Van Helsing's Diaries: Nosferatu

by Cawdron, Peter

  “Why did you bring him here?” Anton demands.

  “We lost Michael,” Jane replies.

  “He cannot replace Michael—no one can.”

  I rub my throat. Jane rushes to see if I’m okay. Like the ER doctor Alan once was, she looks in my eyes, assessing my level of consciousness from the motion and dilation of my pupils. Cutting off oxygen to the brain, even if only for a few seconds, can cause someone to keel over and black out at any point up to five minutes later. Like me, she realizes I might look perfectly fine until I collapse.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  Sirens sound in the distance.

  Vlad says, “We need to get out of here.”

  Chapter 3:03 — Dinner

  The apartment is luxurious. I’m not sure what I expected, a hovel, or some rundown seedy hotel room given that the trio are on the run, but the building is new, and the apartment is spacious.

  Gothic paintings line the walls. Medieval princes stare at me with a lingering gaze, appearing to follow me as I walk past. Their features are somber. Some of them are dressed in armor, with a sword and shield, while others wear the pomp of court—rich shades of burgundy, striking yellows, dark browns. The reds and greens of modern paintings are missing altogether. There must be half a million dollars worth of artwork on these walls alone, and I wonder whether the apartment was loaned to Vlad, or furnished when rented. I can’t imagine Vlad has this level of wealth. Jane certainly doesn’t. Where does their funding come from? Is someone else financing their efforts? Who are they conspiring with?

  I sit on the couch as Jane excuses herself to take a shower. The old man puts on the kettle, boiling water for a cup of tea. Anton is still brooding. He positions himself behind me, sitting on the edge of a polished desk, ostensibly looking at his cell phone. His actions seem innocent enough, but I can’t escape the feeling he’s creeping up on me with a garrote. Rather than relaxing and sitting back on the couch, I’m perched on the edge of the cushion.

  Vlad turns on the television. The sound is low, but as the broadcast is in German, I don’t care. English subtitles run along the bottom of the screen. A set of ads comes to an end and the image switches to a news reporter standing outside the opera hall.

  Footage is emerging of the moment American fugitive Jane Langford leaped from the stage here at the opera house and impaled Serbian Ambassador Hans Jorgen.

  Langford, who is wanted in connection with the death of her husband in Romania two years ago, was believed to be in hiding in the Ukraine. Her emergence here in Berlin is an embarrassment to the government of Angelick von Brassen. After promising to crack down on Germany’s porous borders, the presence of an international fugitive hiding in plain sight has irreparably damaged the von Brassen administration. Already, Serbia is calling for an independent investigation into what it describes as the assassination of its most senior representative in Europe.

  Langford is believed to have acted in association with several others. Police have listed Dr. Joseph Anders Manning as a person of interest, but have stopped short of calling Dr. Manning a suspect. Manning, a known associate of Langford, arrived from the United States this morning and was in the theater at the time of the attack. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Langford or Manning is urged to come forward to the authorities.

  “Oh, great,” I say, pointing at the screen. “I get a mugshot and a biographical sketch, but you guys escape any mention.”

  Vlad simply smiles. It’s almost as if he expected this outcome and is pleased by it. He hands me a cup of tea, and sits down in the armchair across from me, turning off the television. I’d prefer coffee.

  “You need not worry about them,” he says. “They are nothing compared to our foe.”

  “So he was one of them?” I ask. “The ambassador?”

  “They like to infiltrate the ranks of society. It makes it easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “To go unnoticed. There are two rules in society. Two laws. Common law, and the rule of the rich. You think the vampire is the killer? You think he’s a cold blooded, ruthless murderer? Have you not seen what our politicians do? Hah. Sometimes, I think the Nosferatu are the amateurs.”

  Anton has a wicked laugh.

  Vlad says, “However, you—you’ve seen the vampire. You know what they can do.”

  “I don’t know what I saw,” I say. “I still struggle with what happened to Alan.”

  “As in how he died, or how he transformed?”

  “Both.”

  “It is fantastic, no?” Vlad asks, although since English is an acquired language, his choice of term isn’t appropriate. “Unbelievable.”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you do believe—you must.”

  “I’m not sure,” I reply.

  “Ah, but you believe. You see, the Nosferatu, he is counting on disbelief. If you do not believe, he has won. This is his secret. This is why he succeeds, because no one sees him coming. He is invisible—a shadow.”

  Jane sits down on the couch next to me. She’s wearing jeans and a long sleeved shirt. She’s dyed her blonde hair black, and I have to do a double take to recognize her. Jane works a towel around her hair, still drying the long strands.

  “Have you shown him?” she asks.

  “We were waiting for you,” the old man says, handing me a photocopy of a handwritten diary entry. “This is from the original van Helsing. It is one of his last entries.”

  I start reading to myself, when Jane says, “Read it aloud.”

  This darkness that has fallen upon us is insidious—like no evil on Earth. As plain as that has been to me over these past few decades, I was not prepared for the conclusion I have reached—that the Vampire is not from this world.

