Dracula Lives (19 page)

Quinn pictured drained souls staggering out of those deep woods after having their blood sucked—if they made it that far. For all he or anybody could know, Markov’s vast private forest could be littered with bodies. As that grim thought coiled itself around Quinn’s brain, he felt himself being drawn into exactly the type of atrocity he had come here to escape.

What other atrocities might Markov have committed? His talk of feeding on campers as the Wolf Man or Dracula had taken his story far beyond the eccentricities of a strange recluse and his enslaved daughter. Quinn had worked on cases where murderers, claiming someone else inside them did the killing, were later diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. That had to be what was afflicting Markov. Despite his very well-reasoned and persuasive explanations of what he believed were monsters inside him, he couldn’t possibly be the actual Wolf Man or Dracula.

Another thought occurred to Quinn. Perhaps Markov’s explanation of his vampiric tendencies was merely dialogue for a scene. The things he was saying might be true, or he might just be taking dramatic license to get a reaction from Quinn for the hidden cameras. Quinn decided to play along and see where this went.

With a disturbingly clinical detachment, Markov continued.

“You said that the head has been kept alive. Yes and no. The fact that blood still flowed meant there was some semblance of life. But the eyes remained closed; there was never any movement, no indication of any brain or muscle activity. So I tried an experiment.

“For the last several years, I have been using the latest technology in an effort to fully re-animate the head. Much in the manner of Mesmer and Galvani.”

“Have you gotten any results?”

“With electric current I achieved what Galvani did, to make the dead twitch. Two hundred years ago that was thought to be life, but we now know that it is merely the danse macabre of dead nerve tissue simulating life. But more recently I have introduced another element that has given me pause.”

Quinn waited.

“Magnetism,” Markov said. “I have added magnetic flux to the current and gotten dramatic results. The eyelids flutter. The lips move, as if trying to speak. At first this could all be considered the same simple reflexive movement we might get from a frog in biology class, but lately…. I could swear I have heard sound issuing from the mouth. Nothing intelligible, perhaps it is only air being released, but….”

Quinn followed his gaze until they were both staring at the head. It remained utterly still. Markov seemed disappointed.

“It would take some time to set up the apparatus,” he said, “but I can show you my experiment. An opinion from a neutral party could be valuable.”

Quinn felt any sympathy he had for Markov—George Tilton—melting away at the thought that he might be feeding on hapless souls who happened to wander onto his property. Whether Markov was delusional or not, he believed he was drinking the blood of Vlad the Impaler and that it was keeping him young. There was no denying the fact that he and his daughter looked decades younger than their ages.

“Does Johnny also drink the elixir?”

“She and Max both did when they were younger, but at my behest more than by choice. Max refused to drink it long ago, and Johnny did too, some years later—when what was left of her will asserted itself.”

A hot burst of anger burned away Quinn’s last shred of sympathy. “You forced your madness on your kids?”

In an instant Markov’s benign expression changed to one bordering on ferocity.

“I
loved
my family, sir. I wanted to bring them with me on my journey to immortality, but first I had to see if the elixir worked. I had to make sure there were no harmful effects and that I had gotten the balance of human and vampire blood right. So for years I kept them completely in the dark about my experiment, administering the elixir only to myself.”

“How could you keep the head a secret?”

“I know this is the hoariest of movie clichés, but movie clichés are the story of my life. Wherever we lived, I always had a laboratory that was never to be entered by anyone but me.”

His gaze softened. “The experiment began in 1945 when I procured the head. It had to be long-term, to measure aging and to be sure there were no negative side effects. In ten years the calendar said I had gone from forty-four to fifty-four, but my body had not aged a day.”

“How could you know that?”

“It was clear in every way such a thing could be measured. If anything I was younger, stronger. My skin became less wrinkled. It had the glow of youth. I needed far less sleep—a side benefit I loved, because it gave me much more time to study and pursue my work. My teeth began to regenerate themselves. New ones came in and pushed out the old ones. Broken veins in my legs disappeared. I had a sexual prowess far beyond anything I had ever had, even at the peak of my virility.”

