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

      Hemophile that I am known to be (in the true sense of the word), it is not true that the mere sight of blood under any and all circumstances is enough to trip me into a paroxysm of lust for the good red stuff. According to Harker’s journal, which is unforgettable to me and from which I quote verbatim, my “eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury” as soon as I saw his blood, and I “suddenly made a grab” at his throat.

      Now I ask you — you enjoy a good rare beefsteak, perhaps? Naturally. Now, suppose you stroll into the dining room where a guest of yours is finishing his lunch, and observe a morsel of meat left on his plate. Does the sight make your eyes blaze with demoniac fury? Or suppose that under circumstances of perfect propriety one guest in your house is a young lady, an attractive one, let us say. And suppose further that through some truly innocent mistake upon her part or yours you open a door and discover her unclad — are you so automatically provoked that you literally make a grab at her, without thought for the consequences? No more am I provoked in comparable situation. Great heaven, if male hemoglobin were all that I desired I should hardly have gone to all the trouble and expense of buying an estate in London so they should send me a ruddy young solicitor.

      There was, as always — I admit it — a certain pang of longing at the sight of blood. But it was concern for Harker’s welfare, nothing else, that prompted me to reach out a hand in the direction of the wound. The bitter shock of realization that he had noticed my absence from the mirror was augmented severely at the moment when my outstretched hand brushed the open collar of his shirt, and just beneath it touched the string of beads which an old woman in Bistrita had forced upon him when she learned his destination.

      String of beads? Of course at the moment I discovered them I knew they were a rosary, and at its end I knew the cross was hung. And since I had already learned in one of our conversations that Harker was a staunch Protestant, an English Churchman as he put it, there was but one interpretation that I could put upon his wearing of a crucifix — he had acquired it, or at least it had been thrust upon him and accepted, as armor for his journey into a vampire’s lair.

      I, who had begun to think of myself as already accepted by society, had my fool’s hopes dashed before they were well launched. In the moments before I could get them off the ground again, and counsel myself to patience, I behaved rashly. My first impulse was to tear the beads from around his neck but reverence held me back from that — I am a Catholic myself, you know, though born into the Orthodox faith, and in my days of breathing I endowed five monasteries. With a moment in which to reflect I realized the injustice of an assault upon the person of Harker, an ignorant, well-meaning youth who doubtless did not understand fully the implications of the good-luck charm he had been given to wear.

      “Take care,” said I, whilst struggling to master my anger and disappointment, “take care how you cut yourself, for it is more dangerous than you think in this country.” I had in mind Anna, Wanda, and Melisse, whose reaction to the sight and scent of fresh young male blood was sure to be much less restrained than my own. “And this is the thing that has done the mischief!” I cried out, forced by the strains upon my soul to take some kind of violent action, and seizing on the symbol of my alienation as its object. “It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!” I wrenched open the heavy window and threw out Harker’s shaving glass, to be splintered by the fall to the courtyard.

      Not trusting myself to say more at the moment, I left the room. My months and years of careful, meticulous preparation, had they all gone for nothing? Would Harker carry home the truth and the terrible lies about me, all mixed up, and find a way to make them all believed? Would I arrive on the quay at Whitby, or in Charing Cross station in London, and find exorcist priests and stinking garlic-mongers drawn up in a phalanx to repel me?

      Whilst I, on that fateful morning, was trying to regain my composure and rethink my plans, Harker, as he records in his journal, began a rather panicky exploration of those parts of the castle not sealed off from him by locked doors: finding a great many of the latter, he at once adopted the idea that he was a prisoner.

      Not that he ever told me so straight out, or plainly asked me if it were true. As he wrote: “… it is no use making my ideas known to the count. He knows well that I am imprisoned; and as he has done it himself, and has doubtless his own motives for it, he would only deceive me if I trusted him fully with the facts … I am, I know, either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears, or else I am in desperate straits.”

      A little later Harker returned to his room, as I was making his bed, and we exchanged a few polite words, neither of us alluding to the incident of the shaving mirror. Later, in the evening, my spirits rose again, for my young visitor sat down with me to chat as usual, and began to question me on the history of my land and of my family.

      He understands, I thought, at least he begins to understand, and he does not prejudge me, but continues