"Now the servants will leave us alone," Lucy said to me in a voice rapidly growing vague and distant. "For I have drugged the wine… oh, Vlad, are you my death? Your face is sometimes… if you are indeed death, then I must plead with you. Whoever you are… my mother's dead, but I'm too young. I'm to be married in September."
"Lie still now. I think that you are very ill." Giving Lucy a quick examination, I noted the bandaged incisions on the inside of each arm at the elbow. "Who is your doctor, and for what has he been treating you?"
"There are two: Dr. Van Helsing, of Amsterdam, and Dr. Seward."
I looked up sharply at that first name; I had heard it once before, from a vampire of my acquaintance. "And who is Dr. Seward?"
"He is about thirty, and very nice. In fact…" She paused. "He is superintendent of a lunatic asylum in Purfleet."
My mind raced, seeking understanding. But there is no understanding coincidence, or the imitation thereof by fate. "And their treatments? What are these little wounds? Surely they do not bleed you, in this day and age?"
"Ah, Vlad, I do not know. The doctors are kindly, and they mean well, I am sure. But they tell me nothing, and I am too ill to argue with them and insist on knowing." After a gasping pause, during which I tightened the bandage once more on her arm, she went on: "They bring me garlic flowers and bulbs. And three times now I have been drugged, and the doctor has performed some-some operation whose nature I do not fully understand."
"Three times. Damnable. Which doctor operates?"
"Dr. Van Helsing, I think. I feel so safe when he is with me. But still…" She had lost the strength for speech. I bent and laid my ear against her breast, and liked not the laborious pumping sounds of the machineries of her body. By modern standards I am certainly no qualified physician, but then neither would many of those be who earned their bread as such during the nineteenth century.
Her eyes were on mine, trusting, praying.
"Lucy. Be clear, lightbearing girl. Be clear now in your thoughts. There is a most momentous decision that we may have to make tonight." And I caressed the golden beauty of her hair. In four hundred years of war and peace I had seen death come to many, and I thought her unlikely to survive the night. Unless…
"Vlad, help me, save me. Arthur is not here, and I fear the others are killing me with what they do." A spasm of fear had temporarily renewed her energy. "Don't let me die." And Lucy was seized with sudden nausea, and retched feebly over the side of the bed. There was an acid smell but little vomitus. "Hold me, Vlad!"
Yet I did not pull her into an embrace, but straightened and stood upright beside the bed. Belowstairs, all sounds of the maids' movements had ceased, save for the stertorous breathing of their four pairs of lungs; for all intents and purposes, Lucy and I were in the house alone. There was a little time, at least, in which to plan and think. Perhaps no more than a little; she might well die, I thought, before a long discussion could be held.
"Lucy. Death will come soon or late to all of us. And it is not the worst thing in the world, though full well I know how frightening it can sometimes be."
"No, no!" Terror gave her a terrible, momentary energy, and her nails tried to bite at my arm. "Save me, Vlad! Do something. I see in your eyes that there is something you can do."
"Lucy, there is one way in which I can-not cancel your death, for I am not God-but put it off, for some indefinite time. But to take this road will mean a great change in your life. Greater than you can possibly imagine now."
"Only save me, Vlad, I beg of you. I do not want to die!" I cannot describe the emotion that was in her failing voice as she uttered these words.
I lifted her weightless-seeming body from the bed; in shifting her slightly in my arms, so that the whiteness of her throat where I had left my marks before was tautly exposed, I also turned my own body slightly. There was a mirror hung on the wall across the room, and inside its gilt frame Lucy's unsupported body hung, her nightdress gathered up at the knees and back by the pressure of invisible arms. Then I bent down my head…
When I had taken something of her blood it was time to give her to drink deeply of mine. I undid the clothing over my own heart and tore the flesh there with one of my own talonlike fingernails-no other cutting tool can do the job so well-and quickly pressed Lucy's mouth against my breast as if she were a suckling babe and I a crooning nurse.
As soon as we were done with exchanging a considerable quantity of blood I wiped her pretty lips and put her back into bed, having done all that I could do. At the moment she was still nearly comatose, but I knew now that she would not die before the night was out, at least not of unmatched blood put straight into her veins. I thought she was no longer likely to die at all, in the near future. It was still quite probable that she would soon be put into her grave, but as we know, that is not quite the same.
"Lucy," I said softly, and extended my hand toward her still figure on the bed. She took it and arose, although her eyes stayed shut until she came gracefully to her feet. Then they opened. Ah, changed… Van Helsing would be sure to see it, and what might he do then?
But I had come to London on my own affairs, and not to fight him for this woman. She meant very little to me, except that she had called on me for help, which I had now given as best I could.
"Lucy, you will not die tonight. You may feel ill. But if they come to you tomorrow, to drug you and transfuse you once again, I would advise you to refuse them."
"But they never ask." Change in the voice, too, already; it was at once a little livelier, and more remote.
"Insist that this Arthur of yours be called, if he will help you take a stand against them. Do you understand? They are putting the blood of other people into your veins. I suppose they do mean well, but what they were doing had brought you to the point of death."
"But, Vlad… I feel stronger now. I believe that you have saved me."
"And so I have, my dear, for the present. Snatched you from death, put back the Day of Judgment for you. Not many men can truthfully claim such power. It was what you wanted from me." I sighed. The warning I was about to attempt would not, in my opinion, do much good. New-made vampires must find their way at first by instinct, much as newborn children do.
I went on: "You may at some time soon fall into-another coma. If you allow them to give you another transfusion I would say this is quite likely. And if you fall into this coma you are going to wake from it in circumstances that will be at first quite hard to understand; but be of good cheer and understanding will come." The first emergence from one's grave is a unique experience indeed.
"I will be of good cheer, Vlad. Oh, Vlad, tell me again that I will not die."
"You will not die." It was a lie, such as one gives the wounded after battle sometimes. A lie, because I did not know what Van Helsing might decide to do with her now that she had changed; and all must die the true death sometime. Earlier, when the great decision had still been hers to make, I had been as truthful with her as I could be in the small time we had. Now there were only small but troublesome decisions left and I judged it better to be simply soothing.
"Now, my dear. Eventually the women you have so cleverly drugged below are going to awake, and also other people can be expected to enter this house when morning comes. There is much here that will require explaining." I sighed; there were my fresh fang marks on her throat, about which nothing could be done.
As I spoke I was stroking Lucy's bare arm, and her forehead, to strengthen her with suggestion for the tasks ahead. There was the broken window to be accounted for, and the wolf outside, whose howls the maids had heard and whose role in the night's events might, for all I knew, not yet be over. There was the mother, dead of heart failure as unexpected by Lucy as it was by me; and there were the maids, who would certainly tell any investigators of their drugged sleep, even if they should rouse from it before anyone else had entered the house.