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

against the sun’s rays to make out a human figure that was climbing alone toward my forbidding walls. When I recognized Van Helsing my grip tightened on the edges of the embrasure through which I watched until the old stones gave up flakes into my hands. But I meant to let him have his way, convince himself that he had sterilized my house. Mina was far more important to me than any thing or person he might destroy within that gloomy pile.

      I remained in my high, comparatively sunny observation post, where I thought he was not very likely to come looking for me. Soon after he reached my front door far below a hollow booming began to reverberate up through the courts and rooms between. Later I discovered that the professor had been prudently knocking loose the hinges of those great entrance doors, not wishing to be trapped inside by any misfortune, or vampirish plan. He used a handy hammer that he had lugged up in his bag, and for which he meant to find other employment as well.

      As he wrote later, he was working on the doors when he thought he heard “afar off the howl of wolves. Then I bethought me of my dear Madam Mina …” He had left her sleeping alone in the snow, wrapped in rugs for warmth but protected by nothing else more substantial than his ring of crumbled Host. If she had never drunk from my veins she very likely would have perished from exposure. And had those wolves been looking for their breakfast … but as matters stood they were sent by me to find her and stand guard.

      Van Helsing of course did not know this. The dangers Mina might be facing put him, as he wrote, “in terrible plight. The dilemma had me between his horns.” Though he expected that his Holy Circle would guard her from vampires by day or night, “yet even there would be the wolf.”

      But he was not the man to let the wolf’s real fangs on Madam Mina’s skin, or the dilemma’s figurative horns upon his own, turn him aside from his objective now so near at hand within the castle.

I resolve me that my work lay here, and that as to wolves we must submit, if it were God’s will. At any rate it was only death and freedom beyond. So did I choose for her.

      As for himself:

I knew that there were at least three graves to find — graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder.

      Now, Professor, why on earth should you have felt that way, do you suppose?

Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine found at the last that his heart fail him and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, until the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotize him; and he remain on and on, till sunset come, and the vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the woman open

      In my time I have known an ugly vampire wench or two; theirs is a sad lot.

and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss — and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire fold …

      No such weakness for Van Helsing himself, of course; though he admitted that he:

was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyze my faculties … I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields to a sweet fascination, when there came through the snow-stilled air a long, low wail, so full of woe and pity that it woke me like the sound of a clarion. For it was the voice of my dear Madam Mina that I heard.

      This yowl seems to me more likely to have issued from the throat of one of the guardian wolves than from the lady herself; however that may be, the professor did not bother to check on Mina’s position vis-à-vis the wolves, but turned back to the “horrid task” from which he had been distracted. He soon:

found by wrenching away tomb tops one other of the sisters, the other dark one. I dared not pause to look on her as I had on her sister, lest once more I should begin to be enthrall; but I go on searching until, presently, I find in a great high tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister … she was so fair to look upon, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely

      Guess what?

voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me … made my head whirl with new emotion.

      Of course he was not put off by human instincts. After desecrating another Host by dropping it within my own disappointingly empty sarcophagus, he nerved himself to face his “terrible task … had it been but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three! To begin twice more after I had been through a deed of horror …”

      He does not record the order in which he took his victims, but I can testify that fair Anna was the last. It bothered me that at the end she screamed my name. And when I felt something within me trying to move and melt at that mere sound, I knew I had already changed; that my sojourn to England and my love of Mina had not been without profound effect … but whether this changing, softening, in me was for good or ill I could not have said.

      So the professor thrice dutifully endured “the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam.”