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

at these repeated stoppings of the carriage, at the eerie glow of faint, flickering blue flames appearing here and there about the countryside, and at my several dismountings to build up little cairns of stone. With these cairns to guide me on future nights when I was alone, I would be able to recover the treasure troves at my leisure.

      I had expected Harker’s natural curiosity at these events to break forth at once in questions, whereupon I, in my coachman’s character, would be able to demonstrate irrefutably that marvels unmet in England existed here in Transylvania. Thus he would be led by degrees into a frame of mind receptive to the real truth about myself and vampires as a race.

      What I had not reckoned with was the — in this case — damnable English propensity for minding one’s own business, which in my opinion Harker carried to lengths of great absurdity, even for a discreet and tactful young solicitor. There he sat, upon the exposed seat of my caleche, watching my antics with the cairns but saying nothing. He called out at last only when the wolves, my adopted children of the night, came from the darkness of the forest shadows into the moonlight close around the carriage, staring silently at him and at the nervous horses. And when I came back from marking my last trove of the evening, and with a gesture moved the wolves away and broke their circle, Harker still had no questions, though I could sense his stiffness when I climbed into driver’s seat again, and knew that he was quite afraid. Harker’s tenseness did not ease during the remainder of our ride, which ended when I drove into “the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky,” as he was shortly to describe my home.

      I left Harker and his baggage at the massive, closed front door and drove the horses on back to the stables, where I roused with a kick the least undependable of my snoring servants to take care of them. Ridding myself on the way of false beard, hat, and livery, I sprinted back through the clammy lower passages of Castle Dracula to resume my own identity and welcome in my guest.

      As I paused in the corridor outside the rooms I had made ready for his lodging there came into the dark air beside me a shimmering that would have been invisible to eyes any less attuned to darkness than my own; came voices tuneful as computer music and no more human; came the substantiation in the air of faces three and bodies three, all young in appearance and female in every rich detail, save that they wore without demur their clothes a century out of date. Not Macbeth on his moor ever saw three shapes boding more ill to men.

      “Is he come?” asked Melisse, the taller of the dark pair of the three.

      “How soon may we taste him?” Wanda, the shorter, fuller-breasted one inquired. With the corner of her smiling ruby lips she chewed and sucked a ringlet of her raven hair.

      “When will you give him to us, Vlad? You’ve promised us, you know.” This from Anna, radiantly fair, the senior of the three in terms of length of time spent in my service. Service is not the right word, though. Say rather in terms of her endurance in a game of wit and will, which all three played against me without stop, and which I had wearied of and ceased to play long decades since.

      I strode into the rooms I had prepared for Harker, poked up the hearth fire previously laid and lit, moved dishes that had been warming on the hearthstone to the table, and sent words over my shoulder into the dim hallway outside. “I’ve promised you just one thing in the matter of the young Englishman, and I’ll repeat it once: If any of you set lip against his skin you’ll have cause to regret it.”

      Melisse and Wanda giggled, I suppose at having irritated me and having gotten me to repeat an order; and Anna as always must try to get the last word in. “But there must be some sport, at least. If he stray out of his rooms then surely he shall be fair game?”

      I made no answer — it has never been my way to argue with subordinates — but saw that all was in readiness for Harker, as far as I could make it so. Then, an antique silver lamp in hand, I dashed down to the front door, which I threw open hospitably, to reveal my now-doubtful guest still standing waiting in the night, his bags on the ground beside him.

      “Welcome to my house!” I cried. “Enter freely and of your own will!” He smiled at me, this trusting alien, accepting me as nothing more nor less than man. In my happiness I repeated my welcome as soon as he had crossed the threshold, and clasped his hand perhaps a little harder than I ought. “Come freely!” I enjoined him. “Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!”

      “Count Dracula?” Harker, trying to unobtrusively shake life back into his painfully pressed fingers, spoke questioningly, as if there might still be some reasonable doubt.

      “I am Dracula,” I answered, bowing. “And I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill and you must need to eat and rest.” I hung my lamp on the wall and went to pick up Harker’s luggage, overriding his protests. “Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort myself.” He followed as I carried his things upstairs and to the quarters I had prepared for him. One log fire flamed in the room where the table was spread for supper, and another in the large bedroom where