Séance for a Vampire Page 11

  To begin with, I had no idea of where the prince might presently be found, no reason to believe that he was even in England. As far as I was aware, Holmes had maintained no steady or regular contact with Dracula over the six years since our first encounter. But years ago my friend had had the foresight to inform me that a definite summoning procedure had been arranged, at the same time warning me that it was to be used only in case of emergency. The necessary information, Holmes had assured me, was filed, indexed by means of code words I was required to memorize, among his papers in our lodgings. Duplicate materials were stored in the vault of the Capital and Counties bank.

  As I began my search, I could not rid my mind of my worries regarding Mycroft. And in fact the man himself arrived, and was shown up to our rooms while my preparations were still under way.

  As Sherlock Holmes had once remarked upon a similar occasion, I could not have been more startled to see a planet departing from its orbit, so proverbial was the fixity of the man's daily routine. The morning of each business day saw Mycroft leave his rooms in Pall Mall for his (deceptively small and unassuming) office in Whitehall; the evening saw him walk back to his lodgings; and he was seen nowhere else, save in the Diogenes Club, which was just opposite his rooms.

  One glance at the materials I had begun to arrange upon the table—the old book, the mirror, the candle, and the tied-up lock of graying human hair—sufficed to reveal the truth of the matter to him at once.

  "So," he murmured abstractedly, rubbing his massive, clean-shaven chin with a broad, trembling hand, as he observed these preparations. "So, it has come to that again."

  Regarding my visitor, I beheld a man now in his middle fifties, his hair now substantially more gray than dark, a change from the last time I had seen him, a year or two earlier.

  Mycroft was, as I have already noted, a much larger and stouter man than Sherlock. His body was absolutely corpulent, but his face, though large, had preserved something of the sharpness of expression which was so remarkable in that of his brother. His eyes, of a peculiarly light, watery gray, seemed always to retain that faraway, introspective look which I had only observed in Sherlock's when he was exerting his full powers.

  So far I had of course held to the pledge requested of me by Sherlock regarding his brother and the mention of vampires; but now it was Mycroft himself who had raised the dreaded subject, and I could only suppose that a total refusal on my part to discuss it might strike him even more terribly than the truth.

  Before 1897, I had considered vampires (on those rare occasions when the word, the idea, had crossed my mind at all) as nothing more than tropical bats—any further interpretation of the word was utter rubbish, the material of lurid fiction and superstition. The events of that year of Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee had disabused me of my basic misconceptions on the subject—but in truth I now did not know what to think.

  However, I judged it necessary to give Mycroft the facts, putting as optimistic an interpretation on them as possible. He appeared much perturbed, though not at all surprised. To my relief, the news at least did not cause him to faint, or to collapse. In a voice that quavered only slightly he assured me that, while garlic might sometimes be an effective repellent, the efficacy of crucifixes and holy water must be regarded, for this purpose, as mere superstition.

  "I am aware of that, Mycroft," I assured him patiently.

  "Are you indeed?" He dabbed at his broad brow with a handkerchief. "It somewhat relieves my mind to hear it."

  Impulsively my visitor went on to discuss briefly the history of the Holmes family as it had been affected by vampires. The main problem (it pains me even now to set the matter down; therefore I pass over it quickly) had been the vampirism, developed after her sons were born, of Mycroft's and Sherlock's mother.

  This conversation on Mycroft's part was conducted, understandably, with intense emotion; and he then begged me to allow him to take himself away, before there was the least prospect of Prince Dracula actually appearing in our rooms. I had the impression that he would not have been surprised had his distant cousin arrived upon the scene in a dazzling flash and a cloud of smoke, like some stage representation of Mephistopheles.

  When Mycroft had gone, I returned without hesitation to the task I found myself required to do. Finding the information and the necessary materials concealed among my friend's private archives had been actually the work of only a few minutes, since I had fortunately remembered the essential code word by which the items were indexed. Putting the information and materials, once obtained, to their proper use proved considerably more difficult.

  Until now Holmes had given me not the slightest hint of what his special procedure for communicating with Prince Dracula might be, and I in my reluctance to think about the matter at all had not endeavored to find out. I was somewhat relieved on discovering that the details, which were distasteful, were not as bad as I had feared: The summoning involved the reading aloud of a few Latin verses from an old book, and the simultaneous burning of a lock of what appeared to be human hair—the latter provided with the book—before a mirror. This performance, strongly suggestive (to say the least) of magic, even of witchcraft, was most uncongenial to my nature. Yet I dared not even hesitate, as the matter had already been unavoidably delayed. Holmes's old chemical workbench provided me with the space and the small flame that I required.

  Bolting our sitting-room door on the inside, I began. So repugnant did I find this business to common sense, so mocked by the warm summer sunshine at the window and the mundane noises of the street outside, that three or four times during the course of the brief ritual I found myself on the verge of damning it all as foolishness, consigning to perdition the book, the hair, and the small mirror which also played a part, and seeking some other means to locate the man I wanted. Only the certainty that I was following Holmes's instructions, which had been given in deadly earnest, and the knowledge that I had not the faintest notion of any alternate method of procedure, caused me to persevere.

