The Dracula Tape

by Fred Saberhagen

  Melisse, tall and dark, and Wanda, her shorter, fuller-breasted sister, were in the background, not quite daring such impertinence but brave enough to give out nervous little laughs when Anna was not punished instantly. I wanted to see exactly how matters stood here before I acted.

  In tall man-form I stood with my back to the rainswept parapet and looked down at the three white faces looking up, and soon the laughter stopped.

  “I am informed,” I stated then, “that you are molesting the local people here. That you have abducted young men from the villages and held them prisoner. My orders were that you take no lovers nearer than a score of leagues, and that you take none by force —”

  It may be that I have an extra sense for danger. Or it may have been some combination of hearing, subtle mental alarms, and the sight of unconcealable anticipation in the women’s faces that warned me to spin round on guard. A peasant youth with lank blond hair and straggly, sprouting beard was rushing at me just inside the parapet, charging with a stout wooden spear, its sharp point fire-hardened, leveled at my midsection. I pushed the thrust aside with one hand, wrenched the weapon from him, and seized him in a killing grip.

  But before my hands put on the force that would have crushed his spine I looked into his face. No secret agent of Van Helsing, this. Only a farm lad, strong as a young horse and handsome as a god, or had been before his strength was drained away through the six small red points that now marked his throat. He had spent almost his last strength in rushing to kill me, and now his eyes gazed back at mine almost indifferently.

  I let him drop to the stone walk, picked up his weapon, broke it to splinters in my hands, and threw them into the abyss. All the while I was looking at the women.

  Anna sighed, then raised her chin proudly as ever, returned my gaze, and waited. Melisse suddenly brought hands up to hide her face. “Oh, Vlad,” cried Wanda, “he did come from more than a score of leagues away!” Then in a breaking voice she said: “I warned them not to try to kill you.”

  “Your cry of warning just now to me, my dear,” I answered, “was so soft that I heard it not.”

  Then I went on, almost as if nothing had happened: “The Szgany are returning. And there come also some English folk, whom you are not to touch. As for your punishment, for disobeying my orders and then trying to take my life, the first part of it is this — to wait.” Memories of old happiness with these women came to me as I looked at them, and made me smile; and first Wanda and then Melisse began to whimper in the rain.

  Hardly a word more did I hear from any of them. I carried the peasant youth below, to what had once been Harker’s room, and examined him. Despite all the blood that had been taken, he was not yet nosferatu, or at least his case was still doubtful. I pondered the situation and realized, with a sigh, that it was my duty as lord of Castle Dracula to restore him as best I could to his own home. There was not another living soul at hand whom I could entrust with such a mission, and after obtaining a horse and cart from Tatra I set out to do the task myself, despite the days that it must occupy.

  Meanwhile there was my daily chore of keeping track of the Czarina Catherine at sea, by means of her splinters and dust that I kept in my possession. I continued to see to it that her winds were favorable, as if I were in fact depending on her in my race for home. Since the enemy were waiting for her at Varna, I had decided not to land her there at all, and so blew a few more well-chosen winds about the ship, with fogs so that her crew would be at a loss to know which way to steer and I could drive her where I willed.

  By the time the crew knew fully what was happening to them they were in the mouth of the Danube at the port of Galatz, somewhat closer to my own domain than I had been in Bucharest.

  The docks at Galatz were new and efficient, having been begun only in 1887, and the place was a thriving port. The unloading of the boxful of earth was seen to by my unwitting agent, one Immanuel Hildesheim, slurred by Harker in his journal as “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphia Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep.” Hildesheim, acting under written instruction from a Mr. de Ville of London — a near relative and close friend of Dr. Corday, of course — gave the box over to Petrof Skinsky, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with my departure from my homeland.

  The posse, when they learned of the ship’s arrival in Galatz, lost no time in entraining there from Varna, a comparatively short journey of some three hundred miles by rail. They of course brought Mina along. As the train passed through Bucharest she stared out through its windows, hoping unreasonably to catch some sight of me.

  In Galatz the adventurers interviewed Czarina Catherine’s captain, a superstitious but opportunistic Scot who had suspected that something more than natural good luck was behind the astounding swiftness of his voyage, yet had clubbed his restive crew into submission and enjoyed the ride as being good for business. Information gleaned from the captain led Van Helsing and his men to Hildesheim, and thence to Skinsky, whose body with its throat cut was found in a nearby churchyard just as they were asking for him. I suppose he had tried to cheat the Slovaks in some way, and was killed by them, but of course the implication in my enemies’ records is that I was responsible for his death.

  Exhaustion was setting in among the hunters, who for a time lay about dispiritedly in their several rooms at the Galatz hotel. Quincey nursed his scalp wound, that was somehow never mentioned in any of their journals. Mina began to fear that they might not, after all, push on to the conclusion she and I were trying so hard to arrange. She therefore decided to spur them on by drawing up a logical — though of course fallacious — chain of reasoning, showing where the box that had become their grail was now most likely to be found.

