“God,” Lucy muttered, stepping back, “he has become a monster.”
She sagged into a chair that barely supported her weight. She covered her face with one hand and looked away from him.
Jackson realized she was sobbing.
“Lucy ... what...”
He knelt by her, caressing a leg.
“Seeing him this way, what’s become of him ... I knew it would be bad, but this ....”
“Then we’re doing the right thing.”
Lucy tried to look up, nodding. “We are, but... it’s still hard for me. I loved him so.”
Jackson pulled back from her as if she had struck him. “You ... loved him? But he—”
She cut him off, almost irritated. “Yes, I loved him. He’s the only one I’ve ever really loved. He gave me my life, how could I not love him? No one could ever mean to me what he does. All the rest, they’re just... ghosts.”
“Including me?”
Lucy stood, realizing her mistake, turning to him with a poor attempt at a smile. She put her arms around him, but he was stiff. “It’ll be different when I’m free of him ... and you’ll be the one who’s there when that happens.”
Jackson let himself be drawn into her embrace, gave his senses over to her ... but his mind was replaying what she’d said, and weighing chances.
~ * ~
For the first time since his resurrection, he had no desire to feed.
He floated, insubstantial, over the city, dimly aware that he was searching for something. Whatever it was—romance, reason, adventure, simplicity — it was not to be found, not in this place or time. His ways were completely dead, and not even blood would comfort him now.
When the horizon began to pale, he saw the colours there preceding the coming of the sun, and made his first truly conscious decision in days, maybe years:
I will greet the light this morning.
But, as the sky turned pink and gold around him, it was his unconscious instincts that took over, the primordial will to survive that told humans to breathe and his kind to flee the day. And so it was, with an inward scream of disappointment, that he realized he was once again in his coffin prison, the lid closing over him, sealing him away from the release promised by the light.
~ * ~
They had watched silently as Dracula had entered the room, mist seeping through a ceiling vent into the coffin, then coalescing into a gaunt figure who reached a hand up to pull the lid shut.
Now Lucy handed a stake and mallet to Jackson; he took them, half-numb with the sudden realization that she had always meant for him to do this. She crept up to the coffin now and paused there, her face unreadable. Then, finally, she laid her fingers on the lid, looked to Jackson and mouthed two words:
The heart.
Jackson nodded, then tightened his grip on the arcane tools and waited.
She flung the lid back.
Jackson looked down and froze.
The thing in the coffin was neither the handsome vampire prince of cinema nor the rat-faced historical Vlad. No, what Jackson saw was a hollow-eyed and stained spectre, past all delusions of vanity or care, clad in clothing so old and stained it was impossible to identify either colour or style. Dracula exuded neither menace nor allure, just great age and sad, apathetic madness.
A cry of dismay escaped Lucy.
Dracula’s eyes opened. They fixed on Lucy’s.
“My Prince,” she breathed.
There was no response. Without breaking her gaze, Lucy ordered Jackson: “Do it.”
Jackson moved the tip of the stake over Dracula’s chest, guessing where the heart would be. He settled the point and raised the mallet, gathering force for the blow.
Dracula’s features clouded over, and he spoke one word.
“Lucy.”
Lucy cried out again, and saw Jackson swinging the mallet. “Wait—!”
She was too late. The mallet struck the wooden stake with enough force to drive it all the way through Dracula’s body. Cold blood splattered Jackson’s hands and arms, but he pounded the stake a second time, to be sure.
A long hiss was the only sound. Then even that was gone.
Lucy stared, aghast. Jackson dropped the mallet and started to reach for her, but pulled back, seeing his gore-covered fingers. Instead he moved up to her, so close he could feel her trembling.
“Lucy,” he said softly, “you know it had to be done.”
She wouldn’t look at him.
He bent to pull the body from the coffin, to let the sun send it to its final rest, but Lucy suddenly turned on him, pushing him away so roughly he staggered. “No! I won’t let you touch him!”
She closed the lid gently.
“What about you? The coffin…”
“I don’t need it,” she answered in a voice as cold as his blood had been. “There’s an old trunk in the corner. I’ll use that.”
She kissed the ebony surface gently, let her fingers rest there for a moment, then crossed to the trunk.
“You won’t touch him,” was all she said.
Jackson nodded, and she lowered herself in, closing the darkness around her. He waited a few moments, to be sure day had painted the world outside, then he hefted the coatrack up. A few thrusts shattered the black-coated glass overhead, and rich morning sunlight streamed into the room.
He walked back to the trunk and positioned himself at the far end. He pushed until it lay full under the sun, and then he opened it.
Lucy barely had time to scream before the burning began.
When she sprang halfway up, he pushed her back down and held her there while she writhed beneath him. When her struggles began to weaken, she looked up at him, her skin black and blistering, and asked why.