  My task was soon completed, but no immediate result was visible. I confess that while pondering the situation, wondering if I had erred somewhere, I fell asleep in my chair from sheer exhaustion. When I awakened, at seven upon a clouded summer evening, my neck and limbs were stiff, and for a moment or two I could not remember why I found myself once more in this familiar room rather than at home with my wife in our recently acquired lodgings in Queen Anne Street.

  Memory soon returned. I glanced again at the clock, which ticked remorselessly upon the mantel. Approximately nineteen hours had now elapsed since Holmes had disappeared, and still there was no news of him. And no response to my summoning. I wondered again whether I had mishandled the ritual in some way.

  Thunder rumbled over London, and I had just closed the window against a first spattering of rain when there came a brisk tapping at the bolted door. I am certainly not the most imaginative of men, but I found it necessary to steel my resolve before walking to the door and undoing the bolt.

  Even so, a moment later I was trying to conceal my disappointment. The opened door revealed no figures more impressive than those of Martin Armstrong and Rebecca Altamont.

  "Watson—good to see you again—I don't suppose that Mr. Holmes is here?" Armstrong looked about anxiously as he came in. It was plain from the young man's appearance— haggard, disheveled, and unshaven—that he had had little or no rest since I had left him in Amberley and that he was now in the last stages of exhaustion.

  "Certainly he is not," I replied. "I have not heard from him. Have you just come from Norberton House? What can you report from there?"

  Both the young American and Miss Altamont began to speak at once.

  The most important item of information they brought with them was the sad but not surprising news that Abraham Kirkaldy had died of his injuries.

  "It's a case of murder now," Armstrong said solemnly.

  Maddened by the lack of any progress in organizing a search for the living Louisa, by
what he considered an obstinate refusal to face the facts on the part of the authorities, Armstrong had boarded the train to London to confer with me again, preferring not to try to discuss the subject on the telephone. Rebecca Altamont, concerned about this mood of desperation on the part of the man who was to have been her brother-in-law, had insisted on coming with him. Her first look at me was a silent plea for help, and I endeavored to convey a silent reassurance.

  Armstrong, stumbling and stuttering in his weariness, and now distraught by his renewed fears for Louisa, still had not slept. Somehow, between conversing with his companion and attempting to compose an article on last night's events for his American newspaper, he had kept himself from nodding off on the train.

  "Even my friends in Fleet Street, Watson—for example, a London editor I know—even he cannot seem to understand. He now complains that I 'phoned him an unsupported story. I can tell he doesn't really believe me about Lou being still alive. All anyone will tell me now is that I ought to rest. But how can I rest, Watson? How—?"

  "At least you can sit down," I advised him gently. "You ought to save as much of your strength as possible for when it will be needed."

  "Yes, that's true—true enough. Let me rest, then—for a few minutes only." Moving with the uncertainty of an old man, he lowered himself to the sofa. "Any word as yet from Mr. Holmes?"

  Patiently I repeated that there was none. Meanwhile Armstrong, having allowed himself to sit down, was almost at once reclining at full length on the sofa, as though he had been drawn into a horizontal position by some irresistible force of gravity, though scarcely conscious of its operation. Only moments later he was sound asleep.

  Bending quietly over my visitor—who now, by default, seemed to have become my patient—I loosened his collar, took his pulse, and concluded a brief examination. None of this disturbed the young man in the least. Obviously he had succumbed to total exhaustion, both mental and physical.

  "Let him sleep," his fair companion pleaded in a whisper.

  I straightened, nodding. "Of course. But there is no need to whisper. It would not be easy to rouse him now if we made a deliberate effort to do so." Then, fixing the young lady with my professional gaze, I added that she looked very tired herself.

  Miss Altamont, sunk wearily in an armchair, dismissed my comment with a wave of her hand. "Dr. Watson, what has really happened to my sister? Do you know?"

  "I was hoping that you would be able to give me some information on the subject," I hedged.

  "I cannot," Rebecca responded sadly. Then she cast on the recumbent form of young Armstrong a glance in which pity and some stronger emotion were perhaps mingled. She shook her head. "He is certain that it was Louisa who came to us in the library last night, but I am not sure even of that. While we were on the train coming here, he... he looked so pitiful that I pretended to fall in with his ideas."

  Clearing my throat, I made an effort—perhaps a rather clumsy one—to turn the conversation another way. "I wonder, Miss Altamont, whether your parents did not raise a strong objection to your coming to London in this way?"

  Her gaze came back, as if from a great distance, to settle wonderingly on me. "Why should they do that, Dr. Watson?"

  "I meant... that you should travel such a distance accompanied only by a young man who is really not a close relative."

  I believe it took her a moment to understand. Then she dismissed any such Victorian misgivings with another wave of her hand—I got the impression that Rebecca Altamont had had a great deal of practice in this gesture. As for any moral concerns that I, or her parents, might have regarding her traveling about unchaperoned, she gave me to understand that we were now living in the twentieth century and there was no need any longer to worry about such things.

  I think it was in that moment that I for the first time truly began to see myself as old.

