Dracula Sequence - The Dracula Tape Part 2

So let him walk, I thought, it is only a few kilometers down to the pa.s.s; and though the road was poor it did not branch and it went downhill nearly all the way. I suppose I a.s.sumed without thinking about it that he still had some money of his own in his pockets, along with the diary he still retained. I suppose also I really should not complain about the gold coin he stole from me on his departure, as I, or rather my household, was at the same time left in possession of a letter of credit, his best suit of clothes-which I had got a gypsy wench to clean, with lamentable result-and the overcoat and traveling rug mentioned earlier, along with railroad timetables, et cetera, et cetera.

I stood aside from the door of his room, relieved that my guest had finally plainly expressed his obvious desire to leave, and that I could accede to it so quickly and directly that his opinion of me was bound to be improved. I intended to press into his hands at the last moment a few weighty pieces of antique gold, as mementos of his visit. My grand, elaborate scheme was all going to work out after all, I thought. Once Harker had won back to reasonable human surroundings he would change his mind about what had actually happened under my roof, or change his story about it anyway. And going home might do him so much good that any mental breakdown could be avoided after all.

As Harker notes in his journal, it was at this point that I said to him, with a "sweet courtesy" that made him rub his eyes because "it seemed so real": "You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars: 'Welcome the coming, speed the departing guest.' Come with me, my dear young friend. Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will, though sad am I at your going, and that you so suddenly desire it. Come!"

I took up a lamp and went ahead of Harker down the stairs, he following hesitantly, testing every footstep as if suspicious of some trap. Meanwhile, using that inner utterance with which I converse with animals, I summoned up to the castle the three or four wolves presently lurking in the woods not far below, which I intended should provide my visitor with safe conduct on his way. I meant to bring them in and introduce them to my guest and let them lick his hands and learn that he was to be treated with good will. They were howling in the courtyard by the time we reached the front door from inside, and as I began to open it they threw themselves into the widening gap. I stood in their way till I could calm them enough to make my wishes clear.

Their noise, however, and the sight of those fanged muzzles, red-tongued and slavering, extending under my arm as I stood in the doorway holding my children back, were too much for Harker. In his diary he credits me with the "diabolical wickedness" of wanting him eaten alive by the wolves, as well as plotting to have him drained of blood by the three women; two mutually exclusive fates, as it seems to me, beyond even the power of Count Dracula to inflict on the same victim.

"Shut the door!" he cried out, and I turned my head with some surprise to behold him sagging in despair against the wall, hands covering his face. "I shall wait till morning!"

Obviously, he was after all in no state to be allowed to wander on the mountainside at night. I was bitterly disappointed-with some violence I threw the last howling child out into the darkness, and slammed the great door shut-but I said nothing more to Harker then. In silence I walked with him back to the library, where I bade him a very brief goodnight. I did not know until I read his journal that later those three d.a.m.nable women came to whisper seductive invitations outside his door, taunt him with their lip-smackings and their laughter, and even imitate my whispered voice in pretended dialogue with them thus: "Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have patience! Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours!"

No, Jonathan Harker, if you can hear me, I suppose that I can hardly blame you for what you later did to me. Nor did I feel much pity for Melisse, Wanda, and fair Anna when Van Helsing the s.a.d.i.s.t eventually came calling...

But I must adhere to the order of my story. On my last night before leaving Castle Dracula I supped full well, on bright beef blood-not from mere appet.i.te, though I had that, but with a view to acquiring a more youthful look. Of course I had not seen my own face in a mirror for some four hundred years-it may be evidence of some benign plan for the world, that neither do I have a regular need to shave-but from certain words dropped now and then by my occasional companions, I had gathered that my recent appearance was that of an old man, white of hair and mustache though quite hale, and on occasion red-eyed like some animal caught in a beam of one of the new electric lights. This aspect I could alter by regular heavy feeding, and meant to do so in case Harker should after all have the hue and cry out for me by the time I reached England.

I supped well, as I say, and expected to rest well too, trying out another of my stout new traveling beds. There is not much can rouse a vampire in bright day, when he has gone, fully sated, to his earth. One sure alarm clock of course is the sharp point of the wooden stake entering his rib cage, with a strong and determined arm hammering behind it. This I know, though of course not yet by direct experience. What is it about wood that makes the stuff, under the proper conditions, so utterly, no-nonsense lethal to my kind? That it itself was once alive but is no more? Metal, that hacks up in such fine style the flesh of breathing men and draws out the rich red streams of life from them, is alien to us and cannot find its way to kill. It bounces off, disperses through, and interpenetrates our peculiar flesh, but cannot transfer fatal force to us. Silver bullets? Their efficacy is mere superst.i.tion as far as vampires are concerned.

