Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  There was Clift’s face on the screen.

  Against library pictures of desert, the announcer was speaking: “The scientific world—or at least that part of it meeting yesterday at a conference in Houston—was in an uproar over a statement made by famous paleontologist Bernard Clift. Clift claims he has discovered a race of humanlike beings who lived millions of years before the Stone Age.”

  Clift was seen at a microphone, brushing back a lock of hair from his forehead and speaking above a hubbub. “On the evidence of a pair of graves in Utah we cannot generalize too freely. But the workmanship of the coffins, which is surprisingly modern in technique, suggests a high degree of culture. Dating methods indicate beyond doubt a date of some 65.5 million years ago. This clearly places the coffins and the bodies they contain back at a period when the tyrannosaur and other giant dinosaurs were still roving the continents.”

  The clip ended. Back came the announcer, saying, “Later, Clift revealed that a preliminary analysis of the two fossilized bodies indicates strong shoulder development with much-enlarged shoulder blades—which leads to the hypothesis that Clift’s new discoveries could possibly have evolved from a flighted species, such as the pterodactyl or pteranodon, as shown in this artist’s impression.”

  Over the sketch, his voice continued, “A natural wave of skepticism greeted the Utah announcement …” By this time, Larry and Kylie were arm in arm before the TV set, jumping with excitement.

  “Skepticism!” Larry exclaimed. “What else?”

  “… and it’s not only from the Bible Belt that these protests have come. Within the last hour, Professor Danny Hudson of the Smithsonian Institution has issued a challenge to Bernard Clift to put up or shut up. He is reported as saying he expects the evidence to become available to, quote, ‘unbiased scientific examination,’ unquote.”

  Mina’s face appeared on the screen.

  She was in mid-spate. This was evidently an excerpt from a longer interview in Clift’s defense. They heard her say only, “They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, remember? Columbus thought the world was round, the idiot.”

  She laughed and was faded out. The station announcer reappeared.

  “Professor Clift is unavailable for further comment. That was forty-six-year-old Mina Legrand, close associate and intimate friend of the legendary Joe Bodenland, who once claimed he had gone back in time to shake hands with Frankenstein. Bodenland now heads the multinational Bodenland Enterprises.

  “Our sources report that Bodenland himself is missing. Mina Legrand would not comment, beyond stating Bodenland was interested in the amazing new discovery. Meantime, let’s hope all those Utah critters are well and truly extinct …”

  “Oh god …” Kylie switched off the power before the commercials popped up, and turned to Larry.

  He set down his half-empty glass.

  “You were right all along, sweetie. Something is wrong. My father needs me. We’re going to have to catch the next plane.”

  “Oh no, Larry. Your father has to look after himself, just as you say he always made you look after yourself. You’re only going to lay yourself open to a snub if you interfere now. He’ll be okay. Joe’ll be okay. Let’s go back to the beach.”

  “Jesus!” He waved his hands above his head. “Who just now wanted to get off the beach? Women—I’ll never understand them. Pack, Kylie. We’re off. Utah—that’s where Joe’ll be. Old John.”

  She blocked his way to the bedroom, angry and pugnacious.

  “I’m not going back to Old John. Neither are you. Screw Old John. Think, will you? You are married to me. You are no longer going to live under your father’s shadow. I love the old boy, but he is going to ruin your life if you are weak. Can’t you understand that? Everyone else does.”

  “Weak, am I? We’ll see about that.” He grabbed her wrist and twisted her round until she sank to the ground. “Baby, I’m all action when I get going, and I’m going right now.”

  As he ran into the bedroom, Kylie got to her knees and shouted, “Buster, if you go you’re gone for good, get that? Your parents have already loused up our honeymoon once. I’m not having it again. Call your mother if you’re so anxious about your father. But if you leave this hotel, you leave it on your own, and our marriage is a dead duck.”

  Striding by her with a hastily packed overnight bag, he stared at her bitterly and made a threatening gesture.

