The Mammoth Book of Dracula (89 page)

“And no one has any idea who or what you really are?”

“None who matter. And they matter less every day.”

We talked a while longer. Vlad was curious about where I’d picked up the ghosts, so I explained they’d once been brothers I’d tricked into duelling to the death when I’d fought on England’s side in border wars with Wales, long long ago. Such talk of death for sport piqued my curiosity. Was my death sentence, four days from now, just another amusement for him, for Rome?

“Amusing for me. But for the rest, I think it’ll be a grander thing than that,” he said. “You deserve more.”

“Then may I at least shave?” I scratched at the heavy growth of beard. I felt like a wretch. “Allow me that much vanity.”

“Always thinking so small,” said Vlad. “Let it grow. It gives you character.”

I thought he was about to leave when he opened the door and motioned to someone on the other side. A moment later, one of the Swiss Guard forced in a feebly struggling cardinal, one of Vlad’s squawking red-robed old birds. His wrists were tied, and his eyes wide above a gag stretched taut over plump cheeks.

“You must be ravenous by now,” Vlad said. “I’ll have another sent over the night before your execution. Drink, as much as you can hold. When those bullets blast your chest open, I really want you to bleed.”

Stunned, I gazed down at the cardinal squirming on the floor.

“Go ahead,” Vlad ordered. “I have less use for them every day now. Now I have
you.”

~ * ~

VI

No longer a man. A thing. A thing who looked like a man but fed like a beast. I had come to Palestine to fight for God, and left wanting no part of any Allah who allowed such things as me to exist, even if they deserved their fate.

I became a wanderer, deciding that if I were to be damned for what I was, I would make sure I’d earned it. So I again took up the sword, for whoever would hire me. Causes meant nothing, only wages and plunder, as I returned to living by that savage credo: spill blood, first and often. How better to keep myself well fed than as a soldier of fortune?

When I returned home in the mid-fifteenth century, I found my family’s descendants, but there was nothing left of Hugh de Burgundy, and nothing left
for
him, only a dim recounted memory of ancestors who’d journeyed off to the Crusades and were never heard from again. To stay would have brought more sadness than comfort.

I didn’t have to look far for my next commission. The dukes of Burgundy, I learned, still upheld the crusading traditions, and furnished knights and mercenaries to fight Muslims on a newer front: the Ottoman Turks who kept spilling into Romania.

So I went. Eagerly. It had been centuries since I’d seen such wanton carnage, and all at the fury, hatred, and instigation of one man, Vlad Dracula, Prince of Wallachia. I had forgotten that mortal hearts could be so cold.

Centuries of practice had evolved me into a warrior beyond reckoning. I’d seen every possible strategy of attack, by sword and spear, mace and war hammer, and by virtue of repetition only had to see the merest shift of foot or flex of arm to know how to counter. I couldn’t be fooled. I couldn’t be killed. I could scarcely even be touched.

Kill ten enemies in a single battle and you’re worthy of respect. Kill twenty and you’re a hero. Fifty, and you’re a god. They fell to my blades like wheat before a sickle, and even Vlad Dracula took notice.

“You fight like no mercenary I’ve ever seen,” he told me on a corpse-strewn field. “You fight as though you’d be here even if there was no pay in it.”

I lodged in his castle. I shared his table. Surrounded by the bodies he’d had impaled and erected into a makeshift forest in his courtyard, we broke bread together and dipped it in bowls of blood.

It was inevitable, I can see it now, that he would eventually spot me on a field littered with Turks, glutting myself from the very source. I’d done it so often I’d grown careless. When our eyes met, as I knelt on all fours over my kill like a jealous wolf, I knew that he finally understood. That he would see me dead for the abomination that I was.

“Were you once a man?” he asked instead, while smoke gusted black and greasy from burning dead.

“Almost longer ago than I can remember,” I said. “I was.”

He nodded with hideous desire. “Then you were made by another just like you. The same as you can make
me.”

I found it a horrible thing to ask. No one had ever asked to be what I was. Never.

“The conquests still left before me,” he said, “and all the lives I’ve yet to take ... these can’t be accomplished in one man’s lifetime. Perhaps they can be in one like yours.”

And after it was done—days, maybe—I found myself wandering through that reeking forest of poles and corpses, blood and flies, once again in tears, begging for forgiveness. Not from them. But from all who would be sure to follow in their wake.

I thought I was alone.

But even then he seemed to see everything.

~ * ~

VII

On the morning of my latest execution:

My elbows were broken by heavy mallets. Great gouges of flesh were ripped from my back by a man wielding an ugly chain flail. My thumbs were crushed in thumbscrews, while currents of electricity were jolted through my genitals and rectum.

It would all heal in time, but the pain was real enough.

When they deemed me sufficiently purified, I was dragged out before the public into a
piazza
adapted for executions, tied to a post, and shot with five rifles.

