“Tell me, little one,” the Count says. “Tell me how someone as pathetic as you became one of my children.”
Harry made all kinds of resolutions and promises to himself in the first days after he was taken prisoner. He made them all over again after the terrible thing in the cell in Block A. They melt like ice in sunlight before the actuality of the Count. The story tumbles out of him, drawn by the Count’s red gaze. He tells the Count how he fell through the black air over Yugoslavia. He tells him how he nearly died, and how he was saved.
1943. Harry Merrick was twenty-three. A lieutenant in the Special Air Services, an explosives expert. He was being flown toward a drop behind enemy lines when a stray unit spotted the little plane and strafed it with machine-gun and rifle fire. A lucky shot hit a fuel line. The pilot was killed. Harry was hit. He jumped, and found the bullet which had shattered his left kneecap had also passed through his parachute. It tore apart when it opened. Harry plunged through freezing black air and crashed through fir trees and landed in a bank of snow, lacerated, bleeding heavily, dying.
And they came. The strong, beautiful people, swift and fierce as wolves. They killed the Serbian patrol which had been slogging up the mountainside toward Harry. They found him and took him back to their cave. A girl slit her wrist and he fed from her, hardly knowing what he was doing. He thought she was his fiancée, Catherine. He died, and he was reborn.
“The Children of the Night,” the twisted little man in the green coat says. “You see, master? You see?”
“Let him tell his story, fool. Tell me, little one. What happened to them?”
They called themselves the Children of the Night. They were from Romania, they said, a place called the Borgo Pass. They had fled from persecution sixty years ago, and now they were fighting the Fascists because thousands of their human brothers and sisters had been killed in the death camps. They were undead, but they were also gypsies. The girl who had saved Harry, Eva, said that the two types of blood, gypsy and that of their father in darkness, mingled in them and gave them a hybrid strength. She was more than a hundred years old but looked like a girl of eighteen, with an elfin face and a fall of black hair. She ran like the wind, calling the wolves of the mountains around her. The metal-frame stock of her Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle was notched with more than three dozen kills.
Reborn, Harry fought alongside Eva and her compatriots. The gypsies specialized in hit-and-run raids and ambushes. Harry devised ways of blocking roads with the minimum of explosive. They killed without mercy for they would not drink the blood of their enemies, impaled the corpses and the wounded on stakes as a sign of their vengeance. To feed, they ran with the wolves, bringing down deer and wild boar with teeth and nails, drinking the hot blood of their prey but never killing. It was a pure, clean way of life. There were eight of them. Eva and Maria and Illeana. Ion and Little Ion, who was also called Savu. Mircea and Vioreland the oldest (although he looked no older than Eva), calm gray-eyed Petru, who could turn himself into a wolf. They were all killed. Only Harry survived.
It happened in the last days of the war. It was very hot, and the short summer nights restricted their activities. There was a great deal of traffic on the roads heading north. Victory was in the air—to the south, each night, there were rumbles and flashes as allied bombers dropped their sticks of high explosive on the retreating Fascists.
A raiding party came in the day, when the Children of the Night were asleep. Twenty, thirty of them, Croatian peasants who were once their allies. Desperate dirty scared men in a medley of torn uniforms, some armed with no more than scythes or pitchforks, one carrying an ancient blunderbuss. But most had rifles, and silver bullets. They knew what they were dealing with. Harry slept at the back of the cave; as a newborn he could least stand the daylight. When the humans poured in, shooting wildly, he took a stray round that passed clean through his side. Maddened by the violent pain of the silver-tainted wound, Harry ran right through the attackers, ran through burning sunlit air and plunged down the steep side of a ravine, coming to rest in a deep bank of ferns in the shade of pines that clutched at rock with twisted roots.