  Meanwhile my young visitor had promptly returned to the subject from which I had sought to distract her. "I don't know, Dr. Watson, if that was really my sister who came into our house last night or not. It was certainly no ghost or spirit, as our parents believe. But if it was Louisa—then I tell you that something dreadful has happened to her. She has been terribly changed."

  Some relevant response on my part appeared to be called for. "Changed? In what way?"

  "I don't know! That's part of the terror of it." In another moment the girl had broken down in tears. I thought that she herself could not be far from collapse.

  Then she appeared to rally, and stated firmly: "Nothing has made any sense, really, since the day Louisa drowned."

  Her eyes sought mine, as if anticipating and challenging my reaction to what she was about to say. Then, drawing a deep breath, she added: "Since the day I saw those pale hands reach up out of the water to overturn the rowboat."

  9

  The walls of our sitting room at 221B Baker Street have been privileged to hear many a strange tale, but perhaps none quite the equal in its implications of that which was related to me by Miss Rebecca Altamont upon that fateful summer evening. It was then that she revealed for the first time the full story of her experiences on the day her sister had been so tragically torn from the bosom of her family.

  "Until now, Dr. Watson, I have held back certain things—one thing, really—I thought I saw that day. Because I doubted my own sanity, and I feared that others would doubt it even more. But now, when some people seriously believe that séances can bring us the truth—and others are convinced that our dear one whom we all thought dead is only hypnotised—oh, I cannot bear it any longer, I must tell someone!"

  I took my visitor's hand and patted it reassuringly. "If you have any revelation to make, I hope you will tell me. You may find me a more receptive audience than you expect. More than that, you may help us all to find a way out of this ghastly business."

  The young woman sighed, and sat back in her armchair. "You've heard the statements I gave, and Martin gave, at the inquest. They are substantially true as far as they go. But mine, at least, did not go far enough. Now let me tell you everything.

  "You've seen the Shade now, Doctor—it's always a fairly placid stream, no more than twenty or thirty yards wide anywhere within several miles of our house.

  "We'd brought a picnic basket with us, and most of its contents had been disposed of—we'd been nibbling pretty steadily. And we were singing, off and on—Louisa had brought her banjo.

  "Martin of course had been doing almost all the rowing, though each of us girls had taken a brief turn. Everything was going peacefully and pleasantly... and then it happened." Miss Altamont paused at this point, her blue eyes searching mine as if for reassurance.

  "Go on," I urged, as cheerfully as possible.

  "You won't call for attendants and have me taken to an asylum?"

  "Most assuredly, I will not."

  "You say that very convincingly. Well, call them if you must; still, I must tell someone.

  "I was sitting with Lou in the stern, both of us naturally facing forward, looking past Martin toward the prow. What I thought I saw then... it was only the briefest impression, and for days and days I have tried to convince myself that I must have been mistaken..."

  "Yes, go on," I urged again. Encouragement seemed necessary.

  Briefly the girl still hesitated. But then she plunged ahead. "What I thought I saw was... first, hands. Large, human hands coming up out of the water, one seizing the very front of the boat on each side, like this." The girl raised her own small hands in demonstration. "And then... then I had the distinct impression of a man's head and body coming up, just on the left side of the boat as I sat looking forward."

  "A man? Who?"

  "I don't know; it was only the briefest glimpse, if it was not entirely an illusion, but I have no reason to believe that it was anyone I'd ever seen before. My impression is of longish red hair, and a red beard, both looking dark because they were wet—and I can remember, or I think I can, that his lips were parted, showing his white, sharp
teeth. And his eyes... they were green, I think, and when I try to remember, something about the memory always makes me think of dead fish, or of something drowned..."

  Briefly Miss Altamont buried her face in her hands. When she looked up again, I asked as gently as possible: "Was there anything else you noticed about him?"

  "Only that he was—he appeared to be totally unclothed, and his skin was everywhere very pale—I may have only imagined all this, you understand."

  "I understand."

  "I suppose Louisa might possibly have seen him too, because she uttered the last sound I ever heard from her lips, a kind of little gasp, or shriek—although that may have been only because the boat was going over. I cannot rid my brain of the thought that the man was really there, and that he tipped it. If so, it was incredible."

  "Surely any man might tip a rowboat?" I asked in soothing tones.

  Miss Altamont dabbed at her eyes with a small handkerchief. She nodded. "Yes, an ordinary man could do it gradually, by throwing all his weight on one side and forcing one gunwale under water. But whatever happened was nothing like that. What happened still does not seem possible. We were in the center of the stream, deep water, and I don't see how the man's feet could have been planted on the bottom.

  Yet he—if he was really there—he flipped that heavy row-boat—you have seen it—like some child's toy."

  I nodded reassuringly. "Do you think that Martin might have seen this man too—if, as you say, he was really there?"

  "He might have seen him." The young woman shook her head. "But he has said nothing to me about it. Of course, at first Martin was facing in the opposite direction, but he might possibly have seen him when the boat capsized... Dr. Watson?" A new tone had come into the girl's voice. "Is it really possible that you believe me?"