Dracula Sequence - Seance For A Vampire Part 17

Holmes, the prince, and I had already agreed that Kulakov had probably formed a careful, suspicious habit of s.h.i.+fting daily from one earth to another, and that one or more of his essential troves of Russian soil might be in close proximity to the place where we had finally found Louisa, and where we hoped to be able to find her again.

Today our raiders, like yesterday's disguised inquirers at the door, were told by two servants of Kulakov's, the only people inhabiting the house at present, that the master had gone elsewhere; he was in London, they thought. No, they could not say where, and they had no means of reaching him.

When the opportunity presented itself, Holmes and I, by prearrangement, slipped away from the main house without telling Merivale or any of his men, and made our way back to the abandoned greenhouse. Holmes had great hopes that there we should find Louisa Altamont in daylight trance.

Should we be successful in this endeavor, Holmes had worked out a plan of getting her away to a hiding place of his own choosing and then, later, with Dracula's help, working out some kind of viable future for the girl.

But such was not to be. Our departure from the area of the main house was not unnoticed by our enemies. Holmes and I were trudging across a gra.s.sy meadow, not yet within a hundred yards of the old greenhouse, when I happened to glance back and saw that we were being pursued.

I cried out immediately, and my companion turned. At the same moment a shot was fired from behind us, and a bullet sang past our ears. A small group of men in dark clothing, sprung seemingly out of the earth itself, were running after us from the general direction of the house. Even as we stared, our lead pursuer raised a pistol and fired again. I had drawn my own revolver now, and returned fire, with no effect.

Remembering that the wooden bullets would tend to be inaccurate at long range, I turned and ran, with Holmes, toward the abandoned greenhouse.

As investigation later proved, the men who came after us were some of Kulakov's adherents, four or five revolutionary terrorists wanted by the police in London and other cities, who had been using another old shed on the grounds as a hiding place.

They had failed to observe our intrusion yesterday, but today, when they had seen where Holmes and I were going, they had burst out of concealment in obedience to their master's orders and pursued us. Evidently their dark master had enjoined them to protect the old greenhouse from intruders at any cost.

"Run, Watson, run! We must reach Louisa Altamont before they do!"

I redoubled my efforts, and managed to stay close behind Holmes as we went pounding over the meadow, stirring up songbirds, and along the faint track of a farm road, toward the grove of trees in which our objective lay concealed.

Shouts of anger, and of momentary triumph, sounded from behind us, closing in, and I knew it was likely that our pursuers ran on younger legs than ours. Once more I turned, at bay, thinking at least to delay the foe long enough for Holmes to reach the greenhouse and what it contained. This time the enemy was closer, and I took more careful aim. My next shot dropped our first pursuer in his tracks, and caused the others to hesitate.Beyond the men who were chasing us, a greater number of policemen, some in uniforms, were now running to our aid. Among the latter I saw Mr. Prince, his long legs outpacing all the others.

It was necessary for me to shoot a second of the gasping villains in our wake before the rest turned away, scattering with police in pursuit. I then ran again, gasping and tottering, after Holmes, who had gone on into the grove.

I found my friend inside the greenhouse, where he stood looking down into the great toolbox. Inside it lay Louisa Altamont again; but this time the girl was truly dead. She lay on her back with arms outflung, still clad in her once-white burial gown, the fabric now further torn and disarranged. Her blue eyes were open and unseeing, unbothered now by daylight; her white breast was transfixed by splintered wood in the form of the long, broken handle of a rake.

We were standing there, speechless with exertion and surprise, when light rapid footsteps announced the arrival of Prince Dracula, who came bounding into the sunlit s.p.a.ce to stop suddenly beside us, and join us in silent contemplation.

I turned to him in puzzlement. "But, her body-I thought that it would vanish?"

The shouts and heavy footsteps of the police now sounded from just outside the building. Dracula put his lips close to my ear and whispered, almost pedantically and more calmly than I would have expected: "A new vampire when killed is hard to distinguish from a breather newly dead; only the bodies of old nosferatu like myself are wont to disintegrate spectacularly into dust and gas when their spirits achieve a true departure from this plane of existence."

