by Simon Hawke
With Rizzo, as with Ransome, it was a different matter. No trappings of vampiric folklore for them. There was no point to it. They were the first pawns
taken in a far more intricate, and for Drakov, much more personal game. Ransome
was already infected with the vampire DNA and brainwashed through the medium of cybernetic programming to function as Drakov's agent. Rizzo would be next. Through them, Drakov planned to attack the temporal agents and, if he was successful, they would each become infected with a frightening disease.
"I would love to see the expression on my father's face when he realizes that I've struck back at him through his finest agents," said Drakov. "I will have disrupted the timestream irreparably and, at the same time, I will have shown them all the ultimate folly of their conceit, their insufferable arrogance in flouting the laws of nature."
"And when you have done this," said the vampire hesitantly, "what will become of us, of Janos and myself?"
"What do you mean?" said Drakov, frowning.
"It is a question I never dared to ask before," said Vlad "hut I feel that I must ask it now. Janos and I have talked of this and it is a matter of great concern to us. All our lives,we have been prepared for this one moment and now it is at hand. What shall become of us when it is finished? What are we to do? You now have Hesketh, Ransome and this man, Rizzo. Soon you will have others. You will have no further need of us."
Drakov put his hand on the vampire's shoulder. "You and Janos are like my children," he said. "You are my firstborn, Volodya. Did you think I would abandon you?"
"I did not know what to think," the vampire said. "I have always known that you gave me life for a purpose and I have always wondered what would become of my life once that purpose was fulfilled."
"It will become your own," said Drakov. "You will be able to go anywhere you please, choose any time you wish, pick any identity you like. I will see to it that both you and Janos are well provided for."
"And we shall be able to live as normal people do?" said Dracula.
"As normal people? What do you mean?" said Drakov. "The craving for blood," said Dracula. "The change Janos experiences every month. You will remove these?"
"Remove them?" said Drakov. "Don't be absurd! How can I remove them?"
"But ... you have made us as we are," the vampire said.
"And you think I have the power to turn you hack into ordinary men?" said Drakov. He chuckled, then shook his head. "Volodya, you disappoint me. Have you learned nothing in all these years? You can never be ordinary. I have made you extraordinary! You are a predator! A superior being! The first of a new race! You are stronger than they arc, mom intelligent, quicker and with a far greater life-span. You are a wolf among !sheep. How can you even entertain the thought of being like other men? Whatever gave you this ridiculous idea?"
"Wherever we may go and whatever we may do, we shall always be hunted," said the vampire. "We shall be hated and misunderstood . . . indeed, how can we even hope for their understanding when our very nature compels us to prey upon them? You taught us to kill them, so that we could avoid creating others like ourselves before the time was ripe, but now that the time has come, where will it end? Now that you want us to create others like ourselves, will there come a time when there are no more humans, only hominoids like us? Where shall we turn for sustenance then? We shall have to kill each other, feed on our own kind. What will happen then? What will become of us'?"
"You have intelligence," said Drakov impatiently. "Use it. It will be up to you to control your population. I have shown you how. Besides, even if you were to fail in that, it would take many generations before you would have totally exhausted your food supply. Humans breed quickly and they will always be a dangerous prey. I have not made you invulnerable. Unlike the Dracula of legend, you are not immortal. Although your life-span is far greater than that of any ordinary human, you can be killed far more easily than the vampire of folklore. In order to survive, you and your kind will have to become canny hunters, keen competitors. Your greatest weapon will be that humans shall find it impossible to believe in your existence."
Drakov snorted with derision. "The fools have always lacked imagination. A few short centuries from now, they will have killed off all their predators and eliminated all the diseases which controlled their population, allowing themselves to spread unchecked until their cities are all choked with life and their wilderness despoiled, their water not fit to drink and their air no longer fit to breathe. They will crowd together in increasingly dense concrete warrens, too many people in too small a space, and the stress of such proximity will affect their emotional stability and they will all start going mad. They will become base unstable creatures who will understand only the artificiality of their own urban existence. They will have lost touch with nature, having brought her to her knees, and they will forget how to survive. And then they will begin to die."
He glanced at the vampire. "In creating you and Janos, I have introduced a predator into their midst that is at least their equal in intelligence, if not their superior. One that will not be easily destroyed. I have done them all a favor."
He looked back through the iron bars at Rizzo. The transformation was complete. The werewolf crouched on the floor of the cell, exhausted from its efforts, its chest rising and falling heavily, saliva dribbling onto the floor as it panted like a dog, staring at him balefully.
"What a look!" said Drakov.
"He hates you," said the vampire. "He would kill you if he could."
"I do believe he would," said Drakov, "and do you know why. Volodya? Not because I have transformed him, but because I have revealed him to himself as he really is. A loathsome animal. A predatory beast."
