The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  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all young in appearance and female in every rich detail, save that they wore without demur their clothes a century out of date.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, fuller-breasted 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 Wallachia , 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.

  But to return to that first evening. When my guest had refreshed himself from his journey and rejoined me in the dining room he found me leaning against the fireplace and awaiting him in eagerness, as hungry for intelligent conversation and first-hand news of the great outer world as he was for good food.

  I gestured him to the table, saying: “I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup.”

  Whilst Harker attacked the chicken I read through the letter he had handed me. It was from his employer, Hawkins, who described his young deputy as “full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition,” and also as “discreet and silent.”

  This was all to my liking and I at once began a conversation that went on in the dining room for hours, as Harker ate and then accepted a cigar. We discoursed mainly on the circumstances of his journey — I was particularly interested in trains, which at that time I had never seen, and I enjoyed our talk immensely.

  Toward dawn a companionable silence fell between us, broken shortly by the howling, from down the valley, of many wolves.

  “Listen to them,” I said, for a moment unthinking. “The children of the night. What music they make!” A momentary look of consternation came into my guest’s face; I had forgotten that only a few hours earlier, as I in my guise of coachman brought him up the winding mountain road, he had seen wolves at disturbingly close range.

  I quickly added: “Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.” And shortly we took our separate ways to rest.

  Not having gone to bed till dawn, and being wearied from his journey, Harker naturally slept until late in the day, and as I thought would not have been surprised not to see or hear from me until after sunset. When I looked for him at that hour I was briefly alarmed at not finding him in his own rooms. I had not wished to shatter the spell of that first evening of human society by trying to explain to him how dangerous to him certain parts of the castle could be.

  To my relief, he had strayed no farther than my nearby library, where to his “great delight,” as he recorded in his journal, he discovered “a vast number of English books … magazines, and newspapers … the books were of the most varied kind — history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law — all relating to England and English life and customs and manners.”

  “I am glad you found your way in here,” I said with honesty, “for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These companions” — I gestured at the books — “have been good friends to me, and for some years, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come t
o know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the rush and whirl of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I know your tongue only through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak.”

  “But, Count,” Harker expostulated, “you know and speak English thoroughly!”

  “I thank you, my friend,” I responded, “for your all too flattering estimate, but yet I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them.”

  “Indeed, sir, you speak excellently.”

  “Not so. Did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. And that is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one: men know him not — and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pauses in his speaking if he hears my words, ‘Ha ha! a stranger!’ I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me awhile, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today, but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand.”

  Harker pledged his willingness to help me with my English and then asked if he might use the library at will. This seemed like a good time to issue my warnings, so I said:

  “Yes, certainly. You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge you would perhaps better understand.”

  “I am sure I would, sir.”

  But I knew that he could not begin to understand, as yet, and I tried to press the point, still without giving away too much. “We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of what strange things there may be.”

  Thus having led the conversation into the murky region of Strange Things, and seeing my guest nodding soberly in apparent agreement, I momentarily hesitated, on the brink of trying to Tell All; but no, I decided, I must first make Harker my good friend.

  He now took the opportunity to ask what I could tell him of the mysterious blue flames that he had glimpsed on the night of his arrival, and about the odd behavior of the “coachman.” In reply I told him a substantial portion of the truth.

  “Transylvania is not England,” I repeated, “and there are things here which reasonable men, men of business and science, may not be able to understand. On a certain night of the year — last night, in fact, when all evil spirits were supposed by the peasantry to rule unchecked — a blue flame is seen over any place where treasure has been concealed. That much treasure has been concealed in this region, there can be but little doubt; for this is ground fought over for centuries by the Walachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil hereabouts that has not been enriched by the blood of patriots and invaders.” Speaking of the past began to bring it back to me, as it does now; again I felt the movement of the warhorse beneath me as his ears picked up the sounds of battle, the clash of metal and the cries of terror. Again I smell the stinks of war; and see the banners and the blood. I remember the treachery of the boyars, and recall the beautiful, beautiful loyalty to me, the voivode, warlord, of the men who worked the land and knew me to be fair. How good it was to breathe the air with them … but never mind.

