The Mammoth Book of Dracula (10 page)

His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as
Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead,
and
Just Behind You.
He has also edited a number of anthologies, including
New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts
and
Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror
(with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

He has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award.

Dracula returns to the Carpathians, but continues to take a great interest in world events and politics. However, some things never change ...

~ * ~

YOU’RE IN SIGHT of home when you know something’s wrong. Moonlight shivers gently on the stream beyond the cottage, and trees stand around you like intricate spikes of the darkness mounting within the forest. The cottage is dark, but it isn’t that. You emerge into the glade, trying to sense what’s troubling you.

You know you shouldn’t have stayed out so late, talking to your friend. Your wife must have been worried, perhaps frightened by the night as well. You’ve never left her alone at night before. But his talk was so engrossing: you feel that in less than a night you’ve changed from being wary of him to understanding him completely. And his wine was so good, and his open-throated brightly streaming fire so warming, that you can now remember little except a timeless sense of comfortable companionship, of communion that no longer needed words. But you shouldn’t have left your wife alone in the forest at night, even behind a barred door. The woodcutter’s cottage is nearby; at least you could have had his wife stay with yours. You feel disloyal.

Perhaps that’s what has been disturbing you. Always before when you’ve returned home light has been pouring from the windows, mellowing the surrounding trunks and including them like a wall around your cottage. Now the cottage reminds you of winter nights long ago in your childhood, when you lay listening to a wolf’s cry like the slow plummeting of ice into a gorge, and felt the mountains and forests huge around you, raked by the wind. The cottage feels like that: cold and hollow and unwelcoming. For a moment you wonder if you’re simply anticipating your wife’s blame, but you’re sure it’s more than that.

In any case you’ll have to knock and awaken her. First you go to the window and look in. She’s lying in bed, her face open as if to the sky. Moonlight eases darkness from her face, but leaves her throat and the rest of her in shadow. Tears have gathered in her eyes, sparkling. No doubt she has been crying in memory of her sister, a sketch of whom gazes across the bed from beside a glass of water. As you look in you’re reminded of your childhood fancy that angels watched over you at night, not at the end of the bed but outside the window; for a second you feel like your wife’s angel. But as you gaze in, discomfort grows in your throat and stomach. You remember how your fancy somehow turned into a terror of glimpsing a white face peering in. You draw back quickly in case you should frighten her.

But you have to knock. You don’t understand why you’ve been delaying. You stride to the door and your fist halts in mid-air, as if impaled by lightning. Suddenly the vague threats and unease you’ve been feeling seem to rush together and gather on the other side of the door. You know that beyond the door something is waiting for you, ready to pounce.

You feel as if terror has pinned you through your stomach, helpless. You’re almost ready to flee into the woods, to free yourself from the skewer of your panic. Sweat pricks you like red-hot ash scattered on your skin. But you can’t leave your wife in there with it, whatever nightmare it is rising out of the tales you’ve heard told of the forest. You force yourself to be still if not calm, and listen for some hint of what it might be.

All you can hear is the slow sleepy breathing of the wind in the trees. Your panic rises, for you can feel it beyond the door, perfectly poised and waiting easily for you to betray yourself. You hurry back to the window, but it’s impossible for you to squeeze yourself in far enough to make out anything within the door. This time a stench rises from the room to meet you, trickling into your nostrils. It’s so thickly unpleasant that you refuse to think what it might resemble. You edge back, terrified now of awakening your wife, for it can only be her immobility that’s protecting her from whatever’s in the room.

But you can’t coax yourself back to the door. You’ve allowed your panic to spread out from it, warding you further from the cottage. Your mind fills with your wife, lying unaware of her plight. Furious with yourself, you compel your body forward against the gale of your panic. You reach the door and struggle to touch it. If you can’t do that, you tell yourself, you’re a coward, a soft scrabbling thing afraid of the light. Your hand presses against the door as if proving itself against a live coal, and the door swings inwards.

You should have realised that your foe might have entered the cottage through the doorway. You flinch back instinctively, but as the swift fear fades the panic seeps back. You can feel it hanging like a spider just inside the doorway, waiting for you to pass beneath: a huge heavy black spider, ready to plump on your face. You try to shake your panic out of you with the knowledge that it’s probably nothing like that, that you’re giving in to fancy. But whatever it is, it’s oozing a stench that claws its way into your throat and begins to squeeze out your stomach. You fall back, weakened and baffled.

