The Dracula Tape

by Fred Thomas Saberhagen.

  No, Jonathan Harker, if you can hear me, I suppose that I can hardly blame you for what you later did to me. Nor did I feel much pity for Melisse, Wanda, and fair Anna when Van Helsing the sadist eventually came calling…

  But I must adhere to the order of my story. On my last night before leaving Castle Dracula I supped full well, on bright beef blood-not from mere appetite, though I had that, but with a view to acquiring a more youthful look. Of course I had not seen my own face in a mirror for some four hundred years-it may be evidence of some benign plan for the world, that neither do I have a regular need to shave-but from certain words dropped now and then by my occasional companions, I had gathered that my recent appearance was that of an old man, white of hair and mustache though quite hale, and on occasion red-eyed like some animal caught in a beam of one of the new electric lights. This aspect I could alter by regular heavy feeding, and meant to do so in case Harker should after all have the hue and cry out for me by the time I reached England.

  I supped well, as I say, and expected to rest well too, trying out another of my stout new traveling beds. There is not much can rouse a vampire in bright day, when he has gone, fully sated, to his earth. One sure alarm clock of course is the sharp point of the wooden stake entering his rib cage, with a strong and determined arm hammering behind it. This I know, though of course not yet by direct experience. What is it about wood that makes the stuff, under the proper conditions, so utterly, no-nonsense lethal to my kind? That it itself was once alive but is no more? Metal, that hacks up in such fine style the flesh of breathing men and draws out the rich red streams of life from them, is alien to us and cannot find its way to kill. It bounces off, disperses through, and interpenetrates our peculiar flesh, but cannot transfer fatal force to us. Silver bullets? Their efficacy is mere superstition as far as vampires are concerned.

  But metal hurt me in my box that day, a sharp-edged spade swung in the desperate grip of Harker, who once more had dared the castle's slippery outer wall to gain my rooms, who once more ransacked my chambers and my vaults in hopes of finding there a key or other means of getting out in daylight on his own. He found me in a box again, and, this time yielding to the impulse to do murder, snatched up the nearby digging implement.

  Imagine the deepest sleep that you have ever slept, the hardest to break free from, and multiply its inertia by tenfold. In dreamless near-oblivion I lay so, a leaden lethargy, a numbness, wound like chains on all my limbs. He might have found me, searched me, raped me, and I would neither have known nor cared until sundown. But when he took up the spade, the psychic blow, the impulse of wholehearted murder came singing through the vaulted air to rouse me, to begin my rousing, well before the whistling blade itself struck home.

  "Bloody bastard." His voice was only a faint wheezing moan but yet I heard it clearly. "Monstrous bloody bloated leech."

  My eyes were open, had been open all along, but only slowly, blurrily, did the blindness of trance clear from them. I realized that the lid of my box had been pulled open, for there was the groining of the stone above. There was light, faint daylight whispering down through many a room and passageway. And off in one corner of my vision, Harker's face, at first only a whitish oval blur, and then as my sight cleared and my eyes began to focus, a mask of madness, the face of breathing Man as he exists in all the vampire nightmares that ever were, mask of the hunter, persecutor, stake pounder, who would cleanse his world by making sacrificial goats of the undead.

  Coming so very slowly and hopelessly up out of trance-I would not be in time, I knew, to act effectively in self-defense-I realized for the first time and with detachment that Harker had lost weight as my guest-his arms were thinner in their dirty sleeves-that his hair hung down disheveled around an evilly transformed face, that his shaving had been spotty at best during the weeks since he had lost his mirror.

  "Bloody bastard!" he grated out again, and in the midst of that last word his voice broke on a sob. And with a little whining screech of indrawn breath he raised the spade, held it high in both hands for an edge-down swing straight at my face.

  I am not boasting when I say I was not terrified. Later on I will discourse of fear. I say now only that I watched, unhappily, as that heavy blow came down. Impossible to do more than turn my head and try to glare at my attacker. The shovel struck in the middle of my forehead, and I took the shock and pain of it through my head, and tried to no avail to move my hands and feet, and thought that in a second more the blow would come again.

  And Harker? What saw he? "… a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semidemons to batten on the helpless… I seized a shovel… and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned and the eyes fell full upon me with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead." In rebuttal I can only reiterate that the sight of Harker swinging a shovel at my head was somewhat perturbing to me as well.

  Unnerved by my movement and by the failure of this first attack to destroy me, he let the shovel slip from his hands and it somehow brought the box lid slamming down, leaving me to wait in darkness for his next move. It is perhaps fortunate for those interested in this history that at this point our tete-a-tete was interrupted, by "a gypsy song sung in merry voices," offstage but approaching, and accompanied by other noises of the Szgany who were coming with heavy wagons into the courtyard to begin my move. Harker fled back upstairs to scribble more into his journal. As soon as the coast was clear of gypsies he took the daring chance of climbing down the whole surface of the castle wall, and shortly got clear away upon his own initiative. My carriage rested empty that day, and Tatra put on his coachman's livery for nothing.

