Whispers from the Beyond

The clock now reads half past twelve...Nothing has happened, despite the pitch darkness. I can see the outline of the body lying in the coffin, Catherine's dull eyes, I smell the formaldehyde, and I hear the beats of my own heart... Nothing has changed...It was all an illusion...I lit the candle slowly, and it illuminated the place somewhat...The Count now seemed vulgar and absurd to an indescribable degree...The same face, the same decaying hair... and... and...It's over...I spoke to Catherine, but she didn't respond. A strange, distant look was on her face... This experience had shattered her, but I had no choice. What matters now is figuring out where the other fools went...Perhaps they left for some reason... or they're hiding in some tacky stunt, or...I lit a cigarette. Strange, this smell of sulfur... I had a lighter, which is why the smell surprised me. Dr. Richard Cummings, the fool who wasted his life on childish games, that fat Jew, and me—I'll return to Cairo carrying nothing but smiling memories... The smell of sulfur.Now I can say that science is science... and everything else is nonsense. But why are you looking at me like that, Catherine? That longing gaze... I was still handsome, my hair intact, but I wasn't that attractive, especially not to a teenage girl like Catherine... Come on, let's go up...She didn't respond. Suddenly, she burst into hysterical laughter... laughing and laughing in the dark... The poor thing had lost it... Then she stood up, staggering toward... toward the bucket of blood. She dipped her index finger into it, pulled it out stained, and... licked it with relish."Catherine, you madwoman..."She turned to me with her red lips and whispered in a cold voice:"You still don't understand, you fool... You don't understand..."How strange this is, what you're doing. You've gone completely mad... and...The coffin remained in its place all these centuries, with the Count lying inside and the ivory box on his chest... That's why Dr. (Lovarski)'s story seemed illogical and fabricated to me. It's impossible for him to be killed each time and then laid back in the coffin in the same position..."You'll never understand, you fool."Her teeth gleamed in the dark, and then I understood everything... It was never that (Dracula) rose from his coffin. The rituals were performed beside his coffin every hundred years, and then his spirit would transfer into one of the ritual practitioners. They would become the new (Dracula)... In our case, Catherine and I were the chosen ones for this purpose: that's why the others were excluded somehow... And now, Catherine—after midnight—had changed so much...Catherine had drunk the blood, her sharp teeth gleaming in the dark, and that cursed smell of sulfur filled the air...And I was trapped with her in the basement...I understood everything too late..."Dr. (Rifaat)... Come and kiss me..."A seductive voice coming from a distant world. So, this is how it ends."Come..."And that's why I hadn't transformed yet—because a newborn vampire needs a dinner... And what would it feast on if I became a vampire too?Before I could even comprehend what was happening, I bolted. I ran as I had never run in my life. I fled the basement, the hallway, the entrance to the house... The pitch darkness made me crash into countless unknown objects, my heart nearly leaping out of my throat...The garden was bathed in moonlight, and I started running... running... running... In the distance, I spotted the lights of civilization and saw ordinary people…