A Sharpness on the Neck d-9

by Fred Saberhagen

  Dazedly, he seemed to remember Connie telling him that the transformation from breathing man to vampire, and all the changes which must accompany it, took a little time.

  Oh yes, Connie. Oh God… how could he have done the things he did, with her? But there was no question that he had.

  Maybe it was the brandy. He could try to blame his behavior on the drink.

  However miserable his regrets, simply groaning over his situation was going to be no help. He was, or had been, under a sentence of death, and he had to find some practical answers to what seemed a hundred urgent questions. Shivering with the chill of rain (his trousers and torn shirt, almost his only garments, were soaked through), he made an effort to pull himself together.

  Try to think! The last thing he could remember was… yes, of course, the scaffold. Oh God, yes. That would be the last thing he would ever forget.

  The city streets were a good distance from him in every direction. The cemetery contained a large expanse of open ground, and no doubt that was the chief reason it had been chosen to meet the needs of the People for burying-space. Those needs had turned out to be enormous.

  The summer night was not really cold, and Radcliffe's shivering soon ceased when he forced his body into a regular walk—not that he knew yet where he was going—waving his arms and beating them against his sides. His legs woke up and started to perform more normally. But his body still ached in every bone, and his head throbbed.

  Only now did Radcliffe realize that the piece of cord that had secured his wrists behind his back had somehow been removed. He ceased thrashing his hands around for a moment and gazed at them in puzzlement. Did the gravediggers routinely perform that service for their customers? He doubted it. Phil wondered dazedly if he might have broken the cord, without realizing the fact, in an access of that new vampirish strength Connie had so vividly described and demonstrated with her own body. His wrists were still chafed from being bound.

  The bell of a church clock was striking somewhere in the distance, but Philip was too muddled to count the strokes. Stranger sounds drifted to his ears from somewhere else, also far away—it sounded like some drunken mob, singing the Ca Ira.

  If only his head would stop aching—not the least of Radcliffe's practical problems was an ugly hangover.

  And this time the usual ghastliness that a hangover left in a man's mouth was compounded by an unmistakable aftertaste of blood—he remembered all too well that it was a woman's blood. Vampire blood, if the one who had called herself Constantia had been telling him the truth about anything. The thought of the gypsy woman, the vivid memories of what he and she had done together, now sent shivers of mixed repulsion and attraction along his spine.

  The gall and wormwood in his mouth had subtle but important differences from the taste of his own nosebleed or knocked-out tooth.

  There was also the savor of remembered ecstasy. But at the moment, all recent memories were predominantly horrible.

  He spat. God, but he was thirsty. All this rain, and no water anywhere to drink—

  Again the combination of taste and recalled experience provoked him to nausea, and his empty stomach retched.

  But to hell with blood, and to hell with gypsy women, whether they were vampires or not. The fundamental fact that Philip Radcliffe had to bring himself to face was that he knew his head had been cut off.

  He could remember, damn it! They had dragged him up there on the scaffold, and… he could almost remember the impact of the falling blade…

  All right, everything wasn't exactly clear, just at the vital point. Go back a little farther. Far enough so that memory was plain and unequivocal. Somewhere sense and sanity must be attainable.

  Very clearly the young man remembered having his hands bound by one of the jailers before he'd left the prison. Even now his wrists were sore, in evidence of that. Then he remembered being in the narrow courtyard where the great carts were loaded with the condemned, its stone walls seemingly threatening to crush him. No doubt about that either. Then the ride to the scaffold, in a large cart pulled by a team of horse and crowded with his fellow victims. There had been jeering crowds along the way.

  Very little time had elapsed between the termination of that ride and the moment when the lights went out for Philip Radcliffe. It was the events just before the end of consciousness which were hard to pin down—like trying to remember the exact moment when you fell asleep. But yes! With a little effort he now clearly recalled being half-marched, half-carried up the steps.

  The fierce, dark eyes of the executioner, the great shock of the falling knife—and also the sharp tug on his recently shortened hair, as the executioner displayed his head—or someone's—to the routinely cheering crowd.

  … the great shock of the falling knife…

  But wait a minute! He could not possibly have watched, looking on as a spectator, seeing from the rear his own head being held up for display. Oh yes, he'd recognized his head; there was even the small white bandage on the crown…

  Whatever the answer, however the mystery of what had happened on the scaffold might finally be explained, here he was now, alive—yes, alive—in what was certainly a cemetery. Peering around him in the darkness, he at last made out, at a distance of some thirty or forty yards, the raw earth mounded beside a trench.

  At least the gravediggers had not ripped the clothes from his body. That, he had learned in prison, was what those predatory vultures often did.

  The clothes Radcliffe had been wearing when he was arrested, and while he was in prison, had been only ordinary. His coat had been taken from him when his wrists were bound, and the collar of his shirt had been ripped open. Small wonder that the petty thieves in the cemetery had not bothered with what was left, if they'd had the chance. There had lately been no shortage of finer garments for their selection.

  If he'd had a hat, they'd certainly have taken that. Hats must be one item they very seldom encountered in the course of business. The idea of a man wearing a hat to his own beheading suddenly struck Radcliffe as tremendously amusing, and he began to chuckle, an ugly sound. But of course he'd been hatless when his would-be murderers had dragged him from his cell to have his head cut off.