But metal hurt me in my box that day, a sharp-edged spade swung in the desperate grip of Harker, who once more had dared the castle's slippery outer wall to gain my rooms, who once more ransacked my chambers and my vaults in hopes of finding there a key or other means of getting out in daylight on his own. He found me in a box again, and, this time yielding to the impulse to do murder, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the nearby digging implement.

Imagine the deepest sleep that you have ever slept, the hardest to break free from, and multiply its inertia by tenfold. In dreamless near-oblivion I lay so, a leaden lethargy, a numbness, wound like chains on all my limbs. He might have found me, searched me, raped me, and I would neither have known nor cared until sundown. But when he took up the spade, the psychic blow, the impulse of wholehearted murder came singing through the vaulted air to rouse me, to begin my rousing, well before the whistling blade itself struck home.

"b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d." His voice was only a faint wheezing moan but yet I heard it clearly. "Monstrous b.l.o.o.d.y bloated leech."

My eyes were open, had been open all along, but only slowly, blurrily, did the blindness of trance clear from them. I realized that the lid of my box had been pulled open, for there was the groining of the stone above. There was light, faint daylight whispering down through many a room and pa.s.sageway. And off in one corner of my vision, Harker's face, at first only a whitish oval blur, and then as my sight cleared and my eyes began to focus, a mask of madness, the face of breathing Man as he exists in all the vampire nightmares that ever were, mask of the hunter, persecutor, stake pounder, who would cleanse his world by making sacrificial goats of the undead.

Coming so very slowly and hopelessly up out of trance-I would not be in time, I knew, to act effectively in self-defense-I realized for the first time and with detachment that Harker had lost weight as my guest-his arms were thinner in their dirty sleeves-that his hair hung down disheveled around an evilly transformed face, that his shaving had been spotty at best during the weeks since he had lost his mirror.

"b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" he grated out again, and in the midst of that last word his voice broke on a sob. And with a little whining screech of indrawn breath he raised the spade, held it high in both hands for an edge-down swing straight at my face.

I am not boasting when I say I was not terrified. Later on I will discourse of fear. I say now only that I watched, unhappily, as that heavy blow came down. Impossible to do more than turn my head and try to glare at my attacker. The shovel struck in the middle of my forehead, and I took the shock and pain of it through my head, and tried to no avail to move my hands and feet, and thought that in a second more the blow would come again.And Harker? What saw he? "... a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his l.u.s.t for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semidemons to batten on the helpless... I seized a shovel... and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned and the eyes fell full upon me with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead." In reb.u.t.tal I can only reiterate that the sight of Harker swinging a shovel at my head was somewhat perturbing to me as well.

Unnerved by my movement and by the failure of this first attack to destroy me, he let the shovel slip from his hands and it somehow brought the box lid slamming down, leaving me to wait in darkness for his next move. It is perhaps fortunate for those interested in this history that at this point our tete-a-tete was interrupted, by "a gypsy song sung in merry voices," offstage but approaching, and accompanied by other noises of the Szgany who were coming with heavy wagons into the courtyard to begin my move. Harker fled back upstairs to scribble more into his journal. As soon as the coast was clear of gypsies he took the daring chance of climbing down the whole surface of the castle wall, and shortly got clear away upon his own initiative. My carriage rested empty that day, and Tatra put on his coachman's livery for nothing.

Had my guest stayed with me a little longer and put his wits to work he might well have done me serious or even fatal damage. Of course a simple attack with a metal tool was doomed to fail, a point Harker might profitably have remembered later, when he and I resumed our social intercourse. By now the mark has entirely disappeared from my forehead-wouldn't you say?-or at least my fingers can no longer find the ridgelike scar, and no one has remarked upon it for some decades.

But I had been given a throbbing head, and some fresh food for thought, viatic.u.m for my journey; I was in no state to communicate with the loyal Szgany as they nailed down my lid and began to roll me down the long road to the sea.

TRACK TWO.

My overland journey, some five or six hundred kilometers across the Transylvanian Alps and eastward through the banat, the fertile plain, was uneventful.

Once out of the mountains the roads were good, and my Szgany made good time with their wagons.

The sun of early July beat down upon my box as we pa.s.sed through the city you call Bucharest-did you know I named it Cetatesa Bucurestilor, in 1459, when it was one of my important fortresses? For a time it was my capital. We crossed the Danube shortly thereafter, and by the evening of July fifth we were in Varna, on the Black Sea, from which port I would take s.h.i.+p for England.

