In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  It took Ashley four years to learn that she was terrified of losing me, needed to control me, had to learn to accept that my seductions were nothing more than calling a cow in for the slaughter, and that her anger was behind her prostituting herself. Not some imagined need for financial security. When she got it, she got it. She turned to acting lessons at a local theater while I was out feeding, and began to get parts in equity plays.

  For me, it took six years to learn that I was living in denial of my emotions for so long I had no self, no ego, and therefore no one to respect in myself. I also intellectualized Ashley’s jealousy as insignificant. I also tended toward an antisocial personality, and needed to acquire a sense of purpose in my life beyond food, sex, and the love of a beautiful woman. He also suggested I find another manner of acquiring blood that would put my relationship first, and not allow my sustenance to be lessened.

  It seemed that after seven years together, I, the Prince of Darkness, and Ashley Hibbert, were making a go of a real relationship. Everything was wonderful. Ashley was about to star in a television series, and I had become a reader for the Braille Institute. I was feeling fulfilled, as was she, and our love life was renewed with passion and devotion.

  Alex told us we didn’t need him any more, and off we hurried into a new wall. Too embarrassed to return to face him, I kept my new discomfort to myself.

  Ashley was an instant little star. Because we agreed she wouldn’t allow anyone access to me or to know about me, she fell prey to every hip single guy or unscrupulous married man in town. She resisted them all, but their curiosity had to create some answer for her rejections or their egos couldn’t take it. The tabloids had fun with speculating on her gender preferences, and she soon had to devise dozens of circuitous ways to get home to me. All of this exhausted her, but she remained devoted.

  Somehow, this annoyed and finally angered me. Her complaints she was too tired to make love grew in number, and the time apart due to her change in sleep cycle from mine multiplied as well. I suffered this in silence. After all, she loved me. I was nothing any more without her. She sensed my troubled heart and soul and begged me to go back to Alex. Ashamed, but determined not to lose my Ashley, I humbled myself back into my nine o’clock appointment.

  Alex listened, more fascinated now than ever. Ashley said she’d go with me, but she was always too tired. Alex said I should work on myself, and during the hiatus, she’d come in. He trusted her sincerity in wanting to save our relationship. So, I went alone.

  What a mistake. I delved into the psyche of the most perverted compulsive the world’s ever known. Alex was elated in this process, while I only grew more and more depressed.

  “When will this melancholy leave me, Alex? I am no good to Ashley when all I want to do is mope around the house when I am awake, and sleep too many hours in the day.”

  “Vladdie, depression is the valley in the walk of life. You and Ashley hiked up a steep mountain together and while her road is still in ascension, she will grow depressed as part of her walk. You, my friend, are in the period of time when all you’ve learned has pitched you into a world where things are no longer familiar. You don’t know yet where you’re going, but the past is behind you. Trust that in time, you will be moving up the side of another mountain. This time to greater heights.”

  “And how long should I give this valley?”

  He chuckled warmly, always assuming I was kidding around when I used his words in the mocking manner I had.

  “If you’re still feeling blue in a year, I’d say we should try tricyclics on you. There are antidepressants around that could wipe this dysphoria right out.”

  “Pardon my naiveté, but wouldn’t it be a helpful thing for me to take an antidepressant now, while I’m newly depressed?”

  Again he chuckled. “Dear Vlad, you don’t want to run from these negative feelings. They’re just as valuable as your positive feelings. You grow from fully experiencing both of them. All of them. Don’t you enjoy your emotions now that you have them?”

  I found myself studying his neck, seeking a pulse under his thick skin.

  “Well, frankly, no, I don’t. And I’m afraid Ashley will leave me if I continue to be a sucking vortex of negativity, as she calls it.”

  Alex mused over this. He had the habit of appearing to stare at me blankly, but that analytical mind was always working. Working. “Isn’t that telling . . . a sucking vortex. She’s admitting to her codependence in this depression of yours. Tell her I want her here next session, even if she has to drink a gallon of coffee.”

  Ashley was reluctant, only because, she said, she didn’t want to confuse her television persona with her evolving self. But she went. We were back to our weekly sessions, endless and intense discussions at home, our language peppered with psychobabble.

  The years in love and therapy continued. Ashley’s show was cancelled, and she developed anorexia. My depression was unaffected by medication, and Alex got fatter, older and richer on us. He even put Ashley into a thirty-day residential program for eating disorders, while I began combing the city in bloodlust, growing sloppier by the night.

  My evolution was becoming my undoing. I was decompensating. Dracula was not meant to be self-aware. Guilt and remorse lived in me like parasites, sapping my motivation for living. I could barely recall what it felt like to know a positive emotion. My anger at my ignorance in this ate at me as well.

  On Ashley’s twenty-eighth birthday, she insisted she never looked better, and would I please marry her. I blinked at her. She knew I couldn’t marry. Wouldn’t marry. I was working on that part of commitment phobia as her birthday neared.

  “No, no, Vlad, you don’t understand. I want you to drink my blood and let me drink yours. I want to remain this way for eternity with you.” She took my chin in her hand and batted her lashes at me. “It may take that long for us to resolve all our issues in therapy, yes?”

