by John Burke
The coach thundered out over the creaking bridge. Charles was not sparing the horses. Diana did not try to speak to him. She wanted them to get as far away as possible from this castle of terror—and she sensed that Charles was driving the horses madly because he was afraid, as she was, that Dracula might have some supernatural way of summoning them back if they were allowed an instant’s respite.
They rocked round a corner, the wheels screaming in protest. The coach bucked under them like a live thing. Diana clung on for dear life. The whip cracked again and the horses began to pound down the long descent to the crossroads.
The slope steepened. Too late, Charles realized that it was time to pull back. But the frenzied horses could not control themselves, and the weight of the coach was racing madly on behind them.
The crossroads were immediately ahead. Charles pulled as strongly as he could on the reins, turning in the direction of Josefsbad.
It was too late, the horses got round in a swirl of dust, but not the coach. There was a crack below Diana, and she was dimly aware of a shattered wheel springing away towards the grass verge. For a moment she was falling. Sickeningly they were weightless for a second that was incredibly long. Then there was the smack of an impact. The coach lurched on to the hub, there was another rending crack, and Diana was thrown from the seat.
The world turned, she threw out her arms to grasp a safety that wasn’t there. Darkness reeled around her.
Suddenly she was struck a great, brutal blow down the whole length of her body.
And then there was nothing.
7
The night should have been black but was blood-red. Charles wiped a hand across his eyes, and the red became a thousand pin-pricks of lurid colors. He felt soft grass and earth beneath him; pressed both hands down to steady the spinning world; and forced himself to open his eyes and stare into the dazzling confusion. Gradually the flecks of color drifted away. He heard the melancholy call of a night-bird and the rustle of wind in tall treetops. He saw moonlight edging a tuft of cloud.
He got to his feet. There was no sign of the coach. The horses must have dragged it on, bouncing it to pieces against the road as they went.
Diana . . . Where was Diana?
For a few seconds he had an awful picture of her clinging to the wrecked coach and being dragged back up the hill to the castle, back into the clutches of that gruesome creature up there. Then he saw her.
She lay in a heap, crumpled and unmoving, on the grass a few yards away. Charles choked back a cry, and blundered towards her. He went down on his knees and rolled the body over.
A thin trickle of blood seeped from beneath Diana’s hair. In this light it was impossible to tell whether she was really as pale as she seemed: the fitful moonlight gave her the bleached features of death, and the blood was no more than a black line.
“Diana . . .”
He breathed her name over her. She did not stir. He put his hand on her breast and felt it move. He was sure she moved, sure that her heart was beating. Yet his head still swam and his hands were trembling. How could he be sure of anything?
Charles lifted Diana in his arms. He walked with difficulty. He had no idea where he was going, but some deep instinct told him to get away from the road, to seek cover before the fiends from the castle were loosed on the two of them. He could not fight back; could only cower away and pray they would not be discovered.
All directions were the same. He made himself stop and get his bearings. Better to make for Josefsbad, however superstitious the people there might be. The road along which they had originally come was a long road, the town far behind them. There was only Josefsbad. Even that was impossibly far in his present condition. Two or three kilometres, he remembered. Or thought he remembered. So close. An easy walk. Yet too far; much too far.
He reeled into the protective shadows of the trees. Carrying the limp form of his wife, he tried to tread carefully and not to make any noise that would attract the attention of anyone who might be looking for them. But twigs snapped and exploded beneath his feet. Bushes tangled in his jacket and sprang back, slapping against tree trunks.
Charles plodded forward. Branches whipped at his face. His eyes blinked apprehensively, shutting against obstacles that were not there and then stinging with the lash of dark tendrils which even in daylight would have been invisible in these tangled woods.
His breath wheezed in his throat. For a while he mumbled to Diana—mumbled encouragement, prayers, sounds that were as much a reassurance to himself as anything—and then he could not manage even that. He stumbled, regained his balance, rested against a tree and then forced himself to go on . . . until at last his legs gave way beneath him and he let them both collapse. The ground was prickly with wood and projecting roots. But he had gone beyond caring. There was nothing he could care about any more. Diana fell away from him as he went down, and it didn’t matter. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do.
Charles lay with his cheek pressed to the cold, hard earth. A jagged branch dug into his left temple. He waited for the world to begin its gyrations again, to make him dizzy and finally to swallow him up. But the rasp of his own breath was the sound of life. He wanted to give up and yet there was something within him that would not permit this.
He lifted his head. Diana was a pale shape in the gloom. With a superhuman effort he started to crawl towards her.
He lay beside her and stared into her face. As pale as before. Her eyes shut, the blood caked on her forehead.
A moan of despair was dragged from Charles’s throat. He reached out to touch his wife’s chill, unanswering face. As he moved, pushing himself up on one elbow, he became aware that a shadow stood behind Diana. Not a tree, not the twisted shape of a bush—but the stiff, straight shadow of a man.
Charles tried to get up.
Father Shandor said, in a voice as dark as the forests about him:
“I warned you, Mr. Kent. I warned you not to go anywhere near the castle.”
