The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  I was wrong. When I said, “Good morning!” almost in his ear, he was so startled that he reacted physically and his straight razor made a slight cut on his chin. At the same time I was made aware that he had indeed noted my image’s absence from the mirror, for he alternated his glance from me to it not once but several times whilst he struggled not to let his bafflement show on his face. This was a blow to me, the first indication that my plans were indeed impossible, and it hit me hard, though I struggled to maintain composure.

  After a moment Harker gave up looking for me in his glass, returned my greeting in a flustered way, then put his razor down and began to look for some sticking plaster in his kit. His chin was beading blood.

  Hemophile that I am known to be (in the true sense of the word), it is not true that the mere sight of blood under any and all circumstances is enough to trip me into a paroxysm of lust for the good red stuff. According to Harker’s journal, which is unforgettable to me and from which I quote verbatim, my “eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury” as soon as I saw his blood, and I “suddenly made a grab” at his throat.

  Now I ask you — you enjoy a good rare beefsteak, perhaps? Naturally. Now, suppose you stroll into the dining room where a guest of yours is finishing his lunch, and observe a morsel of meat left on his plate. Does the sight make your eyes blaze with demoniac fury? Or suppose that under circumstances of perfect propriety one guest in your house is a young lady, an attractive one, let us say. And suppose further that through some truly innocent mistake upon her part or yours you open a door and discover her unclad — are you so automatically provoked that you literally make a grab at her, without thought for the consequences? No more am I provoked in comparable situation. Great heaven, if male hemoglobin were all that I desired I should hardly have gone to all the trouble and expense of buying an estate in London so they should send me a ruddy young solicitor.

  There was, as always — I admit it — a certain pang of longing at the sight of blood. But it was concern for Harker’s welfare, nothing else, that prompted me to reach out a hand in the direction of the wound. The bitter shock of realization that he had noticed my absence from the mirror was augmented severely at the moment when my outstretched hand brushed the open collar of his shirt, and just beneath it touched the string of beads which an old woman in Bistrita had forced upon him when she learned his destination.

  String of beads? Of course at the moment I discovered them I knew they were a rosary, and at its end I knew the cross was hung. And since I had already learned in one of our conversations that Harker was a staunch Protestant, an English Churchman as he put it, there was but one interpretation that I could put upon his wearing of a crucifix — he had acquired it, or at least it had been thrust upon him and accepted, as armor for his journey into a vampire’s lair.

  I, who had begun to think of myself as already accepted by society, had my fool’s hopes dashed before they were well launched. In the moments before I could get them off the ground again, and counsel myself to patience, I behaved rashly. My first impulse was to tear the beads from around his neck but reverence held me back from that — I am a Catholic myself, you know, though born into the Orthodox faith, and in my days of breathing I endowed five monasteries. With a moment in which to reflect I realized the injustice of an assault upon the person of Harker, an ignorant, well-meaning youth who doubtless did not understand fully the implications of the good-luck charm he had been given to wear.

  “Take care,” said I, whilst struggling to master my anger and disappointment, “take care how you cut yourself, for it is more dangerous than you think in this country.” I had in mind Anna, Wanda, and Melisse, whose reaction to the sight and scent of fresh young male blood was sure to be much less restrained than my own. “And this is the thing that has done the mischief!” I cried out, forced by the strains upon my soul to take some kind of violent action, and seizing on the symbol of my alienation as its object. “It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!” I wrenched open the heavy window and threw out Harker’s shaving glass, to be splintered by the fall to the courtyard.

  Not trusting myself to say more at the moment, I left the room. My months and years of careful, meticulous preparation, had they all gone for nothing? Would Harker carry home the truth and the terrible lies about me, all mixed up, and find a way to make them all believed? Would I arrive on the quay at Whitby, or in Charing Cross station in London, and find exorcist priests and stinking garlic-mongers drawn up in a phalanx to repel me?

  Whilst I, on that fateful morning, was trying to regain my composure and rethink my plans, Harker, as he records in his journal, began a rather panicky exploration of those parts of the castle not sealed off from him by locked doors: finding a great many of the latter, he at once adopted the idea that he was a prisoner.

  Not that he ever told me so straight out, or plainly asked me if it were true. As he wrote: “… it is no use making my ideas known to the count. He knows well that I am imprisoned; and as he has done it himself, and has doubtless his own motives for it, he would only deceive me if I trusted him fully with the facts … I am, I know, either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears, or else I am in desperate straits.”

