Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (15 page)

Winthrop could not bring himself to pity the Bloody Red Baron.

'Very well,' Manfred said, the good soldier obeying an order. He stepped forwards, close to me. I saw healed scars on his handsome, square face. Under his cropped hair was a fading red weal. He had recently been shot in the head.
'Madame,' he held out his hand. I took it. A queerly boyish look passed across his face, as if he did not know what to do next. I believe he had never before been with a woman.
Ten Brincken nodded to one of the attendants, who slipped my peignoir from my shoulders.
'You appear to be in excellent health,' he remarked.
Other fliers followed Lothar's example. Stalhein had Faustine pinned down, and drank from her slit wrist as from a public water fountain. Meinster opened his dressing gown like batwings and moaned in a species of pleasure as Murnau knelt before him, sucking intimate wounds.
Manfred dipped his head and touched a sharp tongue to my neck. When I say sharp, I mean it literally. Some vampires have barbed points in their tongues, to pierce their companions' skin. The Baron clamped his mouth to my wound and sucked, ferociously. I felt points of pain and an ocean of pleasure. I was near swooning. The experience had not been this intense since Dracula took me for the first time. I was warm again, alive.
'Not too much, Baron,' said Ten Brincken, tapping Manfred's shoulder. 'It can be dangerous.'
I wanted to push him away but I had to hold him to me. I felt myself dwindling.
'Baron,' Ten Brincken nearly shouted, fear lost in his devotion to science, 'enough!'
I shook. My vision clouded red. I was dying again. We can kill each other, Charles. I have seen Dracula do it, and contemptuously spit out in a great stream the blood he has taken. That was how he murdered Armand Tesla. This is true death, from which there is no returning. This is the death I shall meet at dawn.
Two attendants held Manfred's arms, wrenching him away from me. His mouth was still attached to my neck like the sucker of a carnivorous plant. With a wet snap, it came free. Manfred shook his head, my blood dripping from his lips. Unsupported, I crumpled. Ten Brincken's stepped over me to examine the Baron. That told me where I was in his priorities.
The Professor clapped his hands and called for the fliers to leave off their drinking. For those who had lost control, attendants had wooden-handled devices like tongue- depressors. A touch of a silver spatula causes enough pain to shock a vampire free of red thirst.
I felt myself lifted into a sitting position. I was as pliable as a broken doll. General Karnstein had taken notice of me. With a pointed forefinger, he slit his wrist and raised blood to my lips like water to a wounded man. I had not the strength to swallow but Karnstein let blood dribble into me. His line is pure and strong, but it was hours before I was fully recovered.
From the floor, I looked up at Baron von Richthofen. He turned away from me, but I could see the flush of my blood in his shaved hackles. Then, I fainted.
That night, Meinster's flier died. Murnau's skull became that of a huge rat, but his flesh did not change. Bone burst through his skin. The next day, we were sent from the château, duty done. That is all I know. You must think of this, for I believe it to be the important kernel of my story:
he
has shaped them,
he
has given them his blood,
he
has made them into something new.'

Winthrop must have asked her to be more specific.

I mean Dracula. He is the ringmaster of the Flying Circus, and the Red Baron is his star act.'

The duckboards were warped and ill-fitting, but it was best to walk on them rather than the mud. The top layer was frozen but boot-shaped holes showed where others had sunk to the knee in viscid filth.

'We don't see many civilians parading through here,' said Lieutenant Templar, a handsome new-born with a quizzical eyebrow. The breed prefer to fight their wars from armchairs in Boodle's.'

'Boodle's is not my club,' Beauregard said, treading carefully.

'No offence meant. It shows pluck to come this far when you don't have to.'

'You are right. Would it were that I was possessed of such spirit. Sadly, I
do
have to be here.'

'Worse luck, then.'

The slip-trench was ten feet deep. Its higgledy-piggledy sandbag walls were mortared with frozen mud.

A projectile overshot the line, sailed above at a decent altitude, and exploded a hundred yards off, where fields were patched with the last of the snow. Earth rained down. Templar shook like a dog, raising a halo of loose dirt. Beauregard brushed the shoulders of his Astrakhan coat.

'A whizz-bang,' said the lieutenant. 'Nasty beasts. Fritz has been lobbing the little devils all week. We think they're trying to fill in this thoroughfare.'

