The Dracula Tape

MASSAGE AND ELECTRICITY

(Weir Mitchell system) with Swedish and German movements combined. As each LESSON of two hours' duration is given daily on a living subject, pupils can be perfected in a fortnight. No bruising; those who bruise have been improperly taught…

Mary Jane Heathcote, 28, was indicted for the willful murder of Florence Heathcote… her little girl… aged five years and six months…

At Clerkenwell, Henry Bazley, 29, bookbinder, was… charged with having taken away out of the possession and control of her mother a girl named Elizabeth Morey… aged 16 years 10 months. She was traced to Highgate, where she lodged in a room for which the prisoner was found to be paying 5 shillings a week, and where he visited her… Detective-sergeant Drew, who had executed the warrant for the prisoner's arrest, said that he found him at home hiding in a backyard. The prisoner was a married man with four children. When told the charge he said it was a lie. On the application of the prosecutor the prisoner was remanded…

… Do you doubt I can remember all these items as they were? Well, I found them memorable. Check your library's microfilm files of the Times if you doubt me.

(To the editor) Sir-Contrary to my inclination, it has fallen to my lot to refute the theory put forward by my friend Mr. Haliburton at the Oriental Congress that a race of dwarfs exists between the Atlas and the Sahara…

Jas. Ed. Budgett Meakin

Sir-The necessity for a ready communication between the front door and the upper floor of a house in case of fire or other urgent need… is so obvious as to require no comment… I have thought of the following simple contrivance: A loud-ringing bell is hung in the upper floor; the wire of this bell terminates at its lower end on a chain and hook in the basement of the house. At night the hook is attached to the crank of the ordinary housebell and is detached in the morning… by this means also the filthy and insanitary practice of having a manservant sleeping in the pantry, that fertile source of much immorality, both in and out of doors, may be avoided.

Yours, amp; C. H.

PICCADILLY (Overlooking Green Park)-self-contained FLAT-four rooms, bath room, lift, etc., to be LET, on LEASE, and Furniture sold. Apply Housekeeper, 98, Piccadilly, W.

… That was interesting. But I would rather buy than rent, wanting nothing to do with nosy landlords.

Sir-If one of the delegates who spoke so strongly in favor of the eight-hours movement was, on his return home, seized with a sudden and dangerous illness; and if, on sending for his doctor, he got an answer to say that the latter had just finished eight hours of work, and that for the next sixteen hours he was going to rest and enjoy himself, what would he think of the new arrangement?

Yours truly, J.R.T.

And back to the front page…

MOULE'S PATENT EARTH-CLOSET COMPANY (Limited)

Garrick-street Covent-garden, LONDON

MOULE'S COMPANY NOW MAKES:

CLOSETS-for the garden

CLOSETS-for shooting boxes

CLOSETS-for cottages

CLOSETS-for anywhere

CLOSETS-Complete are now made, fitted with "pull out" apparatus

CLOSETS-fitted with "pull up" apparatus

CLOSETS-fitted with self-acting apparatus

CLOSETS-made of galvanized, corrugated iron

CLOSETS-to take to pieces, for easy transport

CLOSETS-can be put together in two hours.

CLOSETS-to work satisfactorily

CLOSETS-only require to be supplied

CLOSETS-with fine and dry mold

CLOSETS-on this principle never fail

CLOSETS-if supplied with dry earth…

The litany went on, and I read it, eyes almost in hypnotic bondage. But my higher attention was still back with that manservant sleeping in the pantry. Why was his condition so "filthy and insanitary"? Had he his feet resting on the bacon, or was his foul breath contaminating bags of sugar? And where exactly in the "fertile source" did the noxious weeds of "immorality" sprout? Was I to read into the letter dark implications of the deadly sin of gluttony?

The London papers, that in my own homeland had seemed to promise marvels, seemed only to grow more bewildering the longer I dwelt amid the world which they described. It would take time, I comforted myself, and threw my paper into a dustbin nearby-the park was very neat. Getting to my feet, I strolled on to the zoo. The day was overcast, and, top-hatted like a proper gentleman, I found the sun scarcely bothersome at all.

It was a relief to reach the zoo and see more animals than people round me for a while. Great throngs of humanity, though I had sought them out and still found pleasure in them, still were wearying to one who like myself had been so long removed from crowds. A stranger in a strange land was I indeed, notwithstanding a reasonable facility in the English speech and an appearance acceptable in the metropolis.

Naturally enough I gravitated toward the cage of wolves, where three gray beauties suffered with innate dignity their ignominious confinement. Although I at first made no effort to converse, one wolf of them knew me; more accurately, he knew that I was not as common men, and that I was far closer kin to him than any two-legged creature he had ever seen before. He knew that I knew what it was to run on four gray paws, and leap to the kill, and drink the raw red blood from flesh my teeth had torn. He knew, and could not decently contain his knowledge. While the other two in the cage, who may have known something too but did not care, lay drowsing and wondering at him, he bounded like a madwolf against the bars, and let his feelings out in the only kind of voice he had.