Varna. I suppose the name means little or nothing to you now. In 1444, in a battle fought nearby, the young King Vladislav III of Poland died under Turkish swords, and Janos Hunyadi himself was lucky to escape the field of battle alive, with the aid of my Walachian kinsmen.

No, I was not there. I was thirteen years old in 1444, and already fighting battles of my own, without an army for support. When the Christians and the Turks fought near Varna I was away amid the mountains of Asia Minor, in Egrigoz, a hostage for my father's cooperation with the Turks; imprisoned with me was my brother Radu, the one they called the Handsome later, who then was only six...

Can you picture me as a child? No more than Hitler, I suppose. But all who have at any time been human have traversed that phase, and I remember it. As the twig is bent... Great twig benders were those Turkish jailors of my youth. Never mind. They came to fear me ere I left their walls some four years later.

As I say, my journey, to the Black Sea port was uneventful. My Szgany handed me over to my agent, Petrof Skinsky, and he in turn to the good Herr Leutner, with whom I had been in correspondence but who was too modern a man to ever have credited tales of nosferatu if they had reached his ears. Of Skinsky I was not so sure; and I will have a little more to tell you about him later.

So Leutner took faithful charge of my fifty large boxes of earth, and saw to it that they were loaded aboard s.h.i.+p, never dreaming that the consignor himself was voyaging along, his luggage of money and spare clothes packed in a st.u.r.dy traveling bag beneath him in the soil. I was s.h.i.+pped aboard the schooner Demeter, bound for Whitby, which is, as some of my hearers may not know, on the Yorks.h.i.+re coast about three hundred kilometers north of London.

I had ridden some river-going craft before but the Demeter's was my first sea voyage. Emerging from my box on the first night out-the box I happened to be in had been stowed beneath several others, but between sunset and dawn I can pa.s.s if I wish through a crack narrower than a knifeblade-I walked in man-shape up from the hold, and attained the deck by sliding through the watertight sealing of a hatch. In the comforting dark of night I could perceive a ma.s.s of land on the horizon to our starboard; the sea around was otherwise clear to the horizon, and a fresh east wind blew from astern. There were three other men on deck, and I did not long remain. By careful reconnoitering during those first nights of the voyage, I ascertained that there were nine men in all on board besides myself, five Russian sailors, a Russian captain and second mate, and the first mate and the cook, who were both Romanian.

Also I used my senses diligently, especially during the hours of darkness, to learn what I could of this new world of the sea. As you no doubt realize, I have some command of wind and weather, and had naturally considered using these powers to facilitate my journey. The difficulty, as I soon came to understand, was that although I was able to remember our course very well as we traversed each part of it in turn- we vampires having what I suppose would now be called an inertial guidance system, or something akin to one-I had not the slightest feel for where we should be going, which way to tell the wind to push. I had of course the pure intellectual knowledge that my destination's name was England, and that it was to be reached by a roundabout pa.s.sage through the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. But this knowledge would be of small help in trying to speed the s.h.i.+p on its way, and so I was content to observe and try to learn.Five days out of port we reached the Bosporus, and a day later we pa.s.sed through the Dardanelles and entered the Mediterranean. It was at about this point, as I now suspect, that the first mate began to be aware of my nocturnal wanderings. I do not believe that he had actually seen me yet, but by means of the marginal perceptions that breathing humans sometimes have he came somehow to know that a tenth presence inhabited the s.h.i.+p after nightfall; that now a plank creaked slightly beneath an unfamiliar tread; that again there was no shadow on the moonlit deck just where a shadow should have lain, and that darkness lay instead just where the moonbeams should have fallen clear.

Sailors are a superst.i.tious lot; I had not realized before how true this truism was.

And the mate was a man, as I now suppose, abnormally sensitive to the abnormal; on July fourteenth, the eighth day of our voyage, the men having evidently caught the contagion of fear from the first mate, one of them disputed him about something and was struck. Whether the quarrel was about an apparition in the night or something totally unrelated I do not know, as it took place in daylight when I was snug below and my only knowledge of it is from my enemies' records.

These records also make the following night, that of July fifteenth to sixteenth, as the first on which I was actually seen by any of the crew. As the captain duly entered in his log, one of the seamen, "awestruck," reported watching "a tall thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward, and disappear." I had grown careless, and even a little carelessness is always bad.

On that night I still had no suspicion that my presence aboard was creating a stir, but when I roused at the following sunset I became aware that everything in the hold around me had been disarranged. My boxes were all moved at least slightly from their original positions, and the ballast of silver sand had been much trampled on.

