The Mammoth Book of Dracula (44 page)

“... extensive ulceration of the small intestine, such as is typical in the third week of typhoid fever. You will also note the swelling of the spleen
—”

There were, altogether, ten wheeled tables in the room. All held corpses.

Five pairs of twins.

All children, none older than eight.

All carefully dissected. All had had their eyes removed. One wall held a board to which pairs of human eyes had been pinned, like butterflies, carefully sorted by colour.

The smoking man finished glancing over the report he held in his other hand and looked up, nodding in approval.

“Is the report satisfactory,
Hauptsturmfuhrer?”

“Most satisfactory. Invaluable, in fact. I want these
—
”he gestured at the twins on the nearest table, “
—
packed carefully and shipped to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Mark the shipping crates ‘War Materials -Urgent’. Do you understand?”

The men in white coats glanced at each other, then the one in charge answered, “Yes. And the rest?”

The man in leather murmured off-handedly, “Dispose of them.”He was gazing down at the twins, bobbing on his feet excitedly.

The men in the stained lab coats waited nervously.

The mist in the corner was consumed.

Madness.

This place was madness, impure and unsimple, and he gave himself over to it. He congealed in an eyeblink and exploded through the men, hurling them aside easily. The one in leather pulled a gun and fired at him, clumsily killing one of the doctors instead. The Prince barely noticed, so intent was he on the one he held before him, the one who had relayed the “report”.

“Why have you done this?” he snarled.

The man shook violently, barely gasped out, “Please, we had no choice, they would kill us like our brothers if we didn’t
—”

“Your brothers?” He nodded at the dissected corpses, “These are your own people?”

The man did not reply. The look in his eyes was his answer.

In two seconds his headless body was flung aside, the Prince holding the head aloft, blood streaming down his chin.

In five seconds the last of the white-coated doctors was dead, his throat gone.

He rounded on the man in leather, who fired his pistol until the hammer clicked on empty chambers. There were shouts and running feet in the hallway outside, but the Prince gestured and the door slammed shut. Then he began to move towards his final victim, savouring the exquisite terror.

“Before I kill you, slowly and painfully, I ask of you one question: Why do you deserve to call yourself human?”

The man reached behind him, seeking a weapon, and the leather coat was tugged open.

There was a cross on his chest.

Even though it was not a true crucifix, the Iron Cross medal held enough of the symbol’s power to repel the vampire. He fell back, averting his gaze, his eyes stinging.

The potential victim hesitated, then laughed as he sensed he was out of danger. “You—you recognized me! You saw my medals and suddenly knew who I was. Now you cower from me, like the rest of your inferior kind!”

The Prince couldn’t face his accuser directly, but he could spit out, “How dare you
—”

“I dare,” responded the German, “because your accent marks you as a Slav, and as such second only to the Jews as a degenerate race, although I admit that you have some personal power. You will make a most interesting display for the Institute”

Outside, a shot sounded. The lock exploded and the door burst inwards. The Prince took the first guard through and tore his throat out.

The Nazi watched in horrified fascination. “What are you?”

The Prince threw the soldier’s drained body aside and stood in the doorway. “I am,” he answered, “by comparison, a very small nightmare”

With that his form altered, becoming a winged creature of the night, and he left the accursed place.

Three years after the war had ended and the German horrors had been disclosed, he saw a picture in a newspaper of an escaped war criminal. He recognized him from that night, the blandly handsome features, the gap in the front teeth, the Cross pinned to the chest (the most ironic and perverted use of that symbol imaginable). Now the monster had a name:

Dr Josef Mengele.

Mengele escaped, but the Prince, ageless and deathless, was not so fortunate. He was captured and cruelly taunted by what Mengele had unleashed at the place known as Auschwitz.

~ * ~

She’d left last night, after revealing the name to him. Now she was back, and Jackson looked up without surprise from the cheap paperback novel he was reading.

She saw the cover and smiled wryly. “Obviously you believed me.”

He closed the book and gestured with it. “You know, Lucy dies in this.”

She smiled again and sat, not in the chair but on a corner of Jackson’s desk near him, her crossed legs brushing his. “Staked through the heart. Ouch.”

“Then you aren’t this Lucy.”

“Oh, yes I am,” she began, “but that book... a ridiculous collection of half-truths, a Victorian fiction at best.”

He waited, and after a moment she went on. “In the book I have three suitors. Very nattering, but not very true. There was only one. His name was Bram Stoker.”

Jackson blinked in surprise. “Stoker?”

“Yes. That night, in the crypt with that terrible old man, Van Helsing ... Bram sent the professor outside, claiming he wanted to be alone. The professor left, Bram raised the stake—and then couldn’t do it. He was a coward, my dear Bram was. I heard him, as I lay helpless in the coffin, tell the old man that the deed was done.”

“And Van Helsing believed him?”

“No. I’m sure he intended to come back and finish me alone after they were done with the Count, but the Professor did not survive the encounter.”

“Dracula killed him?”

“He didn’t get the chance—heart attack.”

Jackson considered, then asked, “So why did Stoker rewrite the truth so heavily?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Bram’s entire reason for writing his quaint book was to expunge his guilt.”

“So Dracula drank your blood and you became like him.”

“It isn’t that easy, Detective, I assure you. He drained me to the point of death, then made me drink of his blood. You needn’t worry about his victims—they won’t be coming back unless he transformed them, and frankly vampires don’t like the competition.”

