the newfound night. All but Ellen stand at one of the windows, watching her, watching as she finally stops and glares down at them from the hill. She raises her arm and points at the small house, at them, then turns her palm to the falling rain, somehow catching it in her hand although she remains dry. She calls out in a singsong voice, “Girls and boys, come out to play. The moon doth shine as bright as day. Leave your supper and leave your sleep, and come with your playfellows into the street!”
“She is absolutely mad,” Vambéry says softly at Bram’s side.
She sings this again and again. When she sings it for a fifth time, the wind and rain come to a sudden and swift stop. Emily laughs aloud and spins in a circle, the hem of her dress riding the wind.
A thin mist comes forth from the ground at her feet and curls into the air, spinning for a brief second before growing solid and taking the form of a man, a man none of them have ever seen. He wears strange clothing from another place and time and his blond hair is ruffled, hanging down over his red eyes. He seems confused at first, unaware of where he is; then his eyes find the small house, find them standing at the window, and he smiles.
Another mist sprouts from the ground, then another, and yet another after that.
“Vampires, the whole lot of them,” Vambéry says. “They are rising from their graves.”
A dozen more, both men and women, adults and children, come up the other side of the hill behind Emily, stopping when they reach her. More behind them.
Bram watches in revulsion as these ghouls begin to arise all around. He thinks of all the defiled crucifixes tangled in the weeds, the graves throughout the village, hundreds of undead all resurrecting on this dreadful night—all those poor victims Dracul drained and enslaved when he hid the heart of Deaglan O’Cuiv in this godforsaken place, all drank of his blood. He turned every last one of them; he controls them all.
Behind them, Maggie and Patrick O’Cuiv rise from their own graves, from the crates inside the house, their slumber over. They rise and stand beside Ellen, looking down at the body of Deaglan O’Cuiv, at the heart beating slowly within his chest.
Outside, Emily comes down from the hill and goes to the black coach. She strokes the neck of each horse in turn as she passes, their skin flinching and quivering, endeavoring to evade her touch, but, still in their harnesses, unable to do so. The undead stand all about, parting their ranks as she approaches.
A swirl of white mist rises out from under the coach, and, even before it assumes a solid form, Bram realizes where Dracul has been hiding all along. Had he studied the coach with a more discerning eye when they first arrived, he may have discovered it then, but he did not. Instead, he walked right past it, as they all did. Built into the underside of the coach, fashioned to blend into the woodwork unseen, was a coffin.
* * *
? ? ?
IT TAKES SHAPE not at Emily’s side but halfway down the hill, between her and the house in which they all are gathered. The crowd of undead parts once again creating a void at their center and it is here the cloud of mist from beneath the black coach becomes a man.
He appears no different than he had at Whitby Abbey, Bram thinks.
Dracul stands there for a moment, regarding all around him, his long inky cape fluttering in the storm’s violent breath. His deep red eyes gaze out over the legion of undead, up at Emily next to the coach, then finally settle upon the small house.
He smiles.
A number of the undead hungrily spy the inert bodies of the Szgany lying around the house, now abandoned by the marauding cockroaches, and they eagerly converge. Like a pack of wild dogs, they drop to all fours and fall upon the Szgany, hunkering over them, the Szgany disappearing under a frenzied cacophony that Bram will hear echoing in his brain for the rest of his life. Emily’s