We all turned to the old man. There was a sharp intake of breath from Lucy. “Father . . . no.”
EXCERPTED FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOVEL THE DRAGON PRINCE AND I
by Lenore Van Muller
Her father had never spoken of what had brought him to Transylvania so many years ago, but Lucille had heard the stories, lurid tales too outlandish to be believed. She heard them as a child, murmured about at school, overheard in stores and shops whenever people saw her, whispered recountings of the tale. Lucille’s mere presence seemed to prompt the repeating of the legend.
In response, she had prodded her father, even tried to provoke him into telling her something—anything—about that part of his life. But his silence concerning the subject was absolute, and she soon learned to never bring up the matter.
The mystery grew from a seed into a great, dark tree that cast its shadow over their otherwise happy lives. When her mother was still alive, Lucy had pressed her, too, but she would never part with any information, acceding to her husband’s silence.
That left Lucille to compile what she could from the snippets of village rumour, secondhand accounts, and, of course, that novel. Her father had received numerous copies, sent to him by the author and aficionados of the book, some requesting his autograph or an interview, and he burnt every one in the fireplace. She found a copy in the school library and stole it from the shelves. She read the forbidden tome in secret, hiding it at home, and reading bits in the bathroom and by lamplight under her blanket as if it were pornography.
She wanted to ask her father so many questions. How much of the book, the myth, the gossip, was true? Was the creature real or an exaggerated version of some madman killer?
These questions returned to her as they left the tailor shop. But she said nothing on the drive home. Harker, possibly sensing her mood, was also silent. The questions swirled around her brain, as if she were standing outside a carousel with taunting wooden horses passing by, mocking her over and over. By the time they reached the house, she had decided, she was going to finally confront him. Now was her chance to have some answers.
One clue was evident. Her father had just admitted that much. The monster was real. And that fact tinged her decision to question him with a dark sense of apprehension.
“Father, do you intend to enlist the . . . vampire in our cause?”
“I do.”
“So it exists,” Harker said.
“It does,” her father replied.
“It was not destroyed,” Harker persisted. “As was described in the book.”
“The book, pfui!” Van Helsing spat.
“I’m going with you,” Lucille immediately announced.
“I forbid it,” her father answered.
“I think I am far beyond the age where you can forbid me.”
He went from room to room gathering diverse items off tables and from assorted drawers and tossing the objects into his black bag. Lucille followed, arguing with her father every step. Harker trailed close behind, deep within his own thoughts.
They travelled from parlour to library, into the medical examining room, to the attached shed where her father had a wood and metal workbench on which he tinkered with his inventions, back upstairs to his private quarters.
All the while the two Van Helsings tossed the same argument back and forth in some verbal tennis match.
“Why can’t I come with you?” she finally demanded.
“Because it is too dangerous,” her father said as he put his shaving mirror into his medical bag.
“More dangerous than a German bullet?” she asked.
“Decidedly,” he replied and went about collecting any other mirror that he could find. She and Harker followed him from room to room like two puppies after their mother.
“Even more reason for me to accompany you,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Lucille, but no.”
One hand mirror was too large to fit into his valise, and he laid it upon the floor. To her astonishment he stomped on the glass and broke it into pieces. It had belonged to her mother and was sacrosanct. At least until now. He bent to the floor and carefully picked up the shards and put them into his bag, muttering to himself, “So sorry, Lyuba, but you would understand, I’m sure.” Harker went to his knees and helped collect the broken glass.
“You cannot stop me.” She stood in front of her father, blocking the doorway. “I am an adult now.”
He stood and they faced each other, both ramrod straight, both equally stubborn by blood, neither ready to give ground.
Her father laid a hand on her shoulder and appealed to her with his greatest weapon.
