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

fitfully now and again from torpor, half expecting and hoping to hear at any time hail of English voices from another ship, and then their footfalls as men came aboard to see what ailed the derelict. Hoping, because to be boarded so near Whitby would, I supposed, get me an easy tow into the proper port. But no ship came close enough to take an interest in the Demeter, and when night fell again I judged that the time had come to get to land as best I could by my own actions.

      The raising and ordering of a major storm is an exhausting business, and one not altogether pleasant. Even after I had identified the harbor that I sought and worked the ship ’round to it, great exertion was required to aim the schooner at last — “as if by a miracle,” in the words of a newspaper account — between the piers that guarded the harbor mouth, so that she flew in to finally ground with little damage upon a shingle of dark stones just beneath the tall east cliff.

      Electric lighting had then been in gradually increasing use in England for some ten years, but in my backwaters of Eastern Europe I had not yet seen it; and when the searchlight, quite powerful for its day, glared from one of the piers toward my fleeing ship I was startled and knew not what to expect next.

      When the light struck I was directing the last necessary push of the wind in bat-form, so as to be ready to fly free, if need be, from a sudden grounding shock. My clawed feet were both snugly gripped about some rigging lines and my wings were furled close about me in the wind. Even in the searchlight’s glare none of the onlookers thronging the piers and shore were able to make out my small brown form upon a mast. That so many folk were out to watch, at this hour of the night, was a surprise to me. I had not realized that Whitby was something of a resort town, full of folk not used to the ocean and its moods, and the storm itself had attracted hordes of sightseers to the shore.

      Bat’s eyes are bothered by electric glare, and as soon as I saw that the ship was inevitably going to ground in a few moments I dropped into the companionway and altered form to that of a wolf. As soon as the first thrill of grounding ran up through the schooner’s bottom, the entertainment seekers on the cliffs were surprised to see an “immense dog” — as a reporter wrote — spring up on deck from below. It jumped ashore from the bow and at once vanished in the darkness beyond the searchlight’s reach.

      To run as a wolf is a powerful and easy mode of travel, less dreamlike and less dependent on the air than bat flight, faster and more effortless than running as a man. In less than a minute I had reached the darker, inland regions of the town, which seemed as still and deserted now as if the entire populace had gone to line the oceanside and watch the storm. After some little time spent waiting among the deeper shadows of a narrow street I felt sure that no one had pursued or followed me from the harbor, and let myself return to man-shape. This process excited a large mastiff that had been cringing, moaning its fear of the wolf, in a coalyard opposite. When wolf smell changed to something like man smell the brute was emboldened to attack, and came out after me.

      Ordinarily I would probably have soothed the beast and sent it home again, but my nonphysical powers were greatly wearied by the raising and direction of the storm. Under the circumstances I thought the dog fair game, and drank its blood as restorative. Its torn body was found the next day, but was not for a long time connected with the arrival in the harbor of fifty large boxes invoiced as clay.

      Feeling stronger in the hours before dawn, I stalked the rain-wet streets of Whitby in search of a vantage point from which I might see the grounded schooner without coming too close to her. I was wearily reluctant to take on bat-form but still wanted to see what, if anything, was being done with her precious cargo.

      For this purpose of observation the small churchyard on a cliff high above the town and harbor proved to be ideal. It was a wild, magnificent scene that I beheld from this clifftop before dawn; of course by now I had let go my reins on weather, and the storm was much abated. But the ocean was still sullen and unruly and the sky filled with low, scudding clouds. I was sated and revitalized with fresh blood and exalted in the grandeur of the scene and in what I took to be my victorious arrival against considerable odds. The small parish church near which I stood and the great ruined abbey above were both empty of human life, and I stood there watching until nearly dawn before taking my way on bat wings down to the ship again.

      If I was roused from sleep at all by my box being unloaded with the others I have no recollection of the disturbance now. Mr. Billington, the good Whitby solicitor to whom the shipment had been consigned, had dutifully brought a crew of men aboard the Demeter with the morning tide, and when I woke once more at sunset I found myself still amid my fifty boxes of sweet earth, stacked now in a dry warehouse.

      For the next few days I endured a rather passive though risky existence. Inquiries about the shipwreck were in the air. The admiralty, as I gathered from a few words overheard, were taking an interest; harbor dues were payable, and in the midst of these threatened complications Billington dawdled over completing the arrangements for my shipment