Kate looked from the Romanian woman to the portraits of Nicolae and Elena on the wall behind her. All eyes were cold, hateful. The woman wore a discreet crucifix and a Party badge clipped to her uniform lapel.
A rope barrier was removed and the eager crowd of the Dracula company stormed toward the airplane, mounting the steps, squeezing into the cabin.
The flight was for London, then New York, then Los Angeles. Half a world away.
Kate wanted to stand up, to join the plane, to add her own jokes and fantasies to the rowdy chatter, to fly away from here. Her luggage, she realized, was in the hold.
A man in a black trenchcoat—Securitate?—and two uniformed policemen arrived and exchanged terse phrases with the woman. Kate gathered they were talking about Shiny Suit. And her. They used old, cruel words: leech, nosferatu, parasite. The Securitate man looked at her passport.
“It is impossible that you be allowed to leave.”
Across the tarmac, the last of the crew—Ion-John among them, baseball cap turned backwards, bulky kit-bag on his shoulder—disappeared into the sleek tube of the airplane. The door was pulled shut.
She was forgotten, left behind.
How long would it be before anyone noticed? With different sets of people disembarking in three cities, probably forever. It was easy to miss one mousy adviser in the excitement, the anticipation, the triumph of going home with the movie shot. Months of post-production, dialogue looping, editing, rough cutting, previews, publicity and release lay ahead, with box-office takings to be crowed over and prizes to be competed for in Cannes and on Oscar night. Maybe when they came to put her credit on the film, someone would think to ask what had become of the funny little old girl with the thick glasses and the red hair.
“You are a sympathizer with the Transylvania Movement.”
“Good God,” she blurted, “why would anybody want to live here?”
That did not go down well.
The engines were whining. The plane taxied toward the runway.
“This is an old country, Miss Katharine Reed,” the Securitate man sneered. “We know the ways of your kind, and we understand how they should be dealt with.”
All the eyes were pitiless.
The giant black horse is led into the courtyard by the gypsies. Swords are drawn in salute to the animal. It whinnies slightly, coat glossy ebony, nostrils scarlet.
Inside the castle, Harker descends a circular stairway carefully, wiping aside cobwebs. He has a wooden stake in his hands.
The gypsies close on the horse.
HARKER’S VOICE: Even the castle wanted him dead, and that’s what he served at the end. The ancient, blood-caked stones of his Transylvanian fastness.
Harker stands over Dracula’s coffin. The Count lies, bloated with blood, face puffy and violet.
Gypsy knives stroke the horse’s flanks. Blood erupts from the coat.
Harker raises the stake with both hands over his head.
Dracula’s eyes open, red marbles in his fat, flat face. Harker is given pause.
The horse neighs in sudden pain. Axes chop at its neck and legs. The mighty beast is felled.
Harker plunges the stake into the Count’s vast chest.
The horse jerks spastically as the gypsies hack at it. Its hooves scrape painfully on the cobbles.
A gout of violently red blood gushes upwards, splashing directly into Harker’s face, reddening him from head to waist. The flow continues, exploding everywhere, filling the coffin, the room, driving Harker back.
Dracula’s great hands grip the sides of the coffin and he tries to sit. Around him is a cloud of blood droplets, hanging in the air like slo-mo fog.
The horse kicks its last, clearing a circle. The gypsies look with respect at the creature they have slain.
Harker takes a shovel and pounds at the stake, driving it deeper into Dracula’s barrel chest, forcing him back into his filthy sarcophagus.
At last, the Count gives up. Whispered words escape from him with his last breath.
DRACULA: The horror . . . the horror . . .
She supposed there were worse places than a Romanian jail. But not many.
They kept her isolated from the warm prisoners. Rapists and murderers and dissidents were afraid of her. She found herself penned with uncommunicative Transylvanians, haughty elders reduced to grime and resentful newborns.
She had seen a couple of Meinster’s Kids, and their calm, purposeful, blank-eyed viciousness disturbed her. Their definition of enemy was terrifyingly broad, and they believed in killing. No negotiation, no surrender, no accommodation. Just death, on an industrial scale.
The bars were silver. She fed on insects and rats. She was weak.
Every day, she was interrogated.
They were convinced she had murdered Georghiou. His throat had been gnawed and he was completely exsanguinated.
Why her? Why not some Transylvanian terrorist?
Because of the bloodied once-yellow scrap in his dead fist. A length of thin silk, which she had identified as her Biba scarf. The scarf she had thought of as civilization. The bandage she had used to bind Ion’s wound.
She said nothing about that.
Ion-John was on the other side of the world, making his way. She was left behind in his stead, an offering to placate those who would pursue him. She could not pretend even to herself that it was not deliberate. She understood all too well how he had survived so many years underground. He had learned the predator’s trick: to be loved, but never to love. For that, she pitied him even as she could cheerfully have torn his head off.
There were ways out of jails. Even jails with silver bars and garlic hung from every window. The Romanian jailers prided themselves on knowing vampires, but they still treated her as if she were feebleminded and fragile.
