Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  As he opened his arms to her, she bent eagerly toward him, letting the long dress fall away. He caught her scent, like a forgotten dream.

  Now her arms were almost round his neck. He felt them intensely, was filled with rapture, when a pistol shot rang out.

  Kylie was gone. The stony structure of the crypt faded.

  He was back on the bed, his arms tingling with cramp behind his head. The long-horned cattle stared at him from the walls of the room.

  He sat up, sick, cold. Had he heard a real shot?

  Rising, he padded over to the window and drew aside a curtain a little way.

  Two moons shone over the haunting nineteenth-century landscape, one in a clear night sky, the other its sister, its reflection, in the ornamental pool. The gazebo was a ghostly thing, its Chinese chimes not stirring. On the terrace, the statues stood in their dramatic attitudes, casting their shadows toward the facade of the old house.

  Among the statues was a human figure. It was Stoker, his ginger coloration turned snowy by the moon.

  Breaking the chain of garlic flowers, Bodenland opened the window and leaned out.

  “What’s the matter? I thought I heard a shot.”

  Stoker looked up, his features made brutal in the diffused glow.

  “Keep your voice down. You aren’t going to be too bucked with this, Bodenland. I’ve had to perform a soldierly duty. As I was turning in, I heard a bit of thumping, armed myself, and came out here to see what the devil was going on.”

  “The driver …”

  “That’s it—your driver. He emerged through the door. Like a ghost. One of the Un-Dead, my boy! I put a silver bullet through him in self-defense. It’s the only thing that stops his kind.”

  “I’ll come down.”

  The window next to Bodenland’s was thrown open and van Helsing thrust his head out into the night air. He was wearing a nightcap.

  “Now we’re in trouble—real trouble, you understand? What are you going to do with the body? You’ll be charged with murder.”

  “I’ll come down, Bram,” said Bodenland. It was the first time he had used his host’s Christian name.

  “Better stay where you are. There’s another presence out here.”

  “What?”

  Stoker paused before answering, and glanced about.

  “A woman’s presence. I’ll be in soonest, don’t worry. I’ll heave this damned corpse back into the shed. We’ll worry about it in the morning.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “Heroism, Bodenland, what we were talking about. Get to bed, and sweet dreams. And you, Doctor.”

  Bodenland withdrew his head and closed the window, but stood looking at the silent terrace. When Stoker disappeared, dragging the corpse, he returned to bed. But hope of sleep had been shattered.

  Although he admired Stoker’s courage, he still could not persuade himself to believe in vampires. His experience told him they existed, his intellect denied it. Of course, that paradox played to the advantage of vampires, if they existed. But they did exist—and somehow below the level of human intellect.

  He paced about the room, trying to work it out. The human intellect originated in the neocortex, the gray matter of the brain. Below lay deeper layers, much older on an evolutionary scale than the neocortex—layers of brain common to other mammals, the limbic brain, primed by instincts such as aggression and submission and sexual response: the very instincts which propelled the processes of life on the planet.

  Suppose there was a type of creature which was subject to different processes. A creature like a vampire, without intellect, and therefore almost safe from human molestation. The human species would undoubtedly kill off all vampires, as they had almost killed off wolves, if they could only believe wholeheartedly in the idea. Once you got the idea, vampires were not particularly hard to kill—to exterminate. Were they? The silver bullet. The shaft of light. The religious symbol. The stake through the heart.

  He stood and stared abstractedly at the pokerwork legend: THOU SHALT NOT BE AFRAID FOR ANY TERROR BY NIGHT … Nevertheless, the human race was afraid, always had been …

  Always had been …

  Vampires, if they existed—he could not resist adding the saving clause—were older than mankind.

  How much older? Really millions and millions of years older, as Clift’s discovery seemed to prove?

  Why were they so feared?

  They were a disease.

  They brought death. Worse than death, the existence of the Un-Dead. If legend was to be believed.

