The Dracula Tape

As I say, my journey, to the Black Sea port was uneventful. My Szgany handed me over to my agent, Petrof Skinsky, and he in turn to the good Herr Leutner, with whom I had been in correspondence but who was too modern a man to ever have credited tales of nosferatu if they had reached his ears. Of Skinsky I was not so sure; and I will have a little more to tell you about him later.

So Leutner took faithful charge of my fifty large boxes of earth, and saw to it that they were loaded aboard ship, never dreaming that the consignor himself was voyaging along, his luggage of money and spare clothes packed in a sturdy traveling bag beneath him in the soil. I was shipped aboard the schooner Demeter, bound for Whitby, which is, as some of my hearers may not know, on the Yorkshire coast about three hundred kilometers north of London.

I had ridden some river-going craft before but the Demeter's was my first sea voyage. Emerging from my box on the first night out-the box I happened to be in had been stowed beneath several others, but between sunset and dawn I can pass if I wish through a crack narrower than a knifeblade-I walked in man-shape up from the hold, and attained the deck by sliding through the watertight sealing of a hatch. In the comforting dark of night I could perceive a mass of land on the horizon to our starboard; the sea around was otherwise clear to the horizon, and a fresh east wind blew from astern. There were three other men on deck, and I did not long remain. By careful reconnoitering during those first nights of the voyage, I ascertained that there were nine men in all on board besides myself, five Russian sailors, a Russian captain and second mate, and the first mate and the cook, who were both Romanian.

Also I used my senses diligently, especially during the hours of darkness, to learn what I could of this new world of the sea. As you no doubt realize, I have some command of wind and weather, and had naturally considered using these powers to facilitate my journey. The difficulty, as I soon came to understand, was that although I was able to remember our course very well as we traversed each part of it in turn-we vampires having what I suppose would now be called an inertial guidance system, or something akin to one-I had not the slightest feel for where we should be going, which way to tell the wind to push. I had of course the pure intellectual knowledge that my destination's name was England, and that it was to be reached by a roundabout passage through the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. But this knowledge would be of small help in trying to speed the ship on its way, and so I was content to observe and try to learn.

Five days out of port we reached the Bosporus, and a day later we passed through the Dardanelles and entered the Mediterranean. It was at about this point, as I now suspect, that the first mate began to be aware of my nocturnal wanderings. I do not believe that he had actually seen me yet, but by means of the marginal perceptions that breathing humans sometimes have he came somehow to know that a tenth presence inhabited the ship after nightfall; that now a plank creaked slightly beneath an unfamiliar tread; that again there was no shadow on the moonlit deck just where a shadow should have lain, and that darkness lay instead just where the moonbeams should have fallen clear.

Sailors are a superstitious lot; I had not realized before how true this truism was. And the mate was a man, as I now suppose, abnormally sensitive to the abnormal; on July fourteenth, the eighth day of our voyage, the men having evidently caught the contagion of fear from the first mate, one of them disputed him about something and was struck. Whether the quarrel was about an apparition in the night or something totally unrelated I do not know, as it took place in daylight when I was snug below and my only knowledge of it is from my enemies' records.

These records also make the following night, that of July fifteenth to sixteenth, as the first on which I was actually seen by any of the crew. As the captain duly entered in his log, one of the seamen, 'awestruck,' reported watching 'a tall thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward, and disappear.' I had grown careless, and even a little carelessness is always bad.

On that night I still had no suspicion that my presence aboard was creating a stir, but when I roused at the following sunset I became aware that everything in the hold around me had been disarranged. My boxes were all moved at least slightly from their original positions, and the ballast of silver sand had been much trampled on.

There was no sign of any leak or other nautical emergency which would have required the crew to do so much labor in the hold, nor had I the feeling that a storm had come and gone. What then? The evidence suggested to me that the hold had been searched, though fortunately not with the thoroughness that would have been necessary to dig me from my earth.

