by Tanith Lee
As this – what was it? – indifference – was borne in on the boy, he became deeply offended. Somewhere in his unremembered past, he must have seen human funerals, and more recently observed the laments of persons who had lost relatives, lovers or friends to the vampires. Human beings had this quality. Those they cared for that died, they mourned. Yet the Nosferatu, it transpired, were with their own kind also heartless, callous. Rather as they left the butchered woodcutter to rot and rats on the vault floor, they cast Cesaire out of doors, into the sun, and let it burn him up. Like emptying a pail of slops.
Dracul took his problem to Tadeusz.
The boy was taller now, tall and thin, hard and strong. He confronted the old wolf leader of the pack, courteous and overawed as always, by Tadeusz, but with scorched affront.
‘Didn’t they love him?’
‘Yes. Cesaire was ours.’
‘Then why – that? Why do none of you –?’
‘It is a fate any of us may share. Yet, too, we have no vast fear of death, for it is nearly forever avoidable among us. Humankind demonstrates hysteria at human death, but this is a form of panic, for each of them knows he too, today, tomorrow, or in fifty years, must experience the same extinction.’
‘You tell me it’s cowardice then, not sorrow.’
‘To a degree.’
‘What then do I feel? You promise me immortality, yet I still mourn Cesaire.’
‘You are yet human, little Dragon. Listen. Mihaly named you after a very great and mysterious member of our universal family. It was his joke, perhaps, though affectionate enough. And you may grow to reap the name. That one you are named for was a great warrior, and a noble and intellectual scholar, a rare combination. At his changing, he became less and also far more than he had ever been. Yet, even in his human state, before vampiric prowess came to him, it is said he had no fear of death, and both gave his enemies to it, and faced it out himself, laughing. Laughter is king, Dracul. Misery is only negation. Laugh, Dracul, and loudly, in the face of fear and death, or desolation. Give the dead no tears of yours. They, none of them, nor yet Cesaire, can use them. Nor yet can you.’
Dracul – named for some legendary warrior-scholar of the vampire horde – went out and roamed the midnight woods, laughing, yelling with laughter, till his throat bled. In the hour before dawn he returned to Tadeusz and knelt at his feet. ‘You were right.’
But then he asked Tadeusz where he lay through the daylight hours. Because, if ever this occurred again, Dracul would run to the place and rouse Tadeusz, who might then intervene.
‘Ah, Dracul. If it is only the stake, then sometimes it is possible to save us. But the severing of the spinal cord – head from body – after that, it is finished. But I will show you my bed. If you need me, I will try to wake.’
It stood behind a secret wall in the library. It was dark as pitch in there, and smelled of moist earth and green plants, and some other tindery scent, like a cedar scorched by lightning. Maybe that was the odour of Tadeusz or his slumber, for it was always there, in that cubby behind the books. Dracul knew, for he went there twice, by day, about a month after Cesaire’s slaughter, and looked for Tadeusz, and found him lying asleep, and the scent was more rich. The leader slept with his eyes open, like a golden snake. Yet he was not behind them. Since vampires did not die, did they perhaps instead die in some temporary manner while they slept? For it was obvious, they went far off. To bring them back took the trumpet of sun fall, or the throes of personalised true death. Dracul, seeing the patriarch, the grandfather and king of his adopted life, did not believe he could be woken after all, only by a human boy, however frantic the demand.
III
Until he was 18, or 19, they waited.
That was a proper age for him to alter to their condition, they told him, when – as after his fourteenth year he did – he grew urgently impatient to be as they were. Once changed, he would age very little, and very slowly. He must accordingly reach manhood, before the ordinary process was stopped.
The day-eve of his birthday – that was, where Tadeusz had fixed his birthday, for he himself did not know it, no more than if he was 18 or 19 – Dracul could not sleep. He prowled the hills, looking at everything with sun-inflamed, sore eyes, for the very last. Five, six, or seven nights were needed for his transformation. After that, he would probably never see the sunlit earth again. He thought he was not sorry. He was eager for godhead, and a magician’s powers.
