by Jeff Rovin
Joan had always prided herself on being a woman of principle. An idealist, always choosing the right course over the convenient one. But she wasn’t foolish. Breathing deeply, she ran toward Talbot.
“God help us both,” she said as she knelt in front of him. Her face was directly in front of his. She could smell the inhuman breath coming from his mouth. “What do you want me to do?”
“Push!” he cried. “Just push!”
Joan extended her left hand toward the piece of glass. She wrapped her fingers around Talbot’s. She could literally feel the fingers becoming thicker, hair pushing from under the skin.
“Hurry!” Talbot implored her, his voice gruff and deepening.
Joan placed the heel of her right hand against the edge of the fragment. She saw his wrist thicken and short, bristlelike hair rise from it. This was not an illusion. It was proof of the existence of hell.
As her resolve grew stronger, Joan pressed more firmly against the smooth edge of the glass. It penetrated Talbot’s bare flesh. A trickle of blood spilled out as spittle dripped onto her hand.
“Do I need to put the glass—all the way through the pentagram?” Joan asked.
“As far as you can,” Talbot said. His woeful eyes found hers. The eyes were narrowing, the flesh around them darkening. “Quickly!” he urged.
She hesitated. Her fingers weakened and her grip relaxed. If there were a hell then there had to be a heaven. And one day she would be judged for this—
“I don’t think I can do this!” she cried.
“You must!” Talbot gurgled, his voice changing into a low rasp as he slipped one of his big hands from underneath hers. He placed it firmly behind Joan’s. She felt a strong push on the back of her hand and, surrendering, she went with it.
Talbot’s frown became a grimace as the sharp-edged glass penetrated his chest more deeply. Joan shut her mouth and breathed through her nose and pressed harder on the mirror. He moaned, a trace of the wolf still in his voice as the silver-backed shard slid between his ribs.
“More!” he pleaded as his blood spilled onto her dress.
“God, no—”
“The silver must penetrate . . . my heart.”
With a cry, Joan turned her face to the side and put both palms on the back of the shard. She leaned into his chest. Talbot sucked down air as the makeshift weapon found its target. He smiled, exhaled loudly, and then slumped forward.
“At last,” he gasped. “At last.”
Joan shrieked and pulled her hands away as blood poured over the back of the glass. She put her gory palms on the cold stone floor and scuttled away, watching as Talbot bent over further. His forearms hit the floor. Blood dripped into a puddle under his chest. She raised the back of one hand to her mouth and began to cry.
“Forgive me,” she said, as much to God as to Talbot.
“No,” Talbot said. “It’s . . . what . . . I’ve wanted.”
The candle threw off enough light so Joan could see Talbot’s face reflected in the spreading pool of blood. She wanted to go to him and comfort him. But it was all so horrible—
“Listen . . . carefully,” he wheezed. “My body . . . must not . . . be burned. It must be buried . . . in an unmarked place. And the mirror . . . must never be removed.” Talbot looked over at her. “Will you . . . see to it?”
“This can’t be happening!” she cried as his blood streamed toward her. It seemed almost as though the blood were alive, seeking her out. The wolf’s life essence determined to mark her for all time.
“Will you . . . see . . . to . . . it?”
Joan moved aside at the last moment. She was relieved as the thin stream of blood flowed past her.
“Yes,” she cried. “I’ll make sure no one finds you!”
“Thank . . . you,” Talbot said. His torso drooped and his head struck the floor. He struggled briefly for breath. “I must never . . . live . . . again.”
“Never,” Joan repeated.
With a little smile and a final gasp, Lawrence Stewart Talbot shuddered and rolled onto his side.
Joan waited a long minute before crawling toward him. She felt as though she were in a Grand Guignol play, dressed in a costume, creeping through a gothic setting, going to examine a corpse. She bent over the body, lifted one of his wrists, and looked for a pulse. There wasn’t any. Slipping the shawl from around her shoulders, Joan laid it over his head and stood. She felt guilty as she looked down at the peaceful body and then into the laboratory at the butchered remains of Professor Stevens. Stevens had come back to save her. Had he remained on the mainland, he’d still be alive. So why did she feel bad for Talbot and not for him? And why did she actually believe the most fantastic thing Talbot had said?
