Dracula’s Brethren

by Richard Dalby

  A few moments later the motor arrived. We bundled Mrs Jones in; and as Vane gave the chauffeur the address, he added: ‘Drive like hell!’ I shall not forget that ride in a hurry, and I am quite sure Mrs Jones won’t. We plied her with questions, but her replies were so incoherent we soon gave it up. She sat with bulging eyes, one hand clutching the side of the car, the other my coat, and every time it bumped over an obstacle she shrieked. More than once I bawled into her ear: ‘It’s all right!’ but I might have saved my breath, for she made no sort of variation on her terror-stricken cry: ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

  A scared-looking maid let us in. We brushed past her, and went straight upstairs. Arriving at the door of that room, we stopped and listened, but could detect not the slightest sound. We tried the door – it was locked. So, after all that tearing hurry we were met by a well-built door, and Vickers had the key. We looked at each other in despair, but with Dr Vane it lasted but a moment, and was succeeded by a look of grim determination.

  ‘He is in there, and we have got to get to him,’ he said decisively.

  ‘I’ll fetch a locksmith: I think that will turn out to be the quickest way out of the difficulty,’ I said, and was on the point of moving off when the doctor whispered excitedly: ‘Wait! Listen! He is speaking!’

  I tiptoed back to the door, and listened with loudly beating heart, but hardly breathing: there was silence, a long silence, then I heard a voice, but what it said I could not distinguish. It seemed to come from afar off, like a voice on a telephone that had been badly connected up. Vane shook his head.

  ‘Speak up, old man! We can’t hear you!’ he shouted.

  Again we listened, and this time we could just make out the words ‘… key … false … bottom … desk,’ then all was quiet again.

  ‘Which drawer, and how do you open it?’ the doctor asked loudly. But not another sound came from the room, although he repeated the question twice.

  Vane turned to me. ‘That’s a piece of luck. I wonder why he had two keys made? Well, we have got to find that duplicate, quick,’ he said.

  We rapidly made our way to Vickers’s study, where we knew there was a roller-top desk. We thanked Heaven when we found the door open, and also the desk. It was a beautiful piece of furniture, and the top was rolled back, showing the row of pigeon-holes and small drawers. Tucked in one of the pigeon-holes was a bunch of keys.

  ‘Now, where the dickens is the drawer with the false bottom?’ said Vane, and he hurriedly tried to find the keys which fitted the drawers.

  Now, investigations of this sort cannot be hurried, and, swearing softly, he demonstrated this fact completely. The swearing grew louder and louder, till, for a moment, I lost sight of the object of the search in amazement at the extent of his vocabulary.

  I relieved him of the bunch when he had opened half the drawers. Eventually we unlocked the lot, but although we quickly took a large number of measurements, we could not find the slightest indication of a false bottom to any of them.

  Our nerves were in a high state of tension before we entered the study; by this time, mine were in a deplorable condition. The doctor’s face was lined with anxiety.

  Silently he handed me a poker, and from the wall took down an old Malay kriss, which did duty for an ornament.

  ‘You take the right side of the desk; I’ll take the other,’ I said.

  We found the precious key, but the desk—

  Again we were at the door upstairs, and, although I turned the lock, I dreaded pushing it open. The whole business was so uncanny. Was that horrible creature prowling about the room ready to rush at us the moment we entered? How should we find Vickers?

  I glanced at Vane. His jaw was set, and he had taken the revolver out of his pocket. The only sounds we could hear were some carts rumbling along the roadway, and the whistling from a train a long way off.

  But the business in hand was very real and desperately urgent, and I do not think anyone would have noticed any hesitancy in pushing that door open; yet the next moment we were suddenly struck motionless as a low whisper reached us: ‘For God’s sake, move as quietly as you can!’ We entered on tiptoe.

  There are some scenes which are stamped on the memory in such a way that they are never forgotten. Years after they can be called to the eye of the mind with wonderful fidelity to detail. The scene which met us was such a one.

  A broad beam from the setting sun came through the bottom of one of the windows, where the blind had not been completely drawn, and we saw. Very plainly, too, for the beam fell straight on it.

  Vickers lay stretched on his back in the middle of the room, with that grisly Thing straddled across his chest, its sucker buried in his throat. His face and lips were quite bloodless. His eyes were closed, and I could detect no sort of movement.

  I looked at Vane. His brows were contracted till they almost met, and his breath came and went through his teeth with a little hissing noise. I reminded him of the revolver ready cocked in his hand.

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ he said irritably. ‘Get some brandy, and, for Heaven’s sake, look slippy!’

  When I returned he had his fingers on the poor fellow’s wrist, and the frown was still on his face, but the revolver was on the box which was pierced with airholes.

  I suppose I must have looked puzzled. Vane spoke impatiently, yet his voice was hardly above a whisper.

