Dracula Lives (13 page)

On the long walk to the outbuilding they used for storage, Johnny tried to work out the details of a real-life ending that would undoubtedly be far different from whatever twisted Tod Browning-influenced movie version Markov had in mind. But it was hard to concentrate while having to listen for any unusual sounds in the surrounding woods. Still, one image remained unwavering in Johnny’s brain: those two words, emblazoned over a beautiful natural landscape, while a lush string orchestra played a sound track of soaring happy-ending music.

For Johnny, those two words couldn’t come soon enough.

Quinn took a quick shower, got dressed, and headed for his four o’clock meeting with Markov in the den. It was only 3:40, but he wanted to have time to mull over his decision about whether to stay or leave. Ten minutes later, he had finished his pastry and was sitting at the hearth by the fire, sipping coffee as he contemplated the irony of his situation.

He’d come here to get away from the ever-darker evil he’d been seeing in his work with law enforcement, excited about a chance to escape into the world of someone who had not only worked on one of his all-time favorite movies, but had to be a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes stories going back to the dawn of motion pictures.

Instead he had walked into a world so warped by the movies that it rivaled Norma Desmond’s in
Sunset Boulevard
. But where she had preserved her dead pet monkey, Markov seemed to be preserving his dead pet monsters. He had said his castle was “extremely haunted” by his “bad deeds.” Was there any genuine danger here, or was Markov merely preparing Quinn for his role in the movie?

The floating Chaney head and the pterodactyl had been special effects. Surely all the monsters in and around this castle were nothing more than digital smoke and mirrors.

But that moaning sound coming from the forbidden chamber below.… Another special effect?

In his years of studying the horror genre, Quinn had given a lot of thought to the nature of evil, especially as it manifested itself in movies and books. That line of reasoning had invariably led his philosophical nature to contemplate the much larger picture: why does evil exist, and where does it come from? Even staring into its darkest face as a consultant on the sickest murder cases, he’d never come up with any satisfactory answers to those questions, finally deciding they were probably unanswerable.

But working on those cases had opened his eyes to an obvious, inescapable truth—a truth he’d known all along, but never seen so clearly. More than opened his eyes. Had driven the truth home like a stake through the heart.

Evil thrived in the hidden places where no one ever went, when no one was looking. Or—much worse—when people saw it and looked the other way. Whenever any of us comes face to face with evil, there are only two choices: face it head-on, or look away. Confront it or turn and run. Fight or flight. It was that simple.

If, after Markov gave him the full tour, it became clear that this was truly a house where evil dwelled, Quinn would become the only witness. The only one who could stop it. Leaving would not be an option.

And if he decided to stay, Johnny was right. It would be time to find out all he could about his “acting space”—a lost world where pterodactyls still existed, and something moaned in a forbidden chamber.

Feeling ridiculous dressed in a diving outfit and carrying a spear gun, Johnny came to the end of the underground passage that connected the outbuilding to the lagoon. Markov’s tortured rationale for having the tunnel dug was as a security measure for keeping their clandestine activities out of sight. As though anyone would ever see or care.

When the tunnel had been completed, Markov had indulged his
auteur
fantasy and had a second one dug. Connecting the lagoon to the castle’s subterranean chamber, he’d envisioned it as a setting for spooky, atmospheric scenes—especially ones showing creatures from the lagoon creeping along it to infiltrate the castle and threaten its inhabitants.

Like so many of his harebrained ideas, those scenarios had never materialized.

Johnny hesitated a few feet from the water’s edge. It wasn’t the plunge into the cold water that was causing the hesitation, although even with the insulation provided by the full-body dry suit, a water temperature around forty degrees would not be pleasant.

The hesitation was dread over what might be waiting at the bottom. In Markov’s insane desire to create the most realistic movie monsters ever—unstoppable killing machines he tried to bring to some semblance of actual life—Johnny could never be sure that the corpses of the failed experiments down there hadn’t come back from the dead.

