“This time Turgut stopped her with a gentle hand. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We have our own superstitions here.’ From somewhere inside his jacket he took a string of wooden beads, such as I’d seen in the hands of men on the streets of Istanbul. This one ended in a carved medallion with Arabic lettering on its face. He touched the medallion gently to Mr. Erozan’s lips, and the librarian’s face gave a grimace, as of involuntary disgust, twitching and curling. It was an awful sight, but a momentary one, and then the man’s eyes opened and he frowned. Turgut bent over him, speaking softly in Turkish and touching his forehead, then giving the wounded man a sip of something from a little flask he conjured out of his jacket.
“After a minute, Mr. Erozan sat up and looked around, groping at his neck as if it hurt. When his fingers found the little wound with its trickle of drying blood, he buried his face in his hands, sobbing, a heartrending sound.
“Turgut put an arm around his shoulders, and Helen placed a hand on the librarian’s arm. I found myself reflecting that this was the second time in an hour that I had seen her tending with gentle touch to an afflicted being. Turgut began to question the man in Turkish, and after a few minutes he sat back on his heels and looked at the rest of us. ‘Mr. Erozan says the stranger came to his apartment very early this morning, while it was still dark, and threatened to kill him unless he opened the library for him. The vampire was with him when I called him this morning, but he dared not tell me about his presence. When the strange man heard who had called, he said they must go at once to the archive. Mr. Erozan was afraid to disobey, and when they arrived here the man made him open the box. As soon as it sprang open, the devil leaped on him, held him on the ground-my friend says he was incredibly strong-and put his teeth in Mr. Erozan’s neck. That is all he remembers.’ Turgut shook his head sadly. Mr. Erozan suddenly grasped Turgut’s arm and seemed to be imploring something of him in a flood of Turkish.
“For a moment Turgut was silent, and then he took his friend’s hands in his, pressed the prayer beads into them, and gave him a quiet answer. ‘He told me that he understands he can be bitten only twice more by this devil before becoming one himself. He asks me if this thing should come to pass to kill him with my own hands.’ Turgut turned away, and I thought I saw a glistening of tears in his eyes.
“‘It will not come to that.’ Helen’s face was hard. ‘We are going to find the source of this plague.’ I didn’t know whether she meant the evil librarian or Dracula himself, but when I saw the set of her jaw I could almost believe in our eventual success in vanquishing both. I had noted that look on her face once before, and the sight of it took me back to the table of the diner at home, where we’d first talked about her parentage. Then she had been vowing to find her disloyal father and unmask him to the academic world. Was I imagining it, I wondered, or had her mission shifted at some moment that she herself hadn’t noticed?
“Selim Aksoy had been hovering behind us, and now he spoke to Turgut again. Turgut nodded. ‘Mr. Aksoy has reminded me of the work we have come here to do, and he is right. Other researchers will begin to arrive soon, and we must either lock the archive or open it to the public. He offers to desert his shop today and serve as librarian here. But first we must clean up these documents and see what damage has been done to them, and above all we must find a safe place for my friend to rest. Also, Mr. Aksoy would like to show us something in the archives before other people are present.’
“I began at once to gather up the scattered documents, and my worst fears were immediately confirmed. ‘The original maps are gone,’ I reported gloomily. We searched the stacks, but the maps of that strange region that looked like a long-tailed dragon had vanished. We could only conclude that the vampire had hidden them on his person even before we’d arrived. It was a dreary thought. We had copies, of course, in both Rossi’s hand and Turgut’s, but the originals represented to me a key to Rossi’s whereabouts, a closer link than any other I’d handled so far.
“In addition to the discouragement of losing this treasure, there came to me the thought that the evil librarian might unlock its secrets before we did. If Rossi was at Dracula’s tomb, wherever it lay, the evil librarian now had a fair chance of beating us there. I felt more than ever the twin urgency and impossibility of finding my beloved adviser. At least-it came to me again, strangely-Helen was now solidly on my side.
“Turgut and Selim had been conferring beside the sick man, and now they turned to ask him a question, it seemed, for he tried to raise himself and pointed feebly to the back of the stacks. Selim vanished, returning after a few minutes with a small book. It was bound in red leather, rather worn, with a gold inscription in Arabic on the front. He set it on a nearby table and searched through it for some time before beckoning to Turgut, who was folding his jacket to make a pillow for his friend’s head. The man seemed a little more comfortable now. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest we call an ambulance, but I felt Turgut must know what he was doing. He had risen to join Selim, and they conferred earnestly for a few minutes while Helen and I avoided each other’s eyes, both of us hoping for some discovery, and both fearing further disappointment. Finally, Turgut called us over.
“‘This is what Selim Aksoy wished to show us here this morning,’ he said gravely. ‘I do not know, in truth, whether it has any bearing on our search. However, I will read it to you. This is a volume compiled in the early nineteenth century by some editors whose names I have not seen before, historians of Istanbul. They collected here all the accounts they could find of life in Istanbul in the first years of our city-that is, beginning in 1453, when Sultan Mehmed took the city for his own and proclaimed it the capital of his empire.’
“He pointed to a page of beautiful Arabic, and I thought for the hundredth time how terrible it was that human languages and even alphabets were separated from one another by this frustrating Babel of differences, so that when I glanced at a page of Ottoman printing, my comprehension was immediately caught in a bramble of symbols as impenetrable to me as a hedge of magic briars. ‘This is a passage that Mr. Aksoy remembered from one of his researches here. The author is unknown, and it is an account of some events in the year 1477-yes, my friends, the year after Vlad Dracula was killed in battle in Wallachia. Here it tells how in that year there were cases of the plague in Istanbul, a plague that caused the imams to bury some of the corpses with stakes through their hearts. Then it tells about the entrance into the city of a party of monks from the Carpathians-this is what made Mr. Aksoy remember the volume-in a wagon pulled by mules. The monks begged for asylum in a monastery in Istanbul and resided there for nine days and nine nights. That is the whole account, and the connections within it are very unclear-it says nothing more about the monks or what became of them. It was this wordCarpathian that my friend Selim wished us to know about here.’