Vlad

Chapter 13

Though that revolting display along the ravine sickened me, it did not divert me from my clear objectives: to confront the monster and to save my family. I did not abandon Magdalena, tempted as I was to flee.

Turning my back on Borgo, Minea, and my daughter, I located the entrance to the tunnel at the edge of the gully; I pushed open the metal door and entered the accursed Alcayaga’s passageway, brand-new but already suffused with the mossy smell of centuries, as if — instead of having been constructed on site — it had been transported from the distant lands of Vlad Radu’s native Wallachia.

Again that aroma, as though of sensually corrupt meats, sweetly rotting.

Tar and barnacles from ancient seas clung to the coffins. The smoky smell of sand that came from far away, from a land that was not my own, arose from creaky wooden planks and moldy nails.

I walked through the tunnel quickly, because I had already satisfied my curiosity about this lugubrious traveling cemetery — until I stopped and had to muffle a gasp. Vlad had appeared from behind a casket, blocking my way.

For a second, I didn’t recognize him. He was wrapped in a mounted dragoon’s cape, and black and lustrous hair fell to his shoulders. This wasn’t just another wig. It was the hair of his youth — renewed, once again shiny and thick. I only recognized him by the shape of his face, by his chalky pallor, and by the black sunglasses that masked his bloody sockets.

I recalled Zurinaga’s bitter quotation of Vlad’s boast: he could choose his age at will, appear old, young, or even an age in keeping with the natural progress of time. He could fool us all. .

“Where are you heading in such a hurry, Mr. Navarro?” he asked in his deep, slick voice.

That simple question threw me off my game. I had only left my daughter in the ravine so that I could confront Vlad. And here he was. But I had to give him another answer.

“I’m looking for my wife.”

“Your wife doesn’t interest me.”

“That’s good to know. I want to see her so that we can take Magdalena away with us. I’m not going to let you destroy our home.”

Vlad smiled like a cat breakfasting on canaries.

“Navarro, let me explain the situation.”

He turned with preternatural swiftness and opened a coffin, inside of which lay Asunción, my wife, pale and beautiful, dressed in black, with her hands crossed over her chest. I examined her neck, out of instinct. Two purple pricks, the tiniest bloody buds, bloomed above her jugular.

I was still trying to stifle my scream when Vlad moved behind me and with the strength of a gladiator smothered it himself with a spidery hand over my mouth, while his other hand grabbed me by the chest.

“Take a good look at her and listen carefully. I’m not interested in your wife, Navarro. I am interested in your daughter. She is the perfect companion for Minea. They’re practically twins, did you notice? You should have seen the enormous quantity of photographs that I had to examine during the endless nights in my ruined castle in Wallachia until I found the girl who most closely resembled mine. And she was in Mexico, a city of twenty million new — as you might call them — victims! A city without police protection! You wouldn’t believe the trouble Scotland Yard put me through in London! And, best of all — even though I have cultivated friendships all over the world — the city of my old — yes, elderly — friend Zurinaga! All served up on a silver platter, as it were. . twenty million delectable blood sausages!”

Vlad showed his poor manners by licking his lips.

“They’re practically twins, did you notice? Minea was the source of my life. You must believe in the true depths of my feelings, Navarro. You who know the mystical bonds that make a family. This girl is, in fact, my only true family.”

He sighed sentimentally. As the Count loosened his grip over my body, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the creature’s cynicism.

