Authors: Robert Ryan
Markov stated the obvious. “Vlad the Impaler.”
Quinn nodded. “The original Dracula. Son of Dracul. Very realistic sculpture. Is it wax? If it is, Madame Toussaud would have loved to have it for her museum.”
Markov gave him the Lugosi stare.
“It is not a sculpture. It is real.”
Quinn understood but couldn’t accept it. “
What?
What are you saying?”
“I’m saying this is the actual head of Vlad Dracula III. Vlad the Impaler. I’m sure a folklorist with your love of the macabre knows the story.”
Quinn nodded and looked back at the severed head, recalling the exhaustive research he’d done into the Dracula legend. Years of dealing with murders prompted by the most outrageous superstitions had conditioned him never to rush to judgment, but the notion that a five-hundred-year-old severed head could still exist, in this pristine condition, was preposterous. Nevertheless, he quelled that thought and recited what he knew of the legend with scholarly objectivity.
“Documentation confirms that Vlad Dracula was indeed beheaded after a battle against Ottoman Turks in 1476. Most likely near the monastery at Snagov. Some accounts say that monks found the body, but not the head. One legend has it that the sultan had ordered for the head to be brought to him in Constantinople. It was dipped in honey to preserve it, then put on display to prove that the Ottomans’ evil archenemy had been vanquished. That may or may not be true, but the fact is that no one knows what happened to the head.”
“Until I tracked it down in 1945.”
“Markov. Come on.”
“I completely understand your skepticism. I’m asking you to believe something—many things—that are far beyond the laws of nature. But there are two things you need to factor into your thinking: My obsession with the Dracula legend, and the fact that I had access to a trailblazer no one else had: Lugosi. He was born and raised in a land steeped in the Dracula legend, going back centuries, to Vlad’s days as Prince of Wallachia—the region that included Transylvania.
“Lugosi was born in 1884, and Bram Stoker’s book came out in 1897. Until then Vlad Dracula III was merely a ruler Lugosi had learned about in history class. To some, Dracula was seen as a hero for repelling the Turkish invasion. But then Stoker’s novel came out, giving Vlad’s name to the infamous vampire, and the legend began.
“Lugosi told me what a sensation it caused in Transylvania. He and his teen-aged friends devoured the book. It affected him deeply, to the point where he wondered if the original Dracula might have ever engaged in vampirism. Lugosi researched it off and on for years, even more intensely when he got cast in the part in the stage production that preceded the film. He was a serious actor who always did his homework, and he poured himself into that role, feeling it was the one he had been born to play. He combed the records, looking for descendants. He went to the town where Dracula had spent five years in prison and sought out the local historian. This historian had collected every shred of information he could find about their most infamous prisoner, which included the prison log with the names of Dracula’s visitors.
“The name of one particular woman kept appearing that didn’t appear in any of the other documents. The historian had traced her to a remote village some distance from the prison. Romanian oral tradition is very strong. Often it is all we have to go on in the centuries before records were well kept.”
“Welcome to the world of a folklorist,” Quinn said.
“Indeed. So we can imagine this historian talking to the villagers, armed with only the name of this woman and her apparent connection to Vlad Dracula. Eventually he found someone who recognized her name. The scandalous story had been passed down for generations. She’d had a son but never gotten married. The father was said to be Vlad Dracula. According to the villager, legend had it that, years later, the son was at the battle where his father was beheaded with his own sword. He had somehow retrieved the head and sword and escaped to England.
“Lugosi had to abandon his search at that point, because after
Dracula
came out, his career took off. And that could have been the end of it. But Lugosi’s fateful path had brought him to someone far more obsessive about the Dracula legend—me. The chance, however remote, to actually possess the head of Vlad Dracula himself took my obsession to a whole new level.”
At first Quinn had considered Markov’s talk of Dracula and dark secrets to be simply manifestations of his movie-influenced tendency toward melodrama. But now Quinn was beginning to see the aptness of his references. Whether or not he was staring at the actual head of Vlad the Impaler, he felt himself being pulled into Markov’s “infernal miasma.”
