A Sharpness on the Neck d-9 Read online

  All this, from the moment of the old coffin's sliding into the deep pit until now, had happened very quickly. The pounding feet of the man who had run away could still be heard, but in a few more seconds the sound faded into darkness and patchy fog.

  Somewhere, in the city that now seemed so far beyond the cemetery wall, a dog was howling in abandon.

  Jerry was still held by one wrist. His remaining comrade appeared to be free, but did not run away. Nor did Jerry struggle. Slowly the bodies of both men slumped, until they were sitting on the ground. It was as if they were held in place by a combination of greed and amazement, subtly aided by an hypnotic influence which neither breathing man could recognize for what it was.

  Presently the inhabitant of the coffin, twisting his body slowly from side to side, and now displaying a touch of uncertainty in his movements, had got himself entirely free of the splintered wood. Now he was sitting up. And now he was crawling, the warm blue gaze in that decrepit face fixed on Jerry, his teeth, which were very white and at the moment very pointed, displayed in a friendly smile.

  Deep in his throat Jerry was making incoherent sounds. Just when he was on the point of springing to his feet again, he was stunned and half-paralyzed by a gentle-seeming stroke, almost a caress, as the hand he had been trying to butcher for its rings released his wrist and rose to stroke him on the cheek. A moment later the same hand fell on his ankle with a wrenching grip, to pull him even closer with nightmarish ease. Then the hand let him go for a fraction of a second, only to re-establish its grip upon his neck. There it left an impression that filled his arms and legs with pins and needles.

  Satisfied that Jerry was temporarily deprived of the power of movement and of speech, the thing from the coffin reached out and took hold of Jerry's remaining colleague.

  Too late, and ineffectually, the man began to struggle. Then he screamed: a faint, half-breathless, inarticulate sound. The sound was not a conscious utterance, but only the result of the breath being crushed entirely out of his rib cage by arms almost skeletally thin, but far stronger than those of any breathing human.

  No blood had yet been visibly spilled, though now a great deal was being drained. The helpless, dying man was being dressed like a fowl, by a butcher who set a very high value on the avoidance of carelessly spilled blood.

  And soon the two pale hands, working together, had wrenched off one of the living arms that a minute ago had been swinging a shovel at him. And now at last there came a spray of red, quickly cut short as Radu's mouth closed over the pumping artery.

  * * *

  … and a little later, after a timeless interval of unconsciousness, Jerry Cruncher opened his eyes to see that the man who had been buried (his hair that had been white was now luxuriant and raven black, growing on a head as firmly fastened to his body as Jerry's own—How could he ever have imagined that the head had once been separate?)—that man was chewing to pulp much of the soft tissue of Smith's body, his white teeth crushing, splintering the bones. The man from the coffin was straining Smith's blood through his mouth to swallow it, spitting out the gruesome residue, murmuring and puffing a red froth of satisfaction…

  The white face, marked with only three almost microscopic spots of wasted blood, turned in Jerry's direction. All the signs of age had disappeared, subsumed in a glorious and vital youth.

  Jerry, his body no longer physically pinned, but his mind effectively paralyzed, was compelled to watch while his companion's life was drained away, his body efficiently emptied of blood. All he could think of was that his own turn would be next…

  But the blood of one stout man had evidently been sufficient to take the edge off decades of hunger.

  When the mouth of the thing from the coffin was no longer too busy taking nourishment to speak, there issued in a whispery rasp from its dry lips elegant words, sentences, in a French that was highly literate but almost barbarous in its antiquity. When Jerry only stared with lack of comprehension, the French was followed by a kind of English closer to the speech of Shakespeare than to that of the wretch who had come intruding with his shovel.

  The voice grew more dry and ghastly with every word it uttered. "Come here to me, young man. Come here."

  "Uhh…"

  "But wait. First…"

  Radu, standing now, free of the last coffin-fragment, methodically hand-scooped earth to bury the ghastly, unrecognizable remains of Smith at the bottom of the hole from which his own breathless yet undying body had so recently emerged.

  Then, still standing up to his ragged knees in loosely piled dirt, he turned to the other graverobber. Jerry was considerably younger, and much handsomer, than either of the other two.

  "Come here."

  Again, the victim had no choice.

  "What year…? What is the Year of Our Lord…?"

  This time Jerry willed himself to spring to his feet and run, and nothing visible held him back from darting away in flight, leaving the horror behind; but there could be no possibility of help within a hundred yards, the distance of the nearest portion of the cemetery fence. Nearer than that were only grass and darkness, trees and tombstones. And the confident attitude of the thing from the coffin assured him that he had no chance to get anywhere near that fence by flight.

  What year? Unable to do otherwise, he muttered an answer to the question.

  Meanwhile waves of horrible fear were washing over him, blending with a luminous, sickly, and all but irresistible attraction. It seemed to Jerry that his body was moving and acting on its own, independent of his will. He sidled closer to his undead captor and whimpered unconsciously, like a timid pup. He shivered as if with electric shock when the pale hand fell on his arm.

