The Mammoth Book of Dracula (52 page)

The Count laughs. “You waste yourself in a silly little pretence. Accumulating gold, sipping the blood of whores. Who have you turned? Where are your get? Are you afraid you cannot control them? I will teach you!”

Harry shakes his head. He tried to turn someone once. It went horribly wrong.

“You English have no heart. No passion. You will learn. You will learn from me. When I was alive I commanded thousands. I swept the Turks from the battlefields. I was so powerful that death could not claim me. I refused it. And in my undeath I grew greater still, with thousands of loyal children.”

The Count falls silent. He is possessed by his past.

“You will be great again,” the crooked little man says. He has crept back into the room, as a loyal dog creeps back to its master after a whipping. “I promise it.”

“He tampers with our blood with his genetic science,” the Count says. “He says he can cure me. He needs only much gold, and a little time.”

“Science is expensive,” the crooked little man says, “but it is very powerful, master. Once I properly understand how the blood of posthumous animates transforms the DNA of the living, then I will understand what has gone wrong. I can fix it.”

“Silver,” the Count says. “They poisoned me with a silver stake, but ran away before they finished me. Cowards! But I recovered. It took decades, but I regained myself. So I won after all, but their pollution lingers still in my blood.”

Harry understands. After the Children of the Night were killed, he lay in a torpor for three years, reviving to feed once a month or so, until he recovered from the glancing wound caused by the silver bullet. If it had lodged in his body it would have killed him. He cannot imagine the strength of will the Count must have applied to regenerate with a silver stake piercing his body. Harry learned a lot about the Count from the gypsies, and later he read the standard text. The Count is a monster in every way, father of lies. He was a monster when human, so afraid of the true death that he would do anything to cheat it. Far from sweeping Turks from the battlefield, he had always run away at the first hint of defeat. And he has run from death, clinging to life with every ounce of will.

Harry shares that lust for life. It possesses him. Undead, he cannot imagine an ending to his appetite. He will do anything to survive. He has always known that, although the terrible thing which happened in the cell in Block A still shocks him.

All the time he has pretended to be human, almost forty years, the beast has lain just beneath his skin. He has been like a patient with a disease in remission. It has inhabited him quietly, and he has accommodated to its symptoms, but suddenly it has broken out again.

The Count’s gaze pierces Harry through and through.

“You thought you could pretend to be human,” the Count says, “but you know now what you are. I put you in the cell in Block A to teach you that.”

“They would have killed me,” Harry says. “I did it to save my life. Any man would have done the same, if placed in danger.”

“Yes, but the life to live is unbreakably strong in you. You will serve me, Harry Merrick, because the will to live is so strong.”

“I would rather die than serve you.”

“You sought refuge amongst humans as humans seek consolation from religion.”

The Count’s arm shoots out across the room, longer than any human arm should be. He wrenches the crucifix from the wall, plucks the pale figure from it and thrusts it into Harry’s face; it bursts in the Count’s fingers, and ivory dust stings Harry’s skin and eyes.

“So much for religion,” the Count purrs. “I could have skewered your heart with this cross, but I am merciful.”

“I rather think you’ve aligned yourself with the wrong side,” Harry says. “The rebels will find you.”

“Not at all. We have captured one of their leaders and many of his men, and we will make them our brothers with your blood. We will destroy the other rebels, or welcome them into our family. There are no trivial divisions amongst us. You must know that. We are all blood brothers.” The Count turns away from Harry. “Bleed him now and let him grow thirsty. Then he will learn what he is!”

The crooked little man taps a vein of Harry’s right arm, filling a litre bottle with dark blood while two undead women hold Harry down, stroking his body and kissing and nipping him in a parody of lust. They leave him dazed and weak. He finds enough strength to crawl away from the patch of sunlight that falls through the silver bars.

~ * ~

After he was captured on the airport road, Harry was put in a cell with twenty human prisoners. He was the only white man there. He lasted eight days before the terrible thing happened, almost as bad as what he had done to Catherine forty years ago.

Each night two or three prisoners were tortured until they confessed and then taken out to be executed. Each day two or three new prisoners, dazed and bleeding from beatings, were thrown into the cell to replace those executed the night before. A few were there on criminal charges, but most had been arrested because they were of the wrong tribe, or because they owned something an army officer had taken a fancy to, or because they were relatives of someone who had already been arrested. A few shouted at the guards, trying to reason with them or bribe them with promises, and one or two prayed wildly, calling on God and all his saints to save them from injustice, but most slumped with a sullen air of acceptance of their fate.

Harry was surrounded by the heat and strong beating hearts of human beings, and his thirst grew unbearable. At the end of the eighth day he could bear it no longer. He had enough sense to wait until the hour before dawn, when the prison block was as quiet as it got. He slid over to an old man who had been thrown in the cell that evening, stupefied by a savage beating. He calmed the man and slit a vein in his wrist with his eye teeth, but he had barely begun to lap the blood, thin stuff soured by spent adrenaline, like wine on the turn, when another prisoner saw what he was doing.

The man was a long-distance truck driver, strong and alert despite the month he’d spent in the cell after his truck and its cargo of cigarettes had been liberated. He grabbed Harry from behind and slid a shiv made from a bit of sharpened wire through his ribs into his heart. Harry tore out the shiv and killed the man with an SAS trick, thrusting two fingers up his nostrils, driving broken bone into his forebrain. The quick struggle woke the other prisoners and he killed them all too, in a black/red confusion of screams and shouts and blows.

Then the guards came. He was taken across the compound to Block B, bled, and left alone until the Count came for him.