  ‘Look here: what guarantee is there I should kill this vampire before it had time to discharge its deadly current through George’s body? You know as well as I do that creatures low down in the scale of creation take a lot of killing. We can’t risk it, and I am sure we can’t risk hauling it off.’

  The brandy was doing its work, and Vickers must have heard some of our conversation, because his eyes opened, and he said, with a ghost of a smile: ‘Have you ever seen a leech applied, Charlie?’

  I started violently.

  ‘Good heavens! you don’t mean to say Vane and I have to hang about with our hands in our pockets doing nothing except speculating whether – whether—’

  ‘Whether I shall be able to stand the drain till it shifts?’

  Vickers smiled again as he took the words out of my mouth.

  The thought was intolerable; surely there must be some way!

  For hours Vane sat waiting. I also was waiting, but on a couch in another room, getting over the effects of a little blood transfusion. ‘It is very necessary,’ Vane had said, as he skilfully made the arrangements, so skilfully that the creature was not disturbed. The improved appearance of poor George was my reward.

  Wearied in mind and body I fell asleep, and dreamed dreams of men and women I knew, but I gazed at them with horror, for they all had drawn, blanched faces, with great staring eyes, and something with its body across their chests and with its head buried at their throats, and they beseeched me by all I held sacred to take it from them, but I was bound by invisible bands. How shall I tell of my agony of mind? I woke with a start, and in a terrible perspiration, and found the doctor looking at me, hollow-eyed and unshaved.

  ‘Nightmare?’ he asked. ‘Where did you want to go, and who wouldn’t let you? Steady, steady,’ he added, as I jumped up and swayed, owing to the floor apparently moving about. As he pointed out, transfusion has no great tendency to make things appear as steady as rocks.

  ‘Has the thing moved?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he answered laconically.

  We looked at each other in silence. I was hoping he would guess my next question, but I had to ask it.

  ‘How is George?’

  ‘Alive.’ And I knew from the way he said it that he had told me simply the bare truth and that was all. There was another long silence.

  ‘Oh! can’t we do something?’ I cried despairingly.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Vane. ‘I am going to do something if that vampire does not move in ten minutes. The point has been reached when the risk is negligible, inasmuch as if it does not move now there will be no necessity of doing anything. I am g
oing to shoot it.’

  We returned to that chamber of horrors. Poor Vickers looked ghastly, and it did not require a trained eye to see that the end was not far off.

  I took my watch out. ‘Give it five minutes,’ muttered Vane; and I sat on the box with the airholes, glancing first at the deathlike face of Vickers, then at Vane’s set features as he stood stroking his unshaven chin, gazing at our friend.

  ‘Time’s up,’ I said.

  The doctor walked gently till he was opposite the creature’s head, and droped on one knee, then lowered the revolver till it was within six inches of its head. His finger was on the trigger when a strange thing occurred: the bloated monster suddenly withdrew its sucker and glared at him as if it knew that its hour of death had arrived. I thought Vane was fascinated by those baleful eyes, for he did not stir as the creature commenced to move towards him.

  ‘Look out!’ I shouted, and he sprang back. None too soon, for the thing rushed at him with incredible swiftness.

  Then I had an opportunity of witnessing Vane’s beautiful nerve, for not until the last trailing filament had left Vickers did he fire. I saw his finger press the trigger. The next instant a terrific report shook the building, and my hands flew up to my eyes to shut out that terrible blinding flash. Women’s screams, mingled with noises as if giant hands were tearing the house to pieces, floated up from below.

  The sound of someone groaning made me rouse myself.

  Vane lay face downwards in an immense pool of blood, his head hanging over a ragged hole in the floor. I thanked Heaven fervently when I found that he had only been stunned by the vast charge of static electricity the creature had suddenly let loose. Like a flash of lightning the charge had struck the floor, bursting it open, then torn its way through the house.

  We turned to Vickers. Vane felt his pulse.

  ‘I will save him,’ he said. And he did.

  Footnotes

  THE BRIDE OF THE ISLES

  fn1 This remark of Robert’s was another popular superstition of the Isles.

  VIY

  fn1 An officer in command of a company of Cossacks, consisting originally of a hundred, but in later times of a larger number. – (Translator’s Note.)

  GLÁMR

  fn1 Also known as Grettir’s Saga.

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  ——. ‘The Crab Spider.’ Originally published, as ‘L’Araignée Crabe,’ in Les Contes Fantastiques. Paris: Hachette, 1860. Translated into English, under the title ‘The Crab Spider,’ for the October 1893 issue of Romance Magazine, and was reprinted, with this title, in The Invisible Eye, edited by Hugh Lamb. Ashcroft, B.C., Canada: Ash-Tree Press, 2002. Also appeared in The Strand Magazine for October 1899 under the title ‘The Spider of Guyana,’ and was reprinted, with this title, in Ghostly by Gaslight, edited by Sam Moskowitz and Alden H. Norton. New York: Pyramid, 1971.

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