Stoker's Manuscript (16 page)

A loud shriek from the woods nearby frightened me, and I stopped. It sounded like the wounding of an animal and lasted several seconds. After it subsided, I heard the buzz of mosquitoes before a thousand bats descended toward the noise.

I picked up my pace and soon encountered uneven rocks underfoot where the path began its climb.

Tripping over stones.

I was almost there.

A
t the top of a small rise were traces of a two-lane path leading north off the road and through a dense row of trees to an open field beyond. I knew I was not alone, yet saw no one. I had saved the flashlight for just this part of my search, and I clicked it on.

In the clearing I found a cemetery. No crosses adorned the headstones, and the engravings were clearly in Hebrew.

The Jewish cemetery,
awaiting their judgement
.

So ended the trail of clues. Was it enough that I had gotten there, or was I supposed to guess which tomb hosted the unholy guest? And were the Master’s people watching as I tried to decide what to do next?

I turned off the flashlight in the hopes of reacquiring my night vision. It appeared the cemetery occupied about an acre of scrubby land, neither flat nor sculpted, boundaried on two sides by a loosely wired fence, with trees lining the roadside to the west and a wall of rocks and stones providing a natural northern barrier.

If I were in a hurry, doing something wrong in a place without welcome, where would I place the casket?

I looked back south, across the river and down into Baia Sprie, where the brightly moonlit twin steeples of the Catholic church rose against the uneven outline of mountains crowning the valley. A noise began to build behind me from the tree line. I clicked on and pointed the flashlight in that direction, only to see the tree limbs and branches filled to capacity, not with the dense foliage as I had assumed, but with perched birds. Past their bedtime, they certainly must have been waiting for something. I tried to refocus on the puzzle.

Would it be unmarked? Or might it have a scrambled name, either a character in Stoker’s book or one I saw in the notes?

My search continued. Something told me I was not using my head.
Think, think.
If the object was to get in and out quickly, I would . . . not want to dig. I would use an aboveground sarcophagus. My search narrowed to only elevated crypts. I passed by one because it had a cross at its head, but passing by it a second time, it occurred to me that the cross was exactly what did not belong here.

I returned to the spot and looked it over. The tomb stood by itself, a stone box topped with a large slab about belt height. It had a smooth top, unadorned except for the design of a strap forming the shape of a cross as one looked down upon it. Engraved in the stone was a name—
LOREENA BRAITHWAITE
. No dates.

Why should I know that name?

Then the light flickered. I checked the flashlight, but it was still strong. The interruption seemed to come from above, and when I looked up, I saw that the moon had been eclipsed. The sky was filled from horizon to horizon with bats, as if every bat in Europe were receiving its calling that night. I pulled my jacket over my head, covering my face as they swarmed and dived all around. They squealed like rats on water, and all at once all the birds lifted from the branches and shrieked a war cry. I peered out from under my coat; it looked like two men were fighting near an oak tree only ten yards from me. Both men appeared to be the same size, lean and quick, grabbing and lunging at each other and making banshee noises as the bats bombed and bounced off of them. They moved so quickly that I could only see a blur in the darkness.

I turned my flashlight toward them, and when the light hit one set of eyes, the man froze. In his moment of hesitation, the other one bit down on his forearm. The victim let out a howl that sounded half human and half dog. A quick swipe of the aggressor’s hand ripped open the side of the screaming man’s neck, and a second later blood pumped out like a squeezed fountain pen. The victor grabbed the wounded man’s neck with one hand, an arm with the other, and pinned the victim to the tree. A third man joined the fight, also moving as a blur, and grabbed the victim’s other arm. The pair yanked to pin his arms around the tree trunk, exposing the man’s front as he cried in pain, blood now running freely out of his neck.

A fourth man entered the scene from behind me, walking a hunter’s conquering stride. He wore a long black coat with its collar turned up. Two long knives sparkled in the moonlight from his draped sleeves as he stepped to the tree. The defeated man spat at him futilely as the hunter lifted both knives head high and plunged them in the victim’s chest.

