A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) by Fred Saberhagen (most read book in the world .TXT) 📗

the gravediggers routinely perform that service for their customers? He doubted it. Phil wondered dazedly if he might have broken the cord, without realizing the fact, in an access of that new vampirish strength Connie had so vividly described and demonstrated with her own body. His wrists were still chafed from being bound.

* * *

      The bell of a church clock was striking somewhere in the distance, but Philip was too muddled to count the strokes. Stranger sounds drifted to his ears from somewhere else, also far away—it sounded like some drunken mob, singing the Ça Ira.

      If only his head would stop aching—not the least of Radcliffe’s practical problems was an ugly hangover.

      And this time the usual ghastliness that a hangover left in a man’s mouth was compounded by an unmistakable aftertaste of blood—he remembered all too well that it was a woman’s blood. Vampire blood, if the one who had called herself Constantia had been telling him the truth about anything. The thought of the gypsy woman, the vivid memories of what he and she had done together, now sent shivers of mixed repulsion and attraction along his spine.

      The gall and wormwood in his mouth had subtle but important differences from the taste of his own nosebleed or knocked-out tooth.

      There was also the savor of remembered ecstasy. But at the moment, all recent memories were predominantly horrible.

      He spat. God, but he was thirsty. All this rain, and no water anywhere to drink—

      Again the combination of taste and recalled experience provoked him to nausea, and his empty stomach retched.

* * *

      But to hell with blood, and to hell with gypsy women, whether they were vampires or not. The fundamental fact that Philip Radcliffe had to bring himself to face was that he knew his head had been cut off.

      He could remember, damn it! They had dragged him up there on the scaffold, and … he could almost remember the impact of the falling blade…

      All right, everything wasn’t exactly clear, just at the vital point. Go back a little farther. Far enough so that memory was plain and unequivocal. Somewhere sense and sanity must be attainable.

      Very clearly the young man remembered having his hands bound by one of the jailers before he’d left the prison. Even now his wrists were sore, in evidence of that. Then he remembered being in the narrow courtyard where the great carts were loaded with the condemned, its stone walls seemingly threatening to crush him. No doubt about that either. Then the ride to the scaffold, in a large cart pulled by a team of horse and crowded with his fellow victims. There had been jeering crowds along the way.

      Very little time had elapsed between the termination of that ride and the moment when the lights went out for Philip Radcliffe. It was the events just before the end of consciousness which were hard to pin down—like trying to remember the exact moment when you fell asleep. But yes! With a little effort he now clearly recalled being half-marched, half-carried up the steps.

      The fierce, dark eyes of the executioner, the great shock of the falling knife—and also the sharp tug on his recently shortened hair, as the executioner displayed his head—or someone’s—to the routinely cheering crowd.

      …the great shock of the falling knife…

      But wait a minute! He could not possibly have watched, looking on as a spectator, seeing from the rear his own head being held up for display. Oh yes, he’d recognized his head; there was even the small white bandage on the crown…

* * *

      Whatever the answer, however the mystery of what had happened on the scaffold might finally be explained, here he was now, alive—yes, alive—in what was certainly a cemetery.

      Peering around him in the darkness, he at last made out, at a distance of some thirty or forty yards, the raw earth mounded beside a trench.

      At least the gravediggers had not ripped the clothes from his body. That, he had learned in prison, was what those predatory vultures often did.

      The clothes Radcliffe had been wearing when he was arrested, and while he was in prison, had been only ordinary. His coat had been taken from him when his wrists were bound, and the collar of his shirt had been ripped open. Small wonder that the petty thieves in the cemetery had not bothered with what was left, if they’d had the chance. There had lately been no shortage of finer garments for their selection.

      If he’d had a hat, they’d certainly have taken that. Hats must be one item they very seldom encountered in the course of business. The idea of a man wearing a hat to his own beheading suddenly struck Radcliffe as tremendously amusing, and he began to chuckle, an ugly sound. But of course he’d been hatless when his would-be murderers had dragged him from his cell to have his head cut off.

      While these thoughts were running through his mind, unconsciously he had started walking again, toward the pale blob that he thought must represent a mound of raw earth.

      In prison he’d also heard the gruesome details about the burial mound, the endlessly long mass grave whose active end was excavated every morning for the day’s harvest of bodies, and filled in every evening—that was the place where Marie and Melanie sometimes came to do their work.

      His feet slowed to a stop, dragging through the grass. Suppose, just suppose, he’d never been in the hands of the gravediggers at all.

      Slowly Radcliffe came to realize that some clue to the solution of his mystery might lie in the fact that he had come to himself lying perhaps forty or fifty yards from the place where the bodies were routinely dumped—and where the gravediggers had been, or ought to be, industriously at work.

      He wanted to see the place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. He set out to reach it.

      When he had covered half of the remaining distance to his goal, stalking stiff-legged toward the