'Poelzig,' announced the clerk. 'Herr Oberst Hjalmar Poelzig.'
A sallow-faced officer arose and sauntered through the doors. Poe assumed he had shares in munitions. Only someone making money could look so arrogantly satisfied.
Ewers still paced, fuming. In the motor-car that conveyed them from the railway station to the Chancellory, Ewers had impressed the driver with the urgency of their mission. The name of Mabuse was well enough known to spur the man to an over-enthusiastic burst of speed. A ferocious honk on the horn startled a horse into rearing. Ewers chuckled while two soldiers tried to calm the beast and the car sped by, eagle pennants fluttering. Now, in this huge room, he was diminished. His true position emerged as each of his humble solicitations was pointedly ignored or waved away by hawk-eyed clerks. If he had not been so tired and thirsty, and conscious of his own bad clothes, Poe might have enjoyed the braggart's slow shrinkage.
A young veteran, a burned arm twisted into a batwing against his side, face snouted and angry with scars, entered with a trolley of newspapers which he hawked around the room. A colonel learned from the front page that secret information he was to hand over to his High Command was now common knowledge. Poe thought to buy a paper, but realised he had absolutely no money about him.
Ewers did his best to impress upon a clerk that his career would suffer dreadfully when it was found by Dr Mabuse that he, Hanns Heinz Ewers, had been kept waiting. He suggested darkly that a word from him ensured transfer to active service on the Western Front. The clerk humoured him but action was not forthcoming.
Strangely, Ewers was the only person in the room inclined to complain. The field marshal sat meekly, waiting. It was very German. Everyone knew their rank and place and stuck to it. All very reassuring, providing one had a seat on the pyramid. Anyone whose station could not immediately be determined from a glance at an epaulette was the equivalent of an Indian 'untouchable', excluded entirely from the caste system.
The soldier suppressed a groan and hugged his stomach as if a shrapnel fragment were working its way through. Poe thought a trickle of blood was seeping through the soldier's coat. His red thirst was excited but the battered and filthy soldier was revolting to his sensibilities. Poe would have to be starved indeed to feed on such poor meat.
The mood of the room suddenly changed, as if smoke had been scented in the air. The supplicants were like a herd of grazing deer, alert to the tread of a hunter. A susurrus of whispering swept past like a wind and Poe heard a name, repeated.
'Dracula ...'
The main doors were held open by attendants. A noisome party was coming into the room. Even Ewers stopped pacing to come to attention.
'Dracula ...'
The Graf von Dracula was the Elder Vampire of Europe, Master Strategist and Great Visionary, Architect of Victory and Defender of the Kind. It was due solely to his colossal schemes that the vampire condition was spread throughout the world. Uncle-by-marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, he was rumoured to have a greater say in the conduct of the war than Hindenburg or Ludendorff.
'Dracula.'
Soldiers marched in, boots and breastplates clattering. Elders of the Graf's Carpathian Guard, they had fought at his side through the centuries. With them, they brought an icy stink, of old spilled blood and discharged guns.
'Dracula.'
Poe had written to the Graf many times early in the war, encouraged by the elder's endorsement, never retracted but also not mentioned much these days, of The Battle of St Petersburg. He had never been granted a reply.
'Dracula ...'
The repetition of the name was almost a cry, almost a prayer. An adjutant was dragged in behind a pair of wolves which snapped and snarled on leashes. Ewers jumped at the approach of the beasts. Poe had heard these were Dracula's lieutenants from his warm days, transformed by his powers into faithful familiars.
A tall vampire came through the doors at a striding pace. He wore a grey cloak over a simple uniform. Poe noted the leather holster at his belt, the shiny-peaked black cap, the pointed ends of his moustache. While other elders clung to their own times, Dracula changed eternally with each war. While his generals advised the tactics of Waterloo and Borodino, the Graf deployed machine-guns against cavalry charges and ordered the digging of trenches across the whole of Europe. He was the great adapter, the supreme pragmatist.
A dowager knelt before the Graf and kissed his hand, pressing lips to spade-like nails. He tolerated her attentions but was eager to move on.
Though not given to fawning on the great, Poe stood to present himself. A word from Dracula would free him from the abominable Ewers and find him a suitable position. General David Poe, his grandfather, had been a warlord also, in the Revolutionary war. There were too many in the way. The Graf could not venture among the generality without being surrounded by the grateful, the solicitous, the opportunist.
Poe dashed forwards, running through his accomplishments in his mind. The conversation of Poe and Dracula. This was to be a moment in the history of imagination. As he neared the Graf s party, the air seemed richer, thick and liquid. Close to the warlord, Poe's step slowed as in a dream. Background noise was blotted out and Poe heard the beating of a huge heart, a drumbeat of life drowning all else.
The Graf's great head turned as he strode. His eyes passed over Poe without recognition. Poe skidded to a halt, gaping at the elder. Dracula hurried on. A pair of plumed Carpathians, one a warrior woman with a tattooed face, covered his back. Their hostile gaze drove Poe back. The elder swept through the room unquestioned, leaving supplicants in his wake. The weeping dowager had to be comforted by an aghast junior officer.
Poe felt the passing of the unusual conditions that obtained in the immediate vicinity of the Graf. Normal sounds and smells poured back in, setting his senses a-jangle.
The presence of the warlord was overpowering and did not fade fast. Ewers was electrified, unable to contain his nervous energies. Newspapers riddled with bad news from the front were abandoned. Officers hung together to propose new paths to victory. Everyone knew a big push was in the offing, striking at Paris before the Americans arrived in force.
Poe could not forget Dracula's eyes.
The eagle doors were held open for the Graf's party. They moved into the hallway and mounted a wide set of stairs. The doors closed but Poe still heard boots on the marble steps. The heartbeat pulsed in his brain, setting a pace for the progress of empires.
Over three-quarters of the vampires in the room were of Dracula's bloodline. Poe felt excluded: Virginia never knew the name of her father-in-darkness, though she thought he might be a Spaniard. He called himself Sebastian Newcastle. The vampire had sought out the poet of the uncanny and found only Mrs Poe at home, then begun the process of her turning on a motiveless whim. That neither Poe nor Virginia demonstrated an aptitude for shape-shifting proved Newcastle was not of the Dracula line. At odd times, Poe was obsessed with tracking the vampire who had turned Virginia, but his enquiries always petered out.
The waiting hall settled again. Even the Graf's heartbeat, which had chimed with the throbbing of Poe's own blood, was gone.
He looked at the front-line soldier, alone on his couch. Unlike the general and the diplomat, he had not stood in the mighty presence. His lap was stained scarlet. Blood dribbled down his breeches and into his boots. A recent wound had opened. The man might die in this waiting hall.