In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  A break in the tape, then Neumann was back: “Night two. Uh, recording starts 01:09 A.M. 6th of December 1999.”

  This time the thrashing was more pronounced, accompanied by a tapping sound, a scratching, as of a finger-nail on glass.

  “Go away,” hissed Salavaria. “Leave me be. I have atoned.”

  The scratching increased until Salavaria screamed. It did not sound like the scream of the person she had met a day previously. This was bloody and desperate, the scream of a man who was allowing the fear for his own life out of his body. There was a word too, that he gasped repeatedly, once all the fight had left him.

  Oupiere.

  There were more recordings in a similar vein, and she noticed they grew more frequent until he was having these “attacks” four or five times every night. On each occasion, he used that strange, almost beautiful word.

  Oupiere.

  She paid for her tea and stepped into the street. The light was on the wane and a bitter wind was flooding the lanes. She pulled her coat tight around her and walked toward Salavaria’s flat. Hornsey Road stretched away from her—a hemisphere of cold light and traffic. Her footsteps thickened around her as she entered the tunnel of the railway bridge. Before she’d passed through it, a second pair of footsteps were marking time with her own.

  Naim looked back and saw, about thirty feet away, a tall man in a black polo-neck sweater. He was wearing sunglasses with tiny round lenses. Was Neumann having her followed?

  In his hand he was carrying a bundle of papers. A black stain soiled the bottom of the package, where he was holding it. He seemed to draw the dark around him, as if he were a magnet for its shade. A thin cloud fussed about his head. It took her a moment to realize that they were flies. She picked up her pace, startled by the panic that had burst in her gut. She fished the keys from her pocket and crossed the road, looking back again when she had reached the opposite curb. He had not emerged. She ran.

  At the communal door, she pressed all the entry buttons until someone buzzed her in. She slammed it behind her before she had a chance to worry about disturbing the other occupants. She had intended to be a little more cloak and dagger. Flicking on the timer-light, she took the stairs two at a time, trying to force her breathing to regulate itself. The light died. Cursing, she edged along the worn carpet until she found another switch. How would she get in? Surely he would not leave a key under the rug for her. She had checked before the nonsense of the idea could take hold. But above the architrave she found what she was looking for. When the light had died a second time, she blindly made her way into Salavaria’s flat.

  She stumbled to the window and looked down into the street. The man was there—it was difficult to make him out in the darkness. His face seemed smudged, a thoughtless thumb on a charcoal sketch. She watched as his fingers dipped into his package and pulled something black and wet from it. She saw him duck to catch the morsel between his lips. When he went for a second mouthful, he paused and looked up at the window. A chunk of his supper slipped between his fingers and spattered the pavement by his feet.

  “Christ,” she said, and moved away.

  She felt for a lamp, brushed a hand against its shade, and turned it on. Salavaria’s flat leaped back from her. The living room was tidy, if a little dust-coated. She wondered if she should find a telephone and call the police but reasoned that she was being paranoid and that explaining her presence in a flat that was not hers seemed just too much like hard work at the moment.

  There were bookshelves containing a selection of modern novels and 19th-century classics. There were vases containing powdery flowers. A coffee table was scattered with magazines a year old. Naim could not ignore the smell. It was not unpleasant, and if she had not known of Salavaria’s habits, she might not have immediately guessed its origin.

  She followed the slightly stale, slightly acrid odor to the bathroom where she found a sheaf of human skins laid out in the tub. They were yellowish and brittle, like unscrolled papyrus. In fact, on closer inspection, the simile bore additional fruit: brown ink traveled the grain of the skin, skirting a mole here, a scar there, a tattoo. Naim found it hard to work out what the words said. Not only were they in a foreign language, but the ink had dried and leeched into the skin, spoiling its sense. At intervals, however, she recognized a pattern. Or rather, a letter, a capital dotted around the text with curious frequency.

  D.

