The Holmes-Dracula File

gesture. 'This does not look like my idea of Scotland Yard.'

'No more am I of the official police. Nevertheless you will be well advised to answer my questions. What of Frau Grafenstein?'

'What of her?'

My foe took a half-step toward me, righteous anger rising in his voice. 'Do you still think you can play games with me? I tell you I know very much—that you killed her, and that you drank her blood.' He paused; when he went on, his voice was no longer impetuous, but inexorable. 'I know, also, that no prison built can hold you for trial or execution. Therefore I stand here as your sole judge and jury—it is fortunate that there is probably no other man in England so well qualified to do so.'

I took in breath to make a sigh. 'Very well—no more games.' As I spoke I tested the fingers of my wounded arm, and was gratified to find them movable. Expected pain came with the effort, but not the wetness of fresh bleeding. As a rule we heal with great rapidity even when hurt by wood, if the damage be not immediately fatal and the weapon not held in the wound. 'I killed the woman because she had attempted to kill me. Also, I was in need.'

'Of—?'

'Of nourishment, of course, as well as of revenge. Is there not some old British saying, about killing two birds with one stone? I really hope that she was not a friend of yours.'

'Scarcely that.' He paused to study me in silence, his brows knitted with thought. There was something terribly vital he wanted to say to me—perhaps to ask—but he had not yet decided how.

I gave him half a minute, then interrupted his pregnant silence. 'And how is Sally Craddock? I sent her to your police to keep her safe.'

A shadow crossed Holmes' face. 'I regret very much, Count, that the girl is dead.'

'Ah. I should have brought her to you, instead of to the police, for safekeeping.'

Holmes looked at me strangely. 'The thing that drove her running, screaming, to where her enemies could reach her—was the sight of my face, Count. Or should I say, our face?'

'I do not understand.' But then I did, even as I spoke, and suddenly much was clear to me. For example: Watson, rushing to my aid in that strange room filled with smoke and noise. And again: Matthews, in the cellar, sneering Mr. Great Detective.

'Ah, yes,' I answered. 'As you doubtless understand, I have not been permitted the luxury of mirrors for some centuries. But the resemblance is actually that close?' My foe was nodding. 'So it must be. And that means that there is some… ah.'

'Family relationship—unquestionably.' We had come to the nub of what was bothering Holmes. 'What remains to be determined is its exact degree.'

The aim of his revolver had never wavered in the slightest, and he had already proven his marksmanship and iron nerve; one false twitch on my part, I knew, and the great true death would greet me in that room. I may have already mentioned somewhere in these pages that I am—though not all vampires are, by any means—immune to fear, having exhausted at a tender age my whole life's allotment of that arguably useful lading. Yet honor and love of life alike forbade me to perish without a struggle.

'Mr. Holmes, my first visit to England took place but six years ago. The relationship you propose—well, doubtless it exists, since you are so certain of it. But it cannot be very close.'

'The date of your first visit to England is quite irrelevant.' Holmes paused again, then spoke distinctly. 'My parents traveled on the Continent, in the year preceding my birth. To my certain knowledge, my mother was long unfaithful to my father; and it is equally certain that one of her paramours was of your race.'

'My race, sir, is the human race.'

'I think you know what I mean, Count.' Holmes considered for a moment. 'I have—or had; I do not know if he is still alive—a twin brother, vampire from his beginnings. You will pardon me for saying I felt an inexpressible relief on finding your trunk and thus demonstrating to my own satisfaction that you, the killer of the woman on the docks, could not be him. Since my childhood I have loathed and despised all that he stood for. All the things of the vampire world, that haunted my own early years like some—some nightmare made real. All that you are and stand for, indeed.'

'Indeed.'

'Indeed.' And with that the vanishingly faint humor of these unplanned repetitions occurred, I think, to both of us. Not that either of us went so far as to smile, but the air had been cleared, and now something seemed to lighten in it.

'Do you mind if I sit down?' I asked. 'Please do. But keep your hands in sight.' I did, perching on my trunk. 'I think that I begin to understand,' I said. As a general rule, the vampire race (I still dislike that term, but there does not seem to be a better) gains members only by adoption, through initiation, rather like a hard-core political party or a religious order. A few of us, as in my own rare case, become what we are by making, as breathing human beings, a transcendent refusal to die, a truly heroic act of will. And there is one other road to the world of the nosferatu, which I had better digress for a moment to explain. It had been known to happen that a normally breathing woman becomes pregnant (in the traditional breathing way) while concurrently carrying on an affair with a male vampire. To such a woman, twins may be born, either fraternal or apparently identical. One of the twins in these cases is firmly committed to breathing. The other will draw air to cry with when he—or she—is spanked, but is in essence nosferatu from the womb.

But how, I hear a reader asking, how can hereditary characteristics such as facial appearance be passed on through love-making in the vampire style? I answer that, scientists are lately of the opinion that the whole hereditary blueprint is contained in each and every living cell of the body; that living body cells are contained in the blood; and that for a vampire's lover to drink from a vampire's veins is as traditional a part of their intercourse as is the reverse.

'Yes, Mr. Holmes, I see,' I said to him. 'And the year of your parents' travel on the Continent was—?'

'It was during the summer of 1853.' I cast my memory back, or tried to. After more than four centuries of life, sometimes only the very earliest and very latest events are easy to disentangle. 'That was only a few months before the outbreak of the Crimean War, was it not? Of course. In my homeland, also, that was a troublous time. And where precisely did your parents travel?'

'I should prefer that you first tell me where you were that summer.'

I took thought. Was he likely to accept my unsupported word? It would have been possible, perhaps, for a breathing man of genius and determination to have established something of my biography through historical research, provided he knew where to look; and so I might be caught out in a lie. (Had I known Holmes then, I would of course have replaced that 'might' in my thoughts with something considerably stronger.) In any case, the situation seemed to demand a response on a higher level than routine falsehood. True, I had begun by lying to this man, in implying that I bore him no ill-will for trapping me and shooting me, but now that denial was becoming true. In fact I had already grown intensely interested in the relationship between us, and wanted to learn the truth of it, however dangerous the truth might be. If I was not the vampire lover of Holmes' mother, then surely someone closely related to me was—how else could the uncanny resemblance between us be explained?

I drew in breath for speech, and told the truth. 'I went no farther west than Budapest that year. And I do not remember meeting a Mrs. Holmes at all.'

A strange constellation of emotions struggled in his face for dominance. 'You would remember?' The words were half a plea and half a fierce command.

She would have been a remarkable woman, I felt sure. 'I am quite positive I would.'

Now at last I could detect a hint of relaxation in Holmes' posture. 'That year,' he said, 'my mother went no farther east than Switzerland.' His hand holding the gun had actually begun to tremble, not with tension but with its release.

I allowed myself another smile. 'Then, my dear sir, much as I would like to be able to urge some close family connection upon you now, it would appear I cannot do so.' Actually, I was not at all eager to have Holmes think me a near relative. Most murders, as we know, are committed within the circle of friends and especially of family, and the man holding the gun was obviously not pleased by the thought that he and I were bound by ties of blood.

'As to our remarkable resemblance,' I went on, 'I can only surmise that it is the result of some distant relationship—how shall I put it?—breeding true?' And even in that moment, by the Beard of Allah even as I spoke, it came to me! My brother Radu, the one they called the Handsome in his breathing days—he