Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  “As a matter of interest, Bernie,” Bodenland said, “how did you get them to swear?”

  He laughed. “On their mother’s virginity. On whatever they took seriously. Even the Bible.”

  “I’d have thought that custom had worn thin by now,” Joe said.

  “Not with all of us, Joe,” said Kylie, laughing.

  Clift looked at her approvingly, then said, “Well, come and see before light fades. That’s what you’re here for.”

  He spoke jerkily, full of nervous energy.

  As they followed him along a narrow track among low sage winding up the mountain, he said, “Joe, you’re a rational man and a knowledgeable one, I figured you’d know what to make of this find. If it’s what I think it is, our whole worldview is overturned. Humans on the planet sixty million years earlier than any possible previous evidence suggested. A species of man here in North America, long before anything started crawling round Olduvai Gorge …”

  “Couldn’t be a visitor from somewhere else in the universe? There’s just the one grave?”

  “That’s why I’m insisting on secrecy. My findings are bound to be challenged. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition and I know it. But if we could find a second grave … So I don’t want anyone interfering—at least for a few days.”

  Bodenland grunted. “Our organization has its own security unit in Dallas … I could get guards out here tomorrow prompt, if you need them. But you must be wrong, Bernie. This can’t be.”

  “No, it’s like the comic strips always said,” Larry remarked, with a laugh. “Cavemen contemporary with the brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus. Must have been some kind of a race memory.”

  Ignoring her son’s facetiousness, Mina said, “Bernard, hold it. I’m not prepared for this ancient grave of yours. I’m no dimmer than the next guy, but I can’t attach any meaning to sixty-five million years. It’s just a phrase.”

  Clift halted their ascent abruptly. “Then I’ll show you,” he said.

  Bodenland glanced quickly at his friend’s face. He saw no impatience there, only the love a man might have for the subject that possessed him and gave his life meaning.

  Before them, streaked now by the shades of advancing evening, was a broken hillside, eroded so that strata of rock projected like the ruins of some unimaginable building. Sage grew here and there, while the crest was crowned by pine and low-growing cotton-woods.

  “For those who can read, this slope contains the history of the world,” Clift told Mina. “What interests us is this broken line of deposit under the sandstones. That’s what’s called the K/T boundary.”

  He pointed to a clayey line that ran under all the shattered sandstone strata like a water-proof barrier around a house.

  “That layer of deposit marks a division between the Cretaceous rocks below and the Tertiary rocks above. It represents one of the most mysterious events in all Earth history—the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s only inches thick. Below it lie miles of rock which is—as you might say—solidified time, the long millennia of the ages of reptiles. It has been verified beyond doubt that that K/T deposit line was laid down sixty-five million years B.P., before present. Our grave lies just below that line.”

  “But there were no humans living then,” Mina said, as they started walking again, taking a trail to the left.

  “The K/T layer preserves evidence of a worldwide ecological catastrophe. It contains particles of shocked minerals, clues to massive inundations, soot which bears witness to continental-scale firestorms, and so on. Some gigantic impact occurred at that time—scientists guess at a meteorite capable of creating a vast crater, but we don’t really know.

  “What we do know is that some large-scale event ended a majestic era of brilliant and strange living things.

  “Our grave suggests that what perished at the end of the Cretaceous period—or the Mesozoic era, which contains all reptilian periods—was not only the dinosaurs but also a humanlike race perhaps so thinly distributed that no remains have turned up—till now.”

  “Homo Cliftensis,” said Kylie.

  They halted where the sandstones had been excavated and there were tokens of human activity, with planks, brushes, jackhammers, and a wheelbarrow incongruous nearby. They stood on a bluff overlooking the desert, across which mesas were sending long fingers of shadow. A well of shadow filled the excavation they now contemplated, as it lay like a pool below the ancient crusts of the K/T boundary.

  Kylie shivered. But the air was cooling, the sky overhead deepening its blue.

