The detective turned to me. “Dr. Corday, it is essential that we ascertain the — nature of this man Hayden.” A meaningful glance assured me what sort of variations in nature he had in mind.
I nodded, and addressed myself to the lady, who had now somewhat recovered.
“At what time of day, madam, did these events occur? Can we be absolutely sure that they took place after dawn and before sunset?”
The lady looked for a moment as if she suspected that madness was my problem instead of hers. “In broad daylight, surely,” she replied at last. “Though what possible difference…”
I signed to my friend that I must speak to him in confidence. After a hurried apology to our client we withdrew to a far corner of the study. “The man she knocked down”, I informed the detective there, “could not possibly have been a vampire, because the force of the blow that felled him was borne in stone, to which we are immune. Nor could he, even supposing him to be a vampire, have shifted form in broad daylight, and escaped as a mist from that closet under the conditions we have heard described. Nor could he in daylight have taken on the form of a small animal and hidden himself somewhere among those crates and boxes.”
“You are quite sure of all that?”
“Quite.”
“Very good.” My friend received my expert opinion with evident satisfaction, which surprised me.
For my own part, it seemed to me that we were getting nowhere. “My life has been very long,” I added, “and active, if not always well spent. I have seen madness … much madness. And I tell you that the lady here, if I am any judge, is neither mad nor subject to hallucinations.”
“In that opinion I concur.” Still my friend did not appear nearly as disconcerted as it seemed to me he should. There was, in fact, something almost like a twinkle in his eye.
“Then what are we to make of this?” I demanded.
“I deduce…”
“Yes?”
Again the twinkle. “That one of her father’s trips abroad, before the wedding, took him to Arizona. But of course I must make sure.” And with that; leaving me in a state that I confess approached speechlessness, my friend went back across the room.
He approached our client, who still sat wearily in her chair, and extended both his hands. When she took them, wonderingly, he raised her to her feet. “One more question,” he urged her solemnly. “The stone with which you struck down Hayden — where is it now? Surely it is not one of those still on the desk?”
“No,” the lady marveled. “I could not bear to leave it there.” Going back to the door of the lumber-room, she reached inside, and from a shelf took down a pinkish stone of irregular, angular shape, a little larger than a man’s fist. This she presented to my friend.
He turned it over once in his hands, and set it back upon the desk. A confident smile now transformed his face. “It is my happy duty to inform you,” he said at once, “that the man you knew as Hayden will never bother you again; you may depend upon it.”
Dracula paused here in his narration. “In a moment I was able to add my own assurances, for what they were worth, to those of the famed detective. That was after I had walked over to the desk and looked at the weapon for myself.
I knew then that the man struck down with it could indeed have been a vampire; nay, that he must have been. For when he died of the effects of the blow, there on the floor of the lumber-room, his body, as is commonly the case with us, had at once undergone a dissolution to dust, and less than dust. His clothing, including the letters in his pocket, had, as would be expected, disappeared as well. No humanly detectable trace was left when the fiancé opened the door a few moments later.”
“A vampire?” I protested. “But, he was struck down with a stone…”
“I was looking,” said Dracula softly, “at a choice Arizona specimen of petrified wood.”
* * * * *
FRED SABERHAGAN is the author of many popular science fiction and fantasy books including the Berserker series, Swords trilogy and Lost Swords series. A special tip of the deerstalker for the classic novels The Holmes-Dracula File and Séance for a Vampire.
“The Executioner” by Lawrence C. Connolly
Illustration by Luke Eidenschink
The Executioner
by Lawrence C. Connolly
I awoke in an overstuffed bed, in a chamber larger than the whole of my London rooms. Coal burned in the fireplace, but the main source of light came from electric bulbs in two wall-mounted sconces, each trailing a wire that snaked along the wall before vanishing into a hole beside a curtained window.
A cabinet stood open near the fireplace. A tweed suit hung inside. Beside the cabinet, on a dressing table, lay an array of personal items: shirt, collar, tie, leather case. Of these, all but the case appeared to be mine. How they and I had come to be here, I had no idea. Nor did I know where here was.
There was a darkness in me, an emptiness that suggested I had slept far longer than a single night. Yet I recalled no dreams, only the distant memories of a cliff, water, and the body of a man broken on jagged rocks. I had tracked him across the continent, seven-hundred miles to a precipice in the Swiss mountains. The chase had ended there, with him lying dead at the base of a cataract, and I remember looking down at him, watching his body grow larger, expanding in my view as if his broken remains were rising toward me. But in truth it was I who was moving, hurtling downward, still pursuing him even as he lay smashed below the falls. And then, just as the speed of my plunge reduced his body to a blur, I hit the water.
After that, I remembered nothing.
I pushed back the covers and tried getting up. My body ached, the pain worsening as I swung my legs over the side of the bed, looking down at what should have been the floor. But in that instant, it was as if I were back on the cliff, losing my grip on a jagged ledge….
I blinked.
The memory receded. The floor returned. No body beneath me now, only a pair of slippers, fleece-lined, scuffed along the toes. I put them on, feeling their familiar indentations. Like the things in the cabinet and on the table, the slippers were mine.
I found a chamber pot beneath the bed. It was chipped but clean. I knelt beside it, still trying to make sense of where I was. Then I stood and crossed the room, shuffling like a man twice my age, coming at last to the window where I pushed back the curtains and looked out at a moon-lit night. Mountains cut the horizon, jagged peaks of rock and pine. Water roared, muted by distance. Reichenbach, I thought. I’m still in Meiringen. I pressed my face to the window, looking for the falls, seeing only a curl of mist rising from a chasm halfway between me and the distant peaks. And on the edge of the precipice….