Seance for a Vampire

Sixteen

Martin Armstrong returned to Norberton House that evening, and lied convincingly enough to Rebecca and to the elder Altamonts about his day’s activities.

A little later that night, when Armstrong had retired and was trying to close his eyes in sleep, Louisa drifted in uninvited through the window of his room and, as on the previous night, materialized sitting on the edge of his bed.

The idea of trying to resist her attraction crossed the young man’s mind, but only briefly. The attempt failed before it had really started, and the couple passionately made love.

This did nothing to resolve Armstrong’s feelings. He found himself sliding inexorably into a crisis of doubt, fear, and hesitation regarding his relationship with his beloved.

While the sensual attraction between the pair was, if anything, stronger than on the previous night, the young man’s feelings of revulsion had also increased to the point where they could no longer be denied. He realized, with the night’s first surge of passion spent, that these contrary emotions must be either wholeheartedly accepted, or overcome.

Armstrong was thinking, as most of us do most of the time, of his own future. Holmes and Watson had been trying to instruct him about vampires. For him to remain Louisa’s lover in a permanent way, forsaking all others, would sooner or later mean setting his own feet irrevocably upon the path to vampirism, thus bringing upon himself the implacable enmity of the great mass of humanity–however many could be induced to believe in him.

Side by side with the great tree of passion, the faint seed of disgust, sown during Louisa’s first visit to his bedroom, was growing rapidly.

He spoke the word to her during this visit: “Lou, you have become a... vampire.”

“Yes. I know.” She pleaded with her lover not to tell anyone, her parents least of all. They must not learn that she was coming to him in this way, the discovery that their daughter had become a monster–so they must view the matter–would destroy them.

Nor did Louisa’s new master know that she was here, and she was afraid that he would find out.

She also feared Sherlock Holmes and his associates, though not as much as she feared Kulakov. She felt instinctively that Holmes and Watson, as preservers of law and convention, would pass the terrible knowledge of her state on to her family, and would separate her from Martin.

Dracula she feared as well, but in yet another way; he was somehow kin to the man who had enslaved her, even though he was Kulakov’s enemy as well.

Armstrong was both angry at Kulakov and afraid of him, and wanted to see the man destroyed.

Louisa had had other reasons for returning that night to the home of her breathing childhood, and actually she had accomplished these before coming to see her lover: She had wanted to see her sister (without allowing Rebecca to see her), and also to gaze from a distance at her parents, whom Louisa loved but who, she thought, were now farther than they had ever been from understanding what had happened to their elder daughter, and what was going to happen.

On Saturday morning, at least some of the people who arrived at the cemetery for the burial service of Abraham Kirkaldy were astonished and outraged to discover the vandalism that had been committed by an angry vampire the night before.

But the service went on as scheduled.

Martin Armstrong was there, nervously wondering if the small amount of blood he had lost during the night had weakened him, and if one of the new fang marks on his throat might show above his collar. A police constable was at the service too, taking the place of Inspector Merivale, who was busy elsewhere that morning. The constable stood quietly in the rear with Mycroft Holmes, observing the mourners.

Also present were the two elder Altamonts–Rebecca, pleading weariness, had stayed home. There were only a few other people, mostly spiritualist enthusiasts who had known the Kirkaldys as mediums. These last and the officiating clergyman eyed one another uneasily.

Just as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, a soft rain began to fall. Sister Sarah, weeping for her brother for the last time, was supported by both of the elder Altamonts, who, in the freshness of their conversion to the spiritualist outlook, could not refrain from sometimes gazing at the young woman’s tears in gentle wonder, that she, so knowledgeable about commerce with the other world should grieve so at a temporary separation.

Prince Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Watson were elsewhere that morning, having delegated Mycroft, who was considered no great shakes as a man of action, to represent them at the cemetery and act as their observer. The hunters considered it barely possible that Count Kulakov, if he were truly as mad as his behavior seemed to suggest, might put in an appearance at his victim’s burial. but they thought that in the daylight, and surrounded by other people, Mycroft would probably be safe enough.

I, Dracula, at the time of Abraham’s interment, was wistfully imagining myself enjoying yet another daylight rest at the Saracen’s Head, my darkened room’s one door not only snugly locked, but barricaded, so that no maid might enter and run screaming to announce the discovery of a corpse. but alas for my comfortable imaginings, the game was afoot in earnest, as Cousin Sherlock used to say, and such lassitude on my part was not to be. At the moment when the first shovelful of earth fell upon the coffin of Abraham Kirkaldy, I, in company with Sherlock and the faithful Watson, not to mention Inspector Merivale and a small army of police in horsedrawn vehicles, was just arriving in sight of Smithbury Hall.

