Seance for a Vampire d-8, page 25
part #8 of Dracula Series
So far, the doors in this part of the hall had fortunately remained closed. Still, we could not remain indefinitely where we were, nor could we reach the stairway without passing directly in front of the large alcove where Rasputin and Kulakov were having their strange confrontation. I now observed that the alcove also contained some nameless lady of the Russian nobility, whose elegantly gowned form was lying senseless upon a bearskin rug. both of the men ignored her completely. I could see her stir at intervals, a movement suggesting that at any moment she might regain sufficient consciousness to complicate our situation even further.
In this awkward situation, Holmes and I exchanged whispered comments. Neither of us could understand what might have happened to Prince Dracula, who had supposedly been on guard in the very alcove where Kulakov and the strange-looking peasant were now conversing.
We were forced to the conclusion that in one way or another, the prince must have been put at least temporarily out of action.
Within a few moments–though the time seemed vastly longer– Holmes succeeded in somehow positively identifying a figure visible through a distant window, silhouetted against a brightening eastern sky. It appeared that our ally was now standing, strangely motionless and facing outward, upon a balcony on the next floor up. If Kulakov and his companion were aware that anyone was on the balcony, they paid that motionless figure no attention.
Shaking my head, I whispered: “What shall we do? Dracula stands like one mesmerized.”
“That must be it!”
And we realized further that the rising sun, due to appear in a few minutes, must destroy our comrade in arms. The balcony faced the east, where the orb of day would soon appear out of the endless bulk of enigmatic Asia.
Clearly we could not allow this, if there was any way to prevent it, and Holmes whispered as much to me. Hastily we worked out a plan between us. While I remained with our young charge, supporting her, still dazed and uncooperative, on her feet, Holmes walked boldly forward–there was no other way to reach the stair or climb to the level of the balcony where the prince stood so serenely poised to watch the sunrise.
To judge by the growing brightness of the eastern sky, dawn could not be more than a minute or two away–the sun never goes very far below St. Petersburg’s horizon at this season of the year. And today, for once, the morning promised to be cloudless.
The two men in the alcove at the end of the hall looked up sharply as Holmes approached. but his walk had altered, become the light, obsequious tread of a servant, and it must have seemed to them that a dark-clad footman or waiter had gone by with averted face.
Evidently Kulakov had not recognized his own former prisoner. Still, something about the briskly moving figure apparently jarred the former pirate into suspicions regarding his present hostage. Mumbling inaudibly, moving slowly at first, he started out of the alcove–glanced up the stair after Holmes, shook his head as if in doubt–then turned again, proceeding straight down the central hallway in the direction of the room where Miss Altamont had been confined. by good fortune, he had chosen the other branch of corridor from the one where she and I were waiting.
My opportunity, as I saw it, had come, and I did my best to take advantage of it. Quickly I resumed my efforts to persuade Rebecca to walk along the corridor toward the stairs. My urging had little effect on the girl, who remained no more than half-conscious. After a moment, I picked her up bodily in my arms and strode along.
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.”
Holmes went on to recount how the missing girl, still fully clothed in the powerful grip of her naked captor, was carried swiftly and silently away downstream, to where a rusted, moss-grown iron fence marked the border of the cemetery.
There Louisa had been brought out of the water, and there her wet garments were torn back from her throat, and the vampire’s fangs pierced her white skin.
“But even that was not the worst. She was compelled to drink her attacker’s blood.” There was a shuddering reaction among the listeners. “With a long nail Kulakov opened the skin on his own chest, and forced her mouth to that place.”
After that, Louisa, bound as Holmes was later bound, had been hidden for some hours in the same secret crypt from which Holmes was later rescued. There Kulakov again attacked her repeatedly, so that in a matter of hours, she was well along in the transformation from breathing human to vampire.
That transformation was irreversible by the next morning, when Kulakov left the girl’s body on the riverbank, to be discovered by the first searchers who came that way after dawn.
“Had he a conscious motive in so doing? I am inclined to the belief that he did not. It seems probable that one of Kulakov’s periodic lapses of purpose, even of coherent thought, overcame him there on the riverbank at dawn. He had achieved a great revenge upon the Altamonts, but there was no ultimate satisfaction in this deed, and he was as far as ever from recovering the treasure.
“We come now to the treasure–a much happier subject.”
Our little circle of listeners heartily agreed with that.
Holmes went on: “The key, of course, lies in what Kulakov– during the last minutes of his life–confessed to the man who was endeavoring to heal him–about what happened in 1765, on the morning after Kulakov was hanged.
