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

back with that manservant sleeping in the pantry. Why was his condition so “filthy and insanitary”? Had he his feet resting on the bacon, or was his foul breath contaminating bags of sugar? And where exactly in the “fertile source” did the noxious weeds of “immorality” sprout? Was I to read into the letter dark implications of the deadly sin of gluttony?

      The London papers, that in my own homeland had seemed to promise marvels, seemed only to grow more bewildering the longer I dwelt amid the world which they described. It would take time, I comforted myself, and threw my paper into a dustbin nearby — the park was very neat. Getting to my feet, I strolled on to the zoo. The day was overcast, and, top-hatted like a proper gentleman, I found the sun scarcely bothersome at all.

      It was a relief to reach the zoo and see more animals than people round me for a while. Great throngs of humanity, though I had sought them out and still found pleasure in them, still were wearying to one who like myself had been so long removed from crowds. A stranger in a strange land was I indeed, notwithstanding a reasonable facility in the English speech and an appearance acceptable in the metropolis.

      Naturally enough I gravitated toward the cage of wolves, where three gray beauties suffered with innate dignity their ignominious confinement. Although I at first made no effort to converse, one wolf of them knew me; more accurately, he knew that I was not as common men, and that I was far closer kin to him than any two-legged creature he had ever seen before. He knew that I knew what it was to run on four gray paws, and leap to the kill, and drink the raw red blood from flesh my teeth had torn. He knew, and could not decently contain his knowledge. While the other two in the cage, who may have known something too but did not care, lay drowsing and wondering at him, he bounded like a madwolf against the bars, and let his feelings out in the only kind of voice he had.

      An elderly keeper came from somewhere and regarded me with suspicion. There was no one else about at the time and I was obviously at the focal point of lupine uproar.

      I was not in London to be mysterious, but to bind myself more closely to the great mass of humanity. “Keeper,” I said, to have something to say, “these wolves seem upset at something.”

      “Maybe it’s you,” the man retorted, and his gloomily surly manner reminded me of a Turkish jailer I once had, and the resemblance made me smile even as it aroused my further sympathy for the confined wolf.

      “Oh, no, they wouldn’t like me,” I answered vaguely, distracted by a communication from another source. Freedom, the wolf was saying, looking out. It was not a question but a complete declarative sentence.

      I cannot give you that. I answered him. Take it for yourself and it is yours.

      “Ow yes they would,” the old man answered me, impertinent with the privilege of crabbed and independent age. “They always like a bone or two t’ clean their teeth on about teatime, of which you ’as a bagful.”

      Freedom! came from the gray iron cage.

      Take it. Transcend. Do you want it more than food, more than retaining your own wolf nature? Will you put by your very body and its known comforts to have this thing you say you want? Simply to be free of your cage?

      And the early years of Turkish imprisonment were once more very clear to me. Radu was then a mere child, a small child, too easily frightened to offer any sport at all to our inventive jailers. But I was fourteen years old when they began on me …

      The animal’s brain was churning with unworded thoughts, but for the moment it quieted and lay down. The keeper looked at it in puzzlement, looked back to me, and then walked over to the cage and reached inside to stroke the ears of the panting beast. To startle the old man I did the same, and had my reward in his expression.

      “Tyke care!” he said. “Berserker here is quick!”

      “Never mind, I’m used to them.” The wolf’s eyes were not on me but fixed on distance now, as he thought of running in unbarred, unbounded space.

      “Are you in the business yourself?” the keeper asked, his tone now friendlier. He took off his hat. Perhaps he hoped to buy another wolf or two from me.

      “No, not exactly.” And I tipped my own hat to him and to Berserker in farewell. “But I have made pets of several.” And with that I turned and walked away. The wolf’s wordless thought-voice was falling off in my mind to mere muted distant mumbling, but the infinitely more verbal noise of Lucy’s thoughts was audible again and mounting higher. I did not wish to hear either of them.

* * *

      Something was seriously wrong with Lucy, I could not help but know that much, but I closed off my mind against knowing more.

      There was no possible way I could have guessed that after dark Berserker would break the railings of his cage, forcing iron bars loose from their fastenings, and come racing unerringly to find me in the night — at Hillingham.

      I could not know what the night before me held. But still as I walked out of the park I was perturbed in spirit.

      I said before that I would later speak of fear, and now the time has come. I will not say that I have experienced infinite fear, but I have known all fear that my mind and soul could ever bear, and more. The first time that my Turkish jailors stripped me naked in my cell and carried me, paralyzed with terror and dripping with my own excrement, out to the impalement stake, I had no doubt that I was going to die upon it. Some