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

was behind the astounding swiftness of his voyage, yet had clubbed his restive crew into submission and enjoyed the ride as being good for business. Information gleaned from the captain led Van Helsing and his men to Hildesheim, and thence to Skinsky, whose body with its throat cut was found in a nearby churchyard just as they were asking for him. I suppose he had tried to cheat the Slovaks in some way, and was killed by them, but of course the implication in my enemies’ records is that I was responsible for his death.

      Exhaustion was setting in among the hunters, who for a time lay about dispiritedly in their several rooms at the Galatz hotel. Quincey nursed his scalp wound, that was somehow never mentioned in any of their journals. Mina began to fear that they might not, after all, push on to the conclusion she and I were trying so hard to arrange. She therefore decided to spur them on by drawing up a logical — though of course fallacious — chain of reasoning, showing where the box that had become their grail was now most likely to be found.

      Although I had no hand in formulating Mina’s report it was quite accurate about the coffin’s location. Of course its usefulness to my foe rested, as she knew full well, upon two false premises: first, that I could not move, or chose not to move, toward my home by my own efforts, but preferred to be conveyed by others; and second, that I was within the box that had come by ship. When she had finished presenting her report and logical analysis to the men they were delighted by it and reinvigorated for the chase, and she promptly got out of their way again. Van Helsing himself paid her intelligence a verbal tribute which was perhaps somewhat tarnished by the words with which he closed his speech: “Now, men, to our council of war …”

      Mina’s conclusion was that my box was being shipped by water closer to Castle Dracula, and so Arthur and Jonathan were detailed to take up the pursuit by chartered steam launch, ascending the river Sereth toward its junction with the Bistrita, which latter stream, as Mina had noted, ran “up round the Borgo Pass. The loop it makes is manifestly as close to Dracula’s castle as can be got by water.” Quincey and Dr. Seward, accompanied at first by two men to look out for their spare horses, were to follow generally along the right bank of the Sereth, being ready to take action on land wherever the box carrying the vampire might be put ashore.

      As for Van Helsing, he had his own goals in view and after a short rest in Galatz was ready to pursue them:

      I will take Madam Mina right into the heart of the enemy’s country. Whilst the old fox is tied in his box, floating on the running stream whence he cannot escape to land … we shall go in the track where Jonathan went, from Bistrita over the Borgo, and find our way to Castle Dracula. Here, Madam Mina’s hypnotic power will surely help … there is much to be done, and other places to be made sanctify, so that that nest of vipers be obliterated.

* * *

      Harker was ready to leave his wife, to go himself aboard the launch, where he assumed the chances of coming to grips with me would be the best; but he was not at once convinced that Mina should be taken toward my castle any farther. “Do you mean to say, Professor Van Helsing, that you would bring Mina, in her sad case and tainted as she is with that devil’s illness, right into the jaws of his death trap? Not in the world! Not for heaven or hell!”

      But his sales resistance could not hold out against the old maestro of obfuscation:

The professor’s voice, as he spoke in clear, sweet tones, which seemed to vibrate in the air, calmed us all: “Oh, my friend, it is because I would save Madam Mina from that awful place that I would go. God forbid that I should take her into that place. There is work — wild work — to be done there, that her eyes may not see. We men here, all save Jonathan, have seen with our own eyes what is to be done before that place can be purify ... if the count escape us this time … he may choose to sleep him for a century, and then in time our dear one” — and he took Mina by the hand — ”would come to keep him company, and would be as those others that you, Jonathan, saw. You have told us of their gloating lips; you heard their ribald laugh as they clutched the moving bag that the count threw to them. You shudder; and well may it be. Forgive me that I make so much pain, but it is necessary, my friend. Is it not a dire need for the which I am giving, possibly my life? If it were that anyone went into that place to stay, it is I who have to go to keep them company.”

      The vision of Van Helsing as a vampire is one before which my imagination balks; this is doubtless only a shortcoming on my part; he may have been well fitted for the role, since as we have seen he had already the power, by means of speech, to cast his victims into a stupor. At any rate, Harker in his confused anxiety was made to feel that it was he who was somehow endangering his own wife: “Do as you will,” said Jonathan, with a sob that shook him all over. “We are in the hands of God!”

      Mina’s own feelings were very complex at this point. But she was stirred to see how the men threw themselves and their fortunes into the preparations for their final assault