“My dear Lucille, I am the only one who knows this creature and its insidious ways, hence, I am the only one to do this. But in attempting such I must be in complete command of my faculties. Having you present will only create a distraction, one that could get me, us, killed. Or a fate worse than death. I need to focus, as if this were surgery, an operation where life hangs in the balance. As it does. So I ask you, for me, for the success of this travail, for your country, stand aside and let me do this. Alone.”
She took a moment to consider his argument. And as he expected, as he knew she would, Lucille consented with a slight, reluctant nod of her head.
“But take someone with you. Farkas,” she suggested.
“Farkas is too superstitious. He would be more of a hindrance than help.”
“Pavel, then,” she offered.
Harker, standing behind her father, urgently raised his hand like a schoolboy with a ready answer and an eagerness to please the teacher.
It was her father’s turn to nod. “Pavel, then. I will ask him, but these local people have strong feelings—”
“And me!” Harker finally exclaimed like a balloon filled to the bursting point.
They both looked at him. He nervously stroked his thin line of mustache.
“Me,” he repeated. “Please. Take me with you.”
FROM THE WAR JOURNAL OF J. HARKER
(transcribed from shorthand)
I suddenly found myself overcome with nerves. This was it. I was finally going to see for myself what had changed my grandfather’s life so profoundly that he left the law and became a man of God. That had such an impact on my grandmother that if the devil’s name was spoken in polite conversation her hand reflexively went to the scar on her forehead. I was now embarking on my own encounter with the wellspring of all of those macabre tales.
We picked up Pavel, who was waiting at a crossroads south of Brasov, and I followed Van Helsing’s directions to the village of Sacele. We were stopped by one German and two recently established Rumanian Army roadblocks. The Professor’s medical papers and the lie that Pavel’s wife was in the midst of a difficult birth were enough to allow us safe passage. There was no doubt that Pavel’s fidgety and pale appearance gave credence to the lie.
I drove along the twists and turns of the narrow roads, past a tiny, pastoral village. The countryside was lovely and most interesting; if only we were there under different conditions. How delightful it would have been to see it all, to stop and meet people and learn something of their lives, to fill our minds and memories with all the colour and picturesque scenery of this whole wild, beautiful country and the quaint people. But alas . . .
One turn and the pavement gave way to gravel, and another turn led to two muddy ruts that were deep enough to control the Bentley so well that I could let loose of the steering wheel, and we rode along as if on a train following tracks.
All three of us were silent the entire ride, each deep inside our own thoughts. I noted that Pavel, sitting in the passenger seat next to me, stank of garlic, and I was able to discern a garland of it strung around the man’s neck. I was reminded of the Mohammedan tale that when Satan stepped from the Garden of Eden, after the Fall of Man, garlic sprang from where he placed his left foot and onion from where his right touched.
I also noticed that Pavel now wore a rosary made of
some dark wood with a large silver crucifix that hung almost to his belt. I had not seen him wear this religious symbol at the meeting before, and I had been told by dear Lucy that he was a steadfast Communist, rejecting religion as “the opiate of the people.” But I guess everyone falls back on what comfort they can when they are frightened.
The road became overgrown with weeds and brush. Just when I thought we could push no further through this dense foliage, Van Helsing told me I could stop and then ordered us out of the car. Van Helsing opened the Bentley’s boot and gave Pavel the tyre jack carried therein. He then led us away from the car and around a lilac hedge the size of a London bus.
Our path entered a twisted mass of trees, the corridor blocked with recent growths. Pavel walked ahead, slashing at the foliage with the long knife he wore sheathed at his belt. I wished I had brought my grandfather’s kukri. The blade, if nothing else, could serve as a comfort in this twilight grove of grotesque and vine-encumbered trees, the branches distorted, shrivelled, and decaying. The very look of this dark realm was enough to stir a morbid fancy. My own doubts and fears crowded upon me, and I was struck by the grim adventure I had embarked upon.
“‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!’” I quoted. “‘The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The frumious Bandersnatch!’” My attempt at some humorous relief fell on deaf ears, the other two men as grim as last week’s mutton.
