Van Helsing's Diaries: Nosferatu

by Cawdron, Peter

  Already, my kin are creeping through the shadows, moving around the vast chamber in the darkness, closing in on them.

  “You needed us,” Jane says. “You kept us alive because you needed to know how deep the conspiracy ran.”

  “And we needed you,” Vlad says. “We needed you to lure them here—all of them.”

  I get to my feet as the realization hits. My heart pounds in my throat. “The nuke.”

  “Yes, yes,” Vlad says. His voice echoes across the void. “That drone was never bound for New York. It was only ever coming here.”

  “What???” I scramble for the tunnel, yelling, “Run, my brothers. Flee, dear sisters.”

  Around me, there are shrieks of anger and anguish as the vampires race for the surface.

  “We’ll bury you down here,” Jane yells, her voice trailing off as I rush through the cavern. We’re two hundred yards beneath the surface, deep enough that we’d survive the initial blast, but we’d be trapped down here, or crushed by the rockfall.

  “Faster,” I yell, pushing against the vampire ahead of me. We race through the twisted labyrinth, leaping over boulders, and darting through openings. Behind me, Vlad laughs. His voice echoes. My clothes catch on a rock, tearing open.

  We reach the graveyard beneath the castle wall. Outside, the sunlight is bright, blinding me for a moment as my eyes struggle to adjust. Rocks crunch beneath my boots. I run out into the snow, yelling, waving my hands, wanting to warn the others. A drone circles not more than a thousand feet overhead. It banks, turning toward the watchtower. A black cylinder drops, racing toward the hillside, but it never reaches the ground.

  The flash is all-absorbing, saturating everything around me. Although the explosion unfolds in less than a millisecond, my acute reaction time allows me to turn, but even I can’t outrun a nuclear blast. A wall of heat strikes my body, searing my skin and tearing the flesh from my shattered bones. The pressure wave ruptures my internal organs. Temperatures soar from below freezing to several thousand degrees in an instant of time. There’s no pain. The damage occurs faster than even my nerves can respond. All that remains is eternal silence and the endless darkness.

  The End

  Epilogue

  I’m drowning. Dark water swirls around me, tugging at my body, causing me to tumble. Bubbles churn in the wake, trapping me in the current. There’s no up, no down, just the constant twist as oxygen burns within my veins.

  Fingers reach for me. A gloved hand passes through my long hair, grabbing at strands and yanking them loose, but I barely feel any pain. As I roll around, tossed by the strength of the torrent, a hand grabs my ankle, hauling me out of the freezing cold water. Pebbles shift beneath my body as I’m dragged on shore.

  Blue skies haunt me. A dark mushroom cloud rises thousands of feet into the air, curling in on itself and drifting with the wind. The trees are dead, flattened on the hillside.

  A diver starts compressions, driving hard into my chest and breaking several ribs, but I don’t care. The pain is indistinct, almost like a dream. He’s dressed in black. A respirator hangs around his neck, but he’s still wearing goggles over his full body wetsuit. Water runs from my lips. Someone slips a mask over my mouth and starts squeezing a plastic bulb, forcing air into my lungs.

  “I’ve got the woman,” the diver yells, still pounding on my chest. “Where’s the old man. Does anyone have eyes on him?” His voice is American, which is a pleasant surprise. At a guess, I’d say Californian. It’s funny the things that run through my mind while dying.

  A soldier stabs me with a needle, injecting adrenaline into the veins on my neck. The chest compressions stop. I cough, feeling a rush of warmth surge through my torso.

  “Hang in there,” the diver says, checking my pulse with some kind of electronic device. They won’t touch me. No one will. No one’s going to risk touching me. Not until they’re sure.

  Military helicopters circle overhead. They’re low and loud. It takes a moment before I realize one of them’s landing beside the river, kicking up an artificial snowstorm. Over the sound of the rotors, someone yells, “I’ve got the old man.”