One last loud howl drained from the dying man as he slumped forward, head lolling. The hunter then reached deep into the wound on the dead man’s neck and yanked. I heard a sound like a branch snapping, and the victim’s head fell onto the ground. I shone the flashlight down on the man’s grimacing face, revealing two prominent canine teeth and dim red lights in his eyes that were slowly extinguishing.

The hunter turned and walked toward me. It was the Master from Castel Bran. He breathed hard, not from exhaustion, I thought, but from excitement. He grabbed a bat in midair that had bumped into him, snapped its neck, and tossed it to the ground as one would crumple and discard a paper cup. He stood on the other side of the tomb I had been looking at.

“I am Dalca,” he said, “and I have come to reclaim my family.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

He raised his voice. “Tell me what you found.”

I thought a moment. “This tomb is marked
Loreena Braithwaite
.”

He looked down at the sarcophagus, and when his eyes saw the stone cross standing at its head, he swung his right arm toward it and smashed the crucifix to the ground.

His eyes glowed red. “Explain.”

The directions in Stoker’s original epilogue led to the cemetery, but to no specific tomb. Nor did he write it, for he was never there. I concluded that the assistant picked the name off a headstone, altered it, and gave it to Stoker to insert somewhere else in the novel. Two other chapters in the original manuscript mentioned names on tombs,
Dolingen
being the most obvious and thus not likely. I recognized the woman’s name as a derivative of another one in the novel.

“A Christian,” I said, referring to the cross, “with a Scottish-Irish name does not belong in this cemetery.” I sensed the Master’s impatience and spoke quickly. “In Stoker’s manuscript, there’s a fictional character in the Whitby cemetery named Braithwaite Lowery.”

He looked at me, looked at the tomb, then reached under the stone cap, and with a great exhale heaved at least two tons of stone from its mooring. It tilted my direction and slid off as I jumped backward. I shone the flashlight toward the open tomb. Inside lay the skeletal remains of a person—a woman, I think—clothed in a wedding dress with hands folded over the midsection holding a candle, a coin, and a rosary, the traditional burial garb of an unmarried woman. Around the neck rested a crucifix on a chain. Dalca reached into the tomb, grabbed a handful of remains, and threw them at me. I ducked, but a bone hit me and knocked me to the ground.

“This is not my wife!” His growling voice was so loud, I plugged my ears while kneeling. Had I not I would surely be deaf today, because he let out a primal scream inhuman in volume lasting a good ten seconds. Birds scattered and bats retreated. Finished, he walked over and yanked me up with one hand and spoke with his coffin breath in my face. “Imbecile. I lost three warriors tonight.” He shook me. “Those are my
copii
!”
Children.
He dropped me to the ground and instructed the other two, “Take him.”

Each of the pair took an arm and roughly led me toward the road from which I had come. They walked faster than I could run, my feet skipping along the dirt road, across the flimsy stone bridge, and into the black Suburban. They threw me inside and pinned me to the floor as the vehicle sped off.

Only minutes later the vehicle stopped and the door opened; roughly was I lifted and set on the ground. Outside the city where no lights burned, it took several seconds to recognize the wooden church lit only by moonlight—All Saints. Dalca was there waiting and instructed his two guards to bring me. At his command they grabbed my shoulders and dragged me at running speed toward the gate. The Master didn’t bother to open it, but kicked it off its meager hinges and walked directly toward the Paddock of the Damned. He stopped at the side of my mother’s tomb while the guards shoved me next to him. Dalca reached under the lip of the lid, just as he had with Braithwaite’s tomb, and lifted the cap off the crypt, sliding it onto the grass.

“Look,” he said. Grabbing the nape of my neck, he shoved my face toward the vault. “Look!”

In the dim light, I saw a shriveled, headless, unrecognizable corpse draped in ragged, burnt-blackened clothing. A shard of wood stuck out of my mother’s chest. Her head, detached, lay at her feet.