“With Minea, you see, I understood, I became aware of things I never knew. Imagine, my life, begun five centuries ago in the citadel of Sighişoara above the Târnava River, and in those days my life was all about fighting for political power, trying to secure the inheritance of my father, Vlad Dracul, fighting against my half-brother Alexandru for the throne of Wallachia, fighting against my father’s lover Caktuna, who became a nun, just as my half-brother, her son, became a monk, both conspirators hiding behind the sanctity of the Church, fighting against the Turks who invaded my kingdom with the help of my traitorous and corrupt younger brother Radu, an ephebe of Sultan Mehmed’s boys’ harem — a prisoner myself of the Turks, Navarro, from whom I learned the most refined cruelties and from whom I escaped, armed with a vengeance that I unleashed until I dyed the Danube red, from Silistra to Tismana, filled the swamps of Balreni with corpses, blinded with iron and buried my enemies alive, and impaled on stakes all those who opposed my power, impaled them through the mouth, through the rectum, through the umbilicus: that’s how I earned the title Vlad the Impaler. The papal nuncio Gabriele Rangone accused me of impaling a hundred thousand men and women, and the Pope himself condemned me to be buried incommunicado in the secret depths below an iron tombstone in a cemetery at the edge of the Târnava River after ruling that “consecrated ground will not receive your body,” condemning me to remain forever unburied and yet buried alive. . That is how the false legend of my existence as living-dead was born in all the villages between the Dâmboviţa and the Roterturn Pass. Every unexplained death, every disappearance or kidnapping, was blamed on me, Vlad the Impaler, the Living-Dead Man, the Unburied, while in reality I laid buried alive in a deep cavern, feeding on roots and dirt, snakes and spiders, rats and the bats that hung from the cavern’s vaults, buried alive, Navarro, wanted for crimes I did not commit and paying for those I did commit, wanted by the Congregation of the Holy Inquisition, which was convinced that I had indeed not died and that I was perpetrating every crime attributed to me, but where was I? How were they to discover my hiding place among the tombs like stone fingers, marble stakes, at the edge of the Târnava: buried without a name or date by order of the deceased nuncio, erased from the world but suspected of corrupting it? The location of my forced confinement had been jealously guarded in Rome, forgotten or lost, I don’t know. The nuncio took the secret with him to his grave. Then the people of Wallachia heard from the ancestral counsel. A naked girl on horseback is galloping through all the cemeteries of the region, and wherever the horse comes to a stop, that is Vlad’s hiding place, and right there we will bury a stake in the Impaler’s chest. One night I finally heard the fateful gallop. I wrapped my arms around myself. On that night alone, I felt frightened, Navarro. The gallop faded. A few hours later the naked girl returned to the place of my prison, opened the iron doors of my horrible papal jail. ‘My name is Minea,’ she said. ‘I dug the spurs into the horse when he was about to stop over your hiding place. That’s how I knew that you were imprisoned here. Now come out. I have come to your rescue. You’ve learned to nourish yourself from the earth. You’ve learned how to live underground. You’ve learned how to get by without seeing your own face ever again. When the hunt for you began, I volunteered myself innocently enough. Nobody suspects a ten-year-old girl. I took advantage of my childish appearance, but I have been roaming the night for three centuries. I have come to make a deal with you. Come out of this prison and join us. I offer you eternal life. We are legion. You have found your people. The price you have to pay is very small.’ That little girl Minea threw herself on me and buried her teeth in my neck. I had found my people. I am not a creator, Navarro, I am just another creature, do you understand? I was made by that innocent-seeming ten-year-old girl. Like you, I lived in time. Like you, I would have died. The girl ripped me out of time and dragged me into eternity. .”

He was strangling me.

“Don’t you feel any compassion for me? She ripped out my eyes, she sucked them out the way she sucks everything, so that my eyes couldn’t express a need for anything other than blood, nor sympathy for anything other than the night. .”

I tried to bite the hand that gagged me and forced me to listen to this incredible and ancient story, though I feared, like an idiot, that to draw the blood of a vampire was to tempt the devil himself. Vlad tightened his grip over my body.

“Children are all inner strength, Mr. Navarro. A part of our vital force is contained inside each child, and we waste it. We want them to stop being children and to become adults, workers, people ‘useful to society.’ ”

He let out a revolting laugh.

“History! Think about the history I just recounted to you, and tell me if that garbage dump of lies — those screens we erect around the terrified mortality that we call careers, politics, economics, art, even art, Mr. Navarro — can save us from idiocy and from death! Do you know what my plan is? To let your daughter grow up, acquire the shape and beauty of a woman, but never to allow her to stop being a girl, a source of life and purity. .

“No, Minea will never grow up,” he said, sensing my confusion. “She is the eternal girl of the night.”

He turned me around so that I faced him, and he showed me his shining gums and his ivory fangs polished into mirrors.

“I am waiting for your daughter to grow up, Navarro. She will stay with me. She will be my. . girlfriend. One day she will be my wife. She will be brought up to be a vampire.”

The evil monster flashed an acerbic smile.

“I don’t know if we’ll be giving you any grandchildren.”

He let me go. He extended his arm and pointed the way.

“Wait for your wife in the living room. And keep in mind one thing. I have been feeding on your wife while the little girl has been growing accustomed to her new home. But I won’t want to keep her around much longer. Only just so long as she is useful to me. Frankly, I don’t understand what you see in her. Elle est une femme de ménage!”