***
The corridor in which Art currently stood was quiet; he had encountered only a few people in the past ten minutes, and they were neither un-dead nor threatening.
For a long time, he stood in the middle of the hall, looking helplessly about himself. He had heard nor seen anything weird since he had freed the young American steward; Dracula had given his the slip, so to say, and he was either hiding or still on the move. For some reason, Art didn’t think that he was particularly interested in Seward and Van Helsing at the moment. It could have been his own paranoia, exacerbated by chasing a real life monster through a foundering vessel, but Art was sure that Dracula wanted to claim him first. Dracula may even have wanted to turn him into an un-dead, just out of a sick hate. As Art got back under way, moving cautiously so that he could not be ambushed, and so that he would miss no noise or any other unnatural disturbance, Art was jolted by the resolution that came into his mind: He would commit suicide before he let Dracula do to him what he had done to…Lucy. A picture flashed across Art’s mind: He was on the floor, struggling weakly under the hellish weight and fury of Dracula, who’s mouth was open in an O, revealing his nasty needlepoint fangs. This imagination Art calmly removed the pistol from his jacket, placed the barrel into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Art shuddered. He hoped to God that it would not come to that.
A few moments later, Art found himself standing before a glass door leading to the second-class dinning saloon. He tentatively entered, peered from left to right, saw only a few stewards sitting around a table smoking cigarettes, and removed himself. They didn’t seem to be flustered in any way. If Dracula had come through…
Just then a horrible occurred to Art. He tried and tried to ascribe it to his unfounded paranoia, but he couldn’t. Dracula, possibly, didn’t have just one lackey on the ship, he had two, or four, or ten…
Art chuckled away his own apprehension, and continued on down the long corridor. A narrow stairwell brought him down a deck, and he was immediately taken with how almost all the corridors on Titanic were nearly identical; it couldn’t have been too hard to draw the plans up: a few luxurious accommodations, and the rest bland, rehashed filler.
Up ahead, several men stood outside of a door, smoking and casually conversing. They took little notice of Art as he approached.
“There’s talk of water down in the engine room,” one man, a tall bald specimen with a walrus mustache, informed his comrades.
“Nah,” one said with a dismissive wave. “You mean in the watertight compartments, and that’s only two of ‘em.”
“I thought it was all the same,” replied the walrus.
“Nope. The engine rooms are back towards the stern; only the two forward-most compartments are flooded, and not even to the ceiling. All’s well, boys, it takes at least five or six flooded compartments to sink us.”
Art passed them without a word or a thought. Another staircase took him down another deck…and there, up ahead, stood Dracula in man form, his arms crossed and a hellish smile splitting his blood-caked face. Art jerked to a stop, and at once had the gun in his hand.
“Too late,” Dracula said goading. And indeed it was. For when Art next settled his eyes on Dracula, he was nothing but a fine mist, which was quickly sucked into a vent on the baseboard.
Molten rage filled Art. “Come back! Come back and fight, you coward!” he screamed, already moving. He knelt down before the brass vent, and peered into the darkness. From faraway, echoy, evil sounding laughter drifted forth.
“Fight me!” Art called into the vent, but was rewarded only with a repeat of his own command. “Come face me like a man!”
More chilling laughter rolled forth. “Art…Art…” said Lucy Westenra’s voice, mocking and hateful. “Art, I never loved you, I hated you from the first…I didn’t want you…who would want a sissy, a Lord Weakling!”
The laughter which followed, a blasphemous reproduction of the same laughter that Art had so cherished in his youth, ripped his heart wide open. Dracula had taken and befouled Lucy, now he meant to use her to torture him.
“Bastard! Bastard! Come and fight me! Come and say that to my face!”
“Oh….Art!” Lucy’s voice continued, fading further away into Titanic’s ventilation system. “Did I ever tell you about Quincy and I? How he made dirty, dirty love to me? How he made me fucking bleed…from front and back?”
“Shut up! Shut up! Leave Lucy and Quincy out of this! Stop it, monster, beast, motherfucking piece of goddamn gutter trash!”
“Bye, Art…” faint now, very far away. “Back to hell with me, where Quincy and I can fuck and watch you sink. We’ll be waiting, Art…we’ll hold the door for you…”