Evidently Kulakov, once distracted from his conversation with Rasputin, needed perhaps half a minute to clear his mind fully of the light trance into which, under the ministrations of the healer, he had begun to descend. by that time Miss Altamont and I had reached the stairs and were making steady progress down them. They were broad, marble stairs, gracefully curved, and discouragingly well-lighted compared with the dim bedroom corridors above. Although at the moment the young lady and I had the way all to ourselves, the sounds of ribald merriment proceeding from the several doorways visible below us suggested strongly that that state of affairs could not last long.
Meanwhile the count, going to check on his victim, needed only a few moments to discover that she was not in her room. Alarmed, he dashed straight back to the stairs, where one look down showed him that his prisoner was being carried out of his control.
Kulakov came charging, leaping downstairs after us, roaring like the madman he was. The vampire did not change form, and it crossed my mind, even in the moment of crisis, that perhaps daylight was already too far advanced to permit him to do that. The first rays of the rising sun, striking in through the skylight far above us in the roof, produced a crystalline, slightly dazzling effect, but I knew well that here in the house we were too sheltered and shaded to allow me to depend substantially upon the sun for our defense.
My revolver was already in my hand, and as that dark, snarling figure came bounding downstairs toward us, reaching out with taloned fingers, I fired repeatedly.
Fortunately my aim was true, and at least two or three of Von Herder’s heavy wooden bullets pierced our attacker’s body.
The effect was devastating. Kulakov went tumbling past us down the broad curving marble stairway, his flesh, even as he fell and rolled, hissing and dissolving as though submerged in some vat of acid. In another moment the vampire’s body had been claimed by the true death.
With all the noisy celebration still in progress, no one in the house paid much attention even to the sound of gunfire; a few heads looked round corners toward the stairs, and laughter ceased briefly, only to resume as loud as before. The body, being that of an old vampire, dispersed in mist-form, clothing and all, before anyone could see it, and before I or my companions could be embarrassed by the necessity of explaining a corpse.
Rasputin had come out of the alcove and looked down once, from the landing. I am not sure that he actually saw Kulakov die, but I believe that through occult knowledge or instinctive wisdom, the peasant understood what had just happened, and that he then simply and prudently took himself away. I can only say that the man’s later notoriety, seemingly at its peak in this year of 1917 in which I write, does not surprise me at all.
Meanwhile, once Holmes had reached the balcony where the prince was standing, it became possible for my friend to invoke a certain name effectively, that of a lady to whom the prince had long shown sincere devotion. Also, I suspect Holmes’s studies in Tibet might have served him well when the need arose to break a hypnotic trance. He led an awakened Dracula indoors before the direct sunlight could do his cousin fatal injury.
By that time it was possible for them to see that Miss Altamont and I had safely reached the street; and moments later, Dracula and his cousin had joined their co-conspirators in the street and were running to board the waiting carriage with them.
Fortunately, with Kulakov’s death, Rebecca Altamont quickly recovered from her hypnotized state and was soon able to cooperate actively in her own rescue. Soon we had succeeded in removing her to a place of relative safety.
We determined to cable this happy result to England as soon as possible, but then decided we had better not delay our departure to do so.
Meanwhile, in the course of our forced delay inside the house, Holmes and Dracula between them had by accident overheard a fairly detailed account, by Kulakov himself, of those peculiar events involving vampires, an execution, and stolen treasure in London in 1765. After a few minutes of intense thought upon these matters, Dracula’s cousin hastily dispatched a cable, this one coded, back to Mycroft in London.
Having done this, the detective, in a smug, elated mood, promised all of us, to our astonishment, that he had identified the pirate treasure, and hoped soon to be able to explain where it had been hidden for the past one hundred and thirty-eight years.
Some hours after Holmes had dispatched his cable to Mycroft–in fact, as we were about to board our ship to leave St. Petersburg–he received an answer, this time in the form of a clear transmission. It ran as follows: MATERIAL FOUND IN PLACE DESCRIBED ALL SATISFACTORY HERE MYCROFT.
Epilogue
We were worried lest some powerful subordinate or ally of Kulakov’s deduce that he was dead, and discover–perhaps from the splinters of a wooden bullet–the manner of his death, and then take measures to delay or prevent our departure. Moving quickly, yet deliberately to avoid giving any appearance of undue haste, we completed our preparations for taking ship from St. Petersburg.
Fortune smiled on us, and within a matter of hours, we were well on our way back to England, embarked on the same speedy private vessel which had carried us to Russia.
We were well out at sea, and had satisfied ourselves that no pursuit was to be anticipated, before we openly discussed every aspect of the case among ourselves.
In these circumstances, Holmes concluded his summing-up, including an outline of the chief events that must have taken place in 1765 to provoke Kulakov’s thirst for vengeance and cause the mysterious disappearance of the jewels.
“Before giving his final explanation about the treasure, I believe it will be pertinent to explain the circumstances in which Louisa Altmont had apparently been drowned.
“Young Martin Armstrong has told us how he plunged again and again into the pool where the boat had overturned, looking for the victim of an accident, never dreaming that a kidnapping had taken place instead.
“But actually, Louisa, her attempts to cry out strangled in her throat, was already in the grip of the vampire Kulakov, and was being pulled downstream, under water, at a speed that would have seemed incredible to anyone who did not understand the powers of the being who had seized her.
“Pulled downstream, around the next bend, then brought to the surface long enough for a few gasps of air–the last air she would ever breathe upon this earth.”
While Becky had run for help, first to the nearest cottages and then to Norberton House, Martin, soon aided by other swimmers, plunged into the water again and again, screaming Louisa’s name in an ever more hoarse and breathless voice. He worked his way some yards downstream and then came back, afraid that she was still under water near the place where she had fallen in... afraid that she was dead.
“But in fact Louisa was not dead. Kulakov had repeatedly forced himself upon her–in vampire fashion. This sexual assault took place first underwater and later upon the land. He also, in his half-crazed state, demanded that his victim tell him where the treasure, the family jewels, were hidden.
“Louisa of course knew nothing, or at least very little, about her ancestor’s conflict with a piratical vampire more than a century ago. Pressed to reveal the secret of a supposed family treasure of whose existence she was unaware, she could only tell this man, this fiend, about a safe in her father’s office, which held only some irrelevant legal papers and a few pieces of modern and comparatively inconsequential jewelry.”