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

answer for the clamoring servants, who now poured into the library bearing lights and a variety of improvised weapons. “She came to us! To her old parents–and I had doubted, but I shall never doubt again!” He went to try to comfort his wife, who, rather than rejoicing in Louisa’s return, was bemoaning her renewed loss. Neither had really taken any notice as yet of the new tragedy on the terrace–or of the kidnapping which had seemingly just occurred.

Looking around in the confusion, the fact struck me again, with even more ominous force than before, that Sherlock Holmes was still nowhere to be seen.

One of the servants had now brought my bag. Having done my best to stanch the bleeding of young Kirkaldy’s scalp wound–there was nothing else I could do for him at the moment–I quickly descended once more into the garden a few yards west of the terrace, and shouted Holmes’s name repeatedly. but there was no reply. It seemed to me that he had been made to vanish into a darkness whose ominous silence swallowed violence and death alike.

Now I had a few moments in which to look about the library. Perhaps Louisa had dropped something, left some actual trace of her presence in the house? but in the general disarrangement and confusion I could discover nothing.

It upset me at the time, but perhaps it is not really to be wondered at that in the circumstances, confronted by marvels and by violent injury, no one else seemed much concerned about the fact that Holmes was missing. I believe it was generally assumed that he had gone in pursuit of some intruder, despite my denials that that had been the case. Even though I was sure that my old friend had been in distress when I last saw him, I was still able to hope that he would soon return.

Despite my attempts to give myself such reassurances my worry grew.

Meanwhile, the various minor injuries suffered in the outbreak of violence kept me busy for a time in my professional capacity. At intervals I went outside again and looked and listened, but neither my borrowed electric torch nor my ears gave me the slightest encouragement regarding the success of any renewed search.

The screams uttered by Louisa’s mother had by this time declined into low exhausted moans. Obviously the woman remained for the moment inconsolable. In a low voice she had begun lamenting, over and over, the fact that her beloved Louisa had been here, within reach, and then had been somehow driven away again.

Mrs. Altamont, evidently in some forlorn hope of tempting her lost daughter back, asked that the electric lights be once more turned off. Of course the request had to be refused, and I invoked my medical authority firmly enough that the servants obeyed me. Meanwhile young Rebecca Altamont was trying, in a broken voice, to comfort her mother, even while struggling to suppress her own sobs.

Louisa’s father, obviously shaken to the depths of his being by the experience through which he had just passed, sympathized with his wife’s grief, but the main focus of his attention remained elsewhere. The man kept wandering in and out of the house, from the terrace to the library and back again, looking about him hopefully at every step, as if he thought his daughter might appear again. At length he came inside, let himself down in one of the chairs turned sideways from the table, and sat there staring into space, his mouth open, his expression vacant, as if unaware that his hand was still bleeding from a piece of broken glass. A servant who came to help him was ordered absently away, so that the blood continued to drip, unnoticed by the victim, upon the carpet.

On approaching him with my professional manner I had better success, and soon succeeded in getting his hand bandaged. Still Altamont, though yielding to my ministrations, seemed scarcely aware of his injury. Gradually I understood that the man had undergone something approximating a religious conversion, during the last few minutes of darkness following the appearance of his daughter–the image, the figure he had seen, had very probably touched, had been genuinely that of his little girl.

As I tied the knot securing the bandage on his hand, he roused himself from this ecstatic trance to become aware of who I was and what I was doing. His manner turned grim. “I was wrong, Watson, I was terribly wrong. Oh, forgive me, Louisa–the blessed spirits will forgive me, I know they will!”

“The blessed spirits?” I asked hollowly–my thoughts were still full of that shadowed horror which had hung near me in the darkness, and had struck twice at members of our group.

Martin Armstrong, who had now collapsed into another chair nearby, was also overjoyed, but while listening to Louisa’s father, kept shaking his head in obvious disagreement. “No,” the young man interjected at one point. “No, sir, you don’t understand. Oh, she came back, she did indeed! but the blessed spirits had nothing to do with it!”

The father, however, ignored this comment, and springing up suddenly from his chair, began clutching at one person after another, weeping in his growing joy and his continuing amazement.

Repeatedly he told us how Louisa, in the brief interval when she had been present, had spoken to her father of things no one else could possibly have known. Though stunned with astonishment, he was certain of her identity.

“And then... and then... certain things happened. There was a dreadful interference... which drove her away again.” Once more a sterner expression came into his face, and he looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time since the lights had been restored. “Where,” he demanded, “is Mr. Holmes?”

Armstrong, in the background, was still in smiling disagreement, but made no further argument.

Tersely I explained, as best I could, the situation with regard to Holmes.

As he heard me out, Ambrose Altamont, his clothing disheveled, his hair standing on end, assumed a new