Van Helsing gave this reply: “Our lives are in the balance, gentlemen. We do this properly or we die. And possibly many others. And death is the best of our options. We do this right or we suffer in dire fashion. Believe me.”
I believed him. My grandfather had planted the seed of horror, and now Van Helsing was nourishing the carnivorous plant that was devouring my courage.
Finally he gave the word, dismissed Pavel, and hung a cloth over the window while I set down my mallet. We went outside, and I could see the sun turning the eastern sky pale. I stared at the dawning as if it were the first I had ever seen.
My arms ached from the work, and I could see Pavel trying to massage out the kinks in his own arms, as he had been holding the lantern over his head for hours. Van Helsing glanced at his watch and looked up at us. He appeared tired. For the first time since I had met him he seemed old, the burden upon him sapping his normal vitality.
“Dawn is upon us,” he said, hefting the tyre jack from where it leaned against the crypt. “Now we see if we are as smart as we think.”
He stepped into the tomb and I followed. All of a sudden I wanted out of this lordly death house in this lonely churchyard, to be away to teeming London where the air is fresh and the sun rises over Hempstead Hill and where wildflowers grow of their own accord.
“Close the door,” Van Helsing ordered Pavel, and my skin crawled as stone ground against stone, cloaking us in darkness with but a faint glow from the cloth-covered window. I was overcome with fear, the smell of the grave permeating the core of my being. Van Helsing turned on his electric torch, handed me the tyre jack, pointed to the locks securing the steel bands that encompassed the sarcophagus. The locks broke easily and the bands, three inches wide, fell to the marble floor with a clang that startled us both.
I reached down and put my hands to the lid, the same red-veined, black granite that clad the outside, but this was polished to a high gleam that could be seen under the layer of dust. Van Helsing added his strength, and we slowly slid the heavy slab away. It fell to the floor with a loud thunk that shattered some floor tiles.
“Is everyone all right in there?” Pavel called from outside. His voice sounded small, a thousand miles away.
“Yes, yes!” Van Helsing shouted.
I stared down at the casket, black lacquered wood, simple, elegant in its own manner.
“‘Of witch, and daemon, and large coffin worm, / Were long be-nightmared,’” I quoted. This time I elicited a response.
“Keats,” Van Helsing noted correctly as he took the pry bar and inserted it under the coffin lid. He levered the jack up and down a few times and, with a crack, the seal was breached. With another tug and push, the lid sprung up a few inches on its hinges. Tossing the pry bar aside with a loud clang of steel against marble, Van Helsing then used his hands to push the lid up into the vertical.
Dracula. The legend, the myth made corporeal, that very creature lay there in state. I knew him at once from the description in The Book: the waxen face, the high, aquiline nose on which the light fell in a thin white line, the slightly open mouth with sharp white teeth showing between blue lips. The mustache that trailed to his jawline and shoulder-length hair were a brilliant white. His hands, long-fingered, the nails a soft purple, still clutched at the rounded, wooden stake that pierced his chest. The top of the wood was splintered.
I held my breath. I was here, standing before the fabled monster, the locus of my grandfather’s tales. I was finally confronting the being that had preoccupied a good part of my life.
“This is why I volunteered for the SOE,” I whispered to the Professor. “This is why I cajoled and pleaded to be assigned to Rumania.”
“And the reason I stayed,” he replied.
Van Helsing was also contemplating the body, deep in his own thoughts, memories.
“I thought you destroyed it. Cut off his head and all that,” I ventured.
“That book!” the old man spat, then settled into his professorial mode. “I could not. The scientist in me, I suppose. Such a unique specimen. I wanted to study the phenomenon of the creature. That was why I began to delve deeper into my medical studies. Then . . . life took precedence, a marriage, a child, my practice, the offer to build a university, and now the war. I never got around to it. Maybe I was . . . avoiding the whole endeavour. But I knew he was here . . . waiting.”
We both examined the form in the casket. Despite the history, it was a noble visage, broad of forehead, a Romanesque nose, and a surprisingly sensual mouth.
