by Joseph Rubas
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
John Seward stood in a rich, warmly lit hallway somewhere in the second class, looking strickenly about himself and wondering where to go. Titanic was such a big ship; there were so many corridors.
A few men in lifebelts rushed past him, commenting on the list, and disappeared up a well-appointed staircase.
Rounding a corner up ahead was a large group of what appeared to be steerage passengers. Reaching into his wallet, figuring it was worth a shot, he pulled out a faded photograph of Art (regal and stone-faced), and flashed it to the first person to pass him, a Hungarian woman in a kerchief. She looked at the picture, and made wild gestures while spewing out words in her native tongue.
A man in a cap leaned over his shoulder.
“Have you seen this man?” Seward asked.
“Ay,” the man replied in a thick Scottish accent, “’e’s the one let us out not ten minutes gone by.”
The man went on to tell Seward about the gates and Art freeing them.
“Is the situation bad in steerage?” he asked.
“I’d say. The dinnin’ room was flooded.”
After the group went on its way, Seward stood indecisively. He considered venturing into steerage, but if the situation was that bad, he doubted Art and Dracula would be there. On the other hand, Art might be trapped.
Sighing, Seward tucked the photo into his pocket and followed the signs on the walls to a stairwell leading into third class. Here, the list was even greater. He started down the plainly appointed hall, but stopped when he became aware of an odd roaring din. He stopped, cocked his head, and listened for a moment, but couldn’t quite place it.
Suddenly nervous, he took the crucifix from his coat and advanced slowly down the hall; it was like descending a ramp.
A right turn brought him to the top of a staircase: Rushing water covered all but the last two steps. As he watched in amazement, the water closed over the second-to-last tread and began to rise.
“Art?” he called, his voice muffled by the sound of the water. “Art?”
No reply.
“Art!”
Nothing.
If he was trapped, it wasn’t here.
Licking his lips, Seward turned and started down a hall leading deeper into the ship, but stopped: Ahead, water gushed out of a vent grate along the bottom of the wall.
“Art?”
No reply.
Gnawed by worry, he went back up the hall and poked around a bit. The staterooms he found were abandoned, the lights left blazing and personal effects strewn across the floor. In one berth he found a man lying in the center of the room. With a jolt of the heart, he knew the man was dead.
Kneeling, Seward found that it wasn’t a man at all but a boy no more than seventeen. His face was white and shrunken, and two ugly red puncture wounds marred his neck.
Dracula.
When he returned to junction leading to the stairwell, he saw that the water had come up into the hall and was washing across the floor. The stairs were completely submerged.
In the smoking room, he found Dr. Van Helsing by the card table, standing over a large man’s shoulder and smiling. The man, beefy and mustached, said something, and Van Helsing chuckled.
“John,” he called when he saw him, “come here.”
Seward approached the table, and Van Helsing introduced him to the beefy man, Archibald Butt.
“I came over to chat after one of these men spilled their drinks and they had to break while it was cleaned up,” Van Helsing said.
“I did not spill it,” a man wearing a monocle said indignantly, “it slid off the table.”
Seward noticed that there were no glasses present on the table.
“I wonder how long it’ll be until we start sliding around,” Butt mused.
Van Helsing’s smile died. “Not long, I am sure.”
“The third class dining room is flooded,” John said, “and so is much of steerage.”
The men at the table looked as though he had told them an army of savages was on its way. “Third? Already?” asked monocle.
Seward nodded. “Dr. Van Helsing, could you come with me, please?”
Van Helsing nodded. He clapped Butt on the shoulder. “Hopefully I will see you again.”
“Hopefully,” Butt echoed.
Van Helsing hobbled past Seward. “Follow me to the deck. I want to make a round. How did your search go? You were not gone very long.”
As they left the smoking room and stepped onto the icy deck, Seward told Van Helsing what he had learned.
“Good,” Van Helsing said, “maybe he has Dracula.”
“I just worry about the flooding. Hopefully he isn’t trapped somewhere.”
The number of people on the deck had tripled in the twenty minutes they had been gone. Van Helsing saw people of every social class; men, women, children, stewards, maids, and other Titanic employees. Two boats just aft of the smoking room entrance were being filled by several officers, one of whom stood in the boat and held fast to the davit, waving on women and children and waving back men. Van Helsing saw that J.J. Astor and his group had abandoned the gym and were waiting back in the crowd. Once several more ladies had been admitted to the boat, the Astors came forward.
“Do you mind if I join my wife?” Astor asked the officer, one arm protectively around Madeline’s waist; “in her condition...”
“Sorry, sir; women and children first,” the officer said.
Astor, looking a bit wounded, motioned his wife to get in.
So this was it. People were beginning to realize that Titanic was gravely wounded. In the twenty minutes it had taken John to search for Art, fear, disquiet, and foreboding had begun to color the prevailing mood.