I must never live again.
How could he live again? He was dead. So were Professor Stevens and Dr. Mornay, though they were truly dead. Or were they? It was all too much to assimilate.
Joan didn’t understand what she’d seen, and she still didn’t believe she’d actually seen much of it. But Talbot had believed. And if nothing else, she had promised that no one would ever find his body. She would keep that promise.
Joan had heard enough lame alibis in the course of her career to be able to create better ones. She considered what she must do. She’d telephone the police and tell them that Professor Stevens had been murdered by a madman named Count Dracula. Dracula had also attacked Dr. Mornay before he left the island—left it in a motorboat, she suspected. She heard it leave. Maybe he’d set fire to the pier to try to prevent any other boats from pursuing. Lawrence Talbot? She had no idea what happened to him after their brief encounter at the ball. As for Chick Young and Wilbur Grey, if they were foolish enough to tell what had really happened here, it would only legitimize her own story. No one would believe them.
Poor men, she thought. They really were innocent victims caught in the scheme of Count Dracula.
Young and Grey had said there was a basement in the castle. Joan began opening doors around the foyer until she found it. The torchlit wooden staircase led to a grotto, which had probably been constructed by the original Dr. Mornay to allow secret access to the sea. It was a clever and convenient way to dispose of failed experiments, Joan thought. As she walked cautiously down the steep stairs, looking for a place to conceal the body, she leaned on the moldy walls for support. At the first landing she nearly lost her balance as the wall turned inward. She gasped as it revealed a hidden chamber. She looked inside. There was a heavy wooden chair against one wall and a grate in the floor. A choking, sulfurous smell rose from the pit beneath the grate. Whatever unspeakable activities had taken place here, the room would serve only one purpose henceforth. It would provide Lawrence Talbot with a suitable tomb.
Returning to the foyer, Joan picked up her shawl, grabbed the shoulders of Talbot’s shirt, and began pulling him across the smooth stones. His body left a long red smear in its wake. The young woman looked away. She knew she’d think of Talbot often after tonight, and she didn’t want to think of him dead. She wanted to picture him savoring that moment of death—not happy, but at least at peace.
At the top of the steps, Joan picked him up under the arms and backed down ahead of him. She wanted to lend some measure of dignity to his final descent. Upon reaching the secret room, she lay him on his back on the cold, damp floor. After wiping her bloody hands on her shawl, she closed the revolving section of wall. Then she looked back at the wall and touched it.
She thought of the race she’d been running for seven years. The race to build a career. Pretending to be someone’s daughter or secretary or long-lost relative or, most recently, Wilbur Grey’s lover. Then she thought of the race Lawrence Talbot had run. Pursuing Count Dracula around the world. The depression brought on by his failure. The passion he harbored for his own destruction and the pleasure he experienced when he succeeded. Her own goals and achievements seemed mundane by comparison. Though Joan had not known Lawrence Talbot before this evening, and she had not known
him for very long, she knew that the encounter would change her life.
Slowly, she walked back up the damp, slippery stairs. She used her shawl to wipe Talbot’s blood from the floor. When she was finished, she took a poker from the fireplace and stuck it through the garment. She walked over to the basement, threw the poker into the water, and shut the door. Then she sat at the wooden writing desk, picked up the telephone, and asked the operator to connect her with the LaMirada sheriff’s office.
She told him who she was. She told him where she was and what had just happened—more or less. The sheriff asked Joan if she were in any immediate danger. She said no, she didn’t believe so. He told her that a patrol boat would be over within a half hour and she should stay where she was.
Joan hung up and looked around the sunlit foyer. The light dispelled the horrors without destroying the history and character of the room.
Stay where you are.
Despite everything that had happened, Joan smiled. That seemed like a very good idea indeed.