  I spun away. “God, Ashley, how can you think of spending eternity with a depressed partner? It is a comfort to me to think one day you will be free of this burden in your death, if you don’t choose to leave me first.”

  “Turn around you ancient bag of psychological torments, and look at me.” I did. “I love you. I’ve not stopped loving you. You will not be depressed forever. Alex said so.”

  I hated to correct her. “He said that it is not uncommon for someone to be depressed a month for every year they were abused or tortured or whatever their trauma. Darling, I’ve lived far longer than most psychology texts have been around, and that means I could be depressed for decades.”

  “And what if I choose to work with you in this?”

  I was suddenly tired, weary of working on myself. Exhausted at searching for myself. I hadn’t yet found anyone within me worth being glad about. Her enthusiasm was born of her mortality and dogged faith in our love. My affection for her couldn’t have been more at that moment.

  “I love you, Ashley, but I’m afraid I love you too much to allow you to attach yourself to an emotional cavern of gloom for eternity. I’d rather let you go, than do that to you.” I regretted saying that as soon as it left my lips. How could I not see then the manipulation? It was shouting in my face!

  “Oh, Vlad, you’re so noble. But I want to be immortal. Please. I mean what I said. I’m not bullshitting you.” She set her manicured fingers on her perfect hips.

  Three sessions later, I’d been convinced, even though I couldn’t summon the ecstasy I knew I should be feeling at the prospect of eternity with her. With that we went home to Ashley’s grandly theatrical production of the Big Seduction. She wanted to be reborn in splendor.

  A thousand candles, twenty pots of smoldering incense, silk sheets, sultry music and a table of delicate sweets awaited us. I knew as I went through the motions, that it was wrong, that my dammed emotions weren’t going to spring a leak in time to make this glorious for me as well. Ashley, contrary to my experience, was ardently amorous.

  When it was over, I fou
nd myself wishing to stand in the face of the sun at dawn. Ashley was sick as hell for a while, but rebounded as I knew she would. I also knew how being immortal would come to change her. I simply hadn’t imagined the speed at which that metamorphosis would occur.

  It was less than a week later when she called me into the bedroom where she reclined in all her bored immortal beauty. “I don’t like you any more, Vlad. Whining, moaning, telling me all the time how you miss your old self. Well, I miss him, too. I’m leaving. I want to find someone who can keep up with me, who can feel joy and smile. It’s been years since I heard you laugh.”

  I couldn’t say I was stunned. I suspected this was coming. I tried a hollow chuckle. It failed as miserably as our union.

  What I hadn’t expected was how her leaving would be as a stake to my heart.

  Alex continued to treat my ennui, and I continued to lose what desire I had left to go on. He tried to put me in a psychiatric hospital, but I had to remind him I would be a danger to the patients, and it would jeopardize my anonymity. He relented.

  So you can see, can’t you? Once the most feared and most fascinating of monsters in the known world, I’ve become a pathetic mass of neuroses, pathologies, with an apparently endless road ahead of me toward an iota of peace and a cohesive self. I’ve even lost interest in feeding. What is the point? I can’t even live up to my myth any more. When I’m gone, I ask only that you not tell the truth of my downfall, the demise of the Dracula the world still clings to with trepidation. Allow my legacy to live on.

  I leave this world without regrets, and I have found some measure of peace. I made my last appointment with Dr. Alex Bloward, and told him of my plans. He did his duty as a psychologist and insisted on committing me for my own protection. It was while he was on the telephone ordering the ambulance, I ripped out his throat and eviscerated him.

  The condemned are always given whatever they ask for as their last meal, and I couldn’t have asked for better.

  LISA MORTON is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert. She has written more than 100 short stories, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning “Tested” (from Cemetery Dance magazine). In early 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, was published to critical acclaim, and was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. She has also written the novels Malediction (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel), Netherworld, and Zombie Apocalypse: Washington Deceased. Her books have been translated into eight languages.

  As a Halloween expert, she wrote the definitive reference book The Halloween Encyclopedia (now in a second edition), and the multiple award-winning Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. She also served as Consultant on U.S. Postal’s first official Halloween stamps.

  Her other non-fiction books include The Cinema of Tsui Hark (the first comprehensive study of the influential Hong Kong filmmaker), the award-winning Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-authored with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Ghosts: A Haunted History.

  Morton currently serves as President of the Horror Writers Association, and is also an Active member of Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime.

  Children of the Long Night

  Lisa Morton

  Dracula finds himself ever more disgusted with humanity and what it is becoming . . .

  C’mon, Tet, you know you can’t spend the night here.”

  The ragged man in filthy combat fatigues looked up from under his thin stringy hair. His real name was John Douglas Black, but he’d earned his street name by begging passers-by to “spare some change for a vet, man, I was in the Tet Offensive, had the skin on my back torched by napalm.” Tet didn’t appear old enough to have served in ’Nam, but, on the other hand, no one had ever seen his back, either.

  Tet staggered to his feet, half-leaning against the wall beside him for support. The two beat cops eyed him with a mix of disgust and pity, then the female one leaped forward to steady him when he almost fell.

