SIX

Donna Wexler, Dr. Aimslea, Carl Berry, and our Professor Emeritus, Dr. Leonard Paxley, took the waiting VIP van back to Bucharest from Sighişoara. I stayed behind. The morning was dark, with heavy clouds that moved up the valley and shrouded the surrounding ridges in shifting haze. The city walls with their eleven stone towers seemed to blend their gray stones with the gray skies, sealing the medieval town under a solid dome of gloom. After a late breakfast, I filled my Thermos, left the old town square, and climbed the old steps to the house on Piaţa Muzeului. The iron doors to the wine cellar were closed, the narrow doors to the first floor sealed with heavy shutters. An old man sitting on a bench across the street told me that the restaurant had been closed for several years, that the state had considered turning the house into a museum but then decided that foreign guests would not pay hard currency to see a run-down house … not even one where Vlad Dracula had lived five centuries before. The tourists preferred the large old castles a hundred miles closer to Bucharest; castles which had been erected centuries after Vlad Ţepeş had abdicated.

I went back across the street, waited until the old man had fed his pigeons and left, and then I tugged off the heavy bar holding the shutters in place. The panes on the doors were as black as the soul of Copşa Mica. The doors were locked, but I scratched at the centuries-old glass.

Fortuna opened the door and led me in. Most of the tables and chairs had been stacked on a rough bar, cobwebs running from them to the smoke-blackened rafters, but Fortuna had pulled one table down and set it in the middle of the stone floor. He dusted off the two chairs before we sat.

“Did you enjoy the tour?” he asked in Romanian.

“Da,” I said, and continued in the same language, “but I felt that you overdid it a bit.”

Fortuna shrugged. He went behind the bar, dusted off two pewter tankards, and brought them back to the table.

I cleared my throat. “Would you have recognized me at the airport as a member of the Family if you had not known me?” I said.

My erstwhile guide showed his grin. “Of course.”

I frowned at this. “How? I have no accent and I have lived as an American for many years.”

“Your manners,” said Fortuna, letting the Romanian word roll off his tongue. “Your manners are much too good for an American.”

I sighed. Fortuna reached below the table and brought forth a wineskin, but I made a gesture and lifted the Thermos from my overcoat pocket. I poured for both of us and Radu Fortuna nodded, as serious as I had seen him during the past three days. We toasted.

“Skoal,” I said. The drink was very good, fresh, still at body temperature and nowhere near that point of coagulation where a certain bitterness sets in.

Fortuna drained his tankard, wiped his mustache, and nodded his appreciation. “Your company will buy the plant in Copşa Mica?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And the other plants … in other Copşa Micas?”

“Yes,” I said. “Or our consortium will underwrite European investment in it.”

Fortuna smiled. “The investors in the Family will be happy. It will be twenty-five years before this country will be able to afford the luxury of worrying about the environment … and the people’s health.”

“Ten years,” I said. “Environmental awareness is contagious.”

Fortuna made a gesture with his hands and shoulders … a peculiarly Transylvanian gesture which I had not seen in years.

“Speaking of contagious,” I said, “the orphanage situation seems insane.”

The small man nodded. Dim light from the door behind me lighted his brow. Beyond him there was only blackness. “We do not have the luxury of your American plasma or private bloodbanks. The state had to provide a reservoir.”

“But the AIDS…” I began.

“Will be contained,” said Fortuna. “Thanks to the humanitarian impulses of your Doctor Aimslea and Father O’Rourke. In the next few months your American television will air ‘specials’ on 60 Minutes and 20/20 and whatever other programs you have created since I visited last. Americans are sentimental. There will be a public outcry. Aid will flow from all those groups and from rich people who have nothing better to do with their time. Families will adopt, pay a fortune for sick children to be flown to the States, and local television stations will interview mothers weeping with happiness.”

I nodded.

“Your American health workers … and British … and West German … will flock to the Carpathians, and the Bucegis, and the Făgăraş … and we will ‘discover’ many other orphanages and hospitals, many other of these isolation wards. Within two years it will be contained.”

I nodded again. “But they’re liable to take a sizable amount of your … reservoir … with them,” I said softly.

Fortuna smiled and shrugged again. “There are more. Always more. Even you know that in your land of teenage runaways and missing children’s photos on milk cartons, no?”

I finished my drink, got up, and paced toward the light. “Those days are over,” I said. “Survival equals moderation. All of the Family must learn that someday.” I turned back toward Fortuna and my voice held more anger than I had expected. “Otherwise, what? The contagion again? A growth of the family more rapid than cancer, more virulent than AIDS? Contained, we are in balance. Left to … propagate … there will be only the hunters with no prey, as doomed to starvation as those rabbits on Easter Island years ago.”

Fortuna held up both hands, palms outward. “We must not argue. We know that. It is why Ceauşescu had to go. It is why we overthrew him. It is why you advised him not to go into his tunnels, to reach the triggers that would have brought Bucharest down.”

For a moment I could only stare at the little man. When I spoke, my voice was very tired. “You will obey me then? After all these years?”

Fortuna’s eyes were very bright. “Oh, yes.”

“And you know why I returned?”

Fortuna rose, walked to the dark hall where a darker stairway waited. He gestured upward and led the way into the dark, my guide one final time.

