A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  "But what about these documents?" Malcolm asked. "If there's no truth to any of this, why does my grandfather have all this stuff?"

  "Maybe," Jerry answered, "just maybe your great-grandfather was a book collector and he bought Stoker's manuscript at an auction or something. Maybe he even knew Stoker and got the manuscript and stuff from him. Maybe all of this handwritten stuff is a private joke by your grandfather! Maybe somebody copied over parts of the book for … I don't know, some kind of fraud or hoax or something. There are lots of maybes here, Mal, and 'maybe my best friend is turning into a vampire' is not very high on the list."

  "Right," Holly agreed. "So I'll agree with everything you want, I'll even agree to opening Lucy Westenra's grave, because I'm certain that she never existed. If by some bizarre coincidence your great-grandparents had the same names as a couple of characters in the novel, well, then, all it is, is a bizarre coincidence."

  "What about the other names?" Malcolm asked heatedly.

  "What about them? All you've told us is that there are two different sets of names for some of the characters, and the same names for some of the others. So what? That doesn't mean anything. I mean, really, Mal! The Duke of Wellington? Come on!" She put her arms around his neck and smiled at him, her eyes laughing at him and mocking his foolishness and fear. "I'll agree to anything you want, because it won't mean a thing. It's fiction, Malcolm, just fiction."

  "I'll second that," Jerry said, raising his glass of beer to his lips.

  "Fine," Malcolm said, nodding. "Just so long as it's understood that if the rest of it checks out, we look for Lucy's grave and open it." He sipped again from the glass of burgundy.

  Jerry glanced over at Holly, his eyes twinkling and a smile struggling to emerge on the corners of his mouth. "Hey, uh, Mal, I thought you guys didn't drink … wine."

  "That's not funny, Jerry," Holly snapped.

  Malcolm did not reply. He was gazing pensively at the glass of wine that he was holding, noticing with curious dispassion that it was the color of blood. "Stupid thing to pop into my head," he muttered.

  "What, honey?" Holly asked.

  "Nothing, nothing," he replied. "Let's go to a travel agent and get things moving. We'd better arrange for a rental car also. I've never driven on the left-hand side of the road before, but lots of people do it, so it can't be all that difficult."

  "Hey, if it is, you can always turn into a bat and—"

  "Jerry!" Holly shouted.

  "Sorry." Jerry sniffed and took another swig of beer. Curse of the vampire! he thought. Good grief!

  By Saturday all the necessary preparations had been made, and late Sunday evening they boarded the plane at Kennedy Airport and were on their way to England.

  Chapter Seven

  Under other circumstances, Malcolm would have been fascinated by the sights and sounds of London and its environs. The country was dripping with history, and a young man of Malcolm's deep interest in the past—in particular Europe's past—would have delighted in it; under other circumstances, of course.

  Under other circumstances, Holly would have spent many a carefree hour wandering through Harrods' enormous store, would have browsed through a multitude of quaint little shops, examined the wares of the swarms of street vendors along King's Road and Carnaby Street.

  Under other circumstances, Jerry would have flitted happily from pub to pub, and if he was lucky, female to female, exulting in the varieties of ales, bitters, and lagers, seeing if the carefully cultivated social presence he had developed over the years had any effect upon the leggy girls with their multicolored hair.

  Under other circumstances, all of this might have been the case. But after allowing for a few hours of jet-lag-induced sleep, Malcolm had badgered his friends into joining him in the archives and dusty old stacks of the huge British Library, seeking clues and verifications of the places and people mentioned in Stoker's book.

  Holly remained convinced that the entire problem rested in Malcolm's extreme sensitivity and trustfulness, coupled with a particularly active imagination. She cursed his family inwardly for having stuffed his mind full of foolish old stories, and she was certain that as soon as he realized that none of the people mentioned in either the altered or unaltered text ever really existed, he would calm down, begin to enjoy himself, and start acting like his old self again. Jerry concurred wholeheartedly, and he somewhat testily resented each hour spent in libraries instead of pubs, in archives instead of discotheques.

