Seance for a Vampire

Prologue

Of course I can tell you the tale. but you should understand at the start that there are points where the telling may cause me to become rather emotional. because I–even I, Prince Dracula–find the whole matter disturbing, even at this late date. It brought me as near to the true death as I have ever been, before or since–and in such an unexpected way! No, this affair you wish to hear about, the one involving the séances and the vampires, was not the commonplace stuff of day-to-day life. Hardly routine even in the terms of my existence, which for more than five hundred years has been–how shall I say it?– has not been dull.

It is difficult to find the words with which to characterize this chain of events. It was more than grotesque, it was fantastic. Parts of it almost unbelievable. You’ll see. Pirates, mesmerism, executions by hanging. Stolen treasure, murder, kidnapping, revenge and seduction. Women taken by force, attempts to materialize the spirits of the dead...

I know what you are going to say. Everything in the above list is a bit out of the ordinary, but still the daily newspapers, those of any century you like, abound in examples. but in this case the combination was unique. And soon you will see that I am not exaggerating about the fantasy. Some of my hearers may not even believe in the existence of vampires, may find that elementary starting point quite beyond credibility.

Never mind. Let those who have such difficulty turn back here, before we really start; they have no imaginations and no souls.

Still with me? Very good. Actually no one besides myself can tell the tale now, but I can relate it vividly–because, with your indulgence, I will allow myself a little creative latitude as regards details, and also the luxury of some help in the form of several chapters written decades ago by another eyewitness. He, this other witness, who is now in effect becoming my co-author, was your archetypical Englishman, a somewhat stolid and unimaginative chap, but also a gentleman with great respect for truth and honor.

As it happens I was nowhere near London’s Execution Dock on the June morning in 1765 when the whole fantastic business may fairly be said to have begun. However, somewhere past the halfway point between that date and this, less than a single century ago in the warm summer of 1903, I lived through the startling conclusion. In that latter post-Victorian year I happened to be on hand when the whole affair was pieced together logically by–will you begin to doubt me if I name him?–by a certain breathing man blessed with unequaled skills in the unraveling of the grotesque and the bizarre, a friend of the above eyewitness and also a distant relative of mine. And this adventure involving vampires and séances was enough, I think, to drive the logician to retirement.

But let me start at what I will call the beginning, in 1765...

There had been laughter inside the crumbling walls of Newgate during the night; at a little past midnight a guard in a certain hellish corridor was ready to swear that he had just heard the soft giggle of a woman, coming from one of the condemned cells, a place where no woman could possibly have been. Naturally at that hour all was dark inside the cages, and there was nothing that could have been called a disturbance; so the guard made no attempt to look inside.

Some hours later, when the first daylight, discouraged and rendered lifeless by these surroundings, filtered through to show the prison’s stinking, grim interior, there was of course no woman to be seen. There had been no realistic possibility of anyone’s passing in or out. The cell in question contained only the prisoner, the tall, red-bearded pirate captain, still breathing, just as he was supposed to be–for a few hours yet. breathing but otherwise silent, not giggling like a woman, no, he was still sane–poor chap. And the guard, as little anxious as any of us ever are to seem a fool, was privately glad that he had said nothing, raised no ridiculous alarm.

No one in the prison had anything to say about impossibilities that might have been heard or seen before the dawn.

An hour or so after that same dawn, upon one of those raw June british mornings suggestive of the month of March, a solemn procession left London’s Newgate Prison. At the heart of the grim train emerging from those iron gates there rolled a tall, heavy, open cart in which rode three doomed men, all standing erect with arms chained behind them. Their three sets of leg irons had been struck off only an hour ago, by the prison blacksmith. Once out of the prison gate, the cart, departing sharply from its customary route, turned east. These prisoners had been convicted by the Admiralty Court, and such did not at that time “go west” with the ordinary felons to hang on Tyburn Tree. Instead, a special fate awaited them.