“Let’s walk, John.”
On the port deck, a scene similar to the one on starboard was unfolding. There seemed to be more people here than there were on starboard, many more, and after a moment, Van Helsing understood why. The officers at the davits were letting almost anybody onto the boats.
Weaving through the crowd on the forward part of the deck, Van Helsing carefully inspected every face that he came across. Dracula wasn’t out in the open, but it was possible that he was on the promenade deck.
Close to the bridge, a small stairway enclosed on three sides by a bland white wall, waist height to a man, gave access to B-deck. Seward unquestioningly followed Van Helsing down the gently sloping stars, already having inferred what they were doing.
The promenade deck wrapped around the ship entirely; one could start at port stern and wall all the way around the vessel. A few steerage men and manual laborers were standing on the section of deck which connected the port and starboard bow, looking out at the ever lowering bow, talking and speculating excitedly. Looking aft, Van Helsing saw a massive crush of people huddled along the glassless windows, restlessly waiting for the boats to drop spider-like from above; so many of them were talking at once that he couldn’t make out any individual conversations, but he didn’t need to. They looked scared, all of them, their faces ashen and their eyes bright and clear. The deck was growing steeper by the moment; even the most imbecilic of men could now clearly see that the Titanic was in mortal danger.
How long before the deck erupted into full-blown panic? Van Helsing wondered, before men started to fight women for spots in the boats, before the thin layer of civility shattered and all hell came through?
Presently, a boat jerked past one of the wide windows and grinded to a halt. The resident officer, a rather rotund man, roughly oversaw the loading of nearly a dozen people, including woman, several small children, and a boy of roughly thirteen who was at first denied passage until his father demanded it. Several men asked if they could board, but each one was rebuffed.
Once the officer decided that the boat was full, he grabbed one of the ropes tethering it, looked up, and called, “Alright, lower her down!”
Van Helsing watched as the faces in the boat, wan a
nd drawn, haltingly disappeared.
He looked then to the people around him.
“At any moment,” Van Helsing said, “their masks could slip off.”
“What?” Seward asked.
“Nothing,” Van Helsing replied.
***
Arthur Holmwood was at a loss. Though a man to rarely ever rest in indecision, and certainly not one to give up when something lost any ease it may once have had, he hadn't an idea how to proceed. The hour was growing late and the list heavier, and Dracula was nowhere to be found. Searching every single cabin, each linen closet, each nook and cranny...wasn't merely a daunting task, it was an impossible one, as Doctor Van Helsing had said. The ship was simply too big to be gone over by one man alone, and time was running out. Most of the lowest decks were already underwater. Several times since the monster had escaped him, he had come to stairways leading down into nothing but glowing, bubbling ocean. The only thing the search had yielded was another gated passageway, this one presided over by a tall Irish man with blazing eyes and rotted teeth that would have blocked the continued life of nearly three dozen frightened immigrants. The man crumbled easily enough when Art unpocketed the defunct pistol and aimed it (God forgive him) at his crotch.
"There are no others that I know of, I swear it!" the man yelped when Art cocked the trigger. A hefty, middle-aged man in a cap disagreed, however, and claimed that he had come upon three such barriers in his terrified search for safety.
"Go and tell the people watching them that Lord Godalming has demanded they be opened," Art told the man, who nodded and rushed away down a dim hall.
Now, as Art came to the second class stairway and sank to the bottom step in a posture of utter despair, he lit a cigarette and puffed angrily on it, filling the slanted corridor with fragrant smoke. God damn it all. Where was that son-of-a-whore? He had trouble believing he would crawl into a stateroom and die quietly like an animal in the wild, but that didn't mean anything. He was wounded and weak. He could easily become lost and stumble around until the Titanic went down, thus depriving Art the pleasure of killing him.
There was no escape for him, Art realized, whether death came by his hand or not. And though the thought of Dracula dying filled him with indescribable joy, the thought of Dracula dying any way but by his hand enraged and agitated him.
He sighed and took another long puff. If he must, then he would accept Dracula's death in whatever form it came. He would prefer to look into the motherfucker's eyes as his filthy soul was ripped back to hell, to see the fear, the terror, the horror, the dread, the agony, but if he was unable, then that was something that he, as a gentleman, would have to come to terms with. There was no use in sulking around like a sullen child who hasn't gotten his way.
Sighing, he flicked his cigarette into the hall and stood. Below him, the step was uneven. He took out his pocket watch. 1:30 am. Another hour and a half, if he was lucky. God, was that the true time? It felt as if he had been after the thing much longer than that. Art closed his eyes and did a bit of mental math. The last time he remembered with any clarity was 12:30 on the clock on the grand staircase.
Time was short, and Dracula was nowhere.