In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  The man is tall and muscular, dressed in a ripped tunic with colonel’s bars on the shoulders, and torn fatigue trousers. His face is swelling with bruises and he is bleeding from a bad cut over his right eyebrow, and the smell of his sweet blood fills the little room. He moves quickly, ripping a spar from the ruins of the projector and holding it in front of him like a javelin.

  “Wait,” Harry says. He climbs to his feet. His eyeteeth prick through his gums, and his jaw aches with the effort of keeping it from unhinging. His fingernails have lengthened into curved talons and he jams them into his palms; the pain makes him cry out, but helps keep the red mist of his mounting thirst at bay.

  “I know you,” the colonel says. Despite his bruises and torn clothing he has a commanding dignity. His gaze is steady, and he firms his grip on the spar. “You own the bar on Freedom Avenue. The guards said that you are a monster.”

  “I would agree with them.”

  “The guards said that you will tear out my throat and drain the blood from my body.”

  “I need to feed, but I do not have to kill you to do it.”

  “They said you killed twenty men with your bare hands.”

  “Yes, I did. I am not proud of it, Colonel. That’s why I’m trying not to kill you.”

  “Then keep trying, Mr. Merrick.”

  “I believe we can help each other,” Harry says, and explains about the silver bars at the window.

  They work through the night. Harry extrudes razor-sharp talons to excavate the mortar around the window; the colonel, Milton Tombe, uses the spar to lever at the bars, rocking each one back and forth until they are loosened so that he can pry them out with his bare hands. The bars are deeply embedded and it takes a long time to remove each one. While they work, Colonel Tombe tells Harry that he was part of a group of army officers who wanted to kill the President and sue for peace with the rebels.

  “There was an order two days ago that we should return to our barracks for special medical treatment. We were told it would make us invulnerable to bullets. Well, I was educated at Sandhurst, and I have a degree in chemistry from our own university, Mr. Merrick, and I do not hold with superstitions. I held my position, and yesterday a friend of mine came roaring up in a jeep. He was almost hysterical. It seems that the fourth brigade had been injected with something that turned them into monsters. Most had died, he said; the rest went mad, rampaging through the streets. In the confusion, some captured rebels escaped, and were fighting with the President’s guard. I knew about the monstrous women the President has surrounded himself with. I thought they were the products of steroids, or some other muscle-building treatment. Until now, I did not believe that they drank blood. One hears these things about other troops. They make empty boasts to try and unnerve their enemies. It seems that I was wrong.”

  “They took my blood,” Harry says. He is sitting in a corner while Colonel Tombe, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat, levers at a bar. It is near dawn, and they have removed only three of the dozen bars. “That’s what the soldiers were injected with. And the rebel prisoners, too.”

  “Then it’s true your kind make more, by biting men?”

  “You would have to drink a little of my blood, and I would want to turn you. I’ve never wanted to do that to anyone. At least, not for forty years.”

  It has to come out of desire, he thinks. The Count has desire enough to fill the world, even if it was only to create so many mirror images in which he can admire the warped reflection of his own self. But Harry has no desire left; after the disastrous tryst with Catherine, he lost everything but his thirst.

  “The President wants to turn all the army into monsters. The army is fighting against itself,” Colonel Tombe says. “And in the middle of the confusion the rebel leader, Prince Marshall, has escaped. My brother officers and I went to plead with the President to stop this madness, and we had determined to kill him if he refused. But when we got to the palace grounds a white man swept down upon us, and killed everyone but me. It was the President’s adviser, and I think he has killed the President, too. Meanwhile, the rebels led by Leviticus Smith advance apace. They took the power station and the oil depots three days ago. There!”

  The bar has come loose. Colonel Tombe weighs it in his hand. “I could kill you with this, you say?”

  “If you tried, I would probably kill you first.” Harry gets up and starts to score the mortar around the next bar, working carefully but quickly. After a while, he says, “I think the President is still alive. The Count will need a human figurehead to deal with the outside world.”

