Dark Labyrinth 1 (5 page)

“Absolution!” Lugosi cried. “For this? Who do you think I am?”

“How are you called?” Dracula asked.

Lugosi, disoriented yet accustomed to having his name impress guests, answered, “Bela Lugos—no, I am Bela Blasko of the town of Lugos.” He drew himself up, trying to feel imposing in his own Dracula costume, but the enormity of Vlad the Impaler’s presence seemed to dwarf any imaginary impressiveness Lugosi could command.

Vlad Dracula appeared troubled. “Bela Blasko—that is an odd name for an angel. Are you perhaps one of my fallen countrymen?”

“An angel?” Lugosi blinked. “I am no angel. I cannot grant you forgiveness. I do not even believe in God.” He wished the morphine would wear off. This was growing too strange for him, but as he held his hand on the cold stone of the balcony it felt real to him. Too real. The sharp stakes below would be just as solid, and just as sharp.

He looked down at the ranks of tortured people covering the hillside, and he knew from the legends about the Impaler that this was but a tiny fraction of all the atrocities Vlad Dracula had already done. “Even if I could, I would not grant you absolution for all of this.”

Vlad Dracula’s eyes became wide, but he shrank away from Lugosi. “But I have built monasteries and churches, restored shrines and made offerings. I have surrounded myself with priests and abbots and bishops and confessors. I have done everything I know how.” He gazed at the bloodied stakes, but seemed not to see them.

“You killed all these people, and many many more! What do you expect?” Lugosi felt the fear grow in him again, real fear, as he had experienced that war-torn night in the Carpathian mountains. What would Vlad Dracula do to him?

Some of those victims below were Lugosi’s own countrymen, the simple peasants and farmers, the bakers and bankers, craftsmen, just like those Lugosi had fought with in the Great War, just like those who had rescued him after he had been shot in the legs, who had dragged him off to safety, where the nurses tended him, gave him morphine. Vlad Dracula had killed them all.

“There are far worse things awaiting man. . .than death,” the Impaler said. “I did all this for God, and for my country.”

Lugosi felt the words catch in his throat. For his country! His own mind felt like a puzzle, with large pieces of memory breaking loose and fitting together in new ways. Lugosi himself had done things for his country, for Hungary, that others had called atrocities.

Back in 1918 he had embraced communism and the revolution. Proudly, he had bragged about his short apprenticeship as a locksmith, then had formed a union of theater workers, fighting and propagandizing for the revolution that thrust Bela Kun into power. But Kun’s dictatorship lasted only a few months, during which Romania attacked the weakened country, and Kun was ousted by the counterrevolution. All supporters of Bela Kun were hunted down and thrown into prison or executed. Lugosi had fled for his life to Vienna with his wife and from there, penniless, Lugosi had traveled to Berlin seeking acting jobs.

And now Vlad Dracula thought he was doing this for his people, to free Wallachia and the towns that would become great Hungarian cities. Lugosi had scorned the weak American audiences because they proved too weak to withstand anything but safe, insignificant frights—but now he didn’t believe he could stomach what he saw of Vlad the Impaler.

“I fight the Turks and use their own atrocities against them. They have taught me all this!” Vlad Dracula wrung his hands, then snatched a torch free from its holder on the wall. He pushed it toward Lugosi, letting the fire crackle. Lugosi flinched, but he felt none of the heat. It seemed important for him to speak to Lugosi, to justify everything.

“Can you not hear me? The Turks held me hostage from the time I was a boy. To save his neck, my father Dracul the Dragon willingly turned me over to the sultan, along with my youngest brother Radu. Radu turned traitor, became a Turk in his heart. He grew fat from harem women, and rich banquets, and too much opium. My father then went about attacking the sultan’s forces, knowing that his own sons were bound to be executed for it!”

Vlad Dracula held his hands over the torch flame; the heat licked his fingers, but he seemed not to notice. “Day after day, the sultan promised to cut me into small pieces. He promised to have horses pull my legs apart and hold me where I could not struggle while he inserted a dull stake through my body the long way! Several times he even went so far as to tie me to the horses, just to frighten me. Day after day, Bela of Lugos!” He lowered his voice. “Yes, the Turks taught me much about the extremes one can do to an enemy!”

