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

look of youth. And remember, too, she must have been as certain as were my would-be murderers, that the old man she once had tried to help was dead.

   Although my face was no longer a mask of exhausted senility, there was of course a strong resemblance to my debilitated self; so with my voice, though it was now considerably stronger. The truth stood before Sal, struggling to be known; but it was too large and disturbing a truth to be acknowledged at first glance.

   “Know you?” she answered me at last. “Can’t say as I do.” Her voice was high and tense, her last words almost a question.

   “As you will, my dear. Why were you at Barley’s tonight? Standing sentry for your employers, perhaps?”

   “That ain’t your business, now, is it?”

   “Your welfare has become my business, girl. Was Matthews there as well? I did not see him.”

   After a long pause, in which a series of emotions crossed Sal’s marred, shadowed face, she shook her head. “Don’t know no one by that name.”

   “Ah, Sal, trust me.” I took her patiently by both hands. Though I had lost the doctor, I had Sal now, and so I was in no great hurry. Eventually, through her, the ones I wanted would become accessible. “Did not that old man promise you that there would be no involvement of the police?”

   The nervous start in her hands felt to mine like an electric shock. “The old man? Wot old man?”

   Gently I patted her right hand into place on my left arm, and off we started walking, a gentleman and his lady. Well, no, it could scarcely have appeared that way. More like, had there been anyone to watch, two of the ragged poor aping the behavior of their betters.

   “Now, my dear,” I went on, when we had walked half a mile or so, and the tension in the hand upon my arm had started to relax. “Now, you cannot really have forgotten that old man. He’d lost his name, remember? You spoke to him so kindly. And you did more. You very bravely, once, tried to help him—really help. That was shortly before they—took him off.”

   Her fingers would have pulled free, but could not move. Then slowly, slowly, they were once more persuaded to relax. Her voice, as she murmured “I never ’eard of...no old man,” faded almost to stunned silence.

   I smiled fondly, stroking her captive fingers on my arm, almost as I had soothed the rat. “I’m sure the old fellow never forgot your great kindness. And he did most solemnly promise, no police.”

   “Sir, don’t go a-scarin’ a poor girl with talk like that.” Had Sal now recognized me, at least on some hidden level of her mind? Her numb voice was sunk so low I had to concentrate to hear it. “If—if yer really wants t’ help me, just—just get out o’ this and let me go—”

   “My dear, I might get out o’ this, as you put it, at any time. But I fear that you cannot, without help, disentangle yourself from the nets of wickedness. Will you not accept my help?”

   “Ah, God...” We were passing now under a streetlamp, but Sal forgot to try to hide her birthmark as she looked at me with eyes of terror. (How could she fail to know me, now?) “It’d be as much as me life is worth... sir, there’s some folk it’s death to trifle with.”

   “So I have heard.” I let show in my face the anguish that I sometimes feel, when I am forced to contemplate the evil ways of men. “I sympathize with your fear.” Now for a time I only held her hand in silence as we walked, and let her choose the way. I’ll see you safely home,” I said.

   At the next streetlamp, Sal looked at me very closely once again, this time remembering to use her hair to hide her cheek. She made a small, choked sound, but in this sound there was only a small component of fear, and bolder and bolder grew her eyes probing mine.

   Once more the fang-roots in my upper jaw were aching. When we had walked farther still, and I could read unforced consent in Sal’s brown eyes, I turned our path into a darker, narrower way, and stopped and pulled her close...

   It is now common knowledge that the briefest, pleasantest love-making with a vampire will change a breathing human to a fang-sharp monster in a trice. Common knowledge that is of course absurdly wrong. Would you accept the follies of the films and so-called comic books as gospel truth on any other subject? No. To render any man or woman nosferatu requires a prolonged exchange of blood; and so when I released Sal a few blissful minutes later, her throat was marked but her species—as yet—was quite unaltered.

   “Now I shall truly see you home,” I said. And like a girl who walks and dreams at the same time, Sal put her hand upon my arm and led me promenading down the shabby street.

   A drizzle had begun, dissolving the day’s dust into slime on the paving stones, before we reached, at the low end of an even meaner street, the hovel she called home. Hers was a cellar room, in a building old even for London, that must have stood sunny in a bird-song field before the city rose like a dirty tide around it.

   Sal was reaching with her latchkey for the door at the dark bottom of some stairs, when I put out an arresting hand. In the room beyond the door, a set of lungs—a man’s, I thought—was breathing. He might be husband, lover, father—all quite all right with me—but then again he might be something else. When Sal turned up a questioning face to mine, wondering why I held her back, I whispered very softly in her ear: “As soon as you have