There was no sign of any leak or other nautical emergency which would have required the crew to do so much labor in the hold, nor had I the feeling that a storm had come and gone. What then? The evidence suggested to me that the hold had been searched, though fortunately not with the thoroughness that would have been necessary to dig me from my earth.

The crew then, or some of them, probably suspected that something was amiss.

But having searched around me once, they were not likely to search the hold again without good cause; so I thought, at any rate, and determined to lay low for a night or two. Thus I found out only later that one of the seamen had disappeared on the night of July fifteenth to sixteenth, an important fact which I would have learned sooner had I not stayed so prudently within my snug, attractive box.

Ah, my homes of earth! Good Transylvanian soil, consecrated by humble and worthy priests so long ago as my familial burying ground. Sometimes I wonder whether the strength I draw from my own earth is not purely a matter of psychology.

But the fact is that nowhere else can I truly rest, and without true rest neither breathing man nor vampire can long survive. Bits of my ancestors' bones are in my earth, unrecognizable in their humility, along with an occasional patient worm or insect, timid creatures frightened alike of me or you, of anything that moves.

Fragments of roots of st.u.r.dy trees, and compost of their leaves, and maybe here and there a particle of hidden Walachian gold, over which a pinhead of blue flame will burn whenever St. George's Eve comes round. Good black earth that yet does not unduly stain the clothes. It is only sliding about or rubbing in it that produces smudges, and my lying down to sleep is very still and my getting up is as a rule without the disturbing of a single clod. In England or anywhere else I would have been lost without the good earth of my homeland, as I knew and my enemies came to know full well. In time I hoped to make the native soil of England hospitable to me as well...

But to the Demeter again. She went plowing into the rough weather she met in the western Mediterranean, her first mate gone violently but so far un.o.btrusively insane with brooding on his fears. And I was snugged down prudently-I have a quite irrational dislike of that virtuous word-in my coffin, where I could be of no help to my own cause.

How was that first sailor, that I have mentioned, lost? By some sheer accident, I would surmise. He had evidently been relieved on watch, during the night, then somehow had fallen overboard before he got back to his bunk. It happens. But there was the brooding mate, needing just this mysterious tragedy to send him over the rails of his own mind, into the vasty deep of lunacy. The mate went mad-as the captain himself later thought probable-and the mate was from somewhere about my own land, remember, and infected with its endemic terrors. He must have been mad enough to see nosferatu in every face, especially in the face of any man who approached him alone on deck at night. Then whiss! he would out with his knife and strike, and throw his victim overboard. It was all in an insane kind of self-defense, you understand. As if his knife could have done him much good against the real thing; but then I suppose the mate was a half-educated man at best, from the back country somewhere, and his fears were much greater than his knowledge of the subject.

During the remainder of July he disposed of four more of his s.h.i.+pmates in this wise, and the survivors of the now short-handed crew went staggering in fatigued despair about their duties, unable to imagine what evil fate had come upon their voyage. We had been at sea nearly a month before I again emerged from concealment.

Though of course I did not at first realize the situation, there were by this time only the captain and the first mate and two sailors left to work the s.h.i.+p, the rest having died one by one in darkness.

The schooner had now pa.s.sed Gibraltar, traversed the Bay of Biscay, and was nearing England.

On the night of August second I came on deck to find the foredeck deserted, and as a landlubber did not realize at first what a grave sign this was to meet upon a foggy night. I enjoy the fog and dark, and was in the bows drinking it in, lost in some fatuous dream of England as I imagined it: myself lord of some sunlit manor where no one minded that the lord did not go out by day, a pair of those great dogs that the English painters could execute so well sitting in attendance on me as I gazed into my fire... or squinted off across my meadows, perhaps... some buxom Saxon wench laboring there, gathering hay, the muscles showing rounded in her arms, and the veins in her throat beneath the suntanned skin...

The mate was too near before I heard him, and his coming was too swift, for me to get out of his way entirely-small wonder that none of the breathing men he crept upon in the same way survived. His keen knife tore at my clothes, but pa.s.sed through my flesh as through a shadow, leaving no damage behind but only searing pain. In a moment I had melded myself into the fog. Cursing my own innocent foolishness, I pa.s.sed belowdecks, where I waited in bat-form for an outcry, for searchers bearing torches and weapons in their trembling fists. None came during the night.

At dawn I took to my earth in one of the lowest boxes, hoping that the unpiling of the others might give me warning enough to rouse myself for some defense if searchers came again by day.

