The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  I began to realize that my problem was no longer so much how to win Harker’s friendship as it was what to do with him, or do about him. Were I to send him home at once, he must at the very least have some strange stories to tell about me when he got there. My own departure was scheduled for June thirtieth, still more than a month away, and Harker could easily be back in London within a week, there to prepare for me a reception of the most unpleasant kind. His knowledge of my business affairs in England was so great that I could not hope to avoid such an outcome if he left Castle Dracula as my enemy and were given a head start. At the same time, he was as yet my guest, my responsibility, and honor and justice alike forbade that I should do him any harm. I yearned that he would either come out with open accusations to which I might openly reply, and demand his freedom if he minded the locked doors, or else that he would show himself my enemy, in order that I could justly kill him.

  We came near reaching the latter solution when I discovered that he was attempting to smuggle out a secret letter. It was addressed to his fiancee, Miss Mina Murray, to whom he had written openly at my request only the day before. Harker threw this clandestine letter, along with another one, addressed to Hawkins, out the window along with gold, to some of my gypsys, who of course brought the letters to my attention.

  The secret letter to Hawkins was very brief, and merely asked him to communicate with Mina Murray; but the letter to her was written in code, the same shorthand as Harker’s secret journal. When I had examined it I came near going to his rooms to do him violence. I had to remind myself forcibly that my guest was still my guest, that he was in strange circumstances for an ordinary, untraveled Englishman, and that I did not really know that the coded missive contained anything untruthful about me or meant to cause me harm.

  Still, I was angry. Rarely had I been so angry since the day I nailed the Turkish envoys’ turbans to their heads when they refused to doff them for me. Remind me to tell you about that later. But in my greatest angers I show outward calm. Taking the two letters, I went to Harker’s room and sat down beside him. He looked up at me with the guilty, hopeless, haggard look that now grew worse upon his face with every day.

  “The Szgany have given me these,” I began steadily. “Of which, though I know not whence they come, I will of course take care. See!” — and I reopened one letter — “one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other” — and I pulled from its envelope the one in code — “is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! So it cannot matter to us.” And then and there I burned it, in the flame of Harker’s lamp … ah, I really do not care for electric light.

  “The letter to Hawkins,” I continued, “I shall of course send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal.” I handed Harker the letter and a fresh envelope, and watched him as he addressed and sealed the message anew. There was in his face such despair, with a nervous twitching at cheek and eye, there was such a tremor in the fingers with which he tried to write, that my sensibilities were touched and I was glad I had not been more severe.

  I had at that time been a frequent observer of human beings under stress for more than four hundred years, and it was plain to me that Harker now teetered on the brink of mental breakdown. This was regrettable in itself, and also I felt at least some indirect responsibility; yet all the same I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. With any luck he was going to be a couple of months in a sanatorium after he left my domain, and no one would believe vampire tales from the mouth of one whose mental scales so obviously had tipped.

  Hawkins might call upon me at Purfleet, I supposed, and perhaps Harker’s much beloved Miss Mina Murray, too — her name had something interesting about it for me, even then — to see what might have happened in the Carpathians to upset the poor boy so. And I would be concerned and gracious, and would entertain them, for which purpose I meant to have my estate in part at least, renovated according to modern standards of comfort. By the time Harker had managed to make his stories credible, if he did not prudently choose instead to alter or disavow them, I should have managed to establish new English sanctuaries for myself, even to alter my appearance, and I might well be able to get beyond the reach of any investigation launched.

  Meanwhile, there were the three predated letters I had wisely obtained from Harker a few days earlier, by making up some story for him about the uncertainty of posts. They were chatty, innocuous reports of good health and a pleasant journey, ostensibly written by him on the twelfth, the nineteenth, and the twenty-ninth of June, the third dated from Bistrita rather than from the castle. I had got these letters in anticipation of some unhappy ending to Harker’s visit, and now my foresight was proven wise. If for some reason he failed to arrive home in good health, suspicion would be shifted from me.

  When I took the readdressed — and now harmless — letter to Hawkins back to the gypsies to be posted, I informed the leader of their band that my guest was becoming non compos mentis and that we should all have to take good care of him. Tatra, a swarthy, compact man who could meld into a centaur with his horse, for some reason received this news with little surprise.

  “On the day after I am gone, Tatra,” I added, “I charge you to put on the coachman’s uniform and drive him down to the Pass, so that he may in good time board there the diligence for Bistrita, where he may regain the railroad. Obey his orders or requests in any small matters that seem reasonable; nay, in anything that will not be dangerous for him. It is not his fault that he has suffered here, or at least not his alone.”

  Tatra bowed and swore that he would do as the master wished; I hoped silently that it was so.

  My own mood was brighter than it had been for some days when I returned to Harker’s rooms, unlocked his door — I had begun to fear he might do something truly rash — and went in, to find him asleep upon a sofa. He roused when I entered and looked up at me with haggard wariness. He looked almost too worn to be afraid.

