Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  She was newly roused from the oblivion which overtook her in the holy hours of daylight. Her hair lay about her shoulders. About her lips was a deadly pallor. Her fragility expressed itself in the lingering way she descended the broken stair. No living man, regarding her, could have resisted the lure of a ruined madonna, fearing his own weakness.

  Yet she herself, the magnet for terror, was also subject to terror. She went to a rendezvous with her Lord.

  Some reassurance was to be drawn from the atmosphere of the crypt, which was dark and rank. Her keenly attuned ear caught the drip of moisture, the whisper of a spider in its web, and all the sharp-toothed harmonies of decay. It suited her, too, that the stained glass window to one side allowed in only the barest stain of light, red-tainted from the dregs of sunset.

  Tombs stood all about. An open coffin lay nearby, lending its gamey flavor to the air. Bella stood by it, slightly luminous, waiting in absolute stillness.

  At a sign of some kind, perhaps a change of pressure in the morbid dampness, she sank to her knees, lifting her white hands up to her breast. Her mouth opened and her pale gums made her teeth look longer and sharper than ever.

  In the gloom, very distant, a mighty figure materialized. It remained for an instant at the brink of visibility. Then it began its advance toward the kneeling woman. It had infinite space to cover, but it approached at infinite speed. Suddenly it was close, robed in smoldering darkness. Its face was long, pale, powerful. It had horns, rising on bosses from its thick, coarse hair.

  It had no majesty. What it had was brute presence, before which Bella cowered.

  She addressed him as Lord and Count, and said that Bodenland would soon be finished as thoroughly as the other grave-defiler, Clift. She would not let him escape. She spoke submissively, in her deep growling voice.

  There was no doubting the monster’s power when he stood forth as now, horned and in his true guise. There was no doubting the moral ugliness of his strength—or the note of sorrow in his voice when he made his reply.

  “My bride and daughter, be not too certain. Nothing is ordained. Show confidence, inwardly fear. Bear in mind that the Fleet Ones must always remain the negative side of humanity, their dark obverse. Otherwise we hold no attraction for them.”

  “Our attraction, our darkness, is our strength, Great Lord.”

  She might as well not have spoken. His voice ground on, with the light of hell in his mouth as well as in his eyes.

  “For all our strengths, we remain forever slaves to the human imagination. You deal with a man of more than ordinary imaginative power.”

  “I shall conquer, Lord, for I have learned much from you.”

  “Only in the realm of Death where humans cannot go have we total supremacy. Remember that, my daughter and bride.”

  “I do and I will.”

  “Then come to me.” He was already aroused. With a cry, Bella moved into his arms and gave her corpselike being to him.

  It grew still darker in the woods below the house. Bodenland was inside the time train, stowing away ammunition, general supplies, and Stoker’s cricket bat, which he swore was his lucky mascot; he had scored several centuries with it, which was a good omen for traveling through long periods of time.

  Examining the old rifles, Bodenland called down to the ginger man to express his doubts about them.

  “But we have proof they’re effective,” Stoker said, pausing and looking up at his friend. “You’re forgetting. It was a bullet from one of these that finished off the vampire in your friend’s ancient grave. They’ll do well. And don’t forget, Joe, these ugly critters have guile but no real savvy—no human intelligence. A madman at the loony bin told me that.”

  Bodenland squatted on his haunches in the entrance to the train.

  “I was trying to think over that very problem in evolutionary terms.”

  “You mean Darwinism?” Stoker’s broad face was lit by the uncertain light of a storm lantern.

  “Exactly. Listen, Bram, we now know that vampires evolved millions of years ago from some other form of life. They adapted to parasitism. They developed sucking mouth-parts, they developed a kind of hypnotic and semitelepathic power to attract victims. Those changes had to be at the expense of some other ability. Well, even over millions of years, as they came more or less to resemble Homo sapiens, they did not develop a neocortex.”

  “But they can talk.”

