The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  An elderly keeper came from somewhere and regarded me with suspicion. There was no one else about at the time and I was obviously at the focal point of lupine uproar.

  I was not in London to be mysterious, but to bind myself more closely to the great mass of humanity. “Keeper,” I said, to have something to say, “these wolves seem upset at something.”

  “Maybe it’s you,” the man retorted, and his gloomily surly manner reminded me of a Turkish jailer I once had, and the resemblance made me smile even as it aroused my further sympathy for the confined wolf.

  “Oh, no, they wouldn’t like me,” I answered vaguely, distracted by a communication from another source. Freedom, the wolf was saying, looking out. It was not a question but a complete declarative sentence.

  I cannot give you that. I answered him. Take it for yourself and it is yours.

  “Ow yes they would,” the old man answered me, impertinent with the privilege of crabbed and independent age. “They always like a bone or two t’ clean their teeth on about teatime, of which you ’as a bagful.”

  Freedom! came from the gray iron cage.

  Take it. Transcend. Do you want it more than food, more than retaining your own wolf nature? Will you put by your very body and its known comforts to have this thing you say you want? Simply to be free of your cage?

  And the early years of Turkish imprisonment were once more very clear to me. Radu was then a mere child, a small child, too easily frightened to offer any sport at all to our inventive jailers. But I was fourteen years old when they began on me …

  The animal’s brain was churning with unworded thoughts, but for the moment it quieted and lay down. The keeper looked at it in puzzlement, looked back to me, and then walked over to the cage and reached inside to stroke the ears of the panting beast. To startle the old man I did the same, and had my reward in his expression.

  “Tyke care!” he said. “Berserker here is quick!”

  “Never mind, I’m used to them.” The wolf’s eyes were not on me but fixed on distance now, as he thought of running in unbarred, unbounded space.

  “Are you in the business yourself?” the keeper asked, his tone now friendlier. He took off his hat. Perhaps he hoped to buy another wolf or two from me.

  “No, not exactly.” And I tipped my own hat to him and to Berserker in farewell. “But I have made pets of several.” And with that I turned and walked away. The wolf’s wordless thought-voice was falling off in my mind to mere muted distant mumbling, but the infinitely more verbal noise of Lucy’s thoughts was audible again and mounting higher. I did not wish to hear either of them.

  * * *

  Something was seriously wrong with Lucy, I could not help but know that much, but I closed off my mind against knowing more.

  There was no possible way I could have guessed that after dark Berserker would break the railings of his cage, forcing iron bars loose from their fastenings, and come racing unerringly to find me in the night — at Hillingham.

  I could not know what the night before me held. But still as I walked out of the park I was perturbed in spirit.

  I said before that I would later speak of fear, and now the time has come. I will not say that I have experienced infinite fear, but I have known all fear that my mind and soul could ever bear, and more. The first time that my Turkish jailors stripped me naked in my cell and carried me, paralyzed with terror and dripping with my own excrement, out to the impalement stake, I had no doubt that I was going to die upon it. Some in my situation would have fainted, others would have gone mad. What I did … well, perhaps only a caged wolf could begin to understand.

  Of course I did not die. If the guards had killed me they would have had no fun for the next day. I was not even really — or I should say “not permanently” — impaled. The end of the upright stake was blunt and drew no blood immediately when it was inserted into a natural orifice of the body; and by standing on tiptoe I could keep it from entering deeply enough to do serious damage. I could not stand on tiptoe indefinitely, but when my weight began to come down the men were quick to take me off the stake. They certainly did not want me to die on it then and there. Never before had they seen anyone who retained consciousness while being so deliciously, excruciatingly, helplessly frightened.

  Next day they played a new game, showing me first what they claimed was a signed order for my execution. Again I believed them, for my susceptibility to terror gave me no choice. Perhaps I am not really exaggerating when I say that on each of these days I died of fright. The new game had to do with being burned alive, and I had blisters and scorched hair before they called a halt. And on a succeeding day there was a game involving voracious rats; and again, one with a Turkish woman whose husband, she said, had been tortured to death by Walachians; and after that … but I have no wish to disgust you with all details.