All day I lay there undisturbed, and at sunset I was up betimes; but I waited for full dark, in fact for midnight, before emerging in mist-form from below. To my astonishment, I found the decks utterly empty of men. The wind was steady astern and the vessel moved on as if by her own will.

I was, and am, no sailor, but still presumed that such a state of affairs could not persist for long. Immediately I took what measures I could with the wind to prevent its s.h.i.+fting, and I listened intently for signs of life anywhere in the s.h.i.+p. The thought of being on an unmanned vessel, due for capsizing or wrecking on some unknown sh.o.r.e, and all my transported home-earth lost beneath the waves, was not one to give me pleasure.

Somewhere below me in the s.h.i.+p, two sets of lungs were laboring; and two hearts beat, though scarcely as one. No more than two. Great G.o.d, I thought, seven men dead, or at least gone. In the old days I would have suspected plague or pirates. In 1891 I did not know what to suspect.

I was about to s.h.i.+ft to bat-form and go stealthily below, to find out what I could, when there came the sound of footsteps ascending the companionway, and the captain himself emerged. He was unshaven and worn-looking, like a man who has been in battle for days on end. He saw me not, though his tormented eyes darted this way and that about the otherwise deserted deck from which his crew had vanished one by one.

A moment later the captain had realized that the s.h.i.+p was unmanned, had thrown himself at the wheel, and was shouting for the mate. It was not long before the Romanian appeared, in his long underwear, disheveled and looking a very maniac. He at once went close to the captain at the wheel and spoke to him in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, which I in the shadows not far off could plainly hear: "It is here, I know it, now. On the watch last night I saw it, like a man, tall and thin and ghastly pale. It was in the bows, and looking out. I crept behind it, and gave it my knife; but the knife went through it, empty as the air." Even as the mate spoke he drew out the knife again to demonstrate; and my night-seeing eyes noted traces of fresh blood on the blade even as he flourished it. I realized that it must be the blood of the last helmsman, who must have been put over the side only minutes before.

I very nearly sprang forward and disarmed the first mate at this point, in my expectation that he was about to kill the only sane sailor left on board, the captain, who alone stood between myself and probable s.h.i.+pwreck and ruin.But already the madman had sheathed his knife and was stepping back from the horrified captain, who maintained his grip upon the wheel.

The mate babbled on: "But it is here, and I'll find it. It is in the hold, perhaps in one of those boxes. I'll unscrew them one by one and see. You work the helm." And, holding a finger to his lips, enjoining silence, he went below. The captain stared after him, with pity, horror, and despair all struggling for expression amid the exhausted lines of his face.

The lunatic's a.s.sault upon my boxes I could not endure. If he armed himself with a few tools, he, laboring alone but with the fanaticism of madness, might in an hour or so have breached them all, and their contents, so vital to my existence, would be mingled inextricably with the ballast and the bilge. Had I been certain that the captain unaided could steer the s.h.i.+p to some safe port I would have slain the mate there on the spot-but no, perhaps not even then would I have killed. As a soldier long ago I saw enough of killing, and as a prince more than enough to last a lifetime greater than my own.

Though I had no desire to encompa.s.s the mate's death I was forced to act to block him in his new plan. I altered wind just enough to keep, as I hoped, the captain occupied at the wheel, and stealthily followed the mate below. He was already in the hold, and in the act of raising a maul to strike at the lid of one of the boxes, when I confronted him.

He screamed, the maul flew from his hands, and he dashed for the companionway to reach the open air again. Let me say parenthetically that I find it strange how many people have inferred from the captain's scribbled record of these events that the mate actually opened one or more of the boxes and found me, somnolent, within. I would like to point out, first, that it was past midnight at the time, the hour when I am usually up and about; and secondly, that if he had found me in such a state, the man who had been trying for weeks to kill a vampire could hardly have failed to put me overboard at once, perhaps box and all; and thirdly, no one reported that any of the boxes were lidless or broken when they were finally received at Whitby. A small matter, perhaps, whether he found me in a box or active, but still indicative of how events are misinterpreted.

But to return. The mate shot up on deck again, by now, to use the captain's phrase, "a raging madman" beyond all doubt. He first cried out to be saved, and then fell into a despairing calm; evidently he realized that from the murderous phantom vampires of his disordered mind there could be no escape this side of death. Moving toward the rail, he said in a suddenly reasonable voice: "You had better come too, Captain, before it is too late. He is there. I know the secret now. The sea will save me from him, and it is all that is left!" And before the captain could move to interfere, the luckless mate had thrown himself into the sea.

