A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9)

by Fred Saberhagen

  As the first minutes passed, the keen attention of the audience began to waver, and they looked at each other unhappily; the session began to seem an ordeal by nonsense.

  Already the very gentleness and consideration in minor matters with which the Radcliffes were being treated had begun to arouse in them suspicions that the whole kidnapping might be a monstrous joke, perpetrated by some of their supposed friends.

  “Junie, is this all a gag?” Philip hissed, at a moment when he thought he would not be overheard. “Some kind of a gigantic … put-on?”

  June looked back at him in quiet desperation. “I don’t know. The thought crossed my mind, too. But who do we know who’d do a thing like this?”

  Despite the inroads of weariness, even with hysteria not far away, it was difficult to think of anyone.

  The tape played on.

  Philip and June sat side by side on the cheap sofa, holding hands most of the time, frequently exchanging looks but seldom comments, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. On the small screen the videotaped image of the man who seemed their chief persecutor was now well into what was evidently going to be a long narrative of the past.

  And it wasn’t working.

  It was not that the speaker raved or rambled. No, he spoke coherently and calmly enough. Having got a brief introduction out of the way, he began the body of his story by recalling another year that, like 1996, had once been called the best of times and the worst of times.

  Still, Phil and June were looking at each other in dismay; far from offering any reasonable explanation, the story seemed only to confirm that they were in the hands of hopeless lunatics.

  The scene opened (according to the narration of the thoughtful, dry-voiced image on the screen) in the city of London, in the year 1790, just as the Revolution and its Terror were taking over across the Channel in France. Months earlier, the Bastille had fallen to the Parisian mob, and in that country all titles of hereditary nobility had been abolished. King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were prisoners of the new government in all but name, though still clinging, tenuously, perilously, ambiguously, to some pretense of authority.

  “The very year,” observed the image of Graves on screen, “of the death of Benjamin Franklin—who, as I am sure you know, Mr. Radcliffe, is your own ancestor.” The dark eyes looked into the camera…

  * * *

  Yes, he, Philip Radcliffe, had known that about Franklin. He had been well aware, at least, that it was an old tradition in the Radcliffe family. But what connection could there be between randy old Franklin and the craziness of Mr. Graves and his associates two hundred years later? If the ancestral Franklin really had something to do with their behavior, maybe he, Radcliffe, could talk them out of it … but with the best will in the world, it was hard to concentrate under these conditions of captivity. Radcliffe fidgeted on the sofa, moment by moment expecting one of their deranged kidnappers to come in and say or do something outrageous. Nothing of the kind happened, but he kept looking for it all the same. And June, beside him, was in no better shape.

  On top of the other craziness, the watchers soon found themselves being intermittently distracted by what looked like technical difficulties; sometimes the image of the man on screen turned transparent, colorless, and strangely insubstantial. Then again, for intervals of several seconds the man and his clothing, along with the pen or pencil that he was holding in his hand, disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, all other objects in the picture, including the narrator’s table and chair, remained rock-steady.

  “Why is the picture doing that?” June whispered.

  “I don’t know.” Philip looked around again, as he did on an average of once every thirty seconds, to see if anyone was listening. “Maybe that’s someone’s idea of really super special effects, that are certain to impress us.”

  “But all this stuff he’s saying about vampires and oaths doesn’t make sense…”

  “Shh. I know, but listen…”

  Twentieth-century Philip and June, seeing and hearing Vlad Dracula’s version of Philip’s ancestor’s adventures of two hundred years ago, tried to convince each other that it would afford them some clue to the madness of the people who were holding them prisoner.

  Guardedly keeping an eye out for any of their captors, who were maintaining a steady though relaxed presence in the other room, Radcliffe and his bride exchanged a few terse comments. The implication had been that they would be left undisturbed while they watched the tape, and so far their kidnappers were holding to that plan. None of the masked figures appeared to be observing them at all closely. Now neither Connie nor Graves had been heard from for a considerable time…

  Beside Phil, June made a small noise, like a young woman caught in the grip of an unpleasant dream. His attention jerked back to discover his wife staring at the screen in apparent fascination.

  “What is it?” Phil demanded.

  She had paused the tape, and now gestured nervously toward the frozen image on the screen. “What did he say? I thought he said that someone, the man in the coffin in the London cemetery, had had his head cut off before he was buried … but then his head and body somehow came back together again?”

  “I heard the same thing.”

  “Let me rewind, run that bit over again.”

  They did so. But instant replay proved to be of little help. The words spoken had been correctly heard, but that fact brought no real enlightenment. Neither watcher could derive from the tape much more than seeming confirmation that the narrator, the creator of this tale, had to be a madman.

  The voice of the storyteller was calm, the sentences and thoughts coherent. But overall, the picture he painted was growing more and more disturbing. This so-reasonable voice detailed horrors, and more than horrors: a fantasy of survival in and beyond the grave, of centuries of life—or of extravagantly and grotesquely transformed existence.

