Church would, in fact, perform the funeral mass. He had never harbored any real doubts, for though Rome asserted its spiritual authority on the Iberian Peninsula, real power lay with the Caudillo, and General Franco had quietly decreed that his dead friend would be honored with the full rites of the Church. The congregants trickled in over the next few days, fellow travelers who departed Argentina, Uruguay, and Egypt, and a few from the Fatherland itself, lucky souls whose crimes had been too small to attract the attention of the authorities. They dressed in ordinary business suits, and their wrinkled uniforms remained hidden at the bottom of aging suitcases until they arrived safely in Madrid.  Jos pitied them, for their Waffenröcke were threadbare and ill-fitting – his uniform, by contrast, was immaculate, and at sixty, his waistline was as trim as it had been at twenty-five. Similarly, his faith in the Volk was undiminished, and though the Fuhrer had not survived the war, Jos remained confident that in due time, the sun would rise again upon the Aryan race. The millstones of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

The coffin rested at the front of the nave, and the attending priest cringed as Jos approached the bier and saluted. His own lip curled upward in disgust, for the priest was clearly Spanish, and Jos deemed him to carry a significant quantity of African blood. How far we have fallen, that our honored dead must be buried by the Untermenschen. He stood in silent reverie for a moment, eyes averted from the coffin and taking care that his fingers did not touch its wooden surface. When his obligation to the dead was completed, he retreated quickly to the pews.

The ceremony began, and he squirmed as the priest sprinkled holy water on the coffin. He had arrived from Buenos Aires for a final visit to a dying comrade, and though Jos had seen the inside of more than one sickroom, the sight that greeted him in the hospital bed had left him badly shaken. If only I had arrived a day earlier – or a day later. The body still lay on the hospital bed, awaiting transfer to the morgue, and the expression on the dead face haunted him for days afterward, a rictus of horror and pain that appeared in vivid detail in his nightmares. The millstones of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. A horrified certainty gnawed at him, that the holy water and consecrated wafer, the mumbled Latin phrases, would cause the coffin to burst into flames and its inhabitant to cry out in agony. For the first time, he noticed that the box was encircled by three iron bands, sealing the lid in place – a traditional protection against the rising of the dead. When the service was over – Requiescat in pace – the pallbearers carried the coffin to a waiting hearse. Otto Skorzeny would be interred in Vienna, but the body would be cremated before its final journey. He gave a final glance toward the hearse and shivered at the thought of the shriveled corpse in its wooden cask.

“Jos!”  A toothless old mummy in an SS uniform waved him toward the hearse.  “A photograph for old times’ sake.” 

They gathered in a semicircle, and a pair of mourners unfurled a flag, its blood-red background contrasting sharply with the black swastika in the center. Jos Van Helsing stood at one end as a half-dozen raised their right arms in a stiff salute to the ghosts of Otto Skorzeny and Adolf Hitler.  His smile gleamed for the camera, though he remained inwardly troubled. 

The millstones of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

For the love of God, Otto, what did you see in those final moments?