  Although I had no hand in formulating Mina’s report it was quite accurate about the coffin’s location. Of course its usefulness to my foe rested, as she knew full well, upon two false premises: first, that I could not move, or chose not to move, toward my home by my own efforts, but preferred to be conveyed by others; and second, that I was within the box that had come by ship. When she had finished presenting her report and logical analysis to the men they were delighted by it and reinvigorated for the chase, and she promptly got out of their way again. Van Helsing himself paid her intelligence a verbal tribute which was perhaps somewhat tarnished by the words with which he closed his speech: “Now, men, to our council of war …”

  Mina’s conclusion was that my box was being shipped by water closer to Castle Dracula, and so Arthur and Jonathan were detailed to take up the pursuit by chartered steam launch, ascending the river Sereth toward its junction with the Bistrita, which latter stream, as Mina had noted, ran “up round the Borgo Pass. The loop it makes is manifestly as close to Dracula’s castle as can be got by water.” Quincey and Dr. Seward, accompanied at first by two men to look out for their spare horses, were to follow generally along the right bank of the Sereth, being ready to take action on land wherever the box carrying the vampire might be put ashore.

  As for Van Helsing, he had his own goals in view and after a short rest in Galatz was ready to pursue them:

  I will take Madam Mina right into the heart of the enemy’s country. Whilst the old fox is tied in his box, floating on the running stream whence he cannot escape to land … we shall go in the track where Jonathan went, from Bistrita over the Borgo, and find our way to Castle Dracula. Here, Madam Mina’s hypnotic power will surely help … there is much to be done, and other places to be made sanctify, so that that nest of vipers be obliterated.

  * * *

  Harker was ready to leave his wife, to go himself aboard the launch, where he assumed the chances of coming to grips with me would be the best; but he was not at once convinced that Mina should be taken toward my castle any farther. “Do you mean to say, Professor Van Helsing, that you would bring Mina, in her sad case and tainted as she is with that devil’s illness, right into the jaws of his death trap? Not in the world! Not for heaven or hell!”

  But his sales resistance could no
t hold out against the old maestro of obfuscation:

  The professor’s voice, as he spoke in clear, sweet tones, which seemed to vibrate in the air, calmed us all: “Oh, my friend, it is because I would save Madam Mina from that awful place that I would go. God forbid that I should take her into that place. There is work — wild work — to be done there, that her eyes may not see. We men here, all save Jonathan, have seen with our own eyes what is to be done before that place can be purify ... if the count escape us this time … he may choose to sleep him for a century, and then in time our dear one” — and he took Mina by the hand — ”would come to keep him company, and would be as those others that you, Jonathan, saw. You have told us of their gloating lips; you heard their ribald laugh as they clutched the moving bag that the count threw to them. You shudder; and well may it be. Forgive me that I make so much pain, but it is necessary, my friend. Is it not a dire need for the which I am giving, possibly my life? If it were that anyone went into that place to stay, it is I who have to go to keep them company.”

  The vision of Van Helsing as a vampire is one before which my imagination balks; this is doubtless only a shortcoming on my part; he may have been well fitted for the role, since as we have seen he had already the power, by means of speech, to cast his victims into a stupor. At any rate, Harker in his confused anxiety was made to feel that it was he who was somehow endangering his own wife: “Do as you will,” said Jonathan, with a sob that shook him all over. “We are in the hands of God!”

  Mina’s own feelings were very complex at this point. But she was stirred to see how the men threw themselves and their fortunes into the preparations for their final assault on Castle Dracula and its dread lord: “Oh, it did me good to see the way that these brave men worked. How can women help loving men when they are so earnest, so true, and so brave! And, too, it made me think of the wonderful power of money!” That is my girl, as they say, in a nutshell.

  On October thirtieth the three-pronged drive of my enemies was launched. Van Helsing took Mina by train to Veresti, where the professor planned to buy a carriage and press on to the Borgo Pass. Jonathan and Arthur, the latter an amateur steamfitter of some standing, to judge by the skill with which he effected several repairs en route, started chugging up the Sereth. In two days they reached the Bistrita, meanwhile receiving from the river folk occasional reports of the Slovaks’ boat that was carrying my box ahead of them. Quincey Morris and Seward meanwhile had rather a dull ride of it, trotting across country with no real excitement until they joined forces with the river-borne party near the end … or what they all took to be the end.

  Van Helsing’s journey with Mina was somewhat more lively, though nowhere near as eventful as it would have been if I had been as intent on his destruction as he imagined. The professor recorded in his diary that their carriage “got to the Borgo Pass just after sunrise” on the morning of November third. The several closely following entries are rather muddled and probably unreliable, for he records that they did not come near the castle itself until the sun was “low down” on the afternoon of the following day. This would seem to mean that nearly two full days of driving were needed to cover a distance which I as coachman traversed in a couple of hours with Harker as my passenger, on a night when I did some deliberate doubling back and made frequent stops looking for treasure. Perhaps the professor and Mina — both of them by now, for different reasons, in peculiar psychological states — actually dozed in their seats through many of the daylight hours, whilst the horses stood idle, or sought their own path among the few available.