V
With the advent of the automobile, the tiny fishing village of LaMirada, Florida, had become the sandbox of the well-to-do. Mansions rose and tennis courts sprouted beside the Gulf beaches, and recreational tans joined the leathery bronze of longtime locals. The sheriff acquired a deputy. The main street got a traffic island. The mayor was given an office, a secretary, and a raise when he was forced to spend less and less time managing his general store.
When the train station opened in LaMirada in 1922, the village became a weekend haunt of the middle class. By the 1940s, a tiny airfield had been built just north of the marshes and travel agents in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington made LaMirada one of the hottest resorts on Florida’s west coast. Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey stopped in the town during the 1944 campaign.
By 1950, LaMirada was nearly a ghost town.
To hear some people tell it, LaMirada was literally a ghost town. Spirits were said to roam the grounds of an abandoned military research facility. Disembodied laughter was heard in the streets and in movie theaters, lighted cigarettes floated along beaches and roads, and food rose from tables in homes and restaurants and disappeared, bite by bite. Some crackpots said the specters belonged to ancient Spanish settlers who had colonized the region. Among those local eccentrics, the lunatic fringe said they were the result of “invisible soldier” experiments conducted at the local military facility during the war.
But the ghosts were not entirely responsible for the near death of LaMirada. They were merely a curiosity and a nuisance. The real town-killer was a shadowy figure known as the Beast of LaMirada.
The Beast first appeared almost a month to the day after the strange events reported on La Viuda, a rock of an island located just off the Florida coast. Two shipping clerks, Chick Young and Wilbur Grey, returned from Mornay Castle on La Viuda with tales of having encountered a vampire they called Count Dracula, a werewolf called Talbot, the legendary Frankenstein Monster, and even the Invisible Man. No trace of these creatures was ever found, though authorities were never able to question Young and Grey. The men left their LaMirada hotel room the day they returned. Some people said they assumed aliases and went to Mexico; others claimed they went to Africa; some maintained they’d joined the Foreign Legion. Whatever the truth, they never returned to LaMirada.
Authorities also weren’t able to question Dr. Sandra Mornay, owner of the castle. Her smashed body was found beside a curtain wall, in the shadows. She was dressed in a lab coat and surgical cap. Apparently, she’d been thrown from the window of the castle laboratory. Given the reputation of her ancestors, villagers could only speculate as to what godless work she’d been up to. Mornay’s assistant, Professor Charles Stevens, was also dead. His jugular vein had been severed and half the blood in his body had been drained. The only eyewitness to his murder, insurance investigator Joan Raymond, said that the young scientist had been slain by the mysterious Count Dracula. Though she insisted that Dracula was a madman and not a vampire, she could not explain the missing quantities of blood. Miss Raymond also said that she thought she heard Dracula and Dr. Mornay struggling in the laboratory. They had also argued at the castle before the masquerade party. Perhaps they were lovers, she suggested. Perhaps they were expatriate Nazi spies. Whatever the truth was, it vanished with Count Dracula and died with Dr. Mornay. The scientist was buried in the neglected garden behind the home of her ancestors.
It wasn’t Miss Raymond’s calm truths but the wild claims of Young and Grey that marked the beginning of the end of LaMirada. Newspapers from Naples to Miami carried the story that a vampire was prowling the coast. Reporters, curiosity seekers, and even hunters descended on the region, overtaxing its resources for nearly a month during the summer peak and chasing away regulars. When no vampire was found and the fad ended, many of those regulars did not return.
Miss Raymond did return, however. Following a brief vacation she resigned from her job with Shippers Insurance. Because Dr. Mornay had died intestate, Mornay Castle was auctioned by the state. Using her savings and a small inheritance she shared with her sister, Joan Raymond bought the castle and moved in alone. She donated the laboratory equipment to New York University, hired workers to seal off the basement, and renamed the castle the Tombs. Except for brief weekly visits to the mainland, she kept entirely to herself.
