PROLOGUE:

In a Time of
Silence
T
here is in my mind even now a single and horrible image
that never leaves my thoughts: the empty cross, that
symbol of the Immortal Adversary’s primacy over the fetid
tumescence of sinew and flesh. It does me no comfort to consider that
this wretched ornament of servitude is thought lovely by millions of
my onetime species, for it is their devotion to such icons of their
indenture that besets me and that I have striven to escape from, and
even to reverse.
Hold a crucifix before me, with the Adversary’s effigy pinned to it
the way an entomologist might pin a beetle-bug before dissection, and
my joy is unbounded. The Foe is imprisoned. Harmless. Constrained
to partake by some small measure in the unrestrained suffering He
has meted out to others in their billions down the blood-soaked
ages.
The vacated cross is another matter: God’s malevolent parlor
magic made manifest, with all His grim trickeries revealed, enlarged
and set like traps before the weak and thoughtless hordes who would
rather writhe for a lifetime in His appalling grasp than taste the
crisp and terrifying atmosphere of a single un-poppetted breath.
Transfigured by some squalid vision of religious ecstasy, with
hymnals to the benevolence of his Cruel Master deafening him,
and puerile candy-colored phantasms of some fictive and invisible
reward blinding his sight, the man who brandishes so profane an
object is not the religious warrior of his own imaginings but a slave
who kisses his chains. I shrink from this man, but not from his alleged
and self-awarded sanctity, for he has none. I shrink instead from the
vacancy on that uninhabited cross, an emblem of my own failure in
a centuries-old war yet to be concluded. He has escaped me. What
raw red mischief is He working somewhere? And who is to die this
time for His unquantifiable sins?

xxi
xxii Incarnadine

I have traveled the world from end to edge and am older than
forests. Men, of the sort I was once but am no longer, have spent
centuries trying to finish me in ways both direct and imaginative,
and I have faced unnumbered perils by spear and sword and gun and
bow. The blades that bit deep into my body, bullets that cleaved my
skin and organs and tissues then passed harmless by, images seared
into my eyes of man’s viciousness toward innocent others—few of
these things have left more than a glancing mark upon my mind and
heart.
Of a thousand-thousand horrors ingested, it is the vacated cross
that preeminently haunts my dreams.
My struggle against that unholy artifact now reaches for its
decisive moment, and while many of my actions have not gone
unspoken of, the Adversary’s minions have too frequently been my
interlocutors. I am named Demon, Usurper, the Unconsecrated and
Dread Prince. Peasant mystery stories accrue to me, heightening my
depravities, clovening my hoof. And so the fetid odor of a grave I
have eluded and taught others to evade scents my every gesture, a
befouled and manufactured atmosphere that transmogrifies my one
unquestioned accomplishment into something like its opposite, and
sends those I might reach for across the mortal abyss scurrying from
my hand—rushing for the shameful magic of ritual, crucifix, and
prayer.
I alone have perpetrated the one offense the Adversary abides
least of all. I alone have conspired successfully to end God’s monopoly
on time.
In the indeterminate twilight of our pitiless campaign, the Wiley
Foe may yet triumph against me, and my foundering offensive end
in rout and ignominy. Against that outcome, I leave behind this
testament, that fair-minded creatures of another time may see past
 R. H. Greene xxiii

my own imperfections as an insurrectionist and judge me by my

motives and true deeds.
Whether this is to be the final diary of a greater emancipation
than the world has yet known of, or the object lesson of a defeat to
rival bright Lucifer’s, can only be revealed in the fullness of a time yet
to come. But that time draws near. And so I set down this story of a
reluctant and fretful Spartacus and his inconceivable sufferings, that
others unborn may take what is usable or consoling for their own
skirmishes against the Great Antagonist out of the raw stuff of my
pitiable and unachieved life.
I set this down freely, of my own will and by my own hand, and
avow that everything contained herein is true and factual, however
incredible the exterior details may appear.
- Konstantin Kuzmanov, nee “Dracula”
London, Tuesday 4th October, 1887