Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

  When the power came back, the emergency radio frequencies broadcast only soothing music. The meeting was more sparsely attended than usual, and Chirkov realised faces had been disappearing steadily, lost to desertion or wastage. Dr Dudnikov announced that he had been unable to reach anyone on the telephone. Lyubachevsky reported that the threat of demolition had been lifted from the Spa and was unlikely to recur, though there might now prove to be unfortunate official side effects if the institution was formally believed to be a stretch of warm rubble. The kitchens had received a delivery of fresh fish, which was cause for celebration, though the head cook noted as strange the fact that many of the shipment were still flapping and even decapitation seemed not to still them. Valentina, for the hundredth time, requested specimens be secured for study and, after a vote – closer than usual, but still decisive – was disappointed. Tarkhanov’s suicide was entered into the record and the scientists paid tribute to the colleague they fervently believed had repeatedly informed on them, reciting his achievements and honours. Tulbeyev suggested a raiding party to relieve the queuing Amerikans of those goods which could be used for barter, but no one was willing to second the proposal, which sent him into a notable sulk. Finally, as was expected, Kozintsev gave an account of his day’s progress with Grigori Yefimovich. He had achieved a certain success with the arms: constructing elementary shoulder joints and nailing them to Rasputin’s stand, then layering rope-and-clay muscles which interleaved with the neck he had fashioned. The head was able to control its arms to the extent of stretching out and bunching up muscle strands in the wrists as if clenching fists which did not, as yet, exist. The Director was also pleased to report that the head almost constantly made sounds with the Jew’s harp, approximating either speech or music. As if to demonstrate the monk’s healing powers, Kozintsev’s sinus trouble had cleared up almost entirely.

  * * *

  Two days later, Tulbeyev let the Amerikans in. Chirkov did not know where the corporal got the idea; he just got up from the gun emplacement, walked across the foyer, and unbarred the doors. Chirkov did not try to stop him, distracted by efforts to jam the wrong type of belt into the machine gun. When all the bolts were loose, Tulbeyev flung the doors back and stood aside. At the front of the queue, ever since the night they had brought in Valentina’s specimens, was the officer. As he waited, his face had run, flesh slipping from his cheeks to form jowly bags around his jaw. He stepped forwards smartly, entering the foyer. Lyubachevsky woke up from his cot behind the desk and wondered aloud what was going on. Tulbeyev took a fistful of medals from the officer, and tossed them to the floor after a shrewd assessment. The officer walked purposefully, with a broken-ankled limp, towards the lifts. Next in was the woman in the pinstripe suit. Tulbeyev took her hat and perched it on his head. From the next few, the corporal harvested a silver chain identity bracelet, a woven leather belt, a pocket calculator, an old brooch. He piled the tokens behind him. Amerikans filled the foyer, wedging through the doorway in a triangle behind the officer.

  Chirkov assumed the dead would eat him and wished he had seriously tried to go to bed with Technician Sverdlova. He still had two rounds left in his revolver, which meant he could deal with an Amerikan before ensuring his own everlasting peace. There were so many to choose from and none seemed interested in him. The lift was descending and those who couldn’t get into it discovered the stairs. They were all drawn to the basement, to the Pool. Tulbeyev chortled and gasped at each new treasure, sometimes clapping the dead on the shoulders as they yielded their riches, hugging one or two of the more harmless creatures. Lyubachevsky was appalled, but did nothing. Finally, the administrator got together the gumption to issue an order: he told Chirkov to inform the Director of this development. Chirkov assumed that since Kozintsev was, as ever, working in the Pool, he would very soon be extremely aware of this development, but he snapped to and barged through the crowd anyway, choking back the instinct to apologise. The Amerikans mainly got out of his way, and he pushed to the front of the wave shuffling down the basement steps. He broke out of the pack and clattered into the Pool, yelling that the Amerikans were coming. Researchers looked up – he saw Valentina’s eyes flashing annoyance and wondered if it was not too late to ask her for sex – and the crowd edged behind Chirkov, approaching the lip of the Pool.

