by David Wood
The door swung open and the ocher light from the candles invaded the darkness, showing Wagner a raised stone sarcophagus in the center of the space, its head toward the door. The lid was pushed slightly off the side, as if someone had been peeking into the box. Or out of it.
He retrieved the candelabrum, and checked the ceiling and around the room. In the far corner was another small door, only a few feet high—surely used for storage more than for people. When he took a second to think about what kind of storage, his stomach roiled. Probably another vampire sleeps in there, he thought. He set the ax down against the wall, then pulled out his stake-cross. He peered into the open stone coffin, and found that it was empty. He quickly looked around the room again, and reassured himself that he was still alone. The priest had prepared him for this eventuality, and he knew what he needed to do. Even though every bone in his body bade him to hunt through every room of the castle for his wife, he needed to finish in this dark crypt first. He set the candle tree down on the foot of the stone coffin lid, and cross-stake in one hand, he went over to the small door, and flung it open.
He was ready to stab with the wooden stake. Ready to plunge the tip into a vampire’s heart or to be greeted with a disgusting pile of human organs and vats of blood. He was not expecting what he found. The small crawlspace was filled with glinting golden coins that washed out into the chamber like a cascade. He tentatively picked one up and examined it in the light. This was where the Count’s great source of wealth was—how he was able to afford expert stonemasons and all the books. But the gold did not interest Wagner at the moment, at all. He had work to do.
He stood and walked back around the raised coffin and peered into its empty depths where the lid had been slid aside. The cross-stake held tightly in one hand, he withdrew the remaining heads of garlic with the other. He tossed one of them into the coffin, so it would roll to the bottom, as Father Abraham had instructed him. He took the second and crushed it in his hand as best he could, rolling it apart and dropping bits into the head of the coffin. Then he withdrew the flask. He glanced around him at the door to the room, then turned back to the sarcophagus. Wagner prepared to defile Dracula’s crypt with the holy water, as something just as dangerous slinked up behind him.
He was just about to dump the liquid from the flask into Dracula’s resting place, when he heard the soft whisper of fabric on skin behind him. He whirled, stake at the ready, but was unprepared for what he found.
Gretchen looked lovelier in death than she had ever looked in life. Wagner almost didn’t recognize her. Her hair was straighter, and her breasts, while still attractive, no longer looked like overripe melons stuffed into her brassiere. She wore a simple gown, cut low in the front, and she walked toward him slowly, gyrating her hips as she moved. She swayed like a snake, and he found the movements mesmerizing. She was looking at him with what seemed to be both need and uncertainty in her eyes. For a second, he allowed himself to believe they had all been wrong—Gretchen had awoken from her illness, and now she was confused and needed his help. Her eyes were dark in the feeble light, and she approached him as if she knew him.
“Andreas?” she asked, like a lost, scared child. “Where is everyone? What is happening?”
He was speechless, and his mouth hung limply. He watched her face now, looking for something—a sign—that he should move, that he should react. But all he felt was tired. He wanted to tell her everything would be alright. She stepped up to him and put her arms around him, clearly needing comfort. He put his arms around her back, and prepared to tell her everything would be fine.
But he noticed his hands were empty. No holy water flask, no stake or makeshift cross. He didn’t know when or how he had dropped the items. But the priest’s words came haunting into his memory: She will be a thing only, no longer human. His left arm tight around her lower back, his right hand slipped lower and grazed his thigh, just as he heard the strange creaking in her jaw, as she opened her mouth wide and tilted her head up to him.
“Not a drop,” he told her, as he thrust a stake into her back, piercing her heart, and jabbing the sharpened tip out through her rib cage to press against his own chest. Her mouth froze in its wide open position, droplets of saliva glistening on the tips of her long fangs. Not human, he told himself. I’m doing her corpse a favor. He let the grotesque thing that used to be his wife’s friend—his friend—fall to the stone floor, and berated himself for feeling attraction to her, for being unfaithful in his thoughts to his wife, and for wavering, for even a second, in his duty to kill the thing.
Then he felt his anger rising again. He did this. Dracula.
He bent down to scoop up the flask, and swiftly emptied the contents, some of which had spilled to the floor, directly into the open coffin. A haze of smoke filled the space. Wagner kicked hard at the lid with his foot. The stone cover scraped off to the side and hit the floor with a rumbling boom. The mist-like smoke from the holy water he had poured into the sarcophagus refused to leave the stone container, floating around in it like it was at home. Good, he thought.
He grabbed his ax and went to work on the Gretchen-thing’s head. Once it was free, he collected his stakes, and filling with an intense burning hatred, he made a solemn vow.
“You will be avenged, Gretchen. Dracula is next, and he will never create another.”
Chapter 32
Wagner stormed up the spiral stairs, ideas formulating in his head with each step. Ways to stop Dracula, and ways to make him pay if he had hurt Anneli—or God forbid, if he had already turned her. Armed now only with the ax, his stakes back in their sheathes, the candelabrum, and one final head of garlic, he continued up the steps, and out into the kitchen. He had no fear that Dracula would somehow get behind him now and seek refuge in the cellar. Following the priest’s instructions, he had made the sarcophagus uninhabitable to a vampire. He expected the Count would prefer to fight instead of hide anyway.
