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

saying: ‘Do not trouble about it now. Forget it for the present. You shall know and understand it all in good time; but it will be later …’ ”

      When Lucy emerged from her coma she at first tried to tear up the story we had concocted, but then relented, evidently realizing that it was better than nothing to offer as some explanation for the weird events of the preceding night.

      The story of course purported to be “an exact record” of those events, set down in her handwriting almost as they occurred. It related how Lucy had been awakened from peaceful sleep by “a flapping at the window,” and shortly thereafter heard “a howl like a dog’s, but more fierce and deeper.” She had gone “to the window and looked out, but could see nothing, except a big bat, which had evidently been buffeting its wings against the window.”

      Unperturbed by this commonplace event of suburban London, Lucy in our fiction returned to her bed. Presently her mother looked in, spoke “even more sweetly and softly than her wont,” and came to lie companionably at her daughter’s side. But the “flapping and buffeting” returned to the window, quickly followed by “the low howl again out in the shrubbery, and shortly after there was a crash at the window and a lot of broken glass was hurled on the floor … In the aperture of the broken panes there was the head of a great, gaunt gray wolf. Mother cried out in a fright … clutched the wreath of flowers that Dr. Van Helsing insisted on my wearing ’round my neck, and tore it away from me.” I thought it best my enemies continue to believe in the efficacy of garlic.

      “There was a strange and horrible gurgling in her throat; then she fell over … a whole myriad of little specks seemed to come blowing in through the broken window, and wheeling and circling around like the pillars of dust that travelers describe when there is a simoom in the desert. I tried to stir, but there was some spell upon me …” Comparing the coy approach of the vampire to the simoom was, I confess, my own idea. Somehow at the time I thought that it created a vivid image.

      Our story goes on to relate how Lucy recovered consciousness; how she called for the maids to come in and, after they had decently arranged her mother’s corpse, sent them to take some sherry as a tranquilizer. When they failed to return betimes she pursued them to the dining room and found there on the floor “the sleeping servants, whom someone has drugged … The air seems full of specks, floating and circling in the draught from the window, and the lights burn blue and dim … I shall hide this paper in my breast, where they shall find it when they come to lay me out …”

      The relation ends thus, save for a few stylized groans. I suppose I need make no apology for its inadequacies, since it served its intended purpose, viz., it was accepted by Van Helsing and the rest as a true account of the night’s events, and got Lucy off the hook, as the slang expression has it, on any possible charges of collaboration.

      But, by the beard of Allah, and all the relics of the Patriarchs! That such a farrago of falsehood could have passed successfully under the noses of even the most inept investigators is still a source of wonderment to me. Inspector Lestrade would not have wasted five minutes on it — I say nothing of Sherlock Holmes.

      Consider the evidence of the drugged wine. Presumably, if the maids had not taken it Lucy would have escaped the full horrors of the night, as hinted at in the Dracula-Westenra manuscript. Some evil person, then, poured the laudanum into the decanter. It must have been the malign Count Dracula himself — wait, though, he could not have entered the house without an invitation, and had he been invited he would have had no need to employ a wolf as battering ram. And that the wolf had been so employed there is no doubt, for the poor beast was seen returning wearily to the zoo on the evening of the next day, with bits of window glass still in its bloodied fur.

      Someone else, then, acting as Dracula’s agent, drugged the wine. But, given the existence of such an agent inside the house, that agent’s most valuable function would have been to grant direct entree to her master, not to toxicate the wine on the sheer hope that enough people might chance to drink it to clear the field and give the count a clear shot at his goal.

      Or is it reasonable to suppose that the four serving women, when Lucy sent them for a soothing draught, decided instead to render themselves completely insensible, as a defense against the dangers of the night? With a wolf prowling at large and evidently able to force its way into the house at will, this explanation would not have seemed likely to Lestrade, or even Dr. Watson. Either of those two relatively astute gentlemen would have bluntly demanded to know just who did let Count Dracula in …

      But let the story go. In passing, you think, I have let out the real truth, and it proves to be just what my enemies have claimed. I have now confessed that I deliberately made that girl into a vampire.

      Is it not so? you ask. And I answer, jovially enough, in a phrase that men have used to excuse everything from genocide to sexual oddity: Yes, and what’s wrong with that?

      Will you tell me that the mere existence of a vampire creates a blot of unexampled evil upon the earth? You would be in danger of becoming insulting if you said that to Count Dracula. But never mind personal considerations for the moment. The fact is that you are arguing in a circle. It is evil