The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  Great heaven! If little Whitby were as full as this of life, promise, and humanity, then what, I thought, must London be? Surely in that vital metropolis I would not be able to remain a common vampire even if I tried. Not that I wished merely to be as one of the more ordinary inhabitants, lungs gasping perpetually in the sooted air for a lifespan of a few decades only. No, I saw myself as becoming a synthesis, the first of a new species, warmth-and light-loving as breathing men, and with as many lusts to satiate and enjoy: tough and enduring as the nosferatu, able to hold converse with animals if not necessarily to assume their shapes. With balmy thoughts like these I kept myself befuddled and bemused.

  One of my favorite haunts during those first wildly hopeful English nights was the churchyard I have mentioned. It surrounded St. Mary’s parish church, which clung on the east cliff high above the town, and was immediately below the ancient and ruined abbey. In this same Whitby Abbey, some twelve hundred years before I came to it, the plowboy poet Caedmon was the first in England to sing a hymn to the creative god of Christendom. I found the place to be invariably deserted after dark, and, like the poet of old, perhaps, I spent there many quiet hours in thought and dream. The harbor and the peaceful town alike were spread before me, as was the sea, to my sightseeing eyes, and the headland called Kettleness bulked low against the sky.

  So I was, leaning against one of the abbey’s remaining walls, and observing moonlit scenery in a euphoric mood, when sweet Lucy first came into my sight. It was close upon the hour of twelve, as I recall, some three nights after my tempestuous arrival. I was roused from contemplation of moon, earth, and sea by the appearance at one corner of my vision of a single figure in some kind of long, white dress, approaching the churchyard along the lengthy flight of steps that led up from the town. I turned to observe this figure more directly and made out that it was a young woman perhaps not yet turned twenty, and rather slight of build, with a diaphanous fall of hair about her shoulders. I did not move. Though with my night-tuned eyes I could see her at a good distance, I stood myself in partial shadow and thought it unlikely that she would become aware of me even if she should pass quite near, as she seemed like to do if she remained on the path that she had chosen.

  She was sleepwalking, I realized as she drew within a few score yards, sleepwalking barefoot and in a thin, white nightgown. The gown shimmered about her with the vibration of her stride, calling to mind the blowing of pure snow, or moonlight of the rare Carpathian heights. Her eves, the rare blue of sunlit English skies, were open, but even had she been fully dressed I would have known she slept — I have a knowing in such matters. Fair hair, to go with such eyes as those; wild heart, which though I heard it as she drew quite near I did not yet begin to understand.

  She passed my place of shadow and I thought she was about to go on farther up, into the abbey or around it, but suddenly her footsteps slowed. She halted, and turned so that she seemed to be looking straight away from me, and out to sea; and at that moment, with a small and scarcely perceptible start, she came awake. You, watching from where I watched, could probably not have perceived the change, so easy was it. Nor did she herself know clearly if she woke or dreamt, as her first words showed.

  I am not one to doubt the existence of a sixth, or even sixteenth, sense. Too often have the breathing members of humanity surprised me with the quickness and acuity of their perceptions. Even before she had fully awakened Lucy’s face turned round in my direction, and my motionless form, in shadow some ten steps away, was the first object which her eyes found in their focus.

  She looked at me as calmly as if it were midday, and I no more than some peculiar, quaint grave marker to be studied. She shifted her gaze to the fleeing clouds; the shattered pile of the abbey, whose tumbled stones may have witnessed sights stranger than a vampire in their time; she gazed upon the intermittent moon; then she looked back at me. You will remember that I had been at work to alter my appearance, and I suppose she saw my hair crisp curling brown instead of sere and white, my face perhaps almost unlined.

  “Why, then, I am dreaming still,” she murmured. “Good sir, what do you in my dreams? I have but lately had three men ask for my hand; am I to hear another wordy proposal of marriage still? But no, you have more the aspect of some old Viking, wrapped in his cape, come to ravish me away across the northern seas.” And without her face showing any fear she gave a long shivering shudder, an altogether delicious movement that began somewhere about her throat and undulated down until one set of white toes went out of sight behind the other.

