Dracula's Child

by J. S. Barnes

  ‘Gypsies,’ Gabriel breathed. There was a distinctly boyish note in his voice, as though he thought himself the hero of the kind of story in which a white man journeys into darkness to gain treasure, and in doing so earns the respect of the natives.

  ‘They are the Szgany,’ said Ileana, raising her hand imperiously to keep us where we stood. ‘They will be giving us what we need. But I alone must talk with them.’

  She spoke then in the harsh, angular tongue of the Roumanian peoples. A vein of beauty was audible in the hard lines of its syllables. As she talked, the gypsies – how strangely she had named them – drew back, their manner one of exaggerated respect. She gave more orders (or, at least, what sounded to my ear like commands) and several of the women loped away from the fireside and into one of the caravans. There were no words that I recognised in the lady’s monologue, although one in particular seemed to recur with unusual frequency: ‘Strigoi’. I have no notion of its meaning, yet something in the shape of it seemed, somewhere deep within me, to resonate.

  Ileana’s speech done, she stepped back and took up a curiously choreographed position, facing the Szgany but with one hand, palm outwards, placed before the two of us. I could not be certain – though now I have my strong suspicions – whether this was intended as a gesture of protection or as a symbol of ownership.

  To break the silence, one of the men produced an old violin and began to tease from that flaking, battered fiddle a tune which seemed to speak of lonely roads and treacherous mountains, of lost lives and the impossibility of true love. I turned to Gabriel and, having by now recovered at least something of my breath, spoke some words of Shakespeare’s: ‘Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet aires, that give delight and hurt not.’

  He nodded but, fascinated by our surroundings, did not reply. I was, I confess, made extremely nervous by our having walked into the heart of such a place. Had the formidable Ileana not been at the head of our party I have no doubt that matters would have turned out differently indeed.

  At last, one of the women emerged from a caravan, now carrying in her arms a pile of clothes and a pair of battered packs. Ileana pointed towards them and said: ‘These are for you. Change. Stow your possessions. Your old clothes are to be a gift to the Szgany.’

  I began to protest at this indignity but Gabriel silenced me.

  ‘If this is how it must be, dear Maurice, then this is how it must be.’

  I acquiesced and agreed that, given the nature of the quest, the proffered raiment did seem rather more appropriate than did our city costumes.

  ‘But where,’ I asked, ‘do we change?’

  I expected to be shown to one of the caravans, or at least to some secluded paddock. Instead, Ileana smiled.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You are to be changing here.’

  I must have looked appalled but Gabriel laughed.

  ‘Come, if this is their custom then let us honour it. Let us be gentlemen in this matter. Let us be civilised.’ And in defiance of all English decorum, he began to disrobe. At this sight, the music took a jauntier turn, almost mocking in its cadences. Reluctantly, to the sullen delight of that gypsy band and the inscrutable smile of our guide, I followed suit.

  We left shortly thereafter, dressed in the drab, durable clothes which are worn by all the peasantry in this province and with our few possessions encased in those crudely fashioned sacks which are affixed now to our backs.

  ‘So you are ready,’ Ileana had purred, and it was true that I felt as if some preliminary change had been wrought in us both, one which should make us acceptable to the wild.

  There is little enough to say of the interminable hike that followed, the long, exhausting, repetitive hours of walking, as we ventured farther and farther into the forest, less like explorers, it seemed to me, than children in some grisly fairy tale.

  We stopped only once, for luncheon. Bread and cheese was provided by Ileana, who watched us tear and rip at our repast with notable disdain.

  She must eat in private, when our backs are turned, for I have seen her take no food at all. She bristles with secrets and invokes in the breast of any observer a multitude of questions, the answers to which I fancy it might be best never to learn.

  We walked on. There was nothing to be seen in any direction but trees. All was bark and leaf, root and bough, an arboreal profusion which seemed to eat the light and which rendered our existence in this primeval woodland one of near-perpetual dusk. The three of us were made as shadows, moving ever farther into a kingdom of shadow.