  Two divers drag Vlad out of the river. They’ve got his arms draped over their shoulders. He’s conscious, making an effort to move his legs, even though the soldiers are running through the knee-deep water. A military medic waits on shore, dressed in a hazmat suit. The Union Jack on his shoulder identifies him as a British soldier. I see tiny French flags, German, and Russian, as soldiers rush in around me.

  Two medics place a stretcher beside me. Everyone’s either in hazmat suits, or wetsuits, ensuring there’s no possibility of skin-to-skin contact. I’m lifted onto the stretcher and carried along the beach until they find a spot where they can climb onto the riverbank.

  An Apache helicopter with US markings flies low over the dark water. A Gatling gun swivels beneath the cockpit, following the vision of the gunner as he watches us from behind a black visor, ready to tear us to shreds at the first sign of danger.

  Another fuel-air bomb explodes in the distance, flattening more trees and sending up a glowing mushroom cloud. Fighter jets roar overhead. Several other Apache helicopters fly over the decimated forest, moving in parallel, occasionally opening fire with missiles. Smoke trails lash out from their sides, disappearing in a burst of violence on the mountain. Trees splinter, exploding into matchsticks.

  My stretcher is lowered to the frozen ground. The rotor blades of a nearby helicopter send a chill through me. A medic starts an IV, while another puts an oxygen mask over my face.

  “Breathe.”

  Vlad hobbles up to me, escorted by several armed soldiers watching him with suspicious eyes.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, crouching and taking my hand. We’re both still wearing gloves, and as he squeezes my fingers, water runs down my arm. I pull the mask from my face, more concerned about what just happened than my own health.

  “They bought it,” I say. “They really thought we were going to nuke the castle.”

  “How many did you get?” Vlad asks, turning to the soldier beside him.

  From behind a hazmat mask, General Alexei says, “We detected forty-seven thermal signatures in the kill zone.”

  “Is that all of them?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Alexei replies. “I hope so. Only time will tell.”

  “Time,” Vlad says, but he never finishes his sentence. He seems disoriented. Confused. Lost in a daze.

  Alexei says, “NATO forces have detained another two hundred people inside the containment area, but they’re mostly peasants. We’ll keep them in solitary until we can verify there’s been no contamination.”

  “Good,” I say, relieved to hear our plan worked. I sit up on the stretcher. My astonishing body is already healing itself at a rapid pace.

  Alexei says, “We need to keep you in isolation until we can confirm there’s been no infection, although in your case, it’s impossible to tell,” I nod, resigned to the fact no one will ever trust me—I’m a hybrid. “But it worked. Well done,” he says. “This changes everything.”

  Vlad is frail. His emotions are hard to read. I expected him to be more excited at our triumph, but he looks to the hills, watching as the military sweeps the area. He’s sad. Perhaps I’m reading too much into his reaction, expecting far too much of an old man. Both of his sons are dead. He almost drowned. He’s dripping wet and freezing cold. Yet something’s wrong. His demeanor leaves me feeling slightly uncomfortable.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Yes, yes,” he replies, and I catch a slight glimmer in his eye. For a moment, for the briefest fraction of a second, it’s as though he’s not himself, but then he smiles, and says, “You have done well.”

  Could Vlad have been? No. I was with him the whole time. Joe never touched him, of that I’m sure. But when Michael died, there was so much blood as Vlad drove the stake into that vile heart. Was there any—

  A medic covers me with a thermal blan
ket that’s as thin as a sheet of tinfoil. He tucks the blanket around my body, distracting me. I was thinking about something—something important. There was a conclusion just within reach, but now it escapes me. I was going to say something. What was I about to say?

  Alexei interrupts my thought process. “Once we’ve swept the area, we’ll move in and secure the craft.”

  “Yes,” I say, feeling overwhelmed with excitement and forgetting about the nagging suspicion at the back of my mind. “For the first time, we hold the advantage—and now, we have a starship.”

  Afterword

  Thank you for taking a chance on Nosferatu. I hope you enjoyed this remake on a classic horror story.

