I.
It was past midnight. I sat at my desk, feet kicked up, staring at the skull on my bookshelf. Slow raindrops crawled down the office window, dyed scarlet by the taillights outside. They set me dreaming about the cleaning lady. Miss Rosa Flores. A nice piece. Ruddy. Lovely neck. The vein on the left side throbs when she reaches up to dust the ceiling fans. I can watch that thing for hours. Not that I’d ever harm her. One thing I’ve learned in all my years is not to shit where you sleep.
Anyway, as I dreamed of Rosa’s throbbing jugular, a voice pulled me from my reverie.
“Are you Mr. Orlok?”
“Depends on who’s asking?” I looked over. If I had any breath to lose, it’d be on a milk carton. Ellen Hutter stood in my doorway.
She hadn’t aged a day since I last saw her in 1920, just before I met Fred Murnau and got mixed up in that damned film.
I looked again, though, and realized it was not my Ellen, just a brunette girl, maybe thirty years old. She walked into my office like a nun entering a speakeasy. She smoothed her skirt as she sat in one of my client chairs (ever the optimist, I have three). Her wrists were silky and supple. She bent her head down examining her work, and I got an unobstructed view of her nape. Heaven. “My name’s Greta Wegener,” she said. “Someone has stolen my identity.”
II.
She had awoken the previous day in strange clothes on a bus near Forsyth Park. Her purse contained no forms of identification. When she went to her apartment building, her name was not listed on the call buttons.
“Where’d you sleep last night?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I woke up this morning on a bus heading downtown.”
Her heart rate remained regular. Probably she was telling the truth. I looked at her face and thought of Ellen.
“I charge $500 a day plus expenses,” I said.
She rummaged in her handbag, pretending to look for her wallet.
“I generally ask for a day’s retainer, but we can make other arrangements if necessary.”
“Thank you.” Her carotid pulsed as she smiled. A man has bills to pay, but he also has to eat.
It had stopped raining. I followed Greta from half a block away, scaling the walls like a spider. Nobody looks up in this town. Even if they did, the streetlights date back to the nineteenth century and don’t illuminate enough for a nearsighted beggar to read his own sign.
She walked south on Ann Street, then turned left on Oglethorpe and south on MLK. Hopped a bus at MLK and Turner. I can move faster than most humans can see, but I can’t move that fast. I leapt to the roof of the bus and held on as it traveled south.
Riding on top of a bus, trailing a skirt through the streets of a coastal town was not how I ‘d imagined my afterlife. I’m not sure what I expected.
I don’t remember how I came to be a vampyre. One day I was alive, and the next, not so much. This memory lapse has irritated all of my biographers. Jim Rymer, the first person to hear my story, claims I was turned after betraying Cromwell, but that doesn’t make any sense. Unless Cromwell was undead, and I assure you he was not. Of course, he also can’t decide if my true name is Bannerworth (it isn’t), so everything he says is suspect. Except throwing myself in a volcano. I did that. And turning young Miss Crofton, but not for vengeance. Okay, I did a lot of what he says, but he can’t decide if I’m the hero or the villain of his story, and the book suffers terribly for it. Truth is, like anyone, I’m neither one nor the other. I exist. I do things. Sometimes they’re bad things, sometimes good, often neither.
Murnau claims I was turned by Belial, lieutenant of Satan himself. It’s a better story than the Cromwell thing, sure, but still ludicrous. I doubt Satan even exists, much less his upper management.
However I was made, once I learned I couldn’t die (not by the sun; not even by volcano), I mostly continued to live as I always had. Bought a house in Bremen, fell in love with a married woman, convinced her to leave her boor of a husband and spend eternity with me.
Eternity lasted just north of eighty years. Then Ellen grew bored, with me or with immortality I never knew. I rose one evening to find she had left and had taken her coffin with her.
Then I met Fred Murnau, may he rot in hell. I knew he was a filmmaker, had even seen a few of his flickers, and I knew how well Vlad had done with Stoker’s novel. I thought flickers were the coming thing (they were) and that my story would do for film what Vlad’s had done for penny dreadfuls (it didn’t). Turns out my story was merely a flimsy stake upon which Fred tried to drape a thinly plagiarized Dracula.
The rest is history: Mrs. Stoker sued Fred, and Vlad hasn’t spoken to me since he threatened to destroy me a century ago.
