A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  "Mal, who the hell knows?" Jerry said. "I didn't memorize the flucking book, you know!"

  Malcolm glowered at him. "He was called Vlad Tepes, which means Vlad the Impaler, when he ruled the province of Wallachia as prince, or in Rumanian, voivode." He jabbed his forefinger hard on the signature. "WlWalWoi. Vlad of Wallachia, Voivode."

  Holly shook her head. "I really think you're reaching here, Malcolm."

  "Oh, come on, Holly! Admit it! It's proof positive! This guy's father was called the Dragon by his people, and he was called the Little Dragon, Dracula. But his name, his real name, was Voivode Vlad of Wallachia." Malcolm sat down heavily at the table. "This clinches it. Dracula bought Carfax Abbey through my great-grandfather and Mr. Hawkins, shipped boxes of native soil to England through Carter, Patterson and Company. It's all real. Van Helsing, Stewart, Wellington, Carfax … it's all true!"

  Jerry looked at Holly. "Tell him what you told me outside."

  Malcolm looked up excitedly. "Tell me what?"

  Holly repeated her theory and Malcolm listened attentively, skeptical at first, but becoming increasingly thoughtful as she pressed her point with insistence. She concluded her argument by saying, "You have to admit that it would make a lot more sense than all of this supernatural stuff, wouldn't it?" He nodded, not convinced but desperate to be convinced. "It's possible … it's possible …"

  "Of course it's possible," Jerry said casually, as if it were obvious to even the most benighted intellect. "I mean, the alternative is impossible, so this must be the truth."

  Malcolm continued to nod his head but then said firmly, "There's one way to settle it once and for all. I told you what I was going to do if everything else checked out as real."

  Jerry moaned as Holly said, "Malcolm, you are not going to start opening people's graves looking for wooden stakes!"

  "Holly, I have to—"

  "No! I'm putting my foot down here!" she said petulantly. "Jerry and I have gone along with you this far, but this is it! This is the end!"

  "She's right, Mal," Jerry added. "We've checked the obits and all that stuff, and there's no reference to Lucy Westenra anyway."

  "So we go to Hempstead and look for her grave," Malcolm said.

  "No, Malcolm!" Holly said. "I've just about had it with this nonsense! We've driven all the hell over the place ever since we got here; my eyes are probably damaged from reading all these faded old documents; I've inhaled enough dust to make me feel like a coal miner. Enough, Malcolm! Enough!"

  His eyes narrowed as he stared at her, and she felt herself shivering slightly. There was a coldness about his look, something unfamiliar and alien, and when he spoke, his voice was hard and bitter. "You promised me," he said. "You both promised me. I have to find out the truth, and I don't want to have to do it alone. You say that you're my friends, and yet … and yet …" He paused and looked from Holly to Jerry. "You promised me, both of you."

  Holly looked to Jerry for support, but she saw that he, too, had been nonplussed by the strangeness of Malcolm's aspect. She turned back to Malcolm and said, "I didn't mean to yell at you, honest I didn't. I know how upset you are, and … well …" She stopped speaking and looked again to Jerry.

  "Look, uh, Mal," Jerry said tentatively, "how about this: We go to Hempstead tomorrow and look around the graveyard. If we don't find the grave, we go back to London and party like crazy for the week we have left. Will that satisfy you?"

  Malcolm nodded slowly. "And if we do find the grave?" Neither of his friends replied.

  "And if we do find the grave?" he repeated. "Remember what I said back in New York. If we find Lucy Westenra's grave, we open it up and examine her remains. Right?" Again, no response.

  "Right?" he said again, slowly and forcefully.

  Jerry nodded. "Yeah, sure. Sure, Mal, sure."

  Malcolm looked at Holly.

  After a moment she said, "Okay, Malcolm."

  He nodded. "Good." Then something of the customary melancholy warmth returned to his face, and he smiled as if slightly ashamed of his attitude of a moment before. "You have to bear with me. This whole thing is eating me up inside."

  Holly was relieved at the sudden disappearance of the stranger, and she smiled as she squeezed his hand. "You know what I think?"

  "What?" he asked.