  It was when the cycle came round to the stake again that I realized abruptly that I had nothing left to fear, that in fact I was afraid no longer. I had used up all the fear my soul could ever generate, were I to live to be a thousand. My life’s ration of anxiety, dread, timorousness, and terror, all was consumed before I had a beard to shave. From those days to this, I have feared nothing. I am not brave and never was; that is a different matter entirely …

  It seems to me the most striking proof that this estimate of my condition is correct that I simultaneously lost all desire to be revenged upon my jailors. A high official of the sultan himself, happening to pass through Egrigoz, observed with astonishment how imperturbably I bore some of the fruitless later attempts of my enemies to frighten me. They were in fact applying torture at the time, but, do you know, it is the moment-to-moment fear of pain that is the worst part of pain itself? This high official, as I say, applauded what he took to be my fortitude, and took an interest in my case. In time he became my friend, to such an extent that, had I wanted revenge upon my low-ranking tormentors, I could probably have had it. And it was my refusal of revenge, not out of any heroic Christian virtue but rather because of sheer fearless indifference, that so frightened them in turn. Man fears that which he cannot understand, and I had gone far beyond the comprehension of those simple but evil men …

  So as I walked the London streets it was not with fear or hatred but in gloomy meditation that I thought back upon the Turks. Was I so sure that Iwanted to rejoin the ranks of the mainstream of mankind? To shorten my life, possibly, in doing so? Not that I feared a shortened life, or aught else in the world or out of it.

  Not even God, my friends, although I know him better than you do …

  An hour or so before the wolf escaped at midnight I had been standing in a Soho tavern, acutely conscious of the fact that there was no image of myself in the cracked and cloudy mirror behind the bar and that the fleshly girl clinging to my arm would be indeed surprised were she ever to note that fact. I was acutely conscious also of the warm fluid pulsing so rapidly within her Vena jugularis, and of the impossible odors of alcoholically fermented grain rising from the glass that waited untasted before me on the arm-smoothed wood. Conscious with all my soul of the gulf between me and those round me, all of them unarguably human, misshapen in mind and body and spirit though they were.

  It was in this state that I felt Lucy call to me with a new urgency, cry with a terrible fervor across the four or five miles of the city that separated us. In her fear and sickness she was appealing for my help, calling on me as her protector and her lord, and so it was I answered her. From the shadows of a Soho alley I took flight, and came down to rest on earth again in the dark, timbered lawn of Hillingham.

  From there I sent my wordless summons, as before. This time, however, I soon learned that she could not or would not try to come out. Nor could I simply enter the house upon my own initiative. Whether the reason is to be found in physics or in psychology I am not sure, but the fact is that I may enter no dwelling place of breathing folk unless I have been at least once invited to do so by one who dwells within.

  I knew by
this time which window of the upper floor was that of Lucy’s room, and I quickly took wing again and perched outside it, on the ledge. The blind was drawn and at first I could not see into the room, but Lucy’s voice was plain. She was engaged in a shrill argument with another, older woman who could only be her mother. The argument ended abruptly when Lucy fell back exhausted upon her bed, thus coming partially into the narrow range of vision into the room I had obtained by pressing my bat head as close as possible against the glass at one side, where a chink was open twixt blind and casement. Round Lucy’s neck, I saw, were garlic flowers garlanded, together with the long green leaves, and the whole room was fetid with the plant.

  Almost simultaneous with this shocking discovery — which meant of course that someone was attempting antivampire measures — I heard Berserker’s first low howl below me in the shrubbery, and looked down over one batwing in absolute consternation. It might take long minutes to quiet the wolf and send it peaceably back to the cage from which it had so recently, obviously, broken free, and Lucy’s mental anguish was too urgent for me to spare the time for that. Feeling like a general beset in camp by a series of sudden surprise attacks, I crouched there on the windowsill and tried to marshal my thoughts calmly. Could there be some reason for the garlic, other than the one with which I was most familiar? There were undoubtedly some English customs of which I had not yet heard; but I had little hope that this was one of them.

