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

such a fuss about it that those in charge of him, who so far seemed to think there was no point to his madness, would be impelled to further investigation.

      Besides, there were my boxes, without which I would be homeless and soon doomed in this alien land. I saw now that I dared not leave them vulnerable to easy attack or even casual vandalism for so long as an hour, and I therefore spent the rest of the night making my position somewhat more secure, at least on my own grounds. It took me a few very worthwhile hours to replace the good Transylvanian earth in several of the boxes — even at this late date I am not going to tell you exactly how many — with English soil, equally good by most standards but not nearly as hospitable to me. One small portion of my homeland I transplanted into the ground within the Carfax chapel, and the contents of some other boxes I buried elsewhere on the grounds, in heavily thicketed places where no chance discovery of my digging work was likely.

      Next day I could rest with some confidence through the hours of light, and by the following evening I had convinced myself that the madman’s incursion was not so important after all. I did not want to spend the night lurking round an asylum, anyway; I wanted to see London, and I did.

      Or I began to see her. There is of course no end to such an enterprise. Taking to my small leathery wings at dusk, I made short work of fifteen miles. Before I came within a mile of London’s heart the roar of her never-quiet streets assaulted my ears and the glow of the metropolis dazzled my bat eyes. It was night, and summer, and many of the coal fires were out that on a winter’s day would have quite blackened the sky about me.

      There wound the Thames, girded by great bridges and giving back a million sparkling lights. There beyond the Green Park was the palace wherein Victoria herself graced the last years of her long reign; there sounded, close below me, the deep and solemn notes of Big Ben. The larger thoroughfares were all crowded, and my eye picked out here and there the unfamiliar, unnatural steadiness of electric light. The fronts of stores and restaurants glowed along Piccadilly and in the Strand; the Abbey, towering remnant of an age long gone, looked out and pondered on a changing world. A few lights burned in Parliament, where government of a far-flung empire no doubt could not afford to wait till morning.

      Below me now St. Paul’s Cathedral raised its dome; now passed the crooked streets and savage slums of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green …

      But I could talk for hours on London, and I must not. Let me now say only that night after night I came to her, and each night was more enraptured than the last.

      Meanwhile …

      I suppose it cannot be counted as remarkable coincidence that Lucy came down to London — or rather to its northern environs, where stood her family’s house called Hillingham — some five days after I did. London was and is the Rome toward which all English roads must tend. It was at about this same time that she began to keep a diary, recording rather gloomy thoughts. It may be that after a few episodes of life lived keenly with her Viking she found the prospect of life with Arthur Holmwood no longer attractive.

      Holmwood — shortly to become Lord Godalming, on the death of his father — was easily the wealthiest and most influential of Lucy’s three breathing suitors, and he was the one she had accepted. I was to learn about him shortly. Dr. Seward, as I have said, was another. The third we will come to in a little while.

      Since Lucy and I had come to be of one blood I vaguely sensed her geographic closeness when I awoke on the evening of August twenty-fourth. But I only smiled fondly to myself and went out to look at London once again, to taste the psychic nectar of her crowds, to mingle with her great masses of vital humanity, to study in her houses, streets, and monuments the records of her enormous past. Each hour I spent in these activities tempted me to spend two more, and it was only with difficulty that I could force myself to allot time for necessary business: the dispersal of my nests.

      I now began to get about regularly during the daylight hours, and walked into the office of a carter’s firm to arrange for the removal of some of the boxes from Carfax to secondary depots about the city. I was delighted to find that the proprietor and clerks, upright daytime citizens all of them, dealt with a vampire in a courteous and businesslike way: they observed my coin and paid little attention to my face. Meanwhile I also replaced the native earth in some more of my boxes with English soil. These refilled boxes I let sit in the Carfax chapel, whilst to hold the Transylvanian earth I employed some large boxes obtained at night, by stealth and strength, from a coffin monger’s in Cheapside. I left some gold behind there, in payment more than adequate, but did not wish to attract attention by open purchase of such specialized items, when I was not an undertaker and had no stock of corpses to be exhibited on demand.

      These modern double coffins I found to make delightful domiciles; with my native soil packed into the outer box, I could rest in perfectly clean comfort within the inner, leaden shell. One such double coffin I buried in the chapel, and another in the yard of a house at Mile End that I was already negotiating to acquire. A third box I kept in reserve, in a rented shed near Charing Cross. I tell you now quite freely where they were, for they