Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  A consuming sickness choked Bodenland’s throat. He managed to ask what crime the prisoner had committed, foreseeing that the same kind of treatment might be in store for him.

  From Dracula’s reply it could be deduced that he enjoyed the tale he had to tell: in his words, “a tale of what you call superstition triumphing over what you call science.”

  The being pinned to the torture table was now one of the Un-Dead. In his lifetime, he had been a scientist and savant—an intellect before which other intellects bowed. His name was then Alwyn. He had been taken from his own century to labor with others of his ilk in the far distant future, where living conditions were more congenial to the Fleet Ones than in earlier days.

  “Alwyn tried to escape from servitude in a flying machine,” the Dark Lord said. “But my powers are such that I can fly at greater speeds than such machines. I recaptured Alwyn, and he has been impaled on this table through many millennia. He is without intellect now.”

  “You’re filth!” Bodenland exclaimed.

  “We have turned him into one of us, Joe Bodenland, as you shall see immediately.”

  He lifted a coarse index finger no more than an inch in order to summon the assistant forward to the table.

  Most parts of the prisoner’s body had been mutilated in some way. His skull was shaven. Just above his brows a purple line had been painted round the scarred equator of his head.

  The dull eyes of the prisoner turned fearfully to observe what the assistant was about to do to him.

  “You will be interested to watch this, Joe Bodenland. It will explain much you fail to understand. You will then appreciate the difficulties under which the Un-Dead labor.” As he spoke he signaled with another controlled gesture.

  His assistant leaned toward the prisoner, who urinated with fright. He tapped with a long-nailed finger at the side of the prisoner’s shaven skull. Two taps, then a third, sharper.

  The top of the skull fell cleanly away, opening along the painted purple circle, to lie rocking on the table. Flies issued forth from the cranium, and the victim foamed at the mouth.

  Inside the open cranium lay a small doughy brain much resembling a blob of ice cream and not divided into hemispheres.

  When this creature was the scientist Alwyn, Dracula explained, his brain had been fully human. The invasion of vampiric blood, with its freights of hostile cells, had caused the neocortex to wither and fall away finally like a sere and yellow leaf.

  Alwyn’s identity was then lost. He had ceased to be Homo sapiens.

  “So you are a disease,” Bodenland said. “Nothing more than a disease, a contagion.”

  Dracula released a fanged smile into the dark. “The thing is human no longer. I doubt he even remembers who he once was or will be, centuries from now. He is, you might say, a diagram.”

  His deep voice contained the mortuary echo of a chuckle.

  “This is how we are, Joe Bodenland, we to whom you are so antagonistic. This brain you see here is how our brains are. The brain, you note, is similar in structure to a human brain—minus the neocortex, the higher reasoning part.”

  “You mean the part with the conscience.”

  “Animals have no conscience, Joe Bodenland. They nevertheless spare each other. Animals wage no wars, organize no persecutions, run no concentration camps. Nor do we, the Fleet Ones. The neocortex is a new and unwelcome adjunct to the natural world. It is the disease.

  “Before the development of the neocortex—a random mutation only two million years before you were born—many many millions of years passed serenely. In those millions of years lived a great variety of creatures equipped with the old limbic brain only. Now that balance of nature, so much disturbed recently, will be restored.

  “How? Ha, with the aid of the F-bomb. The F-bomb, Joe Bodenland, that crowning achievement of your vaunted neocortex …”

  He was at his most terrifying when he laughed. It was a laugh brought about by throwing back the head, tossing the straggling hair, and opening wide the mouth to expose fangs and pallid gums. The sound accompanying this sudden spasm was without relish. All was over in a second, with the cold gaze fixed back on his opponent immediately, in order not to be caught off guard for more than the briefest duration of time. A limbic laugh, thought Bodenland.

  Briefly a vision came to him of those sempiternal centuries of which the brute before him spoke, centuries of fangs and foraging and mindless time, with no one alive to count the rising and setting of the sun.

