ST. PETERSBURG–A Wireless Telegraph station has been established at Port Arthur, with the object of organizing regular telegraphic communication with Russian warships...
I cast my newspaper aside. Watson’s had now collapsed into a kind of tent, behind which he was snoring. Holmes came into the room shortly, and I, Dracula, began to argue with him, because I still felt real doubts as to whether Holmes’s kidnapper should be regarded as the only villain in the piece. For all we knew, young Louisa Altamont might have yielded willingly to her fanged seducer, even before the boating “accident”—and that traumatic event, if carefully investigated, might bear some different interpretation.
My cousin the detective did not care much for my tentative hypothesis, though he conceded to me that it was entirely possible that a treasure
Presently abandoning the argument, which had never been very intense, I announced my immediate intentions, or some of them anyway, and nipped out of doors. Shifting quickly to bat-form under cover of the blessed night, I made my second visit in a few hours to Sarah Kirkaldy, who I must confess was beginning to seem more and more attractive. Tut-tut, you say. With brother Abraham still laid out in his coffin in the parlor downstairs?
Actually, I refrained from any romantic endeavors on that night. I found Sarah keeping vigil by the coffin. For a while, I peered in through a window at this touching scene, then flew round the house, making an estimate of its security, before deciding that my seduction of Sarah had better wait. Maybe at least until tomorrow night.
While looking in the parlor window I also observed, briefly and more chastely, Rebecca Altamont, who like a good girl was reading another book–I could not make out the title–and keeping bereaved Sarah company in her deathwatch. That dutiful young woman was spending most of her time with her parents now, trying to shield them from further hurt.
I thought that the younger Miss Altamont, too, stood at some risk from her family’s mad enemy. I decided that tomorrow Mr. Prince must find an opportunity to warn becky, as he had already warned Sarah, of the dangers of taking the night air unaccompanied. Of course rebellious becky, if she knew Mr. Prince to be secretly associated with Mr. Holmes, would probably spurn the warning.
Even postponed for one more night, such early wooing would have to be classifed as very impetuous. but certainly there was good reason not to leave Sarah unattended. I would go to her, when I went again, with the genuinely altruistic motive of offering protective advice, and real protection.
Readily enough I imagined myself the scene that might take place upon my finding her in her room, restless and unable to sleep...
At my blackguardly intrusion, her gasp, of outrage mixed with other things. “Where did ye coom from?”
“You called me, Sarah.”
“I didna!” Pulling the bedclothes up ever more tightly under her chin. but her outrage was hollow.
“Perhaps it was your beauty alone that called... with such a voice that I was quite unable to resist.”
Well, soon enough I would probably play out that scene, or one much like it, in reality. I wondered whether my new potential conquest had been in communication with our chief foe since the former disastrous seance. Or whether this Count Kulakov–if that was really his name–his mind wandering as Cousin Sherlock said it did, or else focused sharply on revenge, had forgotten about Sarah and her dead brother for a time. A blessing for them if it were so–but one cannot always rely on blessings.
When I, Dracula, felt that I had done all that could reasonably be done to enhance Sarah’s security, and that of the household in general, I flew back to rejoin Cousin Sherlock and the worthy Watson at the inn. En route I actually passed (without, of course, being noticed) Armstrong in his roaring Mercedes, bound for the same goal. On reaching the Saracen’s Head I looked in at the window of Inspector Merivale’s room, where a steady snore informed me that the poor, tired man had retired early.
Gathered at our improvised headquarters, we felt reasonably certain that the last of the regular parties sent out to search for Holmes had retired or been recalled from the field, and as soon as Armstrong had rejoined us we equipped ourselves as best we could for the effort that lay ahead. The necessary materials included some tools suitable for breaking and entering. Even I might have trouble entering this tomb without them.
Let Watson tell the tale again.
Armstrong was familiar with the village and its environs, and was able to provide us with some tools. As we left the inn, the night was mostly cloudy, with little moon, which suited our purposes admirably.
In response to a question from Holmes, I assured him that I had indeed come equipped with my old service revolver.
“And wooden bullets?”
With some dignity I was able to reply that such necessities had not been forgotten.
Armstrong looked from one of us to the other as if quite convinced that we were both mad.
(Holmes told me he had considered waiting, tactfully, until Dracula was absent on some errand, to equip himself and me with implements intended for an even grimmer purpose: a wooden stake and large hammer. but Dracula would accept the need for such implements if tonight’s investigation indeed led us to the resting place of the vampire rapist and murderer, and if the latter should, by some good fortune, be in his coffin. At any rate, it would be hard indeed to conceal from the prince any sizable objects that we were carrying.)
Our party was fully assembled near midnight. The four of us set out for the cemetery secretly; we now had a rented carriage big enough to hold us all, and Dracula himself harnessed our horses without disturbing the stable boy.
Young Martin Armstrong’s impatience with the general failure to find any clue to the whereabouts of the living Louisa was reaching a dangerous level, nearing the point of frenzy. Despairing of ever obtaining official permission, he was ready to consider a rough-and-ready exhumation of the occupant of Louisa’s tomb as one way of making progress.
He mentioned that he had been planning his own independent expedition along that line, but he joined forces with us gratefully. He understood, he said, the desirability of having other witnesses present besides himself when the tomb was opened.
Though the night was very dark, so that I supposed even the horses could scarcely see the road, Dracula drove the carriage without lights, and without apparent difficulty. In about twenty minutes we were dismounting, leaving the horses and the lightless vehicle at a little distance from the burial ground. before we left the animals, which seemed skittish, Dracula soothed them somehow, and they started to crop the grass.
An owl flew hooting overhead as we once more approached the Altamont family mausoleum, its walls pale in the garish light of our electric torches. The sweet honeysuckle vine was now marked, somewhat to my surprise, by clustered, night-blooming, purple-white flowers. I stared intently and suspiciously at a small shape flying near these, thinking about bats, until Dracula assured me it was only a nightfeeding hawk moth, by which these flowers were mostly pollinated.
I held a small electric torch, and by its light Holmes needed only a moment or two to pick the old lock of the iron grating. The fastening of the inner door to the mausoleum yielded almost as quickly to his skilled fingers. The process of opening these barriers was silent; all the locks and hinges had been oiled and repaired less than a month ago, at the time of Louisa’s funeral.
Meanwhile Mr. Prince stood back a little, watching silently and with every appearance of tranquility, first with his hands in his pockets, then with his arms folded under his short cabman’s cape. He might have been listening to the ordinary sounds of the night–insects, an owl, the murmur of the nearby stream–but I felt mortally certain that he was on guard, in a way that we could never be, against any attack by our chief adversary.
Not far away was the place where Abraham Kirkaldy was to be buried–by the kind charity of the Altamonts, put under the soil in a simple grave. Tonight the open pit, edged by its pile of fresh earth, yawned at us, awaiting its tenant, and when we shone our lights in that direction provided us with an ominous reminder of mortality.
Having all, or most of us, crowded into the little building, we now turned our attention to the small crypt in the wall where almost a month ago Louisa’s body had been laid to rest. A small brass plate on the door confirmed the exact niche. Another door to be opened, and the casket was exposed. There was, as was more commonly the case a few years ago, a double coffin, the inner vessel of lead and hermetically sealed.
Dracula, resting one hand on the outer casing, turned his head and assured us silently, with a slight shake of
