by Jeff Rovin
Odd? Willis thought. That’s an understatement.
Shortly after speaking with Mrs. Brien, Willis got word from Dr. Benson that both Tom Stevenson and Lawrence Talbot had disappeared from their hospital rooms. Benson said he had nurses and attendants searching the hospital, but so far they hadn’t turned up a trace of the two—nor any sign of foul play.
Willis wasn’t surprised, nor was he angry. To the contrary. With the burgeoning zeal of a convert, he phoned Kernan Cripps and asked about Stevenson. The low-keyed air traffic controller at LaMirada Field informed him that Stevenson did indeed take off three-quarters of an hour earlier. The flight plan he’d filed described a short hop to the south, over the Morgan Islands.
After hanging up, Willis sat at his station with his arms folded. He thought of Deputy Trooper Clyde, of Caroline Cooke—and of Talbot. The whole story was impossible, unbelievable, mad. But there was no getting around one thing: it had happened. All of it. Just as Talbot had said.
Silently, he wished Talbot and Stevenson good luck. For there was one thing Willis knew above all. If the rest of Talbot’s claims were as accurate as these, he was going to need it.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Morgan Islands are four balmy landmasses of which Marya Island is the easternmost and the largest. The islands comprise a total of 566 square miles and are named after the English privateer Sir Henry Morgan, the scion of a family of Welsh farmers, who was born in 1635. In his teenage years, Morgan traveled to Barbados as an indentured servant. He surfaced next in the chronicles of the West Indies when he received a commission as a privateer, a seaman who had been granted leave to plunder the commercial ships of Spain. By the time the Treaty of Madrid was signed in 1670—which in effect made all forms of piracy illegal—Morgan was wealthy and one of the largest landowners in the Caribbean.
The Morgan Islands were a special jewel in his crown and the reason for that was sugar cane. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, European explorers had brought home sugar cane from the South Pacific and Arabia. Once planted, the cuttings prospered in the Caribbean’s warm temperatures and rich soil. By 1600, sugar production in the region had become the world’s biggest and most lucrative industry. The natural harbors and warm, moist climate of the Morgan Islands quickly made them the hub of this burgeoning industry.
The stalk of the sugar cane is one of the richest supplies of sucrose—sugar—which is used by the plant in its metabolic processes. After nine to thirty-six months, the cane reaches heights of ten to fifteen feet. It’s then harvested by machine or manually with a machete, stripped of leaves, and transported to a sugar mill. There, the stalks are crushed by heavy rollers to extract the cane juice. This juice is concentrated by boiling. The resultant thick syrup, called massecuite, is poured into a centrifuge, which has a sievelike basket at its center. When the centrifuge is spun, some of the syrup crystallizes and remains in the basket. This raw sugar is collected and bagged for bulk shipping. Though automation has come to sugar cane-producing facilities throughout the world, it is still collected and processed by hand in the Morgan Islands.
After Morgan’s death in 1688, his holdings passed to a succession of owners. In 1776, due to the chaotic conditions in the American colonies, many of these owners opted to sell their plantations in the West Indies. One purchaser who was not concerned about the political climate of any given era was Count Dracula. Through the firm of Frye and Sons, Solicitors, of London, Dracula quietly began buying land on Marya Island. By the end of the nineteenth century he owned it from shore to shore. He also bought all the private property on the three smaller islands, La Riana, Ottola, and Polo, which trailed westward like a scorpion’s tail. While the United States had dominion over Marya, the other three islands belonged to Great Britain.
In 1932, a tall, devilishly goateed houngan named Murder Legendre from Haiti had washed up on the shores of Marya Island. According to local legend, the voodoo priest had been thrown into the sea by a fellow plantation owner who had been victimized by his occult powers. But the houngan could not die, and during the next two years he resumed his practice of the black arts. Using the resurrectional properties of bagasse, a by-product of the sugar cane refining process, Legendre began building an army of zombie workers like the one he had commanded in Port-au-Prince. When Dracula arrived in 1934, he decapitated the houngan after forcing him to reveal his secrets. Dracula took control of Andre, who ran the sugar cane operation. To ensure that no one else ever became so powerful in the voodoo realm, Dracula made regular trips to Marya. After the events in LaMirada, he made the island his home.
