Blood of the Impaler Read online

  BLOOD OF THE IMPALER

  Jeffrey Sackett

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Jeffrey Sackett

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by:

  Jeanette Arde

  http://dagwanoenyent-stock.deviantart.com/

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  This novel is for my brother Gary, with whom I used to stay up late on school nights to watch Shock Theater when we were children.

  Author's Note

  The historical events referred to in this novel have been presented as accurately as possible, with due allowance, of course, for artistic license. The Balkans in the fifteenth century was a rather tumultuous place, and the sequence of historical events is still a hotly debated topic, so I have chosen to follow a chronology which fits my general plot needs. I have taken some liberties with Balkan geography as well, for the same reason. I hope that this will not upset the observant reader too severely. (And I wish to extend a word of thanks to John Prehn for his research assistance.)

  Any reader unable to distinguish between the historical and fictional elements of the plot is urged to seek professional help as quickly as possible.

  Readers intimately familiar with Bram Stoker's Dracula may be chagrined by what appear to be errors in references to character names. To you I can only say, Read on. The text explains it all. Those readers who have only seen the Dracula movies or the stage play upon which so many of them were based may be confused by the character references. This is understandable, because the films take the names of Stoker's characters and jumble them up and switch them around for reasons I have never understood. (For example, the Langella version of the story contained a character named Mina Van Helsing. Mina Van Helsing?! I mean, I ask you!) To such readers, the English teacher in me responds, Read the book, dammit! Don't just sit there in front of the television set!

  A word about Vlad IV, also known as Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler: he ruled the Rumanian province of Wallachia as voivode (a Rumanian title of nobility, usually rendered into English as "prince," though "count" will do well enough) from 1456 until his overthrow in 1462, and then again briefly in 1476, the year of his death. In the course of his brief rule he adopted and discarded religions as one might change clothes, betrayed every ally he ever had, and according to some estimates killed one-quarter of the population of his own realm, which makes him proportionally a greater mass murderer than Hitler or Stalin. He acquired a reputation for savage brutality unique even in that savage, brutal age, his most famous act being the simultaneous execution of thirty thousand captive enemy soldiers by impalement, i.e., a stake driven up through the anus and out the mouth.

  He was not a nice fellow.

  "Wallachia" is pronounced "Vallakhia" and is spelled in a variety of ways. The Rumanian nickname "Tepes" is pronounced "Tsepesh." Vlad's other nickname is sufficiently well known to make any explanation of pronunciation unnecessary.

  Enough said. I have to go now and hang some fresh garlic on the windows.

  J.S.

  Out cam the thick, thick blud, out cam the thin,

  Out cam the bonny heart's blud til there wass non within.

  Mither, Mither, mak me bed, mak for me a windin' sheet.

  Wrap me up in a cloak o' gold and see if I ca' sleep ...

  -SCOTTISH BALLAD

  MEPHISTOPHILIS: Now, Faustus, ask what thou wilt.

  FAUSTUS: First will I question thee about Hell. Tell me, where is this place that men call Hell?

  MEPH. Under the heavens.

  FAUST. Aye, but whereabouts?

  MEPH. Within the bowels of these elements,

  Where we are tortured and remain forever.

  Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

  In one self place, for where we are is Hell,

  And where Hell is there must we ever be.

  And, to be short, when all the world dissolves

  And every creature shall be purified,

  All places shall be Hell that are not Heaven.

  FAUST. I think Hell's a fable.

  MEPH. Aye, think so,

  Till experience change thy mind.

  -CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Doctor Faustus, Act II, scene i

  ... for the blood is the life ...

  —Deuteronomy 12:23

  Prologue

  Death dreams drifted through his dead mind.

  He lay in the darkness, only vaguely aware of the sound of the waves as they crashed against the hull of the ship. He was still and silent. His chest did not rise and fall with breathing, for he did not breathe. His cold white hands lay folded upon his stomach and his head rested upon a layer of his native earth. The red fire of his eyes, burning in the darkness of night, had dimmed with the sunrise, and now they stared ahead of him at the inside of the lid of the box. His empty eyes did not see and did not move, as he dreamed the dreams of the dead.

  He was in great danger. If they caught him now as he lay helpless in the wooden crate, no power on earth or in hell could protect his heart from the wooden stake. They had been chasing him for weeks, following him all the way from the English coast to the mouth of the Danube. He was in danger of true death, and his motionless body seemed almost tense with the knowledge.

  The beast in him predominated at such times, the cunning jungle animal which was ever listening, ever alert to danger. His dead human brain slept the sleep of death, but his animal soul heard and knew. He heard the sounds of leather boots on the deck above him, the cries of the gulls, the raucous laughter of the storm-hardened seamen as they raised and lowered sails.

  Time passed as the sun traveled in its slow circuit, and still he slept. He felt the soft thud of the hull against the mooring post, and he heard voices drifting down to the hold from the deck above him.

  "This is the Czarina Catherine?" asked a voice with a middle-European accent and an aged tremor.

