Anno Dracula (2 page)

E
ven before the War, Transylvania was the country of the dead. These forests and mountains were homeland to the dead that walked.

The boy had no fear of vampires. Nor of the Germans and the Russians. Nothing more could be done to him.

Once, the boy had known a home. His world included parents, a larger family, church and school, playthings and playmates, food preferences, choices of clothing. Now that was a hazy dream, a story told around the campfire. The Iron Guard - Romania’s SS - had come to his village to put an end to ‘Red activity’, blotting out his former life with flame and blood. The boy couldn’t separate his own tattered memories from the images which sprang into his mind from the others’ stories.

In the dark, he remembered things which had happened to Brastov, Nicolae or Magda. Sometimes, he even sank into the golden, embroidered past of the Baron Meinster, whose tales of lost elegance and privilege no one believed. Over half the partisan band were Reds, but they let the Baron retain his title and the pretence of command. The boy thought the vampire Brastov, who’d once let slip that he could also claim a title, was the true leader. The sullen living man Nicolae was the brute who made sure the sly, cat-like Brastov got his way most of the time. The fiercely independent Magda Cuza, a Jewish social democrat, always argued her own course, forcing the men to take her into account. The boy never added to the endless debates. They all knew better than to issue him orders. He did what he did and that was the end of it.

Alone on the ill-maintained road to Dinu Pass, the boy leant on his rifle while he made a slow path upwards. Stood on its stock, the Russian gun was fully three-quarters his height. Inherited from a fallen partisan, the rifle was his only true comrade. Well after midnight - the whole band had fallen into the sleeping-waking habits of the undead among them — the air was thickly moist. Either heavy mist or light drizzle. There was no moon. On the plain below, it was summer, hot August made hotter by the still-burning petroleum refineries of Ploieşti. Poisonous black smoke was everywhere. High in the Transylvanian Alps, the ice grasp of winter never fully relaxed and the air was clear and sharp in the lungs.

The boy saw little - the occasional glistening patch of wetness on black granite or blacker fir tree - but heard all the sounds of the night, the tiny, scurrying creatures who were justifiably afraid of him (his staple diet, when they could be had) and the ancient, ever lasting creak-breath of mountain and forest.

No Germans had been to Dinu Pass for three years, since the Wehrmacht abandoned the ancient Keep that perched above the deepest gorge. The Iron Guard was smashed, thrown away by the Nazis in the War against the Russians. Their passing didn’t make this a safe country. The forests were infested with bandits, deserters, wolves, rival night-creatures. Often, the partisans didn’t know who they were fighting until the skirmish was over and bodies could be examined.

Carefully, solemnly, the boy made his way up the steep road.

He did not know how the message had been received, but they were summoned to Dinu Pass, to the Keep, to meet with the one they all respected and feared, far above circus clowns like Hitler and Stalin.

Dracula.

Even a boy without history, with little sense of what came before or after any moment, knew the name. It came with many titles, more even than Meinster claimed: Voivode, Prince, Count, Vlad Tepes, Prince Consort, Graf, King of the Cats, Prince of Darkness, Sovereign of the Damned. In these mountains, the peasants and the gypsies knew the titles were a cloak, meaningless and unnecessary. Here, the name was enough.

Dracula.

For months, Baron Meinster had regaled them with yarns of Count Dracula, his father-in-darkness, father and furtherer of almost all the vampires in the world. Transported by his own stories, the Baron seemed little more than an excited boy himself, with his wave of golden hair, natty grey cloak and odd fastidiousness about feeding. He spoke of the old times when the undead were masters of the warm, as fondly as a Red spoke of the coming age when the masters were killed and the workers ruled. Now, at the point of entering the Royal Presence, the Baron was quiet on the subject. Perhaps the father was as inclined to punish as reward, and Meinster too doubted his self-declared status as the favoured get.

Suddenly, the Keep was in front of the boy, radiating cold like a monumental chunk of black ice. He felt no discomfort. Cold was his natural condition, as much as hungry. He no longer shivered, rarely made a sound, never complained. Invisible until its walls were only feet away, the Keep had been built of blocks quarried locally. It seemed grown from the mountain, commanding the pass, moated by a deep gorge crossed by a shored-up causeway.

For generations, Dracula had been away, adventuring in the world, spreading his bloodline across the globe, making and changing history. Now, in his homeland’s hour of darkest need, he was returning. Brastov speculated that the Count had been shipped from Cairo to Italy by the Americans or the British, and flown over Transylvania by planes like the bombers that had destroyed the Ploieşti refineries in April. Above the clouds, he would slip out of the aircraft to glide on great leather wings, down towards his native soil. His coming was the blue flame that would spark an uprising, uniting all the partisans, taking Romania out of the Axis. Brastov, looking to Russia, and Meinster, out for himself, welcomed the return of Dracula, but the warm - Magda, the old gypsy Maleva -were wary, fearful that one great evil was to be exchanged for another.

The boy was early. The Keep was empty. If Dracula were here, he’d have sensed it. Such an immense person would disturb the air. He stood on the causeway and made out the arch of the ungated entrance to the courtyard. Nothing was here, not even rats.

