Good evening. I congratulate you.
At this my father seemed to come to life again. I don’t know how he found the strength to speak. “Where is she?” he cried. His voice trembled with fear and fury.
You are a remarkable scholar.
I don’t know why, but at that moment, my body seemed to move toward him slightly of its own volition. My father put his hand up at almost the same second and gripped my arm very hard, so that the lantern swayed and terrible shadows and lights danced around us. In that second of illumination, I saw something of Dracula’s face, just a curve of drooping dark mustache, a cheekbone that could have been actual bone.
You have been the most determined of them all. Come with me and I will give you knowledge for ten thousand lifetimes.
I didn’t know, still, how I could understand him, but I thought he was calling out to my father. “No!” I cried. I was so terrified at having actually spoken to that figure that I felt my consciousness sway inside me for a moment. I had the sense that the presence before us might be smiling, although his face was in darkness again.
Come with me, or let your daughter come.
“What?” my father asked me, almost inaudibly. It was at this moment that I knew he could not understand Dracula’s words, and perhaps could not even hear Dracula. My father was answering my cry.
The figure appeared to think for a while in silence. He shifted his strange boots on the stone. There was something about his shape under the ancient clothes that was not only gruesome but also graceful, an old habit of power.
I have waited a long time for a scholar of your gifts.
The voice was soft now and infinitely dangerous. We stood in a darkness that seemed to flood us from that dark figure.
Come with me of your own volition.
Now my father seemed to lean toward him a little, his grip still on my arm. What he couldn’t understand he could apparently feel. Dracula’s shoulder twitched; he shifted his terrible weight from one leg to another. The presence of his body was like the actual presence of death, and yet he was alive and moving.
Do not keep me waiting. If you will not come I will come for you.
Now my father seemed to gather all of his strength. “Where is she?” he shouted. “Where is Helen?”
The figure rose up and I saw an angry gleam of teeth, bone, eye, the shadow of the hood swinging over his face again, his inhuman hand clenching at the margin of the light. I had the terrible sense of an animal crouched to pounce, of a leaping toward us, even before he moved, and then there was a footfall on the shadowy stairs behind him, and a flash of motion that we felt in the air because we could not see it. I raised the lantern with a scream that seemed to me to come from outside myself, and I saw Dracula’s face-which I can never forget-and then, to my utter astonishment, I saw another figure, standing just behind him. This second person had apparently just come down the stairs, a dark and inchoate form like his, but bulkier, the outline of a living man. The man was moving rapidly, and he had something bright in his raised hand. But Dracula had sensed his presence already, and turned with his arm out, and pushed the man away. Dracula’s strength must have been prodigious, because suddenly the powerful human figure collided with the crypt wall. We heard a silent thud, then a groan. Dracula was turning this way and that in a kind of horrible distraction, first for us, and then toward the groaning man.
Suddenly there was again the sound of footsteps on the stairs-light ones, this time, accompanied by the beam of a strong flashlight. Dracula had been caught off balance-he turned too late, a blur of darkness. Someone searched the scene swiftly with the light, raised an arm, and fired once.
Dracula did not move as I’d expected a moment earlier, hurtling over the sarcophagus toward us; instead he was falling, first backward, so that his chiseled, pale face surfaced again for a moment, and then forward and forward, until there was a thud on the stone, a breaking sound like flung bone. He lay convulsed for a second and at last was still. Then his body seemed to be turning to dust, to nothing, even his ancient clothes decaying around him, sere in the confusing light.
My father dropped my arm and ran toward the flashlight’s beam, skirting the mass on the floor. “Helen,” he called-or maybe he wept her name, or whispered it.
But Barley was pushing forward, too, and he had caught up my father’s lantern. A large man lay on the flagstones, his dagger beside him. “Oh, Elsie,” said a broken English voice. His head oozed a little dark blood, and even as we watched in paralyzing horror, his eyes grew still.
Barley threw himself into the dust next to that shattered form. He seemed to be actually strangling with surprise and grief. “Master James?”
Chapter 79
The hotel in Les Bains boasted a high-ceilinged parlor with a fireplace, and the maître d‘ had lit a fire there and stubbornly closed the parlor doors against other guests. “Your trip to the monastery has tired you” was all he had said, setting a bottle of cognac near my father, and glasses-five glasses, I noted, as if our missing companion were still there to drink with us-but I saw from the look that my father exchanged with him that much more than that had passed between them.
The maître d‘ had been on the phone all evening, and he had somehow made things right with the police, who had questioned us only in the hotel and released us under his benevolent eye. I suspected he’d also taken care of calling a morgue or a funeral parlor, whatever one used in a French village. Now that everyone official was gone, I sat on the uncomfortable damask sofa with Helen, who reached over to stroke my hair every few minutes, and tried not to imagine Master James’s kind face and solid form inert under a sheet. My father sat in a deep chair by the fire and gazed at her, at us. Barley had put his long legs up on an ottoman and was trying, I thought, not to stare at the cognac, until my father recollected himself and poured us each a glass. Barley’s eyes were red with silent weeping, but he seemed to want to be left alone. When I looked at him, my own eyes filled with tears for a moment, uncontrollably.
My father looked across at Barley, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, too. “He was very brave,” my father said quietly. “You know that his attack made it possible for Helen to shoot as she did. She would not have been able to shoot through the heart like that if the monster had not been distracted. I think James must have known in the last moments what a difference he had made. And he avenged the person he had loved best-and many others.” Barley nodded, still unable to speak, and there was a little silence among us.
“I promised I would tell you everything when we could sit quietly,” Helen said at last, setting down her glass.
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like me to leave you alone?” Barley spoke reluctantly.
Helen laughed, and I was surprised by the melody of her laugh, so different from her speaking voice. Even in that room half full of grief, her laugh did not seem out of place. “No, no, my dear,” she said to Barley. “We can’t do without you.” I loved her accent, that harsh yet sweet English of hers that I thought I already knew from so long ago I couldn’t remember the time. She was a tall, spare woman in a black dress, an outdated sort of dress, with a coil of graying hair around her head. Her face was striking-lined, worn, her eyes youthful. The sight of her shocked me every time I turned my head-not only because she was there, real, but because I had always imagined only the young Helen. I had never included in my imagination all her years away from us.
“Telling will take a long, long time,” she said softly, “but I can say a few things now, at least. First, that I am sorry. I have caused you such pain, Paul, I know.” She looked at my father across the firelight. Barley stirred, embarrassed, but she stopped him with a firm gesture. “I caused myself an even greater pain. Second, I should have told you this already, but now our daughter”-her smile was sweet and tears gleamed in her eyes-“our daughter and our friends can be my witnesses. I am alive, not undead. He never reached me a third time.”