A thousand reasons flooded Jackson’s mind:
Because you’d have come to hate me for what I did today
Because I’m just a ghost
Because you used me
Because you didn’t love me
Because you’re a monster, just like he was
Because you don’t belong here
But he said nothing.
When it was over, he turned to the coffin and scraped it across the floorboards a few feet at a time, his muscles straining. Once gold pooled over it, he flung the lid open, ready for anything, except what he saw:
The coffin was empty, nothing left of the vampire prince but the dried blood and the stake.
Jackson stared for a long time. He disintegrated from the staking. It had to be true. He was so old there was nothing remaining, not even ash.
After a time, Jackson convinced himself. His mind moved onto other matters and he left. There was, after all, still something to be done.
~ * ~
He spent the next day checking on all of Dracula’s known victims over the last two years. All from Tet back had been cremated. One of the young junkies had been given over to his parents for burial, but that had been after three days spent in the county morgue. The victims from the shelter massacre had likewise been cremated by the county. He crossed them all off.
Next he drove to a costume shop, purchased a wig, moustache, and dark glasses. A thrift store provided a long coat. He managed to check out a car being held in connection with an armed robbery.
Then he drove to the hospital.
The two young survivors of the shelter massacre were still unconscious, in critical condition. In his disguise, Jackson slipped easily into their room, unseen.
He had already examined them, noted how they had been left strangely untouched, compared to their elders. Even the child who had died had not been torn apart, but had succumbed to shock. The only mark these two bore were tiny pinpricks on their necks.
It was possible that even Dracula had been incapable of mutilating a child ... or perhaps he had appropriately applied the ancient urge to procreate to children.
Jackson wasn’t taking any chances. He could not suffer a possible monster to live ... and so he removed the two stakes from beneat
h the long coat.
It was done quickly and quietly, then he was gone before anyone knew. He realized he hadn’t needed the borrowed car after all, but then again, if nothing else, Lucy had taught him not to risk unnecessary self-sacrifice.
He thought it was done now. He didn’t even mind that no one else would ever know what a hero he’d been, how he’d driven the shadows out. Even if the children had been untainted, Jackson could rationalize that survival would only have meant lives of poverty and misery, ever-increasing violence and tragedy. And if Dracula had escaped (it isn’t possible), he was hopelessly mad, in a world of madness.
Jackson, on the other hand, would face that world and, if he had to, meet it every step of the way.
<
~ * ~
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Mbo
NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of five novels—Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp—and two novellas—The Appetite and The Enigma of Departure.
He has published more than 100 horror stories, most recently in Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (PS Publishing), Bloody Vampires (Glasshouse Books), Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories (Noose & Gibbet), Black Static and Shadows & Tall Trees. His short story collection, Mortality, was short-listed for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize.
Born in Manchester in 1963, Royle teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and reviews fiction for The Independent. He also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in the form of signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He is a past winner of the British Fantasy Award and the Bad Sex Prize—and hopes to win both again.
As the cracks widen in Dracula’s carefully kept sanity, he escapes to the African continent...
~ * ~
IT WAS A question of arriving at the right time. You didn’t necessarily, for example, turn up at the same time each evening, but juggled various considerations, such as the heat, the number of clouds in the sky, even what type they were, whether they were cumulus or stratus or cirro-stratus—stuff like that. You wanted to turn up just at the right moment, just in time to get a seat and a good view and not a moment too soon. After all, the terrace of the Africa House Hotel was not a place you wanted to spend any more time than you absolutely had to. It simply wasn’t that nice.
It wasn’t nice partly because you were surrounded by all those people you had gone to Zanzibar to get away from—white people, Europeans, tourists; mzungu, the locals called them, red bananas. White inside but red on the outside, as soon as they’d been in the sun for a couple of hours. Apparently there was a strain of red-skinned banana that grew on the island.
And partly because the place itself was grotsville. In colonial days, the Africa House Hotel was the English Club, but since the departure of the British in 1963, it had been pretty much allowed to go to seed.
But you didn’t go there for the moth-eaten hunting trophies on the walls, or the charmless service at the counter, but to sit as close to the front of the terrace as you could, order a beer and have it brought to you, and watch the sun sink into the Indian Ocean. Over there, just below the horizon—the continental land mass of Africa. Amazing really that you couldn’t see it, thought Craig. It didn’t really matter how far away it was—twenty miles, thirty—looking at it on the map, Zanzibar Island was no more than a tick clinging to the giant African elephant.
Craig ordered a Castle lager from the waiter who slunk oilly around the tables and their scattered chairs. He was a strange, tired-looking North African with one of those elastic snake-buckle belts doing the job of keeping his brown trousers up. Similar to the one Craig had worn at school—8,000 miles away in east London.