Seen from the sky, Marya Island looks curiously alive, like an amoeba. The swift-moving clouds cast ever-changing shadows over the lush, leafy hills, while the powerful waves create the impression of a living, constantly shifting shoreline. To the south, near the island’s only plantation, a blanket of reddish dodder, “the devil’s sewing thread,” covers the hills. It crawls over the other plants and flowers, sinking rootlike growths into them and feeding on their tissue.
The nucleus of the island, Mt. Mord, seemed especially alive. Talbot first saw it from the passenger’s seat of the Cessna Aerobat, shortly after noon. As they approached from the north, he was struck by Mord’s sharp, eccentrically bent peaks. The mountain looked almost like the inverted head of a goat, its beard twisting away to the south. The sun seemed to skid off its tortuous ridges to cast impenetrable, slablike shadows beyond them. The ever-changing angle of the sun caused those shadows to elongate even as Talbot watched.
Talbot sat there scratching the armrests.
“Nervous?” Tom Stevenson asked.
“A little,” Talbot allowed.
“About flying? Because if you are, don’t be. I may not be able to turn my head around very well, but I’m really good at this. I’ve flown in all kinds of weather, even in the Arctic.”
“Oh, I’m all right with flying.” Talbot smiled lightly.
“Have you ever flown a plane?”
“Not personally,” Talbot said. “But back in Los Angeles, a friend of mine, Dick Russell, had a de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane.”
“Whoa!” Stevenson said. “A vintage Tiger Moth?”
“Yes,” Talbot said. “It wasn’t vintage—back then.”
Stevenson’s mouth twisted. “Right. You were there in the thirties, weren’t you? I keep forgetting that.”
Talbot smiled again. He stared out the side window, his mind drifting to a life that could no longer be his. “Dick was an auto mechanic. He worked for himself. He didn’t have much money, didn’t have a family—that plane was his girl and his baby. We used to go barnstorming on weekends. We took what he called the ‘BC’ route.”
“ ‘BC’?”
“We’d go up as far as British Columbia or down into Baja California,” Talbot said. “Those were carefree days before the war. Before everything.” For a moment, Talbot could still feel that hot California sun pounding down as Russell put the plane through loops and dives. He could see his friend smiling, hear his scarf flapping in the stiff wind, smell the tart, very distinctive odor of the petrol.
“It must have been incredible,” Stevenson said. “I’d love to have flown one of those. No radar and computers, none of that fly-by-numbers junk. Just the pilot, the machine, and the air.” Stevenson glanced at Talbot, who was still staring away. “Lawrence? Are you all right?”
Talbot blinked. His eyes were moist. “Sorry. I was just thinking about that other world.”
“I understand,” Stevenson said. “Do you have any idea what became of Mr. Russell?”
“No,” Talbot said. “Before I left we talked about him flying over, but then the United States joined the war. Dick wrote to say he was enlisting in the Air Force. That was the last I heard of him.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Stevenson said.
Talbot began scratching the armrest again. He would give anything to be back there. Not just working in California and barnstorming with Dick, but experiencin
g joy and mortality again, his hands clean and his spirit light. He wanted to return to a time when women looked in his eyes with love or desire, when their screams were not from terror. When the world itself was not so . . . polished, was the word that came to mind. When there were still rough edges for a man to pit himself against. Rough edges that also helped to shape the man.
Things had changed a great deal during the years he’d been sealed up in the castle. Shortly before he picked up Dracula’s trail in Europe in 1947, the Americans had just broken the sound barrier. That had seemed so exciting at the time. But when he and Stevenson left LaMirada, Talbot had seen a number of startling aircraft—slender, streamlined jet planes with engines that looked like rockets. Some of them looked as if they actually could go to the moon. Even the controls of this small plane, with their plastic buttons instead of switches and their glowing numbers, were far beyond anything Talbot had ever imagined. Yet none of that was exciting or heroic. It was cold and robotic.