  Behind her, in the corner, shinbones were stacked like so much firewood. There was a human head on top of the fridge, a note to buy more matches pinned to its desiccated cheek. She moved slowly, through the dead center of the room, anxious not to touch anything. Her breath felt extremely cold in her lungs. She saw a painting of a marigold on the wall, a photograph of Salavaria in the driving seat of a sports car.

  There was a small anteroom just off the corridor that joined the kitchen to the bathroom. Naim pushed the door back and saw the bureau Salavaria had referred to. It was empty apart from a journal, wrapped in its blue leather binding. To her left, a stack of papers—real ones—were weighted down by a lump of something she was not too keen to study. She elbowed it out of the way and sat on the high-backed wooden chair which was a little too tall for the desk. It creaked massively. She pushed her focus into the densely knitted text, hoping to forget the cloying horrors around her for the revelations she needed so that she could leave. She had had a bellyful of Salavaria’s insanity.

  It was hard to read, but the first entry appeared to be dated some time in the last century, 18—what? 97, was it? She squinted at the text, running her finger under the elaborately scrawled words. Here and there, passages stood out, not least because somebody—presumably Salavaria—had underlined them.

  13th November, 18—

  We have been on the road for some ten or eleven days now. This winter wind bites at us with a passion, constantly reminding us of the dead, cold thing we are fleeing. At nights we huddle together, reassuring each other that he is gone forever, but we never can quite believe it. Pyotr keeps watch while I feed Alexander and help him to sleep. This evening, he asked me why Ubek was not with us. I have dreaded such a moment. For a while I could not answer. I told him, eventually, that she had gone to a better place and had died to save us. The image of her snapped apart in Draoul’s hands like so much kindling will stay with me till judgment day. That we had a part in his banishment from this world is a blessing, yet no amount of pain could be too great for that leech, that evil beast. Dear Ubek.

  17th (?) November, 18—

  A bitter night in the Carpathian mountains. Pyotr has terrible frostbite and raves in his sleep about the night’s face. How it folds around him and tries to suck the very life from his lungs. We are having trouble with wolves. They are growing bolder, despite the fires we burn each dusk. Horrible animals, they come up to the very edge of the firelight and growl at us. Their eyes seem almost human. Sometimes they foam at the jaws, this light turning their spittle almost red. Alexander has gone down with a fever. He says he can sometimes see Ubek in the trees, smiling at him and asking him to come and play with her. The sooner we are away from these ill-charmed heights, the better. I long for our home, where we could sit and look across at the forests at night, at the lanterns that shone in the fields. So much ash, now. All ash.

  21st November, 18—

  Pyotr has rallied. The weather has eased off as we come out of the foothills and approach Sibiu. It seems, watching the sunrise, as if the worst is behind us. I can almost believe that tomorrow, as Pyotr promises, we will be with his uncle and safe from the nightmare of this past six months. We pray that Professor Van Helsing is similarly protected. And yet . . . Draoul seems as close as the sudden touch in the night from the dead winds blowing down from the north. I pray for us. I pray for our future families. God save us all.

  Naim blinked and sat up. The bones in her back crackled with effort. A light headache had nestled behind her eyes. Draoul, she thought. Who the fuck is Draoul? The chill of Salavaria
’s room settled into her. She pulled her cardigan more closely around her shoulders and pushed away from the desk. At the window, she pulled the blinds apart minutely but the stranger was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes were playing tricks; a smear of darkness shimmered where he had stood. Playing safe, she rang for a cab, then tidied up Salavaria’s effects, carefully wiping away her presence with a balled-up tissue. She did not want to explain her visit to the police when they eventually grew wise to this place.

  A minute waiting was a minute too long for her. She grabbed her bag and strode to the door. She would hang around in the corridor downstairs. The smell of corpses was a bitter flood in her nostrils. Naim opened the door as he was unhinging his immense mouth: packed with teeth, drifting into the dark of his gullet like those of a shark. She gasped, stepped backwards. Blinked. He was gone.

