A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9)

by Fred Saberhagen

  On the kitchen wall there hung a 1996 calendar, the handout of some charitable organization. June had turned to the proper month, and started to check off the days since their arrival.

  * * *

  Radcliffe wondered who might have been living in this house yesterday, or last month. The place didn’t appear to be brand new, just well cared for. But whoever it was seemed to have left no clues behind.

  The previous tenants, whoever they might have been, had evidently done without a telephone. But once or twice Radcliffe saw his masked and breathing guardian, standing at a distance out of earshot, speaking calmly into a cellular. Some forethought had obviously gone into this plan.

  The TV was connected to a satellite dish. On the evening of their second day in the mobile home, between intervals of exhausted sleep, Phil tuned in to the news, with some vague hope of discovering that the Radcliffes had been reported missing. Well, if they had, there was no way the TV news-people were going to let the world know about it. What scanty factual content there was had trouble finding space between political attack ads, and consisted almost entirely of political soundbites, alternating with the usual courtroom scenes, celebrity scandals, and a peculiarly outrageous murder in a remote part of the country. Sure, the news would be delighted to report a missing man and woman—as soon as someone provided them with a good videotape of his mutilated corpse, or at the very least a roomful of sobbing relatives.

  Graves, choosing that moment to pay another brief call on his prisoners, happened to observe the broadcast as he came in. The chief kidnapper seemed to Radcliffe a little tired and a little more philosophical—also a little more human—than before. He commented that supposedly your neighbor’s grief was almost as entertaining as your neighbor’s blood … Radcliffe didn’t want to pursue that line of thought.

  “Have you now seriously considered the content of the tape—as it applies to you?”

  “I still have trouble making that application. Maybe it’s partly because I don’t care for the special effects.”

  Graves looked his puzzlement. “I mean the way your image flickers, comes and goes.”

  “Ah.” The dark man’s face cleared. “That was not calculated. It is because of mirrors, you see.”

  “Mirrors?”

  “I am told that inside the type of video camera which we used—I am not really familiar with the technology—there are mirrors, or rather some analogous electronic device.” He frowned lightly. “But I earnestly urge you to disregard the special effects, as you call them. What does concern you vitally is the content of the tape. Are there any questions you would like to ask?”

  “When can we go home?” Phil demanded promptly.

  Graves looked at him. “I meant, about the content of the tape.”

  “If you’d let us take the tape home,” said June, “we’d watch it very carefully.”

  Graves stared at her flatly for a long moment. Then he said: “If I were to tell you that you may go now, and had you driven to your automobile and released—would you jump at the chance to simply go, and after reporting your adventure to the police, attempt to resume your normal lives?” Radcliffe tried to look as if the question deserved serious consideration. So did June.

  “We wouldn’t necessarily report anything to the police,” Philip said at last. “We haven’t been harmed so far, and…” He let his words trail off, because he could see it was the wrong answer.

  Graves was looking at him with an increased contempt, though no real surprise. “I had hoped that by now you would have come to a better understanding regarding your situation. You must be made to realize that what you tell the authorities after your release, or do not tell them, may be of some importance, but it is not the main point.”

  “What is the main point?”

  It seemed that Graves, confronted with such stupidity, was mentally forcing himself to count to ten before he answered. The reply when it came was mild enough: “Let us go into the house, and watch the tape together. Certain sections of it, at least.”

  “All right.”

  “The mirror in your bathroom is perfectly functional?”

  “As far as we can tell,” said Phil. For some reason he could feel his scalp beginning to creep.

  “Good. I shall stand in front of it, and you will have the chance to seek my image in its bright, well-lighted surface.”

  But that demonstration was not to be, not then. Interruption came before it could take place.

  One of the masked people came and stood in the doorway and made a cryptic sign to Graves, who announced that he was called away.

  June and Phil silently thought of possible trickery.

  * * *

  The live man turned in the doorway to deliver his exit line. His voice ate at them like the voice of doom: “Perhaps my plan was wrong in its approach, but there is no help for that now. You must not only watch the tape, you must ponder seriously its contents, and accept the truth that it reveals. I cannot compel you to believe the story on the tape. But you must know it, well enough to discuss it intelligently with me, next time we meet.”

  Phil wanted to tell the man that he was crazy, but the words choked in his throat. His wife beside him was nodding helplessly. “We will,” she said.

  Chapter Six

  Within two weeks of his emergence from underground, Radu made his first foray outside the boundaries of the metropolis of London. At first, moving across country only after dark, he went no farther than a few miles from the East End of London, where he had hidden the precious supply of his native earth that had sustained him for almost a hundred years.

  Only now, when he began to travel, did he fully appreciate the scale of the changes in human society and achievements which had come about during his last sojourn underground.

  As weeks and months went by, he extended the scope of his explorations. Visiting by night certain ships out of the thousands which were engaged in the unending maritime commerce on the Thames, scraping secretly through holds and bilges, he augmented his perilously thin supply of his homeland’s hospitable soil. He also made sure of several earths he had earlier secretly established in Britain. Evidently Vlad had never located these deposits, for they were still usable.