“I told Bela I would follow the trail he had blazed. He let me copy the records he had kept, and gave me his blessing. His research had uncovered the illegitimate son’s name: Viktor Flaviu.”
In the quick glance Markov cast at the severed head before going on, Quinn thought he saw a trace of affection.
“And so began a quest that took nearly fifteen years. Since the villager had told the historian that the son had escaped to England, I went to London and scoured the records: births, deaths, marriages, passenger lists, military records, land records—everything. Viktor had gotten married in 1502 and had two sons. He died in 1521. I won’t bore you with the countless dead ends, but this is where—some would say luck, I would say destiny—plays a part. Finally, after following a bloodline that had trickled down to a few drops, in 1945 I found a Romanian man who had the head. He was living in a rundown flat in Manhattan. Irony of ironies, only a few miles from where Lugosi had starred in the stage version of
Dracula
. I was awestruck at having succeeded on such a far-fetched quest, but the scene was not one for rejoicing.
“To see this eighty-nine-year-old shell of a man, sitting in his ratty armchair with the stuffing coming out … faithfully executing a duty he probably had never really wanted or understood, doing whatever needed doing to preserve the five-hundred-year-old remains of Vlad the Impaler. I pictured his whole world just sitting in that room, tending to what was left of Dracula: a severed head in a glass case, showing no sign of life, yet still powerful enough to command his one remaining loyal subject to do his bidding.”
The same thing could be said about you
, Quinn thought.
“Looking at the man’s cadaverous frame,” Markov continued, “I couldn’t help but think that, if not literally, certainly figuratively, Dracula had sucked the life out of him.”
As he has done to you.
“I asked for proof, and he gave me a letter establishing provenance and giving instructions to each custodian on what must be done to preserve Vlad’s head. The letter had been written by the first caretaker. His son Viktor.”
“You have the letter?”
“Yes. And one thing more had been passed down along with the head and the letter. The sword that had supposedly been used to behead Vlad Dracula. His prized sword that had belonged to his father. It had the Dracula crest on the hilt, but even so, I knew this could all be a hoax. The sword could be an imitation. The letter could be a forgery, the head a fake. But the scene of the withered custodian watching over these relics had me in no mood to argue, and on some visceral level I was convinced. Technically I owed this man nothing, but I already had more money than I could spend in several lifetimes, and wanted to do something to ease whatever days the poor wretch had left. He almost went into shock when I wrote him a check for fifty thousand dollars—a fortune in those days. I promised to follow the prescribed treatment and perpetuate the legacy.” Markov nodded toward the head that, if genuine, had deteriorated very little since posing for that famous portrait five hundred years ago. “And here he is.”
“An astounding tale, to say the least,” Quinn said. “I see a bare spot on the lining at the bottom of the case in the shape of the sword. Did you remove it for some reason?”
“No. Max absconded with it.” Markov’s face sagged under a weary regret. “My son. He knew it was my most precious possession. It had traveled with the head all those centuries. An expert confirmed that it was a Toledo sword from the 1400s. It is a matter of record that after Vlad Dracul was slain, his sword was retrieved from the battlefield and given to his son. Dracula—which means ‘son of Dracul’—treasured it and used it for the rest of his life. When DNA testing became reliable, I scraped a small sample of dried-up blood from the sword and collected a vial of blood from the head. I had them tested and they were identical. The blood on the sword was the blood of Vlad the Impaler.”
Quinn remained skeptical, but let it pass.
Markov went on. “The final irony was that the sword Dracula used to behead so many was used to behead him in the end.”
“Why would your son take the sword?”
“Because he despises me.” He made an impatient wave. “Another twisted branch in my family tree. I’m not in the mood for that particular story right now. Perhaps later.”
Quinn added it to the growing pile of questions pummeling to get out and gestured at the head. “How can tissue that’s been dead for over five hundred years not have decomposed? The only deterioration I see is those bumps, or ridges, where the skin has apparently sagged or drooped.”
“We cannot possibly know everything that has happened in the passing along of this head for five hundred years. We can only hypothesize.”
“So what is your hypothesis?”
