Vampires Don't Cry: The Collection

by Ian Hall

  I took the first step back to a career that had been curtailed because of my impending retirement.

  I began to do guest lectures on chemical warfare and its feasibility, and on nerve agents and gasses.

  When the American government announced they would attend the Hague Conference in 1899, I was immediately shortlisted in an advisory category. To my extreme delight, I was chosen, and I accompanied Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval captain also out of West Point. Mahan had proven himself a superb naval strategist, and we spent countless nights in deep discussion of many of his thought processes, and some of my own.

  At the conference, out of all the delegates in the world attending, the United States of America was the only nation to vote against the ban on chemical weapon manufacture. Mahan’s quotation read: “The inventiveness of Americans should not be restricted in the development of new weapons.”

  When the conference had closed, and we all had returned home, Mahan touted my brilliance around the War Department for years, and when a position in Research and Development became available, despite my withering age on paper, they quickly interviewed and employed me.

  During these years, I kept my bloodlust to an absolute minimum, and found that I could go sometimes six months without fresh blood. I led a double life; chemist on one hand, backstreet criminal on the other.

  And wherever I worked, I took my own disease with me, trying every treatment against the Vampir menace in my arteries.

  In 1901, I passed a bookstore in downtown Manhattan, when my attention got drawn to a display of books in the window.

  “Dracula.”

  If it hadn’t had a map of Transylvania spread over the floor, I would not have given it one piece of attention. But my interest was piqued, and I went inside. A large sign above a pile of books read: “Dracula the Vampire, by Bram Stoker.”

  I read the book three times before beginning my research.

  To my surprise, I found that this Irish author had not been the first to spread the news of my kind. During the day, I worked at a research laboratory run by the War Department, and in the evening I’d troll New York’s bookstores and libraries for anything on vampires.

  Perhaps Heinrich August Ossenfelder had been the first, back in 1748, with a poem, entitled ‘The Vampire.’ I felt amazed at the early date, almost a hundred and fifty years before my own turning, and before Kristina had been born.

  I discovered that vampire legends were common in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. But then, as I researched deeper, I found Norse stories carried such creatures, as did Mayan and Aztec scriptures from Central America. I became consumed with a thirst for knowledge of this ‘Order’ of which I had so ignorantly begged inclusion.

  In time I collected first editions of everything written on the subject, even silly penny dreadfuls like ‘Varney the Vampire’, run in serial form over two years.

  When I got transferred to England in 1906, I made it my mission to track down Mr. Stoker and ask him his source of inspiration, thinking in part that it would be a terribly difficult job. In fact, it took one phone call. Bram Stoker worked for the London Daily Telegraph, just a few streets away, and confirmed that he’d more than willing to be my guest for dinner the following night.

  Turns out Mr. Stoker turned out to be a typical Irishman, and we set out to drink the restaurant dry in one evening.

  “So where did you draw your inspiration?” I asked, as the waiter brought two very large scotch whiskeys to the quiet table.

  “And your interest is?”

  “I’ve actually travelled in Transylvania, and your descriptions were very accurate.”

  “Ah!” he laughed. “That would be the fault of the Earl of Errol. Damnable nice chap, even if he was a big-wigging royalist. I was up at Slains Castle in Scotland, and he had a few guests. Well, we drank up a storm, they told ghost stories into the night, and with the help of Joseph Sheridan’s books, Dracula was born.”

  “You’ve never been in Transylvania?” I asked, actually quite relieved he hadn’t.

  “Not a day. I was told to think of how shitty Scotland was, and multiply it! And I had a painting of Dracula’s Castle to base that on.”

  We both laughed and drank the night away. I mentally ticked off most of my collection as parts of his influences, and went home to my digs quite satisfied that he’d no contact with any of the Elders.

  I worked with the British Army for a few years, then the American War Department built its own laboratories outside Cambridge (under a false pharmaceutical name, of course) and I transferred to the quaint English town.

