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

acquired an obligation to carry out my orders. In a moment he had swung his heavy forequarters round and smashed the glass panes of the window in.

      I was leaping up to catch the windowsill with both my hands just as the wolf fell back. As we passed I saw the red cuts on his muzzle and the small gleam from a bit of broken glass that had stuck in his fur. I meant to tend his wounds, who had served me faithfully, but I would see to Lucy first. I will be human, I will be, I kept repeating to myself.

      I crouched on the sill again, my face framed in the broken-edged aperture of glass. “Lucy!” I called in, quietly but fiercely, using mind as well as voice.

      On a carpet littered with broken glass and garlic flowers Lucy stirred and sat up slowly, not seeming to realize that she was half entangled with her mother’s corpse.

      “What … who … ?”

      “Lucy, your Viking is here to aid you. Call me to come in. Call me to come to you.”

      Her eyes lifted slowly, puzzledly, to behold my face. Now belowstairs I could hear some of the housemaids stirring; no doubt they had been awakened by the crash of glass. Outside, the wolf howled once again, this time in pain. Lucy raised a hand to try to put back the blond hair from her face, but she was too weak and the gesture failed halfway through.

      “Lucy, my name is Vlad. Bid me to come in, quick.”

      “Oh. Come, then, Vlad. I feel so sick, I am afraid that I am going to die.” Then, when I had lifted her in my arms, she made a gesture toward the still form remaining on the floor. “Mother?”

      “Your mother is not suffering,” I said, and put down Lucy on the bed. Then, before I could do or say anything more, a multitudinous shuffle of feet in the carpeted hall outside the bedroom door announced the arrival of the housemaids in a frightened group.

      “Miss Lucy? Are you all right?”

      “Answer carefully!” I whispered, gripping Lucy’s arms. My eyes burned into hers, my voice commanded, and she seemed to regain a little of her strength.

      “I am all right,” she called out weakly, “for the moment.”

      “Is your mother in there, Miss Lucy? May we come in?”

      I nodded.

      “Come!” she called out, and the handle of the door began to turn; before it had completed its motion I was under Lucy’s bed, stretched out at full length and ready to melt to mist or shrink to bat-form in an instant.

      Eight bare girlish feet paraded into the room and round the carpet near my head, accompanied by dancing nightgown hems, outcries, and lamentations. Mrs. Westenra’s body was lifted to the bed, the broken window marveled at, and horror expressed at the continued howling of the wolf outside. Injured — and thinking himself betrayed, for he went home before I could get out to tend his wounds — he had better cause to howl than they did, and he made less noise.

      And there were those garlic flowers on the bedroom floor, now crushed almost into my very nostrils. Vlad, I asked myself, reviewing the situation as I lay beneath the bed; what is the world, the great breathing human world which you expect to join, going to make of all this?

      Lucy sat exhaustedly in a chair whilst the maids were laying out her mother’s corpse. But despite her weakness and illness she retained presence of mind enough to realize that a man was in danger of being found concealed in her boudoir, a state of affairs less tolerable than death. And she retained the wit to do something about it. I saw her suddenly get up and leave the room, and heard her soft feet descend the stairs, whilst the maids remained gathered round the bed with the dead woman on it and the live vampire out of sight beneath. The maids did not note their young mistress’s departure or her quiet return a minute later. During this minute I heard, faint but distinct, the sound of a brief trickle of liquid being poured somewhere downstairs.

      Lucy was now standing upright, with an effort, just inside her bedroom door. “All of you,” she commanded, having to raise her voice slightly to cut through the maids’ continuing babble, “go down to the dining room and take each a glass of wine. Take only the sherry, mind. Then come back when I call.”

      There was no problem in obtaining prompt obedience to such an order. In a moment the whole moaning and cooing herd of them was gone, and Lucy had closed the door behind them and locked it. I wriggled out from concealment in a trice and found her once more on the point of swooning. She would have thrown herself upon the bed already but that her mother’s clay lay there. I put her down there anyway, after moving the old lady next to the wall.

      “Now the servants will leave us alone,” Lucy said to me in a voice rapidly growing vague and distant. “For I have drugged the wine … oh, Vlad, are you my death? Your face is sometimes … if you are indeed death, then I must plead with you. Whoever you are …  my mother’s dead, but I’m too young. I’m to be married in September.”

      “Lie still now. I think that you are very ill.” Giving Lucy a quick examination, I noted the bandaged incisions on the inside of each arm at the elbow. “Who is your doctor, and for what has he been treating you?”

      “There are two: Dr. Van Helsing, of Amsterdam, and Dr. Seward.”

      I looked up sharply at that first name; I had heard it once before, from a vampire of my acquaintance. “And who is Dr. Seward?”

      “He is about thirty, and very nice. In fact …” She paused. “He is superintendent of a lunatic asylum in Purfleet.”

      My mind raced, seeking understanding. But there is no understanding coincidence, or the imitation