The Mammoth Book of Dracula (30 page)

Dracula:
I
am a Prince still. Of Darkness.

The brides titter and clap. A look from their Master silences them.

Dracula:
Harker, what do you think we are doing here, at the edge of Christendom? What dark mirror is held up to our unreflecting faces?

By the throne is an occasional table piled high with books
and periodicals.
Bradshaw’s Guide to Railway Timetables in England, Scotland and Wales,
George and Weedon Grossmith’s
Diary of a Nobody,
Sabine Baring-Gould’s
The
Book of Were-Wolves,
Oscar Wilde’s
Salom.

Dracula picks up a volume of the poetry of Robert Browning.

Dracula: “
I
must not omit to say that in Transylvania there’s a tribe of alien people that ascribe the outlandish ways and dress on which their neighbours lay such stress, to their fathers and mothers having risen out of some subterraneous prison into which they were trepanned long time ago in a mighty band out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land, but how or why, they don’t understand.”

Renfield claps.

Renfield:
Rats, Master. Rats.

Dracula reaches down with both hands and turns the madman’s head right around. The brides fall upon the madman’s twitching body, nipping at him greedily before he dies and the blood spoils.

Harker looks away.

~ * ~

At the airport, she was detained by officials. There was some question about her passport.

Francis was worried about the crates of exposed film. The negative was precious, volatile, irreplaceable. He personally, through John, argued with the customs people and handed over disproportionate bribes. He still carried his staff, which he used to point the way and rap punishment. He looked a bit like Friar Tuck.

The film, the raw material of
Dracula,
was to be treated as if it were valuable as gold and dangerous as plutonium. It was stowed on the aeroplane by soldiers.

A blank-faced woman sat across the desk from Kate.

The stirrings of panic ticked inside her. The scheduled time of departure neared.

The rest of the crew were lined up with their luggage, joking despite tiredness. After over a year, they were glad to be gone for good from this backward country. They talked about what they would do when they got home. Marty Sheen was looking healthier, years younger. Francis was bubbling again, excited to be on to the next stage.

Kate looked from the Romanian woman to the portraits of Nicolae and Elena on the wall behind her. All eyes were cold, hateful. The woman wore a discreet crucifix and a Party badge clipped to her uniform lapel.

A rope barrier was removed and the eager crowd of the
Dracula
company stormed towards the aeroplane, mounting the steps, squeezing into the cabin.

The flight was for London, then New York, then Los Angeles. Half a world away.

Kate wanted to stand up, to join the plane, to add her own jokes and fantasies to the rowdy chatter, to fly away from here. Her luggage, she realized, was in the hold.

A man in a black trenchcoat—
Securitate?—
and two uniformed policemen arrived and exchanged terse phrases with the woman.

Kate gathered they were talking about Shiny Suit. And her. They used old, cruel words: leech,
nosferatu,
parasite. The
Securitate
man looked at her passport.

“It is impossible that you be allowed to leave.”

Across the tarmac, the last of the crew—Ion-John among them, baseball cap turned backwards, bulky kit-bag on his shoulder—disappeared into the sleek tube of the aeroplane. The door was pulled shut.

She was forgotten, left behind.

How long would it be before anyone noticed? With different sets of people disembarking in three cities, probably forever. It was easy to miss one mousy adviser in the excitement, the anticipation, the triumph of going home with the movie shot. Months of post-production, dialogue looping, editing, rough cutting, previews, publicity and release lay ahead, with box office takings to be crowed over and prizes to be competed for in Cannes and on Oscar night.

Maybe when they came to put her credit on the film, someone would think to ask what had become of the funny little old girl with the thick glasses and the red hair.

“You are a sympathizer with the Transylvania Movement.”

“Good God,” she blurted, “why would anybody want to live here?”

That did not go down well.

The engines were whining. The plane taxied towards the runway.

“This is an old country, Miss Katharine Reed,” the
Securitate
man sneered. “We know the ways of your kind, and we understand how they should be dealt with.”

All the eyes were pitiless.

~ * ~

The giant black horse is led into the courtyard by the gypsies. Swords are drawn in salute to the animal. It whinnies slightly, coat glossy ebony, nostrils scarlet.

Inside the castle, Harker descends a circular stairway carefully, wiping aside cobwebs. He has a wooden stake in his hands.

The gypsies close on the horse.

Harker’s Voice:
Even the castle wanted him dead, and that’s what he served at the end. The ancient, blood-caked stones of his Transylvanian fastness.

Harker stands over Dracula’s coffin. The Count lies, bloated with blood, face puffy and violet.

Gypsy knives stroke the horse’s flanks. Blood erupts from the coat.

Harker raises the stake with both hands over his head.

Dracula’s eyes open, red marbles in his fat, flat face. Harker is given pause.