  There I met an Army Captain called Warren James Fleece, a forty-five-year-old Kentuckian who served originally in the ‘acquisitions department.’ This basically meant he stole other people’s weapons (including British), brought them to us, and we took them apart and studied them. Warren quickly showed much greater ability than just stealing the shells, and quickly became my personal research assistant. Within months, we were an inseparable team, and he proved invaluable in many of my scientific breakthroughs.

  Very quickly, we discovered that Germany had developed chemical weapons with sophisticated launch, delivery, and dispersal systems, and had produced them in mass quantities. Apparently Germany’s vote ‘not’ to build chemical weapons at The Hague in 1899 had passed unheeded to their armaments industry.

  When war broke out in 1914, Warren Fleece and I were on one of the first boats over to France. With colleagues from the British War Department, I helped in the formation of the Allied Special Weapons Division, the ASWD. With laboratories based south of Paris, the ASWD used captured German munitions to begin creating our own versions of the horrific munitions.

  So, in April 1915, when Germany used their chemical weapons at the second battle of Ypres, we were prepared and able to retaliate. The cat had been released out of the chemical weapons bag, and both Warren and I were absolutely in the thick of things. Hardly a day passed when something wasn’t brought back from the front; fragments of shell, traces of strange bottled liquid, affected soldiers; we investigated them all.

  Within six months of Ypres, we were fighting back with our own ‘special’ weapons, mostly with my fingers in the pie somewhere. Our mixtures included mustard gas, chlorine, and nerve agents from my earlier works. At every push forward, we spoke about the ‘end of the war’, and with every advance, we believed it.

  Through the war years, Warren Fleece stood at my side, my constant companion. We shared our furloughs together, and wasted many bottles of wine and brandy as the years steadily plodded by. Once, in the laboratory, he dropped a chlorine canister, and only my vampire speed and strength pulled him free in time. No amount of normal explanation could allay his questions, so I told him some of my life story over congratulatory drinks.

  To my utter surprise, he took it all with the utmost straight-forwardness. He proved totally unflappable.

  But even Great Wars come to a close. In November 1918, after four years of constant shelling, the guns fell silent for the last time. Warren and I gathered our belongings and headed south for a much-needed stint of R & R. We had no particular plan in place, just to get to the Mediterranean Sea would be enough, anywhere where we could change out of our uniforms and forget.

  Driving south of Lyons on a narrow country road, disaster struck. A sheep burst across the road, just in front of the car, and Warren swerved to avoid it. We hit the tree straight-on. My head was hurt from the impact on the windshield, but Warren was in a bad way. Within seconds of my getting out of the car, he was collapsed across the steering wheel, wheezing his last breath, thick, dark blood being coughed from his mouth.

  His pain and anguish were more than I could stand; I determined to attempt to save my friend who had just lived four years through a war, only to die on a lonely French road. Remembering Kristina’s actions many years before, I rushed round to the driver’s side and grabbed his arm, pulling it roughly out of the open window. I slashed his wrist with my teeth, tearing his ar
teries apart, and drank deeply. Then I reciprocated, and forced him to drink from me, holding my torn wrist over his dying mouth and physically pouring my blood down his throat.

  At first, I thought I’d made a mistake in the process, but then he gasped a huge breath, his eyes open wide. As the first moments of his transformation stretched into minutes, I slowly began to hold out hope of the success of my rescue attempt. There seemed nothing else for me to do but sit by the side of the road. Eventually, a farmer arrived, and within an hour, Warren lay in the backseat of a car, on the way to a local hospital. I stayed by his bed constantly, calming his terrified nerves, explaining the changes his body went through. When we were alone, I had to tell him exactly what I had done. It was the prelude to my entire life story. To my surprise, in a spirit of some humor, he took it well, and considered being alive in any form preferable to being dead.

  I fed him secretly from my wrist each night, and he soon gained enough strength to discharge himself from care.

