The Holmes-Dracula File, Fred Saberhagen [pride and prejudice read .TXT] 📗

It was natural enough, then, that we should begin to exchange a few words, and so my soup bought me a little information regarding the hostel to which I had been led by fate. I sat with my face mostly in the shadow of the distant lamp, pretending from time to time to sip a little tea. When we were finished in the canteen, we found ourselves assigned, as latecomers, not to the rows of ordinary cots which filled a long, dim dormitory room, but rather to an even older-looking chamber hard nearby. This room was smaller and even darker than the other, and in it the beds were not raised in the ordinary way. Rather they were thin pallets fixed right on the floor, and encased in bed-sized boxes, so that they looked like nothing so much as a row of coffins set out to accommodate the victims of some middle-sized disaster. The great majority of these beds were empty.

   The disaster of which we were the victims was of course the world—such was my dark thought as I looked upon the beds, and smelled the misery, and heard from the troubled sleepers in the next room almost continual groans, interspersed with strange prayers, oaths, and all the muttered illogic of bad dreams.

   With my new companion I proceeded slowly along the row of bleak containers, of which we had our almost complete choice. The instinct that had drawn me to enter this place still held, and I still trusted in it, though as yet I could not see that it had helped me in the least. The sailor by now had begun to talk of the possibility of finding work along the docks, where no man was asked for his background or his papers. As I half-listened to him, my attention was captured by a curious fact: the odd receptacles before me were covered, one and all, with oilcloth, tightly sewn on. I squatted down beside one empty box to feel of the material, so very like that of my erstwhile prison rack.

   The sailor had come to a stand beside the next coffin in the long row. Now he cackled, having put a perhaps natural misinterpretation upon my behavior. “Not quite yer silk or satin, is it, Matey?” He had promptly sized me up as one used to richer surroundings than these.

   I stroked the fabric. “I was just wondering why they used this stuff?”

    “Why?” He bent a little, to peer at me the better. “Why? ’Cause erlcloth won’t offer a snug place t’ no bugs. Wot did yer think?”

   “In any case, I tolerate no such creatures about my person,” I replied, absentmindedly fastidious. No doubt my voice contained more lordliness than appeared warranted by my situation.

   “We-ell! I craves yer pardon most ’umbly, I’m sure, Yer Grace. Or might it be Yer Worship, or jist wot?” He felt strong, with my soup to fortify his belly.

   But I was paying him very little attention. Holding in one hand the thin blanket I had been issued upon leaving the canteen, I stepped into that strange bed as I might have moved from a sinking ship into a lifeboat that I did not expect would float. If I could not find here the repose that I had so far been denied, I knew that I must die with the first rays of dawn.

   My neighbor meanwhile was stripping himself completely in preparation to retire. This seemed to be the common practice here, judging by the clothes piled up where other men were sleeping, doubtless on the old theory that a bare skin is less attractive to vermin than one snugly wrapped. I had limited my own undressing to the removal of my cheap cloth cap; and now I noted in passing that the long hair swinging before my eyes had, since my heavy feeding, acquired a strong mixture of youthful brown amid its gray.

   There was no point in further hesitation, and quickly I lay down, and quickly knew my doom. No sooner had I willed to rest, than came again the quivering spasms along the muscles of my arms, my back, my legs. To turn in my bed, to stretch, to twist, to exert the full power of my will, availed me nothing. I could not be still. No matter what I did inside the oilcloth coffin, I should never be allowed to rest.

   Why, then, had my deepest instincts led me to this strange bed? I sat upright and glared at it.

   The sailor, now snugly blanket-wrapped in his own box, appeared almost luxuriously comfortable. “ ‘Is Mightiness maybe finds the shape of ’is bed not to ’is fancy? Har, har! Doss down in yer coffin like a brave ’un, Milord!”

   I turned my gaze upon him, suddenly and with what must have been an unexpected force, for he fell abruptly silent and shrank away, squinting narrowly at me with his one eye. Yet I was hardly aware of the fellow himself. It was the full unconscious meaning of his words that had struck me—aye, struck me!—with almost the impact of a second oaken cudgel, so that for several long seconds I could hardly, move. Lord... yes! And coffin... yes!

   But it was my own coffin that I needed, that I might find rest in my own homeland’s holy soil!

   With a single shock, the shards of my broken memory fell almost completely into place. I cast the poor thin blanket down and slowly stood erect, rising there amid the lost men, the gloom, the mumbled, hopeless prayers and curses, the fetor of illness and defeat.

   Aye, “Your Grace” I once had been, indeed! And even higher honors than a dukedom had been mine. In my own land I had ruled as Prince, four hundred years and more before this fool who gibed at me was born! The sailor crouched far down, then made as if to scramble from his box upon the