Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  “He was as sane as the next man. A poet but a normal man.”

  “Your normal man’s a dark horse.”

  Bodenland laughed at that.

  Stoker was still pursuing his own line of thought. “These poor wretches of vampires don’t have sex, do they? Not as we understand it. Is the future you live in very effete—Listerized, Pasteurized, in a word? I’ve been on the nest, as they say, in dog-fouled archways, in pure-laden courts, in a thousand louse-infested rooms, in every stinking corner of the metropolis. I suppose all that’s gone by the end of the twentieth century …”

  “Bram, as far as London is concerned—”

  He was interrupted as Spinks came dashing in.

  “Gents, some of these foreign blokes are approaching. Driving in armored machines. It’s not the most encouraging of sights.”

  They pulled on their boots and had a look through the open door of the factory. The soldiers of the Silent Empire were advancing—on items that looked like motorized skateboards and, more formidably, in tanks resembling boats, heavily armed.

  “They want their bomb back,” Bodenland said. “Let’s go.”

  Spinks was already up in the train. The others ran to it. As Stoker slammed the door of the cab. Bodenland started the engines. The first shells began to fall in the vast field of mangel-wurzels, then the Libyan world faded and disappeared from view under their acceleration.

  As the time train began to tunnel into the past, Bodenland sighed with relief and turned to look at Stoker. He had sunk down on a stool and was mopping his brow.

  “Now then, Bram, before Dracula strikes again, my vote is that we shoot all the way back to the Mesozoic and visit the great family meeting in the Hudson Bay area which Bella mentioned.”

  Stoker shook his head.

  “I’m exhausted. I’m sorry. I believe I’m in need of van Helsing’s ministrations—though I never expected I’d live to hear myself say so.”

  Bodenland went over to him. “I’m thoughtless, Bram. You’re such an old rogue I forgot you’re ill. We’ll make a stop in 1999—I seem to have the controls to rights now. I’ll just check that Mina and the others are fine, and we’ll pick up some penicillin and get rid of that malady of yours in double-quick time.”

  “Excellent.” He sat with his head down, breathing heavily. Spinks came up with a bottle of brandy, part of Mrs. Stoker’s generous hamper.

  After taking a sip or two, Stoker perked up.

  “Rid me of what ails me and I might be able to go gallivanting again. Your wedding tackle tends to atrophy if not put to regular use.”

  He laughed rather miserably, and rambled on for some while along these lines. Bodenland grew impatient.

  “Rest for a bit, Bram. Sup some more brandy. I have a duty to discharge.”

  He worked his way back carefully through the speeding time train, now extended to its full length. He kept a shotgun loaded with Stoker’s silver bullets ready, vividly aware of the horror that had pursued him and Clift in this very corridor. Nothing jumped out at him. Although the corridor remained dim as ever, he observed a dull red glow suffusing the distance. It was no more than a suggestion of color. Speculation implied it might be some kind of Doppler effect generated by their progress through time; the rear of the extended train could be many centuries behind the leading carriage.

  The train was empty of its previous melancholy occupants, with the exception to which Bodenland came in the torture chamber.

  Here were the same glass doors fronting twisted pieces of iron, the same heavy drapes, the same table, scarred by practice of a cruel art, the same suffocating atmosphere of eternal damnation. And the same victim, pinned like a sullied Prometheus to his rock of torture.

  Once more there came over Joe Bodenland the sense of having to live through some mislaid dream, a suspicion that throughout the days of his conscious life some semiautonomous part of his mind had been undergoing dramas altogether darker, more intense, in tune with protolithic existence.

  The creature on the slab still wore his skull. As on a magic Easter egg, a colored band marked where it opened. Stirring under its confining bars, the prisoner contrived to roll its eyes almost into its head in order to survey Bodenland, hesitant on the threshold of the chamber. Its foam-fringed mouth worked against the bit confining it.