“I should put you in there.” He adjusted his grip to my neck and lifted me, pulling me within inches of his face. “She belonged to us, until your
took her.”
Father.
He shook me. “How do you think you got your eye for paper,
orfan
? You think it is your gift. It is from me. My blood . . . to her . . . to you. You owe me, you
and
your brother owe me.”

He threw me to the ground and ordered his guards to take me back.

D
ays passed back in internment in the confines of my room in Castel Bran, silent room service my only interruptions. Now I knew what
acceptance
meant and needed no imagination to know how this would all end. What was it that swung this normally God-fearing man to one who plots the demise and destruction of another? When Dalca announced that both I
and
my brother owed him, I knew he meant to splatter the blood of one of us so the other would see.

There were other realities, as well—my injuries throbbed, it took five days before I could retain any food, and my vision jittered as if I had consumed too much coffee. At times I fantasized that I had been drugged or infected.

But most of all, a single question pulsed in my mind:
Could that have really been our mother?

She had been murdered—correct that,
destroyed
by way of the centuries-old disposal of the undead. My father was either deranged enough to believe she belonged to them or he had witnessed something that spurred his attack. When I peeled away the horror surrounding the truth, certain things became clear, like why dogs and cats reacted toward us the way they do, and why mosquitoes think I’m one of them. It was because of the smell of our blood.

Certain questions stirred about: Why did my father do it? Did he have sufficient reason? And most of all, if my mother was involved with the undead, why did they have children? I kept hearing Dalca’s words invading my mind:
my blood . . . to yours
. As much as I wished not to be so, I did have an inhuman gift of sight, one that could not be explained away by mere science.

Further, I questioned if my brother had found out, and if it was the source of his stern warnings. I did not know how I would broach the subject.

Rummaging through the bottom of my suitcase for a clean set of clothes, I found a small book, Mara’s journal, which I had packed and forgotten. Lifting the protective crucifix to my lips, I kissed it in gratitude, for I knew that every time I had been in real need, God had always sent me a tool. I prayed now that some answers lay therein.

The page fell open to the jaw structure Mara had shown me, and instantly I recognized what I had seen at the monastery and cemetery. Another page had a three-tiered pyramid of boxes, similar to a corporate org chart, with two boxes at the top of the pyramid labeled
Nobles
. The middle row showed several boxes with solid lines up to the Nobles, labeled
Regulats
, the Romanian word for
common
, and must be how the offspring came to be known as Common Vampires. Below that the bottom row, labeled
H Slave
, was connected to the Commons boxes
.
To the side of the Nobles were several
H Slaves
, plural, perhaps denoting a harem arrangement. This helped clarify for me what Mara mentioned—that the Nobles were the breeders, and that their children were either other Nobles or Commons, the latter born without reproductive parts. The Commons served as protective forces around the Nobles, thus Dalca’s reason for scolding me for the loss of his children in battle.

Human slaves were the people supplying regular nourishment to the vampires, and appeared to be assigned in pairs to each Common. Nobles maintained several humans for nourishment. Again thoughts of my mother invaded. If she was, in fact, supplying blood to vampires, it was no wonder my father would be furious and destroy her. But no matter how many times the evidence suggested that reality, my reason and heart dismissed it as too far-fetched to consider.

Another couple pages dealt with lunar phases and what Mara had told me about the full moon’s gravitational pull on their bodily fluids. The last five days before a full moon were highlighted with the word
adrenaline
. Perhaps that constituted the distinct glandular smell I sensed in the cemetery, the hormone secreted during their warring period, the source of his superhuman strength.

Another page listed methods of killing vampires, including burning, cooking in the sunlight, decapitation, or skewering, either by wooden stakes or metal lances. Drawings included two knives to the heart, a wooden stake much like the one in my mother’s tomb, and a detached head. The silver bullet was not recommended, for the creatures moved fast enough to avoid any but the closest gunshot, pouncing on the shooter before another round could be fired. One other crude drawing showed a handheld device emitting squiggly lines, like a weapon shooting heat waves toward a closed coffin. I did not immediately understand what that diagram meant.

