Dracula (A Modern Telling) Page 14

  “Give me an army. I will win this war for you.”

  “Your skills in combat were impressive but you’re no general. You’ve never led men.”

  I lifted my hand over the candle and let it burn. It did not injury me. “I can win this war for you. I see things your generals can’t. I know where the Sultan will attack.”

  “Attack? We’re allies.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Father. He wishes to replace you with Radu. I can smell the death in you. You have been poisoned by it. You will be dead soon.”

  Shock grabbed him, and then faded away. “I can feel it,” he said.

  “Radu will destroy our homeland. You mustn’t allow our lands to fall to the Moslem. They feel we are infidels, they have no compulsion against slaughtering our women and children.”

  He nodded reluctantly and began pacing slowly as his weakened body would not allow full movement. “I’ve known this for a long time. But I had no choice. I had to choose what I thought was best at the time.”

  “And you will give me an army because you know it is the best thing. Unleash me, Father. They have never seen anything like me.”

  “Very well. You have your army.”

  STATIC … INAUDIBLE ... BREAK AT 11:57

  My father had been correct in stating I had not led men. What was worse was that I couldn’t lead them during the day. I attempted to cover myself in a litter but that only helped so much. In the full light of the sun, I was little more than a child. So I would give my orders to the generals at night and have them carry it out during the day.

  We attacked first. The battle of Sebes. The Sultan’s warriors outnumbered ours three to one, but I had seen their weakness. Their soldiers had been out for nearly four years securing their borders, and had been fighting my father’s enemies for many months. Abel was defeated and on the run, but the Moslems had given chase so deep into our lands they had thinned their supply chain and were desperate for food and medicine and clothing. They were tired and hungry and missed their families. War-weary, is the modern term.

  So I simply attacked their weakened supplies. For two weeks, we attacked anybody coming into or out of the main camp and prevented them from resupplying. I could feel their wills weakening. The passion of fighting for a cause was dimming. None of the men wanted to die in this dark and foreign place. And that is when we attacked. At their weakest.

  I was in a crate in a tent far from the combat, and yet could see the battle as it unfolded in the early morning as the mist still rolled on the ground. I had given my generals very specific instructions: the right flank would be weak. Attack the left so they send more forces there and then swing to the right with the full force of our army. We broke through their ranks and slaughtered their cavalry before they could even mount to fight. Their will was broken, and they ran.

  My soldiers wished to chase them but the generals forced them to stay. I had ordered none were to be killed that had surrendered or fled.

  When night came, I went to the battlefield. At least five thousand Moslem’s were dead, and perhaps five hundred of our men. I had never seen death on such a scale. I could hear the groans of the dying, I could smell the blood in the ground. It was … intoxicating. I could not resist. I bent down over one of the dying and quickly drank my fill. The blood warmed me and attuned my senses. I saw images and heard conversations this man had had. I felt a oneness with him that I had never felt with any of my family.

  When he passed, shame overtook me. I buried the man before leaving the battlefield to confer with my generals.

  But something even more pressing overtook me. Elizabeth. I had been attempting to locate Grigore since I had returned and was told he had gone to a nearby province to the home of his family. I did not know how Elizabeth would react to me now. Would she recoil in horror at what I had become or would she embrace it? I felt love from her across time and space and I could not imagine she would reject me, but a woman’s heart is an unknowable thing. Even for one such as I.

  The next battle went much the same way, as did the one after that. I could see their movements and look inside their hearts and find their worst fears. For example, one Moslem general was deathly afraid of snakes. We released hundreds of them on the field of battle. In a moment of panic, the general retreated. The soldiers, unaware that he did not intend for all of them to retreat, assumed the battle was over and fled as well. It caused my soldiers no end of amusement. I was … unstoppable.

  Radu and Mehmed took over the armies personally. The first battle was to be held in a field near the border of our province. The opposing army looked like a swarm of ants. As I observed their camp from the mountains, every blade of grass appeared to have a soldier on it. I did not think it possible that so many men could be gathered in one place.

  I had spies in their camp, for as long as money exists loyalties will be ephemeral, and found that Mehmed had wished to take my head, but Radu told him it would demoralize my troops more to take me alive and enslave me. Perhaps turn me into a prostitute. This filled Mehmed with glee and they had decided they would take me alive.

  I attacked when they did not expect it: at night at my full power. I could not stand to simply sleep while this battle raged.

  I charged down the middle of the field with my fiercest warriors behind me. I wore the red armor of my family and I recall it gleaming in the light of the moon.

  All sense had left me and I was in a frenzy. I held a sword in each hand and swung them like lion’s claws. I was too fast for any soldier — mine or the Moslem — to see. Bodies would simply drop with severed limbs, raining blood down over everyone surrounding them. It was chaos. Thousands of men pressed together and I could hear all their thoughts: every single one. I saw the faces of wives they would never see, of children they would love no longer. I heard thoughts of desperation and pleading, begging God to allow them to live long enough to see their families one more time.

