The Voivode stood in contemplative silence, his graying mustache drooping with the frown of his face. There was a scream that rent the silence, but the Voivode did not hear it.
The woman screamed again, and Malcolm jumped up. "Rachel!" he shouted, "Rachel! What is it?" He ran from his bedroom and threw open the door to his sister's room. Malcolm shook his head to clear it as the words of the dark spirit echoed in his ears.
Rachel was sitting upon the edge of her bed, pallid and trembling, her eyes darting insanely back and forth. "Malcolm!" she screamed when she saw him. She pushed herself up onto her feet and seemed almost to collapse forward into his arms.
"What happened?" he asked. "Why are you screaming? What the hell happened?"
"I was dreaming … I was … I was someone else … I was him! I was him! I was dreaming, but my dreams were his memories!"
"Wh … ? Rachel, that can't be." Malcolm led her back to the bed and seated her upon it, sitting down beside her. "I have these … I don't know, these visions because I was in close proximity to the remains. But you …" His face went white. A terrible idea had occurred to him.
"I was speaking to a … to a thing, a demon," she wept. "Malcolm, he had a plan, he had a trick he was playing. I don't know what it was, but there's something, something!"
"Rachel," Malcolm said urgently, "the evening I returned from Europe, did you let anyone in the house, anyone you didn't know, didn't recognize?"
"The thing laughed at me, it laughed at all of us," she babbled on, not hearing him. "It kept saying that things were not as they seemed to be, that we were all fools, that he would triumph."
"Rachel, damn it, listen to me!" Malcolm shouted. "Did you let anyone …" His question was interrupted by the sounds of crazed laughter coming from down the hall. He cocked his head to listen, and Rachel, hearing it also, took her breath in sharply. It was their grandfather.
Malcolm ran from the room with his sister close behind him. They burst into old Quincy's bedroom to find the old man standing unsteadily beside his sickbed, his aged frame trembling and swaying, his eyes wide and mad, his quivering lips turned upward in a frightening grimace as the bizarre laughter continued to erupt in short, feeble bursts from his creaky lungs.
Malcolm rushed forward and grabbed the old man by the shoulders. "Gramps!" he said. "What are you doing? Are you okay?"
"Fools, stupid fools!" old Quincy said, and laughed. "You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's."
"Grandfather!" Rachel whispered. "What are you saying?"
"You shall be sorry yet," the old man said, still laughing.
"My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries!"
Malcolm shook his grandfather gently. "Gramps, wake up, wake up! You're dreaming. Wake up!"
The mad aspect of the old man's eyes suddenly faded into a confused normalcy. "M … Malcolm," he said weakly, then fell forward into his grandson's arms. Quincy wheezed and pressed his hands spasmodically to his chest as he muttered unintelligible sounds of fear and pain. Malcolm continued to hold his grandfather as Rachel ran to the phone to call an ambulance.
Chapter Sixteen
Hours later, Jerry Herman pressed the doorbell of the Harker home for the fifth time. He tapped his foot with irritation, cursed under his breath, and was just about to turn and walk away when the cab pulled up and Malcolm and Rachel climbed out. Malcolm put his arm around his sister, and together they walked slowly toward the front door. As they drew closer, Jerry did his best to muster up a smile as he said, "Where were you two? I was just about to …" He stopped as he realized from the looks on their faces that something was amiss. "Hey, what's wrong?"
"It's Gramps," Malcolm sighed. "He's in the hospital."
"Oh, shit, Mal, that's too bad. Is he going to be okay?"
"He's going to die," Rachel muttered as she walked past him and entered the house.
Jerry looked at Malcolm, and Malcolm shook his head. "He had a memory, like I've been having, a memory from the blood. Rachel had one, too, but Gramps is just too old and too weak to be able to handle it." He laughed without humor. "God, I don't know if I can handle it."
"But how … I mean, I thought … how could they be having these dreams like you've been having?"