  “You all right, Tet? We can take you to a clinic, get you some help . . .”

  Tet flinched away from her hand. “Already been. They couldn’t do shit for me.”

  The cop reluctantly let her partner lead her back to their car, the game finished for tonight. It was always the same—they knew Tet was one of the harmless ones, didn’t really want to roust him, but if they didn’t some Yuppie on his busy way back from the video store would complain, then they’d have to arrest Tet. It was easier this way for everyone.

  Except Tet really did need help. Something was wrong with him. Every morning he awoke feeling weaker, more feverish. He wondered if he’d caught some disease from a rat—there were bite marks on his wrists, small gaping pink spots standing out from the grime.

  Tet reached the side street and turned the corner. There was an alley down here that was little more than a walkway and trash storage between buildings. Tet could store himself there with all the rest of the garbage and no one cared.

  He stumbled past the first two dumpsters, then let himself collapse. He was almost asleep when he realized he wasn’t alone. He looked up blearily and made out a figure standing over him, a silhouette. Then the blackness was dropping beside Tet, and he heard a noise, a hideous noise like a cross between a guttural laugh and an animal snarl. He realized he’d been hearing that sound every night for nearly a week.

  “Hey man, leave me alone, I got nothin’—”

  They were the last words Tet said before his throat was torn out.

  It was an evening in early November 1917 as he strode across the French plain. When the war had finally washed up against his Carpathian hillsides a year earlier, the smell of blood had begun to work on him, drawing him down from his eyrie. He had returned to his homeland ten years earlier, disenchanted and dismayed by London society, and had lived in solitude for a decade, content to feed only on the occasional gypsy or stray traveler.

  But then, as the war spread and his native soil was seared and smeared with gore, he became aware of his own hungers. And so he finally followed them until they led him here, to the battlefield of Ypres, on this fall night.

  He had spent last night and today in an inn a hundred miles away, and had flown here after sunset. He touched down on a small hill on the edge of the conflagration, and was mildly surprised to find himself shocked by the carnage. In his own battles he had seen wholesale slaughter, but never this devastation of the land. He remembered this area from fifty years earlier; it had been thick with vegetation, a dark green that rustled with life in the night breeze. Now he saw only brown mud, broken metal and broken men.

  He descended into the foggy yellow hell of mustard gas, unaffected but not unrepulsed. Even so, he was drunk on wafting copper scent and the moans of the dying. He bypassed mounds of corpses until he came to a man still alive, missing a leg, dragging himself through the clutching filth, gas mask making him look like an insect, a carrion fly.

  The Transylvanian fell on the man, tearing the gas mask loose to fix on his throat. The soldier clawed feebly as needle-pointed teeth slid into his skin, and then he gave in gratefully as death finally overtook him.

  And when the Transylvanian had drained the man, he swam to his feet, head reeling, and let his predator’s instincts bring him to the next one . . . and the next . . . and the next, ten years of starvation erased in one night . . .

  Until, in his ecstasy, he did not realize that he had fastened upon a man dying of gas poisoning. And suddenly he was on his knees, vomiting up tainted blood with good, helpless as wave after wave of spasm forced the precious fluid from him, until he lay as weak as one of his victims, as barren as the land. Sunrise found him rolling into a trench and covering himself with corpses to escape the light. And although he survived, undiscovered, to rise again at dusk and flee back to his comfortable coffin . . .

  . . . Something else in him had begun to die.

  Jackson didn’t want the job
. A bum who’d had his throat ripped out, probably by some other bum’s rabid dog. It could’ve been easily written off, except that the coroner had found the body almost completely drained of blood and ruled it a homicide.

  They’d had other cases of homeless death in the last year, and a higher-than-normal percentage had died of blood loss. Some had been found with small animal bites on the throat or wrists, but the M.E. suggested they’d been dying in the alleys for some time, and rats had hastened the process along.

  But clearly no mere rat had torn out John Black’s throat, and so now they finally had to accept the possibility of a serial killer. Some nut stealing blood to sell, or experiment with, probably. Jackson didn’t really care—he had more important cases to deal with. A double homicide of a wealthy couple in Hancock Park. A drive-by in Hollywood. A rape-mutilation-murder in Silverlake, a victim who had left behind three young children. Who gave a shit about a fucked-up friendless ex-vet on the streets? He intended to file it in the back of the unsolved cases as quickly as possible.

  That is, until she walked in.

  It was after 8:30 on a Tuesday night. She appeared unannounced, asking if he was the one in charge of the John Black case.

  He didn’t even think to ask how she’d gotten past the main desk and all the barriers from there to here without anyone notifying him, he was so stunned by her.

  She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  Flawless, gleaming pale skin, a perfectly-sculpted face framed by undulations of auburn hair, a lovely shape draped in leather and jewels.

  “Excuse me—are you the one in charge of the John Black case?” she asked again, and he realized she had a British accent, very upper-crust and old-sounding.

  “Yes, sorry. Cal Jackson.” He paused, surprised to realize he was nearly speechless in this woman’s presence. “And you are . . .?” She entered his office, closed the door behind her and seated herself in a guest chair.