The Holmes-Dracula File

Chapter Nineteen

In stories, any number of imbeciles may be encountered, ready to deliberately insult strangers who are aiming deadly weapons at them. In real life, there are only a few folk so suicidally inclined.

"So," I said mildly, when the two men and the lovely young woman had gone out. "You are Sherlock Holmes." I was of course trying to give the impression of some sort of recognition—better belated than never—before a second wooden bullet should leap superbly aimed from my captor's gun, this one to splinter its way right through my vitals. His first shot, I observed, had incidentally punctured my fine trunk, as well as spraying it delicately with its owner's gore. "You must tell me," I went on, "how you managed to learn my name."

"Tut. I see by your earthen baggage that you are a foreigner, and brought your means of sustenance to England with you. The clothing and coins in it tell me what part of the world you are from. I have heard from witnesses of your accomplishments here, and have seen more evidence of them with my own eyes. Anyone who knows the slightest bit about vampires, Count, must know you by name and reputation; I might possibly have been wrong about your name, but now that I can look you in the eye, I have no doubt."

"I am flattered. But very few breathing folk know anything of vampires. And of those few, most have the truth of the matter quite thoroughly confused with their damned superstitions. They waste good powder on silver bullets. They assault me with crucifixes, as though I were a devil and not as much a creature of the Earth, a child of God, as they are."

"I shall not make that error."

"I believe you. Well, what now?" Looking about the queerly furnished room, I made a careful, empty-handed gesture. "This does not look like my idea of Scotland Yard."

"No more am I of the official police. Nevertheless you will be well advised to answer my questions. What of Frau Grafenstein?"

"What of her?"

My foe took a half-step toward me, righteous anger rising in his voice. "Do you still think you can play games with me? I tell you I know very much—that you killed her, and that you drank her blood." He paused; when he went on, his voice was no longer impetuous, but inexorable. "I know, also, that no prison built can hold you for trial or execution. Therefore I stand here as your sole judge and jury—it is fortunate that there is probably no other man in England so well qualified to do so."

I took in breath to make a sigh. "Very well—no more games." As I spoke I tested the fingers of my wounded arm, and was gratified to find them movable. Expected pain came with the effort, but not the wetness of fresh bleeding. As a rule we heal with great rapidity even when hurt by wood, if the damage be not immediately fatal and the weapon not held in the wound. "I killed the woman because she had attempted to kill me. Also, I was in need."

"Of—?"

"Of nourishment, of course, as well as of revenge. Is there not some old British saying, about killing two birds with one stone? I really hope that she was not a friend of yours."

"Scarcely that." He paused to study me in silence, his brows knitted with thought. There was something terribly vital he wanted to say to me—perhaps to ask—but he had not yet decided how.

I gave him half a minute, then interrupted his pregnant silence. "And how is Sally Craddock? I sent her to your police to keep her safe."

A shadow crossed Holmes' face. "I regret very much, Count, that the girl is dead."

"Ah. I should have brought her to you, instead of to the police, for safekeeping."

Holmes looked at me strangely. "The thing that drove her running, screaming, to where her enemies could reach her—was the sight of my face, Count. Or should I say, our face?"

"I do not understand." But then I did, even as I spoke, and suddenly much was clear to me. For example: Watson, rushing to my aid in that strange room filled with smoke and noise. And again: Matthews, in the cellar, sneering Mr. Great Detective.

"Ah, yes," I answered. "As you doubtless understand, I have not been permitted the luxury of mirrors for some centuries. But the resemblance is actually that close?" My foe was nodding. "So it must be. And that means that there is some… ah."

"Family relationship—unquestionably." We had come to the nub of what was bothering Holmes. "What remains to be determined is its exact degree."

The aim of his revolver had never wavered in the slightest, and he had already proven his marksmanship and iron nerve; one false twitch on my part, I knew, and the great true death would greet me in that room. I may have already mentioned somewhere in these pages that I am—though not all vampires are, by any means—immune to fear, having exhausted at a tender age my whole life's allotment of that arguably useful lading. Yet honor and love of life alike forbade me to perish without a struggle.

