Dark Labyrinth 1 Page 6

  “My Lord Prince! Why did you 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 snatched 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 moustache. “This is interesting. The sultan will think it just as horrible, but God 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. 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.”

  Lugosi tried to shake the thickening cobwebs from his eyes. “The morphine must be wearing off. . . .”

  “And I can barely feel the effects of the opium pipe anymore. 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.”

  “Farewell, Vlad Dracula,” Lugosi said, raising his hand. It passed 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 for 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 could not guess where it would take him next, and 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 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 cumbersome 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’d 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.”

  The Sum of His Parts

  Kevin J. Anderson

  “The Sum of His Parts” originally published in Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest, vol 1, Issue 9, 2007.

  When working with Dean Koontz on the novel Prodigal Son (the initial novel in his phenomenal Frankenstein series), I spent a lot of time pondering the origin of the Frankenstein monster, a being stitched together from parts of several different people. How did all the pieces fit together, as it were? The bodies had to come from somewhere, they were people with their own stories, their own troubles, and they had all died at approximately the same time (so the pieces were fresh for Victor’s laboratory). As I considered how those original “donors” might have known or interacted with one another, a nicely tangled story emerged.

  * * *

  Lightning turns the castle tower into a silver silhouette. Energy collects in metal rods, floods into crackling apparatus. Sparks fly from wires connected to a bandaged figure composed of cadaverous tissue assembled with thick sutures.

  The doctor studies his creation, the mismatched parts, the thick sutures.

  Spiderwebs of electricity flow like white-hot blood into the patchwork body, awakening the components like embers under an insistent puff of breath. The reattached hands twitch, the fingers flex. Transplanted lungs expel fetid air, unleashing a flood of memories.

  #

  He drew a deep breath of the open air. The snow-capped Alps framed the fragrant meadows where his sheep roamed. He preferred to be alone in the mountain vales, away from his brother Stefan and his flock; he didn’t like the sound of talking. In fact, he didn’t like sounds at all.

  The wind spoke to him with breezes that whispered i
n his ears and taunted him like the hot breath of a wolf. The waving grasses hissed and rustled.

  One afternoon during a thunderstorm, he huddled next to a rock, wrapping his hands around his ears, but the thunder made his head ring. The wind was all around, plucking at his clothes, gasping, wheezing, shrieking. He abandoned his flock, ran to his hut, and slammed the rickety door. The wind moaned through the cracks, slipping inside to get him. Plugging his ears with beeswax only amplified the sounds of his own breathing, the blood pounding inside his head. There was no escape. . . .

  When it was time for the two brothers to join their flocks and take them to market in Ingolstadt, he and Stefan climbed a pass that separated their grazing fields from the valley. His brother was lonely, loquacious, and pestered him with constant conversation, to which he received no reply. As the two hiked up the steep slope, Stefan began panting, louder and louder, breathing so heavily that he could not even keep up his inane patter.

  The shepherd squeezed his eyes shut, but couldn’t block out the sound of the awful heaving breaths. Each loud inhalation and exhalation was like the thunder, until he could stand it no more.

  He spun and wrapped his hands around Stefan’s throat. His brother struggled frantically while he squeezed, but the shepherd focused only on stopping the noise, smothering it. When he let his brother’s limp body tumble down the steep path, the world was peaceful for a time. A few moments of blessed silence. Then the wind picked up again.

  He fled toward the valley. When the shepherd reached Ingolstadt and left his sheep in the market pen, he passed an old woman sitting in front of her candle shop. She coughed incessantly, hacking, wheezing; she spat a mouthful of phlegm into the gutter and started coughing again. The sound was like hammers pounding on his nerves. The old woman breathed and coughed and wheezed and coughed and breathed—until he knew he had to silence her as well.

  She stood on creaking legs and tottered into the dimness of her shop, still coughing and coughing. Without hesitation, the shepherd stalked after her. She turned, no doubt thinking him a customer, and before she could speak, before she could cough again, he wrapped his callused hands around her thin throat. His muscles were strong, and he clamped down harder and harder until her struggles stopped, and the silence came back.

  When he reeled outside again, the streets of Ingolstadt were a storm of people, a constant din, far too much noise. He had to escape back to the high mountain meadows, but before he could run from the square, a town crier began to bellow at the top of his lungs, announcing a tax that old Baron Frankenstein had imposed. The crier’s words broke through the air like cannon shot.

  The shepherd wanted to scream for silence. He needed the crier’s mouth to stop opening and closing, to stop spewing words. Unable to control himself, the shepherd threw himself upon the man, shutting off the breath and the voice. It took four grown men from the astonished crowd to pull him away. The crier squawked and gasped, but his throat was so damaged he could no longer speak.

  After the strangler was dragged before the magistrate, he was convicted of killing the old candle-shop woman and his brother Stefan, whose body had been found by another shepherd. In addition, several children around Ingolstadt had disappeared over the years, and (since he was in custody) he was accused of killing them as well, though he denied that. He did not, however, deny the rest.

  While the shepherd sat in his cell, the mocking wind stole through chinks in the wall and laughed at him. One blustery night, he watched the Baron’s son, Victor Frankenstein, come to talk to the jowly jailer. From where he huddled sullenly in his cell, he could overhear the conversation. Victor had an edginess and a calculating intelligence. “I am here on behalf of several medical students from the University. We are woefully short of cadavers for dissection.”