An elderly keeper came from somewhere and regarded me with suspicion. There was no one else about at the time and I was obviously at the focal point of lupine uproar.

I was not in London to be mysterious, but to bind myself more closely to the great mass of humanity. "Keeper," I said, to have something to say, "these wolves seem upset at something."

"Maybe it's you," the man retorted, and his gloomily surly manner reminded me of a Turkish jailer I once had, and the resemblance made me smile even as it aroused my further sympathy for the confined wolf.

"Oh, no, they wouldn't like me," I answered vaguely, distracted by a communication from another source. Freedom, the wolf was saying, looking out. It was not a question but a complete declarative sentence.

I cannot give you that. I answered him. Take it for yourself and it is yours.

"Ow yes they would," the old man answered me, impertinent with the privilege of crabbed and independent age. "They always like a bone or two t' clean their teeth on about teatime, of which you 'as a bagful."

Freedom! came from the gray iron cage.

Take it. Transcend. Do you want it more than food, more than retaining your own wolf nature? Will you put by your very body and its known comforts to have this thing you say you want? Simply to be free of your cage?

And the early years of Turkish imprisonment were once more very clear to me. Radu was then a mere child, a small child, too easily frightened to offer any sport at all to our inventive jailers. But I was fourteen years old when they began on me…

The animal's brain was churning with unworded thoughts, but for the moment it quieted and lay down. The keeper looked at it in puzzlement, looked back to me, and then walked over to the cage and reached inside to stroke the ears of the panting beast. To startle the old man I did the same, and had my reward in his expression.

"Tyke care!" he said. "Berserker here is quick!"

"Never mind, I'm used to them." The wolf's eyes were not on me but fixed on distance now, as he thought of running in unbarred, unbounded space.

"Are you in the business yourself?" the keeper asked, his tone now friendlier. He took off his hat. Perhaps he hoped to buy another wolf or two from me.

"No, not exactly." And I tipped my own hat to him and to Berserker in farewell. "But I have made pets of several." And with that I turned and walked away. The wolf's wordless thought-voice was falling off in my mind to mere muted distant mumbling, but the infinitely more verbal noise of Lucy's thoughts was audible again and mounting higher. I did not wish to hear either of them.

Something was seriously wrong with Lucy, I could not help but know that much, but I closed off my mind against knowing more.

There was no possible way I could have guessed that after dark Berserker would break the railings of his cage, forcing iron bars loose from their fastenings, and come racing unerringly to find me in the night-at Hillingham.

I could not know what the night before me held. But still as I walked out of the park I was perturbed in spirit.

I said before that I would later speak of fear, and now the time has come. I will not say that I have experienced infinite fear, but I have known all fear that my mind and soul could ever bear, and more. The first time that my Turkish jailors stripped me naked in my cell and carried me, paralyzed with terror and dripping with my own excrement, out to the impalement stake, I had no doubt that I was going to die upon it. Some in my situation would have fainted, others would have gone mad. What I did… well, perhaps only a caged wolf could begin to understand.

Of course I did not die. If the guards had killed me they would have had no fun for the next day. I was not even really-or I should say "not permanently"-impaled. The end of the upright stake was blunt and drew no blood immediately when it was inserted into a natural orifice of the body; and by standing on tiptoe I could keep it from entering deeply enough to do serious damage. I could not stand on tiptoe indefinitely, but when my weight began to come down the men were quick to take me off the stake. They certainly did not want me to die on it then and there. Never before had they seen anyone who retained consciousness while being so deliciously, excruciatingly, helplessly frightened.

Next day they played a new game, showing me first what they claimed was a signed order for my execution. Again I believed them, for my susceptibility to terror gave me no choice. Perhaps I am not really exaggerating when I say that on each of these days I died of fright. The new game had to do with being burned alive, and I had blisters and scorched hair before they called a halt. And on a succeeding day there was a game involving voracious rats; and again, one with a Turkish woman whose husband, she said, had been tortured to death by Walachians; and after that… but I have no wish to disgust you with all details.