  There was already a delicious anticipation in the shiver, a reaction no more controllable than that produced by a dousing in cold water.

  Sheer food-hunger had for the moment been satisfied; in the far more delicate blood-draining that now ensued, there was a kind of love.

  Smoothly and almost effortlessly, with a look and a touch and the murmur of a few soft words, Radu seduced the young man who had tried to despoil his body. The breathing youth was handsome, or at least made that impression on the vampire, who had been underground and dreaming nightmares for more than eighty years.

  Before climbing out of the pit, Radu scraped up and gathered, from where it lay mixed with the wreckage of his coffin, the essential native earth that Vlad had seen to it was there to sustain his life. He bundled the earth into a piece of cloth that had once been Smith's coat, and put the bundle carefully under his arm.

  Then Radu, like an insect newly emerged from his latest chrysalis, resumed his coupling with the young man, strengthening himself further and weakening his breathing victim.

  Presently the two began to walk together toward the cemetery fence, and the murmuring night-sounds of the great city that lay beyond.

  Before the sun had worked its way up into the cloudy sky to brighten London, Jerry Cruncher had come home to the room he shared with his girl, bringing with him a man she had never seen before, and who introduced himself to her as Mr. Shade. Jerry, looking unusually pale, seemed both pleased and put on edge by the newcomer.

  "Who is he, then?" the girl whispered to Jerry when they had a moment to themselves.

  "Never you mind who. I'd say the fewer questions you have t' ask, the better."

  She was intrigued to receive the attention of the handsome stranger who had now attached himself to Jerry.

  But she was somewhat surprised when the suave newcomer almost at once pulled her to the bed and began to bite her throat. And she was even more surprised—though now her head was spinning in a haze of pleasure—when Jerry, responding to Mr. Shade's gesture of invitation, shed his clothes and climbed into the bed with them.

  She'd never thought that Jerry was the kind of man who did such things with other men… but at the moment nothing mattered but what was happening to her. Pleasure unbelievable, delight that she had never imagined until now…


  Gradually, in the hours and days following his fortuitous release from his drugged, nightmarish sleep, Radu satisfied himself that Vlad was nowhere in the immediate vicinity of the cemetery. Indeed there was no evidence that his hated elder brother had ever visited London at all, but instead had entrusted his younger brother's transportation and burial there to someone else.

  The one who had been buried, freed now from unbearable dreams of hell, granted an escape from his coffin, knew basically what he had to do in these circumstances. He had played a very similar role in other scenes very much like this one, several times before, in other centuries—and so began the lengthy process of warily, methodically, ruthlessly, patiently learning and working his way into the changed society into which he had emerged.

  Over the next few days he gave attention to his speech and wardrobe, bringing both up to date, equipping himself to move when necessary in both the highest and the lowest strata of society.

  For a whole month following his latest emergence from a coffin, the pallid and handsome vampire spent most of his daylight hours drowsing indoors, in one poor room or another in the neighborhood of Hanging-sword-alley, Whitefriars, where Jerry Cruncher lived. The revenant, breathing only when he felt it necessary to get wind to speak, closed his nostrils against stench and tolerated ugliness and noise.

  Ah, to be able to admire himself in a mirror! But that pleasure was permanently denied him. The eyes and faces of admirers were the only looking-glass he could ever use.

  He kept his eyes open for the man who had run away in terror from the graveyard, and managed to learn his name from Jerry. But that man was gone from his old London haunts, vanished as if… yes, as if the earth had swallowed him.

  Few men loved luxury more than did Radu, but few could be more patient in assessing the right priorities. In present circumstances, luxury could wait.

  By night, now almost every night, he strengthened himself with the blood of youth, seeking and attracting both sexes to his couch. Coolly he gave thought as to who among these breathing folk, and how many, he should begin to recruit to his cause.

  During this period he drowsed and daydreamed away many a daylight hour. But he did not really sleep at all. What Radu Dracula's soul demanded now was not rest—he had had enough and more than enough of that—but vengeance. Retribution, overwhelming and exquisite, on the man who had put in him the ground. Upon his elder brother. Upon Vlad, who had been, for most of the last three hundred years, true head of the House of Drakulya.

  Through all the nights during the next several months, through all the long days of that time, during hours when bright sun made even shaded rooms uncomfortable, Radu's eyelids were seldom closed for more than a few moments consecutively. In that epoch he spent most of his hours lying in one cheap room or another, listening to the noises made by breathers enacting their wretched existences around him. Now and then he enjoyed the blood of one or another of the youthful, savory bodies who could be so easily persuaded—with a few words, a tender look, a gentle touch—to yield to his embrace.

  But there were many hours when he was quite alone, resting wakefully in as dark a room as he could find, clinging to the bagful of his native earth he'd salvaged from what his buriers, determined that he should not die, had provided for him in his most recent grave.

  Time and again, on gray or sunny afternoons, he caught himself beginning to drift into trance, and with a start and a shiver of fear he fought himself free from the soft entanglement. Then he would arise, and pace the cramped room for a time, pushing sleep away as if it were his deadly enemy. His sufferings during the long slumber so recently concluded had immeasurably deepened his terror of nightmares. Thanks to his brother, he had had enough of helpless, abandoned sleep to last him for the next ten centuries.