“Strange,” the Professor went on. “It is as if time had not passed since I and the others stood here so many years ago. The body appears exactly the same, not a bit of decomposition that I can see. No change of any kind is evident, no lengthening of the nails or hair as the dead oft-times exhibit. The flesh has not sunken or contracted; there seems to be no desiccation of any form. Though the hair has turned white. Curious.”
He was bent over the coffin, his eyes inches from the corpse, scrutinising every inch of exposed flesh, assuming the mantle of scientist.
“Remarkable,” he whispered.
I, too, perused the cadaver, with a less scientific bent and a bit more trepidation. Were we really contemplating the revivification of this monster? Was this action at all proper? Was this act not impious sacrilege? Would Van Helsing and I leave this tomb alive? Would we suffer the fate worse than death that Van Helsing had referred to more than once?
Van Helsing steeled himself and wrapped both hands around the stake that penetrated the creature’s chest.
The sharpened wood came out easily enough. There was no blood or gore, just a blackish residue adhering to the stake.
We both took a reflexive step back as if we had just opened a box of venomous snakes. But Dracula did not move. The body was as still as before.
“I thought as much,” Van Helsing said as he tossed away the stake. It landed on the tiles with a clatter. The Professor went to his medical bag, withdrew a syringe, and slid up the sleeve of his shirt and coat to expose the ropey vein at the crook of his elbow.
“No! Use mine,” I said, astounding myself.
I slipped up my own sleeve and offered him my arm. I do not know why I did this. I tell myself that it was because the old man looked so tired and I thought that a loss of blood might further weaken him. If there were any deeper reason, I do not want to contemplate such.
Van Helsing stared at me for what seemed to be an eternity, studying my face, searching for that same rationale. He finally turned his attention to my arm, regarding the filigree of bluish veins that weaved under my skin. Selecting the most prominent blood vessel, he pierced it with the point of the needle. I prided myself that I did not flinch, but this was more, I think, the skill of Van Helsing’s phlebotomic finesse than my bravery.
Dark, scarlet blood filled the glass tube. When it was full, Van Helsing slid the needle out of my skin. Again he bent over the coffin, poised the syringe over Dracula’s chest, and pushed the plunger. A stream of bright red arced into the puncture wound. Then he moved the needle up to the dead face and squirted the remaining fluid upon the vampire’s mouth. The blood seeped between blue lips and disappeared.
I gasped and Van Helsing turned from his kit to look. In alarm, I could only point with a shaking hand at the chest wound. The dead flesh was healing before my astounded eyes, scar tissue forming over the gaping hole and then, just as swiftly, that shiny skin transforming to a firmer state.
Dracula’s body arched. Then contracted. The eyes snapped open. The mouth flew agape. The fangs were displayed.
Van Helsing leapt away, retreating until his back hit the rear wall. My reaction was a mite slower. I stood there for a second, mesmerised by those eyes. They were of a yellow-green cast, like those of a black cat once owned by one of my aunts. Trying to gather my senses, I took a step to the rear and my foot stumbled over the discarded stake, causing me to fall on my pipe and drum.
Dracula leapt from the casket wi
th feline grace, stood glowering at Van Helsing and then at me. But his strength seemed to abandon him, all of it spent on the quick exit from the coffin, I suppose, and his legs gave way. He was obviously weak, his muscles not performing properly.
Using the sarcophagus for purchase, he pulled himself back upright and turned his head slowly, taking in his environs. Those vulpine eyes passed over me, I still on my arse, then fixed upon the Professor, huddled against the wall under the tiny window.
Dracula extended one long arm, and with his trembling white finger pointed at the old man he instantly recognised.
“Van Helsing!” The voice was a dry rasp, like old parchment being crumpled into a ball. “You!”
The creature summoned what strength he had and charged across the tomb toward Van Helsing, who whipped the improvised curtain off the window.