  He had also to establish new earths, of the soil of his homeland, as that seemed prudent. He had to, if possible, re-establish some network of allies among the European vampire population. At any one time, near the end of the eighteenth century, there were probably not more than a dozen nosferatu active on the whole continent.

  In this same period Radu, establishing sporadic contacts with British vampires, began also, in his way, to make discreet inquiries about me. His family name was known to them, but, as he discovered to his delight, they tended to confuse him with his brother, who seemed never to have visited Britain.

  Within a month he had convinced himself that Vlad was certainly not to be found in England. The elder Dracula was known to the local nosferatu only by reputation.

  Radu could begin to relax a little.

  * * *

  At that time, in the early summer of 1792, I was still in a state of blissful ignorance regarding the fact that my brother was once more prowling above ground.

  Other matters, which, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with Radu, were claiming my attention. It was in Paris, in the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, on one particular summer night, that I participated in one of those meetings that turn out to be of great consequence to the persons involved, though at the time none of them are conscious of the fact.

  The reason for my presence at that time and place was very simple: I had been resting in one of my earths nearby.

  Even at this late date I do not care to be more specific about exact locations. Enough to say that I reclined not in any ordinary grave. But the reader may visualize several possibilities, e.g., crypts or accidental cavities in or under the church itself, or one of the other buildings nearby. Certainly it was in a location which I believed was li
kely to remain undisturbed, at least for a long time. Somewhere, even now, a reader is guessing that it might be in some ancient monument. Well, that might be a good guess. Or how about this one: under a path or road? But never mind.

  A light of unwonted brightness shone there, from a lantern hanging on the stub of a tree branch. It was, though I did not yet understand the fact, one of the new Argand lamps, invented in England a bare ten years earlier, which derived from their burning oil about ten times the light of old lamps of the same size. And by this light, the forms and features of two women were revealed, both of them intent upon some task whose details I could not yet make out, but of whose basic nature I felt immediately certain.

  In that year, and through much of the madness that followed through the next few orbits of the Earth, the Parisian guillotine’s victims were commonly hauled, after decapitation, to the cemetery of the Madeleine. But in the year and month of which I speak, their numbers were increasing only gradually, and sometimes whole days went by without a single accused aristocrat or traitor losing his or her head in the name of Liberty.

  I had been asleep for several days, oblivious to what was going on in the breathing, waking, workaday world only a few yards from my hidden fastness. But my first sight of this new digging, the broad trench ten feet deep, obviously intended for mass burials, stopped me in my tracks. Such excavation suggested either an epidemic or the near approach of war. A faint odor of corruption was perceptible despite the scientifically enlightened attempt at thorough burial.

  Listening carefully, I could hear no cannon. That, I thought, suggested pestilence as the most probable cause.

  How little did I know.

  * * *

  I decided that a brief examination of whatever bodies had been buried in the trench would be the quickest means of gaining the information that I sought. And indeed one glance, more or less over the shoulders of the two women, was sufficient. They were all adults, and mostly men. Most were fully clothed, though coats and hats were absent. And they were all without their heads; and I suddenly understood just what kind of an epidemic had begun to ravage Paris.

  The new government had adopted the guillotine in April of that year, the same month in which Revolutionary France found herself at war with Austria and Prussia. The introduction of the new machine was viewed as an idealistic gesture. Away with the hideous and prolonged tortures which in the past had been the common means of capital punishment! The age of humanitarianism had arrived. No more would those condemned to death be broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, or have their flesh torn with red-hot pincers—modes of punishment still very much in style across the map of European civilization. In France, simple beheading had formerly been reserved for aristocrats, but now everyone in the newly classless society could enjoy its benefits.

  Let me assure the modern reader that it is not my intention to single out the French as particularly brutal. The last execution for witchcraft in England had occurred as late as 1685, when Jack Ketch, whose name came to stand for all of his profession, hanged Alice Molland in Exeter.

  In 1790 in England, the penalty of burning to death, inflicted for a variety of crimes, had finally been abolished—for women. And hanging, drawing, and quartering was still on the books as the prescribed punishment for treason.

  Also there is testimony that as late as 1790, the heads of executed traitors were still to be seen exhibited on Temple Bar—staring eyelessly in through the north windows of Tellson’s Bank, which stood adjoining. (One version has it that they were two officers of Prince Charles’s army, decapitated in the old, inefficient, and haphazard way, by the headsman’s axe or sword; another, that they were veterans of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715.)

  * * *

  But let us return to that fateful night in 1792, in the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, the burial ground of Revolutionary freedom. I was aware that the place was guarded, at least sporadically. The sentries were under orders from the Committee of Public Safety, to prevent grieving relatives from attempting to retrieve the mangled bodies of their loved ones. As one might expect, a little bribery allowed such recoveries to take place fairly often—the fewer bodies, the easier the gravediggers’ task. And, as it happened, no guards were anywhere in sight when my fateful meeting took place.