  Had my guest stayed with me a little longer and put his wits to work he might well have done me serious or even fatal damage. Of course a simple attack with a metal tool was doomed to fail, a point Harker might profitably have remembered later, when he and I resumed our social intercourse. By now the mark has entirely disappeared from my forehead-wouldn't you say?-or at least my fingers can no longer find the ridgelike scar, and no one has remarked upon it for some decades.

  But I had been given a throbbing head, and some fresh food for thought, viaticum for my journey; I was in no state to communicate with the loyal Szgany as they nailed down my lid and began to roll me down the long road to the sea.

  TRACK TWO

  My overland journey, some five or six hundred kilometers across the Transylvanian Alps and eastward through the banat, the fertile plain, was uneventful. Once out of the mountains the roads were good, and my Szgany made good time with their wagons.

  The sun of early July beat down upon my box as we passed through the city you call Bucharest-did you know I named it Cetatesa Bucurestilor, in 1459, when it was one of my important fortresses? For a time it was my capital. We crossed the Danube shortly thereafter, and by the evening of July fifth we were in Varna, on the Black Sea, from which port I would take ship for England.

  Varna. I suppose the name means little or nothing to you now. In 1444, in a battle fought nearby, the young King Vladislav III of Poland died under Turkish swords, and Janos Hunyadi himself was lucky to escape the field of battle alive, with the aid of my Walachian kinsmen.

  No, I was not there. I was thirteen years old in 1444, and already fighting battles of my own, without an army for support. When the Christians and the Turks fought near Varna I was away amid the mountains of Asia Minor, in Egrigoz, a hostage for my father's cooperation with the Turks; imprisoned with me was my brother Radu, the one they called the Handsome later, who then was only six…

  Can you picture me as a child? No more than Hitler, I suppose. But all who have at any time
been human have traversed that phase, and I remember it. As the twig is bent… Great twig benders were those Turkish jailors of my youth. Never mind. They came to fear me ere I left their walls some four years later.

  As I say, my journey, to the Black Sea port was uneventful. My Szgany handed me over to my agent, Petrof Skinsky, and he in turn to the good Herr Leutner, with whom I had been in correspondence but who was too modern a man to ever have credited tales of nosferatu if they had reached his ears. Of Skinsky I was not so sure; and I will have a little more to tell you about him later.

  So Leutner took faithful charge of my fifty large boxes of earth, and saw to it that they were loaded aboard ship, never dreaming that the consignor himself was voyaging along, his luggage of money and spare clothes packed in a sturdy traveling bag beneath him in the soil. I was shipped aboard the schooner Demeter, bound for Whitby, which is, as some of my hearers may not know, on the Yorkshire coast about three hundred kilometers north of London.

  I had ridden some river-going craft before but the Demeter's was my first sea voyage. Emerging from my box on the first night out-the box I happened to be in had been stowed beneath several others, but between sunset and dawn I can pass if I wish through a crack narrower than a knifeblade-I walked in man-shape up from the hold, and attained the deck by sliding through the watertight sealing of a hatch. In the comforting dark of night I could perceive a mass of land on the horizon to our starboard; the sea around was otherwise clear to the horizon, and a fresh east wind blew from astern. There were three other men on deck, and I did not long remain. By careful reconnoitering during those first nights of the voyage, I ascertained that there were nine men in all on board besides myself, five Russian sailors, a Russian captain and second mate, and the first mate and the cook, who were both Romanian.

  Also I used my senses diligently, especially during the hours of darkness, to learn what I could of this new world of the sea. As you no doubt realize, I have some command of wind and weather, and had naturally considered using these powers to facilitate my journey. The difficulty, as I soon came to understand, was that although I was able to remember our course very well as we traversed each part of it in turn-we vampires having what I suppose would now be called an inertial guidance system, or something akin to one-I had not the slightest feel for where we should be going, which way to tell the wind to push. I had of course the pure intellectual knowledge that my destination's name was England, and that it was to be reached by a roundabout passage through the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. But this knowledge would be of small help in trying to speed the ship on its way, and so I was content to observe and try to learn.

  Five days out of port we reached the Bosporus, and a day later we passed through the Dardanelles and entered the Mediterranean. It was at about this point, as I now suspect, that the first mate began to be aware of my nocturnal wanderings. I do not believe that he had actually seen me yet, but by means of the marginal perceptions that breathing humans sometimes have he came somehow to know that a tenth presence inhabited the ship after nightfall; that now a plank creaked slightly beneath an unfamiliar tread; that again there was no shadow on the moonlit deck just where a shadow should have lain, and that darkness lay instead just where the moonbeams should have fallen clear.

  Sailors are a superstitious lot; I had not realized before how true this truism was. And the mate was a man, as I now suppose, abnormally sensitive to the abnormal; on July fourteenth, the eighth day of our voyage, the men having evidently caught the contagion of fear from the first mate, one of them disputed him about something and was struck. Whether the quarrel was about an apparition in the night or something totally unrelated I do not know, as it took place in daylight when I was snug below and my only knowledge of it is from my enemies' records.

