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

coming safe to port. The first grayness of dawn was on the sea when I walked toward him in man-form, boldly and matter-of-factly, with my approach in his full view.

      His bloodshot eyes fixed on me after flickering once, almost longingly, toward the rail; he would not desert his post, and his fingers tightened convulsively upon the wheel’s spokes.

      I stopped when I was still some paces distant and tipped my hat. “Good morning. Captain.”

      “What — who are you?”

      “A passenger who wishes only to reach port in safety.”

      “Begone from me, fiend out of hell.”

      “I understand your crew is gone now, Captain, but that is not of my doing. And I am ready to labor with you in our common cause of survival. I know nothing of sailing, but I can and will pull ropes, tie knots, whatever a sailor is supposed to do — and more.” I deemed it inadvisable to propose at once that I could control the weather to his order. “You will find your new crew even stronger than the old, though the old had the advantage of numbers.”

      “Devil, begone!”

      Alas, my Russian was imperfect. And the man at the wheel would not truly listen to me, but only muttered prayers and incantations and curses, and forgot to steer whilst I remained in sight. Shortly I thought, perhaps erroneously, that this neglect was like to wreck the ship at once, and I took myself out of his sight once more.

      All the next day, whilst I rested uneasily below, he remained sleeplessly at his post. He took some time to scribble his continuation of the log on some papers which he then stuffed into a bottle and concealed in his clothing — this log I did not know of until much later, or I would have thrown it into the sea once he was dead.

      When on the following night I came on deck again I saw that he had lashed himself to the wheel and was grown much weaker. Approaching as before, I again addressed him in soft words; but his terror grew, until I stopped out of compassion.

      “Monster!” he shrieked. “Back to the depths from whence you came! I will yield to you neither my ship nor my immortal soul!”

      “You may retain the captaincy of both,” I replied, trying to speak as soothingly as possible. “I ask this and no more, that you tell me which way lies Whitby. In what direction, England?” Ah! In the halls of my own castle, or amid other congenial surroundings, I flatter myself that I can indeed be soothing, charming. Whatever soft and summery impression you will have, that can I give. Aboard ship, though, I am outré, no matter what. I seized the poor wretch by the collar in my impatience and shook him roughly. “Tell me, you scoundrel, idiot, where lies the port of Whitby?”

      By this stage, I think, he knew no more than I. Of course I was aware that by now we must have threaded through the channel, and be in the North Sea, somewhere in the region of my destination. The stars gave me rough directions whenever I blew a little hole in the fog to let them be seen. If the captain saw them too and used them to steer by I could not tell at the time; later I supposed that he somehow did.

      Toward dawn the next morning he died; his body remained at the wheel, where he had contrived to bind himself, tightening the cord’s last knots with his teeth. Of the rosary he had bound beneath his crossed hands I was ignorant, or I would have taken it from him as I would have taken his bottled writings — that neither might suggest the presence of a vampire aboard the schooner.

      I considered untying his corpse from the wheel and letting him rejoin his crew in that great fellowship who sleep beneath the waves. But after reflection I left him where he had chosen to remain. The discovery of a ship at sea, completely abandoned by her crew, is a mystery more intriguing to the human mind than any mere wreck, and therefore more closely studied. I thought that when the Demeter came in one way or another to the land — I felt confident of accomplishing at least that much with my raw control of winds, though whether she would smash to bits or merely grate aground I could not guess — her crew would be believed to have simply perished in a storm. With this in mind I began to use my powers to raise such a storm as would make such a fate for them convincing.

      The raising of the storm was a calculated risk; should the ship capsize or sink beneath me there would be nothing I could do but take flight in bat-form amid the gale. My boxes of home soil would be lost irretrievably and I would be a thousand miles as the bat flies from obtaining more. The chances of my survival under such conditions would not be great.

      The storm brewed and grumbled for days out in the North Sea toward Scandinavia. I wanted it kept boiling, as it were, until I knew with some precision in just what direction its impetus should be applied against my drifting craft. It was with a surge of elation that I became aware one night of a headland to the northwest, and thought I recognized the towering cliffs of Flamborough Head from drawings and descriptions that I had pored over in my distant study. If this identification was correct, Whitby must lie no more than forty miles to the northwest, and with a little luck I should be able to blow the schooner right into the estuary of the Esk.

      I called the storm on slowly, wanting only its fringes to actually encompass the vessel in which I rode. The maneuvering proved not as easy as I had hoped, and all during the seventh of August I lay below decks in a box, rousing