  Eventually, we made camp. We built up a small fire around which the three of us lay.

  ‘Do not fear,’ Ileana said as we slumped miserably in blankets, watching the flames crackle and rise, ‘you are being quite safe here. No animal will come close. The fire drives them away. You fine English gentlemen are both under my protection.’

  So profoundly fatigued were we by the labours of the day that Gabriel and I went to sleep that night almost at once, heedless of the dreadful wilderness into which we had, with such cavalier abandon, delivered ourselves.

  The following day was just the same as our first, a trek along a rarely trodden path, much grown over.

  Little was said between us, although Gabriel and I occasionally exchanged glances of substance. We had no time alone in which to renew so much as an echo of our former confidentiality.

  Once, in the afternoon, Ileana stopped beside the track and crouched to examine a trampled patch of grass. She brushed it – indeed, she seemed almost to stroke it – before returning to an upright position, murmuring: ‘There is another in this forest. A stranger who is not yet known to me.’

  ‘You can tell so much from a few twisted blades of grass?’ Gabriel asked.

  Her eyes flickered up and down his form with the expert’s contempt for the amateur. ‘My senses are acute, Mr Shone. I have honed over many years all the skills of the huntsman.’

  He looked at her with a frank admiration for which I did not care.

  We made camp again just before darkness fell. Gabriel and I busied ourselves with the fire. He avoided any conversation or intercourse with me. For a few moments we lost sight of our dark-tressed guide. She returned just as the conflagration was taking hold, with two plump, sleek rabbits in her arms, their necks neatly broken.

  Precisely how all this might have been achieved in so short a space of time I have no plausible notion, for all that I recalled her earlier remark concerning the talents of the hunter. We ate well that night, though Ileana herself once again abstained. Instead, as we ripped with our teeth at the soft flesh of the animals, she spoke more and in far greater depth and detail than she ever has, before or since. She spoke of the history of Transylvania, and of its peoples, of the Boyar princes, of the aggression of the Turks and their empire, of the courage and resourcefulness of the Impaler.

  In spite of our exhaustion we listened with keen attention, as though at the feet of a storyteller. Again we slept well, warmed by the fire, our heads full of tales of warfare and bravery, heroism and blood, although I felt a little troubled in my mind by what seemed to be a growing sympathy between Gabriel and the woman.

  Another day of hiking passed and we drew near at last to the edge of the forest. The trees began to thin and we caught glimpses of increasing duration of the sky above our heads. I noted that our little group was beginning to divide into two. Gabriel and Ileana walked ahead, talking more and more often, while I, old and aching, struggled to keep pace and, often, even for breath. I felt within me an uneasy queasiness, not wholly unfamiliar, as of that which presages betrayal.

  Again, last night, we made camp, now at the very fringe of the forest, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. As we ate by the fire, Ileana spoke once more of the past, this time of the family that had resided in the stronghold which we were endeavouring to reach.

  ‘The Dracula line,’ she said, her liquid voice rising above the crackle of the flames, ‘was once courageous and true
. In ancient times they were devoted to the care and protection of their people. Yet, over the ages, something in them grew sick and withered. They became ruthless, avaricious and lost all vestiges of mercy. There was being said about them many strange things and many wild rumours flew. Who knows the truth of them now? The last of the Draculas died in the old century. There are no living heirs. His castle has been left to rot and ruin. The common people, they dare not go there out of superstitious fear. But we, my friends, are being far from common. We despise the ordinary. We spurn the everyday.’

  In the course of these accounts, I observed not the lady but rather my friend. Gabriel’s face was a mask of delighted attention, his expression one of adoring credulity of which I would not hitherto have believed him to be capable. Although I remain in a state of near-absolute exhaustion, I found last night that I slept only fitfully. I woke often from bad dreams and stirred awkwardly upon the ground, assailed by doubts and fears.