  This daylight-dozing theory may be strengthened by Van Helsing’s statement that he was awake most of the night of November third to fourth to keep a fire going. Mina seemed to have given up eating, he wrote, “and I like it not.” During the night he several times nodded into slumber, each time awakening to discover her “lying quiet, but awake, and looking at me with so bright eyes.” At the same time she was in general “so bright and tender and thoughtful” that his fears were somewhat allayed.

  Still, by the night of November fourth to fifth, he again “began to fear that the fatal spell of the place was upon her, tainted as she is with vampire baptism,” And now Castle Dracula was indubitably in sight, even in reasonable hiking distance, and he set up a sort of base camp.

  Mina still professed not to be hungry, and — though she really made little effort to do so — apparently could not cross a circle of crumbled host that she watched him make around her. This, he told Mina, was for her own protection. Van Helsing himself of course was armored by all his usual freight of herbs and religious paraphernalia.

  After dark the horses screamed, and amid snow flurries the three women of the castle appeared, taking form slowly in the outer reaches of the firelight. From Harker’s descriptions Van Helsing “knew the swaying round forms, the bright hard eyes, the white teeth, the ruddy color, the voluptuous lips …” For some reason voluptuous was a favorite word of the professor.

  Alas for Anna, Wanda, and Melisse. I had warned them against touching any of the expected “English,” and now, too late, they were being obedient to the letter of my orders. But still of course they must go out and gibber at Van Helsing in the night, and drink his horses’ blood, and call to Mina to come and join them as a sister. Perhaps they thought to send Van Helsing screaming in panic and fleeing like a peasant down the mountainside, rushing over a precipice in blind terror. They did not know his name, of course. I had not told them that …

  They were disobedient subjects, not once but again and again. In the old days such behavior would quite likely have brought them to the wooden stake whilst they still breathed … has it occurred to you that impalement is the one punishment equally enforceable upon a vampire and a breathing man or woman? Some say now that I was known as Vlad the Impaler whilst I still breathed. Bah, to be remembered for mere gory butchery, no matter how just or necessary, and to have all guiding purpose and ideals forgotten …

  Never mind. I had tolerated far too long the three women’s disobedience, which had then culminated in treachery to me and assaults upon the innocent. Certainly if things were to fall out so that Mina had to join me at the castle at once, I did not want those three around to spit with jealousy and bother her.

  Seward at dawn on November fifth “saw the body of Szgany … dashing away from the river with their leiter wagon. They surrounded it in a cluster, and hurried along as though beset.” This was indeed Tatra and some of his most faithful men, who, according to my orders, had taken the box unopened from the boat and were rushing it toward the castle. By this time Jonathan and Arthur had seen their vessel suffer its final breakdown, had somehow commandeered horses, and were riding in pursuit as well.

  Meanwhile I had returned to Castle Dracula from my errand of duty with the unfortunate peasant, arriving just before dawn; and now, congealed in man-shape by the morning light, I squinted against the sun’s rays to make out a human figure that was climbing alone toward my forbidding walls. When I recognized Van Helsing my grip tightened on the edges of the embrasure through which I watched until the old stones gave up flakes into my hands. But I meant to let him have his way, convince himself that he had sterilized my house. Mina was far more important to me than any thing or person he might destroy within that gloomy pile.

  I remained in my high, comparatively sunny observation post, where I thought he was not very likely to come looking for me. Soon after he reached my front door far below a hollow booming began to reverberate up through the courts and rooms between. Later I discovered that the professor had been prudently knocking loose the hinges of those great entrance doors, not wishing to be trapped inside by any misfortune, or vampirish plan. He used a handy hammer that he had lugged up in his bag, and for which he meant to find other employment as well.

  As he wrote later, he was working on the doors when he thought he heard “afar off the howl of wolves. Then I bethought me of my dear Madam Mina …” He had left her sleeping alone in the sno
w, wrapped in rugs for warmth but protected by nothing else more substantial than his ring of crumbled Host. If she had never drunk from my veins she very likely would have perished from exposure. And had those wolves been looking for their breakfast … but as matters stood they were sent by me to find her and stand guard.

  Van Helsing of course did not know this. The dangers Mina might be facing put him, as he wrote, “in terrible plight. The dilemma had me between his horns.” Though he expected that his Holy Circle would guard her from vampires by day or night, “yet even there would be the wolf.”

  But he was not the man to let the wolf’s real fangs on Madam Mina’s skin, or the dilemma’s figurative horns upon his own, turn him aside from his objective now so near at hand within the castle.

  I resolve me that my work lay here, and that as to wolves we must submit, if it were God’s will. At any rate it was only death and freedom beyond. So did I choose for her.

  As for himself:

  I knew that there were at least three graves to find — graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder.

  Now, Professor, why on earth should you have felt that way, do you suppose?

  Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine found at the last that his heart fail him and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, until the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotize him; and he remain on and on, till sunset come, and the vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the woman open

  In my time I have known an ugly vampire wench or two; theirs is a sad lot.