Dracula Unbound (16 page)

As he thought of it, of that shadowy thing he was wise to dread, a wave of desire came over him.

He fought it back.
The pestilence that walketh in darkness …
Was that how the rest of the psalm went?

To calm himself, he measured his strides about the bedroom, trying again to think of the problem scientifically.

Why else were vampires so feared?

Because they were parasitical. Parasites were always feared.

If they long preceded humans on the scale of existence, then they had once preyed on other living things.

What had they been—he caught himself avoiding the word—what had vampires
been
before they became parasitical? Before that dreadful need for blood arose?

Many arthropod bloodsuckers existed—bedbugs, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, all parasitical on man. As the fossil record proved, those creatures were about in the busy world long before mankind. Even before birds and mammals.

All those little plagues to human life were originally innocent suckers of fruit juice and plant juices. But the taste of blood proved addictive and they had become enslaved by parasitism.

Blood was a dangerous beverage. An addiction like any other drug.

And vampire bats …

So what had vampires been, many millions of years ago, before they became enslaved?

It was a short distance from gnawing on a wound to drinking its substance … from swooping down through the air to being called to swoop … from inciting the dread to inciting the lust …

Almost in a fever, he thought he had glimpsed what turned an aerial predator into the pestilence that walketh in darkness. Sick with the sound and smell of the gas jet, Bodenland went to the window and flung back the curtains, letting moonlight enter the foggy room. Brushing away the strings of white flowers, he threw open the window and took some lungfuls of air.

The moon still floated upside down in the pool.

Of Stoker there was no sign.

The woman stood there on the terrace, tall against the figure of a putti. She looked up at him, eyes agleam with a cold green fire.

His heart turned over. But his intellect remained cool.

Distantly, the clock in the asylum tower chimed one in the morning.

She lifted her arms and flew up to him.

She was in the bedroom, among the domestic things with her dead eyes, walking, gliding rather. Close to him—and he staring with his hair standing on end.

“This is no dream, Joe,” she said. Her voice was deep and masculine.

She brought a chill to the room. In her whiteness, with something sparkling like frost in her hair, and the wan white robe, all shadowy yet bright—why, he thought, it's more like a fever than a person, frightening, yes, yet no more dangerous than a ghost … Yet he was in a prickle of lust to be touched by her, to enjoy an intimacy no one knew this side of the grave.

His intellect had no part in this encounter.

Her name was Bella, the name spoken like a bell.

“What do you want of me?”

“I know what you want of me, Joe.” Still the voice was thick, as if there was blood just below the throat. And her lips were red.

She began to talk, and he to listen, entranced.

Her people were ancient and had survived much. When oak trees die, they still stand against the storm. Her exact words never came back to him after; he only recalled—trying to recall more—that she gave an impression of the Un-Dead as being nothing outside nature, as being of nature. Of humans as being the exiled things, cut off from the ancient world, unable to throw themselves into the streams of continuity pouring from the distant past into distant futures. She spoke, and it was in images.

For these reasons humanity was doomed. Men had to be slain for the survival of the ancient planet. Yet she, Bella, had it in her power to save him, Joe. To more than save him: to crown him with eternal life, the great stream of life from which his humanity exiled him. She spoke, and he received a picture of glaciers from which pure rivers flowed, down to teeming future oceans, unpolluted by man.

“What do I have to do?” His whisper was like the rustle of leaves.

Bella turned the full beam of her regard upon him. The eyes were red like a dog's or yellow like a cat's or green like a polar bear's—after, he could not remember. They pierced into him, confident, without conscience or consciousness.

“All Fleet Ones need to attend a great conference which our Lord has called. We are summoned, every one. We must go to the region you call Hudson Bay. There we will finally decide mankind's fate.”

“You cannot exist without us.”

“As we existed once, so we shall again. You're—but a moment.”

Again a kind of telepathic picture of the highest mountains brimming over with glaciers, slow-growing glaciers crowned with snow. And by their striped flanks, thorn bushes growing, stiff against the wind.

