In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  “You look awfully young to be a homicide detective.”

  Jackson blinked, then took his chair. “I’m older than I look.” For some reason she laughed.

  He went on, “I was one of the youngest officers ever promoted. That was four years ago.”

  “So you’re good at what you do?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  She nodded, considering. Now that the initial shock of her was wearing off, Jackson was becoming impatient. “Do you have some information on the case? I’m frankly surprised anyone even knows about it.”

  “Yes,” she smiled slightly, “it was buried in the paper, wasn’t it? Apparently poor Mr. Black didn’t rate better. Even though he was drained of blood.”

  Now Jackson leaned back, interested. The blood draining wasn’t public knowledge. He picked up a pencil. “Just what do you know about Mr. Black?”

  She rose to go. “I’ll be back.”

  Jackson lurched from his own chair, seeing more than an answer to a case walking from his office. “Wait, I didn’t even get your name!”

  “I won’t tell you my married name, Detective Jackson, but you can call me—”

  “. . . Lucy.”

  Sometimes the name pushed its way out, torn from somewhere deep inside him even though it meant nothing now. Everything was nothing now. He existed, undead, not living at all; he went on only for the taste of the blood, the rich metallic tang of it, the sweet numbing as it filled him. He did not even bother to disguise his kills any more, as he once had. He had been clever, so clever, at erasing his marks, disposing of bodies, stealing the blood so slowly that doctors called it disease rather than murder.

  And he had excelled at murder. As a living Prince, he had been a warrior, a great defender of his country and a dispenser of terrible justice. The ground around his castle had run red with the life of his enemies, and his people had named him Dracula—Son of the Dragon. His cruelty—impalings, disembowelings, slow tortures—had become legend. And yet the pain had been inflicted only on enemies, always in the name of preserving his land.

  Wallachia . . . another name that sprang unbidden to his lips sometimes. Another name, like Lucy or Mina, that brought him comfort, a minor peace. Sometimes when he woke at sunset, the names were there and for a second he remembered what they were and had meant to him. Then time intruded again, and they were all gone, and only he was left, alone in an era when his name was a Gothic romance and his evil small.

  So it was every dusk that his madness returned.

  He no longer slept encrypted in a glamorously-ruined abbey or castle. Now his daytimes were spent in the roach-infested attic of an abandoned theater in a Western city of the New World. Once he had admired the theater’s crumbling Art Deco façade, but that had been when he still had enough mind left to admire things. Now he just knew it as the place he returned to each morning, and left each night. This evening he drifted away from his lair, his form an insubstantial mist carried by a hot Santa Ana wind.

  He did not have to search far. A freeway underpass. Three underage addicts handling hypodermic needles with trembling fingers. He waited until they fell back in heavy joy, then took his form. One of the trio saw something, a smoke that became a man, a man dressed in tattered, heavily-stained clothes, with burning eyes and sunken features. He took the first two, then turned to the third, who was so far gone he had not even noticed the deaths of his companions.

  The boy wore a Star of David about his neck.

  It was gaudy, heavy cheap metal on a thick chain, probably purchased as costume jewelry, but the power of the symbol held nonetheless. Although it was not the symbol of good from the Prince’s mortal religion, and thus held no fear for him, something about it stopped him from attacking the boy. He left him there and floated away, vaguely troubled somewhere in the back of his mind, old memories stirred up that disturbed his dreams all the next day . . .

  Lucy did come back the following night.

  Jackson had spent a sleepless day thinking about her. Trying to sleep, but impossible with her image burned into his mind’s eye. He gave into fantasies, speculations—she murdered her husband she wants a new lover she will seduce me I’ll let her yes.

  It was just after 10:00 P.M. when she arrived, as maddeningly beautiful as she’d been the night before. Once again she glided into his office, apparently having been invisible to the desk sergeant and the other homicide detectives.

  “Good evening, Detective Jackson.”