  In the dimness of the stifling compartment, the glazing in the doors of the torture cupboards reflected back what light there was like rows of polished teeth. Pinpoints of light glinted in Dracula’s ever-watchful eyes. The poor victim on the table managed small constrained movements in a moribund t’ai chi. Difficult though it was to see in Dracula’s presence, it was more difficult to think.

  Attempting a scientific detachment, Bodenland said, “You speak of the neocortex. It represents the highest evolutionary development so far. It achieves a complexity far above that of the old limbic brain. You are failed creatures, by nature as extinct as the massive herbivores on which you originally preyed. You’re fossils, Dracula, compressed between life and death. I’ll exterminate you if I can.”

  He spoke more boldly than he felt. With his every fiber he had to resist Dracula’s strong hypnotic spell.

  The dark specter spoke again.

  “Your kind regards my kind as evil. I have been forced to observe your kind over the centuries, since you huddled in caves against the ice. Has ever a day gone by, or a night, in all those centuries, when you have not put someone to death? Women subjected to all kinds of injury, children abused, babies flung over cliffs, slaves beaten, preachers stoned, witches drowned, villages burned, wars fought over nothing … a litany of murder in more various forms than we of the Un-Dead could ever command. Your sins are endless, and committed wilfully. What we do we cannot help.”

  Raising his hands to his temples, Bodenland shook his head. The words burned. The worms worked in him.

  “Being evil, you can see only the evil in mankind.” He choked on the uvula dry at the back of his throat, coughed, and could only say, “Before this great victory—what of this victim of yours?”

  He indicated the creature pinned to the table.

  “The attendants will stick his skull on again. He’ll survive. After all, he’s one of the Un-Dead. He can’t die. You would call that a paradox.”

  Thinking that he would be on this vehicle of damnation again—was it past or future?—he sighed heavily.

  “What of the real paradoxes, the scientific paradoxes of travel through time?”

  Dracula put mild thunder into his reply. “For you, and even for those without neocortexes, time paradoxes are canceled out by expenditure of energy, just as energy can cut through the thickest metal. Millions of volts drive this train of yours through time, and they iron out paradoxes flat. Power will achieve anything. As you know.”

  Bodenland was silenced.

  Dracula began to fade into smoke and cloud. As he disappeared, he spoke again.

  “Now we are well on our way to collecting your story-writing friend.”

  In the huge agricultural plant, several box-shaped robots moved among the rows of fungi, tickling and tending them almost in silence. Under the echoing acres of roof, one sound prevailed, the pleasant sound of willow striking leather.

  “Pull up your socks, Spinks, my boy—Hampshire is forging ahead.”

  “I think light’s stopping play, sir,” gasped the gardener.

  The light was certainly dim. Spinks had dropped several catches because of it. His inefficiency encouraged Hampshire, who was hitting out. Spinks’s underarm lobs proved irresistible.

  The next ball came. Stoker struck out mightily. The ball sailed over Spinks’s head and through the open door.

  “A six!” yelled Stoker, as Spinks disappeared out of the door. “Sure, it’s a swine I am to you, my boy, and now I’ll declare.�
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  He thought to himself as he stood alone in the vast dim building, I must keep young Spinks’s spirits up as much as I can. What a reckless fool I am to have brought him on this expedition. His old mother will have it in for me when we get back. If we get back. Perhaps I should never have trusted this chap from the future. I was flattered just because he knew something about my novel … conned, I was. Fool I am. Why didn’t Flo stop me? His meditations were startlingly interrupted.

  From the far end of the plant came a glaring light. A massive moving object appeared to hurtle through the far wall, traveling at infinite speed. The light died, somehow inertia was lost, the object slowed and stopped. It was the time train.

  Stoker staggered back, flattening himself against the nearest wall, staring at this manifestation with disbelief.

  As the train stopped, it plowed through the rows of cultivated fungus, halting only a few yards from where he stood. It went through its usual sense-defying shrinkage, to end up looking no larger than an ordinary railroad carriage. There it waited in the dimness, without lights or motion.

  “I don’t believe my eyes,” said Stoker. “We’ve got you parked safe outside.” He wanted to call for Spinks but did not dare. Spinks was still outside the building.

