The Holmes-Dracula File d-2

by Fred Saberhagen

  Farther toward the gaslit regions I could not venture naked, and so turned back to midnight territory. Here the night was not entirely silent either. And the way was far from uninhabited, though it looked empty at first glance. When I focused my keen senses and my keener purpose, I could detect in almost every quarter wheezy breathing and the movement, in uneasy sleep, of ragged limbs. These came from almost any spot that offered some concealment and the promise of a little shelter against rain and wind—a doorway here, a row of dustbins there, a hedge across the way.

  Although in December the situation might have been quite different, on such a balmy night in early June there were great throngs of London vagabonds, of both sexes and all ages, who preferred the risks of freedom to the gray walls of workhouse or charitable shelter. With an effortless stealth that kept my own presence unseen and unheard, I slid from one secreted sleeper to the next, inspecting them and passing on. Only a cat upon a windowsill reacted to my soft passage, with a faint snarl of vague concern. She quieted when I had looked into her yellow eyes.

  So many derelicts were abroad hereabouts that it took me only a few minutes to locate a sleeping man whose physical measurements quite closely approximated my own. He was a-shudder already with some nightmare, his long limbs trembling, as I reached inside the angle of the disused doorway where he slept, and hauled him to his feet, with such a good grip on his collar that the seams of the ragged coat I coveted at once began to yield.

  "Softly!" The word hissed from my lips in low but fierce command. I had seen that my client's mouth was opening, even before his eyelids began to flutter, and his larynx was in a preparatory state of vibration, tuning up for a mad scream of terror.

  "Softly!" I urged him. "And those dreams of wealth that you must sometimes nurse shall find at least modest fulfillment. But the first loud sound you utter must be drowned out at once by the sharp crackling of your own bones—and that is such a revolting noise that I grow angry if I am forced to listen to it. Surely you will not choose to anger me?"

  Whilst I was reasoning with him thus, his eyes opened in the worn leather of his face—they seemed to go on opening forever—and fixed on me. The few bad teeth remaining in his mouth were like to break themselves with chattering. And his trembling legs, their joints at every moment seeking a new angle, seemed utterly unable to support his meager weight. But fortunately—for both of us, perhaps—the scream still hung unvoiced within his throat.

  Having made sure of this, I eased my grip a trifle, to let his own feet assume most of their rightful load. "I mean you no harm, my man," I went on. "I simply require your rags, or those of someone of your shape, and I see no reason why you should not be the one to benefit from my generosity. In payment for the abominable clothing you are wearing, I offer this." And between thumb and forefinger. I held up a gold sovereign. "A fair price, is it not?"

  It was of course a princely overpayment. Yet I was forced to repeat my offer several times before the oaf could master his terrors sufficiently to stammer out a crude agreement. So protracted was this delay, and the fumble-fingered unbuttoning which followed, that I came near letting him fall back to the pavement, and going on my way in search of someone brighter with whom to trade.

  In glancing back over the account of this event I have just written, I am convinced that some of my modern readers will have doubts (to say the least) that I should have been so patient and generous when I so sorely needed clothing. Why did not I, with all my boasted stealth and night-vision, break into some house or shop and steal garments that were clean and whole? Or waylay some victim in the dark and strip him forcibly? Well, I shall return to this point later. For the present, let me only remark that I cannot, and never could, abide a thief.

  Thus I concluded purchase of cap, coat, shirt, trousers, and a pair of shoes that would never have come close to fitting me had the soles still been in reasonable communion with the uppers. These clothes were aswarm in their every decayed seam with a variety of vermin, who at my silent shout of command leaped one and all, like sailors from a drowning ship, onto the cobblestones. This dominating rapport with less-than-human life was as much part of me as my pulse, and in my addled state I never remarked to myself upon the fact that the folk around me gave no evidence of enjoying any such power.

  With my nakedness now covered, I could walk openly along the lighted streets. In that quarter of the city there walked many who had no better garb than mine. The late shops all seemed to be closing now, but I thought that in the morning I would be able to enter one and buy some better clothes… if I survived till then.

