Blood of the Impaler (25 page)

He did not waste the week during which the Rumanian bureaucrats were processing their forms. While Jerry and Holly nervously watched the days and hours pass away, Malcolm spent half of each day sequestered in the stacks of books on geography and history at the British Library. He spent the other half teaching himself Rumanian—a task made less difficult by the facts that Rumanian is of Latin derivation (not Slavic like most of its neighbors); that Malcolm was already fluent in German and French, could sight-read Latin and ancient Greek, and thus had a demonstrable affinity for foreign languages; and that he had discovered a kosher restaurant not far from St. John's Wood in London which was run by a Rumanian Jew, with whom he was able to practice speaking and listening. By the end of the week he had developed a competency in the tongue. Though not fluent, to be sure, he felt secure in the hope that he would be able to get around in Rumania without too much difficulty, as long as he kept his grammar book and dictionary close at hand.

It was the other half of his daily study that he knew to be the more important, for to find Dracula's remains it would be necessary to find his grave. This promised to be no easy task. Malcolm made copious notes on his reading and research, and he realized after only a few days in Rumania that he had been correct in his careful attention to historical fact.

The three young Americans had departed from Heathrow Airport in London in the morning, arriving in Bucharest in the afternoon. The rest of that day was spent in checking and rechecking their visas and other documents, and they were unable to begin the search until the next day. By the end of that second day, Malcolm had begun to suspect that the sites visited by the so-called Dracula Tours organized by the government of Rumania were to be of no use to him; by the end of the fourth day, he was certain of it.

In the center of Lake Snagov, just outside of Bucharest, was an island upon which stood a monastery that had been endowed by Vlad the Impaler, and which was the traditional site of his burial place; but a few hours in the monastery, looking around and reading the literature available there, had made Malcolm and his friends realize that this tradition was without foundation. The long drive the next day took them from Bucharest in Wallachia to Brasov in Transylvania, just outside of which was Bran Castle, built by the Voivode Ion the Terrible in
1377
and briefly occupied by Vlad IV in 1462;
hardly the "Castle Dracula" his great-grandfather had visited in 1889, the castle within which Van Helsing had destroyed the three female vampires and beneath the shadows of which Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris had stabbed the monster to death later that same year.

None of this surprised Malcolm, for his own researches had led him to some conclusions derived from the careful comparison of facts and very careful reasoning.

There were many traditions regarding the death of Vlad IV one of which was that he died fighting the Turks at the Battle of Oradea in 1476.
Malcolm knew that though Vlad had been the Voivode of Wallachia, it was to a castle in Transylvania that his great-grandfather had been summoned a century before. Oradea was in Transylvania, and the original manuscript of the Stoker book had shown that Oradea was the site of the first journal entry by Jonathan Harker, not Bistritz as the printed version would have it. If Vlad IV did indeed die in the Battle of Oradea, that might explain his subsequent rise from death to undeath in Transylvania rather than his own province of Wallachia.

If Oradea was the city near the castle, then near there they would find the ruins of the vampire's medieval fortress. All of the nobles of medieval Rumania were related by marriage or blood, so it would not be unusual for Vlad to have had a personal residence in the province of a cousin voivode. The problem, of course, was that Rumania, like all European countries, had been picked to the archeological and historical bones years ago. If there were a ruin associated with Vlad Dracula near Oradea, the Rumanian Tourist Bureau would have been exploiting it already. Then he found a notation in an archeological guide that near the border—near Oradea but in Transylvania—was a site designated by the Rumanian government as a historical edifice not open to tourists. The exact words, expressed with the unintentional humor so characteristic of communist bureaucracies, were that the site was an "unauthorized ruin."

And so, after visiting Snagov Monastery and Bran Castle, just to be certain, just to be sure to leave no stone unturned, Malcolm, Holly, and Jerry had driven to the small city near the Hungarian border, all believing that it was this "unauthorized ruin," this decaying castle, unmarked by scholars other than Balkan medievalists and unknown to the Western Dracula enthusiasts, that was the burial place of Vlad the Impaler.

It was this castle whose tumbledown towers and broken battlements, as Jonathan Harker had so accurately and evocatively described them, even now brooded over the little Rumanian city. The castle that Holly Larsen gazed at from the window of the hotel room with such unadulterated dread.

"All you have to do is gather up his remains, right?" she asked. "You don't need me to help do that, do your'

"Hmmm?" Malcolm asked.

"I just can't go with you," she muttered. "I just couldn't take it if something else terrible happened."

Malcolm, who had resumed reading in the midst of Jerry's tirade, looked up from his book. "What did you say, Holly?"

She turned back to him. "I just can't go with you, up there to that place. I'm sorry, Mal, but I just can't. I don't think I'm ever going to forget what I saw in that crypt, and I just couldn't take it if anything like that happened again."

Malcolm nodded. "It's just as well. I don't think either of you should go with me. If the remains of the Count are connected to the power of my. . . of the blood . . . well, I don't know what kind of an effect it might have on me."

Holly blanched. "What do you mean?"

He rose from his seat to walk over and take her in his arms. "I'm just thinking of what happened when I was with Vanessa, that's all. There may be a risk, and I don't want you exposed to it. It's enough that you came here with me. Remember, I told you to wait for us in Bucharest."

"I know," she said, nodding. "I just couldn't let you go by yourself."

"Hey, thanks a lot," Jerry grumbled. "What am I, a suitcase?"

"You know what I meant, Jerry," she said kindly. "I'm worried about you, too." She looked back at Malcolm. "But I just can't go to that castle. I'm too scared."

"I understand completely," Malcolm said. "You're not the only one who's scared. So am I."

She shook her head. "You don't act it. You don't seem scared at all."

