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

of Tuesday, August eighteenth, 1891, shouts dimly heard gave me to understand that we were arriving at King’s Cross station, London. I roused somewhat with my inner excitement, and was awake as my box was slid among its fellows from the doors of the goods carriage directly onto a heavy wagon of some kind. With only the briefest of delays the carters took their seats and used their whips, the horses pulled, and we were off to my newly acquired estate, Carfax.

      I listened to London on the way, although I could not see beyond my box. There were perhaps six million souls alive and breathing in the great metropolis through which I then moved for the first time; whistling, coughing, cursing, singing, praying, selling, calling to one another in joy and fury and fellowship, whilst their horse-drawn vehicles innumerable went past mine on all sides. I reveled in the symphony until at length it faded to inaudibility below the steady noise of my own wagon.

      Purfleet, where my house Carfax stood, was, as I may have mentioned before, a semiurban district of Essex on the north bank of the Thames, some fifteen miles east of the heart of London. The teamsters grumbled and used good English words that I had never heard from Harker’s lips, or read in books, as they heaved and pushed, and carried and slid the lord of the manor into his new home. My own delivery instructions, passed along through Dillington and Son, were followed faithfully enough, and by about eight-thirty in the evening my installation had been completed. The footsteps of the last laborer departed and there came to my glad ears the sound of the doors being pulled shut behind him. At about nine o’clock in the evening I emerged from my coffin, eager as a child to explore my new home.

      I found myself standing in a ruined chapel, obviously built before my time, and giving evidence of having stood untenanted by breathing folk for perhaps as long as my own castle. Such remote, comforting privacy for my retreat, and London hardly more than walking distance off. I blessed Harker and Hawkins, stretched my arms high in my joy, and came near laughing for the first time since my first wife killed herself … a dear girl, but she became quite mad, and jumped from a castle parapet back near the middle of my breathing days. There was not much softness in me before that bitter day, but ever since there has been almost none at all …

      Where was I? Yes, describing my first evening at Carfax. A memorable night. Eagerly I toured the vast, deserted, crumbling house, talking now and then to rats, and then I explored the surrounding wooded acreage. Also I remembered to unpack from its nest of mold and earth my traveling bag with its freight of money and new clothes. The latter I hung up where they might stay free of damp and remain in a presentable condition until I should have occasion to try them in society. What foolish thoughts I doted on …

      During the centuries of my existence it has become my firm conviction that they are right who maintain the nonexistence, in a strict sense, of such a thing as sheer coincidence. Yes, I nursed foolish thoughts. How could I have known that Carfax, purchased by myself from a thousand miles away, adjoined a lunatic asylum governed by a man, Dr. John Seward, who had recently, though unsuccessfully, proposed marriage to my slender, passionate blonde of the churchyard and windowsill? And this fact is not the only, nor perhaps the most remarkable, link in the chain of “coincidence” — for want of a better term — that bound my fate so inextricably with those of Harker, Mina, Lucy, Van Helsing, and the rest. Who could have guessed that the sturdy young woman who had come to succor Lucy in the Whitby churchyard was in fact the fiancee, and would soon be the bride, of young Harker, whom I had left behind me in Castle Dracula? He at that very moment was tossing deliriously with what was then called brain fever, in a hospital bed in Budapest, unidentifiable by the good sisters who had him in their care. After climbing down the castle wall with a pocketful of stolen gold, he made his way somehow to the railway station at Klausenberg, where he had rushed in shouting incoherently for a ticket home. Employees in the station, “seeing from his violent demeanor that he was English,” hastened to accept most of his money and put him on a train going in the proper direction. He got only to Budapest before he had to be hospitalized for what would now be called a nervous breakdown.

      I can but relate these intertwined events as they occurred, or as they appeared from my own viewpoint as they were happening. Some intellect more powerful than my own may find a thread or threads of natural causation running through and uniting them all; I can find no sensible explanation for these wild chains of “coincidence” without appealing to causes that are above and beyond nature as she is commonly understood.

      But to return again to Carfax, on my first night. I was not long in being disabused of the idea of the security, safety, and relative isolation of my new estate. Shortly after two in the morning, as I stood gazing fondly into the small lake that graced my grounds, the fun began. It started with a scrambling upon the western side of the high stone wall that completely surrounded Carfax, as of someone trying to climb over. What can this be? I thought, and hurried back inside my dusty, ruined chapel, where my precious boxes had been deposited and were yet in such vulnerable concentration. To guard them was imperative.

      I heard a single breathing being climb the wall and drop onto my ground uninvited. The hesitant quickness of the intruder’s movements made me think of