by Joseph Rubas
CHAPTER THREE
Titanic dropped anchor two miles off of Queenstown at 11:30 that morning, and passengers were ferried to and from land by two small White Star vessels. Van Helsing, alone, for Art and John were taking lunch in the Café Parisian, stood at the railing next to a large American man named Archibald Butt, a military aide to President Taft, and watched the transfer process while thinking of Dracula.
“The biggest damn ship I ever been on,” Butt was saying as he looked toward the Irish coast, his ham hock hands tightly gripping the rail.
Butt, though flabby, perfected a stern, military air. Van Helsing could sense a great energy lurking just beneath the surface; this was a born man of action. Van Helsing couldn’t help but contemplate the ravishes of time. He imagined that Butt had once been lean and young, his face unlined and his hair lacking the hints of gray that were there now. Van Helsing had once been young and strong. Now he was an old man.
“Yes,” Van Helsing said and leaned against the railing on his forearms. He wished to cast the hateful cane in his right hand, a testament to his age and decrepitude, into the churning gray waters, but he did not. Instead, he mused. “It is a wonder of the world, I suppose.”
“We’re living in a wondrous time, my friend. Man can fly; crossing the Atlantic is as dangerous as taking a bath; and our medical knowledge increases every day. We have electric lights, motor vehicles, telephones, phonographs. Surely the best of times.”
“Yes,” Van Helsing replied, “it amazes me so all of the luxury and amenities that we today have. I never thought I’d see the day when men in America and men in England could communicate as though they were in the same room.”
“The best of times. “But perhaps also the worst.”
“How so?” Van Helsing asked. He turned from the gray coast, and the small oncoming liners, and looked at Butt. He was still facing forward as if afraid to meet Van Helsing’s eyes, sullen, his face hard.
“Weapons of war, Doctor Van Helsing. We have modern Gatling guns, cannons, aeroplanes, submarines, a thousand other machines that, if unleashed, would destroy the world.”
“Perhaps,” Van Helsing said. “But I have faith in my fellow man. I think war will be a thing of the past by 1940. If not through compassion, then simply because everyone has these weapons and no one will want to go against them.”
Butt shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe. But the tangled alliances of Europe have me doubting. One small conflict can plunge the whole Continent into war. Will plunge the whole Continent into war.”
“Certainly not.”
“Mark my words, Dr. Van Helsing. In ten years there will be a war unlike any we’ve ever seen.”
Van Helsing opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. Such a war was possible. He elected...
Toward aft, a woman screamed.
Dracula!
Van Helsing turned, and saw the women several yards away, terror written across her porcelain face. She was pointing at one of the funnels.
Expecting to see a ghastly cross between a man and a bat, Van Helsing looked up.
A black, sooty face peered down over the lip of the fourth funnel.
A jolt hit Van Helsing’s heart, and he nearly cried out a warning to his deck side contemporaries, his chest clenching painfully, but, beside him, he heard the rich booming laugh of Butt.
“Why, that’s just a stoker from the engine room,” he said, and waved to the sooty face. Van Helsing saw a small dark form, which must have been the stoker’s own arm, return the wave.
A few of the men on deck, having had their attention drawn from Queenstown by the woman’s frightened shriek, and having overheard Butt, chuckled lowly; some even gave their own wave.
Van Helsing clutched his chest, his heart thundering against his ribcage. He took several deep breaths to fill his windless lungs; the world began to gray at the edges, and he was dreadfuly certain that he was having a heart attack.
Slowly, however, the world went back to the way it should have been.
“See, that last smokestack’s a fake,” Butt explained, pointing. “They added it for cosmetic reasons; it is only a vent for the boilers. That stooge there musta crawled up the inside.”
“I would never have known it was not real,” Van Helsing said a bit breathlessly.
“Me neither, but I talked with Mr. Andrews, the ship’s builder. A nice man, on this very voyage.”
***
At 1:45, with Titanic finished and underway, Queenstown at her back, the men gathered in Van Helsing’s stateroom.
“Okay,” he said as he handed John and Art both a small crucifix and a pointed piece of birch wood. “We all too well remember how to kill Dracula. All I need to then say is exercise extreme caution. He may have set a trap for us.”
Van Helsing led the men in a quick, silent prayer, and afterward they left. With Van Helsing in the middle between Art and John in case he fell where corridor width allowed, they descended into the bowels of the ship.
While not as stunning as the breathtaking first-class staircase, the one leading down into the second-class, simple, carpeted, surrounded by gleaming polished dark oak, was still ornate, reminding Van Helsing of some of the better hotels he had stayed at over the years.
From second class, they entered into a virtual maze of corridors, rooms, and gangways.
At nearly 3:00, they entered Titanic’s cargo hold, a massive space crammed with a jumbled assortment of crates, trunks, boxes, and other odds and ends, including a Renaults motorcar.
“We have marked the suspected boxes with chalk,” Seward said as he led the men into the hold.
Van Helsing followed behind the younger men, grimly silent, as they led him to the first box, a large wooden crate shoved up against the ship’s hull. In black stencil, French writing was splayed across the box, over an uneven read stamp, faded and apparently hurriedly applied, which read TITANIC.
