Dark Labyrinth 1 Page 5

  Outside, Dwight Frye’s laugh changed into the sound of distant, agonized screams.

  Blinking and disoriented, he tried to comprehend exactly what had altered around him. As if walking through gelatin, Lugosi shuffled toward the dressing room door and opened it. The morphine made fright and uneasiness drift away from him. He experienced only a melting curiosity to know what had happened, and in his mind he questioned nothing. His Dracula costume felt alive on him, as if it had become more than just an outfit.

  The set for Castle Dracula appeared even more elaborate now, more solid, dirtier. And he saw no end to it, no border where the illusion stopped and the cameras set up, where Karl Freund and Tod Browning would argue over the best way to photograph the action.

  The fire in the enormous hearth had burned low, showing only orange embers; sharp smoke drifted into the greatroom. He smelled old feasts, damp and mildew in the corners, the leavings of animals in the scattered straw on the floor. Torches burned in iron holders on the wall. The cold air raised goosebumps on his morphine-numbed flesh.

  The moans and screams continued from outside.

  Moving with a careful, driven gait, Lugosi climbed the wide stone staircase, much like the one on which he met Renfield in the film. His shoes made clicking sounds on the flagstones, solid stones now, not mere papier mache. He listened to the screams. He followed them.

  He knew he was no longer in Hollywood.

  Reaching the upper level, Lugosi trailed a cold draft to an open balcony that looked down onto a night-shrouded hillside. Stars shone through wisps of high clouds in an otherwise clear sky. Four bonfires raged near clusters of soldiers and drab tents erected at the base of the knoll. Though the stench of rotting flesh reached him at once, it took Lugosi’s eyes a moment to adjust from the brightness of the fires to see the figures spread out on the slope.

  At first, he thought it was a vineyard, with hundreds of stakes arranged in rows, radiating from concentric circles of other stakes. But one of the “vines” moved, a flailing arm, and the chorus of the moans increased. Suddenly, like a camera coming into focus, Lugosi recognized that the stakes contained human forms impaled on the sharp points. Some of the points were smeared with blood that looked oily black in the darkness; other stakes still shone wicked and white, as if they had been trimmed once again after the victims had been thrust down upon them.

  Lugosi gasped, and even the morphine could not numb him to this. Many of the human shapes stirred, waving their arms, clutching the wounds where the stakes protruded through their bodies. They had not been allowed to die quickly.

  Dim winged shapes fluttered about the bodies—vultures feasting even at night, so gorged they could barely fly, ignoring the soldiers by the tents and bonfires, ignoring the fact that many of the victims were not even dead. Ravens, nearly invisible in the blackness, walked along the bloodstained ground, pecking at dangling limbs. A group of the soldiers broke out in laughter from some game they played.

  Lugosi winced his eyes shut and shivered. Revulsion, confusion, and fear warred within his mind. This must all be some illusion, a twisted nightmare. The morphine had never affected him like this before!

  Some of the victims had been hung head down, others sideways, others feet down. The stakes rose to various heights, high and low, as if in a morbid caste system of death. A rushing wail of pain swept along the garden of bloody stakes, sounding like a choir.

  From the corridor behind Lugosi, a quiet voice murmured. “Listen to them—like children in the night. Do you enjoy the music they make?” Lugosi whirled and stumbled, slumping against the stone wall; the numbness seemed to put his legs at a greater distance from his body.

  Behind him stood a man with huge black eyes that reflected tears in the torchlight. His face appeared beautiful, yet seemed to hide a deep agony, like a doe staring into a broken mirror. Rich brown locks hung curling to his shoulders. He wore a purple embroidered robe lined with spotted fur; some of the spots were long smears of brown, like dried spots of blood wiped from wet blades. His full lips trembled below a long, dark moustache.

  “What is this place?” Lugosi croaked, then realized that he had answered automatically in the stranger’s own tongue, a language as familiar to Lugosi as his childhood, as most of his life. “You are speaking Hungarian!”

  The stranger widened his eyes in indignation. Outside, the chorus of moans grew louder, then quiet, like the swell of the wind. “I speak Hungarian now that I am no longer a prisoner of the Turks. We will obliterate their scourge. I will strike such fear in their hearts that the sultan himself will run cowering back to Constantinople!”

  One of the vultures swooped close to the open balcony, and then flew back toward its feeding ground. Startled, Lugosi turned around, then back to face the stranger who had frightened him. “Who are you?” he asked.

  The Hungarian words fit so naturally in his mouth again. Lugosi had forced his native language aside to learn English, phonetically at first, delivering his lines with power and menace to American audiences, though he could not understand a word of what he was saying. Understanding came much later.

  The haunted stranger took a hesitant step toward Lugosi. “I am. . .Vlad Dracula. I bid you welcome. I have waited for you a long time.”

  Lugosi lurched back and held his hand up in a warding gesture, as if reenacting the scene when van Helsing shows him a box containing wolfsbane. From childhood Lugosi had heard horrible stories of Vlad the Impaler, the real Dracula, rumored to be a vampire himself, known to be a bloodthirsty butcher who had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Turks—and as many of his own people.

  In the torchlit shadows, Vlad Dracula paid no attention to Lugosi’s reaction. He walked up beside him and stood on the balcony, curling his hands on the stone half-wall. Gaudy rings adorned each of his fingers.

  “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 his performance 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 God.” 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 God, 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 wife and from there, penniless, Lugosi had traveled to Berlin seeking acting jobs.

  And now Vlad Dracula thought he was doing this for his people, to free Wallachia and the towns that would become great Hungarian cities. Lugosi had scorned the weak American audiences because they proved too weak to withstand anything but safe, insignificant frights—but now he didn’t believe he could stomach what he saw of Vlad the Impaler.

  “I fight the Turks and use their own atrocities against them. They have taught me all this!” Vlad Dracula wrung his hands, then snatched 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 him to speak to Lugosi, to justify everything.

  “Can you not hear me? The Turks held me hostage from the time I was a boy. To save his neck, my father Dracul the Dragon willingly turned me over 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 and hold me where I could not struggle 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 scene of slaughter on the hillside.

  “After I escaped, I learned that my father had been ambushed and murdered by John Hunyadi, a Hungarian who should have shared his loyalty! Hunyadi captured my father and my brother Mircea so he could gain lordship over the principalities my father controlled. He struck my father with seventy-three sword strokes before he dealt a 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 scraped 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 scraped 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 pass. 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. In the ten years since, Lugosi had already married twice more, but he still did not feel he had found her match. 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 snatching 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 snatched out at Lugosi’s vampire costume, but his hand passed 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 superstitious 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 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 passed 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.

  “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 fe
ar? All is lost. I have been abandoned. God 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 cocked an eyebrow. Below, a clattering sound signaled a portcullis opening. Booted feet charged across the flagstoned 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, and mothers with 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 God 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 glass. “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 scraped 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.