  And all the while, as Malcolm dragged them with him along the motorways of England from place to place and city to village, the verifications of Stoker's text began to accumulate with depressing, frightening regularity. Malcolm had starred or underlined passage after passage in the altered, "corrected," paperback editions of Dracula that he had purchased in Forest Hills, and as he and his companions searched through the tax records, the obituaries, the ordnance survey maps, the dusty old ledgers and property registries, a terrible fact began to emerge: Bram Stoker's book was not a work of fiction.

  In the county archives in Exeter, they found a copy of the partnership agreement between John Hawkins and Jonathan Harker, dated two months after the latter's return from his business trip to Eastern Europe.

  In the Times index they found an obituary for Arthur Wellesley, the seventh Duke of Wellington, who died fighting in the Boer War in South Africa in 1898.

  In the index to the Journal of the British Philosophical Society they found a listing for an article entitled Über Metaphysieche Ganzheit, "Concerning Metaphysical Unity," published in 1899, written by Abraham Xavier Klemens Van Helsing, translated by Di John Stewart.

  In the tax records housed in the British Library, they found a record of import duties paid by the shipping firm of Carter, Patterson and Company on fifty boxes of soil. The point of origin was listed as the Hapsburg Empire, that sprawling realm which in 1889 included the province of Transylvania.

  In the Hall of Records they found a death certificate for one Richard Michael Renfield, place of death: St. Anseim's Asylum, Whitby, Yorkshire; cause of death: "misadventure"; attending physician: Dr. John Stewart. At first Malcolm was confused by the signature on the certificate, for Stewart had written the words "body embalmed" in parentheses after his name. Death certificates did not provide space for any record of the disposition of the body, but Stewart seemed to want it recorded and known that Renfield had been embalmed before burial.

  And then Malcolm understood, and he swallowed hard as he stared at the words on the death certificate. Embalming in late-nineteenth-century England was an expensive procedure, not a commonplace one. Under ordinary circumstances, the body of a penniless lunatic would not be embalmed.

  Unless the attending physician had reason to want to make very, very certain that no blood remained in the corpse when it was buried.

  Van Helsing, Wellington, Hawkins, Renfield, Carter and Patterson. Real. All real.

  And yet, their research yielded no reference to a place called Carfax Abbey, and no record at all of a young woman named Lucy Westenra. Malcolm, half-wishing to be proven wrong and half-determined to be proven right, speculated that the death record of Lucy might have been suppressed, and that the Carfax estate might have been called by another name. When Malcolm insisted upon driving north from London to the town of Whitby in Yorkshire, Holly and Jerry objected in the strongest possible manner. "What's the goddamned point, man?" Jerry asked with exasperation. "If there was any truth to all this bullshit, don't you think the name of Dracula's estate would have been recorded somewhere?"

  "Yes, I do," Malcolm replied. "That's why we have to go to Whitby. The record of the sale might only have been filed locally. And besides, we know from the book that the estate was originally called Quatre Face because of its shape, and Carfax was a local name. Maybe it's listed somewhere as Quatre Face or something else entirely. In any event, the information would more likely be in Whitby than in London."

  "This is absurd!" Jerry said. "If there's
no mention made of the place in any of the records we've checked, then it doesn't exist, period! I think we should just forget this whole stupid idea of yours and just try to enjoy the last week we have here!"

  The emphatic tenor of his words might have had a greater effect had they not been driving into the Yorkshire town of Whitby as he said them. The drive from London to the coastal town set on the central coast of one of England's northernmost provinces, only shortly removed from the border of Scotland, had taken them but a day. This was a result of Malcolm's frenzied driving and the fact that he had ushered them out of the London bed-and-breakfast well before dawn.

  By the time the sun rose they were past Oxford, and at Whitby by midafternoon.

  The land office of the town doubled as the local constabulary, so there was no need to worry about closing hours once

  Malcolm explained that he was researching his family's past.

  Unlike many peoples in other countries, the British are sympathetic to Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock who are seeking information about their forebears. The police officer politely sent them downstairs to the room in which local archives were stored, and the clerk who was about to lock it up politely invited them to browse about to their hearts' content. He was unable to give them any information himself, having never heard of Carfax Abbey or Quatre Face. He apologized profusely, and Holly and Jerry told him sincerely that he need not do so.

