Dracula's Ghost - Chapter 12
A Man of Diabolical Cast
Purfleet
1893
“In nomine Paris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” Abraham Van Helsing sprinkles the earth with holy water as Arthur Holmwood pries open another box with his knife. Jonathan Harker does a brief accounting of their work. Twenty-nine boxes destroyed at Carfax Abbey, six at Mile End, and another six in Bermondsey. Nine more boxes to find. Dracula has purchased a fourth property at Piccadilly, and Jonathan prays that the remaining boxes will be found there. The whole business is wearing on Mina – she looks pale and drawn every morning.
Jonathan snaps to attention as Arthur Holmwood cries out, and he hears a sharp, hissing intake of breath as Abraham Van Helsing stares into the box. A strand of half-rotted flesh hangs from the skull as Arthur probes at the soil with his knife.
“What do you make of this, John?” Arthur impales something with the point of his knife and holds it aloft – a watch cap, of the type worn by sailors.
I.
Salzburg, Austria
1933
“Your questions, sir, are a matter of internal security.” The customs officer with the ill-fitting uniform stared at him from the far side of the desk. “If such a person entered the Österreich, it would not require the involvement our German neighbors.”
“I see.” Sigmund allowed silence to hang between them. He was playing a dangerous game, but the identification cards of his would-be assassins had been sufficient to get him across the border. And the cash, of course. They were collecting the week’s extortion payments when they detoured to kill me. Close examination of the documents would reveal him for a fraud, but Sigmund did not let himself worry over the poor forgery. Give the appearance of a Reich official, and he will follow your lead.
“Here is the issue.” He leaned across the desk to emphasize his point. “The presence of this woman is of some importance to the Fuhrer, and assistance on the part of the Österreich would be appreciated – and remembered.”
“So what?” the officer frowned. “We may be brother nations, but the Österreich is not the little brother.”
An SS man, Sigmund understood, would raise his voice at this point, sputtering over the outrage to German honor with crimson face and wild gesticulation. His counterpart would respond that the Österreich would never stand for such insults to the national character, and the argument would continue until a price was negotiated. Sigmund had neither the time nor the temperament for such play-acting.
“Very well then.” He stood to leave. “If you are unable to help, I will search elsewhere.”
He was halfway to the door when the customs officer cleared his throat.
“Last week, we arrested a woman matching the description you gave. How important is she?”
They made the arrangements, and Sigmund paid in cash. He considered offering a larger amount – call the SS switchboard in Munich if the money doesn’t show up in seven days – but the risk was not worth a final joke at the Reich’s expense. His transaction complete, he abandoned the car on a residential street before walking to the train station. Sigmund needed a little luck, and he needed to move faster than Heydrich, but if everything worked out, Sarah Spencer would be on her way to London tomorrow. Unable to sleep, he stared out the window as the train sped on its path.
II.
Graz
They walked the palace grounds, wandering the labyrinth of gardens as Cristofor pointed out the statues and plaques commemorating various luminaries of the House of Eggenberg. The palace itself was ornate and richly furnished, and Cristofor explained that it was built atop a much older structure. Gabriela found the idea disconcerting, bones of an old castle hiding beneath a modern façade, though she suspected that He would have been amused by the idea. Cristofor was delaying, not ready to convey the news that would end her time in Graz. Gabriela let him talk - she enjoyed his company, though her pleasure was tinged with regret. I married young, and you entered the priesthood. Perhaps it was just as well - Cristofor had a kind heart, and it was better that he had not followed her path. They wandered about the Planetary Room for another hour before he delivered the news.
“A week ago,” the priest said, “the Interior Ministry arrested a woman found wandering in the forest near Salzburg. Rumor has it that she will be released today.”
“How do you know?”
“God works in mysterious ways.” He smiled at her as Mercury, winged messenger of the gods, gazed at them from the wall. “Occasionally, those ways include bribery and espionage. They’re taking her to Vienna tonight.”
“Vienna.” Gabriela frowned as she studied the paintings. “Graz is closer, and There is a consulate here. Why take her to Vienna?”
“A good question.” Cristofor shrugged. “One possibility is that they are taking her to the Embassy rather than the consulate. However, there is a fair amount of interest in your missing woman, and I am not the only one who has been asking questions. The Nazis are also looking for her. It’s possible -” He paused, troubled.
“What? Out with it, Cristofor.”
“They’re taking her a safe distance from Germany before she disappears forever.”
III.
Austria was beautiful when not viewed from the inside of a jail.
She had wandered the forest, hungry and slightly delirious, for three days before her arrest. None of the soldiers spoke English, but Sarah was fed and dressed in warm clothing, and her body began to recover from its ordeal. On the second day of her confinement, a guard brought a pen, inkwell, and paper, and Sarah wrote a carefully worded letter to the British embassy. She waited and forced herself to believe that she would not be returned to Germany.
