Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  The bulk of his new army, now almost seven hundred strong, had taken wing for Carcassonne.

  Dracula walked through the entrance hall of the hotel, his boots clicking rapidly on the wooden floor. A low hum of noise could be heard from around the corner beyond the reception desk, where the corridor opened up into a large lobby full of sofas and tables, with an ornate wooden bar on one side and windows that looked out on to an immaculate garden. He stepped around the corner, enjoying the hush that fell as his presence was noted, and surveyed the wide space.

  Huddled together in the middle were a group of men and women, their eyes brimming with fear. Many were bloodied, their clothes torn, but none had life-threatening injuries, just as he had ordered; injured hostages caused complications, which he did not have time for. There were perhaps a hundred of them: waiters and shopkeepers, tourists of every nationality, men and women, boys and girls, young and old.

  In a shadowy corner on the far side of the lobby, Dracula saw Emery staring at the hostages with his dark, hollow eyes, and suppressed the urge to shudder with disgust. The quiet, softly spoken Englishman was the only one of his new followers who was not a vampire; what he was, was one of the most profoundly empty creatures Dracula had ever come across. He had appeared outside the farmhouse one morning, his clothes neat, his eyes like black holes behind the sensible glasses he wore at all times. He had carried no bags, and it had become rapidly clear that luggage was not all that he was lacking; he was also devoid of a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, and even the most basic empathy towards other living creatures.

  Osvaldo had been obviously wary, and Dracula’s first instinct had been to have the new arrival killed. But when he had summoned the man to his rooms, he had found himself instantly intrigued; Emery had shown no fear in his presence, no panic, nothing but calm, polite composure. He had looked into the man’s eyes and seen darkness, the kind of inky absence of light that he had only seen once before, many centuries earlier; in that moment, he had made a decision, and told Emery that he was welcome to stay. The Englishman had thanked him by telling him the things that he would happily do if he was ordered to, and Dracula, who had forgotten more about cruelty and torture than most people would ever know, had felt his stomach turn with revolted admiration.

  The hostages looked suitably terrified as the first vampire swept his gaze across them, which was good; he was searching for the set of a jaw or the narrowness of an eye that might suggest someone potentially capable of resistance. He saw nothing but fear, and smiled widely.

  “My name is Count Dracula,” he said, “and you are prisoners in a war that you could not have known was being waged. You should not blame yourselves for the situation in which you find yourselves, and should not take it as anything more than a stroke of misfortune. It is not my intention to kill you, as you are more valuable to me alive than dead, but that is the limit of my generosity. The punishment for resistance, for insubordination, for any refusal to do as you are told, will be death. Is that clear?”

  Silence.

  “You will not speak to me without permission,” he continued. “If I address you, you will answer by referring to me as ‘my lord’ or ‘master’. You will be fed and watered, and if you conduct yourselves with obedience and deference, your imprisonment may pass without incident. But I urge you not to misunderstand the reality of your situation, which is that you are no longer free. You are prisoners, and will remain so until I decide differently. The sooner you accept this, the better.” He looked at his followers, who were watching him in silence. “Lock them in the rooms on the first and second floors. Give a list of their names and locations to Osvaldo.”

  “Yes, my lord,” growled the vampires, and moved forward. Dracula watched the crowd of hostages shrink back in terror, then frowned as footsteps echoed along the entrance hall behind him. He turned to see one of his followers round the corner, pushing an older couple before him. The man’s face was lined and his hair was grey, but his eyes were clear and full of anger. The woman looked more frightened, but she was walking under her own steam; every few seconds, she glanced over at the man, as if drawing strength from him.

  “My lord,” said the vampire, and bowed his head. “I found these two in the backstreets. Osvaldo told me to bring them to you.”

  Dracula nodded. The vampire bowed again, released the man and woman, and backed towards the entrance hall. The couple stood where they were, looking around at the crowd of people and vampires.

  “What is this?” asked the man. “Just what the hell is going on here?”

  Dracula smiled. Then he swept forward, far faster than any human eye could follow, and lifted the man into the air by his throat. Screams rang out as the woman made to move towards him, but one of his followers was there before she had the chance. The vampire pinned her arms tightly behind her back and held them in place as the man struggled in Dracula’s immovable grip, his face reddening alarmingly. As it began to turn purple, the first vampire released him. The man fell to the floor, clutching at his neck, spluttering and gasping, as Dracula looked down at him.

  “You will not speak unless you are spoken to,” he said. “Stand up. Now.”

  The man got to his feet. There was shock in his eyes, and pain, but in the set of his jaw and the squareness of his shoulders was visible determination.

  Military, thought Dracula. I’d bet my life on it.

  “Tell me your name,” he said.

  “Colonel Alan Foster,” said the man. “United States Army. Retired. Who the hell are you?”

  “I am the person who will decide whether you live or die,” said Dracula. “Would you like me to make that decision now?”

  Foster didn’t respond.

  “I thought not,” he said. “I assume this lady is your wife?”

  “That’s right,” said Foster.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Emery? Come here.”

