City Under the Moon

by Sterbakov, Hugh

  Inside the mausoleum, there were three marble statues of knights bearing the Wallachia coat of arms. They were kneeling before a warrior king, whose prideful gaze was locked on the crypt’s lid, a marble slab unmarked but for one word carved across its center: DOMN, Romanian for Dominus, the Latin title for lord or master.

  On the base of the king’s statue, one word was inscribed: Întemeietorul. “The founder.”

  The founder?

  Basarab I of Wallachia! The founder of the House of Basarab!

  “You guys,” Lon stammered. “You guys—this crypt—this castle, you have no idea what this is!”

  Ilecko threw a glare at Lon to dampen his enthusiasm.

  “Well, what is it?” Tildascow asked, pulling cobwebs from her hair.

  “That,” he said, referring to the king, “is Basarab I. He’s known as ‘the founder’ because he led a revolution against Hungary and established independent Wallachia, which was basically the beginning of Romania. This was in the 1330s. His family was known as the House of Basarab. They ruled Wallachia for a hundred years, but they had all sorts of power struggles until, in 1430-something, the family divided into two rival factions, the Dăneşti and the Drăculeşti.”

  Lon hit that last word hard. He paused for a reaction, but all he got was a confused squint from Mantle.

  “Drăculeşti,” he repeated. “I’m sure that name rings a bell.”

  He’d lost Tildascow’s attention. She had gotten into some kind of cockfight with Ilecko over who was going to lift the crypt’s heavy lid. “Too heavy,” he muttered when she crouched to help him. Then she hefted it on her own, leaving Ilecko almost too surprised to assist.

  “The House of Drăculeşti,” Lon urged, “was ruled by Vlad II. Vlad Dracul.”

  He could hear the steam engines in their brains, just about to go choo—

  “Dracula?” Mantle trilled.

  “Exactly! Vlad was given the surname Dracul from the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, the King of Hungary, upon his induction as a knight of the Order of the Dragon. The coat of arms on the monument outside represents the Seal of the Order of the Dragon! The original version of it has been lost for centuries, but that fits the description—that must be it.”

  “What is it?” Tildascow snapped as she and Ilecko dropped the lid.

  “This is the long-lost tomb of the House of Drăculeşti! If what’s down there is what I think—“

  “We came to Transylvania looking for werewolves and you brought us to the tomb of Dracula?” Tildascow directed her question at Ilecko.

  “Not necessarily,” Lon said. “Vlad Dracul was actually the father of the legendary Vlad III, or Vlad Ţepeş, also known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula, the inspiration for the novel. Vlad Dracula’s body has been lost for five hundred years, it couldn’t possibly…” Lon trailed off, lost in thought.

  Mantle filled the silence. “So this is Dracula’s dad’s house?”

  “Lon?” Tildascow jarred him.

  “Yes,” he responded. “Dracul means ‘dragon’ in English and Dracula means ‘son of the dragon.‘“

  “’Devil in English,” Ilecko added pointedly. “’Son of the devil.’”

  “It means both. It comes from the Latin word draco.”

  Tildascow looked to Ilecko for a verdict. He shook his head, dismissing the topic as distasteful.

  “Are there vampires down there?” Mantle whispered.

  Beethoven nudged him to be quiet.

  Tildascow was growing impatient. “How does this connect to Demetrius Valenkov?”

  “I don’t know. But I think I know what this castle is. During Vlad Dracul’s reign, Wallachia was immersed in wars and shifting alliances with the Ottomans and Hungary. His marriage to Princess Cneaja of Moldava was a political arrangement. But he also had a concubine, a mysterious woman of legendary beauty known only as Călţuna. Some say she was Vlad’s true love.

  “According to records, Călţuna later became a nun. But, I mean, come on—what sense does that make? How do you go from being the ruler’s mistress—and mother of his children—to entering a convent? Right? I mean, these were ruthless warlords; they didn’t divorce amicably. When it was time for a change, the women became dead.”

  “Go on,” Tildascow muttered, barely listening. She was crouched at the top of the crypt’s stairs, scanning with her flashlight.

  Ilecko stepped past her and descended into the chamber. Lon wanted to follow, but Tildascow stopped him with a raised hand.

