Return of the Wolf Man (35 page)

“He did, Master,” said Andre. “He said it was Lawrence Talbot. He said he wanted the woman.”

Dracula looked back at Caroline and his mood changed abruptly. “He is still the melancholy knight.” The right side of his mouth rose in the semblance of a smile. “My sword, Andre.”

The
sarpe
walked over. He placed the hilt in Dracula’s hand.

“Watch over the young woman,” the vampire commanded. “You will bring her to me after I have dealt with Talbot.”

“Yes, Master,” Andre replied.

His cloak sweeping behind him, Dracula strode beneath the crossed machetes that hung above the door. Then he walked imperiously down the corridor to the front door. The glow of day was still visible in the sky. It would be at least half an hour before the full moon rose. Only on this night it would have no effect on Lawrence Talbot. By then his miserable suffering—along with his very existence—would be ended.

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
he mill had a tart and dusty smell, a distinctive aroma caused by years of sweet ground cane mixing with the seawater that was used to keep the millstone moist. The damp soil of the floor was covered with straw to help the laborers keep their footing. Skylights in the ceiling were closed now and thick with spiderwebs. They had been built long ago to provide light for the slaves who used to work in the mill. The air was extremely stuffy and still, heated during the day by the constant beating of the sun. Talbot had to admit that if anyone but a zombie had been forced to work here, the atmosphere would have been stifling.

The structure was lit now by shafts of light spilling through the two old chimneys. The ovens beneath would hold fires for boiling the cane juice, but they burned only at night when the tireless
sarpe
workers had harvested the stalks. In the center of the room, occupying nearly one-quarter of it, was a massive grindstone nearly eight feet high. It was pushed around a rutted square stone base by a wooden handle seven feet long. The handle was dark with the sweat of centuries.

As soon as Talbot and Stevenson were alone, the attorney walked toward the column of light above an oven.

“I assume we’re going to have to fight our way out,” Stevenson said.

Talbot didn’t answer. He was cautiously making his way toward the huge stone roller.

“Lawrence? What are you doing?” Stevenson asked.

“Someone else is here,” Talbot said as he neared the back of the mill.

“Who?” Stevenson asked. “Caroline or more of those zombies?”

“Neither,” Talbot said. “Don’t you smell it?”

Stevenson took a few steps forward then stopped. He sniffed. “I smell something sweet, like syrup.”

“That’s the sugar cane,” Talbot said. “I mean beneath that.”

Stevenson sniffed again. “Sorry, no. I don’t smell anything else.”

Talbot stopped when he reached the millstone. He ducked under the long wood handle and continued around the base. The shadows, which had been long when they entered, were blending with the rest of the darkness as the sun sank lower.

“What is it?” Stevenson asked.

“Something I’ve smelled many times,” Talbot answered. “It’s like the metallic air you can almost taste after a violent electrical storm.”

“I still don’t smell it,” Stevenson said. “What do you think it is?”

Talbot reached the other side of the large millstone. There was an arched door in the back of the mill. It was nearly eight feet tall. The vertical panels were dark with age and smoke, the iron handle dirty-red with rust. Talbot walked toward it, his shoes sinking into the damp soil.

Stevenson followed him. “That must be some kind of storage shed,” he said. “Is that where the smell’s coming from?”

“I think so,” Talbot said. “Please be quiet. He may be awake.”

Talbot touched the handle with the tips of his fingers and pushed down; the handle groaned and moved. Count Dracula obviously wasn’t concerned about anyone entering the room. Talbot continued pushing down on the handle. When he heard the bolt slide back he pulled the handle toward him. The door creaked open slowly on old, loose hinges. There were no cobwebs on the top of the door or along the jamb; it had been opened recently. Talbot stepped around the door and peered inside, his eyes quickly adjusting to the deeper darkness.

The room was extremely large, the length of the mill itself. One wall was lined with rusted farm equipment, coils of barbed wire, iron spikes used to hold the wire to fence posts, and a block and tackle with yards of chain hanging beside it. The tractor, harvester, plow, and cultivator were rusted and cobwebbed. Along the other wall were seven wooden crates of different sizes. And in the center, lying on a high pile of straw, Talbot found what he knew he would. Even in the dark, his pasty features glowed faintly with an unmistakable inner light.

“Come here, Mr. Stevenson,” Talbot said. “Come and look upon the limitations of man.”

The young attorney hurried over. He stopped short when he saw the giant. “Talbot, I don’t believe it! He’s—
enormous!”

“No,” said Talbot as he looked down on the dormant body of the Frankenstein Monster. “He’s very, very small. The flawed product of a great man’s imagination—and arrogance.”

Stevenson stepped into the doorway and stood beside Talbot. “Is he dead or sleeping?”

“In a manner of speaking, he’s both,” Talbot said. He entered the room and walked slowly toward the creature. “He’s dormant. The Monster lives on electricity. He consumes it at an incredible rate. When it runs very low, he can no longer move.”

“My God,” Stevenson said.

“That glow you see is from residual electricity,” Talbot said. “He didn’t have that back at the castle. Dracula must have recharged him, though not enough to allow the Monster to remain awake.”

“He feeds on electricity?” Stevenson asked. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t understand his biology entirely,” Talbot replied. “All I know is that the electricity enters the Monster’s body through those two terminals on either side of his neck. Do you see them?”

Moving his injured neck slowly and carefully, Stevenson looked down at the silver bolts. “I see them.”