When mocking laughter rang out and echoed around the hallways and rooms of the giant castle, Wagner knew his instinct about the creature was correct. He didn’t know how to find Dracula, but an idea that was born of vengeance on the stairs now became a stratagem of battle tactic. He knew how to draw the wily vampire out of hiding. Wagner quickly searched the kitchen, finding rags, bottles, and cooking fuel oil, each of which stuffed into or through his bandolier.
He mounted the main staircase, whistling loudly. As he got closer to his intended target, he began talking, trusting that if Dracula could not yet hear him, then the Count would at least make an appearance quite soon.
“No more games, Dracula. I know how to get you to come out of the shadows.”
As he spoke, Wagner stepped into the darkness of the library. Setting the ax and the candelabrum down, he took one of the bottles with the oil in it, and stuffed a small strip of fabric into the neck of the bottle. He lit the end of the strip of fabric with a match, which illuminated the space around him. Then, nearly anathema to his being, he hurled the makeshift bomb at the far wall of books. When the glass exploded, the fuel oil and its vapors and droplets in the air caught fire with a loud thump. Then the flames leapt at the wall, clawing and scratching their way up toward the high ceiling, like rabid animals. The old and brittle spines of the books and the glue and string that bound them, caught alight and spread. The room was thrust into near daylight, and the blaze showed no signs of stopping.
“I am going to remove the shadows. I will set the whole damned building on fire, Count. You won’t escape me, I—”
Wagner was cut off as something slammed into him from the side, sending the next bottle of oil with its freshly lit fuse tumbling from his hands. It shattered on the floor, spraying its liquid across the room, and flames lurched out of the puddle as if it were a hole through the floor of the library directly into Hell itself.
The Count had burst into the room, throwing Wagner aside. He looked frantic, like a man hoping beyond all reason to save his beloved library—just as Wagner might have
been if the library had been his. It hurt his heart to set the room on fire, but his plans were to destroy the castle, after he had killed Dracula—a small price to pay for the deaths of friends. He staggered to his feet, while the Count recoiled from gouts of flame that jumped across the room. The Count was desperately looking around for something with which he could douse the blaze, his long black cape fluttering behind him. Had the fire been smaller, Wagner thought the cape might have done the job, but the flames were crawling to the ceiling of the vast library now, and soon the entire castle—or the parts of it that would burn—would be alight.
Wagner picked up his ax, and held his stake vertically, with the small cross-bar piece of wood he had picked up. He stepped up behind the Count. The man’s dark suit and cape were covered already in the falling gray ash, as case after case of books and rare manuscripts went up in a rush of flames.
“Noooo! What have you done, you mad German?” Dracula whirled on Wagner and leapt for him.
Wagner raised the makeshift cross and shouted at the creature.
“Back!”
Dracula recoiled across the room, deathly afraid of the holy symbol. He turned and fled into a corner, to a door Wagner had not seen on his earlier visits to the library. Wagner pursued the Count. He stepped through the door and into a small drawing room, with a curtained entryway into yet another sitting room with plush furniture. The thought flitted through Wagner’s head that all the rich fabrics and tapestries in the room would catch fire as easily as the books in the library.
The Count was somehow gone. Wagner checked the ceiling, then was about to look behind the curtains bisecting the double lounge when he heard the noise behind him. Dracula was on the wall above the door he’d just come through, but he had no time to turn before the creature had leapt and landed on his shoulders, crushing him down to the floor. The ax flew from his hand and slid across the rich carpet, well out of his grasp.
But then the Count was up and running for the door at the far end of the room. Wagner stumbled to his feet and saw just the tip of the Count’s cape disappearing through the door. He ran across the room to catch up with the creature. If he let Dracula escape, there were countless places in the castle he could hide. The wooden inner structures of the building might collapse before Wagner could find Anneli. He had to keep up.
As Wagner came through the door, something was flying for him. He ducked back into the doorway in time to avoid a hurtling vase, which shattered against the door frame. When he looked around the frame again, Dracula was far down the hallway. Wagner raced after him.
“There’s no escape Count,” Wagner called after him. “All your resting places around the countryside have been destroyed. You’re trapped here in your own burning castle!”
“Impossible!” the creature called out from the shadows. With the candelabrum left behind and the glow from the flames in the library receding, Wagner was finding it harder to see.
“I will find a way, Wagner. I have for centuries now,” Dracula called, his voice echoing oddly in the twisting corridors of black. Sometimes near and sometimes far. Wagner could not determine the Count’s direction. “You think you are special?” The voice was far away. “That you, and you alone, can stop me?” Now the voice was so close, Wagner whirled in the dark, thinking the vampire was right behind him. But he was alone.
He pulled his small leather pack off of his back and withdrew an object from it, holding the item at the ready. He felt the attack was coming.
“With your pitiful wooden stakes and crosses. You have nothing that can defeat me. I am invincible…I am the night…I am—”
Dracula was right behind him. Wagner whirled and activated the flashlight. The vampire recoiled in horror as if the tungsten light was a beam from the sun itself. He retreated from Wagner and smashed into the hallway’s wall just feet away.
