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

and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. And that is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one: men know him not — and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pauses in his speaking if he hears my words, ‘Ha ha! a stranger!’ I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me awhile, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today, but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand.”

      Harker pledged his willingness to help me with my English and then asked if he might use the library at will. This seemed like a good time to issue my warnings, so I said:

      “Yes, certainly. You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge you would perhaps better understand.”

      “I am sure I would, sir.”

      But I knew that he could not begin to understand, as yet, and I tried to press the point, still without giving away too much. “We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of what strange things there may be.”

      Thus having led the conversation into the murky region of Strange Things, and seeing my guest nodding soberly in apparent agreement, I momentarily hesitated, on the brink of trying to Tell All; but no, I decided, I must first make Harker my good friend.

      He now took the opportunity to ask what I could tell him of the mysterious blue flames that he had glimpsed on the night of his arrival, and about the odd behavior of the “coachman.” In reply I told him a substantial portion of the truth.

      “Transylvania is not England,” I repeated, “and there are things here which reasonable men, men of business and science, may not be able to understand. On a certain night of the year — last night, in fact, when all evil spirits were supposed by the peasantry to rule unchecked — a blue flame is seen over any place where treasure has been concealed. That much treasure has been concealed in this region, there can be but little doubt; for this is ground fought over for centuries by the Walachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil hereabouts that has not been enriched by the blood of patriots and invaders.” Speaking of the past began to bring it back to me, as it does now; again I felt the movement of the warhorse beneath me as his ears picked up the sounds of battle, the clash of metal and the cries of terror. Again I smell the stinks of war; and see the banners and the blood. I remember the treachery of the boyars, and recall the beautiful, beautiful loyalty to me, the voivode, warlord, of the men who worked the land and knew me to be fair. How good it was to breathe the air with them … but never mind.

      To Harker I went on: “In old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out to meet them — men and women, the aged and the children too — and awaited their coming on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on them with artificial avalanches. When the invader was triumphant he found but little in the way of gold or precious stuff, for all had been sheltered in the friendly soil.”

      Harker was now at least halfway to believing the tiny marvel of the flames and treasure. “But how,” he asked, “can treasure have remained so long undiscovered when there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look?”

      I smiled. “Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool!” The villagers below in 1891, I had in mind. “These flames only appear on one night, and on that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors.”

      We drifted into other matters, and back at last to real estate.

      “Come,” I enjoined my guest, “tell me of London and the house which you have procured for me.” Whilst Harker was getting his business papers together in another room I took the chance to clear the table of his latest meal, linen cloth and all in a bundle a-down the cliffside from a western window, where for a thousand feet the soiled dishes sang in air before the garbage was knocked off them on the rocks. By the time he rejoined me I had lit the lamps and was lying on a sofa reading Bradshaw’s Guide.

      The paperwork connected with house buying was complex but Harker seemed competent to lead me through its mysteries. He remarked once on my knowledge of the estate’s neighborhood —  that of Purfleet, some fifteen miles east of the center of London, on the north bank of the