  “So, my friend, you are tired?” I asked, briskly rubbing my hands. “Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure to talk tonight, since there are many labors to me” — my stock of provisions for him was far depleted, he having consumed the greater part of the pig whose squeals had so alarmed him earlier — “but you will sleep, I pray.”

  He got up like a sleepwalker and went into his bedroom, where he threw himself face down upon the covers. Shortly he was indeed asleep again — as he wrote in his journal the next day, “despair has its own calms” — and I took the opportunity of removing his papers, money, and so on from his apartments for safekeeping. I also borrowed his best suit of clothes, so that some of the gypsy women might try their hand at preparing for me garments more in the English style, with Harker’s as a pattern.

  This task took them a couple of weeks, but I was able to wear the finished product when I left upon another provisioning errand on the night of June sixteenth. I wished to try my new clothes’ fit and durability. Only much later, when the chance came for me to read Harker’s journal in typescript, did I understand that he had spied on me again that night, and had imagined that I was wearing his own suit as I crawled down the wall — for the purpose, if you will believe it, of blackening his reputation; that “any wickedness” which I might do to the local people should be attributed to him. No, Mr. Harker, I assure you — can you hear me now, from your presumed post in heaven above? — other matters which I judged more important than besmirching your name were claiming all my energies. “Great God!” some yokel doubtless exclaimed upon that night, when he beheld my tall figure, white-haired, white-mustached, red-eyed, and decked out for Savile Row. “There goes the vampire in the clothes of the young Englishman. He must have eaten him.”

  Scarcely had I completed my night’s labors and come back to Castle Dracula — lugging in my straining bag a newborn calf to give my girls some blood, and provide for my guest a taste
of veal — when that poor woman from the nearest village came to the castle pleading for my help. That poor, brave woman whose face I never saw; not one in a thousand down there would have dared so much in bright sunshine, let alone the middle of the night. But the commands of motherhood give wonderous strength sometimes.

  “Master, find for me my child!” the poor wretch called up to Harker, whose moonlit appearance at a high window she mistook for my own. Yes, I know, I know very well, that in his journal he sets down her words as: “Monster, give me my child!” But do you suppose that she spoke English? Or that he had ready his “polyglot dictionary” that he had needed in the coach from Bistrita, to talk with these same folk?

  For my part, I knew perfectly well that the woman was there, without sticking my head out a window to see her. And I understood her words. Nor did I need to raise my voice to summon up a few pretty children of my own — the wolves — from a kilometer or two around. These set to work at my command. They combed the forest quickly and in the space of an hour had found the straying child. They herded it with nips and tugs into the courtyard, where the stupid woman — I suppose it was through some negligence of hers that the child had gotten lost — still beat her flabby hands upon my door, until she saw her infant come amid the howling escort. At that point she grabbed it up and ran for home, and small thanks I or my four-pawed rangers ever got. And Harker’s book implies that, having stolen the child for my own snack, I then called up the wolves to eat the mother …

  Now I see in your eyes that this time you do not believe my version of the event at all. Well, and why should I not have helped her, as I helped a thousand others when I ruled as Prince? She came to me in my capacity of lord, and asked for help, and I was duty-bound to render it. That actions so elementary and right, on her part and on mine, must be verified and spelled out shows how far the world has fallen … but there, I now sound like an old man.

  Still you doubt. You will insist on believing that I would rather drink a baby’s blood than dandle it on my knee. And you are right, or would be, were those the only two courses of behavior from which I had to choose.

  Very well. Now is as good a time as any, and we will discuss the drinking of the blood. You eat flesh. Do you eat that of man and woman? Maybe a playful love bite now and then, but not beyond that, hey? So, very approximately, the matter rests with me. My only material sustenance is blood, warm and preferably mammalian, but I am indifferent as to what species I use for nourishment. For now, take that as given. Later, if we have time, we will discuss how, as I believe, most of my needful energy comes to me by an as-yet-unmeasured radiation from the sun.

  Another peculiarity of the vampirish existence is that the reproductive organs, along with other systems of excretion, cease to function; the body throws off neither seed nor waste. This is not to say that we are passionless; far from it. But whereas in breathing men and women there are many raging lusts — go without food two weeks, water two days, air two minutes, and see if I am using the wrong words — besides the lust for mere sexual activity, for us the blood is the life, the blood is all.

  The love of women I have known all my life and for me its essence does not change. But its mode of expression had changed when I awoke from my mortal wounds of 1476. Since then, for me, the blood is all. Oh, I can do without the blood of sweet young women for two months, two years, two centuries, I suppose, if there were reason for such abstinence. I have told you that I never forced Lucy, or Mina, or any of the others.

  But never mind. It was on the day following the poor village woman’s visit that Harker, maddened by fear, dared to climb down the outside of the castle wall from his window, far enough to enter my own rooms. Then following an interior passage down to a lower chapel, he came upon the boxes of earth which I and my friends had been preparing for my journey. And snooping into the boxes, he found in one of them your obedient servant, resting. He might have destroyed me on the spot, had he been clever and malign enough, had his wits matched his foolhardy courage that let him dare that wall. For I, of course, was not aware at the time of his investigation.

