Seance for a Vampire

him...”

“Who?”

Her answer sounded like words out of a dream: “I cannot say his name. That’s been forbidden me.”

But then she moved, sliding even closer to him, and for the moment none of those objections mattered, because she was here with him. She was genuinely here. In his arms–and, for the first time, in his bed.

Again Louisa was trying to speak, but his lips crushed hers to silence. Now both of his hands, as if they had escaped from his control and taken on a life of their own, were seeking her warm body under the pale gown. And he discovered with joy, with all the certainty of dreaming, that under the gown she was wearing nothing at all.

Overpowering delight–the unmatched, unhallowed delight of her sensual embrace! Nothing mattered but this; everything else could be put right, somehow, later...

Their two bodies rolled over on the bed. To Martin Armstrong the fact seemed unutterably strange, and at the same time irresistibly arousing, that Louisa should be biting at his throat.

Later–Armstrong having at last convinced himself almost completely that he was fully awake–they were lying side by side on the cool sheets. Louisa was more silent tonight than had ever been her wont before... before...

He cleared his throat. “Last night–no, only tonight, only a few hours ago–we even went to look at the place where we thought you were buried.” Her lover was almost chuckling with amusement at the outrageous idea. “How could we ever have believed that you were dead? Of course the coffin was empty. Whoever it was we thought we had buried there... whoever it was, she had been taken away again.”

“Marty?”

“Yes?”

But then, before she said anything more, the young woman stroked the young man’s hair for a time in silence. At last she murmured: “I was buried there, Marty.”

That got him to lift his head from the pillow and turn toward her. “I don’t understand.”

“I was put there, in the family vault. You, and Father, and Mother, and becky, buried me. I can remember it, my funeral, and all the rest, like some bad dream. I was aware of what was happening. I just couldn’t move.”

“Don’t talk like that!”

But Louisa’s voice went on, dully, gently, as if the story she recounted had happened a hundred years ago. “When the boat tipped, Marty, he was there, and he carried me away. Dragging me with him while he swam at great speed underwater. I was under water until I thought I was going to drown–I was still breathing then–but at last he brought me to the surface for a while and let me have air.”

“Don’t talk like that, I said!”

Louisa paused, looking at her lover wistfully. She added: “It was later when I stopped breathing, after he had... How can I tell you what it was like? but when we were far downstream, he took me out of the water, and he drank my blood, again and again–until finally I wanted him to do it. And he gave me his blood to drink–he opened one of his own veins for me– and it was marvelous.”

“Lou!”

“Then you found me, and said prayers, and put me into the vault–andit was warm and dark and pleasant there. but twice now, he has made me leave the cemetery by night, and go back to the house, and say things to Mother and Father about some treasure.”

Martin breathed twice before he asked: “What treasure?”

“I don’t know! I say only what he orders me to say. I went into Father’s safe, and took out some jewels; but he was only angry when I brought them to him, and he threw them all over the cemetery... and then he would not let me go back to my coffin, where it was so nice and dark all day. Now I must spend the day in a place where there are many windows, but no curtains, and light comes through into the place... and it’s so hard to sleep. Oh, Marty! Hold me! Love me!”

And Martin Armstrong did his best.

Ecstatic fainting blurred and prolonged itself, in some manner, into sleep. From a dream of still being embraced tightly in Louisa’s arms, Martin Armstrong drifted slowly into wakefulness. Early summer daylight had arrived outside his window, where now all was birdsong and gray light. His body stirred slowly, full wakefulness coming only as he sat up with a jerking start. Louisa was gone, gone as if she had never existed. Martin himself was entirely naked, his nightshirt having been cast aside during the...

The dream?

Lurching out of bed, he stumbled to the bureau, where his shaving mirror was propped. It was the need to see his own face that drew him there, the feeling that some essential doubt had been created regarding his own identity.

And, indeed, the reflection of his face looked strange enough, pale and gaunt, but after a single glance he hardly looked at it. What put the seal of reality on Louisa’s life, on last night’s encounter, were the two painless little marks on his throat. As if they had been magically transferred somehow from her throat to his.

Becky was right, he realized twenty minutes later, while knotting his tie preparatory to going down to breakfast. (His collar hid one of the little marks at least, and the other was not particularly noticeable.) Louisa still lived–perhaps now more intensely than ever before–but she had been drastically altered. The woman who had come to him last night (however that trick had been managed) was no substitute for Louisa Altamont, but rather Louisa Altamont transformed. The girl to whom he, Martin Armstrong, had once proposed marriage had not become a ghost–but certainly the young woman who had wantoned in his bed last night was not the same one who had accepted his proposal of holy matrimony. Last night’s... last night’s whore (in the privacy of his own thought, he could try how that word sounded, when applied to his betrothed)... that woman could not be identified with the sunlit figure in a summer dress who last month had smiled at him so lovingly just before the rowboat tipped.

Armstrong, still staring into the mirror, shivered faintly, uncontrollably. If it were still possible, in this day and age, to believe in demons, or in possession... in, in something that could take the outward likeness of the beloved... but of course such possibilities could not exist in the same world as automobiles of forty horsepower, telephones, and progress.

Breakfast was an ordeal. Martin Armstrong, desperately seeking an explanation for last night’s experience, felt himself unable to say anything to Louisa’s parents or sister about her visit.

Why had she not stayed with him? If not in his room, why had she not remained in the house, her own home, reuniting joyously with Mother, Father, becky? Obviously it was because something terrible had happened to Louisa, something that compelled her to an awful exile.

Was it conceivable–a new and hideous idea dawned, and grew with terrible force and swiftness–could it be possible that Louisa had been stricken with some loathsome disease? but no, she had come so willingly to his bed... Louisa wouldn’t infect him deliberately, whatever else was going on. That fear declined, as rapidly as it had burgeoned.

But was it possible that she was mad?

After breakfast he announced that he was going out. Secretly he had decided that he would turn to Sherlock Holmes.

Once more, let Dr. Watson speak...

On Friday morning, Holmes and I were discussing, over bacon and eggs in our rooms at the inn, what our next move should be. At dawn, Prince Dracula, exhausted by long exposure to daylight on Thursday, had retired to his own bedroom and the occult solace of his native earth.

Ever alert against the possibility of eavesdroppers, Holmes and I conversed in low voices; bright sun and birdsong outside our window seemed to mock the terrors of the night with which we had to deal.

One subject of our discussion was the deliberate countermove made by the Russian vampire, in getting Louisa Altamont out of her original tomb and into hiding elsewhere.

Before retiring, Dracula had advised us: “Of course her new sanctuary need not be a grave in the ordinary sense. Anyplace underground, or any sheltered vessel aboveground, containing earth, will do. A buried lair need not even be connected by a clear passage to the atmosphere. between sunset and sunrise, the solid ground is generally permeable to members of my race moving in mist-form.”

Holmes and I, in planning our efforts to discover the new hiding place where Kulakov must have commanded or forced his fledgling vampire to make her nest, began with the assumption that Louisa’s new place of concealment