The Dracula Tape.
by Fred Saberhagen.
The following is a transcript of a tape found in a recorder in the back seat of an automobile belonging to Mr. Arthur Harker of Exeter, two days after the freakishly heavy Devon snowstorm in January of this year. Mr. Harker and his wife, Janet, both suffering from exposure and exhaustion, were admitted to All Saints Hospital, in Plymouth, on the morning following the height of the storm. They spoke of abandoning their auto on an impa.s.sable road near midnight, but seem never to have given any convincing explanation for leaving the relative security of their vehicle at an hour when the storm was at its worst, nor of exactly how they reached Plymouth. All Saints Hospital is some thirty kilometers from where their car was found in a drift on the Upham Road, just outside St. Peter"s Cemetery and virtually on the edge of Dartmoor. The Harkers" physical condition and the state of their clothing upon arrival at the hospital suggests that they may have walked across country. Their car was undamaged when found, and although all its doors and windows were locked the key was still in the ignition, which had been turned off.
The petrol tank was approximately one-third full.
The voice on the tape is masculine and rather deep. It speaks English with an indefinable slight accent. Three linguistics experts consulted have given three divergent opinions regarding the speaker"s native tongue.
The general quality of the tape, and the background noises detectable thereon, are, in the opinion of technical experts, consistent with the hypothesis that the tape was in fact recorded in an automobile, engine running at idling speed, heater and blowers operating, with gusts of high wind outside.
The Harkers dismiss the tape as "some joke," profess no interest in it, and refuse all further comment. It was first played by rescue workers who found the car and thought the recorder might hold some emergency message from its occupants. They brought the tape to the attention of higher authorities because of the references to violent crimes which it contains. No external evidence has been found to connect the tape with the alleged vandalism and grave robbing at St. Peter"s Cemetery, now under investigation.
... this switch, then my words will be set down here electrically for the world. How very nice. So, if we are going to tell the truth at last, then what real crimes can I be charged with, what sins so utterly d.a.m.ning and blastable?
You will accuse me of the death of Lucy Westenra, I suppose. Ah, I would swear my innocence, but what is there to swear by that you would now believe? Later, perhaps, when you have begun to understand some things, then I will swear. I embraced the lovely Lucy, it is true. But never against her will. Not she nor any of the others did I ever force.
At this point on the tape another voice, unidentifiable, whispers an indecipherable word or two.
Your own great-grandma Mina Harker? Sir, I will laugh like a madman in a moment, and it is centuries since I have laughed, and no, I am not mad.
Probably you have scarcely believed one single thing that I have said to you this far. But I mean to go on talking anyway, to the machine, and you may as well listen.
The morning is far off, and at present none of us have any place to go. And you two are well armed, in your own estimation at least, against anything that I might try to do to you. Heavy spanner clutched in your white-knuckled right hand, dear Mr.
Harker, and at your good wife"s lovely throat hangs something that should do you more good, if all reports are true, than even such an estimable bludgeon. The trouble is that all reports are never true. I"m the last stranger you"ll ever welcome into your car out of a storm, I"ll wager. But I intend you no harm. You"ll see, just let me talk.
Lucy I did not kill. It was not I who hammered the great stake through her heart.
My hands did not cut off her lovely head, or stuff her breathless mouth-that mouth- with garlic, as if she were a dead pig, pork being made ready for some barbarians"
feast. Only reluctantly had I made her a vampire, nor would she ever have become a vampire were it not for the imbecile Van Helsing and his work. Imbecile is one of the most charitable names that I can find for him...
And Mina Murray, later Mrs. Jonathan Harker. In cla.s.sic understatement I proclaim I never meant dear Mina any harm. With these hands I broke the back of her real enemy, the madman Renfield, who would have raped and murdered her. I knew what his intentions were, though the doctors, young Seward and the imbecile, could not seem to fathom them. And when Renfield spelled out to my face what he intended doing to my love... ah, Mina.
But that was long ago. She was an old, old woman when she went to her grave in 1967.
And all the men on the Demeter. If you have read my enemies" version of events I suppose you will tax me with those sailors" lives as well. Only tell me why, in G.o.d"s name why, I should have murdered mem... What is it? At this point a man"s voice, conditionally identifiable as that of Arthur Harker, utters the one word nothing.
But of course. You did not realize that I could speak the name, of G.o.d. You are victims of superst.i.tion, sheer superst.i.tion, which is a hideous thing, and very powerful indeed. G.o.d and I are old acquaintances. At least, I have been aware of Him for much longer than you have, my friends.
Now I can see you are going to wonder whether the crucifix at the lady"s throat, from which you have begun to derive some small measure of comfort, is really efficacious at all in present company. Do not worry. Believe me, it is every bit effective against me as-as that heavy spanner in the gentleman"s right hand would be.
