Bitterly depressed
late one night, Frank Drake plans to leap off a bridge and end it all; he is
rescued by the huge Taj Nital and Frank meets his friend Rachel van Helsing,
whose great-grandfather killed Count Dracula. She saw in the news that he had
inherited and then sold Castle Dracula and now the Count is now loose in
London….
Clifton Graves,
drinking heavily since he saw Jeanie die last issue, is found by Count Dracula
and made his servant. Clifton is sent to the hotel where Frank had stored
Dracula’s stolen coffin and the night porter takes him to the storage room in
search of it. But Rachel van Helsing asks Frank to join their vampire-hunting
crusade and they arrive at the same place to look for the coffin. As the porter
helps Cliff with the coffin it falls revealing a false bottom full of gold.
Dracula arrives and “rewards” the porter with a bite. Frank, Rachel, and Taj
hear the man’s scream and come running. The two men try to fight Dracula but he
is too powerful. Rachel reveals a crossbow and she fires at the Count but he
dodges by becoming a bat and flying away with Cliff, locking the door behind
them. They struggle with the door until the police arrive and arrest them for
the porter’s murder….
The three are
questioned by Inspector Chelm but he doesn’t believe them until he is persuaded
to accompany them to the morgue and they are all present when the porter
awakens as a vampire, to immediately put to death….
Meanwhile at the
estate of Ilsa Strangway, her lawyer expresses concern over her purchases of
occult and bizarre items, noting that a man named Graves is making an offer for
Castle Dracula, which she recently bought from Frank Drake. Her concern is that
she was once a celebrated beauty and popular artists’ model but now that she is
aging her looks are eroding and if medical science can’t stop her aging, she
will turn to magical means. She thinks she has found the answer in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula; when he scoffs, she dismisses him. She turns to find
Count Dracula himself standing silently on her balcony; knowing that a vampire
cannot enter a home for the first time without being invited by one of the
household, Ilsa Strangway bids Dracula enter….