It was when the cycle came round to the stake again that I realized abruptly that I had nothing left to fear, that in fact I was afraid no longer. I had used up all the fear my soul could ever generate, were I to live to be a thousand. My life's ration of anxiety, dread, timorousness, and terror, all was consumed before I had a beard to shave. From those days to this, I have feared nothing. I am not brave and never was; that is a different matter entirely…

It seems to me the most striking proof that this estimate of my condition is correct that I simultaneously lost all desire to be revenged upon my jailors. A high official of the sultan himself, happening to pass through Egrigoz, observed with astonishment how imperturbably I bore some of the fruitless later attempts of my enemies to frighten me. They were in fact applying torture at the time, but, do you know, it is the moment-to-moment fear of pain that is the worst part of pain itself? This high official, as I say, applauded what he took to be my fortitude, and took an interest in my case. In time he became my friend, to such an extent that, had I wanted revenge upon my low-ranking tormentors, I could probably have had it. And it was my refusal of revenge, not out of any heroic Christian virtue but rather because of sheer fearless indifference, that so frightened them in turn. Man fears that which he cannot understand, and I had gone far beyond the comprehension of those simple but evil men…

So as I walked the London streets it was not with fear or hatred but in gloomy meditation that I thought back upon the Turks. Was I so sure that I wanted to rejoin the ranks of the mainstream of mankind? To shorten my life, possibly, in doing so? Not that I feared a shortened life, or aught else in the world or out of it.

Not even God, my friends, although I know him better than you do…

An hour or so before the wolf escaped at midnight I had been standing in a Soho tavern, acutely conscious of the fact that there was no image of myself in the cracked and cloudy mirror behind the bar and that the fleshly girl clinging to my arm would be indeed surprised were she ever to note that fact. I was acutely conscious also of the warm fluid pulsing so rapidly within her Vena jugularis, and of the impossible odors of alcoholically fermented grain rising from the glass that waited untasted before me on the arm-smoothed wood. Conscious with all my soul of the gulf between me and those round me, all of them unarguably human, misshapen in mind and body and spirit though they were.

It was in this state that I felt Lucy call to me with a new urgency, cry with a terrible fervor across the four or five miles of the city that separated us. In her fear and sickness she was appealing for my help, calling on me as her protector and her lord, and so it was I answered her. From the shadows of a Soho alley I took flight, and came down to rest on earth again in the dark, timbered lawn of Hillingham.

From there I sent my wordless summons, as before. This time, however, I soon learned that she could not or would not try to come out. Nor could I simply enter the house upon my own initiative. Whether the reason is to be found in physics or in psychology I am not sure, but the fact is that I may enter no dwelling place of breathing folk unless I have been at least once invited to do so by one who dwells within.

I knew by this time which window of the upper floor was that of Lucy's room, and I quickly took wing again and perched outside it, on the ledge. The blind was drawn and at first I could not see into the room, but Lucy's voice was plain. She was engaged in a shrill argument with another, older woman who could only be her mother. The argument ended abruptly when Lucy fell back exhausted upon her bed, thus coming partially into the narrow range of vision into the room I had obtained by pressing my bat head as close as possible against the glass at one side, where a chink was open twixt blind and casement. Round Lucy's neck, I saw, were garlic flowers garlanded, together with the long green leaves, and the whole room was fetid with the plant.

Almost simultaneous with this shocking discovery-which meant of course that someone was attempting antivampire measures-I heard Berserker's first low howl below me in the shrubbery, and looked down over one batwing in absolute consternation. It might take long minutes to quiet the wolf and send it peaceably back to the cage from which it had so recently, obviously, broken free, and Lucy's mental anguish was too urgent for me to spare the time for that. Feeling like a general beset in camp by a series of sudden surprise attacks, I crouched there on the windowsill and tried to marshal my thoughts calmly. Could there be some reason for the garlic, other than the one with which I was most familiar? There were undoubtedly some English customs of which I had not yet heard; but I had little hope that this was one of them.

The women inside had not yet heard the wolf, or else they thought its howls were those of some dog in the neighborhood, for the noise made no impression upon them. Contorting my small, furred body, I made a greater effort to peer in beside the blind and got a better look at Lucy in her nightgown. It was something of a shock to see how ill she looked. I also saw Lucy's mother in her robe, looking tired and drawn herself-recall that even at this time neither Lucy nor myself had yet any inkling of the very grave condition of Mrs. Westenra's heart-just as she tottered from the room and closed the door behind her. This was my chance; I sent another mental summons and simultaneously flapped my bat wings at the panes. Lucy turned her head a little on the pillow, but no more. Her eyes were closed.

Clinging carefully to stone in the autumnal night, I altered back to man-form right on the windowsill. I drew mass and weight unto myself-from nothing? Say from the great reservoir in which God kept such things before deciding to enact Creation, and to which some of his creatures are allowed a limited access still. How do I do it? Let me ask how you sort out the myriad atoms in your lungs each time you draw a breath to oxygenate your blood.

Now I tapped at the window with a long fingernail and spoke aloud. Lucy rose up in bed, with a startled look that soon changed to joy. She got up as quickly as she could, and came to the window, and was about to speak the words that would have let me pass in to her; but on the instant the door of her room opened once more and Mrs. Westenra's figure was plain in my field of vision-and mine, alas, in hers.

