Dracula Lives Page 15

  Quinn pictured drained souls staggering out of those deep woods after having their blood sucked—if they made it that far. For all he or anybody could know, Markov’s vast private forest could be littered with bodies. As that grim thought coiled itself around Quinn’s brain, he felt himself being drawn into exactly the type of atrocity he had come here to escape.

  What other atrocities might Markov have committed? His talk of feeding on campers as the Wolf Man or Dracula had taken his story far beyond the eccentricities of a strange recluse and his enslaved daughter. Quinn had worked on cases where murderers, claiming someone else inside them did the killing, were later diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. That had to be what was afflicting Markov. Despite his very well-reasoned and persuasive explanations of what he believed were monsters inside him, he couldn’t possibly be the actual Wolf Man or Dracula.

  Another thought occurred to Quinn. Perhaps Markov’s explanation of his vampiric tendencies was merely dialogue for a scene. The things he was saying might be true, or he might just be taking dramatic license to get a reaction from Quinn for the hidden cameras. Quinn decided to play along and see where this went.

  With a disturbingly clinical detachment, Markov continued.

  “You said that the head has been kept alive. Yes and no. The fact that blood still flowed meant there was some semblance of life. But the eyes remained closed; there was never any movement, no indication of any brain or muscle activity. So I tried an experiment.

  “For the last several years, I have been using the latest technology in an effort to fully re-animate the head. Much in the manner of Mesmer and Galvani.”

  “Have you gotten any results?”

  “With electric current I achieved what Galvani did, to make the dead twitch. Two hundred years ago that was thought to be life, but we now know that it is merely the danse macabre of dead nerve tissue simulating life. But more recently I have introduced another element that has given me pause.”

  Quinn waited.

  “Magnetism,” Markov said. “I have added magnetic flux to the current and gotten dramatic results. The eyelids flutter. The lips move, as if trying to speak. At first this could all be considered the same simple reflexive movement we might get from a frog in biology class, but lately…. I could swear I have heard sound issuing from the mouth. Nothing intelligible, perhaps it is only air being released, but….”

  Quinn followed his gaze until they were both staring at the head. It remained utterly still. Markov seemed disappointed.

  “It would take some time to set up the apparatus,” he said, “but I can show you my experiment. An opinion from a neutral party could be valuable.”

  Quinn felt any sympathy he had for Markov—George Tilton—melting away at the thought that he might be feeding on hapless souls who happened to wander onto his property. Whether Markov was delusional or not, he believed he was drinking the blood of Vlad the Impaler and that it was keeping him young. There was no denying the fact that he and his daughter looked decades younger than their ages.

  “Does Johnny also drink the elixir?”

  “She and Max both did when they were younger, but at my behest more than by choice. Max refused to drink it long ago, and Johnny did too, some years later—when what was left of her will asserted itself.”

  A hot burst of anger burned away Quinn’s last shred of sympathy. “You forced your madness on your kids?”

  In an instant Markov’s benign expression changed to one bordering on ferocity.

  “I loved my family, sir. I wanted to bring them with me on my journey to immortality, but first I had to see if the elixir worked. I had to make sure there were no harmful effects and that I had gotten the balance of human and vampire blood right. So for years I kept them completely in the dark about my experiment, administering the elixir only to myself.”

  “How could you keep the head a secret?”

  “I know this is the hoariest of movie clichés, but movie clichés are the story of my life. Wherever we lived, I always had a laboratory that was never to be entered by anyone but me.”

  His gaze softened. “The experiment began in 1945 when I procured the head. It had to be long-term, to measure aging and to be sure there were no negative side effects. In ten years the calendar said I had gone from forty-four to fifty-four, but my body had not aged a day.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “It was clear in every way such a thing could be measured. If anything I was younger, stronger. My skin became less wrinkled. It had the glow of youth. I needed far less sleep—a side benefit I loved, because it gave me much more time to study and pursue my work. My teeth began to regenerate themselves. New ones came in and pushed out the old ones. Broken veins in my legs disappeared. I had a sexual prowess far beyond anything I had ever had, even at the peak of my virility.”

  “Ten years is a long time to keep a secret like that,” Quinn said. “I did a lot of homework to prepare for our meeting. There’s a record of your son, Max, being charged with attempted murder in 1954. Does that have something to do with why he despises you?”

  Markov’s sudden flare of anger at the mention of Max’s name quickly melted under a flush of remorse—remorse that struck Quinn as the inevitable result of a family neglected to pursue an unwholesome, unfulfilled dream. George Tilton, the father, overtook Markov long enough to say, “In a sense, yes.” His gaze drifted toward the floor. “Not entirely without cause.”

  “What happened?”

  His normally resonant voice took on a hollow quality, as if coming from a crypt somewhere deep in his soul. “The continuation of my dark destiny. A path that had led me to become inextricably linked to Tod Browning and Dracula, and to become an eager participant in the power you spoke of: the power of movies to affect real life.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Sitting in his inner sanctum, overseen from above by the closed but undead eyes of Dracula, Markov turned over the next card from the Tarot deck of his life.

