Jake scrambled for the shotgun that stood leaning in a corner of the room. He swung the weapon around and aimed it, squarely at the old man in the doorway. Jake pulled the trigger, and the hammer fell with a dry snap.
Jake screamed at Camilla to wake up.
At last the old man seemed to notice of him. “She’ll awaken when I want her to,” said Edgar quietly. He smiled, as if finding mild enjoyment in Jake’s tantrum, went out calmly with the sleepwalking woman, and closed the door of the house behind them.
Jake stood staring at the blank panels for a few moments. Then he broke the shotgun, saw that its load had been removed, and cast the useless weapon down. Opening the door, he followed Camilla and the vampire out of the house.
With Camilla walking a step in advance of her escort, who seemed almost deferential, they were going in the direction of the workshop-cave.
Jake continued to follow the pair, at a distance of ten yards or so. If either Edgar or Camilla was aware of Jake’s continued presence, they had chosen to ignore him.
The figures disappeared inside the cave, which remained dark. Jake, following cautiously, standing first just outside the entrance, and then just inside, peered into the darkness. A faint white glow that somehow impressed him as unhealthy was coming from the inner chamber.
Dimly he saw that the huge stone blocking the inner chamber had by some means been swung or tilted back; there was room, just room, for Camilla to squeeze her naked body through the aperture. Edgar went after her, his body somehow gliding easily through the gap.
Fascinated, frightened but unable to help himself, Jake crept closer, step by step.
Until he was close enough to see how the two bodies, Edgar’s and Camilla’s, came together. Camilla moaned as the old man pressed her back into the corner of the chamber. Jake could see only heads and shoulders, but from the angle between them, they couldn’t very well be in contact below the waist. But Jake saw now what Camilla had meant by the vampire’s love-making. The old man’s teeth, suddenly turned as sharp as a rat’s fangs, were on her throat…
Jake, sickened, watched for no more than a few seconds; then he retreated to the cave entrance, where he sat on the threshold of stone, staring into the cave at nothing, trying not to hear the occasional moans—perhaps they were of pleasure—that came from the inner room.
An hour passed—or it might have been several hours. The eastern sky was growing steadily brighter, when Camilla came stumbling out of the inner chamber. Jake raised his head to see her slow emergence, her form ghostly and somehow pitiful in the dim light. At the same time Jake could hear the huge rock grating, and knew that Edgar must be moving it back into place, so it would block the aperture as before.
When Camilla reached Jake’s side, he stood up and put a supportive arm around her.
“Cam? Cam, are you all right?”
She moaned again, and mumbled something. At that moment Edgar appeared briefly, standing before them in the entrance to the cave, apparently paying no attention to either Jake or Camilla. A few seconds later, the figure of the old man disappeared.
Jake looked around, dazed, in the slowly increasing light. There was only Camilla, sobbing, with him now.
Jake could see the little blood-beads on the whiteness of her throat.
* * *
Leaning on each other for support, the two of them made their way slowly back to the house. Into the bedroom, where their clothes were still scattered about. Where their master, as Jake now fully realized, could enter any time he chose.
* * *
There was no hope, no thought, of getting back to sleep, no effort at it. Half an hour after coming back to the house, sitting at the table in the main room, pretending to drink coffee, Camilla suddenly said to Jake: “I think he wants you to get me pregnant.”
Jake goggled at her. “What? Why’d he want that?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then she gripped Jake by the arm. “When he had me back inside that little room…”
“Yeah?”
“The two of us weren’t alone. There was someone else in there too.”
“What?”
“Someone—or something.”
Jake remembered the vague form he had seen with his flashlight, in the course of his earlier exploration of the cave. He could feel his scalp creep. “What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Jake, get me out of here! GET ME OUT!”
* * *
Jake had no answer ready for that demand.
In an hour or two, leaving Camilla, fully clothed again, lying sleepless on their bed, he shuffled back to the cave, where he got to work, once again following orders to mine nodules of the nameless white rock. There was nothing else that he could do, and the labor at least gave him some way to occupy his time.
And for Jake the really crazy part, the part that made him think that maybe he’d gone around the bend himself, was yet to come.
It came that evening, an hour after sunset, when he found himself once more standing with the vampire-sculptor at the workbench. It came for Jake as he stood there with old Edgar, and heard himself talking calmly about tools and rocks, weights and shapes, almost as if the horrors, sexual and otherwise, of the night before had never happened.
Jake, watching the old man handle the rocks, seeing him shatter Vishnu schist with hard blows of his metal tools, could only marvel again at the master’s strength and skill. Despite his fear and hatred, he could almost feel himself starting to develop enthusiasm for this project.
* * * * * *
For the second night in a row Jake’s and Camilla’s bedroom was invaded without warning; this time Jake slept through the intrusion as if he had been drugged. He was not aware of what was happening until Camilla was already gone. Then, hurriedly throwing on his clothes, he followed her and her abductor to the cave, which was once more dark and silent.