After the Nosferatu debacle, I hopped a ship for the new world. I tried a few more times to get my story told, all to varying degrees of failure. Since even the undead need money and I had read Chandler and Hammett, I settled on sleuthing as a profession. What else was I going to do? The only other jobs available to me, given my aversion to sunlight and near total lack, at the time, of documentation, were third shift fast food worker or late-night janitor. I’d been a knight and a count. I was nobility. The least I could be was my own boss.
And private investigation works perfectly: It’s mostly done at night, and the job’s relatively easy: I mainly follow cheating husbands or wives and photograph them for their betrayed spouses. Sometimes I investigate prospective employees for local businesses. Once I even found a lost puppy.
Greta left the bus after nine stops, then walked north. We were in Carver Heights, which once had known better days, maybe back when Georgia was a prison colony. It’ll see them again, once the wealthy realize its potential for gentrification and jump the claims of the riffraff. I followed her on foot. The streetlights here were completely out. After about a block, she entered what looked like an abandoned school converted into low-income apartments. It had all the public housing charm: no expense had been spared on cinder blocks. The entry door led to a hallway running right and left, punctuated with scarred veneer doors. I’ve seen nicer graves.
At the end of the hallway, Greta inserted a key into a deadbolt, opened the door, and disappeared inside. Before I could follow, a claw grabbed my left shoulder.
“Where you going, cueball?” The voice had the mellifluous tone of a backed-up garbage disposal.
“Cueball?” I asked. “That’s hardly nice.” I turned around. The light was dim here, so I couldn’t be sure, but I was restrained by either a yeti or a wolfman. Maybe the ghost of Robin Williams. Anyway, somebody hairy. “I’ve been led to believe”—I ran my free hand over my scalp—“that bald was beautiful.”
“Listen, mosquito.” He leaned in. I could see him better now. He looked like a middle manager masquerading as a bum. His jacket was ratty and his jeans faded, but his aftershave smelled expensive, and despite his hairiness, every strand was in place and not likely to move far. Fella used a lot of product is what I’m saying. He shook me and growled, “Scram.”
“That’s the best you can do?” I chuckled. “Scram? Read a lot of Dick Tracy, do you? Gonna ask if I’m some kind of wise guy next?” I winked at him. “I am, by the way.”
“I’m asking nicely,” the well-groomed hairy hobo growled. “Next time maybe I don’t ask so nicely.”
“I’ll be out of your ample hair as soon as I talk to the girl down there.”
He cast his eyes down the hall, shrugged. “I don’t see no girl, and in about three seconds, I better not be seeing you.”
“Can you say, ‘Get out before I gets you out?’” I asked. “I think I’ll have a Hard-Boiled Bingo.”
“Walk away, shamus.” He turned me toward the door. “You don’t, you’re not going to like what you find.”
I smiled. “I rarely do.” I twisted my shoulder under his hand and shifted my weight. He loosened his grip for a better hold. I dropped and jabbed my right hand into his left kidney. When he buckled, I jumped up, leapt to the wall, and crawled along it toward Greta’s room.
Before I could get there, someone dropped an airplane on me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was leaning against a glass door. I looked up:
Night Vesper Investigations
F. V. Orlok, P.I.
Savannah, Georgia
Clearly Robin Williams knew who I was. He called me “mosquito,” so he probably knew what I was, too.
The world seemed a bit too bright. I blinked twice, rubbed my eyes, and realized it was dawn. I rose to my feet, bracing myself on the door frame, and entered my office.
I needed a nice nap.
III.
There are many things I hate about being a vampyre in the twenty-first century. Popular media paint immortality as a fairly sweet deal. No responsibilities, no roots. The ability to go anywhere, do anything you desire. Hell, even the most morose of immortals can at least be sad on mountaintops overlooking sweeping vistas or from the height of a penthouse in Times Square.
The reality is different.
Try getting a business license when the sunlight sears your flesh. Or a driver’s license. Christ, try buying a house after the sun has set in most towns, even large towns. Sure New York may be the city that never sleeps, but even there, the banks close at dusk. And I don’t live in New York.
But what about computers, you ask? Sure, a lot of business can be taken care of on-the-line nowadays, but I can’t do it. I’ve known octogenarians who can’t figure out television remotes. For a man who knew Oliver Cromwell personally, I’m going to understand this webnet thing?
It’s enough to drive a man to alcoholics.
That’s where Knox comes in.
“No record of a Greta Wegener in any of the databases.” Knox was a computer technology student when I bit him. “I looked at property records, birth certificates, driving records.” He typed at the computer in the corner.