Astride his horse at the very head of the procession was the Deputy Marshal of the Admiralty. Red-faced and grave, this functionary bore in prominent display the Silver Oar, almost big enough to row with, symbol of that court’s authority over human activity on the high seas, even to the most distant portions of the globe. Next came the elegant coach carrying the Marshal himself, resplendent in his traditional uniform, surrounded by his coachmen wearing their distinctive livery. After these, on horseback, rode a number of City officials, one or two of considerable prominence. but whatever their station, few amid the steadily growing throng of onlookers had eyes for them, or for anyone but the central figures in the morning’s drama.

The high ceremonial cart in the middle of the parade came lumbering along deliberately upon great wooden wheels, which, though freshly greased, squeaked mildly. The three prisoners standing more or less erect in the middle of the cart had their backs to one another, and with their arms still in irons had little choice but to lean on one another for mutual support. The executioner–Thomas Turlis in that year–and his assistant rode standing in the cart beside the prisoners, and a Newgate guard walked beside each of the great slowturning wheels.

The cart was followed immediately by a substantial force of marshal’s men and sheriff’s officers, mostly afoot. These walking men had no trouble keeping up; those who calculated the time of departure from the prison had assumed that only a modest pace would be possible. The narrow, cobbled streets made progress for a large vehicle slow at best, and today as usual the throng of onlookers grew great enough to stop the death-cart altogether several times before the place of execution could be reached.

All three of the men who were riding to be hanged today had been convicted of the same act of piracy. The tallest of the condemned, the only one with anything exceptional in his nature or his appearance, was Alexander Ilyich Kulakov, red-haired and green-eyed, rawboned but broad-shouldered and powerful, his red beard straggling over his scarred cheeks and jaw. Kulakov was Russian, but at the moment nationality did not matter. His britannic Majesty’s justice was about to claim all three lives impartially–none of them had any influential friends in London–quite the opposite.

The morning’s procession carried its victims east, as I have said. A little over two miles east of Newgate Prison, passing just north of the great dome of St. Paul’s, through Cornhill and Whitechapel, past Tower Hill and close past the pale gloomy bulk of the squat Tower itself, to Wapping, a district largely composed of docks and taverns, nestled into a broad curve formed by the north bank of the Thames.

And with every rod of progress achieved by the doomed men and their escort, it seemed that the crowds increased. Last night and this morning word had spread, as it always did, of a scheduled hanging. Hundreds went to London’s various scaffolds every year, but despite the relatively commonplace nature of the event the route of the procession was thickly lined with spectators. As often as not, when the high cart stalled in traffic, folk leaned from windows or trees to offer the condemned jugs or bottles or broken cups of liquor.

Kulakov’s usual craving for strong drink seemed to have deserted him. He stared past the reaching arms and what they offered, and ignored the excited faces; but his two fellow prisoners did their best, even with their arms bound, to take advantage of the gift. The executioners, with a practical eye to making their own job easier, assisted the pair to drink, now and again fortifying themselves from the same jug or bottle.

One of the Russian captain’s former shipmates was well-nigh insensible with drink before the ride was over.

It was the other of the two English prisoners who, in that age when death was so often a social function, had a small handful of relatives present; these–weeping, expostulating, or stony-faced according to their several temperaments–tagged after the cart, and were jostled to the rear by the sheriff’s men.

The authorities had long practice with such processions from Newgate; and this enabled them to time the arrival of the cart at Execution Dock to coincide almost precisely with the hour of low water in the tidal Thames, this being the only time when the gallows was readily accessible.

For hundreds of years, pirates and mutineers had been executed on this spot, while for occasional variety a captain or mate would be dispatched for murderous brutality directed at his own crew. On this morning, several of the fruits of last week’s executions were still to be seen, each hanging in chains on its own post. Gulls and weather had already reduced the dead faces to eyeless, discolored leather and protruding bone, raking the passing ships with empty stares. Their continued presence was intended to impress the thousands of seamen on those ships as examples of the Admiralty’s long arm and exact justice.

