The Mammoth Book of Dracula (78 page)

“What? Nothing?”

Neumann shook his head. “Although, he does talk in his sleep. We’ve got a VA mic in his cell. There are tapes if you’d like to listen.”

“Not just now. I’d like to be free of anything that might influence any conversation.” She thought of the forensic pictures of Lisa Chettle, his first victim, her remains flapping in the branches of a tree like strips of cloth. “Well, as free as I can make it.”

“I understand. I’ll give you a copy of the tape to take away. But you’ll have to sign a legal waiver agreeing not to reproduce the material in anything you write.”

He joined her in front of the screen. He was wearing a sweet, expensive aftershave; it had brought his skin out in reddish bumps. When he spoke again, it was in a conspiratorial murmur as though this room, as opposed to Salavaria’s cell, was being bugged. Perhaps it was.

“Before you leave, I could show you my quarters. It might be amusing.”

Niam looked up at his florid face and felt a wave of nausea wash through her. She guessed it would be anything but amusing.

~ * ~

He became more animated when she entered, but not much more.

“Gyorsy? Hello. My name’s Niam Foxley. Uh, can I call you Gyorsy? You agreed to speak to me?”

“Don’t talk to me as if I were an idiot. I know who you are. My brain works okay. Sit.”

“Thank you. I—look, I can’t pretend ... I’m a little nervous. I’m a lot nervous. I’ve never ...”

“Never what? Passed the time of day with a serial killer before? Is that what you were going to say? Or something more emotive. A pervert, yes? Or better: a psycho. A ding-dong fucking psycho.”

“Prisoner 2433249. Code breach. Any more of that, Sally, and you’ll be on bread and water for a week’’

He looked up, then closed his eyes and smiled. “Apologies Professor. I was not thinking.” His gaze levelled with hers once more. It was not, she noted with some discomfort, unpleasant. “And apologies to you too, Ms Foxley ... Bread and water, though, that’s for your benefit. Prison brutality is not dead, you know. I’ll be scarred before the day is out. Batons are still the favoured weapon, even as we reach the end of the century. You’d think they’d come up with something a little more modern. A little more
Star Wars.”

He shrugged her towards the chair opposite. “I’d offer to make you some tea, but I’m not allowed near the kettle,” he said. His voice carried some of the authority she’d missed in his physique.

“I’m not thirsty,” she said, through a mouth that had become powder dry.

They sat silently, his eyes sad, absent of any mocking of her as she fumbled her interview materials on to the table.

“Where do you come from?”

“Cusmir, in the south of Mehedinti. Romania. Although I lived a great part of my life in Hungary before moving here. In a village, Bitcse, with my grandparents.”

She had a bunch of questions ready to recite, designed to bring him out of his shell. What shell? He knew why she was here, his glittering eyes said so. The questions were there for her. They were a runway for her to gather pace before she launched herself at the big one. Now she saw she didn’t need it. “Why?” she mouthed, unable to summon a squeak of sound.

“Do you know what it is like to float in a bath of blood?” he whispered. “To sleep in a bed with corpses that cannot close their eyes? Do you know the feeling, when you take something incontrovertibly positive as a life and turn it, with your own hands, against everything that is outlined in its code, to oppose what nature intended?”

There was no gloating in his revelations, no theatre. His voice became drawn and robotic, reciting the delusions of his psychosis as though they’d been scripted for him. She was grateful she didn’t have to ask any more questions; he guided her through the misery without prompt. He began to quietly cry through his words, a wetting of the bluish skin beneath his eyes. He looked pathetic, not the man who had torn an unborn child from the womb of Emily Tasker and partially devoured its face while the mother bucked in the throes of haemorrhage.

“I didn’t do it for me. I didn’t do any of it for me,” he said. “I was trying to atone for the actions of my forebears and trying to lay a safe passage for the family I once thought I might have. Imagine,” he snorted, twisting his face, “me, The Leech, fathering children. The press would think the pram I sat them in a snack bucket.”

