Dracula Lives Read online

  They reached the top of the stairs. Markov’s black velvet slippers moved noiselessly across an expansive landing inlaid with large rectangular stones. Quinn followed to an intricately carved wooden door. Markov turned the handle and gave the door a gentle push, inviting his guest in with a theatrical sweep of his arm, made more dramatic by the groaning accompaniment of the hinges.

  Because Markov had referred to this space as his den, Quinn had expected something small, but at roughly thirty yards square, the chamber was bordering on vast. His library took up the entire right wall. Rich mahogany shelves were filled with books, many appearing to be quite old. Ahead, a fire blazed invitingly from a large fireplace embellished with elaborately carved scrollwork. High-backed chairs on either side of a black granite table formed a seating area on the hearth. Dozens of candles burned in wall sconces and candelabra around the room.

  Much of the wall space was taken up by framed movie posters and stills from the glory days of Universal horror. Quinn quickly became absorbed by several that were from silent films on which Lon Chaney and Tod Browning had worked together.

  Markov came up beside him, and for the first time it fully registered how tall he was. Quinn stood six one, and Markov was a few inches taller.

  “I hope you were comfortable enough in the horse-drawn carriage,” his mysterious host said. “I could have sent our horseless carriage, but I thought you would appreciate being transported to the castle in Dracula fashion.”

  “It was perfect. As was your re-creation of Borgo Pass. I felt like Renfield.”

  “It is nice to meet someone who can fully appreciate the pains I have taken to re-create the Dracula experience. In that spirit, this would be the moment when Dracula asks Renfield if he is hungry.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Drinks, then. Contrary to what Bela Lugosi might have led you to expect, I do drink … wine.”

  Quinn smiled an acknowledgement of the famous Dracula line. “This room reminds me so much of those Vincent Price-Poe movies, it seems like a snifter of brandy is the way to go.”

  “Make yourself comfortable while I take care of it.”

  A tasseled velvet bell rope hung beside the door. He gave it a gentle tug and less than a minute later there was a knock. Markov opened the door a crack, muttered to some unseen person beyond, then rejoined Quinn, who had again turned his attention to the posters and stills.

  “Johnny will take care of us,” Markov said. “My right arm. The one who tends to the considerable details of maintaining this estate with impeccable discretion.”

  Quinn nodded distractedly, continuing to stare at the posters. “All the ones in this section are from Tod Browning movies,” he said. “Dracula, of course. Freaks.” He pointed to one of the stills. “I love this picture of Lon Chaney flashing that famous sawtooth grin from London After Midnight. It’s a shame that movie is lost. It’s probably the most sought-after lost film.”

  “I worked on all those pictures.”

  London After Midnight had been released in 1927. How old was this man?

  “How was working with Tod Browning?”

  “We were very close. I became like the son he never had. And he was like a father to me.”

  A flicker of emotion gave Quinn his first peek at the human being behind the Markov persona. George Tilton had loved Browning deeply. In an instant the mask was back.

  “Once he left the picture business and moved to Malibu, he never wanted to leave his home. So as often as I could, I flew out to see him.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Markov said.

  Johnny was thick through the chest and walked with a pronounced limp. The sole of one slipper was a few inches thick, apparently compensating for one leg being shorter than the other. The shorter leg seemed to bend at an unnatural angle, but it was difficult to tell through the baggy legs of pantaloons that gathered at the ankles. A loose-fitting blouse with decorative stitching combined with the pantaloons to form a kind of uniform.

  Despite the attendant’s hitching gait, the silver tray with two snifters of brandy and a carafe of water remained rock steady on an upturned palm, while a garment draped over the other forearm never fluttered. As Johnny deftly placed the brandies in front of the two men, Quinn noticed a cauliflower ear and wondered if the servant had been a boxer in a previous life.

  With a flourish Johnny set the tray aside and held out the garment for Quinn to slip into. The burgundy smoking jacket had black silk lapels and pocket flaps, trimmed in gold. Quinn ran his hands over the impeccably tailored velvet, admiring the styling and craftsmanship. It fit him perfectly.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Johnny made a slight nod and withdrew.

  Quinn and Markov swirled the amber liquid, clinked snifters, and drank. Markov cut an elegant figure as he relaxed into his chair, crossing his legs at the knee and cradling his brandy. “How did you come to believe in human monsters, Mr. Quinn?”

  “My answer to that would be a long and rather dark tale.”

  “We have brandy, a warm fire, and nowhere else to be. This is our time to get to know one another, and I’m sure your tale can hardly be darker than mine. My home was built for dark tales.”

  “A House of Dark Shadows?”

  “Indeed. I could have been the script consultant for that show.”

  “As someone who worked in Castle Dracula, with the greatest of all vampires, I’m sure you could have.” Quinn held up his snifter. “To you and your house of dark shadows.”

  Markov held up his glass in acknowledgement.

  After they had taken a moment to savor their brandy, Quinn began. “The answer to your question begins with my love of horror movies. Since I was born on Halloween to a father who loved them, it seems I was destined to become a horror fan.”

  “Did you inherit your love of the old classics from him?”

