"Let me guess, my dear Malcolm," Lucy said, smiling. "You found that the blood has memories, did you not?"
This startled him, and he stopped briefly in his slow movement toward the knife. He started moving almost immediately, however, and he said, "Why didn't you tell me about that, if you knew about it?"
She laughed. "Why on earth should I have? I owe you nothing, you little fool!"
He reached the table and turned his back to Lucy so that she did not see as he picked up the knife. "But how did you know?" he asked as he hid the blade behind his slightly cupped palm and then turned to face her.
"Do you think the blood speaks to you alone?" she asked. "Really, Malcolm! You are such a fool. But enough of this nonsense. Is that all you had to say?"
He walked toward her, and behind his back, he moved the knife from his palm into the grip of his right hand. "No," he said. "There is this as well." With a motion faster than he would have thought himself capable, he swung his arm around and slammed the knife into Lucy's chest, burying the blade deep into her undead flesh.
She staggered back on the window ledge and seemed for a moment to lose her footing, but she never released her hold on the jewelry box. In an instant she was once again standing securely upon the ledge, and her eyes blazed red with fury as she reached up and grasped the handle of the knife. "You little worm!" she hissed. She pulled on the knife and it popped out of her with a flat, sucking sound. Lucy leaped from the ledge back into the room and approached Malcolm menacingly. "How dare you!" She reached out at him with her one free hand, still clutching the box with the other, and grabbed him by the throat.
Holly had been standing aside, frozen in a paralysis induced by fear, but the sight of Lucy's hand upon Malcolm's throat seemed to break her free from it. She ripped the small silver crucifix from the chain around her neck and ran forward to thrust it between Lucy's face and Malcolm's. Lucy recoiled immediately, screaming and spitting.
Lucy Westenra jumped back up onto the window ledge and cried, "Soon, little idiots, very soon, you shall pay for your impertinence!" Then she jumped from the window and seemed almost to take wing as she disappeared into the darkness, still holding the jewelry box that contained the remains of the founder of her inhuman line.
Malcolm had fallen to the floor when Lucy had released him, and he now moved on his hands and knees over to the bed. As he pulled himself up onto it, he placed his hand upon his friend's arm and said, "Jerry?"
Jerry Herman's nervous system seemed to have overloaded. He had lain motionless—but for the incessant shuddering of his stiff body—during the confrontation between Malcolm and Lucy. His mouth seemed to have been frozen open, and his tongue darted in and out in a frenzied, serpentine fashion.
"Jerry?" Malcolm repeated.
Jerry turned his head very slowly in Malcolm's direction, stared at him for a moment, and then began to scream. He screamed without stopping, without pausing. He was still screaming when the hotel manager strode angrily into the room, he was still screaming when the doctor arrived and plunged the needle into his arm, and he screamed right up to the moment when the sedative cast him into a blissful forgetfulness.
But they who drink from narcotic Lethe have no permanent escape from evil memories, and he awakened screaming the next day.
Chapter Thirteen
As he sat with his friends on the edge of the large fountain that stood before the Hotel Bernini in Rome, Malcolm knew that he should have felt at least a bit lucky. The Rumanian authorities had not wanted to take any actions or generate any publicity that might adversely affect the American tourist trade, so they chose to disregard Jerry's behavior in the hotel and in the hospital the next day. The voluntary and immediate departure of Malcolm and his party from Rumania aboard the next available plane had been sufficient to smooth the ruffled official feathers.
And old Quincy Harker, informed of the situation by a frenzied phone call from his grandson, had promptly wired yet more money for the Alitalia flight from Bucharest to Rome.
Yeah, real lucky, Malcolm thought. Twenty-four hours since Lucy stole the jewelry box, and here we are with a great suite of rooms in a luxury hotel, with two days of rest and relaxation and sight-seeing before our flight from Da Vinci Airport takes us back to Kennedy in New York.
Lucky as hell.
The argument was not convincing. Neither Malcolm nor Holly felt particularly lucky, and Jerry felt positively cursed—which is precisely what he was.