  As Malcolm began poring over ledgers and newspaper files, Holly motioned to Jerry and whispered, "Let's go upstairs for a minute, okay?"

  "Sure," he replied, glancing at Malcolm. His friend was too engrossed in his search to notice when they left.

  They mounted the stairs and walked out onto the cobblestone street where the Yorkshire wind, damp and a bit cold even in early June, made Holly shiver. "Jerry," she said earnestly, "I don't like the way this is working out at all. He's getting much too worked up over the whole thing."

  "Yeah, I know," Jerry agreed. "He's starting to act weird … I mean, weirder than usual. Did you see the way he looked at me when I argued with him about driving up here? I've never seen him get so angry. I think that if I'd insisted, he would have hit me or something."

  Holly shook her head. "You're his best friend, Jer. He wouldn't have done anything like that. But I'm not talking about how he's acting, not about how obsessed he seems, anyway."

  "Okay, so what are you talking about?"

  "Well," she said, frowning slightly, "I figured that he'd find out right away that the book is fictional, but he keeps turning up things that bear it out. And we've been helping him do it, which doesn't make me feel—"

  "Oh, come on!" Jerry interrupted. "Don't tell me you're starting to think there's something to all this crap!"

  "Of course not!" she said with annoyance. "Lots of novels use real people's names and real places and all that. But listen, let's just suppose that Mal's great-grandfather knew all the people in the book, and that the writer, Stoker, knew them, too. Stoker might very well have written the book as sort of a fun thing for his friends, sort of an in-joke. I mean, he wrote the book to make money, sure; but if you were going to write a novel and you thought that your friends would get a kick out of being in it, wouldn't you use their names?"

  Jerry nodded thoughtfully. "You know, that makes sense! So, of course everything checks out against facts. That's a great thought, Holly!"

  "No, it isn't," she said seriously. "If what I just said is true … and we know at least that Stoker did know Jonathan Harker, from the inscription in the first edition Mal's grandfather has … then the more research we do the more evidence Malcolm will find to prove that the book is a record of fact. If that happens, then nothing we say or do is going to make any difference. He's going to end up convincing himself that it's the truth, and I don't think he's in any shape psychologically to resist a delusion like that."

  Jerry understood her concern, and he placed his hand gently on her arm. "I really wouldn't worry about that. No matter how much local color Stoker used, no matter how many real people—friends of his, even—the story is still all make-believe. Mal's got to realize that eventually. In fact, the longer he's away from his family, the better. They're the ones who dumped this load of shit on him in the first place."

  "Maybe we should tell …" She stopped. "Is that Malcolm?" They both listened hard for a moment to the faint voice calling their names from the basement of the building. Distance made it almost impossible to hear actual words, but even so they realized that Malcolm was shouting. They went back inside and walked quickly down the stairs to the archives room.

  Malcolm was sitting at a table, papers spread out haphazardly before him, gazing at one with undisguised absorption, almost happiness, as if he had become so devoted to the task of proving the truthfulness of Bram Stoker's account that he had forgotten what such proof portended for him. "Come here!" he said excitedly. "Look at this!"

  He tossed the sheaf of papers to Holly, who caught it and looked at it uncomprehendingly. "What is it?"

  "It's a bill of sale, a transfer of ownership! It says on the bottom of the form … there"—he jabbed at the page—"that there are three copies: one to be filed, one for the buyer, and one for the seller."

  Jerry looked over Holly's shoulder and squinted at the faded writing. "Hey, Mal, this isn't for Carfax. This is for someplace called the Davignon Estate."

  "Of course it is, of course it is!" he exclaimed. "That's why we couldn't find any record of Carfax or Quatre Face anywhere. That wasn't the real name, the legal, official name of the property!"

  Holly tossed the papers back onto the table. "So how do you know it's Carfax? I mean, good Lord, Mal!"

  "Malcolm," Jerry said seriously, "you have to get hold of yourself. You're starting to rave."