Van Helsing strongly doubted that this was one of Dracula’s boxes, but it was not impossible; he could have come through France on his way from Eastern Europe. Van Helsing stiffly bent down and placed one hand upon the splintered wood, trying to imagine this crate, containing possibly just soil, or soil and an affront to God, strapped to the back of a jostling horse carriage, bumping over rutted dirt roads and through rocky mountain passes. But he was no clairvoyant.
Van Helsing rose to his feet with a popping of the knees and a weary sigh, when each man grabbed each of his arms, sudden anger exploded within him. He almost snapped something, almost told them that he didn’t need their damn help, that he could stand on his own; but, as fast as it flashed, the anger went, leaving Van Helsing cold and sorrowful inside. They were only trying to help him, they worried about him; he was lucky to have friends like he did.
“Thank you,” he said a bit forced.
Art and Van Helsing stood aside while Seward produced a crowbar from inside his jacket, and used it to pry open the box in a shriek of nails wrenched from wood.
Once the box was open and the lid set aside, Art and Van Helsing stepped forward, and joined Seward in looking down into it. The box contained nothing but a few stacks of fine china set atop what looked like a soft, cushy tarp.
“Damn it,” Seward muttered disappointedly.
“You two pry open the next box while I reset the lid,” Van Helsing said. He saw a look exchanged between the two younger men. They were probably wondering if it was a good idea to let old, elderly Van Helsing do even that much; he could drop it, or hurt himself.
Van Helsing felt anger threatening to overwhelm him again, so he took three deep breaths and said, “Go, we haven’t much time. You are the slowest men I have ever seen.”
Without further word or protest, Art and John moved on to the next box while Van Helsing dragged the lid back onto the box, panting, his arms screaming by the time that he had done.
The box that Ar
t and John were currently focused on was rather queer, made of a curious red wood and polished to a slippery finish.
“This must be one of his boxes,” Van Helsing declared as he hobbled over. “Be very careful in opening this, Dracula may be inside.”
Opening this box was much harder than the last one had been. First Seward took a swing, and nearly collapsed after five minutes of straining and grunting. Only having removed the lid about two mere inches from the box, Seward, red face covered in sweat, panting deeply, handed the crowbar to Art.
“You try, I might break myself,” he said with a small smile.
Art took the crowbar, rolled up his sleeves, and made a show of strutting over to the box. “Let me show you a true man in action,” he said, and thus began an epic ten minute struggle which ended with Art on the ground, gasping for breath, and the lid atop him. John and Van Helsing could not help roaring laughter when Art finally wrenched the lid free, and fell back with a small cry of shock, his eyes wide and his mouth open in an O of surprise.
No Dracula popped out, Van Helsing saw through tear filled eyes, so he hoped that at least this would prove to be a box of dirt.
“A true man,” Seward was saying in-between laughs, “yes, yes, a true man indeed!”
“Shut up,” Art grunted as he pushed the box off of him and sat up, his wet face the color of a beet. “I got it, didn’t I?”
“I believe that it got you,” Seward retorted, and everyone laughed, including Art.
“Let’s see what she has in her, anyway,” Art said, peering in.
Nothing. At least nothing pertaining to Dracula; only a stack of books atop a neat pile of folded clothing.
“Damn it all!” Art exclaimed and kicked the side of the box, “for nothing!”
Van Helsing reset the lid while Art and John, shrouded in sullen silence, went on to the next box, a long steamer trunk with unlocked latches on the sides. Inside, there were several folded suits, a dress or two, and a pair of men’s shoes.
They franticly checked several more boxes, some not even marked with the white chalk cross that Art and John had earlier used, but they found nothing; no soil, no Dracula, only clothes, personal effects, and failure.
Once they had done all that they could presently do, the three men sat side-by-side-by –side on a long crate (which had been checked) and smoked; Art and John cheaply made cigarettes, Van Helsing his pipe.
“I don’t understand it,” Van Helsing said between puffs, blue smoke hung in a haze around their heads. “His boxes have to be around here somewhere, he is onboard Titanic, I know it.”
“John and I will have to come down later,” Art said almost sadly, “and scout out more possible matches. He’s here, alright, but where?”
On thinking of Dracula’s hiding place, and the man himself, black anger washed over Art and the pain of Lucy’s death was brought back anew. He tried his best not to think of her, and he succeeded most times, but he still had the damned nightmares, in which he was in vampire Lucy’s crypt alone, with a stake and no idea (or no wish) to use it. He usually awoke with a jerk when the stake plunged into Lucy’s heart, and her eyes, her eyes flung open, along with the horrible Satan’s mouth. He’d had it last night.
“Somewhere,” Van Helsing said.
Somewhere, Art thought as he took a puff of his cigarette.
“I still wonder if I was right in assuming Dracula is aboard,” Seward said fretfully, bringing Art out of his deep pool of thought.
“I have already told you,” Van Helsing said slowly, with the infinite patience of a long time teacher, “you were right, John, Dracula is here.”
“I just hope that I didn’t make an awful mistake,” Seward said quietly.
To this, Art replied tightly, “Don’t worry, he’s here.”
Before they left the hold, Van Helsing removed a bit of Eucharist wafer from his bag and sprinkled its crumbs around the hold. Outside, he mashed it up with water and rubbed it on the doorframes. If Dracula’s boxes were inside, they were off limits to him now.
Van Helsing smiled.