The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  Mina, as she later told me, was left totally at a loss for enacting an innocent maiden’s proper response to a remark so supremely churlish. She came near speaking out after all, to defend me as an honorable gentleman; but wisely settled for covering her face with her hands, shuddering and moaning in a style that could not fail to draw sympathy.

  Seward records of Van Helsing that “when it struck him what he had said, he was horrified at his thoughtlessness and tried to comfort her.” But it is my opinion that the remark was a test, uttered callously and deliberately by the professor, that he might discover from her reaction whether her association with me had been in any way voluntary.

  He may have had a similar test in mind a short time later, when in a purported effort to “guard” Mina against further evil influences he approached her solemnly and touched to her forehead a “piece of sacred wafer in the name of the Father, and the Son, and —”

  She screamed, this time in authentic pain. Harker records that the host “had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal.”

  I have in my time seen the effects on human flesh of divers metal objects at a wide range of temperatures, and I count this claim as something of an exaggeration. Still, I am sure that Mina felt real pain, and certainly a blistered and unhealing wound. Today I suppose it would be called a psychosomatic effect. Any good hypnotist working with a good subject can achieve a similar result. Van Helsing certainly had the forceful personality required to hypnotize; and his questioning and that of the other men must have brought forward all the subconscious guilt and fear that Mina was experiencing as a result of passionate embraces with a man who was not her husband.

  In fact I had not “banqueted heavily” — the bliss between lovers has little to do with fluid volumes — nor was I sleeping late. Dimly and at a distance I felt Mina’s pain as she was scarred, and raised my head and growled, earth crumbling from my fingernails, but there was nothing I could do to help her then. At that moment I was in my Piccadilly house, even as Harker had surmised. Frozen in man-form for the hours of daylight, I was at work in the backyard, prizing up some of the flagstone pavement with my fingers, and exchanging good London earth for Transylvanian so as to make myself another secret resting place. I could work in daylight as the yard was quite secure from observation, there being only windowless walls in sight except for the rear of my own house. Ah, it grieved me to give up that dwelling! From its upper windows I loved to look over the trees of Green Park, to Buckingham Palace less than half a mile away — and I did not mean to give it up entirely.

  The men who were gathered round Mina when she was branded looked on with a mixture of pity, horror, and disbelief. But I am compelled to give Jonathan Harker his due. It was on this day that he wrote:

  To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.

  Of course if the semantic bludgeons hideous and ghastly are omitted from this passage it may provoke the thoughtful hearer to a quite different evaluation of the matter.

  * * *

  Up to this point Carfax had still been available for my use, though my enemies had actually known for three days that it was my base and believed they had the means at hand to deny it to me — God send my foe such generalship in every war. But on the morning of October third, only an hour or so after Mina’s forehead received its mark, Van Helsing acted at last, leading his troops in another invasion of my lands and house. To their disappointment they once more “found no papers, or any signs of use in the house; the great boxes looked just as we had seen them last.” Their leader set about to distribute fragments of the Host in all the boxes; in order to deny the vampire his base of operations, he judged it necessary to:

  sterilize this earth, so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant land for such fell use. He has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still.

  Faith and reason are whipped together from the temple.

  My own business in Piccadilly was finished before midday, and I came back by train and cab to Purfleet, walking the last half mile home to Carfax. In a lair lined with my native earth deep-hidden in a thicket on my grounds I rested, needing rest yet still wanting to be near Mina should she suddenly and urgently need help. I rested in the gloom of heavy undergrowth but did not truly sleep; and I heard the hunters when they came to bang about inside my house once more. If I listened attentively I could tell when they opened a box and when they closed its lid down tight again and could pick out their individual coughs and curses as they choked on dust. It was an opportunity to seek the further confrontation with them required by the plan that I had formed; but Mina did not know that plan as yet and I considered that her full cooperation would be vital.

  After a while I heard the vandals leave, driving away on the road that fronted Carfax rather than going back to the asylum. I rested a little more, then walked out onto my overgrown lawn before my house, from which vantage point the upper front of the asylum, where Mina’s windows were, was visible. In the hazy autumn daylight of England, mild and cloudy to the eyes of breathing men but enervating desert glare to me, I sought, as some weary traveler might seek the sight of an oasis, a glimpse of my beloved — and behold! To my great joy I saw her come and stand there in a window, waving, beckoning to me.

  In one moment I was running toward the wall that separated our grounds, and in another I had leapt lithely up and over it. Intervening trees on the asylum grounds now kept me from seeing Mina’s window. I was working my way toward the building, taking care not to be seen by others, when with a leap of my heart I beheld Mina’s sturdy figure come running gracefully toward me through the trees. It might have been impossible for me to have entered the asylum in the daylight, forbidden to change forms, without some servant observing me. But Mina could stroll out into the grounds without attracting any particular attention, and she had done so.