  “Perhaps more Hun than Viking, my dear lady,” I said, and left my shadow to walk a little closer. “As to the ravishing, that will be largely up to you. But it appears to me that you have already made up your mind in that regard.”

  She did not draw back as I approached, although she grew a little paler than before. Her eyes, lidding as if toward sleep again, were fixed on mine. “I ask only that you do not smother me with words,” she murmured. “I am weary, oh God, so weary, with all the words of men in waking life.”

  My fangs were aching in my upper jaw. Without another word she came into my arms, as smoothly and willingly as any wench that I have ever clasped to lips or loins. She trembled as I kissed her throat, and with my first touch above the jugular her knees were weakening. I led her to a bench nearby, and stood behind her as she sat, and bent to nuzzle at her neck.

  A heavy clock somewhere below struck one in sullen tone. The warm salt richness of her life was trickling in its grateful radiance through my cold veins when I heard a name called: “Lucy! Lucy!” in a girl’s voice that seemed to me far off, but was not so.

  Lucy stirred beneath my mouth and hands, but when I would have raised my head to see who called her fingers knotted in my hair to clamp my parted lips against her skin. I raised my head anyway — drawing from Lucy a little disappointed moan — and saw and heard the other girl coming in our general direction from the head of the long stairs. Of course it was dear Mina, though I did not know her yet, and saw her only as a cursed interruption of my joy. She was hurrying forward purposefully, and had probably seen the two of us there on the bench; but her path led ’round St. Mary’s church and for a few moments she would be out of sight again.

  “Tomorrow night,” I promised Lucy, holding her cheeks in my hands and looking down into her eyes, which were now almost closed. She was no more than half awake now — not from loss of blood, for the amount drained had been trivial to a healthy girl of nineteen. I saw unforced consent there in her eyes and heard it in her slowly calming breath. With women, of course, sex is far less localized anatomically than it is with most men.

  By the time Mina came hurrying ’round the little church, and another racing cloud had fled to bare the moon, I was melted invisibly back into the shadows. Mina ran straight to where Lucy still half reclined upon the bench. Lucy’s eyes were now fully closed in almost-self-convincing sleep, though her breathing was still heavy with the excitement of our embrace. Mina, murmuring maidenly endearments and expostulations, hastened to cover my erstwhile victim with a shawl, and stooped to put her own shoes protectively on Lucy’s feet. I remarked to myself that this new girl, wearing a full robe over her own nightdress, was also attractive, though in a different way. Where Lucy was slight and dainty, the newcomer was sturdy, but yet graceful with her air of robust health.

  As the girls left the churchyard, Mina leading her half-roused friend, I followed at some distance, wanting to discover where Lucy lived. I was somewhat puzzled to see Mina — whose name I still did not know — stop beside a puddle and daub each of her now-bare feet with mud; it came to me that she must be doing this in order that any chance passerby would think her shod. Why this should have been of any great importance I did not know; another vagary of the English mind for me to ponder.

  After seeing the girls safely home and noting that they evidently dwelt in the same house I took me to an early rest and slept well through the day. As for Lucy, Mina was relieved to not
e in the morning that she showed no ill effects from her night’s adventure: “… on the contrary, it has benefited her, for she looks better this morning than she has done for weeks. I was sorry to notice that my clumsiness with the safety pin hurt her. Indeed, it might have been serious, for the skin of her throat was pierced … there are two little red points like pin pricks, and on the band of her nightdress was a drop of blood. When I apologized and was concerned about it, she laughed and petted me, and said she did not even feel it. Fortunately it cannot leave a scar, as it is so tiny.”

  Lucy herself, as she later confided to me, was still uncertain as to whether her sleepwalking adventure had been a dream or not. She said no more about it as the girls went picnicking, accompanied by Lucy’s widowed mother, who was with them on their seaside holiday as chaperone. It was probably fortunate for Mrs. Westenra that neither of the girls mentioned the nocturnal experience to her, for she was even then suffering from a severe form of heart disease; though Lucy, at that time, was as ignorant of her mother’s illness as I was.