Malcolm entered the house and Jerry followed. As Malcolm poured himself a glass of bourbon at the bar in the sitting room, he said, "Early last evening, before Holly and I got home, Lucy must have killed a nun and stolen her clothes. Maybe she did it in England, I don't know. She came here to the house, pretending to be a new worker at our parish church, sent over to visit with Gramps."
Jerry sighed, knowing what Malcolm was about to say. "And so Rachel invited her in."
"Yes," Malcolm said, nodding. "Rachel thought she was a nun and invited her in. She was carrying a large shoulder bag, and the jewelry box must have been in it. She must have hidden it somewhere in the house."
Jerry shook his head and frowned. "I don't understand it, Mal. I just don't understand it. What's the purpose of all this? Why is she doing this to us, to you and me and your family? It just doesn't make any sense."
Malcolm poured a glass of bourbon for Jerry and handed it to him. "It makes perfect sense. At least I can think of a scenario that explains it all."
"Well, let me in on it," Jerry said, seating himself in Quincy's plush chair. "I do have a personal interest in all this, you know."
Malcolm sat on the sofa and drank deeply from the fiery liquor. He shuddered slightly as the bourbon burned its way down his throat, then he said, "Dracula vowed revenge on his enemies, and whenever he vowed revenge, he somehow managed to take revenge. The Turks found that out, I think."
"The Turks? What—"
"Imagine this," Malcolm went on. "Imagine that the Count knew that Van Helsing and my grandparents and the others posed a threat to him. Imagine that he forced my great-grandmother to drink his blood so that just in case—just in case, mind you—he was destroyed, some part of him would live on in Mina Harker and her descendants. His being, his blood, would be ever present and always influential, though largely dormant. Imagine that he reasoned that someday, maybe in a hundred years or in five hundred years, the blood would awaken, might somehow lead the person whose veins held the blood, lead him to Dracula's dust. The proximity of the dust would awaken the blood and Dracula could live again in the form of the Harker descendant."
"Doesn't make sense," Jerry said quickly. "If you hadn't decided to go to England to check this all out, if you hadn't come up with your fucked-up idea to resurrect Lucy, you would never have gone to Rumania. Just too many ifs."
"I know, but remember that the threat my ancestors and their friends posed to him was in England while he himself was in England. He may have made the assumption that if they ever caught and killed him it would have been in England, so that his remains and my ancestors would have been in the same country, probably in the same region."
Jerry absorbed this. "Possible. Possible. But then what about me? What do I have to do with all of this?"
Malcolm sighed. "Innocent bystander. Lucy needed you, that's all." He did not bother to apologize once again. "The point is that Lucy is following the commands of the blood. It's in her, too, don't forget. She followed me back here, with your help"—Jerry's jaw clenched at these words—"and managed to hide the remains of the Count somewhere here in the house. There are only three people who inherited the blood, only three who are still alive, anyway. Me, Gramps, and Rachel. Lucy must have hidden the remains somewhere in the house in the hopes of giving the blood enough … I don't know, enough time, enough of an impetus, something like that, to take over the three of us."
Jerry sighed. "Gets worse and worse."
"No, better and better," Malcolm said. "At least we know where the remains are. We have to search the house, tear it apart if need be, and find those remains. She wouldn't take any chances with them, wouldn't just dump them somewhere or sweep them under a rug. She'd k
eep them in the jewelry box or put them in some other container. The only time Rachel wasn't with her was when Lucy was upstairs, so they have to be up there somewhere."
"Is it safe for you to be in the house with the remains? I mean, is it safe for either of you?"
"No," Malcolm replied. "It isn't. But we have no choice. I assume that the power of the blood is greatest at night … though now that I think about it, I've had visions during daytime. But at least we have to take the precaution of not being here after sundown. Rachel and I will have to stay elsewhere, your place maybe."
"Lucy knows where I live, remember," Jerry sighed. "She knows everything there is to know about me."
"I'll have to … I'll have to call Holly, ask her if we can stay with her."
"She'll say no, Mal. She's a sweet kid and all that, but I don't think she wants anything to do with any of this ever again."
