"I knew you would come," Dracula said. "I have been smoking the opium pipe, a trick I learned during my decade of Turkish captivity. The drug makes my soul rest easier. It makes me open for peace and eases the pain. I thought at such a time you might be more likely to appear."
Vlad Dracula turned and locked eyes with Bela Lugosi. The dark, piercing stare seemed more powerful, more menacing than anything Lugosi had mimed in hundreds of performances as the vampire. He could not shirk away. He knew now how the Mina character must feel when he said "Look into my eyes..."
"What do you want from me?" Lugosi whispered.
Vlad Dracula did not try to touch him, but turned away, speaking toward the countless victims writhing below. "Absolution," he said.
"Absolution!" Lugosi cried. "For this? Who do you think I am?"
"How are you called?" Dracula asked.
Lugosi, disoriented yet accustomed to having his name impress guests, answered, "Bela Lugos-no, I am Bela Blasko of the town of Lugos." He drew himself up, trying to feel imposing in his own Dracula costume, but the enormity of Vlad the Impaler"s presence seemed to dwarf any imaginary impressiveness Lugosi could command.
Vlad Dracula appeared troubled. "Bela Blasko-that is an odd name for an angel. Are you perhaps one of my fallen countrymen?"
"An angel?" Lugosi blinked. "I am no angel. I cannot grant you forgiveness. I do not even believe in G.o.d." He wished the morphine would wear off. This was growing too strange for him, but as he held his hand on the cold stone of the balcony it felt real to him. Too real. The sharp stakes below would be just as solid, and just as sharp.
He looked down at the ranks of tortured people covering the hillside, and he knew from the legends about the Impaler that this was but a tiny fraction of all the atrocities Vlad Dracula had already done. "Even if I could, I would not grant you absolution for all of this."
Vlad Dracula"s eyes became wide, but he shrank away from Lugosi. "But I have built monasteries and churches, restored shrines and made offerings. I have surrounded myself with priests and abbots and bishops and confessors. I have done everything I know how." He gazed at the bloodied stakes, but seemed not to see them.
"You killed all these people, and many many more! What do you expect?" Lugosi felt the fear grow in him again, real fear, as he had experienced that war-torn night in the Carpathian Mountains. What would Vlad Dracula do to him?
Some of those victims below were Lugosi"s own countrymen-the simple peasants and farmers, the bakers and bankers, craftsmen-just like those Lugosi had fought with in the Great War, just like those who had rescued him after he had been shot in the legs, who had dragged him off to safety, where the nurses tended him, gave him morphine. Vlad Dracula had killed them all.
"There are far worse things awaiting man... than death," the Impaler said. "I did all this for G.o.d, and for my country."
Lugosi felt the words catch in his throat. For his country! His own mind felt like a puzzle, with large pieces of memory breaking loose and fitting together in new ways. Lugosi himself had done things for his country, for Hungary, that others had called atrocities.
Back in 1918 he had embraced Communism and the revolution. Proudly, he had bragged about his short apprenticeship as a locksmith, then had formed a union of theater workers, fighting and propagandizing for the revolution that thrust Bela Kun into power. But Kun"s dictatorship lasted only a few months, during which Romania attacked the weakened country, and Kun was ousted by the counterrevolution. All supporters of Bela Kun were hunted down and thrown into prison or executed. Lugosi had fled for his life to Vienna with his first wife, and from there, penniless, he had traveled to Berlin seeking acting jobs.
Lugosi had scorned his faint-hearted American audiences because they proved too weak to withstand anything but safe, insignificant frights-yet now he didn"t believe he could stomach what he saw of the Impaler. But Vlad Dracula thought he was doing this for his people, to free Wallachia and the towns that would become great Hungarian cities.
"I fight the Turks and use their own atrocities against them. They have taught me all this!" Vlad Dracula wrung his hands, then s.n.a.t.c.hed a torch free from its holder on the wall. He pushed it toward Lugosi, letting the fire crackle. Lugosi flinched, but he felt none of the heat. It seemed important for Dracula to speak to Lugosi, to justify everything.
