Palermo, Sicily, 1902
Moonlight streamed through the ruined palazzo’s atrium, illuminating the crumbling gallery railings and enclosed courtyard below. Two men sat on the cobblestones beside an empty fountain, legs extended, arms raised overhead, wrists chained to the rim.
From the edge of the darkness that surrounded them, a tall fragment of shadow broke free—a shadow on two legs. Neither prisoner reacted as Mezzanotte swept forward in his long, black coat. Their trousers and vests were dusted with the fine ash that ringed the fountain’s base, their faces snow white, shirt collars spattered with bright drops of blood. Dozens of purple puncture wounds decorated their throats and wrists, as if they had been set upon by ravening beasts.
Mezzanotte leaned closer.
One of the mafia clansmen was dead. His chin rested on his chest, eyes open, staring vacantly at the unmoving dome of his stomach. The other criminal still inhaled and exhaled, but barely. Looking up at Mezzanotte, eyes brimming with tears, he wheezed, “Have mercy!”
For a murderer, thief and extortionist, a predator of the defenceless, mercy was never an option. From the moment of his capture there was only one way forward, and it was neither easy nor quick.
The sound of a violin filtered through a shadowed doorway behind the fountain. Individual notes of perfect pitch stretched on and on, swelling in volume until they became an unbroken moan.
The chained corpse twitched, then a violent shudder shook it from head to foot—and lifeless flesh began to stir. Still not breathing, eyes open but not seeing, the chin slowly began to rise from its resting place.
“Minchia!” the surviving mafioso shrieked, hurling himself as far from the wakening horror as his shackles would permit. Words spilled in a torrent from his bloodless lips: “Dear Lord, no, this cannot be! I watched him die, I watched Carlo die. Only witchcraft could have brought him back like this—a rotting puppet without a soul. Is that my fate as well? I beg you, destroy me now with fire, crush my bones to powder, before…”
Carlo stared at his fellow captive, eyes swimming with darkness.
“A line has been crossed,” Mezzanotte said, “and a point must be made.”
“Desecration and black magic have never been the way of the clans. We are men of true faith. Your capocosca, Don Falde, has sworn the oath, signed it in his own blood.”
“I do as I am bid, with the means at my command.”
“Then you are a monster!”
“We are all monsters,” Mezzanotte said.
The mafioso started to protest, then fell into convulsions, frothing at the mouth as Death took a firmer grip.
Mezzanotte tested the shackles a final time. Satisfied that they were secure, he followed the strains of the violin, around the fountain, through the doorway, into the palazzo, and down the pitch-black corridor leading to the dining hall.
He walked past heavy doors ripped off their hinges, into a narrow, high-ceilinged room with stone block walls and wooden crossbeams. Moonlight streamed through a row of curtainless windows.
On the scarred oak table, amid the scattered plates, overturned goblets, dust and cobwebs stood the violinist. Eyes closed in rapture, with exquisite tenderness Hannah Krugerhof played a melody of passion spent, of desire fulfilled. Turned by Dracula in a Salzburg graveyard in 1895, Hannah would be forever seventeen, blonde, slender, waif-like, with huge blue eyes. In life she had been a meek music student; in death, she was a lioness, always first to the blood.
Slumped in chairs beside the long table were Peter Moresby and Johannes Vilnes, both sated to the point of immobility. Peter was the son of a British admiral, a family disappointment, and would-be poet. He’d met the vampire in 1893 in Amsterdam’s De Wallen red light district. Johannes, a young Swiss outdoorsman, had been murdered and resurrected by Dracula on a moonlit path beneath the Jungfrau.
The Italian noblewoman Zenobia di Schiani sat at the head of the table. Cascades of wavy black hair framed startling green eyes that matched the glittering emeralds encircling her slender throat. She had been plucked from life in Florence’s Boboli Gardens in 1891, at the pinnacle of her youth and radiance.
Mezzanotte smiled at their torpor. It was always so peaceful after they had fed. They could be reasoned with. They could all enjoy a carriage ride or a leisurely passagiata down Via Roma, even take in an opera or concert with no danger to innocent bystanders or fear of public exposure. It was nearly five in the morning, too late for anything but a short stroll.
He said, “Shall we get some air while the moon is still high?”
Peter groaned and waved off the suggestion. A smear of dried blood decorated the right lens of his spectacles.
“Give us a story instead, Master,” Hannah said, lowering her instrument and taking a seat on the edge of the tabletop.
“Yes, please give us a story,” Johannes agreed.
“You know which one,” Zenobia said.
