Never mind. The point is that I took the opportunity of that night to mark out a few sites of buried wealth, of which there were likely to be several, as we shall see. My passenger was quite naturally curious at these repeated stoppings of the carriage, at the eerie glow of faint, flickering blue flames appearing here and there about the countryside, and at my several dismountings to build up little cairns of stone. With these cairns to guide me on future nights when I was alone, I would be able to recover the treasure troves at my leisure.
I had expected Harker's natural curiosity at these events to break forth at once in questions, whereupon I, in my coachman's character, would be able to demonstrate irrefutably that marvels unmet in England existed here in Transylvania. Thus he would be led by degrees into a frame of mind receptive to the real truth about myself and vampires as a race.
What I had not reckoned with was the—in this case—damnable English propensity for minding one's own business, which in my opinion Harker carried to lengths of great absurdity, even for a discreet and tactful young solicitor. There he sat, upon the exposed seat of my caleche, watching my antics with the cairns but saying nothing. He called out at last only when the wolves, my adopted children of the night, came from the darkness of the forest shadows into the moonlight close around the carriage, staring silently at him and at the nervous horses. And when I came back from marking my last trove of the evening, and with a gesture moved the wolves away and broke their circle, Harker still had no questions, though I could sense his stiffness when I climbed into the driver's seat again, and knew that he was quite afraid. Harker's tenseness did not ease during the remainder of our ride, which ended when I drove into "the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky," as he was shortly to describe my home.
I left Harker and his baggage at the massive, closed front door and drove the horses on back to the stables, where I roused with a kick the least undependable of my snoring servants to take care of them. Ridding myself on the way of false beard, hat, and livery, I sprinted back through the clammy lower passages of Castle Dracula to resume my own identity and welcome in my guest.
As I paused in the corridor outside the rooms I had made ready for his lodging there came into the dark air beside me a shimmering that would have been invisible to eyes any less attuned to darkness than my own; came voices tuneful as computer music and no more human; came the substantiation in the air of faces three and bodies three, all young in appearance and female in every rich detail, save that they wore without demur their clothes a century out of date. Not Macbeth on his moor ever saw three shapes boding more ill to men.
"Is he come?" asked Melisse, the taller of the dark pair of the three.
"How soon may we taste him?" Wanda, the shorter, fullerbreasted one inquired. With the corner of her smiling ruby lips she chewed and sucked a ringlet of her raven hair.
"When will you give him to us, Vlad? You've promised us, you know." This from Anna, radiantly fair, the senior of the three in terms of length of time spent in my service. Service is not the right word, though. Say rather in terms of her endurance in a game of wit and will, which all three played against me without stop, and which I had wearied of and ceased to play long decades since.
I strode into the rooms I had prepared for Harker, poked up the hearth fire previously laid and lit, moved dishes that had been warming on the hearthstone to the table, and sent words over my shoulder into the dim hallway outside. "I've promised you just one thing in the matter of the young Englishman, and I'll repeat it once: If any of you set lip against his skin you'll have cause to regret it."
Melisse and Wanda giggled, I suppose at having irritated me and having gotten me to repeat an order; and Anna as always must try to get the last word in. "But there must be some sport, at least. If he stray out of his rooms then surely he shall be fair game?"
I made no answer—it has never been my way to argue with subordinates—but saw that all was in readiness for Harker, as far as I could make it so. Then, an antique silver lamp in hand, I dashed down to the front door, which I threw open hospitably, to reveal my now-doubtful guest still standing waiting in the night, his bags on the ground beside him.
"Welcome to my house!" I cried. "Enter freely and of your own will!" He smiled at me, this trusting alien, accepting me as nothing more nor less than man. In my happiness I repeated my welcome as soon as he had crossed the threshold, and clasped his hand perhaps a little harder than I ought. "Come freely!" I enjoined him. "Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!"
"Count Dracula?" Harker, trying to unobtrusively shake life back into his painfully pressed fingers, spoke questioningly, as if there might still be some reasonable doubt.
"I am Dracula," I answered, bowing. "And I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill and you must need to eat and rest." I hung my lamp on the wall and went to pick up Harker's luggage, overriding his protests. "Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort myself." He followed as I carried his things upstairs and to the quarters I had prepared for him. One log fire flamed in the room where the table was spread for supper, and another in the large bedroom where I deposited his bags.
With my own hands I had prepared the supper that awaited him—roast chicken, salad, cheese, and wine—as I did most of the meals that he consumed during the weeks of his stay. Help from the girls? Bah. They affected to be like infants, who can sometimes be stopped from doing wrong by threat of punishment but cannot be forced to do things properly. It was part of the game they played with me. Besides, I did not want them ever in his rooms if I could help it.
So with my own hands, hands of a prince of Walachia, the brother-in-law of a king, I picked up and threw away his dirty dishes and his garbage, not to mention innumerable porcelain chamber pots. I suppose I could have brought myself to scrub the dishes clean, like any menial, had there been no easier way. True, most of the dishes were gold, but I was determined not to stint on my guest's entertainment. Also, should I ever return to the castle from my projected sojourn abroad, I had little doubt of being able to recover the golden utensils from the foot of the three-hundred-meter precipice which Castle Dracula overlooked and which provided an eminently satisfactory garbage dump. The dishes would be there, dented by the fall no doubt, but cleansed by the seasons and unstolen. I have always had a dislike of thieves, and I believe the people of the villages nearby understood me on this point, if probably on nothing else.