"Can you not hear me? I care not if you are not the angel I expected. You have come to me for a reason. The Turks held me hostage from the time I was a boy. To save his own life, my father Dracul the Dragon willingly delivered me to the sultan, along with my youngest brother Radu. Radu turned traitor, became a Turk in his heart. He grew fat from harem women, and rich banquets, and too much opium. My father then went about attacking the sultan"s forces, knowing that his own sons were bound to be executed for it!"
Vlad Dracula held his hands over the torch flame; the heat licked his fingers, but he seemed not to notice. "Day after day, the sultan promised to cut me into small pieces. He promised to have horses pull my legs apart while he inserted a dull stake through my body the long way! Several times he even went so far as to tie me to the horses, just to frighten me. Day after day, Bela of Lugos!" He lowered his voice. "Yes, the Turks taught me much about the extremes one can do to an enemy!"
Vlad Dracula hurled the torch out the window. Lugosi watched it whirl and blaze as it dropped through the air to the ground, rolled, then came to rest against a rock. Without the torch, the balcony alcove seemed smothered with shadows, lit only by the starlight and distant fires from the slaughter on the hillside.
"After I escaped, I learned that my father and my brother, Mircea, had been ambushed and murdered by John Hunyadi, a Hungarian who should have shared their loyalty! Hunyadi captured my father and brother so he could gain lordship over the princ.i.p.alities my father controlled. He struck my father with seventy-three sword strokes before he dealt the mortal blow. He claimed that he had tortured my brother Mircea to death and buried him in the public burial grounds." Dracula shook his head, and Lugosi saw real tears hovering there.
"Mircea had fought beside John Hunyadi for three years, and had saved his life a dozen times. When I was but a boy, Mircea taught me how to fish and ride a horse. He showed me the constellations in the stars that the Greeks had taught him." Dracula sc.r.a.ped one of his rings down the stone wall, leaving a white mark.
"When I became Prince again, I ordered his coffin to be opened so that I could give him a proper burial, with priests and candles and hymns. We found his head twisted around, his hands had sc.r.a.ped long gouges on the top of his coffin. John Hunyadi had buried him alive!"
Vlad Dracula glanced behind him, as if to make certain no one else wandered the castle halls so late at night, and then he allowed himself to sob. He mumbled his brother"s name.
"Just a few months ago, in my castle on the Arges River in Transylvania, the Turks laid siege to me and fired upon the battlements with their cherrywood cannons. One Turkish slave forewarned me, and I was able to escape by picking my way along the ice and snow of a terrible pa.s.s. My own son fell off his horse during the flight, and I have never seen him again. My wife could not come with us, and so rather than being captured by the Turks, she climbed the stairs of our tallest tower overlooking the sheer gorge, and she cast herself out of the window. She was my wife, Bela of Lugos. Do you know what it is like to lose a wife like that?"
Lugosi felt cold from the breeze licking over the edge of the balcony. "Not... like that. But I can understand the loss."
In exile from Hungary back in 1920, Lugosi had left his wife Ilona in Vienna, while he tried to find work in Berlin in German cinema or on the stage. He had written to her every other day, but she had never replied. He learned later that her father, the executive secretary of a Budapest bank, had convinced her to divorce him, to flee back to Hungary and to avoid her husband at all costs because of the awful things he had done against his own country. Dracula"s wife had chosen a different way out.
Outside, Lugosi heard distant shouts and the jingling of horses approaching at a gallop. He saw the soldiers break away from their tents, scattering the bonfires and s.n.a.t.c.hing up their weapons. The Impaler seemed not to notice.
"I do not know who you are, or why you have come," Vlad Dracula said. "I prayed for an angel, a voice who could remove these demons of guilt from within me." He s.n.a.t.c.hed out at Lugosi"s vampire costume, but his hand pa.s.sed directly through the actor"s chest.
Lugosi shrank back, feeling the icy claw of a spectral hand sweep through his heart. Vlad Dracula widened his enormous dark eyes with superst.i.tious terror. "You truly must be a spirit come to torment me, since you refuse to grant me absolution."
Lugosi did not know how to answer. He delivered his answer with a stuttering, uncertain cadence. "I... I am neither of those things. I am only a traveler, a dream to you perhaps, from a time and place far from here. I have not lived my life yet. I will be born many centuries from now."
"You come not to judge me, then? Or punish me?" Vlad Dracula looked truly terrified. He looked down at the hand that had pa.s.sed through Lugosi"s body.
