Blood of the Impaler (42 page)

The Turk hovered between life and death when the Voivode stood up and gazed down upon him with contempt. He turned to the three shrouded women who were waiting
near the doorway and issued a silent command. They responded instantly. They leaped upon Torghuz Beg in a frenzy of hunger and anger and vindictiveness, and in the eagerness of their newfound drives, they tore him to pieces.

Terror and death descended upon the occupied castle and the camp of the Turks as the hours passed, and the screams of horror and pain drifted upward into the night sky.

They killed and killed and killed, impervious to the knives and arrows and swords, reveling in the death and the terror.

This
, thought the Voivode,
this is better than battle! It is better than torturing peasants, better than impaling enemies, better than nailing Turkish hats to Turkish heads! This is magnificently wondrous! The screams, the fear, the misers - the power, and the blood, the blood!

The mist swept over him and carried him through century after century of inhuman horror. He saw the terrified faces of women as he bore down upon them, the pleading eyes of men as he ripped through their throats with his great fangs, heard the delightful wails of infants as he tasted their sweet new blood. He and his wives ran joyfully through the Carpathian woods in the form of wolves; they flew upon their leathery wings through the windows of taverns and palaces and peasant huts; they floated invisible in the fog amid the ignorant evening merrymakers. They drank and they killed and they mocked the stupid, foolish cattle.

And each dawn they pulled shut the lids of their coffins, and they slept a sleep like unto death.

And each twilight they felt the same inhuman power course through them, filling them with cruelty and the lust for blood.

And they hovered like angels of death above the terrified peasants of the Carpathians.

The mist thinned and the centuries ceased their lightning passage, and he knew that the peasants had learned how to protect themselves. They covered their windows with garlands of garlic and placed crosses and crucifixes upon themselves and their doors. Priests armed with consecrated hosts and holy water and wooden stakes searched for them, never finding them, but inspiring the peasants to seek refuge from the demon in the symbols and sacraments of the Orthodox Church.

And he grew hungry and restless as the decades passed into centuries.

He pulled open the great door of the castle and stood motionless inside the great hall, smiling at the clear-eyed young man who waited politely without. He made no movement toward the young man, did nothing to impel him forward, for no one may be forced to pass through the gates of Hell. "Welcome to my house!" he said, and smiled. "Enter
freely and of your own
will!".
As the young man
stepped over the threshold he grabbed his hand and shook it firmly, thinking,
little fool, little fool! Such easy prey you and your kind will be, you proper English with your ignorance and your skepticism and your reliance upon reason and your pathetic faith in science!
"Welcome to my house," he repeated. "Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring."

The young man returned the smile and the handshake but was apparently uncertain whom he was addressing. "Count Dracula?"

He bowed and said, "I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house . . ."

The mists swept him away and carried him along. Time seemed to be compressed into snatched and fleeting moments, scenes blending into scenes, people and places indistinguishable from each other. And then he found himself standing upon the deck of a ship, drawing closer to a deserted beach on the English coast. He stood motionless, impervious to the biting, rain-drenched wind, unshaken even as the dead ship drifted closer to shore and then impaled itself upon the jagged reef which bordered the harbor at Whitby, the reef which would have been so easy for a navigator to avoid if only the ship were piloted by a living man. But this was a ship of the dead, the dead captain's hands bound to the wheel, the mates and crew all dead.

England
, he thought.
A new land, filled with new cattle, running with new blood
. His eyes blazed in the tornadic darkness. England . . .

He felt himself again swept along by the mists of memory, saw himself as if from a distance running upon four padded feet and flying upon two taloned wings; and then he was in human form, floating in midair outside a barred window, looking in at the feverish face of a madman.

Renfield wrapped his scabby fingers around the bars and drew his pallid face close to the apparition that floated before him. "I know what you are," he whispered. "I know what you want. You want me to invite you in, don't you?" The apparition did not reply, and Renfield went on, "Why should I? Why should I invite you in, bloodsucker?"

He smiled.
Fly-eater
, he thought.
Spider-eater. Invite me into your cell, and the entire mansion will then be open to me
. He swept his hand out behind him, and Renfield looked down at the dark mass that was spreading over the grass. Renfield's eyes went wide as the vampire whispered, "Rats, rats, rats! Hundreds, thousands, millions of them; and dogs, and cats. All lives! All red blood, with years of life in it! Not little buzzing flies, but millions and millions of rats!"

Renfield licked his lips and drooled as the tidal wave of rodents rolled over the grass and surrounded the Victorian mansion which served as St. Anselm's Asylum. "All these lives will I give you," the creature said, "aye, and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me."

Renfield's eyes were those of a child before a candy shop window as he stepped back from the bars and whispered, "Come in, Lord and Master!"

He changed into mist and floated into the cell. After resuming human form he looked at Renfield and commanded, "Kneel, servant. Kneel to your lord." The madman fell to his knees and looked up at his master worshipfully. The vampire plunged a sharp fingernail into his wrist and held it out, saying, "Take, drink. This is the new covenant in my blood, which will bind you to my service . . .
"
The madman fastened his lips upon the bleeding wrist and drank long and deep.

The cell dissolved before his eyes, and then he was standing upon a balcony on the east wing of St. Anselm's Asylum, the building he could now enter at will as a result of the lunatic's invitation. He smoothed his gray mustache and quietly opened the window door to the bedroom. All was silent in the stately Victorian mansion; all were sleeping. He crept into the room.

Lucy Westenra lay upon her bed, lost in sweet dreams of her fiancé, Arthur Wellesley, the heir to the Wellington title and its attendant fortune. She was a lovely young woman, rosy-cheeked and healthy, filled with delicious young blood. As he gazed down at her, he smiled at the sight of her long blond hair as it lay in delightful dishevelment upon her pillow.
How like Simone you are, sweet Lucy!

