Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  3

  At some time in the past, the cell had been whitewashed in the interests of cleanliness. It was now filthy. Straw, dust, pages of old newspaper, a lump of human ordure littered the stone-paved floor.

  A mouse ran full tilt along one of the walls. Its coat was gray, with longer russet hair over the shoulders. It moved with perfect grace, its beady eyes fixed on the madman ahead, and more particularly on his open mouth.

  Strapped within a straitjacket, the lunatic lay horizontal on the floor. The straitjacket was of canvas, with leather straps securing it, imprisoning the arms of the madman behind his back.

  He had kicked his semen-stained gray mattress into a corner, to lie stretched out on the stones, his head wedged into another corner.

  He was motionless. His eyes gleamed as he kept his gaze on the mouse, never blinking. His chops gaped wide, his tongue curled back. Saliva dripped slowly to the ground.

  The mouse had been foraging in one of the holes in the old mattress when the madman fixed it with his gaze. The mouse had remained still, staring back, as if undergoing some internal struggle. Then its limbs had started to twitch and move. It had slewed round, squealing pitifully. Then it had begun its run toward the open jaws.

  There was no holding back. It was committed. Scuttling along with one flank close to the wall, it ran for the waiting face. With a final leap, it was in the mouth. The madman’s jaws snapped shut.

  His eyes bulged. He lay still, body without movement. Only his jaws moved as he chewed. A little blood leaked from his lips to the floor. With much cracking of tiny bones, he finished his mouthful. Then he licked the pool of blood from the stained stones.

  Outside the cell stretched a long corridor, a model of cleanliness compared with the cell in which the madman was imprisoned. At the other end of the corridor, Doctor Kindness had his office, which connected with a small operating room.

  The office was furnished with phrenological and anatomical charts. On one of the wood-paneled walls hung a day-to-day calendar for the current year, 1896, with quotations from Carlyle, Martin Tupper, Samuel Smiles, and other notables.

  The furniture was heavy. Two armchairs were built like small fortresses, their soiled green leather bulging with horsehair, their mahogany shod with brass studs.

  A general air of heaviness, of a place where, in the interests of medicine, oxygen was not allowed to enter, hung about the room. In the black lead grate, a coal fire had died, in despair at the retreat of the last of the oxygen. Only the black meerschaum pipe of the doctor glowed, sucking oxygen from the lungs of this pillar of the asylum. Clouds of smoke ascended from the bowl of the pipe to the ceiling, to hang about the gas brackets looking for release.

  In order to make the room less inviting, a row of death masks stood on the heavy marble mantleshelf above the dead fire. The masks depicted various degrees of agony, and were of men and women who, judging by this plaster evidence involuntarily left behind, had found life with all its terrors preferable to what was imminently to come.

  The doctor was perfectly at home in this environment. As he sauntered through, smoking, from the operating room, he set a blood-stained bone-saw down among the papers of his desk before turning to his visitor.

  Dr. Kindness was pale and furrowed, and enveloped almost entirely in a blood-stained white coat. In his prevailing grayness, the only vigorous signs of life were exhibited through his pipe.

  His visitor was altogether of a different stamp. His most conspicuous characteristic was a bushy red beard, which flowed low enough over the lapels of his heavy green tweed suit to make it impossible to tell if he was wearing a tie. He was of outdoor appearance, solid, and normally wore a pleasant expression on his broad face. At this moment, what with the smoke and the bonesaw and the oppressive atmosphere of the asylum, he looked more apprehensive than anything else.

  “Well, it’s done,” said Dr. Kindness, removing the pipe for a moment, “if you’d like to come and have a look. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  “Sure, sure, I’d be glad …” But the ginger man rose from his armchair by the dead fire with reluctance, and allowed himself to be guided into the operating room by Dr. Kindness’s pressure behind him.

  The reason for Dr. Kindness’s smoke screen was now apparent. The stench in the operating room was pervasive. To breathe it caused an agitation in the heart.

