Lycanthropos

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  The three women looked at each other briefly and then withdrew from the crypt. As the sky outside the castle was suddenly filled with the sound of flapping, leathery wings, Janus said, "It is not fortune which brings us here. We have come to enlist you aid."

  "Indeed!" the vampire smiled. "How interesting! I have not had occasion to, ah, aid anyone for quite a long time!"

  "We want to die." Claudia said.

  "Oh, no doubt, no doubt!" he laughed. "Therein rests the difference between your kind and mine. To me, immortality is a gift, a blessing."

  "To us it is a curse." Janus said.

  "My point precisely," the vampire responded.

  Claudia stepped forward and stared into his eyes, eyes dead yet alive with merriment and cruelty. "Can you kill us?"

  The vampire laughed again. "Apparently not! I fear that were the three of us to keep company solely with one another, we should all soon find ourselves plagued by unsatisfied thirst and hunger."

  "Do you know how we can be killed?" Janus asked.

  "Do I know how you can be killed," he echoed, and then paused as if considering an answer. After a few moments he smiled. "Of course I do," he replied casually. "Such things are not mysteries to one such as I, who is privy to the secrets of hell itself."

  "Do not tell us of silver weapons," Claudia said. "We know from long experience that such things cannot harm us."

  "Am I an ignorant peasant, Vroloka, an untutored serf?" he asked her. "I have knowledge, not superstition!"

  Janus felt hope surging up in him as he asked, "Then you know how we can be killed? You know how this curse can be ended?"

  "Most certainly," he said, leaning back against his coffin. "The solution to your problem is the opposite of its cause, its mirror image, as it were." He smiled again. "Not that my experience with mirrors has been very extensive of late..."

  "Be specific," Claudia demanded. "What must we do to die?"

  "Oh, anything that kills mortals will kill you, once the curse has been lifted," the vampire said. "It is lifting the curse which may cause you some difficulty."

  "And how," Janus asked, trying not to give voice to his impatience, "can the curse be lifted?"

  "By doing the opposite of that which brought it down upon you in the first place," he replied amicably.

  "But we don’t know what caused this to happen to us!" Claudia screamed. "We can’t remember, neither of us can remember anything!"

  "It’s true," Janus nodded. "The past fades into mist and darkness. I do not know how I became what I am. She says that she has a memory of being attacked by me..."

  "But I’m not certain," Claudia finished for him. "It may be a memory. It may be a dream."

  "No matter," the vampire smiled. "Two elements are involved here. Only one thing creates a werewolf, and only one kind of person, in one kind of situation, can become one. The first element is obvious."

  "The bite of another werewolf?" Janus asked.

  "Yes," the vampire replied. "The bite of another werewolf. That far the legends are correct."

  "And the second element?"

  The vampire laughed softly. "Why should I tell you?"

  Neither Janus nor Claudia replied at first. Then Claudia said, "To help us rid ourselves of this living hell!"

  "Ah, yes, but why should I help you?" When no response seemed to be forthcoming, the vampire suggested, "Out of a feeling of moral obligation? As an act of Christian charity? To free the poor, defenseless mortals from your bestial depredations?" He began to laugh heartily as Claudia’s face grew red with rage. Janus looked at him coldly as the vampire continued, "As an act of gratuitous kindness? To strike a blow against the forces of evil? To render aid and succor to my fellow man?"

  "As an act of self-defense," Janus replied softly. "As part of a bargain. You tell us what you know, and we will not come back here at sunrise to pound a wooden stake into your chest."

  "Oh, my goodness!" the vampire said, feigning surprise at the suggestion.

  Claudia grinned at Janus, delighted at his statement. "Yes, self-defense, the oldest motive on earth. If you do not destroy us, we will destroy you."

  "An interesting suggestion," the vampire smiled, seeming not the least disturbed by the statement. "But has it not occurred to you that you are, shall we say, temperamentally unsuited to such an act?"

  "We have killed hundreds of innocent people..." Janus said firmly.

  "Thousands, I would think," the vampire observed.