The posts displaying these veteran corpses had been erected along the riverbank at various distances from the now ominously empty gallows. The latter was no more than two posts and a crossbeam, the horizontal member being not much more than ten feet above the strip of muddy ground and gravel exposed now at low tide.

Somewhat closer to the gallows itself than last week’s bodies, another set of three stakes, also ominously empty, waited for today’s victims.

Crowding nearby land and water were spectators even more numerous than those along the route. Folk of high station and low were out this morning, their numbers not much diminished by the weather, which so far had not improved. Every comfortable vantage point, and some perches fit only for the stoic, even the acrobatic, had been occupied. The windows and terraces of taverns and other riverside buildings, as well as docks and jetties, were thick with onlookers. Scores of small boats passed to and fro, or had cast anchor in the river. The current was very slow just now, with the tide about to turn. A barge moored no more than forty yards offshore afforded rows of seats for those willing and able to pay. At a somewhat greater distance over the broad face of the Thames, the crews and passengers of a couple of anchored ships presented on decks and rigging rows of pale faces. Well beyond these larger craft, the shadowy shapes of docks and buildings on the south shore loomed out of cold mist and drizzle.

One of the watchers, ensconced in a high-priced seat in the window of a tavern built upon a nearby promontory, was a dark-haired, smooth-skinned woman of somewhat exotic dress and remarkable appearance. Despite the sunless pallor of her skin, her countenance was undoubtedly Asiatic. Today she was keeping to a position where she herself remained inconspicuous, her pallid face shaded from even this clouded daylight. She was sharing a table–though she was not eating or drinking–with a well-dressed, well-fed, stoutish man of middle age, named Ambrose Altamont, a commoner very recently come into startling wealth. The weathered condition of Altamont’s face suggested that he was no stranger to the sea and tropic suns.

The table was bare before the woman–she had assured her new patron that she was not hungry–but the man had dishes and bottles aplenty in front of him. He was dining early today, by way of celebration, on lamprey pie–then considered a rare treat–and sampling good wine.

As nearly as I can discover, Altamont at this point did not, strictly speaking, know that the woman with him was a vampire. That fact and all its implications still lay over his horizon. He certainly understood that she was strange–for several nights now he had reveled in excitement over her exotic antics in his bed. Whatever the limits of her strangeness, whatever disadvantages were yet to be discovered, here was an attractive female who gave delight and satisfaction, beyond anything that he had ever previously encountered in almost fifty years of a thoroughly unsheltered life. Altamont might well have betrayed a business partner for her favors alone–even had there been no jewels.

The creaking high wheels of the tall cart fell silent as the vehicle eased to a halt on Execution Dock. While the massed guards cleared a space of spectators, the prisoners–their bodies stiff with confinement, two of them reeling with drink, all three chain-laden–were helped down. The severely drunken man had to be lifted bodily. Then, one at a time, the sober Kulakov first, the three men were led–or carried–down through mud and gravel to the rude platform, which consisted of only a few boards laid in mud beneath the gallows.

Waiting for them at that threshold of eternity was the chaplain, Mr. Ford, Ordinary of Newgate, ready to lead repentant sinners in prayer or persuade them that they should seek divine forgiveness. No one today had thought to provide a Russian Orthodox clergyman; but if any had been there the Russian doubtless would only have snarled at him, as he did at Mr. Ford.

Under the circumstances whatever prayers were possible for Kulakov, the first victim, were soon said. Then a ready noose was placed around his neck and he was blindfolded.

Meanwhile, at the tavern table, the pale and sheltered but vivacious lady had allowed herself to be distracted from the show by a sudden impulse to admire yet again a gift she had very recently received. This was a wonderful bracelet, fine gold and silver filigree sparkling with red rubies and clear diamonds. This masterpiece of the jeweler’s art came into view upon her white and slender left wrist when she deliberately drew back her full sleeve to reveal it.

“It fits you loosely,” her companion commented, his voice rich with wine and satisfaction.