  “1954,” he began. “Unlike Poe’s narrator in Ulalume, it was not my most immemorial year. I remember it vividly. We were living in Boston, and a local movie theater found out that I had worked on Dracula and Freaks with Tod. They wanted to show them as a double feature on Halloween, make it a gala event with me as their guest of honor. Dolores—my first wife—Johnny and Max were with me, reveling in all the attention.

  “Until a man who had been in the audience came up to me at the reception, raving about the way the so-called pinheads had been presented in Freaks. You remember them?”

  “Yes. They had misshapen heads that almost came to a point.”

  “A condition known as microcephaly. This man’s young daughter had just died from it. He grabbed a knife from a food table and tried to stab me, but I moved out of the way and the blade went into my wife instead. Max yanked the knife out and stabbed the man. He lived but my wife died. Since Max had acted out of self-defense, the charges were later dropped.”

  The Markov persona continued to crumble as the fatherly part of George Tilton broke through. “I was left to live with my children alone. Without my wife’s sensible feminine influence, I could see that imposing my twisted worldview was damaging them. Again, the intertwining of my life with Tod Browning’s had played a hand. His films had brought me to the screening on what turned out to be a very fateful night in my life. It resulted in the death of my wife, but it also introduced me to the woman who would become the helpmate I desperately needed, lest I slip irredeemably into madness and take my children with me.

  “Elinore was her name. She was the organizer of the gala, a lover of film whose background meshed perfectly with mine. She had fallen in love with horror movies as a child, as I had. Dracula was one of her favorites, so she was thrilled to meet someone who had worked on it. We started dating. She loved my idea of building a castle and studio for making horror films. We married and I moved my new family here, rationalizing that seclusion and fresh air would help cleanse our souls—a
ll the while building a home where no soul could ever be clean.

  “In this movie world I had created, my fetters of reason were cast off, Mr. Quinn. My obsession with immortality and Dracula was given full rein. At first it was just cinematic immortality. But as the Dracula blood got stronger, and I saw myself not aging, I convinced Elinore to begin drinking the elixir with me. I had hoped that we might live together forever.”

  He hesitated, and Quinn watched his authoritative air melt away. When he spoke again, his tone was that of someone resigned to an ill-chosen fate.

  “And so began the inevitable fall of the House of Markov. We were never a normal family, but our first years here were the closest we ever came. We had moved here in 1960. Johnny and Max were both in their twenties then, and could have gone out on their own, but they seemed content to learn everything there was to know about filmmaking. We stayed busy setting this place up as a studio and movie set, shooting some of the establishing scenes for our movie. But, eventually, the piper had to be paid.”

  “As he always must,” Quinn said.

  “Indeed. The vampire blood in the elixir constantly absorbed the human blood, making it virtually impossible to maintain the proper balance. There would be brief periods when my wife and I would succumb to the vampiric urges coursing through our veins. We would prowl the woods at night to feed…. Small animals at first, then the occasional camper or hunter. We would satisfy our cravings, then leave them to fend for themselves. We should have stopped drinking the elixir, but the lure of immortality had become too strong.

  “As I got deeper into my Markov persona, my twisted psyche began envisioning myself as the patriarch of a race of immortals, directly descended from Dracula himself. I had used the basic idea in Blood of Dracula, but now—now—I had everything I needed to make the plot of my movie a reality. To create an actual race of immortals, as Viktor had described in his letter.”

  Markov’s eyes narrowed as they stared inward, apparently at a memory he was hesitant to reveal. After a long pause he said, “I decided it was time to begin giving the elixir to Johnny and Max. Ours would be the family that blazed the trail into that brave new world.”

  Quinn took a measured breath to quell his rising anger. “A world where—despite Viktor’s decree never to engage in the foul bloodsucking of a vampire—that’s exactly what you were doing. Surely you could see that.”

  “I turned a blind eye.”

  “Ah,” Quinn said, his patience all but gone for Markov’s lame rationalizations of his soul-stealing behavior. “So you brought Johnny and Max into your vampiric fold.”

  “Yes. But as I said, not by their choice. They submitted to my domineering will—with the full support of Elinore, who found it exciting to be pursuing immortality by perpetuating the bloodline of the actual Dracula.

  “Johnny was more malleable. I took advantage of her gentle nature and the pact I had forced upon her—that we would be together forever. She drank the elixir for years. Enough to greatly retard the aging process. But she could not turn a blind eye to the inevitable urges. Whenever they became too strong, Johnny would stop taking it. She never engaged in bloodsucking. Even so, I still managed to turn a lovely young lady into a cringing servant. My Renfield.”

  “You were assuaging your guilt over having ended the life your daughter might have had—with another Faustian bargain. The promise of immortality in exchange for her soul.”

  Markov used his perfect Lugosi voice to paraphrase Dracula’s line when Van Helsing exposes him with the mirror: “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Mr. Quinn.”

  Quinn was not in the mood for snappy repartee. “What about Max? What was his reaction to the elixir?”