  In three days we were back on the road, down to the coast. The Vampir power of ‘suggestion’ made getting girls quite easy, and we wallowed for a week, never visiting the same bar twice.

  “Don’t you want to go back to the Elders and get revenge?” Warren asked one night. We’d been in a bar all night, and it seemed neither of the two of us wanted female company that much; we’d not even tried. “Get some closure, you know.”

  I had pondered the same thing, many, many times. I took a large slug of brandy, and called for two more. “I’ve seen them in action; they’re formidable creatures, regardless of their age.”

  “Okay, hear me out.” His speech sounded slurred, but nowhere near drunk. “We tape some phosphorous grenades to packs of chlorine. And we throw them in their lairs. We pick the best time. Fire will kill them, right?”

  Surprisingly, I couldn’t see a major flaw in his plan. The first burst of the chlorine would render them immobile and the phosgene would burn them to a crisp in minutes. They would have no time to transform again. “But that’s just one Elder, the other would be round in seconds, making a right mischief of himself. Even one could tear a person limb from limb.”

  “So we get them when they’re feeding; when they’re both together.”

  I looked at him with wide open eyes. Sobriety kicked in with a vengeance, and I nodded, my thoughts elsewhere. “That could work.”

  I could not sleep much that night, and woke the next morning fresh and planning my revenge. When Warren woke, I filled him in with the details; first we’d returned to base and find the necessary armaments, then we could find a way to get to Gheorgheni.

  The base seemed relatively quiet when we entered, and we knew no one would question two senior officers anyway. We gathered enough phosphine grenades to sink a battleship and got them back in the car without difficulty. The chlorine gas nodules were more difficult; we had to be careful with those. One false move and people around us would die. Warren never questioned me, he just followed my instructions without complaint and without hesitation.

  Getting an extended leave from the commanding officer proved easy; we’d worked so hard for four years without a break, he seemed glad to get rid of us. Before we got out of his office, however, he warned us of a flu epidemic that had begun to show signs of spreading worldwide. When I asked why we didn’t already know about it, he told us that a news blackout had been placed over most of Europe. Neither the Germans nor the Allies wanted the other side to know how many were dying, for fear of a loss of morale.

  The figure he gave us was ten percent. That scared me a little.

  With papers that put us on furlough for three months, we headed for the coast. We had our plan; Brest first, then seaward ‘til we got to Constanta on the shores of the Black Sea. We didn’t worry about any details after that, we knew we’d make it up as we went along.

  We boarded a boat in Brest, heading for Alexandria, Egypt, and actually got a Royal Navy destroyer between Cairo and Thessaloniki in Greece. We considered going overland, but eventually got on board a Turkish vessel, heading into the Black Sea. The route took us past the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the site of that terrible loss of life. Passing the half-sunken warships proved a particularly difficult time. In total, the journey to Constanta had taken us three weeks.

  At last I stood back on Romanian soil, weary of the sea, and ready to take revenge to the Elders’ doorstep. Assured of a good road between Constanta and Gheorgheni, I bought a second-hand car and found a great deal of improvement on the road up into the old town in the mountains. After booking into the hotel, we set off into the forest; watching the Elders’ movements was the next item on the agenda.

  We selected a suitable position on the hill overlooking Ramir’s house, and set up a camouflaged observation point. We had binoculars, a tripod stand, and notebooks. We detailed every movement in and out. On day eleven, the first girl arrived, and I remembered her from before; her man in tow looked listless both in movement and expression. By nightfall, the second guests had arrived, followed by a coach and horses containing the second Elder. We instantly moved into action.

  We readied our munitions; the phosgene grenades were taped to the chlorine gas nodules. When the grenade exploded, not only would the chlorine gas immobilize everyone, but the phosgene would disperse the gas and also act as an incendiary. Inside the house, when the grenades exploded, it would be as fiery as the pits of Hell.