“I’ll not lose it. Where are the other things?” she inquired softly. “Your brother has them, perhaps?” Her voice was small but determined, her English sounding with a strong accent, hard to define, but certainly as Eastern as her face.

Altamont winked at her, and smiled. “They’re where they’ll be safe for the time being–and you may lay to that.” Turning away again, he squinted, in the practiced manner of a ship’s captain, through his sailor’s brass-tubed glass at the proceedings on shore.

Confident as Altamont was that no one could overhear their talk, he lowered his voice when he added: “My own suspicion–I’ve no proof of it, mind–is that they were meant as a gift for the Empress Catherine of Muscovy, from one of those nabobs in the East. Or they might have belonged to the Russian church, some of their clergy smuggling them abroad to keep them out of Her Imperial Majesty’s hands. I hear Catherine’s developed a taste for churchly property, as did our own dear Henry long ago.” He shot his companion a sharp glance. “The Russian might have given you a better answer than I can give, as to who the first owner of your bangle was. Not that it much matters now.”

The dark-haired woman did not seem to care. Indeed her fascination with the beauty of the ornament was as apparent as her lack of interest in its origins. “Then the other things must be just as rich as this?”

The man almost sneered, in his pride and his amusement. “Richer, by God! Half a dozen pieces in all, rings and necklaces, in the same style, but even more extravagant–a king’s ransom. I am surprised you had no chance to see them on the voyage. You must have shared the Russian’s cabin, sailing back to London.”

The woman let her long sleeve drop, concealing jewels and precious metal. “Cap-tain Kulakov kept all well hidden.”

“No doubt. I think he meant to keep such great treasure all to himself, and maybe to some of his men who knew of it. but to cheat his English partner–”^* Altamont smiled and shook his head. “Well, greed, like pride, goeth before a fall. And now the Russian hath lost all; his treasure, his woman, life itself. Almost I could feel sorry for him–why are they taking so long about his stepping off?” He squinted through his glass again.

A prosperous man, Mr. Altamont, even before his recent dramatic accession of new wealth. He felt himself capable of handling even greater prosperity without undue difficulty. At the moment his countenance was alternating between frowns at the delay and a faint expression of abstract pleasure as he shifted from wine to hot buttered rum, while watching from his comfortable chair.

The pallid woman remained patiently seated with him. Though the air on this June morning had turned quite mild, she was glad to shelter here indoors; in her case it was in fact not chill nor damp, but the mild English sun that threatened.

On shore the experienced Thomas Turlis, and his assistant who was hardly less qualified, were proceeding about their business with deliberate speed. The junior member of the official team had already climbed to straddle the crossbeam, where he sat waiting until Turlis had guided his first victim halfway up the ladder, Kulakov’s feet on the rungs awkward with the weight of chains and terror. Then, receiving from his senior’s hand the loose end of the short rope already snug around the victim’s neck, the assistant quickly and efficiently secured it tightly to the heavy crossbeam.

The red-haired man cried out, loudly and articulately, in the last moments while he waited for the noose to choke off his breath.

“Al-ta-mont!” There followed a string of violent un-English words, sounds carrying well across the water, between the two points on the curving shore.

“I understand very little Russian, really,” the man at the table remarked comfortably. “Which no doubt is just as well.”

“I un-der-stand a little, as with Ain-glish,” the watching woman remarked abstractedly. “I spoke to him last night,” she added after a pause. “He think he have give the jewels to you only for safe-keeping, not?”

“You saw him last night?” briefly her companion turned a puzzled but fascinated frown in her direction. “Really, I think that you did not, for you were pretty steadily with me. As I have good cause to remember, having got but little sleep.” Lecherously Altamont displayed bad teeth. “but you know, I would wager my new fortune that it would not be beyond you to gain entry to a condemned cell–not when the guards are men.”

