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

      Meanwhile I of course went out at night and despite these problems enjoyed myself enormously. Change and promise and success seemed to be in the air, along with the salt tang from the North Sea, which I began to practice breathing to enjoy. On my nocturnal ramblings I even caught myself looking for mirrors; I actually nursed stirrings of faint, unreasoned hope that at least the ghostly outline of my reflection would now be visible.

      The mirrors were always disappointments but my existence otherwise had none. The life of the seaside town flowed on at night in the open air as well as behind doors, and no one’s life seemed bound in secrecy or fear. I listened to band concerts on the piers. I heard much laughter in the streets. It seemed to me then that even the poor and wretched of this new country were conscious of all the possibilities of enjoyment in the world, and meant to have some for themselves. I marveled happily. After killing the dog I fed no more during those first few English nights. In fact I felt little craving for blood, a fact from which I drew hope for the fulfillment of my future plans; finer things than blood seemed stirring in the English air, and in my soul. I sublimated my fleshly cravings and platonically enjoyed the presence around me of all the women of the town.

      Great heaven! If little Whitby were as full as this of life, promise, and humanity, then what, I thought, must London be? Surely in that vital metropolis I would not be able to remain a common vampire even if I tried. Not that I wished merely to be as one of the more ordinary inhabitants, lungs gasping perpetually in the sooted air for a lifespan of a few decades only. No, I saw myself as becoming a synthesis, the first of a new species, warmth-and light-loving as breathing men, and with as many lusts to satiate and enjoy: tough and enduring as the nosferatu, able to hold converse with animals if not necessarily to assume their shapes. With balmy thoughts like these I kept myself befuddled and bemused.

      One of my favorite haunts during those first wildly hopeful English nights was the churchyard I have mentioned. It surrounded St. Mary’s parish church, which clung on the east cliff high above the town, and was immediately below the ancient and ruined abbey. In this same Whitby Abbey, some twelve hundred years before I came to it, the plowboy poet Caedmon was the first in England to sing a hymn to the creative god of Christendom. I found the place to be invariably deserted after dark, and, like the poet of old, perhaps, I spent there many quiet hours in thought and dream. The harbor and the peaceful town alike were spread before me, as was the sea, to my sightseeing eyes, and the headland called Kettleness bulked low against the sky.

      So I was, leaning against one of the abbey’s remaining walls, and observing moonlit scenery in a euphoric mood, when sweet Lucy first came into my sight. It was close upon the hour of twelve, as I recall, some three nights after my tempestuous arrival. I was roused from contemplation of moon, earth, and sea by the appearance at one corner of my vision of a single figure in some kind of long, white dress, approaching the churchyard along the lengthy flight of steps that led up from the town. I turned to observe this figure more directly and made out that it was a young woman perhaps not yet turned twenty, and rather slight of build, with a diaphanous fall of hair about her shoulders. I did not move. Though with my night-tuned eyes I could see her at a good distance, I stood myself in partial shadow and thought it unlikely that she would become aware of me even if she should pass quite near, as she seemed like to do if she remained on the path that she had chosen.

      She was sleepwalking, I realized as she drew within a few score yards, sleepwalking barefoot and in a thin, white nightgown. The gown shimmered about her with the vibration of her stride, calling to mind the blowing of pure snow, or moonlight of the rare Carpathian heights. Her eves, the rare blue of sunlit English skies, were open, but even had she been fully dressed I would have known she slept — I have a knowing in such matters. Fair hair, to go with such eyes as those; wild heart, which though I heard it as she drew quite near I did not yet begin to understand.

      She passed my place of shadow and I thought she was about to go on farther up, into the abbey or around it, but suddenly her footsteps slowed. She halted, and turned so that she seemed to be looking straight away from me, and out to sea; and at that moment, with a small and scarcely perceptible start, she came awake. You, watching from where I watched, could probably not have perceived the change, so easy was it. Nor did she herself know clearly if she woke or dreamt, as her first words showed.

      I am not one to doubt the existence of a sixth, or even sixteenth, sense. Too often have the breathing members of humanity surprised me with the quickness and acuity of their perceptions. Even before she had fully awakened Lucy’s face turned round in my direction, and my motionless form, in shadow some ten steps away, was the first object which her eyes found in their focus.

      She looked at me as calmly as if it were midday, and I no more than some peculiar, quaint grave marker to be studied. She shifted her gaze to the fleeing clouds; the shattered pile of the abbey, whose tumbled stones may have witnessed sights stranger than a vampire in their time; she gazed upon the intermittent moon; then