The archaeologist spared no details in his story. He explained how the peepholes allowed guards who got a thrill from watching the suffering of others to observe the prisoners’ slow and painful deaths as starvation and disease took hold. How they would watch as the rats started chewing on the dying when they became too weak to shoo them away, taking bets on which part of a prisoner’s body the rodents would go for first. Apparently, it was always the soft tissue – the genitals, the face, the eyes. Once the body had been reduced to gnawed bones and a sticky, stinking coating of vitreous fluid on the stone floor, the door was opened and a new occupant took residence. Except one.
Like freaked-out boy scouts telling ghost stories around a campfire, Flynn and his team had leaned in. After all, everyone loves a good ‘haunted castle’ story, don’t they? The archaeologist risked permanent sight damage by pouring himself another glass of hooch and had continued with his tale.
This cell, he explained, had no door. Instead massive stones had been seconded from other parts of the castle and used to wall up the doorway, leaving just the iron-barred peep-hole through which guards occasionally pushed a hissing, squawking cat. This unique prisoner, brought back home to this dark and terrifying castle after rampaging for years across Europe, liked his food still kicking. So they gave him cats because it seemed to be the one thing he… it… feared. That was their torment – giving him something they knew full well he detested, but was so starved and emaciated that he had no choice but to overcome his revulsion and feed on whatever screeching titbit the guards tossed through the barred gap.
The isolation was a torment, too, especially for such a brilliant, bright and diamond-hard mind. The knowledge that the stinking, festering cell littered with the bones of cats and rats was to be his everlasting tomb – a tomb that was designed for the living, not the undead – had warped his already-twisted mind beyond evil, and beyond any form of redemption and turned it from a ‘he’ into an ‘it’. That’s why the priests had brought it back here. Even they were afraid of it; afraid of what it had become. Afraid of what it could do, especially after Death had supposedly claimed its putrefying corpse and it had reanimated, sending at least three of those same priests to early and very violent deaths.
This was the cell it had called home for years, centuries, driven utterly insane by the lust for sustenance and tormented by the hissing, caterwauling animals the guards hurled into his cell. When the citadel was abandoned and the tunnels lost to history, it went into hibernation for centuries. Occasionally, it woke and fed on any rat that wasn’t quick enough to escape its clutches. Then, it returned to its state of stasis until the starvation became too great once again.
Well, that was the story. Flynn had listened, but up until about five minutes ago, he really hadn’t bought any of this BS. As an ex-soldier he had seen enough horror in his life to be open to the idea of the manifestation of evil. Getting chased through slime-covered corridors by that a snarling, salivating monstrosity meant he was getting more open-minded by the second…
They’d found the cell. And behind the stones lurked a creature that had wandered the dark desert of madness for more lifetimes than it could count. When the archaeologists had unblocked the tomb it had burst forth in a howling, screaming frenzy, tearing the first man it saw to pieces. It had sucked the young man – a research fellow in the final year of his doctorate – dry, gorging itself and likely relishing the feeling of drunken power. Sated, it had slumped to the floor for a moment, laughing maniacally. The first taste awoke the hunger. Now? It wanted more.
This was what Colby Flynn and the archaeologist were running from. Not an alcohol-fuelled story. A very real, very hungry and very angry creature from the pit of mankind’s nightmares.
But this was no simple medieval terror, released from its prison at last, and free to unleash its maddened, blackened rage once again on the world. Once, it had been a sentient, passionate young man, a visionary and military genius. But fate had been cruel to Vlad and the Black Prince had eventually been imprisoned in the stone-lined cell of Tokat Castle, a broken tooth of a citadel that towered high above the city.
The Seljuk Turks who had conquered Tokate in the 12th Century had discovered a maze of underground passages and stone-lined cells, and had turned it into their own stronghold. In 1442 they were given their most dangerous prize, Prince Vlad III. But the young boy and his brother were political hostages, not prisoners. So, during his internment the Ottomans had attempted to create an ally out of him. They taught him military strategy. They nurtured his natural ability for warfare and combat, taught him the classics, languages, geography, mathematics and science. They had given him every advantage.
But they also brutalised him, beating and humiliating this prince’s son who would not bend his knee to the Turk’s rule.
And that was a big, big mistake.
They turned an intelligent, bright boy into a sadistic, vicious man – a military savant whose ability to strategise played a major part in his success as a ruler later on. But his brutalised, blackened heart became darker and more infested with evil until he created a monster that would resonate through the centuries.
Dracula.
The Impaler.
The devourer of children and sucker of souls.
This was to be his prison – firstly in life, and later, when the monks of Comana had brought his bloated corpse back from their monastery to the one place on earth they knew would hold him.
And it had held him. The monks’ plan had worked – right up until the moment when well-meaning academics with no understanding of true evil and a firm if totally misguided belief that knowledge would be their shield, had torn down the stones that kept Vlad from unleashing his unique brand of horror on the world.
To modern minds, especially those belonging to academics and military specialists that had indulged in the local hooch for a couple of hours, vampires were nothing more than a myth. One that had been responsible for some of both the best and the worst literary endeavours, and that echoed down through the ages to become sanitised by Hollywood into sparkly vampires with sickly complexions, beloved of swooning and incredibly stupid teenage girls. All of the archaeologist’s tales were merely that. Just tales. Stories. Pseudo-romantic embellishments of the history of an otherwise ordinary Ottoman castle.
Yeah. Tell that to the ragged, bloody remains of a twenty-five-year-old research fellow who had been Vlad’s first real meal in over five hundred long, long years. He had taken the full brunt of Vlad’s maddened rage. Flynn and the archaeologist had watched helplessly as a whirling maelstrom of hatred, blood-lust and utter fury swirled around the screaming student, tearing and shredding his skin, ripping it from his face and spraying blood in an arc around the corridor. It moved too fast to see clearly; just a tornado of rage that dismembered the student in a heartbeat.
And then?
Silence.
For a few fleeting seconds, a lull had descended on the corridors, allowing the echoes of the research student’s screams to fade into the stone and join the entombed chorus of thousands of other victims locked into the granite blocks for eternity. But then slowly, after the savagery and the silence, came a growing, rolling, maniacal laugh that reached out beyond the walls that had entombed the monster for so long. In the nearby village, the not-quite-so-ignorant-as-everybody-thought peasants who had grown up on fireside stories of the demon that was entombed in the citadel’s secret tunnels, bolted their doors, pulled the shutters closed and huddled together, gripped with an ancient fear that their ancestors had passed to them in their very genes. They knew. They knew that Vlad was free. The Dracul, the Black Prince, the Impaler. He was free…