“I spoke to him,” the woman repeated. Not with an air of insistence, but as if she had not heard her companion’s denial. “but he would not believe that I was real. I think thees Russian must be very–what is word?–su-per-sti-tious.” Pulling her dreamy gaze back from the shore, she fastened it upon the man beside her. “Will you believe me, Al-tamont, when I try to tell you what I am?”

He made a small noise compounded of amusement and satisfaction. “I think I understand well enough what you are. So, you visited the condemned cell, did you, and had a chat? And what do you want me to think that you told dear Alexei? That we have both betrayed him? That the jewels are all mine now, while he is come to dine today on hearty-choke and caper sauce?”

The woman very slightly shook her head. “He did not need me to tell him that you keep the jewels.” Perhaps she intended to offer some explanation about her activities last night, or drop more teasing hints; but at the moment her full attention, like that of all other watchers, had become focused on the shore.

For the space of a held breath the raucous cries of even the least reverent onlookers were silent. Turlis, the older and paunchier of the hangman pair, with his feet planted solidly in mud–the planks had been disarranged in Kulakov’s last awkward stumbling–took hold of the ladder and, with a strong twisting wrench, deprived the bound man of all physical support. Except for that now afforded him by taut hemp, the smoothly clasping noose.

The drop was a short one, no more than three feet at the most, in this case not nearly enough to break the neck-bones, to tear and quickly crush out life and consciousness from the vulnerable soft tissue of the spine and brain stem. There was only the steady, brutal pressure of the rope to squeeze the windpipe, veins and arteries. Kulakov’s powerful frame convulsed. His bound arms strained, his legs and feet moved in a spasmodic aerial ballet.

Hearty-choke and caper sauce.

The fact that Kulakov had been first to be hanged meant that comparatively few among the audience were paying his prolonged death struggle as much attention as it must otherwise have received; rather the fascinated scrutiny of the mob now rested in turn upon each of his colleagues.

Altamont commented knowingly to his companion that the knot of the rope had very likely slipped from the favored location behind the Russian’s ear to behind his neck–but how could Altamont have known that, at the distance, unless he had made some private arrangement to have the knot deliberately adjusted in that wise? Trying to get the better of Altamont, as the man himself would have assured you, was likely to result in truly frightful punishment.

As for Kulakov, he had been denied his broken neck. So that he hung for a quarter of an hour, intermittently twitching and tensing in agony, all breathing not quite cut off.

“Are they not going to finish him?” Altamont’s comment, coming after five minutes or so, was dryly lacking in surprise. “It would seem not.”

It was common in such cases for one or both hangmen, when not entirely lacking in pity, to seize their client by the legs, and drag down with their full weight upon the poor wretch’s body to assist his soul on its way out of it. but at the moment the executioners were busy. If any friends or relatives of the condemned were in attendance, that office might fall to them. but in Kulakov’s case no one had come forward with any such merciful intention.

One after the other, the two remaining pirates followed their captain to the scaffold. The executioners gave no thought to taking down the body of the first man to be hanged, until the third was dangling, and they had paused to fortify themselves with rum. The two Englishmen went quickly, so there was no need for relatives to intervene.

When, in the chief executioner’s professional judgment, the third man had been well and truly hanged, he gave curt directions to his assistant. between them the two men loosened the knot holding the first body to the crossbar–there would be no wasteful cutting of the rope–and lowered their grim burden to the muddy shore. Already the feet of the hangmen splashed in water; at this hour the lower Thames was entering that part of its unending tidal cycle in which the rising weight of ocean a few miles distant forced the river swiftly back toward its source, as if it would convey the brackish tide up into the middle of the great island.

Now Kulakov’s body, hands still chained behind its back, had been dragged some twenty-five or thirty yards from the gallows, to its next temporary resting place. There with some difficulty it was being chained upright, feet at ground level, to one of the three tall, empty stakes that had been driven deep into the muddy sands. by tradition, the freshly hanged at Execution Dock remained so mounted until their already lifeless lungs had been drowned thrice by the high tides.