  The women inside had not yet heard the wolf, or else they thought its howls were those of some dog in the neighborhood, for the noise made no impression upon them. Contorting my small, furred body, I made a greater effort to peer in beside the blind and got a better look at Lucy in her nightgown. It was something of a shock to see how ill she looked. I also saw Lucy’s mother in her robe, looking tired and drawn herself — recall that even at this time neither Lucy nor myself had yet any inkling of the very grave condition of Mrs. Westenra’s heart — just as she tottered from the room and closed the door behind her. This was my chance; I sent another mental summons and simultaneously flapped my bat wings at the panes. Lucy turned her head a little on the pillow, but no more. Her eyes were closed.

  Clinging carefully to stone in the autumnal night, I altered back to man-form right on the windowsill. I drew mass and weight unto myself — from nothing? Say from the great reservoir in which God kept such things before deciding to enact Creation, and to which some of his creatures are allowed a limited access still. How do I do it? Let me ask how you sort out the myriad atoms in your lungs each time you draw a breath to oxygenate your blood.

  Now I tapped at the window with a long fingernail and spoke aloud. Lucy rose up in bed, with a startled look that soon changed to joy. She got up as quickly as she could, and came to the window, and was about to speak the words that would have let me pass in to her; but on the instant the door of her room opened once more and Mrs. Westenra’s figure was plain in my field of vision — and mine, alas, in hers.

  Lucy had already drawn the blind full back. When the unsuspecting old woman looked over her daughter’s shoulder into the night it was my visage that she saw peering in at both of them.

  I expected shock, but not what happened. Mrs. Westenra extended her arm for a second or two, pointing at me in silence, her face contorted with her fright; and then there came from her throat a gurgling noise and she fell as if an ax had struck her down.

  “Mother!” Lucy cried out, and hurried to try to lift her aged parent from the floor; but in Lucy’s weakened condition the shock and the exertion were too much for her, and she crumpled over also, in a faint.

  Mrs. Westenra’s heart and lungs had already ceased their labors and I was not sure that Lucy’s would not shortly do the same, so feebly and irregularly were they now working. She had called to me for help and I was anxious — nay, almost desperate — to fly to her aid, but I could not. I had not yet been bidden directly to enter the house wherein she lay. I, who might pass like smoke through barriers impossible for breathing men to penetrate, was held back by a law as inexorable to me as gravity.

  Another low wolf howl rising from the shrubbery at last jogged my slow brain back into action. I dropped lightly to the ground, which was some twelve feet below the windowsill, and called Berserker to me. For a moment I held the big gray wolf tightly, one hand gripping his muzzle, my eyes locked on his, trying to force into his willing brain knowledge of the service that I required of him. I wanted him to force his way into that room above, and lick at Lucy’s face to rouse her; failing that, to drag her by her nightdress or her hair to the window where she might come within my reach.

  Why did I not go instead, in my most suave and reassuring style to knock at the front door? All this was in the middle of the night, remember, and the house was isolated. Lucy had once mentioned to me in passing that no male servants slept in the house — the pantry at Hillingham was evidently a place of impeccable morality. Were the women within likely to open a door for me, under whatever pretext I came? I thought not. My instincts argued for direct action, and I have learned to trust my instincts in emergencies.

  It took me two, three, tosses to cast the heavy wolf up to the windowsill above. Its surface, though broad enough for a lean and rather acrobatic gentleman to sit on at his ease, offered but scanty purchase for Berserker’s paws. He whimpered at the treatment I accorded him but seemed to realize that in adopting me as master he had acquired an obligation to carry out my orders. In a moment he had swung his heavy forequarters round and smashed the glass panes of the window in.

