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

seated moodily on a stool in the middle of his small floor. All day he had evidently been brooding, and had convinced himself that I had deliberately tricked and misled him, promised him Mina and then snatched her away for my own enjoyment. He looked sidelong at me as I came in and for the first time did not rush to fawn over me and protest his loyalty. His very stillness made me slow my passage through his chamber and look at him well, and mark the cunning of violent madness that gleamed so in his eyes.

      He addressed me then in a most soft and beseeching voice, and wearing the face of perfect sanity that he put on periodically in his discussions with Seward and the rest; but Seward had never been taken in by this appearance, and no more was I.

      Renfield pressed me again to grant him Mina for his obscene delight, as if she were some slave or chattel, whose favors and very flesh and blood were mine to do with as I chose. When I would hear no more, and made to walk past him in man-form to reach the door, he at last exploded in frustrated wrath.

      “God! God! God!” he screamed. “Then I shall take her for myself. Twice before I have escaped and fled to plead my cause with you; the next time I go straight to her and do with her what I will!” He had a little more to say, namely some details of his plans, that I shall not repeat. And with that he hurled himself upon me, maniacal fingers reaching for my throat.

      In all the years since I first rose from the grave I have never felt a stronger human grip; but if Renfield’s strength in his full fit of madness was that of four stout men or five, why mine is normally that of four or five such robust raving madmen as himself; and when I heard his threats against Mina my sinews too were amplified by rage.

      It gave me savage satisfaction to come to honest grips with a foeman at last. I lifted him like a scarecrow and slammed him to the floor, once, again, how many times I do not know. I heard bones grind and break, and when I let him go I marked the twisted way in which he lay. His blood, his life, poured freely out from several lacerations on his head and face. The last I saw of Renfield was that spreading scarlet pool, which I disdained as carrion as I turned my back on him and hastened to where my beloved waited in her rooms.

      The struggle made noise enough to rouse the dozing attendant in the hallway. He, after a quick look in through the door’s observation panel, hurried to tell Seward of the “accident.” I had made myself nearly invisible before the man looked in at the door, and by the time Seward had got himself down to Renfield’s room I was up above in Mina’s, where Harker snored in bed, with honest oafish weariness, and where my lady sat in her nightdress gazing out the window, as if she sought the solace of the moon, or mayhap a pair of flapping wings.

      My entry was utterly silent, but in a moment she was somehow aware of my tall presence near the door, and looked around with an intake of breath.

      “What are you doing?” she cried to me in a fierce whisper, her gaze meanwhile darting to her husband’s sleeping form and back to mine.

      I glanced at him and listened to his breath, and marked the rhythms of his heart and sleeping brain.

      “Jonathan will not heed us,” I remarked, and went on: “There is some news. The madman Renfield downstairs was utterly determined to supplant your husband and myself as well; I cooled his ardor as I passed, so you may still sleep easily tonight.”

      “Sleep easily?” she cried. “God, Vlad, how may that be?” Mina stared a long moment at me as if she had never truly seen me before. “Is Renfield dead, then?”

      I bowed slightly. “It was done to protect your life, my lady, which is dearer to me now than my own.”

      “Oh, Vlad.” Her voice lowered briefly to a whisper of pure horror. “And you and Jonathan stalking each other like — like —”

      “I am not stalking him, dear heart.” A blase snore came from the bed. I went on: “I now have relatively secure lodgings available elsewhere, away from Carfax, and I am going to abandon my estate. We shall be neighbors no longer.”

      Mina came to my arms, moaned softly as I nuzzled her, and then stood back, raising her head proudly to look me in the eye. “Take me with you,” she demanded.

      There was a brief silence, in which I could find nothing soft or smooth to say. Again, a faint and flaccid snore came from the bed. Downstairs, feet ran, and an attendant’s footsteps climbed rapidly to our level but did not approach our door. I could hear the man tapping at another door, probably Van Helsing’s, and then talking in low, urgent tones.

      “You do not know what you are asking me,” I said at last.

      “You do not want me with you, then? But I cannot enduring this — this tension — anymore.”

      Our voices were both near breaking and I could resist no longer. Mina raised her arms and I caught up and crushed her soft body — ah, so tenderly, gently, my hands of twentyfold strength held in such exquisiteness of control — crushed her against me, and my lips sought hers before they moved on down to worship at her throat …

      Passion blinded and deafened both of us for a while. Mina, drained and white, but shuddering with the aftermath of ecstasy, clung close against my chest when I at last released her. “Now I am yours entirely,” she sighed. “And you must take me with you.”

      “Yes, yes, my darling. But first I must think, and