  “The UN was sent away.” Colonel Tombe starts to lever again. This time the bar comes away almost at once. “We will have to ask them back, to mediate. Are you all right, Mr. Merrick?”

  “I am trying hard not to think about how thirsty I am.”

  “They took blood from you.” Colonel Tombe looks shrewdly at Harry. “You would not turn me into one of your kind if you fed from me?”

  “Believe me, it’s the last thing I want to do.”

  Colonel Tombe loosens the collar of his tunic, baring his muscular neck. “Then I will think of it as a transfusion.”

  After Harry awakened in the cave in the mountains, cured of the worst of his wound, he made his way to England and the dim memory of his fiancée. It was 1948, the coldest winter in memory. He found that Catherine had married, supposing him dead, and he killed her husband and took her, tried to make her over. But he did it not from love, but from a desire for revenge: for her infidelity; for the loss of what he had once been. She became a monster, and he killed her, bursting her head between his hands. On the run, he spent an evening in a cinema, and the first film of the double bill, The Vampire’s Ghost, a poor melodramatic thing, gave him the idea of finding a new life in Africa.

  He has been hiding from what he has become ever since.

  Harry slits a vein in Colonel Tombe’s forearm and drinks deeply. He could drink forever, but he pulls himself away after only a few minutes, licking the film of blood from his sharp eyeteeth with his roughened tongue.

  The two men stand face to face in the growing light of dawn. The colonel wraps his fingers around the slit in his forearm. At last he says, “It won’t stop bleeding.”

  Harry explains about the anticoagulants in his saliva, and rips a strip from his shirt and binds the wound. The smell of blood on the colonel’s fingers is heady, but he resists the temptation to blot it up with his tongue. It would not be seemly.

  He says, “We should rest. I can’t work in the daylight. It burns as badly as silver, and the human guards will come, I’m sure, to see if you are dead.”

  But the guards do not come. Harry and Colonel Tombe sit at opposite sides of the little room, Harry under the window, Colonel Tombe by the door. Harry falls into a stupor, and wakes in darkness to find the colonel working at the bars again.

  The colonel hears him stand, and turns quickly. Harry laughs, and says, “You could have killed me while I slept.”

  “We need each other, Mr. Merrick.”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose that we do.”

  They renew their joint attack on the barred window. The last bar comes away after midnight. Harry reaches through and crumples the wire mesh and climbs through into the warm night, then helps Colonel Tombe scramble out. The compound is lit only by moonlight. Dogs are barking nearby, and further off there is the crackle of small arms fire. To the west, a sullen red glow stands behind the roofs of the dark city.

  It is the oil depot, Colonel Tombe says, and adds, “Perhaps the rebels are close at hand. It would explain why the guards have run away.”

  “We should wait for the rebels, perhaps.”

  “I would not make myself a prisoner. Besides, I think they would kill me. Come with me or stay.”

  “Lomax didn’t come tonight. I wonder why?”

  Harry and Colonel Tombe run across the wide cinder yard to the tall wire fence without raising any challenge. Colonel Tombe pauses and
says that the fence is electrified; Harry laughs and grabs it with both hands and tears it apart. Like the city, the prison compound is without electricity.

  The compound is on the far side of the park made from the grounds of what was once the Governor’s Mansion. They run a long way down the road through the park until the colonel must stop, breathless. With fresh blood in his veins, Harry thinks that he can run forever.

  “We’ll find my men,” the colonel says, when he has his breath back. Moonlight slides like oil over his black face. He is smiling. “By God, I will deal them a blow they won’t forget.”

  Harry does not have to ask if he is talking about the rebels or the President’s—the Count’s—undead army. He says, “Use silver bullets. Even if they look completely dead, cut off the heads, or they’ll heal. Find out where they hide in the day. Newborns can’t stand daylight.” “We’ll work together against this. I could arrest you, but I hope that you will volunteer.”

  Colonel Tombe still carries the metal spar. Harry snatches it up, bends it in two and tosses it into the darkness. He shows his teeth, and the big soldier takes a step backwards. Harry says, “Don’t follow me, Colonel. I have business of my own. Family business.”