Lucy had already drawn the blind full back. When the unsuspecting old woman looked over her daughter's shoulder into the night it was my visage that she saw peering in at both of them.

I expected shock, but not what happened. Mrs. Westenra extended her arm for a second or two, pointing at me in silence, her face contorted with her fright; and then there came from her throat a gurgling noise and she fell as if an ax had struck her down.

"Mother!" Lucy cried out, and hurried to try to lift her aged parent from the floor; but in Lucy's weakened condition the shock and the exertion were too much for her, and she crumpled over also, in a faint.

Mrs. Westenra's heart and lungs had already ceased their labors and I was not sure that Lucy's would not shortly do the same, so feebly and irregularly were they now working. She had called to me for help and I was anxious-nay, almost desperate-to fly to her aid, but I could not. I had not yet been bidden directly to enter the house wherein she lay. I, who might pass like smoke through barriers impossible for breathing men to penetrate, was held back by a law as inexorable to me as gravity.

Another low wolf howl rising from the shrubbery at last jogged my slow brain back into action. I dropped lightly to the ground, which was some twelve feet below the windowsill, and called Berserker to me. For a moment I held the big gray wolf tightly, one hand gripping his muzzle, my eyes locked on his, trying to force into his willing brain knowledge of the service that I required of him. I wanted him to force his way into that room above, and lick at Lucy's face to rouse her; failing that, to drag her by her nightdress or her hair to the window where she might come within my reach.

Why did I not go instead, in my most suave and reassuring style to knock at the front door? All this was in the middle of the night, remember, and the house was isolated. Lucy had once mentioned to me in passing that no male servants slept in the house-the pantry at Hillingham was evidently a place of impeccable morality. Were the women within likely to open a door for me, under whatever pretext I came? I thought not. My instincts argued for direct action, and I have learned to trust my instincts in emergencies.

It took me two, three, tosses to cast the heavy wolf up to the windowsill above. Its surface, though broad enough for a lean and rather acrobatic gentleman to sit on at his ease, offered but scanty purchase for Berserker's paws. He whimpered at the treatment I accorded him but seemed to realize that in adopting me as master he had acquired an obligation to carry out my orders. In a moment he had swung his heavy forequarters round and smashed the glass panes of the window in.

I was leaping up to catch the windowsill with both my hands just as the wolf fell back. As we passed I saw the red cuts on his muzzle and the small gleam from a bit of broken glass that had stuck in his fur. I meant to tend his wounds, who had served me faithfully, but I would see to Lucy first. I will be human, I will be, I kept repeating to myself.

I crouched on the sill again, my face framed in the broken-edged aperture of glass. "Lucy!" I called in, quietly but fiercely, using mind as well as voice.

On a carpet littered with broken glass and garlic flowers Lucy stirred and sat up slowly, not seeming to realize that she was half entangled with her mother's corpse.

"What… who…?"

"Lucy, your Viking is here to aid you. Call me to come in. Call me to come to you."

Her eyes lifted slowly, puzzledly, to behold my face. Now belowstairs I could hear some of the housemaids stirring; no doubt they had been awakened by the crash of glass. Outside, the wolf howled once again, this time in pain. Lucy raised a hand to try to put back the blond hair from her face, but she was too weak and the gesture failed halfway through.

"Lucy, my name is Vlad. Bid me to come in, quick."

"Oh. Come, then, Vlad. I feel so sick, I am afraid that I am going to die." Then, when I had lifted her in my arms, she made a gesture toward the still form remaining on the floor. "Mother?"

"Your mother is not suffering," I said, and put down Lucy on the bed. Then, before I could do or say anything more, a multitudinous shuffle of feet in the carpeted hall outside the bedroom door announced the arrival of the housemaids in a frightened group.

"Miss Lucy? Are you all right?"

"Answer carefully!" I whispered, gripping Lucy's arms. My eyes burned into hers, my voice commanded, and she seemed to regain a little of her strength.

"I am all right," she called out weakly, "for the moment."

"Is your mother in there, Miss Lucy? May we come in?"

I nodded.

"Come!" she called out, and the handle of the door began to turn; before it had completed its motion I was under Lucy's bed, stretched out at full length and ready to melt to mist or shrink to bat-form in an instant.

Eight bare girlish feet paraded into the room and round the carpet near my head, accompanied by dancing nightgown hems, outcries, and lamentations. Mrs. Westenra's body was lifted to the bed, the broken window marveled at, and horror expressed at the continued howling of the wolf outside. Injured-and thinking himself betrayed, for he went home before I could get out to tend his wounds-he had better cause to howl than they did, and he made less noise.

And there were those garlic flowers on the bedroom floor, now crushed almost into my very nostrils. Vlad, I asked myself, reviewing the situation as I lay beneath the bed; what is the world, the great breathing human world which you expect to join, going to make of all this?