  I was now grown so tired that only an effort of will kept me from staggering openly. In this way I moved on through the foggy streets, no conscious goal in mind. When in extremis it is not the intellect I trust, but something deeper and more elemental, whether it be called blind Fortune, or a warrior's instincts.

  The city darkened as lights went out in one window after another. Brushing past me in the murk, the homeless and the relatively prosperous alike had turned their thoughts to shelter and to sleep. My own limbs now felt not much stronger than those of the man from whom I had my clothing. Only the fact that it was as yet not much past midnight gave me the strength I needed to move on. Every instinct warned me that from this hour my strength must wane, till dawn came like a fire to burn away my life—unless before dawn I had found rest.

  By now my wanderings had brought me out upon the great thoroughfare called Commercial Road. Comparing what I saw about me with the blotched palimpsest of my memory, I gained some vague awareness of my location within London, and judged that Limehouse must be near ahead. Whether to push on farther to the east, or turn my steps some other way, I could not immediately decide. I stumbled and nearly fell, less from my broken shoes than from sheer deadly weariness. Folk hurried past in the slum street, paying no attention to my difficulties. Even my will wavered momentarily. Then I stoked up the flickering fires of life within my soul, and chose.

  Scarcely had I proceeded fifty yards along the dim street of my selection, when the flare of a private gaslight came into view immediately ahead, shining full upon a sign whose painted message I at once accepted as an omen. In bold lettering it promised to all in need the solace of their Savior, in the most eminently practical form of food and lodging.

  Though there was money in my pockets, I had so far avoided all hotels and lodging houses, feeling certain in my bones that their soft beds would offer me no more repose than had my prisoner's cot, or the rough planking of the pier. But this hostel, with its tender of more than ordinary help, seemed something different, and I was immediately drawn to it.

  I had, as I was later to realize, chanced upon one of the first shelters operated by the Salvation Army. The sturdy outer doors were on the verge of closing for the night, but their keeper—a charity case himself, to judge by his apparel—delayed long enough to admit me, along with one additional latecomer. This last, a patch-eyed fellow with a sailor's rolling gait, came hurrying along behind me.

  The gatekeeper, as he barred the doors behind us, recited in a sort of doggerel the basic rules of the establishment. Between my own weariness and his thick country accent being unfamiliar to me, I failed to extract much of his meaning. This was no loss, for the laws were also posted beside an inner door, for the benefit of all guests who could read. Another small sign there announced the availability of tea and soup, in the canteen, for a charge of only a few pence; and I believe that if I had sworn myself penniless, nourishment and lodging would both have been provided gratis.

  The man who ladled out the soup and poured the tea looked twice at me, and at my shilling thrice. But he took it and said nothing, and contrived to make my change, though no doubt he was seldom handed anything but coppers. I carried mug and bowl and spoon over to a heavy trestle table, dimly lighted but quite recently scrubbed clean. The one-eyed sailor perforce followed me, for all other furniture had been stacked or upended to make way for a recent mopping of the floor, which stil
l shone damp.

  The soup-man went away upon some chore, and we two were left alone in the large room. After tasting my soup, I passed it over to the sailor, in whose eyes I thought I could see the reflexive greed of those who live habitually near starvation. He was not reluctant to accept, and wolfed down the contents of my bowl even before beginning upon his own, perhaps in fear that I might change my mind.

  It was natural enough, then, that we should begin to exchange a few words, and so my soup bought me a little information regarding the hostel to which I had been led by fate. I sat with my face mostly in the shadow of the distant lamp, pretending from time to time to sip a little tea. When we were finished in the canteen, we found ourselves assigned, as latecomers, not to the rows of ordinary cots which filled a long, dim dormitory room, but rather to an even older-looking chamber hard nearby. This room was smaller and even darker than the other, and in it the beds were not raised in the ordinary way. Rather they were thin pallets fixed right on the floor, and encased in bed-sized boxes, so that they looked like nothing so much as a row of coffins set out to accommodate the victims of some middle-sized disaster. The great majority of these beds were empty.

