“There’s a new thing I saw,” Sante said, drawing his chair closer to Harry. “It was in front of the army barracks. Three men, on stakes.”
At first, Harry thought Sante meant that the men had been tied to posts and shot and left as a warning; a few days ago a dozen men had been hanged from lampposts along the main commercial street, with placards tied to their chests proclaiming them to be saboteurs. But Sante said no, this was different.
“These are stakes about eight feet long, sharpened at one end. The men have been lifted onto them and dropped so the stake pierced the—how do you call it?—the asshole. It went all the way through one, came out of his chest. All three were officers. One was a major I knew vaguely. They say it’s the President’s new adviser, the mercenary they call the Count.”
~ * ~
Harry is left alone in the small square room for ten days.
The bars at the window are coated with silver. He burns his left hand badly; the old wound in his side, between the fourth and fifth ribs, aches in sympathy.
At intervals guards bring in vegetable slop heavily flavoured with garlic. Another pointless insult, like the crucifix. Harry has not needed to eat for forty years.
He managed to drink a little from one of the dying men in the cell in Block A before the guards pulled him out, but in a few days his thirst begins to return. He catches a rat on the first night, but after that the rats keep away, although they had the run of the cells in Block A. He keeps the worst of the thirst at bay by eating the cockroaches and centipedes which infest the room, crunching down a dozen at a time, savouring the small bitter sparks of life and spitting out pulped chitin, but the thirst persists, a low-level ache, a hollow in his belly. His bones feel brittle, their cores hollow. He tries to exercise. His muscles clench weakly, like tattered grave shrouds on his dead bones, but he knows he has to keep up his strength. Someone has been turning humans, making an undead elite within the army. The Count, the President’s adviser. Harry has a black dread that he knows who the Count is, but he tries not to dwell on it. He’ll find out soon enough.
He spends most of the time in deep black dreamless sleep, curled up tightly in the corner beneath die oblong slot of die barred window, where the hot, heavy African sunlight cannot find him. Where he is safe from the memories of what he did to the twenty men in die cell in Block A. Where he is safe from his past. Still he weakens, hour upon hour. He needs the life in hot sweet salty human blood. Even in his sleep he can feel the tides of blood moving through die bodies of die guards and the prisoners in this terrible place, each a secret sundered sea. The thirstier he grows the more sensitive he becomes. He can hear the wary rustle of the rats in the spaces behind die walls, die conversations and laughter of the guards, the sighs and moans and rattling breaths of the prisoners in the cells in Block A, die music played by a radio in die old gymnasium on die other side of die compound where die officers lounge, drinking beer and whisky, and the rattle of the vultures on the tin roof. Every night two or three prisoners are tortured until they confess to die truth of the accusations made against diem by die security force (and everyone screams, and pleads and finally confesses to stop the torture; Harry can hear every word) and then are led out—either to the cinder track behind the prison block where they are made to kneel in front of the wire fence in the harsh glare of the lights on the tower and are shot in the back of the head by an officer, or to a waiting truck which drives them off to some public place where they are impaled as a lesson to the populace. Harry hears it all, and wider, further, the agitated stir of the city, and the rattle of small arms fire and crump of mortar rounds in the suburbs as the two groups of rebel forces engage with the army to the east and west.
And on the tenth night, precisely at midnight, he hears the limousine sweep into the compound and the panicky flurry of the guards as they spring to attention, the steady tread across cinders, down the stairs, along the corridor, the heavy presence growing nearer and nearer, like a thunderstorm racing across the plains. Harry feels a fluttering panic, an echo of the horror the rats feel about the monster in the cell in Block B, who is his own self. The steady tread fills his head, and then the door slams open like all the graves of the world opening at the Last Trump and the Count is in the cell, a tall dark upright figure filling the little room with his presence, with only the broken projector between him and Harry.
“Fe-fi-fo-fum,” the figure says. The voice is deep and resonant. It fills the cell; it resonates in Harry’s hollow bones. “I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
~ * ~
Impalation became the chosen form of public execution. In front of the post office; along the square between the Presidential Palace and the edge of the Park of the People’s Liberation; by the entrance to the ferry terminal. Stakes with rounded points were used in the last place, and when Harry went past one evening two of the men were still alive, screaming to be killed. None of those watching dared go near because of the soldiers who sat around the base of the stakes, smoking and drinking beer and gambling.
Harry had seen this before, soon after he had been turned. The resistance band of Szekeley gypsies had impaled every German, dead or alive, they took in ambushes.
By now, it was common knowledge that the President had abandoned the advice of his tribal elders for that of the mysterious Count, who was rumoured to be Polish or East German. The Count was going to bring in communist troops to clean out the rebels in the south, it was said; the President was opening his Swiss coffers to pay for helicopter gunships, T45 tanks and SAM launchers. Harry’s cronies at the golf club began to revise their opinions. They didn’t want the President to win the civil war if it meant that the communists came in, but it didn’t seem possible that he could win without outside help while his army tore itself apart along tribal divisions.