Jerry Herman looked over at Malcolm and said, "Mal? What are we gonna do? There's gotta be something we can do, isn't there?" His voice was weak and tremulous, and his shaking hands fidgeted incessantly.
Malcolm sighed and shook his head. "I don't know, Jerry. I honest to God don't know what to do next."
"We have to go home," Holly said, her customarily steady, even voice now a whine. "We have to forget about this whole horrible thing, put it all behind us, just forget it!"
"Easy for you to say," Jerry muttered. "How am I supposed to forget it? How can either of us, me or Mal, forget it? Right, Mal? We have to do something!" The emotional shock that Jerry had sustained had rendered him incapable of the petulant rage with which he had greeted the first of Lucy's assaults. He now clung to Malcolm with a submissive devotion, desperately depending upon his friend to help extricate him from his situation.
Malcolm nodded. "We have to find Lucy, we have to get the dust away from her, and we have to scatter it."
"And we have to kill her, right? We have to kill her, don't we, Mal?" Jerry said eagerly in his trembling voice. "We have to kill her, we have to kill her, we have to beat a fuckin' stake into her goddamn fuckin' heart!"
Holly grabbed Jerry's hand and squeezed it. "Jerry, try to stay calm. Don't lose your grip. Try hard, Jerry."
"Yeah, yeah." He nodded, wiping the sweat from his brow and trying to smile as he jerked his head up and down spasmodically. "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay."
"I think," Malcolm said slowly, "that you should go back to the U.S. without us, Holly. You aren't infected, so you might still be in danger. I think Jer and I should go back to England and see if we can find her there."
"Okay, fine with me," Holly said quickly. She firmly believed in standing beside her man, but there were limits.
"Why England?" Jerry asked. "Why not Timbuktu or Peking or fuckin' New Zealand or something? She could go anywhere she wants to go. I mean, she followed us all the way to Rumania, didn't she? Why would she go back to England?"
"Because that's where her grave is," Malcolm replied thoughtfully. "Remember, her coming to Rumania was a matter of necessity for her. She had to get hold of the remains of the one who made her a vampire in the first place, just to insure her own survival. But that doesn't mean that she had any desire or intention of leaving England, not permanently." He paused and thought further. "I wish I could figure out how she managed to move about with such ease from one place to another. I mean, when Dracula moved from Transylvania to England a century ago, he took months of preparation to do it. Where did she sleep? How did she travel?"
"Maybe she turned into a bat and flew," Jerry said. Two weeks ago this would have been a joke. Now it was a serious suggestion.
"No, remember what it says in the book, what Van Helsing said about their powers and limitations. They can't move over water. They have to be carried, as Dracula was, by ship."
"Or by plane," Holly said.
Malcolm considered this. "A night flight from London to Bucharest? A suitcase full of earth from Hempstead? Find somewhere secluded to rest during the day? It's possible."
"But where would she get the money?" Holly asked.
He sighed. "The same place she got her clothes, I imagine. From someone she killed."
Holly shuddered.
Jerry stood up and began pacing up and down in front of them. "Okay, okay, so we get Holly on board a plane, and then we go back to England. If we find her, we kill her, right?"
"It won't be necessary to do that if we
retrieve the dust and scatter it," Malcolm said, "but if we find her, we should kill her anyway—just to be safe."
"Yeah, yeah"—Jerry nodded obsessively—"just to be safe."
"When we go to the airport tomorrow night, we'll cancel our two tickets and get a couple of reservations on a flight to London. Holly, you'll go on to New York."
Jerry breathed deeply. "Look, I can't sit around here watching the clock and waiting to leave. I got to walk around for a while. I'll see you later on, okay?" He began to walk away from them.
"Jerry," Malcolm called after him, "you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, I just want to use up some energy, that's all," he called over his shoulder. "I'll see you around dinnertime."
"Jerry," Holly shouted, "it's way past dinnertime! It's nearly eight o'clock!"
"Okay, so for midnight snacks, okay?"
"Where are you gonna go?" she shouted louder at the retreating figure.
"I don't know," he shouted back. "Go see Michelangelo's Moses or something."