  The Englishman walked forward. He didn’t hurry, the way the rest of Dracula’s followers did when they were called for; he came at his own pace, as slow and deliberate as a spider approaching an insect caught in its web.

  “My lord,” he said, and dipped his head.

  “Colonel Foster,” said Dracula. “This is Emery. If you cause me so much as a moment’s trouble, your wife will spend some time in his company, and the worst thing you ever saw in your military career will seem like a fairy tale in comparison. Do you understand?”

  Foster stared at him for a long moment, then nodded.

  “Good,” said Dracula. “Join the others, and be glad you found me in a forgiving mood.”

  His follower pushed Foster roughly forward, dragging the man’s wife behind him. Dracula turned away as they were manhandled towards the rest of the hostages, and walked back into the entrance hall, leaving Emery standing blankly where he was. As he exited the hotel, he heard the hostages being shepherded up the staircase and into the rooms where they would spend the foreseeable future.

  There was no sign of Osvaldo in the square outside, and Dracula assumed he had personally taken a squad of vampires down to deal with the police; such attention to detail was characteristic of the Spaniard. He listened for the screams that would mean his order had been successfully carried out, straining his supernatural hearing, then growled as the thunder of a helicopter engine hammered into his ears, as suddenly as if it had materialised beside him. The acoustics of the old city were unpredictable, which he didn’t like, but there was nothing to be done about that; it was a rabbit warren of old stone perched on a hilltop, and strange echoes and dead spots were only to be expected.

  Dracula leapt easily into the air and rose above the rooftops, searching for the source of the noise. He turned south, towards the main gate and the modern city of Carcassonne that sprawled beyond the walls, and was engulfed in the blinding white beam of a spotlight. He howled in pain, and flung himself clear; the light was agonising to his supernaturally sharp eyes, and he felt crimson fire flood into them as anger roared through
his body.

  The fools, he thought, as black spots and points of light wheeled across his vision. They have no idea what they bring upon themselves.

  His eyes cleared, and he immediately located the helicopter. It was painted blue and white with the word POLICE printed on its side, and was rising quickly over the distant ramparts to the south-west, its hateful searchlight sweeping back and forth across the sky. Dracula spun up and around, keeping a safe distance between him and the wide beam, silent and invisible in the darkening sky.

  Gunfire rattled out, from somewhere near the bottom of the hill, punctuated by a terrible screech of pain. Dracula smiled as two more screams rang out, followed by an awful gagging noise, like the sound of someone trying to breathe underwater, and a second, final burst of gunfire.

  He spun forward in the air until he was looking down into the square below; less than thirty seconds later four vampires flew in from the south-east corner, each one dragging two black shapes behind them. The bodies of the police officers were dumped in front of the entrance to the hotel, and Dracula permitted himself a moment of satisfaction; ability and experience were valuable traits, but obedience outranked them both, and on that front, his army were thus far proving acceptable.

  He spun back upright, and sought out the helicopter again. If the order he had given to Osvaldo was not carried out quickly, he would fly down and deal with it himself. But as he located the helicopter, now flying low over the western walls, he saw that his intervention would not be needed.

  A distant trio of dark shapes soared silently up from the narrow streets. They accelerated towards the unsuspecting helicopter from below, safely out of reach of its searchlight, and slammed into it with crippling force, driving its metal body up and over. The engine noise rose to a deafening howl and its rotors sent turbulent air billowing in every direction as the pilot tried to stabilise the aircraft. The three vampires, one of which he believed was Osvaldo himself, hammered the protesting helicopter back and forth, then began to haul it up and away from the walls. The engine screamed, the sound awful to Dracula’s ears, then gave out in a shower of sparks and an explosion of shearing metal. Without power, the helicopter pitched forward and fell towards the ground. Osvaldo and his comrades held on, steadying it with its nose pointing directly down; across the clear, suddenly quiet night sky, Dracula could hear the muffled screams of the pilot and the thuds as he beat at his cockpit windscreen.

  Then the helicopter was moving again, as his followers swung it out and up. They released their grip and sent it flying over the walls, flipping end over end until it dropped out of sight. A second later the sound of an explosion hammered into the air as a bright cloud of orange fire bloomed above the ancient battlements and screams and sirens filled Dracula’s ears.

  Now, he thought. It’s time.

  He sped over the city towards the thick stone wall that stood above the drawbridge. The old entrance was purely ceremonial, designed to make tourists feel that they were entering something old and dramatic, but that was just fine for his purposes. As he descended towards it, he got his first look at the scene beyond the walls. There was a long line of ambulances, standing in front of rows of police cars and fire engines, around which paramedics were frantically treating the men and women who had made it out of Carcassonne with their lives. Further down the hill, approaching along the wide streets of the new city, he could see a great many spinning blue lights.

  The survivors of the attack he had ordered were wandering aimlessly or slumped on the grass, groaning and sobbing and begging for help. The paramedics were running back and forth between them, as the police looked on with apparent paralysis. Beyond them, Dracula could see a steady stream of people making their way up the hill; word that something was happening in the old city had clearly travelled fast.