  From whence then has this evil come? Mina says, Hell, but even the flames of Hades could not have spawned such bitter hatred against the races of man.

  Our greatest minds have long marveled at the vast size of space. Brahe and Kepler contend that the tiny specks of light marking Venus, Mars and Jupiter are as big, if not bigger than our Earth. If such a thing is true, could not these worlds also hold life? Indeed, even the great luminary Voltaire speaks plainly of what most call madness. In his Micromégas, Earth is visited by Giants from the Stars. I would not believe such things myself had mine own eyes not seen the unearthly evil unleashed upon us.

  Is it so great a thing? We sail between continents. Could not others cross the dark oceans of space in vast ships?

  From whence then does this evil come? Is it perhaps from the darkness between the stars? Or from some other planet where these creatures are the jaguar, the leopard, or the panthera feeding on souls.

  I am old. These are the ramblings of a fool. For nigh on two score years I have sought the Enemy. Yet as I grow frail, he becomes younger. As I shrink, he increases in strength, mocking me. I am no threat. I can only hope that those to follow will heed my warning. There is much I—

  I turn the page, but that’s all there is.

  “Is that all?” I ask, noting Vlad is sorting through a bunch of similar papers looking for something else. I’m intrigued. It’s fascinating to hear what the original van Helsing was able to deduce in his dealings with the vampires. From what they’ve figured out, it seems Dracula was the leader of a clan—perhaps an entire race of the ungodly.

  “Only this,” the old man says, handing me an aging map. Rather than being something produced by a cartographer, the map appears to have been sketched by a teenager, perhaps a peasant. The place names are written in cursive, probably in Romanian, making them illegible to me. Various lines seem to indicate ridges and valleys. Paths converge on what I guess are villages beside a lake.

  Jane points at one of the dots, saying, “This is Cetatea Poenari, the Citadel, an outpost from the time of Vlad the Impaler.”

  “So this is Count Dracula’s castle?”

  Vlad waves his finger. “No, no, no. Not as you know it from Bram Stoker’s book.

  “Stoker, he c
ompiled diary entries. He was not there. He did not witness these events. Sometimes, he’s right. Sometimes, he embellishes. The castle he writes of is two hundred kilometers away, but this—this is the fortress of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia of the House of Drăculești, in the Vein of Basarab. This is no mere work of fiction printed on a page. This is reality.”

  “Show him the conclusion,” Jane says.

  “Conclusion?”

  “Ah, yes,” Vlad replies, shuffling more papers. He hands me a typeset sheet of paper, saying, “Here it is.”

  As I examine the paper, which must be well over a century old, Jane says, “This is the original ending of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the unpublished ending.”

  Again, I read aloud.

  As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment with a roar which seemed to shake the very heavens, the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke, volume on volume in rolling grandeur, was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity.

  Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder-clap—the long reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skywards in the cataclysm.

  From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “In the book, the Castle Dracula is located near Brasova, but this—this describes the earthquake that struck Cetatea Poenari in 1888.”

  “So?” I ask.

  “Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, describing events that had occurred barely a decade earlier, events that were relayed to him by the journal entries of his friends. He confused the location. All those that have sought the vampire’s lair have looked in the wrong castle.”

  “Where were we?” I ask, pointing at the map. “Is this the village?”

  “No,” Jane says, quite forcibly. She points at another smudge on the parched paper, saying, “She was here.” It’s chilling to hear her talk of herself in the third person. The detachment Jane has is surreal, not something I’d expected.

  “This,” she says, pointing at the line running between the two locations. “This is what got us interested in Poenari. For a long time we thought it was a path, a trail linking the two, but it’s not. We suspect it’s a tunnel.”

  “That’s impossible,” I say, getting a sense of the scale. “It would have to be several miles long.”

  “Impossible to dig,” Vlad says, “but not impossible if it were a natural formation.”

  “They’re hiding something,” Jane says. “Here, in the tunnels. That’s why they protect these castles so fiercely.”

  “Hiding what?” I ask.

  “That is what we intend to find out,” Vlad says, gathering the papers and arranging them with meticulous care. He slips them back into the folder. “Tomorrow, we leave for the East.”

  East? East is a rather nondescript term. Travel east long enough and you arrive back where you started, having come from the west. The way van Helsing says ‘East' leaves me in no doubt he knows precisely where we’re going, but doesn’t want to disclose the location. I suspect ‘East’ is somewhere beyond the borders of Germany, perhaps outside Western Europe.

  “Come,” Jane says, slapping my leg and breaking the tension of the moment. “I’m hungry. Let’s go and get something to eat.”

  I’m still trying to process what I’ve heard. It is fascinating to hear what they’ve learned, and I am acutely aware that what they’ve shared with me is only the tip of the knowledge they’ve gained. What else is there? Who else knows about this? Clearly, they’re part of some larger organization mobilizing against the Nosferatu, as there were police officers involved in our escape. This luxurious home, the ability of Jane to infiltrate the opera, traveling across international borders with ease, it all speaks of a level of sophistication I had had no idea existed.