That night they had a breakfast feast, in which Dracul joined. Fresh human blood had been collected in a large crock. Next, goblets of tarnished silver were filled with it. Everyone drank deep, Dracul with the rest. Accustomed to the raw bloody meats they had reared him on, he did not mind the blood, was only a little disappointed that it did not yet thrill him. In the past, sometimes, one or two of them had awarded him a sip of blood, smeared on their fingers from a victim. He had been like a child given as a treat a sip of alcohol. He had failed to see much in it. Which had not yet been rectified, but soon, now, would.
Tadeusz spoke some words. Excited and nervous, Dracul barely heard them. Then Schesparn came and led Dracul into one of the smaller stone chambers.
There was an old bed there, its canopy long eaten away and posts fallen. Mice rustled in the depths of the couch, but Dracul had no fear of mice or rats. Presently he would be able, if he wished, to command them. He lay down.
Schesparn sat by Dracul, and stroked back his hair.
‘So it is to be now, my friend. Are you content?’
Dracul nodded. He was alight with expectancy, already running before he had assayed a single step.
Schesparn murmured, the purring chant that soothed and controlled. Dracul tried to sink into it, to allow it to do its work. But he had seen this done, listened to it, so often – partially he had become immune. Nevertheless, he turned his head, offering the vantage of his neck, the vein there, to be milked.
Perhaps he, or could it be Schesparn himself, misjudged? They knew each other too well. Trusted too much. Or perhaps it was not that at all, could never be only that. The sharp teeth, like great needles, pierced inward in one snapping bite. And at once on the pain, from which Dracul had not flinched, came an awful drawing, a tugging of darkness, and the young man felt his very psyche come loose inside him, and begin to unravel up through the two wounds in his throat. He had anticipated much, something wonderful – spiritual – even, he later thought, sexual, for he believed he had seen versions of both transports happen in the vampire’s victims, yes, even sometimes those Chenek and Faliborv had forced. There were neither now for Dracul. It was only horrible – disgusting – and it filled him, he who had looked for anything but fear – with sheer primal terror. For it was death itself he felt fastened there upon him. Not a friend and mentor, not his rescuer, his ‘Papa,’ nor even his brother or lover. Death, stinking of corruption and the repulsive muck of a grave.
So Dracul fought. He did it without thinking. It was spontaneous. But Schesparn, far gone already in his own trance, the ecstasy of drinking living blood, struck Dracul randomly a solitary blow, that had behind it, naturally, incredible strength.
Disabled then, swimming in unspeakable swirlings of pain and miasma and horror, Dracul lay, till Schesparn was done with him. And after that, the others came, like ghosts. One by one each of them sucked out a little more of his life. Tadeusz the leader, first, a moment only. Mihaly, Béla, the hunters, slower. Medestha with a childish little murmur of enjoyment, Faliborv rough, biting him again, Chenek strangely mild, perhaps bored. Last, Sraga, then Stina, Dracul’s too-young mother. They had done this because they honoured and cared for him. It was a ritual act, not greed or sadism – but in the nightmare, he no longer knew that. And even when Stina … The feeling and sense was of death, still, of a reeking mouldy corpse, its breath raucous with foulness. And once she too was finished, her cold stony hand on his forehead, ‘It’s done for this night. Sleep now.’
And into sleep, as into death, he tumble
d – screaming, but in silence, dying but yet alive.
Dracul woke at noon. The sunlight pouring in beyond the columns that guarded his box, cut through his eyes like knives. He writhed from the earth bed and threw up on the floor. Then he wept. He kneeled snivelling on the flagstones. Shivering, he dragged himself to the dim hall where the fountain played, and drank the water on and on, a river of it, unable to get enough, until once more he vomited. Then out into the sunlight he staggered, the sun right overhead like a boiling spear, its razor-beak in his brain.
Five or six more nights. He must be brave, and patient. The prize would come to him. Had he really never grasped he must suffer to achieve his longed-for goal? But he knew, Dracul, he knew, it was not the suffering, not even the dying that he feared.