“Did you check German records?” I was kicked back at my desk sipping a lowball of blood. Every evening Knox meets me in the office with a bandage about his left wrist, offering me a glass of freshly decanted claret. Knox smokes, which gives him a pleasant, woody flavor.
“I’m not an amateur, Frank.” He seemed irritated that I’d even ask. Vampyre familiars are rarely the fawning lunatics popular culture describes. Just because Vlad chose Renfield, whose belfry, let’s be honest, was already overfull of bats, doesn’t mean we all have moon-dazed assistants. No, Knox knows his stuff. All my familiars have been masters of their fields, all the way back to the original, the real estate lawyer who set me up in Bremen. His crazed portrayal in that damned film was just another in my long list of grievances against that fucking Murnau.
“Hold on.” Knox snapped his fingers to get my attention. “This is weird.”
I leaned over and inhaled the aroma of his neck. Looked longingly at the two healing puncture holes. Maybe later. He pointed at the screen. Fifteen entries for a Greta Wegener appeared: an address, a car registration, employment histories, her school and university records. Even an application for a library card.
“This wasn’t here a minute ago.” Knox shrugged.
“Any pictures of her?”
Knox clicked a button and the screen showed the face of a young brunette woman. “That her?”
“Apparently.” I tapped the screen beside her picture. “This isn’t where I followed her last night, though.”
“I reckon you’ll be going there tonight then.” Knox reached into a desk drawer, removed a black thermos, and began to unwrap his bandage. “I’ll pack your lunch.”
IV.
Something I’ve learned through years of traveling, especially in the American South, is that the reality of a place rarely fits its portrayal. If a film wants to imply an old Southern aristocratic family fallen on hard times due to their own depredations, for example, they’ll live in a crumbling plantation house, columns overrun with kudzu and Spanish moss (even where Spanish moss doesn’t thrive) and built conveniently on swampland. There will often be a crack or two running from the foundation to the roof. Very metaphoric.
As anyone actually from the South knows, these houses, by and large, don’t exist. Decadent Southerners from old families generally live in ritzy subdivisions near golf courses.
Greta Wegener’s address, though, brought me to just such a house in the swampy backlands of Ebenezer Creek, about an hour north of town, on an island near where Ebenezer empties into the Savannah River. I parked off of a private road and walked the rest of the way. Even from the shore, I could see the house’s widow’s walk above the tree line across the water. Folklore gets many things wrong about vampyres. We cannot transform into mist or hordes of rats, for instance. Nor can our shadows move independently of our bodies (though admittedly in the film, that scene was the tits). We’re also perfectly able to cross running water, so long as we can swim or there’s a boat.
Sadly, I found no boat. I stashed my coat and wallet under a tree root, and waded in.
One myth that is true is that we cannot enter uninvited a home occupied by the living. I found it curious, then, that I crossed the threshold of Greta’s house unhindered (except for the lock I’d picked). On one hand, this implied that the place was abandoned. However, the furniture and dust-free floors suggested otherwise. The door had been locked from the inside, too.
The lack of clutter, though, argued for at least recent abandonment. Most people maintain a modicum of untidiness in their homes. Books scattered on tables, magazines draped across chair arms, toys on the floor. Generally, the only time houses are this clean is when the owners are selling them.
Or are expecting company…
I moved carefully through the house. Upstairs the beds were made. I bounced a quarter on one of them. The bathrooms were spotless: no toothpaste tubes dripping onto the sink. No toothbrushes, for that matter. The toilets were pristine.
Back downstairs to the kitchen. Empty sink. Dishes stacked in cabinets. Bare refrigerator.
A door under the stairwell led to the basement. Here were the first signs of neglect: the air was damp, smelling faintly of must. The walls had a patina of mildew. The floor was only slightly spongy.
And in the corner, against the wall, leaned a coffin.
“You’re a tough nut to break, Mr. Franklin Varnae Orlok.”
Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy loomed behind me. The must on the air hid the scent of his mousse and aftershave.
“A tough nut to crack.” I grinned. “If you’re going to speak in clichés, at least get them right.”
Jojo seemed not to hear. “You got a chance to walk away.” His right arm moved to his left shoulder. Almost certainly a gun. “Don’t, and the sun back in Wisburg won’t do half the job I’m gonna do.”
“Wisburg isn’t real.” I replied. “It was Bremen. And the sun thing never happened. Murnau was low on money and needed to end his picture.”
He didn’t seem the least bit amused. “I’m asking you nicely. Go back to your office. Look the other way.” He nodded upstairs. The light there had brightened. “The sun may not kill you. But it’ll hurt a great deal, I believe. And it’s rising directly.”