Within a few moments Merivale and others had joined us, and were loud in their expression of outrage at what they saw. Louisa's death was of course blamed on the villainous terrorist gang, whose surviving members were now being rounded up among the estate's woods and fields. Holmes soon whispered to me privately that he was certain Kulakov must be responsible, that perhaps he had slain the girl himself before somehow making his escape, or perhaps she had been killed by one of Kulakov's servants, obeying his orders to do so if her discovery should seem likely.

By whatever hand had been accomplished, the killing was going to be difficult to explain, especially to Louisa's shocked and horrified parents. The official theory, soon developed, was that Louisa had been held for weeks as a drugged kidnap victim in Smithbury Hall, and whatever body had originally been buried in her place had now been destroyed by the villains in an attempt to cover their trail. Louisa's body, at last truly dead, was soon taken away by a medical examiner who, fortunately or not, had no means of discovering the truth.

I foresaw that Holmes and Dracula and I would be spending the rest of the day in clearing up, or concealing, the details of this grim and distasteful business; what I did not foresee was the great shock which awaited us on our return to Norberton House.

The abduction of Rebecca Altamont took place in her own home, in broad daylight, on the same morning as the burial of Abraham Kirkaldy and the police raid on Kulakov's rented manor.As we were able to reconstruct the matter later, there sounded a light tap on the door of Becky's sitting room, wherein she was reading. When the girl opened the door, the man who had tipped the rowboat was standing just outside, rubbing the back of his neck as if it hurt. This time he was fully clothed, and as on the earlier occasion, she had been given only the most fleeting glance. But she had no doubt that the green eyes were the same.

With part of her mind, but only part, she wondered whether she ought to try to scream...

In Kulakov's place, I should probably have left some gloating sign of triumph behind, some challenging message, boasting of this latest punishment I had inflicted upon my enemies, and threatening to do even worse. Kulakov did nothing of the kind; we were left to realize gradually that Becky was now gone, taking with her the clothes she had been wearing and apparently nothing else.

Early Sat.u.r.day afternoon, with the graveside service for Abraham Kirkaldy some hours over, Martin Armstrong was told of Louisa's death, and treated to a further serious talk, by Sherlock Holmes, on the subject of vampires.

After dark there was another short lecture on the same subject, this one by Dracula, and accompanied by a demonstration. These coordinated efforts gave Martin a more realistic view of what his own situation would have been, and Louisa's, had she lived. Then, his mind full of other problems, Armstrong required some little time to understand that Mr. Prince was a vampire too.

On the day after Rebecca's ominous disappearance from Norberton House, the coffin containing her elder sister's body was-for the second time this summer-on display in the best parlor. Louisa's parents-for the second time-wore mourning and held vigil at the dead girl's side.

It was easy to see that the mother and father had been driven to the brink of madness, if not beyond, by grief and uncertainty. They could hardly avoid the torturing hope that this too might be some mistake, that the girl would yet again come back to them, somehow. Madeline soon collapsed with what her physician diagnosed as brain fever, and Ambrose was reduced to maundering about the construction of this seeming Louisa-body from "psycho-plastic material," a term then much in vogue with certain mediums.

"This... this is not my daughter, gentlemen," said he, looking fondly at the body in the coffin, as he might have gazed at a photograph of Louisa, or a sculpture. "This is only a reproduction, created by psychic forces."

And Martin Armstrong, who had found in a drawer and put on again the black armband he had so recently taken off, was looking at his lover in her coffin-again.

This was the face he had kissed, the body he had embraced and hungered to embrace again. But was this really his Louisa, or was it not? The breathing, laughing, shy girl of boat rides and garden parties in the summer afternoons?

And, above all, whoever this woman was, was she really dead?Even though Louisa might now be truly dead, Armstrong endured, repeatedly, a horrible nightmare about her being raped and transformed into a vampire. He was beginning to fear that he stood in peril of undergoing the same change, begun much more gradually and pleasurably, but with the same resulting alteration in his very nature.

The fears and doubts that had arisen when the young man was repeatedly visited by his vampire lover at night returned with redoubled force now as he watched her lying in daylight-dead?

Armstrong told me he thought that perhaps never again could he be sure of death.

