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

Then before leaving the castle he “so fixed its entrances that never more” could the rightful proprietor “enter there Un-Dead.” It is hard to imagine what means he employed toward this end. Surely particles of transsubstantiated bread would have ceased to resemble bread, and therefore ceased to be the body of God, within a few months at the most. At any rate, I noted no impediment when I went out or in.

      There remains but little to be told. Weary from daylight, from my long though indirect exposure to the sun, I descended from the castle and waited in the last light of afternoon beside a rocky outcropping, along the road by which the Szgany soon must come. From the distance my ears brought me the sounds of their flight with their wagon, and from farther still I heard the hoofbeats of the Furies who had pursued them all the daylight hours. As I waited, my wolves came now and then to give me dumb report, by howls, and head pointings, and flashing wordless thought. I saw how the chase must end, and smiled. And I knew also of Mina not far away, now with the professor back at her side, both of them watching the approaching chase.

      I called great blasts of wind and snow about me as I stepped out into the road before the gypsies’ wagon, halting their horses more with my felt presence than any sight they could have of my upraised arm.

      “Master!” cried out Tatra, joyful in the driver’s seat. “I thought —” He turned in puzzlement to look at the heavy box that rode behind him. The Szgany around him reined their plunging horses in.

      “There is no time to explain now, my loyal ones,” I said, springing up into the wagon. I set my fingers beneath the box’s lid and opened it, wrenching screws and nails free. “Drive on! And as we go, do one of you nail this down again. Above all, remember, they must not uncrate me till the sunset.”

      I flattened myself down within the box, upon the alien earth that gave no rest nor peace, and waited, calling down blessings on my loyal men. How, in cold alien England, could I ever have set such an ambush for my enemies? Willing arms beat down the lid above me whilst the wagon lurched underway again and gathered speed.

      As we sped I called more wolves together and set them running on the heels of my pursuers. There I held them, for a diversionary attack at the last moment should one be needed.

      I know when sunset’s coming, even if the day be overcast, or black as night with clouds. That day was partly cloudy, with the snow coming and going like curtains drawn across the rocky, piny landscape. Believe me well, I knew to the moment when sunset was due upon that day. After four centuries’ dependence on it there was no way that I could fail to know.

      Our horses labored. Those of the foe grew nearer and nearer still. Then all at once and nearly simultaneously two voices, Harker’s and Morris’s, cried out in English: “Halt!” Through the wooden lid above me I could hear contending voices, those of my foes and friends, and then the wagon stopped. I needed but a few moments more, a very few … I decided to risk it without calling in the wolves.

      The astronomer, the meteorologist, the artist, each have their own definitions of the precise moment of sunrise or sunset. For me, sunset occurs when the mass of intervening earth grows great enough to sharply attenuate the flow of neutrinos — or whatever the proper title of this flux should be — that, emanating from the unshielded sun, hold in partial paralysis the deep nerve centers of the vampire brain and body.

      At the moment when the first of my enemies sprang upon the wagon the mass of an intervening mountain already blocked me from the sun. Mina, then at a slightly higher elevation and looking down with Van Helsing at the scene of struggle below, noted that “the castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun.”

      It was Harker himself who had boarded the wagon, and at once “with a strength which seemed incredible raised the great box and flung it over the wheel to the ground.” Quincey Morris, though sustaining in the process a knife wound that was shortly to prove fatal, bulldozed his way through the Szgany and joined Harker in prying off my lid. Seward and Lord Godalming were now at hand, sitting their weary horses with leveled Winchesters, against which my knife-carrying gypsies were powerless to interfere. As the lid fell free I looked toward the western sky, from which the sun had just that moment gone, and felt my powers come. My timing had been fine; nay, I boast quite truthfully that it was perfect.

      Mina shrieked as she saw her husband’s knife cut through my throat.

whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart. It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and vanished from our sight.

      I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution there was in the face a look of peace such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.

      And so shall I, my dear; for that look meant that my body, lanced with metallic pain at heart and throat, found anesthesia in the balm of victory as I changed form to mist, which, flowing away unnoticed amid the flurrying snow, was soon invisible to all who might have watched it …

* * *

      I had thought that Van Helsing or Seward or even one of the others might be bothered by the metallic means — involving no wood, nor