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

by Chet Williamson

  Father Henley heard the heavy door close and got up from behind the desk in his office to see who had entered. He smiled at Rachel and said, "Good morning!" as he saw her walking forward down the aisle between the rows of pews. "Father," she said, and nodded in response, hoping that he was not in a conversational mood.

  He was. "Have you heard from Malcolm?"

  "Yes," she replied, trying to mask her disquiet. "I've spoken to him on the phone."

  "How is he enjoying England? Has he gone to the cathedral at Canterbury?"

  "I don't believe so, Father, but he probably will before he leaves." He isn't there to sight-see, she thought to herself.

  "Well, he certainly should go there while he's in England," Henley said, walking with Rachel back to the storage room where the candles and altar cloths were kept. "Travel can be such a broadening experience if you make a point of seeing the right things." He heard Rachel emit a curt, humorless laugh, and he looked at her closely, noticing for the first time that something seemed to be amiss. "Rachel?" he asked. "Is everything all right? You seem troubled."

  She shook her head emphatically. "No, I'm fine, Father. Everything is just fine."

  Henley was not persuaded. "You're worried about Malcolm, aren't you?"

  She grimaced. "Yes, I suppose I am."

  He took her hand and patted it comfortingly. "Well, I don't think you should be. He's a good boy deep down. He'll turn out just fine, I'm sure of it."

  "Yes, I know," she replied without conviction. She withdrew her hand from his and turned away.

  "This isn't unusual, you know. We all have periods of doubt and temptation." Henley laughed softly. "I seem to recall that you had your moments yourself, when you were a teenager. Remember?"

  "Yes, Father. I remember." Rachel gazed distractedly at the wall as she took the folded altar cloth from the shelf. I remember, Father Henley, she thought.

  I remember how suffocated I felt in my grandfather's home. I remember how absolutely stifling the piety and the propriety seemed to me as I entered my teenage years.

  And I remember how much in love I was with Billy Malone when I was fifteen. He was eighteen, practically a grown man, and he made me feel so special, so different, so grown up. A bad boy, Grandfather said. A bad influence. I remember that big argument the day I ran away from home, ran away with Billy, went to live in Manhattan with him and his friend … what was his name? Frank? Fred? …

  I remember, Father Henley. I remember how delightfully wicked it all was, how exciting and Bohemian and romantic. I remember that bottle of chianti we drank up on the roof of that run-down tenement. I remember lying on my back on the warm, prickly tar, staring up at the moon as I gave myself to Billy and clutched his shuddering body tightly to mine.

  A woman and free. Fifteen years old, and I felt myself a woman and free.

  I remember.

  And then I went home to confront Grandfather, to demand a recognition of my freedom and my womanhood. He wept so hard, so long, so bitterly, but I was adamant. I would not be moved.

  And then he told me everything. And then I read Mina's diary.

  And something died inside me, some glowing ember was extinguished, some flame flickered and was snuffed out. Perhaps it was the evil dying. Perhaps it was the blood sinking back into the cold darkness of oblivion.

  Or perhaps what I felt was the cold steel of chains wrapping themselves around my soul, locking me up within the prison of fate, stripping away all happiness and all freedom.

  Possibilities. That was what I had felt die in me, possibilities. It was the end of joy, the loss of hope, the death of dreams.

  Yes, I remember.

  Henley was speaking to her, and she turned abruptly in his direction. "I'm sorry, Father. What did you say?"

  "I said that we all go through dangerous times in our youth, but we come through them, with God's help, just as you did. Your life could have turned in a tragic direction. But just look at you now."

  "Yes," she muttered as she took the candles out of the cardboard box which rested on the shelf beneath the altar cloths. "Just look at me now." Henley seemed about to speak again, but her tone and demeanor had a cold finality about them and Henley felt himself somehow dismissed. He went back to his office, wondering what was bothering her.

  Rachel went about the process of preparation with her customary efficiency, and soon the candles had been replaced, the citorium and chalice polished, and the cloths upon the altar, lectern and pulpit changed to the colors appropriate to the Sunday on the church calendar.

  When she was finished she sat down in the front pew and stared silently at the large golden crucifix upon the altar. Then she crossed herself, closed her eyes and began to pray "Lord, protect Malcolm," she whispered. She could feel the tears roll down her cheeks despite her attempt to prevent herself from crying. "Don't let anything happen to my little brother, Lord, don't let anything happen to my little brother …"

  Father Henley stood at his office door, quiet and motionless, watching the weeping woman, listening to the soft and unintelligible sounds of her muttered prayer. His assistant, Father Terrence Langstone, came up beside him and whispered, "Matt, is something wrong? Mrs. Rowland seems very upset."

  "It appears so, Terry," Henley said softly.

  "Is it her brother again?"

  "I thought so at first, but I get the feeling it's something else. I don't know. She doesn't seem to want to discuss it with me, and I don't want to intrude unless she brings her problem to me herself. She's communing with God, and He can be more help to her than I can." The two priests disappeared behind the office door and left Rachel Rowland to the privacy of her prayers and her fear.