  "Can't ye bludy read? 'Course it is," was the reply.

  "Good, good. And you are maybe the Captain Donelson?"

  "Aye, I be Donelson. 'oo the bludy 'ell are you?"

  "I am Hildesheim, Herr Captain, Immanuel Hildesheim."

  "'oo . . . ?" A pause, and then, "Oh, right. 'ildes'eim. We got that bludy box, and you can 'ave it and be damned wiv it."

  "I have here the . . . ah . . . the invoice . . ."

  "Aye, aye, keep your bludy hinvoice. Jus' get this bludy thing off my ship."

  "There is a problem, Herr Captain?"

  No, no problem, not if you think makin' me crew all prayerful and skittish ain't a problem. I expects to lose a man or two in foul weather, but this voyage I'v
e lost three, and never a day or night's been stormin'. No rain, no snow, nuthin' but a damned cold fog what wrapped us up of a night and blew us on like 'ell's own breath."

  "Ja,ja . . . but . . ."

  "And I makes good progress of a day on this ship, but never sailed so bludy fast and gone so bludy far so damned bludy quick, and me crew blames that bludy box. I even 'ad a man jump ship in Gibraltar, and I hain't never 'ad a man jump ship afore. So you're 'ildes'eim, and I'm to deliver the box to you, so take the damned thing and the 'ell with ye both."

  He drifted back and forth between the world of sunlight and the world of shadows, between the land of the living and the realm of the dead. As part of him moved through the murky otherworld, part of him heard the grappling chains being affixed to the box. He felt himself being hoisted upward from the hold and swung over to be lowered onto a cart which waited on the dock. He felt the rumble of wooden wheels on cobblestones and heard Hildesheim whistling as he drove the team of horses.

  More time passed, and at last it was drawing close to sunset. He did not know this with his thoughts, but he felt it in his ancient bones, in his infernal blood. He was growing hungry.

  "Herr Hildesheim?" he heard a voice say.

  "Ja, I am Hildesheim."

  "My name is Petrof Skinsky. I believe that—"

  "Ja, ja, Herr Skinsky, of course. I have expected you long time ago." A pause. "Skinsky, Skinsky. You are maybe the Skinsky who works the Slovak crews on the upper Danube, ja?"

  "Da, I am that Skinsky. You have a—"

  "You be careful, Herr Skinsky. The Slovaks, they slit your throat for a groschen, ja?"

  "I know my men, Herr Hildesheim. You have a box to deliver to me?"

  "Ja, is in the warehouse out back. Wait, I get the papers ..."

  The sun touched the tips of the distant Carpathian Mountains.

  When he awakened, it was not slowly or with confused distraction as living humans awakened. His hands suddenly flexed as his serpentine tongue flicked hungrily against the tips of his fangs. He sensed the movement of the sun closer to the horizon, and his dead body was infused with a sudden, horrible semblance of life. His eyes shone crimson in the darkness of the box, and he laughed softly. He did not wish to disturb the nails which had so tightly secured his temporary home, so he dissolved into mist and seeped out through the narrow, almost imperceptible space between the box and the lid.

  Skinsky and Hildesheim were talking in the office, and when they walked back to the warehouse neither thought it unusual for the sunset to have brought fog. It was November, and the moist air drifting in from the Black Sea often mingled with the colder air from the snow-laden lands of the Danube valley to produce such mists.

  They did not notice that the fog waited motionless until they had entered the warehouse and were not outside to see it move slowly out onto the dark street where it coalesced into the figure of a tall man, clothed in black. The only things interrupting his darkness were the patches of white at his temples, the iron gray of his drooping mustache, the cadaverous hue of his waxen flesh, and the hellfire which burned in his unearthly eyes.

  He walked slowly along the streets of the port town of Galatz, listening to the sounds coming from the taverns and the houses. His gaze shifted rapidly back and forth, and his tongue eagerly licked his cold lips. At such times, when the hunger was upon him and the hunt was underway, his movements were like those of a carnivorous animal.

  A prostitute stood near the dim signpost of a tavern, and he walked toward her. "Nacht'n, Min Herr," she said drunkenly in her gutter Balkan German. "Such'st en Freund fürm Aben'?" She was young in years, no more than twenty, but excessive drinking and the diseases incumbent upon her profession had aged her, and the bloom had long since faded from her sallow cheeks. He stopped walking a few yards away, and she tried to sway her hips provocatively as she came to him, but she had drunk too much to do more than stumble. "Ik heiss' Lara," she slurred. "Wa' heiss'n Sie, Min Herr?" He did not respond to her words. "Such'st een Kuh für de fickend? Mein'st b'reit, Liblin . . ."

  He smiled coldly as his eyes bored into hers. At first she attempted to feign a seductive smile, but then she felt herself drained of strength by the inhuman power of those eyes, and she neither cried out nor offered resistance as he grabbed her by the hair, pulled back her head, and sank his fangs into her throat.

