The Dracula Tape Fred Saberhagen (great reads TXT) 📖

effect on the most knowledgeable and reverent. The scoundrel! An indulgence, indeed! As if any worthy priest would have pretended to be able to give him such to carry on his superstitious nonsense. At any rate, after an aching wait the men saw amid the gloom of distant trees “a white figure” carrying a small child. This form at last came close enough to be recognized as:

      Lucy Westenra, but how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. Van Helsing stepped out … the four of us ranged in a line before the door of the tomb. Van Helsing raised his lantern and drew the slide: by the concentrated light that fell on Lucy’s face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood.

      Although the child, as Van Helsing later admitted, was “not much harm.”

      When Lucy — I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape — saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and color, but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing: had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight.

      Lucy flung down her victim — her plaything, rather, that she had grabbed up in her addled state — and gazed on Arthur, the lover she still tenderly remembered. Then “with outstretched arms and a wanton smile” she advanced on him, whereupon “he fell back and hid his face in his hands.”

      She still came forward, however, saying in “diabolically sweet” tones: “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

      On hearing this appeal Arthur “seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix.” Angered by this meddling which followed her beyond the grave, and I suppose utterly dismayed by Arthur’s meek submission to it, Lucy “recoiled, and with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.” But her wish to gain that shelter was thwarted by Van Helsing’s putty, which doubtless contained an admixture of garlic.

      She turned, and her face was shown in the clear burst of moonlight and by the lamp, which now had no quiver from Van Helsing’s iron nerves … the beautiful color became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, bloodstained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death — if looks could kill — we saw it at that moment.

      Van Helsing broke the silence by asking Arthur “Answer me, oh my friend! Am I to proceed in my work?”

      Arthur threw himself on his knees and hid his face in his hands as he answered: “Do as you will … there can be no horror like this ever anymore.”

      This agreement extracted, Van Helsing took some of his paste from the tomb’s door.

      We all looked on in horrified amazement as we saw, when he stood back, the woman, with a corporeal body as real at that moment as our own, pass in through the interstice where scarce a knifeblade could have gone. We all felt a glad sense of relief when we saw the professor calmly restoring the strings of putty to the edges of the door.

      The professor and his acolytes went home then for a much-needed rest. But next afternoon all were back, and when the churchyard was otherwise deserted they went into the busy tomb — “Arthur trembling like an aspen” — and opened Lucy’s coffin for the fifth time since her interment.

      Van Helsing, with his usual methodicalness, began taking the various contents from his bag and placing them ready for use. First he took out a soldering iron and some plumbing solder, and then a small oil lamp, which … burned at fierce heat with a blue flame; then his operating knives, which he placed to hand; and last a wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in the fire and was sharpened to a fine point. With this stake came a heavy hammer, such as in households is used in the coal cellar for breaking the lumps. To me, a doctor’s preparations for work of any kind are stimulating and bracing, but the effect of these things on both Arthur and Quincey was to cause them a sort of consternation.

      His bracing preparations finished, Van Helsing found time for another speech, leading to the conclusion that Lucy’s forthcoming impalement was bound to make her ultimately happy, as it meant the termination of her hellish vampire life and it would be most intensely joyful for her if accomplished by “the hand of him that loved her best; the hand of all she would herself have chosen, had it been to her to choose … tell me if there be such a one among us.”

      All looked at Arthur, who, now thoroughly brainwashed by the old sadist, stepped forward bravely. Van Helsing quickly gave directions.

      Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might.

      The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white