  Bodenland walked round the table and leveled the gun at the creature’s heart. He fired a magic silver bullet from point-blank range. The detonation filled the compartment with noise. One of the cupboard windows shattered, as if to allow exit to the soul of the prisoner. The hapless creature suffered such a convulsion that one wrist tore free of its iron bondage and gestured upward. Then it fell. Its poor blue tendons hung like string over the side of the table.

  Bodenland instinctively made the sign of the Cross.

  “Amen,” he whispered. “Farewell, Alwyn …”

  Peace returned to the tormented features. The body, so long unnaturally imprisoned, began immediately to decay, its limbs to detumesce, to stink and liquefy.

  Dracula’s terrible speech in this place, in which he had revealed the inevitable attitude of predator to prey, remained vivid in Bodenland’s mind. Once more he had committed an act of violence in defense of what he saw as right; but where ultimate judgment lay in such matters he did not know. Wearily he made his way forward, to seek out Stoker’s genial companionship and think of happier matters.

  Spinks saluted him as he re-entered the cab. He produced the recently opened bottle of brandy. “Wine, women, and song, sir—without the women and song.”

  “Spinks, we owe you a great deal,” Bodenland said. “I will have a glass, and you must drink with us, of course.”

  Spinks looked doubtfully at his master; but Stoker, who had revived considerably, started to sing in a rich baritone, “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes.”

  Relieving Spinks of the brandy, Bodenland joined in the chorus while pouring it into three glasses.

  “Here’s to several pairs of sparkling eyes,” said Stoker, raising his glass. “To our wives—and others!”

  “Which reminds me, Bram. Despite all the horrors we’ve endured, I’ve not forgotten the beauty of your famous Ellen Terry—lovelier than a dream. Tell me about her. You’ve known her long?”

  “Ah, never too long. There’s gaiety in the very air she breathes, like embodied sunlight.”

  “Have you ever … I mean, you’re a lusty fellow, you must have had the temptation …”

  He let the sentence hang, seeing Stoker fall into a fury, angrier than Bodenland had ever known him. “You dare suggest such a thing? Ellen’s no whore, you Yankee cad. She’s as pure as the mountain air, every inch of her, that’s what. If I wasn’t so feeble, I’d punch your head in at the very thought.”

  “No offense intended.” He said no more, well understanding what to make of the violence of Stoker’s denial.

  Stoker’s face remained red. “Another thing. A gentleman does not drink with his gardener. It demeans both of them. You may go, Spinks.”

  Spinks moved out of the cab, looking ashamed, but taking his glass with him.

  The atmosphere remained stormy. Bodenland went over to check the controls.

  Leaning back and closing his eyes, Stoker said, “I should take no offense, Joe. Ellen’s a woman apart. If there were only blackness and disease and death in the world—well, who’d want to live? Thank God for women like Ellen Terry. I hope I go to meet my Maker thinking of her … Not that I’d ever want to shuffle off the old mortal coil while buzzing about in time in this unnatural fashion …”

  “You’ll soon be okay.”

  “… particularly when I can’t fathom for the life of me how we do all this buzzing about from century to century. What did that hideous monster tell you about electricity wiping out all paradoxes?”

  “That? Oh, it was something he must have picked up and repeated. It’s meaningless. Dracula understands nothing of science. No brain, you see.”

  Sighing, Stoker said,
“There I’m in the same case as Dracula. Can you explain this time business to me?”

  Bodenland looked up abstractedly at the roof of the cab.

  “You must understand that when the terms ‘time’ or ‘space’ are used scientifically, they don’t mean what you mean by them. Our science uses the terms to designate an overall structure consisting of the totality of phenomena of whatever kind is under consideration. In this sense, ‘time’ has its own phase space, consisting of all elements and polynomials within the mathematical orbit of its totality. When our laboratories were working on the theory of what became our inertial system, we isolated what’s termed a ‘strange attractor.’”

  “Dracula’s a strange attractor.”

  “Here the term’s used in a mathematical sense. Points that are stretched far apart come close in the region of an attractor, so that in our hypothesis we were able to project ‘sinks’ in real time, whereby periodic time simply held steady. Time stopped, if you like to put it that way.”