Holmes went on to describe the scene, as it must have taken place in the Angel Inn: “...Kulakov, in his confused state, still looking for his treasure and having no success, had heard the woman’s despairing cries and had come back from the adjoining room.
“Doll had put on her clothes again. Gibbering and pleading in her terror, she tried to bargain with him. She spoke now in her native language, which Kulakov had learned to understand. She told the Russian that she knew where the stolen ornaments were hidden, and that she would give them all to him in exchange for only a few pounds of her native earth.
“Somewhere among the hundreds of ships in the great port, which had brought in by accident soil, plants, vermin from the farthest reaches of the globe–somewhere among all those far-traveled hulls, surely, surely there must be one whose cargo or bilge or windblown planking contained a few pounds, a few handfuls even, of that stuff more precious now to her than any gems or lustrous metal.
“The Russian, with his understanding clouded by the multiple stresses of strangulation and rebirth, heard her out. Then he had a question of his own. He whispered it in English:’Where are the jewels? They are not here.’
“‘Are you not listen to me? I tell you where the treasure is, I swear, when you have help me find the soil I need. The jewels are not here. but they are all safe, in place you know, where you can get them!’
“‘I know.’ The pirate looked down at the red mess on the floor. ‘He gave them to his brother, who has them at his country estate, somewhere out of town. His brother, who helped him to betray me.’
“In near despair the woman clutched his arm, her long nails digging in, a grip that might well have crushed the bones of any breathing man. Once more she spoke in her own language.’Will you not listen to me, Kulakov? I need my earth! By all the gods of my homeland–by whatever gods you pray to in your Muscovy–I swear that if you help me find the earth that I must have, the treasure shall all be yours!’
“Indeed,” continued Holmes, “Doll told the truth in saying that she knew where the jewels were hidden–because she had put them there herself!”
There was a sensation among the listeners.
Holmes went on. “Let us try to put ourselves in this woman’s place. She had been in England for only a few days, and was still almost totally unfamiliar with the metropolis in which she found herself. When Kulakov, seeking vengeance, entered the room at the Angel Inn, she did not wish to oppose him directly in his murderous rage.
“Seeing that her patron and lover, Altamont, was doomed, Doll prudently gathered up the treasure that he had secreted in the next room and carried it to a certain place she had seen and remembered. It was a place from which she could easily retrieve the jewels, at any time between sunset and dawn, while they remained secure from accidental discovery by any of London’s swarming, breathing folk.
“It was even possible to theorize that Kulakov in a daze might have put the treasure in that place himself, and then have forgotten the act. but if we accept the scene in the Angel Inn as factual, then the correct explanation must be something else.
“Let us consider carefully what the doomed woman actually said to Kulakov when she was pleading for his assistance. According to the recent testimony of Kulakov himself, while hypnotized, her words were these:
“‘The jewels are not here. but they are all safe in a place you know, where you can get them.’
“On hearing this, Kulakov, who was already convinced that Peter Altamont had the treasure, assumed that Doll meant the family estate in the country–Norberton House. but there are several reasons why that could not have been her meaning, assuming she spoke the truth.
“To begin with, Norberton House was hardly a place known to Kulakov–he had heard it mentioned, but that was all. Nor had Doll ever been there. Again, if Doll spoke the truth, all the pieces of treasure, her own bracelet included, must be together–but we know now that her bracelet had been on her arm, in London, only minutes before she began to plead with Kulakov for help.
“Norberton House is hours distant from London by modern train. Not even the speed of vampire flight would have allowed Doll to carry the jewels there and return to the Angel Inn in the time allowed.
“If any further proof is needed, consider: Had Peter Altamont ever come into possession of the jewels, he would certainly have kept them. A sudden increase in his family’s wealth, dating from that time, would now be discoverable by a thorough search of the historical records–which it is not.”
There was a murmur of agreement round our little circle.
Holmes went on. “We are faced with the inescapable conclusion that Peter Altamont never had the treasure; that Ambrose, who betrayed Kulakov, had given Doll one trinket and kept the others with him in London, until he was killed. And that immediately after his death, Doll, who must have discovered where the things were hidden, spirited them away to what she must have considered a safe hiding place, within a mile or so at most of the Angel Inn.”
There was a murmur of comment around our circle.
Holmes resumed: “Remember, she told Kulakov:’It is a place you know.’ but at that time the Russian pirate had even less familiarity with England than she did. What places did she know in London, of which she could be certain that they were known to the Russian as well?”