  “They can, but reluctantly, it seems. They have the classic one-track mind. Try them on the rules of baseball. Nix! I believe they also lost an ability. Does it make sense to you to say that their intense sexual power is generated because they are themselves sexually frustrated, having lost the power of reproduction?”

  Stoker stared down at the trampled grass under his feet.

  “Spinks,” he said to the young gardener, who was standing nearby with his arms akimbo, listening, “You’d better cut on back to the house. This conversation is not for you.” When the lad did as he was told, Stoker said, “I understand your meaning perfectly, Joe. Vampires can’t get on the job, Dracula himself being an exception. All they do for sex is suck. Not F but S, you could say.”

  “So how do they keep the species going?”

  “That is a problem. If you can’t get it up, the population goes down.”

  “They recruit, don’t they? It’s all in your novel. They recruit humans into the ranks of the Un-Dead. And such ex-humans also face brain-extinction.”

  Stoker leaned against the train and looked up through the canopy of leaves to the darkening sky, where a flight of rooks made belated wing overhead.

  “You’re saying there are two strains in the vampire kind, the way it needs blacks and whites to make up humanity. So one strain is ex-humans. What is the other?”

  “Overgrown vampire bats. Or their equivalent back in the Mesozoic. That is, pterodactyls and pteranodons. From devouring carrion, it was a short step to preying on the half-living.”

  “No, no,” said Stoker vehemently. “I’ll not believe it. I’ll not believe that such creatures—brainless—could make this amazing vehicle and travel on it through all the years of time. You can’t explain that, Joe, can you?”

  Bodenland laughed as he jumped to the ground.

  “Nope. But I will …”

  “Let’s get back to the house.” They trudged uphill through the copse, chatting companionably, agreeing to make a start early the following morning.

  As they reached the lawn, with the house in view, van Helsing approached. Seeing that he had a speech ready on his lips, Stoker grinned and held up a hand.

  “Don’t tell me, Van. Joe and I are on a crusade, and nothing is going to stop us.”

  “You are not fit, Mr. Stoker, believe me.”

  “Fit or not, I’m going. I arranged it with Irving. We believe the vampires can be stopped, and we’re going to do it. Why not come with us?”

  Van Helsing looked appalled.

  “If you indeed are going on this dangerous errand, it is my graven duty to stay here to protect Mrs. Stoker.”

  Stoker patted him on the arm. “That’s right, Van. I applaud your keen sense of duty.”

  He sniffed the breeze. “I have a feeling that bad things may be abroad again later, Joe—without wishing to scare the doctor here.”

  “‘Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night …’”

  Stoker completed the quotation for him “… ‘Nor for the arrow that flieth by day. For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.’ Sounds as if the old psalm-writers were regularly plagued by our friends, doesn’t it?”

  It was growing darker still on the extensive grounds of the lunatic asylum next door. Dim lights burned in the building, none outside it. The ruin of the old abbey behind the asylum had known no candle since Cromwell’s artillery had struck its ancient walls. As for the extensive and neglected grounds, so close to London yet so near to the archaic, they retained the nature of wilderne
ss everywhere, embracing darkness early, surrendering it late.

  In his cell on the north corner of the north wing of the asylum, Renfield was on his knees, praying, counting, humming, reciting nursery rhymes, wagging his head like a pendulum as the fit took him. Like Bram Stoker, he had scented something on the breeze, and knew ill things were abroad. In a corner of his brain he remembered the big bronze sound of the Salvation Army band playing in the gutter outside the mean room which his family rented; he banged the tune with his fists on the drafty stonework now: “The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling,” with a clash of the cymbals on the word “Hell”; while he, almost naked and the size of a shrimp, cowered with an even tinier brother under the one bed in the room, powerless not to watch his drunken ogre of a father battering his mother to death with a chair leg; and the brass band played on triumphantly outside, drowning her last cries—“For you but not for me-a-lee-a-lee,” went his fist now on the gray stone.

  On one of the walls of his cell, out of reach, was an electric light, protected from vandalism by a mesh.