I remained for some time concealed in the shadows on deck, steadying and moderating the wind and trying to think. Later in the night I tried to approach that brave man at the wheel; it was my wish to explain my position to him, at least partially, and to try to make him see that he and I shared a common interest in coming safe to port. The first grayness of dawn was on the sea when I walked toward him in man-form, boldly and matter-of-factly, with my approach in his full view. His bloodshot eyes fixed on me after flickering once, almost longingly, toward the rail; he would not desert his post, and his fingers tightened convulsively upon the wheel's spokes.

I stopped when I was still some paces distant and tipped my hat. "Good morning, Captain."

"What-who are you?"

"A pa.s.senger who wishes only to reach port in safety."

"Begone from me, fiend out of h.e.l.l."

"I understand your crew is gone now, Captain, but that is not of my doing. And I am ready to labor with you in our common cause of survival. I know nothing of sailing, but I can and will pull ropes, tie knots, whatever a sailor is supposed to do- and more." I deemed it inadvisable to propose at once that I could control the weather to his order. "You will find your new crew even stronger than the old, though the old had the advantage of numbers."

"Devil, begone!"

Alas, my Russian was imperfect. And the man at the wheel would not truly listen to me, but only muttered prayers and incantations and curses, and forgot to steer whilst I remained in sight. Shortly I thought, perhaps erroneously, that this neglect was like to wreck the s.h.i.+p at once, and I took myself out of his sight once more.

All the next day, whilst I rested uneasily below, he remained sleeplessly at his post.

He took some time to scribble his continuation of the log on some papers which he then stuffed into a bottle and concealed in his clothing-this log I did not know of until much later, or I would have thrown it into the sea once he was dead.

When on the following night I came on deck again I saw that he had lashed himself to the wheel and was grown much weaker. Approaching as before, I again addressed him in soft words; but his terror grew, until I stopped out of compa.s.sion.

"Monster!" he shrieked. "Back to the depths from whence you came! I will yield to you neither my s.h.i.+p nor my immortal soul!"

"You may retain the captaincy of both," I replied, trying to speak as soothingly as possible. "I ask this and no more, that you tell me which way lies Whitby. In what direction, England?" Ah! In the halls of my own castle, or amid other congenial surroundings, I flatter myself that I can indeed be soothing, charming. Whatever soft and summery impression you will have, that can I give. Aboard s.h.i.+p, though, I am outre, no matter what. I seized the poor wretch by the collar in my impatience and shook him roughly. "Tell me, you scoundrel, idiot, where lies the port of Whitby?"

By this stage, I think, he knew no more than I. Of course I was aware that by now we must have threaded through the channel, and be in the North Sea, somewhere in the region of my destination. The stars gave me rough directions whenever I blew a little hole in the fog to let them be seen. If the captain saw them too and used them to steer by I could not tell at the time; later I supposed that he somehow did.

Toward dawn the next morning he died; his body remained at the wheel, where he had contrived to bind himself, tightening the cord's last knots with his teeth. Of the rosary he had bound beneath his crossed hands I was ignorant, or I would have taken it from him as I would have taken his bottled writings-that neither might suggest the presence of a vampire aboard the schooner.

I considered untying his corpse from the wheel and letting him rejoin his crew in that great fellows.h.i.+p who sleep beneath the waves. But after reflection I left him where he had chosen to remain. The discovery of a s.h.i.+p at sea, completely abandoned by her crew, is a mystery more intriguing to the human mind than any mere wreck, and therefore more closely studied. I thought that when the Demeter came in one way or another to the land-I felt confident of accomplis.h.i.+ng at least that much with my raw control of winds, though whether she would smash to bits or merely grate aground I could not guess-her crew would be believed to have simply perished in a storm. With this in mind I began to use my powers to raise such a storm as would make such a fate for them convincing.

The raising of the storm was a calculated risk; should the s.h.i.+p capsize or sink beneath me there would be nothing I could do but take flight in bat-form amid the gale. My boxes of home soil would be lost irretrievably and I would be a thousand miles as the bat flies from obtaining more. The chances of my survival under such conditions would not be great.

The storm brewed and grumbled for days out in the North Sea toward Scandinavia. I wanted it kept boiling, as it were, until I knew with some precision in just what direction its impetus should be applied against my drifting craft. It was with a surge of elation that I became aware one night of a headland to the northwest, and thought I recognized the towering cliffs of Flamborough Head from drawings and descriptions that I had pored over in my distant study. If this identification was correct, Whitby must lie no more than forty miles to the northwest, and with a little luck I should be able to blow the schooner right into the estuary of the Esk.