It took three days for Harry’s bones to knit (the wound in his side would not heal, and bled a thin black gruel). He climbed the steep cliff, found the shriveled blackened bodies set upright on stakes. The heads had been taken. The bodies looked as if they had been rescued from a furnace; sunlight had burnt them to bone. Eva and Maria and Illeana. Ion and Little Ion, who was also called Savu. Mircea and Vioreland calm gray-eyed Petru. Harry couldn’t recognize any of them.
“They were strong,” the Count says. “They were my children. What music they made, in the mountains!”
“Listen to my master,” the crooked little man tells Harry. His tongue is black, and too long. His left arm is withered, the hand swollen and fused into something like a lobster’s claw. He scuttles up the wall to avoid a blow from the Count. He says, peering down from the corner between wall and ceiling, like a gecko, “He is a great man and I will make him greater.”
“My children were beautiful,” the Count says. “My brides were lamia who could turn the heart of the staunchest Christian; my Children of the Night were splendid, swift and strong. Even the cold English rose I claimed as my own was magnificent. Now my blood makes only sterile monsters, but soon it will be as it was.”
“It will be as it was,” the little man says, scampering along the ceiling until he is above his master’s cold white face. He has extruded talons narrow and sharp as knife blades from fingers and toes. “My master’s blood is tainted, but I will wash it clean.”
The Count casually swats him away, and he crashes through the doorway into the guards. The Count turns his red gaze upon Harry, who tries and fails to meet it.
The Count’s voice lowers to a silky rumble. “And you, little creature. To find you here, wasting your inheritance. Why do you want to be what you once were? You should rise above it, splendid and terrible! Are you a coward?”
“I’m simply trying to make a living, like the next man,” Harry says.
The Count laughs. “You waste yourself in a silly little pretense. Accumulating gold, sipping the blood of whores. Who have you turned? Where are your get? Are you afraid you cannot control them? I will teach you!”
Harry shakes his head. He tried to turn someone once. It went horribly wrong.
“You English have no heart. No passion. You will learn. You will learn from me. When I was alive I commanded thousands. I swept the Turks from the battlefields. I was so powerful that death could not claim me. I refused it. And in my undeath I grew greater still, with thousands of loyal children.”
The Count falls silent. He is possessed by his past.
“You will be great again,” the crooked little man says. He has crept back into the room, as a loyal dog creeps back to its master after a whipping. “I promise it.”
“He tampers with our blood with his genetic science,” the Count says. “He says he can cure me. He needs only much gold, and a little time.”
“Science is expensive,” the crooked little man says, “but it is very powerful, master. Once I properly understand how the blood of posthumous animates transforms the DNA of the living, then I will understand what has gone wrong. I can fix it.”
“Silver,” the Count says. “They poisoned me with a silver stake, but ran away before they finished me. Cowards! But I recovered. It took decades, but I regained myself. So I won after all, but their pollution lingers still in my blood.”
Harry understands. After the Children of the Night were killed, he lay in a torpor for three years, reviving to feed once a month or so, until he recovered from the glancing wound caused by the silver bullet. If it had lodged in his body it would have killed him. He cannot imagine the strength of will the Count must have applied to regenerate with a silver stake piercing his body. Harry learned a lot about the Count from the gypsies, and later he read the standard text. The Count is a monster in every way, father of lies. H
e was a monster when human, so afraid of the true death that he would do anything to cheat it. Far from sweeping Turks from the battlefield, he had always run away at the first hint of defeat. And he has run from death, clinging to life with every ounce of will.
Harry shares that lust for life. It possesses him. Undead, he cannot imagine an ending to his appetite. He will do anything to survive. He has always known that, although the terrible thing which happened in the cell in Block A still shocks him.
All the time he has pretended to be human, almost forty years, the beast has lain just beneath his skin. He has been like a patient with a disease in remission. It has inhabited him quietly, and he has accommodated to its symptoms, but suddenly it has broken out again.
The Count’s gaze pierces Harry through and through.
“You thought you could pretend to be human,” the Count says, “but you know now what you are. I put you in the cell in Block A to teach you that.”
