The Dracula Tape Fred Saberhagen (great reads TXT) 📖

      On this occasion Van Helsing had along his little black bag, with its cargo of hammer and stake and beheading knives, and he might have performed final surgery right then and there and discharged his patient. But once the doctors were in the tomb, and had opened the coffin to find the still-beautiful girl stretched out helpless and unconscious before them, it occurred to the professor, as he said to Seward: “How can I expect Arthur to believe? He doubted me when I took from him her kiss when she was dying … he may think that in some mistaken idea this woman was buried alive … that we, mistaken ones, have killed her by our ideas and so he will be much unhappy always. Yet he never can be sure, and that is the worst of all … again, he will think that we may be right, and that his so-beloved was, after all, an Un-Dead …”

      Van Helsing, of course had a prescription to save Arthur from this dilemma. “He must pass through the bitter waters to reach the sweet. He, poor fellow, must have one hour that will make the very face of heaven grow black to him …”

      In short, the old sadist wanted to get Arthur himself to do the killing, or be a witness at the very least.

      After sending Seward home to his madhouse, and dining alone in Piccadilly — perhaps not far from where I was at my domestic tasks —

Van Helsing returned to the Berkeley Hotel, where he was staying. He girded himself for a night-long vigil, and wrote out an impressive farewell note to Dr. John Seward, just in case. He left it in his portmanteau, and it was never delivered.

*

                        27 September

Friend John —

      I write this in case anything should happen. I go alone to watch in that churchyard. It pleases me that the Un-Dead, Miss Lucy, shall not leave tonight, so that on the morrow night she may be more eager. Therefore I shall fix up some things she likes not — garlic and a crucifix — and so seal up the door of the tomb. She is young as Un-Dead, and will heed. Moreover, these are only to prevent her coming out; they may not prevail on her wanting to get in; for then the Un-Dead is desperate, and must find the line of least resistance, whatsoever it may be. I shall be at hand all the night from sunset till after the sunrise, and if there is aught that may be learned I shall learn it. For Miss Lucy or from her, I have no fear; but that other to whom is there that she is Un-Dead, he now have the power to seek her tomb and find shelter. He is cunning, as I know from Mr. Jonathan and from the way that all along he have fooled us when he played with us for Miss Lucy’s life, and we lost; and in many ways the Un-Dead are strong. He have always the strength in his hand of twenty men; even we four who gave our strength to Miss Lucy it is all to him. Besides, he can summon his wolf and I know not what. So if it be that he come hither on this night he shall find me; but none other shall — until it be too late. But it may be that he will not attempt the place. There is no reason why he should; his hunting ground is more full of game than the churchyard where the Un-Dead woman sleep and the one old man watch.

      Therefore I write this in case … Take the papers that are with this, the diaries of Harker and the rest, and read them, and then find this great Un-Dead, and cut off his head and burn his heart or drive a stake through it, so that the world may rest from him.

      If it be so, farewell.

                        Van Helsing

*

      And neither, perhaps, will I be greatly saddened when the time comes that I rest from the world, forever. But Count Dracula is not yet ready to be killed, nor was I then.

      Though I wished nothing more than to be let alone, yet I could not forget that Van Helsing must know of me and that he was a killer. I avoided Carfax during the day, and at night, like my enemy, I took my way once more to the cemetery, to find out what I could.

      The night of the twenty-seventh was warm and fair, and would have disappointed those cinematographers who deal much with vampires and such other improbable creatures as are thought to frequent graveyards. And this time I was in luck. Even from a considerable distance I could see that something new had been added to the Westenra mausoleum: from a chain looped over a roof ornament there dangled a small crucifix of wood, just opposite the middle of the doors.

      Resuming the mist-form in which I had crossed the cemetery wall, I drifted closer. But progress in that mode is very slow and it is hard to see or hear very much en route. In the deep shadow of some trees I resumed the form of man and was at once rewarded with the soft sounds of a single human heart and pair of lungs at work not far away. With his broad back set against a cross that served as headstone on a neighboring grave, a man who could be none other than Van Helsing watched with sleepless eyes the quiet exterior of Lucy’s tomb. Inside, I felt her mind, not quite awake, but fretful.

      Wishing to achieve some rational discourse with Van Helsing rather than put him to flight or come to grips with him, I circled to approach him from his front. In a few moments he looked up with a start at the sight of my figure walking toward him through the night along the grassy, seldom-used road.

      “In nomine Dei, retro, Satana!” His hands were clenched,