Count Dracula had existed through all of these changes. Before facing him again, on his home soil, Talbot wondered whether the vampire would have embraced technology or ignored it.
He’d have ignored it, Talbot decided. Talbot had never known the vampire to ride a motor car or use a telephone, to turn on a radio or fire a gun. And there was no reason for Dracula to do so. These things gave people that which the vampire already possessed: speed and power. But there was another reason Dracula would shun these tools. The vampire had contempt for human desires and curiosity. He scorned any passion or dream given power and urgency by human mortality. The things Caroline had told him about—new medicines, passenger jets, computers—allowed people to live longer, to fly, to communicate regardless of distance. Were Dracula to use these things it would not only acknowledge human achievements but also the needs they served. That was something the vampire’s demonic vanity would not allow.
“Judging from your expression,” Stevenson said, “I’m not doing a good job of distracting you.”
Talbot managed a little smile. “You’re doing fine,” he said. The smile faded quickly. “It’s just that—before that terrible night in the woods when I was attacked, I used to enjoy thinking about the future. Now the only pleasure I have is remembering the past. And it’s a bittersweet pleasure.”
“One that’s got to stop,” Stevenson said. “You have a future, Lawrence. When we’re finished here you’ll get help. We’ll lick the affliction. You can start to put all of this behind you.”
Talbot shook his head. “There’s still Dracula—”
“And there’s still plenty of daylight left,” Stevenson shot back. “You’ve got to start thinking positively. We’re going to make it.”
“You don’t know,” Talbot said miserably. “I’ve been closer than this to Count Dracula many times, yet he’s always managed to slip away.”
“That won’t happen this time,” Stevenson said. “There are two of us. And we know how to defeat him.”
“Don’t be so confident,” Talbot warned. “Dracula is not only powerful, but he can hypnotize most people between the beats of their heart.”
“Then I won’t look at him,” Stevenson said. “Remember your Greek mythology? That’s how you fight a Medusa.”
“If it were only just his look,” Talbot said. He thought back to the few times, in mortal form, when he’d encountered the Lord of the Vampires. The last time was at the masquerade ball on LaMirada. “It’s also his voice, so smooth and comforting, inviting peace. Only it’s the peace of the grave. It’s also his presence, which can be electric. People can’t help but look at him.”
“Warning noted,” Stevenson said. “I’ll watch out.”
“And then there are his accursed wiles,” Talbot said. “When Dracula came to the masquerade party in LaMirada he asked Joan Raymond to dance. I tried to warn her that he was dangerous but he acted as though I were insane. She believed him and she was bewitched.”
“I imagine Dracula has learned quite a few tricks in—how many centuries has it been?”
“He’s existed for five hundred years,” Talbot said. “And there isn’t a lie or deception he hasn’t practiced.”
“Five hundred years,” Stevenson said. “That’s incredible. But you know what I find fascinating? If most men had Dracula’s powers and his wealth, they probably would do worse things than he’s done.”
“Worse in scope, perhaps,” Talbot said. “But Count Dracula has turned predation into a horrible sport. The way he selects his victims—the pride and prime of youth—then tricks them into opening their homes to him—”
“Tricks them?”
“Dracula can go nowhere unless he’s invited,” Talbot said. “After that he can come and go as he pleases.”
Stevenson made a face. “I was wondering about that. Last night at the station house he asked several times if he could come in. His persistence seemed like more than just good manners.”
“That’s Dracula’s way,” Talbot said. “The tease—the flirtation before the seduction or the kill. My point is that Dracula enjoys the trickery, just like the Devil, who made him what he is.”
The men fell silent then. Stevenson ignored his cellular phone as it rang inside his jacket pocket.
“I still can’t believe that people carry telephones around in their pockets,” Talbot said with a trace of disgust.
