by Robert Ryan
“The Blood of Dracula,” Quinn said. “I’ve been looking forward to it.”
Markov pulled up the time on his computer. “It is almost eleven,” he said. “That screening and the rest of the tour will have to wait until morning. We must at least try to get a few hours sleep for what will be a long and grueling day. The most important one of my life. As you said, minutes count. Can you be ready by four?”
“Absolutely,” Quinn said.
“Good. Meet me in the den. After the tour I can give you some time to make your decision—but not much.”
“Understood,” Quinn said.
“Very well. Then let me show you to your bedchamber.”
Despite Markov’s dire warnings, Quinn found himself perversely excited to see what monsters his eccentric host had unleashed in his “extremely” haunted castle. Haunted castle movies had always been his favorites. Now, according to Markov, he was in one.
He’d had many philosophical discussions with his father about what it would be like to actually confront movie monsters in real life, as opposed to watching them in the safety of a theater while happily munching popcorn. Now, according to Markov, if he decided to stay, he was going to find out.
CHAPTER 11
Markov led Quinn into the spacious bedchamber. He lit a taper and went around the room lighting candles in copper wall sconces, fashioned into sinister gargoyle faces. As each candle winked to life, it animated its gargoyle into an eerie semblance of life. On the wall beneath the gargoyles were slanted, disorienting shadows—odd geometrical shapes that hinted at some approaching alien menace, made more sinister because they remained perfectly still. The candlelight should be making them flutter.
Quinn looked for the source of the shadows but could find none. Finally he realized they had been painted on for effect. Markov had clearly been influenced by German expressionism. And Jack Otterson’s unsettling set design for Son of Frankenstein.
Markov finished lighting the candles and showed his guest the accommodations.
The four-poster bed was a perfect reproduction of those found in medieval bedchambers. A sheer linen curtain hung from a gold-fringed canopy, and the bed had been turned down to show a crisp white sheet under a black coverlet so luxurious it almost glowed. At the foot of the bed, Quinn’s bags rested on the velvet-upholstered bench where Johnny had neatly placed them.
Markov led the way into an inviting open room off the main chamber. “The oriel,” he explained. “One of my favorite parts of the castle. A good place for study, for writing, or simply to sit and reflect.”
Its main feature was a huge bay window consisting of three panes at least twenty feet tall and ten wide. Near the center pane, a gold-plated telescope rested on a tripod. The entire roof of the oriel was a skylight. A fireplace of ornamental brick had been built into the wall beside the bay window.
Quinn admired the skylight. “I would imagine that on a clear night the stargazing is excellent.”
“On a clear night it is superb.”
A comfortable retreat had been set up in the alcove surrounded by the window. A Persian rug covered most of the wooden floor. To the left, a loveseat and two high-backed chairs were arranged around a wooden table. To the right was a wooden desk and beautifully upholstered armchair. Atop the desk, a thick half-melted candle rested in a brass chamberstick holder—19th-century, Quinn guessed. Near the candle, a large quill pen stuck up from its inkwell, along with several sheets of vellum writing paper. Gas lamps at the seating area and desk gave a soft pleasing glow. A few steps beyond the seating area, a bookshelf was filled with books.
Quinn went to take in the view through the bay window. The brunt of the storm had passed, but in its wake the wind bent the thinnest trunks of a few leafless trees and whistled against the windows. About fifty yards from the base of the castle, sporadic glimmers of light looked like reflections of the Blood Moon off a body of water. “Is that a pond?”
“In ‘House of Usher’ Roderick had his tarn. At the House of Markov, I have my lagoon.” He moved quickly to the right edge of the fireplace. “The last thing I need to show you.”
Quinn stood beside him and waited.
“The third brick down.” Markov pressed it. To the right of the fireplace, an undetectable wall panel slid open to reveal a small bathroom. He explained that he couldn’t have anything modern appearing in any of his scenes.
Back in the main chamber, Quinn noticed a suit of armor with its halberd held high standing in the corner to the right of the door. “Another piece from your collection?”
Markov nodded as they continued toward the door. “From London After Midnight. We can continue our discussion after we rest. I will meet you in the study at four. If you get there before me, simply ring the bell and Johnny can fix you breakfast or take care of whatever you need.”
He paused in the doorway. “I know you must be wondering about the age of someone who worked on Dracula in 1931.” He leaned forward, clear shining eyes boring into Quinn. “I passed the century mark a while ago.”
Quinn had done the math when Markov mentioned graduating from high school in 1919, but it was still shocking to hear him say that he was over a hundred years old. What made it even more so was that he looked barely sixty.
Markov spoke as if reading his mind. “I know I look much younger. My lifestyle helps retard the aging process.”
Without any apparent awareness or effort by him, his features again took on an aspect of Lugosi. Quinn wasn’t ready to accept the notion that parts of movie characters had seeped into him, but whatever was going on, he would have been the envy of any impressionist. His eyes again widened in the famous stare, and as Lugosi he said the well-known line perfectly: “The blood is the life, Mr. Quinn.”
“A great line, but how do you mean it?”