  When the jailer’s breathing quickened, it set the strangler’s teeth on edge. Victor looked at the pot-bellied and splotchy-skinned jailer; distaste was clear on his face, as if he dismissed him as a potential specimen. “If we are to become physicians, we must have material with which to practice.” He indicated the miserable prisoner. “This madman is penniless and without family. He will be hung tomorrow. I would like to purchase his body afterward. At present, I have a particular need for a pair of hands and a set of lungs.”

  The jailer pretended to be offended. “That’s highly illegal, sir!”

  “But quite commonly done—as you well know.” Victor pulled out a pouch of gold coins. “Perhaps this will salve your conscience?”

  The jailer looked at the coins, looked at the Baron’s son, then sneered at the strangler in his cell. “Done.” Victor’s breathing was calm with satisfaction. Outside, the wind scraped past the walls. It never stopped. . . .

  The following day, when the shepherd was brought to the gibbet in the town square, he heard the mob shouting, breathing.

  As the rough noose tightened around his neck, the strangler realized that the loudest sound that had haunted him all his life came from air passing through his own throat from his own lungs. Every waking moment he had forced to listen to each breath whistling in and out of his mouth and nose. Finally, that noise would cease too!

  When the hangman hauled on the rope, lifting him into the air to dangle under the gibbet’s crossbar, the noose squeezed off the sounds he made. All of them. The straining pulse grew to a roar in his head—and then he fell into blessed, total silence. . . .

  Until now.

  #

  Storm electricity floods the muscle tissue. The bandaged legs twitch, as if remembering how to run.

  “Just nerve impulses,” Victor says, checking his apparatus. The legs spasm again, trying to break free and bolt from this hellish place. . . .

  #

  He loved to run. As a servant in Castle Frankenstein, he preferred being sent to town to perform errands for the old Baron. He was fleet as a deer, and his muscles sang with the satisfying ache of tired legs after a long and glorious run.

  His main duties were to tend Baron Frankenstein’s menagerie of exotic animals on the castle grounds: peacocks, a wildebeest, an aardvark, a spotted ocelot, even a lemur. The Baron’s noble friends marveled at the private zoo, while his son Victor studied the creatures with a scientist’s eye. The Baron also indulged the boys and girls from Ingolstadt who sneaked onto the estate to look at the animals.

  The runner was a happy-go-lucky man with many flirtations, and the young women did not mind his attentions, especially the innkeeper’s plump daughter. The old Baron paid his servants well enough, but coins did not stay long in the servant’s purse. He cheerfully bought food, wine, and friendship for his companions, though the generosity usually went only one way.

  The innkeeper’s daughter chided him for his spendthrift ways, especially in the evils of gambling, but he simply laughed her off, then pinched her substantial bottom. He frequented the dicing tables, invoking the name of his master to gain special privileges or to increase his line of credit.

  Unfortunately, his luck was never good, even in the best of times. Finding himself out of money and in debt, he assumed that his fellow gamers (who had been happy to accept his coin when he bought food or bottles of wine) would be sympathetic to his plight. But his supposed friends vanished like smoke, and the gambling-house proprietors demanded repayment.

  Twice in the past four months, the old Baron had lectured him to be careful. “Because you work for the House of Frankenstein, you have a responsibility not to cause shame and scandal.” So the servant knew he could never ask his master for a loan. Baron Frankenstein was a hard man, not unjust, but not softhearted either.

  Owing so much money, the runner didn’t know what he could do. Collectors had cornered him in an alley, describing in great detail what they would do: First they would tie a gag around his mouth to stifle his screams, then they would beat his boots with iron clubs until his ankles shattered. Afterward, they would slowly pull off his boots, drawing out the pain. Once his broken feet were bare, they would take a set of
curved tongs stolen from the local blacksmith, and twist his toes one by one, bending them backward and up until the bones snapped. He would never run again.

  He could not allow that to happen. He couldn’t! Therefore, when the old Baron went off to be alone in his isolated hunting lodge deep in the forest preserve, as was his habit, the runner slipped into Castle Frankenstein. He bundled up four silver candlesticks and hurried out the servants’ entrance, beyond the squawking and grunting creatures in the menagerie, and ran down the path to Ingolstadt as fast as his legs could take him.

  The candlesticks were more than enough to pay his debt, but his tormentors showed no sympathy. They accepted the stolen silver and looked at him as if they knew he would gamble again, that this was only the first theft he would be forced to commit. But they had their money, and the servant was free of his tormenters. Relieved but not at all interested in the pleasure of running, he stayed the night with the innkeeper’s daughter, who did not know of his troubles. In the morning, shaky with both relief and guilt, the runner went back up to the castle, glad to have a fresh start.

  When he arrived, the household staffmembers were distraught, and young Victor Frankenstein glared at him with angry eyes. His voice was cold. “We know what you’ve done. Those candlesticks were my mother’s heirlooms, fashioned out of the purest silver from the mines of Transylvania.”

  “I . . . I did nothing. I didn’t take them.”

  “You were seen!” cried the head housekeeper, her face streaked with tears. “I saw you, and so did two others!”

  Victor said, “You are hereby discharged from service.”

  The runner stood aghast. “I will make up for it, sir. I’ll pay you back. Please don’t tell the Baron!”

  “I am in charge while my father is away. You cannot repay this debt. You have stolen from us. You have betrayed people who trusted you. Leave Castle Frankenstein, before I call the magistrate.”