The Dracula Tape

by Fred Thomas Saberhagen.

  On the night of September twenty-ninth I ghosted in bat-form around this converted mansion, observing what I could wherever blinds were open. The first figure that I recognized was that of my erstwhile visitor Renfield, sitting placidly, with folded hands, in a ground-floor room whose window had been lately reinforced with heavy metal bars and fresh timbers. As I flew past I saw a sort of inner light come over the madman's face, and he started up from his poor chair-that with a simple cot made the chief furnishing of his room-and began to approach the window; but I flapped on my way, not wishing to provoke any sort of outburst from him.

  In other ground-floor rooms the handful of other patients then in residence rocked ceaselessly upon their beds, or stared at their contorted fingers, or paced the floor. And from behind the half-closed blind of one such room came utterance in tones of such dismal, groaning sorrow that even I must draw near to see whose voice it was. I caught a glimpse of book shelves, paneled walls, and then…

  It was Dr. Seward's study, and in fact his voice, although it did not issue from his throat. Seated at a desk with her back to me was a sturdy, brown-haired young woman, her fingers poised above the keys of a strange machine that clacked rhythmically and printed words upon a sheet of paper that wound itself spasmodically through it on a roller. Upon the young woman's curly head rested a device of forked metal whose cupped ends managed to embrace both her ears, and from these ear cups issued Seward's voice-though of course I did not recognize it then-tuned to a groaning slowness that enabled the typist to keep up. From the headset a wire ran to a nearby table, where a cabinet contained a spring-driven mechanism that made things turn, and a needle rode lightly in the groove that wound about a waxen cylinder.

  It was a simple type of early phonograph, of course-how far from that to this small wonder that I hold in my hand!-on which Seward was wont to keep his journal, which his new ally Mina had just volunteered to transcribe. I recognized her almost at first sight as Lucy's friend, the girl who had come to lead Lucy home from the Whitby churchyard at midnight.

  On Mina's finger a wedding ring now gleamed, where none had been before; but I had no doubt of my identification. A female servant chanced to enter the room and Mina's voice, coming out faintly through the leaded glass when she spoke briefly to the girl, was the same that had called out "Lucy! Lucy!" on Whitby's tall cast cliff, that August night that already seemed so long ago.

  The servant went out and a few moments later a stalwart man of about thirty entered. He had a rather stern, commanding look, though his voice when he spoke was mild enough: "And how is the work progressing?"

  Mina's machine ceased clacking and she removed her headset. "Slowly but surely, Dr. Seward."

  "I expect it will be a great help to have it all in typescript, Mrs. Harker."

  What Mina replied, I do not know. I sat there on the windowsill for a full two minutes, blinking my little bat eyes, stunned by the club of coincidence once again. When at last I rose and flew, I was already over the wall and into Carfax before I remembered that it could no longer offer me safety for my rest. I flew on to one of my new lairs, in Bermondsey, thankful that my plan of dispersing boxes was already so far advanced, and pondered what new snares Fate might have laid in my path. That Harker and his wife should now know Seward came as no surprise; but that the wife of the guest I left in Transylvania should chance to be the second girl I saw in England was a staggering concurrence of events.

  Harker himself was at that time in Whitby, trying to pick up my trail there. He had been galvanized into becoming one of my most enthusiastic persecutors by his recent meeting with Van Helsing. As it turned out, however, there was not a great deal for him to learn in Whitby, beyond confirming that my boxes had been sent on to London; and on the next day, September thirtieth, Harker was back in Purfleet, at the asylum, where his wife was already established in guest quarters. They were joined there on the same day by Van Helsing, Arthur, and Quincey Morris.

  When I came to reconnoiter the asylum again that night I at once perched on a high windowsill of Seward's study; and it was with a sense of fortune at last deciding to smile upon me that I saw the blinds were partially open and a strategy meeting was in progress before my eyes.