That’s difficult for even one like me to shrug off. I suppose I looked dead enough for the moment.

I understand that I bled spectacularly.

~ * ~

VIII

And in my dreams, while bone re-formed and flesh knitted, the dreams I never seemed to have during ordinary sleep, because I was too guarded to be bothered by such things as simple regret...

But in my death-dreams I see her again.

It’s been just short of two weeks and yet I’ve forgotten so much about her. But in my dreams I remember what matters most.

She sketches in a
piazza,
and for as long as I look at her the world seems friendly and promising again. I forget ghosts, I can no longer hear volcanoes. I dismiss every suspicious eye and the fear that narrows them, and I almost feel that I can be better than the thing that I am.

Everywhere she goes, she must carry with her a rare world in which grace is still possible. She looks at smoke but sees clouds. She looks past fallen trees and notices saplings. She holds the sketch pad against her knee and a fat charcoal pencil in her hand; an espresso rests beside her foot. She is the most beautiful creature who’s spoken to me in longer than I can remember.

“Your face ... is so familiar,” she tells me. “I may draw you, yes?”

I let her. She does one sketch, then another. A third and a fourth. I rest between flips of the page, and once I close my eyes and tip back my head and feel the hair spill over my shoulders.

“I have it now!” she cries, and then glances self-consciously about. She hurries closer because she thinks better of speaking too loudly. “Your face... is so like the face on the Shroud. It’s amazing, the resemblance.”

I smile, telling her I’ve heard this before.

Aching so deep inside because I can’t tell her there’s a good reason for the familiarity.

~ * ~

IX

The bodies of political prisoners and religious penitents were rarely given burial, not when there was ample space beneath Rome, in catacombs that had been swallowing bones for centuries. There they would be laid and forgotten, and so was I.

When I awoke to the smell of dust and mould and decay, he was waiting. He turned some anonymous ivory skull in his hands.

“These weren’t my original plans at all, you know. But when you came to Rome... it was impossible to resist,” Vlad said. “I’ve felt your presence passing nearby at least a dozen times over the centuries. Close. But never so close as this time. You can’t have thought you’d walk in and out of my city without meeting again.”

I shook my head. Probably not.

“And you can’t have failed to realize it’s your face on that Shroud of theirs.”

Again, I shook my head. My long-haired, bearded head, growing more recognizable by the day.

“Then you wanted this, Hugh. You wanted it. I have the power to grant it. The Shroud has been locked away at Turin for many years. But I own the keys now.”

“I think you want it more than I do,” I said.

“Of course. I love the Church, but I’m not above destroying it completely. Which may happen, when people realize what we’ve done, who they’ll think we’ve put to death. I’ll take that chance. Your first public act can be forgiving your executioners. Or, instead of peace, you can bring a sword—as I said, I don’t need the cardinals any more, now that I have you.

“Either way, I’m giving the world something the Church never managed. Something it’s been promised for two thousand years.
That
should give my cattle enough to rally around, to survive the next few years. If they’ve lost faith in themselves, then perhaps the sight of you, and the news of your resurrection, will be enough to restore it.”

“Your cattle?” I whispered. “You still don’t care any more for them than that?”

“Why should I? It’s an old principle, played out in nature countless times. If the deer die off, the wolves starve. Beyond that, what else is there for me to care about?”

I tried to sit up, naked and sore and scabbed in this newest burial rag. “You really are the Devil, aren’t you?”

He extended his hand. “So pleased to make your acquaintance, after all this time.”

I took it, because what else could I do, too stiff to haul myself off that rough stone slab. Vlad steadied me on my feet.

“Just remember,” he warned me. “You may be God incarnate. But you’re still in my hands.”

He led me past the more fortunate dead, to the steps that would take us back up to the daylight world of affliction and need.

<>

~ * ~

PETER CROWTHER

The Last Vampire

PETER CROWTHER is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, his editing and, as publisher, for the hugely successful PS Publishing imprint.

As well as being widely translated, his short stories have been adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in
The Longest Single Note, Lonesome Roads, Songs of Leaving, Cold Comforts, The Spaces Between the Lines, The Land at the End of the Working Day
and the upcoming
Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew.

He is the co-author (with James Lovegrove) of
Escardy Gap
and author of the
Forever Twilight
SF/horror cycle
(Darkness Darkness, Windows to the Soul
and
Darkness Rising)
and the Hallowe’en novel
By Wizard Oak and Fairy Stream.

He lives and works with his wife and business partner, Nicky, on the Yorkshire coast.

When the Post Apocalyptic Shadow Show rolls into town, the last thing anyone expects to meet is a vampire ...

~ * ~

THE SOUND OF air horns cut through the early evening, two deep
harrrnkkk
dispelling the stillness and, albeit for only a moment, frightening the crickets into a stunned silence.