  He vaulted in and sloshed through the mess towards Kozintsev’s cubicle. Many partitions were down already and there was a clear path to the Director’s workspace. Valentina pouted at him, then her eyes widened as she saw the assembled legs surrounding the Pool. The Amerikans began to topple in, crushing furniture and corpses beneath them, many unable to stand once they had fallen. The hardiest of them kept on walking, swarming round and overwhelming the technicians. Cries were strangled and blood ran on the bed of the Pool. Chirkov fired wildly, winging an ear off a bearded dead man in a shabby suit, and pushed on towards Kozintsev. When he reached the centre, his first thought was that the cubicle was empty, then he saw what the Director had managed. Combining himself with his work, V.A. Kozintsev had constructed a wooden half-skeleton which fitted over his shoulders, making his own head the heart of the new body he had fashioned for Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. The head, built out to giant size with exaggerated clay and rubber muscles, wore its black wig and beard, and even had lips and patches of sprayed-on skin. The upper body was wooden and intricate, the torso of a colossus with arms to match, but sticking out at the bottom were the Director’s stick insect legs. Chirkov thought the body would not be able to support itself but, as he looked, the assemblage stood. He looked up at the caricature of Rasputin’s face. Blue eyes shone, not glass but living.

  Valentina was by his side, gasping. He put an arm round her and vowed to himself that if it were necessary she would have the bullet he had saved for himself. He smelled her perfumed hair. Together, they looked up at the holy maniac who had controlled a woman and, through her, an empire, ultimately destroying both. Rasputin looked down on them, then turned away to look at the Amerikans. They crowded round in an orderly fashion, limping pilgrims approaching a shrine. A terrible smile disfigured the crude face. An arm extended, the paddle-sized hand stretching out fingers constructed from surgical implements. The hand fell onto the forehead of the first of the Amerikans, the officer. It covered the dead face completely, fingers curling round the head. Grigori Yefimovich seemed powerful enough to crush the Amerikan’s skull, but instead he just held firm. His eyes rolled up to the chandelier, and a twanging came from inside the wood-and-clay neck, a vibrating monotone that might have been a hymn. As the noise resounded, the gripped Amerikan shook, slabs of putrid meat falling away like layers of onion-skin. At last, Rasputin pushed the creature away. The uniform gone with its flesh, it was like Valentina’s skeleton, but leaner, moister, stronger. It stood up and stretched, its infirmities gone, its ankle whole. It clenched and unclenched teeth in a joke-shop grin and leaped away, eager for meat. The next Amerikan took its place under Rasputin’s hand, and was healed too. And the next.

  THE CHILL CLUTCH OF THE UNSEEN

  IT WAS AUTUMN, kissing close to winter; late November, early December; the daytime a few dim drab moments between elongated hours of heavy, cold dark. The last of the unswept leaves were dull orange, frost-crispy under his boots. He could not feel his toes. But the other aches were all there, in his leg bones, his knuckles, his face. Your pains calling in, all present and correct, Chief Stockton, sir. Hell, any day without blood in the toilet bowl was a good one. He was so old that the boy who’d taken over his job was retired (and buried). Someone he didn’t know had sat in his old seat down at the police station for as long as most folks could remember. Someone with his name was on the highway patrol, so he supposed that the family tradition was being carried on. Stocktons had helped police this stretch of Connecticut since witch-hanging times. The family had been there for all the things worse than witches that came down the pike or stepped off the train.

  Usually, it was the train.

