by Melanie Tem
For one thing, he saw that the darkness was not total now; a faint ring of what could only be called paler black hinted—falsely—at sunrise. This slight illumination threw rocks, snowfields, his own stumbling feet into a disorienting relief, making him wish for complete darkness again, and, because it limned the horizon all the way around, it helped not at all to find north.
He also realized suddenly that he was a step or two away from the edge of a crevasse. It wasn’t so much that he could see the crack but that he could hear some alteration in the ambient silence.
Caught between powerful eagerness and strong aversion, neither of which he could quite justify, Jay set his right boot down carefully, almost soundlessly, on the frozen ground a wide pace ahead. Stalking in the tundra was different in technique from stalking in the jungle, but the attitude, the relationship with the environment and with the prey, was the same, and something in Jay welcomed the chance to do this again. His body remembered how to move, his lungs how to breathe, his mind how to think of himself. His gloved hands were clumsy around the flashlight that ought to have been a weapon, but the single assaultive motion—shifting his weight and bringing his left foot forward, crouching, swinging the beam out and down—was practiced and still sure. He continued it down the sloping lip of the crevasse, stepping carefully, checking himself with each footfall. Going north. Going down.
He’d found the children just this way, a sliver of light on their pale, bloody faces. Barely breathing, they would have died anyway, had been about to die. After all, hadn’t they crawled off into the jungle, their bodies chewed by bullets and shrapnel, to die in peace? He’d only helped them—that had been his intention all along. And all he’d wanted for his trouble had been the taste.
At first, when the shaft of light hit something large below him, Jay thought the crevasse must not be very deep after all, which would, if true, belie what his senses had told him. So, scanning the beam back and forth and, with each pass, picking up more detail, he felt a grim sort of relief to discover that, indeed, this enormous crack in the ice and icy ground was stuffed with something. Something alive, and huge.
As he climbed and then slid down the steep incline, two surprising thoughts, apparently disparate, occurred to him: that—as with the children in the jungle pit—he’d hardly even paused to consider whether he’d go down or not, and that streams in the Brooks Range flowed north-south while their trellis-like tributaries flowed east-west, so by heading along this fissure the narrow way he had a fifty-fifty chance of still traveling north.
The air grew noticeably warmer as he descended, which was contrary to what he’d expected, and peculiarly soggy. Any trace of daylight vanished. Snow flew up at him, and darkness.
Gradually, though, he began to discern features, first only those very close to his eyes—an outcropping to steer himself against, a line left on rock by summer algae, the zipper on his own right sleeve. Now the sweep of hard snow on the other side of the crevasse came clear, and numerous footprints across it, and now the huge human body below and ahead of him. Whether his eyes were growing accustomed to the barely perceptible light or whether there was actually increased illumination from some source unknown to him, he could now clearly see a massive naked human being, supine between the sheer icy walls.
Jay wedged his feet and braced his elbows to keep from going on over the last little ridge between himself and the enormous creature, and he stared. The body, many yards across at the widest point of its belly, all but filled the fissure, stretched and bloated like many he’d seen drowned, but ruddy, almost scarlet, instead of pale. It was male; the huge erect penis, so engorged it was almost purple and looked painful, made Jay wince. Caucasian; the skin was florid, but unnaturally so. Old, probably, with hair two or three times longer than Jay was tall, white and dirty as glacial ice.
Mostly the man looked hot, and his body heat radiated in all directions. Sweat was raised uncomfortably inside Jay’s parka, and the permafrost had melted slightly so that under and alongside him oozed a steady, eerie dripping.
He crabbed along the wall of the fissure, northward. Before he’d gone very far he was overheated and exhausted, and the slippery ground under his hands and feet threatened to give way with every inch of forward progress he made.
The heat and luminescence of the gigantic swollen torso helped him keep his bearings, distorted as they were. The gelatinous hump of the belly nudged up against his flank, then receded slightly to the moraine-like expanse of the chest braided over with that icy hair from beard, moustache, scalp, brow. An arm rose and fell like ruddy dough. A hand flexed and clenched like rubber. The man’s great moist inhalations and exhalations seemed to express both passion and pain, and Jay, who had long regarded sex as a release not much more intimate than passing gas, felt a strange excitement.
As he crawled along, glancing down now and then to keep track of where he was in relation to the giant, Jay became aware of dark patches on the reddish flesh, then realized that they were fur. Suddenly shivering violently, he wondered what their purpose could be since their relative proportion was inadequate for either warmth or modesty. Oddly, his right glove rubbing his left sleeve, he found himself wishing for some of those warm little spots himself. They were moving, too, he saw—massaging, kneading. His chill passed, replaced by a wave of prickly, itching heat.
Finally he was perched directly above the vast face. At first his fascination with each individual feature—wet and bulbous nose, bulging eyes, cheeks like hillocks implanted with silicon—that he had no sense of the visage as a whole. The mouth, especially, riveted his attention: pillowy lips, tongue like a gargantuan worm, and fangs.
“Dracula,” Jay whispered.
The countenance billowed up toward him and he recognized it—distorted in color and shape, but still the face he’d been shown once in a dark old portrait, told once was his great-grandfather, and never seen again.