"No, I am just an actor-an entertainer. I perform for other people. I try to make them afraid." He shook his head. "But I was wrong. What I do has no bearing on real fear. The acting I do, the frights I give to my audience, are a sham. That fear has no consequences." He leaned out over the balcony, then squeezed his eyes shut at the scores of maimed corpses, and those victims not fortunate enough to have died yet. "Seeing this convinces me I know nothing about real fear."
In the courtyard directly below, shouting erupted. Marching men hurried out into the night. Someone blasted a horn. Lugosi heard the sounds of a fight, swords clashing. Vlad Dracula glanced at it, dismissed the commotion for a moment, then locked his hypnotic gaze with Lugosi"s again. The anguish behind the Impaler"s eyes made Lugosi want to squirm.
"That is all? I have prayed repeatedly for an apparition, and you claim to have learned something from me? About fear? All is lost. I have been abandoned. G.o.d is making a joke with me." His shoulders hunched into the fur-lined robe, and he reddened with anger.
Lugosi had the crawling feeling that if he had been corporeal to the Impaler, Vlad Dracula would have thrust him upon a vacant stake on the hillside. "I do not know what to tell you, Vlad Dracula. I am not your conscience. I have destroyed enough things in my own life by trying to do what I thought was right and best. But I can tell you what I think."
Vlad Dracula c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. Below, a clattering sound signaled a portcullis opening. Booted feet charged across the flagstone floor as someone hurried into the receiving hall. "My Lord Prince!"
Lugosi spoke rapidly. "The Turks have taught you well, as your atrocities show. But you have perhaps gone too far. You cannot undo the things you have already done, the thousands already slain. But you can change how you act from now on. Your brutal, bloodthirsty reputation is already well-earned. Mothers will frighten their children with stories of Vlad the Impaler for five hundred years! Now perhaps you have built enough terror that you no longer need the slaughter. The mere mention of your name and the terror it evokes may be enough to accomplish your aims, to save Hungary from the Turks. If this is how you must be, try to govern with fear, not with death. Then your G.o.d may give your conscience some rest."
Vlad Dracula made a puzzled frown. "Perhaps we are together because I needed to learn something about fear as well." The Impaler laughed with a sound like breaking gla.s.s. "For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Bela of Lugos."
They both turned at the sound of a running man hurrying up the stone steps to the upper level where Lugosi and Vlad Dracula stood side by side. The messenger sc.r.a.ped his sword against the stone wall, clattering. He swept his cloak back, looking from side to side until he spotted Dracula in the shadowy alcove. Sweat and blood smeared his face.
"My Lord Prince! You did not respond!" the man cried. A crimson badge on his shoulder identified him as a retainer from one of the boyars serving Vlad Dracula.
"I have been in conversation with an important representative," Dracula said, nodding to Lugosi. Surprised, but falling back on his training, Lugosi sketched a formal bow to the messenger. But the retainer looked toward where Lugosi stood, blinked, and frowned.
"I see nothing, my Lord Prince."
In a rage, Vlad Dracula s.n.a.t.c.hed out a dagger from his fur-lined robe. The messenger blanched and stumbled backward, warding off the death from the knife, but also showing a kind of sick relief that his end would be quick, not moaning and bleeding for days on a stake as the vultures circled about.
"Dracula!" Lugosi snapped, bringing to bear all the power and command he had used during his very best performances as the vampire. Vlad Dracula stopped, holding the knife poised for its strike. The retainer trembled, staring with wide blank eyes, but afraid to flee.
"Look at how terrified you have made this man. The fear you create is a powerful thing. You need not kill him to accomplish your purpose."
Vlad Dracula heard Lugosi, but kept staring at the retainer, making his eyes blaze brighter, his leer more vicious. The retainer began to sob.
"I need not explain my actions to you," he said to the man. "Your soul is mine to crush whenever I wish. Now tell me your news!"
"The sultan"s army has arrived. It appears to be but a small vanguard attacking under cover of darkness, but the remaining Turks will be here by tomorrow. We can stand strong against this vanguard-many of them have already fled upon seeing their comrades impaled on this hillside, my Lord Prince. They will report back. It will enrage the sultan"s army."
