The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  The night of the twenty-seventh was warm and fair, and would have disappointed those cinematographers who deal much with vampires and such other improbable creatures as are thought to frequent graveyards. And this time I was in luck. Even from a considerable distance I could see that something new had been added to the Westenra mausoleum: from a chain looped over a roof ornament there dangled a small crucifix of wood, just opposite the middle of the doors.

  Resuming the mist-form in which I had crossed the cemetery wall, I drifted closer. But progress in that mode is very slow and it is hard to see or hear very much en route. In the deep shadow of some trees I resumed the form of man and was at once rewarded with the soft sounds of a single human heart and pair of lungs at work not far away. With his broad back set against a cross that served as headstone on a neighboring grave, a man who could be none other than Van Helsing watched with sleepless eyes the quiet exterior of Lucy’s tomb. Inside, I felt her mind, not quite awake, but fretful.

  Wishing to achieve some rational discourse with Van Helsing rather than put him to flight or come to grips with him, I circled to approach him from his front. In a few moments he looked up with a start at the sight of my figure walking toward him through the night along the grassy, seldom-used road.

  “In nomine Dei, retro, Satana!” His hands were clenched, and he got his feet beneath him, ready to spring up.

  “Pax vobiscum,” I replied, but in such low voice that he may not have heard. “Dr. Van Helsing, I presume,” I added, louder, as I drew near, in unconscious parody of Stanley’s Ujiji words of twenty years before.

  As I approached Van Helsing got to his feet, an obstinate bull digging in his heels to launch a charge at a locomotive. Despite his gloomy note left for Seward, he really thought himself protected. The great stone cross was still at his back; in his left hand I saw a small golden crucifix, and in his right, only partially visible, the whiteness of some folded paper.

  He raised both hands and held them forward as I drew near. Let him think his toys would stop me, if he really believed such rot. I wanted the chance to talk. We eyed each other for some moments above the little crucifix.

  “Count Dracula.” He made a tiny bow. His nerve was high, his mouth smiling a little now.

  “At your service,” I replied, and gave him back his bow.

  He tipped his head in the briefest nod toward the silent tomb. “You may not have her longer,” he said, continuing to smile. “She is no longer yours.”

  “My dear young sir, she never was.” Van Helsing’s face at that time bore more agelines than my own, but he understood. “Not in the way you seem to think.”

  “You lie, king-devil Dracula. Ve know you, better than you realize.”

  “Very well, Van Helsing, we will have bluntness. I know your name, but nothing good of it. What are your intentions now?”

  “That the so-young Miss Lucy shall have rest, and peace.”

  “And as regards me?”

  “If it so may be,” he said with a grim, measured determination, “that you shall trouble none other as you have troubled her.”

  I turned away and strolled about a little among the tombs, my hands behind my back and beneath my cloak, somewhat in the way that I have seen Napoleon walk when deep in thought. “Why?” I asked, stopping to face my antagonist once more.

  And then I saw in his face, in his eyes, that he probably really did not understand my question.

  “I mean why, Professor, do you persecute and torment us? I know of one vampire that you have slain near Brussels, and two more, a man and wife, near Paris …”

  “Man and wife!” He was outraged. “If there are marriages not in heaven, as the Scripture say, then surely not in hell either!”

  “And we are hellish, of course; more so than other folk, I mean. Tell me, Van Helsing, if I took that cross from out of your grasp and hung it ’round my own neck, would you still be so certain that I came from hell?”

  His pudgy fingers tightened on the gold. “By your works I know you, Dracula. I fear there is much power to you, and that you may play tricks with crosses, and the other things of holiness. In Brussels where I did my work of mercy I heard your name, and in Paris too; and I have read the journal of young Harker, from his stay at your damned castle, from which the powers of heaven so blessedly delivered him.”

  “Ah! And is Jonathan well, and back in London now?” As I spoke I recalled the notebook with Harker’s ciphers in it. “I would be pleased to know that he is well, but saddened if he found my hospitality so hard to bear as your grim tones and looks imply.”

  Van Helsing now held silent, regretting perhaps that he might have given something away by mentioning Harker at all. Utter loathing was in his eyes, which remained fixed on me, but also the beginning of something like triumph as he saw that my renewed pacing brought me never any nearer to his crosses, nor to the white envelope in his right hand, whose contents I thought I had already guessed. He put this hand back into his pocket now whilst he swiveled the little gold crucifix to keep it facing squarely toward me as if it were a loaded gun.