  “Absolutely. He was an English professor, with a very keen critical mind. Among other things he taught classes on horror literature, which always included showing the movie version, if there was one. I was six when he started my horror film education. This was in the early ’60s, before home video, so my introduction to the old classics was through Shock Theater on television. Dad and I watched them so many times over the years that I just about knew every line by heart. When I was little, he got a kick out of having me get up and act out famous lines when we had company over.”

  “Did that embarrass you?”

  “No. I loved it. I’m kind of a ham. For a while I had thought of pursuing acting.”

  Quinn watched Markov centering his face in the square he’d formed with his thumbs and forefingers, a director framing his shot. “Yes,” he said, peering through the frame. “I think the camera would like you.”

  Quinn gave a wistful smile. “One of the roads not taken.”

  “We all have those. I’ve chosen to believe that something keeps us on the one we are meant to be on.”

  Quinn didn’t agree. He’d known plenty of people who’d gone down all sorts of wrong roads. He’d been on a few himself. He said nothing, not wanting to waste time on pointless philosophical digressions.

  Markov cradled his glass. “Is your father a fan of Dracula like yourself?”

  “It was his favorite.”

  “‘Was’? Is he no longer with us?”

  “Sadly, no. He … passed away several years ago.”

  Passed away. Quinn had chosen the euphemism because he wasn’t ready to stir up the ashes of a burning regret that were just now starting to cool. The truth would cast its own dark shadow over a weekend he had been looking forward to, a chance to hear the experiences of a man who had worked on Dracula. Knowing that their time would be limited, and wanting to maximize his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Quinn had even made sure to get plenty of sleep in anticipation of lively all-night discussion. Just picking Markov’s brain about working with the legendary Lon Chaney, going back to the silent
era, could take hours. Quinn didn’t want to seem impatient by looking at his watch, but it had to be somewhere around seven. They only had one more day, and Markov had said he would be using it to shoot the climax of his film.

  Talking about personal tragedies could wait.

  Markov held out his snifter. “Here’s to the spirit of your father that lives on in you.” After they drank to the somber toast, Markov said, “So. Your Dracula roots run deep.”

  “Not as deep as yours, obviously, but yes. Very.”

  “Do go on.”

  “I idolized my father and had always wanted to do something with that love of the genre that he had instilled in me, something that would make him proud. I majored in film in college, thinking I might become the next great horror director. I made a few short student films, won a couple local awards, but never pursued it. Watching movies and critiquing them appealed more to the analytical nature I had also gotten from him. So I concentrated on the film study courses, with some vague idea that I might become a critic or cinema scholar.

  “But—there’s always a ‘but’ in life, isn’t there?—as I got deeper into the study of horror movies, I became fascinated by the legends the monsters were based on, to the point where I ended up pursuing a second major in folklore.

  “I was having a good career as a college professor, teaching courses on the horror film, writing for various film magazines, spending most of my summers tracking down one legend or another. My father was still teaching at Maryland when I became a part of the faculty. Our minds thought so much alike that we always had to get together before planning our courses for the next semester, to make sure we didn’t both end up teaching the same thing. With my background in folklore, I always taught the Ray Harryhausen course, since he used those stories from Greek Mythology.”

  “I knew Ray Harryhausen’s mentor. Willis O’Brien. Tod got me in to see him when O’Brien was working on King Kong. He showed me how he did his stop-motion technique.”

  Quinn was much more interested in hearing those kinds of behind-the-scenes stories—from what had to be the only person still alive to tell them—than in talking about himself, but he understood the desire of a recluse to get to know the stranger he had risked inviting into his home. As much as he wanted to take Markov’s fascinating tidbit about Willis O’Brien and run with it, he needed to finish his story.

  As though reading his mind, Markov said, “Please—continue.”

  “You asked if I believed in monsters. No, I don’t, but I’ve become fascinated by humanity’s obsession with them, going back to Beowulf and Grendel and beyond, to the oral traditions when the tales first got told around the campfire. Why did we invent monsters for all the ills that plague us? Why have we been drawn to scary stories from the very beginning, like Poe’s Imp of the Perverse? Why do we like to be scared? There have been a lot of attempts to explain it, but no one really knows.

  “I put together a graduate course that was my attempt to shed some light on the subject: Monsters and Why We Need Them. My research led me to write a book with the same title. The book did well and the course was extremely popular. They both traced the evolution of monsters from their origins in folklore to the present day. In the graduate course, I had the added advantage of being able to have lively discussions of books that had played a part, and screenings of horror movies that had done the same. I had an entire two-week unit devoted to the mythology of vampires—which means, by the way, that I’ve watched and discussed Dracula many, many times.”

  “It sounds as though your Dracula—would obsession be too strong a word?—might be second only to mine.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be, and yes, you’re probably right.”

  “Are you still teaching?”

  “No. My studies had led me down an unexpected path: investigating the belief among a growing segment of the population that these creatures are real. That unnameable monsters lurk in all the hidden realms on earth. What I have dubbed the Shadowland. The belief has become so widespread that it has spawned countless TV shows documenting the search for these creatures. A field of pseudoscience has developed to explore it.”

