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

      As I say, my journey, to the Black Sea port was uneventful. My Szgany handed me over to my agent, Petrof Skinsky, and he in turn to the good Herr Leutner, with whom I had been in correspondence but who was too modern a man to ever have credited tales of nosferatu if they had reached his ears. Of Skinsky I was not so sure; and I will have a little more to tell you about him later.

      So Leutner took faithful charge of my fifty large boxes of earth, and saw to it that they were loaded aboard ship, never dreaming that the consignor himself was voyaging along, his luggage of money and spare clothes packed in a sturdy traveling bag beneath him in the soil. I was shipped aboard the schooner Demeter, bound for Whitby, which is, as some of my hearers may not know, on the Yorkshire coast about three hundred kilometers north of London.

      I had ridden some river-going craft before but the Demeter’s was my first sea voyage. Emerging from my box on the first night out — the box I happened to be in had been stowed beneath several others, but between sunset and dawn I can pass if I wish through a crack narrower than a knifeblade — I walked in man-shape up from the hold, and attained the deck by sliding through the watertight sealing of a hatch. In the comforting dark of night I could perceive a mass of land on the horizon to our starboard; the sea around was otherwise clear to the horizon, and a fresh east wind blew from astern. There were three other men on deck, and I did not long remain. By careful reconnoitering during those first nights of the voyage, I ascertained that there were nine men in all on board besides myself, five Russian sailors, a Russian captain and second mate, and the first mate and the cook, who were both Romanian.

      Also I used my senses diligently, especially during the hours of darkness, to learn what I could of this new world of the sea. As you no doubt realize, I have some command of wind and weather, and had naturally considered using these powers to facilitate my journey. The difficulty, as I soon came to understand, was that although I was able to remember our course very well as we traversed each part of it in turn — we vampires having what I suppose would now be called an inertial guidance system, or something akin to one — I had not the slightest feel for where we should be going, which way to tell the wind to push. I had of course the pure intellectual knowledge that my destination’s name was England, and that it was to be reached by a roundabout passage through the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. But this knowledge would be of small help in trying to speed the ship on its way, and so I was content to observe and try to learn.

      Five days out of port we reached the Bosporus, and a day later we passed through the Dardanelles and entered the Mediterranean. It was at about this point, as I now suspect, that the first mate began to be aware of my nocturnal wanderings. I do not believe that he had actually seen me yet, but by means of the marginal perceptions that breathing humans sometimes have he came somehow to know that a tenth presence inhabited the ship after nightfall; that now a plank creaked slightly beneath an unfamiliar tread; that again there was no shadow on the moonlit deck just where a shadow should have lain, and that darkness lay instead just where the moonbeams should have fallen clear.

      Sailors are a superstitious lot; I had not realized before how true this truism was. And the mate was a man, as I now suppose, abnormally sensitive to the abnormal; on July fourteenth, the eighth day of our voyage, the men having evidently caught the contagion of fear from the first mate, one of them disputed him about something and was struck. Whether the quarrel was about an apparition in the night or something totally unrelated I do not know, as it took place in daylight when I was snug below and my only knowledge of it is from my enemies’ records.

      These records also make the following night, that of July fifteenth to sixteenth, as the first on which I was actually seen by any of the crew. As the captain duly entered in his log, one of the seamen, “awestruck,” reported watching “a tall thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward, and disappear.” I had grown careless, and even a little carelessness is always bad.

      On that night I still had no suspicion that my presence aboard was creating a stir, but when I roused at the following sunset I became aware that everything in the hold around me had been disarranged. My boxes were all moved at least slightly from their original positions, and the ballast of silver sand had been much trampled on.

      There was no sign of any leak or other nautical emergency which would have required the crew to do so much labor in the hold, nor had I the feeling that a storm had come and gone. What then? The evidence suggested to me that the hold had been searched, though fortunately not with the thoroughness that would have been necessary to dig me from my earth.

      The crew then, or some of them, probably suspected that something was amiss. But having searched around me once, they were not likely to search the hold again without good cause; so I thought, at any rate, and determined to lay low for a night or two. Thus I found out only later that one of the