*   *   *

The bedroom had been one of the larger storerooms above the tourist restaurant. Five centuries ago it had been a bedroom. My bedroom.

Others were waiting there, members of the Family whom I had not seen for decades or centuries. They were dressed in the dark robes we used only for the most sacred Family ceremonies.

The bed was waiting. My portrait hung above it: the one painted during my imprisonment in Visegrad in 1465. I paused a moment to stare at the image—a Hungarian nobleman stared back, a sable collar topped by gold brocade, gold buttons closing the mantle, a silk cap in the style of the times ringed by nine rows of pearls, the whole headpiece held in place by a star-shaped brooch with a large topaz in its center. The face was both intimately familiar and shockingly strange: nose long and aquiline, green eyes so large as to appear grotesque, thick eyebrows and thicker mustache, an oversized underlip on a prognathous shelf of jaw and cheek … altogether an arrogant and disturbing visage.

Fortuna had recognized me. Despite the years, despite the ravages of age and revisions of surgery, despite everything.

“Father,” whispered one of the old men standing near the window.

I blinked tiredly at him. I could not quite remember his name … one of my Dobrin brothers’ cousins perhaps. I had last seen him during the ceremony before I migrated to America more than a century and a half earlier.

He came forward and touched my hand gingerly. I nodded, removed the ring from my pocket, and set it on my finger.

The men in the room knelt. I could hear the creaking and popping of ancient joints.

The Dobrin cousin rose and lifted a heavy medallion into the light.

I knew the medallion. It represented the Order of the Dragon, a secret society first formed in 1387 and reorganized in 1408. The gold medallion on the gold chain was in the shape of a dragon: a dragon curled into a circle, jaws open, legs outstretched, wings raised, its tail curled around to its head and the entire form entwined with a double cross. On the cross were the Order’s two mottos: “O quam misericors est Deus” (Oh, how merciful is God) and “Justus et Pius” (Just and Faithful).

My father had been invested in the Order of the Dragon on February 8, 1431 … the year I was born. As a Draconist … a follower of draco, dragon in Latin … my father carried this insignia on his shield and had it inscribed on his coins. Thus he became Vlad Dracul, dracul meaning both dragon and devil in my native language.

Dracula meant simply Son of the Dragon.

The Dobrin brother set the medallion around my neck. I felt the weight of gold trying to drag me down. The dozen or so men in the room chanted a short hymn, then filed forward one after the other to kiss my ring and return to their places.

“I am tired,” I said. My voice was the rustle of ancient parchment.

They moved around me then, removing the medallion and my expensive suit. They dressed me carefully in a linen nightshirt and Dobrin pulled back the linen bedclothes. Gratefully, I got into bed and lay back on the high pillows.

Radu Fortuna moved closer. “You’ve come home to die then, Father.” It was not a question. I had neither the need nor energy to nod.

An old man who may have been one of the other surviving Dobrin brothers came closer, went to one knee, kissed my ring again, and said, “Then, Father, is it time to begin thinking about the birth and investiture of the new Prince?”

I looked at the man, thinking how the Vlad Ţepeş in the portrait above me would have had him impaled or disemboweled for the inelegance of that question.

Instead, I nodded.

“It will be done,” said Radu Fortuna. “The woman and her midwife have been chosen.”

I closed my eyes and resisted a smile. The sperm had been collected many decades ago and declared viable. I could only assume that they had preserved it well in this inefficient, hapless nation where even hope had trouble surviving. I did not want to know the crass details of the selection and insemination.

“We will begin preparations for the Investiture,” said an old man I had known once as the young Prince Mihnea.

There was no urgency in his voice and I understood the lack of it. Even my dying was to be a slow thing. This disease that I had embraced so very, very long ago would not release me lightly. Even now, riddled and made rotten by old age, the disease ruled my life and resisted the sweet imperative of death.

I will not drink blood after this day. This is my decision and it is irrevocable. Having entered this house again, this bed, I will not leave either willingly.

But even fasting, my body’s relentless ability to heal itself, to prolong itself, will struggle with my urge to die. This deathbed may hold me for a year or two or even longer before my spirit and the insidious, cell-deep compulsion to continue must surrender to the inevitable need to cease.

I am determined that I shall live until the new Prince is born and until his Investiture, no matter how many months or years may intervene until then.

But by then I will no longer be the aged but vital Vernor Deacon Trent; I will be only a mummified caricature of the man with the strange face in the portrait above my bed.

I lay back deeper into the pillows, my yellowed fingers frail above the bedclothes. I do not open my eyes as—one by one—the eldest Family members in the room file by to kiss my ring a final time and then to stand, whispering and murmuring like peasants at a funeral, in the hall outside.

Below, on the ancient stairs of the home where I was born, I hear the soft creaking and shuffling as other Family members—long lines of Family members—ascend in reverent silence to view me like some museum mummy, like a waxwork Lenin all hollowed and yellowed in his tomb, and to kiss the ring and medallion of The Order of the Dragon.

I close my eyes and allow myself to slip away to dreams.

I feel them hovering above me, these dreams of past times, dreams of sometimes happier times, and all too frequently these dreams of terrible times. I feel their weight, these dreams of blood, and of iron.

I close my eyes and surrender to them, dreaming fitfully while my final days file through my mind, shuffling past like the curious and mourning members of my Family of Night.