~ * ~

Weakened by loss of blood and his mounting thirst, Harry is anchored to the present only by the alternation of light and darkness. Each day, he sinks into the oblivion that is deeper than sleep; each night, he is visited by the twisted little undead in the surgeon’s gown, the Count’s assistant.

His name is Lomax. He is an American biochemist who tracked the Count down and offered his services. Amazingly, the Count did not kill him; perhaps Lomax’s willing subservience reminded the Count of the human agent of his British adventure. Lomax was not transformed by the Count, or by his women, but by what he calls a recent laboratory accident. He has been experimenting on the blood of what he calls postanimates, has discovered how to keep it alive and whole by mixing it with a soup of haemoglobin and plasma enriched with glucose and potassium chloride. Each night, he takes a little more of Harry’s blood, despite Harry’s protests that it will kill him.

Lomax is garrulous. He wants to share his secrets. Each night Harry listens, barely understanding, to his theories.

“We will feed you soon, Mr Merrick,” Lomax says. “We need you. You are of the same blood as my master. It runs pure in you, direct from his younger self through the gypsies to you. It has not been contaminated by silver. You must cooperate, Mr Merrick. It will be easier for you.”

“Humans say we are cruel, but it seems to me that science is crueller.”

Lomax ignores this sally. “You have seen my master’s get. You see what his women are like. Warped is a kind word. Although he transformed them by the old way, they do not have the capacity to make get of their own. The women are feral creatures and useful, but they are limited. I have experimented with direct injection of my master’s blood and that of his get into subjects, but the transformations were too violent and created only monsters, things turned inside-out yet still living, and worse. Injection of your blood gives better results, but they are still... disappointing.”

“It should be done with tenderness and desire,” Harry says. He is disgusted by Lomax’s enthusiasm.

The crooked little man giggles. “True, true! There is a change in the blood of the donor that is necessary to initiate a successful transformation of the recipient. Something hormonal, perhaps. If I locate it perhaps I could define what love is.”

“I rather think that you confuse desire and love, Dr Lomax. Our desire is closer to hunger than to love. After we sate our desire we want our victims to love us, but we do not love them.”

After Catherine, Harry has never been tempted to turn anyone else, but he knows that the Count would change the whole world if he could. He is a monster of ego. He believes he can make anyone love him. He wants Harry to love him.

Harry believes that the Count visited him earlier that night, the third since he was transferred from Block A. At least, Harry seemed to wake, seemed to see a dark figure standing in the open doorway, staring down at him. How long had the Count been watching? Harry tried to frame a question, his dry lips splitting in a dozen places, but the figure was gone. A few moments later something darkened the moonlight that fell through the barred window.

Harry waited for the Count to return, listening to distant gunfire and wondering if the rebels might soon capture the security compound and free or kill him. But the Count did not come back. When at last the cell door was unlocked, it was to allow in Lomax.

“At first I thought it was an infective agent,” Lomax says now. “A DNA virus which added genes to human cells at the point of death. Now I am inclined to believe it is something which switches on existing genes. There are things called homeoboxes in our chromosomes, stretches of DNA which code for related proteins which link together to carry out a particular task. Expression of a homeobox is induced by an activator, a substance which causes the control gene to make a protein which switches on the other genes. I think that the blood of the postanimate contains such an activating substance. A flavonoid, perhaps. Whatever it is, it is highly sensitive to silver.”

“You are dying, doctor. I can smell it.”

Lomax lifts the club of his arm. The skin has transmuted to a hard semi-transparent substance something like horn. “In my case, the sequence may not have been fully activated. Perhaps there is more than one homeobox involved. There are many sequences in the human genome which appear to code for nothing at all. Junk DNA, it’s called. But perhaps it isn’t junk. Instead, it may be a relic of our evolution. Perhaps our ancestors were all like my master, a race which lost its nobility by a genetic accident.”

Lomax’s eyes gleam red and wet behind his slab glasses. He says, “Humans pretend to be rational but they are tormented by their animal selves. They are badly knit together, torn apart by a thousand different impulses. But we know our nature completely. It is simple and pure. Hunger, hunger for life. That is all we must satisfy. It frees us from the mess of sex and tribal hatred. All of our kind are one, even the least. Even me.”

“Kill me,” Harry says. “Do it cleanly. Not like this.”

“Oh no, you are necessary. There have been ... problems with our recent converts. One or two have escaped tonight. But I can overcome problems. It’s just a matter of time. You will feed tonight, and I will come again tomorrow.”

Lomax signals to the guards, and takes out the hypodermic.

After Lomax has packed the blood-filled hypodermic in ice and left, the guards push a man into the room. They screech with glee and lock the door.

The man is tall and muscular, dressed in a ripped tunic with colonel’s bars on the shoulders, and torn fatigue trousers. His face is swelling with bruises and he is bleeding from a bad cut over his right eyebrow, and the smell of his sweet blood fills the little room. He moves quickly, ripping a spar from the ruins of the projector and holding it in front of him like a javelin.

“Wait,” Harry says. He climbs to his feet. His eyeteeth prick through his gums, and his jaw aches with the effort of keeping it from unhinging. His fingernails have lengthened into curved talons and he jams them into his palms; the pain makes him cry out, but helps keep the red mist of his mounting thirst at bay.

“I know you,” the colonel says. Despite his bruises and torn clothing he has a commanding dignity. His gaze is steady, and he firms his grip on the spar. “You own the bar on Freedom Avenue. The guards said that you are a monster.”

“I would agree with them.”

“The guards said that you will tear out my throat and drain the blood from my body.”

“I need to feed, but I do not have to kill you to do it.”

“They said you killed twenty men with your bare hands.”

“Yes, I did. I am not proud of it, Colonel. That’s why I’m trying not to kill you.”