The Seventh Bullet

by Daniel D Victor

  Altamont and the very un-English woman he called Doll—he had tried her real name once and found it unpronounceable—remained in their snug tavern window for an hour longer, until he had made sure with his own eyes that the swiftly running tide had raised the surface of the Thames well above that pale dot of a distant, red-bearded face. Then, humming a sea-song to himself, and more than content with the day’s events so far, the prosperous observer called for his waiting carriage, offered his arm to his woman, and leisurely took his way to the Angel Inn on the south bank, where snug warm rooms awaited them.

  Early next morning Turlis and his helper returned to the scene to check on their most recent handiwork. June at that latitude brought full sunlight well before many folk of any class or inclination were up and about. Both men expressed mild surprise on observing that the central stake of three was now unoccupied, the chains in which they had hanged the Russian’s body for display now lying in the mud below, still looped and locked together but quite empty. Surely mere tide and current could not have done this—yesterday these experts had secured their trophy well. But there were obvious explanations. Either relatives had shown up belatedly to spirit his corpse away—or someone, even in this enlightened seventh decade of the eighteenth century, had coveted morsels of hanged man’s flesh as an aid to practicing the black arts of magic.

  The hangmen, discussing these possibilities, were momentarily distracted by the sound of shrill feminine screaming. The sound was repeated several times, carrying readily over the water, through the bright incongruous early morning sun, all the way from the south shore. Only momentarily distracted; at the river’s edge in Wapping, such racket was common enough. Actually, what Turlis and his comrade heard were the screams of horror uttered by some innocent female servant who had just opened the door of a certain room in the dockside Angel Inn.

  More than a hundred years would pass before any rational investigator connected that hanged man’s disappearance during the night with the shocking sight which met the maid’s eyes a few hours later. Not that the maid was startled by the walking undead form of Alexander Ilyich Kulakov—she was perhaps an hour too late for that. No, she had unsuspectingly come upon a corpse much more severely mangled.

  * * *

  Shortly after the midnight immediately following the execution, Altamont had been awakened by something in his room. It was a supreme despair, more than terror, that choked off his first scream in his throat when he beheld what had roused him and now stood beside his bed. It was the figure of Kulakov, still wearing the prison clothes in which he had been hanged. The Russian’s red beard was dripping water, his dead face a ghastly livid hue, his strangled throat, though no longer required to breathe, made croaking noises. But his limbs were free of chains, and his white hands were half-raised and twitching, groping toward the bed. The pirate’s eyes, the only feature appearing to be fully alive in that corpse-countenance, were fixed on Altamont.

  Doll in turn was awakened by Altamont’s hoarse abandoned cry. on seeing Kulakov, she registered mild surprise—so, she had been wrong about Kulakov’s dying a true death yesterday! It was obvious to her that the Russian, stimulated by Doll’s repeated attentions on the voyage and in his Newgate cell, had, after all, become a vampire instead.

  The woman immediately slid her compact, dark-nippled, quite un-English body naked from the bed. she smiled, and before her bedmate’s uncomprehending eyes melted into mist-form and disappeared—only pausing long enough to pick up her jeweled bracelet from the bedside table, and slip it on her wrist. The bangle went with her when she vanished—we who are wont to travel in that fashion commonly carry with us a few small items, most commonly our clothing, when we go changing forms.

  Kulakov paid little attention to either the woman’s presence or her departure. The red rage filling his whole mind concentrated his attention elsewhere. In the next moment, the hands of the undead man had fastened their icy, awkward grip on Altamont. Then the vampire—new to the powers he had been given, almost as bewildered as his victim by his own seemingly miraculous transformation, and still unsure of how to handle it—plucked the treacherous, nightshirted Englishman like a louse out of his bedclothes, and cast him aside with stunning force. In the next moment Kulakov, moving in a kind of somnambulistic fury, groaning and grunting foul Russian expletives, began ransacking the room in search of his stolen treasure. Drawers, bags, and boxes were hurled about and emptied, furniture shifted in a grip of giant’s strength. All in vain.

  A moment later the searcher grunted in befuddled triumph, on discovering some small, hard objects sewn into a quilt or featherbed. Carrying his find to the moonlit window, smashing the dim smoky glass in a reflexive move to gain more light, (not that his newly empowered eyes really needed any more; but Kulakov did not yet understand this fact) he ripped the cloth to shreds. Inside, to his great disappointment, the searcher discovered only sand and gravel, what was to him mere ordinary dirt. In anger he hurled the torn cloth from him, letting its worthless contents scatter into the Thames below.

  It flashed across Kulakov’s mind that Altamont, rather than risk carrying the treasure about with him in London, had very likely given it to his brother for safekeeping.

  And he turned to complete his vengeance upon Altamont.

  The doomed Englishman had turned back to the bed and now had both hands under his pillow—in a moment they were out again, not holding gems and precious metal, but newly armed with a loaded pistol and a dagger. A tough, resourceful man, old Ambrose Altamont; but both weapons very quickly proved completely useless.