  There was Van Helsing at the head of a large table, with Mina, notebook open on her lap, sitting at his right hand as secretary. Her husband sat beside her, looking fully restored to health. Flanking Dr. Seward on the table's other side were a tall young Englishman, obviously of the upper classes-this was Arthur, as I soon understood-and a fresh-faced young American, Quincey Morris, who sat closest to the table's foot.

  Van Helsing, as usual, was speaking whilst his disciples listened. Their expressions were varied, ranging from horror, through incredulity, to a sort of numbness that still was not exactly boredom; the subject matter of the address was of a kind to transcend deficiencies of treatment.

  "He is of cunning more than mortal," were the first words I heard as I began to eavesdrop. "For his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy… and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute… he can, within limitations, appear at will when and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things; the rat, and the owl, and the bat-the moth, and the fox, and the wolf…"

  Could I have commanded the pinworm and the body louse I would have sent a plague of them upon him. Apart from the superstitious rubbish about necromancy, though, he was doing a reasonably good job of describing the wanted man, of whose identity not one of his hearers was in doubt. The spellbinder's words went on and on. Something of the same dazedness that I observed upon the patrician features of Lord Godalming no doubt began to glaze my own mean little bat eyes as we both listened to this litany.

  "For if we fail in this fight he must surely win, and then where end we? Life is nothing; I heed him not. But to fail here is not mere life or death; it is that we become as him… foul things of the night…"

  Harker had taken his wife's hand, which action interfered with her shorthand stenography; not that she seemed to mind the interference a great deal. I was surprised to feel something like a pang of jealousy, which I sternly put down. When the professor paused for breath the newlyweds exchanged a loving glance.

  "I accept the challenge, for Mina and myself," Harker said then, resolutely. He had evidently been listening after all. And Mina, who had just opened her own mouth, thought better of expressing her opinions, and held her peace.

  "Count me in, Professor," the young American declared in drawling Texas accents that were then quite strange to my ears.

  "I am with you," Lord Godalming said. "For Lucy's sake, if for no other reason."

  All stood up then and clasped their hands together above the table; their deadly purpose toward me was being sealed in a most solemn compact, and with a tiny sigh I realized that I might have to kill, and kill again, to thwart it.

  But how then was I to resume my pursuit of peace?

  They all sat down again and Van Helsing launched into a fresh harangue. I must have been near dozing at the window, for somehow I missed Morris's keen glance in my direction; and when from the corner of my myopic bat vision I saw him rise and leave the room, I thought only that nature must have called him, or some innate intelligence forbade him to hear more.

  There was a little pause, in which others observed his exit, some not without envy, but said nothing. Then the professor resumed: "We know that from the castle to Whitby came fifty boxes of earth, all of which were delivered at Carfax; we also know, from seeing wagons and workmen there, that at least some of these boxes have been removed. It seems to me that our first step should be to ascertain whether all the rest remain in the house, or whether any more have been removed. If the latter, we must trace-"

  The bullet from Morris's pistol came at me from behind and traversed the upper part of my right wing and then
the right front quadrant of my tiny skull; had I been bat in truth, my small, furred body would have convulsed and fallen dead without managing a single wing flap toward escape. As matters stood I felt the pain and shock of the leaden bullet's supersonic passage as it interpenetrated the alien matter of my flesh and then passed on without spilling blood or breaking skin. Glass shattered in the window and the bullet whanged off the top of the embrasure and ricocheted inside the room, where Mina screamed in startled fright.

  Mastering an impulse to descend in man-form to the ground and mangle the author of the agony that still reverberated through me, I took to my wings instead. Off into the wooded portion of the grounds I flew, there to change to man-form, lean against a tree, and try to think. The pain of being shot ebbed but slowly, like some molten silver tide, through all my throbbing nerves. The effect was worse than if I had been full size when I was hit.