He lowered himself over the final drop and, as his boots hit ice and rock that didn’t give and flesh that did, he sank to his knees, bouncing slightly. Aware of a dozen pools of warmth and motion around him, he realized with a not altogether unpleasant shock that the spots of fur were heads, the dark hair of Eskimo women whose clothed bodies blended with the old man’s flesh but whose heads stood out like hairy moles. And they weren’t massaging; they were sucking. Dozens of enthusiastic slurps and swallows punctuated the arctic silence, in dizzying counterpoint to Dracula’s panting and his own.
The face had turned toward him, setting off small avalanches, and the dark head clinging to the flabby underside of the jaw squirmed off. The bloodshot eye on this side focused with some difficulty on Jay.
“I’m Jay Eric Bucher,” Jay explained, feeling ridiculous. “I think you’re my great-grandfather.”
Dracula snorted, showering Jay and heaving him onto his side. “The same could be said by countless hordes. What are you doing here?”
Not bothering to right himself, Jay mumbled into the springy flesh under him, “I—don’t know. I was just headed north.”
“Keep going, then. North.”
“I don’t think I can.” Jay despised the whine in his own voice, but it was the truth; he was incapable of continuing as far north as north went, to the end of the world. “I’ve gone as far as I can.”
“I want no company but my ladies. I came here to be alone.”
“I’m not company. I’m family.”
Dracula sighed. Jay stretched his arms and legs out over the shifting breast on which he lay. “I grew weary with both the individual and the massed lives of humanity,” Dracula declared. “The petty concerns, the tediousness of their every breath and movement. The very pulse of them became an irritant I could no longer bear.”
“I know,” Jay murmured, thinking of Rachel.
“My body refused to process any more of their fluids. The regular movement of my bowels, once redolent of massive quantities of blood and the sweat of lives cut short—the stool of a hunting beast—all but
ceased. It all collected in my gut.”
Thinking of the child with no legs, the pit full of blood and flesh, the woman with a razor blade in her vagina, Jay breathed, “I know.”
“I grew in proportion to the blood I drank, the lives I took away, the evil I caused and consumed. The ocean of blood which had always made an island of my mind now became the ocean my skin could but barely contain. I hardly eat at all anymore. I cannot stomach the thought of coming close enough to eat.”
Jay felt a touch at the small of his back and stiffened.
“My concubines can never consume enough to reduce me for more than a brief spell. But they give me momentary relief as nothing else can do.”
Jay slid over onto his back. A dark-haired, round-faced woman was smiling at him, clearly offering herself. Teeth glittered. He must have seemed willing, for she lowered her mouth to his in a long kiss that had pain in it and, quickly, blood. He struggled to free himself but only sank back into Dracula’s flesh, and the woman followed him without ever breaking contact, sucking.
Panicked, Jay flailed to look for his great-grandfather’s eyes. The Eskimo woman bit into his back and he howled. Then above a mass of flesh one gargantuan eye peered darkly, bloodshot. Like the eye of one of the children at the end of the trail of blood across glistening green leaves. Begging for relief.
When Jay buried his teeth into Dracula’s flesh, murmurs of approval rose like steam from the women around him. Murmuring. Biting. Sucking. Trying to eat his way through an ocean of flesh into an ocean of blood below.
The child’s eye stared up at him as Jay first dug for, then found, its fist-sized heart.
But when he found his way to Dracula’s heart he was amazed at the enormity of it: a heaving, impassioned, great side of beef of a heart that exploded with the first tug of Jay’s teeth.
“And so the grandson drowned in the blood of the great-grandfather’s beast of a heart,” George said, winking at the solemn Eskimo children gathered around him. “For hunger is a wonderful thing, and a terrible thing, as every Inupiak young and old must know.”
EMPTY MORNING
All evening, before she stood up and found her balance and began a slow journey across the small room made to seem smaller by multicolored smoke and by the impression of many bodies not entirely visible, before she stalked him and called out his name, she had been watching him. Through the opium haze so dense it did not drift but pulsed, pooled, coagulated, she had traced and traced again his features, his profile, the outline and contours of his head and shoulders and arms, the occasional glimmer of his hands on pipe or glass.
Having wizened considerably, he could no longer be said to be of medium weight and strongly built. His head, though, was still noble, large behind the ears in the shape currently imagined to indicate superior intelligence. His nose, when she caught it in profile, was still straight, the two ridges at his hairline still prominent above bushy brows. Dim blue and violet lights had the intended effect of obscuring the true colors of objects they illumined, but she knew his hair would be gray now rather than red. His eyes would still be large, dark blue, set wide. She had looked into his eyes before, and would do so again, this time with very different purpose.
He sat hunched over his folded hands. He leaned back, rested his head against the pillowed edge of the chair, folded his hands across his abdomen. He looked up to exchange words with someone who paused beside him, then gazed distractedly after the figure as it went on.
He lifted the thin green glass, sipped, set it down, did not drink again for a long time. Others approached him, spoke, drifted away. She watched him.
