Séance for a Vampire, Fred Saberhagen [win 10 ebook reader txt] 📗

many windows, but no curtains, and light comes through into the place... and it’s so hard to sleep. Oh, Marty! Hold me! Love me!”

And Martin Armstrong did his best.

Ecstatic fainting blurred and prolonged itself, in some manner, into sleep. From a dream of still being embraced tightly in Louisa’s arms, Martin Armstrong drifted slowly into wakefulness. Early summer daylight had arrived outside his window, where now all was birdsong and gray light. His body stirred slowly, full wakefulness coming only as he sat up with a jerking start. Louisa was gone, gone as if she had never existed. Martin himself was entirely naked, his nightshirt having been cast aside during the...

The dream?

Lurching out of bed, he stumbled to the bureau, where his shaving mirror was propped. It was the need to see his own face that drew him there, the feeling that some essential doubt had been created regarding his own identity.

And, indeed, the reflection of his face looked strange enough, pale and gaunt, but after a single glance he hardly looked at it. What put the seal of reality on Louisa’s life, on last night’s encounter, were the two painless little marks on his throat. As if they had been magically transferred somehow from her throat to his.

Becky was right, he realized twenty minutes later, while knotting his tie preparatory to going down to breakfast. (His collar hid one of the little marks at least, and the other was not particularly noticeable.) Louisa still lived–perhaps now more intensely than ever before–but she had been drastically altered. The woman who had come to him last night (however that trick had been managed) was no substitute for Louisa Altamont, but rather Louisa Altamont transformed. The girl to whom he, Martin Armstrong, had once proposed marriage had not become a ghost–but certainly the young woman who had wantoned in his bed last night was not the same one who had accepted his proposal of holy matrimony. Last night’s... last night’s whore (in the privacy of his own thought, he could try how that word sounded, when applied to his betrothed)... that woman could not be identified with the sunlit figure in a summer dress who last month had smiled at him so lovingly just before the rowboat tipped.

Armstrong, still staring into the mirror, shivered faintly, uncontrollably. If it were still possible, in this day and age, to believe in demons, or in possession... in, in something that could take the outward likeness of the beloved... but of course such possibilities could not exist in the same world as automobiles of forty horsepower, telephones, and progress.

Breakfast was an ordeal. Martin Armstrong, desperately seeking an explanation for last night’s experience, felt himself unable to say anything to Louisa’s parents or sister about her visit.

Why had she not stayed with him? If not in his room, why had she not remained in the house, her own home, reuniting joyously with Mother, Father, becky? Obviously it was because something terrible had happened to Louisa, something that compelled her to an awful exile.

Was it conceivable–a new and hideous idea dawned, and grew with terrible force and swiftness–could it be possible that Louisa had been stricken with some loathsome disease? but no, she had come so willingly to his bed... Louisa wouldn’t infect him deliberately, whatever else was going on. That fear declined, as rapidly as it had burgeoned.

But was it possible that she was mad?

After breakfast he announced that he was going out. Secretly he had decided that he would turn to Sherlock Holmes.

Once more, let Dr. Watson speak...

On Friday morning, Holmes and I were discussing, over bacon and eggs in our rooms at the inn, what our next move should be. At dawn, Prince Dracula, exhausted by long exposure to daylight on Thursday, had retired to his own bedroom and the occult solace of his native earth.

Ever alert against the possibility of eavesdroppers, Holmes and I conversed in low voices; bright sun and birdsong outside our window seemed to mock the terrors of the night with which we had to deal.

One subject of our discussion was the deliberate countermove made by the Russian vampire, in getting Louisa Altamont out of her original tomb and into hiding elsewhere.

Before retiring, Dracula had advised us: “Of course her new sanctuary need not be a grave in the ordinary sense. Anyplace underground, or any sheltered vessel aboveground, containing earth, will do. A buried lair need not even be connected by a clear passage to the atmosphere. between sunset and sunrise, the solid ground is generally permeable to members of my race moving in mist-form.”

Holmes and I, in planning our efforts to discover the new hiding place where Kulakov must have commanded or forced his fledgling vampire to make her nest, began with the assumption that Louisa’s new place of concealment was almost certainly somewhere on the extensive grounds of the house Count Kulakov now occupied. Such an arrangement would give the master vampire a large degree of control over access to the site.

We had not got far in our planning before we were joined by young Martin Armstrong.

“Did you sleep well?” my friend inquired, looking probingly at the young man as he gestured for him to take a chair.

“Not very well, actually.” Armstrong cleared his throat, and tugged at his collar as if it bothered him. “I thought, Mr. Holmes... I thought that I saw Louisa last night.”

Holmes leaned forward, galvanized. “Where?”

“When?” I demanded at the same time.

Armstrong seemed startled at our readiness to believe that he had really encountered his former fiancée. He needed a moment or two to confess, rather awkwardly, that Louisa seemed to have come to him in his bedroom.

Again he was startled when I immediately asked to see his neck. There were the two fang marks, small and painless; I made sure that Holmes got a look at them as well.

Under our probing questions, the story of Louisa’s visit to Armstrong came out in some detail.

My friend’s interrogation was incisive. “Did she let fall any