Vlad

Chapter 9

I woke with a start. I didn’t know where I was. This displaced feeling was one I’d experienced before on long trips. I didn’t recognize the bed or the large room in which I found myself. When I checked my watch, it was twelve o’clock. But was it noon or midnight? My head pounded. Heavy baize curtains covered the windows. I stood, and when I pulled back the curtains found myself staring into a brick wall. This brought me to my senses. I was, I realized, in Count Vlad’s house. All his windows had been walled off. From inside the house, there was no way to distinguish day from night.

I was still dressed in the same clothes as at that execrable dinner. So what had happened? The Count and his servant had drugged me. Or was it that invisible woman? Asunción must never have come to rescue me, as she had promised. Magdalena would still be at the Alcayagas’ house. No, if it were noon, she’d be at school. Today wasn’t a holiday. The feast of the Assumption of the Virgin had concluded. The two girls, Magdalena and Chepina, were together at school, safe.

My head was a maelstrom, and the profusion of drains in the Count’s house made my body feel like a liquid that was losing its shape, flowing away, spilling into the ravine. .

The ravine.

Sometimes one word, just one word, gives us an answer, restores our reason, or inspires action. And more than anything, I needed to think and to act: not to rehash how I ended up in this absurd and inexplicable situation, but to get out of it as soon as possible. I was sure that, if I escaped, I would understand everything later.

With a natural and reflexive gesture, I touched my chin and cheeks. Rubbing the stubble of my growing beard, I could tell that about twenty-four hours had elapsed since I’d last shaved. . so I knew that the dinner had taken place “the night before” and that now was “the day after.” I ran my impatient hands over my wrinkled suit, my smelly shirt, and my mussed hair. I tried to straighten the knot of my tie. I did all this as I walked out of the bedroom on the top floor of the house and opened the doors to the other bedrooms, one after the other, taking note of the fact that each room was in perfect order, with perfectly made beds, and in each one discovering no sign that anyone had spent the night there. Unless, I reasoned — and was grateful that my erstwhile sense of logic had returned from its long nocturnal exile — unless everyone had gone out, and the industrious Borgo had already made the beds. .

One bedroom caught my attention. I was drawn to it by a distant melody, which I recognized as the French lullaby, “Frère Jacques.”

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!

Ding-dang-dong. Ding-dang-dong.

I walked into the room and approached a chest of drawers. A small music box was playing the little song, while a little shepherdess, dressed in an eighteenth-century style, holding a hooked staff, and with a lamb next to her, turned in circles.

Here everything was pink: the curtains, the backs of the chairs, the nightdress carefully laid out next to the pink pillow. The short, little girl’s nightie trailed ribbons from its embroidered hem. There was a pair of pink slippers too. No mirrors. A perfect but unoccupied room. It was a room that was waiting for someone. There was only one thing missing: there were no flowers here. And all of a sudden I noticed that there were half a dozen dolls reclining against the pillows. They were all blonde and all dressed in pink. But none of them had legs.

I left the room refusing to allow myself to think about it, and I went to the Count’s bedroom. The wigs were still there, on their wig stands, as though warning of the presence of some otherworldly guillotine. The bathroom was dry. The bed, untouched.

I went downstairs to silent sitting rooms. There was a faint smell of mold. I continued through the impeccably clean dining room. I entered the kitchen, messy and nasty smelling, clouded by the steam coming off heaps of entrails strewn across the floor, and from the remains of a huge, indescribable animal I could not identify, drawn and quartered on the tiled table. Beheaded.

The blood of the beast was still running into the drains on the kitchen floor.

I covered my mouth and nose in horror. I wanted to prevent even a single trace of the miasma rising off of this butchery from entering my body. Taking small steps backward, half-fearing that the animal would come back from the dead to attack me, I bumped up against some kind of leather curtain that gave way when I leaned against it. I drew the curtain aside. It was the entrance to a tunnel.

I recalled Vlad’s insistence on having a passage connecting his house with the ravine. It was too late to turn back. I entered, groping the dark space between the walls. I moved with extreme caution, unsure of what I was doing, looking for a way out, some guiding light in the dark tunnel, with no luck, allowing myself to be guided solely by my subconscious, which impelled me to explore every inch of Vlad’s mansion.

It was too dark. I reached for my cigarette lighter. I lit it and saw what I feared, what I should have known I would see. Unadulterated horror. The heart of the mystery.

Coffins and more coffins, there were at least a dozen coffins lined up along the tunnel’s length.

The impulse to turn tail and run from that place was strong, but not as strong as my will to know, my foolish and detestable curiosity, my investigative lawyer’s reflexes, as I opened coffin after coffin in a fit of self-loathing, unable to find anything but earth inside each one, until I opened the coffin in which my client, Count Vlad Radu, lay in perfect peace, dressed in his turtleneck shirt, his pants, and his black moccasins, with his glass-fingernailed hands crossed over his chest and his bald head resting on a small red silk pillow, as red as the cushioned interior of the box.

I stared at him intensely, unable to wake him and demand an explanation, paralyzed by the terror of this encounter, hypnotized by the details I was only now discovering, having Vlad before me, prostrate, at my mercy, but I was clueless, after all, about which actions I could take, under the sway, as I was, of the legend of the vampire, the tactics recommended by superstition and science, in this case indistinguishable. The garlic necklace, the cross, the stake. .

The intense cold in the tunnel drew fog from my open mouth, but it also cleared my head and allowed me to observe closely certain phenomena: Vlad’s ears — too small, and surrounded by scars, which I attributed to a series of facial surgeries — had grown overnight. I saw them struggle to spread out like the wings of a sinister bat. What did this damned creature do — trim his ears every evening before going out into the world in order to disguise his resemblance to a nocturnal chiropter?

A drop of some horrid liquid splattered on my head. I lifted my gaze. Bats hung upside down, holding on to the tunnel’s rock ceiling by their claws.

An unbearable stench emerged from the corners of Vlad’s coffin, where bat guano — vampire shit — had collected. .

Vampire shit. Count Vlad’s ears. The phalanx of blind rats hanging over my head. These were insignificant compared to the most sinister detail.

Vlad’s eyes.

Vlad’s eyes without his dark, ever-present sunglasses. Two empty sockets.

Two eyes without eyes.

Two lagoons incarnate with crimson shores and depths of black blood.

That’s when the realization finally sank in. Vlad did not have eyes. His black sunglasses were his real eyes. They allowed him to see.

I don’t know what affected me the most when I quickly shut the lid of the coffin in which Count Vlad slept.

I don’t know if it was the horror itself.

I do not know if it was the surprise, or my lacking the tools to destroy him right then and there — my empty, vulnerable hands.

No. I do know.

I know that it was my concern over my wife, Asunción, and my daughter, Magdalena. I had a suspicion, one that would be rejected by daylight logic, that something might have united Vlad’s destiny to that of my family. . and if that was the case, I had no right to touch anything, to disturb the mortal peace of the monster.

I tried to recover the normal rhythm of my breathing. My heart pounded with fear. But when I breathed, I noticed the real smell of this catacomb built for Count Vlad, the smell beneath the ammoniacal stench of batshit. It wasn’t a smell that I recognized. I tried but couldn’t associate it with scents I knew. This smell that permeated the tunnel was not only distinct from any other scent that I had ever smelled, was not only different. . it was a stench that came from somewhere else entirely. From a faraway place.