In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 6

  This disgusting man was beginning to become a nuisance—a potentially dangerous one at that. I leaned down and grasped his shoulders, pulling him closer to my red lips. Then my instincts took over. As my fangs pierced his flesh, the hot blood spurted down my throat, sending the first rich waves deep into my soul. All I could hear was the clacking of the wheels on the tracks. The sound roared in my ears, drowning out his gasps.

  I could sense strange thoughts swirling within my mind. He was fighting me, but not in a physical sense. As he lapsed into unconsciousness, I turned toward his cowering companion. It was over very quickly. I drained her dry.

  My dear, sweet father, would you be proud of me now? See what your gift has wrought? I glanced out of the carriage window; we were nearly there. I would be very glad when this journey came to an end.

  Before the train came to a complete stop, I stepped off onto the platform. No one followed. The deserted station was mute witness to the train’s arrival and departure. It was a characterless structure, a concrete edifice that even the pigeons would avoid.

  “Angelica,” a voice called softly from the night’s gloom. The darkness seemed to part as a figure strode purposely toward me. I recognized his scent instantly—it was my father.

  I took a deep breath and tasted the cool night air. He stood watching me. His crimson eyes betrayed nothing.

  “What are you doing here?” I managed to say, hoping he would not smell the fresh blood on my breath.

  As always, he seemed to take control of the situation. “I thought I would meet you after your long journey,” he said simply. “I have a car waiting for us.” My father pointed toward a magnificent, black Rolls Royce. He always liked to travel in style.

  He was more conservatively dressed than at our last encounter. I had not seen him in person for more than twenty-five years and outwardly, at least, he had changed since then. Now he wore a black, perfectly cut business suit, with gold cufflinks that shone with an unearthly gleam. His dark hair was trimmed neatly above the collar, swept back in a widow’s peak from his forehead. The polished shoes reflected the dim glow of the moon. They probably cost enough to feed a whole village for a year in the old country.

  “Come,” he commanded. “It will be dawn soon.”

  I walked beside him toward the car. A uniformed chauffeur jumped out, and swiftly opened the back door of the vehicle. He was dressed all in black as well. I climbed in, acutely aware of my father’s undead breath on the back of my neck.

  We sat there in silence. The Rolls Royce cruised through the winding, country roads for nearly an hour. I couldn’t tell whether it was getting light or not. The car windows had obviously been blacked out.

  “A good journey then?” he asked, finally breaking the silence between us.

  “No . . . there was a small problem,” I said.

  “I trust you handled it with your usual degree of tact and style?” He smiled and his teeth were very white.

  I did not reply. He was baiting me. Not this time, I thought to myself. Not this time.

  Eventually the car pulled into a long driveway, the sound of gravel crunching beneath the tires.

  “We must hurry into the house,” he warned. “The first light of dawn approaches.”

  I fumbled with the door handle and finally slid out of the car. The driver was nowhere in sight. The house in front of me was typical of the country homes you would normally see in the society pages. I hated it on sight.

  A Szagany woman greeted us at the doorway and quickly beckoned us in. My father was a few paces behind me. I could hear his shoes against the marble flooring, but I refused to turn around and look at him. I didn’t want to be transformed into a pillar of salt.

  “Are you hungry?” the servant asked me with a hint of fear in her dark eyes.

  “No thank you, I’ve already . . . eaten,” I replied quietly. She looked relieved. From the bruises on her neck, her role was obviously a simple one.

  “Come my daughter. We can talk in the study.”

  It was not a request. Few lived who crossed my father’s wishes. The people of Transylvania were witness to that. So I followed him, praying to whichever gods protect such as I that this time he had reconciliation in his thoughts, not destruction. But perhaps secretly I still craved the latter.

  He sat in a large leather chair. It reminded me of a throne, with its high back and ornate carvings on the legs and arm rests. I chose a simpler piece of furniture, more suited to my nature.

  “It has been too long,” he said.

  For the first time I saw weariness in his eyes.

  “I am very alone Angelica,” he continued. “The years have been long.”

  He looked old. I could imagine gray strands in his thick dark hair. Of course I knew that he would never age. It was just an impression of what might have been . . . or was yet to come.

  “I have made some mistakes. I expect you know that. But you are my only true daughter of this century. A miracle in more ways than one.” He let his statement hang in the air, waiting for me to bring it down to earth.

  I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I had heard enough. The question that sprang from my lips had been trapped inside me for far too long. “Do you really expect me to forgive you? I know what you are. I know what I am. Haven’t you done enough?”

  For a moment he said nothing. The silence in the room felt like an eternity. Finally he said: “I need you. You are the only one, there is no other like you.”