"Mr. Holmes, my first visit to England took place but six years ago. The relationship you propose—well, doubtless it exists, since you are so certain of it. But it cannot be very close."

"The date of your first visit to England is quite irrelevant." Holmes paused again, then spoke distinctly. "My parents traveled on the Continent, in the year preceding my birth. To my certain knowledge, my mother was long unfaithful to my father; and it is equally certain that one of her paramours was of your race."

"My race, sir, is the human race."

"I think you know what I mean, Count." Holmes considered for a moment. "I have—or had; I do not know if he is still alive—a twin brother, vampire from his beginnings. You will pardon me for saying I felt an inexpressible relief on finding your trunk and thus demonstrating to my own satisfaction that you, the killer of the woman on the docks, could not be him. Since my childhood I have loathed and despised all that he stood for. All the things of the vampire world, that haunted my own early years like some—some nightmare made real. All that you are and stand for, indeed."

"Indeed."

"Indeed." And with that the vanishingly faint humor of these unplanned repetitions occurred, I think, to both of us. Not that either of us went so far as to smile, but the air had been cleared, and now something seemed to lighten in it.

"Do you mind if I sit down?" I asked. "Please do. But keep your hands in sight." I did, perching on my trunk. "I think that I begin to understand," I said. As a general rule, the vampire race (I still dislike that term, but there does not seem to be a better) gains members only by adoption, through initiation, rather like a hard-core political party or a religious order. A few of us, as in my own rare case, become what we are by making, as breathing human beings, a transcendent refusal to die, a truly heroic act of will. And there is one other road to the world of the nosferatu, which I had better digress for a moment to explain. It had been known to happen that a normally breathing woman becomes pregnant (in the traditional breathing way) while concurrently carrying on an affair with a male vampire. To such a woman, twins may be born, either fraternal or apparently identical. One of the twins in these cases is firmly committed to breathing. The other will draw air to cry with when he—or she—is spanked, but is in essence nosferatu from the womb.

But how, I hear a reader asking, how can hereditary characteristics such as facial appearance be passed on through love-making in the vampire style? I answer that, scientists are lately of the opinion that the whole hereditary blueprint is contained in each and every living cell of the body; that living body cells are contained in the blood; and that for a vampire's lover to drink from a vampire's veins is as traditional a part of their intercourse as is the reverse.

"Yes, Mr. Holmes, I see," I said to him. "And the year of your parents' travel on the Continent was—?"

"It was during the summer of 1853." I cast my memory back, or tried to. After more than four centuries of life, sometimes only the very earliest and very latest events are easy to disentangle. "That was only a few months before the outbreak of the Crimean War, was it not? Of course. In my homeland, also, that was a troublous time. And where precisely did your parents travel?"

"I should prefer that you first tell me where you were that summer."

I took thought. Was he likely to accept my unsupported word? It would have been possible, perhaps, for a breathing man of genius and determination to have established something of my biography through historical research, provided he knew where to look; and so I might be caught out in a lie. (Had I known Holmes then, I would of course have replaced that "might" in my thoughts with something considerably stronger.) In any case, the situation seemed to demand a response on a higher level than routine falsehood. True, I had begun by lying to this man, in implying that I bore him no ill-will for trapping me and shooting me, but now that denial was becoming true. In fact I had already grown intensely interested in the relationship between us, and wanted to learn the truth of it, however dangerous the truth might be. If I was not the vampire lover of Holmes' mother, then surely someone closely related to me was—how else could the uncanny resemblance between us be explained?

I drew in breath for speech, and told the truth. "I went no farther west than Budapest that year. And I do not remember meeting a Mrs. Holmes at all."

A strange constellation of emotions struggled in his face for dominance. "You would remember?" The words were half a plea and half a fierce command.

She would have been a remarkable woman, I felt sure. "I am quite positive I would."