  “Hello, uh—”

  She sighed. “My name is really Lucy MacArthur—Mrs. David MacArthur, if you must know.”

  Jackson knew the name. “David MacArthur . . . some big film guy, right?”

  “Music. He runs CM Records.”

  Jackson nodded, feeling somehow rejected. Christ, that explains the money, he thought.

  “But I’d really like it if you’d call me Lucy. Please.”

  He couldn’t help but return her smile. “Okay, Lucy. Now let’s talk about Mr. Black.”

  “Fine. Surely the word vampire has been suggested in connection with this case.”

  “Surely,” Jackson responded. “I’ve heard my share of Count Dracula jokes in the last few days.”

  “Well, let me assure you, Detective, that you won’t hear any from me.”

  She considered, then rose and turned the blinds down on the glass around his office so it was hidden from view of the rest of the station. He started to rise in protest. “I don’t know what you think—”

  He was halfway out of the chair when she looked at him and said, calm yet rock-hard resolute, “Sit down.”

  Jackson was shocked to discover he was sitting, without remembering moving his legs. She was across the desk from him, watching.

  “I’m sorry, but if I try to tell you who you’re seeking—if I try to tell you who I am—you won’t believe me. I must show you.”

  “Show me . . .?”

  Then she moved so fast he didn’t see. He only knew that suddenly she was standing over him, her hands on his shoulders, her exquisite face near his—

  —and she was baring a mouthful of fangs at him.

  The rational part of Jackson knew he should doubt—plastic fangs, movie props, big deal, he’d seen better in Christopher Lee movies—but somehow he didn’t doubt. He knew they were real. But what that made her—

  She closed her mouth and stepped back from him.

  “You’re . . . why are you showing me this?” Jackson gasped.

  She reseated herself, as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t just shattered Jackson’s well-ordered, rational world. “So you’ll believe me. I need you to believe me, because what I intend to do, I can’t do alone.”

  “You’re a vampire,” he stated.

  “Yes. I’m glad you’re taking it so well.”

  Jackson saw his holstered pistol hanging nearby, but knew he could never beat her to it. “That was you who made me sit, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but please understand—I’m not here to hurt you or control you. I’m here to help.”

  “Are you dead?,” he asked, trying to sound reasonable.

  “Yes. I died in 1893.”

  “And you’ve survived all this time by . . .” He couldn’t say it, looking at her, seeing her beauty.

  “Drinking blood.”

  “I thought you said you were married, to—”

  “David. I am. He . . . accepts my condition. He provides me with servants, associates, groupies . . . I don’t kill, though. They all just think it’s some sort of . . . decadent game. Something the rich indulge in.”

  “You’ve never killed?” he asked.

  “Not since I left England. That was when I realized it wasn’t necessary.”

  “But the man we’re after . . .”

  She looked away, her gaze clouded. “Kills very matter-of-factly—or he did, once. He killed me, in fact, but now . . . he doesn’t even know any more. He’s gone quite mad, I think.”

  “And he is
. . .?”

  She took a deep breath, then exhaled it:

  “Dracula.”

  It was 1943, and the world was at war again.

  After the last conflict, he had fled back to the Carpathians, but then had been lured down again by the end of the hostilities and the beginning of a new, more elegant era. It was a time of youthful jazz, new tolerances and free design. He stayed, even after the stock market crash, which he neither understood nor was affected by. He traveled the great European cities, in the company of other royalty, like himself. He watched in mild amusement as a ridiculous little man named Hitler rose to power in Germany; his warrior’s soul admired the new German spirit of patriotic pride and discipline . . . but when the German forces began to overrun the land, he felt something curdle within him, a thick gathering of apprehension at the useless losses to come.

  For a while he went back to London, but when the bombings began he left; immortal under most circumstances, even he feared the power unleashed by the German planes.

