Perhaps that’s what has been disturbing you. Always before when you’ve returned home light has been pouring from the windows, mellowing the surrounding trunks and including them like a wall around your cottage. Now the cottage reminds you of winter nights long ago in your childhood, when you lay listening to a wolf’s cry like the slow plummeting of ice into a gorge, and felt the mountains and forests huge around you, raked by the wind. The cottage feels like that: cold and hollow and unwelcoming. For a moment you wonder if you’re simply anticipating your wife’s blame, but you’re sure it’s more than that.
In any case you’ll have to knock and awaken her. First you go to the window and look in. She’s lying in bed, her face open as if to the sky. Moonlight eases darkness from her face, but leaves her throat and the rest of her in shadow. Tears have gathered in her eyes, sparkling. No doubt she has been crying in memory of her sister, a sketch of whom gazes across the bed from beside a glass of water. As you look in you’re reminded of your childhood fancy that angels watched over you at night, not at the end of the bed but outside the window; for a second you feel like your wife’s angel. But as you gaze in, discomfort grows in your throat and stomach. You remember how your fancy somehow turned into a terror of glimpsing a white face peering in. You draw back quickly in case you should frighten her.
But you have to knock. You don’t understand why you’ve been delaying. You stride to the door and your fist halts in mid-air, as if impaled by lightning. Suddenly the vague threats and unease you’ve been feeling seem to rush together and gather on the other side of the door. You know that beyond the door something is waiting for you, ready to pounce.
You feel as if terror has pinned you through your stomach, helpless. You’re almost ready to flee into the woods, to free yourself from the skewer of your panic. Sweat pricks you like red-hot ash scattered on your skin. But you can’t leave your wife in there with it, whatever nightmare it is rising out of the tales you’ve heard told of the forest. You force yourself to be still if not calm, and listen for some hint of what it might be.
All you can hear is the slow sleepy breathing of the wind in the trees. Your panic rises, for you can feel it beyond the door, perfectly poised and waiting easily for you to betray yourself. You hurry back to the window, but it’s impossible for you to squeeze yourself in far enough to make out anything within the door. This time a stench rises from the room to meet you, trickling into your nostrils. It’s so thickly unpleasant that you refuse to think what it might resemble. You edge back, terrified now of awakening your wife, for it can only be her immobility that’s protecting her from whatever’s in the room.
But you can’t coax yourself back to the door. You’ve allowed your panic to spread out from it, warding you further from the cottage. Your mind fills with your wife, lying unaware of her plight. Furious with yourself, you compel your body forward against the gale of your panic. You reach the door and struggle to touch it. If you can’t do that, you tell yourself, you’re a coward, a soft scrabbling thing afraid of the light. Your hand presses against the door as if proving itself against a live coal, and the door swings inwards.
You should have realised that your foe might have entered the cottage through the doorway. You flinch back instinctively, but as the swift fear fades the panic seeps back. You can feel it hanging like a spider just inside the doorway, waiting for you to pass beneath: a huge heavy black spider, ready to plump on your face. You try to shake your panic out of you with the knowledge that it’s probably nothing like that, that you’re giving in to fancy. But whatever it is, it’s oozing a stench that claws its way into your throat and begins to squeeze out your stomach. You fall back, weakened and baffled.
Then you see the rake. It’s resting against the corner of the cottage, where you left it after trying to clear a space for a garden. You carry it to the door, thinking. It could be more than a weapon, even though you don’t know what you’re fighting. If your wife doesn’t awaken and draw its attention to her, if your foe isn’t intelligent enough to see what you’re planning, if your absolute conviction of where it’s lurking above the door isn’t false—you almost throw away the rake, but you can’t bear the sense of your wife’s peril any longer. You inch the door open. You’re sure you have only one chance.
You reach stealthily into the space above the door with the teeth of the rake, then you grind them into your prey and drag it out into the open. It’s a dark tangled mass, but you hurl it away into the forest without looking closer, for some of it has fallen into the doorway and lies dimly there, its stench welling up. You pin it with the teeth and fling it into the trees.
Then you realise there’s more, hanging and skulking around the side of the doorframe. You grab it with the rake and hurl it against a trunk. Then you let your breath roar out. You’re weak and dizzy, but you stagger through the doorway. There are smears of the thing around the frame, and you sway back, retching. You close your mouth and nostrils and you’re past, safe.
You lean on the rake and gaze down at your wife. There’s a faint stench clinging to the rake, and you push it away from you, against the wall. She’s still asleep, no doubt because you were mourning her sister all last night. Your memory’s blurring; you must be exhausted too, because you can remember hardly anything before the battle you’ve just fought. You’re limply grateful that no harm has befallen her. If she’d come with you to visit your friend none of this would have happened. You hope you can recapture the sense of communion you had with him, to pass on to your wife. Through your blurring consciousness you feel an enormous yearning for her.
