Brides Of The Impaler (29 page)

Were her batteries weak? It seemed that with each step, the surrounding darkness sucked away at the flashlight’s beam. The smell was revolting. She saw boxes filled with garbage and stubby candles burned down.
Hypes
, she guessed. Heroin addicts would sneak into closed buildings just to heat up their works and shoot up. But if so, how would they get in here?
There’s no exterior door
.

She turned the corner, then, and the door slammed behind her.

Laura held her ground, even as the flashlight beam grew undeniably deficient.
Keep cool. Don’t freak out
. Now the light’s intensity seemed to pitch up and down. She grabbed her Mace with her other hand.
Get out of the room, there
might be someone in here
, was her first thought.

Her second thought, less than wisely, was to proceed.

She took several more steps, then turned a cinderblock corner.

Laura was a gutsy girl, but not
this
gutsy. When the meager thread of the flashlight beam crawled upward—

“Singele lui traieste…”

—she screamed, staring right into the face of the woman whose image had marauded her sleep. The woman stood gloriously naked, full breasts thrust forward. Her hands, first, bid the rest of the filthy room, then extended toward Laura.

Oh my God oh my God oh my God!
her thoughts shrieked as she swept the flashlight to turn but saw slivers of more
faces: pallid women grinning like the nude woman, then the faces of corpses somehow mounted in the darkness.

One of the faces was George Gemser’s, besmirched with streaks of black, green, and red…

A piece of rebar knocked Laura’s Mace away, and then the atrocious room’s darkness exploded with a cackling as dirty hands shot forward, grabbed her, and dragged her down.

Accented words fluttered: “
Me enamourer…for infinitum
.”

Laura was being mauled, bitten, beaten about the head with the rebar. Her struggles didn’t last long. Just before her consciousness would be knocked out of her, she saw the nude woman’s face closer this time, her grin wider and sporting long, thin fangs.

“Man, Paul, I’m sorry,” Jess babbled at the golf course. “I fucked up, I
really
fucked up.”

Paul smiled cockily. “What are you talking about? Those lease arbitrations?”

“No, no, man.” They walked into the bar at the nineteenth hole, Jess having arrived too late to play at all. “The bowl.”

“The—oh, the centerpiece our nutty girlfriends saw fit to dig out of the basement?” Paul laughed and ordered drinks at the bar. “What, you dropped it?”

“No, man.” Jess worriedly pushed his hair off his brow. “It…got ripped off.” And then he explained the bizarre encounter with the woman who’d masqueraded as the jewelry appraiser. “The cunning bitch even stole my wallet.”

Paul sipped his drink. “I’ve heard screwy things before, Jess, but not that screwy. How would this woman even know you’d called for an appraisal? She would’ve had to know in advance since she arrived
before
the real appraiser.”

“You got me.” Jess downed his beer in two slugs, then ordered another. “I figure she was either standing right outside my office when Ann called, or maybe she overheard the information from the jeweler’s office.”

Paul frowned at him. “That’s ridiculous, Jess.”

“Don’t you think I know that? But I can’t think of any other way she could’ve known about it.”

Paul chuckled. “So, what, you were sitting there and this ‘woman who looked like a bum but in a fancy dress’ picked up the bowl and walked out with it?
And
your wallet? With you sitting there?”

“Not…exactly.” Jess shook his head. “She kind of…tried to seduce me, I guess ’cos I refused to sell it to her.”

“And?”

“And, well, she took me back in my office—the bowl was on Ann’s desk—and, well, you know, she, uh—”

Paul stared incomprehending.

“She blew me,” Jess whispered.

Paul almost spat out his drink.

“Then, uh,” Jess continued, “she left. I went to the bathroom, and—”

“She ripped off the bowl while you were getting your Johnson back in your slacks,” Paul finished.

“Yeah.”

“After hearing that, I need another drink.” Paul gave Jess the eye. “If I didn’t know you better I’d say you sold the bowl for a bundle, and are bullshitting me about the rest.”

“Hey, I’m a lawyer, not a thief.”

“Meaning?”

“I’d never steal from a
close
friend.”

Paul just laughed out loud and shook his head.

Jess looked dismayed. “Man, I thought you’d be pissed at me.”

“About
that
dumb-ass thing? I’m glad it got ripped off.”

“Glad?”

“Sure. There was a bad vibe about it—
whatever
it was. Cristina’s off-balance enough as it is, that thing just made her worse—I don’t need something
else
twisting her out of shape. For a while I think she believed she’d
dreamed
about the fucking bowl before she actually saw it for real.”

“Women,” Jess muttered.

“Like they say, can’t live with ’em…”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jess said. “But what should I say when they ask about the appraisal?”

“I’ll bet you the pizza tab they’re both at the house now half-plastered on mimosas. They’ll forget all about it.”