When Markov had first bought this property with the intention of creating a self-contained world for making movies, he’d hired an excavator to create the lagoon. Aside from lending atmosphere to the Universal-inspired horror movies he planned on making, it could also be used for any water scenes.

But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and as Markov began to see himself as “the Orson Welles of horror,” those movies never got made. Instead he had spent—
wasted
—their lives, trying to create a single horror masterpiece that would give him the screen immortality he so dearly coveted.

The problem, Johnny had wanted to scream at him, was that—aside from the fact that Markov was no Orson Welles—he could never figure out the story he wanted to tell. All he knew was that he wanted to make the ultimate monster rally picture with the most realistic monsters the world had ever seen. That, too, was the problem. The monsters would be the stars. Humans, for him, were only fodder for the monsters.

Several times Markov had started production only to shut it down because he wasn’t happy with the robotic monsters he’d created. By the time he finished tinkering with them and was ready to resume shooting, his contract with the actors would have expired and he’d have to recast. The result was a bunch of interesting but disjointed scenes that no amount of clever editing or scriptwriting could pull into a coherent narrative.

He had finally put the picture on hold while he spent decades in his laboratory, trying to develop more realistic monsters he could insert anywhere in the film and make them do anything. But the more real they became, the deeper Markov slipped into madness.

Not long after they’d moved here, he’d summoned Johnny to his laboratory in a panic, pointing to two of his earliest creations that lay dormant on the floor: The Watcher in the Crypt, and his much more terrifying version of the Gill Man. Full-scale models of robotic monsters he’d built, for scenes that would feature the lagoon.

“I no longer have complete control,” Markov had said. “They must be destroyed while they are sleeping. Nothing can live if it cannot breathe. Drown them. And weigh them down somehow, so that if whatever infernal spark of life is in them flares up, they will not be able to come up for air.”

With the usual feelings of self-loathing at continuing to be a party to such madness, Johnny had done his bidding, tying the monstrosities to cinder blocks to keep them from floating to the top. When Markov heard how flimsily they’d been weighted down, he’d immediately hired a heavy equipment operator to deposit a block of granite in the lagoon and instructed Johnny to chain them to that.

Now, awkwardly high-stepping because of the flippers, Johnny took the last few steps, hesitating briefly to quiet the whisper that always came at the water’s edge:

It’s only the current that makes them twitch and float upward, like they’re straining to break free.

Johnny clicked on the diver’s light secured to the forehead like a miner’s and jumped in feet first, quickly sinking to the bottom ten feet away. After taking a moment to stabilize, the usual inspection began, which consisted of floating around the aborted monsters as they gently swayed in the current, making sure they were still chained to the block while looking for anything unusual. When the circuit around the granite slab was complete, Johnny resisted the powerful urge to be gone and took a moment to study the things for any sign of life.

Disturbing as it was, their ghostly swaying was only the normal ebb and flow to be expected underwater. There was no twitching or otherwise unnatural movement. Finally came the most hated part of this task: looking into the eyes to make sure they were still closed.

They were.

Johnny’s feeling of relief was abruptly cut short by an odd movement. The Creature from the Black Lagoon’s arms started drifting upward, as though reaching for the surface. Then the Creature itself starting floating toward the top. Johnny hadn’t noticed if the monster’s slow ascent had been aided by a kick of the scaly webbed foot.

The Gill Man’s head was nearing the surface when the chain became taut. From several feet below in the murky water, it was impossible to tell, but the head might be poking through. Alarmed, Johnny swam up fast to check.

The head was below the surface. Its eyes were still closed.

Johnny looked down.

Visibility was too poor to tell if the thing was straining against the chain. The arms slowly floated back down to the sides, and the Creature just hung there, a few feet below the surface—not alive, but seeming as though any moment it might be.

Markov had said nothing can live without air, but the Creature was amphibious.