One after the other, the Russian’s now-unbreathing comrades joined him, were fastened to the trees which stood one on either side of his, forming a ghastly Golgotha. Surely, in some of the onlookers’ minds, the tableau evoked thoughts of a certain antique and much more famous triple execution. but no one commented aloud upon the fact.

By the time the dead body of the third pirate was thus displayed, and the day’s task of the hangmen essentially concluded, many of those watching had gone on about their business.

But perhaps they had missed something of importance. Did a murmur of morbid excitement pass through the remaining crowd when the central one of the newly chained corpses was seen to move? Could it be that the captain and ringleader of this pirate band was still not dead after having been hanged for a quarter of an hour?

Such an event would not have been without precedent.

We will assume that Altamont, in his dry way, even commented to his companion upon the most famous such case, which some of those watching Kulakov might have seen with their own eyes–that of William Duell, executed at Tyburn a quarter of a century earlier, in 1740. Duell, though only sixteen years of age when hanged, had been widely noted for his sadism. Convicted of rape as well as murder, his body was turned over to medical anatomists... but when finally placed on the dissecting table it displayed certain faint signs of life. The surgeons, ready to try a different experiment than that originally scheduled, applied their skills at healing and soon had the patient sitting up, drawing deep breaths and drinking warm wine.

Duell had cheated the hangman after all. Returned to Newgate, he was eventually ordered to be transported to America.

Hangings here at Execution Dock, with tide-drowning added as a flourish under Admiralty auspices, were somewhat more thorough. No one put up on one of these stakes for show had ever tasted wine again. Certainly the sharp-eyed Altamont did not find the signs of life so stubbornly displayed by today’s first hanged man at all perturbing; rather amusing.

Altamont, alternately smirking and frowning over his latest glass of hot buttered rum, made a few remarks on the case of young Duell to his fair companion, who took a somewhat different view of such phenomena.

The woman said in her abstracted way: “I think we will not have to worry about Kulakov–he will die today. I spent but little time with him last night.”

“Oh, he’ll die today, and no mistake.” The man stared at her for the space of several rummy breaths before adding: “Up to your mystification, are you, Doll? I’ve noticed you have a taste for riddles. but do go on with it–I like it well.”

Altamont and the very un-English woman he called Doll–he had tried her real name once and found it unpronounceable–remained in their snug tavern window for an hour longer, until he had made sure with his own eyes that the swiftly running tide had raised the surface of the Thames well above that pale dot of a distant, red-bearded face. Then, humming a sea-song to himself, and more than content with the day’s events so far, the prosperous observer called for his waiting carriage, offered his arm to his woman, and leisurely took his way to the Angel Inn on the south bank, where snug warm rooms awaited them.

Early next morning Turlis and his helper returned to the scene to check on their most recent handiwork. June at that latitude brought full sunlight well before many folk of any class or inclination were up and about. both men expressed mild surprise on observing that the central stake of the three was now unoccupied, the chains in which they had hanged the Russian’s body for display now lying in the mud below, still looped and locked together but quite empty. Surely mere tide and current could not have done this–yesterday these experts had secured their trophy well. but there were obvious explanations. Either relatives had shown up belatedly to spirit his corpse away–or someone, even in this enlightened seventh decade of the eighteenth century, had coveted morsels of hanged man’s flesh as an aid to practicing the black arts of magic.

The hangmen, discussing these possibilities, were momentarily distracted by the sound of shrill feminine screaming. The sound was repeated several times, carrying readily over the water, through the bright incongruous early morning sun, all the way from the south shore. Only momentarily distracted; at the river’s edge in Wapping, such racket was common enough. Actually, what Turlis and his comrade heard were the screams of horror uttered by some innocent female servant who had just opened the door of a certain room in the dockside Angel Inn.

More than a hundred years would pass before any rational investigator connected that hanged man’s disappearance during the night with the shocking sight which met the maid’s eyes a few hours later. Not that the maid was startled by the walking undead form of Alexander Ilyich Kulakov–she was perhaps an hour too late for that. No, she had unsuspectingly come upon a corpse much more severely mangled.

