by David Wood
He started testing them, one at a time, as Fritz looked on impatiently.
He had twenty unmarked keys. After trying nineteen of them, and looking with despair at the last one, he recalled the door in the wine cellar. The one Petran had guarded so jealously, he now realized. What were you hiding, you slug? He inserted the brass key and attempted to turn it, but like with the others, it was not the correct key. Like with the that cellar door.
“None of them fit,” he told Fritz.
“Here, let me try,” Fritz snatched the ring of keys and stepped in front of Wagner at the door.
Wagner was about to suggest they try one of the other doors out of the building. Surely one of his keys would open one of the exterior doors. There were several of them. He hadn’t tried any of them for some reason. He realized he hadn’t ever needed to—the doors were always unlocked. But he heard footsteps behind him on the marble floor. Anneli, he thought. Something must have happened with Gretchen. But then, before he could turn his head, he realized the sound of the footstep was wrong.
When the hand clutched his shoulder from behind, it felt like it weighed a ton, and Wagner knew he was in trouble. He tried to call out to Fritz, to warn him, but there was no time.
Before he knew it, he had been grabbed, thrown, and was flying across the foyer, back first. His leg slammed into the round wooden table in the middle of the room, where his welcome letter from the Count had waited on that first day. The table flipped over, and Wagner’s body flipped end over end from the impact—everything appeared to be in such slow motion, that he could see the vase tumbling from the table, its water spraying in an arc, as the flowers jettisoned like missiles.
Then Wagner’s body crashed into the wall, and he slid to the floor. The impact blasted the air from his lungs, and his head was filled with a buzzing hum while his chest vibrated with sensation overload, as he desperately tried to draw a fresh breath.
But his lungs felt like they had expelled their air and then sealed themselves forever.
When the breath came, it came in a gulp, as his head arced up from the floor, like a drowning man surfacing from below the waters of a turbulent lake. He saw his attacker—Petran—was locked in a struggle with Fritz near the door. Petran was insanely strong. Even though Petran was a bit taller, Fritz outweighed the man by probably a hundred pounds. And Fritz knew how to hold his own in a Munich beer hall.
Both men threw punches and landed them at the same time, Fritz’s fist hitting Petran’s cheek, as Petran’s hit Fritz in the chest. Fritz stepped into Petran’s next swing and grabbed the man around the waist. He head-butted Petran and then released him. The gangly man staggered away from the fighter’s embrace. Wagner struggled to his feet, his breath finally returned to him. He suspected he would be sore in the morning from the impact with the table and the wall, but right now he was buzzing with anger at Petran, and he needed to help his friend. Blood was rushing in his ears and he could hear nothing but a pounding roar. He raced across the foyer toward the giant. He bent to scoop up the fallen vase from the floor, where the thick carpet had prevented it from shattering. Petran lunged back toward Fritz and kicked out at Fritz’s leg. Fritz cried out in pain, and Petran moved closer to throw a punch at Fritz’s eye. Clutching his knee in pain, Fritz dodged the blow, leaning to his left and throwing up his free hand.
Wagner swung the vase, and cracked it across Petran’s face and temple. The tall man stumbled back and squealed like a little girl shrieking for a lost toy. Wagner didn’t know a man could make a noise like that. It managed to cut through the rush of blood in his ears, and it startled him enough that he stepped backward, bumping into Fritz.
Petran continued his deathly scream, and his body flailed around the room until he bounced off the wall behind him. His face was covered by his hands, and blood leaked between his fingers. When he pulled his hands away, Wagner could see that the vase had shattered on Petran’s skull and a thin sliver of ceramic had plunged deeply into Petran’s eye socket with its edges pointing directly up and down. Crimson blood actually squirted from the wound, and poured down the man’s ruined visage. His lips pulled back in a snarl like a wolf, and he bared his crooked teeth as if he would come to bite Wagner.
But Wagner had had enough. “We are done with you, animal!” He took a step toward Petran, when Fritz cried out from behind him.
