The Third Antichrist (3 page)

Dracul swallowed. It was a beautiful coat. A transcendental coat. In fact the coat was so large and the fur was so thick that it might even double as a blanket, if necessary. Failing that, the coat could be disguised – after a theft, say, leading to a change of ownership – via a trimming away of the base, instantly transforming the coat into a jacket and matching hat. Antanasia was a skilful seamstress. She would have no trouble adapting the coat to Dracul’s specifications. He might even gift her some of the remaining fur with which to make a muff for her hands against the winter chill – if she pleased him, that was, and granted him certain of the additional favours that the Friday-night visitors so frequently demanded of her.

Dracul watched the man start up the rocky steps towards the plateau. The chauffeur also watched his master, his face twisted into a supercilious grin. Then he got back inside the car, which he had left running to conserve the heat, and slammed the door against the cold.

Dracul ghosted the coat-bearer’s steps towards the monastery complex. It soon became apparent that the man wished, for some reason, to visit the actual hermitage itself, and not simply the St Maria church. This decision played directly into Dracul’s hands.

At the last possible moment, Dracul darted in front of the man and splayed himself across the hermitage door. ‘You go in. You pay. You pay to me. Otherwise you not go in.’

Dracul’s eyes played over the man’s coat like a dog sizing up a marrowbone. Closer to, the coat was even more gorgeous than he had at first supposed. In fact it was the single most beautiful object that Dracul had ever seen in his life. If he had possessed a hundred rubles, he would willingly have given them for a coat such as this. But he had only eight-seven and a half kopeks to his name. Hardly enough to purchase a pair of nylon socks from the local flea market – far less an astrakhan coat.

The man punched Dracul in the face. The boy’s head cracked back against the hardwood door as if pivoted on a spring. The shock was total. Dracul lurched forwards onto his knees and vomited out his breakfast.

The man kicked Dracul in the stomach. Then he wiped his shoe – which had been tarnished by some of the vomit – onto Dracul’s trousers.

The man hesitated for a moment, clearly weighing up whether to kick Dracul again. Then he grunted, unlatched the door to the hermitage, and started down the stone steps.

3

Dracul lay on the ground outside the monastery entrance. No one had ever hit him that hard before. Not even his father in one of his drunken rages. Dracul felt as if his jaw might be shattered. And one or two of his ribs.

He dry-retched like a cat. Then he levered himself up onto his knees. He remained on all fours for some time, his head hanging down between his shoulders. Then he lurched to his feet and staggered towards the great stone cross, his body bent double, his hands cradling his stomach like a man with colic.

Dracul collapsed in the lee of the cross. An icy wind bit into his thin jacket. He could feel it searching up the legs of his trousers.

Despite the intense pain, all Dracul could think about was the man in the astrakhan coat. The man filled him with an intense admiration. This nameless person was clearly someone of immense importance. Someone he must learn to emulate. No one, in all the years that Dracul had eked out his living from blackmailing visitors to the monastery, had ever responded as this man had done. One or two had grabbed him, it is true, or pushed him roughly aside – but never with violent intent. They had simply been reacting out of frustration.

But this man had acted without compunction. Dracul had got in his way. So he had forced Dracul out of his way. The fact that Dracul was only twelve years old had clearly not clouded the man’s thought processes in the least.

Dracul hugged himself and moaned. The pain in his ribs was spreading out across his stomach. He coughed in an effort to clear the congestion in his throat, but the pain from the movement was so great that it nearly caused him to black out. He clutched at his mouth to prevent a further unwanted spasm.

It was October, and the autumn was shaping up to be a hard one. Dracul knew that he would not be able to walk far with the injuries he had sustained. Perhaps not even as far as nearby Butuceni. Would the hermit agree to take him in? Might he lie up for a while in one of the stone cubicles the former monks had used as bedrooms? Probably not. The old man spoke to no one. And he mistrusted Dracul – that much was clear. Suspected that Dracul was misusing the monastery site.

Dracul sensed, rather than saw, the man’s approach. The man still had the astrakhan coat draped across his shoulders like a cloak. He stopped at the cross, ignoring Dracul completely. Then he strolled to the lip of the plateau and peered out over the edge.

Everyone did this. It was hardly surprising. It was one of the wonders of Moldova. The river snaked below the limestone escarpment – a sheer 200-foot drop from the base of the great cross – and slithered on through the distant countryside like the retreating back of a meadow viper.

Dracul leapt to his feet and ran at the man. He did not think of the pain. He did not ask himself whether he was capable of achieving his end. He simply acted. Just like the man had acted at the monastery door.

