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

“Is it really fifteen years, then?”

“It is indeed. Consult your records if you doubt the fact. No doubt you would find it difficult, and perhaps confusing, to call me simply’Holmes,’ as you and Sherlock cling so obstinately to that form of address between yourselves. but this is an emergency, and’Mr. Holmes’ is no longer acceptable. Therefore, from now on I intend to call you’John’, and you will call me by my Christian name as well.”

“Mycroft, then,” I responded. but my heart sank when I considered what I ought to say to Mycroft next.

He was too impatient to wait be addressed. “It is true, then, that Sherlock has disappeared?”

“I fear so.”

“Does the matter really stand substantially as the newspaper stories have it?”

“I have not yet read them–I have seen only the headlines. I am afraid–”

“Then the most startling particulars are true–I mean, that he has been carried off by–how does the newspaper put it?–by’some mysterious agency’? Following–what does it say?–‘an attempt to communicate with the spirits of the dead’?”

“I suppose the stories are substantially correct,” I admitted. “Although I have not read them yet. The attempt was made to reach one spirit only,” I amended–and again could not think of what I ought to say next.

“The spirit of the recently deceased young woman, Louisa Altamont?”

“Yes. At the request of her parents... of her mother in particular.”

“And you are telling me that this attempt to reach beyond the grave... in some way succeeded?” I could sense him waiting with a feverish concentration for my answer.

“I...”

Mycroft’s keen brain–his brother considered him his intellectual superior–evidently read volumes into my sheer clumsy hesitation. “I beg of you, John, tell me the truth. Tell me all you know about the’mysterious agency’ which carried Sherlock off.”

“It was a human agency, of that much I am sure.”

“One man?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“A man, I take it, of phenomenal powers–of a truly extraordinary nature?”

“Yes, Mycroft. Yes.”

There came over the wire what sounded like a despairing sigh. “John, I am going to ring off now. I am coming round to baker Street to see you.” This announcement, to anyone who knew Mycroft’s fixed habits, was startling in the extreme. “I have in hand another matter or two of the greatest urgency, requiring my attention first. but you may expect me within the hour.”

Mrs. Hudson, who had also seen the newspapers, was naturally disturbed by my confirmation of the fact that Holmes was missing. but, as she reminded me with determined cheerfulness, we had weathered many a crisis in the past; and this latest difficulty did not delay her orders that my bath be drawn at once, and that a hearty breakfast be made ready for me when I came down to the sitting room shortly after noon.

Freshly bathed, shaved, dressed, and fed, I felt my energies somewhat renewed. Still I had to force myself to put aside my worries concerning Mycroft, and all other matters not bearing directly on the problem at hand, and concentrate upon the effort now required of me, to establish contact with Prince Dracula. This task had been the reason for my return to London.

To begin with I had no idea of where the prince might presently be found, no reason to believe that he was even in England. As far as I was aware, Holmes had maintained no steady or regular contact with Dracula over the six years since our first encounter. but years ago my friend had had the foresight to inform me that a definite summoning procedure had been arranged, at the same time warning me that it was to be used only in case of emergency. The necessary information, Holmes had assured me, was filed, indexed by means of code words I was required to memorize, among his papers in our lodgings. Duplicate materials were stored in the vault of the Capital and Counties bank.

As I began my search, I could not rid my mind of my worries regarding Mycroft. And in fact the man himself arrived, and was shown up to our rooms, while my preparations were still under way.

As Sherlock Holmes had once remarked upon a similar occasion, I could not have been more startled to see a planet departing from its orbit, so proverbial was the fixity of the man’s daily routine. The morning of each business day saw Mycroft leave his rooms in Pall Mall for his (deceptively small and unassuming) office in Whitehall; the evening saw him walk back to his lodgings; and he was seen nowhere else, save in the Diogenes Club, which was just opposite his rooms.

One glance at the materials I had begun to arrange upon the table– the old book, the mirror, the candle, and the tied-up lock of graying human hair–sufficed to reveal the truth of the matter to him at once.

“So,” he murmured abstractedly, rubbing his massive, clean-shaven chin with a broad, trembling hand, as he observed these preparations. “So, it has come to that again.”

Regarding my visitor, I beheld a man now in his middle fifties, his hair now substantially more gray than dark, a change from the last time I had seen him, a year or two earlier.

Mycroft was, as I have already noted, a much larger and stouter man than Sherlock. His body was absolutely corpulent, but his face, though large, had preserved something of the sharpness of expression which was so remarkable in that of his brother. His eyes, of a peculiarly light watery gray, seemed always to retain that faraway, introspective look which I had only observed in Sherlock’s when he was exerting his full powers.

So far I had of course held to the pledge requested of me by Sherlock, regarding his brother and the mention of vampires; but now it was Mycroft himself who had raised the dreaded subject, and I could only suppose that a total refusal on my part to discuss it might strike him even more terribly than the truth.

Before 1897, I had considered vampires (on those rare occasions when the word,