Wagner turned to find Fritz crouched over, and a woman on his back. The waitress in the sheer gown had crept up from behind and leapt onto Fritz’s back. Her face was buried in Fritz’s neck, and as he thrust a fist up at her, knocking her a glancing blow to the side of her head, she pulled her face away, pulling the flesh of Fritz’s neck with her, in her mouth. His neck exploded with a red spray, and the blood dripped down her chin.
When Wagner heard a hiss from across the room, he realized that Petran and the strange waitress would not be the only enemies they would face.
Chapter 23
The hideous woman Wagner had seen outside Gretchen’s room was across the foyer. Her mouth was open, like Petran’s, and she was baring her teeth. But unlike Petran, her incisors were elongated like a wolf’s fangs—like the waitress with the bloody mouth had. The insect-woman was emitting the loud hissing noise, and her eyes were almost glowing red. Just like in his dreams.
Fritz swung his head backward. A gout of blood sprayed from his neck as he did so, but the back of his head connected with the teeth of the woman on his back. She launched off of him, sprawling to the floor. Wagner had been distracted by the motion, and now out of his peripheral vision he saw Petran’s lean form rushing him. He dropped to a crouch and punched out, hitting the tall man in the gut hard enough to knock the air out of him. Wagner sprang to his feet, his other fist leading, and he clobbered Petran in the jaw. The man’s body flew into the air and tumbled over backward like a bad acrobat.
The hissing woman was on him then, having rushed him from the side. He threw the back of his fist up, and hit her in the face. She fell away from him just as Fritz was slamming into his left shoulder, turning him around in a spin.
“Run!” he shouted, as he sprinted past Wagner. The waitress had recovered on the floor, and now she crouched there like a toad wrapped in a bloody curtain. Wagner started to follow his friend, and the woman shot from the floor like she had been launched from a cannon. Wagner dove to the floor in front of him, rolled, and landed on his back.
The waitress, her bloody fangs dripping with Fritz’s blood, flew through the air right over him and crashed into the strange insect-woman, who was coming for him from the other side. Both women fell away in a tumble of limbs into Petran, tripping him up, so that he landed on his face, and drove the vase fragment further into his skull. His scream was inhuman. Wagner, wasting no time, scrambled to his feet. He chased up the stairs after Fritz. The big man clutched the torn side of his neck, holding his life’s blood in by sheer force of will.
As Wagner reached the top of the stairs and looked back, he could see the women and Petran following them already. He turned and sped after Fritz, realizing that the man wasn’t fleeing so much as he was racing toward Gretchen’s room. If these creatures had attacked the two of them, there might be more of them setting upon the women. Wagner was glad Fritz had kept his wits about him.
Nearly to the door to the room, Wagner saw something that made his last shred of hope plummet. At the far end of the corridor, and racing toward them, was Count Dracula. All pretense at civility lost, the Count bared his own fangs—longer than those of the women. His eyes were smoldering volcanoes of rage, and his hands were clenched into deadly talons. It is all of them, Wagner realized. They are all creatures.
Fritz whipped open the door to Gretchen’s room and swept in. Anneli looked up in shock at their hurried entrance. As soon as Wagner was in, Fritz slammed the door behind him and threw his weight against it. Wagner hurried to lock the door with the key on his ring that had the green bit of string—the color he had associated with Gretchen, for the color of the dress
she wore the day Anneli introduced him to her. His mind could easily fix on such random things, and the ability had helped him with remembering crucial things throughout his life. The lock tumbled and Fritz sighed loudly. Both men knew the door was the only way into the room.
Gretchen was sleeping again, and Anneli stood from the chair by the bed and quickly came over to them.
“What is it?”
Fritz turned to Wagner and looked helplessly at him. He turned away and rushed to Gretchen’s closet, grabbing the first piece of cloth he found, and pressed it to his savaged neck. The explanation would be up to Wagner.
“Petran has locked us inside the castle,” he said. Anneli’s eyes widened. “We fought with him. And the woman I saw in the hallway the night my hair turned. She was real. She was…a creature of some sort. Her teeth are long and she hissed like a snake.”