He was pale and trembling as he gazed at that pale, strangely transformed face.

Her beauty had now been enhanced, as sometimes happens in such cases, to a breathtaking perfection.

Going back to his bedroom, where there was a mirror, Armstrong shut the door for privacy and began to examine his reflection, which was still rea.s.suringly visible, in search of any preliminary changes that might signal a coming transformation. He felt encouraged that none were to be found.

For a moment or two, he even forgot the fact that Becky was now missing.

Sherlock Holmes, in discussion with his cousin, agreed that Louisa Altamont had been innocent of any serious wrongdoing. She had been only a p.a.w.n used by Kulakov, and her death deserved to be avenged as much as that of any breathing victim's.

Dracula, going into greater detail on the subject of Louisa's mental state, reiterated his remarks to the effect that folk of his race and hers were even more susceptible to hypnosis than the breathing variety of people were. Indeed, their very existence as vampires depended upon their flesh being held enchanted, as it were, by their own or another's will. This explained how Louisa could have been compelled by Kulakov to plague her parents about some treasure-a treasure that seemed to exist only in the vampire's deranged mind.

Holmes and I were invited back to Norberton House by Ambrose Altamont, who wished to apologize for having treated us, as he now viewed the matter, unfairly.

The true death of their elder daughter, and the abduction of their younger, would perhaps have given a clear-thinking Ambrose and Madeline strong reason for welcoming Sherlock Holmes at last into their house, for apologizing for past mistakes, and for humbly requesting my friend's help at last. As matters stood, however, Ambrose was now a broken man, reduced by the blows of fate to a mild and pleasant manner, living in a kind of contentment from one moment to the next, vaguely agitated by everything that happened, but freed of all terror and grief. He only wanted to explain, he said, that there was really no need to be concerned: What lay in the coffin in the parlor now was not really Louisa at all, but merely a psycho-plastic construction. His dear girl would be coming back to them again, once the proper procedure for a siance could be worked out. They would be holding another sitting, he a.s.sured us, as soon as his dear wife felt well enough to take part.

Madeline Altamont, we were told by her physician, had taken to her bed. She was, at the moment, beyond listening to any explanations at all, or expressing any hopes, and her recovery was doubtful.

Before we left the house, Holmes tried once more, speaking slowly and kindly and carefully, to explain the matter to Louisa's father. "The apparition at the siance of the girl in white was indeed your daughter, though at that time, she was not dead. What we are dealing with here is something more strange and terrible than death."

Involuntarily I looked at Dracula to gauge his reaction to this remark. His glance at me held a flavor of amus.e.m.e.nt. "But I quite agree, Doctor. Life is indeed more strange and terrible than death."

As we left the house, Holmes grumbled privately to me that this was not the first time a client of his had been driven mad, but that made the matter no easier to accept.

"By Heaven, Watson, I mean yet to get my hands on the fiend who has done this.

And when I do..."

Meanwhile, my affair with Sarah was now well launched, with the seductive vampire (myself) continuing to visit the young woman repeatedly in her room at night, or on the grounds of Norberton House at dusk.

Watson, on discovering (I never did learn how) the fact of this affair, was outraged (naturally so, as he thought) and proved brave enough to tell me so to my face.

Considerations of honor and duty restrained my natural reaction to this meddling, and Watson survived the occasion unharmed. His good luck may be partially attributable to Sarah, who, with the wise idea of separating the two men, prevailed on Mr. Prince to escort her there and then to the little cemetery where her dear brother now lay beneath the freshly mounded earth. She said she wanted to bring more flowers to the grave.

"And will you help us hunt his killer, Sarah?" I inquired softly, when she had risen from her graveside prayers. (In recent days the value of traditional religion had risen sharply in her eyes.) "Aye. But how am I t' dae that?" Her brown eyes burned at me.

"He laid a spell upon you, did he not? Meaning to force you to do his will?"

"Aye, he did that."

"Then traces of that connection probably remain. Will you trust me to put you to sleep, and let me look for them?"Suffice it to say that the experiment was made, the thin red threads of mental influence traced to their source. Evidence obtained through Sarah, speaking in true trance, detailing her psychic visions, indicated that Kulakov had carried Becky off to the docks, not in London but in Hull, and from there had promptly taken s.h.i.+p.