  "...and killing one such as you would be an act of positive goodness, all things considered."

  "Ah, yes, my poor Vrolok," he chuckled, "but you cannot consider all things, because you do not know all things. At least, you know less about yourselves than I do." He shook his head with mock sorrow. "You pose no threat to me."

  "Can you be certain?" Claudia asked, her own uncertainty masked by a tone of menace.

  "Certain beyond any doubt," the vampire said. "And even if I had doubts, do you think me such a fool that I have only one place to rest during the day? Do you think that, come sunrise, you will find me lying here, awaiting you?"

  "I warn you…" Janus began, and then he was struck by the stabbing pain that signaled the onset of the change. He screamed and fell to the floor, where he was joined a moment later by Claudia, who doubled over and writhed beside him, shrieking in agony.

  "Poorly timed, don’t you think?" the vampire asked. "You did not plan this well, my poor Vroloki. You should have waited a few nights, waited for the moon to pass from its fullness. We might then have had a longer conversation, for all the good it would have done you." He watched with amused and curious detachment as their limbs and faces and flesh and bones bent and crackled and bled and shuddered and changed. "You know, I’ve known about your type of creature for quite a while, but I’ve never had the opportunity to see one of you in the flesh." His cadaverous brow furrowed thoughtfully. "I’m something of a shapechanger myself, you know...one of the powers granted me by the Dark Lord in exchange for my soul..." He pursed his lips and nodded. "Yes. Yes, indeed. I do believe I’ll have a try at this. Bats, rats, flies, mist, wind, dust, they all have their uses. But this!" He opened his eyes wide as the werewolves raised themselves unsteadily to their feet. "This is delightful! Most impressive, my dear Vroloki, most impressive indeed!"

  The werewolves leaped at him as with one motion, but the vampire himself leaped upward and shrank himself into the form of a bat before their talons could reach his undead flesh. The bat flew up and attached itself to one of the huge rafters that supported the high ceiling of the vault, and in an instant the vampire himself was hanging from the ceiling, his hands and feet clinging to the wood and stone as if he were a spider. He looked down with calm curiosity as the werewolves jumped at him and raked the empty air with their claws, but the rafters were forty feet from the floor of the huge subterranean crypt and the creatures could not reach him. He spoke to them in tones of quiet amusement as they leaped again and again, until at last they stood motionless beneath him, looking up at him and growling angrily. The vampire appraised them, studied them, making note of their form and their movements. Then, satisfied that he had observed all he needed to observe, he released himself from his position and fell downward. Before his feet touched the stone floor he had changed himself into a creature indistinguishable from his two would-be attackers.

  The two werewolves looked with confusion at the third, their dim mentalities unable to understand what had happened. There had been prey, of that they were certain; but now another of their kind stood before them, growling like them, looking like them, smelling like them. They looked at the third werewolf for a few moments and then followed the instincts of their kind and ran from the room to seek out human flesh and human blood.

  The vampire resumed his customary shape after they left him and, after emitting an amused grunt, went himself in search of his nightly bread.

  The sky of the deep, starless night was black but for the brilliant moon which gazed i
mpassively down upon the landscape so replete with misery and death, and even the sounds of the nocturnal forest animals were momentarily hushed by the strange, piercing, frenzied howls which drifted through the darkness. The sound of the flapping of leathery wings was, of course, nothing new to them; that particular harbinger of death was a permanent fixture of the Transylvanian night. It had been so ever since the Wallachian prince had been killed by the Turks one hundred and forty years before.

  The night moved slowly on toward sunrise, and the wreathes of garlic and sanctified crucifixes hung on the locked and bolted windows and doors of straw huts and marble palaces alike as peasant, burgher and noble slept fitfully, tormented by dreams of the undead. They, at least, were safe from the nosferatu, but there were always unwary travelers and foolish skeptics and ignorant foreigners who were able to provide sustenance for the dark prince and his wives; and sunrise showed the people that even garlic and crucifixes and prayers to Christ and His Mother had not sufficed to protect them from the hellspawn which had ripped and torn and devoured their neighbors.