The horse neighs in sudden pain. Axes chop at its neck and legs. The mighty beast is felled.

Harker plunges the stake into the Count’s vast chest.

The horse jerks spastically as the gypsies hack at it. Its hooves scrape painfully on the cobbles.

A gout of violently red blood gushes upwards, splashing directly into Harker’s face, reddening him from head to waist. The flow continues, exploding everywhere, filling the coffin, the room, driving Harker back.

Dracula’s great hands grip the sides of the coffin and he tries to sit. Around him is a cloud of blood droplets, hanging in the air like slo-mo fog.

The horse kicks its last, clearing a circle. The gypsies look with respect at the creature they have slain.

Harker takes a shovel and pounds at the stake, driving it deeper into Dracula’s barrel chest, forcing him back into his filthy sarcophagus.

At last, the Count gives up. Whispered words escape from him with his last breath.

Dracula:
The horror... the horror...

~ * ~

She supposed there were worse places than a Romanian jail. But not many.

They kept her isolated from the warm prisoners. Rapists and murderers and dissidents were afraid of her. She found herself penned with uncommunicative Transylvanians, haughty elders reduced to grime and resentful newborns.

She had seen a couple of Meinster’s Kids, and their calm, purposeful, blank-eyed viciousness disturbed her. Their definition of enemy was terrifyingly broad, and they believed in killing. No negotiation, no surrender, no accommodation. Just death, on an industrial scale.

The bars were silver. She fed on insects and rats. She was weak.

Every day, she was interrogated.

They were convinced she had murdered Georghiou. His throat had been gnawed and he was completely exsanguinated.

Why her? Why not some Transylvanian terrorist?

Because of the bloodied once-yellow scrap in his dead fist. A length of thin silk, which she had identified as her Biba scarf. The scarf she had thought of as civilization. The bandage she had used to bind Ion’s wound.

She said nothing about that.

Ion-John was on the other side of the world, making his way. She was left behind in his stead, an offering to placate those who would pursue him. She could not pretend even to herself that it was not deliberate. She understood all too well how he had survived so many years underground. He had learned the predator’s trick: to be loved, but never to love. For that, she pitied him even as she could cheerfully have torn his head off.

There were ways out of jails. Even jails with silver bars and garlic hung from every window. The Romanian jailers prided themselves on knowing vampires, but they still treated her as if she were feebleminded and fragile.

Her strength was sapping, and each night without proper feeding made her weaker.

Walls could be broken through. And there were passes out of the country. She would have to fall back on skills she had thought never to exercise again.

But she was a survivor of the night.

As, quietly, she planned her escape from the prison and from the country, she tried to imagine where the “Son of Dracula” was, to conceive of the life he was living in America, to count the used-up husks left in his wake. Was he still at his maestro’s side, making himself useful? Or had he passed beyond that, found a new patron or become a maestro himself?

Eventually, he would build his castle in Beverly Hills and enslave a harem. What might he become: a studio head, a cocaine baron, a rock promoter, a media mogul, a
star?
Truly, Ion-John was what Francis had wanted of Brando, Dracula reborn. An old monster, remade for the new world and the next century, meaning all things, tainting everything he touched.

She would leave him be, this new monster of hers, this creature born of Hollywood fantasy and her own thoughtless charity. With Dracula gone or transformed, the world needed a fresh monster. And John Popp would do as well as anyone else. The world had made him and it could cope with him.

Kate extruded a fingernail into a hard, sharp spar, and scraped the wall. The stones were solid, but between them was old mortar, which crumbled easily.

~ * ~

Harker, face still red with Dracula’s blood, is back in his room at the inn in Bistritz. He stands in front of the mirror.

Harker’s Voice:
They were going to make me a saint for this, and I wasn’t even in their fucking church any more.

Harker looks deep into the mirror.

He has no reflection.

Harker’s mouth forms the words, but the voice is Dracula’s.

The horror… the horror…

<>

~ * ~

HUGH B. CAVE

The Second Time Around

HUGH B. CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, and emigrated with his family to America when he was five. From the late 1920s onwards his stories began appearing in such legendary pulp magazines as
Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories
and the “weird menace” pulps,
Horror Stories
and
Terror Tales..

After leaving the horror field in the early 1940s for almost three decades, a volume of the author’s best horror tales,
Murgunstrumm and Others,
was published by Karl Edward Wagner in 1977. Cave subsequently returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels:
Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns
and
The Restless Dead.
His short stories were also collected in a number of volumes, including
The Corpse Maker, Death Stalks the Night, The Dagger of Tsiang, Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask, Come Into My Parlor, The Door Below
and
Bottled in Blonde.
Milt Thomas’s biography,
Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave,
was published by Arkham House a week after the author’s death.