A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9), Fred Saberhagen [some good books to read TXT] 📗

shoppers, were opened—the litter on the floor testified that a great many had been emptied over the past week or two—and food of a kind offered to Philip when some of the others sat down to eat. He settled for a bag of Pop Tarts. The cat, with the air of a gourmet, was sorting through the garbage in a corner.

      At this point someone had the idea of searching Radcliffe all over again. Naturally enough the results this time were disappointing. His money had already disappeared casually into people’s pockets. And the argument over what to do with his credit cards had evidently been settled somehow; certainly the bits of plastic had vanished also. His watch was taken.

      The Master won’t be interested in this. We can have it.

* * * * * *

      They left him his recently acquired wedding ring, because even in a few months it had become a very tight fit, and it soon became obvious that they didn’t want to risk spilling any of Philip Radcliffe’s blood, even scraping the skin of his finger, without the Master’s permission.

      “He owns your blood,” one of them explained to Radcliffe, seeing the prisoner’s uncomprehending look.

      He didn’t argue the point.

      The discussion as to whether to tie Radcliffe up, or lock him in the cellar, or both, rambled on inconclusively.

* * *

      While the crew were still waiting for the Master to come back—though no one seemed really to expect his awesome presence until after dark—someone suggested that they show their unwilling guest the guillotine. Immediately the others cried approval.

      They were sadistically eager to observe Radcliffe’s reaction to the machine, and dragged him out of the house, across a yard where he was beset by snarling dogs, and into the barn.

      Most of the space inside the barn formed one large room, as big as the interior of a small house, with a few disused animal stalls at the farther end and a dangerous-looking built-in ladder ascending to an open hayloft above. There was a lot of space available, and the bulk of it had been converted into a kind of workshop. There was one electric wire, a long shop cord strung carelessly over ground and floor, but it had probably been used only for power tools. After-dark illumination was going to be provided by two or three self-fueled Coleman lanterns.

      Bats, small motionless dark pods, small bulges suggesting the shapes of folded wings, were hanging by their feet under the high, peaked roof. A couple of pigeons cooed sleepily.

* * *

      There in the center of the open space, on a floor of decades-old concrete, stood what was undoubtedly a guillotine. The unique shape, immediately recognizable, stood some fifteen feet tall, and most of it, at least up to the level where a tall man could reach with a paintbrush, had been painted bright red. The lower surfaces, up to a little above the level of the plank and the lunette, bore brownish stains that might have been old blood.

      “What’d you think of that?” The questioner really wanted to know.

      It was hard to find an answer … a man who wants to cut off your head…

      One of Radcliffe’s captors, one of those who seemed to have comparatively little trouble in speaking in coherent sentences, told him that the machine before him was an exact replica of the one used in Paris, France, during the Terror. Someone else broke in to argue that no, this was the original, the very one that had taken off the heads of the king and queen and pope.

      The bandit looked at Radcliffe anxiously, with the air of one who was proud to show off his intellectual attainments to someone who could understand them—but at the same time he wasn’t quite certain that he’d got it right.

      To Radcliffe the machine appeared amazingly tall, and quite authentic. This was the very instrument, one character solemnly affirmed, with which their Master had vowed to chop off his, Philip Radcliffe’s, head.

      A tall young woman, tattoos on her bare arms, told him: “After that, the cats will probably have your tongue. Your blood, though, that’s another matter altogether.” She squinted at him judicially. “I think that most of your blood will be out of your body before your head comes off.”

      “What’s your Master’s name?” the prisoner asked on impulse.

      “None of your business.”

      He thought of mentioning it—Radu—but then decided that there was nothing to be gained by doing that.

      Radu’s assistants fussed over the solidly built, authentic-looking guillotine, and again expressed their hopes of pleasing their demanding Master.

      “He’ll be real happy when he sees what we built for him. All the care and effort we put into it.”

      They bragged of how they had made all the parts of the guillotine somewhere (they were coy about revealing exactly where) and trucked it here, disassembled. Then they had set up the device in the old barn. Signs of fresh repair work suggested it had been necessary to patch the roof and run in a long power cord from the house.

      All of them were eager now to give their prisoner a demonstration of how the machine worked.

      For some reason it was thought necessary to tie Philip into a chair first. He didn’t protest; certainly this was better than being strapped to the plank and tilted into the guillotine. Then an inspiration came, and he persuaded his keepers to untie him, by complaining that the cord was so tight that his arm was bleeding inside his shirtsleeve. He’d observed that these people were very worried about the chance that even a drop of his blood would be spilled.

      The complaint brought him immediate attention, and a loosening of the rope. The villains stripped up his sleeve as far as it would go, then sliced it very carefully with a surgically sharp knife, and looked at his arm. Then they looked at him, in outrage because he’d lied. Actually the bonds had been tight enough to leave marks, though there was no real bleeding.

* * *