Lucy sat exhaustedly in a chair whilst the maids were laying out her mother's corpse. But despite her weakness and illness she retained presence of mind enough to realize that a man was in danger of being found concealed in her boudoir, a state of affairs less tolerable than death. And she retained the wit to do something about it. I saw her suddenly get up and leave the room, and heard her soft feet descend the stairs, whilst the maids remained gathered round the bed with the dead woman on it and the live vampire out of sight beneath. The maids did not note their young mistress's departure or her quiet return a minute later. During this minute I heard, faint but distinct, the sound of a brief trickle of liquid being poured somewhere downstairs.

Lucy was now standing upright, with an effort, just inside her bedroom door. "All of you," she commanded, having to raise her voice slightly to cut through the maids' continuing babble, "go down to the dining room and take each a glass of wine. Take only the sherry, mind. Then come back when I call."

There was no problem in obtaining prompt obedience to such an order. In a moment the whole moaning and cooing herd of them was gone, and Lucy had closed the door behind them and locked it. I wriggled out from concealment in a trice and found her once more on the point of swooning. She would have thrown herself upon the bed already but that her mother's clay lay there. I put her down there anyway, after moving the old lady next to the wall.

"Now the servants will leave us alone," Lucy said to me in a voice rapidly growing vague and distant. "For I have drugged the wine… oh, Vlad, are you my death? Your face is sometimes… if you are indeed death, then I must plead with you. Whoever you are… my mother's dead, but I'm too young. I'm to be married in September."

"Lie still now. I think that you are very ill." Giving Lucy a quick examination, I noted the bandaged incisions on the inside of each arm at the elbow. "Who is your doctor, and for what has he been treating you?"

"There are two: Dr. Van Helsing, of Amsterdam, and Dr. Seward."

I looked up sharply at that first name; I had heard it once before, from a vampire of my acquaintance. "And who is Dr. Seward?"

"He is about thirty, and very nice. In fact…" She paused. "He is superintendent of a lunatic asylum in Purfleet."

My mind raced, seeking understanding. But there is no understanding coincidence, or the imitation thereof by fate. "And their treatments? What are these little wounds? Surely they do not bleed you, in this day and age?"

"Ah, Vlad, I do not know. The doctors are kindly, and they mean well, I am sure. But they tell me nothing, and I am too ill to argue with them and insist on knowing." After a gasping pause, during which I tightened the bandage once more on her arm, she went on: "They bring me garlic flowers and bulbs. And three times now I have been drugged, and the doctor has performed some-some operation whose nature I do not fully understand."

"Three times. Damnable. Which doctor operates?"

"Dr. Van Helsing, I think. I feel so safe when he is with me. But still…" She had lost the strength for speech. I bent and laid my ear against her breast, and liked not the laborious pumping sounds of the machineries of her body. By modern standards I am certainly no qualified physician, but then neither would many of those be who earned their bread as such during the nineteenth century.

Her eyes were on mine, trusting, praying.

"Lucy. Be clear, lightbearing girl. Be clear now in your thoughts. There is a most momentous decision that we may have to make tonight." And I caressed the golden beauty of her hair. In four hundred years of war and peace I had seen death come to many, and I thought her unlikely to survive the night. Unless…

"Vlad, help me, save me. Arthur is not here, and I fear the others are killing me with what they do." A spasm of fear had temporarily renewed her energy. "Don't let me die." And Lucy was seized with sudden nausea, and retched feebly over the side of the bed. There was an acid smell but little vomitus. "Hold me, Vlad!"

Yet I did not pull her into an embrace, but straightened and stood upright beside the bed. Belowstairs, all sounds of the maids' movements had ceased, save for the stertorous breathing of their four pairs of lungs; for all intents and purposes, Lucy and I were in the house alone. There was a little time, at least, in which to plan and think. Perhaps no more than a little; she might well die, I thought, before a long discussion could be held.

"Lucy. Death will come soon or late to all of us. And it is not the worst thing in the world, though full well I know how frightening it can sometimes be."

"No, no!" Terror gave her a terrible, momentary energy, and her nails tried to bite at my arm. "Save me, Vlad! Do something. I see in your eyes that there is something you can do."

"Lucy, there is one way in which I can-not cancel your death, for I am not God-but put it off, for some indefinite time. But to take this road will mean a great change in your life. Greater than you can possibly imagine now."

"Only save me, Vlad, I beg of you. I do not want to die!" I cannot describe the emotion that was in her failing voice as she uttered these words.

I lifted her weightless-seeming body from the bed; in shifting her slightly in my arms, so that the whiteness of her throat where I had left my marks before was tautly exposed, I also turned my own body slightly. There was a mirror hung on the wall across the room, and inside its gilt frame Lucy's unsupported body hung, her nightdress gathered up at the knees and back by the pressure of invisible arms. Then I bent down my head…

When I had taken something of her blood it was time to give her to drink deeply of mine. I undid the clothing over my own heart and tore the flesh there with one of my own talonlike fingernails-no other cutting tool can do the job so well-and quickly pressed Lucy's mouth against my breast as if she were a suckling babe and I a crooning nurse.

