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

to be discussed. The establishment of any genuinely just claim appeared to be impossible, and we all agreed that if the matter were submitted to the courts, it might well enrich a generation of lawyers, but no other benefit was likely. In the circumstances we chose unanimously to arrange for a quiet distribution of the value of the jewels among ourselves.

Martin Armstrong and Rebecca Altamont were married within the year. I have wondered, on the basis of no real evidence, whether the young American’s fascination with the vampire Louisa ever caused him to experience a certain disappointment that his bride was not in that category.

Ambrose and Madeline Altamont, with their surviving daughter restored to them, both enjoyed a gradual recovery from the fever and near-madness with which they had been afflicted–but neither was ever quite the same.

Since the war began, I have heard that Madeline at least, joining with a group of parents who have lost sons at the front, is still making plans for sittings with one or more new mediums, still convincing herself that they enjoy at least occasional success in their ongoing efforts to achieve contact with the departed daughter they so deeply love.

Thank you, Dr. Watson. Now I, Dracula, will have one more word...

Sarah Kirkaldy and I remained very good friends. I spent some time with her in Scotland. I really could not find it in my heart to condemn the lady too strongly for her career as a medium. by and large, her clients received in full measure what they paid for: feelings of excitement and contentment.

In fact, I even consented to help out my newly prosperous friend Sarah with a difficult client or two. There was in Edinburgh a certain psychic investigator, as he styled himself, a very determined skeptic who seemed really bent on giving the poor young woman a hard time... but that is another story altogether.

Probably I should also add that I planned and executed no revenge upon the peasant who had hypnotized me in St. Petersburg. In that case, life itself, as so often happens, exacted sufficient retribution.

In fact, there were witnesses who heard Mr. Prince, just before departing for Scotland, confide to his cousin Sherlock Holmes that he wanted nothing more to do in any way with Gregory Efimovich Rasputin.

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THE STALWART COMPANIONS

by

H. PAUL JEFFERS

One

It was the last day of June 1880 when I left Harvard with my head filled with the anticipation of a thrilling journey into the plains, hills, and valleys of Iowa and Minnesota in the company of my brother, Elliott. A vacation was exactly what I needed, having just completed arduous scholarly pursuits at college. I relished the thought of spending time in the great out-of-doors, especially because I was planning further scholarship in the study of law at Columbia. I was also, at this time, on the verge of marriage, a prospect which delighted me, although my photograph taken in my senior year at Harvard by J. Notman of boston indicates that I was a very serious-minded young man – jaw firmly and determinedly set, the eyes unflinching, the straight nose, all bespeaking a youth of purpose. Yet the sideburns, coming very near to being muttonchop whiskers, indicate the real Roosevelt behind that sombre visage. Not rakish, precisely, but adventuresome, beyond question.

I had thoroughly enjoyed Harvard, which I had entered in the fall of 1876, and I was confident that it did me good. I had earned a Phi beta Kappa key. I had spent a good deal of my time in studying scientific matters because when I entered college I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history. My ambition at the time was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or baird, or Coues type. Much of this interest had been tolerated in me by my father, who had told me I would have to make my own way in the world and if that meant a scientific career, I could do so. before he died, he impressed upon me the need to be serious about my intentions. He warned that the comfortable financial situation in which he left me should not be an excuse for me to approach scientific matters as a dilettante. He also told me that if I was not going to earn money, I should even things up by not spending it. Unfortunately, Harvard disappointed me in my aims. The outdoor naturalist and observer of nature was ignored in the curriculum and biology was treated as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope. While I was quite disappointed, I was also resolved to pursue my interests on my own, if necessary. As a result, I spent a good deal of time teaching myself by whatever means I could find. It proved difficult and I began to resign myself to giving up science as a career.

While my own scientific explorations were to leave me disappointed in terms of my own career, they were to bring me into contact with a young man residing in London, England, to whom science was also a passion and for whom the structured formalities of university science had also proved a disappointment. How I came to know this remarkable fellow is important because of subsequent events shared by the two of us, so I will devote some time here to relating how it came to pass that there had developed by the middle of the year 1880 a friendship, albeit by correspondence, between myself, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr Sherlock Holmes.

That I should undertake a friendship through the post was not unusual for me. The writing of letters had been one of the most important contacts with the outside world in my boyhood. I had the misfortune to be a weak and sickly child. I suffered terribly from asthma and often had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe. One of my memories