  “‘Goodbye was all he wrote,’” he said. The suite door slammed behind him.

  Kylie walked about the suite for a while. She went into the bedroom and collected all her husband’s clothes from the closets and elsewhere, stuffing them into his suitcase. When she had cleared the room of his belongings, she took the suitcase to the window and flung it out into the gardens below.

  She stripped down until she wore nothing but her crucifix, then took a shower. After that, she sat in her caftan and attempted to read Dracula for a while. But her mind was elsewhere.

  When the time came, she put on a cocktail dress in which to go down to dinner. In the Bradford’s outdoor restaurant, she ate a lobster thermidor and drank half a bottle of a white Australian wine.

  Thus fortified, she went into the ballroom, where a blond-haired young man on vacation from Alaska immediately asked her to dance.

  She did dance.

  4

  In the night that enveloped Utah, Larry was half drunk. “This chopper’s easier to fly ’n one of my model planes,” he called to Bodenland.

  Neither Bodenland nor Clift made any response, if they heard.

  “I’ve got a World War II Boeing I just made,” Larry shouted. “A beauty. Fifteen-foot wingspan. You should see it. Goes faster ’n the real thing!” He roared with laughter.

  Beneath them went the rushing phantom of the ghost train, its eerie luminance shining from the roof as from its sides.

  When they were hovering a few feet above the roof, Bodenland lowered himself cautiously on the helicopter’s wire rope. Clift was just above him, his boots almost touching Bodenland’s helmeted head. When Bodenland gave the thumbs-up signal, Larry switched on the improvised inertial beam. It shone down, vividly blue, encompassing the two men and the top of the train. From Larry’s careering viewpoint, they disappeared.

  “You’ve gone!” he yelled to the rushing air. “Gone! The invisible men … That’s you and Kylie—both gone!” The train was getting away from him. Cursing, he tried to kick more power from the laboring engines, but it was not there.

  The train pulled away ahead and he gave up trying. When he switched off the inertial beam, the wire rope was empty. Bodenland and Clift had indeed gone. He wound in the rope.

  Larry’s feelings were mixed. He had had no opportunity to say anything about the quarrel with Kylie. His father had been too absorbed in this venture. His arrival had been taken for granted, to Larry’s mixed relief and disappointment. He had found Old John surrounded by vehicles and uniformed personnel from Bodenland Enterprises. The students were gone. Now the site of the two graves more resembled an armed camp than a dig.

  Only now, as he headed back alone to the camp, did it occur to Larry that perhaps his mother was feeling the same kind of anger with Joe as Kylie felt with him.

  “Ah, I’ll call her in the morning, damn her,” he said. He sensed Joe’s warmth for Kylie, and dreaded his rebuke.

  As soon as the beam was off them, the outside world disappeared. They clung to the train roof, then edged themselves carefully through an inspection hatch and dropped down into a small compartment.

  Neither Bodenland nor Clift had any notions of what to expect. Such vague anticipations as they held were shaped by the fact that they were boarding what they had casually christened a ghost train.

  There was no way they could have anticipated the horrific scene in which they found themselves. It defied the imagination—that is, the everyday imagination of waking life; yet in some way it resembled a nightmare scene out of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, something in a horrible mann
er unconsciously prepared for.

  They had lowered themselves into a claustrophobic little den lined with numbers of iron instruments carefully stowed in cabinets behind glass doors. Separately, scarcely a one would have been recognized for what it was by an innocent eye. Ranked together, they presented a meaning impossible to mistake. They were torture instruments—torture instruments of a primitive and brutal kind. Saws, presses, screws, and spikes bristled behind the panes of glass, which gave back a melancholy reflection of the subdued light.

  Most of the compartment was filled by a heavily scarred wooden table. Pressed against the top of the table by a complex system of bars was a naked man. Instinctively, the two men backed away from this terrifying prisoner.