He reverted to his own voice. “Tomorrow. As part of the tour.” Markov gave a curt bow. “I will meet you in the den at four. Till then, I bid you goodnight.”
As Quinn watched him disappear around the corner guarded by the Grim Reaper, he thought about how excited he’d been to meet this man. But the person he’d been expecting to meet, George Tilton/Frederick Schreck, was buried somewhere deep inside a man who had spent his entire life under the dominion of a fictional creation called Dracula. With a heavy dose of Poe and Morbius thrown in.
It struck Quinn that it went much deeper than that. I am not an impressionist, Markov had said. I am a re-creationist.
The fact that he’d gone to such enormous pains and expense to create his own Borgo Pass, and a castle that was a virtual duplicate of the one in the movie, meant he’d spent over eighty years—his entire adult life—consumed by his Dracula experience.
Quinn turned back into the bedchamber, wondering what dark secrets an old filmmaker obsessed with monsters might reveal. He wondered if he had left behind the deepest level of his own private Hell, only to have entered a deeper one here.
CHAPTER 12
Still standing inside his chamber door, Quinn decided he needed to know his exact location before making up his mind whether to stay or leave. If he stayed, and his situation became truly dangerous, knowing how far he was from his vehicle, and having a map that showed him how to get there, could be vital information.
He went to his duffel bag at the foot of the bed and pulled out an object about the size of an e-book reader. His most valuable tool in tracking down legends, it was a powerful state-of-the-art GPS unit that had kept him on track in the deepest wilderness. He turned it on and waited for the default map that would show him exactly where he was.
Searching for satellites….
It was a message he was used to getting in heavily wooded areas. A few minutes later he got a message he’d never gotten, even in the remotest locations:
Cannot find satellites….
It didn’t make sense. He’d been in woods as dense as these and never had a problem. Maybe the thunderstorm was interfering with the signal. All that lightning, especially aroun
d the castle.… Then he remembered:
Markov’s electromagnetic barrier.
That had to be it. He’d talk to Markov about it later. For now all he could do was extrapolate from what he knew to make a rough guess at where he was.
Markov’s driver had picked him up in the woods a few miles from the small Vermont village of Riverdale, fifteen miles south of the Canadian border. The trip from there to the castle had taken a little over two hours. In a horse-drawn carriage, maneuvering through dense woods, five miles an hour was probably the best they could have done. That would put them about five miles from the Canadian border, more or less. He’d not felt any severe deviations from straight ahead, but they could easily have angled west and gone deeper into Vermont, or east into New Hampshire. Either way, this was all sparsely populated wilderness. Factoring in Markov’s extreme desire for privacy, Quinn leaned toward Vermont. There were fewer villages there than in New Hampshire, and those small outposts were scattered around the edges of fifty square miles of dense, virtually uninhabited forest in the remotest part of the state. His best guess was that he was somewhere in the least populous, northeastern corner of Vermont. It was never good not know where you were, but for now that was the best he could do.
Wanting to clear his head before attempting sleep, he went into the oriel and gravitated to the bay window. As he scanned the night-shrouded landscape, his gaze was drawn to the faint glimmers of moonlight that winked like fireflies on the lagoon. He half-expected a creature to rise up, but nothing stirred, and he began a closer inspection of his apartment.
He went to the suit of armor and smiled at the memory of all the scenes in haunted castle movies, where the halberd would take a swipe at an unwary passerby and just miss. Invariably there would be eyes watching through the visor. He lifted it and peered inside.
The suit of armor was empty.
Above the large fireplace hung a portrait of a man disintegrating into madness. It reminded him of the one from Roger Corman’s House of Usher, which in turn had always made him think of the one from The Picture of Dorian Gray that showed Dorian’s serene expression becoming hideous as the evil within overtook him.
Dorian Gray. A man who had sold his soul to the devil for eternal youth.
Quinn’s gaze automatically went to the eyes, looking for peepholes through which real eyes would follow him around the room. He walked a few steps, then abruptly turned back to stare at the painting.
The eyes hadn’t moved.
He inspected the gargoyle wall sconces, counting as he made his circuit of the room. Thirteen. Each sconce had been meticulously crafted into a different monstrous visage. Almond-shaped holes had been cut out to indicate eyes. Thirteen potential sets of peepholes. Scanning the disturbing collection of leers, hatred, and evil intent, Quinn felt as though he were being scrutinized by a demonic conclave, trying to decide whether they should allow him into their netherworld.
He went to the bookshelves recessed into a wall of the oriel and flicked a switch, cleverly concealed to blend in with the shelving. Lights recessed into the ceiling bathed the shelves in a soft, bright glow.
Quinn immediately became absorbed in a connoisseur’s collection of horror literature, fiction on the upper shelves, non-fiction on the lower. Most of the non-fiction was either biographies of the best-known writers in the genre or scholarly works on its history and significance. Many of the titles were intriguing, but Quinn’s first love was fiction, and his attention quickly focused on the upper shelves.