He walked quietly over to her bedside and leaned over
her, allowing the inviting aroma of her person to drift upward to his flaring nostrils as his tongue flicked eagerly upon the pointed tips of his fangs. Then he leaned closer and gently pressed the tips against her throat.

She started and moaned as he punctured her soft skin, but she did not awaken. Centuries of experience had given him the skill with which to drink without detection. He sucked the blood greedily from her white throat, leaving no stain upon her linen pillowcase when he withdrew from her. Then he whispered, "Lucy!"

She opened her eyes slowly and languidly. He captured her gaze with his own in the instant between awakening and wakefulness, and she was drawn deep into their burning red depths. She was immobile but at his command, unconscious of her actions, still asleep though awake. "Lucy!" he repeated in the same serpentine whisper. "You thirst, do you not?"

"Yes," she whispered. "I'm very thirsty."

He plunged one of his sharp teeth into his own wrist and then pressed it against her lips. "Drink, sweet Lucy. Drink of my elixir. It is warm and sweet, is it not?" Lucy Westenra swallowed the tainted blood and with it drank her own destruction.

The mist surrounded him again, swept him away from the dark bedroom, and he found himself standing before the Westenra crypt in Hempstead, awaiting her emergence. It was long past sundown, but she had not yet come forth from her grave. He pushed open the door of the mausoleum and entered, expecting to find her there, but seeing nothing.

He noticed a repugnant odor, however, and a strange, unpleasant heat. He walked over to her casket and lifted the lid, then recoiled in disgust from the overpowering stench of garlic. He forced himself to look into the coffin, and his lips curled in a furious snarl at the sight of the stake that protruded from her chest, at the severed head and the open mouth stuffed with the foul plant. The communion wafer that rested upon her stomach was the source of the bitter heat, and it prevented him from drawing close enough to the coffin to remove the stake and the garlic and bathe the corpse in his blood. Outraged, he ran from the tomb. "Van Helsing," he muttered angrily. "Van Helsing and his society of meddling fools!"

He drifted again through time and memory, until he was once more a wave of mist seeping into Renfield's cell, the
only entranceway into the asylum that had not been barred to him by garlic and crosses. But as the mist resolved itself into undead flesh, the madman attacked him, grabbed him with his powerful hands, crying, "No, you shall not, you shall not! She is kind and gentle to me! You shall not take her life, you shall not drink her blood!"

He was simultaneously angered at the presumption and amused at the futile rebellion. He freed himself easily from Renfield's grasp and then spun him around, breaking the madman's back with one mighty blow from his fist. He picked Renfield up, threw him down hard, and with his heel ground his face on the cold stone floor. The vampire left the lunatic paralyzed and dying in a pool of blood as he set out to avenge himself upon the miserable cattle who had dared to oppose him . . .

. . . And he laughed as he pressed Mina Harker's terrified face to his bleeding chest, laughed at her idiot husband who lay unconscious upon the bed near the window . . .

"Flesh of my flesh," he murmured to the woman, "blood of my blood, kin of my kin . . ."

And then suddenly there was darkness and bumpy, jostling motion, and he felt the rough interior walls of a wooden box scraping against his hands as he passed from his deep sleep of death to undead wakefulness, and in an instant he knew that he was back in his homeland, that his Gypsy servants were rushing to bring him back to the ruins of his castle, that he was being pursued by Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris and the Duke of Wellington.

And he knew that a choice needed to be made, a risk needed to be taken.

He felt the box being pushed by eager, frenzied hands, heard the sounds of gunfire and the shouting of voices, felt the wooden box being shoved roughly from the wagon to the ground, squinted against the dying rays of the sun as the lid was ripped away and the faces of Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris bore down upon him. He made his decision in an instant.

"Ordogh!" he muttered as the knives of Harker and Morris plunged into his throat and chest.

Malcolm screamed. In the instant between the last moment of Dracula's memory and the first revival of his own consciousness, he felt the cold blades tear into him and felt the incredible agony of disintegration as flesh began to col
lapse into dust. And then he was again in Holly's apartment, lying on the floor in the empty room. Holly was gone.

He jumped slightly as the harsh ringing of Holly's telephone shattered the silence. He crawled over to the small end table upon which the phone rested and picked up the receiver. "H . . . hello?" he said, his breathless voice
trembling and weak
.

"Mal?"
he heard Jerry Herman say. "Malcolm? Is that you?"

"Jerry" he said desperately. "She's dead. Holly's dead, worse than dead. Lucy got to her, killed her, turned her into . . . turned her into . . ." He could not bring himself to say
the words.

Jerry took a moment to react. "Christ!" he whispered. "It can't be!"

"It is," Malcolm said, his voice breaking. "She called me to come over here so that she could help wake up the blood."

"Mal," Jerry interrupted him, "you can tell me about it when you get here . . . I mean, I
want
you to tell me about it, everything about it, but you have to get over here right away."

"Over where? Where are you?"

"I'm at the hospital with Rachel. Your grandfather is sinking fast. The doctor says he won't last the night."

Malcolm dropped the phone and ran to the door. He was motivated by two desires, the one being a frantic hope to be able to be with the old man when the time came for him to leave this world. But there was another motive, a motive more urgent and more compelling.

Rachel had glimpsed part of the truth, and Malcolm had also been aware, dimly, that there was indeed a plan, a plot, a terribly significant fact which was as yet not understood. In the moment of dissolution, as the immortal body of Dracula succumbed to mortality beneath the attack of Morris and Harker, Malcolm's blood memory had detected a smug satisfaction in the mind of the Count. He did not know what it was for, what plan had been set into motion on the cold Carpathian road a century before. But he knew that it had something to do with the blood. It all, always, had something to do with the blood.