  After our first quick, tight embrace I held her at arm’s length. “Mina, my dear one, it is a joy unutterable to see you … how is it with you now?” I was gazing with concern at the cruel mark that marred the whiteness of her forehead.

  “You may see how I am,” she replied, taking note of the direction of my gaze. There was a tremor in her voice but yet the words were clear and brave. “I have looked in the glass at the scar you wonder at, and have seen that it is nearly a mirror image of your own. For good or ill, it seems that I have in truth been delivered into your possession. Oh, Vlad, what is my life to be?”

  “This,” I answered, and gathered her, as willing as ever before, into my arms. Again we exchanged blood, there in the deep shadows underneath the trees. This time I took but little, so as not to weaken her.

  “But,” I added firmly, holding her at arm’s length once again, “because I truly love you, I do not want to take you into my land now.”

  “To your land? You are going to leave England?” I thought I detected the smallest undercurrent of relief in her demeanor.

  “Mina, my princess, my land is the country of the vampire. It exists here in England as well as abroad, but it is different from any country you have ever known. And were I to bring you there, those men would inevitably pursue us, and never rest until they had destroyed us both. Do you think you would be spared because they love you now, or say they do? Remember Lucy’s fate.”

  Mina shuddered, and raised one hand so that its fingers almost touched her scar. “I know I would not be spared.” And suddenly she poured out in some detail the story of her terrible morning: the questions and the isolation, Van Helsing’s suddenly pressing the Host against her skin, the conviction that followed at once amongst them all, that she had been contaminated. “Vlad, does t
his mark truly mean that you are a fiend from hell, and I am damned? When you hold me I feel no sense of evil force, but rather joy.”

  I shook my head. “You are not evil, love.” I had seen something of mesmerism before, had seen folk paralyzed or blinded, and blisters raised on unharmed skin, by nothing but the power of the mind. “Have you a crucifix about your neck, or anywhere upon your person?”

  She recoiled slightly. “Oh, no. After this branding I would not dare to try to touch one.”

  I looked about me, found a dry branch on the ground, picked it up, and snapped it into two pieces, one a little longer than the other. These I held up in the form of the crux immissa, the fingers of my right hand clenched about the joining. “Touch it,” I urged her.

  Mina put forth her hand, then hesitated. “I … I dare not try,” she breathed. “The pain was terrible.”

  “Touch it! If I can hold a cross, what have you to fear?”

  “I — I have not your strength.” She dropped her eyes and turned away.

  “Vile men,” I muttered, and let the cross fall into its components on the sward. “Perhaps for the present, though, it is better that your brand remain. Van Helsing might take its sudden disappearance, whilst I still live, as a bad sign.” I had in mind his reaction to the disappearance of Lucy’s throat marks shortly before that poor girl breathed her last; Mina had said the record showed the professor to have been very much shocked by that, and convinced from that moment that Lucy would inevitably walk as a vampire.

  I put my hands on Mina’s quivering shoulders and turned her round to face me. “But all is far from lost,” I went on. “Tell me, am I right in thinking that life with your husband, though having its drawbacks for an intelligent woman like yourself, is not without its compensations also? In short, that for Jonathan’s good as well as your own — I can see how he must need you — you are not prepared to give him up entirely?”

  She looked up; it was as if my understanding had lifted at least a part of the crushing burden of worry from her breast. “You are right, Vlad! Oh, how good and wise and kind of you! I love you, as you know. And yet I find I have not ceased to love Jonathan. The poor dear needs me now … you would hardly recognize him, he is so changed today.”

  “How so?”

  “He is gray and haggard, and looks at me strangely sometimes, though he speaks as lovingly as before. And I have seen him sitting alone, mumbling to himself, and whetting an enormous knife that I think Lord Godalming or Quincey Morris must have given him. I feel it would be too terrible to leave him now; but still, however am I to stay when he is whetting that knife for your heart and praying for a chance to plunge it in?”

  “Dear lady, I have conceived a strategy that, if all goes well, will resolve this painful dilemma for you. If the future can be fitted to my design, you will be able to stay safely with a contented husband, yet you and I need never be more than a few hours apart, and we can continue to see each other frequently.”

  Mina seized my hand and covered it with kisses. “Dear Vlad! How can I thank you? What is this plan and what may I do to further it?”

  I began to explain to her my scheme. It turned on my being able to convince the men that I had fled from England, with no intention of returning. Within a month or two after I was supposedly gone — actually I would be lying very low in London, in one of my still-secret lairs — Van Helsing would presumably have gone back to the Continent, perhaps hoping to pick up my trail there, and the rest of the vigilantes would have relaxed their vigilance. Mina and I would then be able to resume the enjoyment of each other’s company on an occasional basis, which was all that would really be good for her, husband or not.