Through the fluted syrupy cylinder of her own glass, his silhouette had floated and blurred, emerging into transparency and then sinking once again into emerald murk. Having drained and replenished her drink far less often than he had, she was indeed inebriated. This establishment prided itself on serving only Swiss absinthe, the finest available; the far better and stronger liquors she had once known were now by her own choice lost to her. This was and forever would be the best she could do. With the help for which she had hunted him down, it could perhaps become enough.
An immense holiday was at hand, the turn of a century, but neither the measurement of time nor the celebration for which it provided excuse had relevance to her. She guessed, however, that it would mean something to him.
He was an old man, besotted by opium, absinthe, no doubt laudanum, no doubt memory and dread and all the other maladies she understood were associated with mortal aging. He would be weaker of body, mind, spirit than during their very brief encounter long ago and during the many years thereafter when she had followed him by reputation. But from the throbbing at the base of her belly when he glanced her way, she knew he would still kill her if he knew who she was. And she also knew he, he alone, could save her.
All but certain she recognized this man, she dared not trust what she knew, about this or anything else. “Who—is that?”
Her companion was a long-haired young man who spoke, moved, drank with such studied languor that his recurrent sexual overtures surprised her, and of whom she would soon divest herself, though not with as much dispatch as she once would have done. Mistaking the object of her query to be the girl on a nearby chaise whose hair across her face and fingers around the pipe were themselves like smoke, he uttered a name as if it were an obscenity.
“No,” she interrupted, suddenly very tired and very bored. “The man behind her, at the corner table, alone. The old man.”
“Van Helsing.” Supercilious and sure of himself, he quaffed the last of his absinthe, sighed and licked his lips, reached for her.
She pressed her fist into his chest. It was easy enough to keep him at bay without really hurting him, though under other circumstances and in another time she’d not have resisted the urge. “Abraham Van Helsing?” Her constricted throat had turned her voice husky.
“Yes.” The young man caught her fist, brought it to his mouth, grazed her knuckles with his teeth in what she supposed he thought was a daring caress.
“The physician and metaphysician?” Blood coursed hot through her arteries and veins, pounded at her throat and wrists, reddened her vision, coppered her tongue. To be so close.
“And world-famous slayer of creatures vampiric.” Thrusting her hand away from him, he stood, laughed, swayed. “What utter rubbish.” The declaration was meant to be haughty, but he lost his balance and collapsed against the next table, spilling the liquor of the patrons and attracting the attention of those charged with maintaining the decorum of this place. A large man escorted him out. Blue and violet smoke instantly oozed into the place he had lately occupied.
Testing herself, she took time finishing her drink, smoked another pipe. Since her vow—an indefinite span, as was all time for her kind, though for humans it moved and had shape in ways she could only yearn for—she had tested herself on countless occasions, and had not always passed. Now, though quavering, she did hold firm.
At last, fortified as best she could be within the condition she had set for herself (blood was thick here for the taking, blood to satiate, blood to transport, but she would not take it, she would not), she thought to approach him. The smoky girl on the chaise cried out and flung her legs wide, skirt raised. The stalwart guardian of public propriety went to her, momentarily obscuring the view.
Van Helsing was gone from his table. Panicked, she rose, then saw him slowly making his way toward the door. He was the only hope she had of turning away from the thing she had been for so many years. She had little choice but to follow him.
Sick in stomach and head, unsteady on his feet, he stumbled as he left La Fee and reentered the teeming night. Almost immediately he was seized by the sharp cough that lately beset him in the London streets. A hack driver cursed at him, the horses kicking rubble against his shins. A street urchin screeched in his general direction for tuppence, and dropped into his hand a filthy apple he knew better than to eat but absently ate anyway. H
is head ached, and he noted his hands shook more than usual.
He noted also, and not without a certain sad amusement, that the malaise and despondency which had brought him into La Fee had been deepened by his time there. This was nearly always the case, and yet he went there almost every night, a typical addictive pattern. As he steadied himself against a grimy wall before turning the first of the three corners between the opium den and his flat, he mused that, for a man of science in all its forms, he had become decidedly irrational.
Once he’d believed the turn of the century would herald the dawning of a cleaner, more scientific era. But now approaching his dodder age, and mere weeks away from that most anticipated event, he saw little evidence of it. England was at war once again, this time with the Boers. The summer had seen the death of his beloved Strauss. And if anything these streets were darker, dirtier, more chaotic. He would not be surprised if the Ripper himself returned. He would not be surprised if Dracula himself returned from the dead.
“Sir? Kind sir?” A woman hailed him from behind. Irrationally, he turned. Heavy perfumes did no more to mask her other unsavory odors than did layers of rags to disguise her gauntness and filth. Even in the near-darkness her trembling was evident. He knew her for yet another harlot desperate to feed the very habit he himself was well on his way to acquiring.
Searching a pocket and then another, he grew light-headed, and his vision blurred a sickly version of absinthe’s emerald. Needing both hands now to support himself, scraping his palms on rumpled brick, he shook his head and turned his face away from her.But she came closer and said his name. “Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.” It was not a query.
Drawing in his breath caused him to cough again. “Yes, yes, I am Van Helsing. What do you want with me?” Being thus recognized in public had become increasingly rare; he was both grateful and disappointed.