“…bruised?” Wagner asked with a malicious grin. He hurled the last head of garlic at the creature, and it bounced off of the vampire’s forehead, leaving a hissing, smoking scorch mark as it ricocheted, “…a salad?” Wagner withdrew his final stake from its holster and rushed at the creature, “…impaled?”
Dracula darted to the side, and in a second he was lost in the shadows. Wagner checked his strike with the wooden stake, not wanting to ruin its tip by stabbing it into the stone wall. He turned the beam of the flashlight off for a few seconds, and then on again and left it on, knowing it would burn out soon, but he needed its light. He could only just see the creature at the far end of the hall, making for the stairs to the tower. Dracula stopped and faced Wagner’s light.
“Your woman will pay for your insolence!” The Count turned and fled up the stairs. Wagner could see pieces of the chute that he and Fritz had built heaped in a pile at the bottom of the steps. He wouldn’t be able to use that as a quick escape if his battle with the Count went poorly. The vampire had thought of everything.
Wagner’s flashlight burned out with a sharp. popping sound, and the corridor was plunged into darkness. He fumbled at this throat to pull away his neck scarf, revealing the silver cross—the last one he had. He had lost the stick he had used with his stake to make a large cross. He had no more garlic, no holy water, and the ax was gone as well. He had only one stake and the small neck cross. He gently placed the flashlight on the floor in the dark. He held the wooden stake firmly in his right hand and held his left out to feel for the wall. Once he found it, he headed to the stairwell quickly. He knew the layout of the tower well enough. He could feel his way up it in the dark with no problems. The only question would be where Dracula would be waiting for him.
Then he realized. Dracula wasn’t waiting for him. He would kill Anneli, and then he would head for the top of the tower. The castle below them was on fire. Soon the blaze would consume the whole structure. But Dracula had an escape path.
He can transform into a bat, he recalled.
Dracula would simply fly away, leaving him with a dead wife and a castle burning down under him.
Chapter 33
When Andreas Wagner rushed out of the stairwell to the top of the tower, and into the open night, he knew what he would find. The moon was up and filling the sky, seeming far closer to Earth than it could possibly be. The sky was clear and the night’s fabric was punctuated with billions of brilliant stars and the hazy billow of the Milky Way.
Against the parapet wall, Dracula stood, his back to the horrendous drop down the side of the castle, and further still down the cliffside to the river far, far below in the dark. It might as well have been the drop into Hell. Anneli, her arms pinned behind her back, was held in front of him like a shield. One of his arms was across her waist, and the hand of the other was violently shoving her head to the side, exposing her pale white neck to the starshine, where it glowed like the target it was. The fiend’s open jaws—his exposed fangs, clearly three times the length of the rest of his teeth—were poised to strike.
The dawn was much too far away for Wagner’s taste. He stepped fully onto the roof of the castle’s rear tower, with only the crenellated wall for protection from the drop on two sides to the river, and the drop to the castle roof on the others. He held the stake in his hand, but just behind his leg. He wasn’t hiding it so much as hoping Dracula’s attention could be placed on other things. Wagner noted that the scar from the garlic was still visible on the creature’s forehead, looking angry and welting in the bright moonlight.
“How is it that you can stand the moonlight, when it is just the sun’s rays reflected off the surface of the moon and back at us again?” Wagner asked, taking a step forward.
Dracula’s hand moved to and tightened on Anneli’s throat and Wagner stopped moving. Her eyes were telegraphing a dozen messages to him—she was sorry for getting captured, she loved him, she hated Dracula, and most importantly, she was ready for whatever he had planned.
He wished he had something planned.
He looked in her eyes and tried to project reassurance.
“I’d
like to know how it is that you are not yet dead, Wagner. You are showing great resourcefulness, but it will avail you naught.”
Dracula stepped from behind Anneli, still holding her by the throat, but at arm’s length now, to his side. “I have the advantage, stonemason. I have your woman. You are on my land. I have all the power.”
“Yes, you told me you were invincible,” Wagner said. “But I think you’ve got that confused. I am the one who is invincible. You are the one who will die.”
Wagner could see the anger rush into the Count’s face, as he shoved Anneli to the side, where she fell against the parapet wall, and onto the floor. The Count brazenly stepped forward. “You have no more garlic, or I would smell it. No crosses, no weapons.”
Wagner turned his body slightly, the concealed stake moving further from Dracula’s view. With his free hand he reached for the small silver cross on the chain around his neck.
“I have this,” he said.
Dracula hissed and swiped his hand in the air. A force like a strong wind ripped the cross and the necklace from Wagner, and it flew out over the wall to fall to the castle roof far below.
“Such a tiny thing. That hated symbol. So easy to drop. Is that all you have? That and your bravado?” Dracula swept toward him, the cape flowing out behind him in a billowing arc.
Wagner lifted the stake and made to plunge it into the Count’s chest. But the fiend moved with inhuman speed, and his hand was wrapped around Wagner’s wrist too soon. He twisted hard, and with titanic strength, the vampire forced him to drop the wooden stake. It rolled across the floor behind the creature.
