The voice says: I have given you the keys of past and present. I have made you immortal. From the place of Now, where past and future meet, you may range through time from the creation to the present, but not beyond into the future, except at the pace mortals travel it—day by day.
What are you? What do you want of me? Says the voice: I want nothing.
In the moonlight the stranger made his way through the stark autumn woods. Once he crossed the road that led to his castle atop a rugged hill overlooking the valley at Bran. The road was lined with tall poles, each bearing the body of a Turk. By chance he stopped for a wary breath beneath the pole bearing the skin-wrapped bones of the Pasha of Vidin, whose fine clothes were now wind-tattered rags.
The Pasha had been sent by the Sultan to depose him, but the puppet had learned to walk without strings.
The woods were not quiet. Night birds preyed and the wind howled in the trees like a thousand cats. The lights of a peasant's hovel were as inviting as the sheets of a king's bed. The stranger was cold and hungry and had not slept for many days. His fine clothes had been torn by thorns in the hidden ways of the deep wood.
A suspicious face peered at him from a half-open door.
"I flee the invader," said the stranger, and at this the door opened wide and a tough work-calloused hand grabbed his, and whisked him inside. The door slammed protectively behind him. Inside the house was a faint livestock smell, a smell that was quite inviting, even reassuring.
"Have you been long in flight?" asked the peasant, a proud but shabbily dressed man.
"Some days," answered the stranger. As he began to remove his tattered cloak, the man's daughter came and lifted it from his shoulders. The girl was young and pink-cheeked, and altogether quite a lovely thing to have been produced by the wizened old gnome. In her eye there was a sparkle like the sun shining through Venetian glass, and it did not escape the stranger's notice.
"You have not eaten," said the old man. He took his daughter aside and whispered in her ear.
"She will bring soup," he explained. He seated his visitor at the rough table and asked him, "Tell me, how near is the Turk?"
"I am not sure. They are searching the area around the castle of the Voivode. They suspect all of noble birth. I was forced to flee upon a moment's notice."
The peasant nodded knowingly. After the Pasha's defeat, the Turkish Sultan had invaded the country himself and deposed the Voivode, Vlad IV, much to the relief of Vlad's subjects, who knew him as Vlad the Devil. But it was not wise to mention such things to a nobleman, even though most were sympathetic to the lower classes.
"Ah, may God have mercy on our poor Voivode," said the peasant, crossing himself ostentatiously. "God protect him!" He did not mean it, of course.
Sasha returned with a bowl of thick soup. She was now wearing a large heirloom cross about her throat. The stranger slurped loudly, manners forgotten in the face of hunger. The peasant was pleased.
After the stranger had eaten, there was a fleeting moment when he seemed somehow unsure of himself. A disconcerted look crossed his scratched and stubbled face, a tortured look.
"Is something wrong?"
"I—I feel so strange. As though for a moment—for a moment I were someone else."
Seeing that the stranger was genuinely puzzled, and that it was no trick to deceive him, the peasant said warmly, "Please, your flight has exhausted you. Share our hospitality this cold night. You shall sleep in the bed of my poor dead wife. Come."
The old man reached to take the stranger's arm, but the visitor had now recovered from his strange lapse of memory, and the peasant was satisfied to lead him into the next room and provide him with heavy quilts that had belonged to the dead woman. From the darkness of the room, the stranger's eyes gleamed, and he murmured thanks.
The Voivode of Rumania, Vlad IV, formerly the puppet monarch of Mahomet, Sultan of Turkey, laid down but did not sleep. He was aware of the living things in the outer world, the wolves and the other prowling things, and the huge-winged owls that screeched in the night. His puzzling quirk of memory was forgotten.
He knew who he was.
He rose, his breath rapid. Moving ghostlike, he was poised and calm as he made his way through the darkened hut. He might have been walking through the ritual of a state dinner.
He stepped to the pallet of the peasant's daughter, and he brushed back the curtain as he would brush away a cobweb.