The guard opened her cell door and jangled a pair of shackles with a rapid up-down motion of his right hand, and Sarah held out her wrists. A second guard joined them, and she was led to the waiting car. A pair of men, well-dressed and nondescript, talked politely with the guards as they signed the sheaf of papers with practiced efficiency. At least they don’t look like thugs. She noted the sun’s position as they placed her in the car and read the sign – Ebensee – as they entered the town. As they boarded the train, she noted the sun’s position behind her with satisfaction. We’re traveling away from Germany. It was good news, but she could not shake the sensation that she would find Hans and Richard, or perhaps the mysterious Herr Heydrich, waiting at the end of her journey.
They arrived in Vienna, and the other passengers exited onto a main platform to the right. The guards helped her to her feet and steered her to the left, and Sarah passed through a doorway into a shabby-looking maintenance shop. A sickening wave of nausea settled into her belly. Someone might remember if she vanished in the countryside, but here? They can murder me ten feet from the train, and no one will know better. A hand touched her shoulder, and Sarah felt a painful itch at the base of her neck. They’ll aim right there, just below the skull. She closed her eyes tightly and thought of her son as she whispered a final, desperate prayer. Don’t let me break down. Don’t let me beg them for mercy.
“You keep escaping in the wrong direction.” Sarah recognized the voice but scarcely believed her own ears. “Are you all right?”
“Sigmund?”
She wrapped both arms about his neck in a tight embrace. The notion of safety, of home, struck her like a slap, and she found herself sobbing, her face buried against his shoulder as Sigmund wrapped an arm about her waist. Sarah held onto him as the tension in her muscles gradually eased, then broke away, slightly embarrassed.
“I thought you were coming to kill me.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you back to London.”
She cleaned up at the hotel, and they had dinner at a café on the Danube. Sigmund’s demeanor was pleasant, but the dark circles beneath his eyes suggested a lack of sleep, and his eyes followed the pedestrians that passed outside their window with an odd vigilance. With a shock, she realized that Sigmund resembled her mother - ever watchful, bearing some grievous wound that was kept hidden from the larger world. An odd mix of strength and fragility. Outside, the river flowed idly toward the sea.
“What’s on your mind?” Sarah looked up, surprised.
“Did they tell you why I was kidnapped? The stories about my family?”
Sigmund grinned. “You want to know if I think you are –” he struggled for the English word, and giving up, tapped his temple with an index finger.
“Mad.” Sarah laughed. “Well, do you?”
“I know a little of your story, and no, I don’t think you’re mad,” he said,
“I was four years old, when the police came.” Sarah rested her head in her hands, unable to meet his eyes. “They questioned my father and mother several times over the next year.”
Sigmund raised an eyebrow. “What did they want?”
“I gleaned a few fragments from my brother.” The first stars appeared overhead. “My father and mother were involved in… something… and a young woman died as a result. The police believed that she did not die of natural causes, and some years later, the woman’s fiancé killed himself. As for the rest of the story, the more fantastical parts -”
“Your parents never told you, did they?”
“No. My father was always secretive. My mother was a proper English lady, but a difficult woman – as hard as an oak.” Her thumb encircled the chain about the locket, a frequent habit when her thoughts turned to Mina. “At least that’s what I thought at the time.”
If Sigmund perceived the guilty expression on her face, he let it pass. “And the rest of the story?”
“What would you believe?” There was a bitter edge to her laughter. “A man, dead for four centuries, travels to London and tries to murder my family? It’s the stuff of penny dreadfuls and movie serials.”
They finished eating and walked along the river for another hour before returning to the hotel. Sarah slept fitfully, troubled by dreams of a missing nobleman and a dead girl.
V.
Ploesti
“We need to find him tonight, Varick, and put an end to this shit.” Ormand wobbled a little as he faced his companion. They had been drinking since mid-afternoon, and as the hours passed and the alcohol worked its magic, both men became agitated. It began to rain as they moved up the sidewalk on unsteady feet.
They were in Romania on Party business, and though the fools in Berlin dreamed up some awful cover story, like the “Committee of Friendship for German and Romanian Workers and Peasantry”, their real job was to encourage pro-German sentiment. The Romanian government tolerated them, more or less, to mollify the Reich, but they were constantly watched. That’s Latin decadence for you, Ormand thought. One could hardly expect better in a country of Francophiles.
Lately, things had been going poorly. Their brothers in the Iron Cross were good company, ready to share a glass of beer or an occasional fistfight, but the taverns had been deserted for the better part of a week. The few that bothered to appear were dull and listless, and one of them, a big brawler from up north, had even died. A shame, Ormand thought. I liked Radu. To Ormand and Varick, whose lives were a fanciful world of plots and machinations, the recent events took on an air of divine portent, and only one thing could explain their misfortune – a Jewish spy was following them.
They had glimpsed him a handful of times beneath burned-out streetlamps or in darkened alleyways. A slippery bastard, he drifted through the shadows like smoke and slipped away when they stared in his direction. On one occasion, Ormand was certain, the stranger followed them home and peered through the window of their shabby rooming house. Ormand could feel him in the darkness, the man with the dark coat and burning eyes.
“Do you think he’s one of the gendarmes?” Varick asked. “If we kill a gendarme, we’ll have to run for it.”