  “Cryptozoology,” Markov said.

  “Yes. Every place on earth has legends about creatures living in its uncharted regions. Mothman, Bigfoot, Wolf Men, vampires, creatures from the deep. But the line between legend and reality has always been blurred. Has it all been superstition? Were these all the fanciful tales of writers, the wild imaginings of unenlightened explorers, or … were there dragons? Was there a Grendel? A Cyclops? Were there night prowlers and shadow creatures from another dimension? Finding those answers has become my life’s work.”

  “It is a subject in which I, too, have a great interest,” Markov said.

  “In any case, over the years I’ve watched creatures of superstition and legend and fiction evolve into becoming accepted as real beings. In some cases more than accepted. Admired. Worshipped. Facebook pages devoted to vampires, werewolves, demons. In the worst cases, it has led to bondage, torture, killing. An unmistakable trend has developed in our society. More and more, people have been acting out the horror they see in books and movies. Particularly movies, where seeing and hearing the horror can affect us far more profoundly than printed words on a page.”

  “Movie horror bleeding into real life,” Markov observed.

  “Aptly put.” Quinn inwardly winced at the memory of how his father had died.

  “Another concept with which I am very familiar,” Markov said.

  What did that mean? Again Quinn stifled the urge to respond, not wanting to derail the conversation. “In my case,” he continued, “the unanticipated outcome of all that research was my realization that I had opened a Pandora’s Box. In this day of social media, out there in the vast unpoliced regions of cyberspace, virtual cults have been developing. A parallel universe, where a love of horror stories has mutated into monster worship. Admiring conversations in chat rooms about the darkest aspects of humanity. The deeper you dig, the darker it gets. It goes from talking to doing. Groups believing they are these creatures, emulating them, engaging in their practices.”

  Markov’s gaze narrowed. “Such as?”

  “You find grave robbers. Ghouls. Zombies. Flesh eaters. Blood drinkers. Sex with corpses. Then, in the comments, people saying how funny they find it all.”

  Markov’s gaze became more penetrating. “We shall indeed have much to discuss. As one who has spent his life creating movie monsters, and collecting them in my Chamber of Horrors, I am all too familiar with the influence of movies on human behavior.”

  Creating movie monsters? Chamber of Horrors? Markov’s comments screamed for responses, and Quinn had come to the point in his story where he’d be happy to change the subject. “I’m eager to have those discussions,” he said, “but if you’d like me to go on, this is the point in my rather long-winded tale where, as you so aptly put it, movie horror bleeds into real life.”

  “I do not find your tale long-winded at all. I am finding it most interesting, especially since your life seems to have many parallels to mine. And—you may already know this—but it has taken me a very long life to accept an inescapable truth: one can never be truly happy until one makes peace with whatever is hidden away in the secret chambers of the heart.”

  “There is wisdom in that, certainly.”

  “I must hear how your story ends. Then I will tell you mine.”

  “Very well. Five years ago, two things happened that made me take stock of my life. I turned fifty, and my father …” He started to say “passed away” again, but what Markov had just said made him reconsider. After keeping what had happened that night inside all these years, this might be the right time and place to unlock that secret chamber in his heart. Maybe finally talking about his father’s death would start to pull him out of the downward spiral his life had become since that night. “… my father was murdered.”

  Hearing himself use the correct word roused him into plunging a
head with ruthless honesty. “We had gone to a horror movie on Halloween for our annual father/son birthday ritual. We’d gotten too old for costumes, but most of the audience was wearing one. The movie wasn’t very good, but we were old-school moviegoers. We never left our seats until the last credit disappeared from the screen.

  “This particular night, one other person was still in the theater when we got up. Several rows back. A man wearing the same mask Michael Myers wore in Halloween. Just before we got to his row, he stepped into the aisle and blocked our path.” Despite his steely effort to maintain composure, a hollow sigh escaped. He gathered himself to say something he’d only said once before: on the witness stand. “He stabbed my father in the heart.”

  Markov made a small groan. Quinn went on.

  “At the trial, the killer said the rubber mask had actually been used in one of the Halloween movies. He had gotten it at an auction, and whenever he put it on, he claimed the spirit of Michael Myers got into him. A medical expert for the defense presented a very artfully constructed argument for his ‘personality disorder,’ but to me it was all just courtroom bullshit. There is only one explanation for something like that: pure wanton evil.”

  Markov made a small shake of his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his eyes were filled with genuine sadness. “You have my condolences, Mr. Quinn. Something similar happened to me years ago. It ripped my family apart.”

  “What happened?”

  “That would be one dark tale too many for our first night together. I will let you finish yours, then we can move on to lighter matters. There will be time later to go digging into the secret chambers of my heart.”

  Quinn nodded. “That night affected me profoundly. It was ironic, because even though my father loved horror, a generally amoral genre, he was a very moral man. He abhorred movies with no conscience, where evil went unpunished. He hated what he called the slice ’n’ dice movies that became fashionable in the ’70s, when filmmakers started trying to outdo each other with gratuitous buckets of gore and thinking up new ways to show the human body being mutilated.”