The scene of the night before was re-enacted, with minor variations in detail. Once more the old man forced the young woman back into a corner of the inner chamber, where Jake could see only a small part of what was happening. Once more, more strongly than before, Jake got the impression that Camilla was at least on the way to becoming a completely willing partner in this act—whatever it might be exactly.
And this time, peering into the inner chamber of the cave, Jake got a better look at the third presence there, as insubstantial but as real as light.
He could see the whitish, translucent shape, whatever it was, move in such as way as to suggest that it was enveloping Camilla’s body and like the old man nursing at her veins. While this was happening, the old man withdrew himself as far as the small size of the inner room permitted.
Then he stepped forward again…
Jake carried away with him the very distinct impression of having seen three forms locked in an orgiastic embrace.
* * *
Headed back to the house again with Jake, minutes after sunrise, Camilla said: “Jake, lover, if he keeps on doing that to me…” She let the sentence trail away.
Jake could imagine half a dozen outcomes if it went on. None of the ghastly pictures evoked in his mind were coherent, but each seemed more horrible than all the others.
“We can’t let him keep on,” he said. Then he added, as if in afterthought: “We’ve got to kill him.”
Those last five words just hung in the air. He had pronounced them quite easily and naturally, as he might have said that they needed more firewood.
Almost casually, Camilla was nodding a silent agreement. “And even so, I don’t know that he’s the worst thing we’ve got to be afraid of.”
* * *
For a long time after they returned to the house that morning, Jake and Camilla sat in two chairs at the table, saying little, doing nothing.
For a while, perversely and frighteningly, she was in a mood to giggle and tease Jake—as if getting free from Tyrrell’s control was, after all, the last thing she had in mind.
“Oooh, are you jealous, Jakey?” She pouted, mock-pleading in the tones of baby talk. “Don’t ooo be jealous? Old Edgar’s not a bit jealous of ooo!”
At last he jumped up without answering her and ran out of the house, going to his work. When she brought him his lunch, sometime past midday, she was sober and serious again.
Chapter Twelve
The time at the Greenwich meridian, only ten minutes of longitude east of London, was two minutes past midnight, the penultimate day of the old year just beginning. The man who in Arizona had called himself Strangeways was now standing alone in the darkened parlor of a large Kentish country house, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the center of the village of Down.
For many years no one had lived in this house. But for some forty years of the nineteenth century it had been the home of Charles Darwin, and on most days of the late twentieth century it was open as a museum. Tourists came with some regularity to Darwin’s house, a comparatively small number of them who were interested enough to make the effort to find the place. At midnight, naturally, there were no other tourists and even the caretakers had long since retired to their own homes and beds.
For almost an hour the moderately tall figure of the sole nocturnal occupant had been standing, virtually motionless, in the great scientist’s study. Shortly after the stroke of midnight he moved at last, lightly touched with his fingertips some of the shelved books, drew a deliberate breath to smell the furniture polish of the museum-like preservation in which the house lay bound. Standing close to the tall, dark case of Darwin’s great old clock, he listened carefully to the heavy soft voice of the mechanism within. The silent visitor’s investigatory methods, honed through centuries, were older than those of modern science, and in certain matters even more successful.
At almost three minutes after midnight the tall man turned his head sharply—his ears had caught a sound, just outside the house. Someone was trying to get in. Smiling, he murmured a soft invitation, confident that ears as keen as his own, out there in the winter night, would hear.
Presently there came a gentle shimmering in the dark air of the study, followed by the quiet appearance of a soft but solid feminine form, brown-haired and youthful in appearance, dressed in the English fashion of a century ago.
Offering the newcomer a courtly bow in the style of a bygone age, the foreign visitor exchanged with her a few words of private tenderness.
Then he said: “I am sure you are aware, dear Mina, that this year marks the centennial of my first visit to England—and, of course, of our first meeting?”
The youthful-looking lady smiled. “Perfectly aware, dear Vlad. I was wondering if the entire year would pass before you commented on the fact.” Her voice was as undeniably English as her dress.
“I have been busy,” her companion said abstractedly. For a moment he stood with hands folded in front of him, looking almost like a vicar.
“Of course you have. And with important matters. I did not mean to chide.” Graceful and poised, Mina patted the visitor to Britain on the arm.
“So.” He drew a deep breath—an occasional habit of his which still persisted—and looked about him. “So, this is Darwin’s house.”
“No doubt about that, there’s a sign outside.” Mina was practical as always. “He lived and worked in this building for most of his life—I take it this is not your first visit?”
“A natural assumption on your part, my dear, because I entered the building without any recent invitation—but the truth is that I have never entered this house before. Once, however, almost a century ago, I was invited in. That was on my second—or was it perhaps my third?—visit to England. After a hundred years many such details escape me.”
Mina laughed softly, an almost breathless sound. “To be sure. No doubt your invitation came from some maiden, the revelation of whose name you would still deem inadmissibly ungentlemanly … Vlad Drakulya, do you still suppose me jealous of the breathing kisses you received so long ago? For that matter, of those that, I am sure, you continue to receive?”