  I cannot be certain even now that I saw what I believed I saw after midnight or whether it was simply the product of sleep-fancy, an hallucination born of exhaustion and unease.

  Nonetheless, I do believe that, as Gabriel slept on, I woke in the deep of the night to witness the most outré of sights: that of our guide standing, entirely without her clothes, before the fire, her arms outstretched in some hieratic incantation. I am by no means an aficionado of the denuded female form but even I could tell at once that she was altogether remarkable. Her lean, athletic body gleamed with perspiration, yet was she possessed of softness also – firm, high breasts; large erect nipples; a posterior of smooth curves; that mysterious darkness beneath. At the sight I felt breathless, as though, like Pygmalion, I had witnessed a perfect statue come to impossible life. What man of the majority’s persuasion would ever be able to resist her?

  She was murmuring strange words in what I took to be her own tongue, all of them unknown to me save for one: ‘Strigoi’.

  I lay still, filled with obscure and nameless fears, watching this weird tableau through half-closed lids lest the woman realise that she was being watched. My attempts at deception were doomed. I had recovered consciousness for but a few moments before she sniffed the air and turned to face me. I saw then that some liquid substance trickled in the deep valley between her breasts. In seconds she was over me, crouched by my side, closer than she had ever been before. I smelled her then and I understood that there was something metallic in the taste of her, something sour and ancient.

  I could not move. I was made helpless by her proximity. Her soft fingers caressed my face. Her breath, oddly cool, danced upon my skin.

  ‘Sleep,’ she breathed. ‘Sleep, Maurice Hallam. There is nothing here that is for you to be witnessing.’

  Even as she spoke, the world grew distant and all that was about me began to dim. I swooned and I drowsed.

  I am not yet sure quite what it was that I witnessed when I half woke once more in the long hour before the dawn.

  Now I tell myself that it must have been some manner of nightmare, one that was unusually realist in nature. Yet I am not certain. I am not certain at all.

  This is what I believe that I glimpsed as I rose up briefly through my slumber: Ileana, still nude, athwart Gabriel, both of them crying out. Their bodies were lit by the wild capering of the flames and I saw upon them blood in considerable quantity. It glittered in the firelight. Strange shadows were cast about them, so bizarrely capering that it seemed for a moment almost as though the lady possessed upon her back nothing less than a pair of vast black wings.

  Yet the moment passed, as in a vision, and I knew no more.

  * * *

  When I woke again it was first light and all in our camp was as it should be. Gabriel slept, looking as though nothing in the least could have disturbed him. Ileana was dressed again (if, indeed, she had ever been otherwise) and was sitting close to the fire. She smiled.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Hallam,’ she said, to which I replied in kind. She gestured behind us to the great wall of the mountains. ‘Today we climb. Are you ready to come with me to the Castle?’

  My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard and replied with a single, pitiful, croaking ‘Yes’. I was about to ask her more – I swear that I meant to confront her about what I had seen – but then Gabriel awoke and the day began in earnest and my courage, such as it was, melted away.

  We are to leave in minutes. This account I have scribbled during our last hour in camp. We are well prepared. Ileana beckons. The climb is to commence and we have a dread appointment with the ancestral home of the late Count Dracula.

  It may be folly, but if I still believed in the divine wisdom of God, then I should most assuredly be praying to him today.

  FROM THE DIARY OF ARNOLD SALTER

  16 November. To Great Russell Street and to a sad little tea-room in the shadow of the Museum. According to the flaked and speckled sign that hangs above its door it is called ‘The Pony’s Trough’.

  It was here I met Lord Tanglemere just after five o’clock this afternoon. He must have been early for our appointment as he was waiting when I entered, sitting in the corner of a surprisingly large room, with a pot of tea already set before him.

  The air was clammy and stale. There was a smell of steam and second-hand tobacco smoke. The place was all but deserted except for two elderly matrons, lost in conversation, and a sallow fellow with a sloping, protuberant forehead who cast his gaze lazily about the room, interrupting his survey only to take fastidious bites of a thin slice of fruitcake.