The crew then, or some of them, probably suspected that something was amiss. But having searched around me once, they were not likely to search the hold again without good cause; so I thought, at any rate, and determined to lay low for a night or two. Thus I found out only later that one of the seamen had disappeared on the night of July fifteenth to sixteenth, an important fact which I would have learned sooner had I not stayed so prudently within my snug, attractive box.

Ah, my homes of earth! Good Transylvanian soil, consecrated by humble and worthy priests so long ago as my familial burying ground. Sometimes I wonder whether the strength I draw from my own earth is not purely a matter of psychology. But the fact is that nowhere else can I truly rest, and without true rest neither breathing man nor vampire can long survive. Bits of my ancestors' bones are in my earth, unrecognizable in their humility, along with an occasional patient worm or insect, timid creatures frightened alike of me or you, of anything that moves. Fragments of roots of sturdy trees, and compost of their leaves, and maybe here and there a particle of hidden Walachian gold, over which a pinhead of blue flame will burn whenever St. George's Eve comes round. Good black earth that yet does not unduly stain the clothes. It is only sliding about or rubbing in it that produces smudges, and my lying down to sleep is very still and my getting up is as a rule without the disturbing of a single clod. In England or anywhere else I would have been lost without the good earth of my homeland, as I knew and my enemies came to know full well. In time I hoped to make the native soil of England hospitable to me as well…

But to the Demeter again. She went plowing into the rough weather she met in the western Mediterranean, her first mate gone violently but so far unobtrusively insane with brooding on his fears. And I was snugged down prudently-I have a quite irrational dislike of that virtuous word-in my coffin, where I could be of no help to my own cause.

How was that first sailor, that I have mentioned, lost? By some sheer accident, I would surmise. He had evidently been relieved on watch, during the night, then somehow had fallen overboard before he got back to his bunk. It happens. But there was the brooding mate, needing just this mysterious tragedy to send him over the rails of his own mind, into the vasty deep of lunacy. The mate went mad-as the captain himself later thought probable- and the mate was from somewhere about my own land, remember, and infected with its endemic terrors. He must have been mad enough to see nosferatu in every face, especially in the face of any man who approached him alone on deck at night. Then whiss! he would out with his knife and strike, and throw his victim overboard. It was all in an insane kind of self-defense, you understand. As if his knife could have done him much good against the real thing; but then I suppose the mate was a half-educated man at best, from the back country somewhere, and his fears were much greater than his knowledge of the subject.

During the remainder of July he disposed of four more of his shipmates in this wise, and the survivors of the now short-handed crew went staggering in fatigued despair about their duties, unable to imagine what evil fate had come upon their voyage. We had been at sea nearly a month before I again emerged from concealment. Though of course I did not at first realize the situation, there were by this time only the captain and the first mate and two sailors left to work the ship, the rest having died one by one in darkness.

The schooner had now passed Gibraltar, traversed the Bay of Biscay, and was nearing England.

On the night of August second I came on deck to find the foredeck deserted, and as a landlubber did not realize at first what a grave sign this was to meet upon a foggy night. I enjoy the fog and dark, and was in the bows drinking it in, lost in some fatuous dream of England as I imagined it: myself lord of some sunlit manor where no one minded that the lord did not go out by day, a pair of those great dogs that the English painters could execute so well sitting in attendance on me as I gazed into my fire… or squinted off across my meadows, perhaps… some buxom Saxon wench laboring there, gathering hay, the muscles showing rounded in her arms, and the veins in her throat beneath the suntanned skin…

The mate was too near before I heard him, and his coming was too swift, for me to get out of his way entirely-small wonder that none of the breathing men he crept upon in the same way survived. His keen knife tore at my clothes, but passed through my flesh as through a shadow, leaving no damage behind but only searing pain. In a moment I had melded myself into the fog. Cursing my own innocent foolishness, I passed belowdecks, where I waited in bat-form for an outcry, for searchers bearing torches and weapons in their trembling fists. None came during the night.