How had this happened? He loved them. They him. Yet – instinct – or less even than that. Humanness. He was human, perhaps more so than most. It was his humanness. It would not let him go, he who had thought of himself, since the age of three or four, as the kindred of vampires, and a student-god.
Push it down. Hold himself in fetters of steel, and allow the process of god-making to take place. Even then, half lying on a tree, whimpering from sun, nearly blinded, Dracul knew he could not.
Yet he tried. That night he tried, and when Schesparn came to him again, Dracul saw the face hover above him, and it was not that of Schesparn, nor any saint, but of a fiend. And Dracul shouted aloud. ‘Hush,’ said Schesparn, ‘be still.’ And he sang the purring chant, and now it did not work at all, and despite the fetters of steel Dracul had attempted to put on himself, again he lashed out, and the cuffing paw of the undead smashed him down into oblivion. Much that was Dracul did die then, though it was not yet any fleshly death. It was his love that died, and sympathy, and belief. Later there would come to be what he thought a greater and better belief, one that resided not in men or monsters, but in a single God, brilliant and distant as another sun. For with everything else this young man had learned, he had learned that the Devil existed. And if that were so, God also must exist. One had only to claim Him, and reach out.
When Dracul woke the second day, again at noon, he rushed into the sunlight and let it sear him till he fainted. If the steel had not been able to hold him quiet, still it was there. He had lost his faith and his name. Who was he? A man – a man of flesh and blood.
He knew them too well. Recognised all their charms and spells and tricks – had even gained some of their knack for himself, not noticing, beside the vastness of their talents, that his abilities, now, were something remarkable in a mere human. Oh, he had been well taught.
That afternoon, he walked again among the trees. As if bidding farewell to some beloved, he began to mourn for the loss of day, even though it hurt his eyes, for the greenness of the leaves against sunshine, the colours of fruits in solar light.
Long before sun fall, which had been dawn, he had found an ultimate solution. Deranged as he suddenly was, he thought he heard them laughing, his tormentors, as they slept in their tombs, musing on how they would drain him dry. No, it had been only their game, to keep him, like a favourite calf, letting him grow to his fullest deliciousness, before seeking him with cleavers. Make him their own? Never. He would become what all the other human things had become that he had seen. A mindless automaton, addicted to blood, less than a beast, and, since probably the soul did stay trapped within, damned for all eternity.
In after years, when he had another identity, had become another – that was, as he thought, become himself – he brooded and wrestled over and with his past, both his time of living among Satan’s creatures and his action finally on that last day. Reasoning it through, in ghastly dreams and waking nightmares, he came to see that he had had no choice. For he had only been englamorised, could never have loved them – must in fact have hated them, and their vile deeds, yet been unable to see it, like treasure stored in darkness, until they attacked him. Beyond that day, of course, he must always, therefore, hate them. Hate them best of all the world, both natural and supernormal. And when he had reasoned it all out, this ranting mental hell, which by then would have driven his wife to madness, it would in turn have driven him, at last, quite sane. But all that was in the future. All that was yet to come.
As the sun westered over the mountains, he went into the house. He found what he needed very easily. The legs of the ruinous old chairs were simply enough refashioned, for though leeched of so much blood, he was fit and tough and not at all near death – they had told him, it would be a formula of seven nights. There were even some ready-prepared weapons, carelessly left lying about, from the previous drama years before. Not to mention a rusty sword.
One by one, he went to them, the young man who had been Dracul. One by one he eased up the lids of the boxes, or stole into the shadows of the vaults where they lay. It was always the same. It did not shock him, the outcry, the eyes, the blood, the severed head. He had seen it before with Cesaire, after all. He had at this time no compunction. It was a dirty job that, as with the emptying of night-soil, must be done to make existence a cleaner place.
He visited Tadeusz last of all. Schesparn had been the first, and Stina the second, Mihaly the third. When Undracul drove in the final stake, the open wolf eyes of Tadeusz closed instead. Out of the ancient lips issued, not a shriek, but a breath, carrying two words.