Now sit still, please. We have been cut off alone in this snowstorm for an hour now, and it was half an hour, not until you tried to watch me in the rear-view mirror, before you even began to believe my name, were convinced I was not joking. Not pulling your legs, as I believe the idiom has it. You were quite careless and unguarded at the first. If I had wanted to take your lives or drink your blood the gory deeds would now be done.
No, my purpose in your car is innocent. I would like you just to sit and listen for a while, as I try once more to justify myself before humanity. Even in the remote fastnesses where most of my time is spent, I have caught wind of a new spirit of toleration that supposedly moves across the face of the earth in these last decades of the twentieth century. So once more I will try... I chose your car because you happened to be driving here tonight-no, let me be strictly truthful, some arrangements were made to cause you to come along this way-and because you, sir, are a lineal descendant of a dear old friend of mine, and because I have learned that you habitually carry this tape recorder in your car. Yes, and even the snowstorm has been arranged, a little bit. I wanted this chance to offer this testament, for myself and others like me.
Not that there is anyone else quite like me... Sir, I perceive by the condition of the ashtrays that you are a smoker, and I would wager you would like to smoke. Go ahead, put your spanner down in handy reach, and puff away. The lady too might like a cigarette, at such a trying time as this. Ah... thank you, but I do not indulge, myself.
We are going to be here for a while... I have seen few snowstorms heavier than this, even in the high Carpathians. Without doubt the roads will be impa.s.sable until sometime tomorrow at the earliest. Lacking snowshoes, it would take a wolf to get about in snow like this, or something that can fly...
I suppose you"ll want to know, or others will, why I should bother with this apologia pro vita sua. Why, at this late date, attempt to defend my name? Well, I change as I grow older-yes, I do-and some things, for example a certain kind of pride, that were once of great moment to me are now no more than dust and ashes in my tomb. Like Van Helsing"s desecrated fragment of the Host, which there went back to dust.
I have been there myself, there in my tomb, but not to stay. Not yet to stay beneath the ma.s.sive stone on which the one word"s carved, just... Dracula. TRACK ONE Let me not start at the beginning of my life. Even penned in here, listening at close range to the words from my own lips, you would find the story of those breathing, eating days of mine too hard to believe. Later on, it may be, we will have some discourse of them. Had you noticed that I do not breathe, except to get the wind to talk? Now watch me as I speak and you will see.
Maybe a good point to start from would be that early November day in 1891, at the Borgo Pa.s.s, in what is now Romania. Van Helsing and the rest thought that they had me, then, and brought their chronicle to its end. It was snowing then, too, and my gypsies tried, but with only knives against rifles they could not do much when the hunters on horseback caught up with me at sunset and tipped me out of my coffin, and with their long knives went for my heart and throat...
No. I have the feeling that I would be telling too much backward if I began there.
How"s this? I"ll start where the other chronicle begins, the one that you must be familiar with. It starts early in the previous May, with the arrival in my domain in Transylvania of one Jonathan Harker, a fledgling solicitor sent out from England to help me with the purchase of some property near London.
You see, I had been rousing myself from a period-somewhat extended-of great lethargy, quiescence, and contemplation. New voices, new thoughts, were heard in the world. Even on my remote mountaintop, green-clad in the forests of centuries, well- nigh unreachable, I with my inner senses could hear the murmurings across Europe of the telegraph, the infant splutterings of the engines of steam and internal combustion.
I could smell the coal smoke and the fever of the world in change.
That fever caught in me and grew. Enough of seclusion with my old companions- if one could call them that. Enough wolf howlings, owl hoots, bat flutterings, half- witted peasants hissing at me from behind contorted fingers, enough of crosses waved like so many clubs, as if I were a Turkish army. I would rejoin the human race, come out of my hinterlands into the sunlit progress of the modern world. Budapest, and even Paris, did not seem great enough or far enough to hold my new life that was to be.
For a time I even considered going to America. But a greater metropolis than any of the New World was nearer at hand, and more susceptible to a preliminary study.
This study took me years, but it was thorough. Harker, when he arrived at my castle in May of 1891, took note in his shorthand diary of the "vast number of English books, magazines, and newspapers" I had on hand.
Harker. I have rather more respect for him than for the others of the man-pack that was later to follow Van Helsing on my trail. Respect is always due courage, and he was a courageous man, though rather dull. And as the first real guest in Castle Dracula for centuries, he was the subject of my first experiments in fitting myself acceptably back into the mainstream of humanity.
Actually I had to disguise myself as my own coachman to bring him on the last leg of his long journey from England. My household help were, as some of the wealthy are always wont to say, undependable, even if they were not so utterly nonexistent as Harker was later to surmise. Outcast gypsies. Superst.i.tiously loyal to me, whom they had adopted as their master, but with no competence as servants in the normal sense.
I knew I was going to have to look after my guest myself.
