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

construction of curved wood was then clamped down. A final adjustment, if necessary, was accomplished by tugging on the subject’s hair, or on the ears if there was insufficient hair to offer a good grip. This part of the operation was not entirely without peril for the technician; more than one assistant executioner lost more than one finger due to premature release of the heavy knife above.

      Let us now briefly consider that weapon, its cutting edge poised ten or twelve feet above the waiting neck. Attached to the top of the blade was a mouton, a piece of iron weighing some thirty kilograms, or over sixty pounds, intended to render more forceful the descent of the razor-edged cutter, which in itself weighed about twenty pounds. The impact of all this metal, falling usually on the fourth vertebra, tended to be decisive.

* * *

      I can offer eyewitness testimony that it was Sanson’s habit, each day after work, to bring home with him only the blade of the guillotine, without the mouton. His idea, that of a good workman, was to save the most delicate part of the instrument from rain and rust. Also there was some thought of discouraging curiosity-seekers from playing games with la mecanique, hurting themselves or some innocent victim.

      Naturally Sanson, or more often one of his assistants, saw to it that the blade was cleaned very thoroughly before it was brought into his house. Those in charge also took care that the cutting edge, angled at about forty-five degrees from right to left for improved efficiency, was treated tenderly with file and whetstone to keep it sharp.

* * *

      Up on the platform, when Sanson’s shop was open for business, there waited wicker baskets also painted red, and made small and large, to receive, respectively, the heads and bodies of the corpses which were the finished product of all this industry and ingenuity. The baskets were usually kept half-filled with bran or sawdust, in hopes of making the cleanup easier.

* * * * * *

      How’s this for a joke? Executioner to victim being dragged to the machine: “You don’t want to do it? But it will only take a second.”

      Yes, I quite agree. But at the very height of the Terror, in the summer of 1794 (Year 2 of the now-almost-forgotten Revolutionary Calendar), one of Sanson’s least intelligent assistants was wont to repeat this wheeze a dozen or a score of times a day. Of course each victim only had to hear it once; but after a few weeks it seemed that the fellow’s own co-workers, tortured beyond endurance, were on the point of cutting their colleague’s throat to shut him up … but I digress.

      Where was I? Yes, there is one more point I wish to make about the guillotine, then on with the story, which I trust you will find fully satisfactory … Whenever, in these post-Revolutionary times, a full-size model of la mecanique becomes available—this happens somewhat more often than you might think—many people find something irresistibly attractive in the idea of trying on, as it were, that tillable plank and even that lunette. (Few go so far as wanting to hear above their heads the speedy whisper of the falling blade.) Some of these enthusiasts are found among the adventurous elderly, sometimes they are young men, but for some reason the most susceptible to such temptations seem to be young women. All of them want to know: How would it feel to lie down there?

* * *

      But it would have been hard to conceive of anything more remote from the thoughts of Philip Radcliffe and his bride of three months, the former June MacKenzie, on the late afternoon in the early summer of 1996 when those two young people encountered … no, not a guillotine, not yet … but their first vampire.

      This particular drinker of blood made a first impression all sweet and girlish, with nothing at all in her appearance to suggest, at first glance, the true nature of her being— unless one considered the dark glasses, necessary armor against the day’s last, relatively feeble rays of direct sunlight. She looked very young (though actually well over five hundred years of age, as I can testify through personal acquaintance) and was comely of face and figure. Her hair was curly, coloring on the dark side, more gypsy-looking than African. Wearing faded jeans, a man’s shirt, and long silver earrings, she stood at roadside, one arm boldly extended, thumb up in the hitchhiker’s time-honored gesture, flashing white teeth— none of them at the moment particularly pointed—as Radcliffe’s convertible, slowing to ten miles an hour for a sharp curve on the winding, climbing, narrow western road, drew near.

      The Radcliffes’ kidnapping by the so-called undead took both of them completely by surprise. At the moment when they first came in sight of the young woman, there had been nothing on their minds more exotic than their choice of places, all hours of driving distant, where they might stop for the night.

      But how could an even moderately adventurous young man, accompanied by a wife who invariably wanted to stop for injured animals, resist an attractive young woman standing at roadside at sunset, hitchhiking appealingly in an open area, typical of the western USA, where not even a single thuggish male companion could possibly be concealed? One could see the mountains rising, almost a hundred miles away, with not much of anything but distance in between. There was no broken-down car in evidence, to offer an explanation for her presence.

      The girl at roadside came into the view of Philip and June just as the sun was on the point of disappearing behind the western mountains, on what had been till then a day of only minor surprises for the young couple. The youthful-looking hitchhiker was barefoot, a condition made more noticeable by her blood-red painted toenails. It seemed obvious that she had not been doing a lot of walking along the