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

letter and a fresh envelope, and watched him as he addressed and sealed the message anew. There was in his face such despair, with a nervous twitching at cheek and eye, there was such a tremor in the fingers with which he tried to write, that my sensibilities were touched and I was glad I had not been more severe.

      I had at that time been a frequent observer of human beings under stress for more than four hundred years, and it was plain to me that Harker now teetered on the brink of mental breakdown. This was regrettable in itself, and also I felt at least some indirect responsibility; yet all the same I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. With any luck he was going to be a couple of months in a sanatorium after he left my domain, and no one would believe vampire tales from the mouth of one whose mental scales so obviously had tipped.

      Hawkins might call upon me at Purfleet, I supposed, and perhaps Harker’s much beloved Miss Mina Murray, too — her name had something interesting about it for me, even then — to see what might have happened in the Carpathians to upset the poor boy so. And I would be concerned and gracious, and would entertain them, for which purpose I meant to have my estate in part at least, renovated according to modern standards of comfort. By the time Harker had managed to make his stories credible, if he did not prudently choose instead to alter or disavow them, I should have managed to establish new English sanctuaries for myself, even to alter my appearance, and I might well be able to get beyond the reach of any investigation launched.

      Meanwhile, there were the three predated letters I had wisely obtained from Harker a few days earlier, by making up some story for him about the uncertainty of posts. They were chatty, innocuous reports of good health and a pleasant journey, ostensibly written by him on the twelfth, the nineteenth, and the twenty-ninth of June, the third dated from Bistrita rather than from the castle. I had got these letters in anticipation of some unhappy ending to Harker’s visit, and now my foresight was proven wise. If for some reason he failed to arrive home in good health, suspicion would be shifted from me.

      When I took the readdressed — and now harmless — letter to Hawkins back to the gypsies to be posted, I informed the leader of their band that my guest was becoming non compos mentis and that we should all have to take good care of him. Tatra, a swarthy, compact man who could meld into a centaur with his horse, for some reason received this news with little surprise.

      “On the day after I am gone, Tatra,” I added, “I charge you to put on the coachman’s uniform and drive him down to the Pass, so that he may in good time board there the diligence for Bistrita, where he may regain the railroad. Obey his orders or requests in any small matters that seem reasonable; nay, in anything that will not be dangerous for him. It is not his fault that he has suffered here, or at least not his alone.”

      Tatra bowed and swore that he would do as the master wished; I hoped silently that it was so.

      My own mood was brighter than it had been for some days when I returned to Harker’s rooms, unlocked his door — I had begun to fear he might do something truly rash — and went in, to find him asleep upon a sofa. He roused when I entered and looked up at me with haggard wariness. He looked almost too worn to be afraid.

      “So, my friend, you are tired?” I asked, briskly rubbing my hands. “Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure to talk tonight, since there are many labors to me” — my stock of provisions for him was far depleted, he having consumed the greater part of the pig whose squeals had so alarmed him earlier — “but you will sleep, I pray.”

      He got up like a sleepwalker and went into his bedroom, where he threw himself face down upon the covers. Shortly he was indeed asleep again — as he wrote in his journal the next day, “despair has its own calms” — and I took the opportunity of removing his papers, money, and so on from his apartments for safekeeping. I also borrowed his best suit of clothes, so that some of the gypsy women might try their hand at preparing for me garments more in the English style, with Harker’s as a pattern.

      This task took them a couple of weeks, but I was able to wear the finished product when I left upon another provisioning errand on the night of June sixteenth. I wished to try my new clothes’ fit and durability. Only much later, when the chance came for me to read Harker’s journal in typescript, did I understand that he had spied on me again that night, and had imagined that I was wearing his own suit as I crawled down the wall — for the purpose, if you will believe it, of blackening his reputation; that “any wickedness” which I might do to the local people should be attributed to him. No, Mr. Harker, I assure you — can you hear me now, from your presumed post in heaven above? — other matters which I judged more important than besmirching your name were claiming all my energies. “Great God!” some yokel doubtless exclaimed upon that night, when he beheld my tall figure, white-haired, white-mustached, red-eyed, and decked out for Savile Row. “There goes the vampire in the clothes of the young Englishman. He must have eaten him.”

      Scarcely had I completed my night’s labors and come back to Castle Dracula — lugging in my straining bag a newborn calf to