“They would have killed me,” Harry says. “I did it to save my life. Any man would have done the same, if placed in danger.”
“Yes, but the life to live is unbreakably strong in you. You will serve me, Harry Merrick, because the will to live is so strong.”
“I would rather die than serve you.”
“You sought refuge among humans as humans seek consolation from religion.”
The Count’s arm shoots out across the room, longer than any human arm should be. He wrenches the crucifix from the wall, plucks the pale figure from it and thrusts it into Harry’s face; it bursts in the Count’s fingers, and ivory dust stings Harry’s skin and eyes. “So much for religion,” the Count purrs. “I could have skewered your heart with this cross, but I am merciful.”
“I rather think you’ve aligned yourself with the wrong side,” Harry says. “The rebels will find you.”
“Not at all. We have captured one of their leaders and many of his men, and we will make them our brothers with your blood. We will destroy the other rebels, or welcome them into our family. There are no trivial divisions among us. You must know that. We are all blood brothers.” The Count turns away from Harry. “Bleed him now and let him grow thirsty. Then he will learn what he is!”
The crooked little man taps a vein of Harry’s right arm, filling a liter bottle with dark blood while two undead women hold Harry down, stroking his body and kissing and nipping him in a parody of lust. They leave him dazed and weak. He finds enough strength to crawl away from the patch of sunlight that falls through the silver bars.
After he was captured on the airport road, Harry was put in a cell with twenty human prisoners. He was the only white man there. He lasted eight days before the terrible thing happened, almost as bad as what he had done to Catherine forty years ago.
Each night two or three prisoners were tortured until they confessed and then taken out to be executed. Each day two or three new prisoners, dazed and bleeding from beatings, were thrown into the cell to replace those executed the night before. A few were there on criminal charges, but most had been arrested because they were of the wrong tribe, or because they owned something an army officer had taken a fancy to, or because they were relatives of someone who had already been arrested. A few shouted at the guards, trying to reason with them or bribe them with promises, and one or two prayed wildly, calling on God and all his saints to save them from injustice, but most slumped with a sullen air of acceptance of their fate.
Harry was surrounded by the heat and strong beating hearts of human beings, and his thirst grew unbearable. At the end of the eighth day he could bear it no longer. He had enough sense to wait until the hour before dawn, when the prison block was as quiet as it got. He slid over to an old man who had been thrown in the cell that evening, stupefied by a savage beating. He calmed the man and slit a vein in his wrist with his eye teeth, but he had barely begun to lap the blood, thin stuff soured by spent adrenaline, like wine on the turn, when another prisoner saw what he was doing.
The man was a long-distance truck driver, strong and alert despite the month he’d spent in the cell after his truck and its cargo of cigarettes had been liberated. He grabbed Harry from behind and slid a shiv made from a bit of sharpened wire through his ribs into his heart. Harry tore out the shiv and killed the man with a SAS trick, thrusting two fingers up his nostrils, driving broken bone into his forebrain. The quick struggle woke the other prisoners and he killed them all too, in a black-red confusion of screams and shouts and blows.
Then the guards came. He was taken across the compound to Block B, bled, and left alone until the Count came for him.
Weakened by loss of blood and his mounting thirst, Harry is anchored to the present only by the alternation of light and darkness. Each day, he sinks into the oblivion that is deeper than sleep; each night, he is visited by the twisted little undead in the surgeon’s gown, the Count’s assistant.
His name is Lomax. He is an American biochemist who tracked the Count down and offered his services. Amazingly, the Count did not kill him; perhaps Lomax’s willing subservience reminded the Count of the human agent of his British adventure. Lomax was not transformed by the Count, or by his women, but by what he calls a recent laboratory accident. He has been experimenting on the blood of what he calls post-animates, has discovered how to keep it alive and whole by mixing it with a soup of hemoglobin and plasma enriched with glucose and potassium chloride. Each night, he takes a little more of Harry’s blood, despite Harry’s protests that it will kill him.