  And they preyed on humankind by activating one of the strongest instincts below the neocortical level, the great archetype of sex.

  As a flower attracts by its scent.

  His dream … the incestuous dream of union with Kylie, dead or alive. Repugnant to his consciousness, evidently delightful to some more primitive layer of sensation …

  All of a sudden, he connected the dream with the female presence which, if Stoker was to be believed, walked on the terrace below.

  As he thought of it, of that shadowy thing he was wise to dread, a wave of desire came over him.

  He fought it back. The pestilence that walketh in darkness … Was that how the rest of the psalm went?

  To calm himself, he measured his strides about the bedroom, trying again to think of the problem scientifically.

  Why else were vampires so feared?

  Because they were parasitical. Parasites were always feared.

  If they long preceded humans on the scale of existence, then they had once preyed on other living things.

  What had they been—he caught himself avoiding the word—what had vampires been before they became parasitical? Before that dreadful need for blood arose?

  Many arthropod bloodsuckers existed—bedbugs, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, all parasitical on man. As the fossil record proved, those creatures were about in the busy world long before mankind. Even before birds and mammals.

  All those little plagues to human life were originally innocent suckers of fruit juice and plant juices. But the taste of blood proved addictive and they had become enslaved by parasitism.

  Blood was a dangerous beverage. An addiction like any other drug.

  And vampire bats …

  So what had vampires been, many millions of years ago, before they became enslaved?

  It was a short distance from gnawing on a wound to drinking its substance … from swooping down through the air to being called to swoop … from inciting the dread to inciting the lust …

  Almost in a fever, he thought he had glimpsed what turned an aerial predator into the pestilence that walketh in darkness. Sick with the sound and smell of the gas jet, Bodenland went to the window and flung back the curtains, letting moonlight enter the foggy room. Brushing away the strings of white flowers, he threw open the window and took some lungfuls of air.

  The moon still floated upside down in the pool.

  Of Stoker there was no sign.

  The woman stood there on the terrace, tall against the figure of a putti. She looked up at him, eyes agleam with a cold green fire.

  His heart turned over. But his intellect remained cool.

  Distantly, the clock in the asylum tower chimed one in the morning.

  She lifted her arms and flew up to him.

  She was in the bedroom, among the domestic things with her dead eyes, walking, gliding rather. Close to him—and he staring with his hair standing on end.

  “This is no dream, Joe,” she said. Her voice was deep and masculine.

  She brought a chill to the room. In her whiteness, with something sparkling like frost in her hair, and the wan white robe, all shadowy yet bright—why, he thought, it’s more like a fever than a person, frightening, yes, yet no more dangerous than a ghost … Yet he was in a prickle of lust to be touched by her, to enjoy an intimacy no one knew this side of the grave.

  His intellect had no part in this encounter.

  Her name was Bella, the
name spoken like a bell.

  “What do you want of me?”

  “I know what you want of me, Joe.” Still the voice was thick, as if there was blood just below the throat. And her lips were red.

  She began to talk, and he to listen, entranced.

  Her people were ancient and had survived much. When oak trees die, they still stand against the storm. Her exact words never came back to him after; he only recalled—trying to recall more—that she gave an impression of the Un-Dead as being nothing outside nature, as being of nature. Of humans as being the exiled things, cut off from the ancient world, unable to throw themselves into the streams of continuity pouring from the distant past into distant futures. She spoke, and it was in images.

  For these reasons humanity was doomed. Men had to be slain for the survival of the ancient planet. Yet she, Bella, had it in her power to save him, Joe. To more than save him: to crown him with eternal life, the great stream of life from which his humanity exiled him. She spoke, and he received a picture of glaciers from which pure rivers flowed, down to teeming future oceans, unpolluted by man.

  “What do I have to do?” His whisper was like the rustle of leaves.

  Bella turned the full beam of her regard upon him. The eyes were red like a dog’s or yellow like a cat’s or green like a polar bear’s—after, he could not remember. They pierced into him, confident, without conscience or consciousness.

