The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ~ * ~

  After Harry awakened in the cave in the mountains, cured of the worst of his wound, he made his way to England and the dim memory of his fiancée. It was 1948, the coldest winter in memory. He found that Catherine had married, supposing him dead, and he killed her husband and took her, tried to make her over. But he did it not from love, but from a desire for revenge: for her infidelity; for the loss of what he had once been. She became a monster, and he killed her, bursting her head between his hands. On the run, he spent an evening in a cinema, and the first film of the double bill, The Vampire’s Ghost, a poor melodramatic thing, gave him the idea of finding a new life in Africa.

  He has been hiding from what he has become ever since.

  ~ * ~

  Harry slits a vein in Colonel Tombe’s forearm and drinks deeply. He could drink forever, but he pulls himself away after only a few minutes, licking the film of blood from his sharp eyeteeth with his roughened tongue.

  The two men stand face to face in the growing light of dawn. The colonel wraps his fingers around the slit in his forearm. At last he says, “It won’t stop bleeding.”

  Harry explains about the anticoagulants in his saliva, and rips a strip from his shirt and binds the wound. The smell of blood on the colonel’s fingers is heady, but he resists the temptation to blot it up with his tongue. It would not be seemly.

  He says, “We should rest. I can’t work in the daylight. It burns as badly as silver, and the human guards will come, I’m sure, to see if you are dead.”

  But the guards do not come. Harry and Colonel Tombe sit at opposite sides of the little room, Harry under the window, Colonel Tombe by the door. Harry falls into a stupor, and wakes in darkness to find the colonel working at the bars again.

  The colonel hears him stand, and turns quickly. Harry laughs, and says, “You could have killed me while I slept.”

  “We need each other, Mr Merrick.”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose that we do.”

  They renew their joint attack on the barred window. The last bar comes away after midnight. Harry reaches through and crumples the wire mesh and climbs through into the warm night, then helps Colonel Tombe scramble out. The compound is lit only by moonlight. Dogs are barking nearby, and further off there is the crackle of small arms fire. To the west, a sullen red glow stands behind the roofs of the dark city.

  It is the oil depot, Colonel Tombe says, and adds, “Perhaps the rebels are close at hand. It would explain why the guards have run away.”

  “We should wait for the rebels, perhaps.”

  “I would not make myself a prisoner. Besides, I think they would kill me. Come with me or stay.”

  “Lomax didn’t come tonight. I wonder why?”

  Harry and Colonel Tombe run across the wide cinder yard to the tall wire fence without raising any challenge. Colonel Tombe pauses and says that the fence is electrified; Harry laughs and grabs it with both hands and tears it apart. Like the city, the prison compound is without electricity.

  The compound is on the far side of the park which was made from the grounds of what was once the Governor’s Mansion. They run a long way down the road through the park until the colonel must stop, breathless. With fresh blood in his veins, Harry thinks that he can run forever.

  “We’ll find my men,” the colonel says, when he has his breath back. Moonlight slides like oil over his black face. He is smiling. “By God, I will deal them a blow they won’t forget.”

  Harry does not have to ask if he is talking about the rebels or the President’s—the Count’s—undead army. He says, “Use silver bullets. Even if they look completely dead, cut off the heads, or they’ll heal. Find out where they hide in the day. Newborns can’t stand daylight.”

  “We’ll work together against this. I could arrest you, but I hope that you will volunteer.”

  Colonel Tombe still carries the metal spar. Harry snatches it up, bends it in two and tosses it into the darkness. He shows his teeth, and the big soldier takes a step backwards. Harry says, “Don’t follow me, Colonel. I have business of my own. Family business.”

  Then he turns and runs, so fast he might be flying through the night. He hears Colonel Tombe shouting after him, but he runs on, faster and faster, towards the Presidential Palace.

  ~ * ~

  There is a line of tall, graceful royal palms at the edge of the park. The road is littered with fronds chopped down by small arms fire. Spent cartridges and scraps of metal and bits of broken glass lie everywhere. The bodies of a dozen soldiers lie in an untidy heap beside a checkpoint of concrete-filled oil drums and razor wire.

  Harry moves forward cautiously. Seven bodies are impaled on stakes between the scaly trunks of the palms: the Count’s women, and the Count’s assistant, Lomax. One of the women is still alive. She writhes slowly, hissing and arching her back, trying to lift herself off the wooden post which has pierced her vitals.

  Harry asks her what happened, but she only spits blood in his face. Beside her, Lomax stirs and groans on his stake. He has lost his slab glasses; his surgeon’s gown is stiff with his own blood. “Kill me,” he says. “Oh Christ please kill me.”

  “Tell me about Prince Marshall.”

  “You are my father,” Lomax gasps. Black blood dribbles from his mouth. His feet kick at the stake. His hands are bound behind his back. “Have mercy.”

  “How many did you change? How many escaped?”

  “Yesterday. We fought them through the palace. Please.” He rocks a little on the stake and screams. “Please. I can’t get free.”

  “You’ve probably healed around it. Where is the Count?”