Sarah's visions were also of pain and intermittent weakness. When Sherlock Holmes heard this, he said with characteristic insight that Kulakov probably still was, and had been for most of his long life, suffering from the discomforts of having been hanged in 1765.

Holmes delegated to some of his lesser a.s.sociates a sustained effort to find and destroy all of Kulakov's earths in England. Several such hideaways were found on the grounds of Smithbury Hall, quite near the place where Kulakov had been keeping Louisa. But Holmes thought this search of only secondary importance.

Dracula, too, freely expressed his doubts about the effectiveness of the procedure.

"It seems most unlikely that we should ever really be able to render them all uninhabitable. I speak from a certain experience. A dozen years ago, as perhaps you are aware, some Englishmen led by that idiot Van Helsing were attempting to do the same thing to me. They failed miserably, though they were not aware of their failure.

Someday perhaps I will tell you the whole story.

"But the point to be noted just now is this: A vampire given time for preparation, and the chance to s.h.i.+p in a supply of his native earth, can so entrench himself in a foreign land that he becomes almost impossible to root out-without killing him."

Kulakov's prospects for regaining his lost treasure must have seemed to him as remote as ever. The evil vampire had killed Louisa with his own hands, or arranged for her killing. The count had seen his convert now as only a liability.

Further evidence obtained through Sarah's psychic contact indicated that the Russian vampire had departed from the docks at Hull aboard a fast steamer which, the port records showed, was bound directly for St. Petersburg. The vessel was Russian, and we thought that probably it was under Kulakov's direct control.

Holmes promptly cabled a friendly contact in the Petersburg police, to alert them to be on watch for Kulakov, though there were as yet no formal charges to be brought against him. The cable brought a prompt response, which seemed to promise cooperation; but we feared that Kulakov might have so much influence in the Tsarist government as to be effectively immune to the police.

And Mycroft Holmes promised us that he could arrange for a swift vessel, perhaps even one of the Royal Navy's new turbine-powered destroyers, to carry the band of hunters on to St. Petersburg, where the next act of the drama was to be played out.

Dracula remarked that he could feel a certain remote sympathy for Kulakov.

"Sympathy!""Yes, Doctor. Oh, he is my enemy now, and I will hunt him down and kill him. But I found myself in a somewhat similar situation, that of the hunted vampire, about twelve years ago, on my first visit to Britain, before I had met either you or my distinguished cousin.

"Perhaps I will someday tell you that story, Doctor."

17.

Before departing for London and thence for Russia, Holmes and I paid a final visit to the home of the Altamonts. The sad condition of this once-intelligent and happy couple stiffened our resolve to see that justice was done.

Ambrose Altamont, still denying the fact that his older daughter was truly dead at last, now a.s.sured us that his younger daughter, Rebecca, was only visiting a friend and would return at any hour.

Altamont's back was bent now, like that of an old man. He peered at us timidly, and his voice and hands alike were quivering. "Surely Becky will be back with us by this evening. Then we will have our next sitting. You gentlemen are welcome to attend."

With our former client in this condition, and with Mrs. Altamont still prostrated by brain fever, there was obviously no point in our attempting any further explanations... either of vampires or on any other point. Instead, we nodded and smiled and said our good-byes, promising to call again, with good news, when we could.

At least, as I commented to Holmes a little later, Louisa's parents had been spared the ultimate shock of being present when their daughter was staked as a vampire.

Mycroft was as good as his word, and with the benefit of his powerful though hidden influence, discreetly exercised, our expeditionary force was able to obtain, quickly and quietly, the use of a fast steamer for the journey to St. Petersburg. The vessel provided was in fact the private steam-yacht of one of the Sea Lords-I think that even now I had better not be more specific regarding the vessel's owners.h.i.+p or the circ.u.mstances in which we obtained its use.

There had been some discussion of our using a naval vessel, but Holmes had promptly decided that would be inappropriate. "Owing to the essentially private nature of our business, a privately owned craft is preferable to a s.h.i.+p of His Majesty's Navy, which would inevitably attract attention, and would require some diplomatic prearrangement."