I called the storm on slowly, wanting only its fringes to actually encompa.s.s the vessel in which I rode. The maneuvering proved not as easy as I had hoped, and all during the seventh of August I lay below decks in a box, rousing fitfully now and again from torpor, half expecting and hoping to hear at any time hail of English voices from another s.h.i.+p, and then their footfalls as men came aboard to see what ailed the derelict. Hoping, because to be boarded so near Whitby would, I supposed, get me an easy tow into the proper port. But no s.h.i.+p came close enough to take an interest in the Demeter, and when night fell again I judged that the time had come to get to land as best I could by my own actions.

The raising and ordering of a major storm is an exhausting business, and one not altogether pleasant. Even after I had identified the harbor that I sought and worked the s.h.i.+p 'round to it, great exertion was required to aim the schooner at last-"as if by a miracle," in the words of a newspaper account-between the piers that guarded the harbor mouth, so that she flew in to finally ground with little damage upon a s.h.i.+ngle of dark stones just beneath the tall east cliff.Electric lighting had then been in gradually increasing use in England for some ten years, but in my backwaters of Eastern Europe I had not yet seen it; and when the searchlight, quite powerful for its day, glared from one of the piers toward my fleeing s.h.i.+p I was startled and knew not what to expect next.

When the light struck I was directing the last necessary push of the wind in bat- form, so as to be ready to fly free, if need be, from a sudden grounding shock. My clawed feet were both snugly gripped about some rigging lines and my wings were furled close about me in the wind. Even in the searchlight's glare none of the onlookers thronging the piers and sh.o.r.e were able to make out my small brown form upon a mast. That so many folk were out to watch, at this hour of the night, was a surprise to me. I had not realized that Whitby was something of a resort town, full of folk not used to the ocean and its moods, and the storm itself had attracted hordes of sightseers to the sh.o.r.e.

Bat's eyes are bothered by electric glare, and as soon as I saw that the s.h.i.+p was inevitably going to ground in a few moments I dropped into the companionway and altered form to that of a wolf. As soon as the first thrill of grounding ran up through the schooner's bottom, the entertainment seekers on the cliffs were surprised to see an "immense dog"-as a reporter wrote-spring up on deck from below. It jumped ash.o.r.e from the bow and at once vanished in the darkness beyond the searchlight's reach.

To run as a wolf is a powerful and easy mode of travel, less dreamlike and less dependent on the air than bat flight, faster and more effortless than running as a man. In less than a minute I had reached the darker, inland regions of the town, which seemed as still and deserted now as if the entire populace had gone to line the oceanside and watch the storm. After some little time spent waiting among the deeper shadows of a narrow street I felt sure that no one had pursued or followed me from the harbor, and let myself return to man-shape. This process excited a large mastiff that had been cringing, moaning its fear of the wolf, in a coalyard opposite.

When wolf smell changed to something like man smell the brute was emboldened to attack, and came out after me.

Ordinarily I would probably have soothed the beast and sent it home again, but my nonphysical powers were greatly wearied by the raising and direction of the storm. Under the circ.u.mstances I thought the dog fair game, and drank its blood as restorative. Its torn body was found the next day, but was not for a long time connected with the arrival in the harbor of fifty large boxes invoiced as clay.

Feeling stronger in the hours before dawn, I stalked the rain-wet streets of Whitby in search of a vantage point from which I might see the grounded schooner without coming too close to her. I was wearily reluctant to take on bat-form but still wanted to see what, if anything, was being done with her precious cargo.

For this purpose of observation the small churchyard on a cliff high above the town and harbor proved to be ideal. It was a wild, magnificent scene that I beheld from this clifftop before dawn; of course by now I had let go my reins on weather, and the storm was much abated. But the ocean was still sullen and unruly and the sky filled with low, scudding clouds. I was sated and revitalized with fresh blood and exalted in the grandeur of the scene and in what I took to be my victorious arrival against considerable odds. The small parish church near which I stood and the great ruined abbey above were both empty of human life, and I stood there watching until nearly dawn before taking my way on bat wings down to the s.h.i.+p again.

If I was roused from sleep at all by my box being unloaded with the others I have no recollection of the disturbance now. Mr. Billington, the good Whitby solicitor to whom the s.h.i.+pment had been consigned, had dutifully brought a crew of men aboard the Demeter with the morning tide, and when I woke once more at sunset I found myself still amid my fifty boxes of sweet earth, stacked now in a dry warehouse.