  “Hiding from your children. High above.” Lomax’s red eyes are staring up at the Gothic wedding cake of the Presidential Palace.

  “You told me that humans are less than us because we are perfect expressions of our genetic inheritance. I think you are wrong, Lomax, and your master is wrong, too. At some point in the past humanity overcame beastliness, but in us it has burst out and erased everything that made us human. We are not stronger because of our thirst, but weaker. A good man has just shown me that.”

  But in his torment Lomax hasn’t heard Harry’s speech. “Please,” he whispers. “Please. Father, forgive me ...”

  Harry relents. He hauls on Lomax’s feet with all his strength until the point of the stake bursts the crooked little undead’s heart. Lomax gargles a fountain of blood that boils away to black dust even as it spatters the ground.

  The square beyond the park is eerily quiet, but Harry knows he is being watched. He makes the best of it, straightening his shoulders and whistling “Lily Marlene” as he marches around the empty plinth in the centre of the square, the hub of the traffic circle where, until the country gained its independence fifteen years ago, a statue of Queen Victoria stood.

  Man-sized creatures hang in the branches of the huge coral trees on either side of the gate in the iron railings around the palace; they drop to the ground as Harry goes past. He hears the distinctive sound of a machine gun being locked and loaded, but walks on across the gravel of the courtyard. The President’s black armoured Mercedes sits on burst tyres before the steps of the palace, its doors flung wide, paint knocked from craters in its armoured bodywork, its bullet-proof windscreen starred. Harry starts up the steps, and then the watchers rush him, and carry him forward.

  Harry doesn’t resist as he is bundled through state rooms to the President’s office. The palace is as dark as the rest of the city, but Harry can clearly see the many bodies lying in the shadows. Most are human, mutilated around the throat or decapitated.

  The President’s office, familiar from many TV broadcasts, is hot and stinking, and crowded with the undead. Candles burn everywhere, clustered in elaborate gold or iron candelabra or stuck with their own wax to the polished walnut grain of the expensive ormolu bureaux. Faces like half-melted animal masks turn to stare at Harry as he is hauled through the tall double doors. He realizes with a mingled thrill of horror a
nd excitement that these are the fruits of Lomax’s experiments with his stolen blood. Most are blotched unevenly with patches of dead white pigmentation. One sprouts a tangle of teeth in a mouth that gapes so wide the heavy jaw rests on its chest; another, in a soiled bridal gown, has a face ridged with cartilage, ears grown into ragged leather flaps that fall over its shoulders and trail on the ground; yet another has a head that has shrunken to little more than a long pangolin’s snout set with crooked rows of ivory needles from which a green slaver constantly drips. Even though they can only be a few days past transformation, all, even the most human, are in advanced stages of decay, with weeping sores and ripe bruises and softening skin like over-ripe mangoes. The air is heavy with the smell of gangrene; the deep-pile carpets are sticky with blood.

  The undead are all staring at Harry, but he stares at the two figures separated by the polished mahogany plane of the big desk at the far end of the room.

  A man wearing only tracksuit trousers is handcuffed to a chair in front of the desk. His black skin shines with sweat; his chest and back are covered with welts and bruises, and his head hangs down. He is breathing heavily.

  Behind the desk, the leader of the undead lounges in a pneumatic black leather chair. His face has grown a wolfish snout, but Harry still recognizes him from the tribal scarification which decorates his distorted cheeks, and the trademark red beret.

  Prince Marshall, leader of the breakaway rebel faction. He wears a necklace of hand grenades. He grins, red tongue lolling in elongated jaws, and beckons Harry forward with a lazy gesture. An undead woman in fatigue trousers, a bristling pelt growing thickly over her bare breasts, mops at his forehead with a handkerchief.

  The undead murmur amongst themselves and make way as Harry crosses the room. One, its arms and legs fused into fleshy flippers, scampers towards him and flops down in a parody of obeisance. There is a human amongst them, in a safari jacket with bulging pockets. It is the French journalist, René Sante. His sallow face is strained and pale. He is carrying a video camera the size of a small suitcase on his shoulder, and squints around it at Harry.

  “My god, Harry,” he says, “what are you doing here!”

  “I see you are working,” Harry says. “How much will you make from this, I wonder?”

  “They killed the CBS crew, Harry!” Sante is crying. “They only let me live because they want a record of this.”

  “For history,” the undead rebel leader behind the desk says. His voice is rich and deep, and carries through the cackles and mutters of his undead followers. “We show the world what this traitor has done to his country. Keep filming, little Frenchman. I will let you go, I promise, but only if I like your work.”

  One of the undead, quills of bloody bone hanging around his face, lifts up the head of the man in the chair. It is President Daniel Weah.

  “He tried to make us his zombies,” Prince Marshall says, “but he only made us strong. We acknowledge the strength in your blood, Mr Merrick. You are a great magician, even if you are a white man.”

  “It will destroy you,” Harry says.

  Prince Marshall smiles wolfishly. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Daniel Weah licks his lips and looks around, blinking in the glare of Sante’s video camera. “Undo the handcuffs,” he complains. “They give me a lot of pain. I can’t think with them on.”