  “No father, I’ve grieved enough. This has been a waste of time. You haven’t changed, you’ll never change.” I was gripping the arms of the chair so tightly, that I left indentations in the wood with my nails. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow, once the sun has set.”

  “You fed today, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, you know that. Some self-styled mystic and his companion.” The image of Crowley’s face immediately surfaced again in my mind.

  My father rose from the chair. “You think you are so different Angelica. But you still take life. You see, my daughter, we are . . . one and the same.”

  “But it was in self-defense,” I tried to explain. “They were dangerous. There was something about that man . . . something unusual. I had to protect myself, protect what we are.” His growing anger was piercing me like sharp knives. “However, I did spare the man . . .” I added quietly.

  “What? Then perhaps you are not the one I had hoped for after all . . .”

  Deep down I knew he was right. That’s why I hated him so much. That’s why the years had been such long ones. I’d been the one to push him away. I couldn’t deny that any longer. He was a part of me and I of him. The connection was of blood and flesh.

  I could feel the blood tears rolling down my cheeks. They were tears of blood. He moved toward me then, not quite touching the floor. His eyes were warm, and I stared into them as he wrapped me in his strong embrace.

  I felt safe and secure in the knowledge that he would protect me from anyone or anything. As he held me closer, I didn’t need to breathe, let alone utter a whisper. That might break the spell—shatter it into thousands of pieces that could never again be reformed. He was of course my dear father, and I would always be Daddy’s little girl . . .

  I gazed into his eyes. Once again they were like cold steel. At that moment I gasped as his teeth pricked my skin, sending my body into a spasm of delight. It was better than any earthly pleasure. “It has been too long, daughter,” he finally said, as he pulled back from my throat, smearing the blood from his red lips with the back of his hand.

  “You’ve missed me then?” I asked, once again falling into his embrace.

  His throat was like ice, and he let out a small gasp of surprise as my teeth pierced his cold flesh. I drew the warmth deep inside, not tasting, just desperately feeding upon his life force.

  “Enough,” he demanded, trying to withdraw from my grip.

  “No,” I said. My hands were firmly grasped around his throat, my whole body tremb
ling. But he was too strong, even for me.

  I barely saw the blow as he struck me. The force threw me backwards across the room. I heard dry bones crack, and suddenly I couldn’t move my body.

  “You left me no choice, daughter,” he said. “I will not accept failure, even from you. That man you allowed to survive will cause us trouble in the future, mark my words, and you are to blame.” He looked so tall standing over me, so powerful, so cold. “I am afraid your neck is broken, daughter. That is fatal—even for such as us.”

  His features were becoming blurry now. A single tear of blood ran down his cheek. At least he grieved, but as the final blackness swept over me, I wondered did he grieve for me . . . or for the future?

  The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes RAMSEY CAMPBELL as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.”

  He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky, and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, and “The Three Births of Daoloth” trilogy, comprising The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark, and The Way of the Worm.

  His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, and Holes for Faces, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, and The Pretence are novellas, and he has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

  Campbell’s novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Dead Reckonings, and he is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

  Conversion

  Ramsey Campbell

  Dracula returns to the Carpathians, but continues to take a great interest in world events and politics. However, some things never change . . .

  You’re in sight of home when you know something’s wrong. Moonlight shivers gently on the stream beyond the cottage, and trees stand around you like intricate spikes of the darkness mounting within the forest. The cottage is dark, but it isn’t that. You emerge into the glade, trying to sense what’s troubling you.

  You know you shouldn’t have stayed out so late, talking to your friend. Your wife must have been worried, perhaps frightened by the night as well. You’ve never left her alone at night before. But his talk was so engrossing: you feel that in less than a night you’ve changed from being wary of him to understanding him completely. And his wine was so good, and his open-throated brightly streaming fire so warming, that you can now remember little except a timeless sense of comfortable companionship, of communion that no longer needed words. But you shouldn’t have left your wife alone in the forest at night, even behind a barred door. The woodcutter’s cottage is nearby; at least you could have had his wife stay with yours. You feel disloyal.

  Perhaps that’s what has been disturbing you. Always before when you’ve returned home light has been pouring from the windows, mellowing the surrounding trunks and including them like a wall around your cottage. Now the cottage reminds you of winter nights long ago in your childhood, when you lay listening to a wolf’s cry like the slow plummeting of ice into a gorge, and felt the mountains and forests huge around you, raked by the wind. The cottage feels like that: cold and hollow and unwelcoming. For a moment you wonder if you’re simply anticipating your wife’s blame, but you’re sure it’s more than that.