  A junior warden looked into the cell, saying cheerfully, “Lights out, Renfield, old sport. Going to be all right, are we?”

  The madman rolled on his back.

  “Please don’t switch the darkness on, Bob. Leave me the light, I beg. Something’s going on in the crypt, worse than slugs and snails and puppydogs’ tails. Leave me the light. Ummm-mm.”

  “Sorry, old cocker, orders is orders, got to put it out. Nine o’clock.”

  “Ruff, ruff, ruff!” He rolled on the floor, barking. “Bob, Bob, there’s a big dog in here, got in with me. Going to eat me. Leave me the light—my last words …”

  “Sorry, me old cock-sparrer, I don’t see no dog.”

  He slammed the cell door, switching off the madman’s light from outside the cell.

  The wolf arrived immediately.

  It appeared from wind-tossed bushes a long way distant and made straight for Renfield at a good sharp trot. Renfield at once set up a great hullabaloo and ran to the far corner of the cell. The wolf trotted the faster. Great was the distance, as great its speed.

  The cell was awhirl with something like snow as the wolf closed on its prey. At the last minute, it changed shape. It became Count Dracula.

  Renfield compressed himself into his corner, again the size of a shrimp, watching powerless, as once he had watched murder.

  “Ummm-mm.”

  Count Dracula was brilliantly robed. He had a cow face and horns and a powdery blue complexion. Sometimes Death comes as a clown.

  “You have been talking to a neighbor, Renfield. You know more than is good for you.”

  “I’ll be your slave, master. You know that. Ummmm. Ummmm. I’ll be your slave. Bring blood, fetch. No—”

  He was lifted up, twisted, body one way, neck and head the other. Then his body was flung contemptuously against one of the whitewashed walls.

  Bob found him in the morning and shed a tear.

  “Poor old bugger. Never harmed a fly …”

  Total darkness and Bodenland in his bedroom with the gas fire hissing. He turned it off and listened. The brief wind had died. The stillness of the unknown British countryside came in to him.

  “How silent is the nineteenth century,” he said, almost aloud. With gas and increased use of electricity, people had changed, become more active after dark, forgotten the ancient threats it masked. But in all the centuries before that, there had been no defense against sunset. Oil lamp and candle had been frail protection against the predators of night.

  He sat in a chair and tried to resolve a problem. He wanted to understand why the Christian symbol of the Cross so terrified vampires—if indeed it did. That idea would have to be tested. Was every vampire similarly terrified?

  He set blunt fingertip to blunt fingertip and thought.

  Every vampire … All the facts indicated that all vampires were alike, though Dracula and a few lamia, which were possibly not true vampires, possessed greater powers. Otherwise they were as alike as …

  As animals, as sheep or other livestock. No real individuality. And human beings had been similarly lacking in individuality when they emerged from the ape. So there had to be a period when individuality—the characteristic that set humanity apart from even the higher mammals—had dawned like a light. That light would have spelled the end of vampiric domination. A horse cannot defend itself from a vampire bat, any more than it can open a gate; a human can.

  That great moment of development, the waking of the individual spirit, must be fairly recent.

  His thoughts wandered. Bodenland was not much used to considering his inner self, such were the pressures of economic life. Yet he was aware of an inner consciousness, detached from daily happening, which seemed to be regarding him.

  But many ancient creeds had held ceremonies which proved men were not then individuals, or regarded as individuals, but merely items in the mass. If you could sacrifice a ram or a slave to save your soul, if thousands of captives could be sacrificed to save thousands of souls—as happened in the Aztec culture—then all souls were equal and interchangeable. An individual consciousness had been slow to dawn.

  Signs of dawn came in the sixth century B.C., with such great men as Confucius, the Buddha, and the classical Greek philosophers.

  The religions Moses defeated had worshipped things of wood, graven images, without living spirit. Those images could make do with burnt offerings. The solitary introspection of prayer was a new idea. No one went forty days and forty nights in the wilderness for Baal.