  The rebel with the ruff of bone quills smacks Weah around the head, and the other undead crowd forward, chittering amongst themselves.

  “He tried to run away,” Prince Marshall explains. There is an uncapped bottle of whisky on the desk and he swigs from it and spits it in a fine spray across the desk into Daniel Weah’s face. “This stuff tastes of piss and petrol,” he says, to no one in particular.

  Harry says, “I can explain what has happened to you, but you must let the humans go. This isn’t between them and us. You must understand that they are not our enemies. It is the Count we must fight.”

  “We will catch him,” Prince Marshall says. “We will catch him and put him on the stake next to his creature. Then we will drink your blood again, and grow even stronger.”

  They do not know what they are, Harry realizes in horror. They were changed too quickly, while they were still vigorous. Usually the change is effected only at the point of death of the victim, after a long dance of seduction, after many little feedings, and with blood fed directly from a vein of the seducer. These creatures were changed by injections of his stolen blood; no wonder they are rotting where they stand.

  “Don’t argue with them, Harry,” Sante pleads.

  Harry turns on the reporter. “You’re as bad as them, feeding on horror. Put down the camera. Walk away.”

  “They’ll kill me!”

  The undead laugh and cheer, and Prince Marshall takes out a blue steel automatic and fires it into the ceiling and leans through the cloud of gunsmoke and yells, “I want information! I want to know the truth! You will film the truth for history, Frenchman, then you will go!”

  The half-naked woman wipes Prince Marshall’s forehead with her cloth. He is sweating blood.

  Daniel Weah’s head has slumped down again. Now he raises it and looks around and says, “I’ll tell you the truth, but you must loosen my arms. They pain me. Prince, Prince, just listen to me. I’ll tell you, but loosen my arms.”

  Two undead hoist the President upright in the chair; others crowd around. One, wearing a black cocktail dress ripped at the shoulders and a Hermes scarf in his hair, shows a mouthful of fangs at the camera. They are growing thirsty, Harry realizes, but they don’t know it. The room seems hotter, smaller, full of lurching shadows.

  A kind of interrogation gets under way. Sante tries to hold the video steady, although his hands are shaking. At some point he has pissed in his pants; Harry can smell it. He flinches when Harry puts a hand on his shoulder, then whispers from the side of his mouth, “This is the worst place in the world, Harry. We’re both going to die.”

  Harry remembers what Lomax told him, and can’t help laughing. “The worst place in the world, my friend? It lives inside us all, human and undead.”

  Prince Marshall has become distracted by an argument with one of the undead. He shouts, but Harry can’t hear what he is shouting because the rest of the undead are shouting, too. Suddenly the rebel leader shoots the nearest; the man is knocked back by the impact of the bullet, but he remains standing and begins to laugh wildly, tearing open his khaki blouse to show off his wound.

  “You see!” Prince Marshall yells, leaning over the desk and brandishing the pistol in Weah’s face. “We are unkillable!”

  One of the undead rips a string of juju fetishes from around Weah’s waist and crunches the knots of feathers and small bones between sharp teeth.

  Weah begins to plead. “Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please listen to me. We are all one. We are all brothers.”

  “That man won’t talk,” Prince Marshall yells. “Bring me his ear.”

  One of the undead slices at Weah’s left ear. Weah howls and tries to get loose, but he is held fast. The undead soldier tosses the scrap of gristle to Prince Marshall, who chews it with gusto.

  Daniel Weah groans. Blood runs from his mutilated ear, mixing with the sweat on his chest. Harry can smell it. His eyeteeth prick his gums.

  “I’ll ask again,” Prince Marshall says. “What did you do with all the money? What did you do with the economy of our beautiful country?”

  Weah says, “You know, gentlemen, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Confess to the people,” Prince Marshall says. “Tell them where you keep their money.”

  “I was always working in the interest of the people. I keep only one account.”

  “The number. What is the number?”

  Harry realizes that Prince Marshall wants the access code of Daniel Weah’s Swiss bank account.

  “I don’t know.” Daniel Weah lifts his head, squinting in the harsh light of the video camera. “Loosen my arms, please. I
can’t tell you while my arms are tied. Please, my ear is cut and my arms pain me.”

  This throws the undead, and they begin to argue amongst themselves. Prince Marshall watches, sunk in the black leather chair, sweat and blood mopped from his brow by the woman.

  “The Count,” Harry says. “The Count will drain the account if you don’t stop him.” He steps in front of Weah and addresses the throng of undead. “You are all my children. You are all changed by my blood. What you once were is irrelevant. What you wanted when you were human and alive is irrelevant. Listen to me. It’s more important to stop the Count than pursue your revenge.”

  Prince Marshall yawns, showing the stout yellow teeth that crowd his elongated jaw, and idly waves his big automatic. “I don’t care about this Count. His creature changed us, but we were stronger than his European science. We escaped, and we are the strongest army in this country.” His followers howl at this. Prince Marshall shouts over their noise, “This man claims he is our father. Let him show it. He’ll change this so-called President, and then maybe we’ll believe him!”