  “Well,” Lon continued, collecting his thoughts, “some theorists, including myself, believe that Călţuna was Vlad’s true love, and she was spirited away when the family’s wars became too dangerous, along with their secret daughter. This would have been Dracula’s half-sister. The hope was that one day she would reunite the House of Basarab. In the meantime, Vlad had a secret fortress constructed for her protection.”

  Lon paused for dramatic effect, but it went unnoticed.

  “So this must be it,” he exclaimed. “This is the secret Drăculeşti fortress!”

  “So—so are they vampires?” Mantle squeaked.

  “I’m going down,” Tildascow said to Beethoven.

  “We’re behind,” he sighed.

  Lon was hardly finished. “And there was other evidence to suggest that a secret castle existed. Strange routes taken by Vlad’s armies. Children of the House of Drăculeşti disappearing, and later nobles bearing the Basarab coat of arms, but appearing nowhere in the… oh wow.“

  The vault stretched the entire length of the castle’s rear courtyard, far bigger than suggested by the mausoleum above. Something like forty golden sarcophagi were arranged in uneven rows, with their feet pointing toward the pièce de résistance at the far end of the chamber: a massive golden statue of a dragon, sculpted with hidden stanchions so that he appeared to be flying. His brilliant wings were spread forward and his claws outstretched.

  As the others dillydallied, Lon made a beeline for the dragon.

  “Wait,” Tildascow may have said.

  The dragon was keeping vigilance over a bejeweled paterfamilias tomb. Lon’s flashlight found an inscription on the base: “Mircea cel Bătrân.”

  “You guys,” he sputtered. “Holy shit, you guys. I was right! This is Mircea the Elder! He was the founder of the House of Drăculeşti. Vlad Dracul’s father, Dracula’s grandfather.” He skulked between the other sarcophagi, whipping his light across their nameplates.

  Tildascow dusted off the name on a coffin close to the center of the back row: “Valentina Silviasi,” she read aloud. “So this is the entire family—“

  “This is it!” Lon shouted, kneeling before the coffin closest to the dragon’s left wing. His heart raced as he brushed dust from the marble carving at the base of the casket, choking back excitement and disbelief.

  Vlad III.

  “It’s the long-lost tomb of Vlad the Impaler! It’s been missing for five hundred years!” Lon gasped. “Guys. This is the tomb of Dracula.”

  Tildascow looked to Ilecko for an explanation.

  “But he ain’t no vampire!” Mantle wailed. “Right?”

  “Do not jump to conclusions.” Ilecko called from the far side of the chamber, where he was scanning nameplates of the more recently deceased.

  Lon had spent countless hours studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its inspirations, especially the legends of the Order of the Dragon and the true Vlad Dracula. And now here he was, kneeling before one of the Holy Grails of occult lore.

  “He was inducted into the Order of the Dragon at the age of five, educated by the most brilliant scholars of the day, bred to be a king. Then Wallachia came under the oppression of the Ottomans, and his father willingly donated him as a hostage to ensure their cooperation. Can you imagine that? His father just handed him over to be a slave!

  “His teen years were spent as a slave in Turkish dungeons. The fools thought they had brainwashed him. So when Wallachia’s royal families rebelled against his
father and killed him, the Ottomans invaded and put Vlad on the throne, thinking he would be an ally. But Wallachia was too weak to survive the constant upheavals, so he fled. It took him ten years and several false promises, but he finally amassed his own army and returned to conquer and reclaim his beloved Wallachia.

  “On Easter Sunday in 1457, Vlad Dracula invited everyone in the Wallachian upper class to a grand celebration feast in the great hall of Bran Castle in Târgovişte. That’s really when the fun began. He took five hundred of the richest, most arrogant socialites and put them on blunt stakes, so they slowly impaled themselves with their own body weight. It was an excruciating death, taking hours, even days. Those he didn’t kill, he marched forty miles north and put them to work. There they worked, with no rest, until they died.”

  “Sheezus,” Jaguar muttered.

  “Oh, no, he was just warming up. From there, he turned on the Transylvania Saxons, who were in league with the Wallachs. His army took the city of Braşov and he ate dinner while he watched the boyars slowly die on their stakes. And then—then he turned on the Ottomans, and that’s where things really got sick. He went to Bulgaria and spent two weeks murdering twenty-three thousand men, women, and children.

