Blood of the Impaler (19 page)

Holly sighed and lay back on the bed. "Oh, Malcolm!" she muttered, her voice laced with pity and disgust.

"Holly, just listen to me, okay?"

She sighed again. "Okay, okay."

"Let's say, just for discussion purposes, just for the sake of argument, that Dracula was somehow able to alter the composition of his blood, make it both static and also somehow regenerative. . . ."

"Malcolm," she said wearily, "don't try to make a foolish superstition sound scientific by phrasing it nicely. It's still all nonsense, and deep down inside, you know that it is."

"Listen, listen!" he said, "Let's just suppose that his own blood held the key to . . . well, to what Van Helsing called Undeath, in some chemical manner we can't understand."

"Uh-huh," she said with growing irritation.

"Let's say that there's a chemical reaction of some sort, and that human blood, real, living human blood, is the
catalyst necessary for the reaction to occur. Wouldn't that explain everything? Wouldn't that explain why he lived on for centuries, why he had to drink blood from living people?"

She sat up in the bed and sighed, resigned to the conversation. "Okay, let's examine that idea for a minute. How does that explain how people killed by Dracula, drained dry by him to the point of death, became vampires after they died?"

"Maybe he forced them to drink his blood also. If it's the altered blood that enabled him to return from death, maybe he gave them his blood after drinking from theirs."

She shook her head. "It doesn't say that in the book."

"Of course not," he replied. "No one ever saw Dracula attack his victims. Maybe each night that he drank from Lucy Westenra, he gave her some of his blood in exchange." He
paused. "In
fact, why should we assume that what he did to Mina Harker was an isolated incident? Maybe it was, you know, standard operating procedure!"

"Okay," Holly said. "So if the presence of the blood in the system makes the corpse . . . I don't know, wake up or something, then why didn't your great-grandmother become a vampire? Why didn't your father rise from his grave, looking for blood?"

"Because this is America in the twentieth century, not England in the nineteenth. When a person dies he or she is embalmed. The blood is drained from the body and replaced with embalming fluid. They didn't do that to Lucy Westenra. They didn't do that to the women in Dracula's castle, the ones that Van Helsing destroyed just before the final attack on the Count." He paused again, his eyebrows knitting and his eyes blazing with furious thought. "Don't you see? The power, the real power, is in the blood. It's in the blood!"

"Okay, fine," she said, too tired to argue about it.

"Second thought," he went on. "If Dracula was the only vampire who ever existed, except for his victims, and if he became a vampire by some sort of conscious alchemical process, doesn't it stand to reason that the process is reversible? I mean, aren't most chemical processes reversible?"

"No," she answered simply.

He ignored her objection. "If it could be done, it can be undone, I'm certain of that. There must be a way to counteract the influence of his blood, some way besides taking communion." He paused and thought for a moment. "I know I'm sort of rambling, but the idea is sound."

"The idea is anything but sound, Malcolm," she said. "Don't misunderstand me here; there are no such things as vampires. But if there were, there wouldn't be any sort of scientific explanation of them."

"Okay, so there isn't a scientific explanation, there isn't any sort of rational explanation. The important fact remains that the power is in the blood, and there must be some way to figure out why the blood is so powerful." He looked at her seriously. "That brings me to my third idea."

"Go on," she sighed.

"Later on, when the town is asleep, we're going to go and check out Lucy Westenra's coffin. Maybe we'll just find the remains of a dead person."

"First logical thing you've—"

"But maybe we'll find more. Maybe we'll find a stake sticking out of her ribs. Maybe we'll see that her head was cut off, like it says in the book."

"Yeah, sure. Maybe."

"If the blood in my veins is Dracula's blood, then it was this blood, my blood, that turned her into a vampire in the first place. It was the presence of this blood in her body that caused her to rise from death and become a vampire. If it did it once, it can do it twice."

She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then her eyes went wide as his meaning became clear to her
. "What?"

"Of course!" he said excitedly. "What do you, I, or anyone know about vampirism, except the stuff we read in legends? Nothing, nothing at all! If I want to understand what's been happening to me, and more importantly, if I want to figure out what to do about it, who better for me to question than a real, honest-to-God vampire?"

She continued to stare at him, and then she began to laugh uncontrollably. "Oh, Mal, this is too much! This is too much!"

"I'm not kidding, Holly," he muttered darkly.

"I know you're not," she said through her laughter. "That's what makes it so funny!"

He jumped from the bed and went over to the closet, where he took out a black leather carry-on bag he had brought with him on the plane. "While you and Jerry were in the antique shop, I went out and bought this stuff." He emptied the contents of the bag onto the bed: crowbars, a hammer, a flashlight, a whisk broom, and a small silver crucifix. "I'm in deadly earnest, Holly. If we just find an old skeleton, I'll be the happiest guy in the world. But—and I'm not just saying this—if we find evidence that she had been a vampire a century ago, I'm going to try to bring her back to question her."

"Uh-huh, sure," Holly said, trying not to start laughing again. "Will you be insulted if I tell you that I'm not the slightest bit worried about that possibility?"

"Of course not. I hope that this is all foolishness. I want to feel stupid more than anything else I've ever wanted in my life. I really want to be shown up for a paranoid asshole, I really do."

"Well," she muttered, "you're gonna get your wish."

He either ignored her response or did not hear it. He gazed out the window at the setting sun and said, more to himself than to her, "If it works, we'll be in danger. You will be, anyway. I doubt that Lucy could do anything to me, with my blood already polluted." He turned to her. "You may have to keep a firm hold on the crucifix, Holly. With the crosses and the garlic we should be able to control her, we should be able to force her to obey us. . . ."