“Ten years is a long time to keep a secret like that,” Quinn said. “I did a lot of homework to prepare for our meeting. There’s a record of your son, Max, being charged with attempted murder in 1954. Does that have something to do with why he despises you?”

Markov’s sudden flare of anger at the mention of Max’s name quickly melted under a flush of remorse—remorse that struck Quinn as the inevitable result of a family neglected to pursue an unwholesome, unfulfilled dream. George Tilton, the father, overtook Markov long enough to say, “In a sense, yes.” His gaze drifted toward the floor. “Not entirely without cause.”

“What happened?”

His normally resonant voice took on a hollow quality, as if coming from a crypt somewhere deep in his soul. “The continuation of my dark destiny. A path that had led me to become inextricably linked to Tod Browning and
Dracula
, and to become an eager participant in the power you spoke of: the power of movies to affect real life.”

Sitting in his inner sanctum, overseen from above by the closed but undead eyes of Dracula, Markov turned over the next card from the Tarot deck of his life.

“1954,” he began. “Unlike Poe’s narrator in
Ulalume
, it was not my most immemorial year. I remember it vividly. We were living in Boston, and a local movie theater found out that I had worked on
Dracula
and
Freaks
with Tod. They wanted to show them as a double feature on Halloween, make it a gala event with me as their guest of honor. Dolores—my first wife—Johnny and Max were with me, reveling in all the attention.

“Until a man who had been in the audience came up to me at the reception, raving about the way the so-called pinheads had been presented in
Freaks
. You remember them?”

“Yes. They had misshapen heads that almost came to a point.”

“A condition known as microcephaly. This man’s young daughter had just died from it. He grabbed a knife from a food table and tried to stab me, but I moved out of the way and the blade went into my wife instead. Max yanked the knife out and stabbed the man. He lived but my wife died. Since Max had acted out of self-defense, the charges were later dropped.”

The Markov persona continued to crumble as the fatherly part of George Tilton broke through. “I was left to live with my children alone. Without my wife’s sensible feminine influence, I could see that imposing my twisted worldview was damaging them. Again, the intertwining of my life with Tod Browning’s had played a hand. His films had brought me to the screening on what turned out to be a very fateful night in my life. It resulted in the death of my wife, but it also introduced me to the woman who would become the helpmate I desperately needed, lest I slip irredeemably into madness and take my children with me.

“Elinore was her name. She was the organizer of the gala, a lover of film whose background meshed perfectly with mine. She had fallen in love with horror movies as a child, as I had.
Dracula
was one of her favorites, so she was thrilled to meet someone who had worked on it. We started dating. She loved my idea of building a castle and studio for making horror films. We married and I moved my new family here, rationalizing that seclusion and fresh air would help cleanse our souls—all the while building a home where no soul could ever be clean.

“In this movie world I had created, my fetters of reason were cast off, Mr. Quinn. My obsession with immortality and Dracula was given full rein. At first it was just cinematic immortality. But as the Dracula blood got stronger, and I saw myself not aging, I convinced Elinore to begin drinking the elixir with me. I had hoped that we might live together forever.”

He hesitated, and Quinn watched his authoritative air melt away. When he spoke again, his tone was that of someone resigned to an ill-chosen fate.

“And so began the inevitable fall of the House of Markov. We were never a normal family, but our first years here were the closest we ever came. We had moved here in 1960. Johnny and Max were both in their twenties then, and could have gone out on their own, but they seemed content to learn everything there was to know about filmmaking. We stayed busy setting this place up as a studio and movie set, shooting some of the establishing scenes for our movie. But, eventually, the piper had to be paid.”

“As he always must,” Quinn said.

“Indeed. The vampire blood in the elixir constantly absorbed the human blood, making it virtually impossible to maintain the proper balance. There would be brief periods when my wife and I would succumb to the vampiric urges coursing through our veins. We would prowl the woods at night to feed…. Small animals at first, then the occasional camper or hunter. We would satisfy our cravings, then leave them to fend for themselves. We should have stopped drinking the elixir, but the lure of immortality had become too strong.