Charles got to his feet. And this time the world spun round him, he felt an arm about his waist, and then at last he was able to surrender.
When he recovered consciousness it was to see the dark confusion of the woods transformed to a bleak but clear wall. He turned over on his side and found that he was looking across a narrow cell. The bed beneath him was hard yet gloriously comfortable. A small table and chair in one corner of the cell were stark in their simplicity. This was not the kind of room he had ever been accustomed to—not a room in his home, or the kind of hotel room he and Diana expected wherever they went—but its calm was like the touch of a cool hand on his brow.
“Diana,” he said. He tried to sit up, and began to shout. “Diana!”
A door creaked open and a monk came in on quietly shuffling feet.
“Ah—you are awake, Mr. Kent.”
“My wife . . .”
“Your wife is well. Asleep still—and she will be very weak for many hours—but she is well.”
“I want to see her.”
“She must rest. Of course you will see her when it is right to do so.”
Alarm stirred in Charles’s mind. After all that had happened in such a short time, he could trust nobody. Every hospitable gesture could be a trap. Every soothing remark could be designed to lure him back into the horror which crouched on the mountainside.
He said: “Where is this place?”
“You are in the monastery of Kleinberg.”
He remembered Shandor. Remembered the warning and the grim reproach in Shandor’s voice over their defiance of that warning.
“Father Shandor . . .”
“When you are dressed,” said the monk, “I will take you to him. He is anxious to talk to you.” He turned to the door. “Call me when you are ready. I am Brother Mark.”
Charles was eager to talk to Shandor without delay; to talk at great length. He found, however, that his progress was slow. He felt like a man recuperating from a crippling illness. Every movement h
e made was slow and had to be calculated carefully, as though there were some delay between his brain and the ends of his fingers. He dressed clumsily, and had to sit on the edge of the bed for several minutes when he had finished.
Then he was shown into Father Shandor’s study.
It was larger than the cell from which he had just come, but still austere. The only real luxury was an edifice of bookshelves, bearing volumes splendidly bound in tooled leather.
Shandor rose to meet him. The flamboyance which he had exhibited on the occasion of their first meeting was altogether gone. Charles felt that he was a man who responded with preternatural sensitivity to surroundings and circumstances: he was capable of meeting the outside world on its own terms, but in his study he became a scholar and thinker. There was nothing contrived in this. Father Shandor was a man of many parts, and would give himself unstintingly in any incarnation.
Although his voice now was subdued and courteous, he wasted no words.
“You are ready to tell me what happened at the castle, Mr. Kent?”
There was some of the longed-for peace of the confessional in this room. Charles was indeed ready to speak: he wanted to tell the whole story and then to have someone put it into the correct proportions for him. Darkness must be made to surrender to light; nightmare must be explained away and the terrible curse lifted.
He went over the events of the journey and their arrival at the crossroads. He found that every detail was etched with hideous clarity in his memory. There was no fumbling, no uncertainty. As he spoke, the insane story unrolled before him like a sequence of pictures—blasphemous, incredible pictures which moved and writhed and became real again. He lived through it all again. When he finished he was trembling.
“So,” said Shandor. “He lives again. I have been telling my flock and others, far away from here, that the reign of the demon was ended. But he is back among us.”
“Who is it?”
“You saw him yourself. Do you need to ask me?”
“Count Dracula. But how . . . if he was dead . . .”
“You have ventured into the land of vampires,” said Shandor. “And your own flesh and blood have been sacrificed to restore the most accursed of them all to this land. Your brother died to give Dracula life.”
“Vampires?” For a moment it could have been a joke. He had read about vampires—read about them in books as beautifully cared for as Shandor’s, read about them in comfortable, well-lit rooms in London. Then the superstitions of ignorant peasants had seemed grotesquely amusing. But that had been in London. “I thought,” he said feebly, “that such things were the products of a warped imagination.”
Shandor swung round and took a book from a shelf close behind him. He leafed through its pages. From where he sat, Charles could see that this was no printed book but a diary written in a spidery, regular hand.
“Would that they were,” mused Shandor. “Here in the Carpathians I fear that we cannot dismiss vampirism as mere legend, mere fantasy. These abominations have been only too real in our country’s strange past. But we had hoped there would be no more. The fountainhead of the obscene cult in our own neighborhood was Dracula himself. His influence spread far and wide. He reached out to dominate his hideous brethren for more generations than we can calculate. Many times when he was thought to be dead he reappeared and once more asserted his dominance.” Shandor stopped at a page and brooded over it. “Ten years ago we believed that he had been destroyed. His fellows had been dismissed one after another. The priests, the people, and the Government tracked them down and brought an end to their terrible practices. Until there was only Count Dracula left. And ten years ago there was evidence that he had perished. But now . . . it is clear that the final rites were not carried out. The ultimate exorcism was not fulfilled. Dracula died but did not die. He waited for the conditions that would restore him to the land of the living . . . or the half-dead. It was your unfortunate brother who provided the life force for his resurrection.”