  There was really not much more noise—the pistol was never fired—and those among the other breathing dwellers at the Angel Inn who were awakened by muffled screams and thumps only grumbled and went back to sleep. Soon enough—well before Kulakov really thought of trying to force him to tell where the jewels were hidden— Altamont had ceased to breathe.

  Kulakov, having thus achieved a kind of victory, was suddenly overwhelmingly weary. Once more he returned to his search for the jewels that he still thought might possibly be here somewhere... struck by what seemed to him a good idea, he went to search in the connecting room.

  Only a minute or two after the hanged pirate had stumbled out the door, the woman called Doll, a much more experienced vampire, reappeared in the room of carnage. Doll was as naked as when she left—more so, for she no longer wore her bracelet—and entered as she had left, in mist-form through the window. Around her in the predawn light, as she resumed a solid human shape, the other denizens of the Angel Inn still slept.

  Picking her way fastidiously among great spatterings and gouts of gore, she stopped for an opportunistic snack, bending to bestow a sort of prolonged kiss upon the now-faceless body on the floor. There was, she thought, no use letting so much of the good fresh red stuff go to waste.

  Only when she straightened up, neatly licking her lips clean, did she happen to glance out the window, and noticed to her horror that the cloth bag which had contained her earth, her only earth, lay torn open and emptied, caught on a spiky paling a few feet outside the window, just above the energetic river.

  Kulakov was no longer in the room to hear her, but she screamed at him in her own language that he had slain her, scattering her home-earth thus.

  Perhaps it will be helpful to some readers if I choose this point for brief digression: To each vampire, certain earth is magic. The soil of his or her homeland, is as essential as air to breathing human lungs. For a day, for several days in the case of the toughened elders of the race, the nosferatu can survive without the native earth. After that, a twitching, unslakeable restlessness begins to dominate, and a great weariness soon overtakes the victim, culminating in true death. It is not an easy dying; the sharp stake through the heart, or even the scorching sun, are comparatively merciful.

  Kulakov in his confused state, still having no success in his monomaniacal quest to repossess his treasure, heard the woman’s despairing cries and came back from the adjoi
ning room.

  Doll had put on her clothes again. Gibbering and pleading in her terror, she tried to bargain with him. She spoke now in her native language, which Kulakov had learned to understand: She told the Russian that she knew with certainty where the stolen ornaments were hidden, and that she would give them all to him in exchange for only a few pounds of her native earth.

  Somewhere among the hundreds of ships in the great port, which had brought in by accident soil, plants, vermin from the farthest reaches of the globe—somewhere among all those far-traveled hulls, surely, surely there must be one whose cargo or bilge or windswept planking contained a few pounds, a few handfuls even, of that stuff more precious now to her than any gems or lustrous metal.

  The Russian, his understanding still clouded by strangulation and rebirth, heard her out. Then he had a question of his own. He whispered it in fluent English: “Where are the jewels? They are not here.”

  Doll switched back to her imperfect English. “Are you not listen to me? I tell you where the treasure is, I swear, when you have help me find the soil I need. The jewels are not here. But they are all safe, in place you know, where you can get them!”

  “I know.” The pirate looked down at the red ruin on the floor. “He gave them to his brother, who has them at his country estate, somewhere out of town. His brother who helped him to betray me.”

  In near despair the woman clutched his arm, her long nails digging in, a grip that might well have crushed the bones of any breathing man. Once more she spoke in her own language. “Will you not listen to me, Kulakov? I need my earth! By all the gods of my homeland—by whatever gods you pray to in your Muscovy—I swear that if you help me find the earth that I must have, the treasure shall all be yours!”

  The Russian mumbled something; perhaps he meant it for agreement. But he was almost stupefied. His own need for rest had suddenly grown insupportable. Overwhelmed like an infant with the necessity for sleep, he abandoned his solid form and drifted away, sliding out again in shifting mist-form through the window.

  The woman, unable to obtain his help, began her own search, in desperation and in deadly growing daylight. But alas for poor Doll’s hopes of immortality! Upon the whole long winding Thames on that June day there floated not a single vessel containing any of the special soil her life required.

  But Russian ships, carelessly bearing with them some of the soil of Muscovy, though rare in this port were still discoverable. Kulakov by some instinct managed to locate the hidden, earthy niche he needed, in one of their dark holds.

  New vampires, like new babies, will often require long periods of sleep. Three weeks later when he awakened, out of a long vampirish nightmare of being hanged, he was back in St. Petersburg, the capital of his native land.

  ________

  * The details of the efforts of the pirate partners to cheat each other have never become perfectly clear, nor are they essential to our story. A perusal of Admiralty records of the time indicates that alliances between pirates and politicians were by no means as uncommon as all right-minded people would like to think.—D.

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