At the very last moment the man began to turn, as if he intended to fend Dracul off with the flat of his palm. But it was too late.

Dracul struck the man full in the back, just as he was swivelling, on one foot, to face his assailant. Just as he was at his most vulnerable.

Dracul was not a large boy. But he was strong. He had been used to hard physical labour in the fields ever since his sixth birthday. He was a master scyther and a master hayricker, just as all village boys his age were. His body was as hard as iron from the summer harvest.

The man began to fall.

Dracul’s last conscious act was to drag the astrakhan coat from about the man’s shoulders.

Then he blacked out.

4

The pain in his side awoke Dracul five minutes later. He looked around for the man, but he was not there. The astrakhan coat lay beside him, however, like the sloughed-off skin of a reptile. Like the sloughed-off skin of the river that snaked through the valley below them.

Dracul could sense himself starting to hallucinate. Moaning softly, he dragged the coat towards him and rolled himself in it. The warmth and the smell of the coat comforted him immediately. He lay there for some time, immersed in the fur, not trusting himself to think.

The rush at the man had damaged something further inside him. This much was clear. Dracul could scarcely breathe. It was as if his lungs were filling up with soapy foam.

The chauffeur. The chauffeur would come up and look for his master. Then he would find Dracul. He would see Dracul in his master’s coat. He would look down over the ridge. He would see his master’s body on the rocks below. And his master was clearly an important man.

The authorities would take Dracul away and they would torture him. He had heard of such things happening to people who got on the wrong side of senior Party officials, or who fell foul of the nomenklatura in some way. His father regularly regaled him with gruesome tales of what had gone on over the border in Romania, at the notorious Sighet prison, before the powers-that-be had transformed it into a broom factory and salt warehouse in 1977.

The fact that Dracul was still a minor would have no effect on what they did to him. It would make it worse, perhaps. They would use him, just as the procession of men who came to his father’s house on Friday nights used his sister, Antanasia. And this Dracul could not contemplate.

Once again he forced himself achingly slowly onto all fours. Still clutching the coat, he drifted to his feet and stood, swaying, near the flank of the great cross. One part of him was tempted to approach the ridge and look over the edge to see the body of the important man below – to see where it had fallen. But Dracul knew that this would be madness. He too would fall. Or the old monk would come out onto the stone terrace below the hermitage for a little air, look up, and see him. This could not be allowed to happen.

Dracul stumbled away from the cross and towards some nearby rocks. He knew, from his previous wanderings, where a hidden cave was set deep into the plateau floor. Perhaps a hermit had used it in the old days, before the time of the Soviet Union? Maybe wild animals used it now? Dracul didn’t care. It would serve as shelter from the wind. No one would come there. No one knew of it. In all the years Dracul had been visiting the plateau, it had remained undiscovered.

And now, too, he had the coat.

5

Dracul awoke to find himself lying, not in his secret crypt, but on one of the stone cots in the communal sleeping quarters of the Pestere cave monastery. Candles were burning at his head and feet.

At first he thought he might be dead, and that the village had found his body and had laid him out in preparation for his wake. Then he realized that he was still wearing the astrakhan coat. And that he was still in pain. And dead people, he knew, did not feel pain.

He had crept into the monks’ dormitory often enough in the past, when the weather had turned angry, or when he had felt the need for some, albeit insubstantial, proximity to another human being. The old monk was partially deaf. It had been an easy thing to sneak in when his back was turned, steal some of his food, and then take shelter until the storm had passed.

Dracul would pass the time by secretly watching the old monk at work on his icons – or listening to him muttering to himself and reciting his prayers. Sometimes he would entertain himself by moving some of the old man’s things. Just a small movement. To a different chair, perhaps. Or onto a different bench in the chapel. Did the monk think that this was God scattering about his possessions? Or the Virgin Mary? The prospect of the old monk’s bewilderment pleased Dracul immeasurably.

Looking at the candles, a memory resurfaced of his mother’s wake, four years previously. Her waxen face. The barely disguised bruises that still clouded her neck, and which a thick layer of powder and masking cream could do little to diminish.

At first Dracul suspected that his father had killed his mother in a jealous rage. These rages had been a constant of his early youth. All would be well for weeks, if not months. Then, unexpectedly, his mother would disappear from the house. She would be gone for days. His father would career about the village in increasing desperation, cursing the fact that he had married a Gypsy – cursing his wife’s wandering ways – to anyone he could get to listen. Then he would start drinking.