Vlad Dracula pinched his full lips between his fingers. He looked at Lugosi, who stood watching and waiting. The messenger seemed confused at what the Impaler thought he saw.
"Or it will strike fear into the sultan"s army. We can use this. Go out to the victims on the stakes. Cut off the heads of those dead or mortally wounded-and be quick about it!-and catapult the heads into the Turkish vanguard. They will see the faces of their comrades and know that this will happen to them if they fight me. Find those whose injuries may still allow them to live and set them free of the stakes. Send them back to the sultan to tell how monstrous I am. Then he will think twice about his aggression against me and against my land."
The retainer blinked in astonishment, still trembling from having his life returned to him, curious about these new tactics Vlad Dracula was attempting. "Yes, my Lord Prince!" He scrambled backward and ran to the stone steps.
Lugosi felt the walls around him growing softer, shimmering. His knees felt watery. His body felt empty. The morphine was wearing off.
Dracula tugged at his dark mustache. "This is interesting. The sultan will think it just as horrible, but G.o.d will know how merciful I have been. Perhaps next time I smoke the opium pipe, He will send me a true angel."
Lugosi stumbled, feeling sick and dizzy. Warm flecks of light roared through his head. Dracula seemed to loom larger and stronger.
"I cannot see you as clearly, my friend. You grow dim, and I can barely feel the effects of the opium pipe. Our time together is at an end. Now that we have learned what we have learned, it would be best for you to return to your own country.
"But I must dress for battle! If we are to fight the sultan"s vanguard, I want them to see exactly who has brought them such fear! Farewell, Bela of Lugos. I will try to do as you suggest."
Lugosi tried to shake the thickening cobwebs from his eyes. "Farewell, Vlad Dracula," he said, raising his hand. It pa.s.sed through the solid stone of the balcony wall....
The lights flickered around his makeup mirror, dazzling his eyes. Lugosi drew in a deep breath and stared around his tiny dressing room. A shiver ran through him, and he pulled the black cape close around him, seeking some warmth.
Outside, Dwight Frye attempted his long Renfield laugh one more time, but sneezed at the end. Frye"s dressing room door opened, and Lugosi heard him walking away across the set.
On the small table in front of him, Lugosi saw the empty hypodermic needle and the remaining vial of morphine. Fear. The silver point looked like a tiny stake to impale himself on. Morphine had always given him solace, a warm and comfortable feeling that made him forget pain, forget trouble, forget his fears.
But he had used it too much. Now it transported him to a place where he could see only the thousands of bloodied stakes and moaning victims, vultures circling, ravens pecking at living flesh. And the mad, tormented eyes of Vlad the Impaler.
He did not want to think where the morphine might take him next-the night in the Carpathians during the Great War? Or his secret flight across the Hungarian border after the overthrow of Bela Kun, knowing that his life was forfeit if he stopped? Or just the pain of learning that Ilona had abandoned him while he worked in Berlin? The possibilities filled him with fear-not the fear without consequences that sent shivers through his audiences, but a real fear that would put his sanity at risk. He had brought the fear upon himself, cultivated it by his own actions.
Bela Lugosi dropped the syringe and the small vial of morphine onto the hard floor of his dressing room. Slowly, with great care, he ground them both to shards under the heel of his Count Dracula shoes.
His legs ached again from the old injury, but it made him feel solid and alive. The pain wasn"t so bad that he needed to hide from it. What he found in his drug-induced hiding place might be worse than the pain itself.
Lugosi opened his dressing room and saw Dwight Frye just leaving through the large doors. He called out for the other actor to wait, remembering to use English again, though the foreign tongue seemed c.u.mbersome to him.
"Mr. Frye, would you care to join me for a bit of dinner? I know it is late, but I would enjoy your company."
Frye stopped, and his eyes widened to show how startled he was. For a moment he looked like the madman Renfield again, but when he chuckled the laugh carried delight, not feigned insanity.
"Yes, I would sure like that, Mr. Lugosi. It"s good to see you"re not going to keep to yourself again. The rest of us don"t bite, you know. Nothing to be afraid of."
Lugosi smiled sardonically and stepped toward him. The pain in his legs faded into the background. "You"re right, Mr. Frye. There is nothing to fear."
House of the Rising Sun.
by Elizabeth Bear.