“During our many encounters,” Talbot said, “I’ve observed that the Monster’s strength increases the more energy he absorbs.” Talbot glanced over at the crates. They were gray with dust and covered by a veil of cobwebs. They looked as if they’d been undisturbed for years. “Once he found the Monster, Count Dracula probably intended to turn this room into a laboratory. One of those crates must have a small turbine. My guess is that Dracula planned to use the river and this mill wheel to generate electricity, the way Dr. Frankenstein did.”

Stevenson was still looking at the Monster. “And he’ll probably want Caroline to repair any damage he’s suffered over the years.”

Talbot nodded. “The Monster is incredibly resilient,” he said. “Since he was first trapped in a burning windmill, the poor creature has endured countless injuries—yet he still survives.”

“It’s incredible,” Stevenson said.

“It’s monstrous,” Talbot said. “To paraphrase something my father once said, when it comes to life there is only one professional. Still . . .” Talbot knelt beside the body and regarded the Monster.

“What are you thinking?” Stevenson asked.

The Monster’s eyes were shut and his creased, fire-blistered flesh was utterly still. Dracula had obviously let him get to this run-down state intentionally, prior to turning him over to Caroline. She would repair all the damage and then help Dracula fulfill his decades-old goal of giving the Monster a new, more obedient brain.

“I was thinking,” Talbot said, “that if we had access to a source of electricity, we might be able to get out of here.”

“How?”

“The Monster,” Talbot said. “He’s slavishly devoted to whoever feeds him.”

“You mean if we could charge him—find a way to jump-start him, as it were—he would turn against Dracula?”

“It’s very possible,” Talbot said. “According to Dr. Frankenstein’s journals, brain transplants, however delicately handled, cause tissue damage. They leave the mind unable to handle complex reasoning. If you were to revive him, he would forget that he was ever loyal to Dracula. Just as he forgot, after a very short time, that I was the one who released him from the ice in which he was once trapped.”

“How much electricity would we require?”

“The Monster’s been active fairly recently,” Talbot said. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have this glow. It wouldn’t take much energy to reawaken him. Maybe nothing more than a spark.”

Stevenson reached into his jacket pocket. He withdrew his cellular phone. “There are batteries in this phone. Will they do the trick?”

“I don’t know,” Talbot said. “Let’s find out.”

Stevenson popped open the back of the telephone.

As he did, Talbot noticed how quickly the light was failing. What little color there was in their clothes, in their surroundings, was being sucked away. He wondered if Count Dracula had put them in this shed with the Monster to tease them—to give them hope, a slim opportunity to save themselves, only to snatch it away before they could possibly succeed. That, too, was part of the fiend’s cruel ways.

Stevenson removed the plate and exposed the battery well. He dumped the batteries into his hand.

Talbot looked inside the well. “Hold on!” he said desperately. “There are no wires inside.”

“No,” Stevenson said. “Everything is made with microchips these days—miniaturized electric circuits.”

“But we need some way of running the battery terminals to the bolts on either side of the Monster’s neck.”

“I know,” Stevenson said. “I was thinking we may find something useful in those crates back in the mill.”

“The crates? We don’t have time to search!”

Stevenson started toward the door. “Do we have a choice? There’s got to be a crowbar somewhere. If we both take a crate—”

“Wait,” Talbot said. “What kind of telephone is this?”

“It’s a cellular phone.”

“Put it back together.”

“Why?”

“Caroline said that these produce microwaves,” Talbot told him. “Is that true?”

“Yes . . .”

“She thinks that they may have helped to restore the Monster’s strength at Mornay Castle.”

“But the phone doesn’t produce microwaves,” Stevenson said. “It uses them to generate feedback—electronic information.”

“Just put it together and turn it on so that there’s ‘electronic information.’ ”

Stevenson quickly replaced the batteries and shut the compartment. He turned on the phone and punched in his office number. When his secretary picked up, she pelted him with questions. Stevenson told the worried young woman that he’d answer them later. Right now, he said, all he wanted her to do was leave the line open.

She did as Stevenson requested. Then he handed the telephone to Talbot, who knelt and placed the unit on the straw beside the electrode on the Monster’s left side.

“This is never going to work,” Stevenson said. “Electromagnetism wavelengths are different from electricity. That phone’s not going to generate enough energy to do what you want it to.”

“All we need to do is break through to the residual energy,” Talbot said. Then he stopped, suddenly alert.

“What’s wrong?” Stevenson asked.

Talbot leaped to his feet and spun toward the door.

“Talbot! What’s wrong?”

“I feel his presence,” Talbot said.

“Dracula’s?”

Talbot nodded as he ran toward the door.

“Wait!” Stevenson cried. “I’m coming with you!”

“No!” Talbot cried. “You stay with the Monster. If he moves at all, even an eyelid, speak to him. Tell him you want to help him. Make sure that your face is the first thing he sees.”

“What are you going to do?”

“If it is Dracula, I have to find some way to stall him,” Talbot said.

Shutting the shed door, Talbot circled the massive millstone and walked toward the front door. The mill was almost entirely dark as he crossed on his tiptoes, as quietly as possible. When he reached the door he stood there, listening and feeling. Something was definitely happening outside. Cool air was blowing under the door and he felt a familiar malevolence moving toward him, like a mist.

A moment later he heard the two
sarpe
move with slow and heavy footsteps to either side of the door. The baleful presence was stronger now, a cold and prickly dryness that pushed aside the stuffy, humid air of the mill. The heavy floors were pulled outward and deep blue twilight filled the opening, save for a large spot in the center. There, his white features dark, his cape resting flat on his shoulders like a robe of state, stood the Lord of the Vampires.

Count Dracula.

TWENTY-EIGHT