  The trance of daylight, which we usually — but not always — undergo between sunrise and sunset, actually marks, as I believe, our dependence upon the sun. As breathing men cannot healthfully engage in heavy exercise while eating and digesting food, we of the vampire persuasion are at best somewhat lethargic when in the presence of the sun; nor can any of us bear its unshielded rays for very long.

  At any rate, he found me there, within the wooden box half full of soft, moist earth, in trance. The grip of this day-trance is hard to rouse from, as we shall see, and it is apt to be more open-eyed than common human sleep. We do not grow fatigued in the same sense that breathing humans do, yet eventually we must rest, and rest is possible only in the raw earth of the homeland. Why this is so I do not know; time later, maybe, for a theory or two of mine.

  Not knowing what to make of my state, unbreathing, motionless, but somehow still undead as well, Harker went back to his rooms; nor, of course, did he mention his intrusion to me later. Four days later, on June twenty-ninth, my plans, and the labors of my helpers, were alike complete. In the late evening I went to Harker and said:

  “Tomorrow, my friend, we must part. You return to your beautiful England and I go to some work which may have such an end that we will never meet again. Your last letter home has been dispatched; tomorrow I shall not be here, but all shall be ready for your journey. In the morning come the Szgany, who have some labors of their own here, and also come some Slovaks. When they have gone, my carriage shall come for you and bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence from Bukovina to Bistrita. But I am in hopes that I shall see more of you at Castle Dracula.” Need I add that I was sometimes more diplomatic than truthful in my conversations with Harker? I most heartily wished never to lay eyes on him again.

  My unexpected statement came to him as a shock, beyond a mere surprise. It had a tonic effect; he started to his feet, and I could see his modest store of wits returning whilst he summoned up reserves of courage to confront me, evidently a harder feat than scaling a sheer stone wall.

  In a firm voice he finally asked, straight out: “Why may I not go tonight?”

  “Because, my dear sir, my coachman and horses are away on a mission.” In bald fact, Tatra, the only one of the Szgany whom I would have considered entrusting with a delicate mission out of my presence, was at that moment in a village of Bukovina, negotiating for a new horse; the three dear ladies of my household had drained a black stallion of its life the night before, and I expected the Slovaks and their dogs to munch the stallion’s flesh upon the morrow.

  Harker actually smiled, as if he had trapped me now — it was a smooth, soft, diabolical smile, if I may say so — and I feared from what I saw in his eyes that he was a little mad already, an expectable outcome of his long brooding over fears and doubts rather than having them out with me in open argument. He said: “But I would walk with pleasure; I want to get away at once.”

  “And your baggage?”

  “I do not care about it. I can send for it some other time.” When he had written about it in his journal, though, he had cared, accusing me of stealing his good suit and his overcoat and rug, as well as threatening his life and sanity. But now he stood firmly on his feet, looking for the first time in weeks like the confident and capable young man who had come to Castle Dracula in early May.

  I sighed inwardly. I did not completely trust the Szgany, even Tatra, to carry out to the letter my instructions regarding Harker, not once I myself was boxed and shipped. So, I thought, why not take him at his word and let him walk down to the pass? The only real danger I foresaw was from wolves, and a word from me to some of them before he started would provide him with such an escort that his safety would be assured at least until he reached the domain of ordinary men, after which he would have to take his chances like the rest of us.

  So let him walk, I thought, it is only a few kilometers down to th
e pass; and though the road was poor it did not branch and it went downhill nearly all the way. I suppose I assumed without thinking about it that he still had some money of his own in his pockets, along with the diary he still retained. I suppose also I really should not complain about the gold coin he stole from me on his departure, as I, or rather my household, was at the same time left in possession of a letter of credit, his best suit of clothes — which I had got a gypsy wench to clean, with lamentable result — and the overcoat and traveling rug mentioned earlier, along with railroad timetables, et cetera, et cetera.

  I stood aside from the door of his room, relieved that my guest had finally plainly expressed his obvious desire to leave, and that I could accede to it so quickly and directly that his opinion of me was bound to be improved. I intended to press into his hands at the last moment a few weighty pieces of antique gold, as mementos of his visit. My grand, elaborate scheme was all going to work out after all, I thought. Once Harker had won back to reasonable human surroundings he would change his mind about what had actually happened under my roof, or change his story about it anyway. And going home might do him so much good that any mental breakdown could be avoided after all.

  As Harker notes in his journal, it was at this point that I said to him, with a “sweet courtesy” that made him rub his eyes because “it seemed so real”:

  “You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars: ‘Welcome the coming, speed the departing guest.’ Come with me, my dear young friend. Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will, though sad am I at your going, and that you so suddenly desire it. Come!”