  He hovered in the air, searching for what Osvaldo had assured him he would see. He scanned the chaotic crowd, then settled his gaze on a man standing beside a white van who was holding what he was looking for: the wide glass lens of a television camera.

  The walls of Carcassonne were ringed by powerful spotlights that illuminated the pale stone once the sun had set. Dracula dropped silently on to the top of the wall above the drawbridge, his clothes and hair fluttering in the night air, and looked down at the oblivious crowd. They looked so like ants, diligently going about lives that were insignificant at best. He took a deep breath, then spoke in a voice that rumbled the walls beneath the feet.

  “Citizens of Carcassonne,” he said. “I am Dracula, and I have taken possession of this city.”

  Shouts and screams rose from the crowd, and he smiled as several people turned and fled down the hill without a backward glance. The rest stayed where they were, frozen in place, their eyes fixed on him. He kept his own gaze on the camera, marvelling at the thought of how many people this modern technology was allowing him to speak directly to.

  “I will keep this communication short,” he continued. “To those of my kind who would submit themselves to my service, I say this: come, bow your heads, and make yourselves known to me. And to those humans who reside in Carcassonne: you have forty-eight hours to leave the city. Failure to do so will result in your deaths. This place is no longer your home.”

  The residents of Carcassonne woke to a display that had not been seen in Europe for more than five centuries. Staring down at them from poles driven into the high walls of the medieval city were the lifeless eyes of dozens of impaled men and women, their blood-caked bodies twisting slowly in the morning breeze.

  Below, the modern city was significantly emptier than it had been as the sun set nine hours earlier. Thousands of people had already fled, piling belongings into their cars and driving away, many of them with no real idea of where they were going, or what they would do when they got there; all they cared about was not being inside Carcassonne when the forty-eight hours were up. The outskirts of the city had seen roads jammed with cars, horns blaring as men and women wove their way through the narrow streets.

  The authorities had been just as unprepared for Dracula’s sudden appearance as everyone else and although they were now scrambling to respond, there had been little progress overnight. As a result, hundreds of cars were parked in the empty fields beyond the city’s borders, their owners wandering through the pale morning light, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Fifty miles to the north, a convoy of trucks was rumbling south with large red crosses painted on their sides, carrying tents and food and water and blankets; everything that would be needed to begin the process of setting up a camp for the Carcassonne refugees.

  Inside the city, queues had formed outside the supermarkets and boulangeries as those who had not already left prepared to do so. Despite the early hour, the streets were busy with scared, fractious men and women who did not really understand the horror that had befallen their quiet corner of the world. The police – or rather, those police who had not packed up and left in the night – were out on the streets in force, defusing the fights and arguments that were breaking out with increasing frequency as the shops began to run low on essentials like bread and bottled water. They had been assured that the military would arrive no later than noon to take charge of the situation, but, until then, they were on their own, and hopelessly outnumbered.

  At the centre of the city, an enormous crowd swarmed round the railway station as residents without cars sought seats on the first train to anywhere; to Marseilles and Montpellier, to Bordeaux and La Rochelle, even all the way north to Paris. Mothers and fathers gripped their children tightly and dragged them towards the platforms, their faces pale and tight with the effort of attempting to appear calm for the sake of their kids. And from the shadows, unnoticed by anyone, Dracula watched them with a smile on his narrow face.

  The first vampire had slipped out of the medieval city under cover of darkness, rising silently into the air and descending into the chaos below. He was wearing clothes that Osvaldo had brought him from one of the newly empty boutiques
near the summit of the old city, clothes that felt ridiculous but which he had been assured would allow him to pass unnoticed. The Spaniard had actually attempted to persuade him against venturing down into the city to see what was happening for himself, as he considered it an unnecessary risk, but Dracula had reminded him that if he wanted his counsel, he would ask for it.

  The shoes were the only part of his disguise that he was pleased with; they were made of wonderfully soft leather, a far cry from the heavy boots he had worn first as a man then during his first incarnation as Count Dracula. The rest of the clothes – the jeans, the thick woollen shirt, the hooded top and gloves – felt like the clothes a commoner would wear, apparel wholly unsuitable for a Prince who was about to become the ruler of an entire planet. But as he walked among the men and women of Carcassonne, taking care to keep his face, which was his only area of exposed skin, angled away from the sun, he saw that Osvaldo had been right about one thing: nobody gave him so much as a second glance.

  On several occasions he had slipped unseen into cities his Wallachian armies had conquered, almost always over the protests of his advisers. He had known it was dangerous, perhaps even foolhardy, but he had not cared; there was nothing more thrilling than experiencing the terror of his enemies first hand, to bask in the knowledge that the same men and women who were ignoring him would soon be dead at his command.

  This was different, in some ways, as it would no longer matter if anyone recognised him; in those days he had been human, whereas now he could have defended himself against the entire population of Carcassonne without breaking a sweat. But the fear, the sweet, palpable fear, was the same; he could see it in the wide eyes of every man and woman who hurried past with their meagre belongings in their arms, could smell it rising from their pores.