Séance for a Vampire by Fred Saberhagen (top ebook reader TXT) 📗

Armstrong, frustrated, turned back from the window with a muttered oath. He picked up one of the chairs from near the table, spun round again and swung it hard, smashing the window open. A second blow was necessary to widen the gap sufficiently; a moment later he had plunged out through the gap thus created, with Louisa’s father close on his heels.

Sherlock Holmes, now shouting loudly but uselessly in a great effort to prevent some terrible mistake, and perhaps hoping to influence the girl by some means other than main force, followed the other men out. There came an additional crashing and shattering of glass.

Abandoning my effort to find the light switch in the unfamiliar room, I needed another moment or two to reach the broken window, then to stumble out through the enlarged gap and across the terrace after my friend. At the time I did not notice that I had torn my coat sleeve and scratched my arm on a jagged corner of glass.

But having reached the terrace, I could once more clearly see Louisa–I was now convinced that the visitor was indeed she, though vastly (and to my mind sickeningly) transformed. The girl in white stood near the center of the terrace, surrounded by a small group of struggling people, including her father, her fiancé, and Holmes.

The large expanse of one of the French doors, still unbroken and still closed, reflected the scene on the terrace brightly, illuminated as it was by sporadic moonlight as well as by light washing out of the house through the windows of other rooms. In that mirror I clearly saw the struggling group reflected–all save the central figure.

Our blond-haired visitor in white cast no trace of any image in the glass.

I thrust my hand, as if by instinct, into the pocket where I customarily carried my old service revolver, on the occasions when I went armed. but then I remembered that my revolver was still in London and realized that in any case the time had not come for using deadly force.

I had not been appointed judge, much less executioner. but whatever hopeful doubts might have persisted in my mind at the beginning of the séance were now gone. The nature of the horror we faced was clear. Beyond all question, the young girl in white was a vampire.

Six

In the next instant I was bumped violently from behind by Abraham Kirkaldy. No doubt the impact, heavy enough to send me staggering across the terrace, was entirely accidental. The young medium had come stumbling out through the broken window after me, and on recovering my balance I turned to see him groping slowly with outstretched arms, as if in a trance, in the general direction of the figure in white.

Again and again the youth, his head thrown back, cried out his warnings about a thing from hell. He gestured wildly, emphasizing his unheeded commands that the intruder should go back to the nether regions whence it had come.

The gaunt youth was still standing close beside me as he shouted, pointing with an outstretched arm, though not at the figure of Louisa Altamont, but rather into the darkness beyond it. Once more called out sharply, trying to banish from the house and terrace whatever entity it was that he alone, among us breathing folk, could see.

It was plain to me that the young man’s fear, his attempt to assert authority, were not directed at the vampire girl. but for a moment I thought that she seemed to hesitate, as if she were on the verge of trying to obey his orders.

Then something almost invisible sighed softly in the night beside me, and I belatedly became aware–by what senses I am still not sure–of a heavy and forbidding presence. I saw–trying to regain the memory, I can only assert that I thought I saw–the suggestion of a masculine, malignant face, of greenish glaring eyes, their gaze directed not at me but at the young medium.

The air around me sighed again, and sang. I heard a savage impact–I could distinguish no weapon, but perceived only a dim rushing movement in the air–and in that moment Abraham Kirkaldy collapsed upon the stones of the terrace without a groan, felled by a single blow that had torn his scalp and partially crushed his skull. Of Kirkaldy’s attacker I retained only the vague perception which I have already tried so inadequately to describe.

In the next few moments I beheld a sight which made my brain reel in new horror. Swiftly the figure of the girl in white swirled near the medium’s fallen body, and bent low over him as if to bestow a kiss. Then she looked up, and in the moonlight I saw, by the dark stains around her fresh young mouth, that she had tasted his blood before she fled–or before she was pulled away, by the same almost-invisible power that had struck him down.

In the press and urgency of these events, I had momentarily lost sight of Sherlock Holmes, but now I caught a glimpse of my friend again, still endeavoring to keep Altamont and Armstrong away from the figure in white.

And then, in the next moment, Holmes was gone.

Quite distinctly I beheld his lean, strong body, legs kicking helplessly, caught up like a child’s by some nearly invisible power, and whisked away in the departing rush of the malignant presence which had by now left my side. Let me repeat that at no time on the terrace had I been able to perceive this intruder as a distinctly human form. Rather I was aware only of a dim inhuman horror, that now vanished quickly into the depths of the nighttime garden, carrying Holmes with it.

Again I wished for my revolver, though even had I been armed I should hardly have dared to fire for fear of hitting Holmes himself. Running as quickly as I could toward the spot