Then you jerk alert, for there’s still something in the room. You glance about wildly and see beneath the window more of what you destroyed, lying like a tattered snake. You manage to scoop it up in one piece this time, and you throw the rake out with it. Then you turn back to your wife. You’ve disturbed her; she has moved in her sleep. And fear advances on you from the bed like a spreading stain pumped out by a heart, because now you can see what’s nestling at her throat.
You don’t know what it is; your terror blurs it and crowds out your memories until it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It rests in the hollow of her throat like a dormant bat, and indeed it seems to have stubby protruding wings. Its shape expands within your head until it is a slow explosion of pure hostility, growing and erasing you. You turn away, blinded.
It’s far worse than what you threw into the forest. Even then, if you hadn’t been fighting for your wife you would have been paralysed by superstition. Now you can hardly turn your head back to look. The stain of the thing is crawling over your wife, blotting out her face and all your sense of her. But you open your eyes an agonised slit and see it couched in her throat as if it lives there. Your rage floods up, and you start forward.
But even with your eyes closed you can’t gain on it, because a great cold inhuman power closes about you, crushing you like a moth in a fist. You mustn’t cry out, because if your wife awakens it may turn on her. But the struggle crushes a wordless roar from you, and you hear her awake.
Your seared eyes make out her face, dimmed by the force of the thing at her neck. Perhaps her gathered tears are dislodged, or perhaps these are new, wrung out by the terror in her eyes. Your head is a shell full of fire, your eyes feel as though turning to ash, but you battle forward. Then you realise she’s shrinking back. She isn’t terrified of the thing at her throat at all, she’s terrified of you. She’s completely in its power.
You’re still straining against the force, wondering whether it must divert some of its power from you in order to control her, when she grabs the glass from beside the bed. For a moment you can’t imagine what she wants with a glass of water. But it isn’t water. It’s vitriol, and she throws it in your face.
Your face bursts into pain. Howling, you rush to the mirror.
You’re still searching for yourself in the mirror when the woodcutter appears in the doorway, grim-faced. At once, like an eye in the whirlwind of your confu
sion and pain, you remember that you asked his wife to stay with yours, yesterday afternoon when he wasn’t home to dissuade you from what you had to do. And you know why you can’t see yourself, only the room and the doorway through which you threw the garlic, your sobbing wife clutching the cross at her throat, the glass empty now of the holy water you brought home before setting out to avenge her sister’s death at Castle Dracula.
<
~ * ~
MANLY WADE WELLMAN
The Devil is Not Mocked
MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903-1986) twice won the World Fantasy Award. He was born in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa, and settled in the United States where he worked as a reporter before quitting his job in 1930 to write fiction full time.
He was one of the most prolific contributors to the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s, and some of his best stories are collected in Who Fears the Devil?, Worse Things Waiting, Lonely Vigils and The Valley So Low. He wrote more than seventy-five books in all genres, including horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime and adventure, and had over two hundred short stories and numerous comic books and articles to his credit.
As the Nazi hordes sweep across Europe, the Count’s warrior soul admires the new German spirit of patriotism and discipline. But when Hitler’s forces begin to overrun his homeland, Dracula feels the hatred rise within him ...
~ * ~
Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world hold sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?
— Bram Stoker
BALKAN WEATHER, EVEN Balkan spring weather, was not pleasant to General von Grunn, leaning heavily back behind the bulletproof glass of his car. May 4th—the English would call it St George’s Day, after their saint who was helping them so little. The date would mean something to Heinrich Himmler, too, that weak-chinned pet of the Führer would hold some sort of garbled druidic ritual with his Schutzstaffel on the Brockenburg. Von Grunn grimaced fatly at the thought of Himmler, and leaned forward to look out into the night. An armed car ahead, an armed car behind—all was well.
“Forward!” he growled to his orderly, Kranz, who trod on the accelerator. The car moved, and the car ahead took the lead, into the Borgo Pass.
Von Grunn glanced backward once, to the lights of Bistritz. This country had been Romanian not so long ago. Now it was Hungarian, which meant that it was German.
What was it that the mayor of Bistritz had said, when he had demanded a semi-remote headquarters? The castle along this pass, empty—ready for him? The dolt had seemed eager to help, to please. Von Grunn produced a long cigarette. Young Captain Plesser, sitting beside him, at once kindled a lighter. Slim, quiet, the young aide had faded from von Grunn’s consciousness.
“What’s the name of that castle again?” enquired the general, and made a grimace when Plesser replied in barbarous Slavic syllables. “What’s the meaning in a civilized tongue?”
“Devil’s Castle, I should think,” hazarded the captain’s respectful voice.
