The Dracula Tape, Fred Saberhagen [the dot read aloud TXT] 📗

give my girls some blood, and provide for my guest a taste of veal — when that poor woman from the nearest village came to the castle pleading for my help. That poor, brave woman whose face I never saw; not one in a thousand down there would have dared so much in bright sunshine, let alone the middle of the night. But the commands of motherhood give wonderous strength sometimes.

      “Master, find for me my child!” the poor wretch called up to Harker, whose moonlit appearance at a high window she mistook for my own. Yes, I know, I know very well, that in his journal he sets down her words as: “Monster, give me my child!” But do you suppose that she spoke English? Or that he had ready his “polyglot dictionary” that he had needed in the coach from Bistrita, to talk with these same folk?

      For my part, I knew perfectly well that the woman was there, without sticking my head out a window to see her. And I understood her words. Nor did I need to raise my voice to summon up a few pretty children of my own — the wolves — from a kilometer or two around. These set to work at my command. They combed the forest quickly and in the space of an hour had found the straying child. They herded it with nips and tugs into the courtyard, where the stupid woman — I suppose it was through some negligence of hers that the child had gotten lost — still beat her flabby hands upon my door, until she saw her infant come amid the howling escort. At that point she grabbed it up and ran for home, and small thanks I or my four-pawed rangers ever got. And Harker’s book implies that, having stolen the child for my own snack, I then called up the wolves to eat the mother …

      Now I see in your eyes that this time you do not believe my version of the event at all. Well, and why should I not have helped her, as I helped a thousand others when I ruled as Prince? She came to me in my capacity of lord, and asked for help, and I was duty-bound to render it. That actions so elementary and right, on her part and on mine, must be verified and spelled out shows how far the world has fallen … but there, I now sound like an old man.

      Still you doubt. You will insist on believing that I would rather drink a baby’s blood than dandle it on my knee. And you are right, or would be, were those the only two courses of behavior from which I had to choose.

      Very well. Now is as good a time as any, and we will discuss the drinking of the blood. You eat flesh. Do you eat that of man and woman? Maybe a playful love bite now and then, but not beyond that, hey? So, very approximately, the matter rests with me. My only material sustenance is blood, warm and preferably mammalian, but I am indifferent as to what species I use for nourishment. For now, take that as given. Later, if we have time, we will discuss how, as I believe, most of my needful energy comes to me by an as-yet-unmeasured radiation from the sun.

      Another peculiarity of the vampirish existence is that the reproductive organs, along with other systems of excretion, cease to function; the body throws off neither seed nor waste. This is not to say that we are passionless; far from it. But whereas in breathing men and women there are many raging lusts — go without food two weeks, water two days, air two minutes, and see if I am using the wrong words — besides the lust for mere sexual activity, for us the blood is the life, the blood is all.

      The love of women I have known all my life and for me its essence does not change. But its mode of expression had changed when I awoke from my mortal wounds of 1476. Since then, for me, the blood is all. Oh, I can do without the blood of sweet young women for two months, two years, two centuries, I suppose, if there were reason for such abstinence. I have told you that I never forced Lucy, or Mina, or any of the others.

      But never mind. It was on the day following the poor village woman’s visit that Harker, maddened by fear, dared to climb down the outside of the castle wall from his window, far enough to enter my own rooms. Then following an interior passage down to a lower chapel, he came upon the boxes of earth which I and my friends had been preparing for my journey. And snooping into the boxes, he found in one of them your obedient servant, resting. He might have destroyed me on the spot, had he been clever and malign enough, had his wits matched his foolhardy courage that let him dare that wall. For I, of course, was not aware at the time of his investigation.

      The trance of daylight, which we usually — but not always — undergo between sunrise and sunset, actually marks, as I believe, our dependence upon the sun. As breathing men cannot healthfully engage in heavy exercise while eating and digesting food, we of the vampire persuasion are at best somewhat lethargic when in the presence of the sun; nor can any of us bear its unshielded rays for very long.

      At any rate, he found me there, within the wooden box half full of soft, moist earth, in trance. The grip of this day-trance is hard to rouse from, as we shall see, and it is apt to be more open-eyed than common human sleep. We do not grow fatigued in the same sense that breathing humans do, yet eventually we must rest, and rest is possible only in the raw earth of the