Oh, it was beautiful. He longed for it. Ached.

“The great Lord Dracula will guide our decisions. All of us will have a voice. Possibly extermination, possibly total enslavement. All of you penned within——”

She named a place. Had she said “green land” or “Greenland”?

“Understand this, Joe. We are much stronger than you can imagine. As we possessed the past, so we are in possession of the far future.”

“The present? You're nothing, Bella.”

“We must have back the time train. You have to surrender it. That is what you have to do, and only that, in order that we become immortal lovers, borne on the storm of ages, like Paolo and Francesca.”

While she said these things and uttered these inhuman promises, she lightly roamed the room, as a tiger might pace.

He watched. She gave no reflection as she passed the mirror on the dressing table or the glazed map of the British Empire, or any of the pictures which lay behind glass.

He sat on the side of the bed, unable to control his trembling.

“What does this mean—you possess the future?”

“No more talk, Joe. Talk's the human skill. Forget the future when we can together savor the present.”

The dark voice ceased. She unfolded great wings and moved toward him.

Something in her movements woke in Bodenland the promptings of a forgotten dream. All that came back to him was a picture of the thing that had rushed at him down the corridor of the time train, covering infinite distance with infinite speed. He had time to appreciate the gloomy chamber in which, it seemed, every vertical was ashily outlined by the glare of the gas, caging him into this block of past existence, until the very scent of her, the frisson of her garments, drowned out all other impressions.

She stood by him, over him, as he remained sitting on the side of the bed, arms behind him to prop up his torso as he gazed up at her face. The red lips moved and she spoke again.

“I know of your strength. Eternal life is here if you wish it. Eternal life and eternal love.”

His mouth was almost too dry to speak. He could force no derision into his voice. “Forbidden love.”

“Forbidden by your kind, Joe, not mine.”

And with a great rustle of wings, she embraced him, pressing him into the folds of the eiderdown.

Even as his body's blood flowed thick and heavy with delight, he was also living out a vision. It was antique yet imperishable, like something engraved on stone. It flowed from Bella to him.

Bella's memory was of what would one day be called Hudson Bay and a chill part of Canada. Now the clouds rolled back like peeling skin and heat roared like breath. In the fairer climate of seventy million years past, what would be water and ice and drifting floes was all land, bush-speckled savannah or forest. The knee-deep grasses were rich to the teeth of great blundering herbivores—hadrosaurs that grazed by slow-winding rivers, brontosaurs that blundered into the marsh by the rivers.

These and other ornithischians were herded into pens and thorn-cages by the Fleet Ones, who arrived on wing and foot. They drove their captives, fat with blood and blubber, into the makeshift fields, from which they would be culled.

The savannah fills with their numbers. The beasts lumber and cry. The ground heaves.

The bed heaves. Bodenland cries aloud.

Larry was in an absolute rage. He shook with it. The mortician had said, “I don't think you should take your mother's death like that, sir. We must show respect for the dead,” and Larry had brushed the little man aside.

He ran out of the parlor to the sidewalk, cursing and gesticulating. Kylie followed reluctantly, her pretty face pale and drawn.

In the cheerful morning sunlight, the main street of Enterprise was choked with traffic, mainly rubberneckers come to see what was going on at Old John, lured by the news that mankind's history had been overturned. The cars moved so slowly that both drivers and passengers had plenty of time to watch this man performing on the sidewalk under the mortician's sign. Many called insults, thinking they knew a drunk when they saw one.

“Stop it, Larry, will you?” Kylie seized his arm. “Come on, I'll drive you back to the motel.”

“What have I done, Kylie? What have I done? I'm going to tie one on in the nearest bar, that's exactly what I'm going to do.”

“No, please … It would be better to pray. Prayer gives you more strength than whiskey.”

He appeared not to have heard her.