“I already told you, he’s a Jew.” Ormand replied. “The gendarmes don’t skulk about in the dark.”
“Well tonight, we’ll catch him in the open and finish him,” Varick said. “Maybe they’ll give us a medal when we get back to Berlin.”
Skulking about in the dark - that’s another thing, isn’t it? That feeling of being watched disappears when the sun rises. He held up a hand. A familiar sensation, of hidden eyes boring into his skull, cut through the alcohol haze. Ormand pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and made a slow half-turn, a pantomime of a smoker shielding a match from the wind. His face hidden by the brim of his hat, Ormand scanned the street behind them. There. Fifty meters behind them, something moved in the shadows.
“What is it?” Varick spoke loudly, startling him. The cigarette fell from his lips and landed in a puddle.
“Nothing.” He fished another cigarette from his pocket. “Let’s go. And for God’s sake, keep your voice down!” Varick caught the look in his eye. He’s here.
They wandered toward the jumble of ramshackle dwellings and run-down warehouses on the edge of the city. They were near the refinery, and the adjacent lot was a weed-choked field that served as a dumping ground for Ploesti’s petroleum industry. They had no firearms, but each man carried a folding knife and wore a heavy leather belt around his waist. Lure him to the field, and no one will hear his screams. The rain became a downpour, and Ormand silently cursed as the mud sucked at their boots. Standing watch as Varick relieved himself against a wall, Ormand perceived the outline of a man at the edge of his visual perception. He looked again, and the shape was gone. Before I strangle him, I’ll have to ask how the Jews trained their spies to move with such stealth.
“Ormond - look!”
A hundred meters ahead, the street dead-ended at the rail spur that bordered the refinery. The figure was ahead of them now, and it lingered at the edge of the tracks, watching them, before melting into the brush. There’s no way he could have gotten past us. Ormand was seized by the sudden urge to run. Just go home, and when the sun rises tomorrow, get the hell out of Romania. And when you get back to Germany, tell the Party to go fuck itself. The grand designs of the Fuhrer and the Jewish plots that fermented in his imagination were not worth confronting whatever awaited them at the end of that darkened street. Ormand moved forward - he was no coward, by God - though his feet carried him reluctantly. At the far end of the rail spur, a path led into the brush.
“Ormand?” Varick said. There was a slight quaver to his voice. “There are no tracks in the mud.”
“He went through the trees,” Ormand said, though his own words rang hollow - the thicket was a tangle of vines discarded metal. Nothing could get through that. “Let’s finish this and get out of here.”
The center of the field was a small clearing, roughly circular and perhaps twenty meters across. They paused at the terminus of the path, listening for movement, and Ormand breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing. Their watcher had doubtless scurried back to his synagogue, and tomorrow night, when his own nerves were better, perhaps they would get another chance. Ormand vowed to remain sober, more watchful, so that he could strike without mercy, instead of being lured to a deserted field where –
“Good evening.” The Germans whirled as the tall man emerged from the shadows. “Your friends helped me find you.”
A match flared in the darkness, and he lit the pile of wood in the center of the clearing. The firelight reflected in his eyes, and his smile revealed strong white teeth as Ormand reached for his knife. Just a man. His eyes shine in the dark, and he moves without a sound, but he’s just a man. His confidence returned as the knife clicked open.
“You brought weapons?” The Jewish spy glanced at Ormand’s right hand. “I can be destroyed by fire or sunlight, and a wooden stake will pin me to the earth, but I don’t think your blades will do much good. Still, it makes things slightly more interesting – perhaps you can get close enough to cut off my head.”
Ormand stepped forward, right hand drawn tightly against his hip, left hand leading to protect his vitals. His antagonist was backlit by the fire, and for an instant, Ormand had the odd impression that the flames shimmered through the body, as if the flesh were illusion rather than solid matter. The shape moved and twisted in the firelight, and he had an instant of horrified comprehension as the wolf sprang, moving faster than his eyes could follow. It struck dead-center in his torso, and Ormand was thrown backward as he fainted from the pain.
What happened? Ormond rolled to his knees. His right arm refused to work, and he used his left hand to wipe the blood from his eyes. Ormand’s legs buckled as he tried to rise, and he stumbled, an awkward pirouette that left him face-down in the mud. Varick lay ten feet away, half-concealed in the darkness as his boots quivered in the mud. The shadow rose to face him, and Ormand prayed that he had gone mad.
“Not the challenge that I hoped for, but you were stronger than I expected.” Blood was smeared about its lips, and the eyes, large and crimson, beamed at him in the firelight. “I didn’t expect you to survive when I took off your arm.”
“Please, don’t.”
“Someone in Germany, a very important man, is looking for me, and you’re going to send him a message.” It held a camera in one hand, and the other, pale and cold, caressed his cheek. “Rather, you’re going to be the message. Think of it as a sacrifice to the greater glory of the Reich.”
“For the love of God, please!”
“Yes. For the love of God.”
The field near the refinery was deserted, and in the darkness, no one heard the screams.