  On a large wooden table much like a butcher’s slab lay a naked male body streaked in dirt. The genitals were scabbed, and whole areas of stomach and chest were so mottled with rashes and ulcers they resembled areas of the Moon’s surface.

  The doctor had sawn off the top of the skull, revealing the brain. Blood still seeped from the cavity into a sink.

  “Get nearer and have a good look,” Dr. Kindness said. “Light’s rather bad in here. It’s not many people who get the chance to see a human brain. Seat of all wisdom and all wickedness … What do you observe?”

  The ginger man leaned over and peered into the skull.

  Rather faintly he said, “I observe that the poor feller’s good and dead, doctor. I suppose the corpse will get a decent burial?”

  “The asylum will dispose of it.”

  “I also observe that the brain seems to be rather small. Is that so?”

  Dr. Kindness nodded. “Poke about in there if you wish. Here’s a spatula. You’re correct, of course. That’s an effect of tertiary syphilis. The brain shrivels in many cases. Like an orange going bad. GPI follows—General Paralysis of the Insane.”

  The doctor smote himself on the chest and, in so doing, awoke a husky cough. When he had recovered, he said, “We doctors are fighting one of mankind’s ancient scourges, sir. Satan and his legions now descend on us in modern form, as minuscule protozoa. As you probably know, this disease threatens the very foundations of the British Empire. Indeed, the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were passed in order to protect the young men of our army and navy from the prostitutes who spread VD.”

  At the mention of prostitutes, the ginger man did a lot of head shaking and tut-tutting. “Terrible, terrible it is. And the prostitutes must get it from the men.”

  “The men get it from the prostitutes,” said Dr. Kindness, sternly.

  A small silence fell, in which Dr. Kindness cleared his throat.

  “And there’s no cure once you’ve contracted it?” asked the ginger man, with a terrified expression.

  “If treated early enough. Otherwise …” The doctor removed his pipe to utter what was intended to be a laugh. “Many of the inmates of this institution die of GPI. Men and women. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, I’ll be able to show you a really excellent corpse of an old woman in her sixties. Mad as a hatter the last eight years.”

  “Thanks, Doctor, but I’m busy tomorrow. Sorry to take up so much of your time.” The ginger man thrust his hands deep in his pockets, in an effort to still their trembling.

  As he hurried from the bleak building with all its stone wings and stone walls and stony windows, he muttered a verse from Psalm XXVI to himself: “Oh shut not up my soul with the sinners/nor my life with the bloodthirsty …”

  And as he climbed into his waiting carriage, he said aloud, “Holy Lord, but I need a drink. It’s a terrible way for a man to end up.”

  Bodenland and Waldgrave were in the construction wing consulting with senior mechanics when a call came through from Bodenland’s secretary that Bernard Clift wanted to see him urgently.

  “I’ll be there, Rose.”

  He spotted Clift through the glass door of his office before Clift saw his approach. The younger man still wore the dusty clothes he had had on at Old John in Utah. His whole manner suggested excitement, as he paced back and forth in the waiting room with a springy step, punching the palm of one hand with the fist of the other and talking to himself with a downward gaze as if rehearsing a speech.

  “You’ll wonder what I’m doing in Dallas,” he began, almost without preamble, as B
odenland entered. “I’m on my way anyhow to PAA ’99 in Houston—Progress in Advanced Archaeology. We’re still fighting a clique of idiots who think Darwin was the devil. I’ve been scheduled to speak for some months now. Well, I’m going to announce that I’ve uncovered a humanoid creature who goes back some sixty-five million years. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition, and I know it.”

  “I thought you’d come to inspect our inertial project,” Bodenland said, smiling.

  Clift looked blank. “I wanted to see you because I’ve had a rethink about secrecy in the last forty-eight hours. Our security broke down. The students told the tale to a local radio station. I don’t want a garbled message getting about. I have to ask you for some support, Joe—I mean financial. My university won’t fund me on this.”

  “You asked them and they turned you down?” He saw by Clift’s expression that his guess was correct. “They said you were crazy? What makes you think I don’t think you’re crazy? Have some coffee, Bernie, and let me talk you out of this.”