  In any case you’ll have to knock and awaken her. First you go to the window and look in. She’s lying in bed, her face open as if to the sky. Moonlight eases darkness from her face, but leaves her throat and the rest of her in shadow. Tears have gathered in her eyes, sparkling. No doubt she has been crying in memory of her sister, a sketch of whom gazes across the bed from beside a glass of water. As you look in you’re reminded of your childhood fancy that angels watched over you at night, not at the end of the bed but outside the window; for a second you feel like your wife’s angel. But as you gaze in, discomfort grows in your throat and stomach. You remember how your fancy somehow turned into a terror of glimpsing a white face peering in. You draw back quickly in case you should frighten her.

  But you have to knock. You don’t understand why you’ve been delaying. You stride to the door and your fist halts in mid-air, as if impaled by lightning. Suddenly the vague threats and unease you’ve been feeling seem to rush together and gather on the other side of the door. You know that beyond the door something is waiting for you, ready to pounce.

  You feel as if terror has pinned you through your stomach, helpless. You’re almost ready to flee into the woods, to free yourself from the skewer of your panic. Sweat pricks you like red-hot ash scattered on your skin. But you can’t leave your wife in there with it, whatever nightmare it is rising out of the tales you’ve heard told of the forest. You force yourself to be still if not calm, and listen for some hint of what it might be.

  All you can hear is the slow sleepy breathing of the wind in the trees. Your panic rises, for you can feel it beyond the door, perfectly poised and waiting easily for you to betray yourself. You hurry back to the window, but it’s impossible for you to squeeze yourself in far enough to make out anything within the door. This time a stench rises from the room to meet you, trickling into your nostrils. It’s so thickly unpleasant that you refuse to think what it might resemble. You edge back, terrified now of awakening your wife, for it can only be her immobility that’s protecting her from whatever’s in the room.

  But you can’t coax yourself back to the door. You’ve allowed your panic to spread out from it, warding you further from the cottage. Your mind fills with your wife, lying unaware of her plight. Furious with yourself, you compel your body forward against the gale of your panic. You reach the door and struggle to touch it. If you can’t do that, you tell yourself, you’re a coward, a soft scrabbling thing afraid of the light. Your hand presses against the door as if proving itself against a live coal, and the door swings inwards.

  You should have realized that your foe might have entered the cottage through the doorway. You flinch back instinctively, but as the swift fear fades the panic seeps back. You can feel it hanging like a spider just inside the doorway, waiting for you to pass beneath: a huge heavy black spider, ready to plump on your face. You try to shake your panic out of you with the knowledge that it’s probably nothing like that, that you’re giving in to fancy. But whatever it is, it’s oozing a stench that claws its way into your throat and begins to squeeze out your stomach. You fall back, weakened and baffled.

  Then you see the rake. It’s resting against the corner of the cottage, where you left it after trying to clear a space for a garden. You carry it to the door, thinking. It could be more than a weapon, even though you don’t know what you’re fighting. If your wife doesn’t awaken and draw its attention to her, if your foe isn’t intelligent enough to see what you’re planning, if your absolute conviction of where it’s lurking above the door isn’t false—You almost throw away the rake, but you can’t bear the sense of your wife’s peril any longer. You inch the door open. You’re sure you have only one chance.

  You reach stealthily into the space above the door with the teeth of the rake, then you grind them into your prey and drag it out into the open. It’s a dark tangled mass, but you hurl it away into the forest without
looking closer, for some of it has fallen into the doorway and lies dimly there, its stench welling up. You pin it with the teeth and fling it into the trees.

  Then you realize there’s more, hanging and skulking around the side of the doorframe. You grab it with the rake and hurl it against a trunk. Then you let your breath roar out. You’re weak and dizzy, but you stagger through the doorway. There are smears of the thing around the frame, and you sway back, retching. You close your mouth and nostrils and you’re past, safe.

  You lean on the rake and gaze down at your wife. There’s a faint stench clinging to the rake, and you push it away from you, against the wall. She’s still asleep, no doubt because you were mourning her sister all last night. Your memory’s blurring; you must be exhausted too, because you can remember hardly anything before the battle you’ve just fought. You’re limply grateful that no harm has befallen her. If she’d come with you to visit your friend none of this would have happened. You hope you can recapture the sense of communion you had with him, to pass on to your wife. Through your blurring consciousness you feel an enormous yearning for her.

  Then you jerk alert, for there’s still something in the room. You glance about wildly and see beneath the window more of what you destroyed, lying like a tattered snake. You manage to scoop it up in one piece this time, and you throw the rake out with it. Then you turn back to your wife. You’ve disturbed her; she has moved in her sleep. And fear advances on you from the bed like a spreading stain pumped out by a heart, because now you can see what’s nestling at her throat.

  You don’t know what it is; your terror blurs it and crowds out your memories until it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It rests in the hollow of her throat like a dormant bat, and indeed it seems to have stubby protruding wings. Its shape expands within your head until it is a slow explosion of pure hostility, growing and erasing you. You turn away, blinded.