  Jane is already wearing gloves, ready for the cold outside. She takes my hand, leading me. “I’m famished. I could eat a horse.”

  “Take my coat,” Vlad says.

  I grab his coat from by the door and wrap it around me against the cold.

  Old fashioned street lamps line the cobblestone road. Snow flurries blow down an alley. Snowflakes swirl in the air, drifting lazily to the ground.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Giovanni’s.”

  We round the corner, and walk along the main road. Buses rush past, spraying slush across the sidewalk, and forcing us to stay close to the old stone buildings. I’m not sure what was here previously, but these buildings look like factories from the last century. They’ve been converted into trendy, modern apartment blocks. That which was old and decrepit has been made new again.

  A couple walk toward us, hugging each other against the cold. As they’re walking into the wind, they have their heads bowed against the chill. She’s wearing a beret, while he has a scarf wrapped around his neck. The boyfriend buries his face low into the woolen scarf, trying to stay warm, with only his nose protruding above it.

  Jane grabs me, wrapping her arm around mine, even though my hands are buried in my pockets. My dress pants were made for formal events, not snowstorms, and the cold seems to pass right through them. Jane hunches, looking at the ground, acting as though we’re a couple. She laughs, although I haven’t said anything. It’s almost as though she’s drunk. I find her melodrama strange, but I don’t think too much of it as there’s a cop on the far corner, writing a ticket for someone in a brand new red Porsche. I guess she’s trying to deflect attention and appear natural, given that her photograph is all over the news.

  As we pass the couple, Jane steps slightly to one side, bumping into the young man. The force is such that they both spin around, and I find myself turning to face him and his girlfriend.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Jane says.

  “Vorsichtig. Schau, wohin du gehst,” he says. My German’s rusty, but Vorsichtig is akin to ‘careful.’

  “Oh, es tut mir so leid,” Jane says, which from the tempo and inflection she uses sounds as though she’s repeating what she’s just said, but this time in German.

  “Dumme foriegners,” the girl says as they continue on. That didn’t need any translation.

  “Are you okay?” I ask as we walk further down the street.

  “Sure. Fine.” Jane opens a leather wallet, flicks through the cash, and looks at the credit cards.

  “You stole his wallet?” I say, struggling to keep my voice down.

  “You’re so funny,” she says, slipping the wallet into her purse. “I killed a man earlier today, and you’re worried about a stolen wallet.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Well, I can hardly use my credit card at Giovanni’s, now can I?”

  I peer nervously behind us, expecting the young man to come sprinting down the street after us.

  We cross the road and walk into an open mall. Market stalls sell bratwurst and sauerkraut, homemade ginger beer, and the biggest pretzels I’ve ever seen. There’s jewelry on display, dresses for sale, wind chimes and wood carvings available for any meager offer.

  “I’ll read your future,” an old woman says, singling me out of the crowd. “Five euros to reveal all that will unfold.” Her English is rough, and I’m not sure how she’s identified me as a mark, although it’s probably because I’m the only one not dressed properly for the weather. My leather shoes and thin dress pants scream ‘foreigner.’

  “Come on,” Jane says. “Don’t you want to know your future?”

  “
No,” I say. “Seriously, who wants to know their own future?”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, then,” she says, directing me into the narrow stall.

  The old woman is wearing a floral headscarf, and a cotton dress that looks woefully inadequate, given the weather. At a guess, she’s colder and more miserable than I am. “Seat. Seat,” she says. It’s supposed to be, ‘Sit. Sit,’ but whatever. I plop down on a frozen plastic seat, feeling stupid.

  “You shuffle,” she says, pushing a deck of oversized cards across the table to me. I pick them up, looking at the ornate gothic pattern on them. I go to turn one of the cards over, but she scolds me, saying, “Nein.” Withered fingers and cracked nails push the loose card back onto the pile. “It is bad.”

  “No peeking,” Jane says, sounding far more jovial.

  I shuffle the deck, but given the size of the cards, my efforts are hardly comprehensive. If this were a poker table, I’d be laughed to scorn. I try to hand the woman the deck, but she waves me off, horrified by the notion of touching them, and points to the center of the small card table.

  “Here?” I say, trying to make light of her superstitious nature.

  “Four cards,” she says, holding up four fingers, in case I don’t understand English, I guess. She gestures at four spots in front of me. “Face down.”

  “Four cards, face down,” I repeat, raising my eyebrows at Jane. She just smiles.

  With four cards in front of me, I wait. The woman looks at the cards intently. It’s as though she’s willing them to move. Jane and I exchange glances, wondering what’s next. What began as a lark is far more serious, for the old woman, at least.

  “This one,” she says, tapping at the table in front of the third card.

  I pull the card toward me, peering at it as though I were playing blackjack in Vegas, and slowly turn it over. A man dressed in a blue tunic with red tights hangs upside down from a branch with rope wrapped around his ankles. At the bottom of the card, the title has been sketched in ornate calligraphy, written in both German and English—The Hanged Man.