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

crucifixes, and — for “enemies more mundane,” as he expressed it in a whisper — knives and revolvers. The well-equipped if somewhat tardy adventurers received also small portable electric lamps that could be clipped onto their clothing; and last, but scarcely least, each was given a small envelope like that I had seen Van Helsing clutching in Lucy’s churchyard, containing a portion of the sacred wafer.

      It was a tempting thought that I might quietly join their party whilst they milled around in the darkness of the porch, perhaps receive an issue of weapons from Van Helsing’s bag, and later whisper a few words softly in his ear if I could get him alone in some dark inner chamber of the house. But I had no time for recreation, and contented myself with watching their preparations from the shadows of some trees. I wanted to make sure that they were in the house and fully occupied before I set forth on an expedition of my own.

      All in readiness at last, the trespassers opened my front door with a skeleton key and turned it back on screaming hinges. They paused to invoke the blessing of the Lord on their endeavors, and then passed in over my threshold. All in all, they found their visit not enjoyable from that time on. Harker in his journal complains of a “nauseous stench” and of the dust they were forced to endure whilst in that “loathsome place,” where they could observe to their further dissatisfaction that only twenty-nine of my fifty boxes now remained.

      In order to entertain my guests whilst urgent business compelled me to be elsewhere I had called up from surrounding fields and farms a hundred or so rats — Harker records “thousands,” a pardonable exaggeration under the circumstances — and enjoined them to mingle with the visiting men on terms of as close an intimacy as possible. The men took a dislike to this and managed to disperse my auxiliaries with a trio of terriers, which Arthur through foresight or by some accident had brought along to the asylum.

      But I had not waited to watch the battle of the rats. At about the same moment that Lord Godalming was whistling up his dogs, and the other invaders coughed in dust and brushed at cobwebs, I was approaching the madman Renfield’s window on the ground floor of the asylum.

      Whatever the nature of his peculiar perceptions, he was aware of my approach and even of my wish for silence; for though his joy at the event seemed almost beyond bearing, yet he controlled any physical demonstration of it. Eyes popping wide, gray hair falling wildly around a gray-stubbled, broad face contorted with the effort of suppressing mad excitement, he was waiting for me amid the shabby respectability of his room. From outside the bars of his newly fortified window I let him see my face and I expressed with a gesture my desire to be admitted.

      I had to wait a moment before he could control himself enough to speak the invitation that I required: “C-come in. Lord and Master!” And as I oozed between the window bars he bowed himself away as he might have done in the presence of an emperor. Later on, in a dying statement made to the doctors, Renfield was to claim that to obtain entry I had promised him the lives of rats and flies, which he had long found agreeable to his palate. But it was not so. Certainly I would have done as much, and more, to be able to get in, but no promises or gifts were necessary to win Renfield to my cause. He was my worshiper already, though on a false premise, which I did not fully understand until a later meeting.

      It was not rats and bugs he wanted from me; that sort of life he could get on his own or with some cooperation from his keepers. In fact it was women that he craved, whose lives and bodies alike he wanted to consume. This truth was never quite made plain in the prim journals of my enemies, but truth it was. And, since Renfield had first seen her on the day of her arrival at the asylum, it was Mina in particular he wanted. She was the boon he desired from me, the goal of all his prayers.

      These entreaties, in a low, reasonable, and terribly earnest voice, began the moment I first stood inside his room. Even in the brief space of time before I could cross his worn rug to reach the door he managed to inform me, in several disgusting variations, of his plans for that fresh young girl when she should fall into his power.

      He was a madman, certainly, and I paid these mouthings little heed just then, but gave him a smile and nod in passing. No more did I think the doctors would heed him if he spoke of my visit.

      I laid my ear to the crack of his room’s massive, locked, and bolted door, then passed on through when I was satisfied that the hallway outside was untenanted. Now I found myself in a passage that ran nearly the whole length of the house. In other rooms nearby, servants and inmates were making their several kinds of moderate noises but at the moment no one was in sight.

      Renfield was quiet behind me, whether in disappointment or satisfaction I did not care. I ghosted in mist-form to find a set of stairs, ascended them, and passed almost invisibly along another hall. Now, if my estimates were accurate regarding the configuration of the house and the distances I had traversed, I must be outside the door of the rooms occupied by the Harkers. The upper hallway was, at the moment, as deserted as the lower had been, and quieter. I resumed man-form, took off my hat, and tapped prosaically on Mina’s door.

      “Yes?” The answer in her familiar voice came through the door at once. She evidently had not been