Blood of the Impaler (26 page)

Jerry looked over at him, his fear and anger still evident in his expression. "Good. Don't fuck it up." He looked away. Malcolm waited for a few moments, waited for Jerry to say something more, tried to think of something to say himself, and then he turned to leave. "Malcolm," Jerry said without turning to look at him.

He paused at the doorway. "What?"

"Be careful," he muttered.

Malcolm smiled, glad of his friend's grudging concern. "Thanks. I will. There's no danger anyway, I don't think." He continued on out of the hotel.

Holly sat down beside Jerry, and in an attempt to be light and casual, she grinned and said, "Hiya, sailor. Buy me a drink?"

Jerry laughed humorlessly. "Cute, Holly. Real cute."

T
hough the ruins of the castle were clearly visible from the city, it took Malcolm nearly an hour to reach them by car. The government of communist Rumania had made many reforms since wresting power from the hands of the corrupt and incompetent King Michael in the years after World War Two, and it had committed as many crimes as it had made reforms; but road construction had focused on linking the population centers, leaving areas such as the one in which Malcolm was driving in serious want of decent roadways. Thus it was that to get from Oradea to the "unauthorized ruin," he found himself maneuvering his rented Eastern European car over the same pitted dirt road that his great-grandfather had suffered a century before. The transmission of the Soviet-built automobile screeched and ground along the roller-coaster-like road.

Malcolm had expected to find the entrance to the ruin sealed, had expected perhaps even a barricade; he had not expected to find a bored and irritable guard sitting upon an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair not five hundred yards from the entranceway, reading a newspaper and yawning so loudly that Malcolm could hear him even over the sound of his engine.

Why the hell would they guard this place?
he wondered.
This isn't a museum with valuable exhibits; it doesn't contain anything anyone would want to steal. If it ever had, it was all stolen years ago, I'm sure. So why guard it?

He answered his own question nearly as soon as he had asked it. A country with Rumania's economic problems would, in a free-market society, have a serious unemployment problem, but no Communist country allows unemployment to exist. Thus, jobs are found for all, even if there is no need for the job to be done. As Malcolm approached the bored middle-aged man, he realized that he was witnessing one small example of the kind of inefficiency that seemed endemic to this part of the world.

He climbed out of the car, leaving the engine running, and he smiled and waved as he walked toward the guard. "
Buna ziva
,"
he called out. Good day.

"
Buna seara
,"
the guard replied, just a bit suspiciously. Good evening, he had said, even though it was still afternoon.

"
Vorbitsi engleza?
"
Do you speak English, Malcolm had asked, just in the hopes that he might be able to avoid stumbling through Rumanian in his attempt to gain entrance into a sealed ruin.

The guard shook his head and replied without smiling, "
Nu
."

Damn
, Malcolm thought, and then he said, "
Scuzati-ma, nu vorbesc romaneshte bune
."
I'm sorry, I dont speak Rumanian well. He waved his hand at the ruin and asked,
"
Cum se numeshte acest loc?
"
What's this place called?

The guard glanced up at the ruin, following the sweep of Malcolm's hand rather than actually looking at the castle, and then he answered,
"
Castelul pokol
."

A chill ran up Malcolm's spine, for the guard had told him that the ruin was called Hell Castle. "
Castelul pokol
,"
he repeated, as if his curiosity had been piqued by the name. He nodded his head as if thinking it over and then said,
"
Va rog, ash vrea intrare. Cit costa?
"
I
would like to go inside, please, he had said. What is the charge?

The guard shook his head and spoke so rapidly that Malcolm was unable to follow what he was saying. "
Vorbitrar, vorbitrar, va rog!
"
Malcolm said quickly, asking the guard to slow down.

The guard heaved a burdened sigh and said, slowly though with obvious annoyance,
"Intrarea oprita, inteleg? Inchis, inchis!" No
entry, understand? Closed!

Malcolm pretended not to understand and decided to take a risk by offering the guard money. It would be a bribe, of course, but Malcolm could maintain the fiction that he thought he was paying an entrance fee, while the guard's dignity would be protected by the possibility that the ignorant foreigner did not know he was bribing him. Malcolm had read in numerous places that nothing got done in any Eastern European country without payoffs, and he hoped that he had heard correctly. As he pulled a roll of American twenty-dollar bills from his pocket, he asked innocently, "
Pot plati cu acest?
"

The guard's eyes widened visibly at the sight of the green bills, and he gave Malcolm a sudden, knowing smile. "
Da, da, buna, buna!
"
He held out his hand and Malcolm placed a twenty-dollar bill into it, then a second, and then, seeing the guard had not yet withdrawn his hand, a third. The guard stuffed the money into his pocket and still smiling, said, "
Intratsi, va rog.
"
Please go on in. He returned his attention to the newspaper, grinning to himself, doubtless reveling in the unexpected windfall, doubtless doing some mental calculation as to how many Rumanian lei he could get for sixty American dollars on the black market currency exchange.

Malcolm said, "
Multumesc
,"
thank you, as he got back into the car and began to drive up to the castle entrance. A curve in the dirt pathway took him out of sight of the guard. He had no wish to be seen carrying the jewelry box in or out of the ruin. He parked the car near the surprisingly small door, and carrying the box under his arm, he approached the entrance.

The ruined castle appeared to be roughly square in shape, with the front wall and the side wall close to a quarter of a mile in length. As was common with medieval fortresses, each corner of the square defensive wall was topped with a tower, though both of the towers in front had been obviously collapsing for centuries. Malcolm drew closer to the old, gray structure and nodded, smiling grimly as he saw the iron grating lying flat and partially buried in the earth before the door.
Of course
, he thought.
The gates are not hanging from their hinges
. Van Helsing knocked them off back in 1889 to preclude any possibility of his being trapped inside after sundown. The wind and the weather of the intervening century had caused the iron gates to sink slightly into the ground, and thus they lay only half-uncovered.