  "I think we'll leave here bright and early and get back to southern England by the afternoon. We'll go to Hempstead, find the churchyard, look around, and not find a thing. It's one thing to write a book using your friends' names just for a laugh and using real places and all that, and it's something else entirely to use the name of a real person as a murder victim. Believe me, Malcolm, there just simply was no Lucy Westenra."

  "Couldn't have been," Jerry agreed.

  Malcolm considered their statements. "You both seem pretty certain."

  "I am certain," Holly said confidently. "Aren't you, Jerry?"

  "Not a doubt in my mind," he replied.

  "I hope you're right," Malcolm said, nodding softly.

  Jerry laughed. "Of course we're right, Mal, and by this time tomorrow, not only are you going to realize how silly this whole thing has been, but Holly and I are going to be making you the butt of more jokes than you'll be able to count!"

  They left Whitby the next morning with the dawn. By four in the afternoon they had reached Hempstead. By four-fifteen they had found the old churchyard.

  At four-thirty they were standing silently before the Westenra mausoleum.

  Malcolm Harker gazed out the window of the room he had taken in the King Edward Hotel in Hempstead, watching as the sun sank slowly down toward the distant hills. He did not hear the gentle tap on the door, and thus he did not turn to see Holly Larsen enter his room. "Malcolm?" she asked. "Can I come in for a minute?" He did not respond. He was staring at the ruddy orb pensively, silently. "Malcolm?" she repeated. "Are you okay?"

  He spun around quickly as if startled, startling her in turn with the rapid motion. He gazed at her for a moment and then smiled. "Oh, Holly. I'm sorry I didn't hear you come in."

  She moved farther into the room and closed the door behind her. "I think we have to talk, Mal."

  He nodded. "Yes, we do. I've been thinking this whole thing over, and I have a few ideas I'd like to run by you."

  "That's not what I mean, Malcolm," she interrupted. "I'm not interested in this nutty fantasy of yours, and I'm starting to wonder if … well, if maybe …"

  He sighed. "If maybe we shouldn't see each other anymore, once we're back in the States?" She assented with her silence, and he walked over to the bed and sat down, not looking at her. "I can't say I blame you. There's no reason in the world why anyone would want to stay with someone who has the kind of problem I might have."

  "Damn it, Malcolm!" she said angrily. "You don't understand at all, not at all! Your only problem is that you believe this stupid horror story, and that's what I'm concerned about!" She sat down beside him and took his hand in hers, "Listen, Mal, I'm not really sure that we should break up. It's just that I've had just about as much of this nonsense as I intend to take, you know? You have to get yourself together, Malcolm, you really do."

  Malcolm nodded. "I know I do, I know I do." Then, changing the subject, he asked, "Where's Jerry?"

  "Out hitting the pubs. He's fed up, Mal."

  He sniffed. "Great friend."

  "He is a great friend," she insisted with an adamance she did not truly feel. Were the truth to be known, she had not quite forgiven Jerry for leading Malcolm into the ill-fated tryst with Vanessa; but Jerry's skepticism and common sense were allies in her struggle against Malcolm's delusions, and so she defended him. "You've gotten so wrapped up in this crazy idea that you've forgotten how this looks to me and Jerry Malcolm, this is nuts."

  He looked over at her and then nodded as he squeezed her hand. "Maybe so. We'll know tonight, one way or the other."

  Holly gritted her teeth and sighed. "Malcolm, you are not going to break into someone's grave!"
r />   "I have to."

  "You can't!"

  He rose to his feet and began to pace back and forth, saying, "Listen to me, Holly, listen to me carefully. A lot of very strange ideas have been popping into my head ever since we found Lucy's grave, ideas so weird that they almost scare me, but the ideas keep coming anyway, and the more I think them over, the more sense they make."

  Holly sighed and lay back on the bed. "Oh, Malcolm!" she muttered, her voice laced with pity and disgust.

  "Holly, just listen to me, okay?"

  She sighed again. "Okay, okay."

  "Let's say, just for discussion purposes, just for the sake of argument, that Dracula was somehow able to alter the composition of his blood, make it both static and also somehow regenerative.…"

  "Malcolm," she said wearily, "don't try to make a foolish superstition sound scientific by phrasing it nicely. It's still all nonsense, and deep down inside, you know that it is."