  “All Fleet Ones need to attend a great conference which our Lord has called. We are summoned, every one. We must go to the region you call Hudson Bay. There we will finally decide mankind’s fate.”

  “You cannot exist without us.”

  “As we existed once, so we shall again. You’re—but a moment.”

  Again a kind of telepathic picture of the highest mountains brimming over with glaciers, slow-growing glaciers crowned with snow. And by their striped flanks, thorn bushes growing, stiff against the wind.

  Oh, it was beautiful. He longed for it. Ached.

  “The great Lord Dracula will guide our decisions. All of us will have a voice. Possibly extermination, possibly total enslavement. All of you penned within——”

  She named a place. Had she said “green land” or “Greenland”?

  “Understand this, Joe. We are much stronger than you can imagine. As we possessed the past, so we are in possession of the far future.”

  “The present? You’re nothing, Bella.”

  “We must have back the time train. You have to surrender it. That is what you have to do, and only that, in order that we become immortal lovers, borne on the storm of ages, like Paolo and Francesca.”

  While she said these things and uttered these inhuman promises, she lightly roamed the room, as a tiger might pace.

  He watched. She gave no reflection as she passed the mirror on the dressing table or the glazed map of the British Empire, or any of the pictures which lay behind glass.

  He sat on the side of the bed, unable to control his trembling.

  “What does this mean—you possess the future?”

  “No more talk, Joe. Talk’s the human skill. Forget the future when we can together savor the present.”

  The dark voice ceased. She unfolded great wings and moved toward him.

  Something in her movements woke in Bodenland the promptings of a forgotten dream. All that came back to him was a picture of the thing that had rushed at him down the corridor of the time train, covering infinite distance with infinite speed. He had time to appreciate the gloomy chamber in which, it seemed, every vertical was ashily outlined by the glare of the gas, caging him into this block of past existence, until the very scent of her, the frisson of her garments, drowned out all other impressions.

  She stood by him, over him, as he remained sitting on the side of the bed, arms behind him to prop up his torso as he gazed up at her face. The red lips moved and she spoke again.

  “I know of your strength. Eternal life is here if you wish it. Eternal life and eternal love.”

  His mouth was almost too dry to speak. He could force no derision into his voice. “Forbidden love.”

  “Forbidden by your kind, Joe, not mine.”

  And with a great rustle of wings, she embraced him, pressing him into the folds of the eiderdown.

  Even as his body’s blood flowed thick and heavy with delight, he was also living out a vision. It was antique yet imperishable, like something engraved on stone. It flowed from Bella to him.

  Bella’s memory was of what would one day be called Hudson Bay and a chill part of Canada. Now the clouds rolled back like peeling skin and heat roared like breath. In the fairer climate of seventy million years past, what would be water and ice and drifting floes was all land, bush-speckled savannah or forest. The knee-deep grasses were rich to the teeth of great blundering herbivores—hadrosaurs that grazed by slow-winding rivers, brontosaurs that blundered into the marsh by the rivers.

  These and other ornithischians were herded into pens and thorn-cages by the Fleet Ones, who arrived on wing and foot. They drove their captives, fat with blood and blubber, into the makeshift fields, from which they would be culled.

  The savannah fills with their numbers. The beasts lumber and cry. The ground heaves.

  The bed heaves. Bodenland cries aloud.

  Larry was in an absolute rage. He shook with it. The mortician had said, “I don’t think you should take your mother’s death like that, sir. We must show respect for the dead,” and Larry had brushed the little man aside.

  He ran out of the parlor to the sidewalk, cursing and gesticulating. Kylie followed reluctantly, her pretty face pale and drawn.

  In the cheerful morning sunlight, the main street of Enterprise was choked with traffic, mainly rubberneckers come to see what was going on at Old John, lured by the news that mankind’s history had been overturned. The cars moved so slowly that both drivers and passengers had plenty of time to watch this man performing on the sidewalk under the mortician’s sign. Many called insults, thinking they knew a drunk when they saw one.