  And what else had been done to him? Could he be sure that his personal beauty had not suffered? Again and again Radu yearned for the help of a mirror, even knowing as he did how useless such were to him. Then he would thoughtfully finger his own neck where the skin, its youth renewed thanks to his recent heavy feeding, had now grown seamlessly back together. He could tell, from the way that breathers looked at him, the things they said to him, that they thought him no more than seventeen years old, and as gloriously beautiful as ever. Well, in a way he was fortunate. Mutilation at least he had been spared. The torture and dismemberment that Vlad had inflicted upon him in 1705 might have left permanent scars.

  Radu looked forward with keen anticipation to meeting his older brother again. He craved a carefully planned meeting that would give him the opportunity of surprising Vlad. Dear Vlad, who had arranged to have him put under the ground. Had beheaded him and beaten him as punishment, had drugged and hypnotized him into decades of dreaming hell.

  Dear old Vlad, who would not really be expecting to encounter his younger brother in one piece and above ground again. Not now, not for many decades yet.

  Radu knew from long and bitter experience that trying to revenge himself upon his brother was not a business to be lightly or impulsively undertaken. When he had succeeded in such efforts in the past, it had been only after careful and thoughtful preparation. Therefore he now postponed any plans for fresh revenge until he should have established himself in this unfamiliar world of the late eighteenth century—which was considerably changed in many ways from the city and the society of a hundred years earlier. Radu had been on fairly familiar terms with the London of a hundred years or so earlier, so that the city's vast expansion in the interval had not left him entirely disoriented. A number of familiar landmarks, parks and monuments and palaces, were still helpfully in place.

  Observing the size to which the metropolis had grown in both area and population during his recent extended sleep, and taking note of the relatively frantic pace of activity now occurring the newly revived vampire could not escape the conclusion that the world was changing faster and faster as the centuries whirled by—soon it would be absolutely dangerous to sleep for more than a few years. The scope of transformations accomplished in even a few decades would render the new world unintelligible.

  Dear old Vlad. There was so much, so very much, that Radu had to thank his brother for.

  Chapter Five

  Still the gypsy-looking Connie and the darkly handsome Mr. Graves boldly displayed their faces, while their less flamboyant associates continued to wear masks in the prisoners' presence. These disguised underlings, or some of them at least, evidently shared living quarters in the larger mobile home, a few yards from the smaller unit that served as their victims' prison. Looking out through one or another of their own barred windows, the Radcliffes could see them always scrupulously masked, occasionally coming and going at the larger house. Their victims decided that the place must be crowded if it housed them all.

  Having a second breakfast, largely because of the speed and simplicity of preparation, had been the Radcliffes' first choice when they once more got around to dealing with their hunger. During the meal they kept expecting to be interrupted by one of their cheerful guardians, but that didn't happen. The only sign of the kidnappers' continued presence was an occasional murmur of muted voices from the other room, where the guardians had gone when their victims occupied the kitchen. No one sat with Phil and June, or stood over them, while they ate their cereal and toast, drank their juice and coffee.

  By the time they had finished breakfast, subtle changes in the muted sounds from the other room suggested that a different pair of kidnappers had relieved the pair originally on duty.

  Occasionally the mask of one of their overseers in the living room could be seen turned toward the kitchen, but no one bothered the prisoner couple. When they had finished the brief meal, they were left, still without direct supervision, to wash up the handful of dishes and utensils.

  Several times since they had been lodged in this prison, it occurred to Philip to wonder if hidden microphones and even cameras might be recording his and his wife's behavior. He whispered his suspicions to
June, who shook her head and looked helpless. He made a close-range inspection of the cheap battery-powered clock on the kitchen wall, and of the dully ordinary electrical outlets, without observing anything suspicious. Maybe the feeling was paranoid, but he couldn't entirely shake it.

  After mechanically cleaning up the remains of two breakfasts, both prisoners found themselves exhausted. The kidnapping had dragged them through a long and sleepless night after full day of vacationing. They glanced into the bedroom, where the single small bed looked inviting, but agreed that there was still no possibility of being able to sleep.

  Alternatives being severely limited, they went back into the living room for a second session with the tape. The current pair of masked attendants took themselves unobtrusively out of the way.

  June threw herself down on the little sofa and nodded at the machine before them: Her face was pale, her voice unnatural with stress. "How much more have we got to go?"

  Philip popped the reel out of the VCR and peered into it through the little window on one side. "Looks to me like we've watched about an hour so far; about five hours of tape left on the reel, but I can't tell how much has content."

  "Let's give it another try. Maybe there'll be some magic revelation."

  "Don't hold your breath."

  When they tried fast-forwarding, stopping at intervals to sample content, it was soon plain that they had more than an hour of material to look at. Viewings taken at random spots along the tape indicated that the next two hours or so, like the first, consisted of nothing but Graves, sitting behind his table and talking, sometimes reading from his notes, to the camera. It was a daunting prospect.