  Clift shook his head exasperatedly but allowed Bodenland to pour him a cup from the coffee maker on the other side of the room. He sank into a chair and sipped the black coffee.

  “The experts I told you about—both able young men from the archaeological research departments of the museums in Chicago and Drumheller—took a look at the evidence. Of course they’re cautious. They have to make reports. But I think I have won their backing. They will be at Houston, at PAA ’99. Don’t shake your head, Joe. Look at this.”

  He jumped up, almost upsetting his cup. From his briefcase he spilled on the table black-and-white photos of the site and the grave, taken from all angles.

  “There’s no way this can be a hoax, Joe.” He made an agitated movement. “It would be to your company’s advantage to associate yourself with this momentous discovery. I’m positive there was a—at least a pseudohuman species contemporaneous with the duck-billed dinosaurs and other giant herbivores and, of course, with major predators such as Tyrannosaurus rex. I’m going to overturn scientific knowledge just as Lyell and Darwin and others overturned prevailing false religion in the nineteenth century. You realize the amount we know for sure about the Cretaceous is all virtually contained in a truckload of old bones? The rest is guesswork—inspired imagination.”

  Bodenland interrupted his eloquence. “Look beyond your personal excitement. Suppose you were taken seriously in Houston. Think of the effect on the stock market—”

  Clift jumped up, heedlessly upsetting his coffee. “I change the world and you worry about the Dow Jones Index? Joe, this isn’t like you! Grasp the new reality.”

  “My shareholders would shoot me if—”

  “Here’s a kind of human with burial customs not unlike today’s—flowers in the grave, ocher, even some kind of meaningful symbol on the coffin lid—but below the K/T boundary. Maybe it developed from some offshoot of early dinosaurs. I don’t know, but I tell you that this is—well, it’s greater than the discovery of a new planet, it’s—”

  “Hold it, Bernie,” said Joe, laughing. “I do see that it might be all you say, and more—if it proved to be true. But how could it be true? You want it to be true. But suppose it’s like the Piltdown man, just a hoax. Something some of those brighter students of yours tried on for fun … I can’t possibly associate this organization with it at this early stage. We’ve got responsibilities. If you want a few hundred bucks, I’d be glad—”

  “Joe, are you hearing me?” Clift looked angry. “I just told you, this is no fucking hoax. How many of the world’s great discoveries have been laughed at on first appearance? Remember how men thought that flying machines were impossible—and continued to do so even after the first flying machine had left the ground? Remember how the great Priestley discovered the role of oxygen in combustion—yet still believed in the old phlogiston theory?”

  “Okay, okay.” Bodenland raised his hands for peace. “Quite contrary to Priestley’s case, in this case popular mythology is entirely on your side. The comic strips and movies have always pretended that mankind and dinosaurs coexisted. You’re just claiming that Fred Flintstone was a real live actual person.”

  He saw this remark was not appreciated, and went on hurriedly, “Bernie, honestly, I’d be happy if I could swallow all this. Seeing orthodoxies overturned is my kind of meat. But you don’t stand a chance on this one. Go back to the goddamned Escalante, find a second grave in that same stratum. Then I’ll take you seriously.”

  “You will? Okay.” He paused dramatically and gestured toward the table. “Take a look at the photos. You’ve scarcely glanced at them. You’re like the Italian authorities, refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. You’ve taken it for granted you know what the photos are all about. These are shots of a second grave, Joe. We struck it just when you were leaving to get your plane.”

  Bodenland gave his friend one baffled look, then peered at the pictures.

  The second grave much resembled the first, which was why he had hardly bothered to look at the photos. The remains had been enclosed in a similar coffin, with the same mysterious sign on the lid. In this case, the lid had been removed with little damage.

  The skeleton, sunk in red ocher, lay on its side, in the same position as the first skeleton. Distance shots showed that this grave was no more than fifty yards from the first, still just below the K/T boundary but deeper into the hill, where the strata curved inward.