“Well,” Vernon said after explaining the case and augmenting it with Dr. Aured’s less-than-serious insinuations. “You’re not frowning, you’re not laughing, and you haven’t thrown me out yet.”

“It’s…interesting,” Professor Fredrick remarked. He had the habit of sometimes making comments with his eyes closed and face raised, as if in a muse. “Fascinating, actually.”

“Come on, Dr. Aured said the same thing, but he
did
laugh at me. Vlad the Impaler?”

“It’s not that uncommon, is it, or have I watched too many murder movies? Copycats. That’s what you call them, right?”

“Over the past few days, I’ve been forced to think along the same lines, sir,” Vernon chuckled. “I feel a little bit more assured now.”

“Why?”

“Because, like I said, you haven’t thrown me out and dismissed me as a nut.”

“There’s nothing ‘nutty’ about the historical figure known as Vlad Tepes,” Fredrick intoned, serious and also at odds with something. “And part of his name really was Dracula; he actually signed his name as such. Vladislaus Dracula is the phonetic equivalent. As for your copycat murderers, however, I’m a little mystified. Homeless women, you say? Inspector, it would take someone who’s quite adept at historical research to perpetrate these crimes to such detail. Not the impalements themselves—everybody
knows that Vlad engaged in this atrocity quite without restraint. But the colors—your average ‘Dracula fanatic’ would have to dig deep for that accuracy, not just the colors but the order of the colors. And then the words themselves—they’re even more disturbing.” He looked back at Vernon’s notes, toking his pipe. “I’m sure the good Dr. Aured informed you that these sentences seem to be Vulgar Latin peppered with Saxon, Old English, Finno-Ugris, and others.” And then the professor paused. “
Tara
flaesc Wallkya
,” he uttered under his breath. He seemed coerced by a studied enthusiasm. “Molested aspects of Latin.”

“Dr. Aured used the word
bastardized
,” Vernon volunteered, “but I get it. Someone writing things without much actual knowledge of the languages.”

“Um-hmm. And the attempts at Romanian. I’d be interested in knowing Aured’s reaction to
that
.”

“Along the same lines. Words not quite right but right enough. Sentences not accented—something about an International Phonetic Alphabet.”

Fredrick nodded, eyes closed.

“As if these homeless girls, or whoever really is doing it—”

“Are half-faking it,” Fredrick finished. “Doing the best that they can with the available information source.” He looked at the next line and smiled. “‘
Singele lui traieste
…’ And if the impalements weren’t alarming enough, that line, ‘His blood is alive,’ most certainly smells of Vlad Tepes and his subsequent occult legend. Nor can we ignore the colors of the markings left at the scenes. Add all these elements together and you simply must have some sort of…” His words trailed off along with pipe smoke.

He doesn’t want to say it
, Vernon presumed. “A gang of homicidal Dracula fanatics. A
cult
. It sounds too far-fetched until you look at the possibility more-more—”

“Concretely. Throughout history there have been many
cults that kill in the name of what they believe in, devil worshippers and the like. Mostly just as a systematic rebellion against an oppressive church order. Today, on the other hand, it’s almost become a cliché: disgruntled youth with no direction in life, and defected by antisocial environments, drugs, and what have you—sacrifice animals and sometimes even people to the so-called devil. They’re delusional, of course. That boy in Oklahoma, and that group in New Hampshire, for example. And more clichés abound, the ‘Goth’ movement, an obsession with dark clothes, gloominess, pale skin, and last but not least, vampirism. It’s very true that there are vampire clubs and cults and social coteries that exist today and always have existed. There are people who
believe
not only that vampires exist but that they are vampires themselves. Where some men get together on Friday nights and play cards, and some women have their Tupperware parties,
these
people have gatherings where they drink each other’s blood. But of course…” Fredrick smiled.

“They’re all whackjobs.” Vernon got the gist. He’d read of such things many times.

“So why couldn’t such a group take the next logical—and psychopathic—step? In this day and age, it’s not at all outlandish that sick individuals obsessed with this topic could become killers, thinking of their murder as an offering that will bestow upon them good fortune in some dark afterlife.” Now Fredrick looked back at Vernon. “All these quotes, the details of the desecrations, and then the impalements themselves are, for lack of a better term,
Draculian
.”

Vernon let the strange word slip around his head. “I don’t quite follow you about the colors, though. You mentioned a specific detail that would require some historical research.”

The old man’s brows rose and fell; then he looked again at the morgue photos of Virginia Fleming and the black,
green, and red lines streaking up and down her pallid body. “Well, in the vampire legend, Dracula wore a black cape but the
real
Dracula wore three capes: black over green over red. They’re specifically the colors of an order of knights—the Order of the Dragon—which is well known. But these colors? Not so well known. Red stands for the blood of Christ, green the color of the Holy Roman Empire, and black over it all to actually
hide
the first two colors: these knights were to operate incognito, so as not to solicit the sin of pride.”