  After Moses, Christ embodied what was new and revolutionary—the value of the individual. The idea of individual salvation was consciousness-raising. It had changed the world, or most of it. It was an idea for which the time was ripe—hadn’t other great religions sprung up in the same period? All with the same emphasis?

  Originally the Ur-vampires had preyed on creatures without individual consciousness. Such was their natural prey. Their dangers hugely increased when they found themselves attacking an unpredictable individual—and the Cross was the symbol of that very danger. The Cross embodied all they most dreaded.

  So Bodenland hoped.

  He had sat thinking, fortifying his mind, for some while—reluctant to accept completely the very idea of vampires. Yet he found himself accepting many of the tenets of Christianity—a religion he had stoutly derided all his life. It was for that reason he had refused to undergo the marriage ceremony with Mina. Maybe Kylie and Larry had something, after all.

  Rising, he paced about the bedroom, preparing himself for what he anticipated would be as great a challenge as any he had ever faced. After only slight hesitation, he left the bedroom and crept downstairs. As he let himself out of the back door into the chill of the waiting night, he muffled the click of the lock.

  On the terrace, the statues stood frozen. The silence was unbroken, the light dim, for the moon was hidden in cloud. The line of trees bordering the bottom of the garden was as dark as an ancient sea.

  As soon as he realized that an extra statue stood guard, Bodenland’s senses became preternaturally alert. The figure was that of a woman, standing in an unnatural position, her head thrown right back to expose her neck and throat. Even before he identified the figure as Bella, he saw that behind it, close, something darker than the night stood there, moving, grunting quietly. He had an impression of fur but could not tell whether it was man or beast. She—Bella—remained resistless in that embrace.

  Whatever it was, it looked up with a flash of yellow slitted eyes and was immediately gone with agility over the low hedging at the edge of the terrace, to be lost to view.

  With a lethargic movement, Bella pulled herself erect and her garments in order. She approached Bodenland briskly, showing her white teeth in what could have been a smile.

  His body, confronted by the uncanny, went into a kind of paralysis. Here was a loss of individuality indeed! Prepared though he was for the meeting, the instinctive
part of his brain took over and he fought to regain control of himself, like a man trying to swim in a deep well.

  She was more beautiful than previously, seeming to glow with an inner light. She combined the innocence and waiflike quality of a small girl with the eroticism of a harlot; and these qualities of virginity and depravity seemed complementary rather than in opposition.

  She came forward over the flagstones, utterly confident of her powers. Her movement released him. He made as if to give himself to her, promising to surrender the train and assist in the forthcoming attack on humanity in exchange for the bestowal of her love.

  “Do you place no higher price on my love?” In contradiction to her graceful shape was that deep voice, sometimes harsh, sometimes melodious.

  “With your knowledge of the future, you can say where we might find some ultimate weapon to use against humanity,” he said.

  “I could discard you whenever I wished.” It was a statement of fact, said without arrogance.

  “Of course. You can form no attachments. That I understand.”

  “You think so? But I can tell you where an ultimate weapon will be found. The super-fusion bomb is—will be—in the Great Libyan Empire of Tripoli, known as the Silent Empire.”

  “I have heard of the Silent Empire.”

  “It will be defeated by us. Its last defense, the super-bomb, lies in the capital in A.D. 2599, awaiting release. After that date, human history—that brief thing—ends.”

  “That’s definite?”

  “Even the past is indefinite. After the end of the Silent Empire, all nuclear weapons are finished with. Together with their inventors. But you could live forever, Joe.”

  She radiated a great emotional assault on him, from which even the hideous growling voice could not detract. Joe sank down on one knee, cowed by the sight of the sign emblazoned on her forehead.

  In the empathy flashing between them, he caught an image of how he was seen through those alien eyes. He had shrunk to a scuttling mouse, in too-slow flight along a wainscot. About to master him was a great ox of a man—no female, but a monstrous masculine about to strike.