The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Now the servants will leave us alone,” Lucy said to me in a voice rapidly growing vague and distant. “For I have drugged the wine … oh, Vlad, are you my death? Your face is sometimes … if you are indeed death, then I must plead with you. Whoever you are … my mother’s dead, but I’m too young. I’m to be married in September.”

  “Lie still now. I think that you are very ill.” Giving Lucy a quick examination, I noted the bandaged incisions on the inside of each arm at the elbow. “Who is your doctor, and for what has he been treating you?”

  “There are two: Dr. Van Helsing, of Amsterdam, and Dr. Seward.”

  I looked up sharply at that first name; I had heard it once before, from a vampire of my acquaintance. “And who is Dr. Seward?”

  “He is about thirty, and very nice. In fact …” She paused. “He is superintendent of a lunatic asylum in Purfleet.”

  My mind raced, seeking understanding. But there is no understanding coincidence, or the imitation thereof by fate. “And their treatments? What are these little wounds? Surely they do not bleed you, in this day and age?”

  “Ah, Vlad, I do not know. The doctors are kindly, and they mean well, I am sure. But they tell me nothing, and I am too ill to argue with them and insist on knowing.” After a gasping pause, during which I tightened the bandage once more on her arm, she went on: “They bring me garlic flowers and bulbs. And three times now I have been drugged, and the doctor has performed some — some operation whose nature I do not fully understand.”

  “Three times. Damnable. Which doctor operates?”

  “Dr. Van Helsing, I think. I feel so safe when he is with me. But still …” She had lost the strength for speech. I bent and laid my ear against her breast, and liked not the laborious pumping sounds of the machineries of her body. By modern standards I am certainly no qualified physician, but then neither would many of those be who earned their bread as such during the nineteenth century.

  Her eyes were on mine, trusting, praying.

  “Lucy. Be clear, lightbearing girl. Be clear now in your thoughts. There is a most momentous decision that we may have to make tonight.” And I caressed the golden beauty of her hair. In four hundred years of war and peace I had seen death come to many, and I thought her unlikely to survive the night. Unless …

  “Vlad, help me, save me. Arthur is not here, and I fear the others are killing me with what they do.” A spasm of fear had temporarily renewed her energy. “Don’t let me die.” And Lucy was seized with sudden nausea, and retched feebly over the side of the bed. There was an acid smell but little vomitus. “Hold me, Vlad!”

  Yet I did not pull her into an embrace, but straightened and stood upright beside the bed. Belowstairs, all sounds of the maids’ movements had ceased, save for the stertorous breathing of their four pairs of lungs; for all intents and purposes, Lucy and I were in the house alone. There was a little time, at least, in which to plan and think. Perhaps no more than a little; she might well die, I thought, before a long discussion could be held.

  “Lucy. Death will come soon or late to all of us. And it is not the worst thing in the world, though full well I know how frightening it can sometimes be.”

  “No, no!” Terror gave her a terrible, momentary energy, and her nails tried to bite at my arm. “Save me, Vlad! Do something. I see in your eyes that there is something you can do.”

  “Lucy, there is one way in which I can — not cancel your death, for I am not God — but put it off, for some indefinite time. But to take this road will mean a great change in your life. Greater than you can possibly imagine now.”

  “Only save me, Vlad, I beg of you. I do not want to die!” I cannot describe the emotion that was in her failing voice as she uttered these words.

  I lifted her weightless-seeming body from the bed; in shifting her slightly in my arms, so that the whiteness of her throat where I had left my marks before was tautly exposed, I also turned my own body slightly. There was a mirror hung on the wall across the room, and inside its gilt frame Lucy’s unsupported body hung, her nightdress gathered up at the knees and back by the pressure of invisible arms. Then I bent down my head …

  When I had taken something of her blood it was time to give her to drink deeply of mine. I undid the clothing over my own heart and tore the flesh there with one of my own talonlike fingernails — no other cutting tool can do the job so well — and quickly pressed Lucy’s mouth against my breast as if she were a suckling babe and I a crooning nurse.