He took in their expectant, happy faces, ashen cheeks flushed with the living blood they had gorged upon. He had loved them all before he ever met them. Their tragedies and his were inextricably, eternally interwoven.
Mezzanotte pulled out a chair, sat down, and began the tale his charges never tired of hearing.
I came into being in a land of phantoms.
Not as a seed nourished and nurtured in a loving womb, as you were. Not as a baby thrust forth into the world, as you were. I awoke a fully formed adult, naked in the murky depths of a storm-tossed lake, my mind blazing with images of horror and carnage, and an insatiable thirst for blood. Not just to spill, but to drink. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victims—legions of men, women, and children—flickered though my consciousness. I saw them chased to exhaustion, cornered, their pulsing throats torn open and drained. I saw their terror, their vain struggles, their inevitable surrender. Through a veil of blood I saw shimmering ghosts of steam rise from their heaped bodies.
Alone in the dark at the bottom of the lake, I covered my ears with my hands and screamed.
The revolting memories and urges were not my own.
I knew I had done none of those things. I knew I was only just born. I had never set foot on dry land, had never set eyes on another living creature. I had never tasted blood. But if the memories were not mine, to what unspeakable monster did they belong? How did they get into my head? Why, why wouldn’t they stop?
I struggled to free my feet from the thick ooze of the lake bottom and battled upward towards a faint glow. As I broke the surface, lightning flashed across a stormy night sky. Foam-crested waves, formed by howling wind, slammed into my back and face. In towering waterspouts, spinning columns of mist, I saw the same tableaux of subjugation and slaughter that infested my brain. And above the images of struggle, glittering in the slanting sheets of rain like an enormous unfolded banner, a row of letters spelled a name I recognized—but could not place.
DRACULA
The raging gale pushed me towards the shore. As I bobbed helpless under the light of a moon half-hidden by black clouds, I could make out the lake’s surround of shadowy, densely forested mountains. Perched on a promontory that jutted out over the lake, I saw the jagged parapets of an abandoned castle.
I crawled out of the water and collapsed onto the muddy beach. I should have been gasping for air, but I wasn’t. How I knew this, how I knew anything, I could not say.
I wasn’t breathing at all.
When I forced myself to my feet, I realized the path leading to the ruin lay directly in front of me. Carved from bare rock, crooked stairs marked the face of the massive outcrop. I staggered upward towards shelter, lashed by the wind and driving rain.
Above me was the castle; a weathered crag of gray stone blocks—cloaked in lichen and moss, it looked like a headless giant seated on a decaying throne. Irregular rows of empty windows stared down at me as I climbed over the tumbled-down arch of the entry gate.
Beyond it stood a luminous form.
Human-shaped, like me. Not entirely human, like me. The being had a rat-like face and pointed ears, bald head, needle-like protruding front teeth and dark circles around even darker eyes. It was dressed in a black velvet cloak, its colorless spindly arms folded across a narrow chest.
As I approached, it recoiled from me in shock. Fluttering its long, spidery fingers, it nervously clicked their curved, seven-inch nails. Lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the littered courtyard, and I could see through its body as if it were made of smoke.
More memories surfaced unbidden, more memories that were not mine. Of crossing a raging sea in a sailing ship and rising from a coffin in its hold. Of devouring the ship’s captain and crew. Perhaps all the horrid memories belonged to this wretched thing?
“Are you Dracula?” I asked.
The creature’s bushy eyebrows arched in surprise; then a strangled laugh erupted from its throat. Its eyes twinkled as it spoke. “The answer to your question is yes and no—but mostly no. That’s something you and I have in common.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We are kin, of a sort. The explanation is complex and lengthy, and here you stand cruelly exposed to the storm.”
I was naked and dripping wet, but not cold.
“Please, come out of the rain and let me show you my temple of delights.” The creature half-turned and gestured at the sprawling ruin, revealing a hunch on its back. “I am called Count Orlok. Or was. Not to put too fine a point on it, I am all that remains. What is your name?”
The question took me aback. I had no answer.
Orlok seemed amused by my paralysis. “Follow me inside, No Name,” he said. “To a more comfortable place where we can talk. You can remind me of life as our Master lived it. You can tell me what you have seen through his eyes. What you have tasted.”
When I did not move, Orlok threw a spindly arm around my back and urged me forward. “Come along, brother,” he said, “and I will show you my secret treasure.”
Hoping for answers, I let him lead me into a dim passageway. The instant we stepped across the threshold, howls and shrieks erupted on all sides, throbbing like heartbeats against the rough stone walls.