He cared little that in Bucharest, General Antonescu was withdrawing from alliance with the Germans and Italians, that the army was on the point of turning against the Nazis they had fought beside in Russia. Even the hotly anticipated uprising didn’t excite him, for he had no belief in the future. The others discussed with passion the various factions of Axis and Ally, pitting their imagined saviours, America and the Soviet Union, against each other. The single lesson of the boy’s young life was that there were no saviours, no Jesus Christ or St Nicholas, no Hitler or Stalin, no French or Americans. There was only the merciless crush of falling granite, as solid and black as the Keep, as implacable as the night and the cold.

‘You are wrong, my son.’

He was not alone, after all. The voice came from inside the Keep, a whisper carried by the stone. It sounded inside his skull, smooth as velvet and harsh as tree-bark.

The boy saw the eyes first.

In the courtyard, eyes shone like a cat’s, red around black. The boy approached, passing under the arch.

‘I am Dracula,’ said the tall vampire.

The boy had no reply. Before Dracula, he was no one.

Dracula did not have leather wings, but a one-piece black jump-suit, autopsy-scarred by silver-white zips, worn over heavy airman’s boots and under a woollen cape. His hands were ungloved and very, very white. His face was unlined but ancient, so pale it had a faint moon glow. His hair was night-black, thick and unruly like his eyebrows and moustaches. A leather satchel lay by his feet. He was the only person the boy had seen this past year who was not carrying a gun.

Used to the undead, having lived so closely with Meinster, Brastov and others, he understood how the red thirst that set them apart was as much a weakness as his own hunger, that they were not so different from warm men and women. Dracula
was
different, the creature he had imagined vampires to be before he had met one. Then, all he had known of the undead came from the whispered stories of old women like Maleva, whose memories of Meinster’s golden age were of stolen babies and opened throats.

The others were watching from back in the forest, from up in the trees. It had been decided the boy alone should go first to the meeting place. Brastov worried that the Count would see anyone larger as a threat and scent betrayal - every few weeks, he and Nicolae decided someone was a traitor and killed them for food - while Magda claimed they had no proof that Dracula was not secretly on the side of the fascists and would lead them all into a trap and death.

Also, and only now did the boy understand this, the whole band recognised that he alone was truly without fear, truly did not care what happened to him. Once, Maleva had said of him that he was deader than any vampire. When the old woman realised he had overheard her, she was afraid of what he would do but he took a cold pride in her understanding. He was dead as ice or stone, as impossible to hurt.

‘It is well we should meet, my son.’

Dracula was not his father. He had no father.

‘Again, you are wrong. I shall be your father, and more than a father.’

The boy felt nothing but the absence of feeling.

He had no love, no hate, no fear. He was empty. He noted that Dracula heard his thoughts as if they were words, but did not care.

‘Come to me,’ said Dracula, extending a ghost-white hand. His nails were blood-black diamonds.

The boy stood before the Count. The red eyes were supposed to overwhelm him, to impose a will upon his own, to draw him close. But there was nothing in his heart to catch, nothing to pull.

Dracula smiled. Pearl-white shark-sharp teeth showed beneath his moustaches.

‘It is good you are so hard inside,’ he said, not out loud. ‘It is fitting.’

Of his own accord, the boy approached the vampire.

Dracula was snake-swift, his fangs so razor-keen their work was done before pain could reach the boy’s brain.

He understood the others had known about this, had delivered him to Dracula as an offering. He was not alive, so his death would mean nothing.

At the end, he felt only the cold.

Dracula spoke to him in his mind, all through the sucking and draining. He soothed and demanded, made promises and prophecies, shared secrets and passions.

When the boy was empty, Dracula hugged the almost weightless body to his chest and strode out of the courtyard, onto the causeway. The boy could still smell; his nose filled with the male animal scent of the undead giant, which sparked more memories, hundreds of years of memories, of distant times and lands, of unknown and unknowable things. His own family came back to him - he could remember the name they had called him! - and the whole truth of their deaths. He was swept beyond a cloud of terror into the womb and the pasts of his parents and their parents. Throughout centuries, there was always the black figure with scarlet and silver highlights, the eternal presence of Dracula.

A finger tapped at his temple, fluttering his eyelids open.

Dracula wiped his mouth clean on his sleeve, ensuring that the boy’s attention was on him.

‘Don’t run away yet, my son.’

Dracula poked out his tongue, like a goblin or a cheeky boy. It was long and scarlet, swollen at the end. It looked not like a tongue, but a red adder. The vampire shut and opened his mouth, nipping off the very end of his tongue. A tiny lump of flesh was neatly severed; Dracula spat it out to one side. His mouth filled with his own blood, leaking through the corners of his smile. Even in the night, it was rich and red. He bowed his head and kissed, prising the boy’s mouth open with his bleeding tongue. A flow of cold, salt blood came, sliding over the boy’s palate and into his throat.

The boy remembered his mother’s breast. He suckled.

After seconds that stretched out forever, he was thrown away, off the causeway. The blood in his mouth and stomach burned like ice. The voice in his head was a wordless cry of joy. He thumped against a slope of pebble and leaf-mulch and rolled into the gorge, smacking against bushes and outcrops, shuddering in death and turning and rebirth. His old life - even from moment to moment with the partisans, he’d had a mortal life - was shredded away. His sturdy dead man’s clothes ripped on flints.

He lay in a tangle in the dark. Now he could see the stars, even through thick clouds.

Above, he
was
Dracula, arms proudly folded. Meinster’s band came out of the forest to kneel before him, to take their orders - the insurrection was set for the twenty-third of this month - to be awed by the Presence.

Below, he was not who he had been, but not yet who he would become.

The boy was, however, thirsty.