The first two books on the top shelf were first editions of Dracula and Frankenstein. From there the books seemed loosely grouped in chronological order, going through the 19th century and into the 20th. The essential authors were all there—Poe, Wilkie Collins, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch—along with many other important but lesser-known names. Books by Dean Koontz and Stephen King took up an entire shelf. Anne Rice and several other contemporary authors took up three more. A first edition of The Exorcist had been autographed by William Peter Blatty. Books upon which Tod Browning’s movies had been based were grouped together, including another copy of Dracula.
The next section was dedicated to short stories. A scan of their contents showed a definitive collection of titles and authors. It took considerable willpower to resist the urge to start a fire, take several volumes to the inviting love seat, and become lost in pleasurable hours of reading.
Quinn looked at his watch. A few minutes past eleven. There wasn’t time. He needed to get some sleep before his meeting with Markov.
He started to leave but stopped when a whimsical thought came into his head.
Markov seemed to be incorporating all the stock elements from every haunted castle movie into his set design. Which meant there had to be a secret passage. And the entrance to the secret passage always seemed to be hidden among the bookshelves.
Quinn looked for anything in the woodwork that might be a knob or switch in disguise. Finding none, he went to the unlit torches in brackets on either side of the entrance to the recess. In the movies, a torch often turned out to be the lever that opened the hidden panel.
He tugged the one on the left.
Nothing.
Pulled the one on the right.
Nothing.
He considered other possibilities.
Sometimes things were hidden in hollowed-out books. Acting on his first impulse, he opened the first edition of Dracula. It was a real book, nothing hidden inside or on the shelf behind it. He put it back and opened the other copy on a lower shelf. Again, nothing.
He thought for a moment. The books relating to Tod Browning and his movies.
A thorough search of them revealed no hidden mechanism.
Markov had mentioned that he and Browning shared a reverence for Poe. Quinn removed a beautifully bound copy of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, burgundy with gold edging. A quick inspection revealed nothing odd about the book. When he went to put it back, however, he noticed something hidden behind it. A shadowy cylindrical shape, about the size of a forefinger, jutted up from the shelf.
He removed a few more books to make the space wide enough for his hand. Wondering if it could actually be a finger, he gently poked and squeezed. A wooden peg. He gave it a gentle tug.
There was the slight hum of machinery as the entire bookcase slid into the wall.
Quinn couldn’t repress a smile as he stared into the opening to a secret passageway.
CHAPTER 13
Markov stood in his bedchamber, staring at himself in the full-length mirror.
“Have you truly created monsters? Or are you yourself the monster?”
Shortly after moving here, he’d installed the mirror as a lark, thinking he would channel Lugosi by mimicking his practice of standing in front of his dressing-room mirror saying, “I am … Dracula.”
But when Markov had started remastering the old films, hints of other monsters began to appear, gradually becoming more than hints, as though they were somehow seeping in to him. Except for Dracula. Since a vampire casts no reflection in a mirror, as the spirit of Lugosi’s performance had gotten stronger within him, the Dracula reflection had gotten weaker.
As he continued to stare at the mirror, he watched a series of dissolves in which, for one fleeting moment, his reflection became one movie horror after another.
First a faint image of Lon Chaney’s Dracula from The Un-Dead.
Then an even fainter image of Lugosi’s Dracula.
Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster.
Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man.
As Markov watched the werewolf revert to its human self, he saw hints of his own face mixed in with Lon Chaney Jr.’s. But it was conscience-tormented Lawrence Talbot’s voice pleading inside his head: Save me. Please! The full moon is coming. The worst one of all. The Blood Moon.
Markov struggled for dominance until the tortured Lawrence Talbot persona dissolved, and he was himself again.
Himself.
Who was he?
<
br /> He probed his eyes in the mirror, searching for the lost soul of George Tilton, seeing instead only fading split-second flashes of the monsters that triggered a surge of self-loathing.
Unlike Lawrence Talbot, the hapless victim of a werewolf, Markov had knowingly sold his soul to chase the dream of screen immortality. But like Lawrence Talbot, he despised the beasts within that would devour human life to perpetuate their unnatural existence.
The faint image of another face slowly became visible in the mirror until Bram Stoker’s original inspiration for Dracula was staring back at him. Vlad the Impaler, eyes red with bloodlust. Against his will, Markov followed the eyes as they shifted their focus from him to the ten-foot-long wooden stake propped upright in the corner—as though willing him to use it.
No. That was only a prop for set decoration.
Markov tore his gaze away from the stake and looked back at the mirror.
Now the eyes were those of George Tilton. There was pleading in them.
Could a soul be reclaimed from the Devil?
CHAPTER 14
Quinn walked into the small antechamber that had been hollowed out of the solid rock upon which the castle had been built. At the far edge of the cavity, a large opening loomed. The light from the bookshelves barely reached it, but there was enough to see the top of a staircase leading down into a black void. Unlit torches stood in brackets on either side of the entrance.
He took a tentative step onto one of the large stone tiles covering the floor, then another, half-expecting a trapdoor or some other movie trickery. A few steps later, a spiral staircase cut into the stone disappeared around a bend. He went down far enough to look at the section beyond the curve. Slanting, uneven stairs continued through a crudely hand-hewn tunnel. A craggy, unfinished ceiling hung down into the opening, and chiseled ridges on the stone walls created sharp, sinister shadows.