  These records also make the following night, that of July fifteenth to sixteenth, as the first on which I was actually seen by any of the crew. As the captain duly entered in his log, one of the seamen, "awestruck," reported watching "a tall thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward, and disappear." I had grown careless, and even a little carelessness is always bad.

  On that night I still had no suspicion that my presence aboard was creating a stir, but when I roused at the following sunset I became aware that everything in the hold around me had been disarranged. My boxes were all moved at least slightly from their original positions, and the ballast of silver sand had been much trampled on.

  There was no sign of any leak or other nautical emergency which would have required the crew to do so much labor in the hold, nor had I the feeling that a storm had come and gone. What then? The evidence suggested to me that the hold had been searched, though fortunately not with the thoroughness that would have been necessary to dig me from my earth.

  The crew then, or some of them, probably suspected that something was amiss. But having searched around me once, they were not likely to search the hold again without good cause; so I thought, at any rate, and determined to lay low for a night or two. Thus I found out only later that one of the seamen had disappeared on the night of July fifteenth to sixteenth, an important fact which I would have learned sooner had I not stayed so prudently within my snug, attractive box.

  Ah, my homes of earth! Good Transylvanian soil, consecrated by humble and worthy priests so long ago as my familial burying ground. Sometimes I wonder whether the strength I draw from my own earth is not purely a matter of psychology. But the fact is that nowhere else can I truly rest, and without true rest neither breathing man nor vampire can long survive. Bits of my ancestors' bones are in my earth, unrecognizable in their humility, along with an occasional patient worm or insect, timid creatures frightened alike of me or you, of anything that moves. Fragments of roots of sturdy trees, and compost of their leaves, and maybe here and there a particle of hidden Walachian gold, over which a pinhead of blue flame will burn whenever St. George's Eve comes round. Good black earth that yet does not unduly stain the clothes. It is only sliding about or rubbing in it that produces smudges, and my lying down to sleep is very still and my getting up is as a rule without the disturbing of a single clod. In England or anywhere else I would have been lost without the good earth of my homeland, as I knew and my enemies came to know full well. In time I hoped to make the native soil of England hospitable to me as well…

  But to the Demeter again. She went plowing into the rough weather she met in the western Mediterranean, her first mate gone violently but so far unobtrusively insane with brooding on his fears. And I was snugged down prudently-I have a quite irrational dislike of that virtuous word-in my coffin, where I could be of no help to my own cause.

  How was that first sailor, that I have mentioned, lost? By some sheer accident, I would surmise. He had evidently been relieved on watch, during the night, then somehow had fallen overboard before he got back to his bunk. It happens. But there was the brooding mate, needing just this mysterious tragedy to send him over the rails of his own mind, into the vasty deep of lunacy. The mate went mad-as the captain himself later thought probable-and the mate was from somewhere about my own land, remember, and infected with its endemic terrors. He must have been mad enough to see nosferatu in every face, especially in the face of any man who approached him alone on deck at night. Then whiss! he would out with his knife and strike, and throw his victim overboard. It was all in an insane kind of self-defense, you understand. As if his knife could have done him much good against the real thing; but then I suppose the mate was a half-educated man at best, from the back country somewhere, and his fears were much greater than his knowledge of the subject.

  During the remainder of July he disposed of four more of his shipmates in this wise, and the survivors of the now short-handed crew went staggering in fatigued despair about their duties, unable to imagine what evil fate had come upon their voyage. We had been at sea nearly a month before I again emerged from concealment. Though of course I did not at firs
t realize the situation, there were by this time only the captain and the first mate and two sailors left to work the ship, the rest having died one by one in darkness.

  The schooner had now passed Gibraltar, traversed the Bay of Biscay, and was nearing England.

  On the night of August second I came on deck to find the foredeck deserted, and as a landlubber did not realize at first what a grave sign this was to meet upon a foggy night. I enjoy the fog and dark, and was in the bows drinking it in, lost in some fatuous dream of England as I imagined it: myself lord of some sunlit manor where no one minded that the lord did not go out by day, a pair of those great dogs that the English painters could execute so well sitting in attendance on me as I gazed into my fire… or squinted off across my meadows, perhaps… some buxom Saxon wench laboring there, gathering hay, the muscles showing rounded in her arms, and the veins in her throat beneath the suntanned skin…

  The mate was too near before I heard him, and his coming was too swift, for me to get out of his way entirely-small wonder that none of the breathing men he crept upon in the same way survived. His keen knife tore at my clothes, but passed through my flesh as through a shadow, leaving no damage behind but only searing pain. In a moment I had melded myself into the fog. Cursing my own innocent foolishness, I passed belowdecks, where I waited in bat-form for an outcry, for searchers bearing torches and weapons in their trembling fists. None came during the night.

  At dawn I took to my earth in one of the lowest boxes, hoping that the unpiling of the others might give me warning enough to rouse myself for some defense if searchers came again by day.