The Vampire's Bedside Companion: The Amazing World of Vampires in Fact and Fiction by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-03T23:00:00+00:00

TO CLAIM HIS OWN

by Crispin Derby

[CRISPIN DERBY (BORN 1948) is a journalist and is currently deputy editor of a leading specialist weekly magazine. He has contributed to a wide range of journals. He is a keen sportsman, gardener and lover of wild and domestic creatures - particularly when cooked. He tends to disparage the occult in general and confesses only to an insatiable craving for vampire literature, films and facts. He is a blood donor.]

It was three o’clock in the morning in East Berlin. A tall dark figure passed speedily across the frost-gripped park towards Karl Marx Allee. Prewar tenements rose grimly on the right while, across the broad highway, stood the modern concrete tributes to communist architecture.

Quicker and yet quicker strode his feet until they seemed to barely touch the ground. He was quite alone in the street.

As he approached the garish lights of the luxurious Berolina Hotel, he crossed the road holding aloft an arm as if in protest against the painfully bright illuminations.

He crossed rapidly, though picking carefully through the tramlines in the centre. As he reached the other side a grey uniformed policeman, with pistol at his side, casually stepped out of an alleyway. The man walked past him head down and with hat pushed firmly over his brow, hiding his pallid face.

The policeman watched him go but felt a sudden chill cut through him for which he could not account. But then, the man was heading directly towards the forbidden Berlin Wall.

'I should have stopped him,’ he thought. Then he radioed the nearest command post on the edge of the barbed-wired noman’s-land approaching the Wall.

The man walked on, his footsteps silent on the frost-whitened pavements. Then he ran out of street lights and the night grew black as he came into sight of the bricked-up tenements that marked the two-hundred-yard zone on the east side of the Wall.

There were distant spotlights, barbed wire and soldiers’ huts littered about. Two conscript guards were idly chattering while taking sly drags at an inferior cigarette. The man saw the clouds of smoke and hot breath puffing out of their chilled bodies and strode out of the shadows towards them.

As he came within a hundred yards of them the radio message came through to give the alert. In a flash the cigarette was trampled on and the machine guns were cocked.

He instinctively sought the shadows but could clearly be seen. The guards moved forward. So did he. The young guards did their best to look menacing but he seemed oblivious. With head down his tall slender figure moved inexorably forwards. They turned towards each other feeling horribly lonely.

'He’s a bold one, huh!’ said one.

'We’re for it if we don’t challenge,’ replied his friend nervously fingering the gun. and praying that his authority wouldn’t be tested.

As the man came within twenty yards the taller guard barked out as fiercely as he could.

'Achtung, Achtung.’

But the words stuck in his throat. A cloud of dense fog appeared from nowhere bringing foul vapours, filling their lungs with choking smog.

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