“It isn’t just the phones,” Stevenson said. “We carry our lives in our pockets. Credit cards, ATM cards, laptop computers, telephones, wristwatch alarm clocks. It’s all very convenient but there’s no rest and no privacy.”
The phone stopped ringing as Stevenson nosed the plane down to two thousand feet. It started again a moment later. Stevenson shut off the ringer.
“That’s probably my secretary or Trooper Willis calling,” he said.
“I feel sorry for Trooper Willis,” said Talbot. “I’ve made his life a nightmare and helped turn his town into a place of the damned.”
“My friend,” Stevenson said, “LaMirada was damned long before you showed up.”
“You keep forgetting,” Talbot said, “I first showed up fifty years ago. What I did helped to give LaMirada the reputation it has.”
“Then maybe what we’re doing now can help undo its reputation,” Stevenson said. “When we get Caroline back to LaMirada, we can do what she was talking about at the station house. Find reasons for all these things, your condition included. Scientific or psychological explanations. It won’t be easy, but we can learn together and then start to educate people.”
Talbot said nothing. He had acquiesced to their arguments yesterday. He’d let them put him in a cell, a cell that was supposed to hold him. It didn’t and he’d killed again. If they managed to destroy Dracula, Talbot intended to make sure that there would be no more cells, no more killing.
Stevenson glanced out the side window. “Look, Lawrence. The maritime traffic seems to be headed to the other side of the island.”
Talbot leaned over. He scanned the shore and its myriad inlets and jetties. He had to fight to keep his mind from drifting back, from dwelling on the bitter failures of a bygone time.
“That’s probably where the main port is,” Stevenson said. “I’ll circle wide and drop a little lower. If you spot the boat, I’ll let the tower know we’re coming in. If not, we’re going to have a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dracula may be living on one of the other islands,” he said. “Those islands are British and neither of us has a passport.”
“Oh, but I do,” Talbot said.
Stevenson grinned. “Yes, but it probably expired about, when? Two generations ago?”
Talbot frowned. That was one advantage Count Dracula had over him. All it took was a glance or the crook of the index and middle fingers for the Lord of the Vampires to go where he wished.
As Stevenson banked toward the east, Talbot turned his attention to the boats that filled the wide, U-shaped natural harbor. His eyes were draw
n almost immediately to one of the vessels, a motor yacht nestled alone amidst the small freighters and pleasure boats. The yacht shined a clean, arrogant white in the sunlight. There was no one onboard and the other boats were anchored a respectful distance away. Because they knew? wondered Talbot.
“You can put one worry to rest,” Talbot said.
“You see his boat?”
“Yes,” Talbot said. “The sleek one sitting beside that freighter taking on sugar cane.”
The attorney contacted the tower and was given clearance to land. He made a tight turn to the south and swung the aircraft toward the field.
The airport consisted of a single runway, a small hangar, and a conical, two-story white tower with a dome on top. It was located on the southeastern side of the island, roughly a half mile from the harbor. Stevenson came in low over the trees, scattering flocks of mourning doves and horned larks. Talbot noticed that none of the people working in the sugar cane fields bothered to look up.
The plane gently rocked and bounced as it sailed in. It touched down lightly, hopping from the left wheel to the right before settling down. Stevenson taxied to a spot near the tower and, after securing the aircraft, went to talk with the airstrip manager. Talbot stood outside, his face turned to the sun.
For the first time in his life Lawrence Talbot felt the warmth of the tropics. The pleasant breeze filled the shirt Deputy Clyde had given him, made him smile. But only for a moment. For as he stood alone on the quiet field, his face and neck warm from something other than bloodlust, Talbot knew that the joys of this place, of being human, of sharing the sun with Miliza Morelle or Joan Raymond or Catherine Cooke could never be his. Unlike Count Dracula, who regarded himself as superior to humans, Talbot understood that eternal, carnivorous existence was without meaning.
Stevenson returned quickly. “We’re all set,” he said. “Sunset’s at six-forty tonight, which”—he looked at his watch—“is a little over six hours from now. There are cabs out front. We can hop one to the harbor.”