Dracula Unbound (11 page)

He started to scratch a figure with sharp teeth on the wall as he spoke.

“Talk sense, man,” said the ginger man sternly.

“There soon will come a scientist who will say even stranger things about space and time. We can't comprehend infinity, yet it's in our heads.”

“Together with the blood?” He laughed impatiently, turning to the door to be released.

As he rapped on the panel, the madman said, “Yes, yes, with the blood, with a whole stream of blood. You'll see. It's in your eyes, kind sir, she said. A stream of blood stretching beyond the grave, beyond the gravy.”

He made a jump for the distant spider as the door slammed, leaving him alone.

The ginger man walked with the doctor in the bloodstained coat. The doctor accompanied him gravely to the door of the asylum, where a carriage waited. As the ginger man passed over a guinea, he said, with an attempt at casual small talk, “So I suppose there's no cure for dementia, is that so?”

The doctor pulled a serious face, tilted his head to one side, gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.

“I fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.”

“You wretches live in the dark,” Joe Bodenland said. “Don't you hate your own sickness?”

He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he fingertipped the keyboard in the train's chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.

“If you've told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.”

Bodenland watched the scattering figures on a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.

As the time train slowed, the gray light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.

“Save me—I'm photophobic. We're all photophobic. Oh, please … it would be the end—”

“Wouldn't that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.”

Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift's body.

The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.

Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.

“What …” Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.

They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.

The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist, warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.

As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.

A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet—a dragonfly with a five-foot wing-span came dashing at him, its body armored in iridescent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn't Louisiana.

Gathering his wits, he turned back into the cab. The train gave a lurch sideways.

The LCD coordinates had ceased to spin. Bodenland stared at them incredulously, and then checked other readings. They had materialized some 270 million years before his present, in the Carboniferous age.

The cab rocked under his feet and tilted a few more degrees to one side. Black water lapped over the lip of the door up to his feet. Staring out, he saw that the weight of the train was bearing it rapidly down into the swamp.

“You,” he said, shaking the supine driver under his cover. “I'm going to pitch you out into that swamp unless you tell me fast how we get out of here.”

“It's the secret override. I forgot to tell you about it—I'll help you all I can, since you were merciful to me—”

“Okay, you remember now. What do we do?”

The dark water came washing in as the driver said, “The override is designed to stop unauthorized persons from meddling with the time controls. Only the space controls responded to your instructions, the others went into reverse.”

While he was speaking, the train tilted again and Clift's body slid toward the door.

“What do we do, apart from drown?”

“The train is programmed for its next stop and I can't change that. Best thing is to complete that journey, after which the program's finished and the override cuts out. So you just switch on, canceling the previous coordinates you punched in.”

The water was pouring in now, splashing the men. A bejeweled fly swung in and orbited Bodenland's head.

“Where's this preprogrammed journey taking us?”

With an extra surge of water, a warty shape rose from the swamp, steadying itself with a clumsy foot at the doorway. A flat amphibian head looked in at them. Two toad eyes stared, as if without sight. A wide mouth cracked open. A goiter in the yellow throat throbbed. The head darted forward as Bodenland instinctively jumped back, clinging to a support.

The lipless frog-mouth fastened on Clift's body. With a leisurely movement, the amphibian withdrew, bearing its meal with it down into the waters of the swamp. It disappeared from view and the black surface closed over it.

Bodenland slammed the sliding door shut and staggered to the keyboard. He punched on the Start pressurepads and heard the roar of generators, which died as the engine seemed to lift.

The outer world with its majestic colonnades of trees blurred, whited out, faded to gray and down the color spectrum, until the zero-light of time quanta came in. The driver sat up in the dirty water swilling about him and peered haggard-faced from his tarpaulin.

Drained by the excitement of the last few hours, appalled by the loss of his friend, Bodenland watched the numerals juggling with themselves in the oily wells of the display panel. He came to with a start, realizing he might fall asleep.

Making an effort, he got down a length of thin cable and secured the driver with it, before locking the door to the corridor.

He stood over his captive, who began to plead for mercy.

“You don't have a great store of courage.”

“I don't need courage. You need the courage. I know you have ten thousand adversaries against you.”

Bodenland looked down, contemplating kicking the creature. On hands and knees, he looked up pitiably before seizing Bodenland's leg and kissing it.

“Where are we programmed for?” Bodenland asked, pushing the wretch away.

“We have to visit Transylvania. But the program is set only as far as London, in the year 1896, where we let off a powerful female agent.”

“Oh yes? And what's she up to?”

The driver paused miserably before yielding up a further scrap of information.

“She has business at the home of a man living near London, a man by the name of Bram Stoker.”

7

She went over to look at the little glass panel of the air-conditioning unit. It was functioning perfectly. Nevertheless, the motel suite felt arid to her, lifeless, airless, after her flight through the sky.

Mina Legrand's rooms were on the second floor. She opened a window and let in a breeze sanitized by the nearby desert. Enterprise sprawled out there, the park and sign of the Moonlite Motel, and beyond them the highway, on which were strung one-story buildings, a store or two, and a used-car lot, with a Mexican food joint marking the edge of town. Pickups drove by, their occupants preparing to squeeze what they could from the evening. Already dusk was settling in.

