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

mass grave, a pair of young lovers burst up from the ground like startled birds, almost at Radcliffe’s feet. Tripping on their own half-shed clothing, they ran away screaming through the darkness when he came toward them. Alarmed by this eruption, he almost turned and ran in the opposite direction.

      In his imagination, recalling his nightmare, Radcliffe pictured his headless body separating itself from the jumbled, gory pile, finding his head and putting it back on. Then his reconstituted self had tottered away, under his own power, before the gravediggers had been given a chance to do anything at all with him. The shadow of a nightmare, already almost forgotten, came to plague him again.

      He shuffled slowly forward.

      Yes, damn it all, his head had been cut off. He could remember the event … or at least parts of it, a moment here and there. But no, he couldn’t actually remember his hands groping for his head, pulling it into place.

      But now his head was definitely on his shoulders, as firmly attached as it had ever been. If Sanson and his great machine hadn’t been able to kill him, that meant, according to all Connie had told him, that he, Philip Radcliffe, had become a vampire. What other possible explanation could there be?

      The marks left on his throat by Connie’s fangs—they had been real enough—were genuine. They didn’t hurt, but he could locate them with the sensitive surface of a fingertip, like tiny pimples.

      He drew a deep breath of pride. Pride more in his own sanity, in the integrity of his memory, rather than on the occasion of his joining a gloriously different race of men. Connie, as he remembered her, was real.

      But in the next moment, drawing a deep breath, he realized that everything wasn’t settled yet. Ought he, as a vampire still to be breathing?

      What might have been the basis for an alternate explanation loomed in his exhausted mind: Were all his recent memories, including his trip to the scaffold, only the fabric of a hideous dream? But maybe all of life was one great dream; that answered nothing.

      In Radcliffe’s current mental state, only one thing seemed incontestably true: He was no longer in prison. And for that he could be devoutly thankful.

* * *

      At last approaching closely the mound of fresh earth, Radcliffe was afforded his first good look at the Revolution’s most recent crop of corpses. Tonight’s shift of gravediggers had not yet finished their job. Now he could hear their voices rising from a little distance and see the indirect glow of a small light, where they had taken shelter under an awning stretched out from the side of a wagon. They were distracted in some dispute among themselves, perhaps over some clothing or other valuables taken from the latest batch of victims.

      But it was the silent victims, or their bodies rather, most of their arms still bound behind their backs, that drew Philip with a sickly fascination.

      He shuffled toward them to take a closer look.

      He recoiled from their staring eyes, reflecting faint gleams of stars and moon, or distant torches.

      Some of the mouths in the head-pile were open, and their eyes indifferently looked at him, and at each other, like the eyes of dead fish. Dazedly, feeling that what he did was no more than was now expected of him, he picked one up. This, Marie had told him, was what Melanie did, helping out her helpful cousin.

      He maneuvered his hands carefully, to avoid touching the raw neck-stump (odd, but most of the neck seemed to have disappeared) and to touch the face as little as possible.

      If Melanie could do this, he could too.

      The hair offered the easiest and surest grip. The weight was not surprising, seeming neither too little nor too much.

      He threw aside the peculiar object. The modest weight went bouncing, rolling, across the muddy and uncaring earth. Someone, he supposed, would pick it up again and bring it back.

      The rain was slackening off.

      There was a burst of laughter from where the gravediggers had gathered. Now their meeting, whatever it had been for, was breaking up. They were grumbling and laughing, and he could see their lantern bobbing toward him.

* * *

      How long he stumbled to and fro in the long grass around the border of the churchyard, making his way from one tall fence to another, looking for a gate, anxious to do something but not knowing what to do next, he was never able to determine. When the sky in the east began to brighten, behind clusters of leaden clouds, he remembered certain promises that Legrand and Connie had made, warnings they had given him while he was in prison. And Radcliffe expected that the morning sunlight when it appeared was going to kill him.

* * *

      Suddenly the wonder concerning his own miraculous survival was overridden by an obsessive urge to locate Melanie. In his shock and amazement he had almost forgotten the plan of escape Legrand had outlined to him. There were certain things that he, Radcliffe, was required to do once he had left the prison walls behind. Somewhere he would be given forged papers, providing a new identity for himself … though whether a vampire would need papers or not … and Melanie would be given hers…

      He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Yes, Melanie. Once he had found her, everything else could be made to come out all right And Philip clearly remembered the address where she was to be found. And the directions for getting there.

* * *

      Rain fell intermittently throughout the remainder of the night, keeping Radcliffe’s short, raggedly cut hair wet, and running down his face.

      Running his hand through his hair at one point, he noticed vaguely that his bandage was gone. It must have finally come loose somewhere.

* * *

      … then there was no getting away from it. Crazy or not, it had really happened. Or most of it, the key