Vlad Dracula hurled the torch out the window. Lugosi watched it whirl and blaze as it dropped through the air to the ground, rolled, then came to rest against a rock. Without the torch, the balcony alcove seemed smothered with shadows, lit only by the starlight and distant fires from the scene of slaughter on the hillside.

“After I escaped, I learned that my father had been ambushed and murdered by John Hunyadi, a Hungarian who should have shared his loyalty! Hunyadi captured my father and my brother Mircea so he could gain lordship over the principalities my father controlled. He struck my father with seventy-three sword strokes before he dealt a mortal blow. He claimed that he had tortured my brother Mircea to death and buried him in the public burial grounds.” Dracula shook his head, and Lugosi saw real tears hovering there.

“Mircea had fought beside John Hunyadi for three years, and had saved his life a dozen times. When I was but a boy, Mircea taught me how to fish and ride a horse. He showed me the constellations in the stars that the Greeks had taught him.” Dracula scraped one of his rings down the stone wall, leaving a white mark.

“When I became Prince again, I ordered his coffin to be opened so that I could give him a proper burial, with priests and candles and hymns. We found his head twisted around, his hands had scraped long gouges on the top of his coffin. John Hunyadi had buried him alive!”

Vlad Dracula glanced behind him, as if to make certain no one else wandered the castle halls so late at night, and then he allowed himself to sob. He mumbled his brother’s name.

“Just a few months ago, in my castle on the Arges river in Transylvania, the Turks laid siege to me and fired upon the battlements with their cherrywood cannons. One Turkish slave forewarned me, and I was able to escape by picking my way along the ice and snow of a terrible pass. My own son fell off his horse during the flight, and I have never seen him again. My wife could not come with us, and so rather than being captured by the Turks, she climbed the stairs of our tallest tower overlooking the sheer gorge, and she cast herself out of the window. She was my wife, Bela of Lugos. Do you know what it is like to lose a wife like that?”

Lugosi felt cold from the breeze licking over the edge of the balcony. “Not. . .like that. But I can understand the loss.”

In exile from Hungary back in 1920, Lugosi had left his wife Ilona in Vienna, while he tried to find work in Berlin in German cinema or on the stage. He had written to her every other day, but she had never replied. He learned later that her father, the executive secretary of a Budapest bank, had convinced her to divorce him, to flee back to Hungary and to avoid her husband at all costs because of the awful things he had done against his own country. In the ten years since, Lugosi had already married twice more, but he still did not feel he had found her match. Dracula’s wife had chosen a different way out.

Outside, Lugosi heard distant shouts and the jingling of horses approaching at a gallop. He saw the soldiers break away from their tents, scattering the bonfires and snatching up their weapons. The Impaler seemed not to notice.

“I do not know who you are, or why you have come,” Vlad Dracula said. “I prayed for an angel, a voice who could remove these demons of guilt from within me.” He snatched out at Lugosi’s vampire costume, but his hand passed directly through the actor’s chest.

Lugosi shrank back, feeling the icy claw of a spectral hand sweep through his heart. Vlad Dracula widened his enormous dark eyes with superstitious terror. “You truly must be a spirit come to torment me, since you refuse to grant me absolution.”

Lugosi did not know how to answer. He delivered his answer with a stuttering, uncertain cadence. “I am neither of those things. I am only a traveler, a dream to you perhaps, from a time and place far from here. I have not lived my life yet. I will be born many centuries from now.”

“You come not to judge me, then? Or punish me?” Vlad Dracula looked truly terrified. He looked down at the hand that had passed through Lugosi’s body.

“No, I am just an actor—an entertainer. I perform for other people. I try to make them afraid.” He shook his head. “But I was wrong. What I do has no bearing on real fear. The acting I do, the frights I give to my audience, are a sham. That fear has no consequences.” He leaned out over the balcony, then squeezed his eyes shut at the scores of maimed corpses and those victims not fortunate enough to have died.

“Seeing this convinces me I know nothing about real fear.”

In the courtyard directly below, shouting erupted. Marching men hurried out into the night. Someone blasted a horn. Lugosi heard the sounds of a fight, swords clashing. Vlad Dracula glanced at it, dismissed the commotion for a moment, then locked his hypnotic gaze with Lugosi’s again. The anguish behind the Impaler’s eyes made Lugosi want to squirm.