  To set the scheme in motion required one more confrontation between me and my hunters. I pledged to Mina to do all in my power to assure that this encounter was nonviolent, and she in turn agreed to do what she could to arrange it for me. Therefore as soon as I took leave of her, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, she sent a telegram to Van Helsing at my Piccadilly house, where we knew he was likely to be at that hour. I wanted the gang to wait for me there, whilst I visited Bermondsey and Mile End, checking some hidden caches of home-earth to make sure they were still usable.

  The message, composed at my direction, advised the professor to “look out for D. He has just now, 12:45, come from Carfax hurriedly and hastened toward the south. He seems to be going the round and may want to see you.” It was signed of course by Mina.

  Leaving her to see the telegram dispatched, I sent out toward the south just as it said. In going the round of my other houses known to the enemy, in Bermondsey and Mile End, I found to my satisfaction that the Eucharist had been placed in all of the boxes that I had left, so to speak, on display for visitors. The hunters would feel certain that these places were denied to me as refuges, and if necessary I could use them with impunity.

  It was a little after two when I reached number 347, Piccadilly, and although the old house appeared from the outside to be untenanted I felt confident that my uninvited guests were still within. On reaching the front door I noted a few fine scratches around the lock, where their hired locksmith had been at work to open the house for them and provide a key. Who would question His Lordship Arthur in such a matter? Not the tradesmen, surely, and apparently not the policemen on the beat.

  I opened the door with my own key and entered, moving at a casual pace but with great care. To underestimate the enemy is the surest prescription for disaster in any war. If they should be waiting in ambush with wooden spears or lances, in some room filled with numbing daylight, then I could be killed or seriously hurt. Still I thought that I should probably have to face, at worst, nothing more dangerous than silver bullets. Van Helsing had shown me that he did not really know his game.

  Once I had got inside the house I could quite plainly hear their ten taut lungs like so many boilers working under pressure whilst their owners strove for calm and silence after hearing my key turn in the door. I could hear that the men were gathered behind the closed doors of the dining room; in the silent, dusty hall outside I paused, making certain of the number of my enemies and estimating their several positions within. There was Harker’s familiar breath, that I had heard for two months in my castle; and over there was Van Helsing’s slightly aging wheeze.

  I drew a deep breath of my own — not from necessity, of course, but by a habit that still clings from days of old — and threw the dining-room door open as suddenly as I could. Bounding forward with the same motion, I leaped into the room, confronting them.

  My leap carried me a little beyond the center of the room, so if any ambush had been planned for me at the door I was past it before it could be sprung; but I saw at once that nothing of the sort was being attempted. The men were in scattered positions about the room, a couple near the door by which I had just entered, others near the windows, and Harker alone before another door, which led into the front room of the house. Their plan, insofar as they had one, was evidently to bar my egress now that I had come. So far no one had spoken. I glared about at them in silence and saw unhappily that this time no one was cowering back from me. Of my entry Seward wrote a little later.

  There was something so pantherlike, something so inhuman, that it seemed to sober us all … it was a pity that we had not some organized plan of attack, for even at the moment I wondered what we were to do. I did not myself know whether our lethal weapons would avail us anything. Harker evidently meant to try the matter, for he had ready his great Kukri knife and made a fierce and sudden cut …

  I got out of the knife’s way, wishing of course to avoid its pain and also to give the impression that I was not immune to being slain by such weapons. One might have thought that Harker, who had seen what small effect was had on me by a full swing with a metal shovel, might not have placed his chief reliance on a knife; but sound judgment, when away from the law courts, was not the bulwark of his character.

  The blade came close enough to cut open a pocket of my co
at, from which spilled coins and banknotes in a jumbled stream; I cursed the inconvenience as they tumbled to the floor. A good part of my wealth was there. While avarice is probably not my greatest fault, money in this war as in any other was a vital resource, and its loss was to be mourned. Yes, damned inconvenient; but I hardly felt like stopping to pick it up whilst they belabored me from all sides with painful steel and lead.

  My enemies, too, ignored the dropped money for the moment; evidently they had plenty of their own. While Harker still brandished his knife, Seward and the others moved to the attack with crucifixes and envelopes held aloft. “It was without surprise,” as Seward wrote, that they:

  saw the monster cower back … it would be impossible to describe the expression of hate and baffled malignity — of anger and hellish rage —

  of extreme annoyance, not to be redundant,

  which came over the count’s face. His waxen hue became greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes, and the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound. The next instant, with a sinuous dive he swept under Harker’s arm and, grasping a handful of the money from the floor, dashed across the room and threw himself at the window. Amid the crash and glitter of the falling glass he tumbled into the flagged area below.

  I saw no reason for leaving all my treasure to those thieves and it gave me some satisfaction that whilst running to the window I managed to knock Van Helsing off his feet once more. My plunge through the glass and fall onto stone caused me no noticeable damage and I sprang up immediately and rushed across the paved rearyard to make my “escape” through the stable. At its door I paused, having reached a place where I could deliver my message hinting at retreat without Harker’s antics with his knife distracting the rest of my listeners.