  A little later Harker returned to his room, as I was making his bed, and we exchanged a few polite words, neither of us alluding to the incident of the shaving mirror. Later, in the evening, my spirits rose again, for my young visitor sat down with me to chat as usual, and began to question me on the history of my land and of my family.

  He understands, I thought, at least he begins to understand, and he does not prejudge me, but continues to greet me and speak to me as a friend. It was all true, then! True, what I had heard and read, of the noble English respect for the private affairs of every man! Though it had seemed to me earlier that Harker carried this tradition of respect too far, now I saw how valuable such an attitude could be for my purposes.

  Pacing the floor and pulling my mustache in excitement, I spoke of the glorious history of my family and my race; of Viking ancestors come down from Iceland to mate and mingle with the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame “until,” I cried, “the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” And I held up my arms — like this.

  “Is it a wonder,” I went on, “that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?” I recounted with love and joy the feats of the decades of my own breathing life: “Who was it but one of my own race who crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, and we of the Dracula blood were amongst the leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys — the very name means ‘guardians of the frontier’ — and the Dracula as their hearts’ blood, their brains, and their swords — can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. But now the warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonorable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.”

  I raved and praised myself, as I say, and my little Englishman was tolerant of it all, but he was dull, dull, dull. A brooder, but no dreamer, he. There was no imagination in him to be fired. But then to be honest I must admit that with more imagination he might have fared even worse in Castle Dracula than he did.

 
On the next evening, that of May eleventh, I had a last lengthy discussion with Harker on the conduct of business affairs in England, which concluded by my asking him to write some letters home.

  I inquired: “Have you written since your first letter to our friend Mr. Peter Hawkins, or to any other?”

  “I have not,” he answered, some bitterness audible in his voice, “as I have not yet had opportunity of sending letters to anybody.”

  “Then write now, my young friend,” I said, putting a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. “Write to our friend Hawkins and to any other, and say, if it will please you, that you shall stay with me until a month from now.”

  “Do you wish me to stay so long?” His lack of enthusiasm at the prospect could not be concealed. He was obviously brooding upon some difficulties of his own, but I still had high hopes of being able to win him over.

  “I desire it much,” I said. “Nay, I will take no refusal. When your master, employer, what you will, engaged that someone should come on his behalf, it was understood that my needs only were to be consulted. I have not stinted. Is it not so?”

  He acquiesced with a silent bow, but had on such a troubled face that I knew I had better take an interest in the contents of the letters he sent out. I therefore added: “I pray you, my good young friend, that you will not discourse of things other than business in your letters, except of course that it will doubtless please your friends to know that you are well, and that you look forward to getting home to them. Is it not so?”

  On taking my leave of him that evening, with his letters in my hands along with some correspondence of my own relating to my projected trip, I paused at the door, my conscience somewhat troubled.

  “I trust you will forgive me,” I said — Harker only looked up, his face closed against me — and I went on, “but I have much work to do in private this evening.” Our larder was depleted. “You will, I hope, find all things as you wish.” He continued to be sulky, and I had a strong premonition of plans going wrong, trouble just ahead.

  Before going out I added, “Let me advise you, my dear young friend — nay, let me warn you with all seriousness — that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be warned! Should sleep ever be like to overcome you, then haste to your own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be safe. But if you are not careful in this respect, then —” And I finished my speech with a hand-washing motion. Still he only continued to look at me, a dour and increasingly frightened man.

  And that, of course, was the night on which he happened to see me leave the castle. Why, on that particular spring night, did I choose to crawl head first down the wall above the precipice, rather than fly out unnoticeably in the form of a bat, walk less terrifyingly on four legs, or even expectably on two? I can only answer that my various physical forms and modes of locomotion have each their own comforts and discomforts, their pleasures and predicaments; besides, if truth must be told — and that is why I am here, is it not, speaking into this machine? — I was trying to avoid Anna, with her ceaseless pleading to be allowed to sample Harker’s blood, and thought a climbing egress from the castle best calculated to serve that end.

  And so poor Jonathan, by chance gazing from a window out into the moonlight, observed me, as he wrote, “emerge from (another) window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings … it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones” — my boots I had tied by their laces to my belt — “just as a lizard moves along a wall. What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of a man?”

  Three nights later Harker saw me leave again by the same means, and when I was absent he attempted to get out of the castle by the main entrance. I had left the door securely locked, for his own good, and he turned away, baffled, to seek another exit.

