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

human, or even from animal to human; no doubt in many cases the survival of the patient has been due to failure of the transfusing technique to work, so that no appreciable fraction of inimical blood cells were introduced into his vascular system.

      I was myself quiescent in my tomb in 1492, the year of the supposed transfusion of Pope Innocent VIII with the whole blood of three young men; therefore I cannot venture an opinion on the accuracy of that most shocking story. During a period of activity in the mid-seventeenth century I read with interest more than casual of Harvey’s epochal discovery of the circulation of the blood. From time to time I continue to gather facts and learned opinions in the field. Although my own opportunities for actual research have been more circumscribed than you might think, and my natural bent is toward action rather more than intellectual affairs, still by 1891 I had accumulated some small knowledge of this subject of more than passing consequence in my own life. Had I known what Van Helsing was doing to treat a vampire’s victim — as he saw the case — I would have stopped him. You may believe that I would not have callously left Lucy to her fate. But though I perceived through the continued communion of our minds that she was now definitely unwell, and suffering, I did not guess the cause.

      Whether because of a fortunate compatibility between Holmwood’s blood and her own, or because of some equally lucky failure of the technique to transfuse much of any blood at all, Lucy not only survived that first operation but by next day had regained something of the appearance of heath. She had been narcotized during the operation, and on waking had no clear grasp of what had happened, although of course there was the small bandaged wound upon her arm to give her food for thought. When she questioned the men who had her in their charge they lovingly told her to lie back and rest.

      On the night of September ninth she suffered a relapse; or it may have been a fresh illness, some bloodborne infection from her fiance. Van Helsing’s prescribed treatment for this setback was a second transfusion, this time with Seward as the donor, as the youngest and sturdiest male available at the moment. Those who wonder at the girl’s surviving this second assault — and a third one, later on — at the hands of the indomitable scientist may ponder also Lower’s similar operation, which was also successful or at least nonfatal, performed in London in 1667. And another in Paris in the same year, by Denis, who is documented as transfusing the blood of a lamb into the veins of a boy left anemic by conventional medical treatment — that is, bloodletting — of the time. The nineteenth century in England saw the obstetrician Blundell, and others, attempting the transfusion of blood between humans with increasing frequency, and often claiming favorable results.

      But many unpublicized attempts must have been made that concluded more unhappily. And Lucy’s second transfusion, from Seward — who wrote that he was much weakened by his donation — had a bad effect upon her.

      As she languished in her bed — and I of course unknowingly pursued my own affairs — on September eleventh the house at Hillingham received from Holland the first of a number of shipments of garlic, including both flowers and whole plants. These of course were ordered especially by the philosopher and metaphysician, who by this time knew — though he had told no one — that a vampire was lurking about. Now, the powerful smell of Allium sativumis at least as discouraging to a suitor of my persuasion as to one of the more common sort — nay, more so, for even bland food can be disgusting to a vampire — but it is not quite the impassable barrier Van Helsing evidently hoped for. Still, had I really been intent upon effecting the poor girl’s ruin, this new tactic would at least have been better than injecting her with foreign proteins.

      On the night of September twelfth Mrs. Westenra, though herself semi-invalid, roused sufficiently to throw the supposedly medicinal flowers out of her daughter’s room and leave the window open. Perhaps her own life was somewhat prolonged by this removal of the irritating stench of diallyl disulfide and trisulfide and the rest, but Lucy’s was thought — by the doctors, at least — to suffer. One of the most advanced scientists of his day had of course omitted to tell Lucy’s mother of his theories that her daughter would be better off with windows shut and stinking blooms in place. Had he spelled out all his ideas for Lucy’s mother, I suppose she might have thrown the flowers out anyway, and Van Helsing with them, and we should all have been far better off. However …

      Naturally Lucy’s vampire visitor was blamed, by Van Helsing then, and by the whole crew later, for the continued deterioration of her condition. In fact, I was walking the streets of Whitechapel on the night the flowers were thrown out, and far into the morning; but I could have produced no witnesses. On that night I spoke with and joked with an eyewitness to one of the Ripper’s shocking crimes of three years before. I believed her surprising version of that event, but I doubted that a jury would accept her word on my whereabouts or her testimony as a character witness for me.

      She was welcome company, for during most of that night I walked alone and nursed a grim, post-midnight kind of thought. The first real doubts were rising in my mind as to the feasibility of my planned reunion with the mainstream of humanity. Much as I enjoyed being in London, I was being forced to the realization that my mere presence there was not changing me as rapidly as I had hoped.

      On September thirteenth, as Seward recorded