  He was heading home, surrounded by a caravan of hired mercenaries, when he was distracted one December night in 1943. The source of the distraction was a noise, coming from the east, a sound vaguely like only one other he had heard centuries ago, when still a mortal Prince. It was, in fact, a sound he had inspired then.

  It was the sound of many voices wailing in agony.

  Intrigued, he became airborne and followed the noise. As he neared it, the air around him changed, thickened until it became almost gritty; it stank, filling him with a sickly sweet disgust. He knew that stench. And when he saw the tall chimney stacks belching fire and ashes into the night sky, he knew the source.

  He flew closer, circling unseen over a Hell he soon realized was far beyond any he had ever created.

  Trucks were pulling into a courtyard not far from the buildings—the crematoria, he knew them to be—with the flaming chimneys. The trucks were full of women. Even though it was below freezing, the women were naked. They were badly emaciated, some with open sores and wounds, others bearing bruises that attested to beatings. A few had died already. As the trucks stopped, the women—there must have been seventy-five or eighty crammed into each bed—were herded toward openings to walkways that led below ground level.

  The women were wailing.

  He watched as the trucks finished unloading, the entrances were sealed, and toxic crystals dropped down through pipes into the ground. He heard the cries of the Damned escalate, then finally fade out and cease altogether. In a few moments, the doors were opened and men in gas masks began carrying bodies out, stacking them for the short trip to the crematorium.

  He knew, of course, of the German Konzentrationslager, the “KZ”—everyone in his circles did. But they had been told these were labor camps, to detain the Jews and other “racially-inferior” peoples until they could be relocated. Now, as the truth impacted fully on him, he felt a great rage. He was furious at this squandering of a most delicate resource, the useless waste of blood. He would stop this, make them feel the wrath of a true Prince . . .

  He set foot on the frozen soil and approached the first uniformed man he saw.

  “Who is your leader here?” he asked in thickly accented German. The man drew his pistol before he fell under the power of the vampire’s hypnotic gaze. Then he just used the pistol to point.

  “The Hauptsturmfuhrer,” he mumbled.

  The Prince turned to look, and made out buildings, newly added to one of the vast crematoria. Lights flickered within, silhouettes moving in front of them.

  He became mist and drifted to the nearest door, moving unheeded past several soldiers. Down a hallway, drawn by voices to a doorway. Inside, the smell was of cleaning fluid and formaldehyde.

  Four men were there. The room was a laboratory of some sort, equipped with sinks and cabinets, stainless-steel instruments and gleaming chrome tables. Of the four men, three were in white lab coats; the fourth wore a full-length black leather overcoat, a skullshead-SS cap, and was smoking, listening as one of the other men spoke.

  “. . . extensive ulceration of the small intestine, such as is typical in the third week of typhoid fever. You will also note the swelling of the spleen—”

  There were, altogether, ten wheeled tables in the room. All held corpses.

  Five pairs of twins.

  All children, none older than eight.

  All carefully dissected. All had had their eyes removed. One wall held a board to which pairs of human eyes had been pinned, like butterflies, carefully sorted by color.

  The smoking man finished glancing over the report he held in his other hand and looked up, nodding in approval.

  “Is the report satisfactory, Hauptsturmfuhrer?”

  “Most satisfactory. Invaluable, in fact. I want these—” he gestured at the twins on the nearest table, “—packed carefully and shipped to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Mark the shipping crates ‘War Materials—Urgent’. Do you understand?”

  The men in white coats glanced at each other, then the one in charge answered, “Yes. And the rest?”

  The man in leather murmured off-handedly, “Dispose of them.” He was gazing down at the twins, bobbing on his feet excitedly.

  The men in the stained lab coats waited nervously.

  The mist in the corner was consumed.

  Madness.

  This place was madness, impure and unsimple, and he gave himself over to it. He congealed in an eyeblink and exploded through the men, hurling them aside easily. The one in leather pulled a gun and fired at him, clumsily killing one of the doctors instead. The Prince barely noticed, so intent was he on the one he held before him, the one who had relayed the “report.”