  She ran across the road, barely checking to see that she had shut the door behind her. A light rain had begun. It worried her cheek like the fingers of a playful child. In the cab she gabbled her address and sank back into her seat. The bunched newspaper the stranger had been eating from fluttered on the pavement. She tried to convince herself that it was the rain spoiling her view that made its contents look like the head of a dog.

  Her own flat smelled so conversely clean it was as arresting as the detergent reek of a hospital. Naim bolted the door behind her and sighed, angry that she felt so wired. She shrugged her coat off and hung it up, tossed her bag on to the sofa. In her lounge, she poured a brandy and listened to her messages. Professor Neumann, following-up to see if her visit was enjoyable, ha ha, and see you next week. Oh and what, by the way, did Salavaria mean when he mentioned a bureau? Her mother, checking that everything was all right and what was she planning for the millennium party? Professor Neumann again, asking if she would consider seeing him on a social basis.

  She sighed and took her drink into the bathroom where she drew a hot bath. It was too quiet once she had turned off the taps, so she slipped into the candlelit lounge and put a record on the turntable. It did not matter what it was. As she peeled away her clothing, she had to close her eyes.

  Naim allowed herself to become totally submerged. When her heartbeat became too loud in her ears, she surfaced.

  Reached for the razor blades lined up by the tap. Ran a finger over yesterday’s scars that ran along her arm like chevrons on a warning sign.

  Her veins had grown plump in the heat. They throbbed, bluish, in time to the piano music’s pulse. She pressed the edge of a blade against her wrist and scored lightly until a red bead bubbled there. Now the other wrist. Now the sensitive flesh around her nipples. She thought of Salavaria’s hungry mouth positioned above a hot jet of blood from her carved forearms. She jabbed the razor into her belly three, four, five times, just nicking the skin.

  Breathless, she flung the blade away before her compulsion for deeper wounding went too far. She bathed her cuts, weeping at the lack of control she exerted over her habit and the fear that one day she might find some. Her past welled within her and it was all she could do to stop herself reaching for the Gillette again.

  The memory of boys spilling a different fluid over the pulse points of her body, no less vital, made her feel sick. She told herself then that she was taking their money for her betterment; this was how survival among the dregs was secured. You had to eke it out. You had to earn the right to do it.

  Naim remembered the empty nights sitting in the corner of a squat, hoping that the last candle would not die out before morning. Tending to David in the dark was more awful than being able to see his face as it morphed through a gamut of agonized expressions. She had been mortified at the irony of her situation; offering up her body to shadowy men who might have been carrying the very disease that was ruining her boyfriend.

  Sometimes she would try to sing to him while she bathed his sorry flesh, running a flannel around the ugly statements made by Karposi’s sarcoma. She massaged him when constipation made him cry. She cleaned him during startling bouts of diarrhea and then she would inspect what he produced. She brought him oranges and pasta, bread and pulses. He needed bulk, he needed vitamins. They seemed to make no difference.

  Toward the end, she remembered raising his head in her hand to give him a sip of water. The shock of his lightness had been subsumed by the fall-out of hair the maneuver had caused.

  That night she had gone out, fucked three men and bought enough downers with her earnings to finish him off while giving her the option to follow if she were up to it. The night she decided upon, almost a week later, she sat and watched him guttering beneath the cone of light from a candle she had stolen from a hardware shop. It seemed he would simply wink out while she waited; the shock of her passiveness in his death forced her hand. She wadded eight diazepam capsules between his lips and fed him some water. He choked a little—thrush had turned his gullet into a cheesy mush but he took the pills down. He did not say anything. He did not look at her. He died.

  Naim dried herself, her eyes following the diminishing smears of mist on the mirror. Before long, the steam had retreated to a tiny disc that eclipsed her reflected center. It ceased to dwindle.