“I’ll leave in just a minute.” I said, nodding to the corner. “Who’s in the box?”
Jojo said nothing.
I shrugged and turned to the coffin. As I reached it, the air around me exploded, and I saw Knox’s blood spatter on the coffin. Son-of-a-bitch had gut-shot me.
“You dumb fuck.” I turned around, trying to hold my guts in while the wound healed itself. Jojo stared at me, his mouth attempting to catch flies. “You don’t know shit about vampyres.” I nodded to the casket. “Have a word with your boss. They clearly didn’t prepare you.” I nodded at his iron. “Place your gun on the ground with two fingers only. If not, you should know I haven’t fed well,” I nodded toward the spatter behind me, “and you just blew most of that away, so I’m peckish. You use more than two fingers, I’m going to quench my thirst.”
He dropped the gun.
“Now kick it over.” He did. As I reached down to pick it up, a raspy voice behind me spoke with a faint German or Eastern European accent.
“It’s good to see you again, Frank.”
And for the second time in as many nights, I woke up elsewhere. This time in my car. My wallet lay in my lap, my coat folded under my head. The inside pocket vibrated.
I sat up and pulled my phone from the coat. I saw two texts from Knox. The first read: “Do you know who Greta Wegener was? You probably knew her.”
The second, sent about thirty minutes before I came to, was a grainy picture of a woman in her thirties sprawled in an alley off what appeared to be River Street. She wore a black leather bustier over a pink miniskirt and knee-high black leather boots. Clearly a working girl. Knox’s note read simply “Exsanguinated.” I looked again at the girl’s face.
She had been my client.
V.
“Greta Wegener,” Knox explained the next evening, “was the married name of Greta Schröder.” Knox slid a stack of papers across the desk. “She married Paul Wegener a couple of years after you knew her.”
“Who was Greta Schröder?” I asked.
Knox looked at me as if I had just asked who Frank Orlok was. “You don’t remember?”
“I’ve been around a long time and forgotten a good bit.” I tapped the papers. “Including apparently, who the hell Greta Schröder was.”
Knox shook his head and smiled. “She was in that film about you. Played Ellen Hutter.” He shrugged. “Our Greta is her great-granddaughter.”
Fucking Nosferatu. Film’s done nothing but make my existence a living hell for a century. Since Murnau used my story to tell his own version of Dracula, I’m constantly confused with Vlad. When people meet me, they express surprise at how little I resemble my portrayals. When I explain who I am, they lose interest. Or accuse me of plagiarizing Vlad’s story, though I predate him by a good hundred years.
I’ve got to hand it to Vlad: he has a great public relations team. Look at who plays him on screen: Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman. Who wouldn’t want to be bitten by that? Here’s the thing, though: he’s not nearly as attractive as the flickers make him. Short and dumpy. And that stupid mustache. Like Josef Stalin after a five-day drunk. But no one cares. On screen he looks dreamy, so he never hunts for food. Dames line up around the block to get his teeth in them.
Who plays me on the silver screen? Fucking Max Schreck, Klaus Kinski, and Willem Dafoe. Talented actors all, for sure, but not exactly heartthrobs. Other than the baldness, not one of them carries my disarming charm. So I glut on vagabonds, hospice patients, and the occasional asshole. Well, and Knox, bless him.
I came to America to escape the film. To start fresh. I thought that was what America was for. But every time I turn around, Murnau’s monstrosity finds yet another way to screw me over.
And now this.
Knox had been busy while I slept. Once he made the connection to Schröder, he set about researching her family on something called the CODIS. It’s a webnet thing, he explained, a way of tracing ancestors.
“We’re interested in her descendants,” I said. “What do her ancestors have to do with it?”
“It’s got data on both, Frank.” Knox told me. “The largest DNA record collection in the country. Let me finish my story. We’re burning moonlight here.”
He was able to trace Schröder’s descendants all the way to a granddaughter-in-law in Atlanta, Georgia, whom he called.
“I told her I worked for a personnel vetting firm, and that her daughter Greta had applied for a job,” Knox said. “I tried to get as much information as possible before she realized I was lying and clammed up.” Knox pulled a notebook from his pocket and read from it. “Our Greta attended Georgia Southern as an English major. Received her Master’s there as well. Couple years ago, she applied for and was accepted to a doctoral program in Atlanta.”
“And?”