“What is that?!” I asked.
“A symphony of mourning,” Orlok replied. “Of agony that never ends.”
“Whose agony?”
Ignoring the question, he ushered me into a cavernous chamber lit by scattered torches embedded in rusting sconces. The wailing continued, rising and falling like the wind outside. Rain from a breach in the roof spattered the marble floor. In a huge stone fireplace, flames suddenly leapt to life, dancing and crackling. But they gave off no heat. Shadows drifted across the walls, obscuring, dissolving, reappearing. Like a cloud of hungry flies they swarmed around my host.
Orlok squinted at me, rat teeth protruding over his lower lip. “You resemble him,” he said. “Certainly more than I.”
“Whom do I resemble?” I asked.
Bending over a worm-eaten, lidless wooden chest, Orlok said, “Should you wish to cover yourself, here are furs of the finest quality.” The chamber’s shadows darted around him, swooping and diving as if in attack. “Take what you want. They are no longer of any use to us.”
I puzzled over his last word.
“Are you hungry?” Orlok said. “Do you want blood?”
The images that popped into my head sickened me.
“There are rats in the castle of course, and rabbits in the forest outside, quite juicy,” Orlok went on. “And for something more filling, peasants in the tiny village to the south. It’s not far.”
“Is that what you eat?”
“We don’t eat. I myself have not taken sustenance for fifty years.”
Again, the mysterious plural. “We?” I said.
My host spread wide his skeletal arms. As if at his command, the shadows whirling around him slowly morphed into pale, translucent shapes. Distorted, vague, but human-looking. “These are my trophies,” Orlok said. “The mementoes I gathered and brought with me from the other side of death. Their suffering mine to enjoy forever.”
The chorus of misery rose in volume until it drowned out Orlok’s laughter. His form flickered before me, the edges of its perimeter dimmed, and then he disappeared, but the spirits remained.
I was surrounded by them, their faces elongating, melting, reforming. The only constants in the chaos were their black eyes—or the holes where their eyes had once been.
The shape of a young woman materialized before me, gradually becoming more distinct. Rows of ringlets framed a gaunt, hollow-cheeked face and dark eyes full of pain. She wore a ruffled, gauzy nightgown.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“In a place that does not exist and never has,” she said. “Nothing here is real, not even our unending torture.”
Feeling a sudden chill—not from the air or the damp, but from her words—I lifted a robe of soft fur from the lidless chest, slid my arms into the sleeves, and belted it. It was clean and fit well. There was considerable weight in both side pockets. I dipped my fingers inside.
On upturned palms I showed her fistfuls of bright coins. “What use do spirits have for gold? Or luxurious furs, for that matter?”
“They do not belong to us, they never belonged to us,” she said. “That robe and the gold were the property of your progenitor, the ancient and powerful vampire known as Dracula.”
“Orlok said I looked like someone else. Is that who I resemble?”
“You have Dracula’s height and build, his black hair and chiseled face. You were created from an infinitesimal speck of his essence. Using forbidden magic in this unholy place, the vampire transformed himself into other beings, other forms.”
“How do you know this?”
“I watched him leap from the promontory into the waters of Lake Hermannstadt and burst into millions of glittering fragments.”
“What was his purpose? To escape his enemies?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps to populate the world with his likenesses.”
As improbable as it sounded, it explained the images in my mind and my strange “birth” in the lake. It also explained my knowledge of things I could never have seen.
“I was called Ellen Hutter,” she said. “I sacrificed myself to Orlok to destroy him, to protect my husband and others I knew and loved. I was his last living victim. He drank me all night, and when he was caught in the rising sun, he fell to dust before my eyes. When I died moments later I was certain I would go to heaven. But instead I was drawn here, a prisoner of Orlok’s ghost, condemned as are the spirits of all his innocent victims.”
She stepped into the pelting rain that fell through the roof, and tossed back her head. As she looked upward, arms outstretched, the drops passed through her and splashed in the puddle on the floor. “Why can’t I, why can’t we be washed clean of this filth?” she cried.
Ellen Hutter was a wraith. Made of vapour. Breathing or not, I appeared to have substance. As I dropped the coins back in my pockets, I felt an urge purely my own: to right a terrible wrong.
“Did Dracula create Orlok?” I asked her. “Is that why he calls me kin?”
“Orlok was the product of Dracula’s first attempt at dispersing his essence, a test of the magic spell’s power and effect. He was created from a shard of fingernail that Dracula cast into the lake. The experiment failed. Its result was hideous to look upon, a single-minded predator, spreader of plague, able to make legions of corpses, but unable to create more vampires.”