She recoiled from the image before it had a chance to solidify. She noticed she had neglected to switch on her Dictaphone; her notebook was bare, the point of her pencil lead sharp. It did not matter—his words were scarring her. She would not forget.

The interview swayed between them, like the pendulum of a clock. Time seemed to condense, become syrupy, as he wove his bland, bitter narrative. At times, he swung in so close she feared she would smell the mealy stench of raw corpse on his breath: she almost cried with relief that he smelled of Potter’s throat pastilles. Only when the guards moved in with their weapons cocked did she realize that Salavaria was touching her; she did not have the strength to pull away. When she did, she was aware of a tablet of paper tucked between her fingers.

“I hope I’ve done enough,” he said. “God knows I’m not safe here if I haven’t.”

“What do you fear?”

“You’ll discover that soon,” he said, and nodded. “The bureau.”

She clenched her hand.

In the relative sanctity of her car, Niam allowed herself a long, whooping exhalation. She had to try three times to fit the ignition key into the fascia but her hands were still shaking. She had forgotten about the piece of paper but now she unfolded it. How had Salavaria been allowed pens, even paper? She had reported on suicides achieved with both. But then she saw that the paper was an ancient bus ticket, small enough for him to have lodged it beneath a fingernail. The message, such as it was, had been written in blood, a spidery trail guided, it seemed, by a nib no broader than the end of a hair. Before she had even recognized the words as a London address, she found herself wondering who had spilled the ink that formed them.

~ * ~

Niam disembarked at Euston and took the Tube to Holloway. There, she crossed the street and walked down Hornsey Road to a mini-roundabout. Gripped by an unease which had come on with the speed of her arrival—she could be gazing upon Salavaria’s secret London garret within five minutes—she stopped at a corner cafe for a cup of tea. The address burned against her thigh. She watched as a fat, slow fly landed on a cake by the counter.

While the tea was doing its job, she slipped the tape into her Walkman and pressed the play button. A male voice—Neumann’s—cut in with its cool, precise tones. “Night one. Recording starts 03:45 a.m. Second of December 1999.”

There was a thick, ruffling noise possibly Salavaria moving around beneath his blanket and then a short span of silence broken by his moans.

“Jesus, no,” he whispered. “Lord of Darkness, I beg you, spare me. Spare me. All I did was as an offering for you. It was all in the way of atonement. Leave me in peace ...”

A break in the tape, then Neumann was back: “Night two. Uh, recording starts 01:09 a.m. Sixth of December 1999.”

This time the thrashing was more pronounced, accompanied by a tapping sound, a scratching, as of a fingernail on glass. “Go away,” hissed Salavaria. “Leave me be. I have atoned.”

The scratching increased until Salavaria screamed. It did not sound like the scream of the person she had met a day previously. This was bloody and desperate, the scream of a man who was allowing the fear for his own life out of his body. There was a word too, that he gasped repeatedly, once all the fight had left him.

Oupiere.

There were more recordings in a similar vein, and she noticed they grew more frequent until he was having these “attacks” four or five times every night. On each occasion, he used that strange, almost beautiful word.

Oupiere.

She paid for her tea and stepped into the street. The light was on the wane and a bitter wind was flooding the lanes. She pulled her coat tight around her and walked towards Salavaria’s flat. Hornsey Road stretched away from her—a hemisphere of cold light and traffic. Her footsteps thickened around her as she entered the tunnel of the railway bridge. Before she’d passed through it, a second pair of footsteps were marking time with her own.

Niam looked back and saw, about thirty feet away, a tall man in a black polo neck sweater. He was wearing sunglasses with tiny round lenses. Was Neumann having her followed?

In his hand he was carrying a bundle of papers. A black stain soiled the bottom of the package, where he was holding it. He seemed to draw the dark around him, as if he were a magnet for its shade. A thin cloud fussed about his head. It took her a moment to realize that they were flies. She picked up her pace, startled by the panic that had burst in her gut. She fished the keys from her pocket and crossed the road, looking back again when she had reached the opposite kerb. He had not emerged. She ran.