  As soon as we were done with exchanging a considerable quantity of blood I wiped her pretty lips and put her back into bed, having done all that I could do. At the moment she was still nearly comatose, but I knew now that she would not die before the night was out, at least not of unmatched blood put straight into her veins. I thought she was no longer likely to die at all, in the near future. It was still quite probable that she would soon be put into her grave, but as we know, that is not quite the same.

  “Lucy,” I said softly, and extended my hand toward her still figure on the bed. She took it and arose, although her eyes stayed shut until she came gracefully to her feet. Then they opened. Ah, changed … Van Helsing would be sure to see it, and what might he do then?

  But I had come to London on my own affairs, and not to fight him for this woman. She meant very little to me, except that she had called on me for help, which I had now given as best I could.

  “Lucy, you will not die tonight. You may feel ill. But if they come to you tomorrow, to drug you and transfuse you once again, I would advise you to refuse them.”

  “But they never ask.” Change in the voice, too, already; it was at once a little livelier, and more remote.

  “Insist that this Arthur of yours be called, if he will help you take a stand against them. Do you understand? They are putting the blood of other people into your veins. I suppose they do mean well, but what they were doing had brought you to the point of death.”

  “But, Vlad … I feel stronger now. I believe that you have saved me.”

  “And so I have, my dear, for the present.

  Snatched you from death, put back the Day of Judgment for you. Not many men can truthfully claim such power. It was what you wanted from me.” I sighed. The warning I was about to attempt would not, in my opinion, do much good. New-made vampires must find their way at first by instinct, much as newborn children do.

  I went on: “You may at some time soon fall into — another coma. If you allow them to give you another transfusion I would say this is quite likely. And if you fall into this coma you are going to wake from it in circumstances that will be at first quite hard to understand; but be of good cheer and understanding will come.” The first emergence from one’s grave is a unique experience indeed.

  “I will be of good cheer, Vlad. Oh, Vlad, tell me again that I will not die.”

  “You will not die.” It was a lie, such as one gives the wounded after battle sometimes. A lie, because I did not know what Van Helsing might decide to do with her now that she had changed; and all must die the true death sometime. Earlier, when the great decision had still been hers to make, I had been as truthful with her as I could he in the small time we had. Now there were only small but troublesome decisions left and I judged it better to be simply soothing.

  “Now, my dear. Eventually the women you have so cleverly drugged below are going to awake, and also other people can be expected to enter this house when morning comes. There is much here that will require explaining.” I sighed; there were my fresh fang marks on her throat, about which nothing could be done.

  As I spoke I was stroking Lucy’s bare arm, and her forehead, to strengthen her with suggestion for the tasks ahead. There was the broken window to be accounted for, and the wolf outside, whose howls the maids had heard and whose role in the night’s events might, for all I knew, not yet be over. There was the mother, dead of heart failure as unexpected by Lucy as it was by me; and there were the maids, who would certainly tell any investigators of th
eir drugged sleep, even if they should rouse from it before anyone else had entered the house.

  Above all, there was the condition of the girl herself. Van Helsing could not now fail to detect her symptoms of incipient vampirism. Could he be moved to pity for her? I thought perhaps he might, if she could be made to appear a purely innocent victim of the evil count.

  I had continued to stroke Lucy, and she had fallen by now into the beginnings of hypnotic trance. “Find us some paper and ink, little girl,” I told her. “Before I leave you the two of us in collaboration are going to compose a short story. As wild, perhaps, as one of those of Mr. Poe.”

  * * *

  It was about ten o’clock on the following morning when Drs. Seward and Van Helsing arrived, practically simultaneously and both in desperate haste, at Hillingham. The missent telegram I mentioned earlier had caused them to leave Lucy unguarded through the night. Both were distraught because of this. In Van Helsing’s mind, of course, the peril from which she needed protection was vampires; Seward had not even this warped version of the truth, but he loved the girl, or thought he did, and knew she stood in danger; and, in his inexperience, he followed his former teacher blindly.