  While these thoughts were running through his mind, unconsciously he had started walking again, toward the pale blob that he thought must represent a mound of raw earth.

  In prison he'd also heard the gruesome details about the burial mound, the endlessly long mass grave whose active end was excavated every morning for the day's harvest of bodies, and filled in every evening—that was the place where Marie and Melanie sometimes came to do their work.

  His feet slowed to a stop, dragging through the grass. Suppose, just suppose, he'd never been in the hands of the gravediggers at all.

  Slowly Radcliffe came to realize that some clue to the solution of his mystery might lie in the fact that he had come to himself lying perhaps forty or fifty yards from the place where the bodies were routinely dumped—and where the gravediggers had been, or ought to be, industriously at work.

  He wanted to see the place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. He set out to reach it.

  When he had covered half of the remaining distance to his goal, stalking stiff-legged toward the mass grave, a pair of young lovers burst up from the ground like startled birds, almost at Radcliffe's feet. Tripping on their own half-shed clothing, they ran away screaming through the darkness when he came toward them. Alarmed by this eruption, he almost turned and ran in the opposite direction.

  In his imagination, recalling his nightmare, Radcliffe pictured his headless body separating itself from the jumbled, gory pile, finding his head and putting it back on. Then his reconstituted self had tottered away, under his own power, before the gravediggers had been given a chance to do anything at all with him. The shadow of a nightmare, already almost forgotten, came to plague him again.

  He shuffled slowly forward.

  Yes, damn it all, his head had been cut off. H
e could remember the event… or at least parts of it, a moment here and there. But no, he couldn't actually remember his hands groping for his head, pulling it into place.

  But now his head was definitely on his shoulders, as firmly attached as it had ever been.

  If Sanson and his great machine hadn't been able to kill him, that meant, according to all Connie had told him, that he, Philip Radcliffe, had become a vampire. What other possible explanation could there be?

  The marks left on his throat by Connie's fangs—they had been real enough—were genuine. They didn't hurt, but he could locate them with the sensitive surface of a fingertip, like tiny pimples.

  He drew a deep breath of pride. Pride more in his own sanity, in the integrity of his memory, rather than on the occasion of his joining a gloriously different race of men. Connie, as he remembered her, was real.

  But in the next moment, drawing a deep breath, he realized that everything wasn't settled yet. Ought he, as a vampire still to be breathing?

  What might have been the basis for an alternate explanation loomed in his exhausted mind: Were all his recent memories, including his trip to the scaffold, only the fabric of a hideous dream? But maybe all of life was one great dream; that answered nothing.

  In Radcliffe's current mental state, only one thing seemed incontestably true: He was no longer in prison. And for that he could be devoutly thankful.

  At last approaching closely the mound of fresh earth, Radcliffe was afforded his first good look at the Revolution's most recent crop of corpses. Tonight's shift of gravediggers had not yet finished their job. Now he could hear their voices rising from a little distance and see the indirect glow of a small light, where they had taken shelter under an awning stretched out from the side of a wagon. They were distracted in some dispute among themselves, perhaps over some clothing or other valuables taken from the latest batch of victims.

  But it was the silent victims, or their bodies rather, most of their arms still bound behind their backs, that drew Philip with a sickly fascination.

  He shuffled toward them to take a closer look.

  He recoiled from their staring eyes, reflecting faint gleams of stars and moon, or distant torches.

  Some of the mouths in the head-pile were open, and their eyes indifferently looked at him, and at each other, like the eyes of dead fish. Dazedly, feeling that what he did was no more than was now expected of him, he picked one up. This, Marie had told him, was what Melanie did, helping out her helpful cousin.

  He maneuvered his hands carefully, to avoid touching the raw neck-stump (odd, but most of the neck seemed to have disappeared) and to touch the face as little as possible.

  If Melanie could do this, he could too.

  The hair offered the easiest and surest grip. The weight was not surprising, seeming neither too little nor too much.

  He threw aside the peculiar object. The modest weight went bouncing, rolling, across the muddy and uncaring earth.

  Someone, he supposed, would pick it up again and bring it back.

  The rain was slackening off.

  There was a burst of laughter from where the gravediggers had gathered. Now their meeting, whatever it had been for, was breaking up. They were grumbling and laughing, and he could see their lantern bobbing toward him.

  How long he stumbled to and fro in the long grass around the border of the churchyard, making his way from one tall fence to another, looking for a gate, anxious to do something but not knowing what to do next, he was never able to determine. When the sky in the east began to brighten, behind clusters of leaden clouds, he remembered certain promises that Legrand and Connie had made, warnings they had given him while he was in prison. And Radcliffe expected that the morning sunlight when it appeared was going to kill him.

  Suddenly the wonder concerning his own miraculous survival was overridden by an obsessive urge to locate Melanie. In his shock and amazement he had almost forgotten the plan of escape Legrand had outlined to him. There were certain things that he, Radcliffe, was required to do once he had left the prison walls behind. Somewhere he would be given forged papers, providing a new identity for himself… though whether a vampire would need papers or not… and Melanie would be given hers…

  He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Yes, Melanie. Once he had found her, everything else could be made to come out all right And Philip clearly remembered the address where she was to be found. And the directions for getting there.