  I was leaping up to catch the windowsill with both my hands just as the wolf fell back. As we passed I saw the red cuts on his muzzle and the small gleam from a bit of broken glass that had stuck in his fur. I meant to tend his wounds, who had served me faithfully, but I would see to Lucy first. I will be human, I will be, I kept repeating to myself.

  I crouched on the sill again, my face framed in the broken-edged aperture of glass. “Lucy!” I called in, quietly but fiercely, using mind as well as voice.

  On a carpet littered with broken glass and garlic flowers Lucy stirred and sat up slowly, not seeming to realize that she was half entangled with her mother’s corpse.

  “What … who … ?”

  “Lucy, your Viking is here to aid you. Call me to come in. Call me to come to you.”

  Her eyes lifted slowly, puzzledly, to behold my face. Now belowstairs I could hear some of the housemaids stirring; no doubt they had been awakened by the crash of glass. Outside, the wolf howled once again, this time in pain. Lucy raised a hand to try to put back the blond hair from her face, but she was too weak and the gesture failed halfway through.

  “Lucy, my name is Vlad. Bid me to come in, quick.”

  “Oh. Come, then, Vlad. I feel so sick, I am afraid that I am going to die.” Then, when I had lifted her in my arms, she made a gesture toward the still form remaining on the floor. “Mother?”

  “Your mother is not suffering,” I said, and put down Lucy on the bed. Then, before I could do or say anything more, a multitudinous shuffle of feet in the carpeted hall outside the bedroom door announced the arrival of the housemaids in a frightened group.

  “Miss Lucy? Are you all right?”

  “Answer carefully!” I whispered, gripping Lucy’s arms. My eyes burned into hers, my voice commanded, and she seemed to regain a little of her strength.

  “I am all right,” she called out weakly, “for the moment.”

  “Is your mother in there, Miss Lucy? May we come in?”

  I nodded.

  “Come!” she called out, and the handle of the door began to turn; before it had completed its motion I was under Lucy’s bed, stretched out at full length and ready to melt to mist or shrink to bat-form in an instant.

  Eight bare girlish feet paraded into the room and round the carpet near my head, accompanied by dancing nightgown hems, outcries, and lamentations. Mrs. Westenra’s body was lifted to the bed, the broken window marveled at, and horror expressed at
the continued howling of the wolf outside. Injured — and thinking himself betrayed, for he went home before I could get out to tend his wounds — he had better cause to howl than they did, and he made less noise.

  And there were those garlic flowers on the bedroom floor, now crushed almost into my very nostrils. Vlad, I asked myself, reviewing the situation as I lay beneath the bed; what is the world, the great breathing human world which you expect to join, going to make of all this?

  Lucy sat exhaustedly in a chair whilst the maids were laying out her mother’s corpse. But despite her weakness and illness she retained presence of mind enough to realize that a man was in danger of being found concealed in her boudoir, a state of affairs less tolerable than death. And she retained the wit to do something about it. I saw her suddenly get up and leave the room, and heard her soft feet descend the stairs, whilst the maids remained gathered round the bed with the dead woman on it and the live vampire out of sight beneath. The maids did not note their young mistress’s departure or her quiet return a minute later. During this minute I heard, faint but distinct, the sound of a brief trickle of liquid being poured somewhere downstairs.

  Lucy was now standing upright, with an effort, just inside her bedroom door. “All of you,” she commanded, having to raise her voice slightly to cut through the maids’ continuing babble, “go down to the dining room and take each a glass of wine. Take only the sherry, mind. Then come back when I call.”

  There was no problem in obtaining prompt obedience to such an order. In a moment the whole moaning and cooing herd of them was gone, and Lucy had closed the door behind them and locked it. I wriggled out from concealment in a trice and found her once more on the point of swooning. She would have thrown herself upon the bed already but that her mother’s clay lay there. I put her down there anyway, after moving the old lady next to the wall.