It was this curse of Tadeusz’s that would haunt the man who killed him, long, long after he had become that other studious, secretive self, who was called Van Helsing. Those two words would also catapult him onward, into freedom, into hell and out of hell, toward a future that was all to do with explaining and tidying the past. ‘Remember me,’ Tadeusz breathed as his life went out of him. Van Helsing’s own life became then itself a tomb, the words carved in its granite. He had murdered 11 helpless beings who had perhaps, probably, loved him. If it was not to be his fault, it must be theirs – they and their kind. Remember me. Van Helsing, who had learned every lesson perfectly, would never forget.
NIGHT VISITOR
Something scratched at her window. What was it?
A fearsome sound, like long claws scraping over the glass, and then little random thuds. Some creature was beating on the pane, wanting to come in –
She thought, Imagination. The branch of a tree that I forgot could whip against the window in a strong wind. But there was no wind.
Anna rose and went to the window.
She stared, and saw – not a branch, not a bat or a night bird – but a tiny vampire, perfect in every detail, small as a child’s doll, his black cloak crimson-lined, furling around him, his hungry teeth glittering.
Anna flung open the window with a wild cry.
‘Dracul – my beloved – who has made you into a miniature – who has done this to you – I will kill them –’
THE THIRD HORSEMAN
The hunchback kicked open the door. Uncouth, and grinning his large blunt teeth, he announced: ‘Your dinner, Count. I have brought your dinner.’
The man in the carved chair rose to his feet. He looked through the twilight at the pale figure of the girl the hunchback was ushering into the room.
‘Don’t be a fool, Ygore.’
The hunchback, half resentfully scowling and half intimidated, slunk into shadow by the stair. The girl came forward alone, and the door thudded shut.
‘An idiot,’ she remarked. ‘How he must irritate you. I suppose you keep him … for the obvious reason.’
‘I promised him something of the sort. And he is useful, since I have the primitive leanings of my ancestry: a desire to accommodate my guests.’
‘I see. I noticed the bruises on his neck. He’s strong. I suppose it can go on some while.’
‘Not indefinitely.’
‘Nothing,’ she answered, ‘can do that.’
She drifted to the seat he offered her, and sank lightly into it. He remembered her. He remembered most, perhaps all of them. In the twilight she looked more ghostly than she needed to, her
long, smoke-blonde hair, her blonde dress, her slender, bone-pale face and hands, and throat. She still affected a masking device. In her case a ribbon of wine-red velvet. It was an irrelevant affectation now. He was a dark counterpoint to her pallor, or he believed he must be. The incredibly bleached skin was the same in both, of course. He could see it in his own white hand, reaching out to perch little moths of fire on the candle branch.
But he found it easier to recognise her face than he would have done to recognise his own. An aberration common to them all.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I forget your name.’
‘Berenice.’
A strange melancholy pang went through him, the inchoate vignette of a rambling house, a midnight lawn, trees and stars, excitement, sorrow, bitter-sweet; everything faded by time.
He said, ‘Yes, I recall now. And you’ve come to recite to me how it is, and to curse me probably.’
‘No,’ she said. In her eyes were the same faded emotions his brain and heart had conjured for him. ‘Never that. But to speak the truth. If you will listen. You comprehend, your servant was mistaken?’
‘Naturally. I’ve said, I recall our season together.’
‘I’m sorry that I can bring you nothing.’
Their glances, which had met, slipped from each other. ‘Don’t regret that,’ he said. ‘To stave off the inevitable is always a futile dream. As you’ll have seen from the others.’
‘Others … yes. The far side of the mountains there was a village. They had found a child, four years old. They’d torn it to pieces, mutilated it beyond hope of resurrection. As my carriage drove past, I think they must have supposed I too – your servant’s joke – was useable. They had killed all their horses – so they chased me on foot for several miles. I don’t know how, they were so weak. One man almost caught up to me – his chalk-white face, the red eyes – but he fell. There were many villages like that, others burned to the ground. Animals butchered beyond butchery, or else wandering, or lying on their sides in ditches, black tongued … the cities were far worse.’