As soon as we were done with exchanging a considerable quantity of blood I wiped her pretty lips and put her back into bed, having done all that I could do. At the moment she was still nearly comatose, but I knew now that she would not die before the night was out, at least not of unmatched blood put straight into her veins. I thought she was no longer likely to die at all, in the near future. It was still quite probable that she would soon be put into her grave, but as we know, that is not quite the same.

"Lucy," I said softly, and extended my hand toward her still figure on the bed. She took it and arose, although her eyes stayed shut until she came gracefully to her feet. Then they opened. Ah, changed… Van Helsing would be sure to see it, and what might he do then?

But I had come to London on my own affairs, and not to fight him for this woman. She meant very little to me, except that she had called on me for help, which I had now given as best I could.

"Lucy, you will not die tonight. You may feel ill. But if they come to you tomorrow, to drug you and transfuse you once again, I would advise you to refuse them."

"But they never ask." Change in the voice, too, already; it was at once a little livelier, and more remote.

"Insist that this Arthur of yours be called, if he will help you take a stand against them. Do you understand? They are putting the blood of other people into your veins. I suppose they do mean well, but what they were doing had brought you to the point of death."

"But, Vlad… I feel stronger now. I believe that you have saved me."

"And so I have, my dear, for the present. Snatched you from death, put back the Day of Judgment for you. Not many men can truthfully claim such power. It was what you wanted from me." I sighed. The warning I was about to attempt would not, in my opinion, do much good. New-made vampires must find their way at first by instinct, much as newborn children do.

I went on: "You may at some time soon fall into-another coma. If you allow them to give you another transfusion I would say this is quite likely. And if you fall into this coma you are going to wake from it in circumstances that will be at first quite hard to understand; but be of good cheer and understanding will come." The first emergence from one's grave is a unique experience indeed.

"I will be of good cheer, Vlad. Oh, Vlad, tell me again that I will not die."

"You will not die." It was a lie, such as one gives the wounded after battle sometimes. A lie, because I did not know what Van Helsing might decide to do with her now that she had changed; and all must die the true death sometime. Earlier, when the great decision had still been hers to make, I had been as truthful with her as I could be in the small time we had. Now there were only small but troublesome decisions left and I judged it better to be simply soothing.

"Now, my dear. Eventually the women you have so cleverly drugged below are going to awake, and also other people can be expected to enter this house when morning comes. There is much here that will require explaining." I sighed; there were my fresh fang marks on her throat, about which nothing could be done.

As I spoke I was stroking Lucy's bare arm, and her forehead, to strengthen her with suggestion for the tasks ahead. There was the broken window to be accounted for, and the wolf outside, whose howls the maids had heard and whose role in the night's events might, for all I knew, not yet be over. There was the mother, dead of heart failure as unexpected by Lucy as it was by me; and there were the maids, who would certainly tell any investigators of their drugged sleep, even if they should rouse from it before anyone else had entered the house.

Above all, there was the condition of the girl herself. Van Helsing could not now fail to detect her symptoms of incipient vampirism. Could he be moved to pity for her? I thought perhaps he might, if she could be made to appear a purely innocent victim of the evil count.

I had continued to stroke Lucy, and she had fallen by now into the beginnings of hypnotic trance. "Find us some paper and ink, little girl," I told her. "Before I leave you the two of us in collaboration are going to compose a short story. As wild, perhaps, as one of those of Mr. Poe."

It was about ten o'clock on the following morning when Drs. Seward and Van Helsing arrived, practically simultaneously and both in desperate haste, at Hillingham. The missent telegram I mentioned earlier had caused them to leave Lucy unguarded through the night. Both were distraught because of this. In Van Helsing's mind, of course, the peril from which she needed protection was vampires; Seward had not even this warped version of the truth, but he loved the girl, or thought he did, and knew she stood in danger; and, in his inexperience, he followed his former teacher blindly.

They found the house locked up and barred from the inside, and their increasingly urgent knockings went unanswered. At last they broke in through a kitchen window, to find in the dining room the four servant girls still lying unconscious on the floor. In Lucy's room, upstairs, they found the two women still on the bed, the younger still breathing but by now unconscious again.

Lucy had not even the chance to plead against a fourth transfusion, and that of course is what Van Helsing gave her. This time blood was drawn from the veins of the young American, Quincey Morris, who arrived innocently on the scene with a message of inquiry from Arthur Holmwood, and was thrown, so to speak, into the front lines at once.