  Rain fell intermittently throughout the remainder of the night, keeping Radcliffe's short, raggedly cut hair wet, and running down his face.

  Running his hand through his hair at one point, he noticed vaguely that his bandage was gone. It must have finally come loose somewhere.

  … then there was no getting away from it. Crazy or not, it had really happened. Or most of it, the key parts. He had survived the guillotine. He was a vampire now. Brother to Legrand, and sister, no longer lover (the thought brought a pang of sharp regret) of Constantia the gypsy.

  At last finding a gate that he could climb, he trudged away from the cemetery, moving in the direction where the city lights glowed brightest. Putting a finger in his mouth, he tested the sharpness of his teeth. Still one missing, ever since that brawl years ago in Philadelphia. The others' shape had not changed one iota, as far as he could tell. Not a bit pointier than they had ever been.

  As he stumbled into a puddle it occurred to him to wonder why, if he had really undergone the tremendous transformation, he could not see better in the darkness?

  He had walked a quarter of a mile from the cemetery, through darkened and almost completely deserted streets, before he found water in a drinkable form. Rainwater standing in a barrel, beside one of the outbuildings of a small church.

  He drank and drank, slaking a terrible thirst, then plunged his whole head into the water, and pulled it out. Now, for the first time in days, it seemed, he began to feel completely awake. Brandy and vampire blood were slowly being purged from his system.

  The rain had stopped again, and the unaccustomed shortness of his hair gave him a sense of coolness, and of liberation. Where his bandage had fallen off he could feel a tender scar.

  But he had seen the bandage on that detached head, his own head, as it was held up by its hair…

  Another sensation was finally becoming identifiable. He was desperately hungry.

  So, I am one of them now. Or am I? Still he could not settle the matter, one way or the other, with any degree of satisfaction. He raised his arms, feeling his head with his fingers, testing its connection to his body. He seemed to be as totally in one piece as he had ever been. With tongue and fingers he once more tested the sharpness of his teeth. His skin flowed without interruption, smoothly from jaw to throat to chest—except for Constantia's tiny fang-marks—and save that he once more badly needed a shave; Marie's visit to his cell had been days ago.

  The aftermath of brandy, seasoned with a few drops of genuine vampire-blood, was still throbbing in his head. Yesterday's unsurpassable delight still lay as this morning's cold nausea in the stomach.

  There, for an hour or two, he had known beyond all doubt that he was a vampire…

  With the directions for reaching Dr. Curtius's museum fixed in his mind, Radcliffe plodded doggedly on his way.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Radcliffe, moving with a strange sense of freedom, even a growing (and dangerous) perception of his own invulnerability, found his way to the Boulevard du Temple with only a couple of wrong turnings. Once he asked directions from a streetcleaner, and the man, assured by his provincial accent that he was from out of town, gave him directions willingly. Fortunately no one bothered him about papers.

  Philip had never before visited the House of Wax. In prison he had heard from Marie Grosholtz herself that she expected soon to inherit the property and the business from Dr. Curtius. It stood on a broad street that must be briskly busy in the daytime.

  A prominent signboard, and now just above
that a painted banner, faced the street, each declaring that this place was the Salon de Cire.

  The sun was not yet quite up when Radcliffe arrived, but every minute more people were stirring in the streets, and soon traffic would be heavy. Not wishing to be conspicuous, he paused outside the first side door he came to in the big building and uncertainly experimented, half-willing himself to pass through the narrow crevice. He was not really surprised to find himself unable to pass through knife-edge cracks beside doors, or melt his body into mist. But maybe, he thought, this whole structure counted as a dwelling.

  In keeping with a growing sense that things were being made easy for him this morning, his way somehow smoothed, Philip found a door toward the rear of the main building standing slightly ajar, as though someone had forgotten to close it.

  Listening, he could hear faint snores from open windows in the upper stories, where he thought there must be living quarters.

  He entered through the door he had found open and quietly pulled it shut behind him. He was standing in a dim, drab corridor, more closed doors on either side. The first one he tried showed him a broom closet. The second, a kind of storeroom, very much larger.

  Led by his instincts, and a growing curiosity, he went in.

  Working his way silently into the large storeroom, Radcliffe moved among the silent and unmoving shapes of lifeless kings and queens, prelates and murderers, admirals and generals.

  The first bright glow of the morning's daylight caught his eye, entering the room through a high window. Looking where that light fell upon a set of shelves, Philip Radcliffe came face to face with his own severed, lifeless head.

  When the world had righted itself again, he approached the shelf and helped himself to another, closer look. He had needed only a second to realize that this must be the model made by Marie Grosholtz. Now he could appreciate her artistry.

  There was the white bandage, stuck on amid the short, dark hair which was indistinguishable from his own hair… because, Radcliffe realized with sudden insight, raising a hand to his scalp, it was his own, trimmed from his head in his prison cell by Marie herself on the day when she had made her plaster cast.