  Tha
t was why he kept his routine, trudging early to the railroad station and taking his chair – out on the platform in the balmy days of spring and summer, in the waiting room close to the black iron stove as winter’s shroud descended – so he could keep to his watch. He knew most folks saw him as an old-timer who liked to get out of his empty house and be among people coming and going. Plenty were willing to stop and pass the time with him, talking about TV shows he’d never watch – Ex-Flies or somesuch. The town had long-time residents he thought of as incomers, whose names he needn’t learn. Always, he kept a lazy eye out for movements. Most of the town had forgotten. Things that couldn’t be explained by light of day, it was most comfortable to tidy up and dismiss as imaginings of the night. It had been a long time since the worst of it. But he knew it wasn’t over. The things he watched out for were like him, and took the long view. They could afford to wait it out. In the end, they’d be drawn to this place, to this station, to him.

  And then…?

  ‘Mornin’?’ said the station-master’s daughter Irene, who turned everything into a question. Or was it ‘Mournin’?’

  ‘Ayup,’ he responded.

  It was and he was. No further editorial needed.

  Irene rattled the scuttle into the stove. The embers of yesterday’s fuel were buried under fresh black coal. Smoke soon curled and she dropped the lid. The fire in the station waiting room stove had been burning since before she was born, never dying overnight even when snow lay three- or four-feet deep and tears turned to frost on your face. It was a phenomenon, he supposed. One of the many tiny things about the place no one even questioned.

  Irene wore heavy boots, work jeans and a check shirt. Her hair was done in two thick rope-braids like a storybook child. She might be pretty, and he hoped someone would find out. Then again, the joke was that when she got married she’d even make ‘I do’ into a question. ‘I do?’

  He settled in his seat.

  The next stopping train was due at 7.12. A commuter crawl, picking up fellows (and ladies, these days) in suits, snaking them off to work in the city. He needn’t pay it much attention. That train started up north and collected people as it wound through the state; the rare people who ever got off were day visitors from one or two towns up the line. It was the 7.32 he needed to pay mind to, the empty train coming the other way, from the city – the last train of yesterday, sent back to the terminus so it could return mid-morning and scoop up those who didn’t need to be in the city until after the working day started, the shoppers-and-lunchers and the work-at-homes with meetings to make.

  Almost no one came in on the 7.32. But it was a bad one. It came from New York, and the city was a stage most things passed through on their way here. He wondered sometimes why they didn’t stop there, where they could hide among – how had folks once put it? – the ‘teeming millions’. Up here, no matter how subtle their ways, they’d eventually be noticed. But a giant octopus could get lost in the concrete canyons. Let alone a shroud-thin tatter which could as easily have been a tangle of discarded newspapers as what it was.

  Today, there’d be something.

  Stockton knew this, the way some old folks knew the weather. The quality of his pain changed. He’d learned to read the signs.

  Others had known, but they were gone. Their kids had never believed the yarns or had closed their minds firmly. There weren’t such things. Not any more. And especially not here. Think of what it’d mean for property values. And we’ve got too much else on our plates. There are enough real dangers to worry about, in these times of terror and disgrace, without being troubled by yesterday’s phantasms, by the outgrown nightmares of generations past.

  They weren’t fools. They were just children.

  Kids.

  ‘Coffee?’

  That genuinely was a question.

  ‘Thank you, Irene, yes.’

  She kept a percolator in the office. Her father had maintained a coffee-pot in the same manner as he kept the stove burning, continually topping up sludge built up over decades. Irene had put an end to that, carefully losing the pot and buying a new, complicated machine with her own money.

  Stockton took a gulp. He was expecting the coffee taste, but something else swarmed into his mouth.

  ‘Hazelnut and rum?’ Irene question-explained.

  To which he would have said ‘no, thank you’, but it was too late.

  Some commuting fellow brought back these mutant concoctions from a place in the city. Coffee polluted with flavours. Stockton believed potato chips should taste of salt and nothing else. He had little time for any product described as ‘French’ or with an acute accent in the brand name.

  Still, the warmth in his throat was welcome.

  And the coffee taste was still there, underneath.