  I killed … thousands. I became caked in blood and gore, stopping once to briefly feed on a Moslem soldier that had just stabbed one of my men through the eye. The rest of the time, I was a whirlwind of death.

  Most of the Moslem’s tried to flee. I caught Radu and Mehmed in their massive tent before they had even had the chance to signal a retreat. It was a battle tent with charts and figures laid out on a table. On another table, next to a small harem of nude women and a few young boys, were wines and fruits from all over the Sultan’s empire. Clearly, they intended to watch the battle and celebrate from afar.

  They had with them the Sultan’s Guard, the best warriors in their empire. I informed them with an interpreter that I had obtained that they would be allowed to live only if they fled now. To their credit, not a single one did, preferring death to cowardice. And I was more than willing to oblige. I killed them to the last man, giving them both quick and honorable deaths. I told my men to furnish them proper burials before turning to Radu and Mehmed, who were sitting on jeweled cushions at the far end of the tent.

  Appearing shocked, they hardly noticed me. That was when I noticed the two asps crawling around the floor. The fools had allowed the snakes to bite them in some misguided attempt at honor. I leaned over Radu.

  “I would have let you live, Brother. There was no need for this.”

  He laughed. “We were never brothers, little fool. And you’ve taken everything from me. So I’ve taken everything from you.”

  “What have you taken besides your life?”

  In his hand was a letter. I took it and read it:

  Elizabeth,

  I am filled with grief my dear, to report to you that my sweet younger brother has given up the ghost and returned to his maker. He spoke of you often and would tell me of the life together he planned to build with you. He spoke of children and grandchildren and the peace he had at every moment with you.

  He died quickly, in his sleep from a fever that has ravaged the great city of Constantinople, of which I’m certain you’ve heard. The doctors allowed him rest with narco
tics known to the Moslems that we have yet to discover. He asked that I inform you of his passing, and that I tell you that he loved you with his heart, and with his mind and with his soul.

  Please forgive me that I could not deliver this message in person but I am currently a guest of the Sultan and it is Moslem tradition to remain here until called.

  Yours in Grief,

  Radu Dracul III

  I looked to Radu who had a mischievous glint in his eye that I had seen a thousand times before. A glint that said he enjoyed the suffering he was imposing and that it nourished him.

  “She is dead,” he said.

  “You lie,” I spit.

  “She climbed to the castle to be in your old quarters and threw herself from the window. She drowned in the river below. Go to the cemetery by the church. You will find her grave.”

  I grabbed him by the face and lifted him in the air. “You lie!”

  “Do I?”

  I closed my eyes … and felt it. I saw her grave, saw the last moments of life as she stood at my window and looked out over a golden sun setting behind burnt clouds. The river was churning white below. She stepped to the ledge, the letter still in her hand, and leapt to her death.

  Radu screamed as I crushed his head like an egg. It burst with such force that the roof of the tent dripped with blood. I dropped his corpse and looked to Mehmed. I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. I was completely numb to the world. A royal spear was near Radu, crusted with jewels and gold. I took it and thrust it into the ground with the sharp point skyward. I lifted Mehmed and threw his body onto the spear. He writhed and screamed like an insect with a hot needle through it. I watched as he slid down, blood staining the shaft, and life began to leave his body.

  “Sire,” I heard behind me. I turned. “What shall we do with those that have surrendered?”

  I turned back to Mehmed’s corpse. “All of them will have the same fate.” I spun to the man and grabbed him by the collar. “Do you hear me! Every one of them must suffer the same fate! Line the roads with their corpses like dogs. And their women, and their children and their animals. All of them! I want their world to burn!”

  STATIC … INAUDIBLE …

  BREAK … INAUDIBLE ... MOVMENT … INAUDIBLE …

  “Um, Count, you okay?”

  “Yes, just give me a moment.”

  “Okay, sorry. Um, this is quite a story. I thought you were joking when your assistant told me what you wanted to talk about. But you know, I think I get it. Is this like a publicity thing? ‘Cause actually I think it’s great. Fits your image: rock star writes fictional book about being a vampire. The more I think about it the more I love it. I think it was Mick Jagger or Johnny Cash that did something like this where they talked about shooting someone but never really did. But I think we could work on the story. I’m curious though, what are you going to say happened to you?”

  “I … defeated them in almost every battle. We would fight at night and I would fill them with such terror that their armies would lose heart and run … we would chase them and slaughter them like pigs. But I never forgot, I never could feel … excuse me. I cannot talk about this anymore right now.”

  “I understand. You wanna pick this up tomorrow? Count? Count, you all right?”

  STATIC … INAUDIBLE …

  DR. SEWARDS EVERNOTE JOURNAL

  September 14

  The funeral is being arranged for tomorrow. Lucy’s family is a little on the airheaded side and said they didn’t know where to begin to make funeral arrangements so I’ve jumped in and began setting everything up with Arthur. The lady at the funeral home, I’m guessing in an attempt to comfort me, said, “She makes a really beautiful corpse. It was my pleasure to work on her.”