  Sunrise found Janus Chaldian and Claudia laying in the snow a league from the castle of the vampire. Claudia awakened shortly after Janus, and she rose to find him gazing up at the outline of the fortress against the gray sky of winter dawn. She took a few handfuls of snow and used it to wash the blood from her mouth and hands before walking over to him. "Shall we destroy him, Janus?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "Shall we do as we threatened? Shall we destroy him?"

  Janus paused thoughtfully and then shook his head. "No. For what purpose?"

  "To keep him from killing!"

  He laughed sadly. "Yes, let us execute the sheep thief so that we can slaughter all the lambs ourselves."

  "But he is evil, Janus."

  "And are we good?"

  She sighed. "At least we cannot help ourselves. He can."

  Janus shook his head again. "We don’t know that, Claudia. I don’t know anything, not really. I don’t know what good and evil are anymore. I cannot judge, I cannot act, I cannot reason. All I can do is hope for death." He turned to her. "If you wish to destroy him, go ahead. I’ll wait for you here."

  She looked up at the distant castle for a few moments and then shook her head. "No. It would not help me to die."

  "No." he agreed. "It would not." She sighed again. "Where shall we go, Janus?"

  He shrugged. "What does it matter?"

  He began to walk sadly away from the spot where they had awakened, and she followed close behind him at the same funereal pace. They had nowhere in particular to go, but walking seemed preferable to sitting; at least it helped to ward off the annoying, if harmless, cold.

  For years they continued to wander aimlessly about the Romanian provinces, stopping only on the nights of the full moon, stopping only to murder. Eventually they wandered into Hungary in the realm of the Hapsburgs, and from there through the states of the German Empire into the Kingdom of France. It was five years after their encounter with the vampire that they found themselves brought before the Inquisition at Poligny, accused of werewolvery. And in all that time, as it had been throughout the unremembered centuries before, as it was to be throughout the long centuries to come, their lives were nothing more than a monotonous cycle of sorrow and pain and murder, and sorrow and pain and murder, and sorrow and pain and murder.

  "Who are we, Janus?" Claudia would ask over and over again.

  "I don’t know, Claudia," he would reply.

  "Did you make me what I am?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Why can’t we die, Janus? Why can’t we die?"

  "I don’t know, Claudia. I don’t know..."

  The next cycle of the full moon was three weeks away.

  Colonel Helmuth Schlacht studied himself in the mirror that hung upon the wall of his quarters, and he liked what he saw. He remembered the flush of pride he had experienced ten years before when first he donned the black uniform of the S.S. and looked into a mirror to see himself attired as one of the Nazi elite. The sensation of power and pride which had come over him at that moment had not diminished with the passing of years. Indeed, it had grown stronger as the S.S. had grown stronger, as the Third Reich had grown stronger.

  Satisfied of his appearance, Schlacht left the sumptuous suite of rooms on the top floor of the RagoczyPalace that he had designated as his quarters and walked briskly down the marble staircase until he reached the ballroom on the ground floor. He walked in and surveyed the preparations. The Hungarian staff had followed their orders to the letter, and the aromas of the great variety of hot, appetizing foods which were even now being brought into the room for the buffet mingled pleasantly with the scent of the hundreds of flowers on the tables. Good, Schlacht thought. Excellent.

  Corporal Vogel approached him and saluted. After returning the salute, Schlacht asked, "Have the guests begun to arrive?"

  "Jawohl, Herr Colonel," Vogel replied. "They are being escorted here at this very moment."

  "Good," Schlacht nodded. "I wish to be informed as soon as Reichsführer Himmler is here." He began to tell Vogel something else, but then he heard the sounds of footsteps and turned to see Admiral Horthy, the one-time regent of the Kingdom of Hungary and a loyal if fractious puppet of the Third Reich, smiling and drawing near. Time to begin to play host, Schlacht thought.