Elizabeth Bear"s recent books include All the Windwracked Stars and Seven for a Secret. A new novel, By the Mountain Bound, is due out this fall. Other novels include Carnival, which was a finalist for the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award, Undertow, and the Jenny Casey trilogy-Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired-which won the Locus Award for best first novel. She is a prolific short story writer as well, much of which has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse. Additionally, she is one of the creative minds behind Shadow Unit (www.shadowunit.org), an ongoing, hyperfiction serial. Bear is a winner of the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
This story first appeared in the UK magazine The Third Alternative (which is now known as Black Static). It follows a man who used to be the most famous person in the world, living a life of anonymity that still has strange echoes of his fame. To say more than that might give too much away, but let"s just say that as a result of writing this story, Bear knows a lot more about the history of blues, gospel, and rock and roll than she used to.
Sycorax smiled at me through the mantilla shadowing her eyes: eyes untouched by that smile. She lolled against a wrought-iron railing, one narrow hip thrust out, dyed red hair tumbling out of the black spiderweb of her shawl, looking like a Mac Rebennack song come to life.
The dead quickly grow thin.
She licked her lips with a long pale tongue and even the semblance of amus.e.m.e.nt fell away. "You"re pale, Tribute. No coup tonight?"
"Nothing appealed." Tribute wasn"t my real name any more than Sycorax was hers.
She leaned into me, pressed a hand to my throat. Her flesh lay like ice against the chill of my skin. "I told you to hunt."
"I hunted." Backing away, red nails trailing down my chest. I hunted. Hunted and returned empty-handed. It"s as much how you hear the orders as how they"re given.
She followed close on my steps, driving me before her. Ragged black chiffon clung and drifted around her calves; she reached up to lace china fingers in the fine hairs at the nape of my neck. Her face against my throat was waxen: too long unfed. "You weaken me on purpose, Tribute. Give me what you have."
She needed me, needed me to feed. Old as she was, she had to have the blood more often and she couldn"t take it straight from a human anymore. She needed someone like me to purge the little taints and poisons from it first-and even then, I had to be careful what I brought home. So sensitive, the old.
She caught at my collar, pulled it open with fumbling hands. I leaned down to her-chattel, blood of her blood, no more able to resist her will than her own right hand, commanded to protect and feed her. At least this time, I knew what sort of predator I served, although I had less choice about it.
I figured things out too late, again.
Sycorax curled cold lips back from fangs like a row of perfect icicles, sank her teeth into my flaccid vein and tried to drink. All that pain and desire spiked through me-every time like the first time-and on its heels a hollowness. Sycorax hissed, drew back. She turned her head and spat transparent fluid on the cobbles. I smiled as she turned on me, spreading my hands like Jesus on a hilltop, still backing slowly away. I had made very sure that I had nothing to feed her on.
Petty, I know. And she"d make me pay for it before dawn.
Down the narrow lane, a club"s red door swung open and I turned with a predator"s eye, attracted to the movement. Spill of light cut like a slice of cake, booted feet crunching on glittering gla.s.s. Girls. Laughing, young, drunk. I remembered what that felt like.
I raked a hand through my forelock and looked away, making the mistake of catching Sycorax"s china-blue eye.
"Those," she said, jerking her chin.
I shook my head. "Too easy, baby. Let me get you something more challenging." I used to have an accent-down-home Mississippi. Faded by the years, just like everything else. I suspected I sounded pan-European now, like Sycorax; I"ve put some effort into changing my speech patterns. Her lips, painted pale to match china-white skin, curled into a sulk.
"Tribute. After a quarter of a century, you ought to know I mean what I say."
I tugged my collar, glancing down.
"Them." Sycorax twisted a stiletto-heeled boot, crushing the litter of cracked gla.s.s against the bricks.
She enjoyed the hunt a little too much. But who but a madwoman would have drained my living body and made me hers? Just fetching my corpse from the grave would have taken insane effort.
"I"m hungry," she complained while I sharpened my teeth on my lip to stop a malicious smile.
If I could buy a little time, the girls might make it to the street and I could lose them in the crowds and tangled shadows of the gaslamp district. Footsteps receded down the alley; I spread my hands in protest, c.o.c.king my head to one side and giving her the little half-smile that used to work so well on my wife. "Something with a little more fight in it, sweetie."