In the month and a half that he was with me my increasingly ungrateful guest went through a sultan's ransom in gold plate, and I was reduced to serving him on silver. Toward the end, of course, I might have brought his food on slabs of bark, and he would scarcely have noticed it, so terrified was he by then at certain peculiarities of my nature. He misinterpreted these oddities, but never asked openly for any explanation, whilst I, wisely or unwisely, never volunteered one.
Box Number Fifty
Carrie had been living on the London streets for a night and a day, plenty of time to learn that being taken in charge by the police was not the worst thing that could happen. But it would be bad enough. What she had heard of the conditions in which homeless children were confined made her ready to risk a lot in trying to stay free.
A huge dray drawn by two whipped and lathered horses rushed past, almost knocking her down, as she began to cross another street. Tightening her grip on the hand of nine-year-old Christopher as he stumbled in exhaustion, she struggled on through the London fog, wet air greasy with burning coal and wood. Around the children were a million strangers, all in a hurry amid an endless roar of traffic.
"Where we going to sleep tonight?" Her little brother sounded desperate, and no doubt he was. Last night they had had almost no sleep at all, huddled against the abutment of a railway bridge; but fortunately it had not been raining then as it was
now. There had been only one episode of real adventure during the night, when Chris, on going a little way apart to answer a call of nature, had been set on and robbed of his shoes by several playful fellows not much bigger than he.
Their wanderings had brought them into Soho, where they attracted some unwelcome attention. Carrie thought that a pair of rough-looking youths had now begun to follow them.
She had to seek help somewhere, and none of the faces in her immediate vicinity looked promising. On impulse she turned from the pavement up a flight of stone steps to the front door of a house. It was a narrow building of gray stone, not particularly old or new, one of a row, wedged tightly against its neighbors on either side. Had Carrie been given time to think about it, she might have said that she chose this house because it bore a certain air of quiet and decency, in contrast to its neighbors, which at this early stage of evening were given to lights and raucous noise.
Across the street, a helmeted bobby was taking no interest in a girl and boy with nowhere to go. But he might at any moment. These were not true slums, not, by far, the worst part of London. Still, here and there, in out-of-the-way corners, a derelict or two lay drunk or dying.
Carrie went briskly up the steps to the front door, while her brother, following some impulse of his own, slipped down into the areaway where he was for the moment concealed from the street. Glancing quickly down at Christopher from the high steps, Carrie thought he was doing something to one of the cellar windows. Giving a long pull on the bell, she heard a distant ringing somewhere inside. And at the same moment, she saw to her dismay that what she had thought was a modest light somewhere in the interior of the house was really only a reflection in one of the front windows. There were curtains inside, but other than that the place had an uninhabited look and feel about it.
"Not a-goin' ter let yer in?" One of the youths following her had now stopped on the pavement at the foot of the steps, where he stood grinning up at her, while his fellow stood beside him, equally delighted.
"I know a house where you'd be welcome, dear," called the second one. He was older, meaner-looking. "I know some good girls who live there."
Turning her back on them both, she tried to project an air of confidence and respectability, as she persisted in pulling at the bell.
"My name's Vincent," came the deeper voice from behind her.
"If maybe you need a friend, dearie, a little help—"
Carrie caught her breath at the sound of an answering fumble in the darkness on the other side of the barrier—and was mightily relieved a moment later when her brother opened the door from inside. In a moment she was in, and had closed and latched the door behind her.
She could picture the pair who had been heckling her from the pavement, balked for the moment, turning away.
It was so dark in the house that she could barely see Christopher's pale face at an arm's length distance; but at least they were no longer standing in the rain.
"How'd you get in?" she whispered at him fiercely. Then:
"Whose house is this?"
"Broken latch on a window down there," he whispered back. Then he added in a more normal voice: "It was awful dark in the cellar; I barked my shin on something trying to find the stair."
It was a good thing, Carrie congratulated herself in passing, that neither of them had ever been especially afraid of the dark. Already her eyes were growing accustomed to the deep gloom; enough light strayed in from the street, around the fringes of curtain, to reveal the fact that the front hall where they were standing was hardly furnished at all, nor was the parlor, just beyond a broad archway. More clearly than ever, the house said empty.
"Let's try the gas," she whispered. Chris, fumbling in the drawer of a built-in sideboard, soon came up with some matches. Carrie, standing on tiptoe, was tall enough to reach a fixture projecting from the wall. In a moment more she had one of the gaslights lit.
"Is anyone here?" Now her voice too was up to normal; the answer seemed to be no. The sideboard drawer also contained a couple of short scraps of candle, and soon they had lights in hand to go exploring.