“Now I see what you mean,” Vernon admitted. A haphazard glance to the shelf made him flinch, when he spotted a small bronze statue of a woman with multiple arms. Vernon shuddered once. “Vagabonds wouldn’t know that.”

“Unless somebody else told them, I suppose,” the professor added. “Cults of this nature often have a ringleader, so to speak, don’t they? ‘Jonestown,’ for instance, from the seventies, the Echols tragedy in Arkansas, that multiple-murder group in San Diego not so long ago. It’s mostly sheep who follow such leaders.”

Sheep
. The figure of speech jolted him.
Homeless women
who are mentally unstable…following a leader
…

The nun?

Vernon felt inept for not having thought of it so concisely. “That suggestion is very helpful, sir. ‘Sheep’ following a homicidal leader who is clinically obsessed with all this Vlad stuff.”

“It’s a thought,” the old man remarked. He retamped his pipe.

“And these women were seen once…with a nun.”

Fredrick’s eyes leveled in an inexplicable way. “You don’t say?”

“There’s also this odd coincidence,” Vernon continued, “that I really can’t explain but can’t help but think
isn’t
a coincidence.”

Fredrick smiled. “The fabled gut-feeling of the veteran investigator?”

Vernon laughed. “Sure. You’d be surprised how often they ring true in this business.” Again, he felt foolish. “Take a look at this,” he offered and reached into his briefcase.

He placed the boxed Noxious Nun on the scholar’s desk.

“This
is
a bit odd,” the old man admitted, noticing at once the weavy black, green, and red lines decorating the package. “The lines are quite like those found at some of the crime scenes.”

“Yes, sir. I still don’t know what the connection might be, but it does make me think. A nun witnessed with vagabond girls just before a desecration that involved black, green, and red lines drawn up and down on an altar cloth, similar lines on an impaled body, and now this novelty toy of a
nun
.” Vernon smiled. “Sounds like I’m reaching for—”

“Shit?” The professor smiled. “Maybe, maybe not. Why couldn’t the lines be the coterie’s emblem, the same way the Zodiac Killer left his own emblem?” Fredrick creaked back in his seat. “No, Inspector, it’s not that which rubs me the wrong way. It’s the nun.” He picked up the box for closer scrutiny. “This
vampiric
nun.”

Vernon was duped now by the expression on the man’s face. He seemed
bristled
by something.

“Dracula’s membership in the Order of the Dragon was inherited from his father,” the professor began. “Much has been written of this—
too
much, in fact. But just to give you some background, Vlad initially participated in the Order not so much for religious reasons but to potentially benefit his dedication to fighting the Turks and driving them out of Romania. Keep in mind, the Order was sanctioned by the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, neither of whom Vlad was keen on since they were Catholics and Vlad was Eastern Orthodox. Nevertheless, Vlad converted
to Catholicism, more than anything to support his own agenda.”

“I don’t understand,” Vernon said.

“There are a number of explanations behind the Vlad
legend
; in other words, his vampiric curse. And one involves a nun…”

Father Rollin’s heart seemed to drop into his guts when he watched Cristina enter her studio.
Good Lord. She’s found
the cask. It’s all happening
…He’d kept the hotel window’s drapes parted only wide enough for one binocular lens, and just as he’d been focusing on the rear studio window, his entire soul seemed to rust.

She was naked and glassy-eyed. She’d placed two objects down on one of the desks, one just out of view but the other all too visible.

The dog’s skull
.

The identity of the other object he’d missed just as he was focusing in. Rollin knew now beyond a doubt that Cristina—as he’d feared—was growing more and more subject to the black, paramental will that had targeted her.
She’s doing its bidding, just as was written
. And of course she’d be naked, and highly sexualized, to mimic the blasphemer herself.

But…what was the other object?

It must be the cistern, and if she’s found that she may also
have found
—

Another woman entered the room, pausing in a mild shock before Cristina’s dull gaze and brazen nudity.
The
dark-
haired one again, the friend
, he knew. Now she was yelling at Cristina, shaking her bare shoulders to snap her out of the hold that seized her.

It’s all happening. It’s all for real
. And then the priest lowered the binoculars and fell to his knees to pray.

Britt emotionally exploded when she stepped into the studio and found Cristina sitting naked in her work chair, staring at the wall.
Is she catatonic?
she feared at first but then, thank God, the eyes blinked and recognized her. Britt nearly shrieked when she saw what her foster sister had brought up from the basement: that yellowed dog skull, which she’d placed on a shelf right next to the Noxious Nun figure.

“Cristina! What the HELL is going on?” She grabbed Cristina’s shoulders and shook her till her head wobbled. “Are you drunk? Are you on drugs? What IS it?”