Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  The question was, which would Marie Laveau deem most suitable for her dark purposes?

  (And how would the former voodoo queen handle such a sacred object now that she was of the undead persuasion?)

  As we slowly made our way to the eleventh and twelfth century galleries, we worked out a process where I would scan the even-numbered icons and their accompanying cards while Mama Samm took in the odd-numbered displays immediately adjacent. Irena made several attempts to find out what Mama Samm intended to do when they found her stepmother, as she worked the other side of the room. The conversation was rather choppy as other patrons occasionally drifted within earshot. Mama Samm tried to use these occasions to end the conversation but it was clear that Irena wasn't ready to shut up. Mama Samm's attempts to stonewall her only seemed to make her that much more determined to keep the conversation going.

  And when she saw the old fortune-teller wasn't about to respond to any further lines of inquiry regarding Marie Laveau, Irena did the next best thing. As we moved into the gallery displaying the Pre-Mongol Period icons, she changed the subject.

  "Tell me about the vampire demon you serve," she said. "Tell me about Domo Cséjthe!"

 

  Mama Samm didn't bat an eye. "What do you want to know, child?"

  "I've heard so many stories about him!" Irena continued. "Most of them are so unbelievable yet there must be something to them or my own stepmother would not fear him so. Is it true that he has already slain twenty wampyri lords as well as the Domans' Dracula and Báthory?"

  I observed.

  "No, Miss Irena, these kinds of stories inevitably get the facts wrong," my host explained. "The count of slain vampire alphas is closer to forty, by now, with numerous attached lines wiped out in the bargain . . ." she continued.

  I mused.

  " . . . the Countess Báthory was actually a demon in disguise, bringing the number of hellspawn destroyed to four . . ."

 

  " . . . and Dracula lives but as Domo Cséjthe's thrall."

  I couldn't believe my ears! Come to think of it, I couldn't believe her ears!

  "Is he tall, dark, and handsome?" Irena wanted to know.

  "Tall? Yes."

 

  >You full o'crap, all right,< she thought back at me. To Irena: "And dark. But handsome? I don't think 'good-looking' would be one of the terms to come to mind for anyone setting eyes on him for the first time."

 

  "Domo Cséjthe exudes a dark charisma that is irresistible over time," she continued. "It is how he draws others to his cause without using mind control or domination."

 

  "Oh yes," Irena breathed. "I understand he has taken many concubines!"

  "I can't begin to keep count," Mama Samm answered.

 

  "Is it true that the vampire lords are jealous and fear that he will sire a generation like himself through the wombs of the wampyri?" Irena continued. "That many of their females will turn to him for his potency after centuries of barrenness?"

  "Word do get around," Mama Samm replied with a smile.

 

  "And that he is equipped—" Irena hesitated and her face turned a color to match the background ochre in half a dozen of the nearest icons. "—well, do they really call it 'The Stake'?"

 

  >A star is born,< she agreed.

 

  >Oh, settle down! Ain't you learned nothin' from riding your big, bad, not-so-true reputation these past couple of years?< she scolded. >Your enemies will always seek to exploit the weaknesses and the motivations of the Christopher Cséjthe they know, not the one that you actually are. As long as those two peoples ain't the same, you've got some maneuvering room. Once you start feeding them the facts instead of fiction, your cover is lost and you is way too outnumbered to play fair wit' them odds. 'Sides, do you really want me to tell this lovely young thing dat the real Mister Chris is this pathetic, lonely man whose closest encounter with the opposite sex these past six months, has been with a gay shapeshifter who was only pretending to be interested so she could trick him into getting trapped inside her flesh for purposes other than pleasure or procreation?<

  I answered,

  >Oh, calm down, Mister Chris. At least you still have yours wit' you. Nobody chopped 'em off and put 'em on display in a museum halfway around the world like they did to this po' fool . . . <

  I followed the nod of her head and saw that we had arrived at the entrance to a side room. Inside, the displays were confined to the artifacts and items relating to the last of the tsars: Nicholas and the royal family.

  And not just the end of the Russian Romanov dynasty, but a unique tribute to the man who directly and indirectly brought doom down upon them: Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.

  The Mad Monk.

  As I stared into the room beyond, it took a moment for me to realize what the fortune-teller meant by her last comment. Then I saw it: one of the track lights was focused like a baby spot on a glass cylinder that sat upon an elevated dais. The liquid within seemed to glow with a blue-white radiance of its own accord. The placard beside it proclaimed the contents within to be Rasputin's . . . er . . . genitalia.

  Yikes!