Front hall, with an old abandoned mirror still fastened to the wall beside a hat rack and a shelf. Just in from the hall, a wooden stair, handrail carved with a touch of elegance, went straight up to the next floor. Not even a mouse stirred in the barren parlor. The dining room was a desert also, no furniture at all. And so, farther back, was the kitchen, except for a great black stove and a sink whose bright new length of metal pipe promised running water. An interior cellar door had been left open by Chris in his hurried ascent, and next to it a recently walled-off cubicle contained a water closet. A kitchen window looked out on what was no doubt a back garden, now invisible in gloom and rain.
Carrie was ready to explore upstairs, but Christopher insisted on seeing the cellar first, curious as to what object he had stumbled over. The culprit proved to be a cheaply constructed crate, not quite wide or long enough to be a coffin, containing only some scraps of kindling wood. Otherwise the cellar—damp brick walls, floor part pavement, part dry earth—was as empty as the house above.
Now for the upstairs. Holding the candle tremulously high ahead of her, while dancing shadows beat a wavering retreat, Carrie returned to the front hall, and thence up the carved wooden stair. Two bedrooms, as unused as the lower level of the house and as scantily furnished. The rear windows looked out over darkness, the front ones over the street—side walls were windowless, crammed as they were against the neighbors on either side.
From an angle in the hallway on the upper floor, a narrow service stair, white-painted, went up straight and steep to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
"What's up there?" she wondered aloud.
"Couldn't be nothin' but an attic." Only a short time on the street had begun to have a serious effect on Christopher's English, of which a certain Canadian schoolmaster had once been proud. Carrie spotted fresh footprints in the thin layer of dust and soot that had accumulated on the white-painted stairs. A clear image of the heel of a man's boot. Only one set of footprints, coming down. The trapdoor pushed up easily. The space above was more garret than attic; it might once have been furnished, maybe servants' quarters. The floor entirely solid, no rafters exposed, though now there were dust and spiderwebs in plenty. The broad panes of glass in the angled skylight, washed by rain on the outside, were still intact, and it was bolted firmly shut on the inside; and if you stood tall enough inside, you could look out over a hilly range of slate roofs and chimney pots, with the towering dome of St. Paul's visible more than a mile to the east.
On one side of the gloomy space rested an old wardrobe, door slightly ajar to reveal a few hanging garments. But the most interesting object by far was a great wooden box, somewhat battered by much use or travel, which had been shoved against the north wall. Chris thought it looked like a coffin, and said so.
"No. Built too strong for a poor man's coffin, not elegant enough for a rich man's." What was it, though? There were two strong rope handles on each side, and a plain wooden lid, tightly fitted by some competent woodworker.
Christopher, ever curious, approached the box and tried the lid. To his surprise, and Carrie's, it slid back at once.
"Look here, Sis!"
"Why, it's full of dirt." She was aware of a vague disappointment in her observation, and not sure why. Only about half-full, actually, but that was no less odd. Stranger still was the fact that the neat joinings of the interior seemed to have been tarred with pitch, as if to make them waterproof. Of course so tight a seal would also serve to keep the soil from leaking out. But why would anyone—? The earth was dry. When Carrie picked up a small handful and sifted it through her fingers, it gave off a faintly musty, almost spicy smell, with a suggestion of the alien about it.
Christopher was downstairs again, moving so silently on his bare feet that Carrie had not realized he was gone, until she heard him faintly calling her to come down. She slid the lid back onto the box, and carefully lowere
d the trapdoor into place behind her. Her brother had turned on the gaslight in the kitchen and discovered some tins of sardines abandoned in the pantry. Presently they remembered the box of kindling in the cellar, and it was possible to get a wood fire started in the kitchen stove.
The sardines were soon gone. Brother and sister were still hungry, but at least they were out of the rain.
That night they slept in a house, behind locked doors, curled up in a dusty rug on the kitchen floor, where some of the stove's warmth reached them. Barely into October, and it was cold.
Next day, waking up in a foodless house and observing that the rain had stopped, they were soon out and about on the streets of London, trying to do something to earn some money, and keep out of trouble. But in each endeavor they had only limited success. Carrie was certain that the neighbors had begun to notice them, and not in any very friendly way. So had the bobby who walked the beat during the day.
There was one bright spot. On the sideboard, as if someone had left it there deliberately, they found a key which matched the locks on both front door and back.
Vincent still had his eye on them too, or at least on Carrie. And "Don't see your parents about," one of the neighbors remarked as she came by. She answered with a smile, and hurried inside to share with Christopher the handful of biscuits she had just stolen from a shop.
Shortly after sunset, threatening trouble broke at last. The rain had stopped, and people were ready to get out and mind each other's business. One of the neighbors began it, another joined in, followed by the walrus-mustached policeman, who, when voices were raised, had decided it was his duty to take part.
And joined at a little distance by the nasty Vincent, who before the policeman arrived boldly put in a word, offering to place Carrie under his protection. He had some comments on her body that made her face flame with humiliation and anger.
Carrie could not slam the door on Vincent, because he had his foot pushed in to hold it open. He withdrew the foot as the bobby approached, but Carrie did not quite dare to close the door in the policeman's face.
Of Berserkers, Swords and Vampires Page 27