  It only took us fifteen minutes to get ourselves into position, Fleece round the back, and myself in the driveway. The second hands on our watches were synchronized, and at exactly 7:05, we’d break the first window. I watched the hand tick slowly around. As it reached its zenith, I lobbed my first brick in the window. The bomb followed through the hole in the glass, one second later.

  I heard a crash from the back of the house.

  “Wonderful!” I roared as I reached for the next projectile.

  As expected, when the first grenade exploded, every window in the house blew outwards. I now ran round the house, putting one through every window. The bright yellow conflagration inside blew back through the windows, shattering both glass and frames. As I rounded the side of the house, a wide door opened, and one of the naked girls staggered out. At least I thought it was a naked girl, her flaming body had already burnt quite badly. As I kicked her to the ground, I threw a bomb in the door. In four seconds, that side of the house burst into flames.

  Ignoring my humanity, I bent to the quivering body, ripped the head from its shoulders, and threw both it and the body back inside.

  With the huge amount of accelerant, the house now burnt strongly. Warren now stood by my side, grinning wildly. Each second that passed without an Elder appearing made my smile wider and wider. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but mine felt hotter than the pits of Hell, and I took incredible delight in watching it happen.

  Suddenly a dark figure simply appeared in front of us. It looked burnt almost beyond recognition, but somehow, the hoarse voice still held some strains of Ramir.

  “You fool. You thought you could end me? Ramir, a Ducător of the Grand Duchy of Transylvania!”

  His voice gathered strength and clarity as he spoke. I went for my gun, but he proved far too quick for me. He vanished, and I felt a fleeting touch at my side, then he appeared again, grinning through the burnt flesh that mended itself as we watched. With a flick of his wrist he threw our pistols away.

  “I am Ramir!” he raised his charred hands.

  Unexpectedly, a small, fluffy red dart appeared in his cheek. Ramir looked surprised, turning slowly to see his new adversary. I heard the next one; a puffing noise, then another dart hit its target, this time in his forehead.

  “Don’t move!” A voice came from our right. A figure approached, pushing through the bushes, then walking onto the gravel driveway. The man looked middle-aged, and obviously eastern European; his deep-set eyes and thick eye ridges set him almost as Romany, a gipsy.

  To my surprise, Ramir didn
’t disappear; he just stood, his expression, just a grimace of pain.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” The voice sounded thickly accented German. “I cannot talk the English, I hope you understand me.”

  “I’m fluent,” I replied, taking in more of his appearance as he neared. “My friend, not so much.”

  “My name is Maurice.” He put a tube to his lips and fired another dart at Ramir, who stared at him, annoyance now spreading slowly over his features. “And Ducător Ramir is having a new experience. Aren’t you?” The newcomer slapped Ramir so hard across the cheek; I thought he’d fall to the ground.

  “What have you done to him?” I asked.

  “The Vampir cannot move when their blood is coagulated.”

  I looked at the tiny darts, and grinned at Ramir’s discomfort.

  Behind him, the internal beams of the house began to collapse, and the roof gave way, crashing with a huge cloud of sparks onto the floors below.

  “You did a wonderful job, American man.” Maurice fired another dart from almost point-blank range, hitting Ramir above the eye. “But these bastards are resilient. I came to finish it.”

  “No!” The word was out of my mouth before I could think.

  Maurice came close to us, sniffed the air, then darted suddenly away. “You are Vampir also!” for the first time he didn’t look in control of the situation. He readied a dart, and fired it at Warren, who had advanced. It hit him on the outstretched hand. Within a second, Warren had stopped, and now also looked confused and listless. Maurice put another dart in his pipe, aiming for me. His eyes showed fear for the first time. “You are Vampir,” he repeated.

  “Wait! Don’t shoot. Let me talk,” I said quickly.

  Maurice kept the pipe near his mouth. “I say again, you are Vampir. Why should I not kill you?”

  I took a deep breath, and hoped my candor would continue the cease-fire. “I was made Vampir by my wife. I do not live the lifestyle. I do not kill to eat. I am not a blood-drinker.”