  And yuck for the second time within the past hour.

  * * *

  Albert Einstein's body was cremated after his death in 1955. His brain, however, was preserved in a jar for many years thereafter. Today its remnants reside in a number of jars: the consequence(s) of medical research. Just one of many precedences, I suppose . . .

  But pickled privates?

  It's true that in another age the organs of certain famous men were kept as—well—trophies. Scientific curiosities. After they had passed on and had no earthly use for them.

  Napoleon's "package" was a famous example. And just as Albert Einstein's mental prowess was legendary, so, too, was the would-be emperor when it came to conquests between the sheets. If he'd been half the genius in the field that he was in the bedroom, Bonaparte would have conquered most of the Eastern Hemisphere.

  Rasputin's sexual appetites were even more prodigious according to legend. Small wonder that the Russians—who mummified Stalin and Lenin, keeping the latter on display even today in the Red Square—would hang on to a piece of the guy who may have done more for the rise of socialism than Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky all put together.

  As we walked closer, we could see the placard attributed the temporary donation of "Rasputin Junior" to Igor Knyazkin, Chief of the Prostate Research Center at the Russian Academy of Natural Science in St. Petersburg.

  Nudge, nudge; wink, wink . . .

  According to the placard, the organ in question measured a full thirty centimeters in length—which might go a long way toward explaining this unwashed barbarian's popularity with the ladies of the Russian aristocracy. I mean, being a so-called holy man will only get you so far when you have the table manners of a pig and the body odor t
o match.

  So, given the prodigious dimensions promised by the legend next to the display, it was impossible to not look. We all looked. Stared into the depths of the preservative medium that filled the small "aquarium" on the pedestal.

  "I have to say," Irena said after a long, thoughtful pause, "eleven-point-eight inches isn't what it used to be."

  Other than the slightly milky liquid, the tank was empty.

  Mama Samm didn't say anything but I could tell that she was upset. I doubted it was from disappointment at missing out on hundred-year-old pickled privates.

  "Maybe they took it out for—um—cleaning," Irena offered. Then shrugged, straightened up, and prepared to continue the search for a missing icon.

  "She took it," Mama Samm said finally. "This is what she came for. This is what she meant by the Russian key."

  If this was a "key" I didn't even want to think about what kind of a lock it was supposed to open.

  >I do not know, yet. I must think. Be still for a while . . . <

  While Irena was wandering around in the next gallery, we lingered and studied the abbreviated history of the Mad Monk of St. Petersburg, looking for clues and all the while wondering: what became of the monk, the monk, the monk, the monk. . . .

  Chapter Nine

  The phrase "mad monk" is both alliterative and colorful but not wholly accurate as Rasputin was never a priest or a monk but a staretz—a religious pilgrim. In fact, he had little formal education or training in the Russian Orthodox faith. He was, instead, a self-styled faith healer and so-called psychic. If the czar and czarina had ordered a background check on their "spiritual advisor," his formative years surely would have given them pause.

  As a young man growing up in a peasant village in Siberia, ole Greg was well known as a trouble-maker. He had a taste for liquor, thievery, and women—and not necessarily in that order. Rumors of debauched and endless sexual appetites began early. He was barely into puberty when he had already developed the reputation of a rake.

  At the same time, this Siberian seducer was quite the "holy" roller—when he wasn't off for a roll in the hay or a roll between the sheets. Some sources had him preaching the "word of God" since the age of eleven. Presumably he followed the dualistic path of most religious hypocrites: pious by day, priapic by night. Then, at the age of eighteen, he had a unique and most profound conversion experience.

  It happened over the course of a few weeks while he was staying at the Verkhoturye Monastery. There he discovered the renegade Khlysty sect. The Khlysty philosophy taught that the only way to reach God was through sinful actions. Of course it wasn't that simple. Once the sin was committed and confessed, the penitent could achieve forgiveness. In other words, the central concept of the Khlysty was to "sin in order to drive out sin."

  Sort of transcendence-through-the-12-step-process approach.

  Rasputin had found a religious philosophy that embraced his hedonism and allowed him to exploit it in the name of God. Shortly thereafter he adopted the robes of a monk, developed his own self-gratifying doctrines, traveled the country as a staretz and elevated sinning to a new level of sacred self-indulgence.

  By the time he'd reached his early thirties, Brother Lust's Traveling Salvation Show had journeyed all the way to the Holy Land and back, picking up a load of converts, including a surprising number of clergy from his homeland. And by the time he made a "pilgrimage" to St. Petersburg in 1902, many of the country's religious leaders were beginning to take notice.

