Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (17 page)

'You have acquired a
claque?'

Kate twitched her nose.

'You are blushing. It brings out your freckles.'

For a moment, she thought the bombardment was oddly regular, then she realised she was listening to Edwin's heartbeat, lulled by his strong pulse. Her glass was empty.

'Might I buy you a drink, Kate?'

'No thank you. I'm not thirsty.'

'I should have thought you were always thirsty.'

Her heart ached sharply. She would like a drink but not the sort Edwin might buy for her.

'My associate Charles Beauregard speaks highly of you, too. Though he made sure to remind me you were old enough to be my mother.'

'I am barely out of the cradle. I haven't been dead for thirty years yet.'

He was going to ask her what it was like. All young men did, eventually. It was a two-fold question: what was it like being a vampire, and what was it like to be bitten by a vampire?

The
patron
came over. Edwin ordered brandy giving her the chance to reconsider his offer.

'I'll take vanilla,' she said, like a silly girl in a Paris street café Edwin hadn't heard the expression before. She moderated her request to another blood-in-

When he had sipped his drink, he looked at her and began, 'Kate

' "What is it like?"'

He was astounded she had read his mind, convinced of her supernatural powers. She was amused and a little triumphant.

'It is hard to explain. It is one of those matters one has to experience for oneself. Like war and love.'

Edwin considered her answer and looked her square in the face. Her tinted spectacles were no shield against his gaze.

'You are after me, Kate Reed. I'm not sure to what end, but I'm certain you are after me.'

She shrugged. 'You have a sweetheart at home?'

He weighed the possibilities and nodded. 'Catriona Kaye. We're engaged. She's very modern.'

'Unlike myself, a cobwebbed relic of another age.'

'She is a century baby. I call her Cat.'

'And so might I.'

The tang of Edwin's brandy was in her nose. The
anis
taste on her tongue did not dull her sense of him.

'Does your fiancée want you to turn?'

'We haven't discussed the matter.'

'You'll have to.'

'I like being warm.'

'Not a foolish thought.'

'You are no propagandist for the undead state, then?'

Edwin's breath misted. There was a February evening chill. The warm wore scarves and gloves.

'I'll take vanilla.'

'Pardon?'

'I am the only one of my sisters-in-darkness to survive. It is a thorny thing, this condition, not predictable. After thirty years, the doctors don't fully understand it. To turn is to gamble on one's own strengths. Most new-borns die unpleasantly.'

She had no doubt Edwin would turn magnificently. Even as a warm man, he had a vampire sharpness about him.

'Catriona is my name in Scots. Katharine. Are we alike?'

He was surprised by the question.

You must have something in common. She wants to be a journalist.'

'Will you let her follow a profession?' 'My inclination would be to insist on it. Her father takes a different view. He's a clergyman. She's an agnostic. They're always rowing.'

Annoyingly, she felt sympathy for Edwin's inconvenient attachment. Catriona Kaye sounded like an exact copy of her younger, warm self. Only prettier. Kate would not be able to win him away from the other woman and make of him a docile informant. Her career as a Mata Hari was ended before it could begin.

'Why the interest in my personal arrangements? I thought you ran more to politics and matters of great moment?'

'Journalism needs the human touch. Tiny insights to illuminate dry facts.'

Edwin finished his drink. His blood would be warmed by the brandy, flavoured strongly. An envelope edge peeped out of his jacket. He demurely pushed it out of sight.

'Sealed orders?'

He grinned. 'I couldn't possibly say.'

'I would be prepared to make a wager with you,' she said. 'That I know where you are to be sent.'

'If you could do that, you would indeed be a sorceress. I've no idea what is in these orders.'

She knew from his heartbeat that he was lying but let it pass.

'What would you be prepared to wager?'

She shrugged.

'A kiss?' he suggested.

Her eyeteeth lengthened minutely. She felt little pains, not unpleasant, in the nerves of her fangs.

'Very well,' she said. 'You are recalled to London.'

He took out his envelope and opened it. He read his orders, keeping them close to his chest, chuckling.

'You have lost your wager.'

'Am I to take your word for it?'

'As an officer and something reasonably approaching a gentleman?'