  A door that I had neglected to fasten quite securely led him into the west wing. This was, he surmised, “the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days.” He was led to this conclusion by the presence of “great windows … and consequently light and comfort” here where “sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach” because of the height and steepness of the cliffs below. Here he supposed that “of old, ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars.” Fortunately the ladies of old were, like those of his own time, somewhat tougher and more capable than he ever gave them credit for being. His understanding of this point would have made a great difference, not only in his life but in my own. But I am getting ahead of my story.

  Having forced his way into these closed-off rooms, Harker for a while admired their spacious, moonlit windows, and the furniture, which had “more air of comfort” than any he had seen elsewhere in the castle. Although he found in the suite “a dread loneliness” which chilled his heart, “still it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of Count Dracula, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me.”

  Of course, notwithstanding my most solemn warnings, the clodpate schooled his nerves until he fell asleep. I returned in time to save him, though barely, and even I was struck speechless for a moment by the extent of his folly.

  Without even putting down the burden with which I had reentered the castle, I listened for his breathing in his own rooms and heard it not; then I sped, faster and faster, through the dark corridors, looking and listening for my guest, with ever-growing concern. When I found the open door to the west wing, which I had thought securely locked, I could only pray that I was not too late.

  Barely in time for him, I say, I came upon them, in a chamber thick with moonlight that laid enchantment upon the prosaic ruin wrought by time. Harker supine upon an ancient couch, where he had lain down oblivious to the dust. Wanda and Melisse stood at a little distance, biding their time, waiting their turns, whilst over him crouched fair Anna, who had actually laid the pinpoints of her canines upon his throat. I came in man-form up beside her and put my hand around that fair white neck of hers; raised her soft body that had in it the strength of ten good normal men and hurled her staggering back, halfway across the room.

  I shot a glance down at Harker and saw that his vessels had not yet been tapped. He was nearly unconscious at the time, in sleep and trance commingled; lips half parted in a fatuous smile and a sliver of eyeball gleaming beneath each sagging lid. Hoping that he would not remember this scene upon the morrow, or would recall it only as a dream, I held my voice to a whisper despite my rage.

  “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I have forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.”

  Fair Anna, no doubt aching with frustration at being robbed of her delight when it had seemed so certain, let out a sick and bitter laugh and dared to answer back: “You yourself never loved; you never love!” And in her laughter the other women joined, when they saw I had not moved at once to punish her.

  “Yes, I too can love,” I answered softly. And in that moment my thoughts went back to a far different world, a world once sunlit and alive within that castle, within that very chamber that now held only dust and mold and ruin beneath the glamor of the moon.

  But that world held in my memory was none of theirs, nor did I mean to give them material for mockery. “Yes, I can love,” I said. “You yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go, go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.” These lies I told to be rid of the women without punishing them. I had no real wish to punish them for Harker’s stupidity. I dislike cruelty, and am not cruel u
nless it is quite justifiable.

  “Are we to have nothing tonight?” Melisse whined, pointing to the bag that I had brought, which now lay moving slightly on the floor. It contained the relatively poor results of my foraging expedition — a rather lean pig offered up to me by a peasant woman in hopes of my doing, in return, some damnable evil upon one of her rivals in love. I nodded, and the women sprang to surround the bag, and bore it away with them.

  At this a faint gasp issued from Harker’s recumbent form. I looked round sharply and could now be sure that he was quite dead to the world. What I did not then know was that he had witnessed the women pouncing upon my shopping bag, and had interpreted the porcine squealing therefrom, if his “ears did not deceive” him, as “a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child.” My unimaginative solicitor had fainted.

  Needless to say, there was no possibility of doing business with him that night, even if I had been so minded. I carried him, still oblivious to the world, back to his room and put him to bed; it was still my hope that he might interpret his evening with the girls as a mere nightmare if he remembered it at all. I also took the liberty of going through his pockets, and got my first look at his journal. But it was kept in shorthand, a code I did not understand until much later, and after pondering briefly I left the little book where I had found it.

  “If I be sane,” he wrote in it the next day, “then surely it is maddening to think that of the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone can I look for safety, even though this be only whilst I serve his purpose.” And it had been my thought that, should he remember anything of the moonlit horrors he had so narrowly escaped, he would upon waking bless me as his protector and friend. Alas, for my innocent and long-persisting faith in human nature.