The slip-trench fed men and
materiel
to the front line. If breached, the blockage would have to be cleared.

Another shell whizzed over and banged in the abused field.

'Fritz's calibrations are off. That's two they've laid back there.'

Beauregard looked up. The late-afternoon sky was grey, dotted with wind-whipped earth fragments, trailed across with smoke. Faint in the low cloud were the buzzing black shapes of flying machines.

'If those bats report back to Hunland, the gunners will make a few twiddles and drop whizz-bangs right where we stand. It won't be pretty.'

Early in the war, a reporter wrote up such a situation in
The Times,
boosting home front morale with a picture of cheery Tommies capering in the knowledge that the enemy's heavy guns consistently missed their positions. Devoted readers in Berlin passed on information to the German artillery, who made adjustments with devastating upshot. Journalism was now strictly regulated. Well-intentioned boobs did more harm with jingo puff than iconoclasts like Kate Reed with trenchant criticism. Beauregard would rather have the white cliffs of Dover defended by Kate than by a regiment of Northcliffe's flag-waving grubs.

'Hurray,' Templar exclaimed, 'the Camels are coming.'

A triangular formation of British aeroplanes closed on the German spotters. The gunfire was a tiny sound, like the chattering of insects. The aerial battle was fought in and above the clouds.

'There's one down,' Templar said.

A winged fireball burst through cloud, wind shrieking around it, and streamed towards No Man's Land. It ploughed noisily into the ground.

Air supremacy meant preventing the enemy from using his aeroplanes to gather strategic intelligence. The Germans, and to some extent the Allies, wasted column inches on daring deeds of the knights of the sky, but it was a nasty, bloody business. As things stood, a British observer, unless he ran into Richthofen, was more likely than his German opposite number to bring back details of troop dispositions and gunnery emplacements.

Another German came down, slowly as if approaching an airfield. The machine went into a spiral and crumpled in the air as if colliding with an invisible wall. The pilot must have been dead in his cockpit.

'The slip-trench stays open to fight another day.'

Looking about, it did not seem a particularly notable achievement.

It was a fairly quiet afternoon at the front. Both sides bombarded non-committally, but there were no big shows on. Rumours flew that enemy divisions from the Eastern Front were filtering through Europe, freed by the peace negotiated with the new Russia. Naturally, the rumours were true. Beauregard had reports from the Diogenes Club's associates in Berlin that that Hindenburg and Dracula were preparing for
Kaiserschlacht.
In a last push to victory, the remaining resources of the Central Powers would be thrown into a costly stab at Paris. '
Schlacht'
could be translated as 'attack', but also meant 'slaughter'. Knowing what was to come might not be enough to put a stop to it, especially if carefully gathered intelligence was ignored by the likes of Mireau and Haig.

Now they were near the front itself. The impact of shells was a permanent low-level earthquake. Everything shivered or rattled: tin hats, duckboards, mess kits, equipment, cracking ice, teeth. Beauregard was interested not in forward positions but in an odd, underground emplacement just to the rear of the line.

Some months ago, he had learned Dr Moreau was supervising a front-line hospital, presumably ministering to the sorely wounded. This was the same researcher whose vivisections had earned him repeated expulsions from learned bodies and exposure in the popular press. Beauregard had run across the scientist before, in the thick of another bloody business. By his estimate of Moreau's character, it seemed unlikely the man harboured a patriotic or philanthropic impulse in his breast. Yet here he was, in the worst place in the world, ostensibly risking his own skin to ease appalling suffering.

In consideration of Gertrud Zelle's narrative, he wished to consult Dr Moreau. If anyone this side of the lines could shed light on the darkness of the Château du Malinbois, he was the man.

Towards the front, the trench narrowed. More sandbags were exploded. Major earthworks showed where breaches had been shored up. Templar whistled a little tune, a strange chirrup. Beauregard had heard the new-born was a good officer, concerned for the men under him.

Three Tommies sat at a wonky table, smoking and playing cards. A hand stuck out of the packed-earth wall, cards fanned in a frozen white grip. After a few visits to the front, Beauregard was not shocked by the grim humour. The unknown soldier was too well embedded to be dug free without causing a collapse. His release would have to wait till after the war.

