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

The spellbinder’s words went on and on. Something of the same dazedness that I observed upon the patrician features of Lord Godalming no doubt began to glaze my own mean little bat eyes as we both listened to this litany.

      “For if we fail in this fight he must surely win, and then where end we? Life is nothing; I heed him not. But to fail here is not mere life or death; it is that we become as him … foul things of the night …”

      Harker had taken his wife’s hand, which action interfered with her shorthand stenography; not that she seemed to mind the interference a great deal. I was surprised to feel something like a pang of jealousy, which I sternly put down. When the professor paused for breath the newlyweds exchanged a loving glance.

      “I accept the challenge, for Mina and myself,” Harker said then, resolutely. He had evidently been listening after all. And Mina, who had just opened her own mouth, thought better of expressing her opinions, and held her peace.

      “Count me in, Professor,” the young American declared in drawling Texas accents that were then quite strange to my ears.

      “I am with you,” Lord Godalming said. “For Lucy’s sake, if for no other reason.”

      All stood up then and clasped their hands together above the table; their deadly purpose toward me was being sealed in a most solemn compact, and with a tiny sigh I realized that I might have to kill, and kill again, to thwart it.

      But how then was I to resume my pursuit of peace?

      They all sat down again and Van Helsing launched into a fresh harangue. I must have been near dozing at the window, for somehow I missed Morris’s keen glance in my direction; and when from the corner of my myopic bat vision I saw him rise and leave the room, I thought only that nature must have called him, or some innate intelligence forbade him to hear more.

      There was a little pause, in which others observed his exit, some not without envy, but said nothing. Then the professor resumed: “We know that from the castle to Whitby came fifty boxes of earth, all of which were delivered at Carfax; we also know, from seeing wagons and workmen there, that at least some of these boxes have been removed. It seems to me that our first step should be to ascertain whether all the rest remain in the house, or whether any more have been removed. If the latter, we must trace —”

      The bullet from Morris’s pistol came at me from behind and traversed the upper part of my right wing and then the right front quadrant of my tiny skull; had I been bat in truth, my small, furred body would have convulsed and fallen dead without managing a single wing flap toward escape. As matters stood I felt the pain and shock of the leaden bullet’s supersonic passage as it interpenetrated the alien matter of my flesh and then passed on without spilling blood or breaking skin. Glass shattered in the window and the bullet whanged off the top of the embrasure and ricocheted inside the room, where Mina screamed in startled fright.

      Mastering an impulse to descend in man-form to the ground and mangle the author of the agony that still reverberated through me, I took to my wings instead. Off into the wooded portion of the grounds I flew, there to change to man-form, lean against a tree, and try to think. The pain of being shot ebbed but slowly, like some molten silver tide, through all my throbbing nerves. The effect was worse than if I had been full size when I was hit.

      “Sorry!” came Morris’s voice, from the direction of the house. But it was not to me he spoke. “I fear I have alarmed you. I shall come in and tell you about it.” And I heard the opening and closing of a door. Later I learned that Morris had not really identified me on the window-sill; it was just that in recent days he had taken to shooting casually at every bat he saw. He had nursed a dislike for the creatures ever since my breathing, winged South American namesakes had drained a favorite horse of its blood.

      At any rate, it had been time for me to leave my observation post, for I had learned enough. The opposing forces were going to come, belatedly but with determination and ruthlessness, to Carfax. What should I do? Defend my property forcefully against intrusion? But the old objection remained in full force: the more successfully I used violence against my enemies the greater public belief in me would grow. Against Van Helsing I might logically hope to win a war but against England I could not. No, stealth and cunning were still going to be my most effective weapons, and with that fact in mind I held my own solitary council and made my plans …

      They were brave enough, or foolhardy enough perhaps, to launch their attack that very night. Mina of course was left back in the Harkers’ cozy guest rooms. The men had decided that from this point on she was to be told only so much of their desperate adventures as would be good for her delicate female nature to know; and though she recorded in her diary that this chivalrous treatment was “a bitter pill” for her to swallow, she decided that she “could say nothing” against it, and went off obediently to her bed.

      I was spending the remainder of the night on watch in my woods and of course was not surprised by the five men coming somewhat clumsily over my wall, their burglars’ bags in hand. They approached my house with what stealth they could manage, sticking mainly to the shadows, as if they felt more comfortable there, where only God and Dracula could watch their slightest move.

      At my front porch they stopped, and Van Helsing issued garlic to them all, and