The Dracula Tape Fred Saberhagen (great reads TXT) 📖

      He gave his massive head a little shake, smiling all the while, not so much denying the accusation as failing even to understand it yet.

      I leaned toward him. “You stopped her breath with the pouring of the alien blood into her veins.”

      “No!” Now understanding came.

      “Yes.” He started further protest, which I overrode: “Now shall I call her forth to testify?”

      There was silence in the graveyard, save for a restless owl, and far away the rumbling of a wagonload of freight, and under that the polyphonic voice of distant London, that for a thousand years had not been truly quiet.

      Van Helsing stood much as before, still holding me — as he thought — at a safe distance with his golden cross; but, reading his face through the dark night, I saw that my shot had told.

      “You have done it before, butcher,” I pressed on, guessing, and seeing that my guess was accurate as his face registered yet another inner blow. “And with some similar result. Is it not so? Has any victim of your blood-exchanging surgery yet lived?”

      His smile was gone, his hands and jaw were trembling as he again brought out the small white folded envelope and raised it toward me with the cross. “Begone! To hell!” The words exploded from his mouth.

      “Nothing wiser than that to say to me, Professor?”

      “It shall be —” His voice cracked and he had to begin again. “It shall be war between us, vampire. War to the death.”

      “Let it be peace, I say. Or rather, tolerance. But remember that I have overcome in war a hundred stronger men than you.” And with sad and angry heart I turned my back on that bad man and walked away, half expecting to feel the painful though harmless flick of a silver bullet between my ribs. If he does that, I thought, I shall turn back and insert his bullet, if I can recover it, into his own anatomy at some painful and inconvenient place. But he did nothing, and I betook myself to my newly acquired house to gaze over the moonlit trees of the Green Park toward Victoria’s palace and think my foolish thoughts. A war, then, was inevitable. But how was I to fight it?

* * *

      When Van Helsing rejoined his companions on the following day he told them that he had seen nothing during his dangerous vigil, and let it go at that. Free as he was with words, he was a close-mouthed scoundrel whenever it came to giving out hard facts to people who worked with him or tried to do so. But he must have been wondering how much I actually knew about those failed operations of his on the Continent and in what way I might use my knowledge to embarrass him. Needless to say, I would have done so if I could, but had no specifics to make known nor any way of quickly finding them out.

      What Van Helsing did do on that day was gather his troops for another expedition to the Westenra tomb. This time he enlisted not only Seward, but Arthur Holmwood — who had now become Lord Godalming, by reason of his father’s recent death — and the American, Quincey Morris. In a pep talk the professor assured them all — I am not making this up, you will find it in Seward’s diary! — that there was a “grave duty” to be done. And some have called Van Helsing a humorless man! Well, he was, but only when he tried to joke.

      Naturally they all agreed to accompany him, though so far only Seward could have had any inkling of just what the “grave duty” was likely to involve. As far as the others knew, Lucy was simply though unhappily dead.

      “I have been curious,” Arthur protested after some discussion in Van Helsing’s hotel room, “as to what you mean. Quincey and I have talked it over; but the more we talked the more puzzled we got, till now I can say for myself that I’m up a tree as to any meaning about anything.”

      Nor was he to be rapidly enlightened. The professor strung them all along with earnest pleas for their continued trust, enlivened with hints that Lucy might stand in some vague danger of hell-fire — I think Arthur almost hit him at one point — or that she might not have been dead — exactly — when she was buried. It was a masterly performance by a compelling personality, and Van Helsing not only avoided being punched but in a little while had reduced the three younger men to a state that I can only describe as quietly submissive hysteria. Thus he got them out to the graveyard once again, on the night of September twenty-eighth.

      After finding Lucy’s ravaged coffin empty — again — the four men left what Seward called “the terror of that vault” for the fresh air outside. There Van Helsing got down to business. As Seward’s diary has it:

      First he took from his bag a mass of what looked like thin, waferlike biscuit, which were carefully rolled up in a white napkin; next he took out a double handful of some whitish stuff, like dough or putty. He crumbled the wafer up fine and worked it into the mass between his hands … rolling it into thin strips, he began to lay them into the crevices between the door and its setting in the tomb. I asked him … what he was doing.

      He answered: “I am closing the tomb so that the Un-Dead may not enter.”

      “And is that stuff you have got there going to do it?” asked Quincey. “Great Scott! Is this a game?”

      “It is.”

      “What is that which you are using?” This time the question was by Arthur.

      Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered: “The host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an indulgence.” It was an answer that appalled the most skeptical of us.

      And should have had a similar