  They found the house locked up and barred from the inside, and their increasingly urgent knockings went unanswered. At last they broke in through a kitchen window, to find in the dining room the four servant girls still lying unconscious on the floor. In Lucy’s room, upstairs, they found the two women still on the bed, the younger still breathing but by now unconscious again.

  Lucy had not even the chance to plead against a fourth transfusion, and that of course is what Van Helsing gave her. This time blood was drawn from the veins of the young American, Quincey Morris, who arrived innocently on the scene with a message of inquiry from Arthur Holmwood, and was thrown, so to speak, into the front lines at once.

  “A brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble,” Van Helsing is quoted by Seward as saying whilst they got out the knives once more. I suppose his prescription for Lucy might be taken as closely resembling mine, though unfortunately his method of operation differed. So, sad to say, did the result.

  It was noted in passing by the busy doctors that the decanter of sherry on the sideboard in the dining room had a peculiar odor, had in fact been doped with laudanum from a bottle kept nearby as medicine for Mrs. Westenra. And, when Lucy was lifted from her bed to be treated to a hot restorative bath, there “dropped from her breast” a sheet or two of notepaper. Van Helsing’s brief perusal of these papers brought to his face “a look of grim satisfaction, as of one who has had a doubt resolved.”

  These papers bore, of course, our literary effort of the night before. It was a first attempt at fiction by a beleaguered vampire writing in a foreign tongue and a half-tranced girl who had just been shocked by the sudden demise of a parent. Seward’s first comment after reading our creation was: “In God’s name, what does it all mean? Was she, or is she, mad; or what sort of horrible danger is it?”

  One might suppose that in response to such straightforward and heartfelt appeal Professor Van Helsing would have shouted: “Is a vampire, young man! One hell of a hideous monster that drinks your blood!” But that would not, maybe, have been quite philosophical or metaphysical enough. As matters actually went, “Van Helsing put out his hand and took the paper, saying: ‘Do not trouble about it now. Forget it for the present. You shall know and understand it all in good time; but it will be later …’ ”

  When Lucy emerged from her coma she at first tried to tear up the story we had concocted, but then relented, evidently realizing that it was better than nothing to offer as some explanation for the weird events of the preceding night.

  The story of course purported to be “an exact record” of those events, set down in her handwriting almost as they occurred. It related how Lucy had been awakened from peaceful sleep by “a flapping at the window,” and shortly thereafter heard “a howl like a dog’s, but more fierce and deeper.” She had gone “to the window and looked out, but could see nothing, except a big bat, which had evidently been buffeting its wings against the window.”

  Unperturbed by this commonplace event of suburban London, Lucy in our fiction returned to her bed. Presently her mother looked in, spoke “even more sweetly and softly than her wont,” and came to lie companionably at her daughter’s side. But the “flapping and buffeting” returned to the window, quickly followed by “the low howl again out in the shrubbery, and shortly after there was a crash at the window and a lot of broken glass was hurled on the floor … In the aperture of the broken panes there was the head of a great, gaunt gray wolf. Mother cried out in a fright … clutched the wreath of flowers that Dr. Van Helsing insisted on my wearing ’round my neck, and tore it away from me.” I thought it best my enemies continue to believe in the efficacy of garlic.

  “There was a strange and horrible gurgling in her throat; then she fell over … a whole myriad of little specks seemed to come blowing in through the broken window, and wheeling and circling around like the pillars of dust that travelers describe when there is a simoom in the desert. I tried to stir, but there was some spell upon me …” Comparing the coy approach of the vampire to the simoom was, I confess, my own idea. Somehow at the time I thought that it created a vivid image.

  Our story goes on to relate how Lucy recovered consciousness; how she called for the maids to come in and, after they had decently arranged her mother’s corpse, sent them to take some sherry as a tranquilizer. When they failed to return betimes she pursued them to the dining room and found there on the floor “the sleeping servants, whom someone has drugged … The air seems full of specks, floating and circling in the draught from the window, and the lights burn blue and dim … I shall hide this paper in my breast, where they shall find it when they come to lay me out …”

  The relation ends thus, save for a few stylized groans. I suppose I need make no apology for its inadequacies, since it served its intended purpose, viz., it was accepted by Van Helsing and the rest as a true account of the night’s events, and got Lucy off the hook, as the slang expression has it, on any possible charges of collaboration.