She gazed deep into my eyes. “But in you, Dracula has made a perfect copy. You may possess the power to do everything he could do—or to undo it as you see fit.” Standing in the downpour, undampened, she clasped her hands together. “Have pity on our poor souls. Release us from this nightmare!”
A chorus of assenting wails rose from all around.
Save us save us save us. For the love of God, save us.
“You are our only hope,” Ellen Hutter pleaded as her luminesce and that of the others winked out, smothered by a taloned hand.
“You still have his memories, your Maker’s,” Orlok said to my back. “I had them too, until I made my own.”
I faced the failed experiment, the spawn of a fingernail clipping. The spirits had vanished but I could hear their keening, braided with the shrill wind. “Do you keep your victims with you to drown out the memory of him?”
“No, I keep them because their misery was my only act of creation. The gift of spreading seed, of making progeny was denied me, but perhaps you have it.”
“I am not a vampire. I cannot create vampires.”
Orlok chuckled, his hands opened at his sides, long fingers and even longer nails fanned out in white spikes. “There is only one way to find out. But elsewhere. We are all dead here. You must go among the living.”
He gestured at the chamber door. “You must go now.”
Leaning into the wind and rain, I paused at the tumbled-down arch and glanced back at the courtyard. Ellen stood at the head of a writhing mass of lost souls.
“Don’t abandon us!” she cried.
I felt her pain and desperation, but I knew Orlok was right. This was not the place to find my power. “Ellen, you’ll all be released,” I called back. “I’ll find a way, somehow.”
With that, I departed the land of phantoms. Scrambling up the mountainside, I looked back from its peak. In the light of the moon I saw below me a shallow valley carpeted with black forest. The mystic lake was gone, the castle gone, Ellen and the others gone.
Forever beyond my help.
My promise forever a lie.
Mezzanotte lifted a drowsy Hannah into her coffin and gently lowered her head to the pillow. She weighed next to nothing, an angel of darkness he was sworn to protect, and who in turn protected him. Folding her hands across her chest, he slid shut the lid.
The others had already crawled into their coffins in the windowless chamber. One by one he closed the lids. That they hadn’t been able to stay awake to hear the end of the story didn’t matter, they all knew it by heart.
I descended barefoot to the path on the other side of the mountain, pockets full of gold, my brain, after a few moments of respite, seething anew with Dracula’s urge to feed and destroy. I knew eventually it would overwhelm and prevail, turning me into the monster he had intended.
I had to find a way to defend myself, and in so doing, protect the innocent, and atone in some way for the crimes of my progenitor. I knew I could not do that alone. I had to reach outside myself.
Of all the horrors that filled my mind, the most vivid and most repeated were the most recent. Hannah, Peter, Johannes, and Zenobia had been Dracula’s final victims, their tragedies replayed over and over. I loved them for their perfect innocence before evil touched them, for what they might have been, for what they had become. Like me, they were blameless. I sought them out. I found them. I became their caregiver, and they mine. To that end I created a symbiosis. A way for us all to survive and move forward.
A life made from death.
Mezzanotte returned to the palazzo’s courtyard wearing dark spectacles. Dawn was breaking over Palermo, the atrium filling from top to bottom with lavender light. The mafiosos chained to the fountain had long since turned. No longer alive, no longer human, they bared their fangs at him, snarling like wolves as they jerked taut their restraints. Pulled back from the dead, reborn starving for blood. Beyond the reach of reason.
But not justice.
A ray of bright sunlight cut across the atrium’s cobblestones at Mezzanotte’s feet in a thin line, widening, spreading out towards the fountain. Sensing destruction, the new vampires shrank back as far as they could, and began to scream. No longer cries for mercy. They sounded like gulls fighting over scraps at the edge of the bay.
Mezzanotte did not step back into the shadows. Though it was unpleasant, he could endure daylight. He watched as it devoured them, turning their dead flesh and bone to ash, instantly silencing them. The manacles fell empty, clanking against the fountain. Twinkling dust climbed slowly into the spire of light.
Sicilian clans like Don Falde’s usually left victims’ bodies in public places to instill fear among their prey. Murders for offenses between cosche required a more delicate touch because if evidence were ever discovered, such killings would start a war. That situation called for a different sort of message. And a specialista to deliver it.
The message just sent to Don Falde’s competitor was this: Cross me again and you, too, will vanish like you were never even born.
The specialista was called Mezzanotte.
He had no other name.