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

was now able to meet personally with men whom he had heretofore communicated with only by letter and by cable, and to exchange with the Petersburg police important information on a number of professional matters.

To an Englishman, the main streets of this city are startlingly wide and straight, (the elegant bolshaya Morskaya has signs in French and some in English over the windows of its shops) and many of the buildings which line them have imposing stone façades. The dampness and fog tend to make the English feel at home. Cathedrals and smaller churches abounded.

The bronze Horseman, a monumental statue of Peter the Great, celebrated by Pushkin in a famous poem, stands just east of the English Embankment, near the Admiralty. The equestrian statue, commissioned by Catherine the Great to honor her illustrious predecessor, shows Peter in Roman wreath and toga, right arm outstretched toward the west, making his bronze horse rear on a huge rock, trampling under its hooves the serpent of sedition.

With renewed determination, we pressed our search for our quarry and his prisoner relentlessly through the city, and even through the suburbs.

It was only after a nerve-racking delay, following several days of fruitless search and investigation, that we succeeded in locating Kulakov’s townhouse in St. Petersburg. Our task had been rendered more difficult by the fact that the legal documents of ownership were in another name.

Carefully we approached the house, and observed it from front and rear. Wherever the master might currently be, at the moment he was clearly not in residence, no more than he had been in his rented country house in England. In fact, the St. Petersburg house and its small garden had the look of having been long unoccupied. Shortly after our discovery of the place, and even while we still had it under observation, a small squad of servants appeared and hastily plunged into the task of airing the building and evidently preparing it for occupation. Holmes, through his official and unofficial contacts, soon managed to learn that the count, while en route from England, had sent his housekeeper a cable from Copenhagen.

That night we four men approached the building stealthily, managed to enter without disturbing any of the servants in their sleep, and subjected the premises to a thorough search. It did not take long to convince ourselves that the prisoner we sought could not be here, and that therefore Kulakov himself was almost certainly still taking his daytime slumber elsewhere.

The terrible thought haunted us that the Russian pirate’s hostage might already have been dispatched to some remote Siberian province, and was being borne hourly, by carriage or by rail, farther and farther out of our reach. Prince Dracula and Sarah Kirkaldy were still conducting their daily hypnotic sessions, and the evidence from these was against Rebecca’s having been carried out of the city–Kulakov was still in the city, and there were times when he seemed to be looking directly at his captive. but still, the horrible possibility loomed.

Then, just when all prospects seemed dark, encouraging news came to us–by precisely what route, I will not specify, even now, after the lapse of some fourteen years. Evidence came into our hands that the woman we sought was being kept out of sight in the house of a certain eminent person who was perhaps allied deliberately with Kulakov, or perhaps was being forced, by blackmail or other means, to accommodate the vampire’s wishes.

Taking counsel quickly among ourselves, we hunters decided to risk everything and enter the mansion in question, by stratagem if possible, by force if necessary, and to do whatever was required to rescue Rebecca Altamont–whether she was still breathing, or had become nosferatu– from her evil captor. To this end, we joined our hands in a solemn pledge.

Nineteen

Moving in and around the great city of St. Petersburg, meeting at our hotel to exchange information, the members of our party continued, each in his or her own way, to press the search for Count Kulakov, for his prisoner, and for the mysterious Gregory Efimovich, who seemed to have a dark, controlling influence upon our enemy.

Certain signs suggested that we were making progress–at least our efforts had provoked the count into trying to warn us off–but in other respects we faced great and terrible difficulties. Some of these problems were simply a result of the fact that we were foreigners.

Again it seemed necessary to make sure that all of our party understood the dangers we were facing. We were putting ourselves at a grave risk in our efforts to rescue Rebecca. Dracula dutifully advised us that we breathing folk, at least, were risking arrest and imprisonment, which in Russia could involve a fate more terrible than quick death.

However, we were all in agreement that duty and honor alike forbade any thought of turning back. Whatever fate our enemy might inflict upon his helpless hostage if we persisted, there was no reason to think that she would be spared the same doom if we withdrew.

At last–whether it came through some mysterious local contact of Dracula’s, or whether it was first established through Sarah Kirkaldy, I never learned–there fell into our hands the first real clue as to where and when we might reach Kulakov.

At last, to our great relief, we believed we had succeeded in identifying the house in the city where Rebecca Altamont was being held, almost a mile from the count’s own townhouse. Having ascertained this much, we thought it safe to assume that Kulakov would not likely be very far from this other dwelling, or remain absent from it for any great length of time. We remained determined to take whatever chances were necessary to effect the young woman’s rescue.

Unfathomable complications lurked in the fact that we still had not learned who the important Gregory Efimovich might be. Holmes suspected the name might be that of some Russian mastermind who was engineering a deep plot.

We had received an indication that Kulakov expected to meet this mysterious