The shade grew denser as we meandered through this twisted, macabre wooded labyrinth, and the air filled me with a brooding fear. What eldritch dream world was this, which I had entered?
We finally stepped out of these wind-whispered woods, and I found myself facing the ruins of a church. Crumbling walls displayed elaborate carvings worn to illegibility by eons of rain and wind. The grey stone was black with mould and a green verdigris of lichen. Fallen blocks lay helter-skelter among the weeds and briars. I examined the remains of a doorway arch and the peaked forms of absent windows; shattered white marble tiles were scattered along the interior, which was spotted with tufts of wild grass. Some of the base stones conveyed the semblance of a wall that hinted at an early Roman influence or even construction. What remained of the steeple was a stone cross propped up against a sagging, weary wall.
A gravestone lay in pieces on our pathway, the shattered remains like a puzzle hastily reconstructed. I could barely make out the name, the carving made smooth by the decades: Varney.
At the back end of the ruins was a cemetery. A rusted iron fence was failing, and the headstones had been untended for so long that an oak had sprouted from a ground-level tomb, splitting the marble and heaving it aside, along with a few other grave markers.
While I took in this sad ruin, Van Helsing jolted me out of my melancholy.
“We must hurry while we have the light.” Van Helsing urged us forward through the graveyard, his black bag tinkling like a wind chime in minor chord. Past the fence was another, smaller cemetery. Many of these graves had no stones at all, just iron stakes holding tiny vertical glass panes that had once displayed a piece of paper, long disintegrated, the iron itself corroded with knobby barnacles of rust.
“Unconsecrated ground,” Van Helsing explained. “For murderers, apostates, and the unknown dead.”
There were a few headstones and a large mausoleum with maybe a hundred cubicles inside. There was nothing to mark the names of those interred. I commented on this.
“Influenza epidemic,” Van Helsing explained, as I examined the tomb’s mouldy interior. “So many died that there were not enough survivors to identify them all.”
At the very back of this poor, ignominious graveyard was a larger tomb, twice the size of the mausoleum, carved of black granite flecked with glints of silver and veins of red running through it like tributaries of blood. Ancient carvings along the sides and front had been abraded by the elements, but I could make out a pair of dragons flanking the entrance, their tails curled around a Gothic letter D. Someone had chiselled a crude cross into each of these reliefs.
The entire circumference of this imposing edifice had been wrapped in strands of wire, spaced a foot or so apart, and between the stone and wire a variety of crosses had been inserted. There were crucifixes by the hundreds of every size and type imaginable. Plain wooden crosses, some evidently carved by hand, crosses of brass, copper, steel, iron, some of intricate design, some with Christ, a variety of effigies, from crude to life-like, in his agony or in peace, accepting his pain or crying out, eyes cast down in suffering or uplifted, asking the eternal question.
“All these crosses,” Van Helsing muttered to himself. “Where did they come from? Who could have done this? I thought my secret was well kept.”
The three of us stood there at the tomb’s entrance, I in thrall, Van Helsing most likely in reminiscence, Pavel crossing himself and whispering a prayer. The wind rustled the leaves of the trees, and their branches rattled against each other like the clattering of bones.
Finally, Van Helsing opened his medical bag and pulled from it a pair of wire snips. He cut one wire and a cascade of crosses tumbled to the ground. Pavel scurried to gather them off the dirt. Another wire was cut, the pile of crosses increased.
After severing the last wire, Van Helsing stepped back and gestured to Pavel, who inserted the wedge end of the tyre jack between the tomb door and jamb. He applied some pressure, but the huge stone door moved only a mere inch. There was a loud grating as the rusty iron hinges protested years of disuse. Pavel’s face grew red, and the tendons in his neck went rigid as he dug in his feet and leaned into the pry bar.