  "Listen, listen!" he said, "Let's just suppose that his own blood held the key to … well, to what Van Helsing called Undeath, in some chemical manner we can't understand."

  "Uh-huh," she said with growing irritation.

  "Let's say that there's a chemical reaction of some sort, and that human blood, real, living human blood, is the catalyst necessary for the reaction to occur. Wouldn't that explain everything? Wouldn't that explain why he lived on for centuries, why he had to drink blood from living people?"

  She sat up in the bed and sighed, resigned to the conversation. "Okay, let's examine that idea for a minute. How does that explain how people killed by Dracula, drained dry by him to the point of death, became vampires after they died?"

  "Maybe he forced them to drink his blood also. If it's the altered blood that enabled him to return from death, maybe he gave them his blood after drinking from theirs."

  She shook her head. "It doesn't say that in the book."

  "Of course not," he replied. "No one ever saw Dracula attack his victims. Maybe each night that he drank from Lucy Westenra, he gave her some of his blood in exchange." He paused. "In fact, why should we assume that what he did to Mina Harker was an isolated incident? Maybe it was, you know, standard operating procedure!"

  "Okay," Holly said. "So if the presence of the blood in the system makes the corpse … I don't know, wake up or something, then why didn't your great-grandmother become a vampire? Why didn't your father rise from his grave, looking for blood?"

  "Because this is America in the twentieth century, not England in the nineteenth. When a person dies he or she is embalmed. The blood is drained from the body and replaced with embalming fluid. They didn't do that to Lucy Westenra. They didn't do that to the women in Dracula's castle, the ones that Van Helsing destroyed just before the final attack on the Count." He paused again, his eyebrows knitting and his eyes blazing with furious thought. "Don't you see? The power, the real power, is in the blood. It's in the blood!"

  "Okay, fine," she said, too tired to argue about it.

  "Second thought," he went on. "If Dracula was the only vampire who ever existed, except for his victims, and if he became a vampire by some sort of conscious alchemical process, doesn't it stand to reason that the process is reversible? I mean, aren't most chemical processes reversible?"

  "No," she answered simply.

  He ignored her objection. "If it could be done, it can be undone, I'm certain of that. There must be a way to counteract the influence of his blood, some way besides taking communion." He paused and thought for a moment. "I know I'm sort of rambling, but the idea is sound."

  "The idea is anything but sound, Malcolm," she said. "Don't misunderstand me here; there are no such things as vampires. But if there were, there wouldn't be any sort of scientific explanation of them."

  "Okay, so there isn't a scientific explanation, there isn't any sort of rational explanation. The important fact remains that the power is in the blood, and there must be some way to figure out why the blood is so powerful." He looked at her seriously. "That brings me to my third idea."

  "Go on," she sighed.

  "Later on, when the town is asleep, we're going to go and check out Lucy Westenra's coffin. Maybe we'll just find the remains of a dead person."

  "First logical thing you've—"

  "But maybe we'll find more. Maybe we'll find a stake sticking out of her ribs. Maybe we'll see that her head was cut off, like it says in the book."

  "Yeah, sure. Maybe."

  "If the blood in my veins is Dracula's blood, then it was this blood, my blood, that turned her into a vampire in the first place. It was the presence of this blood in her body that caused her to rise from death and become a vampire. If it did it once, it can do it twice."

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then her eyes went wide as his meaning became clear to her. "What?"

  "Of course!" he said excitedly. "What do you, I, or anyone know about vampirism, except the stuff we read in legends? Nothing, nothing at all! If I want to understand what's been happening to me, and more importantly, if I want to figure out what to do about it, who better for me to question than a real, honest-to-God vampire?"

  She continued to stare at him, and then she began to laugh uncontrollably. "Oh, Mal, this is too much! This is too much!"

  "I'm not kidding, Holly," he muttered darkly.

  "I know you're not," she said through her laughter. "That's what makes it so funny!"