Vlad saw the dim light gleam on white eyes. Her chill-rouged lips smiled at him across the gulf of night, and her wind-licked cheeks formed inviting dimples. She bared her breast to him.
He bent over, his hands tasting her body. He nuzzled her throat softly. He bit into it. Her body jerked convulsively, and blood poured into the echo of her scream.
The old man came stumbling into the room, an ancient knife in his hand. His eyes were like shattered mirrors as he recognized the bloody-lipped specter in the ghostly light.
"Dracul!"
He turned in horror, slipping in the blood that yet Issued from the body's still pulsing jugular. He fell beneath Vlad's heel with a truncated plea. Vlad began to descend upon the old man like the plague of darkness, like a fog of hunting bats, like a dark sea of wolves. Suddenly he clutched his throat.
Choking, gasping in pain, he felt his body becoming a mist, becoming translucent, transparent, invisible. Before he vanished utterly, his true identity blazed forth, as a spark smothered under pine needles will emerge and consume them.
With a pang of anguish he realized who he was and what he had done.
No! Don't let me remember!
Dracul
Dracole
Dragulia
Dracula
DEACON!
I am Walter Deacon! Walter Deacon—stop—make the pain stop—I don't want to kill—what do you want of me?
The voice says: I have longed for death, but I cannot die. I have tasted death vicariously through the sufferings of those slain upon the altar, but there has been no chance of escape until now. I am imprisoned within the circle and pentagram of stones, but free to move in time. Now you shall do for me that which I cannot do for myself.
No no not again! What do you want of me—why must I kill, why must I bring pain?
The voice says: Fear is the greatest emotion. I do not feed upon emotion—I collect it. To invoke it most fully I utilize the supernatural manifestations most feared by men. Your consciousness of your own identity is always just below the surface, but you can only serve my purpose if you are ignorant of my plans. Therefore, you are no longer Walter Deacon.
No—no not again—please—I don't want to kill—just let me forget!
Says the voice: You are . . .
No no no I am—I am . . .
"I want you to kill my wife," said Catullus in a low and casual voice, as he scratched the loose flesh beneath his jowls.
"Why do you ask this of me?" said the witch.
"Would you like more wine, Mother?"
Looking across the table, Catullus saw not a fearsome skull-faced hag, but only a homely woman past middle age, dressed in a worn toga, sitting with him in the cool evening shade in the patio of his house.
He smiled and ordered a brown-skinned boy to bring more wine. The boy came, poured, and left. Catullus's glance lingered after him pruriently.
Returning his attention to his visitor, Catullus produced from the folds of his toga a leather bag. With a flourish he spilled its golden contents onto the table and leaned forward with a confidential air.
"How soon can it be done, Mother?"
Smiling grimly, the witch raked the gold into a pile and put it back into the bag. Opening her robe as though it were the gate of a treasure room, she nestled the purse against her wrinkled dugs.
"Tonight," she said.
Catullus sat up, smiling luxuriously, as though a great burden had been lifted from his tender shoulders.
"She will go with her attendants along the Street of Tombs, after she is satisfied
that I am drunk and asleep."
With a sweeping movement, he brought the alabaster goblet to his mouth. The purple juice ran down the corners of his lips, down his jaw, and crept under the white of his toga, staining it.
"By Jupiter," he said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, "when she is dead and dung underfoot, and eaten by dogs, then I can do as I please in my own house. I'll have a party and invite that poet—what was his name?—the one Claudius told me about. I shall have him compose me an ode. An ode to the garden where my wife meets her lovers. I will retire early tonight. I will in truth be drunk and asleep when she peers in to find me, as still as an Egyptian statue. Bold bitch! Hah, dead dog!"
He laughed, choked on purple juice, and vomited thinly on the ground beside the chair. He laughed again, reaching for the wine and spilled it. The witch took the bottle and held it to his lips.