  Still unaware of my presence, the two women kept working away under their bright light, right at the place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. A new section of trench was dug almost every day, laborious spade and shovel work. Then the section excavated on the previous day was filled in on top of the latest crop of bodies—then usually only two or three, sometimes as many as half a dozen—after they had been hurled carelessly into the pit and sprinkled with lime. Still, as I have already remarked, there was only a trickle of dead flesh as yet, foreshadowing the floods to come; sometimes a day passed without a single beheading.

  The elder of the pair of workers, whose age I judged at a youthful thirty, was sitting on a chair or stool, not knitting but holding a raw-necked head, a fine example of Sanson’s handiwork, face uppermost in her lap, which she had protected with a piece of canvas.

  In my experience it had been invariably only the worst, blackest sort of magic which brought its practitioners into cemeteries to perform rituals at midnight. What little I had seen of such behavior was not only evil but amateurish, a defect which confirmed me in my determination to avoid the business as thoroughly as I could.

  Gradually I drew closer to the busy pair. I wondered if I should call attention to my presence with a gentlemanly cough.

  I had been standing in thoughtful observation for almost a minute before the younger woman looked up and saw me there, standing in the fringes of the bright light of the Argand lamp. For some reason it did not strike me until later that this modern technology argued against the magical explanation of the women’s presence, which I had so unthinkingly assumed. Also, for would-be sorcerers, the pair seemed remarkably unconcerned about an idler who stood by and watched.

  “Good evening, citizen.” By now the older worker had observed me too. There was nothing frightened or uncertain in either woman’s manner. If this was Satanism, it had grown bold indeed.

  Both of the women were obviously hardened to their work. And the elder, as she worked on, informed me that they were there by order of the Convention.

  Is the Revolution dabbling now in magic? I asked myself; but did not bother to voice the question aloud.

  While the woman of thirty kept talking to me, mostly banalities about the weather and the price of bread, her hands kept busy with what was, as I thought, some kind of would-be magical hocus-pocus with the freshly severed head in her lap. Illumination from the bright Argand lamp bathed the sallow skin, the half-exposed teeth (somehow their whiteness was surprising, suggesting health), gray lips, and matted hair.

  Meanwhile her younger assistant, who so far had paid me little heed, was digging methodically through the grisly pile of stiffened, chilling flesh, inspecting and discarding, one after another, the heads that she discovered. A few she chose and put down on the ground in a row, sluicing them with water from a pail to wash away the earth and blood from their faces, to get a better look at them. At last she seemed to find a head she definitely wanted, and set it aside, with a little murmur of satisfaction.

  Meanwhile the older woman worked on. Her skilled technician’s fingers, dipped in what appeared to be clear oil, carried on a deft anointing of the skin of the dead face which she was cradling. I caught the dim flash of a small needle in the lamplight. The eyelids had already been sewn shut, just a little tuck in each would do, and now the lips, which at one corner of the mouth still tended to sag open.

  Deftly her young fingers smeared a thin layer of clay over the fringe of hair around the dead face. The man, whatever his name, had been clean-shaven, rather handsome, with a receding hairline.

  That’s good,” his attendant muttered to herself. The less hair the better; it only gets in the way.”
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br />   In the way of what? I wondered, but indolently did not pursue the question.

  The younger woman, straightening her back, remarked: “They say the beard keeps on growing after death.”

  I looked at her, and found her comely. But at the moment I felt no great hunger. Casually I observed: “They say many things which are not so.”

  * * *

  Though I lingered near the women, I was not watching their work very keenly. The scene, with its ghoulish pair, reminded me of my first encounter, hundred of years earlier, with Constantia, who as a mere breathing girl had been aching to try her hand at witchcraft, not at all afraid to turn up some supposed wizard’s grave. Also of several other episodes, involving would-be witches and magicians, which I had observed down through the centuries. Long ago I had realized that not one in ten of the folk who thought themselves adept in those dark practices were actually in contact with any powers beyond those generated in their own sick minds.

  The two women now before me seemed perfect examples of such self-delusion. But at least their magical paraphernalia struck me as unique. They were using a device of a good size and shape to fit into a hatbox, containing some kind of blocks, screws, and clamps to grip a detached human head and hold it in place, face uppermost, upon one woman’s lap, while she and her fellow technician worked.

  I assumed, without giving the matter any real thought, that the decorations on the hatbox were some kind of amateurish magical symbols.

  Only one face, the dead one, that of some poor breather who would breathe no more, was in full light, while the live countenances of the two women remained in shadow.

  * * * * * *

  What would the attitude of the Revolutionary authorities be toward witchcraft, satanism? The question was seldom asked openly but there can be no doubt that those fanatics were generally against black magic; the devil no less than God was a rival authority, jealously demanding allegiance. Another dreadful superstition. On the other hand, he would have offered an ally against all churches, synagogues, and mosques.