  Three quick strides, a twisting of my arms, and he would have been a vastly surprised corpse. But others — Harker, Dr. Seward, I could not guess who else — were certain to know of Van Helsing’s vigil here tonight. They might even be watching us at the moment from somewhere nearby. Was I then to kill them too? The more I killed, the more the ranks of my enemies must grow, fed from the ocean of unbelievers in which both hunters and vampires were now no more than vastly scattered drops.

  What should I do, then? Kneel down and pray a rosary? I might have done so, but never to placate a foe, and least of all a smirking, self-righteous enemy like this one.

  I tried fair, honest words again. “I have not come to London to make war, Van Helsing, but to make peace with all mankind —”

  “Then, monster, what of the girl? This so sweet young miss who was put in those walls of cold stone; and, worse, who do not stay —”

  “Van Helsing, you may believe if you wish that being a vampire is worse than being dead; I see I am not likely to sway you by any argument. But forcing the consequences of misbelief upon others is something else again.”

  “You dare to speak of forcings, monster!” His courage continued to grow as he saw that I continued to keep my distance. “You who forced that girl to yield to you her very blood and life —”

  “Not so, murderer!” Now I did move closer to him by a step. “You who drove those splintered stakes into the living breasts of my three friends in Brussels and in Paris! And as for Lucy, it was to save her life that I drank deep enough of her sweet blood to make her what she is — it was really you who sent her to the tomb!”

  He gave his massive head a little shake, smiling all the while, not so much denying the accusation as failing even to understand it yet.

  I leaned toward him. “You stopped her breath with the pouring of the alien blood into her veins.”

  “No!” Now understanding came.

  “Yes.” He started further protest, which I overrode: “Now shall I call her forth to testify?”

  There was silence in the graveyard, save for a restless owl, and far away the rumbling of a wagonload of freight, and under that the polyphonic voice of distant London, that for a thousand years had not been truly quiet.

  Van Helsing stood much as before, still holding me — as he thought — at a safe distance with his golden cross; but, reading his face through the dark night, I saw that my shot had told.

  “You have done it before, butcher,” I pressed on, guessing, and seeing that my guess was accurate as his face registered yet another inner blow. “And with some similar result. Is it not so? Has any victim of your blood-exchanging surgery yet lived?”

  His smile was gone, his hands and jaw were trembling as he again brought out the small white folded envelope and raised it toward me with the cross. “Begone! To hell!” The words exploded from his mouth.

  “Nothing wiser than that to sa
y to me, Professor?”

  “It shall be —” His voice cracked and he had to begin again. “It shall be war between us, vampire. War to the death.”

  “Let it be peace, I say. Or rather, tolerance. But remember that I have overcome in war a hundred stronger men than you.” And with sad and angry heart I turned my back on that bad man and walked away, half expecting to feel the painful though harmless flick of a silver bullet between my ribs. If he does that, I thought, I shall turn back and insert his bullet, if I can recover it, into his own anatomy at some painful and inconvenient place. But he did nothing, and I betook myself to my newly acquired house to gaze over the moonlit trees of the Green Park toward Victoria’s palace and think my foolish thoughts. A war, then, was inevitable. But how was I to fight it?

  * * *

  When Van Helsing rejoined his companions on the following day he told them that he had seen nothing during his dangerous vigil, and let it go at that. Free as he was with words, he was a close-mouthed scoundrel whenever it came to giving out hard facts to people who worked with him or tried to do so. But he must have been wondering how much I actually knew about those failed operations of his on the Continent and in what way I might use my knowledge to embarrass him. Needless to say, I would have done so if I could, but had no specifics to make known nor any way of quickly finding them out.

  What Van Helsing did do on that day was gather his troops for another expedition to the Westenra tomb. This time he enlisted not only Seward, but Arthur Holmwood — who had now become Lord Godalming, by reason of his father’s recent death — and the American, Quincey Morris. In a pep talk the professor assured them all — I am not making this up, you will find it in Seward’s diary! — that there was a “grave duty” to be done. And some have called Van Helsing a humorless man! Well, he was, but only when he tried to joke.

  Naturally they all agreed to accompany him, though so far only Seward could have had any inkling of just what the “grave duty” was likely to involve. As far as the others knew, Lucy was simply though unhappily dead.

  “I have been curious,” Arthur protested after some discussion in Van Helsing’s hotel room, “as to what you mean. Quincey and I have talked it over; but the more we talked the more puzzled we got, till now I can say for myself that I’m up a tree as to any meaning about anything.”

  Nor was he to be rapidly enlightened. The professor strung them all along with earnest pleas for their continued trust, enlivened with hints that Lucy might stand in some vague danger of hell-fire — I think Arthur almost hit him at one point — or that she might not have been dead — exactly — when she was buried. It was a masterly performance by a compelling personality, and Van Helsing not only avoided being punched but in a little while had reduced the three younger men to a state that I can only describe as quietly submissive hysteria. Thus he got them out to the graveyard once again, on the night of September twenty-eighth.

