Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Tell me what this train is we’re on. Where are we? Who are you?”

  When he let go of the creature, the driver sank to his knees. Bodenland had done him more damage than he intended.

  “The Un-Dead—the Un-Dead, sir. I won’t harm you …”

  “You sure won’t.” He bent over the driver, catching a whiff of his carrion breath as the man panted. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was an airline pilot in life,” said the driver faintly. “You will become like us. You are traveling on the train of the Un-Dead and our Lord will kill you sure enough.”

  “We’ll see about that. Get up and stop this train.” He wrenched the man to his feet, thrusting him toward the controls. The driver merely stood wretchedly, head bowed.

  “Stop the train. Move, you rat. Where are we? When are we?”

  The driver moved. He pulled open his tunic, ripped his shirt in two with sudden strength, and turned to face Bodenland.

  He pointed to his naked chest. So extreme was its emaciation that rib bones stuck out white as if frosted from their cyanotic covering of skin.

  “Look,” he said. “Get an eyeful of this, you fool. Do you see any heartbeat here?”

  In disgust, Bodenland stared at the dead barrel of chest. He caught the man a blow across the side of his face, sending him reeling.

  “You can still feel pain? Fear? You’re human in that, at least. I will break open your chest and wrench out that dead heart unless you stop this train.”

  Holding his face, the driver said, “The next programmed stop is in what you call A.D. 2399, the Silent Empire. I’m unable to alter the programming.”

  “You slowed in Utah.”

  “Utah? Oh, Point 656, yes … That’s a sacred site to the Un-Dead. We had to let agents off the train.”

  “Okay, you can let me off there. That’s where I need to be. How many time trains are there?”

  “One, sir, just this one.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “There’s just one.” He spoke without emphasis, leaning lightly against the control panels, holding his face, letting the faint illumination turn his body into a seemingly abandoned carcass. “This train shuttles back and forth on scheduled time routes. All programmed. I’m not much more than a supervisor. It’s not like piloting an airliner.”

  “There must be other trains.”

  “There’s just the one. To ride time quanta you gobble vast amounts of energy. Solar energy. Very extravagant. Reverse relativism. Invisible at normal speeds. Train can’t be seen by the outside world—not unless we’re slowing to let agents off.”

  The driver smiled, showing the canines more fully. No humor warmed the smile. The lips simply peeled back in memory of something that might once have amused.

  “The sheep asks the wolf what it does …”

  The detached part of Bodenland watched as he attacked the driver and fell to the floor with him. In their struggle, they kicked Clift’s body, making it roll onto its face.

  And Bodenland was demanding who had invented this cursed train. The answer was that, as far as the driver knew, the train was the invention of the Fleet Ones.

  “The Fleet Ones, sir, are the Un-Dead—the vampires—who rule the world in its last days. This is their train, sir, you’ve ventured on.”

  “I’m borrowing it, and it’s going to get me back home to 1999. You’re going to show me how.”

  The detached viewpoint saw how the creature made to bite Bodenland in the upper arm. But Bodenland took a firm grip of his throat and dragged him to the controls.

  “Start explaining,” he said.

  “Ummmm ummmm ummmmmmmm. Moon and Mercury, Moon and Mercury, Romance and Remedy … Ummmm.”

  The madman Renfield rocked himself in a tight bundle and hummed as if he were full of bluebottles.

  The ginger man squatted stolidly in his corner by the cell door, watching, nodding in time with the humming, alert to the fact that Renfield was rocking himself closer. Above them, against the square of window showing blue sky, a spider hung by a thread, well out of the madman’s way.

  “Ummmm, you’re one of us, kind sir, she said, one of the fallen. May I ask, do you believe in God?”

  Having uttered the Almighty’s name, he fell into fits of laughter, as if the hallowed syllable contained all the world’s mirth.

  “Yes, I do believe,” said the ginger man. “I think.”

  “Then you believe in Hell and hellfire.”

  “Those I certainly do believe in.” He smiled wanly, and again the madman laughed.

  “I’m God. I’m God and I’m hellfire. And where are these items contained? Why—in blood!” He pronounced the word in savage relish, striking his skull violently as he did so. “In blood, in the head, the head, kind sir, the napper. The napper’s full of blood. There are things that peer in here of a night … things which cry and mew for the blood. You see, it’s scientific, kind sir, she said, because … because you need the blood to drown out the thought. You don’t need thought when you’re dead, or silver bells or cockhole smells or pretty maids all in a row, because when you’re dead you can do anything. You can do anything, kind sir, I assure you. The dead travel fast. Ummmm.”

  The ginger man sighed, as if in at least partial agreement with these crazed sentiments.

  “Can you tell me what these things look like which peer in at you at night?”