  Stoker dropped his cricket bat in astonishment as Joe Bodenland stepped from the train, carrying the F-bomb in its red and green case. He was propelled forward by two of the Fleet Ones, the light levels obviously proving dim enough for them to tolerate. About twenty more Un-Dead emerged—a haggard army.

  Stoker picked up his bat again to defend himself.

  A gun turned on him immediately.

  “Even the Australians play fairer than that,” he said. “Back to your graves, scum!” He dropped the bat.

  “Sorry, Bram,” Bodenland called. “We’re caught in Bella’s trap. Take it easy a moment. We have a problem.”

  “So it seems.”

  Stoker fell silent as Count Dracula emerged from the train, then clutched his forehead and staggered sideways with a gesture of amazed horror which would have done his master Henry Irving credit. For the first time he was seeing the character he imagined he was creating.

  The sinister being was moving in an umbrella of shadow. His very presence seemed to lower the temperature. His cohorts were dwarfed by him. When he spoke in his deep growling voice, Dracula addressed Bodenland and Stoker.

  “You two men of strong opinion shall be spared what you most fear. You shall not join the ranks of the Un-Dead. Instead, you shall personally have the honor of detonating this F-bomb. Thus you will end the Silent Empire, and have done with human resistance to me forever.”

  He turned to the guards and ordered them to secure Bodenland and Stoker to the front of the train—with the F-bomb.

  The two men were roughly gathered together and could put up no effective resistance.

  “Think of something,” Stoker said urgently.

  “I am. I’m thinking of Mina.”

  “I was thinking of finishing my novel.”

  They were silenced by blows. Wire ropes were produced as they were pushed toward the front of the train. Dracula looked haughtily on.

  It had taken Spinks a while to find the ball Stoker had hit so brilliantly. The ball had flown through the door, into the field, and beneath the undercarriage of the time train. When at last he discovered it, he returned to the agricultural station—and stopped short when he saw what was going on.

  Bursting into the station, Spinks switched on the great overhead lights which controlled crop growth. The factory was flooded with their glare. Cries of agony rose from the Fleet Ones. They dropped their weapons to stagger about in disarray.

  Bodenland and Bram Stoker stared with stunned amazement at the apparition of a second Bodenland and Stoker rushing in through the door on the opposite side of the factory. They were armed, and ran forward firing silver bullets, faces grim.

  Vampires threw up their arms and fell to the ground under the fusillade. Some shattered and crumbled to dust beneath the brilliance pouring down on them.

  Dracula, under cover of his attendant shadow, glided back into the shelter of the train.

  Almost immediately, the train began to lose clarity, and to shudder into a greater length. Snakelike, it shot forward and disappeared from the building, leaving no trace. Dracula had escaped.

  As the train vanished, Bodenland grasped the situation.

  He gave a glad cry.

  “Bram, quick! This way!”

  He ran with the F-bomb, Bram following, out the door Spinks had just entered. He slapped the gardener’s shoulder as he passed.

  “Great work, lad.”

  The time train stood outside immobile, now encompassed by the shadow of the immense building. There were the rows of mangel-wurzels, the endless field, the endless sky—and their hope for the future.

  The men climbed aboard. Stoker slammed the door shut as Bodenland started up the generators. The train began its sickening elongation as he threw the time coordinates into reverse—ten minutes backward in time.

  The engines, geared to millions of years, squealed in disbelief, but obeyed.

  “We’ve got the bomb, Joe, why not head home?”

  “We must save ourselves. Paradox, Bram.”

  “Paradox, Joe?”

  “There’s just one time train, remember? The driver told me.”

  “Sorry, no savvy.”

  “One train. The one inside the fungus factory was this one, in another period of its existence.”

  “Where’s it gone?”

  “It’ll return, because I’ll be on it. And here we are—back ten minutes in time. Get those guns and magic bullets.”

  They jumped out hastily, loading the guns with Stoker’s silver bullets. Everything looked as it had ten minutes later. But, as they peered rather anxiously about, they saw the time train speeding from the horizon toward them, and flung themselves flat.

