A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9), Fred Saberhagen [some good books to read TXT] 📗

wax figures he had just been looking at reminded him of the madman’s pathetic, small collection. But he, Radu, had more pressing matters to think about just now…

      In a way it was too bad that Radcliffe himself had died so quickly. It would have been an interesting refinement to have him available now, to compel the breather to watch what now was going to happen to his woman, and to the child. But, alas, one could not have everything. And the guillotining itself had been supremely satisfying; once the man was dead, there was no way that even Vlad could bring him back.

      Ke-chark. There went the model guillotine again.

* * *

      Slowly, moving only when he was not observed, Radu made his way toward the rear of the establishment. Just before entering the deserted yard he paused once more, relishing the moment. His ears brought him the sound of a single set of childish lungs, breathing quite easily. Now and then a voice, readily identifiable as that of a little boy, murmured something. The judge and executioner of birds and mice was talking to himself, rehearsing for an adult role. Already passing sentences, no doubt, with the supreme self-satisfaction of the head of a tribunal. Somehow it must be instinctive in the race…

      Entering the courtyard, he set the hook and eye that served as crude lock on the door by which he’d just come in. There was a good bit of shade inside the gloomy shed, and with a little luck he might hope to pass the remainder of the daylight hours here quite undisturbed.

* * *

      I can call up some mice and birds to feed his guillotine, thought Radu suddenly. Hastily he began to revise his plans. First I shall speak winningly to the child, gain his confidence, and perhaps the two of us will be merry playmates for an hour. I will teach him the thrill of power, and the taste, the real taste, of blood, and then how to skin a small animal alive, so that it still breathes and suffers when its skin is almost entirely off. So that he shall be no longer merely innocent when the game is suddenly transformed … so he will understand his own fate when his own skin begins to disappear, a little patch at a time … when the smaller extensions of his own body begin to be tried, as to whether they will fit into his toy…

      Ke-chark.

* * *

      At last, smiling silently, Radu stepped out into the courtyard. The child, all alone and absorbed in his game, was raggedly dressed in approved Revolutionary fashion, and dirty with the neglect of these last few hectic days. No doubt Mama had been thinking of other things.

      On bare feet the small boy crouched before his ingenious toy, rapt over his small institute of slaughter. On the executioner’s left, an array of headless mice and birds were laid out on a plank. On his right, half a dozen other shivering small animals, still intact, awaited their turns.

      Radu’s thoughts were elsewhere than on the animals, and several seconds passed before he noticed that those arrayed on the right of the miniature scaffold were in no way confined or bound, but only mesmerized. Their small hearts hammered rapidly, their little lungs kept laboring, but their limbs that might have carried them to safety were quite immobile.

      Several additional seconds went by before the significance of this fact struck him.

      Someone, no doubt to make friends with the apprentice executioner, had mesmerized the animals.

      The smile froze on Radu’s face, even as the boy, unafraid, looked up to take note of the man’s presence.

      Radu knew what had happened, he understood what his own fate was to be, before he heard another sound.

      There elapsed what seemed to Radu a very long time indeed, in which he tried without success to nerve himself to turn and look.

      But he remained staring straight ahead. Because he knew, perfectly well, that whether he turned around or not was going to make no difference.

      “I am glad to see you, my brother.” Vlad’s deep voice was unmistakable. It addressed itself to Radu in a language he understood very well, centuries older than the French of 1794. And it was very close behind him.

      Radu’s beautifully shaped lips twitched in a faint smile. Whatever was going to happen to him now, at least Philip Radcliffe was dead, and he had tasted Radcliffe’s blood. By no punishment could his brother ever deprive him of that triumph.

Chapter Thirty-One

      In 1996 Radu’s head and body, separated by the latest technology of the end of the eighteenth century, quick-frozen by the most up-to-date equipment of the twentieth century, were shipped to a region of the world very distant from the American Southwest.

* * *

      On the day Vlad Dracula said good-bye to the twentieth-century Radcliffes, he had something he wanted to show them. He had only borrowed it for a while, for this very purpose.

      “So, that is what he looked like,” the modern Philip Radcliffe said, when he had gazed for a little while at the object in his mentor’s hands.

      Vlad nodded. “Originally, of course, the appearance was much more natural. The models in the galleries can last for more than twenty years. Eventually, however, the wax becomes discolored, it dries and crumbles. And the hair wears out: of course it has to be periodically brushed, combed, and washed.”

      June looked away from the ancient model. Her eyes fell on the rubber masks, discarded days ago by Vlad’s modern helpers, now lying in a row on a shelf like so many decapitated heads.

      The thought occurred to Mrs. Radcliffe that on the day Vlad Dracula and Gabriel Sanson had worked their trickery on the platform of the guillotine, the two of them must have actually beheaded more than a dozen victims—the savior of her husband’s ancestor must have played perfectly his role of assistant executioner.

      She looked up to see him smiling benevolently at her, and