"Good. I shall stand in front of it, and you will have the chance to seek my image in its bright, well-lighted surface."
But that demonstration was not to be, not then. Interruption came before it could take place.
One of the masked people came and stood in the doorway and made a cryptic sign to Graves, who announced that he was called away.
June and Phil silently thought of possible trickery.
The live man turned in the doorway to deliver his exit line. His voice ate at them like the voice of doom: "Perhaps my plan was wrong in its approach, but there is no help for that now. You must not only watch the tape, you must ponder seriously its contents, and accept the truth that it reveals. I cannot compel you to believe the story on the tape. But you must know it, well enough to discuss it intelligently with me, next time we meet."
Phil wanted to tell the man that he was crazy, but the words choked in his throat. His wife beside him was nodding helplessly. "We will," she said.
Chapter Six
Within two weeks of his emergence from underground, Radu made his first foray outside the boundaries of the metropolis of London. At first, moving across country only after dark, he went no farther than a few miles from the East End of London, where he had hidden the precious supply of his native earth that had sustained him for almost a hundred years.
Only now, when he began to travel, did he fully appreciate the scale of the changes in human society and achievements which had come about during his last sojourn underground.
As weeks and months went by, he extended the scope of his explorations. Visiting by night certain ships out of the thousands which were engaged in the unending maritime commerce on the Thames, scraping secretly through holds and bilges, he augmented his perilously thin supply of his homeland's hospitable soil. He also made sure of several earths he had earlier secretly established in Britain. Evidently Vlad had never located these deposits, for they were still usable.
He had also to establish new earths, of the soil of his homeland, as that seemed prudent. He had to, if possible, re-establish some network of allies among the European vampire population. At any one time, near the end of the eighteenth century, there were probably not more than a dozen nosferatu active on the whole continent.
In this same period Radu, establishing sporadic contacts with British vampires, began also, in his way, to make discreet inquiries about me. His family name was known to them, but, as he discovered to his delight, they tended to confuse him with his brother, who seemed never to have visited Britain.
Within a month he had convinced himself that Vlad was certainly not to be found in England. The elder Dracula was known to the local nosferatu only by reputation.
Radu could begin to relax a little.
At that time, in the early summer of 1792, I was still in a state of blissful ignorance regarding the fact that my brother was once more prowling above ground.
Other matters, which, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with Radu, were claiming my attention. It was in Paris, in the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, on one particular summer night, that I participated in one of those meetings that turn out to be of great consequence to the persons involved, though at the time none of them are conscious of the fact.
The reason for my presence at that time and place was very simple: I had been resting in one of my earths nearby.
Even at this late date I do not care to be more specific about exact locations. Enough to say that I reclined not in any ordinary grave. But the reader may visualize several possibilities, e.g., crypts or accidental cavities in or under the church itself, or one of the other buildings nearby. Certainly it was in a location which I believed was likely to remain undisturbed, at least for a long time. Somewhere, even now, a reader is guessing that it might be in some ancient monument. Well, that might be a good guess. Or how about this one: under a path or road? But never mind.
A light of unwonted brightness shone there, from a lantern hanging on the stub of a tree branch. It was, though I did not yet understand the fact, one of the new Argand lamps, invented in England a bare ten years earlier, which derived from their burning oil about ten times the light of old lamps of the same size. And by this light, the forms and features of two women were revealed, both of them intent upon some task whose details I could not yet make out, but of whose basic nature I felt immediately certain.
In that year, and through much of the madness that followed through the next few orbits of the Earth, the Parisian guillotine's victims were commonly hauled, after decapitation, to the cemetery of the Madeleine. But in the year and month of which I speak, their numbers were increasing only gradually, and sometimes whole days went by without a single accused aristocrat or traitor losing his or her head in the name of Liberty.
I had been asleep for several days, oblivious to what was going on in the breathing, waking, workaday world only a few yards from my hidden fastness. But my first sight of this new digging, the broad trench ten feet deep, obviously intended for mass burials, stopped me in my tracks. Such excavation suggested either an epidemic or the near approach of war. A faint odor of corruption was perceptible despite the scientifically enlightened attempt at thorough burial.
Listening carefully, I could hear no cannon. That, I thought, suggested pestilence as the most probable cause.
How little did I know.
I decided that a brief examination of whatever bodies had been buried in the trench would be the quickest means of gaining the information that I sought. And indeed one glance, more or less over the shoulders of the two women, was sufficient. They were all adults, and mostly men. Most were fully clothed, though coats and hats were absent. And they were all without their heads; and I suddenly understood just what kind of an epidemic had begun to ravage Paris.
The new government had adopted the guillotine in April of that year, the same month in which Revolutionary France found herself at war with Austria and Prussia. The introduction of the new machine was viewed as an idealistic gesture. Away with the hideous and prolonged tortures which in the past had been the common means of capital punishment! The age of humanitarianism had arrived. No more would those condemned to death be broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, or have their flesh torn with red-hot pincers—modes of punishment still very much in style across the map of European civilization. In France, simple beheading had formerly been reserved for aristocrats, but now everyone in the newly classless society could enjoy its benefits.
Let me assure the modern reader that it is not my intention to single out the French as particularly brutal. The last execution for witchcraft in England had occurred as late as 1685, when Jack Ketch, whose name came to stand for all of his profession, hanged Alice Molland in Exeter.
In 1790 in England, the penalty of burning to death, inflicted for a variety of crimes, had finally been abolished—for women. And hanging, drawing, and quartering was still on the books as the prescribed punishment for treason.
Also there is testimony that as late as 1790, the heads of executed traitors were still to be seen exhibited on Temple Bar—staring eyelessly in through the north windows of Tellson's Bank, which stood adjoining. (One version has it that they were two officers of Prince Charles's army, decapitated in the old, inefficient, and haphazard way, by the headsman's axe or sword; another, that they were veterans of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715.)
But let us return to that fateful night in 1792, in the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, the burial ground of Revolutionary freedom. I was aware that the place was guarded, at least sporadically. The sentries were under orders from the Committee of Public Safety, to prevent grieving relatives from attempting to retrieve the mangled bodies of their loved ones. As one might expect, a little bribery allowed such recoveries to take place fairly often—the fewer bodies, the easier the gravediggers' task. And, as it happened, no guards were anywhere in sight when my fateful meeting took place.