  “I’m on that,” Bodenland said, through gritted teeth. “I’ve just experienced a guard post being blown up and undergone a very nasty conversation with His Majesty himself.”

  Stoker rammed a last bullet home and snapped the barrel into place. “I’m sure you had a lot to talk about.”

  “He didn’t look much like Henry Irving.”

  “Sir Henry Irving, please.”

  “C’mon, let’s go!” As he shouted, the speeding train contracted and vanished into the agricultural factory.

  He led the way at a run, Stoker close on his heels. They ran round the rear of the building. It was longer than either had bargained for—at least a half-mile round to the door in the far side, and there were huge agricultural implements standing in the way.

  After a pause for breath, they stood by the entrance, readying the guns.

  Peering round the doorpost, Bodenland waited for the moment when Spinks entered by the far door. As Spinks slammed on the overhead lights, he rushed in, with Stoker just behind him.

  There was the train, there were the photophobic Un-Dead, thrown into absolute disarray by the barrage of lights. There were they themselves, Bodenland and Stoker, by the front of the train where they had been dragged, looking very shaken.

  “Fire away!”

  They blazed away with the silver bullets, and had the satisfaction of seeing the vampires collapse. Dracula was not in sight, hidden by the bulk of the train. The brief gun battle was hardly over when the train gave a lurch, distended itself, blurred, and disappeared.

  They stood there panting in triumph, watching themselves leave the scene, dashing through the other door to travel back ten minutes in time.

  Cheering wildly, they walked over to Spinks and embraced him. Spinks looked utterly bemused. “What a show! I never seen anything bigger than a rabbit shot.”

  “Cheer up, Spinks. ‘Thou shalt not serve two masters.’”

  “Oh, I enjoyed it all, sir. I must say, you really hit ’em for six!”

  But Stoker rested his arm on the doorpost
and his forehead on his arm. “The next time we do this kind of thing, I’m bringing the British Army along too.”

  “I’m going to celebrate our famous victory with a shower,” Bodenland said. “I still stink of that filthy Tripoli prison. Give me five minutes.”

  “I’ll join you,” Stoker said. “Spinks, keep watch, old chap.”

  The agricultural factory was equipped with adequate shower facilities. The two men were soon under the hot spray, and singing the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore in enthusiastic disharmony.

  “We shall now travel back into the far past and obliterate the first vampire colony at its source,” said Bodenland, as they were drying off in columns of infrared. “We owe Bernard and the rest of humanity that much.”

  “Yes, yes, I couldn’t agree more,” Stoker said, and then was silent. After a while he said, “What is it like to be a vampire, Joe? I mean, when you think about it … It’s a total perversion. In the scriptures it speaks of Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness—and we may presume other people’s wickedness as well—and live. Dracula offers his minions the reverse. Do they live? They die eternally, and are eternally dependent on other species for nourishment. Instead of the light of Heaven, they’re stuck in the night of Earth. It’s not the kind of immortality I’d find desirable at all. It’s Christianity turned upside-down.”

  “As you describe them in your book, they are like the embodiment of some appalling ancient disease.”

  Stoker scratched some of the hairier parts of his large ginger body. “‘Their throat is as an open sepulcher, with their tongues they have deceived; the poison of asps is under the lips,’ as the Psalter puts it. Which brings up the question of sex—again …”

  He was silent as they were dressing, then burst out, “What about the question of sex, Joe? In my eyes, the future has no flavor in it. No savor, no juice. What are the women there like? Would I enjoy ’em if I were free of this disease?”

  “We’re not planning a trip to the future, if that’s what you have in mind.”

  “Oh, I admire women so. I feel myself the equal of any woman alive—except Flo, of course. I told you she was once engaged to Oscar Wilde? I’ve been to bed with many crazy women. They’ve some—some essence … I can’t name it. Like a forgotten dream. That’s why I prefer them. Just as I prefer the lunatics among the poets, Clare, Smart, William Cowper, young Shelley, who was almost confined to a madhouse while still at Eton.”