  Emitting another sigh, Stoker held his head and said, “I don’t understand all this. Yet I’ve umpired cricket matches without difficulty.”

  “The science of chaos is pretty complex. Anyhow, in our inertial equations we were always aware that our calculations took in only one isolated attractor. In reality, the totality of time consists of innumerable strange attractors. Improved computers in the future would no doubt be able to deal with multitudes of them.

  “I can see that the fractals—oh, a fractal is simply an attractor which contains a complete structure however often you magnify it; a fractal’s like eternity—it’s fractals that contain the secret of time travel. Once you throw away classical mathematics, you get into multidimensionality, where one set of ‘time’ elements can be switched from one strange attractor or another to another set. You could have fractal crossover, so that actual ‘movement’ across even millions of years could be very slight.”

  He took another gulp of the brandy. “Well, that’s my guess. I’ll work on it when I get home. Of course, to transform theory into physical terms is no easy matter, and it’s clear that massive power expenditure would be required for the resultant prime mover across ‘time’ quanta.”

  “I’m sure it all makes sense—but not to me, Joe,” Stoker said, tugging at his beard as if to release a few brain cells. “So what about ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream,’ as the good old hymn has it, or Time’s famous Arrow? How do they fit in among your fractals?”

  “To be honest, they don’t fit in at all. They’re metaphors for time derived from the old classical mathematics. Meaningless. As obsolete as the concept of the luminiferous aether. Time’s not like that at all. It has flux but no flow—except as experienced by biological entities like you and me. It may itself prove to be a megafractal of some complexity.”

  “Heaven preserve us all when that happens!”

  12

  The bronzed facade of the Bodenland Enterprises building reflected a rushing mechanized worm which contracted as it stopped in the ornamental garden before the administration wing. Security guards were almost immediately on the scene as alarms sounded. They stepped back respectfully when Joe Bodenland emerged from the cab.

  “Stay right here,” he told them. “Guard this precious vehicle with your lives.”

  He turned to coax Bram Stoker from the cab. Stoker was reluctant to appear.

  “I fear your epoch will be too much for me. The very air smells different.”

  “You’ll be famous here, Bram. Dallas is a great place.”

  “Better than Tripoli?”

  “Loads better.”

  “No mangel-wurzels?”

  “Not a one.”

  Stoker descended from the vehicle, followed by Spinks, clutching the cricket bat for protection. He gazed around, open-mouthed.

  “My hat!” was all Spinks said.

  Stoker walked about on the grass, looking at its neat cut suspiciously. “Who scythes this lawn for you, Joe? Wonderful work. Better than even Spinks’s old father could manage in his day … And this is where you live? An enormous mansion—and all built of glass? Incredible! Jolly cold in the winter, though, I’d say. All window and no wall.”

  Bodenland checked his watch and began to walk briskly toward the door of the administrative wing. He said, rather absently, “You’ll soon get used to it. People themselves are just the same as in your time.”

  “Not if they understand fractals they aren’t, my boy!”

  Bodenland took Stoker and Spinks up in the elevator to his suite. Rose Gladwin almost collapsed at the sight of Bodenland.

  After all her cries of welcome were finished, Bodenland handed his friends over to her care, giving her strict instructions to see that they were taken to the best hotel in Dallas, given a bank account, and looked after. While he was dialing his doctor regarding treatment for Stoker’s illness, Rose hurried into the adjoining office to phone Waldgrave.

  “How do I tell Joe about what’s happened to Mina?”

  “I’ve known him longer than you, Rose. I’ll come and break the news to him.”

  “Max—it’s going to bring him down hard.”

  “I know it.”

  Larry was out on the grounds of Gondwana with Kylie, flying one of his model planes. His father appeared in the Suzuki station wagon. He dropped the radio control and ran to welcome him back home.

