A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) by Fred Saberhagen (most read book in the world .TXT) 📗

gaze in that decrepit face fixed on Jerry, his teeth, which were very white and at the moment very pointed, displayed in a friendly smile.

      Deep in his throat Jerry was making incoherent sounds. Just when he was on the point of springing to his feet again, he was stunned and half-paralyzed by a gentle-seeming stroke, almost a caress, as the hand he had been trying to butcher for its rings released his wrist and rose to stroke him on the cheek. A moment later the same hand fell on his ankle with a wrenching grip, to pull him even closer with nightmarish ease. Then the hand let him go for a fraction of a second, only to re-establish its grip upon his neck. There it left an impression that filled his arms and legs with pins and needles.

      Satisfied that Jerry was temporarily deprived of the power of movement and of speech, the thing from the coffin reached out and took hold of Jerry’s remaining colleague.

      Too late, and ineffectually, the man began to struggle. Then he screamed: a faint, half-breathless, inarticulate sound. The sound was not a conscious utterance, but only the result of the breath being crushed entirely out of his rib cage by arms almost skeletally thin, but far stronger than those of any breathing human.

      No blood had yet been visibly spilled, though now a great deal was being drained. The helpless, dying man was being dressed like a fowl, by a butcher who set a very high value on the avoidance of carelessly spilled blood.

      And soon the two pale hands, working together, had wrenched off one of the living arms that a minute ago had been swinging a shovel at him. And now at last there came a spray of red, quickly cut short as Radu’s mouth closed over the pumping artery.

* * * * * *

      … and a little later, after a timeless interval of unconsciousness, Jerry Cruncher opened his eyes to see that the man who had been buried (his hair that had been white was now luxuriant and raven black, growing on a head as firmly fastened to his body as Jerry’s own — How could he ever have imagined that the head had once been separate?) — that man was chewing to pulp much of the soft tissue of Smith’s body, his white teeth crushing, splintering the bones. The man from the coffin was straining Smith’s blood through his mouth to swallow it, spitting out the gruesome residue, murmuring and puffing a red froth of satisfaction…

      The white face, marked with only three almost microscopic spots of wasted blood, turned in Jerry’s direction. All the signs of age had disappeared, subsumed in a glorious and vital youth.

      Jerry, his body no longer physically pinned, but his mind effectively paralyzed, was compelled to watch while his companion’s life was drained away, his body efficiently emptied of blood. All he could think of was that his own turn would be next…

      But the blood of one stout man had evidently been sufficient to take the edge off decades of hunger.

* * *

      When the mouth of the thing from the coffin was no longer too busy taking nourishment to speak, there issued in a whispery rasp from its dry lips elegant words, sentences, in a French that was highly literate but almost barbarous in its antiquity. When Jerry only stared with lack of comprehension, the French was followed by a kind of English closer to the speech of Shakespeare than to that of the wretch who had come intruding with his shovel.

      The voice grew more dry and ghastly with every word it uttered. “Come here to me, young man. Come here.”

      “Uhh…”

      “But wait. First…”

      Radu, standing now, free of the last coffin-fragment, methodically hand-scooped earth to bury the ghastly, unrecognizable remains of Smith at the bottom of the hole from which his own breathless yet undying body had so recently emerged.

      Then, still standing up to his ragged knees in loosely piled dirt, he turned to the other graverobber. Jerry was considerably younger, and much handsomer, than either of the other two.

      “Come here.”

      Again, the victim had no choice.

      “What year…? What is the Year of Our Lord…?”

      This time Jerry willed himself to spring to his feet and run, and nothing visible held him back from darting away in flight, leaving the horror behind; but there could be no possibility of help within a hundred yards, the distance of the nearest portion of the cemetery fence. Nearer than that were only grass and darkness, trees and tombstones. And the confident attitude of the thing from the coffin assured him that he had no chance to get anywhere near that fence by flight.

      What year? Unable to do otherwise, he muttered an answer to the question.

      Meanwhile waves of horrible fear were washing over him, blending with a luminous, sickly, and all but irresistible attraction. It seemed to Jerry that his body was moving and acting on its own, independent of his will. He sidled closer to his undead captor and whimpered unconsciously, like a timid pup. He shivered as if with electric shock when the pale hand fell on his arm.

      There was already a delicious anticipation in the shiver, a reaction no more controllable than that produced by a dousing in cold water.

      Sheer food-hunger had for the moment been satisfied; in the far more delicate blood-draining that now ensued, there was a kind of love.

      Smoothly and almost effortlessly, with a look and a touch and the murmur of a few soft words, Radu seduced the young man who had tried to despoil his body. The breathing youth was handsome, or at least made that impression on the vampire, who had been underground and dreaming nightmares for more than eighty years.

      Before climbing out of the pit, Radu scraped up and gathered, from where it lay mixed with the wreckage of his coffin, the essential native earth that Vlad had seen to it was there to sustain his life. He bundled the earth into a