Beauregard remembered a cartoon of two British soldiers chatting in a shell-hole. 'I'm enlisted for twenty-five more years,' one says. 'You're lucky,' replies his comrade, 'I'm duration.'

Two men threw in their cards and the third consulted the hand dealt the dead man. If able to bet, he would have won. Aces and eights.

'Moreau's show is down here, sir,' Templar said, lifting a stiff canvas flap.

It was like the entrance to a mine. A tunnel sloped down, shored up with bags, floored with boards, roofed with corrugated iron. An electric light was strung up about twenty feet in, but there was darkness beyond. Treacly mud ran slowly from the trench into the tunnel, but was diverted into sluices. Beauregard could not imagine where the liquid filth ended up.

A high-pitched scream came from the tunnel, followed by lesser yelps and groans. The cries sounded more animal than human.

'It's always like that,' said Templar, eyebrow raised. 'Dr Moreau says pain is healthy. A person in pain can still feel. It's when you can't feel anything that you have to worry.'

Another shriek was cut through by a rasp like the downstroke of a saw.

'It's unusual to have a clinic this close to the line, isn't it?'

Templar nodded, it's practical, I suppose. But not good for morale. The situation is fearful enough without all this. Some of the men are spooked by the confounded din. They're more scared of being taken into the hole than of being wounded in the first place. Silly stories go around about the doctor using the wounded as experimental subjects.'

Beauregard could imagine. Given Moreau's reputation, the stories might not be all silliness.

'As if there were anything to be learned from torturing wounded men. It's absurd.'

Templar was a decent sort, for a vampire; perhaps too decent. Such saintliness often overlooked man's capacity for pointless cruelty.

Beauregard stepped into the tunnel. A curious miasma filled the enclosed space, a strong sulphurous smell. Wavering electric light made the walls reddish.

The lieutenant stayed outside, like an old-world vampire at the edge of consecrated ground.

'You can go on without me, sir. You can't miss it.'

Beauregard wondered if Templar were as immune from superstition as he claimed. He shook the young man's firm hand and walked past the light into the dark.

The tunnel ended at a solid iron door. Getting it down here and set into stony earth must have been a herculean task. An extraordinary soldier stood guard. Stooped almost double, he barely came up to Beauregard's waist. His arms were six inches longer than his sleeves, most of his brown face was matted with hair, large teeth pushed lips out in an apish grin and red marks, like healed wounds, showed in loose folds of skin around neck and wrists. His uniform bagged in some places and stretched in others.

Beauregard took the guard for a savage, perhaps indigenous to a South Sea corner of Empire. He might be a pygmy afflicted with gigantism. The war called upon all manner of King Victor's subjects.

At Beauregard's approach, the guard wrapped long fingers around a rifle and did his best to stand straight. He bared remarkable teeth, yellow bone-spurs in an acre of bright- pink gum.

'I'm here to see Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said.

The guard's tiny eyes glittered. He snorted, nose moving as if free of his skull. More screams sounded from behind the door. The guard, who might be expected to be used to the noise, shrank in terror, cowering into an alcove.

'Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said, again.

The guard's furry brows knit with extreme concentration. He unwound his fingers from the rifle and took hold of a ring set in the door. He hauled the iron portal open in a succession of creaking lurches.

A draught of bloody stink belched out. Beauregard stepped into a chamber hewn out of earth and rock. A row of cots took up fully half the space. On most were patients with terrible wounds, strapped to bloody mattresses. Some stared silently through bandage masks, others keened in idiot pain. A bin overflowed with cut-up uniforms and sawn-through boots. Electric lights pulsed in time with an unreliable generator grumbling in another room. The walls glistened with fresh blood. Everything was speckled. Even the light-bulbs were spotted, blood drops cooked to brown moles.

He saw Dr Moreau at once, a powerfully built old man in a vilely streaked tunic, with a leonine mane of white hair. The doctor bent over the living remains of a soldier, prising apart exposed ribs with a steel implement. The patient was a skeleton clad in wet scraps of muscle and meat. Hurt eyes shone in the red wreck of a face. Exposed fangs clashed in a devil's grin. Beside Moreau, holding down the patient's shoulders, was a smaller man. Moreau gave a cry of triumph as bones parted. A squirt of purple blood shot into the assistant's face, smearing his thick spectacles.