"I know, I know. But I have to try. No one else would understand." Malcolm emptied his glass into his mouth and then stood up. "Let's get going."
"Going where?"
"To search the house. We have to …" He paused, placing his hand upon his forehead. He was suddenly dizzy, and he heard the distant echoes of laughter and the clash of swords. He shook his head, and the unbidden sounds faded. "We have to find that box and get the remains out of it and then scatter them. That's our first priority. Once we've done that, Rachel, Gramps, and I should be free of the visions. It's still daytime, so let's not waste any of it."
He and Jerry went to search Malcolm's and Quincy's rooms respectively while Rachel began a thorough examination of her own. Hours passed, and they redoubled their efforts, expanding their search to include the entire upstairs and then the ground floor and the dark, unfinished basement.
They searched every corner, every closet, under every stick of furniture, and when they had finished, they searched again in the same places. They moved from room to room, from level to level, seeking the hiding place of the small box, and, failing to find it, looking in every possible container into which the dust might conceivably have been poured. The box was nowhere to be seen, and the dust was nowhere to be found.
But Malcolm knew it was somewhere in the house, he knew that the remains of the Count were continuing to awaken the memories buried deep in the unholy blood, for another vision hit him as he took a break from his efforts to pour himself a glass of sherry. He found suddenly that the glass had become a pewter tankard, that a broadsword hung from the belt around his waist, and that he was surveying a room filled with loud, drunken rabble. He blinked and shook his head, then remembered who he was, where he was, when he was. My army, he thought. My gutter rats, making merry on the eve of battle.
The feast was progressing with a licentious revelry made even greater and driven to even more frenzied heights by the unspoken knowledge that the Turks were pressing close to the borders. Fear ran as an undercurrent beneath the laughter and the wenching and the drinking and the swordplay. It was fear that drove the drunken rabble who composed the better part of his army to even greater depths of indulgence. It was fear that made them fight and whore and drink as if this were the last feast they would ever enjoy.
But he was not afraid. He was never afraid. He had never been afraid, not once in his entire life. His life had been spent with the threat of death his constant companion, from the moment in his childhood when his father had left him a hostage with the sultan.
He looked out over the revelry, allowing his eyes to drift lazily from one side of the great hall to the other. Here, two dogs were fighting viciously over a cast-off lamb bone; there, two of his scum were slashing at each other with swords; here a young peasant girl was being taken, brutally, against her will by a few of the Mongol mercenaries, her cries of fear and misery inciting laughter and applause; there, a few drunken foot soldiers were vomiting copiously into an empty wine jug. The Voivode smiled grimly. And have I been reduced to this? he thought. I, who once sat beside Corvinus, the Magyar king, and drank from his own golden chalice; I, who once slept upon silken sheets in the private quarters of the sultan himself; I, whose word was law and whose will was life or death for hundreds of thousands of my subjects; I am now the lord of rabble, the leader of mercenaries, the most glorious master of earth's most murderous scum.
When the battle comes, will they stand by me? Do they fear me more than they fear the Turks? I pray that they do.
He did not pray to God, of course. He had no faith in God, no love for God, no need for God, and he hoped heartily that the sentiment was reciprocated. Throughout his long and tortuous career he had adopted and discarded religions as another man might change his cloak. He had abandoned his ancestral Orthodox Christianity while living at the sultan's court, and his conversion to Islam had been one reason why the Turks had helped him gain control of Wallachia twenty years before. And when he had felt strong enough to withhold the annual tribute to the sultan and declare himself an independent prince, he resumed his Orthodoxy as if he had never rejected it. And when the God-cursed Hungarians abandoned him and cast him into prison, he once more cast off his allegiance to the Orthodox Church and made submission to the Roman pope.
Here he was now, the supposedly Catholic ruler of an Orthodox people under Moslem attack. If he was to win the battle that the morrow portended, he would again cast off this most recent religious cloak, reaffirm his Orthodoxy, and thus bind the peasants to him with bonds of icons and Slavonic chants.
Catholic, Orthodox, Moslem—it made no difference. He would become a Hussite or a Jew if policy necessitated it. He had no interest in God.