“That is all? I have prayed repeatedly for an apparition, and you claim to have learned something from me? About fear? All is lost. I have been abandoned. God is making a joke with me.” His shoulders hunched into the fur-lined robe, and he reddened with anger.

Lugosi had the crawling feeling that if he had been corporeal to the Impaler, Vlad Dracula would have thrust him upon a vacant stake on the hillside. “I do not know what to tell you, Vlad Dracula. I am not your conscience. I have destroyed enough things in my own life by trying to do what I thought was right and best. But I can tell you what I think.”

Vlad Dracula cocked an eyebrow. Below, a clattering sound signaled a portcullis opening. Booted feet charged across the flagstoned floor as someone hurried into the receiving hall. “My Lord Prince!”

Lugosi spoke rapidly. “The Turks have taught you well, as your atrocities show. But you have perhaps gone too far. You cannot undo the things you have already done, the thousands already slain. But you can change how you act from now on. Your brutal, bloodthirsty reputation is already well-earned, and mothers with frighten their children with stories of Vlad the Impaler for five hundred years! Now perhaps you have built enough terror that you no longer need the slaughter. The mere mention of your name and the terror it evokes may be enough to accomplish your aims, to save Hungary from the Turks. If this is how you must be, try to govern with fear, not with death. Then your God may give your conscience some rest.”

Vlad Dracula made a puzzled frown. “Perhaps we are together because I needed to learn something about fear as well.” The Impaler laughed with a sound like breaking glass. “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Bela of Lugos.”

They both turned at the sound of a running man hurrying up the stone steps to the upper level where Lugosi and Vlad Dracula stood side by side. The messenger scraped his sword against the stone wall, clattering. He swept his cloak back, looking from side to side until he spotted Dracula in the shadowy alcove. Sweat and blood smeared his face.

“My Lord Prince! Why did you not respond?” the man cried. A crimson badge on his shoulder identified him as a retainer from one of the boyars serving Vlad Dracula.

“I have been in conversation with an important representative,” Dracula said, nodding to Lugosi. Surprised, but falling back on his training, Lugosi sketched a formal bow to the messenger. But the retainer looked toward where Lugosi stood, blinked, and frowned.

“I see nothing, my Lord Prince.”

In a rage, Vlad Dracula snatched out a dagger from his fur-lined robe. The messenger blanched and stumbled backward, warding off the death from the knife, but also showing a kind of sick relief that his end would be quick, not moaning and bleeding for days on a stake as the vultures circled about.

“Dracula!” Lugosi snapped, bringing to bear all the power and command he had used during his very best performances as the vampire. Vlad Dracula stopped, holding the knife poised for its strike. The retainer trembled, staring with wide blank eyes, but afraid to flee.

“Look at how terrified you have made this man. The fear you create is a powerful thing. You need not kill him to accomplish your purpose.”

Vlad Dracula heard Lugosi, but kept staring at the retainer, making his eyes blaze brighter, his leer more vicious. The retainer began to sob.

“I need not explain my actions to you,” he said to the man. “Your soul is mine to crush whenever I wish. Now tell me your news!”

“The sultan’s army has arrived. It appears to be but a small vanguard attacking under cover of darkness, but the remaining Turks will be here by tomorrow. We can stand strong against this vanguard—many of them have already fled upon seeing their comrades impaled on this hillside, my Lord Prince. They will report back. It will enrage the sultan’s army.”

Vlad Dracula pinched his full lips between his fingers. He looked at Lugosi, who stood watching and waiting. The messenger seemed confused at what the Impaler thought he saw.

“Or it will strike fear into the sultan’s army. We can use this. Go out to the victims on the stakes. Cut off the heads of those dead or mortally wounded—and be quick about it!—and catapult the heads into the Turkish vanguard. They will see the faces of their comrades and know that this will happen to them if they fight me. Find those whose injuries may still allow them to live and set them free of the stakes. Send them back to the sultan to tell how monstrous I am. Then he will think twice about his aggression against me and against my land.”

The retainer blinked in astonishment, still trembling from having his life returned to him, curious about these new tactics Vlad Dracula was attempting. “Yes, my Lord Prince!” He scrambled backward and ran to the stone steps.