  But, by the beard of Allah, and all the relics of the Patriarchs! That such a farrago of falsehood could have passed successfully under the noses of even the most inept investigators is still a source of wonderment to me. Inspector Lestrade would not have wasted five minutes on it — I say nothing of Sherlock Holmes.

  Consider the evidence of the drugged wine. Presumably, if the maids had not taken it Lucy would have escaped the full horrors of the night, as hinted at in the Dracula-Westenra manuscript. Some evil person, then, poured the laudanum into the decanter. It must have been the malign Count Dracula himself — wait, though, he could not have entered the house without an invitation, and had he been invited he would have had no need to employ a wolf as battering ram. And that the wolf had been so employed there is no doubt, for the poor beast was seen returning wearily to the zoo on the evening of the next day, with bits of window glass still in its bloodied fur.

  Someone else, then, acting as Dracula’s agent, drugged the wine. But, given the existence of such an agent inside the house, that agent’s most valuable function would have been to grant direct entree to her master, not to toxicate the wine on the sheer hope that enough people might chance to drink it to clear the field and give the count a clear shot at his goal.

  Or is it reasonable to suppose that the four serving women, when Lucy sent them for a soothing draught, decided instead to render themselves completely insensible, as a defense against the dangers of the night? With a wolf prowling at large and evidently able to force its way into the house at will, this explanation would not have seemed likely to Lestrade, or even Dr. Watson. Either of those two relatively astute gentlemen would have bluntly demanded to know just who did let Count Dracula in …

  But let the story go. In passing, you think, I have let out the real truth, and it proves
to be just what my enemies have claimed. I have now confessed that I deliberately made that girl into a vampire.

  Is it not so? you ask. And I answer, jovially enough, in a phrase that men have used to excuse everything from genocide to sexual oddity: Yes, and what’s wrong with that?

  Will you tell me that the mere existence of a vampire creates a blot of unexampled evil upon the earth? You would be in danger of becoming insulting if you said that to Count Dracula. But never mind personal considerations for the moment. The fact is that you are arguing in a circle. It is evil to be a vampire because they sometimes make other vampires who are by definition evil.

  Mere reproduction has not been thought a crime for human beings, at least not till very recently. Why may not I enjoy the rights of other men?

  It is the forcing of death, or of a change in life, that’s criminal, whether the force be applied by vampire fang, or wooden stake, or means more subtle used against a vulnerable mind or heart. And I say once more: my blood, and nothing else available in 1891, could save Lucy’s life for her that night. Not that the saving was of much duration.

  On September eighteenth and nineteenth Lucy languished, poisoned anew by Van Helsing’s fourth transfusion; I sensed her pain, remotely, but I held aloof, having as I thought done all I could for her. On September twentieth she died, or so thought the grieving Arthur Holmwood, and Dr. Seward, who with Van Helsing were in attendance on her at the time. Though some miles away, I could feel, through our established mental contact, the moment when her breathing stopped, that once had blown so full and sweet across my cheek …

  On that same day laborers came to Carfax, to remove some of my boxes, in accordance with my plan of gradual dispersal. The madman Renfield once more broke out through the much-battered window of his room, to maul the workmen for having, as he thought, robbed him of his “lord and master.” The lord and master, standing amid some trees behind the high wall of his estate — I was not resting in a box, for I could not be quite sure which ones the workmen might decide to take, or cast a look into — heard the row and resolved to speed up the dispersal process and to sell Carfax quickly thereafter, or simply abandon it if need be. The neighborhood seemed after all a little lively for my taste, with the irrepressible Renfield right next door, and his keeper consulting with Van Helsing, who, as I knew, had hunted vampires.