Aside from the obscure electrical device, my options were limited to centuries-old technology, namely blunt trauma, just as Mara had indicated, followed by dismemberment.

A family tree centered the journal, with Vlad Dracul at the top and four sons, not three as the history books suggested, listed below in order of birth: Mircea, Vlad, Radu, and Dalca. Somehow Dalca had managed to escape the pages of history, or else he’d disappeared into the Plague years just as his brother Radu assumed voivode status. If this were in fact him, then the Master would be at least six hundred years old.

One more page caught my eye, something about sunshine. A drawing illustrated sunlight rays with arrows pointing at an arm, with another illustration showing a larger view of the arm and the arrows penetrating the skin, the words
Vit D
written above the arm and
anaph shock
beneath it. After some thought I concluded that the journal was telling me that vitamin D, created in the body by exposure to sunlight, could curdle the vampire’s blood, causing anaphylactic shock. This page happened to be in Mara’s handwriting.

Much of the rest of the book contained miscellaneous drawings and unrelated sketches, none of which looked like weapons, and a list of travel dates and destinations, plus references to certain contract numbers. When I noticed the writing was sourced from a left hand, it dawned on me who’d written the bulk of this journal—Stoker’s assistant.

Unmistakable.

Quite the journey this little book had taken, I thought, from London over a century ago, to Mara’s in southern Wisconsin, and now to Transylvania in my possession. Just as I finished perusing the journal and returned it to my suitcase, the telephone rang, the red phone that had no keypad.

With hesitation, I answered. “Hello?”

I heard the long distance hiss and my brother’s voice. “Joseph?”

“Bernhardt?”

“Where have you been?”

I looked about the room, thinking who might be listening to the call. “Visiting relatives,” I said.

“You’re supposed to be home by now.”

“I’ve been delayed.” I paused. “The buyer is still doing his . . . due diligence.”

“Where are you calling from?” he asked.

Of course, I had not placed the call; someone within the castle must have dialed my brother’s number. “Castel Bran,” I said. I wanted him to know my location.

“Have the police come to speak with you?”

“No, why?”

“There’s been a murder . . . two murders, actually.”

“Someone we know?”

“Your friend, the businessman from downtown, Doug.”

“Doug Carli? You sure?”

“The police were here looking for you, want to ask you a few questions.”

“What happened? Why would they want to speak to me?”

“Seems your friend took a leap off a building downtown and impaled himself on a fence.”

“Doug? He would never kill himself . . . Wait, why speak to me?”

“You met with him that day, and you were his last appointment.”

“He helped me with the due dili—” I remembered who might be listening. Anonymity.

“Joseph . . . Joseph?”

“You said two. Who else?”

“The same day, neighbors of your friend Mara found her body up in a tree.”

I was too stunned to speak.

“Joseph?”

“Mara Sadov? Near Lake Geneva?”

“Yes, I didn’t know her last name,” he said.

“I visited her the day before I left. I . . .” Words failed me. And I did not want to mention Alexandru Bena.

“So you saw her.”

“Of course. She was fine.”

“Some neighbors gave a clear description of your car. It doesn’t look good, Joseph.”

“You said she was hanging in a tree?”

“Not hanging.”

“What happened?”

“Joseph, you need to get back here right away. The police want to question you. You might want to talk to an attorney first.”

“Sounds like more than just a person of interest.”

“Jo—” The line clicked off.

Just as I hung the receiver on its cradle, an envelope slid under the door. I walked over, picked it up, and tried the door again—still locked. It was a handwritten note on personalized Castel Bran stationery. In perfect penmanship, it read:

To Mr. Joseph Barkeley,

The honor of your presence is requested at a birthday party tomorrow night, Friday, at 23:00 until just before sunrise. Dress is casual, meals will be served, transportation and entertainment to be provided by the host. Be ready to be picked up by 14:00. Location is at my residence in Dreptu.

Dalca Drakula