"A brave man's blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble," Van Helsing is quoted by Seward as saying whilst they got out the knives once more. I suppose his prescription for Lucy might be taken as closely resembling mine, though unfortunately his method of operation differed. So, sad to say, did the result.

It was noted in passing by the busy doctors that the decanter of sherry on the sideboard in the dining room had a peculiar odor, had in fact been doped with laudanum from a bottle kept nearby as medicine for Mrs. Westenra. And, when Lucy was lifted from her bed to be treated to a hot restorative bath, there "dropped from her breast" a sheet or two of notepaper. Van Helsing's brief perusal of these papers brought to his face "a look of grim satisfaction, as of one who has had a doubt resolved."

These papers bore, of course, our literary effort of the night before. It was a first attempt at fiction by a beleaguered vampire writing in a foreign tongue and a half-tranced girl who had just been shocked by the sudden demise of a parent. Seward's first comment after reading our creation was: "In God's name, what does it all mean? Was she, or is she, mad; or what sort of horrible danger is it?"

One might suppose that in response to such straightforward and heartfelt appeal Professor Van Helsing would have shouted: "Is a vampire, young man! One hell of a hideous monster that drinks your blood!" But that would not, maybe, have been quite philosophical or metaphysical enough. As matters actually went, "Van Helsing put out his hand and took the paper, saying: 'Do not trouble about it now. Forget it for the present. You shall know and understand it all in good time; but it will be later.' "

When Lucy emerged from her coma she at first tried to tear up the story we had concocted, but then relented, evidently realizing that it was better than nothing to offer as some explanation for the weird events of the preceding night.

The story of course purported to be "an exact record" of those events, set down in her handwriting almost as they occurred. It related how Lucy had been awakened from peaceful sleep by "a rapping at the window," and shortly thereafter heard "a howl like a dog's, but more fierce and deeper." She had gone "to the window and looked out, but could see nothing, except a big bat, which had evidently been buffeting its wings against the window."

Unperturbed by this commonplace event of suburban London, Lucy in our fiction returned to her bed. Presently her mother looked in, spoke "even more sweetly and softly than her wont," and came to lie companionably at her daughter's side. But the "flapping and buffeting" returned to the window, quickly followed by "the low howl again out in the shrubbery, and shortly after there was a crash at the window and a lot of broken glass was hurled on the floor… In the aperture of the broken panes there was the head of a great, gaunt gray wolf. Mother cried out in a fright… clutched the wreath of flowers that Dr. Van Helsing insisted on my wearing 'round my neck, and tore it away from me." I thought it best my enemies continue to believe in the efficacy of garlic.

"There was a strange and horrible gurgling in her throat; then she fell over… a whole myriad of little specks seemed to come blowing in through the broken window, and wheeling and circling around like the pillars of dust that travelers describe when there is a simoom in the desert. I tried to stir, but there was some spell upon me…" Comparing the coy approach of the vampire to the simoom was, I confess, my own idea. Somehow at the time I thought that it created a vivid image.

Our story goes on to relate how Lucy recovered consciousness; how she called for the maids to come in and, after they had decently arranged her mother's corpse, sent them to take some sherry as a tranquilizer. When they failed to return betimes she pursued them to the dining room and found there on the floor "the sleeping servants, whom someone has drugged… The air seems full of specks, floating and circling in the draught from the window, and the lights burn blue and dim… I shall hide this paper in my breast, where they shall find it when they come to lay me out…"

The relation ends thus, save for a few stylized groans. I suppose I need make no apology for its inadequacies, since it served its intended purpose, viz., it was accepted by Van Helsing and the rest as a true account of the night's events, and got Lucy off the hook, as the slang expression has it, on any possible charges of collaboration.

But, by the beard of Allah, and all the relics of the Patriarchs! That such a farrago of falsehood could have passed successfully under the noses of even the most inept investigators is still a source of wonderment to me. Inspector Lestrade would not have wasted five minutes on it-I say nothing of Sherlock Holmes.

Consider the evidence of the drugged wine. Presumably, if the maids had not taken it Lucy would have escaped the full horrors of the night, as hinted at in the Dracula-Westenra manuscript. Some evil person, then, poured the laudanum into the decanter. It must have been the malign Count Dracula himself-wait, though, he could not have entered the house without an invitation, and had he been invited he would have had no need to employ a wolf as battering ram. And that the wolf had been so employed there is no doubt, for the poor beast was seen returning wearily to the zoo on the evening of the next day, with bits of window glass still in its bloodied fur.

Someone else, then, acting as Dracula's agent, drugged the wine. But, given the existence of such an agent inside the house, that agent's most valuable function would have been to grant direct entree to her master, not to toxicate the wine on the sheer hope that enough people might chance to drink it to clear the field and give the count a clear shot at his goal.