  Honestly, I felt a little like vomiting, but I just nodded and pretended it was a perfectly normal thing to say.

  Arthur had to go back to attend to his father who was dying as well and so the task of notifying everyone and making sure the funeral happened was left to me and Van Helsing. The professor’s really taking this hard for some reason. I noticed he’d kept a journal he found in Lucy’s room, and whenever we had a second he would pull it out and start reading. He also got passwords for Lucy’s emails and Facebook accounts from her mother and began reading those.

  “I’m going to search her room,” he said to me.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I sat in the living room and attended to her papers. Lucy was the heir to a small fortune that was going to be left to her when her father passed, and the trust and will had to be modified. We had a good attorney but he was easily seventy-five or eighty years old and had to be reminded to do something ten times before he did it.

  Van Helsing came back down a couple hours later and asked if I needed help with anything.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked.

  “Just some letters and another journal.” He held it up. It had a brown leather cover with a pink heart on the front. “I’m going to ask Arthur’s permission before reading this. Most of it is about him. Some of it is about you.”

  Nothing would have made me happier than to sit down and go through that journal. Lucy was the liveliest person I had ever known. Completely wild and unpredictable. I can’t remember a time when I would have more fun than going out with her. But in a way, I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to know whether she felt the same way about me because it would make her death that much more difficult, so I let it go.

  The funeral was the next day and we were exhausted. We decided to sleep at Lucy’s house because of some follow-up we had to do in the morning with the attorney, and because for some reason Van Helsing insisted on it.

  But there was one place we had to go first: the funeral home. We had to sign off on the condition of the corpse before the funeral. So we drove down together. It was a nice enough place as funeral homes go I guess, but there’s a reason I didn’t become a pathologist. The dead never fascinated me: I became a doctor to help with life.

  The room Lucy was in looked like a flower garden. Lucy’s body was in the center of the room in a white, almost marble-looking, casket. She was surrounded by white roses and lilies and looked so peaceful that it appeared to me like she was asleep. A thin transparent sheet covered her face, and when Van Helsing pulled it back we were truly in awe of the beauty that still shone through. Usually you can tell a corpse is a corpse. Whatever fire had animated their flesh is extinguished and nothing has been left behind but a lump of clay. But Lucy didn’t appear that way. Her lips and skin and hair all appeared as it did when she was healthy. It didn’t look like I was staring at a cadaver.

  Van Helsing looked at her sternly and contemplated something.

  “Wait here till I get back,” he said.

  He came back in the room with some cloves of garlic, and I couldn’t even imagine where he found that on such short notice. He placed the garlic around the casket and then took a little gold crucifix out of his pocket and placed it around Lucy’s neck, putting the cross itself to her lips.

  We put the sheet back over her face and left.

  That night, we were in Lucy’s house. I told Van Helsing after seeing her I was too uncomfortable staying there, but again he insisted and said he would explain to me why later. So I went about trying to get as comfortable as I could. I was in my room, which was just the guest bedroom downstairs, changing when Van Helsing came in.

  “We need to go to the funeral home again. Tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to cut off her head and take out her heart — Jack, you okay?”

  “You want to … what?”

  “You heard me. And don’t look so shocked; how many operations did you perform at the ER? This is even less shocking because she’s already dead.”

  “Professor, there is no way I am going to—”

  “Actually, you know what? Arthur will want to see her at the wake. Hm, well, not tonight th
en. We’ll wait until Arthur sees her and then you’ll have to distract the staff while I do it. I know you cared about her so I’ll be the one to do it.”

  “Are you crazy? Why would we possibly do that? She’s already dead? Why do you want to mutilate her ?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and almost tenderly said, “Jack, you’ve known me a long time. Have you ever known me to do something without good cause? Answer me honestly.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then you must trust me. I know things that you don’t know. I’ve seen things you can’t imagine. And you must trust me. One day I will explain everything to you, but for now you just have to trust me.”

  “All right. I’ll trust you.”

  “Good,” he said, slapping my cheek and cackling like a witch before leaving the room.

  I had a restless night of sleep if ever there was one. I kept having nightmares of Lucy in my room. Her standing in a corner and just staring at me with eyes glowing dimly; she looked like some demon. I woke several times and had to change my shirt because it was soaked in sweat.

  In the morning, Van Helsing burst into my room and threw the little gold crucifix he held in his hand onto my chest. I looked at it: it was the same one he had put on Lucy.

  “The mortician took this off of her.”

  “To steal?”

  “No, he didn’t want it on her face.”

  “So what?”

  He looked at me and exhaled. “I don’t know yet.” He left the room and I heard Lucy’s mother’s car start outside and drive away.

  I sat for a while and played with the crucifix but I had to get going too. I had to pick up Arthur at the airport.

  When I saw him step out of the terminal, he looked like a different man. He’d aged. Having to deal with the death of his father and the death of his fiancé at the same time couldn’t have been easy.