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

in my situation would have fainted, others would have gone mad. What I did … well, perhaps only a caged wolf could begin to understand.

      Of course I did not die. If the guards had killed me they would have had no fun for the next day. I was not even really — or I should say “not permanently” — impaled. The end of the upright stake was blunt and drew no blood immediately when it was inserted into a natural orifice of the body; and by standing on tiptoe I could keep it from entering deeply enough to do serious damage. I could not stand on tiptoe indefinitely, but when my weight began to come down the men were quick to take me off the stake. They certainly did not want me to die on it then and there. Never before had they seen anyone who retained consciousness while being so deliciously, excruciatingly, helplessly frightened.

      Next day they played a new game, showing me first what they claimed was a signed order for my execution. Again I believed them, for my susceptibility to terror gave me no choice. Perhaps I am not really exaggerating when I say that on each of these days I died of fright. The new game had to do with being burned alive, and I had blisters and scorched hair before they called a halt. And on a succeeding day there was a game involving voracious rats; and again, one with a Turkish woman whose husband, she said, had been tortured to death by Walachians; and after that … but I have no wish to disgust you with all details.

      It was when the cycle came round to the stake again that I realized abruptly that I had nothing left to fear, that in fact I was afraid no longer. I had used up all the fear my soul could ever generate, were I to live to be a thousand. My life’s ration of anxiety, dread, timorousness, and terror, all was consumed before I had a beard to shave. From those days to this, I have feared nothing. I am not brave and never was; that is a different matter entirely …

      It seems to me the most striking proof that this estimate of my condition is correct that I simultaneously lost all desire to be revenged upon my jailors. A high official of the sultan himself, happening to pass through Egrigoz, observed with astonishment how imperturbably I bore some of the fruitless later attempts of my enemies to frighten me. They were in fact applying torture at the time, but, do you know, it is the moment-to-moment fear of pain that is the worst part of pain itself? This high official, as I say, applauded what he took to be my fortitude, and took an interest in my case. In time he became my friend, to such an extent that, had I wanted revenge upon my low-ranking tormentors, I could probably have had it. And it was my refusal of revenge, not out of any heroic Christian virtue but rather because of sheer fearless indifference, that so frightened them in turn. Man fears that which he cannot understand, and I had gone far beyond the comprehension of those simple but evil men …

      So as I walked the London streets it was not with fear or hatred but in gloomy meditation that I thought back upon the Turks. Was I so sure that Iwanted to rejoin the ranks of the mainstream of mankind? To shorten my life, possibly, in doing so? Not that I feared a shortened life, or aught else in the world or out of it.

      Not even God, my friends, although I know him better than you do …

      An hour or so before the wolf escaped at midnight I had been standing in a Soho tavern, acutely conscious of the fact that there was no image of myself in the cracked and cloudy mirror behind the bar and that the fleshly girl clinging to my arm would be indeed surprised were she ever to note that fact. I was acutely conscious also of the warm fluid pulsing so rapidly within her Vena jugularis, and of the impossible odors of alcoholically fermented grain rising from the glass that waited untasted before me on the arm-smoothed wood. Conscious with all my soul of the gulf between me and those round me, all of them unarguably human, misshapen in mind and body and spirit though they were.

      It was in this state that I felt Lucy call to me with a new urgency, cry with a terrible fervor across the four or five miles of the city that separated us. In her fear and sickness she was appealing for my help, calling on me as her protector and her lord, and so it was I answered her. From the shadows of a Soho alley I took flight, and came down to rest on earth again in the dark, timbered lawn of Hillingham.

      From there I sent my wordless summons, as before. This time, however, I soon learned that she could not or would not try to come out. Nor could I simply enter the house upon my own initiative. Whether the reason is to be found in physics or in psychology I am not sure, but the fact is that I may enter no dwelling place of breathing folk unless I have been at least once invited to do so by one who dwells within.

      I knew by this time which window of the upper floor was that of Lucy’s room, and I quickly took wing again and perched outside it, on the ledge. The blind was drawn and at first I could not see into the room, but Lucy’s voice was plain. She was engaged in a shrill argument with another, older woman who could only be her mother. The argument ended abruptly when Lucy fell back exhausted upon her bed, thus coming partially into the narrow range of vision into the