  He drank deeply and long, for he was very, very hungry. He had taken a few crew members on the long voyage from the coast of England to the mouth of the Danube, but he had forced himself to go without food for a few nights. The crew of a ship the size of the Czarina Catherine was not large, and he did not wish to repeat his arrogantly confident gluttony of the previous year. Then, when he had sailed on the Demeter from Varna to Whitby, the ship had been tempest-tossed into port with a dead crew and a dead captain whose hands were tied to the wheel.

  There was no need to draw such attention again. Not when he was fleeing and in danger, for the first time in four hundred years, in true danger of being destroyed.

  He drained the woman of every drop of blood, and he felt much better as he let the corpse drop onto the wooden platform before the tavern. As a rule, he disliked turning to such people for his sustenance, for the dregs of human society held no appeal for him. He preferred the highborn or at least the well-bred, for he had been a nobleman, a prince, in those distant days when he had been alive. His greatest joy was in degrading the pure, profaning the sacred, destroying the well-beloved. To destroy the outcast and the unwanted was not particularly satisfying. Still, blood was blood. He dared not take the time to be selective, for he was being pursued.

  He turned and walked back toward the warehouse, but he did not enter. The arrangements had all been made through intermediaries, even as Skinsky himself was an intermediary between Hildesheim and the Szgany, even as Hildesheim had been an intermediary between Donelson and Skinsky. Everything, including the impending meeting with Skinsky, had been arranged by letter and telegram. He was to meet his agent in the graveyard of the Petruskirche, St. Peter's Church, as soon as he had accepted delivery of the box which held all that remained of the supply of Rumanian soil.

  Fifty boxes of earth, he thought angrily, though with grudging admiration for the old man who led his enemies. Fifty boxes of earth shipped to England not one year ago. And now he had only one left. He had shipped a few to Varna in an attempt to throw them off his trail, and the rest had been rendered useless to him, sealed forever with bits of sacred wafer, of consecrated host.

  He stood in the shadows and waited. The half-moon floated in a starless, cloudy sky, and only the quiet gnawing of nocturnal rodents and the ubiquitous sounds of insects disturbed the silence of the graveyard.

  It was an hour before dawn when his agent arrived, and he stepped forward from the shadows into the dim moonlight. "Herr Skinsky," he said.

  Skinsky peered at him through the darkness. "Is that you, Voivode?"

  "I am here," he replied. "Is everything in order?"

  "Yes, Voivode," Skinsky replied, looking around nervously. "The Jew Hildesheim has delivered the box to me, and I have it in my warehouse near the wharves."

  "Is it secure?"

  "Oh, yes, Voivode, quite secure."

  "Excellent," he said with satisfaction. "And the other arrangements?"

  "I have carried out your instructions to the letter, Voivode. At dawn, my Slovak boatmen will get the key to the warehouse from my man Riasanovsky, and will load the box onto one of my barges. They will ferry it up the Danube to the junction with the Siretul River, where they will transfer it to your Szgany servants."

  "And you have made it clear to them that you will not be there when they embark?"

  "Yes, Voivode."

  "And you have spoken of this to no one?"

  "No, Voivode." He paused. "But those Gypsy Szgany, I do not think they can be trusted, Voivode. Once they have taken the box from my Slovaks, they may dump it in the river to avoid the hard poling upstream."

&
nbsp; "My Szgany are faithful servants," he replied. "They have served ... my people for centuries, and they know what fate awaits them if they disobey."

  "Yes, Voivode." He paused again. "And may I ask what further services you require of me? You said I would not be here in the morning when my Slovaks load the barge ..."

  "That is correct," he said, walking up to his agent. "You have another task to perform, a very important task." He reached out and grabbed Skinsky by the collar. "You must bleed, Skinsky, and you must die." Before the man could react to the swift movement, the Voivode closed his teeth upon Skinsky's throat and ripped it open.

  Petrof Skinsky tried to scream, but the blood pouring from his throat turned the sound into a frenzied gurgle as he stumbled backward, clutching madly at the huge gash. Skinsky fell to his knees and then pitched forward onto his face.

  The Voivode gazed down impassively at the bleeding body as it twitched and quivered in its death throes. "This must not be my fate," he muttered. I have cheated true death for four centuries. I will not, I must not end as a pile of rotting dust and bone. My heart must not be host to the wooden stake of the executioner. I must defeat them, destroy them, survive, triumph. I must!

  He smiled in the darkness, amused at his own thoughts. What is this, Voivode? Are you nervous, Lord of Wallachia? You, who waged war upon the Ottoman Turks, are you now afraid of the miserable cattle who pursue you? Do you fear them, that aged German, that American barbarian, those effete Englishmen, that pathetic woman?

  He walked quickly from the churchyard toward the wharves. He did not need to know precisely where Skinsky's warehouse was to be found, for his nostrils could smell the inviting warmth of his native soil. When he reached the warehouse, he dissolved again into mist and seeped through the doorway and then through the space between the box and the lid. Once inside, again safe upon the earth of his homeland, he resumed his physical form.