He didn’t like ordering a Castle, or being seen with one (they didn’t give you a glass at the Africa House Hotel). It was South African and everyone knew it was South African. He supposed it was all right now, but still, if people saw you drinking South African beer they’d assume you were drinking it because that’s what you drank back home. In South Africa. And whereas it was all right to buy South African goods, it still wasn’t all right to be South African.
And Craig wasn’t, and he didn’t want anyone to think he was, but not so badly that he’d drink any more of the Tanzanian Safari, or the Kenyan Tusker. One was too yeasty, the other so weak it was like drinking bat’s piss.
This was his third consecutive evening at the Africa House Hotel and he was by now prepared to let people think he was—or might be—South African. He wasn’t staying there, no way, uh-uh—he was staying at Mazson’s, a few minutes’ walk away. Air-con, satellite TV, a bath as well as a shower—and a business centre. The business centre was what had clinched it. Plus the fact the paper was paying.
Craig slipped the elastic band off his ponytail and shook out his fair hair, brushed it back to round up any strays, and reapplied the elastic. He took off his Oakley wraparound shades and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Stuck them back on. Squinted at the sun, still a few degrees above the bank of stratus clouds which would prevent the Africa House Hotel crowd from enjoying a proper sunset for the third evening in a row.
From behind his Oakleys, Craig checked out the terrace: people-watching, with a purpose for once. News of the disappearances clearly wasn’t putting these tourists off coming to Zanzibar. Mainly because there wasn’t any news. Not enough of a problem in any one country to create a crisis. One weeping family from Sutton Coldfield—“Sarah just wouldn’t go off with anyone, she’s not that kind of girl”; a red-eyed single mother from Strathclyde—“There’s been no word from Louise for three weeks now”. It wasn’t enough to get the tabloids interested and the broadsheets wouldn’t pick up on it until they were sure there was a real story. A big story. No news was no news and, by and large, didn’t make the news.
Craig had latched on to Sarah’s story following an impassioned letter to the editor of his paper from the missing girl’s mother. He was a soft touch, he told his commissioning editor: couldn’t bear to think of those good people sitting on the edge of their floral-pattern IKEA sofa, waiting for the phone to ring, weeping—especially not in Sutton Coldfield. But MacNeill, who’d been commissioning pieces from Craig for three years, knew the young man only attached himself to a story if there was a story there. And since he was between desk assignments anyway, MacNeill let him go. On the quiet, like. Neither the Tanzanian government nor the Zanzibari police would acknowledge the problem—too damaging to the developing tourism industry, ironically—so Craig needed a cover, which Craig’s sister, the wildlife photographer, came up with.
The Zanzibar leopard, smaller than the mainland species, was rumoured by some to be extinct and by others to be around still, though in very small numbers. One of the guide books reckoned if there were any on the islands, they had been domesticated by practitioners of herbal medicine—witch doctors to you and me. The Zanzibari driver who collected Craig from the airport laughed indulgently at the idea. And Craig read later in another guide book that witchcraft was believed to be widely practised on Pemba Island, 85 kilometres to the north of Zanzibar though part of the same territory. Though if you tried to speak to the locals about it, they became embarrassed or politely changed the subject. But that was Pemba, and the disappearances—thirty-seven to date, according to Craig’s researches—were quite specifically from Zanzibar Island.
Thirty-seven. Twenty-three women between seventeen and thirty, and fourteen men, some of them older, mid-forties. From Denmark, Germany, Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Australia and the US. Enough of a problem as far as Craig was concerned. He was torn now, he was ashamed to admit, between wanting the world to wake up and make a concerted effort (thereby, hopefully, securing the earlier recovery of Sarah, or Sarah’s body, and thirty-six others) and hoping he would be the first to break the story.
The cover. A naturalist based at the University of Sussex, Craig’s brief was to confirm whether or not le
opards still lived wild on the island. They’d even put Sussex’s professor of zoology in the picture, for a consideration of course which they called a consultancy fee, so that if anyone called from Zanzibar to check up on Craig, they’d find him to be bona fide.
That afternoon, Craig had visited the Natural History Museum, quite the bizarrest of its type in his experience. Glass cases full of birds, presumably stuffed birds, but not mounted—lying down, recently-dead-looking, their little feet tied together with string. Tags to identify them. Their eyes dabs of chalk. In a grimy case all on its own, the bones of a dodo wired up into a standing position. A couple of stuffed bats—the American Fruit Bat and the Pemba Fruit Bat -ten times the size of the swallow-like creatures that had flitted about his head as he’d walked off his dinner the evening before. A crate with its lid ajar: when he opened it, a flurry of flies, one he couldn’t prevent going up his nose. Inside, a board with three rats fixed to it—dead again, stuffed presumably, but with legs trussed at tiny rodent ankles. No effort made to have them assume lifelike poses. No bits of twig and leaf. No glass eyes. No glass case. He dropped the crate lid.
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 33