  To Harker I went on: “In old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out to meet them — men and women, the aged and the children too — and awaited their coming on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on them with artificial avalanches. When the invader was triumphant he found but little in the way of gold or precious stuff, for all had been sheltered in the friendly soil.”

  Harker was now at least halfway to believing the tiny marvel of the flames and treasure. “But how,” he asked, “can treasure have remained so long undiscovered when there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look?”

  I smiled. “Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool!” The villagers below in 1891, I had in mind. “These flames only appear on one night, and on that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors.”

  We drifted into other matters, and back at last to real estate.

  “Come,” I enjoined my guest, “tell me of London and the house which you have procured for me.” Whilst Harker was getting his business papers together in another room I took the chance to clear the table of his latest meal, linen cloth and all in a bundle a-down the cliffside from a western window, where for a thousand feet the soiled dishes sang in air before the garbage was knocked off them on the rocks. By the time he rejoined me I had lit the lamps and was lying on a sofa reading Bradshaw’s Guide.

  The paperwork connected with house buying was complex but Harker seemed competent to lead me through its mysteries. He remarked once on my knowledge of the estate’s neighborhood — that of Purfleet, some fifteen miles east of the center of London, on the north bank of the Thames — which I had managed to gain even from my remote location, and I replied: “Well, but, my friend, is it not needful that I should? When I go there I shall be all alone, and my friend Harker Jonathan — nay, pardon me, I fall into my country’s habit of putting your patronymic first — my friend Jonathan Harker will not be at my side to correct and aid me. He will be in Exeter, a hundred miles and more away, probably working at papers of the law with my other friend, Peter Hawkins. So!”

  I signed what seemed innumerable papers, which were then wrapped for posting back to Hawkins. My gypsies, Szgany as I called them then, were at the castle frequently, and through both fear and loyalty they were, in what touched my own person, most dependable. They carried mail for me, as well as bringing me horses and caring for them. They brought me food sometimes — I will discourse of my eating habits later — and formed for a long time a useful although shaky bridge twixt me and other men.

  When we were done with signing and mailing Harker read to me his notes describing my new estate and how he had located it. I remember the description well, as I remember the rest of my enemies’ journals for that year. I am not likely to forget a word.

  “At Purfleet, on a by-road, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust.”

  “The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it, which make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, dark-looking pond or small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear and flows away in a fair-sized stream. The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to medieval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my Kodak views of it from various points. There are but few houses close at hand, one b
eing a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum. It is not, however, visible from the grounds.” This last was not an accurate statement, as I later discovered; but of course I was ready to make a few allowances for salesmen’s puffery.

  “I am glad that it is old and big,” I said when he had finished his description. “I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times … I am no longer young and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth … I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.”

  We spent a long evening, similar to the last; and this, the night of May seventh to eighth, 1891, was the last for a long time, many months, when either of us felt that things were going well, indeed, when we were not pondering each other as enemies, at least in potential.

  I had naturally taken the precaution of removing all mirrors from the rooms of the castle that I expected my guest to occupy or visit. On the third morning of Harker’s stay, however, I entered his room early in the hours of daylight — an uncomfortable time for me — to find him shaving with the aid of his traveling mirror.

  It had been a conceit of mine that when I began to be fully and unquestioningly accepted in the normal world as human, the psychology of most men and women would not permit them to credit the objective fact that I cast no reflection in a mirror, at least none ordinarily perceptible to the human eye. Let me say here parenthetically that film and the cathode ray tube are something else again. But whatever the outcome of research along this line is to be, on that morning I had deluded myself into thinking that this reasonable, unsuperstitious Englishman would not be allowed by his own psychology to perceive the exact truth: that when I entered the room behind him as he shaved, my figure cast no reflection in the glass.