  "Sorry!" came Morris's voice, from the direction of the house. But it was not to me he spoke. "I fear I have alarmed you. I shall come in and tell you about it." And I heard the opening and closing of a door. Later I learned that Morris had not really identified me on the window-sill; it was just that in recent days he had taken to shooting casually at every bat he saw. He had nursed a dislike for the creatures ever since my breathing, winged South American namesakes had drained a favorite horse of its blood.

  At any rate, it had been time for me to leave my observation post, for I had learned enough. The opposing forces were going to come, belatedly but with determination and ruthlessness, to Carfax. What should I do? Defend my property forcefully against intrusion? But the old objection remained in full force: the more successfully I used violence against my enemies the greater public belief in me would grow. Against Van Helsing I might logically hope to win a war but against England I could not. No, stealth and cunning were still going to be my most effective weapons, and with that fact in mind I held my own solitary council and made my plans…

  They were brave enough, or foolhardy enough perhaps, to launch their attack that very night. Mina of course was left back in the Harkers' cozy guest rooms. The men had decided that from this point on she was to be told only so much of their desperate adventures as would be good for her delicate female nature to know; and though she recorded in her diary that this chivalrous treatment was "a bitter pill" for her to swallow, she decided that she "could say nothing" against it, and went off obediently to her bed.

  I was spending the remainder of the night on watch in my woods and of course was not surprised by the five men coming somewhat clumsily over my wall, their burglars' bags in hand. They approached my house with what stealth they could manage, sticking mainly to the shadows, as if they felt more comfortable there, where only God and Dracula could watch their slightest move.

  At my front porch they stopped, and Van Helsing issued garlic to them all, and crucifixes, and-for "enemies more mundane," as he expressed it in a whisper-knives and revolvers. The well-equipped if somewhat tardy adventurers received also small portable electric lamps that could be clipped onto their clothing; and last, but scarcely least, each was given a small envelope like that I had seen Van Helsing clutching in Lucy's churchyard, containing a portion of the sacred wafer.

  It was a tempting thought that I might quietly join their party whilst they milled around in the darkness of the porch, perhaps receive an issue of weapons from Van Helsing's bag, and later whisper a few words softly in his ear if I could get him alone in some dark inner chamber of the house. But I had no time for recreation, and contented myself with watching their preparations from the shadows of some trees. I wanted to make sure that they were in the house and fully occupied before I set forth on an expedition of my own.

  All in readiness at last, the trespassers opened my front door with a skeleton key and turned it back on screaming hinges. They paused to invoke the blessing of the Lord on their endeavors, and then passed in over my threshold. All in all, they found their visit not enjoyable from that time on. Harker in his journal complains of a "nauseous stench" and of the dust they were forced to endure whilst in that "loathsome place," where they could observe to their further dissatisfaction that only twenty-nine of my fifty boxes now remained.

  In order to entertain my guests whilst urgent business compelled me to be elsewhere I had called up from surrounding fields and farms a hundred or so rats-Harker records "thousands," a pardonable exaggeration under the circumstances-and enjoined them to mingle with the visiting men on terms of as close an intimacy as possible. The men took a dislike to this and managed to disperse my auxiliaries with a trio of terriers, which Arthur through foresight or by some accident had brought along to the asylum.

  But I had not waited to watch the battle of the rats. At about the same moment that Lord Godalming was whistling up his dogs, and the other invaders coughed in dust and brushed at cobwebs, I was approaching the madman Renfield's window on the ground floor of the asylum.

  Whatever the nature of his peculiar perceptions, he was aware of my approach and even of my wish for silence; for though his joy at the event seemed almost beyond bearing, yet he controlled any physical demonstration of it. Eyes popping wide, gray hair falling wildly around a gray-stubbled, broad face contorted with the effort of suppressing mad excitement, he was waiting for me amid the shabby respectability of his room. From outside the bars of his newly fortified window I let him see my face and I expressed with a gesture my desire to be admitted.

