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

and now gestured nervously toward the frozen image on the screen. “What did he say? I thought he said that someone, the man in the coffin in the London cemetery, had had his head cut off before he was buried … but then his head and body somehow came back together again?”

      “I heard the same thing.”

      “Let me rewind, run that bit over again.”

      They did so. But instant replay proved to be of little help. The words spoken had been correctly heard, but that fact brought no real enlightenment. Neither watcher could derive from the tape much more than seeming confirmation that the narrator, the creator of this tale, had to be a madman.

      The voice of the storyteller was calm, the sentences and thoughts coherent. But overall, the picture he painted was growing more and more disturbing. This so-reasonable voice detailed horrors, and more than horrors: a fantasy of survival in and beyond the grave, of centuries of life—or of extravagantly and grotesquely transformed existence.

      The kidnapping victims looked at each other, each thinking how exhausted the other looked. At first there seemed no possibility of swallowing the story—long-lived vampires, grotesque and monstrous mutilations—as fact. But the narrator plodded on, implacably. All these things were true, he seemed to be saying, with calm infuriating arrogance. Take it or leave it.

* * *

      After half an hour or so, Philip and June, uneasy and unable to concentrate, decided it was time to take a break, and stopped the tape. Outside, the day was heating up, and they turned on the small window air conditioners with which their prison had been provided. They went to make themselves their first meal in the small kitchen. As they entered, the pair of masked guardians who had been sitting at the little kitchen table got up at once, and with some murmured politeness withdrew into the living room.

      The prisoners looked at each other and shrugged.

      “What’ll it be?”

      “Let’s do breakfast.”

* * *

      A few minutes later the two of them were seated, conversing in low voices over toast and coffee and bowls of cereal. Minds whirling, they tried to analyze what they had heard and seen so far.

      “He’s mentioned Benjamin Franklin two or three times, as if he were really relevant. All right, so you have a family tradition that your great-great-however-many-greats-grandfather was Franklin’s illegitimate son. But why does that give these jokers the idea to kidnap us?”

      “I don’t know.” Phil looked around and lowered his voice. “Believe me, I can’t see any possible connection. Our Mr. Graves is evidently an utter lunatic.”

      “Better not let him hear—”

      “I won’t, I won’t. All right. The only thing to do, when we’ve finished our little snack here, is to go back and watch and listen. Go over the whole thing this time. Even if it’s crazy, it’s likely to contain some kind of clue as to what these people really want.”

      “All right. Back we go. We’ll humor them.”

      The Revolution, the biggest and bloodiest one in the memory of the Western world, had taken place in France. But Graves in his taped narration had chosen to begin his story with certain events which were taking place at the same time in London…

* * *

      … It was around midnight, on a night of comforting and concealing fog, a chill damp night after a chill spring day, when young Jerry Cruncher and a couple of his comrades, industriously plying their illegal trade, were approaching in a spirit of enterprise a fresh burial, during the course of which the official diggers had disturbed a number of ancestral interments in the churchyard soil. No one in the Year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and ninety could fairly be blamed for this; generation after generation of burials had already left the ground beneath their feet a thick mosaic of human bones and coffin remnants.

      Less than a dozen hours ago, on the previous afternoon, the newest member of the silent majority had joined these centuries of Londoners, one more necessarily wedged in among old coffins, bodies which had lain in the earth for decades, some for a hundred years and more, disturbed only by the occasional new arrival.

      The latest crew of excavators, three in number and totally unofficial, arriving well after nightfall, felt themselves securely alone. These entrepreneurs moved their lantern down into the excavation as soon as it was deep enough, and they made no unnecessary noise, but worked away briskly, soon forgetting any fear of discovery. A single hour of hard digging in the freshly loosened dirt achieved great progress. As they began their work they had deliberately toppled the modest-sized new headstone away from the grave, where it soon lay half-buried under the mounting pile of newly upturned earth. Had Jerry been more imaginative, he might have wondered if the worms in this particular store of dirt were getting tired of being alternately dug up and reburied.

      The drifts and shoals of flowers that had been deposited at graveside by weeping relatives during the afternoon were quickly tossed out of the way at midnight. But their blooms, not having had time to fade, were still dimly visible in the softly focused light of the single lantern, and two busy shovels were well along in building new piles of earth. Jerry and his mates had taken off their coats and thrown them aside when they began to dig.

      Today’s new grave had been sunk to an extra depth, somewhat below the traditional six feet, in the futile hope of foiling just such an expedition as the one now under way.

* * *

      The broken, worm-eaten boards of the coffin had symbols of true power carved on them—ancient signs that Radu Dracula had understood, in the brief glimpse he had of them before he was put inside—but which his discoverers did not begin to understand.

      Of course he should have thanked Jerry and his coworkers for the rescue. But to give thanks was never Radu’s way.

* * *

      “Wot in th’ ’ell? Where’s she