Then you see the rake. It’s resting against the corner of the cottage, where you left it after trying to clear a space for a garden. You carry it to the door, thinking. It could be more than a weapon, even though you don’t know what you’re fighting. If your wife doesn’t awaken and draw its attention to her, if your foe isn’t intelligent enough to see what you’re planning, if your absolute conviction of where it’s lurking above the door isn’t false—you almost throw away the rake, but you can’t bear the sense of your wife’s peril any longer. You inch the door open. You’re sure you have only one chance.

You reach stealthily into the space above the door with the teeth of the rake, then you grind them into your prey and drag it out into the open. It’s a dark tangled mass, but you hurl it away into the forest without looking closer, for some of it has fallen into the doorway and lies dimly there, its stench welling up. You pin it with the teeth and fling it into the trees.

Then you realise there’s more, hanging and skulking around the side of the doorframe. You grab it with the rake and hurl it against a trunk. Then you let your breath roar out. You’re weak and dizzy, but you stagger through the doorway. There are smears of the thing around the frame, and you sway back, retching. You close your mouth and nostrils and you’re past, safe.

You lean on the rake and gaze down at your wife. There’s a faint stench clinging to the rake, and you push it away from you, against the wall. She’s still asleep, no doubt because you were mourning her sister all last night. Your memory’s blurring; you must be exhausted too, because you can remember hardly anything before the battle you’ve just fought. You’re limply grateful that no harm has befallen her. If she’d come with you to visit your friend none of this would have happened. You hope you can recapture the sense of communion you had with him, to pass on to your wife. Through your blurring consciousness you feel an enormous yearning for her.

Then you jerk alert, for there’s still something in the room. You glance about wildly and see beneath the window more of what you destroyed, lying like a tattered snake. You manage to scoop it up in one piece this time, and you throw the rake out with it. Then you turn back to your wife. You’ve disturbed her; she has moved in her sleep. And fear advances on you from the bed like a spreading stain pumped out by a heart, because now you can see what’s nestling at her throat.

You don’t know what it is; your terror blurs it and crowds out your memories until it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It rests in the hollow of her throat like a dormant bat, and indeed it seems to have stubby protruding wings. Its shape expands within your head until it is a slow explosion of pure hostility, growing and erasing you. You turn away, blinded.

It’s far worse than what you threw into the forest. Even then, if you hadn’t been fighting for your wife you would have been paralysed by superstition. Now you can hardly turn your head back to look. The stain of the thing is crawling over your wife, blotting out her face and all your sense of her. But you open your eyes an agonised slit and see it couched in her throat as if it lives there. Your rage floods up, and you start forward.

But even with your eyes closed you can’t gain on it, because a great cold inhuman power closes about you, crushing you like a moth in a fist. You mustn’t cry out, because if your wife awakens it may turn on her. But the struggle crushes a wordless roar from you, and you hear her awake.

Your seared eyes make out her face, dimmed by the force of the thing at her neck. Perhaps her gathered tears are dislodged, or perhaps these are new, wrung out by the terror in her eyes. Your head is a shell full of fire, your eyes feel as though turning to ash, but you battle forward. Then you realise she’s shrinking back. She isn’t terrified of the thing at her throat at all, she’s terrified of you. She’s completely in its power.

You’re still straining against the force, wondering whether it must divert some of its power from you in order to control her, when she grabs the glass from beside the bed. For a moment you can’t imagine what she wants with a glass of water. But it isn’t water. It’s vitriol, and she throws it in your face.

Your face bursts into pain. Howling, you rush to the mirror.

You’re still searching for yourself in the mirror when the woodcutter appears in the doorway, grim-faced. At once, like an eye in the whirlwind of your confusion and pain, you remember that you asked his wife to stay with yours, yesterday afternoon when he wasn’t home to dissuade you from what you had to do. And you know why you can’t see yourself, only the room and the doorway through which you threw the garlic, your sobbing wife clutching the cross at her throat, the glass empty now of the holy water you brought home before setting out to avenge her sister’s death at Castle Dracula.

<>

~ * ~

MANLY WADE WELLMAN

The Devil is Not Mocked

MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903-1986) twice won the World Fantasy Award. He was born in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa, and settled in the United States where he worked as a reporter before quitting his job in 1930 to write fiction full time.

He was one of the most prolific contributors to the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s, and some of his best stories are collected in
Who Fears the Devil?, Worse Things Waiting, Lonely Vigils
and
The Valley So Low.
He wrote more than seventy-five books in all genres, including horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime and adventure, and had over two hundred short stories and numerous comic books and articles to his credit.