  The kidnapping victims looked at each other, each thinking how exhausted the other looked. At first there seemed no possibility of swallowing the story—long-lived vampires, grotesque and monstrous mutilations—as fact. But the narrator plodded on, implacably. All these things were true, he seemed to be saying, with calm infuriating arrogance. Take it or leave it.

  * * *

  After half an hour or so, Philip and June, uneasy and unable to concentrate, decided it was time to take a break, and stopped the tape. Outside, the day was heating up, and they turned on the small window air conditioners with which their prison had been provided. They went to make themselves their first meal in the small kitchen. As they entered, the pair of masked guardians who had been sitting at the little kitchen table got up at once, and with some murmured politeness withdrew into the living room.

  The prisoners looked at each other and shrugged.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “Let’s do breakfast.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later the two of them were seated, conversing in low voices over toast and coffee and bowls of cereal. Minds whirling, they tried to analyze what they had heard and seen so far.

  “He’s mentioned Benjamin Franklin two or three times, as if he were really relevant. All right, so you have a family tradition that your great-great-however-many-greats-grandfather was Franklin’s illegitimate son. But why does that give these jokers the idea to kidnap us?”

  “I don’t know.” Phil looked around and lowered his voice. “Believe me, I can’t see any possible connection. Our Mr. Graves is evidently an utter lunatic.”

  “Better not let him hear—”

  “I won’t, I won’t. All right. The only thing to do, when we’ve finished our little snack here, is to go back and watch and listen. Go over the whole thing this time. Even if it’s crazy, it’s likely to contain some kind of clue as to what these people really want.”

  “All right. Back we go. We’ll humor them.”

  The Revolution, the biggest and bloodiest one in the memory of the Western world, had taken place in Franc
e. But Graves in his taped narration had chosen to begin his story with certain events which were taking place at the same time in London…

  * * *

  … It was around midnight, on a night of comforting and concealing fog, a chill damp night after a chill spring day, when young Jerry Cruncher and a couple of his comrades, industriously plying their illegal trade, were approaching in a spirit of enterprise a fresh burial, during the course of which the official diggers had disturbed a number of ancestral interments in the churchyard soil. No one in the Year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and ninety could fairly be blamed for this; generation after generation of burials had already left the ground beneath their feet a thick mosaic of human bones and coffin remnants.

  Less than a dozen hours ago, on the previous afternoon, the newest member of the silent majority had joined these centuries of Londoners, one more necessarily wedged in among old coffins, bodies which had lain in the earth for decades, some for a hundred years and more, disturbed only by the occasional new arrival.

  The latest crew of excavators, three in number and totally unofficial, arriving well after nightfall, felt themselves securely alone. These entrepreneurs moved their lantern down into the excavation as soon as it was deep enough, and they made no unnecessary noise, but worked away briskly, soon forgetting any fear of discovery. A single hour of hard digging in the freshly loosened dirt achieved great progress. As they began their work they had deliberately toppled the modest-sized new headstone away from the grave, where it soon lay half-buried under the mounting pile of newly upturned earth. Had Jerry been more imaginative, he might have wondered if the worms in this particular store of dirt were getting tired of being alternately dug up and reburied.

  The drifts and shoals of flowers that had been deposited at graveside by weeping relatives during the afternoon were quickly tossed out of the way at midnight. But their blooms, not having had time to fade, were still dimly visible in the softly focused light of the single lantern, and two busy shovels were well along in building new piles of earth. Jerry and his mates had taken off their coats and thrown them aside when they began to dig.

  Today’s new grave had been sunk to an extra depth, somewhat below the traditional six feet, in the futile hope of foiling just such an expedition as the one now under way.

  * * *

  The broken, worm-eaten boards of the coffin had symbols of true power carved on them—ancient signs that Radu Dracula had understood, in the brief glimpse he had of them before he was put inside—but which his discoverers did not begin to understand.

  Of course he should have thanked Jerry and his coworkers for the rescue. But to give thanks was never Radu’s way.

  * * *

  “Wot in th’ ’ell? Where’s she gone, now?”

  One of the diggers called down curses on their bad luck—which was in fact much worse than he suspected. The first touch on the afternoon’s fresh coffin had sent it shifting and falling from its designated resting place, sliding down another three or four feet into an unexpected cavity created by the decay of much earlier interments. Jerry and his two companions were surprised; but as an habitué of such environments, I can assure my readers that the circumstance is not particularly unusual.

  Ever deeper delved dogged Jerry and his determined colleagues. But the more the short-lived, breathing intruders discovered, the greater the depths to which they probed into this unexpected trove of splintered wood and rotten bones, the more they were impressed, and the more their greed for treasure was aroused.

  * * *

  “Ere, we’ve struck some kind of pit. Bring another light, I say!”

  … and Jerry, when he was holding the second lantern closer, looking into the accidentally broken coffin (not even the oldest of the two or three the diggers had disturbed), saw that which confirmed his first vague impression. He beheld the body of a white-haired man of saintly and ascetic mien, who had obviously been claimed by death when far advanced in years. But his corpse was in a startlingly, even unbelievably good state of preservation.