“Ach, so—Transylvania is supposed to be overrun with devils,” nodded von Grunn, puffing. “Let them defer to us, or we’ll devil them.” He smiled, for his was a great gift for appreciating his own epigrams. “Meanwhile, let the castle be called its German name. Teufelstoss—Devil’s Castle.”
“Of course,” agreed Plesser.
Silence for a while, as the cars purred powerfully up the rough slope of the pass trail. Von Grunn lost himself in his favourite meditation—his own assured future. He was to establish an unostentatious command post for—what? A move against Russia? The Black Sea? He would know soon enough. In any case, an army would be his, action and glory. There was glory enough for all. Von Grunn remembered Wilhelm II saying that, in die last war.
“The last war,” he said aloud. “I was, a simple oberlieutenant then. And the Führer—a corporal. What were you, captain?”
“A child.”
“You remember?”
“Nothing.” Plesser screwed up his courage to a question. “General von Grunn, does it not seem strange that die folk at Bistritz were so anxious for you to come to the castle—Teufelstoss—tonight?”
Von Grunn nodded, like a big, fierce owl. “You smell a trap, nicht wahr? That is why I bring two carloads of men, my trusted bodyguard. For that very chance. But I doubt if any in Transylvania dare set traps for me, or any other German.”
~ * ~
The cars were slowing down. General and captain leaned forward. The car ahead was passing through the great open gateway of a courtyard. Against the spattered stars rose the silhouette of a vast black building, with a broken tower. “We seem to be here,” ventured Captain Plesser.
“Good. Go to the forward car. When the other arrives, form the guard.”
It was done swiftly. Sixteen stark infantrymen were marshalled, with rifles, bombs, and submachine guns. Von Grunn emerged into the cold night, and Kranz, the orderly, began to bring out the luggage.
“A natural fort, withdrawn and good for any defence except against aircraft,” pronounced the general, peering through his monocle at the battlements above. “We will make a thorough examination.
“Unteroffizer!” he barked, and the noncom in charge of the escort came forward woodenly, stiffening to attention. “Six of the men will accompany me inside. You will bivouac the others in this courtyard, maintaining a guard all night. Heil Hitler”
“Heil Hitler” responded the man briskly. Von Grunn smiled as the unteroffizer strode away to obey. For all the soldierly alacrity, that order to sleep outdoors was no welcome one. So much the better; von Grunn believed, in toughening experiences for field soldiers, and his escort had lived too softly since the Battle of Flanders.
He walked to where a sort of vestibule of massive, rough stone projected from the castle wall. Plesser already stood there, staring at the heavy nail-studded planks of the door. “It is locked, Herr General,” he reported. “No knob or latch, bell or knocker—”
But as he spoke, the door swung creakingly inward, and yellow light gushed out.
On the threshold stood a figure in black, as tall as von Grunn himself but thinner than even Plesser. A pale, sharp face and brilliant eyes turned upon them, in the light of a chimneyless oil lamp of silver.
“Welcome, General von Grunn,” said the lamp holder. “You are expected.”
His German was good, his manner respectful. Von Grunn’s broad hand slid into a greatcoat pocket, where he always carried a big automatic pistol.
“Who told you to expect us?” he demanded.
The lamplight struck blue radiance from smooth, sparse black hair as the thin man bowed. “Who could mistake General von Grunn, or doubt that he would want this spacious, withdrawn structure for his new headquarters position?”
The mayor of Bistritz, officious ass, must have sent this fellow ahead to make fawning preparations—but even as von Grunn thought that, the man himself gave other information.
“I am in charge here, have been in charge for many years. We are so honoured to have company. Will the general enter?”
He stepped back. Plesser entered, then von Grunn. The vestibule was warm. “This way, excellency,” said the man with the lamp—the steward, von Grunn decided to classify him. He led the way along a stone-paved passage, von Grunn’s escort tramping authoritatively after him. Then up a great winding stair, and into a room, a big hall of a place, with a fire of logs and a table set for supper.
All told, very inviting; but it was not von Grunn’s way to say as much. He only nodded, and allowed Captain Plesser to help him out of his great-coat. Meanwhile, the steward was showing the luggage-laden Kranz into an octagonal bedroom beyond.
“Take these six men,” said von Grunn to Plesser, indicating the soldiers of the escort. “Tour the castle. Make a plan of each floor. Then come back and report. Heil Hitler”
“Heil Hitler” and Plesser led the party away. Von Grunn turned his broa
d back to the fire. Kranz was busy within the bedroom, arranging things. The steward returned. “May I serve the Herr General?” he asked silkily.
Von Grunn looked at the table, and with difficulty forebore to lick his fat lips. There were great slices of roast beef, a fowl, cheese, salad, and two bottles of wine—Kranz himself could not have guessed better what would be good. Von Grunn almost started forward to the table, then paused. This was Transylvania. The natives, for all their supple courtesy, disliked and feared soldiers of the Reich. Might these good things not be poisoned?
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