  The turn of the century saw a number of holy men, conjurers, psychics, healers, diviners, and unusual characters milling about the capital city, sniffing for opportunities as the royal family was in a state of turmoil. After the unexpected death of Tsar Alexander III, the young and totally unprepared Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich had ascended to the throne and the situation was ripe for exploitation.

  The young heir had already ticked off most of his family's royal connections in Europe on his way to courting and eventually marrying the princess who came to be known as Alexandra Feodorovna. Then he proceeded to burn his bridges with his own countrymen by holing up in the palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Seclusion is great for a couple of nobodies, madly in love with each other. Not so much for heads of state overseeing the largest land mass with its populous range of ethnicities and microcultures. Rasputin had a heavy hand in their unpopularity toward the end but the seeds of their destruction were sown early on.

  The young Tsarina's primary duty was to produce the next male heir so it didn't help her popularity when she produced only daughters for four successive births. The palace doors were opened, at this point to a veritable parade of mystics and self-styled holy men. When all of that intense prayer and mystic ritualism coincided with a fifth pregnancy resulting in a boy, the stage was set for the appearance and disproportionate influence of someone like the wily staretz.

  Rasputin's "in" with the royal court turned out to be a little gift from Queen Victoria to the infant Tsarevich: he had inherited his great-grandmother's hemophilia.

  When the royal physicians were unable to control the episodes of bleeding, this bearded, wild-eyed man in monk's robes could perform seeming miracles! Skeptics would later say he used some kind of hypnotherapy.

  Maybe . . . Gotta say, if I've learned anything over the last couple of years of living in the Valley of the Shadow, it's that there's more to blood than plasma and platelets, that genetics don't cover everything, and that vampires aren't the whole Neighborhood of the Weird. Forget heaven and earth, Horatio; there're more things in the Devil's Medicine Cabinet . . .

  The stories about Rasputin are legion. Many are exaggerated or pure fiction. But even the most skeptical, rational-minded critic is broken, time and again, on two major issues. First, that, time and again, the staretz was able to stop Alexis' bleeding when the finest physicians in all of Europe and Russia were medically impotent.

  And then there was the little matter of his presumed death back in December 1916 . . .

  * * *

  I said, as Sammathea D'Arbonne studied a loose wire on an "unauthorized exit" door.

  >Don't got a minute, Mister Chris. Irena probably no more than a couple a dozen yards into the next gallery and goin' to beat feet right back here in another minute.< She gently depressed the crash bar and slipped into a back hallway.

 

  >The what?< she muttered as she lumbered down the "Authorized Personnel Only" corridor.

 

  >And they didn't, Cséjthe, which is why we're here.<

  That caught me up short.

  According to history they'd killed him pretty dead. First the conspirators, led by Prince Felix Youssoupov, plied their victim with drugged wine and pastries laced with enough cyanide to kill four men. It didn't kill him, though. At least not fast enough. So they came downstairs and shot him in the back. The bullet wandered around his guts before lodging in his liver.

  That should have killed him.

  So they wrapped him in chains and carried him outside to dump the body in the river. They didn't get far before the "corpse" began to struggle again. So they dropped him and proceeded to administer a beating that would have killed an ordinary man. But, of course, this was no ordinary man so they had to shoot him again. In the chest at
point-blank range. At the same time another bullet—a high-caliber slug—was fired from the bushes into Rasputin's head. Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, attached to the Secret Intelligence Service, had been dispatched by the Brits with his own license to kill. After an additional beating with a two-pound dumbbell, the body was dropped into the freezing waters of the Moika Canal on the Neva River.

  But the autopsy determined that Rasputin was still alive and struggling even as he drowned under the ice. (Admittedly, this was superhuman resistance to a series of attacks—any one of which should have been fatal by itself.) But the key words to remember at the end: autopsy; drowned. In the end, Death doth make beggars of us all . . .

  >Anastasia, Cséjthe.<

 

  >Do you remember the woman who turned up back in the 1920s claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia?<

 

  >Well, she knew things—family memories, secrets—that only Anastasia or another member of the family would know.<

 

  >One might think not.<

 

  >DNA only proves origins of the flesh. It means nothing in terms of a person's true identity if they are a Bloodwalker.<

  It was like mental whiplash.

  >Not a Bloodwalker, Cséjthe, but something like. And not Anastasia, but someone who knew the family intimately. Knew their secrets. Wouldn't die easily. And might inhabit a succession of hosts pretending to be royalty rather than presenting its own peasant origins.<