Now Anneli’s eyebrows raised in disbelief. “She did what?”
“There are two women. Both of them are creatures more than human,” hold told her, holding her shoulders and looking directly in her eyes, so she would know how serious he was. “And it gets worse. Dracula is one of them, too.”
The words came out of him in a rush, dumping the bad news on his bride like a waterfall. Then he turned to the locked door, expecting the feral creatures he had faced to burst through the door at any second. But there was no pounding on the wooden door, no heavy breathing outside of it.
Fritz had grabbed one of Gretchen’s scarves from a drawer and was wrapping it around his neck, using the cloth he had found in the closet as a bandage for his neck wound. “Are there any other ways into this room?”
“No,” Wagner told him. He thought again about the design of the castle, and he wondered whether there might be a secret passage that led into Gretchen’s sleeping chambers. “No. Just this door. Not even a window. We are safe.”
Fritz’s face fell, as he came to the conclusion just before Wagner did. “Then we are trapped. All they need to do is wait,” he said, nodding toward the door. “Sooner or later, we’ll have to leave here, and the only way out is through that door.”
“What are they?” Anneli asked. “You make them sound more like animals than people.”
“I have never seen anything like them. I have no idea. But they are strong.” Fritz rubbed his sore throat through the scarf.
“I know what they are,” Wagner told them, as he sat at the dressing table and began absently to paw through Gretchen’s laid out jewelry, his mind a thousand miles away, in the library in Munich. “I read about the folklore of this region of the mountains, before I came. The legends and myths, the stories and the old wives tales. All part of the colorful culture, I thought.”
When he fell into silence, the others simply waited.
He turned to them and looked at each of them in turn before going on.
“Vampires. They drink human blood to survive. There are many legends about them in these parts, but I thought they were just foolish stories for children.”
Anneli’s mouth hung open in shock. Fritz sat heavily down on the side of the bed, not rousing the sleeping Gretchen. “Did you read how to stop them? Or kill them?”
“No,” Wagner hung his head. “Only that they supposedly come out only at night. I’ve seen Petran around the castle, the few times that I’ve seen him, in the day. But I’ve only ever seen the Count after dark. The same with the women.”
Fritz stood again. “Petran didn’t have teeth like the others. Maybe he doesn’t drink blood. We can wait until daylight and try to just get past him.”
“Yes, but where do the others go after dawn?” Anneli asked.
Wagner thought maybe he knew. The room at the end of the wine cellar. He was about to say so, but a sudden croaking sound filled the room. A repeated kack-kack noise that sounded almost mechanical, like a badly damaged clock trying to gong on the hour and failing, the mechanism’s spring attempting the motion again and again.
Fritz looked ready for another fight, despite his blood loss. Anneli was looking at the door in terror, but when Wagner looked at the door, he realized the sound was not coming from the hallway. Were they trying to get in from somewhere else? Then his eyes turned to the bed.
It was Gretchen.
She was coughing. As soon as Wagner laid his eyes on her, the noise ceased, and she laid still. Too still.
He rushed over to the bed and laid his hand on her face. Her skin was cold. He felt at the side of her neck for her pulse, but he could feel nothing. He took her wrist up and checked there, then laid his ear down on her chest to listen for her heartbeat.
When he raised his head and turned to his companions, their expressions had changed. Anneli had tears streaming down her face, but she looked angry and ready for a fight. Fritz looked lost and horrified, his mouth agape and his eyes wide.
“She’s dead.”
Chapter 24
The keening wail of Anneli’s cry echoed against the cold stone walls of the room. It came from somewhere deep inside of her, making her normally soft voice several octaves deeper. And Wagner could still hear the anger there.
Fritz simply fell into a chair in the corner, his look vacant. He hardly moved, and Wagner was afraid for the man’s life. His blood coated the entire front and side of his shirt now, and the man’s skin had gone pale. Wagner understood some of the loss of color was from the shock of Gretchen’s death, but he knew some of it was from loss of blood as well.