  I had Lucy’s name and knew the house in which she slept; and on the following night, true to my word, I called for her. Called silently, my mind to hers, as I was able to do since we had partially become one flesh. Wordlessly there came to Lucy the urgent fact of her lover’s nearness and his desire for her; but she shared a room with Mina and could not readily get out. Lucy feigned walking in her sleep again but this ploy was foiled; her dependable and practical roommate, not wanting another midnight climb to the east cliff, had locked the bedroom door and tied the key to her own wrist. Lucy was led firmly back to bed and almost sat on till she was still. An hour or two later I called again, whilst perched in bat-form at the girls’ window. This time Lucy was truly sleeping as she rose and tried the door. Mina was quickly wakened, and thwarted me as efficiently as before.

  As you have doubtless read somewhere, it is one of the peculiarities of the vampire nature that we may enter into no house where we have never been invited. This being so, there was nothing more that I could do for the moment with regard to Lucy. Disappointed, I made a lonely tour of the town in bat-shape, and gained some additional evidence that when in their rooms and beds, and sure of being unobserved, the Englishman and the Central European were not very much different after all.

  On the following evening, that of August fourteenth if I recall correctly, my persistence was rewarded. Mina was out for a stroll when I arrived at the girls’ window. With a clear field it was no great trick to silently persuade the sleeping girl to open the window and lean out her head, stretching her white and slender throat in the moonlight upon the sill. With my small bat’s mouth I tasted from first one wound and then the other of the two my man-sized canines had so delicately made. The dear girl moaned a bit and had a very pleasant dream.

  Not enough blood could have been drawn into my little bat belly, surely, to have made any real difference in Lucy’s health. But she was not robust. Next day she pined and seemed fatigued, and had no explanation to offer to her dearest friend.

  I called again the next night but Mina was home and once more kept Lucy from sticking her nose out of the room. I was taking a minor but definite delight in this young conquest of mine, and smiled to myself whenever in memory I heard her call me “Viking.” As a matter of fact I took such interest in this dalliance that I almost forgot, for a time, that London was my goal.

  Still, my attitude toward my affair with Lucy was casual, I confess, more suited to the late twentieth century, or to the mid fifteenth, my breathing days, than to the time and place when it occurred. Perhaps it was my attitude, more than my verifiable deeds of blood, that brought that pack of murderers down in full cry upon my trail at last. Really, it was my fickleness, I sometimes think, that they found unendurable. If I had restricted myself to only one of their sweet girls, and married her, and chewed her neck in private, I suppose I might, like an eccentric cousin, have been made almost welcome among family and friends in the circle of the hearth. But perhaps I misjudge what degree of eccentricity even an Englishman can tolerate.

  Never mind. I came near to forgetting about London, as I say, and it was something of a shock when on the evening of August seventeenth I focused my well-rested eyes to find that the box in which I had slept away the day was being loaded aboard a train, along with its forty-nine fellows. I felt a little bit like one of those thieves who occupy the oil jars in Ali Baba.

  That journey of some three hundred kilometers on the Great Northern Railway was my first train ride, and it was no joy. The stench of burning coal that wafted back from steam engine to goods carriages had something organic, almost food-like, in it that tried my endurance over the long hours.

  When we had been chugging on our way some fifteen minutes, it being then practically dark, I oozed out through an imperfection in my crate and stood in man-form to reconnoiter. Swaying with the motion of the train in the long summer twilight, I tallied up my boxes, making sure that none had been left behind. With a roar of hollow, howling steel, a bridge passed under the wheels of the closed carriage in which I and my home-earth rode. Through a chink I caught the faint glimmer of a stream below, and I nodded in appreciation of how effortlessly the flying train could draw me over running water without a tug or pause, such as the strongest horses sometimes gave when freighted with a vampire.