Another advantage of a private s.h.i.+p was that she could stand by un.o.btrusively in the Russian port, ready to carry us on the return voyage-but haste in returning should not be necessary.The craft we were privileged to obtain had engines similar to those of the new turbine-powered destroyers, capable of making more than thirty knots. Most naval vessels of the time could sustain no more than half that speed.

During our voyage, Count Kulakov's motives and behavior were naturally the subject of intense discussion. So were those of Rebecca Altamont, the question being by what combination of force and guile she had been compelled to accompany him.

Our party included Sherlock Holmes, Prince Dracula, Armstrong, and myself, as well as Sarah Kirkaldy, without whose genuine psychic capabilities we might never have been able to follow the escaping Kulakov with any accuracy.

While the Russian's vampirish bloodl.u.s.t had played a part in his behavior, obviously his prime motive in his attacks upon the Altamonts was-or had been- revenge.

Even so, that left unexplained many details of his behavior. Nor was it very helpful simply to say that the man was mad, though that undoubtedly seemed to be the case.

And there was still the matter of the mysterious treasure. Did it exist only in the fevered imagination of a deranged vampire?

"It will of course be difficult, or impossible, to arrest the man we seek, in Russia even more so than in England-but it would be useless to arrest him anywhere.

Courts, fines, and imprisonment are meaningless threats to him. The only practical way to punish a vampire is by the application of direct physical violence."

We could not but agree with Holmes.

At the same time, of course, Rebecca Altamont was making the voyage with Kulakov. We were sure that she must be in some sense his prisoner, though we could not say by what combination of threats, actual violence, and mesmeric power he might be forcing her to his will.

At one point Armstrong asked me whether Becky, having made the voyage with her captor, would be unloaded in an earth-filled trunk, and whether she had been brought aboard his s.h.i.+p and spent most of the voyage thus confined. We all a.s.sured him that this was unlikely-unless Rebecca had already become a vampire. Such intimations as we could receive through the entranced mind of Sarah Kirkaldy indicated that this was not the case, but we could not be sure.

Our sea route to St. Petersburg took us through the North Sea, among the islands and peninsulas of Denmark, and past Copenhagen, with a brief stop there to see if a cable might have arrived from Mycroft-the wireless was not yet available on s.h.i.+ps- before entering the Baltic. Our journey in itself was almost completely uneventful, leaving us plenty of time for discussion of vampirism and related phenomena. I realized only belatedly that the favorable winds and generally calm seas we enjoyed were at least in part a result of Prince Dracula's efforts in an occult way.

Whether Kulakov might be capable of exercising a similar influence upon the weather, we did not know; in any event, we gained a day or more on his s.h.i.+p during the voyage, so that we arrived at our destination only a day, perhaps only a few hours, after he did. We were elated to see that the s.h.i.+p on which Kulakov and his hostage had traveled-her name was plainly visible-was actually still at the quay, in the process of unloading cargo, when we arrived in St. Petersburg. This was indeed an encouraging sign, showing that our enemy and his helpless hostage could as yet be at no very great distance from the city.

With our own vessel berthed, we disembarked amid dense fog and intermittent rain, conditions almost identical to those under which we had left Hull. Under Armstrong's guidance we had little difficulty in finding our way about the Russian capital. Our party took rooms at the Hotel de l'Europe. Here our windows overlooked Nevsky Prospekt, the great boulevard which runs for two and a half miles through the city's heart. When the fog cleared, which it soon did, the view was quite impressive.

We saw the avenue thronged with people under black umbrellas, both of its sides lined by palaces and churches, by business establishments and government buildings of all sorts.

There were an amazing number of uniforms to be seen among the native populace, and no immediate way for the stranger to know which type of costume belonged to high officials and which to mere minor functionaries.

The hotel stood on the north side of the boulevard, less than half a mile east of the Kazan Cathedral, whose colonnade had been copied from that of St. Peter's in Rome, and whose interior boasted the regimental flags and imperial eagles captured from the ravaged army of Napoleon. A block past the cathedral, one reached the luxurious shops of the Morskaya, where I almost thought I might have been in Paris.

Traffic here kept to the right, which added yet another minor strain to our difficulties.