  I love the classics. From Voltaire’s Micromegas to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, there is no shortage of inspiring stories to draw upon in history.

  I’ve always seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an allegory for the old European world of myth and superstition struggling against the advent of a new scientific world. It’s not soldiers or adventurous heroes that expose this evil, but a couple of doctors caring for a sick patient. It’s not superhuman strength that eventually defeats the Count, but rather average men and women rising to the challenge of a new age.

  In reinterpreting Dracula, I wanted to steer away from the obvious bloodsucking vampire that has become so cliché in our culture. Instead, I wanted to explore the subtleties that made Dracula a classic—the moody, oppressive evil, the sense of helplessness, the confusion and fear of the unknown. I hope Nosferatu has restored some of the mystique to Dracula.

  The excerpts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula have been used under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License. Dracula, along with tens of thousands of other classics, can be downloaded from Gutenberg for free.

  http://www.gutenberg.org/

  Dracula is iconic, but the majority of us are more aware of the remakes than the original. For most, it will come as a surprise to learn Count Dracula walked around in the sunlight while in London, but he certainly didn’t sparkle.

  As a novel, Dracula taps into our primal fears of death as a ruthless, unrelenting monster that can never be satiated. Dracula exploits the fear of the unknown, the sense of being vulnerable, the inability to act, and the necessity of banding together for strength.

  The story of Dracula isn’t simply the classic fight between good and evil. Bram Stoker draws the battle lines between ordinary, everyday people who are naive about the challenges they face, and an ancient, inhuman, calculating evil. The imagery is vivid, commoners challenging a powerful aristocracy. The stakes are the opportunity to live a normal life without succumbing to evil and preying on loved ones, and it is this grounding in the daily routines of life in the 19th century that makes Dracula resonate even today. Rather than flights of fantasy, Dracula seems to exist as a shadow in our own world.

  In Nosferatu, I’ve deliberately avoided the regular vampiric tropes, instead grounding the story in a quasi-plausible manner, reviving the realism that haunted the original. In the words of the Daily Mail review of Dracula from 1897.

  By ten o’clock the story had so fastened itself upon our attention that we could not pause even to light our pipe. At midnight the narrative had fairly got upon our nerves; a creepy terror had seized upon us, and when at length, in the early hours of the morning, we went upstairs to bed it was with the anticipation of nightmare. We listened anxiously for the sound of bats’ wings against the window; we even felt at our throat in dread least [sic] an actual vampire should have left there the two ghastly punctures which in Mr Stoker’s book attested to the hellish operations of Dracula.

  —For more information on historical reviews of Dracula, see Dracula: A Documentary Volume (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol 304), Elizabeth Miller.

  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing these three novellas, revisiting Dracula. Although I’ve taken license with the concept, I’ve tried to stay true to the origins of the story, especially the haunting sense of foreboding so masterfully captured by Stoker.

  All three of these stories have utilized the ‘unreliable narrator,’ made famous by such writers as Chaucer, Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie. It’s a fascinating literary device, because our natural assumption is that we’re being told the truth—something that applies not only to the books we read, but the lives we lead. In reality, life is complex, and rarely clearcut. I’ve tried to capture that in the vampire legend, as there has to be more than the outward persona of brutal evil behind these mythical monsters. Motives, intents, plans, desires—these are what define us. We have a penchant for rationalizing our positions in life, and I thought it would be interesting to explore the same self-obsessed flaw in vampires—the ultimate personification of evil.

  Historically, the concept of vampires and werewolves arose from our inability to accept the existence of evil among humans (those we now call psychopaths). It’s much easier to attribute evil to some inhuman monster than to realize that we are fundamentally flawed as a species. Genetically, Homo sapiens is but a single species, something that’s astonishingly rare in biology, and yet we divide ourselves by race, sex, culture, country, political ideology, religion, and a dozen other illogical groupings. Once such divisions are set, we can turn our backs on each other with a surprising amount of speed and indifference, and this is how evil arises.