  “Max fought me on it every inch of the way and finally flatly refused to drink it. From the very beginning he abhorred my cheating death by sucking the life out of the living. He became my nemesis. My Van Helsing. To the point where he could no longer ignore the late-night wanderings of Elinore and myself.

  “Eventually he confronted us after one of our rambles. We told him we simply enjoyed walks in the moonlight, but he knew we were lying. He had followed us and saw what we did. His hatred for me had been growing ever since the night his mother was killed. And he never forgave me for getting remarried. Unlike Johnny, who eventually accepted Elinore as her new mother, Max hated her.

  “After that confrontation, I found a mallet and stake under his bed. I left them there, wanting to see how far his hatred might take him.”

  “I suppose that makes a kind of twisted sense,” Quinn said. “But why would he take the sword?”

  “He had loved his mother dearly and made it clear that he held me responsible for her death. One night he came into my room, sword in hand. Max’s attempt at poetic justice. To use the same sword to behead Vlad Dracula’s spiritual descendant—me—and bring the ‘accursed bloodline’—his pet phrase—to an end.” His lips compressed into a small sardonic smile. “But we Draculas know there are many who wish to destroy us, so we are light sleepers. I sprang up before he reached my bed. He held me at bay, calling me a ‘psychic vampire’, raving about how being constantly immersed in the world of horror had sucked everything good out of him. He vowed to make me pay for what I did to him. And to his mother.”

  Markov’s soul-weary sigh spoke of a battle he no longer wanted to fight, no longer believed in. “His ‘psychic vampire’ comment hit home. I hadn’t sucked my family’s blood, but … some of their souls? I had built an impenetrable wall around that part of my psyche. In the carefully edited movie of my life, I would only allow myself to see the things that made me the hero. I was the devoted father, and Max the ungrateful son. I was teaching him everything there was to know about movies, grooming him to take over my work and my collection when I was gone. If nothing else, he could have been a director.

  “But the damage had been done.” Markov’s eyes narrowed as the anger returned. “My son left home and I haven’t seen him since.”

  Quinn waited while Markov gathered himself, wondering uneasily where his unburdening of his soul would take them.

  “I have received two letters from him in the last forty years. The first came in 1973, updating me on his situation. He had gone to Boston and gotten into acting. He railed against directors who couldn’t spot the obvious talent he deluded himself into believing he showed in auditions. He called them psychic vampires as well. The notion of psychic vampires had become his way of scapegoating others for his shortcomings. He could never accept that, in the world of acting, there are king actors and there are butlers. Alas, Max was doomed to be a butler.”

  Markov’s expression took on a gloating air. “He closed his portentous epistle by saying that only a final reckoning between he and I could fully exorcise the demons I had bred into his soul. His flair for melodrama.”

  A chip off the old block, Quinn thought. “Maybe after all these years he’s forgiven you.”

  “Hardly. The second letter came a few weeks ago. Ravings about my days being numbered. He said my head would soon be resting on a stake beside Vlad the Impaler’s. I doubt that he has the backbone to follow through.”

  Until now Quinn had considered Markov’s description of his castle as a shrine to madness part of his flair for melodrama, but now he realized it was true. Dysfunctional didn’t begin to describe this bizarre family. They had created an alternate reality that existed in a land that time forgot.

  “What about your second wife. Is she … did she…?”

  “Sadly, the vampiric urges kept getting stronger in my beloved Lady Elinore, and … I had to put her away.” In the slight movement of his head, little more than a twitch, Quinn saw George Tilton trying to shake off what had to be one of the most painful memories in a life filled with pain. The moment lasted only a few seconds before Markov was back.

  “This concludes the tour, Mr. Quinn. Now we come to the moment of truth: stay and live forever in the movies, or leave and rejoin the parade
of mortals shuffling to an earthly and unremembered demise.”

  Quinn thought of Markov’s description of his life as a descent into the maelstrom, a whirlpool of madness and death. He pictured Johnny being pulled into the vortex, hands reaching up in desperation, looking for someone to save her from being sucked down into her father’s personal Hell. With that image swirling in his brain, he only half-listened to Markov’s patently absurd plan: that he was ready to write, storyboard, direct, and shoot the ultimate monster rally sequence—in one day.

  “I have written a draft of the ending with you as the lead,” Markov said. “Should you decide to stay, I need to work out the shooting script. If you decide to leave, it will have to be on foot. To borrow once again from Morbius, I must ask you to forgive the ill manners of an old recluse, but I cannot spare Johnny just now. The Blood Moon is upon us and there is still much to do. I can give you a little time to make your decision, but not much.”

  Quinn didn’t need any more time. He’d seen enough to suspect that this was a house where evil dwelled.

  “I’m staying.”

  “Excellent,” Markov said. “I will need a couple hours, more or less. You should use that time to explore the castle and grounds—within the limitations we have discussed. Greater familiarity with the set could save us time when we shoot the final sequence.”

  Quinn had been thinking the same thing—but for a different reason. He wouldn’t be scouting out a location. He’d be looking for an escape route.

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  “I will contact Johnny when I am ready to begin the final shoot. From that point on we will be on a very tight schedule to wrap before midnight. She will let you know when and where to report.”