  Two students, a man and a woman, were standing guard by the dig. They moved back as the new arrivals appeared. Clift jumped down into the hole and removed a tarpaulin, revealing the ancient grave. The skeleton remained lying on its side, cramped within the coffin for an unimaginable age. The Bodenland family looked down at it without speaking.

  “What’s all the red stuff?” Kylie asked in a small voice. “Is it bloodstains?”

  “Red ocher,” Clift said. “To bury with red ocher was an old custom. The Neanderthals used it—not that I’m suggesting this is a Neanderthal. There were also flowers in the grave, which we’ve taken for analysis. Of course, there’s more work to be done here. I’m half afraid to touch anything …”

  They looked down in silence, prey to formless thought. The light died. The skeleton lay half buried in ocher, fading into obscurity.

  Kylie clung to Larry. “Disturbing an ancient grave … I know it’s part of an archeologist’s job, but … there are superstitions about these things. Don’t you think there’s something—well, evil here?”

  He hugged her affectionately. “Not evil. Pathetic, maybe. Sure, there’s something disconcerting when the past or the future arrives to disrupt the present. Like the way this chunk of the past has come up to disrupt our wedding day.” Seeing Kylie’s expression cloud over, he said, “Let the dead get on with their thing. I’m taking you to have a drink.”

  “You’ll find a canteen at the bottom of the hill,” said Clift, but he spoke without looking away from his discovery, crouching there, almost as motionless as the skeleton he had disinterred.

  The sun plunged down into the desert, a chill came over the world. Kylie Bodenland stood at the door of the trailer they had been loaned, gazing up at the stars. Something in this remote place had woken unsuspected sensibilities in her, and she was trying to puzzle out what it was.

  Some way off, students were sitting round a campfire, resurrecting old songs and pretending they were cowboys, in a fit of artificial nostalgia.

  City ladies may be fine

  But give me that gal of mine …

  Larry came up behind Kylie and pulled her into the trailer, kicking the door shut. She tasted the whiskey on his lips, and enjoyed it. Her upbringing had taught her that this was wickedness. She liked other wickednesses too, and slid her hand into Larry’s jeans as he embraced her. When she felt his response, she began to slide herself out of her few clothes, until she stood against him in nothing but her little silver chain and crucifix. Larry kissed it, kissed her breasts, and then worked lower.

  “Oh, you beast, you beast,” she said. “Oh …”

  She clutched his head, but he got up and lifted her over to the bunk.

  Lying together on the bunk later, he muttered almost to himself, “Funny how the marriage ceremony annoys Joe. He just couldn’t face it. I had to go through with it to spite him … and to please you, of course.”

  “You shouldn’t spite your father. He’s rather a honey.”

  Larry chuckled. “Pop a honey? He’s a stubborn-minded old pig. Now that I’m an adult, I see him in a more favorable light than I once did. Still and all … ‘Grocery’s a dirty word to him. He resents me being in groceries, never mind I’m making a fortune. I’ve got a mind of my own, haven’t I? It may be small but it’s my own. To hell with him—we’re different. Let me fix you a drink.”

  As he was getting up and walking naked to his baggage, from which a whiskey bottle protrud
ed, Kylie rolled onto her back and said, “Well, it’s Hawaii for us tomorrow. It’ll be great for you to get from under Joe’s shadow. He’ll change toward you, you’ll see. He may be an old pig, but he’s a good man for all that.”

  Larry paused as he was about to pour, and laughed.

  “Lay off about Joe, will you? Let’s forget Joe. For sure he’s forgotten about us already. Bernie Clift has given him something new to think about.”

  Only a few yards away, Clift and Bodenland were walking in the desert, talking together in confidential tones.

  “This new daughter-in-law of yours—she is a striking young lady and no mistake. And not happy about what I’m doing, I gather.”