Shortly after the midnight immediately following the execution, Altamont had been awakened by something in his room. It was a supreme despair, more than terror, that choked off his first scream in his throat when he beheld what had roused him and now stood beside his bed. It was the figure of Kulakov, still wearing the prison clothes in which he had been hanged. The Russian’s red beard was dripping water, his dead face a ghastly livid hue, his strangled throat, though no longer required to breathe, made croaking noises. but his limbs were free of chains, and his white hands were half-raised and twitching, groping toward the bed. The pirate’s eyes, the only feature appearing to be fully alive in that corpse-countenance, were fixed on Altamont.

Doll in turn was awakened by Altamont’s hoarse abandoned cry. On seeing Kulakov, she registered mild surprise–so, she had been wrong about Kulakov’s dying a true death yesterday! It was obvious to her that the Russian, stimulated by Doll’s repeated attentions on the voyage and in his Newgate cell, had, after all, become a vampire instead.

The woman immediately slid her compact, dark-nippled, quite un-English body naked from the bed. She smiled, and before her bedmate’s uncomprehending eyes melted into mist-form and disappeared–only pausing long enough to pick up her jeweled bracelet from the bedside table, and slip it on her wrist. The bangle went with her when she vanished–we who are wont to travel in that fashion commonly carry with us a few small items, most commonly our clothing, when we go changing forms.

Kulakov paid little attention to either the woman’s presence or her departure. The red rage filling his whole mind concentrated his attention elsewhere. In the next moment, the hands of the undead man had fastened their icy, awkward grip on Altamont. Then the vampire– new to the powers he had been given, almost as bewildered as his victim by his own seemingly miraculous transformation, and still unsure of how to handle it–plucked the treacherous, nightshirted Englishman like a louse out of his bedclothes, and cast him aside with stunning force. In the next moment Kulakov, moving in a kind of somnambulistic fury, groaning and grunting foul Russian expletives, began ransacking the room in search of his stolen treasure. Drawers, bags, and boxes were hurled about and emptied, furniture shifted in a grip of giant’s strength. All in vain.

A moment later the searcher grunted in befuddled triumph, on discovering some small, hard objects sewn into a quilt or featherbed. Carrying his find to the moonlit window, smashing the dim smoky glass in a reflexive move to gain more light, (not that his newly empowered eyes really needed any more; but Kulakov did not yet understand this fact) he ripped the cloth to shreds. Inside, to his great disappointment, the searcher discovered only sand and gravel, what was to him mere ordinary dirt. In anger he hurled the torn cloth from him, letting its worthless contents scatter into the Thames below.

It flashed across Kulakov’s mind that Altamont, rather than risk carrying the treasure about with him in London, had very likely given it to his brother for safekeeping.

And he turned to complete his vengeance upon Altamont.

The doomed Englishman had turned back to the bed and now had both hands under his pillow–in a moment they were out again, not holding gems and precious metal, but newly armed with a loaded pistol and a dagger. A tough, resourceful man, old Ambrose Altamont; but both weapons very quickly proved completely useless.

There was really not much more noise–the pistol was never fired– and those among the other breathing dwellers at the Angel Inn who were awakened by muffled screams and thumps only grumbled and went back to sleep. Soon enough–well before Kulakov really thought of trying to force him to tell where the jewels were hidden–Altamont had ceased to breathe.

Kulakov, having thus achieved a kind of victory, was suddenly overwhelmingly weary. Once more he returned to his search for the jewels that he still thought might possibly be here somewhere... struck by what seemed to him a good idea, he went to search in the connecting room.

Only a minute or two after the hanged pirate had stumbled out the door, the woman called Doll, a much more experienced vampire, reappeared in the room of carnage. Doll was as naked as when she left–more so, for she no longer wore her bracelet–and entered as she had left, in mist-form through the window. Around her in the predawn light, as she resumed a solid human shape, the other denizens of the Angel Inn still slept.