  He jumped from the bed and went over to the closet, where he took out a black leather carry-on bag he had brought with him on the plane. "While you and Jerry were in the antique shop, I went out and bought this stuff." He emptied the contents of the bag onto the bed: crowbars, a hammer, a flashlight, a whisk broom, and a small silver crucifix. "I'm in deadly earnest, Holly. If we just find an old skeleton, I'll be the happiest guy in the world. But—and I'm not just saying this—if we find evidence that she had been a vampire a century ago, I'm going to try to bring her back to question her."

  "Uh-huh, sure," Holly said, trying not to start laughing again. "Will you be insulted if I tell you that I'm not the slightest bit worried about that possibility?"

  "Of course not. I hope that this is all foolishness. I want to feel stupid more than anything else I've ever wanted in my life. I really want to be shown up for a paranoid asshole, I really do."

  "Well," she muttered, "you're gonna get your wish."

  He either ignored her response or did not hear it. He gazed out the window at the setting sun and said, more to himself than to her, "If it works, we'll be in danger. You will be, anyway. I doubt that Lucy could do anything to me, with my blood already polluted." He turned to her. "You may have to keep a firm hold on the crucifix, Holly. With the crosses and the garlic we should be able to control her, we should be able to force her to obey us.…"

  Holly sprang from the bed. "I'm going out to find Jerry and have a few drinks." Her voice was angry and impatient.

  "Wait a minute," Malcolm said. "I'll come with you."

  "Don't!" She shouted. "Please don't. Just stay here and, and … I don't know, sharpen stakes or something!" Then, relenting slightly, she said, "I'll be back in an hour or so, and then we'll go break into the mausoleum. We'll probably end up in jail, but when I make a promise, I keep it." Her eyes narrowed as she glared at him. "But I'm warning you, Malcolm. This is it, you understand? This is it!"

  She slammed the door behind her, and as she strode angrily down the corridor, she thought, Great, just great. I finally find a guy who isn't a jerk and he turns out to be a nut! I mean, vampires, for Christ's sake!

  In the hotel room, Malcolm turned back to the window and watched as the sun vanished behind the hills. "It will all be over soon, Holly," he whispered. "Tonight we'll either know that it's all myth, or we'll have a vampire to interrogate." He remembered the narrative he had read in his great-grandmother's diary. I wonder if that's what my grandfather was trying to do when he was a child, when he tried to break into Lucy's tomb. I wonder if he had an in
stinctive urge to resurrect her.

  He frowned at his own thoughts. What a strange thought! Why on earth would a six-year-old child have an idea like that?

  Malcolm Harker did not pause to wonder why that same idea had so unexpectedly occurred to him.

  Chapter Eight

  The fog drifted about their feet as they stood in the shadows near the crypt in the old churchyard. Malcolm was calm, but it was the calmness of the still air before a thunderstorm.

  "Malcolm," Holly whispered, "I want to go home!"

  He shook his head slowly, without looking at her. "Either it's all true or it's all false, the evidence we've uncovered notwithstanding. If it's all nonsense, then nothing is lost, no one is hurt, and everything is okay. If—God help me if it's true, then I'll be safe, and I'll be able to protect you. She would want true human blood, not mine."

  "Oh, Malcolm!" Holly sighed.

  He stopped and stood contemplatively before the rusted iron gate whose bars covered the cracked wooden door. Then he dropped down to one knee and began to rummage around in the black bag as his companion rubbed her arms against the cold, damp night air and looked around nervously. "What if somebody sees us?" she whispered. "We could get arrested!"

  "Shhh," he replied, taking a flashlight, a crowbar, and a hammer from the bag.

  "I'm serious," she said. "I mean, nobody'd believe the story that you—"

  "Shhh!" he repeated emphatically, shooting her an impatient frown. He rose to his feet and inserted the crowbar between the two iron slats that formed the nexus of the gate frame and the heavy inlaid lock. He grabbed hold of the end of the crowbar with both hands, and after bracing himself against the wall of the tomb with his left foot, he gave a mighty pull. The rusted old lock snapped, and the iron gate swung open as bits of brown metallic dust splintered off and fell from the long unused hinges.

  They stood for a long while, staring at the wooden door with the long, warped crack that extended from top to bottom on the right side. At last she said, "Please, please let's get away from here! I'm scared!"

  Her words seemed to awaken him from some private reverie and he snapped his head in her direction. "I thought you didn't believe in any of this."