He sucked greedily, his eyes rolling.
Later that evening, as the witch prepared her potion of transformation, a sudden sinking doubt came upon her, a doubt—at first—of the efficacy of her powers. Was she really a striga, a witch? Inexplicably the doubt deepened, encompassing not only her powers but her identity, her milieu, her very existence. Then as suddenly as the sensation had come over her, it passed. Ah! We poor strigas, she thought to herself. Impressions of the past and future hover about us like bats about a cave, and no doubt some shreds of memory from the mournful dead. We live between worlds—such is our lot. Thus she explained the strangeness to herself and made it less strange, and was no longer uneasy.
It was dusk on the Street of Tombs. The cypresses were slender obelisks against the blood-red, Tyran-hued purple sky. The massive flagstones of the street were like the scales of some monster fish lying dead in the earth. Along either side of the road rose the tombs, white marble masses of classical proportion. Sea birds flew to and fro, contributing their droppings to the offerings for the dead. The plume of Vesuvius was a witch's hair streaming on the wind. In the volcano's belly the dead cried and grated their tongues between their teeth.
A party consisting of a noble lady and two female attendants with torches walked quietly along, as if they were late mourners. In the distance, horses' hooves clicked on stone, and far away was the sound of a drunken revel, made near by the chill breeze.
The witch crouched in a colonnaded mausoleum, waiting.
Catullus dreamed purple lust-dreams on his couch and hummed obscenely in his sleep to the harp's tune.
The noble lady's servants leered knowingly at one another and flicked their eyes about saucily.
The monster glided out of the tomb's mossy recesses. She had the head and torso of a woman, but at her hips began the body of a great serpent. One servant died of terror on the spot. The other was rendered insane from that moment on. The noble lady's head was crushed between two powerful hands and she disappeared a bit at a time into the monster's fanged maw.
Dawn found the Street of Tombs scarlet with blood along a great distance. There was a dead woman lying on the flagstones without a mark on her. That night a hissing sound was heard and men with torches searched among the tombs. One of them found a naked woman creeping along the ground. Her eyes were glassy. She was hissing like a snake.
Please! Give me back my self! I want to be me again—I want to return to Gertrude, to London.
The voice says: You shall never return.
Is there no escape? For the love of God, tell me! Is there no escape?
The voice says: There is no return, but there is escape. You shall seek it once more—for me.
No, no wait—I—what do you want from me?
Come the answer from it: Nothing.
His mind screamed.
"Murder is a religious experience," said Shamshi.
The girl Humerelli answered, "That is a strange thing to say. Do you speak of the killing of the sheep and goats before the faces of the gods?"
"No, I do not speak of the deaths of animals," he said.
The ekimmu moved closer, smiling, his thick black beard like a bib upon his chest, his dark eyes like nighted caves. Humerelli glanced nervously to the north, along the great Procession Street flanked by the hanging gardens, to the enameled blue glory of the Ishtar Gate. The evening wind blew through the streets of Babylon. Hammurabi of the Golden Age was a thousand years in his grave.
"Do not be afraid, Humerelli," said the ekimmu softly. "Rejoice that you Eve now in the second golden age. After the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon will fall to the Persians, and then it will be Alexander's city, and then it will become dust."
"Shamshi! What are these strange things you say?" said the girl in shocked surprise.
The ekimmu took Humerelli's hand in his own humanlike hand. The girl's brown hand was damp and cold. He felt the flesh of her arm, delighting in the contrasting texture of the smooth flesh and its patina of fine sand grains. All was sand, the streets, the bricks of the city, the desert. Clay and sand.
"Worlds die," philosophized the demon wistfully. "They die, you know, like crushed clay tablets, and they fall and become one with the sand."
"Shamshi, who is this Alexander you speak of? Have we not conquered Ninevah and are we not now supreme in the fertile crescent?"