  “So then the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed II, amassed a huge army—we’re talking two hundred and fifty thousand men—and set out to destroy Vlad once and for all.

  “Vlad’s army was outnumbered more than ten to one, and a lot of them were women and children and Gypsy slaves. But Vlad was a brilliant strategist. As the Ottoman army marched, he crept up on them in the middle of the night for sneak attacks, and he poisoned their water and paid diseased men to infiltrate their ranks. It was immaculate, unprecedented psychological warfare, and he totally demoralized them.

  “So finally, the Ottoman army arrived outside the capital of Târgovişte, determined to storm the city and put Vlad’s head on a stake. And what did they find?”

  Lon went into spooky tone. “Twenty. Thousand. Men. Impaled. Turkish prisoners. The sultan’s own men. The stakes surrounded the whole city. A forest of bodies. Birds picking at their eyes, maggots writhing under their skin, worms falling out of their mouths. Rotting flesh as far as the eye could see, a heinous stench of death… and the only sound was their loose flesh dangling in the wind. So what did the Ottomans do?”

  Jaguar muttered, “Threw the fuck up is what they—”

  “They turned around. They went home. Even though they way outnumbered Vlad, they couldn’t walk through his army of the dead.”

  “Okay, Lon,” Tildascow said. She had crossed the vault to examine the dragon up close. “Enough with the dramatics.”

  “That’s what inspired the legend of Count Dracula, the vampire who could turn the dead against their own.” Lon ran his fingers along a golden etching of the Order of the Dragon symbol on the top of Vlad’s coffin. “Scholars have wondered for centuries where his remains ended up. They were thought to be in a church, but when it was excavated all they found were animal bones.”

  Mantle’s jittery eyes swept from one person to the next. Even stoic Beethoven had forgotten to swallow.

  “Okay, the history lesson is fun,” said Tildascow. “But how is this going to help us find Valenkov now?”

  Ilecko was still examining the sarcophagi toward the back.

  Lon continued admiring Vlad Dracula’s golden coffin, with its intricate carvings and embedded jewels. He ran his hand around the—

  Wait a sec.

  “There’s no lock,” he cried.

  “What?” Tildascow snapped, as if she’d just woken up.

  “No lock,” Lon repeated. “That’s… oh man.” He turned to the others with a delicious grin. “Do you think they did that because they thought he could come and go?”

  “Come and go what?” Mantle barked.

  The lid was hefty, but he could get it up. It unsealed with a throaty creak.

  “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” Jaguar shouted. “DON’T OPEN IT!”

  All weapons whipped toward Lon. He squinted, waiting for the shots. When they didn’t come, he spoke with a quivering voice. “Relax.”

  “IS HE A VAMPIRE?” Mantle cried.

  “Rein it in, fuckchops!” Beethoven yelled at his men.

  “No. He’s not a vampire.” Lon looked inside the coffin. “Well, actually, we’ll never know if he was. Vampires die when they’re beheaded and Vlad’s head was put on a stake in Constantinople. This is just his body. Was just his body. Wanna see?”

  The box was dusty with grey ash and bone fragments loosely mixed with tatters of moldy fabric. An ancient sword, crusted and brittle, lay in the center of the remains.

  “So they’re not vampires,” Mantle reiterated for safety.

  “They are not vampires.” Ilecko said.

  “Are they werewolves?” Tildascow demanded.

  It was an excellent question, one that sent Lon’s mind reeling. The occult scholar within him could only dream of a tangible link between quintessential werewolf and vampire lore, but what did he really have? Vlad’s assault on the Ottomans certainly could have inspired Valenkov to take his fight to America, but was there a more concrete connection?

  Where did the myths end and reality begin?

  Nevertheless… if the Valenkovs, the cursed family of werewolves, were descendants of Vlad Dracula, the preeminent inspiration for vampires…

  How could that be a coincidence?

  Ilecko had found what he was looking for, a modern coffin near the very back of the vault. He slid its locking bolt and lifted the lid, causing the frayed soldiers to flinch again. Lon closed Vlad Dracula’s sarcophagus and hurried to Ilecko’s side.

