Part 17 (1/2)

'No one,' my uncle gasps. 'My name is Andre Kovacs. I found you, I came to you, only to put myself at your service, Count Dracula.'

His words sound unconvincing, even to me. My beloved shakes him, beginning to squeeze his throat. 'Why?'

'You are Dracula, Lord of the Undead. Whom else should I serve? Teach me; in return I give my loyalty -'

'You are lying,' Dracula says quietly. 'You attacked me, as if you would help Van Helsing and those others.'

'Please - in life he was a friend of mine - but -'

I see - having moved as close as I dare - Dracula's mouth open wide, the long teeth s.h.i.+ning. My uncle's face changes, becoming aggressive, feral. He seems to trans.m.u.te, shrinking, slipping out of Dracula's grasp. I cannot believe what I am seeing. Before my eyes, Uncle Andre changes into a wolf.

Dark-grey like a shadow, he slips under Dracula's arms and runs out into the grounds, away down a path through the thickly woven trees. A moment later, my Dark Companion, too, has changed. His wolf-form is bigger than my uncle's, and a brighter, silvery grey. I run after them, fighting between twigs and thorns and brambles, but cannot keep up. I lose them and, turning, see them pa.s.sing me again on the far side of the thicket; a dim shadow and a bright one.

I want no harm to come to my uncle. But I cannot protect him against Dracula. I can only watch as they run, snapping and snarling, along the tortuous overgrown paths, the thick briars and brambles.

I lose sight of them. I run, trying to find them, until I have a st.i.tch in my side, and my dress is wet from the dripping trees. When I come upon them again, on the bank of the deep, still lake, I see the lighter wolf bowl the darker one over, and pin it down, and close its jaw on its hairy throat. The darker one howls, surrendering.

They become human again. It is a kind of unfolding, the way a new-born animal unfolds itself; and it is a strange blurring from one state to the other, so that the eyes cannot quite capture it in the twilight.

I come closer, trembling, as Dracula lifts my uncle up by the throat and shakes him. Poor Uncle, he looks wild with fear. My love drags him, a prisoner, back into the dank black crypt. I follow. As we enter the chapel, Dracula says, 'Elena, bolt the door.'

I do so, and remain. It is so dark I can barely see, even though my eyes are attuned to darkness now. But I sense and hear the two vampires in the darkness, one tormenting the other, and I feel myself to be utterly alone with them, and with rats and blind insects and the bones of the dead.

'Now,' says Dracula, 'the truth.'

He has my uncle against a wall, his wrists pinned to the damp stonework with one hand, the other hand pressed to his throat.

'Who made you Undead, who sent you?'

My uncle breaks very quickly. Who can blame him, when my beloved's will is so hard to resist? Uncle was a good man, but I think he never had much strength. He was never good at keeping secrets, either. Too honest.

'I found the Scholomance. A vampire there, Beherit, he fed upon me, killed my companion, made me like this. And then he sent me to you.' Uncle says more, but this is the essence. It makes more sense to Dracula than to me; I think only of poor Miklos, dead.

Poor Miklos. I did not love him, but still I feel sad.

'Beherit?' Dracula's voice is a dry whisper of disbelief. 'Why?'

'To serve you. To learn from you.'

'I think not.' He makes a movement; my uncle gives a gruff, soul-racked scream.

'He told me to keep you away from the Scholomance at all costs. There is something there that, should you find it, will make you too powerful.'

'What thing is this?'

'He said . . . the powers of h.e.l.l. He said, your soul.'

There is a brief, heavy silence. My uncle continues, 'He wishes you no harm, only that you keep away from him!'

'And he sent you,' Dracula says mockingly, 'you, a dry scholar, initiated two months into Undeath, fragile as a mayfly, to ensure that I never go back to the Scholomance? Four hundred years have made Beherit no less of a fool.'

Dracula thrusts my uncle away, so hard that he flies across the chapel, hits the wall and slides down. Then my Dark Companion goes to help Mina from the tomb where he trapped her for safe keeping; I hear her gasps of relief, of shuddering misery. He takes her away into the house. d.a.m.n them.

I run to where my uncle lies, groaning like a dying man; all hope, all spirit gone from him. I see that a piece of ornate metal with a cross at one end, part of some old chapel decoration, long since toppled from its place, has fallen against his hand; and the cross has burned its black image on to my uncle's pale flesh.

Chapter Fourteen.

ELENA KOVACS'S JOURNAL (Continued)

I remain a long time with my uncle.'Elena, dear Elena,' he says in a voice of cracked leather. 'Leave me. It is not safe for you to be with me.'

As he speaks I ease myself alongside him, amid the spilled earth and cobwebs. I do not care that my clothes are caked with the damp and grime of this place; I feel part of it. 'No, no,' I whisper. 'No danger. You are not alone, Uncle.'

'Elena,' he moans. 'If you do not leave me I will. . .'

'Do it,' I say, wrapping my arms around him and holding him close. 'I am not afraid.'

He turns his head away from me. 'No. Never! How did you come to this?'

'Uncle, how did you?'

As we tell each other our stories, the horror of what has happened to my uncle, the horror of everything, leaps into my brain with pitiless clarity, as if I have stepped outside myself, or been woken violently while sleepwalking. As I tell him about my father's death, tears roll down his face and his long teeth cut into his own lips, so that blood runs down with the tears. He looks grotesque, so plainly dead yet alive, so much the vampire that he has become, that my heart is broken. Yet I do not recoil from him. I have fallen in love with such horrors, with the transparent beauty of the unquiet dead.

He closes his eyes and tells me about the Scholomance, about Beherit, who, as dazzling as Lucifer, claimed and killed poor Miklos. All he tells me flares bright in my brain. I caress his head and draw his face into my neck; he protests, 'Do not, for I cannot stop myself!'

His attempt to hold me off is half-hearted. I slide my arms around his shoulders and hold him hard. He groans. I feel his eye- teeth lance my neck. We are locked together. More than uncle and niece. His hand comes to my cheek and I draw his forefinger into my mouth and bite it, sucking drops of blood from the tender, waxy tip.

Folklore tells us that those most in danger from vampires are the families of the deceased, for the Undead one's love survives the grave, and his thirst for the life of his best beloved will draw them with him into the grave.

I wish to die. I wish to be taken into Undeath now, for I have waited too long already, I fear my Dark Companion will never take me! But my uncle takes only a little blood from me. I could weep with my frustration.

'You must leave here now,' I tell him. 'Dracula will destroy you!'

'Then let him,' he sighs. 'I have nowhere to go. I cannot go back to Beherit; I have failed him utterly. I have no power to keep Dracula from the Scholomance! I wish you would go from me, Elena. I have lost those I loved; Emil, Miklos. Do not let me lose you also. Run away, back to the sunlight, before it is too late!'

'I care nothing for that!' I hold his shoulders. 'Take me into Undeath with you and you will never be alone!'

Anguish webs his face, turning lines to furrows. 'No. You do not know what you ask! I would not bring anyone into this darkness, least of all you, beloved Elena, sweetest, purest child.'

'I was never sweet. Never pure. If I seemed so it was all a facade, all for the benefit of my father and others who so arrogantly decide what a young woman must be. It was never me.'

'No!' he cries. 'Keep away!'