  “The religious and the economic views of mankind are always at odds. Maybe we’re always religious when we’re young. I lost anything like that when my other son died. Now I try to stick to rationality—I hate to think of the millions of people in America who buy into some crackpot religion or other. In the labs, we’ve also come up against time. Not whole millennia of time, like you, but just a few seconds. We’re learning how to make time stand still. As you’d expect, it costs. It sure costs! If only I can get backing from Washington … Bernie, I could be … well, richer than … I can’t tell you—”

  “Rationality,” Clift interrupted impatiently. “It means greed, basically. Lack of imagination. I can see Kylie is a girl with imagination, whatever else—”

  “You have taken a fancy to her. I saw that when we met.”

  “Joe, listen, never mind that. I’ve no time for women. And I’ve got a hold here of something more momentous than any of your financial enterprises. This is going to affect everyone, everyone on earth … It will alter our whole concept of ourselves. Hasn’t that sunk in yet?”

  He started off toward the dark bulk of the mountain. Bodenland followed. They could hear the one group of students who had not yet turned in arguing among themselves.

  “You’re mad, Bernie. You always were, in a quiet way.”

  “I never sleep,” said Clift, not looking back.

  “Isn’t that what someone once said about the Church? ‘It never sleeps.’ Sounds like neurosis to me.”

  They climbed to the dig. A single electric light burned under the blue canopy, where one of the students sat on watch. Clift exchanged a few words with him.

  “Spooky up here, sir,” said the student.

  Clift grunted. He would have none of that. Bodenland squatted beside him as the paleontologist removed the tarpaulin.

  From down in the camp came a sudden eruption of shouts—male bellows and female voices raised high, then the sound of blows, clear in the thin desert air.

  “Damn,” said Clift quietly. “They will drink. I’ll be back.”

  He left, running down the hill path toward the group of students who had been singing only a few minutes earlier. He called to them in his authoritative voice to think of others who might be sleeping. The guard followed him.

  Bodenland was alone with the thing in the coffin.

  In the frail light, the thing seemed almost to have acquired a layer of skin, skin of an ill order but rendering it at least a few paces nearer to life than before. Bodenland felt an absurd temptation to speak to the thing. But what would it answer?

  Overcoming his reluctance, he thrust his hand down into the ocher. Although he was aware he might be destroying valuable archaeological evidence, curiosity led him on. The thought had entered his mind that after all Clift might somehow have overstepped the bounds of his madness and faked the evidence of the rocks, that this could be a modern grave he had concealed in the Cretaceous strata at some earlier date—perhaps working alone here the previous year.

  Much of Bernard Clift’s fame had sprung from a series of outspoken popular articles in which he had pointed out the scarcity of earlier human remains and their fragmentary nature in all but a few select sites round the world. Is Humanity Ten Million Years Old? had been a favorite headline.

  Orthodoxy agreed that Homo sapiens could be no more than two million years old. It was impossible to believe that this thing came from sixty-five million years ago. Clift was faking; and if he could convince his pragmatic friend Joe, then he could convince the world’s press.

  “No one fools me,” Bodenland said, half aloud. He peered about to make sure that Clift and the guard were not returning.

  Crouching over the coffin, he scraped one shoulder against the rock wall and the stained line that was the K/T boundary.

  The ocher was surprisingly warm to the touch, almost as if heated by a living body. Bodenland’s spatulate fingers probed in the dust. He started to scrape a small hole in order to see the rib cage better. It was absurd to believe that this dust had lain undisturbed for all those millennia. The dust was crusty, breaking into crumbs like old cake.

  He did not know what he was looking for. He grinned in the darkness. A sticker saying MADE IN TAIWAN would do. He’d have to go gently with poor old Clift. Scientists had been known to fake evidence before.

  His finger ran gently along the left floating rib, then the one above it. At the next rib, he felt an obstruction.

  Grit trickled between his fingers. He could not see what he had hold of. Bone? Tugging gently, he got it loose and lifted it from the depression. When he held it up to the light bulb, it glittered dimly.

  It was not bone. It was metal.

