[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
inflict on the same victim.
"Shut the door!" he cried out, and I turned my head with some surprise to
behold him sagging in despair against the wall, hands covering his face. "I
shall wait till morning!"
Obviously, he was after all in no state to be allowed to wander on the
mountainside at night. I was bitterly disappointed with some violence I threw
the last howling child out into the darkness, and slammed the great door
shut but I said nothing more to Harker then. In silence I walked with him back
to the library, where I bade him a very brief goodnight. I did not know until
I read his journal that later those three damnable women came to whisper
seductive invitations outside his door, taunt him with their lip-smackings and
their laughter, and even imitate my whispered voice in pretended dialogue with
them thus: "Back, back, to your own place! Your lime is not yet come. Wait!
Have patience! Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours!"
No, Jonathan Harker, if you can hear me, I suppose that I can hardly blame
you for what you later did to me. Nor did I feel much pity for Melisse, Wanda,
and fair Anna when Van Helsing the sadist eventually came calling&
But I must adhere to the order of my story. On my last night before leaving
Castle Dracula I supped full well, on bright beef blood not from mere
appetite, though I had that, but with a view to acquiring a more youthful
look. Of course I had not seen my own face in a mirror for some four hundred
years it may be evidence of some benign plan for the world, that neither do I
have a regular need to shave but from certain words dropped now and then by my
occasional companions, I had gathered that my recent appearance was that of an
old man, white of hair and mustache though quite hale, and on occasion
red-eyed like some animal caught in a beam of one of the new electric lights.
This aspect I could alter by regular heavy feeding, and meant to do so in case
Harker should after all have the hue and cry out for me by the time I reached
England.
I supped well, as I say, and expected to rest well too, trying out another of
my stout new traveling beds. There is not much can rouse a vampire in bright
day, when he has gone, fully sated, to his earth. One sure alarm clock of
course is the sharp point of the wooden stake entering his rib cage, with a
strong and determined arm hammering behind it. This I know, though of course
not yet by direct experience. What is it about wood that makes the stuff,
under the proper conditions, so utterly, no-nonsense lethal to my kind? That
it itself was once alive but is no more? Metal, that hacks up in such fine
style the flesh of breathing men and draws out the rich red streams of life
from them, is alien to us and cannot find its way to kill. It bounces off,
disperses through, and interpenetrates our peculiar flesh, but cannot transfer
fatal force to us. Silver bullets? Their efficacy is mere superstition as far
as vampires are concerned.
But metal hurt me in my box that day, a sharp-edged spade swung in the
desperate grip of Harker, who once more had dared the castle's slippery outer
wall to gain my rooms, who once more ransacked my chambers and my vaults in
hopes of finding there a key or other means of getting out in daylight on his
own. He found me in a box again, and, this time yielding to the impulse to do
murder, snatched up the nearby digging implement.
Imagine the deepest sleep that you have ever slept, the hardest to break free
from, and multiply its inertia by tenfold. In dreamless near-oblivion I lay
so, a leaden lethargy, a numbness, wound like chains on all my limbs. He might
Page 22
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
have found me, searched me, raped me, and I would neither have known nor cared
until sundown. But when he took up the spade, the psychic blow, the impulse of
wholehearted murder came singing through the vaulted air to rouse me, to begin
my rousing, well before the whistling blade itself struck home.
"Bloody bastard." His voice was only a faint wheezing moan but yet I heard it
clearly. "Monstrous bloody bloated leech."
My eyes were open, had been open all along, but only slowly, blurrily, did
the blindness of trance clear from them. I realized that the lid of my box had
been pulled open, for there was the groining of the stone above. There was
light, faint daylight whispering down through many a room and passageway. And
off in one corner of my vision, Harker's face, at first only a whitish oval
blur, and then as my sight cleared and my eyes began to focus, a mask of
madness, the face of breathing Man as he exists in all the vampire nightmares
that ever were, mask of the hunter, persecutor, stake pounder, who would
cleanse his world by making sacrificial goats of the undead.
Coming so very slowly and hopelessly up out of trance I would not be in time,
I knew, to act effectively in self-defense I realized for the first time and
with detachment that Harker had lost weight as my guest his arms were thinner
in their dirty sleeves that his hair hung down disheveled around an evilly
transformed face, that his shaving had been spotty at best during the weeks
since he had lost his mirror.
"Bloody bastard!" he grated out again, and in the midst of that last word his
voice broke on a sob. And with a little whining screech of indrawn breath he
raised the spade, held it high in both hands for an edge-down swing straight
at my face.
I am not boasting when I say I was not terrified. Later on I will discourse
of fear. I say now only that I watched, unhappily, as that heavy blow came
down. Impossible to do more than turn my head and try to glare at my attacker.
The shovel struck in the middle of my forehead, and I took the shock and pain
of it through my head, and tried to no avail to move my hands and feet, and
thought that in a second more the blow would come again.
And Harker? What saw he? "& a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed
to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London,
where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions,
satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of
semidemons to batten on the helpless& I seized a shovel& and lifting it high,
struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]