  "Don't you understand!" Malcolm shouted. "Carfax, Quatre Face, four faces—these were local nicknames! It's like … well, I don't know … like calling some buildings the Twin Towers instead of the World Trade Center, or, ah, calling the Capitol Building 'the Hill.' Everybody knows what it means, but you won't find it on any official documents!"

  "Okay, so if it's a local nickname, how come the people here have never heard of it?" Holly asked.

  "This is why," he said, holding out an old edition of the local newspaper. "The whole area was devastated by German bombs during the Blitz … you know, World War Two."

  "I understood the reference," Holly said dryly.

  "The point is, when the Germans were trying to bomb England out of the war, they concentrated a lot of their missions on ports, and Whitby is a port! In the process of trying to destroy Whitby, they blew up Carfax! That's why nobody's ever heard of the name! If you're fifty years old, like those cops seem to be, you'd have been an infant during the war!"

  "Mal, why are you calling it Carfax?" Jerry said, a hint of exasperated anger creeping into his voice. "I mean, look at your logic, man! What it comes down to is that you're calling it Carfax simply because it isn't called Carfax. That's nuts!"

  "Oh, for Christ's sake, Jerry, look at the goddamn bill of sale, will you!" He grabbed it from the tabletop. "Look here, right here. Who was the agent for the sale? What does it say?"

  Jerry looked down at the page that Malcolm was holding. "Okay, so it says John Hawkins. So what? So Hawkins was a successful solicitor and he did some work up here. Again, so what?"

  Malcolm paused. "So look at the name of the witness to the buyer's signature. Look at it!"

  Jerry looked again. "Okay, your great-grandfather. Mal, we already knew that Jonathan Harker worked for John Hawkins. That still doesn't mean—"

  "Look at the buyer's signature. Look carefully."

  Holly and Jerry took turns trying to decipher the almost illegible letters. "Looks like an abbreviation," Holly said at last.

  "Yeah," Jerry agreed. "Just letters. But none of them is a D."

  "Okay, okay," Malcolm said as if he were speaking to a couple of unusually slow children. "What are the letters?"

 
; "They're …" Holly began, squinting at the scrawl, "they're … WL … WAL … WOI … I think."

  "Will Walwoi?" Jerry said, trying to make auditory sense of the letters. "Will Walwoi? You're trying to tell me that you can get the name Dracula out of Will Walwoi!"

  "Damn it, Jerry, that was his name, his real name!" Malcolm shouted.

  "Good thing he changed it," Jerry mused. "Who could take a vampire named Will Walwoi seriously?"

  "Jerry … !"

  "Will Walwoi, Prince of Darkness! Curse of Will Walwoi! Will Walwoi Meets the Wolfman! Abbott and Costello Meet Will Walwoi!" Jerry began to laugh. "Can you imagine Bela Lugosi saying, 'Good eeevening. I am Will Walwoi!" At this, Holly started to giggle.

  Malcolm's jaw clenched as he grew red in the face. "Will you two shut up!" They did, startled into compliance by the sudden intensity of his anger. "Listen to me, both of you! In languages that use the Roman alphabet for writing, the letters U, V and W are often interchanged. This W is a V."

  "Okay," Jerry said, starting to laugh again, "so it's Vill Valvoi, Prince of Darkness."

  "This isn't funny, goddamn it!" Malcolm shouted.

  Jerry quieted down and listened, trying not to think of other amusing movie titles, knowing that this was a matter of deadly seriousness to his friend.

  "The W is a V" Malcolm went on. "You've read the book, like I asked you to. Where did Dracula come from? What was his title?"

  "The novel," Holly said, "calls him a Transylvanian count."

  "Right, as far as it goes," Malcolm said, still red in the face from his anger. "But the word 'count' is an English title, or maybe it's French. The point is that it isn't Rumanian. What was his Rumanian title? What was the Rumanian name for his province, not where he lived when my great-grandfather met him—"

  "Your great-grandfather did not meet him!" Holly said.

  "—but the province he ruled historically, back in the fifteenth century," he said, ignoring her objection.