  Then he turns and runs, so fast he might be flying through the night. He hears Colonel Tombe shouting after him, but he runs on, faster and faster, toward the Presidential Palace.

  There is a line of tall, graceful royal palms at the edge of the park. The road is littered with fronds chopped down by small arms fire. Spent cartridges and scraps of metal and bits of broken glass lie everywhere. The bodies of a dozen soldiers lie in an untidy heap beside a checkpoint of concrete-filled oil drums and razor wire.

  Harry moves forward cautiously. Seven bodies are impaled on stakes between the scaly trunks of the palms: the Count’s women, and the Count’s assistant, Lomax. One of the women is still alive. She writhes slowly, hissing and arching her back, trying to lift herself off the wooden post which has pierced her vitals.

  Harry asks her what happened, but she only spits blood in his face. Beside her, Lomax stirs and groans on his stake. He has lost his slab glasses; his surgeon’s gown is stiff with his own blood. “Kill me,” he says. “Oh Christ, please kill me.”

  “Tell me about Prince Marshall.”

  “You are my father,” Lomax gasps. Black blood dribbles from his mouth. His feet kick at the stake. His hands are bound behind his back. “Have mercy.”

  “How many did you change? How many escaped?”

  “Yesterday. We fought them through the palace. Please.” He rocks a little on the stake and screams. “Please. I can’t get free.”

  “You’ve probably healed around it. Where is the Count?”

  “Hiding from your children. High above.” Lomax’s red eyes are staring up at the Gothic wedding cake of the Presidential Palace.

  “You told me that humans are less than us because we are perfect expressions of our genetic inheritance. I think you are wrong, Lomax, and your master is wrong, too. At some point in the past humanity overcame beastliness, but in us it has burst out and erased everything that made us human. We are not stronger because of our thirst, but weaker. A good man has just shown me that.”

  But in his torment Lomax hasn’t heard Harry’s speech. “Please,” he whispers. “Please. Father, forgive me . . .”

  Harry relents. He hauls on Lomax’s feet with all his strength until the point of the stake bursts the crooked little undead’s heart. Lomax gargles a fountain of blood that boils away to black dust even as it spatters the ground.

  The square beyond the park is eerily quiet, but Harry knows he is being watched. He makes the best of it, straightening his shoulders and whistling ‘Lily Marlene’ as he marches around the empty plinth in the center of the square, the hub of the traffic circle where, until the country gained its independence fifteen years ago, a statue of Queen Victoria stood.

  Man-sized creatures hang in the branches of the huge coral trees on either side of the gate in the iron railings around the palace; they drop to the ground as Harry goes past. He hears the distinctive sound of a machine gun being locked and loaded, but walks on across the gravel of the courtyard. The President’s black armored Mercedes sits on burst tires before the steps of the palace, its doors flung wide, paint knocked from craters in its armored bodywork, its bullet-proof windscreen starred. Harry starts up the steps, and then the watchers rush him, and carry him forward.

  Harry doesn’t resist as he is bundled through state rooms to the President’s office. The palace is as dark as the rest of the city, but Harry can clearly see the many bodies lying in the shadows. Most are human, mutilated around the throat or decapitated.

  The President’s office, familiar from many TV broadcasts, is hot and stinking, and crowded with the undead. Candles burn everywhere, clustered in elaborate gold or iron candelabra or stuck with their own wax to the polished walnut grain of the expensive ormolu bureau. Faces like half-melted animal masks turn to stare at Harry as he is hauled through the tall double doors. He realizes with a mingled thrill of horror and excitement that these are the fruits of Lomax’s experiments with his stolen blood. Most are blotched unevenly with patches of dead white pigmentation. One sprouts a tangle of teeth in a mouth that gapes so wide the heavy jaw rests on its chest; another, in a soiled bridal gown, has a face ridged with cartilage, ears grown into ragged leather flaps that fall over its shoulders and trail on the ground; yet another has a head that has shrunken to little more than a long pangolin’s snout set with crooked rows of ivory needles from which a green slaver constantly drips. Even though they can only be a few days past transformation, all, even the most human, are in advanced stages of decay, with weeping sores and rotten bruises and softening skin like over-ripe mangoes. The air is heavy with the smell of gangrene; the deep-pile carpets are sticky with blood.