  Renfield had rocked himself very close now.

  He put a dirty finger against the wall, as if pointing to something unseen by others.

  “There, you see? They come from dead planets, kind sir. From the Moon and Mercury.” He ground his teeth so violently that his intention might have been to eat his own face. “Ummmm, they’re a disease, wrapped in a plague, masquerading as life. Life—yes, that’s it, life, ummmm. And we shall all become like them, us, by and by, if God so wills.”

  On the last word, he sprang at the ginger man, screaming, “Give me a kiss of life, kind sir, she said!”

  But the ginger man was alert, leaped to his feet in time, fended off the madman with his silver-headed cane.

  “Down, dog! Back to your kennel, beast, Caliban, or I’ll call in the warden and have you beaten black and blue.”

  The madman retreated only a step and stood there raging or pretending rage, showing teeth, brandishing claws. When the ginger man caught him lightly over the shoulders with his cane, he desisted and crawled on hands and knees back to the far corner, by his mattress. There he sat, looking upward, innocent as a child, one finger stuck deep into his ear.

  A rhombus of sunlight crept down the wall, making for the floor as noon approached, slow as time and as steady. The ginger man remained by the door, unmoving, in a less threatening attitude, though he still had his stick ready.

  Almost as stealthily as the sunbeam, the madman began to roll on the stone floor. His movements became more exaggerated as he tried to tie himself into knots, groaning at the same time.

  The normally genial face of Renfield’s visitor was grave with compassion.

  “Can I help in any way?” he asked.

  “Why do you seek my company in this fortress?”

  “It’s a fair question, but I cannot deliver you the answer. Tell me if I can help you.”

  Renfield stared at him from an upside-down viewpoint.

  “Bring me boxes of spiders to eat. Spiders and sparrows. I need the blood. It’s life, kind sir. Life’s paper. Seven old newspapers make a week in Fleet Street. The Fleet Ones can eat up a week with their little fingers, this little finger on the right.”

  He started to scratch a figure with sharp teeth on the wall as he spoke.

  “Talk sense, man,” said the ginger man sternly.

  “There soon will come a scientist who will say even stranger things about space and time. We can’t comprehend infinity, yet it’s in our heads.”

  “Together with the blood?” He laughed impatiently, turning to the door to be released.

  As
he rapped on the panel, the madman said, “Yes, yes, with the blood, with a whole stream of blood. You’ll see. It’s in your eyes, kind sir, she said. A stream of blood stretching beyond the grave, beyond the gravy.”

  He made a jump for the distant spider as the door slammed, leaving him alone.

  The ginger man walked with the doctor in the bloodstained coat. The doctor accompanied him gravely to the door of the asylum, where a carriage waited. As the ginger man passed over a guinea, he said, with an attempt at casual small talk, “So I suppose there’s no cure for dementia, is that so?”

  The doctor pulled a serious face, tilted his head to one side, gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.

  “I fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.”

  “You wretches live in the dark,” Joe Bodenland said. “Don’t you hate your own sickness?”

  He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he fingertipped the keyboard in the train’s chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.

  “If you’ve told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.”

  Bodenland watched the scattering figures on a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.

  As the time train slowed, the gray light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.

  “Save me—I’m photophobic. We’re all photophobic. Oh, please … it would be the end—”

  “Wouldn’t that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.”

  Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift’s body.

  The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.

  Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.

  “What …” Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.

  They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.

  The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist, warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.

  As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.

  A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet—a dragonfly with a five-foot wing-span came dashing at him, its body armored in iridescent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn’t Louisiana.

  Gathering his wits, he turned back into the cab. The train gave a lurch sideways.

  The LCD coordinates had ceased to spin. Bodenland stared at them incredulously, and then checked other readings. They had materialized some 270 million years before his present, in the Carboniferous age.

  The cab rocked under his feet and tilted a few more degrees to one side. Black water lapped over the lip of the door up to his feet. Staring out, he saw that the weight of the train was bearing it rapidly down into the swamp.

  “You,” he said, shaking the supine driver under his cover. “I’m going to pitch you out into that swamp unless you tell me fast how we get out of here.”

  “It’s the secret override. I forgot to tell you about it—I’ll help you all I can, since you were merciful to me—”

  “Okay, you remember now. What do we do?”

  The dark water came washing in as the driver said, “The override is designed to stop unauthorized persons from meddling with the time controls. Only the space controls responded to your instructions, the others went into reverse.”

  While he was speaking, the train tilted again and Clift’s body slid toward the door.

  “What do we do, apart from drown?”

  “The train is programmed for its next stop and I can’t change that. Best thing is to complete that journey, after which the program’s finished and the override cuts out. So you just switch on, canceling the previous coordinates you punched in.”