“That was my momma lying in there, all white and withered. Stuck in that freezer …” Tears rolled down his face. “Like some little pressed flower she was, her color all faded …”

“Larry, darling, I know, I know. It's terrible. Poor Mina. But getting drunk won't help it one bit …”

Cajoling, crying herself, Kylie managed to persuade her husband back to the convertible. Wiping her tears, she managed the slow drive to the Moonlite Motel. The management had been insensitive enough to offer them Mina's old room. No other was available, owing to the unexpected influx of sightseers. They had taken it. In the hastily cleared room, Kylie found in the waste can a crumpled sheet of notepaper. On it her late mother-in-law had begun a letter.
Joe you bastard
—

“What I fail to understand,” said Larry, heading straight for the mini-bar, “is what this ‘Premature Aging' bit means. I don't trust the Utah doctors—probably bribed by the motel. Hon, go down the corridor and get some ice, will you?”

She stood before him. “I love you, Larry, and I need your support. Don't you see I'm still trembling? But you are like a greedy child. Your parents neglected you, yes, I know, I've heard it a million times. So you keep on grabbing, grabbing, just like a baby. You grabbed. Okay, so you want to keep me, so you must stop being a baby and grabbing for these other things.”

“You ever hear of a baby drinking the old Wild Turkey, hon? I'm never going to get over the death of my mom, because I should have taken better care of her. She loved me. She loved me, Kylie. Something my father never did.”

“Larry!” She screamed his name. “Please forget about yourself. Worry about what happened to Mina. What the hell are we going to do? All human love has its failings, okay, but Joe does love you, best he knows how. But he's missing—”

“I'll go and get the ice myself, don't you worry.” He stood up. “You always take Joe's side. I'm used to that by now, and I'm going to get a drink while you yak, if you must.”

She went over to her suitcase, which lay on the bed. She had opened it without unpacking it. They had checked in only an hour before and gone straight from the motel to the funeral parlor.

“I'm yakking no more, husband of mine. I just can't get through to you. I've had enough. I'm off. You quit on me in Hawaii. Now I'm quitting on you in Enterprise, Utah.”

She snapped the suitcase shut. As she made for the door, Larry ran in front of her. Kylie swung the suitcase hard and hit him in the stomach.

Gasping, he made way for her.

When she had gone, Larry walked doubled up to the sofa, making what he could of the pain. After sufficient gasping, he picked up the quart bottle of Wild Turkey he had brought with him in his case. Lifting it high until it gleamed in the light from the window Kylie had opened, he saluted it.

“Only you and me now, old friend,” he said.

Later, he staggered out and got himself a hamburger from the Chock Full O'Nuts next to the Moonlite. Later still, he pulled down the blind at the window to keep out the glare of the sun. Later still, he placed the empty whiskey bottle on the windowsill and fell into a heavy slumber, snoring with practiced ease.

Evening set in. The neon sign blinked outside, registering the minutes. Cars came and went in the parking lot. Larry slept on, uneasy in dream.

It seemed his mother visited him, to stand before him bloodlessly, with red eyes. She cried to him for comfort. She bent over him, her movements gradual, so as not to startle.

Oh, she whispered, Larry was her dear son—so dear. Now she needed him more than ever.

The evening breeze blew the blind. It flapped inward, striking the empty whiskey bottle. It tapped intermittently. The bottle fell to the floor, clattering.

Larry woke in a fright. He sat up groaning, clutching his head, and looked round the darkened room. “Mother?”

He was alone.

The glorious summer's day bathed the facade of Bram Stoker's residence. A row of newly planted copper beeches shielding the house from the lane gleamed in the early morning sunshine as if they were copper indeed, newly polished by the housemaid.

The carriage, with its two chestnut horses, stood in the drive before the front door. Stoker emerged, resplendent in top hat, chatting happily. He was followed by Joe Bodenland, walking slowly and saying nothing. His face was lifeless and ashen. Stoker helped him into the carriage.

Mrs. Stoker was standing by the herbaceous border, talking to Spinks, the young gardener. She too was dressed in all her finery and, after a minute, came over to the carriage and was assisted aboard by James, the driver.