  His limbs were distorted by the pressure of the bars cutting into his flesh. The gag in his mouth was kept in place by a metal rod, against which his yellowed and fanglike teeth had closed.

  His whole body color was that of a drowned man. The limbs—where not flattened or swollen—were pallid, almost green, his cheeks and lips a livid white. Beyond the imprisoned wrists curled broken and bloody fingers.

  His head had been shaved and was scarred, as by a carelessly wielded open razor. A purple line had been drawn round the equator of his head, above his eyebrows.

  Bodenland and Clift took a moment to realize that the prisoner was living still. Dull though his eyes were, he made a stir, the fangs in the flattened mouth clicked as if ravenous against their containing bar, the limbs trembled, one edematous foot twitched.

  Clift started to retch.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We should never have come.”

  Bodenland would say nothing. They edged round the table. The fish gaze of the victim on the table followed them, eyeballs palely bulging.

  Twisting an unfamiliar type of latch on the door, they moved out into a corridor. Bodenland covered his eyes and face with a broad hand.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this, Bernie.”

  The corridor was even darker than the torture compartment. No sense of movement reached them as they progressed down it, though every now and again it swerved, challenging their balance, as if it was rounding a bend at speed.

  No windows gave on the outside world. At intervals, glass doors led to compartments set on the left of the corridor. Inside these compartments, dark and dreary, sat immobile figures, their bodies half embedded in molded seating. The whole ambience was of something antique and underground, such as a long-forgotten Egyptian tomb, in which the spirits of the dead were confined. The moldings of the heavy wooden doors, the elaborate paneling, all suggested another age—yet the tenebrous scene was interspersed by tiny glitters at every doorway, where a panel of indicators kept up a code of information.

  The men moved down the corridor and came to an unoccupied compartment, into which they hastened with some relief. They shut themselves in but could find no lock for the door.

  “We didn’t come armed,” Bodenland said with regret.

  When their eyes had adjusted to the dimness, they saw plush mummy-shaped recesses in which to sit. Once seated, they had in front of them a control touch-panel—electronic but clearly of another age, made from a material fatty in appearance. Bodenland started to fiddle with the controls.

  “Joe—suppose you summon someone …”

  “We can’t just sit around like passengers.”

  He began to stab systematically with his middle finger.

  A lid shot up like an eyelid on the wall facing them, and a VDU lit. Colors flowed hectically, then a male face snapped into view, a heavy aquiline face that looked as if it had been kept in deep freeze. Seeming to press its nose against the glass screen, it opened its mouth and said, “Agents of Group Sixteen, prepare to leave for—. Agents of Group Sixteen.”

  “Where did he say?” asked Clift.

  “Never heard of the place. How come we can’t see through this window?” Bodenland ran his hand over a series of pressure plates. The window on his left turned transparent. It was barred, but permitted a distorted view of the outside world in tones of gray. With this view, a sense of movement returned; they could see what looked like uncultivated prairie flashing by.

  And at the same time, phantasmal figures, looking much attenuated, drifted from the train to land on a grass mound they were passing.

  “There go the agents of Group Sixteen,” commented Bodenland. “Whoever the hell they are.”

  The train then appeared to gather speed.

  More investigation of the control panel brought forth from its socket a small terrestrial globe. A thread-thin trace light revealed what they could only believe was their course, heading northwest. But the continents were subtly changed. Florida had extended itself to enclose the Caribbean. Hudson Bay did not exist. Indications were that the train was now crossing what should have been the waters of Hudson Bay; all that could be seen were forests and undulating savannah lands.

  Numerals flashed across the VDU. Clift pointed to them with some excitement. He seemed to have recovered from his shock of fear.

  “Read those figures, Joe. They could be in millions B.P. They aren’t speeds or latitudes.”

  “You think that’s where we are—or when we are? Not simply moving through distance, but also through some time before Hudson Bay was formed …”

  “Before Hudson Bay … and when the climate was milder … In a forgotten epoch of some early interglacial … Is it possible?”