  Irene left him and busied herself in the office. Stockton didn’t see her father around much any more. It occurred to him that she might have inherited the job of station-master – station-mistress? – while he was paying attention to what might be coming into town as opposed to what was happening right here. The last-but-one police chief had been a woman, and nobody seemed to mind. She’d looked like a little girl dressed up for trick or treat in the bulky padded jacket and baseball cap that passed for a uniform these days, but her watch had been quiet. He’d have liked to see how she’d have handled the run of things he and his family had coped with.

  The memories – the stories – crept unbidden into his mind.

  Late, late show names. Totemic words and symbols.

  Beast. Bat. Bandage.

  Moon. Dead. Grave.

  They didn’t even have a late, late show any more. Turn on the TV after midnight and it was all infomercials for exercise equipment.

  Twenty years back, when a bulky crate had been unloaded from the train, he had thought it was the last of them. He’d been waiting for the fourth asphalt-spreader’s boot to drop. He had known what lay inside.

  A monster. The Monster.

  The crate was delivered to Doc Stone’s place. Doc, whose medical records were hard to track down and who went by an Ellis Island name. His well-equipped basement workroom drained a power surge and put the lights out all over the county just as the thing in his crate broke loose. Doc had tried to get between the party of Stockton’s men and the thing he said was his child. Now, he lay at the bottom of the river in the embrace of a skeleton with yard-long arm bones.

  That had been the Big One. After that, the others who knew how things were around here thought it was over and drifted away or died. Only he knew it wasn’t over.

  Would never be over.

  On the late, late show, there was always next week and a sequel.

  Tune in again to Shock Theater.

  Bodies were rarely found. Fur, dust, bones. That meant nothing. There were always ways. Curses could be passed on with a bite or a legacy. Another electrical storm, a parchment translated aloud, a scientific breakthrough with unexpected consequences.

  They would be back.

  Something would be here. Soon.

  Beast. Bat. Bandage. Body.

  The casually interested thought that was the Full House. Those four were all there was, all there would be. The famous names, the face cards.

  Stockton thought of the others, the ones who had passed through or ended up. The ones who weren’t headliners.

  The Amazon Manfish, broken out of a research institute in ’56, gulping air through gills unequipped to process anything but warm water, shocked dead or comatose by a plunge through ice into Williamson’s Kill. The madman’s brain, disembodied in its jar, bubbling and flashing party lights as its mentacles kept the hump-backed surgeon in thrall, using his rheumy eyes to see and his warty hands to throttle. The roadhouse singer who exactly resembled a great-grandmother whose picture lay forgotten in the Herald archives, and whose bell-clear high notes stayed in the minds of men who found themselves ageing decades overnight. The long-nailed Chinaman with his platoon of silent servants, hatchets inside their
sleeves, and his hothouse menagerie of exotic and deadly fauna. The slithering stretch of rancid greenery which sometimes took the form of a man of muck and root and opened huge, lucid eyes in its face of filth. The quiet, violet-eyed Christian family who spoke in even monotones and kept to themselves until someone noticed that if you told one of the children something then its parents – all the way across town – suddenly knew it too. The travelling freakshow and its too-tall, too-clever ringmaster. The lights in the sky and mysterious livestock fatalities. The experiments gone wrong in neglected houses outside the town limits. The grey-faced motorcycle gang whose fingers clicked to a rockin’ beat as they tore apart the succession of ugly fast-food outlets thrown up on the site of the diner where they were ambushed and apparently wiped out in 1965, whose arrival was always prefaced by teenage death songs of the sixties coming unbidden from every radio and jukebox in town. The gentle murderer whose skull was swollen with acromegaly and whose heart pulsed only for the beautiful blind piano virtuoso whose short-tempered teachers tended to show up with their spines snapped. The extreme aesthete who could only paint masterworks if his subjects were beautiful and bloodless. The sheeted ghosts who were really scheming heirs, or vice versa. The neon-eyed swami who was always in plain view of a dozen witnesses, performing his mind-reading act, as the professors who once profaned a temple in a far-off land were struck down one by one with distinctive wavy daggers in their chests. The clever ape.