'Ridiculous notion,' blustered General Sir Henry Wilson. 'The Kaiser don't have the men or the means or the guns or the guts. Haig will tell you Germany is an arrant paper tiger. The Huns are beaten badly, their heads are off. They can only flounder in dirt and bleed to death.'
'It would be pleasant to concur,' said Ruthven, 'but we do not just fight Wicked Willi. There are others in this business. Winston is quite right. A concerted attack will come. I know the Transylvanian brute of old. He is a veritable Piltdown Man, an unchecked Eoanthropus. He will not stop until stopped. Even then, he must be destroyed. We made the mistake once before of letting Dracula live.'
'I agree with the Prime Minister,' said Lloyd George. 'Dracula commands the Central Powers. It is his will that must be broken.'
Beauregard, wearily, had to concede he too believed a big push was in the offing. 'With the cessation of hostilities on the Eastern Front, a million men will be freed to fight in the west. Steel forged in the fire of battle, not green recruits.'
'And Malinbois?' Ruthven asked. 'Might this be his forward post? He'll want to be in the field. He has a barbarian vanity about such things. He has not entered the lists, yet he must lust to do so.'
'The castle would make a suitable HQ,' Beauregard said. 'If a ground push is to succeed, he would wish to wrest from us our superiority in the air. Therefore, he would want JG1 with him.'
Ruthven slapped his desk, excited. His monotone became a grating whine.
'I have it! He wants to spread his black wings and fly. He'll be up in that dirigible of his, the Attila. He, and I, we know this war comes down to the two of us. We face each other over the chessboard of Europe. To him, I am the Britain that humiliated and scorned him. To me, he is the past vampirekind must outlive. It is a philosophical and aesthetic battle ...'
Churchill's belly rumbled and Lloyd George examined the cuffs of his striped trousers. Beauregard wondered if millions of truly dead thought it a war of philosophy and aesthetics.
'This is our duel. My brain and his. He has cunning, I'll give him that. And valour, for what it's worth. And he so loves his toys: his trains, his flying machines, his big guns. He's like a monstrous child. If he can't get his way, he will ravage the world.'
Ruthven stood and gestured dramatically, as if posing for a portrait: the Prime Minister in Full Flight.
'I see a way to trip the fiend, though. Beauregard, keep worrying at this Malinbois business. I want details, facts, figures. Mr Croft, this would seem a project suited to your skills. You will take Beauregard's reports and digest them.'
The hatchet man narrowed his dead eyes.
Ruthven continued, 'We can use Dracula's nursery enthusiasms against him, draw him into our trap and close our hands around his cursed throat.'
Ruthven strangled the air.
5
The Prophet of Prague
Knives of daylight glinted in cracks between the serrated tiles of the low, sloping roof. He grew weaker as the sun rose but his red thirst raged. He was starved for human blood. Edgar Poe, as usual, numbered himself among the most wretched of all his kind.
He sat on the cot, elbows on knees, head hung to avoid bumping. Books were stacked against the opposite wall in pillars two or three volumes deep. The bulkiest, least-consulted items of his travelling library were arranged into a literary ledge which served as a table. A jug half-filled with thick juice sat precisely on a circular dent in the cloth cover of his Schiller. His mouth and nose stung with the stench of days-old animal blood. His stomach revolted but soon he would be forced to drink.
Since turning, he had often suffered prolonged abstinence, warm men felt hunger in their stomachs; the nosferatu ache was a pulsing fire in the heart, accompanied by a gnawing need in the throat and on the tongue. The sustenance of blood was as much in the taste as the substance, and in the spiritual mingling that came with the vampire communion.
Confining him to the ghetto, Prague's ancient repository for the alien and unloved, was ingeniously cruel. Under the Edict of Graz, proclaimed by Franz Joseph and Kaiser Wilhelm, it was forbidden for a Hebrew to be turned. Therefore Jews considered vampires predators and kept their women away from him. As with most edicts proclaimed at the dictate of Graf von Dracula, the specified penalty for transgression was impalement.
It was hard to nurture his inner vampire. He was reduced to.procuring animal blood from a kosher butcher. The Israelite was a cursed gouger. In three years, the price of a few rancid drops of cow gore had risen tenfold. Sometimes the need for the sweet and scented blood of women took him to the brink of madness. Looking into a maelstrom, he was strong yet weak. With half dread and half delight, he foresaw a night when need would overcome him. He would claw ferociously into a nearby garret, forcing a fat wife or daughter to give herself up. Then, glutted, he would drift,in poetic reverie, words flowing from his mind like water from a spring. Jews would come for him with a stake and his unhappy career would be at a sordid end.
In May 1917, Poe had risen from lassitude one evening to discover the myopic poltroon Wilson had committed the United States of America to the European conflict. With a pen-stroke, Wilson transformed Edgar Poe into an enemy of the Central Powers. He was then living in a moderately uncomfortable rooming house in the Sladkovsky Platz, eking out an income as a lecturer. The brief prosperity of The Battle of St Petersburg had passed but his name retained some of its lustre. If all else failed, he could recite 'The Raven', the sole constant in his life and reputation. He no longer thought of the piece as something of his own creation, and had come heartily to detest its bleat of 'nevermore, nevermore'.
Eight months later, he was quartered in an attic little larger than a coffin. The ghetto was a slum labyrinth of narrow covered passageways, more like tunnels than streets. This hive of wood and plaster was infested with chattering, chanting Hebrews. Each room harboured unlikely numbers. Europe was choked with inferior peoples. If he ventured beyond the Salniter-Gasse, Poe was required to wear an arm-band signifying his status as a hostile alien.
Upon leaving the sullen and chaotic shores of his native Philistia for an old world of kultur, this was not the situation he had expected. He had sought freedom and found only his old enemies, the envy of lesser men and the temptations of despair. The few inclined to ponder his case treated him as a conundrum concealed within a nuisance, an occasionally diverting specimen but not one whose study offered much in the way of reward.
His gums receded and his sharp teeth hurt. An iron fist gripped and released his heart. He could bear no more. Despising his weakness, he took the jug and poured the sludgy remains into his burning mouth.
Indescribable foulness swarmed into his throat and a black ache split his skull. It was over quickly. Red thirst dissipated, for the moment. There was a nasty aftertaste, as if the blood were laced with machine oil.
Blood blurred his mind. He thought of pale women with active eyes, bright smiles and long, fine hair. Ligeia, Morella, Berenice, Lenore, Madeline. Many faces coalesced into one face. Virginia. His wife had died with blood in her mouth, child's voice choked in the midst of song. Later she returned from her grave, bestowing toothed kisses. She suckled him with her blood and turned him. Virginia was truly dead now, burned with Atlanta, but she was wife and daughter and sister and mother to him. He lived with her taste on his tongue and her blood in his undying body.
Something thumped mightily at the door. He jumped, alarmed, from his cot. His swimming head banged a beam and he groaned. He pulled open the door, scraping carpet away from bare boards. Outside, on the topmost landing, stood a uniformed vampire, glaring angrily from beneath an eagle- crested shako. He wore spiked and waxed moustaches. Poe recognised the Enemy Alien Commission's messenger.