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

      After they had spent a good part of the morning with their questions, and with exchanging over her head silent looks of horror that she found harder to bear even than the questioning, they left her alone in her bedroom for a little time, to rest, as they said, and to ponder what might be her fate. She could already picture Van Helsing coming in with his black bag, which was long enough to carry a yard-long wooden stake.

      Gray, trembling Jonathan soon looked in on her, but he could scarcely find a word of comfort for her. And sometimes he looked at his wife as if she were a stranger on that terrible morning. And soon he was gone again, to sit in on the councils of the other men.

      And then my darling Mina, to whom I now seemed at moments no more than the phantasm produced by a fevered brain, was left alone in truth. Throughout the long, slow hours, marked by the heavy ticking of a clock that seemed to signal some approaching doom, Van Helsing would look in on her at intervals and murmur something that he no doubt meant to be soothing and probe her eyes with his that seemed so bright and wise.

      Poor child! She told me later, sobbing, how during that endless day she became more than half convinced, in a way at once delicious and terrible, that she was damned, as are those who frequent the Black Mass and the Coven.

      It seemed to her late in the day, but was really no more than normal breakfast-time when they came to call her to join their conferences — for some reason the men had decided that now nothing, “no matter how painful,” must be kept from her.

      Harker, when this formal council got underway, urged an immediate raid upon my house in Piccadilly, where, as they had learned, nine of my earth boxes had recently been transferred. Others agreed with Jonathan; it seemed to all that this house, because of its central location in the metropolis, was the most probable site for my new headquarters.

      “We are losing time,” Jonathan urged. “The count may come to Piccadilly sooner than we think.”

      “Not so,” said Van Helsing, holding up his hands.

      “But why?”

      “Do you forget,” he said, with actually a smile, “that last night he banqueted heavily, and will sleep late?”

      Mina, as she later told me, was left totally at a loss for enacting an innocent maiden’s proper response to a remark so supremely churlish. She came near speaking out after all, to defend me as an honorable gentleman; but wisely settled for covering her face with her hands, shuddering and moaning in a style that could not fail to draw sympathy.

      Seward records of Van Helsing that “when it struck him what he had said, he was horrified at his thoughtlessness and tried to comfort her.” But it is my opinion that the remark was a test, uttered callously and deliberately by the professor, that he might discover from her reaction whether her association with me had been in any way voluntary.

      He may have had a similar test in mind a short time later, when in a purported effort to “guard” Mina against further evil influences he approached her solemnly and touched to her forehead a “piece of sacred wafer in the name of the Father, and the Son, and —”

      She screamed, this time in authentic pain. Harker records that the host “had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal.”

      I have in my time seen the effects on human flesh of divers metal objects at a wide range of temperatures, and I count this claim as something of an exaggeration. Still, I am sure that Mina felt real pain, and certainly a blistered and unhealing wound. Today I suppose it would be called a psychosomatic effect. Any good hypnotist working with a good subject can achieve a similar result. Van Helsing certainly had the forceful personality required to hypnotize; and his questioning and that of the other men must have brought forward all the subconscious guilt and fear that Mina was experiencing as a result of passionate embraces with a man who was not her husband.

      In fact I had not “banqueted heavily” — the bliss between lovers has little to do with fluid volumes — nor was I sleeping late. Dimly and at a distance I felt Mina’s pain as she was scarred, and raised my head and growled, earth crumbling from my fingernails, but there was nothing I could do to help her then. At that moment I was in my Piccadilly house, even as Harker had surmised. Frozen in man-form for the hours of daylight, I was at work in the backyard, prizing up some of the flagstone pavement with my fingers, and exchanging good London earth for Transylvanian so as to make myself another secret resting place. I could work in daylight as the yard was quite secure from observation, there being only windowless walls in sight except for the rear of my own house. Ah, it grieved me to give up that dwelling! From its upper windows I loved to look over the trees of Green Park, to Buckingham Palace less than half a mile away — and I did not mean to give it up entirely.

      The men who were gathered round Mina when she was branded looked on with a mixture of pity, horror, and disbelief. But I am compelled to give Jonathan Harker his due. It was on this day that he wrote:

      To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so