Or is it reasonable to suppose that the four serving women, when Lucy sent them for a soothing draught, decided instead to render themselves completely insensible, as a defense against the dangers of the night? With a wolf prowling at large and evidently able to force its way into the house at will, this explanation would not have seemed likely to Lestrade, or even Dr. Watson. Either of those two relatively astute gentlemen would have bluntly demanded to know just who did let Count Dracula in…

But let the story go. In passing, you think, I have let out the real truth, and it proves to be just what my enemies have claimed. I have now confessed that I deliberately made that girl into a vampire.

Is it not so? you ask. And I answer, jovially enough, in a phrase that men have used to excuse everything from genocide to sexual oddity: Yes, and what's wrong with that?

Will you tell me that the mere existence of a vampire creates a blot of unexampled evil upon the earth? You would be in danger of becoming insulting if you said that to Count Dracula. But never mind personal considerations for the moment. The fact is that you are arguing in a circle. It is evil to be a vampire because they sometimes make other vampires who are by definition evil.

Mere reproduction has not been thought a crime for human beings, at least not till very recently. Why may not I enjoy the rights of other men?

It is the forcing of death, or of a change in life, that's criminal, whether the force be applied by vampire fang, or wooden stake, or means more subtle used against a vulnerable mind or heart. And I say once more: my blood, and nothing else available in 1891, could save Lucy's life for her that night. Not that the saving was of much duration.

On September eighteenth and nineteenth Lucy languished, poisoned anew by Van Helsing's fourth transfusion; I sensed her pain, remotely, but I held aloof, having as I thought done all I could for her. On September twentieth she died, or so thought the grieving Arthur Holmwood, and Dr. Seward, who with Van Helsing were in attendance on her at the time. Though some miles away, I could feel, through our established mental contact, the moment when her breathing stopped, that once had blown so full and sweet across my cheek…

On that same day laborers came to Carfax, to remove some of my boxes, in accordance with my plan of gradual dispersal. The madman Renfield once more broke out through the much-battered window of his room, to maul the workmen for having, as he thought, robbed him of his "lord and master." The lord and master, standing amid some trees behind the high wall of his estate-I was not resting in a box, for I could not be quite sure which ones the workmen might decide to take, or cast a look into-heard the row and resolved to speed up the dispersal process and to sell Carfax quickly thereafter, or simply abandon it if need be. The neighborhood seemed after all a little lively for my taste, with the irrepressible Renfield right next door, and his keeper consulting with Van Helsing, who, as I knew, had hunted vampires.

September twenty-second was in truth a day of mourning among my narrow circle of British acquaintances. On that day Lucy and her mother were both interred in a small cemetery near Hampstead Heath. And Jonathan Harker's former employer, more recently his partner, Mr. Peter Hawkins, was also buried on that day, he having perished almost immediately-of natural causes, so far as I know-upon the Harkers' return from abroad as man and wife.

Mr. Hawkins' place of burial was also near London, and it chanced that an hour or so after attending his last ceremonies Mina and Jonathan were strolling hand in hand down Piccadilly. Mina, in her account of the day's events, wrote that she was "looking at a very beautiful girl, in a big cartwheel hat, sitting in a Victoria outside Giuliano's, when I felt Jonathan clutch my arm so tight that he hurt me, and he said under his breath: 'My God!' I am always anxious about Jonathan, for I fear some nervous fit may upset him again… he was very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror and half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man with a beaky nose and black mustache and pointed beard"-these of course were the effects of a regular diet-"who was also observing the pretty girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either of us"-ah, dearest Mina, Wilhelmina, how could I know that you were there?-"and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good face"-but one full of character, hey m'dear? "It was hard and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal's."

The better to-but never mind. "Jonathan kept staring at him, till I was afraid he would notice. I feared he might take it ill, he looked so fierce and nasty. I asked Jonathan why he was disturbed, and he answered, evidently thinking that I knew as much about it as he did: 'Do you see who it is?' "

" 'No, dear, I don't know him. Who is it?' "

" 'It is the man himself!' "

When the lady drove off Mina noted that "the dark man kept his eyes fixed on her… he followed in the same direction, and hailed a hansom. Jonathan kept looking after him, and said, as if to himself: 'I believe it is the count, but he has grown young. My God, if this be so!' "

Poor Harker teetered for an hour or so on the brink of a relapse into the brain fever that had prostrated him for weeks after leaving my domain; but he had pulled himself together by the time the couple got home by train to Exeter. There a telegram from Van Helsing awaited them, informing them for the first time of Lucy's rapid decline and supposed death. The professor, empowered by the grieving Arthur to go through all of Lucy's effects, had found Mina's last unopened missives to her and had thus learned Mina's name and address. The professor soon invited himself to come to visit the Harkers in Exeter, and talk of vampires; or talk around them, rather. It would be some time yet before he spoke the horrid word aloud.