Her strength was sapping, and each night without proper feeding made her weaker.
Walls could be broken through. And there were passes out of the country. She would have to fallback on skills she had thought never to exercise again.
But she was a survivor of the night.
As, quietly, she planned her escape from the prison and from the country, she tried to imagine where the “Son of Dracula” was, to conceive of the life he was living in America, to count the used-up husks left in his wake. Was he still at his maestro’s side, making himself useful? Or had he passed beyond that, found a new patron or become a maestro himself?
Eventually, he would build his castle in Beverly Hills and enslave a harem. What might he become: a studio head, a cocaine baron, a rock promoter, a media mogul, a star? Truly, Ion-John was what Francis had wanted of Brando—Dracula reborn. An old monster, remade for the new world and the next century, meaning all things, tainting everything he touched.
She would leave him be, this new monster of hers, this creature born of Hollywood fantasy and her own thoughtless charity. With Dracula gone or transformed, the world needed a fresh monster. And John Popp would do as well as anyone else. The world had made him and it could cope with him.
Kate extruded a fingernail into a hard, sharp spar, and scraped the wall. The stones were solid, but between them was old mortar, which crumbled easily.
Harker, face still red with Dracula’s blood, is back in his room at the inn in Bistritz. He stands in front of the mirror.
HARKER’S VOICE: They were going to make me a saint for this, and I wasn’t even in their fucking church any more.
Harker looks deep into the mirror.
He has no reflection.
Harker’s mouth forms the words, but the voice is Dracula’s.
The horror . . . the horror . . .
HUGH B. CAVE (1910–2004) was born in Chester, England, and imigrated with his family to America when he was five. From the late 1920s onwards his stories began appearing in such legendary pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales.
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br /> After leaving the horror field in the early 1940s for almost three decades, a volume of the author’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, was published by Karl Edward Wagner in 1977. Cave subsequently returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels: Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns, and The Restless Dead. His short stories were also collected in a number of volumes, including The Corpse Maker, Death Stalks the Night, The Dagger of Tsiang, Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask, Come Into My Parlor, The Door Below, and Bottled in Blonde. Milt Thomas’s biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House a week after the author’s death.
During his lifetime, Cave received Life Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association, the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Convention. He was also presented with the Special Convention Award at the 1997 World Fantasy gathering in London, where he was a Special Guest of Honor.
The Second Time Around
Hugh B. Cave
In a small New England town, a series of bizarre attacks are being blamed on vampires . . .
A lonely road in northern New England, barely two cars wide. Night and road both black as tar except for the area illuminated by the car’s headlights.
Suddenly the light-beams pick out a plodding figure who stops, turns, and lifts a hand in supplication. A stooped old woman, gray-haired, the hand wavering before her eyes to shield them from the headlights’ glare.
The late-model Buick stops smoothly beside her and its driver leans across the emptiness beside him to open a door for her. He is years younger than she. A college professor from Boston, dark-haired and handsome, Jerome Howell is well dressed in brown slacks, a tan jacket, a white sport shirt. From a thin gold chain around his neck hangs a gold cross.
Professor Howell’s hobby—an all-consuming one—is the study of psychic phenomena, and with a whole summer vacation before him and an intriguing mystery to investigate, he is presently in high spirits. Since darkness blacked out the road he has been driving a steady forty miles an hour while thinking of what he will do on reaching his destination.
“Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”
“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” The old woman clambers in and pulls the door shut, then squirms on the seat until she has made herself comfortable. She wears an old-fashioned black dress, a gray sweater, black high-top shoes. “Are you going to Ellenton?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Good, good. I was visiting a friend and my husband was supposed to come back for me. I suppose he forgot. We’re old and he does that sometimes, poor man.” She turns her head to smile at him, but when her gaze touches the gold cross at his throat, she pulls back with a quick little jerk of her shoulders. “I don’t seem to remember seeing you before. Do you live around here?”
He shakes his head. Decides to tell her who he is and what he is here for, because she has probably lived in the area long enough to supply some information that will help him in his forthcoming research. But at that moment the lights of a following car flash in his rear-view mirror.
The car has come up behind him at a suspiciously fast speed and is apparently about to go roaring past without even a horn blast to warn him. Always a defensive driver, he jerks his wheel over, causing the Buick to veer to the extreme edge of the road in search of safety.
In the other car, which is an old but souped-up clunker, are two younger men. Monk Morrisey, driving, is eighteen. Dan Clay will be eighteen next month. Both are high-school students on summer vacation, jobless by choice but engaged in an ongoing enterprise that earns them more money than classmates who do have summer jobs. Both are of slight build, unshaven, with hair to their shoulders. Both wear boots and dirty jeans and even dirtier khaki shirts.
With its windows rolled up against the evening chill, the clunker reeks of marijuana. Dan has just finished a joint. Monk smokes one as he drives.
They close in on the Buick at sixty-odd miles an hour.
As the other car comes roaring up beside him, Jerome Howell tells himself that no one but a fool or a drunk would be driving that fast on this road in the dark. He swings his Buick even closer to the road’s edge to avoid being sideswiped. But despite his defensive maneuver, the clunker lurches at the last moment and thuds into the side of his machine, with a sound like that of a sledgehammer striking an empty oil drum.
