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

depths of the idiocy of that man, Van Helsing, and confess at the same time that he managed to hound me nearly to my death, you will be forced to agree that among all famous perils to the world I must be ranked as one of the least consequential.

      Van Helsing tended to make a good impression, though, especially at first and with the young and inexperienced. Seward held, and stubbornly maintained, a very favorable opinion of this man, who he thought knew “as much about obscure diseases as anyone in the world.” Well, perhaps. Medicine in the 1890s was in a miserable state. “He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than anyone else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician” — right there, Arthur Holmwood, for whom this sales pitch was written, should have been warned —“and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice brook, an indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration” — the latter not for vampires, of course — “exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats …”

      And Mina, when she met him later, saw and described “a man of medium weight, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes one at once as indicative of thought and power; the head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face, clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large, resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight … The forehead is broad and fine … such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big dark blue eyes are set widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man’s moods.”

      Now let us see just what this paragon accomplished for us all. By the time he first examined Lucy, on September second, if I am not mistaken, she had recouped from our perhaps too-enthusiastic embraces of a few nights earlier, and was of course looking better. Van Helsing decided that “there has been much blood lost … but the conditions of her are in no way anemic.” We must make allowance for the fact that English was not the professor’s mother tongue. But neither was his knowledge of the blood and its disorders adequate, a circumstance we all had much cause to regret. After shaking his head over Lucy’s case, but saying little, he went back to Amsterdam to think.

      For several days I had remained away from Lucy to allow her blood time to restore itself, and also to give serious consideration to the idea of breaking off with her permanently and at once. This I decided to do, and when I went back at night to Hillingham it was with the resolution that the time had come to say our last farewell. This decision was for her welfare as well as my own.

      Firstly, I did not want to make her a vampire, when in her ignorance — a state I felt she preferred — she could give no informed consent, could not intelligently weigh the perils and pleasures attendant upon such a momentous transformation. And for us to have continued our intercourse at its then current frequency would shortly have brought her to the point where the possibility of her transformation into a vampire would have to be faced seriously.

      Secondly, I argued with myself, that enjoyable as Lucy was, there was many a peasant wench simpering in my native land who was just as hot-blooded, heavy-breathing, and well-shaped, who might have afforded me the same joys at a small fraction of the expense and effort. Surely it was not for downy skin and tender veins that I had made my odyssey. Alas! how passion can make fools of us! On what was to have been my final visit, devoted to brief explanations and leave-taking, Lucy clung to me as before, and to my chagrin I once more left her noticeably weakened.

      Nevertheless my basic decision was unshaken, and I brought away with me conviction that the assignation just concluded had been our last. The affair was over, I was certain, whether Lucy realized it or not. The chance of her becoming a vampire, which only a few hours earlier had still been relatively remote, had been brought by our most recent embrace to the status of a clear and present danger — or opportunity, depending upon one’s point of view.

      Of course on the next day, which I think was September sixth, Lucy looked somewhat wan and weak and strange again. Holmwood was off attending to his slowly dying father, but Seward looked in on her and did not like what he saw. Again he called in Van Helsing, who had requested that daily telegrams be sent to keep him informed of the patient’s condition.

      The professor hurried back to London, a gleam in his eye I have no doubt, and a bagful of his tools in hand. Before I could have the least inkling of what his intentions were, or even that he was attending Lucy — she had not mentioned to me his earlier visit — the fool had attempted to perform a blood transfusion, with Arthur Holmwood selected — for purely social reasons — as the donor.

      Let us try to see this matter in historical perspective. Not until 1900, some nine years later, did Landsteiner discover the existence in man of the four basic blood groups, A, B, AB, and O, at which point in time the feasibility of transfusion without great peril for the patient may be said to have begun. Of course ever since antiquity some hardy folk have survived their enterprising physicians’ attempts to transfuse blood from human to