“But he turned you.”

“Yes,” she said, and for the first time Jackson saw her jaded irony fail, “I suppose he loved me.”

Jackson looked closely at her, her legs sliding from under the folds of the silk skirt, then forced his gaze up to meet hers. “In the book you were feeding on children.”

She did look away, with a shame that actually surprised him. “I was ... you have to understand that I was like a newborn myself, cast into a strange new life without guidance. Dracula was being pursued then and couldn’t help me. After, though, he did come back. He gave up on Mina and came back to me. He taught me how to use my new gifts, and made me remember who I’d been. He took me to London. We even become part of society…but then he left. He grew tired of the people, the cities. He was homesick. So he left and I stayed. We haven’t been together since.”

“Why do you think this,” Jackson gestured at the files on the desk, “is him?”

“I did see him two months ago,” she began, her voice barely above a whisper. “He must have found out I was married to David, a mention in a magazine perhaps. One night he appeared outside my bedroom window. He was half-formed, hovering, just... watching. He didn’t come in, or speak. After a while he just ... drifted away. He was very lost.”

Jackson waited until she could look at him again before saying, “Even if it is him ... what do you want? Do you think you can save him?”

“Oh no, Detective. I want you to help me kill him.”

Before Jackson could react, she was bending over him, one hand gliding down his shoulder. “Why aren’t you married, Detective Jackson?”

His shoulder jerked away from her touch. “Who said I’m not?”

She picked up his left hand, held it up between them. “No ring.”

He had to admit, “Okay, I’m not. But you are.”

She was pulling him out of the chair now, to his feet, her arms going around his waist. “I’ve been married eight times this century. It’s a convenient cover for the way I have to live, and provides me with income.”

“And that’s all?” he asked, as her hands moved up his back.

“Let’s just say I... do seek my pleasures elsewhere.”

A few seconds later, when her teeth slid easily into his throbbing neck, it was the greatest moment of Jackson’s life.

Another sunup ... another sundown ...

Even though he had fed the night before—completely drained two of them—he hungered again. Maybe it was the drugs he had ingested with last night’s blood, or, more likely, the blood itself was the drug. Only when he was taking in the sweet, rich essence did the pictures in his mind fade. Only then could he rest in peace.

He left his sanctuary and let the night wind take him.

A third floor window in a downtown hotel. One of those to which the government housing programme paid $400 a night to shelter its indigent.

He entered. Two men were passed out drunk on cots in the first room. He took them both without a sound and moved on. In the next room a woman saw him and started to scream—until he ripped her throat out. A third man there. On to the next room ... and the next...

He came to a family, parents and three young children, all sleeping in two beds, only a curtain separating them. He took the parents silently, then tore the curtain aside and faced the children.

~ * ~

The children ...

The world in 1969 had belonged to the children.

Dracula had finally forsaken his dreary, war-torn homeland for the New World. That had been in the fifties, a time he had found depressingly dull and spiritless. But his financial fortunes had multiplied enough to keep him there.

And then times had changed again, as they always did, and he felt reborn. It was summer 1969, the City of Angels. He was now fabulously rich, constantly surrounded by gorgeous young people dressed in flamboyant clothing. It amused him that their colours were DayGlo. He loved the lively music, the open sexuality, the intense communal gathering that took place on the Sunset Strip every Saturday night. He owned movie studios, record companies, apartment buildings and one old art deco theatre, which he planned to renovate soon. He dressed in velvets and silk brocades, frequented the Whisky and the Velvet Turtle, and his head reeled with LSD-laced blood. He became a figure of mystery and intense speculation among the Strip’s habitues, and so was very popular.

All in all, it was a great time to be undead.

It was late on one of those same Saturday nights when he smelled something wafting down from the hills above and to the west. It was something that cut through the haze of marijuana smoke, something he had not smelled since the last war: blood, newly spilled, a great quantity. It was nearly four in the morning. He was just leaving his last club of the night, accompanied by two staggering youthful companions. He planned to invite them to his limo, ply them with hashish, then taste them both, taking only a little, leaving them to spend the rest of the evening passed out in the rear seat while he flew home just before sunrise. His chauffeur, whom he liked to call “Renfield”, was exceedingly discreet.

But the scent, impossible for mortal senses to define, tugged at him, a pull as old and natural as the killer instinct. He halfheartedly excused himself from his prey, moved like a sleepwalker to a dark corner, and there transformed.

On batwings he followed the aroma north, past the Strip, into the hills. Over the sprawling mansions of Beverly Hills, past the winding Coldwater Canyon, up to a place where Christmas tree lights twinkled incongruously in the warm night. He set down nearby, on an expanse of lawn, nearly swooning from the proximity of the scent.

It did not take him long to find the source. There were two bodies on the front lawn, one man and one woman. They had been stabbed, butchered. In a car in the driveway, a third corpse reposed over the steering wheel, bullet holes a testament to his life’s end.

But the inside of the house was where the strongest smells were emanating from, and, in a daze of lust and repulsion, Dracula followed the bloodscent.

There was gore everywhere, on walls, on floors, on furnishings. He turned off a short entryway into a living room, and saw another man and woman. They, like the two outside on the grass, had been savaged, mindlessly stabbed over and over, obviously within the last hour or two. The length of rope connecting them, each end knotted around their necks, showed they had also been hanged. An American flag was draped over the back of the couch.