  "Be with him, Lord, be with Malcolm. Protect my little brother, Lord, don't let anything happen to my little brother …"

  Chapter Ten

  …When I could see again, the driver was climbing into the caleche, and the wolves had disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main always ascending. Suddenly I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky …

  "I don't want to hear it anymore, man!" Jerry shouted, grabbing Malcolm's copy of Dracula from his friend's hands and throwing it on the floor. "I just don't want to hear it anymore!"

  "Jerry," Holly said sympathetically, "try to calm down. Of course you're upset by all of this, but—"

  "Upset!" he shouted. "Why the hell should I be upset? Lots of people get bitten by vampires!" He shook a closed fist at Malcolm and spat, "I swear to God, man, if we get out of this alive, I'm gonna kill you!"

  Malcolm returned Jerry's furious glower with a steady, impassive, almost indifferent look of minor irritation. "If we're to be certain that we've come to the right place, Jerry, we have to check and review all of the references in the book. I was only reading it aloud so as to invite your comments, that's all." He sniffed. "Sorry if it annoyed you!"

  "You want a comment?" Jerry shouted. "Okay, here's a comment! How could you get the two of us involved in this thing? You stupid son of a bitch, don't you realize what's happened to me?"

  Malcolm reached down and picked up the paperback book. "I've already apologized, Jerry," he said softly. "I don't know what else I can say."

  "Apologized! What good does that do me?"

  "All right," he said testily. "If you're so damn angry at me, why did you continue on with us? Why are you here in this hotel with us in Rumania? Why aren't you back in the United States?"

  "Because this isn't a game anymore! I had to come with you to make sure you don't fuck anything up! I mean, we're talking about my life now!
"

  "And we were talking about my life before," Malcolm pointed out.

  "The hell we were! We were talking about some nutty obsession of yours, some stupid story your crazy old grandfather told you! We weren't talking about anything real!"

  "Yes, we were," Holly sighed. "We just didn't know it." She walked over to the window and pulled aside the drape that Malcolm had closed earlier to shield his eyes from the brilliant sun of the Carpathian summer. She did not open the drape but merely parted it slightly so that she could look out at the town square of the small Rumanian city of Oradea.

  It had taken them a full week to get from London to Bucharest. The actual travel time, of course, was a mere five hours by plane, but the preparation for departure had taken six days. A two-hour wait in line at the Rumanian Tourist Bureau offices on Halsworth Road in London had been their introduction to the almost Byzantine complexity of the Rumanian bureaucratic labyrinth, made all the more frustrating by the fact that there were only two people ahead of them dealing with one apathetic, lethargic clerk. It had required another five days for Malcolm, Holly, and Jerry to obtain the necessary entrance visas, transit visas, exit visas, auto insurance card, and temporary driver's permit, to which was added the mandatory security checks, questionnaires, and itinerary verifications. Malcolm had made certain that the latter were left somewhat flexible, for he was not entirely certain at that point where they would be going. He knew that Bran Castle near Brasov and the Snagov Monastery were two places that they had to examine, but he was aware of the strong possibility that other areas might need to be visited if the remains of the Count were to be found.

  He did not waste the week during which the Rumanian bureaucrats were processing their forms. While Jerry and Holly nervously watched the days and hours pass away, Malcolm spent half of each day sequestered in the stacks of books on geography and history at the British Library. He spent the other half teaching himself Rumanian—a task made less difficult by the facts that Rumanian is of Latin derivation (not Slavic like most of its neighbors); that Malcolm was already fluent in German and French, could sight-read Latin and ancient Greek, and thus had a demonstrable affinity for foreign languages; and that he had discovered a kosher restaurant not far from St. John's Wood in London which was run by a Rumanian Jew, with whom he was able to practice speaking and listening. By the end of the week he had developed a competency in the tongue. Though not fluent, to be sure, he felt secure in the hope that he would be able to get around in Rumania without too much difficulty, as long as he kept his grammar book and dictionary close at hand.

  It was the other half of his daily study that he knew to be the more important, for to find Dracula's remains it would be necessary to find his grave. This promised to be no easy task. Malcolm made copious notes on his reading and research, and he realized after only a few days in Rumania that he had been correct in his careful attention to historical fact.

  The three young Americans had departed from Heathrow Airport in London in the morning, arriving in Bucharest in the afternoon. The rest of that day was spent in checking and rechecking their visas and other documents, and they were unable to begin the search until the next day. By the end of that second day, Malcolm had begun to suspect that the sites visited by the so-called Dracula Tours organized by the government of Rumania were to be of no use to him; by the end of the fourth day, he was certain of it.

  In the center of Lake Snagov, just outside of Bucharest, was an island upon which stood a monastery that had been endowed by Vlad the Impaler, and which was the traditional site of his burial place; but a few hours in the monastery, looking around and reading the literature available there, had made Malcolm and his friends realize that this tradition was without foundation. The long drive the next day took them from Bucharest in Wallachia to Brasov in Transylvania, just outside of which was Bran Castle, built by the Voivode Ion the Terrible in 1377 and briefly occupied by Vlad IV in 1462; hardly the "Castle Dracula" his great-grandfather had visited in 1889, the castle within which Van Helsing had destroyed the three female vampires and beneath the shadows of which Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris had stabbed the monster to death later that same year.