“Dropped off the face of the earth.” Knox shrugged. “Mrs. Wegener hasn’t heard from her since. Had no idea if she even started graduate school. Didn’t know her daughter was living here. I’m fairly certain she was unaware her daughter was turning tricks. Mrs. Wegener reported her missing after three weeks of not hearing from her, but the police never found her. She was pretty broken up about it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I did find out something interesting about her family, though.” Knox turned the page of his notebook and smiled at me.
“You gonna tell,” I asked, “or is it a guessing game?”
“Sure.” Knox said. “When I asked about the last time she heard from her daughter, Mrs. Wegener starts crying. Says she should have known something would happen. I asked why.
“‘Because of the curse,’ she says. What curse? Well, turns out every single one of Schröder’s descendants have either died young or disappeared.”
I leaned in. “Elaborate.”
Knox shrugged. “Just that. Mrs. Wegener was widowed shortly after Greta was born. Her father-in-law left on a business trip in the 1970s and never came home. Her sister-in-law, Greta’s aunt, was found overdosed on heroin behind a Piggly Wiggly in 1994.” Knox shrugged again. “All the way back to Schröder’s divorces, the first of which happened right around the time Nosferatu was filming, and her descent to almost total obscurity and bit parts.” He looked at me. “You know, nobody even knows when Schröder died? Some say April 13, 1967, others June 8, 1980.”
A family curse, a girl with amnesia recently dead, and a hirsute heavy. And everything circling back to that damned film. A film supposedly about one vampyre but actually about a completely different and more popular vampyre. The coffin in the basement.
I rubbed my chin and looked at Knox.
“Gonna need your help tonight,” I said. Knox sighed, and began unwrapping his wrist. “No,” I shook my head. “Something else.”
VI.
I approached the plantation house with all the subtlety of a flatulent rhinoceros in St. John’s Cathedral. Knox had rented a motorboat without a carburetor to get me across the water. I was wearing my blue suit, light enough to wake the dead, which I hoped to do.
“Vlad!” I yelled as I scoped the yard. There was an unlocked tool shed in the back. Other than a few yard tools, though, it appeared empty. I stepped onto the porch. “Wake up.”
Nothing. I tried the door. Unlocked.
“Vlad?” I entered the house, leaving the door open behind me. A fire burned in the fireplace. Lamps cast a warm glow over the furniture. The air smelled of sandalwood. I stepped into the room and looked around. No one.
I made my way to the stairs. The air shifted slightly as I reached the basement door. Someone had silently entered the hall behind me. I felt the faintest wisp of breath on my neck and caught just a whiff of cologne, and before you could blink, I had turned around, grabbed Benji by the scruff of his neck and buried my fangs into his carotid.
I intended to drain him only enough to make him groggy, more prone to answering questions, but it had been years since I’d let loose and drained a victim more than a couple of pints (other than the occasional hospice patient), and I went too far. When I finished, Benji sank to the floor with a thud.
“Well, that was anticlimactic.” The voice behind me was accented, not as raspy as the night before. It was also decidedly feminine. I turned from the hairy corpse on the floor.
Greta Wegener leaned against the basement door frame, smiling as she pared her nails with what appeared to be a silver dagger.
“Hello, lover,” she said, “been a while.”
“You’re not Greta,” I said. Something about the voice…
“Well, not since 1980,” she chuckled. “And not before 1967.” She clicked her tongue three times. “Come on, Frank. It’s been over a century, yes, but surely you remember me.”
Then I did.
Ellen Hutter sank her dagger into my heart with one hand and delivered a left hook to my jaw with the other. Since I’d recently had so much practice, I passed out without any trouble.
VII.
One thing people don’t realize about detective work is how little intelligence it takes. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes (hell, I knew him. Even Sherlock Holmes wasn’t Sherlock Holmes). All it takes is reasonable observational skills, a decent grasp of common sense, and an ability to take a beating until somebody tells you what’s going on. Detective work is mostly just pretending to be a punching bag.
When I came to, I was sitting in a Queen Anne armchair in the living room. I tried to rise and found my arms and legs bound tight. In front of me, Ellen poked at the fire with an iron rod.
“I have been waiting a century for this,” she said over her shoulder. “Ever since you and that Murnau ruined my life.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You left me. I never ruined your life.”
“I wanted more than spending eternity in Bremen feeding on farmers and shopkeepers. But you said Bremen felt like home and wouldn’t leave.” A log fell into the coals of the fire with a crackle and a hiss. “Then you told our story to Murnau and the two of you conspired to make me look weak and foolish.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked again. I’ve never been great at holding up my end of a conversation.