  For a moment young Jerry Cruncher, never too swift of thought, was convinced that what lay before him was actually the fresh body he had come to steal. But for a moment only. According to his information, today’s interment had been a woman, and there could be no doubt that the body before him now was no female, as beautiful as the long hair, slightly curly, and finely chiseled features were … the clothing on this strange one was almost a century out of date, decayed and discolored. But still it originally had been of the finest quality—you could tell that by the persisting fineness of lace, and by the buttons, which were of pearl and ivory.

  And though the cloth had decayed, had fallen prey to rot and insects, it seemed that the flesh had not.

  Holding his lantern closer, the young graverobber caught the glint of what certainly must be a valuable ring, glinting with both gold and jewels, on one aged finger, and if his eyes did not deceive him, there were even two ostentatious rings on the same hand … mere costume jewelry? In this bad light it was hard to be sure, but he thought not.

  And only then—such was the intensity of his focus upon profit—only then did Jerry note that the body’s head lay divided from the torso, the two parts of the body separated by a narrow strip of wood running athwart the coffin. This fact struck the discoverers as remarkable indeed. The disjunction was not merely an effect of decay, or of the jostling of the old box by more recent burials. No, it had obviously been accomplished deliberately before interment; the coffin had actually been constructed in two compartments.

  What Jerry was seeing seemed to him impossible to interpret, to invest with meaning. Vaguely he assumed that the man had been beheaded for treason. At the moment no other reason came to mind for such a grisly act. Though the punishment was still on the books in His Majesty’s courts, and no one had yet removed the last dried traitor’s head from Temple Bar—its empty sockets still peered into the office windows of Tellson’s Bank, where Jerry sometimes served as errand boy—he hadn’t heard of any such event in recent years.

  Jerry, going single-mindedly after those gleaming rings, gripped the headless torso and took hold of the stiffened arm in its crumbling sleeve. It occurred to him, even as he reached into his jacket pocket for his clasp knife, that the arm in his grip ought not to be so stiff after so many years, nor ought it to be so rounded with firm flesh. The depth of this burial, and the presence of at least one layer of rotting coffins in the earth above it, indicated that it must have lain undisturbed under the dirt for a period at least equal to a long human lifetime.

  The dead hand on its rigid arm somehow resisted, passively but very effectively, the removal of its jeweled and golden rings. The longer and more closely Jerry looked at those small circlets, the more he would have sold his soul to have them. The gleaming treasure so concentrated his attention that he was hardly aware of the body and its strangeness, except as an obstacle that stood between himself and instant wealth, to be overcome.

  Jerry’s two colleagues were drawing closer to him, one on each side. The one on the right grunted: “ ’Ere! D’ you s’pose them rocks are real?”

  No one bothered to answer.

  The graverobbers were on the verge of a serious falling out over this tremendous treasure, not realizing that the current possessor of the gems was going to have something to say regarding their disposal. For a long moment the two men glared warily, suspiciously at each other. Then the moment was past, and they agreed it would be daft to fight. Here was enough treasure, and far more than enough, to enrich them all.

  * * *

  But over the next few minutes, it was borne in on both of the intruders that the beheading, and the compartmentalized coffin, were not at all the strangest things about this find. The state of the body augured that this had to be a fresh burial, while the condition of the coffin, and the clothing, testified that it could not be.

  And the very strangest oddity of all was this: How could a body actually have been buried wit
h such a cargo of wealth? In Jerry’s experience, the people in charge of burials, except for close relatives temporarily deranged by grief, considered that gold and gems belonged to the living and not the dead. But that was not Jerry’s problem now; the carelessness of those long-dead workers was his good fortune.

  “Real? By God, we’ll soon find out.”

  Methodically one of his companions opened the blade of his clasp knife—he had to retrieve it from the pocket of his discarded coat—and started trying to cut one of the old man’s fingers off. Jerry took hold of the dead arm to steady it. The steel was sharp—its owner made a point of keeping it that way—but what should have been a simple task proved amazingly difficult to accomplish. It was as if the skin and flesh could not be permanently severed, they closed as soon as the penetrating blade had passed…

  The sensation of an independent movement in the arm that he was holding went through Jerry like an electric shock.

  Chapter Four

  “Ere! Wot—?” Jerry’s chums were stuttering and mumbling in amazement. Before their eyes, and hardly more than an arm’s length away, the wooden casket was collapsing around its occupant. The pieces of wood, the planks and plates and partitions making up the coffin, which for decades had enforced compartmentalization inside that silk-lined receptacle, had badly rotted over that span of time in the damp earth. Under the strain of sudden movement, they had now broken loose from each other and fallen free. They were no longer capable of maintaining a separation between the occupant’s head and body.

  The diffuse beam of the lantern showed how the free hand of the headless body in the coffin—the hand not occupied with being robbed—went groping for the gray-haired head, found it, and pulled it into place.

  Jerry, beyond astonishment, stood gaping like a fish in air. The two pieces of the long-dismembered corpse had somehow got themselves back together.