A long shaft of sunlight stabbed into the crypt. Striking a mirror set upon one of the wedges I had driven into the opposite wall, reflecting light onto another piece of looking glass that bounced the sunbeam to another side wall and onto another bit of mirror and another until the tomb was crisscrossed by streams of sunlight.
Dracula recoiled from one, then the other until he found himself backed into a dark corner. He hissed in rage and frustration, like a wolf fighting the trap that snared his leg, and, as any cornered beast, his eyes desperately sought an escape path, any way out.
He lurched toward the door, but found it blocked by three beams of light. He tried another path. Also blocked.
Van Helsing stepped forward just short of obstructing a beam himself so as not to destroy the sun-ray cage he had constructed.
“You are trapped,” he told the creature.
I rose from the floor, finding a space that did not interrupt the reflected columns of light.
Dracula, furious, reached a hand toward Van Helsing. The sunlight struck his skin as if it were a blowtorch. The flesh was instantly burnt, blistered before my eyes, blackened. Smoke wafted from the infernal broiling, and I could detect a rotten sweetness in the air.
Dracula was forced to snatch his hand back into the shadow.
“What do you want?” Dracula snarled. The fangs were no longer in evidence. The canines were rather long, but not anything I hadn’t seen in normal people. “Why have you roused me from . . . that?”
He gestured to the casket.
“I have a proposition for you.” Van Helsing spoke calmly, as if he were a solicitor discussing contracts. “Your country has been invaded.”
“Again? And the invader?”
“The German Army.”
“The Hun . . .”
I noticed that Dracula was paying scant attention to the conversation, but instead was studying the arrangement of the broken mirror pieces perched upon the shims inserted into the brickwork. I had a feeling he was not admiring the workmanship.
“This is the Germans’ second try at a world war. Global domination is their goal,” Van Helsing continued, watching the vampire with the caution a rabbit gives a hawk. “They are back and they are vicious. More brutal than ever. Your country’s leadership has surrendered territory, some of it your homeland, and now cooperate with the Germans. Your people are suffering.”
“My people . . .” Dracula sneered. “They despise me. They regard me as a beast. Less than a beast. To be hounded and killed.”
He studied the beams of light as if they were a knot to unravel.
“You were once a patriot,” Van Helsing continued, never taking his eyes off the vampire. “A champion to your people, your country.”
“True, this. I drove out the Turks, the boyars,” Dracula said with a certain pride. I caught a glimpse of the nobleman who once resided in the creature.
And now I knew it was true. This was Vlad Tepes, who had ruled ancient Wallachia brutally, but fairly, in the 1400s. He had fought the Ottoman Empire and won, driven the Hungarians from his lands. His name translated as Vlad the Impaler, famous for mounting his enemies on stakes. The Ottoman Army, it was said, once fled in fright after seeing thousands of its fellows, all rotting corpses, displayed on the banks of the Danube like so many rats on skewers.
I was musing on my historical studies of this man when Dracula’s hand shot out, like a snake strikes, and snatched the wooden stake from the floor and threw it at a mirror shard. The glass shattered and fell from its place on the wall and suddenly a whole section of Van Helsing’s sunlight prison was gone.
The vampire leapt at Van Helsing, fangs bared. The Professor’s hand went to a pocket, pulled forth his shaving mirror, and bounced light from the window directly into Dracula’s face.
The creature gasped, his face raw and red where he was burnt. Half-blinded, he once again sought the sanctuary of shade.
“I could put you back into your tomb,” Van Helsing threatened.
“Do so,” Dracula softly replied, shielding his eyes. “There is no world out there for me.”
“Your people revile you only because you preyed upon them.” Van Helsing kept his shaving mirror at the ready, dancing the reflected beam above and around the vampire. “I am offering you an opportunity to redeem yourself. A chance to make up for all the misery and pain you have caused.”
“Redemption is not for me.” Dracula shook his head. “It would take a score of lifetimes to atone for my depredations.”
“From all accounts, you have those lifetimes ahead of you,” Van Helsing said, but Dracula, arms still over his eyes, just shook his head again.
“How about something else?” I asked.