"Maybe 'apprehensive' is the better word," Malcolm conceded. "You know, it's funny, but now that I know the truth about myself and my family, now that I have some hope for a solution to the problem, everything seems to be . . . well, somehow more manageable. I'm worried, I'm nervous, I'm tense. But . . ." He paused, as if seeking the proper words with which to express his nebulous feelings. "This all seems right to me somehow. It seems like I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, what I was born to do. I know it sounds silly, but this all seems somehow predestined."

"Now he's talking about destiny," Jerry sighed. "Born to be a corpse collector. Why couldn't you be born to be a chiropractor or something?"

"Oh, Jerry, cut it out," Malcolm said irritably. "I'm not explaining this very well. All I mean is that I have to go up there, I'm
supposed
to go up there. You two aren't."

"Wait a minute, man," Jerry said. "I'm going there with you. I have too much riding on this to let you do it all by yourself. No offense, Malcolm, but this little European expedition of yours hasn't exactly been a smashing success so far."

Malcolm shook his head. "Jerry, I don't want Holly left here all alone."

"What do you mean, all alone?" he asked with exasperation. "We're in a hotel, for Christ's sake, not some bar in the South Bronx! Nothing's gonna happen to her in a fancy hotel." He paused. "Fancy for Rumania, anyway."

"Jerry, this is a provincial backwater in what is still really an underdeveloped country. We aren't in France or Sweden, you know. A young foreign woman alone is just not safe, and I'll be able to concentrate on what I'm doing a lot more easily if I'm not worried about her."

"What the hell are you worried about her for?" Jerry asked, raising his voice. "You and me are the ones in trouble, not her."

"Shh!" Holly said. "Stop yelling. The people who run this place might get mad."

"So let 'em get mad!" Jerry said even louder. "What are they gonna do, arrest me?"

"We're in a Communist dictatorship, Jerry," Malcolm reminded him. "They can do anything to you they want." Jerry Herman lapsed into disgruntled silence as Malcolm walked over to the cheap old bureau. He poured a glass of the thick, syrupy white wine that the Intourist hotel manager had sent up to them as a courtesy. He handed it to Jerry, saying, "Look, Jer, I know that something horrible has happened to you, but don't lose your perspective on it."

"Don't lose my perspective," he grumbled. "I get bitten by a fucking hundred-year-old vampire, and he wants me to keep it in perspective."

"Yes," Malcolm said firmly. "You've read the book. You were bitten—"

"Used like a goddamned faucet!"

"—but she didn't force you to drink her blood. As long as nothing else happens to you, you'll be fine. It's just as if you'd been bitten by an animal, that's all. We got you some antibiotics in London, so you'll be fine."

"Easy for you to say," he muttered.

"He's right, Jerry," Holly said. "And to be honest, I'd rather not be here all by myself, waiting for you guys to come back."

Jerry looked back and forth from Holly to Malcolm and then muttered, "Oh, what the hell, okay." He sat down glumly in the reading chair near the window and gazed morosely at the inside of the closed drapes.

Malcolm looked back at the book and began to read it aloud once again, saying, "The blacksmith hammer which I took in the carriage from Veresti was useful; though the doors were open, I broke them off the rusty hinges, lest some ill chance or ill intent should close them . . ."

"I can't listen to this shit anymore," Jerry said once again, springing to his feet. "I'm going down to the bar and have a drink. Or two or ten or twenty." He stormed out of the room in a state of intense agitation.

"Holly, why don't you go with him?" Malcolm suggested. "I think I've gotten as much information out of Stoker as I need. I'm going up there now."

"Do you know where to look?"

"I think so." Malcolm opened his suitcase and removed the imitation-gold jewelry case that he had purchased in London. "Both Van Helsing and my great-grandfather said that the graves, the coffins, were in the chapel. Most castle chapels were built along the south or eastern wall, depending upon the country. It should be somewhere along the south wall here in Rumania."

"Why the south wall?" she asked as she gathered up her
purse and traveler's checks in preparation for joining Jerry down at the bar.

"Medieval chapels were built in the part of the castle that was closest to Jerusalem," he explained. "In Spain or Italy, that would be the eastern wall. Here in Rumania, it would be the southern one." He checked the interior of the jewelry box to make certain, for the hundredth time, that it was free of holes or punctures, then checked the padlock that fitted through the latch loop, again for the hundredth time. He had purchased the box for the purpose of storing and shipping the dust of the ancient monster until such time as he could dump it in the Hudson River or bury it or scatter it or in some other way dispose of it far from Rumania. "I'm relatively certain that it won't be an interior room for that same reason. All I have to do is find the south wall and follow it along until I find the chapel."

"Wouldn't the crosses in a chapel . . . I mean, they would probably hide their caskets somewhere else, wouldn't they?"

Malcolm grinned as he opened the door. "You're thinking in terms of American funerals."

"What do you mean?" They walked out into the hallway and began to descend the stairs toward the lobby and the bar.

"Medieval nobles were buried in stone sarcophagi, not wooden boxes. The chapel would be where he was buried, and that would be where he would stay."

"But the crosses . . ."

He shrugged. "Doubtless removed centuries ago."

"But by whom?" she asked. "He couldn't very well do that himself!"

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "according to the book, vampires often have servants or slaves—people who do things for them during the daylight hours, people who have been infected and thus brought under their control, but who still aren't vampires themselves."

She nodded. "Like Renfield."

"Yes. Or my great-grandmother. Remember what the book says about her. On occasion she presented a danger to her husband and the others, until they killed the Count." Malcolm and Holly reached the lobby and then turned to the right and entered the hotel bar, a room dimly lighted even in midday where the glow of the lamps reflected off the polished dark wood. Jerry Herman was sitting at the bar, glumly holding a tall glass of vodka and staring off into space. "I'm going now, Jer," Malcolm said.