The Mammoth Book of Dracula (79 page)

17th (?) November, 18—

A bitter night in the Carpathian mountains. Pyotr has terrible frostbite and raves in his sleep about the night’s face. How it folds around him and tries to suck the very life from his lungs. We are having trouble with wolves. They are growing bolder, despite the fires we burn each dusk. Horrible animals, they come up to the very edge of the firelight and growl at us. Their eyes seem almost human. Sometimes they foam at the jaws, this light turning their spittle almost red. Alexander has gone down with a fever. He says he can sometimes see Ubek in the trees, smiling at him and asking him to come and play with her. The sooner we are away from these ill-charmed heights, the better. I long for our home, where we could sit and look across at the forests at night, at the lanterns that shone in the fields. So much ash, now. All ash.

21st November, 18—

Pyotr has rallied. The weather has eased off as we come out of the foothills and approach Sibiu. It seems, watching the sunrise, as if the worst is behind us. I can almost believe that tomorrow, as Pyotr promises, we will be with his uncle and safe from the nightmare of this past six months. We pray that Professor Van Helsing is similarly protected. And yet ... Draoul seems as close as the sudden touch in the night from the dead winds blowing down from the north. I pray for us. I pray for our future families. God save us all.

Niam blinked and sat up. The bones in her back crackled with effort. A light headache had nestled behind her eyes.
Draoul,
she thought.
Who the fuck is Draoul?
The chill of Salavaria’s room settled into her. She pulled her cardigan more closely around her shoulders and pushed away from the desk. At the window, she pulled the blinds apart minutely but the stranger was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes were playing tricks; a smear of darkness shimmered where he had stood. Playing safe, she rang for a cab, then tidied up Salavaria’s effects, carefully wiping away her presence with a balled-up tissue. She did not want to explain her visit to the police when they eventually grew wise to this place.

A minute waiting was a minute too long for her. She grabbed her bag and strode to the door. She would hang around in the corridor downstairs. The smell of corpses was a bitter flood in her nostrils. Niam opened the door as he was unhinging his immense mouth: packed with teeth, drifting into the dark of his gullet like those of a shark. She gasped, stepped backwards. Blinked. He was gone.

~ * ~

She ran across the road, barely checking to see that she had shut the door behind her. A light rain had begun. It worried her cheek like the fingers of a playful child. In the cab she gabbled her address and sank back into her seat. The bunched newspaper the stranger had been eating from fluttered on the pavement. She tried to convince herself that it was the rain spoiling her view that made its contents look like the head of a dog.       

~ * ~

Her own flat smelled so conversely clean it was as arresting as the detergent reek of a hospital. Niam bolted the door behind her and sighed, angry that she felt so wired. She shrugged her coat off and hung it up, tossed her bag on to the sofa. In her lounge, she poured a brandy and listened to her messages. Dr Neumann, following up to see if her visit was enjoyable, ha ha, and see you next week. Oh and what, by the way, did Salavaria mean when he mentioned a bureau? Her mother, checking that everything was all right and what was she planning for the millennium party? Dr Neumann again, asking if she would consider seeing him on a social basis.

She sighed and took her drink into the bathroom where she drew a hot bath. It was too quiet once she had turned off the taps, so she slipped into the candlelit lounge and put a record on the turntable. It did not matter what it was. As she peeled away her clothing, she had to close her eyes.

Niam allowed herself to become totally submerged. When her heartbeat became too loud in her ears, she surfaced.

Reached for the razor blades lined up by the tap. Ran a finger over yesterday’s scars that ran along her arm like chevrons on a warning sign.

Her veins had grown plump in the heat. They throbbed, bluish, in time to the piano music’s pulse. She pressed the edge of a blade against her wrist and scored lightly until a red bead bubbled there. Now the other wrist. Now the sensitive flesh around her nipples. She thought of Salavaria’s hungry mouth positioned above a hot jet of blood from her carved forearms. She jabbed the razor into her belly three, four, five times, just nicking the skin.

Breathless, she flung the blade away before her compulsion for deeper wounding went too far. She bathed her cuts, weeping over the lack of control she exerted over her habit and the fear that one day she might find some. Her past welled within her and it was all she could do to stop herself reaching for the Gillette again.

The memory of boys spilling a different fluid over the pulse points of her body, no less vital, made her feel sick. She told herself then that she was taking their money for her betterment; this was how survival among the dregs was secured. You had to eke it out. You had to earn the right to do it.

Niam remembered the empty nights sitting in the corner of a squat, hoping that the last candle would not die out before morning. Tending to David in the dark was more awful than being able to see his face as it morphed through a gamut of agonized expressions. She had been mortified at the irony of her situation; offering up her body to shadowy men who might have been carrying the very disease that was ruining her boyfriend. Sometimes she would try to sing to him while she bathed his sorry flesh, running a flannel around the ugly statements made by Karposi’s sarcoma. She massaged him when constipation made him cry. She cleaned him during startling bouts of diarrhoea and then she would inspect what he produced. She brought him oranges and pasta, bread and pulses. He needed bulk, he needed vitamins. They seemed to make no difference. Towards the end, she remembered raising his head in her hand to give him a sip of water. The shock of his lightness had been subsumed by the fall-out of hair the manoeuvre had caused. That night she had gone out, fucked three men and bought enough downers with her earnings to finish him off while giving her the option to follow if she were up to it. The night she decided upon, almost a week later, she sat and watched him guttering beneath the cone of light from a candle she had stolen from a hardware shop. It seemed he would simply wink out while she waited; the shock of her passiveness in his death forced her hand. She wadded eight diazepam capsules between his lips and fed him some water. He choked a little—thrush had turned his gullet into a cheesy mush but he took the pills down. He did not say anything. He did not look at her. He died.