The evening after Harry saw the men writhing on blunted stakes, René Sante confided the latest scandal with glee. The President’s wife had fled to England with her entourage, and when her bags had passed through the X-ray machines at the terminal they had been found to be stuffed with money and jewels. The Canadian aircrew had refused to fly the jet back because they had not been paid.
“Otherwise the President would be gone on the next flight,” Sante said.
Harry, who had been listening distractedly, wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t surprised that the President’s wife had fled while she could. She was a silly vain creature who had never been comfortable with the role of consort of the head of state. On one famous occasion she had invited the wives of the ambassadors to lunch. There had been no food, only gin and whisky, which the President’s wife and her lady friends had drunk neat. There had been a six-piece band of soldiers who, dressed in camouflage fatigues, played reggae at ear-splitting volume. After showing off the state rooms and the view of the gardens from the balcony of her bedroom, the President’s wife had announced to her guests, “Now, girls, we’re gonna shake our booties.” The ambassadors’ wives had gamely tried to match the wild gyrations of the President’s wife and her entourage, but after two numbers they had been dismissed, and they had never been invited again.
Harry thought that the President loved power too much to run. It wasn’t a communist takeover or even a rebel victory that he was worried about, but the nature of the mysterious Count.
His worst suspicions were confirmed a few nights later, when an officer of the Bureau of State Research came into the bar. Harry was sitting in his usual place at the far end of the bar, a slight, pale, silver-haired figure in white linen suit and black silk shirt, a gin and tonic going flat by his elbow. The packed crowd of businessmen, hustlers and whores parted as the officer, ugly and bull-shouldered, his shaven head gleaming in the purple fluorescents, made his way towards Harry. He wore crisp fatigues and mirror sunglasses and carried an Uzi slung over one shoulder. The Senegalese house band faltered for a moment, then picked up the beat, watching the officer warily; the go-go dancer in the gilt cage above the band was watching too.
Harry called for a drink to be sent over, double Johnny Walker on ice. He expected nothing more than a crude attempt to sell him confiscated ghat or cocaine at an inflated price, or a shakedown he could defuse by paying a dash now and complaining to the chief of police tomorrow.
But the officer ignored the drink. He leaned close to Harry and showed his needle-sharp teeth. The eyeteeth were hooked like a cobra’s. It was then that Harry realized the man was not breathing.
“The Count is interested in you, Mr Merrick,” the officer said. “He believes you and he might be related.” Then he spat into the whisky and turned and walked through the crowd and out of the door.
Harry closed the bar early, packed a bag and had one of his boys drive him to the airport. An Air Guinea 747 was leaving in the morning, and he had bribed the booking office to get a seat.
He got as far as the second checkpoint. Out on the airport road, at midnight, figures materialized from the darkness beyond the guttering flares and the drum of burning oil-soaked rags which lit an armoured personnel carrier parked across the two-lane highway. They seemed to flit down from the palms which lined the road. Six women in loose-fitting fatigues, armed with machetes and Ml6s. At first Harry thought they were wearing masks, with glaring red eyes and long crooked teeth set in jaws far too wide to be human. Then his driver screamed.
They took the boy there and then, three of them feeding on his living body like turkey vultures, ripping and lapping. Harry tried to run, but the women were stronger and faster than mere humans. They bound his arms with cable and took him to the security compound at the far end of the Park of the People’s Liberation, where in colonial days the daughters of civil servants had played tennis. Harry was thrown into a room crammed with prisoners.
And then the terrible thing happened.
~ * ~
The Count sweeps aside the projector as if it is a papier-mâché toy; it smashes to flinders against the wall. Harry is pressed right up against the filthy breeze blocks under the window. Moonlight falls over his shoulder and shines on the Count’s knife-thin bone-white face. The nostrils of the Count’s long, aristocratic nose flare, and he says, “An Englishman, but with gypsy blood in him.”
Someone else has followed the Count into the room, but Harry does not see him until he speaks. It is as if he has materialized out of the Count’s vast shadow.
“It’s as I said, master. The Szekeley lineage, a direct descendant.”
A small man, pale, hairless, hunched in a green surgeon’s gown. His eyes gleam red and wet behind slab spectacles.
“I thought them all dead,” the Count purrs. He makes a single step, and Harry is lifted into the air. He can feel the silver-coated bars burning the air a bare inch from the back of his skull. The Count’s bone-white face fills his vision.
“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 towards 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 towards 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 Viorel and the oldest (although he looked no older than Eva), calm grey-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 shrivelled 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 Viorel and calm grey-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 br
ides 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 pretence. 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!”
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 37