Now at last I could detect a hint of relaxation in Holmes' posture. "That year," he said, "my mother went no farther east than Switzerland." His hand holding the gun had actually begun to tremble, not with tension but with its release.

I allowed myself another smile. "Then, my dear sir, much as I would like to be able to urge some close family connection upon you now, it would appear I cannot do so." Actually, I was not at all eager to have Holmes think me a near relative. Most murders, as we know, are committed within the circle of friends and especially of family, and the man holding the gun was obviously not pleased by the thought that he and I were bound by ties of blood.

"As to our remarkable resemblance," I went on, "I can only surmise that it is the result of some distant relationship—how shall I put it?—breeding true?" And even in that moment, by the Beard of Allah even as I spoke, it came to me! My brother Radu, the one they called the Handsome in his breathing days—he had in fact spent a summer in Switzerland about the middle of the 19th century! I tried to think… yes, that had been in 1853. But I saw no reason to announce my recollection just at present. It meant I was Holmes' uncle, or half-uncle. Perhaps no language has a precise word for the relationship.

If his eyes had probed sharply at me before, they now pressed like twin stakes fine-pointed for bilateral impalement. "Some distant relationship, you think."

"I regret I cannot lay claim to more than that. If I remember correctly, a branch of the Draculas were drawn into the Wars of the Roses, and I am not the first of my line to set foot in England."

"Drawn in?"

"Yes. They would have come from France, I believe, in 1460, with one of the Yorkist lords—perhaps Warwick. I was myself still breathing, then. Whether any historical record still survives, I do not know. It is, as I say, a disappointment that we are not more closely tied."

"A disappointment?" He laughed, and I knew that he believed me now—because, above all else, he wanted to believe. "You will pardon my expression of relief, Count, on learning that you are not only not my twin, but cannot possibly be the man responsible for his existence."

I nodded, looking gravely sympathetic.

Holmes pressed on, pouring out words that he had probably spoken to no other living being, and would probably never speak again. "I have not seen my twin since we were children. I intend never again to speak his name, and it would not pain me to learn that he is dead—certainly and finally dead. It is because of him that my father went early to his grave—because of him and because of my mother, who went to her grave even sooner—went to it, but not to stay. There followed years of hell, ending only when my father and my older brother, with their own hands… do you understand me? Hell ended for us only when her death had become final and absolute. Well, I hate her no longer." Holmes spoke these last words as if surprised by them himself. He paused, he shook his head, and I saw that in a moment he had forced from his mind the horrors—as he saw them—of his early life. It is, although I did not say so to him, a family trait that one is able to control one's own thoughts so ruthlessly and so well.

"But all of this," Holmes went on urgently, "even this, is at the moment of very little importance. Count Dracula, your life and mine are small things compared to what is now at stake."

I looked at him closely. But no, he was still in too solemn a mood to perpetrate a pun consciously. "I do not understand," I said. "I refer to the fate of London itself. In a moment I shall explain." His weapon's aim was perfectly steady again. "If, Count Dracula—if, I say—I were to permit you to walk from this room a free man, what would your next move be?"

"I have some business in London still unfinished. When that is done I shall be peaceably on my way."

"And the nature of this business?"

"Personal." I smiled yet again, liking the way this man—my nephew, or whatever he might be—met my eye. The more we talked, the more I knew him as a true Dracula. "But then, I suppose it is public, too. Your great city will be a better place when it is done."

"Jem Matthews was of course a part of the same business. As was the lady on the dock."

"Two parts now concluded. But there are at least two more to be finished before honor will allow me to return to private life and cease to trouble your police. And now, my dear Mr. Holmes, I think that I must bid you adieu."

"Ah?"

"Your friend Watson has gone for the redoubtable Lestrade, or Gregson, who are strangers to me, but whose profession I can readily enough guess. A van-load of police are surely on their way here by now. I will allow another minute or two in which to finish this very interesting talk; but then I mean to take my trunk, which you have so kindly found for me, and go on my way. Are you prepared to try to shoot me as I do?"