Oddly, the little old lady seated beside him does not flinch or scream. Apparently unafraid, she only grabs at the dashboard.
The steering wheel spins in Howell’s hands as the sandy road-shoulder traps his car’s right front tire. Out of control while he desperately struggles to brake it, the Buick lurches off the blacktop into a shallow, grassy ditch, climbs the far side, and hurtles into a grove of trees.
Howell is a deft enough driver to avoid the first few trees the car seems likely to crash into, but not the next. The Buick strikes that one a glancing blow with its right front fender, rears high on its left wheels, and tips onto its side.
After sideswiping the Buick, the jalopy slowed from sixty-plus so quickly that its tires squealed on the blacktop and its wheels came close to locking. Bringing it to a halt with its right wheels off the pavement, Monk Morrisey leaned back with a grin.
“Got ’im.”
He thrust out his right hand. Dan Clay slapped it with his right, grinned and said, “Them, you mean. There was two of ’em. The driver and a little old lady.”
“All the better. Little old ladies wear jewelry sometimes. Let’s go.”
The two got out of the clunker and loped back along the road to where they could see the other car’s headlight-glow among the trees. Scrambling across the ditch, they approached the tipped machine with care.
“They must both be out cold. Or dead, even.” Monk’s tone said it made no difference to him. “I don’t see nothin’ movin’.”
“Yeah.”
Going to the front of the wrecked car, they peered in through the windshield. The driver was bent grotesquely against the door the car was resting on, with one arm limply draped over the steering wheel.
“Where’s the old woman?” Dan Clay said. “There was an old woman with him. I seen her.” He leaned closer, pressing his forehead against the cracked windshield glass. “She ain’t here. Where the hell’d she go to?”
Both backed away from the car and peered into the surrounding darkness for a moment. “Maybe there wasn’t no woman,” Monk said.
“I seen a little old lady, I tell you! Right there on the front seat, next to this guy!”
“So how’d she get out?”
“How do I know how she got out? She just did, for Chrissake. If she ain’t here now, she must’ve.”
“Okay, okay.” Monk spread his arms in surrender. “Let’s get what we come for.”
They peered into the Buick again. There was no way they could crawl under it to open the driver’s door. Climbing onto the machine, Dan worked on the high-side door instead. That one was deeply creased from its impact with the tree.
Less experienced predators might not have been able to get even that door open. But after working themselves into a heavy sweat, these two finally succeeded.
Leaning in and reaching down for the unconscious man’s right hand, Monk felt for a pulse at the wrist.
“Well?” Clay said.
“I ain’t sure. Whaddaya think? Should we—”
“No, no. Leave him be.”
“Be better if we—”
“No, damn it. He never seen us. Leave him be but put the mark on him, just in case. Here.” Clay took from a hip pocket of his dirty jeans a metal instrument shaped like an extra wide, two-pronged dinner fork with a stubby handle. He and his buddy had designed it themselves and liked to think of it as a miniature devil’s pitchfork with the center prongs missing. He put the instrument in Monk’s upthru
st hand.
Leaning down into the car again, Monk turned the driver’s head to expose his neck and for the first time noticed the gold chain the man was wearing. He broke it off with a quick jerk and thrust it into his pocket. Then with a practiced hand he pressed the twin points of the devil’s pitchfork into the side of the man’s neck until blood oozed out around them.
Withdrawing the instrument, he handed it back up to Dan Clay without comment and went on with his work. This too was routine.
Aided by the light from the dashboard, which like the car’s headlamps was still on, Monk squirmed even farther into the wrecked machine and emptied the driver’s pockets, pausing only to pass the contents of each up to his companion. Then he emptied the glove compartment. Lots of stupid people kept valuable stuff in glove compartments, he knew from the dozens of cars he and Dan had plundered. Finally he snatched the ignition key, which was one of several on a ring.
“Okay. I got everything.”
“You sure?”
“Course I’m sure, for Chrissake. Gimme a hand up.”
With Dan’s help Monk wriggled back out of the car like a worm from its hole in the ground. Then the two turned to the car’s trunk. One of the keys on the ring opened it.
There was a small leather suitcase in the trunk. Dan lifted it out and slammed the trunk lid shut. Both young men then hurried back through the trees and across the ditch to the road. On reaching their clunker, they flung themselves and their loot into it.
Again Monk Morrisey drove. Tonight was his night. While the old car roared down the road, Dan Clay pulled the assorted loot from his pockets and examined it.
“One big, thick billfold.” Counting the bills in it, he became so excited he performed a kind of breakdance on the car seat, even with the suitcase across his knees. “Jeez, Monk! More’n five hundred bucks in cash! And a Visa card, two gas company credit cards, a driver’s license, car registration . . . The guy’s name is Jerome Howell and he’s from Boston, Mass.” Tossing the billfold onto the back seat, he eagerly turned his attention to the rest of what they had stolen.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 20