The railroad had brought Harker as far as the town of Bistrita, from which a diligence, or public stagecoach, traveled daily to Bukovina, a part of Moldavia to the north and west. At the Borgo Pa.s.s, some eight or nine hours along the way from Bistrita, my carriage was to be waiting, as I had informed my visitor by letter, to bring him to my door. The stagecoach reached the pa.s.s at near the witching hour of twelve, an hour ahead of schedule, just as I, taking no chances, drove my own caleche with four black horses up close behind the diligence where it paused in the midnight landscape, half piny and half barren. I was just in time to hear its driver say: "There is no carriage here, the Herr is not expected after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return tomorrow or the next day; better the next day."
At this point some of the peasants on board the stage caught sight of my arrival and began a timorous uproar of prayers and oaths and incantations; I pulled up closer, and in a moment appeared limned in the glow of the stagecoach"s lamps, wearing the coachman"s uniform and a wide-brimmed black hat and false brown beard as additional disguise, these last props having been borrowed from a gypsy who had once traveled as an actor.
"You are early tonight, my friend," I called over to the stagecoach driver.
"The English Herr was in a hurry," the man stammered back, not meeting my eye directly.
"That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift." I smiled at the coach windows full of white, scared faces, and someone inside it muttered from Lenore: "Denn die Todten reiten schnell [For the dead travel fast]."
"Give me the Herr"s baggage," I ordered, and it was quickly handed over. And then my guest himself appeared, the only one among the pa.s.sengers who dared to look me in the eye, a young man of middle size and unremarkable appearance, clean-shaven, with hair and eyes of medium brown.
As soon as he was on the seat beside me I cracked my whip and off we went.
Holding the reins with one hand, I threw a cloak round Harker"s shoulders, and a rug across his knees, and said to him in German: "The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz underneath the seat, if you should require it."
He nodded and murmured something, and though he drank none of the brandy I could feel him relax slightly. No doubt, I thought, his fellow pa.s.sengers in the coach had been filling him with wild tales, or, more likely and worse, just dropping a few hints about the terrible place that was his destination. Still, I had great hopes that I could overcome any unpleasant preconceptions picked up by my guest.I drove deliberately down the wrong road at first, to kill a little time, for that chanced to be the night, the Eve of St. George, on which all treasure buried in those mountains is detectable at midnight by the emanation of apparent bluish flames. The advance arrangements for my expedition abroad had somewhat depleted my own store of gold, and I meant to seize the opportunity of replenishment.
Now you are doubting again. Did you think that my old home was much like any other land? Not so. There was I born, and there I failed to die. And in my land, as Van Helsing himself once said, "There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been volcanoes... waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify." English was not Van Helsing"s mother tongue.
Never mind. The point is that I took the opportunity of that night to mark out a few sites of buried wealth, of which there were likely to be several, as we shall see. My pa.s.senger was quite naturally curious at these repeated stoppings of the carriage, at the eerie glow of faint, flickering blue flames appearing here and there about the countryside, and at my several dismountings to build up little cairns of stone. With these cairns to guide me on future nights when I was alone, I would be able to recover the treasure troves at my leisure.
I had expected Harker"s natural curiosity at these events to break forth at once in questions, whereupon I, in my coachman"s character, would be able to demonstrate irrefutably that marvels unmet in England existed here in Transylvania. Thus he would be led by degrees into a frame of mind receptive to the real truth about myself and vampires as a race.
What I had not reckoned with was the-in this case-d.a.m.nable English propensity for minding one"s own business, which in my opinion Harker carried to lengths of great absurdity, even for a discreet and tactful young solicitor. There he sat, upon the exposed seat of my caleche, watching my antics with the cairns but saying nothing.
He called out at last only when the wolves, my adopted children of the night, came from the darkness of the forest shadows into the moonlight close around the carriage, staring silently at him and at the nervous horses. And when I came back from marking my last trove of the evening, and with a gesture moved the wolves away and broke their circle, Harker still had no questions, though I could sense his stiffness when I climbed into driver"s seat again, and knew that he was quite afraid. Harker"s tenseness did not ease during the remainder of our ride, which ended when I drove into "the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky,"
as he was shortly to describe my home.
I left Harker and his baggage at the ma.s.sive, closed front door and drove the horses on back to the stables, where I roused with a kick the least undependable of my snoring servants to take care of them. Ridding myself on the way of false beard, hat, and livery, I sprinted back through the clammy lower pa.s.sages of Castle Dracula to resume my own ident.i.ty and welcome in my guest.
As I paused in the corridor outside the rooms I had made ready for his lodging there came into the dark air beside me a shimmering that would have been invisible to eyes any less attuned to darkness than my own; came voices tuneful as computer music and no more human; came the substantiation in the air of faces three and bodies three, all young in appearance and female in every rich detail, save that they wore without demur their clothes a century out of date. Not Macbeth on his moor ever saw three shapes boding more ill to men.