“As I got deeper into my Markov persona, my twisted psyche began envisioning myself as the patriarch of a race of immortals, directly descended from Dracula himself. I had used the basic idea in
Blood of Dracula
, but now—
now
—I had everything I needed to make the plot of my movie a reality. To create an
actual
race of immortals, as Viktor had described in his letter.”

Markov’s eyes narrowed as they stared inward, apparently at a memory he was hesitant to reveal. After a long pause he said, “I decided it was time to begin giving the elixir to Johnny and Max. Ours would be the family that blazed the trail into that brave new world.”

Quinn took a measured breath to quell his rising anger. “A world where—despite Viktor’s decree never to engage in the foul bloodsucking of a vampire—that’s exactly what you were doing. Surely you could see that.”

“I turned a blind eye.”

“Ah,” Quinn said, his patience all but gone for Markov’s lame rationalizations of his soul-stealing behavior. “So you brought Johnny and Max into your
vampiric
fold.”

“Yes. But as I said, not by their choice. They submitted to my domineering will—with the full support of Elinore, who found it exciting to be pursuing immortality by perpetuating the bloodline of the actual Dracula.

“Johnny was more malleable. I took advantage of her gentle nature and the pact I had forced upon her—that we would be together forever. She drank the elixir for years. Enough to greatly retard the aging process. But she could not turn a blind eye to the inevitable urges. Whenever they became too strong, Johnny would stop taking it. She never engaged in bloodsucking. Even so, I still managed to turn a lovely young lady into a cringing servant. My Renfield.”

“You were assuaging your guilt over having ended the life your daughter might have had—with another Faustian bargain. The promise of immortality in exchange for her soul.”

Markov used his perfect Lugosi voice to paraphrase Dracula’s line when Van Helsing exposes him with the mirror: “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Mr. Quinn.”

Quinn was not in the mood for snappy repartee. “What about Max? What was his reaction to the elixir?”

“Max fought me on it every inch of the way and finally flatly refused to drink it. From the very beginning he abhorred my cheating death by sucking the life out of the living. He became my nemesis. My Van Helsing. To the point where he could no longer ignore the late-night wanderings of Elinore and myself.

“Eventually he confronted us after one of our rambles. We told him we simply enjoyed walks in the moonlight, but he knew we were lying. He had followed us and saw what we did. His hatred for me had been growing ever since the night his mother was killed. And he never forgave me for getting remarried. Unlike Johnny, who eventually accepted Elinore as her new mother, Max hated her.

“After that confrontation, I found a mallet and stake under his bed. I left them there, wanting to see how far his hatred might take him.”

“I suppose that makes a kind of twisted sense,” Quinn said. “But why would he take the sword?”

“He had loved his mother dearly and made it clear that he held me responsible for her death. One night he came into my room, sword in hand. Max’s attempt at poetic justice. To use the same sword to behead Vlad Dracula’s spiritual descendant—me—and bring the ‘accursed bloodline’—his pet phrase—to an end.” His lips compressed into a small sardonic smile. “But we Draculas know there are many who wish to destroy us, so we are light sleepers. I sprang up before he reached my bed. He held me at bay, calling me a ‘psychic vampire’, raving about how being constantly immersed in the world of horror had sucked everything good out of him. He vowed to make me pay for what I did to him. And to his mother.”

Markov’s soul-weary sigh spoke of a battle he no longer wanted to fight, no longer believed in. “His ‘psychic vampire’ comment hit home. I hadn’t sucked my family’s blood, but … some of their souls? I had built an impenetrable wall around that part of my psyche. In the carefully edited movie of my life, I would only allow myself to see the things that made me the hero. I was the devoted father, and Max the ungrateful son. I was teaching him everything there was to know about movies, grooming him to take over my work and my collection when I was gone. If nothing else, he could have been a director.