“That damned film!” Ellen yelled as she turned around and leapt toward me. She held the red-hot iron poker under my chin. “You made me a fool! You painted me as a mealy-mouthed housefrau without the gumption or wits of a half-rotten radish.” She touched my right cheek with the poker. I heard the sizzle. Smelled my flesh singe. Felt the burn. I didn’t scream. I’ve survived the sun and Vesuvius, after all.
Ellen rose from me and stomped her foot on the floor. “You made me out to be the doting little wife to that braying jackass, and made him the hero. As if he ever did anything more interesting than watch other people act. I left him for you, and you weren’t any better. Though honestly, you’re more interesting now.”
“I’m a late bloomer.” I said, but she didn’t hear.
“I spent years taking my anger out on the actress because I couldn’t find you, and Murnau was too well-known.” She smiled before turning back to the fire and reheating the poker. “I interfered with every relationship she had. Sometimes I lured her men away, even turned one or two. Sometimes I let men think I was her.” She turned back to me, waving the poker. “You know I killed her in ’67? Should have done it sooner, really. Old blood tastes so thin, don’t you agree? Like seltzer water gone flat.”
Something moved outside the window behind her.
“You killed her,” I said, “then took her identity.”
Ellen smiled. “She stole my life. I stole hers.”
Outside, I heard a faint shuffling sound from the shed. “Why’d you stop in 1980?”
“Bored.” Ellen shrugged. “I couldn’t do it forever. After all, humans must die eventually. And her grandson’s family had moved here.”
“You killed him too, I’m guessing.” The shadow moved across the window again, “and mesmerized the great-granddaughter. Took her identity, too. Turned her out on the street at night for what? Kicks?”
“I want Schröder to know, wherever she is, that I am not the frail violet she made me out to be, and that my vengeance spans generations. Sins of the Mother and all that.” She leaned down again and waved the iron poker. “I will not be trifled with by anyone living or dead.” She gave me a matching brand on my left cheek. Again, I didn’t scream, but I thought long and hard about it.
“I was going to go after Murnau and his family, but he was long dead by the time I got to America, and he had no children.” She looked at me. “Did you know he was an Arschficker?”
“We say gay now, but yes.” The air in the hallway behind us shifted.
“Someone took his skull a few years ago, right from his grave.” Ellen shook her head and stared into the ceiling, lost in thought.
“Shocking.”
She returned her attention to me. “That left you. Imagine my surprise when I followed young Greta here, and found one of your advertisements on a park bench.”
“So you planted the idea for her to hire me.” It wasn’t a question.
“And you took the case.” She shrugged. “She was no longer needed, and I was hungry.”
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “it would help my case if I told you I’m not exactly a fan of the film either?”
“Perhaps,” Ellen chuckled. “If I believed you.”
“But you don’t believe me?”
“No.” Ellen reached out with her left hand and pulled my lower jaw down, opening my mouth, forcing my eyes to the ceiling. I heard the faint sound of socked feet on hardwood. “This won’t kill you,”—she raised the poker to my mouth, and I could feel it searing the roof— “but it’ll hurt like all the flames of hell.”
“This actually will kill you.” Knox appeared behind her and swung a rusty axe. With a sound like a cleaver cutting steak, Ellen’s head flew across the room, landing in front of the fireplace. She looked startled. Her body fell to the hearth. The clothes began to smolder.
“Took you long enough.” I said.
Knox began freeing my legs. “It’s rude to interrupt someone monologuing.”
Epilogue
Maybe the news of the burning, abandoned old house would make the papers. Maybe not. It was pretty isolated, and I’m fairly sure the whole place went up. Looked that way from the car, anyway.
Knox left me at the office. I leaned back in my chair and stared out the window. It was almost dawn. I thought about that damned film. I thought about Ellen’s century of hatred. I thought about my own.
Truth is Murnau wasn’t alone. No one’s ever told my story well. Rymer wrote an uneven, confused tale that no one other than English majors read. That broad in New Orleans gave me blonde hair and made me a damned rock star. The mook out West kept me as a gumshoe but made me a preening fratboy with a conscience.
Yes, Murnau’s film had problems. He so wanted to film Dracula that he used me and twisted my story to do it. Now if anyone even remembers my name, they assume I’m just a cheap knockoff of Vlad. Hell, mostly they think I’m called Nosferatu. I don’t even bother with aliases anymore. I can’t ever escape the stupid film anyway. I hear they’re even working on a new one.
“Well, Fred”—I winked at the skull on my bookcase—“if nobody else can tell my story right, I’ll have to do it myself.”