  The undead are all staring at Harry, but he stares at the two figures separated by the polished mahogany plane of the big desk at the far end of the room.

  A man wearing only tracksuit trousers is handcuffed to a chair in front of the desk. His black skin shines with sweat; his chest and back are covered with welts and bruises, and his head hangs down. He is breathing heavily.

  Behind the desk, the leader of the undead lounges in a pneumatic black leather chair. His face has grown a wolfish snout, but Harry still recognizes him from the tribal scarification which decorates his distorted cheeks, and the trademark red beret.

  Prince Marshall, leader of the breakaway rebel faction. He wears a necklace of hand grenades. He grins, red tongue lolling in elongated jaws, and beckons Harry forward with a lazy gesture. An undead woman in fatigue trousers, a bristling pelt growing thickly over her bare breasts, mops at his forehead with a handkerchief.

  The undead murmur among themselves and make way as Harry crosses the room. One, its arms and legs fused into fleshy flippers, scampers toward him and flops down in a parody of obeisance. There is a human among them, in a safari jacket with bulging pockets. It is the French journalist, René Sante. His sallow face is strained and pale. He is carrying a video camera the size of a small suitcase on his shoulder, and squints around it at Harry. “My god, Harry,” he says, “what are you doing here!”

  “I see you are working,” Harry says. “How much will you make from this, I wonder?”

  “They killed the CBS crew, Harry!” Sante is crying. “They only let me live because they want a record of this.”

  “For history,” the undead rebel leader behind the desk says. His voice is rich and deep, and carries through the cackles and mutters of his undead followers. “We show the world what this traitor has done to his country. Keep filming, little Frenchman. I will let you go, I promise, but only if I like your work.”

  One of the undead, quills of bloody bone hanging around his face, lifts up the head of the man in the chair. It is President Daniel Weah. “He tried to make us his zombies,” Prince Marshall says, “but he only made us strong. We acknowledge the
strength in your blood, Mr. Merrick. You are a great magician, even if you are a white man.”

  “It will destroy you,” Harry says.

  Prince Marshall smiles wolfishly. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Daniel Weah licks his lips and looks around, blinking in the glare of Sante’s video camera. “Undo the handcuffs,” he complains. “They give me a lot of pain. I can’t think with them on.”

  The rebel with the ruff of bone quills smacks Weah around the head, and the other undead crowd forward, chittering among themselves.

  “He tried to run away,” Prince Marshall explains. There is an uncapped bottle of whiskey on the desk and he swigs from it and spits it in a fine spray across the desk into Daniel Weah’s face. “This stuff tastes of piss and petrol,” he says, to no one in particular.

  Harry says, “I can explain what has happened to you, but you must let the humans go. This isn’t between them and us. You must understand that they are not our enemies. It is the Count we must fight.”

  “We will catch him,” Prince Marshall says. “We will catch him and put him on the stake next to his creature. Then we will drink your blood again, and grow even stronger.”

  They do not know what they are, Harry realizes in horror. They were changed too quickly, while they were still vigorous. Usually the change is effected only at the point of death of the victim, after a long dance of seduction, after many little feedings, and with blood fed directly from a vein of the seducer. These creatures were changed by injections of his stolen blood; no wonder they are rotting where they stand.

  “Don’t argue with them, Harry,” Sante pleads.

  Harry turns on the reporter. “You’re as bad as them, feeding on horror. Put down the camera. Walk away.”

  “They’ll kill me!”

  The undead laugh and cheer, and Prince Marshall takes out a blue steel automatic and fires it into the ceiling and leans through the cloud of gunsmoke and yells, “I want information! I want to know the truth! You will film the truth for history, Frenchman, then you will go!”