Johnny finned to the bottom and used the chain to pull it back down, then coiled the chain to make it shorter and wedged it under the block of granite, knowing it would eventually come loose again and making a mental note to get a shorter chain. Far from convinced that the thing was dead, the head of security swam not to the surface, but to the ten-foot wide opening into the underground tunnels. Eager to be away from robotic corpses that may have been prematurely buried, Johnny plunged into the hole and swam into the tunnel on the left that led to the castle.

A short distance in, the upward-sloping tunnel became free of water except for a trickle glimmering along the bottom. Pieces of slimy marine vegetation were scattered here and there, but there were no signs of life. Johnny replaced the flippers with sturdy slip-ons and moved up the passage.

Moments later, it opened into the Garden. Hastening through the nightmare chamber, Johnny went up a stone staircase that led to the only safe haven in the castle—the private apartment Markov had so generously included for his steward.

Steward. Caretaker. Head of Security. Groundskeeper.

Servant? Slave? Prisoner?

What am I?
Johnny thought. A human being. Trapped in a world of the inhuman.

Markov joined Quinn in the den promptly at four. He fixed himself a coffee and pulled the other chair around, until they sat facing one another from a few feet apart. “How did you sleep?”

“Not well.”

“Oh? Were the accommodations not to your liking?”

“The accommodations were fine. But there were some disturbances.”

“Disturbances?”

“Lon Chaney and a pterodactyl made appearances.” Uncertainty about the shape he thought he’d seen in the lagoon kept him from mentioning it.

Markov showed the vaguest hint of a smile. “I told you there would be previews of coming attractions.”

“So they were your handiwork.” Again Quinn’s flare of annoyance at being manipulated was quickly extinguished by the truth of the matter: he’d been warned. “Impressive,” he said. “Revolutionary. The ability to project a special effect like a hologram anywhere you want and control its movement. But why a pterodactyl? Are you making a dinosaur movie?”

“No. That was just me showing off, I’m afraid. One’s ego can become quite large, living alone for so many years.”

Quinn resisted saying something about becoming a legend in one’s own mind. “Mr. Markov—should I call you Mister? There was a
Doctor
Markoff in
The Monster Maker
.”

“I am no doctor, and Count or Baron would be such a cliché. I thought of Morbius, living on his own Forbidden Planet, but that seemed too … on the nose. Markov will suffice.”

“I know that is not your original name. Did you take it from that movie?”

“You are most well-informed. Yes. Given the movie reality I have created, it seemed appropriate. And it has that eastern European ring to it.”

“You keep hinting at all sorts of dangers—monsters, ghosts, some alternate reality. I had been looking forward to a companionable weekend, discussing your experience on
Dracula
and whatever else you wanted to share. But our visit seems to be turning into something else. If this is your version of
The Most Dangerous Game
, then I need to know exactly what the rules are.”

“And so you shall. You have studied the power of movies to influence real life. The story of my life is that power taken to the nth degree—with, as Poe said in
The Conqueror Worm
, ‘much of Madness, and more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot.’

“I have my flaws, Mr. Quinn. Some quite grievous. But make no mistake: I am not the mad castle recluse one might assume. Nor am I the eccentric reincarnation of Bela Lugosi I sometimes present myself to be.

“It is impossible to know all the countless factors that combine to make us who we are. I believe the overriding force behind it all is Destiny. Some call it God. But if there is a God, then perhaps the evil part of my nature was created by the Powers of Darkness. Whatever the case, I am certain of the
primary
factors that have combined in my warped psyche to turn me into Markov—Maker of Monsters.”

“Someone had scrawled those words on Henry Frankenstein’s tomb in
Son of Frankenstein
,” Quinn said.

“Another of my cinematic ancestors. I am the offspring of those movies.
Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man.
They created me. And now I am creating them. A maker of monsters for the digital age.”

“What are these ‘factors’ that compel you to create monsters?”

“There at least three of which I am certain. The two most dominant are unquestionably my obsession with Dracula, and my genius in applying technology to filmmaking. I say this latter not as braggadocio, but simply to help you fully understand the things that have shaped my life.”