  None of this surprised Malcolm, for his own researches had led him to some conclusions derived from the careful comparison of facts and very careful reasoning.

  There were many traditions regarding the death of Vlad IV one of which was that he died fighting the Turks at the Battle of Oradea in 1476. Malcolm knew that though Vlad had been the Voivode of Wallachia, it was to a castle in Transylvania that his great-grandfather had been summoned a century before. Oradea was in Transylvania, and the original manuscript of the Stoker book had shown that Oradea was the site of the first journal entry by Jonathan Harker, not Bistritz as the printed version would have it. If Vlad IV did indeed die in the Battle of Oradea, that might explain his subsequent rise from death to undeath in Transylvania rather than his own province of Wallachia.

  If Oradea was the city near the castle, then near there they would find the ruins of the vampire's medieval fortress. All of the nobles of medieval Rumania were related by marriage or blood, so it would not be unusual for Vlad to have had a personal residence in the province of a cousin voivode. The problem, of course, was that Rumania, like all European countries, had been picked to the archeological and historical bones years ago. If there were a ruin associated with Vlad Dracula near Oradea, the Rumanian Tourist Bureau would have been exploiting it already. Then he found a notation in an archeological guide that near the border—near Oradea but in Transylvania—was a site designated by the Rumanian government as a historical edifice not open to tourists. The exact words, expressed with the unintentional humor so characteristic of communist bureaucracies, were that the site was an "unauthorized ruin."

  And so, after visiting Snagov Monastery and Bran Castle, just to be certain, just to be sure to leave no stone unturned, Malcolm, Holly, and Jerry had driven to the small city near the Hungarian border, all believing that it was this "unauthorized ruin," this decaying castle, unmarked by scholars other than Balkan medievalists and unknown to the Western Dracula enthusiasts, that was the burial place of Vlad the Impaler.

  It was this castle whose tumbledown towers and broken battlements, as Jonathan Harker had so accurately and evocatively described them, even now brooded over the little Rumanian city. The castle that Holly Larsen gazed at from the window of the hotel room with such unadulterated dread.

  "All you have to do is gather up his remains, right?" she asked. "You don't need me to help do that, do your'

  "Hmmm?" Malcolm asked.

  "I just can't go with you," she muttered. "I just couldn't take it if something else terrible happened."

  Malcolm, who had resumed reading in the midst of Jerry's tirade, looked up from his book. "What did you say, Holly?"

  She turned back to him. "I just can't go with you, up there to that place. I'm sorry, Mal, but I just can't. I don't think I'm ever going to forget what I saw in that crypt, and I just couldn't take it if anything like that happened again."

  Malcolm nodded. "It's just as well. I don't think either of you should go with me. If the remains of the Count are connected to the power of my… of the blood … well, I don't know what kind of an effect it might have on me."

  Holly blanched. "What do you mean?"

  He rose from his seat to walk over and take her in his arms. "I'm just thinking of what happened when I was with Vanessa, that's all. There may be a risk, and I don't want you exposed to it. It's enough that you came here with me. Remember, I told you to wait for us in Bucharest."

  "I know," she said, nodding. "I just couldn't let you go by yourself."

  "Hey, thanks a lot," Jerry grumbled. "What am I, a suitcase?"

  "You know what I meant, Jerry," she said kindly. "I'm worried about you, too." She looked back at Malcolm. "But I just can't go to that castle. I'm too scared."

  "I understand completely," Malcolm said. "You're not the only one who's s
cared. So am I."

  She shook her head. "You don't act it. You don't seem scared at all."

  "Maybe 'apprehensive' is the better word," Malcolm conceded. "You know, it's funny, but now that I know the truth about myself and my family, now that I have some hope for a solution to the problem, everything seems to be … well, somehow more manageable. I'm worried, I'm nervous, I'm tense. But …" He paused, as if seeking the proper words with which to express his nebulous feelings. "This all seems right to me somehow. It seems like I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, what I was born to do. I know it sounds silly, but this all seems somehow predestined."

  "Now he's talking about destiny," Jerry sighed. "Born to be a corpse collector. Why couldn't you be born to be a chiropractor or something?"

  "Oh, Jerry, cut it out," Malcolm said irritably. "I'm not explaining this very well. All I mean is that I have to go up there, I'm supposed to go up there. You two aren't."

  "Wait a minute, man," Jerry said. "I'm going there with you. I have too much riding on this to let you do it all by yourself. No offense, Malcolm, but this little European expedition of yours hasn't exactly been a smashing success so far."

  Malcolm shook his head. "Jerry, I don't want Holly left here all alone."

  "What do you mean, all alone?" he asked with exasperation. "We're in a hotel, for Christ's sake, not some bar in the South Bronx! Nothing's gonna happen to her in a fancy hotel." He paused. "Fancy for Rumania, anyway."

  "Jerry, this is a provincial backwater in what is still really an underdeveloped country. We aren't in France or Sweden, you know. A young foreign woman alone is just not safe, and I'll be able to concentrate on what I'm doing a lot more easily if I'm not worried about her."