Her companion acknowledged the comment with a blink and a faint smile. “Kisses? Yes, indeed, kisses there were, to be sure … by the way, my dear, I have spoken with several of your countrymen since my arrival in Britain yesterday. I have even consulted at some length with one man in particular, who somehow—I confess I do not know how—knew that I was coming.”
Even practical Mina appeared to be impressed. “An elder counselor, perhaps?”
“You may say so. One whom I have, for the past few years, been privileged to call friend. He was almost a thousand years of age when I was born. I will not speak his name…”
“I understand.” The power of some names was not to be taken lightly “And from this ancient and venerable Briton you have learned something that will be of help to you in your current difficulties across the sea?”
“I have learned several things.” Drakulya spread out his arms. “To begin with, a man named Edgar Tyrrell once stood in this very room…”
The visitor spent the next minute or two telling his beloved Mina something about Tyrrell.
Frowning, she asked: “And was your mysterious Tyrrell one of us, nosferatu, before he left England?”
“I cannot be sure, but it seems likely. Darwin died in 1882, nine years before I first visited Britain. And Tyrrell, so interested in Darwin’s work, did not appear in Arizona until almost fifty years later. That would argue a long life for a mere breather.”
* * *
Presently, having absorbed as many useful impressions as he thought he might on this his first visit to Darwin’s house—having at least temporarily sated his curiosity as to what might be discoverable in the dim study—the investigating vampire, with his vampire lady friend beside him, approached a tall window giving on the garden, and passed outside into the dank wintry English night. Both gentleman and lady traversed the locked window without disturbing either glass or wood, having no more difficulty than they had experienced with their entrance.
Pacing the frosted garden, with crisp grass crunching under his boots, Vlad Drakulya took note in passing of a helpful little sign intended to explain some details of the grounds to tourists. Moments later he and his companion, following an arrow on the sign, had entered on Darwin’s looping rustic footpath, used by the great breathing scientist for both exercise and meditation.
The footpath led them across a winter-quiet field, and through a little wood. Along this way the vampires stalked thoughtfully, speaking seldom, communing in silence with each other and with their surroundings. The man in particular was trying to sense the vibrations of the past and hear its deep inhuman voices. Not Darwin’s past, no, he had already finished with that. Let Darwin rest in peace. His life, his house, his work, had served the investigator beautifully as the entrance way. But now entry had been accomplished. The real goal lay vastly deeper in the past. Almost immeasurably deeper. Darwin and Merlin were indistinguishably contemporaneous, seen from the perspective of the depth of centuries, of innumerable millennia, of incalculable ages that now required to be probed…
Recalled from a reverie by the banal stirrings of physical hunger, the male vampire paused to tempt a fascinated rabbit closer among the trees of the small wood. Then a pounce—mercifully quick—and with a good appetite he and his companion fastidiously shared between them the small creature’s blood.
Overhead, the dark skeletal fingers of Darwin’s trees probed and questioned the chill sky.
Mina, her red lips again as clean as those of any breathing maiden—indeed, cleaner than most—indicated the bent limbs with a subtle gesture. “As if they might be sifting the starlight for messages; don’t you think so, Vlad?”
“Very poetic; as to what I think, I think I have now, at last, begun to understand, my dear.”
“To understand—?”
“I think I am ready to return to the Grand Canyon.”
“A very fascinating place, I’m sure. Some day you must show it to me. And
someday—but not now, for I can see that you are in a hurry—you must explain to me what it is that you have just come to understand.”
“Some day I shall.”
The pair kissed chastely. Moments later, the man changed form and spread his wings. Tonight the wings of his own altered body would carry him no farther than Gatwick; for transatlantic movement his fastest travel option was the same as that of the most mundane breather. He was about to board prosaic British Airways.
* * * * * *
A few hours after leaving Darwin’s house, snugly ensconced in driven, roaring metal at some forty thousand feet over the Atlantic, speeding westward toward Chicago, the vampire found time to think, and a great deal to think about.
To begin with, had Tyrrell as a mere breathing boy really known Darwin, who had died in his house at Down in April of 1882? About fifty years had passed between that possible meeting, and the time when Tyrrell—himself by then an old man on the breathers’ scale—met and married Sarah in Arizona.
Old Sarah would certainly know whether her husband had been a vampire when they were married. He, Drakulya, was going to have to talk to her as soon as possible after he reached the Canyon.
Or was it possible that Tyrrell had never known Darwin, though he, Drakulya, had now convinced himself that the former had at least once—whether breathing at the time or not—stood in the great scientist’s house?
Whatever the exact relationship between Darwin and Tyrrell, the artist—and this was the important fact—had certain absorbed some of the ideas of the scientist.
* * *
Not many hours after his departure from England, the returning passenger was standing in one of a row of phone booths in the great terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare Field, trying his best to reach Joe Keogh in Arizona. But the effort was fruitless. Evidently no one was occupying Keogh’s hotel room at the moment.
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