Niam dried herself, her eyes following the diminishing smears of mist on the mirror. Before long, the steam had retreated to a tiny disc that eclipsed her reflected centre. It ceased to dwindle. After all that, it had been easy, back then, to drag herself out of her marginalized existence. She had spent some time evaluating the scant number of skills she possessed and threw herself into a journalism course funded by prostitution. She could write, and she would never be stared down by any interviewee, not after what she had seen. She would never be cowed.

Until Salavaria, that was.

She made tea and carried the cup into the living room where she sat in the dark by the open window, watching the people in the flats opposite. They too seemed slothful, deracinated, as if trundling from room to room might expose the purpose that was missing from their lives and provide an escape.

A storm worried the horizon. As she watched, its thickness blotted out Canary Wharf’s pulse. Lightning forked above the city like cracks in the night. Its enthusiasm failed to muster anything so energetic from her; rather, it only served to make her feel even more exhausted, as if it were sucking the life from her.

Niam made it to the bed as a clap of thunder caromed overhead.
Who the hell was Draoul?
she thought.
Jesus. What a day.

~ * ~

She slept fitfully and dreamed of a swarm of lazy, bloated flies invading her room. Some settled nervously on her wounds and fed there. She imagined something larger flitting outside the window. She felt a sensation drift into her, as of a time she and a friend had entered a restaurant late one Friday night. They had been sober, everyone around was drunk: she had been unnerved by the oppressive force of the hunger in the room, as if alcohol had stripped away any social niceties to reveal the animal lust beneath.

The flies, fattened, lifted like a black-beaded curtain and droned away. She saw them coalesce beyond the window where her dream figure hovered. He turned and favoured her with a shocking smile and she saw it was the stranger she had encountered outside Salavaria’s flat.

“Our time will come.” He enunciated each word with relish. Although they were separated by glass, she heard every word. “I return with the death of the century.”

Thin sexual warmth spread through her groin and she rose through layers of sleep until the room swayed unpleasantly before her sticky eyes. She padded to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, confused and upset by the directionless need of her sex. The cuts itched furiously.

Back in her bedroom, she stood by the window and watched the now clear city lights glisten after the storm. The city seemed fresh, almost alien to her. Newly scrubbed, laid bare for the gradual soiling its inhabitants would be party to. The roads were veins to be furred by traffic and smog. She scratched her wrists and when the sun came up, she was too horrified by its colour to notice that she had made herself bleed.

~ * ~

That next day she had intended to write up her notes and fax a first draft of her interview with “The Leech” to the magazine. She could not bring herself to sit in front of the laptop and it was not merely because she felt like shit, although that had a large bearing on the situation. No, it was because, monster that he was, she felt some sympathy towards Salavaria. She did not want to go down the path her editor had outlined for her: depicting a blood-lusting fiend going even more crazy in his bedlam. She did not want to write about him at all. She just wanted to talk.

By late afternoon she was decided. Niam collected her bag and pulled yesterday’s sweater over her arms, wincing when the fabric drew across the tender incisions. Her breasts sang with pain where she had criss-crossed them with the blade; her belly looked like it had been shot with pellets.

She drove north through the city; it took some time. Banners and lights were being erected along the main roads in preparation for the millennial party, now—she noted with a jolt—only two days away. A pang of sadness drew her eyes to her bare ring finger. Angrily she stabbed at the buttons of her radio until she found some jazz. It helped her to relax. It helped her to cope with the combination of the abject and banal that confronted her whenever she went to see Salavaria.

“When I was a child in Bitcse,” he’d told her. “There was a ... a problem. Children in the village, and in the surrounding villages, began to die. They were discovered in shallow graves, covered in punctures. Drained of blood. Some of the heads had been removed, wrenched away, like someone twisting off the cap on a beer bottle.”

The absence of sensationalism from his voice only made the telling of the story worse, and more compelling. She drove with his Eastern inflections coursing deliciously through her mind like red wine.

By the time she reached the prison, it was getting dark and the storm was expanding across the night. Summer had bitten so deeply into the country that it seemed that anything other than sunshine might never again happen. Black fists of cloud thrust over the countryside. She ran to the door and was allowed in.

One of the insectoid guards ran a sensor over her. “You don’t have an appointment today.” His voice rasped metallically. It would be easy to doubt anything human behind all that plastic.

“Just a few things I need to clear up. Can you let Professor Neumann know I’m here.”

“He knows. I’ll take you.”

Professor Neumann had evidently doused himself with cheap scent very recently. He looked up from his desk, pen poised above a thick ledger as she entered, a mood of urbane ennui about him. He looked like a writer posing for a book jacket.

“Name,” he mispronounced. “A pleasure. For you of course. Ha ha. Only joking.”

“I’d like to see Gyorsy,” she said, trying not to sound too impatient.

His good nature collapsed. “Ah,” he said. “Bit late. He’s in his quarters. Private time. He’s reading, I think. Some Miserablist text or other.”

“I have questions for him. It’s urgent.”

“There’s always tomorrow.”

“It’s New Year ... well, it’s New Millennium’s Eve tomorrow. I doubt I’d be able to get out of the city if I wanted to.”

He perked up. “Why not stay with me? We could go for dinner tonight and my place is only—“