  “Why have you done this?” he snarled.

  The man shook violently, barely gasped out, “Please, we had no choice, they would kill us like our brothers if we didn’t—”

  “Your brothers?” He nodded at the dissected corpses, “These are your own people?”

  The man did not reply. The look in his eyes was his answer. In two seconds his headless body was flung aside, the Prince holding the head aloft, blood streaming down his chin.

  In five seconds the last of the white-coated doctors was dead, his throat gone.

  He rounded on the man in leather, who fired his pistol until the hammer clicked on empty chambers. There were shouts and running feet in the hallway outside, but the Prince gestured and the door slammed shut. Then he began to move toward his final victim, savoring the exquisite terror. “Before I kill you, slowly and painfully, I ask of you one question: Why do you deserve to call yourself human?”

  The man reached behind him, seeking a weapon, and the leather coat was tugged open.

  There was a cross on his chest.

  Even though it was not a true crucifix, the Iron Cross medal held enough of the symbol’s power to repel the vampire. He fell back, averting his gaze, his eyes stinging.

  The potential victim hesitated, then laughed as he sensed he was out of danger. “You—you recognized me! You saw my medals and suddenly knew who I was. Now you cower from me, like the rest of your inferior kind!”

  The Prince couldn’t face his accuser directly, but he could spit out. “How dare you—”

  “I dare,” responded the German, “because your accent marks you as a Slav, and as such second only to the Jews as a degenerate race, although I admit that you have some personal power. You will make a most interesting display for the Institute.”

  Outside, a shot sounded. The lock exploded and the door burst inwards. The Prince took the first guard through and tore his throat out.

  The Nazi watched in horrified fascination. “What are you?”

  The Prince threw the soldier’s drained body aside and stood in the doorway. “I am,” he answered, “by comparison, a very small nightmare.”

  With that his form altered, becoming a winged creature of the night, and he left the accursed place.

  Three years after the war had ended and th
e German horrors had been disclosed, he saw a picture in a newspaper of an escaped war criminal. He recognized him from that night, the blandly handsome features, the gap in the front teeth, the Cross pinned to the chest (the most ironic and perverted use of that symbol imaginable). Now the monster had a name:

  Dr. Josef Mengele.

  Mengele escaped, but the Prince, ageless and deathless, was not so fortunate. He was captured and cruelly taunted by what Mengele had unleashed at the place known as Auschwitz.

  She’d left last night, after revealing the name to him. Now she was back, and Jackson looked up without surprise from the cheap paperback novel he was reading.

  She saw the cover and smiled wryly. “Obviously you believed me.” He closed the book and gestured with it. “You know, Lucy dies in this.”

  She smiled again and sat, not in the chair but on a corner of Jackson’s desk near him, her crossed legs brushing his. “Staked through the heart. Ouch.”

  “Then you aren’t this Lucy.”

  “Oh, yes I am,” she began, “but that book . . . a ridiculous collection of half-truths, a Victorian fiction at best.”

  He waited, and after a moment she went on. “In the book I have three suitors. Very flattering, but not very true. There was only one. His name was Bram Stoker.”

  Jackson blinked in surprise. “Stoker?”

  “Yes. That night, in the crypt with that terrible old man, Van Helsing . . . Bram sent the professor outside, claiming he wanted to be alone. The professor left, Bram raised the stake—and then couldn’t do it. He was a coward, my dear Bram was. I heard him, as I lay helpless in the coffin, tell the old man that the deed was done.”

  “And Van Helsing believed him?”

  “No. I’m sure he intended to come back and finish me alone after they were done with the Count, but the Professor did not survive the encounter.”

  “Dracula killed him?”

  “He didn’t get the chance—heart attack.”

  Jackson considered, then asked, “So why did Stoker rewrite the truth so heavily?”