  After finding Lucy’s ravaged coffin empty — again — the four men left what Seward called “the terror of that vault” for the fresh air outside. There Van Helsing got down to business. As Seward’s diary has it:

  First he took from his bag a mass of what looked like thin, waferlike biscuit, which were carefully rolled up in a white napkin; next he took out a double handful of some whitish stuff, like dough or putty. He crumbled the wafer up fine and worked it into the mass between his hands … rolling it into thin strips, he began to lay them into the crevices between the door and its setting in the tomb. I asked him … what he was doing.

  He answered: “I am closing the tomb so that the Un-Dead may not enter.”

  “And is that stuff you have got there going to do it?” asked Quincey. “Great Scott! Is this a game?”

  “It is.”

  “What is that which you are using?” This time the question was by Arthur.

  Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered: “The host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an indulgence.” It was an answer that appalled the most skeptical of us.

  And should have had a similar effect on the most knowledgeable and reverent. The scoundrel! An indulgence, indeed! As if any worthy priest would have pretended to be able to give him such to carry on his superstitious nonsense. At any rate, after an aching wait the men saw amid the gloom of distant trees “a white figure” carrying a small child. This form at last came close enough to be recognized as:

  Lucy Westenra, but how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. Van Helsing stepped out … the four of us ranged in a line before the door of the tomb. Van Helsing raised his lantern and drew the slide: by the concentrated light that fell on Lucy’s face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood.

  Although the child, as Van Helsing later admitted, was “not much harm.”

  When Lucy — I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape — saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and color, but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing: had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight.

  Lucy flung down her victim — her plaything, rather, that she had grabbed up in her addled state — and gazed on Arthur, the lover she still tenderly remembered. Then “with outstretched arms and a wanton smile” she advanced on him, whereupon “he fell back and hid his face in his hands.”

  She still came forward, however, saying in “diabolically sweet” tones: “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

  On hearing this appeal Arthur “seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix.” Angered by this meddling which followed her beyond the grave, and I suppose utterly dismayed by Arthur’s meek submission to it, Lucy “recoiled, and with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.” But her wish to gain that shelter was thwarted by Van Helsing’s putty, which doubtless contained an admixture of garlic.

  She turned, and her face was shown in the clear burst of moonlight and by the lamp, which now had no quiver from Van Helsing’s iron nerves … the beautiful color became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, bloodstained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death — if looks could kill — we saw it at that moment.

  Van Helsing broke the silence by asking Arthur “Answer me, oh my friend! Am I to proceed in my work?”

  Arthur threw himself on his knees and hid his face in his hands as he answered: “Do as you will … there can be no horror like this ever anymore.”

  This agreement extracted, Van Helsing took some of his paste from the tomb’s door.

  We all looked on in horrified amazement as we saw, when he stood back, the woman, with a corporeal body as real at that moment as our own, pass in through the interstice where scarce a knifeblade could have gone. We all felt a glad sense of relief when we saw the professor calmly restoring the strings of putty to the edges of the door.

  The professor and his acolytes went home then for a much-needed rest. But next afternoon all were back, and when the churchyard was otherwise deserted they went into the busy tomb — “Arthur trembling like an aspen” — and opened Lucy’s coffin for the fifth time since her interment.

  Van Helsing, with his usual methodicalness, began taking the various contents from his bag and placing them ready for use. First he took out a soldering iron and some plumbing solder, and then a small oil lamp, which … burned at fierce heat with a blue flame; then his operating knives, wh
ich he placed to hand; and last a wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in the fire and was sharpened to a fine point. With this stake came a heavy hammer, such as in households is used in the coal cellar for breaking the lumps. To me, a doctor’s preparations for work of any kind are stimulating and bracing, but the effect of these things on both Arthur and Quincey was to cause them a sort of consternation.

  His bracing preparations finished, Van Helsing found time for another speech, leading to the conclusion that Lucy’s forthcoming impalement was bound to make her ultimately happy, as it meant the termination of her hellish vampire life and it would be most intensely joyful for her if accomplished by “the hand of him that loved her best; the hand of all she would herself have chosen, had it been to her to choose … tell me if there be such a one among us.”

  All looked at Arthur, who, now thoroughly brainwashed by the old sadist, stepped forward bravely. Van Helsing quickly gave directions.

  Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might.

  The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together until the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered … his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage so that our voices, reading a prayer for the dead, seemed to ring through the little vault. And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to chomp, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over.