'Officers and gentlemen make the best liars. Especially intelligence officers. Lying is their profession, just as the truth is mine.' l\ could name the odd journalist not unacquainted with mendacity.'

'Touché.'

'You accept you have lost?'

'I suppose I shall have to.'

They stood, awkwardly, and looked at each other. He was not a tall man, within a few inches of her five foot four. He kissed her on the lips. His warmth shocked her, jolting fire through her veins. There was no blood but she had the contact she knew from feeding. It was not a long kiss. Bartlett's table cheered and jeered. She could not draw anything much from Edwin's mind. Just a drop of blood and she would know things. Edwin drew away. His hands opened and his orders drifted down past the table.

'That'd curl your hair,' he said, eyes wide.

With the swiftness of the undead, she bent down and picked up the paper, presenting it to Edwin. He was in a brief reverie, befuddled by the press of her lips. The paper passed only briefly through her glance but she knew Edwin was ordered to return to the airfield at Maranique and arrange another reconnaissance flight to the Château du Malinbois.

'Now that wasn't what you expected?' Kate said.

'I'll say not. You're electric, aren't you. Like an eel?'

'This is absolutely intolerable,' ranted Ewers. 'We were to be met at the station. A car was to be provided for us. This delay was not to happen.'

Poe dumped his carpet-bag on the platform as gloomy soldiers clumped around him. It was just past sunset. His red thirst was roused, an exquisite torture.

'Stakes will be hoist,' Ewers vowed. 'Guts will be spitted for this!'

Small irritations were disproportionately infuriating to Hanns Heinz Ewers. As his sense of self-importance was sorely exaggerated, so was his wrath when others refused to credit him with the inflated position to which he laid claim. Were he a subscriber to the theories of Sigmund Freud, Poe would be forced to conclude that Ewers's phallus was remarkably tiny.

Actually, he felt the Viennese Jew said much of interest. Also, he deserved his place in history. Franz Joseph has been on the point of acceding to a petition underwritten by the House of Rothschild and rescinding the Edict of Graz when Freud published
The Oral-Sadistic Impulse.
With its especial relevance to the undead, the book was evidence that the Hebrew race was so morally degraded, not to mention dangerously supportive of subversive notions, that the Edict should not only remain in force but be considerably strengthened.

'There should be no place for inefficiency in the German soul,' Ewers continued. 'It should be burned out with blood and iron.'

The station was Peronne, near Cappy. They were in France, only a few miles from the lines. This was the Somme. In Berlin, Poe had heard the bombardment as a tiny echo. The audibility grew as the train neared the war. Even Ewers heard it well before the French border. The noise wore on Poe's thin nerves; if he stayed too long near the front, he might go mad.

'Do they expect me to walk?'

In Ewers's tirade, 'us* had been replaced by 'me'. It was no feat of ratiocination to deduce that Ewers felt his was the important mission at Château du Malinbois, and Edgar Poe merely the hanger-on. If Ewers were such a magnificent wielder of the mighty pen, why had not he been engaged to create this marvellous book?

Ewers had two heavy trunks to Poe's one travelling bag and was unused to arriving at a station without exciting a swarm of gaudy-uniformed porters eager to serve his purpose to the death. Peronne was given over entirely to the military. Any Frenchmen normally employed as attendants were either dead or a few miles off, pointing rifles at the German lines.

Having borne its latest cargo of grey-clad bodies to the altar of war, the locomotive breathed angry dragon-steam. The huge, black engine had a smokestack to shame a paddle-steamer. The crest of Dracula was picked out in gilt on the boiler, somewhat obscured by mud and soot.

The Graf's first appointment in the Kaiser's service was as Director of Imperial Railways. Deviation from the timetable by more than five minutes was punishable by three strokes across the back with the flat of a heated sword. If a miscreant engineer committed a second offence, he was thrown alive into his own furnace. The Graf s foresight became evident in the first hours of the war: eleven thousand individual trains were diverted from civilian service to convey several million reservists from their homes to regimental depots and then to the front. The Schlieffen Plan, devised under the Graf s patronage, was less a campaign strategy in the nineteenth-century sense than a colossal railway timetable.