  The box let loose a whiff of rotting cheese—a very familiar smell in this castle. This was a much fresher corpse. It had been laid in a ceremonial cape coat of black and burgundy, with a bejeweled golden cross in its clasped hands. Its flesh had putrefied into a thin amber wax, leaving a sunken grin on its face. Little writhing insects had taken up inside the empty eye sockets.

  “Who is this?” Tildascow asked.

  Lon stepped back and found the nameplate engraving. “Zaharius Valenkov,” he read. “Demetrius’ father.”

  Ilecko directed Tildascow to take the lid as he reached into his jacket’s pocket. He produced a weathered rawhide pouch, grimy with stains of dirt and blood. From his other pocket, he took the soil he’d scooped from the courtyard, and put it into the pouch.

  “What are you doing?” Lon asked. Of course no answer.

  Ilecko reached into the coffin and used two fingers to swab the waxy flesh from beneath Valenkov’s collar. The soldiers grimaced.

  “Oh, what are you doing?” Lon cried.

  He wiped the pulp into the bag, intermingling it with the soil.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  He stepped back. Tildascow closed the coffin.

  “What’s that going to do?”

  Ilecko’s eyes were heavy with dark contemplation as he pulled the pouch’s catgut drawstring. It was a familiar ceremony for him, and a sickening one at that. He held the bag tight, squeezing the contents together.

  “Please tell me?”

  After a long, pensive moment, he raised his gaze to Lon.

  “Your men will provide more of their rations for my horses.”

  “Uh… um, of course. Sure.” Lon looked to Tildascow, who agreed.

  “Very well,” Ilecko said. “Let’s go to America.”

  PART SIX

  One

  January 2

  Around 3 a.m.

  William Charles Weston had bid a lonely goodnight to his wife and kissed the unrecognizable teenagers who were once his baby daughters. And then he had retreated into his office, sat down at his desk, and contemplated killing a million Americans.

  In the early days of August, 1945, Harry S. Truman sat here and considered the use of atomic weapons against Japan. On “Black Saturday,” October 27th, 1962, John F. Kennedy sat here as the nation crept to
the very brink of nuclear war. And on the evening of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush sat here and addressed the terrified people of the United States.

  The Resolute desk in the Oval Office had been gifted by Queen Victoria in 1880. It was a battery of strength, but whatever wisdom it’d absorbed remained frustratingly silent within its timbers. It was a partner’s desk, but it was no partner.

  The grandfather clock chimed three times. Weston put down the shot of whiskey he’d been nursing for… well, he couldn’t remember how long.

  A military action file stared back at him.

  (TS-WOLFSBANE) Manhattan Epidemic Cleanse (TS-WOLFSBANE)

  Again, he opened the file.

  Biological agent M7949, anti-personnel biological weapon also known as “BLUSHBED,” Staphylococcus unclassified 241, or Sorcerer. Causes rapid infection and lethal flesh-eating disease.

  Discovered in 1998 in an underground laboratory seized in the Sar-e Pol province in Afghanistan, likely developed by the Taliban with the help of rogue scientists from Germany and the former Soviet Union.

  It will be deployed via CBU-191 cluster missiles, which explode high above the city and release tennis ball-sized sprinklers, AD24 smart bomblets, also called RAPiDS (Robotic Aerosol Pressurized Deployment Systems).

  Direct exposure to the weapon will result in almost instantaneous death. Filtration systems will carry the bacteria into buildings, cars, or the subway. Anyone outside of an airtight seal would be infected within 24 hours.

  The bacteria will die in the water, so wind distribution will not be an issue. On land, the bacteria will become extinct in two to four weeks. Decay will be monitored by the CDC; cleanup coordinated by USAMRIID. Operatives covered in antibacterial gel will collect the bomblets via GPS guidance.

  The victims’ clothes and bones will be collected, brought to ad hoc dispensaries, and disposed of in vats of acid. No efforts will be made to identify individual victims. Everyone on the island will be presumed dead.

  And then what? Do they just hang a vacancy sign on Manhattan?

  Another rap came at the door, so the first wasn’t his imagination. He closed the file and stretched his eyes. “Come in.”