As I am a loathsome animal and a predatory beast, the vampire thought, but he said nothing. He merely stared at the pathetic creature huddled in the cell and felt unutterable sadness.
"Arthur, it's good to see you," said Bram Stoker, rising to his feet. It was early evening and the pub was crowded. Conan Doyle had worked his way through the crowd unrecognized. He approached the table Stoker was holding for them and took Stoker's hand.
"How are you, Stoker?"
"Reasonably well, Don't know that I can say the same for you, however. You look a bit the worse for wear. Sit down. Are you all right?"
Conan Doyle sat down heavily and leaned hack wearily in his chair. Stoker waved for another pint of bitters. "I have not been sleeping well," said Doyle. "These killings have all of my attention at the moment. I can think of nothing else. The matter is driving me to complete distraction. I sit up half the night, smoking pipeful after pipeful, filling the room with a latakia fog, racking my brain, attempting to arrive at some sort of rational explanation for the whole affair, but every line of reasoning I try to follow leads me nowhere. Nowhere, that is to say, near an explanation that is rational. I have just come from Scotland Yard. There has been yet another murder."
"Another one!" said Stoker. "When?"
"Apparently sometime last night," said Doyle, pausing a moment while the drink was set before him and then lifting the glass and drinking deeply. "A young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, found in the most appallingly disgusting condition. Decency forbids me to describe it. Yet the cause of death itself was almost identical to that of Angeline Crewe. Insult to the system brought about by a profound loss of blood."
"Human teethmarks on the throat?" said Stoker.
Doyle sighed. "Yes, I am afraid so. It seems certain that we are faced with two separate fiendish killers, and yet I cannot help feeling that these killings are connected somehow, despite the fact that we are looking at two different methods of murder. I have no sound basis for drawing this conclusion, but I feel it as an exceedingly strong intuition. You said in your message that you had some information connected with this case."
"Well, I knew, of course, that you were involved in the investigation," said Stoker. "Inspector Grayson took me into his confidence. Has he discussed ou
r last meeting with you?"
Doyle shook his head "Not beyond telling me that the two of you spoke about that young man, Tony Hesketh, whom Grayson has been anxious to question in this case "
Stoker pursed his lips thoughtfully. "He didn't mention the name Dracula to you?"
"Dracula?" Doyle frowned. "What, you mean Vlad the Impaler? Oh, I think I understand. No, actually. it was I who mentioned the name to Grayson, while telling him about—"
"No, no. I did not mean in that connection," Stoker said. "Grayson mentioned the name while telling me about the conversation that you had with him, about the vampire legend and how it may have come about. No, what I was referring to was the fact that it was a name I recognized as belonging to someone I had recently met. An Eastern European nobleman whose name is also Dracula.•'
"Coincidence," said Doyle. shrugging. "Doubtless that was why Grayson never mentioned it. You mean that was all you had to tell me?" He was unable to hide his disappointment.
"Not quite." said Stoker. "This Count Dracula was in the company of young Hesketh when I met him. Also a coincidence? Perhaps. They came backstage to
speak with Angeline Crewe. The Count seemed quite attentive towards Miss
Crewe. She seemed to know him. Hesketh invited one of the other young women in the company, Miss Violet Anderson, to join them for dinner. The Count seemed quite attentive towards Violet, as well, and she did not seem to mind. All four of them left together. Now Angeline is dead, Hesketh is missing, and no one has seen Violet for at least a week "
"I see. How very curious. Has anyone inquired after Miss Anderson?"
"Sh e had sent word that she was ill•" said Stoker, "and we replaced her with an understudy, but when there was no further word from her. I became concerned and sent round to her flat to see how she was feeling. She was not at home and her landlady has neither seen nor heard from her."
"And you mentioned this to Grayson?" said Doyle.
"Well, yes and no," said Stoker. "That is to say. I mentioned having met a man named Dracula, because it seemed a singular coincidence when he brought up the name in that context, but it wasn't until after I had spoken with him that it occurred to me to look into Violet's situation, so I did not discover that she was missing until only this morning. under the circumstances, I became alarmed and, knowing you were involved, I at once sent word to you."
"Why to me and not to Grayson?" said Doyle.
"Well, frankly, because I know that you have already predisposed him not to consider certain possibilities inherent in this case I thought we should discuss the matter further."
"Precisely what are you suggesting?"
"I am suggesting that perhaps the reason you have not been able to find a rational explanation for these events is that there is no rational explanation."
Doyle set down his glass and sighed, shaking his head "Really, Stoker! Are you seriously suggesting that there is sonic sort of supernatural manifestation behind all of this? That we are dealing with a werewolf or a vampire?"