At the communal door, she pressed all the entry buttons until someone buzzed her in. She slammed it behind her before she had a chance to worry about disturbing the other occupants. She had intended to be a little more cloak and dagger. Flicking on the timer light, she took the stairs two at a time, trying to force her breathing to regulate itself. The light died. Cursing, she edged along the worn carpet until she found another switch. How would she get in? Surely he would not leave a key under the rug for her. She had checked before the nonsense of the idea could take hold. But above the architrave she found what she was looking for. When the light had died a second time, she blindly made her way into Salavaria’s fiat. She stumbled to the window and looked down into the street. The man was there—it was difficult to make him out in the darkness. His face seemed smudged, a thoughtless thumb on a charcoal sketch. She watched as his fingers dipped into his package and pulled something black and wet from it. She saw him duck to catch the morsel between his lips. When he went for a second mouthful, he paused and looked up at the window. A chunk of his supper slipped between his fingers and spattered the pavement by his feet.

“Christ,” she said, and moved away.

She felt for a lamp, brushed a hand against its shade, and turned it on. Salavaria’s flat leaped back from her. The living room was tidy, if a little dust-coated. She wondered if she should find a telephone and call the police but reasoned that she was being paranoid and that explaining her presence in a flat that was not hers seemed just too much like hard work at the moment.

There were bookshelves containing a selection of modern novels and nineteenth-century classics. There were vases containing powdery flowers. A coffee table was scattered with magazines a year old. Niam could not ignore the smell. It was not unpleasant, and if she had not known of Salavaria’s habits, she might not have immediately guessed its origin. She followed the slightly stale, slightly acrid odour to the bathroom where she found a sheaf of human skins laid out in the tub. They were yellowish and brittle, like unscrolled papyrus. In fact, on closer inspection, the simile bore additional fruit: brown ink travelled the grain of the skin, skirting a mole here, a scar there, a tattoo. Niam found it hard to work out what the words said. Not only were they in a foreign language, but the ink had dried and leeched into the skin, spoiling its sense. At intervals, however, she recognised a pattern. Or rather, a letter, a capital dotted around the text with curious frequency.

D.

Behind her, in the corner, shin bones were stacked like so much firewood. There was a human head on top of the fridge, a note to buy more matches pinned to its desiccated cheek. She moved slowly, through the dead centre of the room, anxious not to touch anything. Her breath felt extremely cold in her lungs. She saw a painting of a marigold on the wall, a photograph of Salavaria in the driving seat of a sports car.

There was a small ante-room just off the corridor that joined the kitchen to the bathroom. Niam pushed the door back and saw the bureau Salavaria had referred to. It was empty apart from a journal, wrapped in its blue leather binding. To her left, a stack of papers—real ones—were weighted down by a lump of something she was not too keen to study. She elbowed it out of the way and sat on the high-backed wooden chair which was a little too tall for the desk. It creaked massively. She pushed her focus into the densely knitted text, hoping to forget the cloying horrors around her for the revelations she needed so that she could leave. She had had a bellyful of Salavaria’s insanity.

It was hard to read, but the first entry appeared to be dated some time in the last century, 18—what? Ninety-seven, was it? She squinted at the text, running her finger under the elaborately scrawled words. Here and there, passages stood out, not least because somebody -presumably Salavaria—had underlined them.

13th November, 18—

We have been on the road for some ten or eleven days now. This winter wind bites at us with a passion, constantly reminding us of the dead, cold thing we are fleeing. At nights we huddle together, reassuring each other that he is gone for ever, but we never can quite believe it. Pyotr keeps watch while I feed Alexander and help him to sleep. This evening, he asked me why Ubek was not with us. I have dreaded such a moment. For a while I could not answer. I told him, eventually, that she had gone to a better place and had died to save us. The image of her snapped apart in Draoul’s hands like so much kindling will stay with me till judgement day. That we had a part in his banishment from this world is a blessing, yet no amount of pain could be too great for that leech, that evil beast. Dear Ubek.