With a great grinding that was as loud as Pavel’s grunts, the door finally gave way and opened enough for me to get a grip upon the inner edge and help slide the huge chunk of stone open. I was prepared for some unpleasantness, and indeed a faint, malodorous air seemed to exhale through the gap.
One of the iron hinges, rusted completely, fell off and clattered to the stone floor. Inside, a small window set high in the wall across from the door spilled light upon a black marble sarcophagus that was set in the centre of the tomb. Two steel bands were strapped about the sarcophagus and bound with a pair of rust-encrusted locks. The whole interior was lit by an eerie orange light, and I could see the sun setting behind the tomb in a crimson death. Most appropriate, I thought.
Van Helsing stepped inside, and I followed him. Pavel hesitated, began praying under his breath again. Abject fear was evident on his face and he seemed unable to cross the threshold with us.
“Pavel.” Van Helsing’s voice was soft, soothing. “You’ve faced Nazi machine guns, been bayoneted and shot. Surely you can do this.”
“I . . . cannot.” The poor man shook his head. “My mother told me . . . stories.”
“Then wait here,” the Professor told him and took the tyre jack from the man’s limp hands. Pavel stepped farther away from the tomb.
There was an odour of mould, damp, and something more—corruption. I tried to breathe through my mouth as the Professor looked around at the black brick walls. The aged mortar was crumbling, a few bricks fallen to the floor. The tomb was grim and gruesome; spiders had assumed dominance over the discoloured stone and dust-encrusted mortar.
The Professor stepped up to the small window and knocked out the glass with the tyre jack. The sudden wanton destruction surprised me. I had never seen the Professor in any mode other than the intellectual. Brushing the broken shards outside, he then plunged his hand into his magic bag and produced a compass and what appeared to be a farmer’s almanac. Consulting this periodical, he took an azimuth reading through the window.
Then we went to work. The sun was gone and we worked by torchlight, Van Helsing stationing Pavel at the window to shine his own battery-powered lantern through the smashed window to imitate the dawn. The Professor kept having to adjust Pavel’s angle as the man’s arms tired. I was kept busy driving wooden wedges into the wall mortar at Van Helsing’s direction.
As I did so, I coul
d not help but glance frequently at the sarcophagus that dominated the small room. It was so close. The object of terror and bloodshed that might lie within was almost beyond comprehension. Almost. As it was, the proximity was frightening enough, and I found it difficult to concentrate on the simple work of hammering wood into the ancient cement.
Even more disconcerting was the constant sound of breaking glass as Van Helsing smashed his collection of mirrors, one by one, into smaller fragments. The sound of glass scratching stone has always been one of those sounds that curdles my blood and makes my skin crawl. To hear it all night was making me slightly mad. The daemonic and ghoulish atmosphere did not help my mood any. More than once I had to restrain myself from shouting at the Professor to “stop, for God’s sake, stop.” But finally he was done breaking the mirrors and became busy setting the glass upon my wedges.
It took hours and, in the midst of the black night, Van Helsing proposed a break to sup on the bread, cheese, and wine Pavel had brought with him. The usually ravenous Pavel declined, and so did I.
“Let’s just be done with this,” I said, and the Professor acceded.
Our labours were interrupted once more. I suddenly felt a gust of wind buffet my face, and I turned to witness the strangest spectacle. A burst of flower petals, deep violet, wafted in the air above the sarcophagus, like a flock of tiny bluebirds flitting about the room before my amazed eyes.
Van Helsing caught one of the petals in his open palm and examined it in the dim light. “Monkshood,” he remarked, looking around for the source of this strange phenomenon.
“Must have blown through the window,” I offered, but I could tell the solution wasn’t sufficient for him. Silently he went back to the task at hand. I took the cue and resumed my own work.
We finished about an hour before dawn, the Professor constantly adjusting his construction, the kind where one move upsets another, which in turn causes another change, one after another, a cascade of tiny remedies. We did this until mentally exhausted, and when I protested that, certainly, enough was enough, Pavel agreed with me.
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