Dracula took his arms from his face and turned toward me. I found my hands were trembling and hid them behind my back.
“Blood” was all I said.
“Blood.” Dracula spoke the word as if it were holy.
“Nazi blood,” I continued with more confidence. “The blood of the invaders. You can have your fill. And be a hero to your countrymen once more.”
“The blood of my enemies.” There was a crinkling of the eyes, the hint of a smile. “I have a powerful thirst.”
“There is more than enough blood to satisfy even your overwhelming thirst.” Van Helsing picked up the argument. “But you must promise to kill only our enemies.”
“Why would you trust me?” Dracula asked.
“A fair question. One I have pondered myself,” Van Helsing answered. “I have long studied your history, volume after ancient volume, and, despite your unholy appetite, you were once known to be an honest ruler, a man of his word. I now ask for it.”
“My word then. To feed only upon my enemies.”
“Our enemies,” I corrected.
“The enemies of my people. Agreed. My oath. You have it,” Dracula vowed.
“Agreed,” Van Helsing said.
Dracula peered at his former foe, now ally. Van Helsing stepped into the path of the light beam, breaking asunder the reflected prison. Without the glare from the window Dracula could see the old man clearly now and was obviously stunned.
“You are old,” Dracula said in astonishment.
“True, I am old,” Van Helsing acknowledged. “And you are . . . but for the colour of your hair, unchanged.”
Van Helsing walked around the crypt and knocked the bits of mirror to the floor, smashing them. I slipped a hand into my pocket and wrapped my fingers around my pistol, doubting it would prove to be any defence against this creature. The vampire noticed my movement and appeared to be amused at my nervousness.
“You, too, seem familiar,” he addressed me.
“I am the grandson of Jonathan Harker.”
“Harker . . .” Dracula thought for a moment. “The solicitor from England?”
“The same.”
“Grandson.” Dracula shook his head as he walked freely about the crypt, ducking under the window. He paused in front of Van Helsing, who did not even flinch.
I kept my hand in my pocket, seeking security in the steel of the Browning. I realised that Van Helsing had no such talisman and was helpless
before the creature. This raised my estimation of the Professor and how brave a man he was indeed.
“You are most wrong about me, Professor,” Dracula said, his voice becoming more human with use. “I am not totally unchanged. On the contrary. I have changed in many ways, I think.”
He continued to walk, gaining surety in his gait as he did so, turning once again to the old man. “What do we do now?” he asked.
“We wait for nightfall, I suppose,” Van Helsing replied. “For your convenience.”
“I need to feed. I am weak and my thirst is strong. Very strong.” His amber eyes flitted from me to Van Helsing and back. My free hand reflexively went to my neck and, although I tried to cover the gesture with some fiddling of my collar, the vampire caught the motion and gave me a wolfish grin.
“Control yourself,” Van Helsing said. “You are not an animal.”
“Not quite,” Dracula said. “But neither am I human, am I?”
He smiled again. It was a wicked smile, the canines not fully extended, but still prominent enough to give him a predatory aspect.
“How long have I been . . . in state?” Dracula asked. “What day is it? Or should I say year?”
“Year,” I told him. “Nineteen forty-one.”
“Nigh fifty years . . .” Dracula absorbed the information. “And the world has changed much?”
“It has,” Van Helsing replied.
“Aircraft. We have machines that fly,” I supplied. “And drop bombs, men.”
“We have methods of slaughter that would impress even you,” Van Helsing added. “There was a world war. Now there is another. The first tallied deaths in the millions. I think we are destined to top that number this time.”
“There is a man called Adolf Hitler . . .” I began.
The history lesson, with many digressions, lasted until sunset. Van Helsing and I tossed historical benchmarks back and forth like a vigorous badminton rally, trying to encapsulate a half century of human achievement. The vampire took particular interest when Van Helsing told him how Transylvania had been absorbed into the Rumanian Union after the Great War and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The rumours that Hungary would soon be given the Szekely Land of Eastern Transylvania irked him even more.
Dracula vs. Hitler Page 12