  The disaster of which we were the victims was of course the world—such was my dark thought as I looked upon the beds, and smelled the misery, and heard from the troubled sleepers in the next room almost continual groans, interspersed with strange prayers, oaths, and all the muttered illogic of bad dreams.

  With my new companion I proceeded slowly along the row of bleak containers, of which we had our almost complete choice. The instinct that had drawn me to enter this place still held, and I still trusted in it, though as yet I could not see that it had helped me in the least. The sailor by now had begun to talk of the possibility of finding work along the docks, where no man was asked for his background or his papers. As I half-listened to him, my attention was captured by a curious fact: the odd receptacles before me were covered, one and all, with oilcloth, tightly sewn on. I squatted down beside one empty box to feel of the material, so very like that of my erstwhile prison rack.

  The sailor had come to a stand beside the next coffin in the long row. Now he cackled, having put a perhaps natural misinterpretation upon my behavior. "Not quite yer silk or satin, is it, Matey?" He had promptly sized me up as one used to richer surroundings than these.

  I stroked the fabric. "I was just wondering why they used this stuff?"

  "Why?" He bent a little, to peer at me the better. "Why? 'Cause erlcloth won't offer a snug place't' no bugs. Wot did yer think?"

  "In any case, I tolerate no such creatures about my person," I replied, absentmindedly fastidious. No doubt my voice contained more lordliness than appeared warranted by my situation.

  "We-ell! I craves yer pardon most 'umbly, I'm sure, Yer Grace. Or might it be Yer Worship, or jist wot?" He felt strong, with my soup to fortify his belly.

  But I was paying him very little attention. Holding in one hand the thin blanket I had been issued upon leaving the canteen, I stepped into that strange bed as I might have moved from a sinking ship into a lifeboat that I did not expect would float. If I could not find here the repose that I had so far been denied, I knew that I must die with the first rays of dawn.

  My neighbor meanwhile was stripping himself completely in preparation to retire. This seemed to be the common practice here, judging by the clothes piled up where other men were sleeping, doubtless on the old theory that a bare skin is less attractive to vermin than one snugly wrapped. I had limited my own undressing to the removal of my cheap cloth cap; and now I noted in passing that the long hair swinging before my eyes had, since my heavy feeding, acquired a strong mixture of youthful brown amid its gray.

  There was no point in further hesitation, and quickly I lay down, and quickly knew my doom. No sooner had I willed to rest, than came again the quivering spasms along the muscles of my arms, my back, my legs. To turn in my bed, to stretch, to twist, to exert the full power of my will, availed me nothing. I could not be still. No matter what I did inside the oilcloth coffin, I should never be allowed to rest.

  Why, then, had my deepest instincts led me to this strange bed? I sat upright and glared at it.

  The sailor, now snugly blanket-wrapped in his own box, appeared almost luxuriously comfortable. " 'Is Mightiness maybe finds the shape of 'is bed not to 'is fancy? Har, har! Doss down in yer coffin like a brave 'un, Milord!"

  I turned my gaze upon him, suddenly and with what must have been an unexpected force, for he fell abruptly silent and shrank away, squinting narrowly at me with his one eye. Yet I was hardly aware of the fellow himself. It was the full unconscious meaning of his words that had struck me—aye, struck me!—with almost the impact of a second oaken cudgel, so that for several long seconds I could hardly, move. Lord… yes! And coffin… yes!

  But it was my own coffin that I needed, that I might find rest in my own homeland's holy soil!

  With a single shock, the shards of my broken memory fell almost completely into place. I cast the poor thin blanket down and slowly stood erect, rising there amid the lost men, the gloom, the mumbled, hopeless prayers and curses, the fetor of illness and defeat.