  Bodenland rubbed it on his shirt, then held it up again.

  It was a silver bullet.

  On it was inscribed a pattern—a pattern of ivy or something similar, twining about a cross. He stared at it in disbelief, and an ill feeling ran through him.

  Sixty-five million years old?

  He heard Clift returning, speaking reassuringly to the guard. Hastily he smoothed over the marks he had made in the ocher. The bullet he slipped into a pocket.

  “A very traditional fracas,” Clift said quietly, in his academic way. “Two young men quarreling for the favors of one girl. Sex has proved a rather troublesome method of perpetuating the human race. If one was in charge one might dream up a better way … I advised them both to go to bed with her and then forget it.”

  “They must have loved that suggestion!”

  “They’ll sort it out.”

  “Maybe we should hit the sack too.”

  But they stood under the stars, discussing the find. Bodenland endeavored to hide his skepticism, without great success.

  “Experts are coming in from Chicago and Drumheller tomorrow,” Clift said. “You shall hear what they say. They will understand that the evidence of the strata cannot lie.”

  “Come on, Bernie, sixty-five million years … My mind just won’t take in such a span of time.”

  “In the history of the universe—even of the earth, the solar system—65.5 million years is but yesterday.”

  They were walking down the slope, silent. A gulf had opened between them. The students had all gone to bed, whether apart or together. Over the desert a stillness prevailed such as had done before men first entered the continent.

  The light came from the west. Bodenland saw it first and motioned to his companion to stand still and observe. As far as they could judge the light was moving fast, and in their direction. It made no noise. It extended itself, until it resembled a comet rushing along over the ground. It was difficult to focus on. The men stood rooted to the spot in astonishment.

  “But the railroad’s miles distant!” Clift exclaimed, trying to keep his voice level.

  Whatever the phenomenon was, it was approaching the camp at extreme velocity.

  Without wasting words, Bodenland dashed forward, running down the slope, calling to Mina. He saw her light go on immediately in the camper. Satisfied he swerved and ran toward the trailer his son occupied. Banging on the door, he called Larry’s name.

  Hearing the commotion, others woke, other doors opened. Men ran naked out of tents. Clift called out for calm, but cries of amazement drowned his voice. The thing was plunging out of th
e desert. It seemed ever distant, ever near, as if time itself was suspended to allow it passage.

  Bodenland put his arm protectively round Mina’s shoulders when she appeared.

  “Get to some high ground.” He gave Larry and Kylie similar orders when they came up, disheveled, but stood firm himself, unable not to watch that impossible progress.

  The notion entered his head that it resembled a streamlined flier viewed through thick distorting glass. Still no sound. But the next moment it was on them, plunging through the heart of the little encampment—and all in silence. Screams rose from the Dixie students, who flung themselves to the ground.

  Yet it had no impact, seemed to have no substance but light, to be as insubstantial as the luminescence it trailed behind it, which remained floating to the ground and disappeared like dying sparks.

  Bodenland watched the ghastly thing go. It plunged right into and through one of the mesas, and finally was swallowed in the distance of the Utah night. It had appeared intent on destruction, yet not a thing in the camp was harmed. It had passed right through Larry’s trailer, yet nothing showed the slightest sign of disarray.

  Larry staggered up to his father and offered him a gulp from a silver hip flask.

  “We’ve just seen the original ghost train, Joe,” he said.

  “I’ll believe anything now,” said Bodenland, gratefully accepting the flask.

  When dawn came, and the desert was transformed from shadow to furnace, the members of the Old John encampment were still discussing the phenomenon of the previous night. Students of a metaphysical disposition argued that the ghost train—Larry’s description was generally adopted—had no objective reality. It was amazing how many of these young people, scientifically trained, the cream of their year, could believe in a dozen wacky explanations. Many of them, it seemed to Bodenland as he listened and sipped coffee from the canteen, belonged to one kind of cult or another. Nearly all espoused explanations that chimed with their own particular set of beliefs.