  The water was pouring in now, splashing the men. A bejeweled fly swung in and orbited Bodenland’s head.

  “Where’s this preprogrammed journey taking us?”

  With an extra surge of water, a warty shape rose from the swamp, steadying itself with a clumsy foot at the doorway. A flat amphibian head looked in at them. Two toad eyes stared, as if without sight. A wide mouth cracked open. A goiter in the yellow throat throbbed. The head darted forward as Bodenland instinctively jumped back, clinging to a support.

  The lipless frog-mouth fastened on Clift’s body. With a leisurely movement, the amphibian withdrew, bearing its meal with it down into the waters of the swamp. It disappeared from view and the black surface closed over it.

  Bodenland slammed the sliding door shut and staggered to the keyboard. He punched on the Start pressurepads and heard the roar of generators, which died as the engine seemed to lift.

  The outer world with its majestic colonnades of trees blurred, whited out, faded to gray and down the color spectrum, until the zero-light of time quanta came in. The driver sat up in the dirty water swilling about him and peered haggard-faced from his tarpaulin.

  Drained by the excitement of the last few hours, appalled by the loss of his friend, Bodenland watched the numerals juggling with themselves in the oily wells of the display panel. He came to with a start, realizing he might fall asleep.

  Making an effort, he got down a length of thin cable and secured the driver with it, before locking the door to the corridor.

  He stood over his captive, who began to plead for mercy.

  “You don’t have a great store of courage.”

  “I don’t need courage. You need the courage. I know you have ten thousand adversaries against you.”

  Bodenland looked down, contemplating kicking the creature. On hands and knees, he looked up pitiably before seizing Bodenland’s leg and kissing it.

  “Where are we programmed for?” Bodenland asked, pushing the wretch away.

  “We have to visit Transylvania. But the program is set only as far as London, in the year 1896, where we let off a powerful female agent.”

  “Oh yes? And what’s she up to?”

  The driver paused miserably before yielding up a further scrap of information.

  “She has business at the home of a man living near London, a man by the name of Bram Stoker.”

  7

  She went over to look at the little glass panel of the air-conditioning unit. It was functioning perfectly. Nevertheless, the motel suite felt arid to her, lifeless, airless, after her flight through the sky.

  Mina Legrand’s rooms were on the second floor. She opened a window and let in a breeze sanitized by the nearby desert. Enterprise sprawled out there, the park and sign of the Moonlite Motel, and beyond them the highway, on which were strung one-story buildings, a store or two, and a used-car lot, with a Mexican food joint marking the edge of town. Pickups drove by, their occupants preparing to squeeze what they could from the evening. Already dusk was settling in.

  Turning from the window, she shucked off her green coveralls and her underwear and stepped into the shower.

  Despite the pleasure of the hot water coursing over her body, gloom settled on her. She hated to be alone, and she hated solitude even more of late. And perhaps Joe had been absent more of late. Now she would be seeing less of Larry, too
. And there were the deaths in the back of her mind, never to disappear. She was at that age when wretchedness seeps very easily through the cracks in existence. A friend had suggested she should consult a psychoanalyst. That was not what she wanted. What she wanted was more from Joe, to whom she felt she had given so much.

  She discovered she was singing in the shower.

  Well, what did I do wrong,

  To make you stay away so long?

  The song had selected itself. To hell with it. She cut it off. Joe had let her down. What she really needed was a passionate affair. Fairly passionate. Men were so tiresome in so many ways. In her experience, they all complained. Except Joe. And that showed his lack of communication …

  With similar nonproductive thoughts, she climbed from the shower and stood under the infrared lamp.

  Later, in a toweling robe, she mixed herself a margarita from the mini-bar, sat down, and began to write a letter to Joe on the Moonlite Motel notepaper. Joe you Bastard—she began. She sat there, thinking back down the years.

  Finishing the drink, she got a second and began to call around.

  She phoned home, got her own voice on the answering machine, slammed off. Called Bodenland Enterprises, spoke to Waldgrave. No one had heard from Joe. Rang Larry’s number. No answer. In boredom, she called her sister Carrie in Paris, France.

  “We’re in bed, for God’s sake. What do you want?” came Carrie’s shrill voice, a voice remembered from childhood.

  Mina explained.

  “Joe always was crazy,” Carrie said. “Junk him like I told you, Minnie. Take my advice. He’s worth his weight in alimony. This is one more suicidal episode you can do without.”

  Hearing from her sister the very words she had just been formulating herself, Mina fell into a rage.

  “I guess I know Joe light-years better than you, Carrie, and suicidal he is not. Brave, yes; suicidal, no. He just believes he leads an enchanted life and nothing can harm him.”

  “Try divorce and see what that does.”