“When I first gained possession, I carefully removed one of those bumps and had it examined. It was not flesh. It was dried-up honey. With a trace of formaldehyde.” Markov took a beat to let that sink in. “Honey was a common preservative in Dracula’s time. Even today it is still used in some of the more primitive cultures. I believe the early custodians continually replenished the honey until formaldehyde became the scientifically accepted alternative.
“Whatever the case, to fully answer your question I must first show you the letter from Viktor. It is his eyewitness account of how this came to be, and his instructions on the proper care. Only after reading that can you fully understand the things I will tell you. Even then credibility will be stretched to the breaking point. I would not believe these things myself if I had not experienced them firsthand.”
Quinn recalled something he’d said to a detective after assisting on the case involving satanic child porn and sacrifice: nothing shocked him anymore. But….
Vlad the Impaler’s head preserved for five hundred years?
Markov went to a small safe in the corner and removed several sheets of paper. He carefully arranged them into two piles on the small table, then gestured for Quinn to sit in the armchair.
Leaning over him, Markov explained. “This is the original.” He indicated the pile on the left, three pages handwritten on yellowing parchment paper sealed in plastic sleeves. “Written in Latin, which the Romanians inherited from their Roman conquerors.” He gestured at the typewritten pages alongside the letter. “This is my translation. For the sake of readability, I took a few liberties in rendering his sometimes archaic language into a more modern form, but in no way has any of the meaning been altered.”
“You know Latin?”
“And Romanian. And five other languages. Living like Morbius for fifty years has given me ample time to learn many things. Not as many as his Robby the Robot, who knew ‘one hundred-eighty-seven languages, along with their various dialects and sub-tongues.’ But then again, Morbius was a philologist. I am a filmmaker.”
Quinn made a small appreciative nod at Markov’s word-for-word delivery of Robby’s line from
Forbidden Planet
, at the same time wondering how deep into madness a hundred years of obsessive filmmaking delusions—the last fifty on his own Forbidden Planet—had taken him.
“I have another matter to tend to,” Markov continued, “so I shall leave you alone to read the letter. I will return in good time.”
He stood and held Quinn’s gaze for a long beat—a stock actor’s trick for punching up an exit line. “Viktor describes the origin of a species. One that Darwin never dreamed of.”
January 12, 1477
Vlad Dracula is dead but not dead.
I am his illegitimate son, Viktor Flaviu, born in 1456. Those who search for a record of my existence search in vain. Our relationship has been hidden from the world. In the remote village of my mother he arranged an upbringing equal to one of his rightful heirs. In the privacy of his secret home I received the finest education, and in the hidden forests I was trained in the skills of the warrior.
This document is the sole testament and decree regarding the fate of my father and myself. It shall be passed on to future custodians of Vlad Dracula’s
mortal
immortal remains, to instruct them in the proper procedure for preserving them. These instructions must be followed in the strictest manner to keep what is left alive until science can find a way to make him whole again.
First there must be an explanation of what God and science tell us cannot be.
Vlad Dracula had long understood that the blood is the life. He had watched it flow out of the many he had impaled, and knew well the tales the villagers told, of vampires who had roamed the wilds of Transylvania for centuries. Creatures of the night, in whose veins the blood of the living intermingled with the blood of the undead to become the source of eternal life.
During his reign as Prince of Wallachia, Vlad Dracula knew his enemies would attempt to assassinate him as they had his father, Vlad Dracul. And so he made Transylvanian alchemist Baron Dimitru a part of his court, commissioning him to unlock the secret that gave unhallowed immortality to the undead.
The Baron gained the trust of the vampires and was allowed to live among them, they as eager as he to understand how they were able to cheat death by sucking the life from the living, to understand this evil practice that gave them life but cost them their souls.
Through bloodletting the Baron began to combine the blood of the vampires with the blood of aged villagers, willing participants in an experiment that might make them young again. After years of adjusting the admixture, adding elements whose properties are known only to the practitioners of this Hermetic science, he observed their revitalization. Long after the barrenness of old age, they began to have children. Samples of their altered blood proved that the alchemical processes of the human body had fully transmuted the admixture into the blood of immortality.