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

St. Petersburg–he received an answer, this time in the form of a clear transmission. It ran as follows: MATERIAL FOUND IN PLACE DESCRIBED ALL SATISFACTORY HERE MYCROFT.

Epilogue

We were worried lest some powerful subordinate or ally of Kulakov’s deduce that he was dead, and discover–perhaps from the splinters of a wooden bullet–the manner of his death, and then take measures to delay or prevent our departure. Moving quickly, yet deliberately to avoid giving any appearance of undue haste, we completed our preparations for taking ship from St. Petersburg.

Fortune smiled on us, and within a matter of hours, we were well on our way back to England, embarked on the same speedy private vessel which had carried us to Russia.

We were well out at sea, and had satisfied ourselves that no pursuit was to be anticipated, before we openly discussed every aspect of the case among ourselves.

In these circumstances, Holmes concluded his summing-up, including an outline of the chief events that must have taken place in 1765 to provoke Kulakov’s thirst for vengeance and cause the mysterious disappearance of the jewels.

“Before giving his final explanation about the treasure, I believe it will be pertinent to explain the circumstances in which Louisa Altmont had apparently been drowned.

“Young Martin Armstrong has told us how he plunged again and again into the pool where the boat had overturned, looking for the victim of an accident, never dreaming that a kidnapping had taken place instead.

“But actually, Louisa, her attempts to cry out strangled in her throat, was already in the grip of the vampire Kulakov, and was being pulled downstream, under water, at a speed that would have seemed incredible to anyone who did not understand the powers of the being who had seized her.

“Pulled downstream, around the next bend, then brought to the surface long enough for a few gasps of air–the last air she would ever breathe upon this earth.”

While Becky had run for help, first to the nearest cottages and then to Norberton House, Martin, soon aided by other swimmers, plunged into the water again and again, screaming Louisa’s name in an ever more hoarse and breathless voice. He worked his way some yards downstream and then came back, afraid that she was still under water near the place where she had fallen in... afraid that she was dead.

“But in fact Louisa was not dead. Kulakov had repeatedly forced himself upon her–in vampire fashion. This sexual assault took place first underwater and later upon the land. He also, in his half-crazed state, demanded that his victim tell him where the treasure, the family jewels, were hidden.

“Louisa of course knew nothing, or at least very little, about her ancestor’s conflict with a piratical vampire more than a century ago. Pressed to reveal the secret of a supposed family treasure of whose existence she was unaware, she could only tell this man, this fiend, about a safe in her father’s office, which held only some irrelevant legal papers and a few pieces of modern and comparatively inconsequential jewelry.”

Holmes went on to recount how the missing girl, still fully clothed in the powerful grip of her naked captor, was carried swiftly and silently away downstream, to where a rusted, moss-grown iron fence marked the border of the cemetery.

There Louisa had been brought out of the water, and there her wet garments were torn back from her throat, and the vampire’s fangs pierced her white skin.

“But even that was not the worst. She was compelled to drink her attacker’s blood.” There was a shuddering reaction among the listeners. “With a long nail Kulakov opened the skin on his own chest, and forced her mouth to that place.”

After that, Louisa, bound as Holmes was later bound, had been hidden for some hours in the same secret crypt from which Holmes was later rescued. There Kulakov again attacked her repeatedly, so that in a matter of hours, she was well along in the transformation from breathing human to vampire.

That transformation was irreversible by the next morning, when Kulakov left the girl’s body on the riverbank, to be discovered by the first searchers who came that way after dawn.

“Had he a conscious motive in so doing? I am inclined to the belief that he did not. It seems probable that one of Kulakov’s periodic lapses of purpose, even of coherent thought, overcame him there on the riverbank at dawn. He had achieved a great revenge upon the Altamonts, but there was no ultimate satisfaction in this deed, and he was as far as ever from recovering the treasure.

“We come now to the treasure–a much happier subject.”

Our little circle of listeners heartily agreed with that.

Holmes went on: “The key, of course, lies in what Kulakov– during the last minutes of his life–confessed to the man who was endeavoring to heal him–about what happened in 1765, on the morning after Kulakov was hanged.

Holmes went on to describe the scene, as it must have taken place in the Angel Inn: “...Kulakov, in his confused state, still looking for his treasure and having no success, had heard the woman’s despairing cries and had come back from the adjoining room.

“Doll had put on her clothes again. Gibbering and pleading in her terror, she tried to bargain with him. She spoke now in her native language, which Kulakov had learned to understand. She told the Russian that she knew where the stolen ornaments were hidden, and that she would give them all to him in exchange for only a few pounds of her native earth.

“Somewhere among the hundreds of ships in the great port, which had brought in by accident soil, plants, vermin from the farthest reaches of the globe–somewhere among all those far-traveled hulls, surely, surely there must be one whose cargo or bilge or windblown planking contained a few pounds, a few handfuls even, of that stuff more precious now to her than any gems or lustrous metal.

“The Russian, with his understanding clouded by the multiple stresses of strangulation and