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

that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go, go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.” These lies I told to be rid of the women without punishing them. I had no real wish to punish them for Harker’s stupidity. I dislike cruelty, and am not cruel unless it is quite justifiable.

      “Are we to have nothing tonight?” Melisse whined, pointing to the bag that I had brought, which now lay moving slightly on the floor. It contained the relatively poor results of my foraging expedition — a rather lean pig offered up to me by a peasant woman in hopes of my doing, in return, some damnable evil upon one of her rivals in love. I nodded, and the women sprang to surround the bag, and bore it away with them.

      At this a faint gasp issued from Harker’s recumbent form. I looked round sharply and could now be sure that he was quite dead to the world. What I did not then know was that he had witnessed the women pouncing upon my shopping bag, and had interpreted the porcine squealing therefrom, if his “ears did not deceive” him, as “a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child.” My unimaginative solicitor had fainted.

      Needless to say, there was no possibility of doing business with him that night, even if I had been so minded. I carried him, still oblivious to the world, back to his room and put him to bed; it was still my hope that he might interpret his evening with the girls as a mere nightmare if he remembered it at all. I also took the liberty of going through his pockets, and got my first look at his journal. But it was kept in shorthand, a code I did not understand until much later, and after pondering briefly I left the little book where I had found it.

      “If I be sane,” he wrote in it the next day, “then surely it is maddening to think that of the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone can I look for safety, even though this be only whilst I serve his purpose.” And it had been my thought that, should he remember anything of the moonlit horrors he had so narrowly escaped, he would upon waking bless me as his protector and friend. Alas, for my innocent and long-persisting faith in human nature.

      I began to realize that my problem was no longer so much how to win Harker’s friendship as it was what to do with him, or do about him. Were I to send him home at once, he must at the very least have some strange stories to tell about me when he got there. My own departure was scheduled for June thirtieth, still more than a month away, and Harker could easily be back in London within a week, there to prepare for me a reception of the most unpleasant kind. His knowledge of my business affairs in England was so great that I could not hope to avoid such an outcome if he left Castle Dracula as my enemy and were given a head start. At the same time, he was as yet my guest, my responsibility, and honor and justice alike forbade that I should do him any harm. I yearned that he would either come out with open accusations to which I might openly reply, and demand his freedom if he minded the locked doors, or else that he would show himself my enemy, in order that I could justly kill him.

      We came near reaching the latter solution when I discovered that he was attempting to smuggle out a secret letter. It was addressed to his fiancee, Miss Mina Murray, to whom he had written openly at my request only the day before. Harker threw this clandestine letter, along with another one, addressed to Hawkins, out the window along with gold, to some of my gypsys, who of course brought the letters to my attention.

      The secret letter to Hawkins was very brief, and merely asked him to communicate with Mina Murray; but the letter to her was written in code, the same shorthand as Harker’s secret journal. When I had examined it I came near going to his rooms to do him violence. I had to remind myself forcibly that my guest was still my guest, that he was in strange circumstances for an ordinary, untraveled Englishman, and that I did not really know that the coded missive contained anything untruthful about me or meant to cause me harm.

      Still, I was angry. Rarely had I been so angry since the day I nailed the Turkish envoys’ turbans to their heads when they refused to doff them for me. Remind me to tell you about that later. But in my greatest angers I show outward calm. Taking the two letters, I went to Harker’s room and sat down beside him. He looked up at me with the guilty, hopeless, haggard look that now grew worse upon his face with every day.

      “The Szgany have given me these,” I began steadily. “Of which, though I know not whence they come, I will of course take care. See!” — and I reopened one letter — “one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other” — and I pulled from its envelope the one in code — “is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! So it cannot matter to us.” And then and there I burned it, in the flame of Harker’s lamp … ah, I really do not care for electric light.

      “The letter to Hawkins,” I continued, “I shall of course send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal.” I handed Harker the