Picking her way fastidiously among great spatterings and gouts of gore, she stopped for an opportunistic snack, bending to bestow a sort of prolonged kiss upon the now-faceless body on the floor. There was, she thought, no use letting so much of the good fresh red stuff go to waste.

Only when she straightened up, neatly licking her lips clean, did she happen to glance out the window, and noticed to her horror that the cloth bag which had contained her earth, her only earth, lay torn open and emptied, caught on a spiky paling a few feet outside the window, just above the energetic river.

Kulakov was no longer in the room to hear her, but she screamed at him in her own language that he had slain her, scattering her home-earth thus.

Perhaps it will be helpful to some readers if I choose this point for brief digression: To each vampire, certain earth is magic. The soil of his or her homeland is as essential as air to breathing human lungs. For a day, for several days in the case of the toughened elders of the race, the nosferatu can survive without the native earth. After that, a twitching, unslakeable restlessness begins to dominate, and a great weariness soon overtakes the victim, culminating in true death. It is not an easy dying; the sharp stake through the heart, or even the scorching sun, are comparatively merciful.

Kulakov in his confused state, still having no success in his monomaniacal quest to repossess his treasure, heard the woman’s despairing cries and came back from the adjoining room.

Doll had put on her clothes again. Gibbering and pleading in her terror, she tried to bargain with him. She spoke now in her native language, which Kulakov had learned to understand: She told the Russian that she knew with certainty where the stolen ornaments were hidden, and that she would give them all to him in exchange for only a few pounds of her native earth.

Somewhere among the hundreds of ships in the great port, which had brought in by accident soil, plants, vermin from the farthest reaches of the globe–somewhere among all those far-traveled hulls, surely, surely there must be one whose cargo or bilge or windswept planking contained a few pounds, a few handfuls even, of that stuff more precious now to her than any gems or lustrous metal.

The Russian, his understanding still clouded by strangulation and rebirth, heard her out. Then he had a question of his own. He whispered it in fluent English: “Where are the jewels? They are not here.”

Doll switched back to her imperfect English. “Are you not listen to me? I tell you where the treasure is, I swear, when you have help me find the soil I need. The jewels are not here. but they are all safe, in place you know, where you can get them!”

“I know.” The pirate looked down at the red ruin on the floor. “He gave them to his brother, who has them at his country estate, somewhere out of town. His brother who helped him to betray me.”

In near despair the woman clutched his arm, her long nails digging in, a grip that might well have crushed the bones of any breathing man. Once more she spoke in her own language. “Will you not listen to me, Kulakov? I need my earth! by all the gods of my homeland–by whatever gods you pray to in your Muscovy–I swear that if you help me find the earth that I must have, the treasure shall all be yours!”

The Russian mumbled something; perhaps he meant it for agreement. but he was almost stupefied. His own need for rest had suddenly grown insupportable. Overwhelmed like an infant with the necessity for sleep, he abandoned his solid form and drifted away, sliding out again in shifting mist-form through the window.

The woman, unable to obtain his help, began her own search, in desperation and in deadly growing daylight. but alas for poor Doll’s hopes of immortality! Upon the whole long winding Thames on that June day there floated not a single vessel containing any of the special soil her life required.

But Russian ships, carelessly bearing with them some of the soil of Muscovy, though rare in this port were still discoverable. Kulakov by some instinct managed to locate the hidden, earthy niche he needed, in one of their dark holds.

New vampires, like new babies, will often require long periods of sleep. Three weeks later when he awakened, out of a long vampirish nightmare of being hanged, he was back in St. Petersburg, the capital of his native land.

__________________

* The details of the efforts of the pirate partners to cheat each other have never become perfectly clear, nor are they essential to our story. A perusal of Admiralty records of the time indicates that alliances between pirates and politicians were by no means as uncommon as all right-minded people would like to think.–D.