  Tanglemere waved me over. As I came closer, I saw that his old wolfhound lay on the floor by his feet, stretched out and sleeping. Close up, it is an ugly brute.

  ‘My lord,’ I said, trying to make sure I had the proper deference in my voice.

  ‘Mr Salter. Do take a seat.’

  Tanglemere indicated the chair opposite. I sat down, taking care not to wake the animal between us.

  ‘This is a fine cafeteria,’ I declared.

  ‘On the contrary, Mr Salter, the Trough is thoroughly and drearily undistinguished. One could hardly imagine a less memorable site for our rendezvous. All of which, of course, makes it ideal.’ He smiled briskly. ‘Tea?’

  The question was delivered as if it were a statement: a trait that is typical of men of his breeding.

  He poured me a cup without waiting for a reply. I was about to thank him when he held up a hand to silence me.

  ‘Ah!’

  In a single, deft motion he pulled from his pocket an expensive silver flask which he proceeded to tip up briskly into my cup. I reached out and took a sip, identifying the spirit as brandy of a d—n fine sort.

  ‘Thank you, my lord.’

  He waved a hand. ‘My pleasure. Besides, I really should be thanking you for turning out on so bleak an afternoon to so unpromising a venue.’

  ‘But, my lord… you saved my life.’

  He pouted. ‘After a fashion, perhaps.’

  ‘The least I can do now is offer you my loyalty.’

  ‘Then that’s splendid, Mr Salter. Truly splendid. Good man.’ Tanglemere quaffed from his cup then placed it again on its saucer, its polite chink sending a signal that our preliminaries were done. ‘Mr Salter, have you given any thought since our last meeting to the question of the present state of our nation? Of that creeping weakness which we see in every area of public life? Of that moral uncertainty which seems to breed in every strata of our once-great state?’

  ‘My lord, I have.’

  ‘Have you thought of the work that might be done by the Council of Athelstan?’

  I saw no need, of course, to mention my researches in the company of Mr Clay. ‘I have, my lord. Of course.’

  ‘And have you thought also about the great good that they might do in the alteration of this nation’s destiny if only they might be permitted to stand once again at the helm?’

  Just as this question was being asked, the pair of matrons rose to their feet and began their various, compli
cated preparations for departure.

  ‘I have, my lord,’ I said, as discreetly as I could. ‘Often I have thought since our fortunate meeting how much better might the future look if only the Council held the keys to the kingdom.’

  ‘We are of one mind, then?’

  ‘We are, my lord.’

  ‘Well, the Council will have their day again. At least if you and I and certain friends and allies place our shoulders to the wheel and work towards that happy end.’

  The two matrons stepped heavily towards the door and lumbered out of the premises.

  ‘Thank you!’ one cried with unexpected gaiety.

  ‘We are most obliged to you!’ trilled the other.

  These words got for themselves no response at all.

  ‘Mr Salter?’ Tanglemere was peering at me. ‘You seem distracted.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Concerned then?’

  ‘How?’ I said abruptly, for liquor tends to make me blunter than usual. ‘That is my question for you, my lord. How might it be done?’

  ‘This… restoration?’

  ‘You’ll forgive me for saying so, my lord, but it strikes me as all being something of a pipe dream. Surely nowadays the Council are very far indeed from real power?’

  ‘Oh, but you must have faith, Mr Salter. You must believe. In truth, the Council is not so very far from power at all, not at least in strictly constitutional and legalistic terms. That, I grant you, is not reflected in the public’s perception. Which is, I should have thought, rather your own area of expertise.’

  ‘I see. And what would you have me do, my lord?’

  ‘Only that at which you have always excelled, my dear Mr Salter: at speaking to the common man in his own language and persuading him to see the truth of things.’

  ‘About the Council?’ I said. ‘Is that what you want? To tell the people about what they could do?’

  ‘About what they must do, Mr Salter. About their inevitable return to the very centre of public life.’