But let Watson tell the next part of our adventure...

Sherlock Holmes had also been thinking about secretly promoting another attempt at a séance, hoping thereby to make contact with both Louisa and her attacker. He discussed this possibility with his cousin and me while we were on our way to Smithbury Hall.

Today’s raid had been organized and was being launched at the instigation of Sherlock Holmes, acting with the advice of Mycroft. There now existed some hard evidence to tie the Russian count not only to a particularly vicious group of terrorists, but also to the Okhrana, the Russian Imperial Secret Police. Such ambiguity, even among the nobility, would hardly be unheard of in the intrigues of Muscovy. Although our british law and custom can and does tolerate political refugees of every stripe, engaging in violent conflict upon our soil is quite another matter.

This next spiritualist sitting had been arranged for Saturday. It would be conducted in Norberton House by Sarah, with Dracula overseeing matters, lurking alternately outside the house and inside, trying to set a trap for Kulakov.

To hold this new séance so soon was definitely against Mr. Prince’s advice. Sarah had been forced or argued into it somehow by the overanxious Altamonts. I hoped it would not produce disastrous results.

I raised another subject with Holmes as we rode in the carriage. I found myself deeply shocked to learn that Martin Armstrong, even after understanding what fearful alteration the girl’s nature had undergone, had apparently made no effort to break off his affair with her. Indeed, he was seriously, deliberately, considering what sort of future life they might be able to achieve together.

“We must do something, Holmes.”

“I share your feelings, Watson. but by what right would we interfere?”

“By what right? It is our duty to act, as we would act to prevent a suicide, to save a madman from self-destruction.”

“Is Martin Armstrong mad?”

“If he behaves in such a way. On the other hand...”

“Yes?”

“I was about to say, it would be unthinkable, Holmes, to return the girl to her parents in this... this...”

“Quite so.” Holmes, with a sigh, turned to his relative. “To the best of my knowledge, there can be no possibility of reversion to the breathing state once matters have progressed this far.”

“To cling to any such hope would be an utter waste of time.” Dracula’s face seemed carved in ice, as if he might have been insulted by the suggestion that such a change might be desirable. As for repealing Louisa’s vampire-conversion, the prince assured them that everyone had better accept that as impossible. Dracula himself had never seen it happen.

Today, as yesterday, our first glimpse of our enemy’s rented house came from a little distance away among the trees. Today again we had eschewed attention-drawing motorcars and were traveling in a small convoy of carriages.

Smithbury Hall was a relatively new building, constructed in Victoria’s early reign, of yellow stone with white stone columns, and in a mixture of architectural styles, most of them flat-roofed. It stood on a gentle, grassy hill amid fairly extensive grounds, some thirteen or fourteen miles from Norberton House and perhaps half a mile from the abandoned greenhouse.

Our discovery yesterday of Louisa’s “body” so close to the house would certainly have interested the police; but of course we had not told them of our find.

Naturally, we had preferred to launch our raid on Kulakov’s rented manor in daylight, when it was at least probable that the count might be caught sleeping within.

But he was not to be found. Perhaps, we thought, he had somehow got wind of our coming. With Holmes and Merivale leading the way, armed with search warrants, we stormed through the house. Of course Holmes and I, if not the police, were well aware that the vampire could not be caught in such a way–but the police were ready and eager to lay hands on a man whom they conceived to be an ordinary criminal.

Though within a matter of minutes, a dozen policemen were tearing the house apart from roof to cellar, we were not really surprised at our failure to discover Kulakov; and Mr. Prince, once invited in, searched the attic, and particularly the cellar, with a thoroughness of which no breathing man would have been capable, seeking traces of a hidden earth, whether occupied or not. Actually Dracula, while the police remained oblivious to his real activities, located two or three such dens, but all were empty.

Holmes, the prince, and I had already agreed that Kulakov had probably formed a careful, suspicious habit of shifting 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, 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 grassy 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 space 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 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 expressions 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 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 house.

As we were able to reconstruct the matter later, there sounded a light tap on the door of becky’s sitting room, where 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 realization gradually that becky was now gone, taking with her the clothes she had been wearing and apparently nothing else.

Early Saturday 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 reassuringly 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 pawn 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 depends 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 séance could be worked out. They would be holding another sitting, he assured 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 séance 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 amusement. “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 in 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 ship.

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 associates 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 ship 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 some 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 co-operation; 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 his band of hunters on to St. Petersburg, where the next act of the drama was going 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.”