Ordogh, he prayed silently, put iron into the backbones of this rabble army of mine. I will need each one of them tomorrow against Torghuz Beg.
He moved his eyes toward the center of the room and he smiled again, not grimly this time, but in anticipation. I shall give this scum some entertainment, he thought, entertainment that will amuse them and that will drive home to them how terrible an enemy I can be when angered. You must fear me more than you fear the Turks, my children.
In the center of the great hall, two tall oak stakes thrust fifteen feet up toward the high ceiling. Many years ago—long before his most recent imprisonment—the Voivode had ordered that circular holes be carved into the stone floor of this fortress to give the stakes a permanent resting place.
Tonight two terrified peasants sat on the floor, hands tied behind their backs and ankles bound together. Their simple faces were contorted by the frequent beatings they had received in recent days as they stared upward with abject fear at the sharpened tips of the wooden stakes.
The Voivode gazed down at the two peasants impassively. One of them felt the Voivode's eyes upon him, and he glanced over at the austere figure upon the dais, then immediately averted his gaze. The peasant knew that he was about to die to provide a brief amusement for his lord the Impaler, but to look into the Devil's evil eyes would be to endanger his immortal soul. He looked at his own knees with a fervid concentration, silently muttering prayers to Christ and His Mother.
The Voivode smiled. Fear me, peasant animal, he thought. Your fear may be infectious, and I need my scum to fear me. He turned and nodded curtly at his chamberlain, who immediately walked briskly forward and cried out in a loud voice, "Be still! Be still! Be still and attend! Be still and attend! The Voivode speaks! The Voivode speaks!" Then he stepped back to his position beside the throne and froze in place. The clamor subsided almost immediately.
The Voivode rose slowly to his feet and stood smiling, his pearly-white teeth clearly visible beneath his thick gray mustache. "Is all to your liking, my children?" he asked loudly.
Shouts of praise and approbation arose from the rabble who packed the great hall, shouts of devotion to their Voivode.
He raised his hands, and again the noise subsided. "Where are Jagatuik the Mongol and Yaroslav the Serb?"
Two intoxicated ruffians stumbled forward and saluted.
"It was you who captured these two miserable pea
sants hunting deer on my estate. I have sentenced them to death in the usual manner, a manner entirely appropriate for thieves and rebels. For your loyalty and service, I shall allow you to see to their punishment. Choose two comrades each, and attend to it immediately." He resumed his seat and smiled as the hall was suddenly filled with cheers and laughter.
The Mongol and the Serb pulled a few other drunken revelers from the ranks, and they stumbled over to the two terrified peasants. The cries of fear and pleas for mercy were lost in the din of the great hall, and the Voivode smiled as the execution commenced.
The two peasants were stripped and carried by the soldiers up the long ladders that leaned against the stakes. In their drunken lack of coordination they dropped one of the peasants, who fell the fifteen feet to floor and landed on his side. But the soldiers carried him up again, then held his legs apart as they positioned the pointed end of the stake against the pucker of his anus. The other soldiers had positioned the second peasant in the same manner, and after looking at each other so as to coordinate their actions, they counted, "ONE … TWO … THREE …" and shoved the peasants down. The sharp wood thrust up through their intestines and into their stomachs, to the general glee and delight of the assembled soldiery. The first peasant died immediately. The second lingered on for a few minutes, writhing upon the impalement post, his eyes bugging out and blood pouring from his mouth.
The Voivode smiled, satisfied. Peasants may not kill my deer, he thought. There must be order.
He gestured to his chamberlain, who came forward and nodded obediently at the whispered instructions. The chamberlain scurried out of the hall as the Voivode rose again from his throne and said, "We are honored tonight, my children, by the arrival of envoys from our dear friend Torghuz Beg." The soldiers shouted obscenities and curses at the mention of the name. He quieted them with a wave of his hand. "I shall confer with the Turks here and now. Let us all listen politely to their message." A ripple of laughter floated over the assembly. They knew full well how carefully their Voivode would listen.
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