"Silly child. Do you really believe we are great because we have crushed forty-centuried Ninevah? Why, even young Rome in its short life will be greater than we."
"What is Rome?"
"I—I'm not sure," said the ekimmu. From somewhere the unfamiliar words came: Rome, Alexander—what are they? But then they ceased to be important. The demon laughed and kissed Humerelli impulsively.
The girl smiled. She decided there was nothing to fear in this stranger, though the things he said did not seem to make much sense. She threw her arms around him, thinking that his dark speculations masked only loneliness. They fell to the floor, laughing shamelessly, tussling among the silks and cushions like children.
The sun god descended upon crimson wings into the underworld. The girl and the demon made love on the garden balcony among the cool green of the plants and the humming of bees.
"It is to be like god," he said suddenly.
"What, my sweet?"
"To love and bring death. Thus I praise Tiamat, Mother of Chaos." He clutched her to him as they lay there beneath the winged genii of fertility painted upon the wall in earth-red, dull blue, and white. From corners of the balcony, sphinxes and griffins observed impassively.
"How many miles to Babylon?" he asked impulsively, a queer expression upon his face.
"What? Shamshi—never have I heard one speak as strangely as you."
From some unknown store of knowledge, the words came, a poem from a strange and unremembered childhood—a meaningless jumble of words that yet seemed to hold some secret dark and horrible. And the ekimmu, as surprised as Humerelli, quoted them:
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.
If your heels are nimble and light,
You may get there by candlelight.
Humerelli, vastly amused, began to laugh.
The ekimmu tore her apart. Limb from brown limb, he ripped the flesh from her bones. Some he devoured and some he cast like offal into the streets below. Then there came a shock that stunned his soul. He was surprised to find himself becoming less and less real. He struggled against it, to no avail. Finally he was utterly gone, as if he had never been there at all.
Outside the city's walls, the Euphrates flowed silently into the sea of time.
Letter to the London Times, September 1888:
"Could it be that the knife-wielding murderer that stalks our slums is in reality a member of some heathen sect that practices human sacrifice? That only a debased member of the human species could have committed these atrocities is obvious, but does not the geometric arrangement of wounds on the bodies of Tabram and Nicholls, and especially the pins and other objects laid aro
und the last body in the form of a five-pointed star, suggest some form of witchcraft?"
On the rainy morning of 30th September, 1888. Constable Smith found the woman's body. Blood from her horrible wounds pooled darkly on the stones. The contents of her pockets—all of her worldly goods—were laid out in an arrangement of five around the body: a red cigarette case near her head, a tin box of tea and sugar near one outstretched hand, a clay pipe by the other. By one foot was a red mitten, by the other a ball of worsted. The body was spread-eagled as it were, in the five points of a star. She had been disemboweled with great skill. A kidney was missing.
By a quirk of fate, Constable Smith had arrived only seconds after the fiend had completed the mutilation. Smith chased the phantom murderer through Houndsditch, Middlesex Street, Goulston Street, and Dorset Street. There he lost the trail at a public basin, where bloodstained water still trickling down the drain showed that the killer had paused his flight to wash his hands.
All Dorset Street woke to the demon shriek of Constable Smith's police whistle. Soon they would know that the horror was upon them again.
With a secret satisfaction, Wygiff stepped up to a public post office in broad daylight, and there he mailed a cardboard box to Scotland Yard. Inside the box were a portion of a human kidney and a taunting note written in rude but passable English.
It had taken Wygiff a long time to learn the art of writing, which was unknown among the Celts at the time of his disappearance from their midst two thousand years ago. But the keepers of Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane, had managed to teach him the rudiments of written communication, and had eventually released him as being more or less rehabilitated.
They did not really wish to keep in permanent confinement a feebleminded man whose only crime had been capering through London clad in a fox skin and waving a primitive dagger, apparently stolen from some collection of antiquities. As for the blood on the dagger—no one had been reported harmed, and therefore no complaint could be made against him on that ground.
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