The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen (best black authors TXT) 📗

leave the castle. Why, on that particular spring night, did I choose to crawl head first down the wall above the precipice, rather than fly out unnoticeably in the form of a bat, walk less terrifyingly on four legs, or even expectably on two? I can only answer that my various physical forms and modes of locomotion have each their own comforts and discomforts, their pleasures and predicaments; besides, if truth must be told — and that is why I am here, is it not, speaking into this machine? — I was trying to avoid Anna, with her ceaseless pleading to be allowed to sample Harker’s blood, and thought a climbing egress from the castle best calculated to serve that end.

      And so poor Jonathan, by chance gazing from a window out into the moonlight, observed me, as he wrote, “emerge from (another) window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings … it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones” — my boots I had tied by their laces to my belt — “just as a lizard moves along a wall. What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of a man?”

      Three nights later Harker saw me leave again by the same means, and when I was absent he attempted to get out of the castle by the main entrance. I had left the door securely locked, for his own good, and he turned away, baffled, to seek another exit.

      A door that I had neglected to fasten quite securely led him into the west wing. This was, he surmised, “the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days.” He was led to this conclusion by the presence of “great windows … and consequently light and comfort” here where “sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach” because of the height and steepness of the cliffs below. Here he supposed that “of old, ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars.” Fortunately the ladies of old were, like those of his own time, somewhat tougher and more capable than he ever gave them credit for being. His understanding of this point would have made a great difference, not only in his life but in my own. But I am getting ahead of my story.

      Having forced his way into these closed-off rooms, Harker for a while admired their spacious, moonlit windows, and the furniture, which had “more air of comfort” than any he had seen elsewhere in the castle. Although he found in the suite “a dread loneliness” which chilled his heart, “still it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of Count Dracula, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me.”

      Of course, notwithstanding my most solemn warnings, the clodpate schooled his nerves until he fell asleep. I returned in time to save him, though barely, and even I was struck speechless for a moment by the extent of his folly.

      Without even putting down the burden with which I had reentered the castle, I listened for his breathing in his own rooms and heard it not; then I sped, faster and faster, through the dark corridors, looking and listening for my guest, with ever-growing concern. When I found the open door to the west wing, which I had thought securely locked, I could only pray that I was not too late.

      Barely in time for him, I say, I came upon them, in a chamber thick with moonlight that laid enchantment upon the prosaic ruin wrought by time. Harker supine upon an ancient couch, where he had lain down oblivious to the dust. Wanda and Melisse stood at a little distance, biding their time, waiting their turns, whilst over him crouched fair Anna, who had actually laid the pinpoints of her canines upon his throat. I came in man-form up beside her and put my hand around that fair white neck of hers; raised her soft body that had in it the strength of ten good normal men and hurled her staggering back, halfway across the room.

      I shot a glance down at Harker and saw that his vessels had not yet been tapped. He was nearly unconscious at the time, in sleep and trance commingled; lips half parted in a fatuous smile and a sliver of eyeball gleaming beneath each sagging lid. Hoping that he would not remember this scene upon the morrow, or would recall it only as a dream, I held my voice to a whisper despite my rage.

      “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I have forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.”

      Fair Anna, no doubt aching with frustration at being robbed of her delight when it had seemed so certain, let out a sick and bitter laugh and dared to answer back: “You yourself never loved; you never love!” And in her laughter the other women joined, when they saw I had not moved at once to punish her.

      “Yes, I too can love,” I answered softly. And in that moment my thoughts went back to a far different world, a world once sunlit and alive within that castle, within that very chamber that now held only dust and mold and ruin beneath the glamor of the moon.

      But that world held in my memory was none of theirs, nor did I mean to give them material for mockery. “Yes, I can love,” I said. “You yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you