"Church'll be closed," Malcolm muttered. "He isn't going to that church to see that statue anyway. He's just got to wander around, look at stuff, try not to think about everything."
The summer sun was sinking low in the sky over Rome, and Holly glanced up at it as she asked, "Will he be all right? I mean, what if Lucy . . ."
"Followed us to Italy?" Malcolm finished for her. "I doubt that very much. She's got what she wanted. Why jeopardize herself by coming to Italy when she'll be safe in England, in surroundings she knows?"
Holly nodded, wishing to agree with him and forcing herself to do so. "I'm hungry," she said after an interval of silence. "Are you hungry? I wish Jerry hadn't mentioned dinner!"
"Yeah, a little, I guess," he said. "Want to get something to eat?"
"Yeah, I do. And you need something to eat, Mal. You're gonna waste away to nothing, the way you've been just picking at your food." She realized as soon as she made the observation that she should have kept it to herself. They both knew the reason for the reduction in his appetite.
Four hours later they lay silently in the cool darkness of their hotel room, resting in each other's arms, each lost in private reveries. Holly was in a reasonably happy state of mind, considering the circumstances. At dinner Malcolm had eaten but little, but the quantities of wine that they had consumed during and after dinner had seemed to lift his spirits somewhat. It was as if he were a man with a serious illness who was cast into a deep depression for as long as the nature of the disease and the nature of its treatment remained unclear to him, but who, once diagnosis and prognosis had been pronounced, strove to remain cheerful and to avoid thinking of the operation to come. He smiled more frequently than he probably wished to and even ventured a few amusing remarks. Holly seized upon them as a starving woman would a hot meal, and her response to his limited conviviality inspired him to more.
Now, lying quietly in their room, the muted sounds of people and buses and automobiles on the street below reminding them of the potential for life and happiness, they were more content than either of them had been for many days. Holly ventured to roll over and kiss him, and when to her surprise his tongue insinuated itself between her lips, she responded enthusiastically.
Malcolm felt the familiar tingling in his loins, and his hands gently sought out her breasts beneath the soft silk of her blouse. The old Arab epigram drifted into his mind, that God invented silk so that women could be naked in clothes, and he squeezed her cool, soft breasts with careful intensity. The Arabs . . . akin to the Turks in religion and culture . . . akin to Sultan Murad . . . STOP IT. . . STOP IT. . . NO SUCH THOUGHTS NOW . . .
"Oh, Malcolm," she sighed.
"Holly," he murmured, kissing her eyes and her cheeks and her lips, feeling her hand gently move to the thickening bulge between his legs and massage it slowly, causing his still-half-flaccid organ to become further engorged with blood, with sweet red blood, with hot, pulsing streams of blood . . .
NO . . . NO . . . NO SUCH THOUGHTS . . . STOP IT . . .
He drove the unwanted ideas from his mind and concentrated on the beautiful woman who was lying beside him. She unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it away as he reached behind her and unsnapped her bra. He buried his face between her breasts and kissed them and licked them and sucked on them . . . it was just like . . . just like . . .
JERRY AND LUCY . . . JERRY AND LUCY . . . NO NO. . . STOP. . .
She dropped her skirt to the floor and then opened his belt buckle. In a few moments they were naked, pressed together in an embrace of rapidly deepening passion, their hands running up and down each other's body, their tongues and lips exploring each other gently. Malcolm moved above her and began to kiss her as she spread her knees apart beneath him and closed her eyes in a brief spasm of anticipatory pleasure. He kissed her lips as she took his erect organ in her hands and began to guide it into her, and his kisses moved down from her lips to her chin and from her lips to her throat, to her throat, and his erection shriveled to nothing as he kissed her throat, as he tasted the sweet sweat on her throat, as he heard the blood pounding through the veins and the arteries in her throat—and her throat was white and long and rich and filled with blood. His blood called to him to taste her blood, to drink her rich, sweet, red blood, and his blood told him where to strike, and his blood cried out for more blood, for blood, for blood. She was cattle, she was food, she was redolent of blood, she was filled with blood, she was nothing to him but a cow with blood in her udder, a cow to be milked for her blood, for her life-giving blood. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back, and it was as if he could see the blood coursing through the channels just beneath the skin of her throat; just there, just there, in that spot, the white spot, just there, and that was where he was to strike, that was where his teeth would sink into her warm, living flesh and suck out the warm, living blood. He wanted her blood, he needed her blood, and his own blood cried out to him to kill her, to kill her, to kill her . . .