  But Joe was in a storm of fury and sorrow such as Larry had never encountered in him before. He fell back before the first wave of it. Why, Bodenland wanted to know, why had Larry not protected his mother? Why had she been allowed to die? Kylie clung to him but he pushed her away. Why the violence in the mortician’s? Why, above all, why had she become Dracula’s victim?

  Under the barrage of questions, Larry commenced his own monologue, timidly at first, then more forcefully. Mina had insisted on being alone. They hadn’t been told she was going skydiving. They had known nothing of her movements until too late. As for the stake through her heart—that needed courage—that was for her sake—that was for his father’s sake. Everything he did was for his father’s sake. He had gone into groceries so as not to compete with his father.

  “You drink for my sake, too?” asked Bodenland.

  “That is unfair and stupid, Joe,” Kylie said. “Larry certainly drinks because of you. Maybe we were not able to protect Mina—but where were you when it came to protecting your woman? Don’t try to shift your guilt.”

  It was Joe’s turn to be silent under her eloquence.

  Her pretty face was now alight with spirit. She was just as responsible for the stake as Larry. They had had to kill the evil thing in Mina to save her immortal soul—in which she at least believed. If evil survives, good perishes.

  “I agree with that, Kylie,” Joe said. “If evil survives, the good perishes.”

  “And yet with no evil in the world, good has no reason to exist. Which is why the Lord permitted sin to enter the Garden of Eden.”

  “Maybe in the end you’ll convert me to the Christian faith.”

  “No, Joe. I don’t know whether you’re cut out for the Christian faith. It might make you even more difficult than you are.”

  It was not a remark he would have taken from many people, but her smile disarmed him. For a moment he thought of Bram Stoker’s description of Ellen Terry as embodied sunshine. Here was another similar case.

  “At least I believe that Mina had an immortal soul.” He turned to his son and held out his hand. “I should not have turned on you. Forgive me. It was my anguish speaking.”

  Then he explained to Larry how he planned to rescue his mother from the dead.

  Mina walked in her green coveralls over to the motel room window and opened it. Dusk was falling. As she gazed out over the car park, the neon sign lit with the words MOONLITE MOTEL.

  She turned away, shucked off all her clothes, and stepped into the shower.

  Afterward, dressed in a toweling robe, she mixed herself a margarita and tried to w
rite a letter. Joe you bastard—it began, and got no further. She mixed herself a second drink and started to phone around. By now, night was setting in over Enterprise. She was phoning her sister in Paris, France, when a bat flew in at the window. “Oh, god, sorry, Carrie, I’ve got a bat in my room. I can’t take bats.”

  She put the phone down and stood up, watching the flying thing. It changed as she watched, turning into a suave man in evening dress, his hair brushed back and gleaming. Transfixed, she allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her naked body. But his avid gaze was fixed on the whiteness of her throat as he advanced.

  “Hi,” she said. “Like a drink? I was just getting stewed on my ownsome.”

  “Thanks, no,” he said. “Not alcohol.”

  As he was approaching her, the door burst open. Bodenland ran in, holding Kylie’s little gold crucifix before him. He thrust this at the suave man’s eyes. The man screamed with pain, instantly falling back, dwindling, smoking, turning into bat-form again. Bodenland struck at it, slammed the window shut, beat at the creature savagely as it sped trapped about the room. Snatching up a magazine, he knocked the bat into a corner. As it fell, he jumped on it, pounding it underfoot until it spurted blood and died.

  Then Bodenland turned to Mina.

  After they had embraced and kissed and both shed tears, he took her back in the time train to Dallas, only a few days in the future.

  Here was another strange reunion, Mina with Larry and Kylie. Larry squirmed a little as he embraced the mother he had last seen in her coffin.

  Later still, they were introduced to Stoker and Spinks. Spinks was resplendent in a new bomber jacket. Stoker was under doctor’s orders and receiving treatment.

  Stoker’s eyes gleamed when he saw Kylie. He clutched her hand longer than was necessary, and loaded her with such compliments as he deemed suitable for a seductive young lady of the future.