  When Schlacht had received a communiqué from Heinrich Himmler three days earlier informing him that the chief of the S.S. would be visiting him in Budapest, Schlacht had decided to take advantage of the opportunity to hold a reception for him in the RagoczyPalace. The war so absorbed the energy and attention of all of them that the pleasures of social life seemed a distant memory, and Schlacht felt that he both needed and deserved a party.

  The guest list included all of the noble families of the Magyar aristocracy who, though disestablished by war and revolution over two decades earlier, still possessed wealth and prestige and influence and the je ne sais quoi of bearing and demeanor that was the common possession of all the old aristocracies of Europe. The Nazi elite of the occupation forces in Hungary... no, Schlacht reminded himself, the German allied forces assisting the Magyars...were also invited, along with their wives, as were the diplomats from Italy, Finland, Sweden, Romania, Spain, and all the others nations which still maintained missions in Budapest. Gottfried von Weyrauch was invited also. Louisa von Weyrauch was not, a fact which afforded her nothing but relief.

  Soon the ballroom was filled with people, and the musicians in the corner of the room farthest from the door played Hayden’s String quartet in C major as a background to the conviviality. Schlacht thought himself the perfect host as he moved around the room, making introductions, engaging in light and superficial conversation, flirting easily with the women and discussing war and politics with the men.

  A movement near the large open doors of the ballroom caught his eye, and he turned to see a stunningly beautiful woman in a long black silk evening gown entering the room. It took him a moment to realize that the woman was Petra Loewenstein. Schlacht smiled and walked over to meet her in the middle of the dance floor saying, "Fräulein, you look absolutely ravishing!"

  She returned his smile and held out her hand for him to kiss as he bowed slightly. "Why, thank you, Herr Colonel. And thank you for the invitation as well."

  "It is my pleasure," he replied honestly. "Had I known that such beauty existed on my staff, I would have held social gatherings such as this more frequently."

  She laughed. "An error easily corrected, I think."

  "We must not hide you away in the laboratory, my dear," Schlacht said, his eyes twinkling. "This gown flatters you much more than does your white lab coat."

  "Yes, but it is so unjust. Herr Colonel, that you look as handsome in your dress uniform as you do in anything else."

  Schlacht continued the flirtatious repartee as he studied her more closely. The sides of her long black hair had been rolled up tightly against her temples and the back had
been pulled into a chignon. The effect was to accentuate her high cheekbones and long white neck. Her gown, which shimmered in the light from the chandelier, was low cut and hugged her lithe form from shoulder to mid-thigh, where it billowed out slightly to an inch from the floor. Her makeup was understated to a delightful effect, and the single golden chain which hung from her neck contrasted delightfully with the ivory hue of her skin and the jet black of her gown. Schlacht found himself momentarily at a loss for something to say, so he simply repeated, "You look absolutely ravishing!"

  The restatement was so obviously honest that Petra flushed slightly and lowered her eyes. "Herr Colonel, please! You will turn my head!"

  Schlacht began to say that such a movement would afford him the pleasure of watching her from behind when he saw Vogel waving at him and pointing out into the hallway. "I believe that the Reichsführer has arrived, Fräulein. Shall we go and greet him?" He extended his arm to her.

  She placed her hand upon it gently and replied, "I would account it a great privilege, Herr Colonel."

  Schlacht and Petra walked through the ballroom to the door and the colonel noticed from the corner of his eye how the heads of the men were turning to look at Petra. I understand perfectly, he thought. I myself never noticed the exquisite beauty of this woman. He repressed a smile. But it is not likely that I shall continue to be so blind.

  They reached the door just as Himmler and his staff entered through it. Salutes were exchanged and then Himmler shook Schlacht’s hand amicably. "This is a pleasant surprise, Schlacht," the diminutive S.S. leader said, smiling broadly. "Thank you."

  "We are honored by your presence, Herr Reichsführer," the colonel responded. "You visit Hungary so infrequently that I felt it my obligation to see to it that you return to Berlin with pleasant memories." He put his hand upon the small of Petra’s back and pushed her gently forward. "Allow me to introduce Fräulein Petra Loewenstein."