"Perhaps both." said Stoker. "According to legend. vampires often have servants, familiars of a sort, to protect them during their periods of' vulnerability."
"Oh, come now, Stoker!" Doyle said. "What utter nonsense! Do you honestly expect me to believe that a 15th century Wallachian voivode has been
resurrected from the dead and is now among us as a vampire? With some sort of
lycanathropic manservant, no less? I fear you have become carried away by your own imagination."
"What was it your detective was so fond of saying." Stoker said, "that if you eliminate all the probable explanations, what remains, no matter how improbable, MUM be the answer? Something like that, wasn't it'?"
"Something like that, yes," said Doyle irritably. "However, we are still a long way from eliminating all the probable explanations. For example, has it occurred to you that what we are dealing with may be a madman who, in his perverse dementia, believes himself to be a vampire?"
"No, quite honestly, that had not occurred to me," said Stoker. He grimaced, wryly. "I must admit, it makes more sense than my own theory."
"Well, don't feel too badly about it old fellow." Doyle said. "That was not something that just came to me. In the course of racking my brain over these murders, I considered a number of seemingly outrageous theories. One was that the murders were accomplished with the aid of a trained gorilla. Another was the possibility that we could be faced with a madman who believed himself to be a werewolf. Interestingly enough, those werewolf killings, as Holcombe and I have started to refer to them, took place during the time of the full moon and they have apparently stopped now. But in their stead. we now have these vampire- style murders. As if . . ."
"What is it?" Stoker said.
"I am not certain," Doyle said. "Perhaps I've been infected by your active imagination. Stoker, but what if, indeed, the killer were a madman who believed himself to be a werewolf? According to legend, werewolves are active only during the time of the full moon, so if his delusion were associated with the lunar phases, then it would follow that the killings would correspond accordingly. And the werewolf murders have stopped now. However, what if our madman's compulsion to murder were so strong that he could not bring himself to stop until the next full moon? He would have to find some sort of justification that would allow him to continue killing and since he already believes himself to be a werewolf, could he not also convince himself that he was a vampire, as well?"
"And you say my imagination is overactive?" Stoker said. "Still. I must admit that it is a fascinating hypothesis. One that certainly sounds more rational than my own."
"Well, in any event," said Doyle, "I would say that, all things considered. our first order of business must be to speak with this Count Dracula of yours."
"Our first order of business?" Stoker said. "You mean I am to join you in this
investigation?"
"You have already met this Count Dracula, whereas I have not," said Doyle. "And surely you wish to get to the bottom of this matter." "Indeed, I do!" said Stoker.
"Then we must seek out Count Dracula and confront him to see what we can learn. Do you have any idea where he may be found?" "He has a box at the Lyceum," Stoker said. "lie attends our performances with regularity. I expect that we may find him there tonight. The curtain should be going up on this evening's performance within the half hour." "Then there's no time to lose," said Doyle. "Come, Stoker! The game's afoot! We must make haste to the Lyceum "theatre!" • • •
Scott Neilson had left the crime lab early, much to the disgust of Ian Holcombe, who was rapidly coming to the end of his rope as a result of all these killings. Neilson had begged off on a pretext, anxious to get back to the command post at the Hotel Metropole and report the latest developments, so he was no longer there when Linda Craven arrived with Dick Larson to warn him that their cover had been blown and that they were moving the command post. Neilson had wanted to waste no time. There had been another murder, but this time Neilson had no doubt as to who the killer must have been. The corpse had been that of a young male, about nineteen years old, found nude in the bedroom of his boarding house. From the state of the body on the bed when it was found and the subsequent examination in the crime lab, it was obvious that the dead man was killed during a sexual encounter and the autopsy left no doubt as to what sort of sexual encounter it had been. It seemed certain now that Tony Hesketh had become a vampire and he had claimed his first victim. A gay vampire, thought Neilson. What a diabolical creature to release upon Victorian London! Hesketh would be able to prey upon the male homosexual population of London with relative impunity. In Victorian England, with homosexuality still largely locked up in the closet, it would be almost impossible for the police to gather evidence about such murders. And those Hesketh victimized but did not kill would not be wry likely to report the assaults. Given the sexually repressed Victorian morality, a young man trying to make his way up in society would hardly admit to having been bit
ten in the neck and had his blood sucked by another young male. So he would doubtless hide the wound, and soon he would sicken as the infection spread within his body and a new craving began to manifest itself—an insatiable appetite for human blood.
Neilson also wanted to report that Conan Doyle had received an urgent message from Dram Stoker and had rushed off to meet with him. Doyle had crumpled up the note he had received from Stoker and thrown it into a wastebasket. Neilson had retrieved it at the first opportunity. From the message, it seemed that Stoker had