Malcolm pushed Holly away from him as he jumped backward away from the bed and stared at her in abject terror and self-loathing. She returned his gaze with one of confusion. "Honey, what is it? What's wrong?" He grabbed his pants and shirt and pulled on his clothes and his shoes and ran for the door. "Malcolm!" she cried. "What is it? Malcolm? Malcolm!"
He slammed the door behind him.
Malcolm wandered the streets of Rome through the dark hours after midnight, terrified at the sounds and smells around him. Much as he fought against the sensation, each person whom he passed smelled like food, and the smell of food was the smell of blood, and the blood that ran through his own veins was calling out to him in a voice that he could not still.
It was the dust of the Count, he reasoned madly as he ran wildly down the Roman streets. My blood came into contact with the remains, and I've awakened the blood, I've awakened it! I came to Europe seeking to end this curse, this bastard inheritance, and all I've done is worsen it. I've delivered the only hope of my salvation into the hands of a creature more deeply cursed than I. Damn her, damn her!
The need was overpowering him, and the smell of blood was so thick around each person he passed that he was scarcely able to keep his hands from reaching out and grasping them by their necks. Their warm, rich flesh called out to him. The blood surging through the veins in their throats called out to him.
He ran and ran for what seemed to be hours, until at last he collapsed, exhausted and barely able to breathe. He crawled over to an alleyway and sat back against the hard stone wall of one of the buildings bordering on the alley. Malcolm began to weep and pray, sobbing incoherently. All I had to do was just go to church and take the sacrament, he thought in his misery. That's all I had to do, just listen to my grandfather. And now I've awakened an evil within me; I've inflicted it upon my best friend and nearly killed the girl I love. I've released a murdering monster . . .
Malcolm was so deeply lost in his self-recriminations that he did not hear the clicking of the
high heels as they approached him. He looked up when he heard the soft, inviting voice addressing him in melodious Italian.
A girl of no more than twenty stood over him, smiling down at him and speaking words which he could not understand. She was dark haired and pale in the dim street lighting, long-legged and malnourished beneath her excessive makeup. She wore a very skimpy halter top through which the points of her nipples were clearly visible, and the tone of her voice and the smile of feigned lasciviousness told him that she was a streetwalker hoping to roll what she assumed to be a drunk.
He got to his feet, swaying slightly upon his tired, rubbery legs, and he inhaled deeply of the sweet smell of blood that she exuded. She continued to speak to him in her soft, seductive voice as she ran her fingers enticingly over his body, seeking his wallet. He ignored her hands, he ignored her voice. All he was aware of was the smell of the young woman, a smell of food. He gazed at her for a few moments as the predatory urge welled up in him with overpowering force. He fought against the urge. He resisted it. And then be surrendered to it.
And he felt himself swept up and away once again by the enveloping mists of time, and the sense of emptiness returned as he was cast into the black maelstrom of evil remembrance. Malcolm shook his head and rubbed his face, grateful that he had feeling and presence of mind; but then he noticed that his hair was much thicker and much longer than it should have been; that his upper lip was covered by a thick mustache; that he was wearing chain-mail armor over a caftan of purest silk; that he was standing alone in the dark, silent room, his left hand resting upon the hilt of the sword which hung from the leather belt that encircled his waist. He knew that it was the year 1459, and that he, Vlad Tepes, Voivode of Wallachia, was about to take a dangerous gamble, one which might lead to his death—or to more power than he had ever dreamed of possessing. if he failed, the sultan would have him skinned and raise his hide from a flagpole above the citadel at Stambul; if he succeeded, he would have the armies of the Hapsburgs and their European allies beside him in a war to destroy the Turks; and if that enterprise were to prosper, he, Vlad IV of Wallachia, might well become Vlad I, Emperor of a restored Byzantine realm.
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