The Dracula Tape Fred Saberhagen (great reads TXT) 📖

life anywhere in the ship. The thought of being on an unmanned vessel, due for capsizing or wrecking on some unknown shore, and all my transported home-earth lost beneath the waves, was not one to give me pleasure.

      Somewhere below me in the ship, two sets of lungs were laboring; and two hearts beat, though scarcely as one. No more than two. Great God, I thought, seven men dead, or at least gone. In the old days I would have suspected plague or pirates. In 1891 I did not know what to suspect.

      I was about to shift to bat-form and go stealthily below, to find out what I could, when there came the sound of footsteps ascending the companionway, and the captain himself emerged. He was unshaven and worn-looking, like a man who has been in battle for days on end. He saw me not, though his tormented eyes darted this way and that about the otherwise deserted deck from which his crew had vanished one by one.

      A moment later the captain had realized that the ship was unmanned, had thrown himself at the wheel, and was shouting for the mate. It was not long before the Romanian appeared, in his long underwear, disheveled and looking a very maniac. He at once went close to the captain at the wheel and spoke to him in a hoarse whisper, which I in the shadows not far off could plainly hear:

      “It is here, I know it, now. On the watch last night I saw it, like a man, tall and thin and ghastly pale. It was in the bows, and looking out. I crept behind it, and gave it my knife; but the knife went through it, empty as the air.” Even as the mate spoke he drew out the knife again to demonstrate; and my night-seeing eyes noted traces of fresh blood on the blade even as he flourished it. I realized that it must be the blood of the last helmsman, who must have been put over the side only minutes before.

      I very nearly sprang forward and disarmed the first mate at this point, in my expectation that he was about to kill the only sane sailor left on board, the captain, who alone stood between myself and probable shipwreck and ruin.

      But already the madman had sheathed his knife and was stepping back from the horrified captain, who maintained his grip upon the wheel.

      The mate babbled on: “But it is here, and I’ll find it. It is in the hold, perhaps in one of those boxes. I’ll unscrew them one by one and see. You work the helm.” And, holding a finger to his lips, enjoining silence, he went below. The captain stared after him, with pity, horror, and despair all struggling for expression amid the exhausted lines of his face.

      The lunatic’s assault upon my boxes I could not endure. If he armed himself with a few tools, he, laboring alone but with the fanaticism of madness, might in an hour or so have breached them all, and their contents, so vital to my existence, would be mingled inextricably with the ballast and the bilge. Had I been certain that the captain unaided could steer the ship to some safe port I would have slain the mate there on the spot — but no, perhaps not even then would I have killed. As a soldier long ago I saw enough of killing, and as a prince more than enough to last a lifetime greater than my own.

      Though I had no desire to encompass the mate’s death I was forced to act to block him in his new plan. I altered wind just enough to keep, as I hoped, the captain occupied at the wheel, and stealthily followed the mate below. He was already in the hold, and in the act of raising a maul to strike at the lid of one of the boxes, when I confronted him.

      He screamed, the maul flew from his hands, and he dashed for the companion way to reach the open air again. Let me say parenthetically that I find it strange how many people have inferred from the captain’s scribbled record of these events that the mate actually opened one or more of the boxes and found me, somnolent, within. I would like to point out, first, that it was past midnight at the time, the hour when I am usually up and about; and secondly, that if he had found me in such a state, the man who had been trying for weeks to kill a vampire could hardly have failed to put me overboard at once, perhaps box and all; and thirdly, no one reported that any of the boxes were lidless or broken when they were finally received at Whitby. A small matter, perhaps, whether he found me in a box or active, but still indicative of how events are misinterpreted.

      But to return. The mate shot up on deck again, by now, to use the captain’s phrase, “a raging madman” beyond all doubt. He first cried out to be saved, and then fell into a despairing calm; evidently he realized that from the murderous phantom vampires of his disordered mind there could be no escape this side of death. Moving toward the rail, he said in a suddenly reasonable voice: “You had better come too, Captain, before it is too late. He is there. I know the secret now. The sea will save me from him, and it is all that is left!” And before the captain could move to interfere, the luckless mate had thrown himself into the sea.

      I remained for some time concealed in the shadows on deck, steadying and moderating the wind and trying to think. Later in the night I tried to approach that brave man at the wheel; it was my wish to explain my position to him, at least partially, and to try to make him see that he and I shared a common interest in