  Bodenland said, “So we’re traveling on—a time train! Bernard, what wonderful luck!”

  Clift looked at him in surprise. “Luck? Who knows where we’re heading? More to the point, who controls the train?”

  “We’ll have to control the train, Bernie, old sport, that’s who.”

  As he rose, a last group of zombie figures could be seen leaving the train, drifting like gossamer with outspread arms to land safely among tall grasses and fade into night.

  Suddenly the train swerved eastward, throwing Bodenland back into his seat. The thread indicator also turned eastward, maintaining latitude. The electronic numbers on the screen diminished rapidly.

  “Well, that’s something,” Clift said. “We’re coming nearer to the present instead of disappearing into the far past—if our theory’s right.”

  “Let’s move. There must be a cab or something up front.”

  As they rose, the aquiline face returned to their VDU.

  “Enemy agents boarded the train at Point 656. They must be terminated. Believed only two in number. They must be terminated. Death-strikes are also being arranged against their nearest and dearest.”

  “Hell,” said Clift. “You heard that. We have to get off this thing.”

  “You want to jump? I don’t like this either, but our best hope is to try and hijack the train, if that’s possible.”

  “And get ourselves killed?”

  “Let’s hope that won’t be necessary. Come on.”

  He opened the door. The corridor appeared empty. After only a moment’s hesitation, he eased himself through the door. Clift followed.

  Larry had bought himself a big white cowboy hat in Enterprise, after having a few drinks in a bar. He drove in his rental car back to the Old John site.

  The change in three days, since the news of the strange grave had been given to the world, was dramatic. There was no way the Bodenland security force could keep everyone away. As Bodenland had predicted, the world had descended on this quiet southwest corner of Utah. The media were there in force, not only from all over the States but from Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Hustlers, hucksters, and ordinary sightseers rubbed shoulders. Big mobile diners had rolled in from St. George and Cedar City, bars had been set up. It was like a gold rush. Chunks of plain rock were selling fast.

  Temporary TV studios had been established, comfort stations, mobile chapels, all kinds of refreshment stalls and marquees. The actual digs were barricaded off and protected by state police.

  Larry made his
way through the thick traffic, yelling cheerfully to other drivers out of the window as he went. Once he had parked, he fought his way through to the trailer he had hired.

  There Kylie was awaiting him, her fair hair capturing the sun.

  She threw her arms round him. “I’ve been here all day. Where’ve you been?”

  “I was drowning my sorrows in Enterprise.”

  “You got a girl there?”

  “I ain’t that enterprising. Listen, Kylie, forgive me, sweet. I shouldn’t have walked out on you as I did, and I’ve felt bad ever since.”

  She was happy to hear him say it.

  “We were both too hasty.” She stuck her tongue in his mouth.

  “Come inside, on the bed,” he said. “I’ll show you how I feel about you. I’ve had three days here, kicking my heels and feeling bad.”

  “Bed later. I got in this morning with Mina. I flew to Dallas and she flew me here in her plane.”

  “That old Bandierante? It’ll fall to pieces in the air one day.”

  “Come and see her. She’s worried crazy about Joe. You’ll have to tell her—and me—exactly where he is and what happened.”

  He made a face but was in no mood to argue.

  The Bandierante was the plane from which Mina Legrand liked to skydive. She had left it on an improvised landing field at the edge of the desert, five miles away. She had paid dearly for a rusty old Chevy in order to be mobile. They caught up with her in a mess of traffic on what had become Old John’s main street. Mina had climbed out of the car to argue more effectively with a cop trying to control the flow of automobiles, one of which had, perhaps inevitably, broken down.

  She turned an angry face to her son.

  “And where have you been? What have you done with your father?”

  He explained how Joe and Clift had disappeared in the inertial beam. There was every reason to believe that by that means they had managed to get aboard the train.

  “And where are they now?” she asked.

  “Look, lady,” said the cop, “now it’s you holding up the traffic flow.”