Turning from the window, she shucked off her green coveralls and her underwear and stepped into the shower.

Despite the pleasure of the hot water coursing over her body, gloom settled on her. She hated to be alone, and she hated solitude even more of late. And perhaps Joe had been absent more of late. Now she would be seeing less of Larry, too. And there were the deaths in the back of her mind, never to disappear. She was at that age when wretchedness seeps very easily through the cracks in existence. A friend had suggested she should consult a psychoanalyst. That was not what she wanted. What she wanted was more from Joe, to whom she felt she had given so much.

She discovered she was singing in the shower.

Well, what did I do wrong,

To make you stay away so long?

The song had selected itself. To hell with it. She cut it off. Joe had let her down. What she really needed was a passionate affair. Fairly passionate. Men were so tiresome in so many ways. In her experience, they all complained. Except Joe. And that showed his lack of communication …

With similar nonproductive thoughts, she climbed from the shower and stood under the infrared lamp.

Later, in a toweling robe, she mixed herself a margarita from the mini-bar, sat down, and began to write a letter to Joe on the Moonlite Motel notepaper.
Joe you Bastard
—she began. She sat there, thinking back down the years.

Finishing the drink, she got a second and began to call around.

She phoned home, got her own voice on the answering machine, slammed off. Called Bodenland Enterprises, spoke to Waldgrave. No one had heard from Joe. Rang Larry's number. No answer. In boredom, she called her sister Carrie in Paris, France.

“We're in bed, for God's sake. What do you want?” came Carrie's shrill voice, a voice remembered from childhood.

Mina explained.

“Joe always was crazy,” Carrie said. “Junk him like I told you, Minnie. Take my advice. He's worth his weight in alimony. This is one more suicidal episode you can do without.”

Hearing from her sister the very words she had just been formulating herself, Mina fell into a rage.

“I guess I know Joe light-years better than you, Carrie, and suicidal he is not. Brave, yes; suicidal, no. He just believes he leads an enchanted life and nothing can harm him.”

“Try divorce and see what that does.”

“He was unwanted and rejected as a small kid. He needs me and I'm not prepared to do the dirty on him now. His whole career is dedicated to the pursuit of power and adventure and notoriety—well, it's an antidote to the early misery he went through. I understand that.”

The distant voice said, “Sounds like you have been talking to his shrink.”

Mina looked up, momentarily distracted by something fluttering at the window. It was late for a bird. The dark was closing swiftly in.

“His new shrink is real good. Joe is basically a depressive, like many famous men in history, Goethe, Luther, Tolstoy, Winston Churchill—I forget who else. He has enormous vitality, and he fends off a basic melancholia with constant activity. I have to live with it, he classifies as a depressive.”

“Sounds like you should chuck Joe and marry the shrink. A real smart talker.”

Mina thought of Carrie's empty-headed woman-chasing husband, Adolphe. She decided to make no comment on that score.

“One thing Joe has which I have, and I like. A little fantasy world of mixed omnipotence and powerlessness which is very hard to crack, even for a smart shrink. I have the same component, god help me.”

“For Pete's sake, Mina, Adolphe says all American woman are the same. They believe—”

“Oh god, sorry, Carrie, I've got a bat in my room. I can't take bats.”

She put the phone down and stood up, suddenly aware of how dark it was in the room. The Moonlite sign flashed outside in puce neon. And the bat hovered inside the window.

Something unnatural in its movements transfixed her. She stood there unmoving as the pallid outline of a man formed in the dusky air. The bat was gone and, in its place, a suave-looking man with black hair brushed back from his forehead, standing immaculate in evening dress.

Fear brushed her, to be followed by a kind of puzzlement.
Did I live this moment before? Didn't I see it in a movie? A dream?
…

She inhaled deeply, irrationally feeling a wave of kinship with this man, although he breathed no word.

Unconsciously, she had allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her nudity. The stranger's eyes were fixed upon her—not upon her body, her breasts, the dark bush of hair on her sexual regions, but on her throat.

Could there really be some new thrill, something unheard of and incredible, such as Joe seeks? If so … if so, lead me to it
.

This was a different hedonism from the aerial plunge from the womb of the speeding plane.

“Hi,” she said.

He smiled, revealing good strong white teeth with emphatic canines.

“Like a drink?” she asked. “I was just getting stewed all on my ownsome.”

“Thanks, no,” he said, advancing. “Not alcohol. You have something more precious than alcohol.”

“I always knew it,” Mina said.

Lack of motion. Stillness. Silence. “More goddammed trees!” Bodenland exclaimed.

At least there was no swamp this time.

He stepped over the driver, tied and cowering under his tarpaulin, and slid open the door. After a moment, he jumped down on solid earth. Somewhere a bird sang and fell silent.

These were not the trees of the Carboniferous. They were small, hazel and birch and elder, graceful, widely spaced, with the occasional oak and sycamore towering above them. Light filtered through to him almost horizontally, despite heavy green foliage on every side. He guessed it was late summer. Eighteen ninety-six, near London, England, according to the driver and the coordinates. What was going on in England, 1896? Then he thought,
Oh yes, Queen Victoria …