The Beast made his first appearance a few days after Miss Raymond took title of the castle. A couple of never-say-die occult researchers from North Carolina’s Duke University still hunting for Count Dracula were brutally murdered during a storm in a little-traveled region of Big Cypress Swamp. Their jugular veins had been attacked and their blood half-drained, just like Professor Stevens—though there was a difference. Whereas the wounds on Professor Stevens’s throat had been what the Collier County coroner described as “neat slashes,” the wounds on the two new bodies were “savage lacerations.”
There was another brutal murder the next night. A young waitress was attacked while she was walking to her apartment after ten p.m., when her shift had ended. This time, however, there was a witness: a police officer, who wrote in his report that he’d heard a cry like a dog baying and saw “a shaggy man-like beast rushing away from the scene.” The veteran officer said that he fired two shots at the retreating figure and was sure that he’d hit him at least once. But there was no blood at the scene save for that of the poor girl, and the search for the “beast” turned up nothing. The only pedestrian in the vicinity, James Karl McDougal, owner of McDougal’s House of Horrors, gruffly claimed to have seen and heard nothing. When the police officer asked the normally resplendent entrepreneur what he was doing out with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and his feet bare, he snapped, “Coming back from the beach, you moron!” Since the night of the masquerade, when he was attacked by a wolf, less-than-discreet associates reported that Mr. McDougal had been even surlier than usual.
Because the murders began when Miss Raymond returned, county Police Inspector Wellman went to query her about them. Where was she on the night of the first attacks? Island-bound because of heavy rains, she said. Where was she the night of the second murder? Repairing the storm-damage to her tiny launch. Did Inspector Wellman wish to see the boat? He did, and was satisfied that she was telling the truth. However, Miss Raymond did speculate that the killings sounded very much like the work of a werewolf. Why did she say that? asked Wellman. Miss Raymond only smiled and suggested that he arm himself with silver bullets. The inspector did not visit La Viuda again.
Despite the best efforts of local and state police to catch the Beast, the killings continued for years. The few loyalists who returned to LaMirada the following summer did not come back the summer after. By 1951 the permanent population had dwindled from 3,500 to 500. By the following year it had dropped to 375. The tenacious McDougal closed his once-popular House of Horrors and moved to Tibet. Though the murders stopped then, it was too late to save LaMirada. For a while, the town
council toyed with the idea of turning the House of Horrors into a maritime museum. The murderous Vesta Cove was located off a precipice near the McDougal property; the wreckage of many a ship was still strewn across the rocky, difficult-to-negotiate shoals below. But the families of sailors who had died there did not want the site disturbed, so the museum building sat and LaMirada inched a little closer to death. Even the curiosity-seekers stopped coming in 1955 when the famed Gill-Man, who had been captured in the Amazon, escaped from Ocean Harbor Park. For a year after that, everyone who wanted to hunt for a monster went to the Everglades, where the creature had been spotted.
Decades passed. And then, on one moonless night, the population of LaMirada decreased by one more.
ONE
The Present
“Ms. Raymond was a very private woman,” attorney Henry Pratt said as he guided the compact express cruiser through mirror-smooth gulf waters. He had to speak loudly to be heard over the slap of the waves and the rush of the wind. “Your great-aunt was a wonderful writer and a grand old woman. But she was very, very difficult to get to know.”
The late afternoon sky was rich blue and remarkably clear, the warm air invigorating. And the young blond woman sitting beside him in the open cockpit was an exhilarating change from the crusty fishermen and fourth-generation old money families with whom the attorney usually dealt. He prayed that Caroline Cooke would decide to move here from Atlanta.
“You say that as if privacy were a bad thing,” the woman said. “Given my great-aunt’s profession, I’d think that a little aloofness would add to her mystique, to the appeal of her stories.”
“Oh, it did,” Pratt said. “But she had a sharp mind and a great imagination, not to mention an extraordinary talent. I’d have liked to have gotten to know the woman behind that a little better.”
“I understand,” his passenger replied in a flute-clear voice. The young woman was subdued but not morose. Even during the funeral on the island she’d been quiet but not gloomy. And she’d been very, very gracious with those who’d come to pay their respects to LaMirada’s most famous citizen.