  After all that, it had been easy, back then, to drag herself out of her marginalized existence. She had spent some time evaluating the scant number of skills she possessed and threw herself into a journalism course funded by prostitution. She could write, and she would never be stared down by any interviewee, not after what she had seen. She would never be cowed.

  Until Salavaria, that was.

  She made tea and carried the cup into the living room where she sat in the dark by the open window, watching the people in the flats opposite. They too seemed slothful, deracinated, as if trundling from room to room might expose the purpose that was missing from their lives and provide an escape.

  A storm worried the horizon. As she watched, its thickness blotted out Canary Wharf’s pulse. Lightning forked above the city like cracks in the night. Its enthusiasm failed to muster anything so energetic from her; rather, it only served to make her feel even more exhausted, as if it were sucking the life from her.

  Naim made it to the bed as a clap of thunder caromed overhead. Who the hell was Draoul? she thought. Jesus. What a day.

  She slept fitfully and dreamed of a swarm of lazy, bloated flies invading her room. Some settled nervously on her wounds and fed there. She imagined something larger flitting outside the window. She felt a sensation drift into her, as of a time she and a friend had entered a restaurant late one Friday night. They had been sober, everyone around was drunk: she had been unnerved by the oppressive force of the hunger in the room, as if alcohol had stripped away any social niceties to reveal the animal lust beneath.

  The flies, fattened, lifted like a black-beaded curtain and droned away. She saw them coalesce beyond the window where her dream figure hovered. He turned and favored her with a shocking smile and she saw it was the stranger she had encountered outside Salavaria’s flat.

  “Our time will come.” He enunciated each word with relish. Although they were separated by glass, she heard every word. “I return with the death of the century.”

  Thin sexual warmth spread through her groin and she rose through layers of sleep until the room swayed unpleasantly before her sticky eyes. She padded to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, confused and upset by the directionless need of her sex. The cuts itched furiously.

  Back in her bedroom, she stood by the window and watched the now-clear city lights glisten after the storm. The city seemed fresh, almost alien to her. Newly scrubbed, laid bare for the gradual soiling its inhabitants would be party to. The roads were veins to be furred by traffic and smog. She scratched her wrists and when the sun came up, she was too horrified by its color to notice that she had made herself bleed.

  That next day she had intended to write up her notes and fax a first draft of her interview with “The Leech” to the magazine. She could not bring herself to sit in front of the laptop and it was
not merely because she felt like shit, although that had a large bearing on the situation. No, it was because, monster that he was, she felt some sympathy toward Salavaria. She did not want to go down the path her editor had outlined for her: depicting a blood-lusting fiend going even more crazy in his bedlam. She did not want to write about him at all. She just wanted to talk.

  By late afternoon she was decided. Naim collected her bag and pulled yesterday’s sweater over her arms, wincing when the fabric drew across the tender incisions. Her breasts sang with pain where she had criss-crossed them with the blade; her belly looked like it had been shot with pellets.

  She drove north through the city; it took some time. Banners and lights were being erected along the main roads in preparation for the millennial party, now—she noted with a jolt—only two days away. A pang of sadness drew her eyes to her bare ring finger. Angrily she stabbed at the buttons of her radio until she found some jazz. It helped her to relax. It helped her to cope with the combination of the abject and banal that confronted her whenever she went to see Salavaria.

  “When I was a child in Bitcse,” he’d told her. “There was a . . . a problem. Children in the village, and in the surrounding villages, began to die. They were discovered in shallow graves, covered in punctures. Drained of blood. Some of the heads had been removed, wrenched away, like someone twisting off the cap on a beer bottle.”

  The absence of sensationalism from his voice only made the telling of the story worse, and more compelling. She drove with his Eastern inflections coursing deliciously through her mind like red wine.

  By the time she reached the prison, it was getting dark and the storm was expanding across the night. Summer had bitten so deeply into the country that it seemed that anything other than sunshine might never again happen. Black fists of cloud thrust over the countryside. She ran to the door and was allowed in.