  “Stop it, Larry, will you?” Kylie seized his arm. “Come on, I’ll drive you back to the motel.”

  “What have I done, Kylie? What have I done? I’m going to tie one on in the nearest bar, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “No, please … It would be better to pray. Prayer gives you more strength than whiskey.”

  He appeared not to have heard her.

  “That was my momma lying in there, all white and withered. Stuck in that freezer …” Tears rolled down his face. “Like some little pressed flower she was, her color all faded …”

  “Larry, darling, I know, I know. It’s terrible. Poor Mina. But getting drunk won’t help it one bit …”

  Cajoling, crying herself, Kylie managed to persuade her husband back to the convertible. Wiping her tears, she managed the slow drive to the Moonlite Motel. The management had been insensitive enough to offer them Mina’s old room. No other was available, owing to the unexpected influx of sightseers. They had taken it. In the hastily cleared room, Kylie found in the waste can a crumpled sheet of notepaper. On it her late mother-in-law had begun a letter. Joe you bastard—

  “What I fail to understand,” said Larry, heading straight for the mini-bar, “is what this ‘Premature Aging’ bit means. I don’t trust the Utah doctors—probably bribed by the motel. Hon, go down the corridor and get some ice, will you?”

  She stood before him. “I love you, Larry, and I need your support. Don’t you see I’m still trembling? But you are like a greedy child. Your parents neglected you, yes, I know, I’ve heard it a million times. So you keep on grabbing, grabbing, just like a baby. You grabbed. Okay, so you want to keep me, so you must stop being a baby and grabbing for these other things.”

  “You ever hear of a baby drinking the old Wild Turkey, hon? I’m never going to get over the death of my mom, because I should have taken better care of her. She loved me. She loved me, Kylie. Something my father never did.”
>
  “Larry!” She screamed his name. “Please forget about yourself. Worry about what happened to Mina. What the hell are we going to do? All human love has its failings, okay, but Joe does love you, best he knows how. But he’s missing—”

  “I’ll go and get the ice myself, don’t you worry.” He stood up. “You always take Joe’s side. I’m used to that by now, and I’m going to get a drink while you yak, if you must.”

  She went over to her suitcase, which lay on the bed. She had opened it without unpacking it. They had checked in only an hour before and gone straight from the motel to the funeral parlor.

  “I’m yakking no more, husband of mine. I just can’t get through to you. I’ve had enough. I’m off. You quit on me in Hawaii. Now I’m quitting on you in Enterprise, Utah.”

  She snapped the suitcase shut. As she made for the door, Larry ran in front of her. Kylie swung the suitcase hard and hit him in the stomach.

  Gasping, he made way for her.

  When she had gone, Larry walked doubled up to the sofa, making what he could of the pain. After sufficient gasping, he picked up the quart bottle of Wild Turkey he had brought with him in his case. Lifting it high until it gleamed in the light from the window Kylie had opened, he saluted it.

  “Only you and me now, old friend,” he said.

  Later, he staggered out and got himself a hamburger from the Chock Full O’Nuts next to the Moonlite. Later still, he pulled down the blind at the window to keep out the glare of the sun. Later still, he placed the empty whiskey bottle on the windowsill and fell into a heavy slumber, snoring with practiced ease.

  Evening set in. The neon sign blinked outside, registering the minutes. Cars came and went in the parking lot. Larry slept on, uneasy in dream.

  It seemed his mother visited him, to stand before him bloodlessly, with red eyes. She cried to him for comfort. She bent over him, her movements gradual, so as not to startle.

  Oh, she whispered, Larry was her dear son—so dear. Now she needed him more than ever.

  The evening breeze blew the blind. It flapped inward, striking the empty whiskey bottle. It tapped intermittently. The bottle fell to the floor, clattering.