The Dracula Tape Fred Saberhagen (great reads TXT) 📖

      With my own hands I had prepared the supper that awaited him — roast chicken, salad, cheese, and wine — as I did most of the meals that he consumed during the weeks of his stay. Help from the girls? Bah. They affected to be like infants, who can sometimes be stopped from doing wrong by threat of punishment but cannot be forced to do things properly. It was part of the game they played with me. Besides, I did not want them ever in his rooms if I could help it.

      So with my own hands, hands of a prince of Wallachia , the brother-in-law of a king, I picked up and threw away his dirty dishes and his garbage, not to mention innumerable porcelain chamber pots. I suppose I could have brought myself to scrub the dishes clean, like any menial, had there been no easier way. True, most of the dishes were gold, but I was determined not to stint on my guest’s entertainment. Also, should I ever return to the castle from my projected sojourn abroad, I had little doubt of being able to recover the golden utensils from the foot of the three-hundred-meter precipice which Castle Dracula overlooked and which provided an eminently satisfactory garbage dump. The dishes would be there, dented by the fall no doubt, but cleansed by the seasons and unstolen. I have always had a dislike of thieves, and I believe the people of the villages nearby understood me on this point, if probably on nothing else.

      In the month and a half that he was with me my increasingly ungrateful guest went through a sultan’s ransom in gold plate, and I was reduced to serving him on silver. Toward the end, of course, I might have brought his food on slabs of bark, and he would scarcely have noticed it, so terrified was he by then at certain peculiarities of my nature. He misinterpreted these oddities, but never asked openly for any explanation, whilst I, wisely or unwisely, never volunteered one.

      But to return to that first evening. When my guest had refreshed himself from his journey and rejoined me in the dining room he found me leaning against the fireplace and awaiting him in eagerness, as hungry for intelligent conversation and first-hand news of the great outer world as he was for good food.

      I gestured him to the table, saying: “I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup.”

      Whilst Harker attacked the chicken I read through the letter he had handed me. It was from his employer, Hawkins, who described his young deputy as “full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition,” and also as “discreet and silent.”

      This was all to my liking and I at once began a conversation that went on in the dining room for hours, as Harker ate and then accepted a cigar. We discoursed mainly on the circumstances of his journey — I was particularly interested in trains, which at that time I had never seen, and I enjoyed our talk immensely.

      Toward dawn a companionable silence fell between us, broken shortly by the howling, from down the valley, of many wolves.

      “Listen to them,” I said, for a moment unthinking. “The children of the night. What music they make!” A momentary look of consternation came into my guest’s face; I had forgotten that only a few hours earlier, as I in my guise of coachman brought him up the winding mountain road, he had seen wolves at disturbingly close range.

      I quickly added: “Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.” And shortly we took our separate ways to rest.

      Not having gone to bed till dawn, and being wearied from his journey, Harker naturally slept until late in the day, and as I thought would not have been surprised not to see or hear from me until after sunset. When I looked for him at that hour I was briefly alarmed at not finding him in his own rooms. I had not wished to shatter the spell of that first evening of human society by trying to explain to him how dangerous to him certain parts of the castle could be.

      To my relief, he had strayed no farther than my nearby library, where to his “great delight,” as he recorded in his journal, he discovered “a vast number of English books … magazines, and newspapers … the books were of the most varied kind — history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law — all relating to England and English life and customs and manners.”

      “I am glad you found your way in here,” I said with honesty, “for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These companions” — I gestured at the books — “have been good friends to me, and for some years, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the rush and whirl of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I know your tongue only through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak.”

      “But, Count,” Harker expostulated, “you know and speak English thoroughly!”

      “I thank you, my friend,” I responded, “for your all too flattering estimate, but yet I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them.”

      “Indeed, sir, you speak excellently.”

      “Not so. Did I move