  Sliding the door of the goods carriage a trifle open, I peered awhile at the Yorkshire moors through which we were passing at such remarkable speed. Then, not wishing to precipitate anything remotely like the disaster of my first ocean voyage — I envisioned terrified train crewmen leaping off at sixty miles an hour, landing with fatal impact in pastures and manure heaps — I soon retired once more within my crate. Throughout the remainder of the night, and for most of the next day as I lay in my usual daylight stupor, we chugged and rolled into the south, with frequent stops for cargo, passengers, and fuel.

  At what must have been nearly the scheduled time, half past four in the afternoon of Tuesday, August eighteenth, 1891, shouts dimly heard gave me to understand that we were arriving at King’s Cross station, London. I roused somewhat with my inner excitement, and was awake as my box was slid among its fellows from the doors of the goods carriage directly onto a heavy wagon of some kind. With only the briefest of delays the carters took their seats and used their whips, the horses pulled, and we were off to my newly acquired estate, Carfax.

  I listened to London on the way, although I could not see beyond my box. There were perhaps six million souls alive and breathing in the great metropolis through which I then moved for the first time; whistling, coughing, cursing, singing, praying, selling, calling to one another in joy and fury and fellowship, whilst their horse-drawn vehicles innumerable went past mine on all sides. I reveled in the symphony until at length it faded to inaudibility below the steady noise of my own wagon.

  Purfleet, where my house Carfax stood, was, as I may have mentioned before, a semiurban district of Essex on the north bank of the Thames, some fifteen miles east of the heart of London. The teamsters grumbled and used good English words that I had never heard from Harker’s lips, or read in books, as they heaved and pushed, and carried and slid the lord of the manor into his new home. My own delivery instructions, passed along through Dillington and Son, were followed faithfully enough, and by about eight-thirty in the evening my installation had been completed. The footsteps of the last laborer departed and there came to my glad ears the sound of the doors being pulled shut behind him. At about nine o’clock in the evening I emerged from my coffin, eager as a child to explore my new home.

  I found myself standing in a ruined chapel, obviously built before my time, and giving evidence of having stood untenanted by breathing folk for perhaps as long as my own castle. Such remote, comforting privacy for my retreat, and London hardly more than walking distance off. I blessed Harker and Hawkins, stretched my arms high in my joy, and came near laughing for the first time since my first wife killed herself … a dear girl, b
ut she became quite mad, and jumped from a castle parapet back near the middle of my breathing days. There was not much softness in me before that bitter day, but ever since there has been almost none at all …

  Where was I? Yes, describing my first evening at Carfax. A memorable night. Eagerly I toured the vast, deserted, crumbling house, talking now and then to rats, and then I explored the surrounding wooded acreage. Also I remembered to unpack from its nest of mold and earth my traveling bag with its freight of money and new clothes. The latter I hung up where they might stay free of damp and remain in a presentable condition until I should have occasion to try them in society. What foolish thoughts I doted on …

  During the centuries of my existence it has become my firm conviction that they are right who maintain the nonexistence, in a strict sense, of such a thing as sheer coincidence. Yes, I nursed foolish thoughts. How could I have known that Carfax, purchased by myself from a thousand miles away, adjoined a lunatic asylum governed by a man, Dr. John Seward, who had recently, though unsuccessfully, proposed marriage to my slender, passionate blonde of the churchyard and windowsill? And this fact is not the only, nor perhaps the most remarkable, link in the chain of “coincidence” — for want of a better term — that bound my fate so inextricably with those of Harker, Mina, Lucy, Van Helsing, and the rest. Who could have guessed that the sturdy young woman who had come to succor Lucy in the Whitby churchyard was in fact the fiancee, and would soon be the bride, of young Harker, whom I had left behind me in Castle Dracula? He at that very moment was tossing deliriously with what was then called brain fever, in a hospital bed in Budapest, unidentifiable by the good sisters who had him in their care. After climbing down the castle wall with a pocketful of stolen gold, he made his way somehow to the railway station at Klausenberg, where he had rushed in shouting incoherently for a ticket home. Employees in the station, “seeing from his violent demeanor that he was English,” hastened to accept most of his money and put him on a train going in the proper direction. He got only to Budapest before he had to be hospitalized for what would now be called a nervous breakdown.