  I had to wait a moment before he could control himself enough to speak the invitation that I required: "C-come in. Lord and Master!" And as I oozed between the window bars he bowed himself away as he might have done in the presence of an emperor. Later on, in a dying statement made to the doctors, Renfield was to claim that to obtain entry I had promised him the lives of rats and flies, which he had long found agreeable to his palate. But it was not so. Certainly I would have done as much, and more, to be able to get in, but no promises or gifts were necessary to win Renfield to my cause. He was my worshiper already, though on a false premise, which I did not fully understand until a later meeting.

  It was not rats and bugs he wanted from me; that sort of life he could get on his own or with some cooperation from his keepers. In fact it was women that he craved, whose lives and bodies alike he wanted to consume. This truth was never quite made plain in the prim journals of my enemies, but truth it was. And, since Renfield had first seen her on the day of her arrival at the asylum, it was Mina in particular he wanted. She was the boon he desired from me, the goal of all his prayers.

  These entreaties, in a low, reasonable, and terribly earnest voice, began the moment I first stood inside his room. Even in the brief space of time before I could cross his worn rug to reach the door he managed to inform me, in several disgusting variations, of his plans for that fresh young girl when she should fall into his power.

  He was a madman, certainly, and I paid these mouthings little heed just then, but gave him a smile and nod in passing. No more did I think the doctors would heed him if he spoke of my visit.

  I laid my ear to the crack of his room's massive, locked, and bolted door, then passed on through when I was satisfied that the hallway outside was untenanted. Now I found myself in a passage that ran nearly the whole length of the house. In other rooms nearby, servants and inmates were making their several kinds of moderate noises but at the moment no one was in sight.

  Renfield was quiet behind me, whether in disappointment or satisfaction I did not care. I ghosted in mist-form to find a set of stairs, ascended them, and passed almost invisibly along another hall. Now, if my estimates were accurate regarding the configuration of the house and the distances I had traversed, I must be outside the door of the rooms occupied by the Harkers. The upper hallway was, at the moment, as deserted as the lower had been, and quieter. I resumed man-form, took off my hat, and tapped prosaically on Mina's door.

  "Yes?" The answer in her familiar voice came through the door at once. She evidently had not been aslee
p.

  "Mrs. Harker?" I called softly. "I am a neighbor of Dr. Seward's, and I bear a message concerning your husband."

  There were quick footsteps inside the room, the shuffle of a robe being put on, and a moment later the door opened, to reveal a kind of small sitting room, comfortably furnished, with another door beyond that must lead to a bed chamber. Mina's face, rather broad but attractive, firm and intelligent, looked out at me framed by her brown curls. "Has something happened to Jonathan?" She seemed capable of bearing bad news if it had come.

  "No, no." I hastened to be reassuring now that my foot, so to speak, was in the door. "At least he was in good health and reasonably good spirits but a short time ago." As I answered I marked that her concern for her husband, though genuine, did not seem at all exaggerated, or even quite as deep as might have been expected, given the circumstances. I saw also in her eyes that she recognized me, or was at least on the point of doing so. How this could be I did not know, being then ignorant of her observation of me in Piccadilly, but I saw that the situation required the finest handling.

  "You will understand," I pressed on, in as matter-of-fact a voice as some four centuries of practice could give me, "that circumstances of some urgency compel me to perform my own introduction. I am Count Dracula."

  She completed a movement already begun, a half step backward from the door. She had been on the point of trying to slam it in my face. But there I stood in the attitude of a distinguished male visitor in upper-class dress. Not trying to force my way in, not menacing at all but very formidable; I doubt that any Victorian girl could have mustered up the nerve to slam that door. And I was smiling, as I know how to smile at women, with four centuries of practice in that art also. My eyes were fixed on hers…

  I cast no hypnotic spell upon her then; I can never do so against the firm will of the person being hypnotized. But it seemed almost that such was her state, as she half unwillingly remained before me, one hand, still somewhat sun-browned from her summer holiday, holding the door open, the other raised to clutch her dressing gown tight at the throat. She had started to open her sweet mouth as if to scream for help, but then was still.