'Hoy,' Ewers shouted, 'my luggage.'

Vast wheels ground as the train readied to move on. Ewers ran up and down, coat-tails flapping in scalding steam. Brass-bound trunks were tossed out of a carriage on to the platform. Good German workmanship showed as the sturdy cases buckled but did not break. Ewers shouted threats at the departing train, promising numbers and names had been noted down and that steps would be taken to ensure swift dismissal and punitive treatment.

There was a bad smell in the air. Poe recognised it from his last war. The war for Southern Independence. The one they had lost. He had never really purged the taste from his spittle. Mud, gunpowder, human waste, fire and blood. There were new ingredients, petrol and cordite, but the underlying stench was the same on the Somme as at Antietam. For a moment, he was overcome. Death crowded in on his brain, a black flag wrapped around his head, suffocating, blinding, choking.

'What arc you standing there for?' Ewers snapped. 'You look like a scarecrow. *

Ewers did not feel anything. That said much about him.

'Pah,' Ewers spat, waving a dismissive arm.

Poe calmed. He must feed, soon. As always when at the lip of exhaustion and starvation, his senses were more acute. To feel too much is to be mad.

It was little wonder no car waited for them. Beyond the shuttered ticket office and a shelled-out waiting room was military chaos. Soldiers arriving at or returning to the front were sorted into divisions and found places on carts and lorries that took them to where the fighting was done. Sergeants shouted, with the universal bark of sergeants all through history. Men jumped, rifles and kit tangled.

Ewers reluctantly abandoned his trunks into the care of a fire-eyed little corporal with a dash of moustache and a stiff-armed salute. Poe saw in the man the makings of a martinet. They went out on to the station forecourt.

The wall of the ticket office was bullet-pocked at chest height. Rough wooden caskets were stacked to the height of a telegraph pole. An open coffin by the pile was filled to the depth of an inch with undisturbed snow, as if awaiting an Eskimo vampire who slept on a layer of his native ice. Peronne had been extensively bombarded several times and few buildings were undisturbed.

Windows were blown out, roofs sundered, doors burned through, chimneys toppled.

'You there,' Ewers shouted at a sergeant, 'which way to the Château du Malinbois?'

The sergeant, a burly and moustachioed warmfellow, cringed at the sound of the name and shook his head, muttering darkly.

'You don't want to go to the castle, sir,' he said.

'Quite the contrary. We do the business of the Kaiser.'

Ewers was exasperated but Poe was struck by the sergeant's evident fear and disgust. Malinbois was obviously a house of unhappy and frightful repute.

'The castle is a bad place,' the sergeant explained. 'Dead things live there. Things that should be walled up and forgotten.'

Ewers snarled, showing fangs. The soldier was not troubled by the vampire display. So, worse things waited at the château. Poe's interest was almost excited. The sergeant tottered off, leaving Ewers exhaling steam like a train.

'Superstitious peasant,' Ewers spat.

Poe's fangs ached and his heart burned. He needed to drink. Ewers promised luxuries at Malinbois but this fabled castle seemed ever more remote. Official posters warned against fraternisation and disease. It was forbidden to drink the blood of French civilians. It might just as well be forbidden to breathe French air.

A child stood under a street-lamp watching the soldiers, a girl of eleven or twelve. Dressed in a clean pinafore, she had very white skin. In the fall of light, she shone. She was warm. Poe heard her heart beat, heard every rustle of her clothes. Through the fug of war, he tasted the sweetness of her breath.

She looked at him with old eyes. For an instant, she was Virginia. They all looked like Virginia, no matter the colour of their eyes or the style of their hair. There was always a touch of Virginia. He was drawn to the child, pulled across the cratered street, There was already an understanding between them.

'Herr Poe,' Ewers called, distant and irritated.

Reaching the light, he hesitated. The girl's face glowed with life. He was not sure he could touch her without being burned.!

Caution fought his impulses. She was not Virginia. This was a practised French flirt. She was here for someone like him. He saw scabs on her throat, healed bite-marks spreading like a rash from just under her tiny ear down to her collar. She smiled. Her teeth were not good.