For the next few days I endured a rather pa.s.sive though risky existence. Inquiries about the s.h.i.+pwreck were in the air. The admiralty, as I gathered from a few words overheard, were taking an interest; harbor dues were payable, and in the midst of these threatened complications Billington dawdled over completing the arrangements for my s.h.i.+pment by train to London.

Meanwhile I of course went out at night and despite these problems enjoyed myself enormously. Change and promise and success seemed to be in the air, along with the salt tang from the North Sea, which I began to practice breathing to enjoy.

On my nocturnal ramblings I even caught myself looking for mirrors; I actually nursed stirrings of faint, unreasoned hope that at least the ghostly outline of my reflection would now be visible.

The mirrors were always disappointments but my existence otherwise had none.

The life of the seaside town flowed on at night in the open air as well as behind doors, and no one's life seemed bound in secrecy or fear. I listened to band concerts on the piers. I heard much laughter in the streets. It seemed to me then that even the poor and wretched of this new country were conscious of all the possibilities of enjoyment in the world, and meant to have some for themselves. I marveled happily. After killing the dog I fed no more during those first few English nights. In fact I felt little craving for blood, a fact from which I drew hope for the fulfillment of my future plans; finer things than blood seemed stirring in the English air, and in my soul. I sublimated my fleshly cravings and platonically enjoyed the presence around me of all the women of the town.

Great heaven! If little Whitby were as full as this of life, promise, and humanity, then what, I thought, must London be? Surely in that vital metropolis I would not be able to remain a common vampire even if I tried. Not that I wished merely to be as one of the more ordinary inhabitants, lungs gasping perpetually in the sooted air for a lifespan of a few decades only. No, I saw myself as becoming a synthesis, the first of a new species, warmth-and light-loving as breathing men, and with as many l.u.s.ts to satiate and enjoy: tough and enduring as the nosferatu, able to hold converse with animals if not necessarily to a.s.sume their shapes. With balmy thoughts like these I kept myself befuddled and bemused.

One of my favorite haunts during those first wildly hopeful English nights was the churchyard I have mentioned. It surrounded St. Mary's parish church, which clung on the east cliff high above the town, and was immediately below the ancient and ruined abbey. In this same Whitby Abbey, some twelve hundred years before I came to it, the plowboy poet Caedmon was the first in England to sing a hymn to the creative G.o.d of Christendom. I found the place to be invariably deserted after dark, and, like the poet of old, perhaps, I spent there many quiet hours in thought and dream. The harbor and the peaceful town alike were spread before me, as was the sea, to my sightseeing eyes, and the headland called Kettleness bulked low against the sky.

So I was, leaning against one of the abbey's remaining walls, and observing moonlit scenery in a euphoric mood, when sweet Lucy first came into my sight. It was close upon the hour of twelve, as I recall, some three nights after my tempestuous arrival. I was roused from contemplation of moon, earth, and sea by the appearance at one corner of my vision of a single figure in some kind of long, white dress, approaching the churchyard along the lengthy flight of steps that led up from the town. I turned to observe this figure more directly and made out that it was a young woman perhaps not yet turned twenty, and rather slight of build, with a diaphanous fall of hair about her shoulders. I did not move. Though with my night-tuned eyes I could see her at a good distance, I stood myself in partial shadow and thought it unlikely that she would become aware of me even if she should pa.s.s quite near, as she seemed like to do if she remained on the path that she had chosen.

She was sleepwalking, I realized as she drew within a few score yards, sleepwalking barefoot and in a thin, white nightgown. The gown s.h.i.+mmered about her with the vibration of her stride, calling to mind the blowing of pure snow, or moonlight of the rare Carpathian heights. Her eyes, the rare blue of sunlit English skies, were open, but even had she been fully dressed I would have known she slept-I have a knowing in such matters. Fair hair, to go with such eyes as those; wild heart, which though I heard it as she drew quite near I did not yet begin to understand.

She pa.s.sed my place of shadow and I thought she was about to go on farther up, into the abbey or around it, but suddenly her footsteps slowed. She halted, and turned so that she seemed to be looking straight away from me, and out to sea; and at that moment, with a small and scarcely perceptible start, she came awake. You, watching from where I watched, could probably not have perceived the change, so easy was it.

Nor did she herself know clearly if she woke or dreamt, as her first words showed.

I am not one to doubt the existence of a sixth, or even sixteenth, sense. Too often have the breathing members of humanity surprised me with the quickness and acuity of their perceptions. Even before she had fully awakened Lucy's face turned round in my direction, and my motionless form, in shadow some ten steps away, was the first object which her eyes found in their focus.