Malcolm entered the fortress and walked to the center of the cold, gray courtyard. Tufts of grass had forced their way up from between the heavy stones that formed the surface of the court. Birds were flitting back and forth from the thick vines hanging from the cracked and broken walls, which, though ravaged by time, still maintained some element of austere majesty.

Malcolm walked slowly through the courtyard toward the large main building of the castle, listening to the faint echoes of his footsteps against the stones. He felt nervous, frightened, but also grimly determined and a bit lonely. This was a dead building, a place not meant for living men. He knew that the castle had been inhabited continuously from the time of Vlad's death in the fifteenth century until just about a century ago; but not by living human beings. Not by the living.

"No need to be nervous," he muttered aloud.
I'm not like Van Helsing, walking into this castle alone, knowing what Lay sleeping within, knowing that three undead women rested In their coffins awaiting sundown, knowing that Count Dracula vas somewhere near on his way home from England. Dust, just dust. That's all I'm here for, just the remains of the Beast. No danger. No danger
.

He entered the building and found himself standing in the great hall. The huge room was totally empty, devoid of any sort of decoration or furnishing.
The local people must rave looted this place decades ago
, he thought. Malcolm poked around and found a door on the southern side of the room. He headed for it, reasoning that even if the chapel did not lie off the great hall, it must nonetheless be somewhere that general direction.

He glanced at his watch as he wandered down the dusty, dark corridors: two o'clock. "I'd hate to be here at night," he muttered. Nothing to be frightened of, really, but this place makes me uncomfortable enough now, with the sun streaming in through the broken windows and cracked walls. At night it would be terrible!

He walked for a half hour through the rooms and hallways before finding the chapel. It was, as he had suspected, along the south wall of the castle, but it was in a subterranean vault at the bottom of a long flight of uneven stone steps. He descended the stairs and stood in the midst of the chapel. It was just as Van Helsing had described it.

The large subterranean room had apparently doubled as place of worship and crypt. Unlike castle chapels in Western Europe, which contained a limited number of sarcophagi, there were dozens of stone coffins here, some of them small and plain, some ornate and majestic. He noticed that a few
of
them had lids just slightly ajar, and on an impulse he walked over to one such coffin and pushed the lid back.

A skeleton lay within the box, a stake protruding from its rib cage. The still-present long, black hair and rotting yellow gown told him that it had been a woman. "One of his wives," he muttered. One of the three who attacked my great-grandfather. One of the ones killed by Van Helsing. He reached out and gently caressed the top of the stake, and he smiled. "You were a brave man, Professor," he said aloud.

He wandered around the chapel, reading the Latin titles that were carved so deeply upon the stone bases of the sarcophagi. Basarab the Grim. Mircea the Old. Nicholae the Unrelenting. Generation after generation of rulers, princes, voivodes, their wives and their children, their names and even their popular appellatives preserved in the cold, hard stone. The Grim, the Old, the Unrelenting. Where was the Impaler?

He turned and looked toward a recessed alcove off the rear of the crypt, and Van Helsing's written record drifted through his mind as he walked slowly toward it. "There was one great tomb more lordly than the rest," Van Helsing had written. "Huge it was and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word: DRACULA."

It was still there, still huge, still lordly. And the name was still carved deep upon the stone.

Malcolm approached the sarcophagus and reached out to touch the letters, his fear and misery almost forgotten in the horrible wonder of the moment. "Count Dracula," he muttered. This is where they buried him, five centuries ago. Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler. This is the foul home from which he rose to spread pain through the hamlets and forests of the Carpathians.

Malcolm placed the jewelry box down upon the stone floor and placed his hands upon the coffin lid. He pushed up against it. The old lid hinges creaked and scraped against the rust, and the lid swung open with greater ease than he had expected.

He looked into the coffin, and he smiled.
Lucy Westenra was right
, he thought.
The Gypsies must have gathered up his remains after my ancestors and their friends left the
scene, must have carefully collected the fragments of bone and dust and brought them back here for interment. They must have removed the consecrated host that Van Helsing had placed there as a barrier to the Count, and then they must have placed the remains in the coffin.
A pile of bone and dust rested in the shape of a blunt cone in the center of the large coffin. It was obvious from the shape of the pile that it was not dust that had seeped in, borne by the air. The dust had been poured into the coffin. Bits of white and yellow protruded from the pile, bits of bone and teeth.

Malcolm looked closely and carefully at the pile, covering his nose with his hand so as not to breathe on the dust and scatter it. One very long tooth lay on the sloping side of the pile. He reached in and carefully took the tooth from the dust and then held it in the palm of his hand, examining it, reflecting that a hundred years before this very tooth had been embedded in his great-grandmother's throat.

He opened the jewelry box and placed it in the coffin beside the piled remains. Very carefully he reached in with both hands and scooped up some of the bone and dust and put it into the box. He began to repeat his motion, but his hands suddenly felt somehow odd and a bit numb. He flexed them, rubbed them together, but the numbness remained and grew, spread up his arms and toward his chest.

Malcolm began to hear voices, very soft and muted, but increasingly clear and distinct as the numbness continued to spread over his body. He fell back from the coffin and landed on the floor of the crypt as his now rubbery legs folded under him. Feeling rising panic, he tried to force himself to remain calm, to analyze what was happening to him. In an instant, he understood. The blood in his veins and the dust in the coffin were beckoning to each other, calling to each other.

He crawled away from the sarcophagus slowly as the numbness began to engulf him, trying to get as far away from the remains as he could. At last his body could no longer move, and he felt himself slipping into a state of semi-consciousness. He fought against it, struggled to remain awake.