Lomax is garrulous. He wants to share his secrets. Each night Harry listens, barely understanding, to his theories.
“We will feed you soon, Mr. Merrick,” Lomax says. “We need you. You are of the same blood as my master. It runs pure in you, direct from his younger self through the gypsies to you. It has not been contaminated by silver. You must cooperate, Mr. Merrick. It will be easier for you.”
“Humans say we are cruel, but it seems to me that science is crueler.”
Lomax ignores this sally. “You have seen my master’s get. You see what his women are like. Warped is a kind word. Although he transformed them by the old way, they do not have the capacity to make get of their own. The women are feral creatures and useful, but they are limited. I have experimented with direct injection of my master’s blood and that of his get into subjects, but the transformations were too violent and created only monsters. Things turned inside-out yet still living, and worse. Injection of your blood gives better results, but they are still . . . disappointing.”
“It should be done with tenderness and desire,” Harry says. He is disgusted by Lomax’s enthusiasm.
The crooked little man giggles. “True, true! There is a change in the blood of the donor that is necessary to initiate a successful transformation of the recipient. Something hormonal, perhaps. If I locate it perhaps I could define what love is.”
“I rather think that you confuse desire and love, Dr. Lomax. Our desire is closer to hunger than to love. After we sate our desire we want our victims to love us, but we do not love them.”
After Catherine, Harry has never been tempted to turn anyone else, but he knows that the Count would change the whole world if he could. He is a monster of ego. He believes he can make anyone love him. He wants Harry to love him.
Harry believes that the Count visited him earlier that night, the third since he was transferred from Block A. At least, Harry seemed to wake, seemed to see a dark figure standing in the open doorway, staring down at him. How long had the Count been watching? Harry tried to frame a question, his dry lips splitting in a dozen places, but the figure was gone. A few moments later something darkened the moonlight that fell through the barred window.
Harry waited for the Count to return, listening to distant gunfire and wondering if the rebels might soon capture the security compound and free or kill him. But the Count did not come back. When at last the cell door was unlocked, it was to allow in Lomax.
“At first I thought it was an infective agent,”
Lomax says now. “A DNA virus which added genes to human cells at the point of death. Now I am inclined to believe it is something which switches on existing genes. There are things called homeoboxes in our chromosomes, stretches of DNA which code for related proteins which link together to carry out a particular task. Expression of a homeobox is induced by an activator, a substance which causes the control gene to make a protein which switches on the other genes. I think that the blood of the post-animate contains such an activating substance. A flavonoid, perhaps. Whatever it is, it is highly sensitive to silver.”
“You are dying, doctor. I can smell it.”
Lomax lifts the club of his arm. The skin has transmuted to a hard semi-transparent substance something like horn. “In my case, the sequence may not have been fully activated. Perhaps there is more than one homeobox involved. There are many sequences in the human genome which appear to code for nothing at all. Junk DNA, it’s called. But perhaps it isn’t junk. Instead, it may be a relic of our evolution. Perhaps our ancestors were all like my master, a race which lost its nobility by a genetic accident.”
Lomax’s eyes gleam red and wet behind his slab glasses. He says, “Humans pretend to be rational but they are tormented by their animal selves. They are badly knit together, torn apart by a thousand different impulses. But we know our nature completely. It is simple and pure. Hunger, hunger for life. That is all we must satisfy. It frees us from the mess of sex and tribal hatred. All of our kind are one, even the least. Even me.”
“Kill me,” Harry says. “Do it cleanly. Not like this.”
“Oh no, you are necessary. There have been . . . problems with our recent converts. One or two have escaped tonight. But I can overcome problems. It’s just a matter of time. You will feed tonight, and I will come again tomorrow.”
Lomax signals to the guards, and takes out the hypodermic. After Lomax has packed the blood-filled hypodermic in ice and left, the guards push a man into the room. They screech with glee and lock the door.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 35
