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

      The general silence of the night was helpful to my ears, this far from the bustle of the central city. Whilst my visitor was still a hundred paces off I could hear him well enough to be sure he was a man, and not a woman or a child. Motionless and noiseless as a basking lizard myself — more so, for lizards have lungs that work — I waited in the rat-trodden dust of my chapel, listening. The feet of the approaching man seemed to be bare, and he wore some kind of a loose garment that swished about him as he walked. Now he was right outside the chapel wall, and he suddenly threw himself down there and began snuffling and groveling in the most bestial style. With a feeling of sinking dismay it came to me that he might be nosferatu himself. Was England aswarm already with such as I, and had Harker through some insane delicacy omitted to let me know? Then indeed were my hopes likely to be doomed. It was with some relief I noted that this man continually breathed.

      Now the mysterious one had crept along to the iron-bound oak doors that closed the chapel, and now he strained what was evidently a powerful pair of arms to open them, so that the hinges creaked. But the doors held.

      “Master, master!” he hissed then, lips close to the door. It was a whispered entreaty that was fierce and managed to be slavish at the same time. “Master, grant me lives, many lives!”

      What Anglo-Saxon idiom of speech is this? I pondered, even as he went on: “Insects I have now, master, to devour by the scores and hundreds, and animals I may obtain … but I need the lives of people, master! Men, and children, and women, especially women. Women!” He made a sound between a gurgle and a laugh. “I must have them, master, and you must grant them to me!”

      He went on for what seemed like many minutes in the same vein, whilst I stood just inside the door, no more than an arm’s length away, like a priest in some mad confessional. With hands pressed to my temples I tried to think. Of one thing only could I be sure: this man knew that I was there, knew at any rate that some being beyond the ordinary was inside the chapel, and he had come to offer me a kind of self-serving worship. My secure anonymity, upon which I had just been congratulating myself, and toward which I had spent so much coin and effort, was already nonexistent.

      Even as I stood there at a loss I heard the footsteps of others, four or five more men, climbing the wall in the area where my first visitor had climbed. In something like despair I at first visualized a whole troop of worshipers, with this their gibbering high priest who had found the shrine and was going to lead them in their litanies: “Women … master … lives … master … women …”

      But instead of the madman’s acolytes it was of course his keepers who were coming after him, Seward and three or four burly attendants the doctor had wisely brought along. Only at this point did I remember Harker’s casual mention of the asylum adjoining my grounds, and begin to grasp the true state of affairs.

      Outside, the newcomers rapidly came closer. They fanned out into a semicircle centered on the man who knelt at my chapel door, and continued a methodical advance.

      Meanwhile he continued to pour forth his pleas. “I am here to do your bidding, master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshiped you long and afar off.” To this day I am not certain whether this last statement was a lie meant to be ingratiating, a delusion generated in the sick man’s brain, or actually the truth. Certainly Renfield — which was his name, as I later learned; a madman nearly sixty years of age, but of prodigious strength, and from a noble family — certainly, I say, Renfield was somehow aware of my presence as soon as I arrived at Carfax, and was subsequently able to detect my comings and goings there without leaving his own cell or room at the asylum.

      He went on, almost slavering, in a repulsive hissing voice: “Now that you are here, I await your commands, and you will not pass me by, will you, in your distribution of good things?”

      Behind and round him the other men were steadily closing in. Now I heard for the first time the voice of Seward, young, confident, and masterful: “Renfield, time to come back with us now, there’s a good chap.”

      And another, wheedling, in accents of the lower class: “Come on now, ducky. Easy does it … whup!”

      Masterful words or sweet ones would not do the trick for them that night. Though they were four or five to one, the struggle was not easy. Renfield’s was no ordinary strength, as I discovered later for myself. Later also I read of how he had actually torn a window and its casing from the wall of his cell in making his escape that night. Seward and his men at length subdued him, and packed him away, bound like some wild animal to be bundled back over the wall; and stillness and the night were mine once more. But from the noise of that struggle I was well able to believe that, as Seward wrote of his patient on that very night: “He means murder in every turn and movement.”

      And my dreams of a new life had received another powerful blow.

Track Three

      I would have followed the keepers and their prisoner back to the asylum at once to learn if I could from what source Renfield derived his powers, but I expected that he would detect my presence there, and no doubt make