"Is he come?" asked Melisse, the taller of the dark pair of the three.
"How soon may we taste him?" Wanda, the shorter, fuller-breasted one inquired.
With the corner of her smiling ruby lips she chewed and sucked a ringlet of her raven hair.
"When will you give him to us, Vlad? You"ve promised us, you know." This from Anna, radiantly fair, the senior of the three in terms of length of time spent in my service. Service is not the right word, though. Say rather in terms of her endurance in a game of wit and will, which all three played against me without stop, and which I had wearied of and ceased to play long decades since.
I strode into the rooms I had prepared for Harker, poked up the hearth fire previously laid and lit, moved dishes that had been warming on the hearthstone to the table, and sent words over my shoulder into the dim hallway outside. "I"ve promised you just one thing in the matter of the young Englishman, and I"ll repeat it once: If any of you set lip against his skin you"ll have cause to regret it."
Melisse and Wanda giggled, I suppose at having irritated me and having gotten me to repeat an order; and Anna as always must try to get the last word in. "But there must be some sport, at least. If he stray out of his rooms then surely he shall be fair game?"
I made no answer-it has never been my way to argue with subordinates-but saw that all was in readiness for Harker, as far as I could make it so. Then, an antique silver lamp in hand, I dashed down to the front door, which I threw open hospitably, to reveal my now-doubtful guest still standing waiting in the night, his bags on the ground beside him.
"Welcome to my house!" I cried. "Enter freely and of your own will!" He smiled at me, this trusting alien, accepting me as nothing more nor less than man. In my happiness I repeated my welcome as soon as he had crossed the threshold, and clasped his hand perhaps a little harder than I ought. "Come freely!" I enjoined him.
"Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!"
"Count Dracula?" Harker, trying to un.o.btrusively shake life back into his painfully pressed fingers, spoke questioningly, as if there might still be some reasonable doubt.
"I am Dracula," I answered, bowing. "And I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill and you must need to eat and rest." I hung my lamp on the wall and went to pick up Harker"s luggage, overriding his protests. "Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort myself." He followed as I carried his things upstairs and to the quarters I had prepared for him. One log fire flamed in the room where the table was spread for supper, and another in the large bedroom where I deposited his bags.
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 circ.u.mstances 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 and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. And that is not enough for me. Here I am n.o.ble; I am boyar; the common people know me and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one: men know him not-and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pauses in his speaking if he hears my words, "Ha ha! a stranger!" I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London.
You shall, I trust, rest here with me awhile, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today, but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand."
Harker pledged his willingness to help me with my English and then asked if he might use the library at will. This seemed like a good time to issue my warnings, so I said: "Yes, certainly. You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge you would perhaps better understand."
"I am sure I would, sir."
But I knew that he could not begin to understand, as yet, and I tried to press the point, still without giving away too much. "We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of what strange things there may be."
Thus having led the conversation into the murky region of Strange Things, and seeing my guest nodding soberly in apparent agreement, I momentarily hesitated, on the brink of trying to Tell All; but no, I decided, I must first make Harker my good friend.
He now took the opportunity to ask what I could tell him of the mysterious blue flames that he had glimpsed on the night of his arrival, and about the odd behavior of the "coachman." In reply I told him a substantial portion of the truth.
"Transylvania is not England," I repeated, "and there are things here which reasonable men, men of business and science, may not be able to understand. On a certain night of the year-last night, in fact, when all evil spirits were supposed by the peasantry to rule unchecked-a blue flame is seen over any place where treasure has been concealed. That much treasure has been concealed in this region, there can be but little doubt; for this is ground fought over for centuries by the Walachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil hereabouts that has not been enriched by the blood of patriots and invaders." Speaking of the past began to bring it back to me, as it does now; again I felt the movement of the warhorse beneath me as his ears picked up the sounds of battle, the clash of metal and the cries of terror.
Again I smell the stinks of war; and see the banners and the blood. I remember the treachery of the boyars, and recall the beautiful, beautiful loyalty to me, the voivode, warlord, of the men who worked the land and knew me to be fair. How good it was to breathe the air with them... but never mind.
To Harker I went on: "In old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out to meet them-men and women, the aged and the children too-and awaited their coming on the rocks above the pa.s.ses, that they might sweep destruction on them with artificial avalanches.
When the invader was triumphant he found but little in the way of gold or precious stuff, for all had been sheltered in the friendly soil."
Harker was now at least halfway to believing the tiny marvel of the flames and treasure. "But how," he asked, "can treasure have remained so long undiscovered when there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look?"I smiled. "Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool!" The villagers below in 1891, I had in mind. "These flames only appear on one night, and on that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors."
We drifted into other matters, and back at last to real estate.