For himself, Andreas Wagner dealt with the death of their companion in what he felt was an odd way.
It made him sharper.
He chastised himself for thinking the unfolding events had all been in his mind. Of course it had been Dracula in the library. He should have recognized the man, and he should have left the castle immediately. He should have heeded the warnings of the villagers. The villagers, he thought. They knew. Damn them, they knew what was waiting for me here in the castle. But the recrimination and clarity brought him a new sensation: determination. He would fight these hellish creatures and he would get his friend and his wife to safety. One death was all the creatures would have, and if he could help it, the fiends would have no more of Gretchen’s blood.
“We will make them pay,” he said.
Fritz did not respond, but Anneli raised her head from where she had been crying at Gretchen’s bedside, and looked at her husband. He saw fire in those blue eyes he loved so well, and he understood that she would tolerate no more deaths either. Something strong had arisen in her. Something hard.
“What will we do? Tell me,” she said.
“We wait until dawn. The legends I read talked of vampires fearing the daylight,” he replied. He remembered the oddly designed windows in the castle—how they had been shaded to prevent light from entering. Still, he thought the vampires would sleep or rest in the day. He reminded himself, again, that he had only ever seen Dracula at night. And that is why they need Petran. He guards them while they sleep…in the wine cellar’s locked room. It was all coming together for him.
“We’ll need to fight Petran, but the others should be gone with the morning light. And then we get out and make our way to the village. Herr Brandt, the Bavarian shopkeeper I mentioned, will help us to escape.” Wagner went to Fritz, and pushed his hand aside to look at the man’s neck wound. Fritz offered little resistance. The wound was jagged, but not too bad. Wagner had been sure the vampire waitress had pulled a flapping wall of skin away from Fritz’s throat, but he saw now that most of what she must have had on her face was blood. He went to Gretchen’s dressing table and pulled fresh scarves from the drawer that Fritz had left open in his haste to bind his wound. Wagner folded one into smaller and smaller squares, then placed it over Fritz’s neck and used two more scarves to wrap around the man, like bandages. When he was done, he was sure that the makeshift dressing would hold, although the wrappings would probably need to be changed by morning. He checked his pocketwatch and saw they had many hours yet until the dawn.
“
Fritz, help me,” Wagner said, and he walked to Gretchen’s body.
Fritz stood and moved to the bed, then looked at Wagner, unsure of what to do. The man looked only resigned and tired now.
“Help me to shift her to the floor. You and Anneli should sleep. I will remain on watch. When I need to rest, I’ll wake you.”
Anneli stood and silently took hold of the body as well, her intention clear. She would move the body to the floor with the men, a pallbearer for a woman who they all knew would receive no formal funeral in the morning as they battled their way out of the castle.
The corpse was surprisingly lightweight as they lifted Gretchen’s limp form and laid her on the floor to the side of the bed. Anneli knelt on the floor and rearranged her friend’s hair, and then gently stroked Gretchen’s head. Fritz, his work done, moved back to his chair. “I will sleep here,” he said. “Wake me when you need to be spelled.”
“I’m not sure I can sleep at all,” Anneli said as she stood and turned to face the door to the room, which had remained silent.
Wagner went to her and gently placed his arms around her. She held him as well, and they remained unmoving for a moment. “You should try,” he said. Then softer, he told her the rest: “Fritz might not be able to take the next watch. He needs rest badly. And in a few hours, if nothing happens, I will be close to dropping.”
She looked up at him, understanding and acceptance in her look. She gently kissed him, then went to the bed and stripped off the cover that had been over their dead friend. She flapped the blanket out and draped it over the body, then laid down atop the sheets on the bed.
Wagner looked to a dark wardrobe, and opened it, rummaging for another blanket. He found one, and brought it to his wife. Even if the dead woman hadn’t needed to be covered for respect, it probably would be quite offputting for everyone to sleep under a cover that had warmed a dying woman hours earlier. The fresh blanket was not as thick as the one now draped on the floor, but it would do to keep the chill off.