Charles could not face the burning sincerity of Shandor’s gaze. He looked at the serried ranks of books behind Shandor. In there were all the records of the scourge that had flailed the countryside for the generations of which Shandor had spoken.
He said: “My brother is dead, and his wife is possessed. It’s my duty to kill Dracula.”
“Not kill, Mr. Kent. He is already dead. Yet undead. He can be destroyed, but not killed—not as we know it.”
“How destroyed?”
“There are a number of ways,” said Shandor with an abstracted, scientific interest. “He can be traced to his resting place during the daylight hours and there staked through the heart. He can be exposed to the direct rays of the sun. Running water will drown him. The cross will burn him if he is close enough. He is by no means invulnerable.”
“You make it sound comparatively simple.”
“To skin a cat, first catch it,” said Shandor. “To tear the wings from a bat, first have it in your hand. It is not simple. On the contrary, it is an extremely difficult and dangerous undertaking. There are people who will help him—”
“Other vampires?”
“No. Apparently normal human beings who come from families accustomed to serve the castle. And others who are not vampires but, for some reasons we still do not comprehend, are in his power. Dracula’s manservant—”
“Klove!”
“Yes, Klove. Just such a man. He must have spent all these last ten years of his life at the castle waiting for such an opportunity as you presented him with last night . . . a chance to resurrect his master.”
“And now that the master has been resurrected . . . ?”
Shandor closed the book and bowed his head over it as though it had been Holy Writ.
“We do not know. If we knew, we would have some idea of the steps we should take. The plague must not be allowed to spread once again over the countryside. The vampires must not multiply. Yet they are born, can be created, are reborn, faster than anything human. Faster,” said Shandor grimly, “than anything in the animal kingdom.”
Charles thought of the swooping greed of Count Dracula. He had a vision of his brother . . . of the stained, bloodless mess that had been his brother. And of Helen, so swiftly transmuted into a ravening animal. How close they had been—how appallingly close he and Diana had been to the destruction that was not death, the half-life that was an eternal purgatory without any ultimate purgation.
He said: “I want to see my wife.”
“But of course.” Shandor got up. “I wanted us to talk so that she should rest for as long as possible. But you are worried. You feel that all may not be well. I want you to see that she is alive and that there is nothing to fear.”
They went together along a stony corridor which would have been depressing had it not been for the faint smile of a monk who passed them—the smile of a man who offered love to his fellow human beings without expecting anything in return. This monastery, it struck Charles, was a safer fortress than the rearing, castellated walls of that godforsaken fortress on the hillside.
Shandor opened a door and stood back, waving him through.
Diana lay on a simple bed with a rough blanket over her. Her eyes were closed. The blood had been washed away but her face still had the deathly pallor that had brought Charles close to despair in the forest. It was tranquil and lifeless. Perhaps the two words meant the same thing. Perhaps there was no tranquillity this side of death. Charles shivered. Better, surely, to be dead than to live in the twilight world of the undead where fiends and monstrosities walked.
He clutched Shandor’s wrists with both hands, turning on him in a rage of indecision.
“You told me . . . you said she . . .”
“She is in admirable condition,” said Shandor quietly. “Another twenty-four hours and she will be completely recovered. Believe me. There is nothing to fear.”
Charles slackened his grip and, ashamed, let his hands fall away.
Shandor closed
the door behind them and they walked slowly away down the corridor. A monk hurried towards them from the far end. It was the Brother Mark who had spoken to Charles when he awoke.
“Ludwig would like you to have a word with him, Father.”
Shandor nodded. The monk turned and walked away at a steady, rhythmic pace. Charles felt a surge of envy. He was intelligent enough to know that once he had left here, once he was back in the lights and exuberance of London, he would contrive to forget the monastic calm of these cloisters. But in this respite after the night and day and night of perverse, irrational fear, he was lapped in a peace such as he would not have believed could exist.
He shook himself out of the mood. Father Shandor himself was the last to believe in smug acceptance.
“Come with me,” Shandor was saying. His stately pace quickened. “Ludwig should interest you. He was a traveller like yourself. I found him one night near Castle Dracula. Something he had seen or experienced had unhinged his mind. His memory was gone. Probably this was as well—for his sake. I brought him here, and here he has remained these past twelve years. He’s a contented enough soul. Whatever evil may have shrouded him, he has thrown it off—rejected it utterly. He is now a brilliant craftsman and I believe that the joy of his craftsmanship has driven out all lingering echoes of the evil that may once have harassed him.”
The corridors were identical. You turned a corner and found another vaulted roof, another stone passage ahead. You could find it soothing or frightening. It was cold and unemotional. Perhaps Father Shandor found it necessary to escape into the turmoil of the world from time to time in order to establish a counterbalance; or perhaps it was duty and duty alone which drove him out, and the austere calm of these enclosed walks offered him true joy.
Brother Mark stood by a door. As Charles and Shandor approached he opened it and stood back so that they could pass him.