  I’ve included the the original, unpublished ending of Dracula in this story. The section you read about an earthquake destroying Dracula’s castle is precisely what Bram Stoker wrote well over a century ago. He intended the destruction of the castle as a means of destroying any evidence vampires had ever existed, but changed his mind shortly before publication. While developing Nosferatu, I realized his description lined up with an actual historical event, an earthquake that destroyed the Cetatea Poenari fortress in 1888, a castle frequented by Vlad III, the historic Count Dracula. As this occurred less than a decade before Dracula was published, it made for an interesting tie-in, lending plausibility to this story. I hope you enjoyed how Nosferatu was able to exploit this historic coincidence to enhance the legend a little more.

  Editing was provided by Ellen Campbell, Alabama, and Andrea Beatrice Reed, New York, with proofreading undertaken by Crystal Watanabe (Pikko’s House) in Hawaii.

  Thank you again for taking a chance on independent writing. If you’ve enjoyed this story, please tell a friend, and leave a review online. Don’t underestimate the importance of your opinion. Readers don’t look to writers to learn about new books, they look to other readers, valuing their opinions, so have your say, let others know what you think of this story.

  If you’ve enjoyed this series, please take the time to check out my other books. I have over twenty novels, novellas and short stories available online and in paperback.

  Peter Cawdron,

  Brisbane, Australia

  Other Books by Peter Cawdron

  Thank you for supporting independent science fiction. You might enjoy the following novels also written by Peter Cawdron.

  RETROGRADE

  “NASA prepared us for every eventuality on Mars, but they never prepared us for what could go wrong on Earth.”

  Mankind has long dreamed of reaching out to live on other planets, and with the establishment of the Mars Endeavour colony, that dream has become reality. The fledgling colony consists of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. Buried deep underground, they’re protected from the harsh radiation that sterilizes the surface of the planet. The colony is prepared for every eventuality except one—what happens when disaster strikes Earth?

  STARSHIP MINE

  James Patterson is a gay accountant living in Keyes, Oklahoma—deep in the Bible Belt—the religious heartland of America. He’s also the first person to make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence seeking to understand our world, and that makes him the most important person on the planet.

  FREE FALL<
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  Free Fall first appeared as a short story in The Z Chronicles, and serves as a prequel to What We Left Behind.

  Jackson is an astronaut testing a prototype interstellar craft in deep space. When he returns home, there’s no one to greet him. Earth has fallen silent. Now he must decide—stay in orbit, watching a dead planet roll slowly by beneath his windows, or land on Earth and fight for life?

  WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND & ALL OUR TOMORROWS

  Hazel is a regular teenager growing up in an irregular world overrun with zombies. She likes music, perfume, freshly baked muffins, and playing her Xbox—everything that no longer exists in the apocalypse.

  Raised in the safety of a commune, Hazel rarely sees Zee anymore, except on those occasions when the soldiers demonstrate the importance of a headshot to the kids.

  To her horror, circumstances beyond her control lead her outside the barbed wire fence and into a zombie-infested town.

  “Five, Four, Three, Two—count your shots, Haze,” she says to herself, firing at the oncoming zombie horde. “Don’t forget to reload.”

  ALIEN SPACE TENTACLE PORN

  A 1950s hospital. Temporary amnesia. A naked man running through Central Park yelling something about alien space tentacles. Tinfoil, duct tape, and bananas. These are the ingredients for a spectacular romp through a world you never thought possible as aliens reach out and make contact with Earth.

  MY SWEET SATAN

  The crew of the Copernicus is sent to investigate Bestla, one of the remote moons of Saturn. Bestla has always been an oddball, orbiting Saturn in the wrong direction and at a distance of fifteen million miles, so far away that Saturn appears smaller than Earth’s moon in the night sky. Bestla hides a secret. When mapped by an unmanned probe, Bestla awakes and begins transmitting a message, only it’s a message no one wants to hear: “I want to live and die for you, Satan.”