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

   “Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked.

   “Please do. But keep your hands in sight.”

   I did, perching on my trunk. “I think that I begin to understand,” I said. As a general rule, the vampire race (I still dislike that term, but there does not seem to be a better) gains members only by adoption, through initiation, rather like a hard-core political party or a religious order. A few of us, as in my own rare case, become what we are by making, as breathing human beings, a transcendent refusal to die, a truly heroic act of will. And there is one other road to the world of the nosferatu, which I had better digress for a moment to explain. It had been known to happen that a normally breathing woman becomes pregnant (in the traditional breathing way) while concurrently carrying on an affair with a male vampire. To such a woman, twins may be born, either fraternal or apparently identical. One of the twins in these cases is firmly committed to breathing. The other will draw air to cry with when he—or she—is spanked, but is in essence nosferatu from the womb.

   But how, I hear a reader asking, how can hereditary characteristics such as facial appearance be passed on through love-making in the vampire style? I answer that, scientists are lately of the opinion that the whole hereditary blueprint is contained in each and every living cell of the body; that living body cells are contained in the blood; and that for a vampire’s lover to drink from a vampire’s veins is as traditional a part of their intercourse as is the reverse.

   “Yes, Mr. Holmes, I see,” I said to him. “And the year of your parents’ travel on the Continent was—?”

   “It was during the summer of 1853.”

   I cast my memory back, or tried to. After more than four centuries of life, sometimes only the very earliest and very latest events are easy to disentangle. “That was only a few months before the outbreak of the Crimean War, was it not? Of course. In my homeland, also, that was a troublous time. And where precisely did your parents travel?”

   “I should prefer that you first tell me where you were that summer.”

   I took thought. Was he likely to accept my unsupported word? It would have been possible, perhaps, for a breathing man of genius and determination to have established something of my biography through historical research, provided he knew where to look; and so I might be caught out in a lie. (Had I known Holmes then, I would of course have replaced that “might” in my thoughts with something considerably stronger.) In any case, the situation seemed to demand a response on a higher level than routine falsehood. True, I had begun by lying to this man, in implying that I bore him no ill-will for trapping me and shooting me, but now that denial was becoming true. In fact I had already grown intensely interested in the relationship between us, and wanted to learn the truth of it, however dangerous the truth might be. If I was not the vampire lover of Holmes’ mother, then surely someone closely related to me was—how else could the uncanny resemblance between us be explained?

   I drew in breath for speech, and told the truth. “I went no farther west than Budapest that year. And I do not remember meeting a Mrs. Holmes at all.”

   A strange constellation of emotions struggled in his face for dominance. “You would remember?” The words were half a plea and half a fierce command.

   She would have been a remarkable woman, I felt sure. “I am quite positive I would.”

   Now at last I could detect a hint of relaxation in Holmes’ posture. “That year,” he said, “my mother went no farther east than Switzerland.” His hand holding the gun had actually begun to tremble, not with tension but with its release.

    I allowed myself another smile. “Then, my dear sir, much as I would like to be able to urge some close family connection upon you now, it would appear I cannot do so.” Actually, I was not at all eager to have Holmes think me a near relative. Most murders, as we know, are committed within the circle of friends and especially of family, and the man holding the gun was obviously not pleased by the thought that he and I were bound by ties of blood.

   “As to our remarkable resemblance,” I went on, “I can only surmise that it is the result of some distant relationship—how shall I put it?—breeding true?” And even in that moment, by the Beard of Allah even as I spoke, it came to me! My brother Radu, the one they called the Handsome in his breathing days—he had in fact spent a summer in Switzerland about the middle of the 19th century!

   I tried to think...yes, that had been in 1853. But l saw no reason to announce my recollection just at present. It meant I was Holmes’ uncle, or half-uncle. Perhaps no language has a precise word for the relationship.

   If his eyes had probed sharply at me before, they now pressed like twin stakes fine-pointed for bilateral impalement. “Some distant relationship, you think.”

   “I regret I cannot lay claim to more than that. If I remember correctly, a branch of the Draculas were drawn into the Wars of the Roses, and I am not the first of my line to set foot in England.”

   “Drawn in?”

   “Yes. They would have come from France, I believe, in 1460, with one of the Yorkist lords—perhaps Warwick. I was myself still breathing, then. Whether any historical record still survives, I do not know. It is, as I say, a disappointment that we are not more closely tied.”

   “A disappointment?” He laughed, and I knew that he believed me