  Aye, "Your Grace" I once had been, indeed! And even higher honors than a dukedom had been mine. In my own land I had ruled as Prince, four hundred years and more before this fool who gibed at me was born! The sailor crouched far down, then made as if to scramble from his box upon the side away from me. There must have been low growling in my throat, as I stepped from that false coffin. My long-nailed fingers must have worked, as if the man named Matthews and the still-nameless doctor were before me.

  Where was my trunkful of good Transylvanian earth? It must long since have been unloaded from the ship, whose gangplank I had descended to the London dock… great heaven, how many unresting days ago? I had voyaged to England again, of course, because of…

  "Mina!" I groaned aloud, casting the name of my beloved violently into that foul air. It was with relief sharp enough to be a shock that I realized in the next moment that my dear Mina must be quite safe, long miles away in Exeter. Her absence left me unencumbered for the war to come.

  Oh, it was going to be a war, indeed! I knew not how many were against me, opponents clever, mysterious, and powerful. But the odds would not be all upon my enemies' side, although I fought alone. They were but breathing men, and I was vampire, immune to metal, knife or bullet; with the strength of twenty always in my sinews; capable during the hours of night of changing my form to that of an animal, or of a mist impalpable, and changing back again to man.

  And no one in the world of 1897 had more experience of war than I—Count Dracula.

  Chapter Six

  As we rode from the docks back to our lodgings, Holmes maintained an irritable near-silence. Twice he began remarks upon extraneous subjects, but in each instance let his sentence die incomplete, and in such indifferent fashion that no reply seemed called for. This was so at variance with his customary manner of speech, and with his usual ability to divert his thoughts at will from professional matters, that it confirmed my impression of his having been profoundly disturbed by the riverfront murder.

  "Holmes," I offered, with the idea of diverting him, "have you given any consideration to watching Her Majesty's Jubilee procession? There are people asking outrageous prices for the mere privilege of sitting an hour or two in a window of a room along the route. With half a dozen strangers as company, I suppose."

  "Bah, I have no time," Holmes muttered. His tone was scarcely civil, and he continued to stare from the window of the cab as if hidden among the passers-by there were some arch-enemy who had just managed to escape him.

  As we alighted from the cab in Baker Street, a ragged urchin darted toward Holmes from a nearby doorway, where he had evidently been in wait.

  "Got yer message, sir," this small and rather unsavory person reported, giving his hatless forelock a touch that bore some resemblance to a military salute. "I been to the
Northumberland, and neither the boots nor the maids remembers any particular gentleman wot would answer the description, sir."

  "Well done, Murray." Holmes dropped coins into the grimy hand that shot out to accept them. "And what news of the dogs and rats?"

  "Market in stray dogs is quite steady, sir. In rats—to tell the truth, I ain't been able to find out. None of me chums with connections along that line has been where I could discover 'em. I'll be going right off to 'ave another look."

  Holmes dismissed the lad with a nod. When we had ascended to our rooms, I ventured to inquire whether the state of the market in dogs or rats might have any bearing upon any of his cases with which I was acquainted.

  Stuffing his pipe with dark shag, Holmes only grunted in reply, and passed over to me without comment a visitor's card that had been left while we were out. The name it bore was that of Peter Moore, the American manufacturer of medical and scientific goods. The back bore a short written message:

  Will call again in an hour or so. Am very anxious that everything possible be done to find John Scott.

  After passing me the card, Holmes stood for a little while brooding out upon the warm spring afternoon beneath our window. Down in the street, children shouted in merriment over some game; a bird gave voice, and the sun shone warmly. The horror of the docks seemed to belong to another world, and shortly my friend managed to shake off the black mood that had threatened to engulf him, and turned to me with a small smile.

  "My apologies, Watson. Your question is of course a fair one, and I only wish that I were certain of the answer. My thought is that the equipment belonging to Dr. John Scott can be of real use only to a medical experimenter. And, as we have seen, it is not logical that the items were stolen, with considerable risk, effort, and expense, in order to be sold. Then does it not follow that they were taken simply to be used?"