  “You observe,” Clift said, now using a voice of icy calm, “the second grave. There are two significant differences compared with our first discovery. In this case, the skeleton is that of a female. And she lies with a wooden stake through what was her heart.”

  “I’m sure your beautiful young daughter-in-law would tell you that you know nothing about human nature, Joe,” Clift said as they walked through the building. “I can’t keep this secret. I’m bursting with it. There’s the scientific aspect, and that’s predominant. This is something that is going to cause shock waves. It’ll be hotly contested. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition and I know it. I also know I can defend my case.

  “But there’s more to it than that. You’ve had plenty of publicity in your time, what with your association with Victor Frankenstein and Mary Shelley and all that. I also want publicity. I want recognition, as every man does, if he’s honest. Publicity will give me the funding I require.

  “Millions of dollars are needed—millions. The whole Iron Hills area must be torn apart. We’ve got a new civilization to explore—beyond our dreams. Imagine, civilization started here, in the USA, long before apes came out of the African jungles!”

  “Yes, and when this hits the media, you’re going to have the whole universe invading your territory. You’re not going to be able to work. The site will be ruined. And I won’t be able to chase that phantom train.”

  “That’s where you can help. If your organization will back me, we can get an army of security personnel down at Old John straight away.”

  “Let’s do it! Do you want a bed for the night? I’ll call Mina, if she isn’t twenty thousand feet up.”

  “I’ll call her, Joe, thanks. And Joe—thanks a million. I know you’ll be in the hot seat too. One day, I’ll return this favor.”

  They shook hands.

  Joe said, “Mina will take care of you. I may be a little hard to contact, just for a while.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Never mind. Up and at ’em, Bernie. Shake the world! I’m on your side.”

  The great green-and-white waves of the Pacific came curling into Hilo Bay, Hawaii. The foam scattered in the sunlight, the water lost its power, crawled up the volcanic sands, sank down again, and miraculously revived to make another assault on the beaches.

  Larry and Kylie came out of the ocean shaking the water from their hair.

  “I just know something is wrong, Larry. Please let’s get back to the hotel,” she said.

  “Nothing’s wrong, sweetie. Forget your intuitions.
It’s something you ate. How can anything be wrong? We’ve only been down on the beach an hour.”

  “I’m sorry, Larry,” Kylie said, reaching for a towel. “I just feel kind of edgy inside. I need to get back to the hotel to see if there’s a message or something. You don’t have to come. I can go on my own.”

  “Oh, shit, I’ll come. You’ll be making me nervous next.”

  Back in the Bradford Palace, where they had now been staying for three days, everything was normal. Phoning down from their room to the reception desk revealed no message. Nothing had happened.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Kylie said, nuzzling him. “I just had that silly feeling. You want to go back to the beach?”

  “No, I don’t want to go back to the beach. Supposing you get another funny spell as soon as we’re down there. We could be bouncing back and forth like yo-yos all day. I’m going to drag a six-pack out on that balcony and tan. Forget it.”

  “Don’t be like that, Larry. I wish you wouldn’t drink so much.”

  He turned and grinned as he headed for the fridge. “You got some religious objections or something?”

  She stood in the middle of the room, nibbling an index finger. She said nothing to him when he returned, switching on the TV too loud on his way to a cushioned chaise longue on the balcony of the suite. She looked out past him, through the tall palms and over the busy road and the other hotels and the whole vulgar commercial razzmatazz of Hilo Bay, to the green line of ocean beyond the shallows where the swimmers and surfers sported, a line that offered at least the prospect of infinity.

  Sadly she turned away, changed into a loose caftan, and took a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula over to a side sofa to read, out of range of the TV screen. She had marked her place with the wrapper of a Hershey bar.

  With a part of her mind, Kylie was aware of a commercial on television for the local Hedge’s Beer. “It’s slimming, it’s trimming—get a Hedge against inflation.” A news bulletin followed.

  Absorbed in her reading, she hardly took it in until Larry yelled from the balcony, “Bernie Clift!”