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

him. He have take his last earth box on board a ship …  Tally Ho! … Now more than ever we must find him if we have to follow him to the jaws of hell!

      This was not the hoped-for reaction and Mina grew paler as she asked faintly: “Why?”

      “Because,” Van Helsing answered solemnly, “he can live for centuries, and you are but mortal woman. Time is now to be dreaded — since once he put that mark upon your throat.”

      And Mina, not knowing how else to reply, fell down in a faint beneath the professor’s bright-eyed scrutiny. She was game, though, and tried him once more, later in the day, after the men had learned about Czarina’s departure carrying an odd box placed aboard her by a vampirish man.

I asked him if it were certain that the count had remained on board the ship. He replied: “We have the best proof of that — your own evidence when in the hypnotic trance this morning.” I asked him again if it were really necessary that they should pursue the count, for oh! I dread Jonathan leaving me, and I know that he would surely go if the others went.

      Again Van Helsing’s answer was yes. I paraphrase, omitting some five hundred words.

      Mina persisted: “But will not the count take his rebuff wisely? Since he has been driven from England, will he not avoid it, as a tiger does the village from which he has been hunted?”

      Van Helsing, who had now somewhat modified his earlier ideas of my “cunning more than mortal,” would not entertain the thought. “Look at his persistence and endurance. With the child-brain that was of him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city … the glimpse that he have had, whet his appetite only and enkeen his desire …”

      The other men, except for Mina’s outraged husband, who was ready to take any risk to be avenged on me, were as I had expected losing their enthusiasm for the chase. Certainly by October fifth, only two days after I had supposedly fled the country, Seward for one was already having second thoughts:

      Even now, when I am gravely revolving the matter, it is almost impossible to realize that the cause of all our trouble is still existent. Even Mrs. Harker seems to lose sight of her trouble for whole spells; it is only now and again, when something recalls it to her mind, that she thinks of her terrible scar …

      That damned scar hung there on her face, an ominous red warning to us all. The goings-on in Mina’s subconscious — remember that at the time we did not know that word — had been channeled by Van Helsing’s mesmeric powers into producing this stigma. And that the scar nearly matched the one I had received at her husband’s hands must have been more than sheer coincidence — there’s that profound or perhaps meaningless word again. And no one who could see both scars seems ever to have remarked upon their similarity — except for Mina, and one other, as I will shortly relate.

      Van Helsing, now that the tiger had been — as he thought — driven far from the village, and perhaps beyond the hunters’ reach forever, was, perhaps impelled by his own subconscious, looking for other potential game. “Our poor dear Madam Mina is changing,” he confided to Seward at a moment when the two of them were alone. “I can see the characteristics of the vampire coming into her face. It is now but very, very slight; but it is to be seen if we have eyes to notice without to prejudge. Her teeth are some sharper, and at times her eyes are more hard … there is to her the silence now often, as it was with Miss Lucy.”

      Whilst Seward nodded, wide-eyed, the professor went on: “Now my fear is this: If it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance, tell what the count see and hear, is it not more that he who have hypnotize her first, and have made her drink of his blood, should compel her mind to disclose to him what she know of us?”

      Seward had to agree, and it was decided to again reverse policy and exclude Mina from all councils of war. On that evening, before they had been forced to break this sad news to her, “a great personal relief was experienced” by both doctors, as Seward wrote, when “Mrs. Harker … sent a message by her husband to say that she would not join us at present, as she thought it better that we should be free to discuss our movements without her presence to embarrass us.” Mina of course had caught some hints from Jonathan as to which way the wind was blowing, and had also caught from me a mental signal that I was a-thirst to visit her that night.

      Actually my small, furry shape alighted on her bedroom windowsill just as she was packing her husband off to join the other men in their deliberations below. She closed the door of their sitting-room behind him with a sigh of relief, and came tripping gaily into the bedroom. Her face brightened further as she caught sight of the transformed count with bat nose pressed against the pane, impatiently awaiting audience.

      She moved at once to open the window for me — that I might avoid the inconvenience of a shape change to get in — but her first glance at the bat-form as it hopped inside was not without an admixture of repugnance. I made haste to swell into human shape as soon as I was well within the room.

      “Think of it as a mere disguise,” I murmured when we had kissed. “No more than a suit I sometimes wear. But tell me, why such a joyous dance step, fair lady, as that with which you crossed the sitting room just now?”

      “Besides the joy of seeing you