Holly sprang from the bed. "I'm going out to find Jerry and have a few drinks." Her voice was angry and impatient.

"Wait a minute," Malcolm said. "I'll come with you."

"Don't!" She shouted. "Please don't. Just stay here and, and . . . I don't know, sharpen stakes or something!" Then, relenting slightly, she said, "I'll be back in an hour or so, and then we'll go break into the mausoleum. We'll probably end up in jail, but when I make a promise, I keep it." Her eyes narrowed as she glared at him. "But I'm warning you, Malcolm. This is it, you understand? This is it!"

She slammed the door behind her, and as she strode angrily down the corridor, she thought,
Great, just great. I finally find a guy who isn't a jerk and he turns out to be a nut! I mean,
vampires
, for Christ's sake!

In the hotel room, Malcolm turned back to the window and watched as the sun vanished behind the hills. "It will all be over soon, Holly," he whispered. "Tonight we'll either know that it's all myth, or we'll have a vampire to interrogate." He remembered the narrative he had read in his great-grandmother's diary. I wonder if that's what my grandfather was trying to do when he was a child, when he tried to break into Lucy's tomb. I wonder if he had an instinctive urge to resurrect her.

He frowned at his own thoughts.
What a strange thought! Why on earth would a six-year-old child have an idea like that?

Malcolm Harker did not pause to wonder why that same idea had so unexpectedly occurred to him.

Chapter Eight

T
he fog drifted about their feet as they stood in the shadows near the crypt in the old churchyard. Malcolm was calm, but it was the calmness of the still air before a thunderstorm.

"Malcolm," Holly whispered, "I want to go home!"

He shook his head slowly, without looking at her. "Either it's all true or it's all false, the evidence we've uncovered notwithstanding. If it's all nonsense, then nothing is lost, no one is hurt, and everything is okay. If—God help me if it's true, then I'll be safe, and I'll be able to protect you. She would want true human blood, not mine."

"Oh, Malcolm!" Holly sighed.

He stopped and stood contemplatively before the rusted iron gate whose bars covered the cracked wooden door. Then he dropped down to one knee and began to rummage around in the black bag as his companion rubbed her arms against the cold, damp night air and looked around nervously. "What if somebody sees us?" she whispered. "We could get arrested!"

"Shhh," he replied, taking a flashlight, a crowbar, and a hammer from the bag.

"I'm serious," she said. "I mean, nobody'd believe the story that you—"

"Shhh!" he repeated emphatically, shooting her an impatient frown. He rose to his feet and inserted the crowbar between the two iron slats that formed the nexus of the gate frame and the heavy inlaid lock. He grabbed hold of the end of the crowbar with both hands, and after bracing himself against the wall of the tomb with his left foot, he gave a mighty pull. The rusted old lock snapped, and the iron gate
swung open as bits of brown metallic dust splintered off and fell from the long unused hinges.

They stood for a long while, staring at the wooden door with the long, warped crack that extended from top to bottom on the right side. At last she said, "Please,
please
let's get away from here! I'm scared!"

Her words seemed to awaken him from some private reverie and he snapped his head in her direction. "I thought you didn't believe in any of this."

"I don't," she replied, just a bit defensively.

"Well, then, what are you afraid of?"

"I'm afraid of getting arrested!" she said. "I'm afraid of meeting some nut prowling around here at night! Can't we leave, please?"

He turned away from her, not responding to her request. He pushed gently on the wooden door and felt it give slightly. Then he raised his foot and kicked against it, sending it flying open and leaving a section of crumbling wood lying beside it on the damp stone floor of the crypt. "Wait out here," he muttered as he stepped over the threshold into the darkness of the interior.

"Are you kidding?" she whispered. "I'm not standing out here all by myself in the middle of the—"

"All right, all right," he said testily. "Come in if you want to. But just be quiet." His last words were spoken more harshly than he had intended them, and he smiled at her, saying, "I'm sorry. I'm just a little jumpy."

His smile was forced and impatient, but she chose to accept the apology. "Sure," she smiled back. "It's okay." She waited until he had switched on the flashlight and then she, too, entered.

The air was musty and dank. It was obvious from the condition of the exterior and the layers of dust in the interior that the crypt had neither been cared for nor visited for many, many years. This did not surprise him, for he knew that the grave that they had sought was occupied by a young woman who had died shortly after the demise of her widowed mother. There were no relatives, no family to care for the burial place. There had been friends, of course, but they were all long since dead and buried themselves.

Malcolm and Holly quietly entered the sepulcher. He moved the flashlight beam about slowly, resting it for a moment upon the brass plaque that had been affixed to the side of one of the three antique lead coffins. "Her mother," he muttered. He moved the beam to the left and illuminated a similar plaque on a similar sarcophagus. "Her father," he said. "She must be here," and he swung the light quickly over to the third coffin. Holly Larsen did not move from her spot as he walked over and read the third plaque. "This is it," he whispered. "Try to close the door."

"Close the door! Whatever for?" she asked.

"We don't want to be interrupted, do we?" He began to work the tip of the crowbar in between the heavy lid of the sarcophagus and the main body of the lead casket.

"Well, I wouldn't mind being interrupted," she replied. "I don't even want to be here! This is the craziest—"

"Will you shut up!" he said angrily. "You didn't have to come here tonight, you didn't have to come to England at all! If you're not going to be of any help to me, then get the hell out!" He paused, glaring at her. "I mean it!"