All the signs of age had disappeared, subsumed in a glorious and vital youth.
Jerry, his body no longer physically pinned, but his mind effectively paralyzed, was compelled to watch while his companion's life was drained away, his body efficiently emptied of blood. All he could think of was that his own turn would be next…
But the blood of one stout man had evidently been sufficient to take the edge off decades of hunger.
When the mouth of the thing from the coffin was no longer too busy taking nourishment to speak, there issued in a whispery rasp from its dry lips elegant words, sentences, in a French that was highly literate but almost barbarous in its antiquity. When Jerry only stared with lack of comprehension, the French was followed by a kind of English closer to the speech of Shakespeare than to that of the wretch who had come intruding with his shovel.
The voice grew more dry and ghastly with every word it uttered.
'Uhh…'
Radu, standing now, free of the last coffin-fragment, methodically hand-scooped earth to bury the ghastly, unrecognizable remains of Smith at the bottom of the hole from which his own breathless yet undying body had so recently emerged.
Then, still standing up to his ragged knees in loosely piled dirt, he turned to the other graverobber. Jerry was considerably younger, and much handsomer, than either of the other two.
Again, the victim had no choice.
This time Jerry willed himself to spring to his feet and run, and nothing visible held him back from darting away in flight, leaving the horror behind; but there could be no possibility of help within a hundred yards, the distance of the nearest portion of the cemetery fence. Nearer than that were only grass and darkness, trees and tombstones. And the confident attitude of the thing from the coffin assured him that he had no chance to get anywhere near that fence by flight.
What year? Unable to do otherwise, he muttered an answer to the question.
Meanwhile waves of horrible fear were washing over him, blending with a luminous, sickly, and all but irresistible attraction. It seemed to Jerry that his body was moving and acting on its own, independent of his will. He sidled closer to his undead captor and whimpered unconsciously, like a timid pup. He shivered as if with electric shock when the pale hand fell on his arm.
There was already a delicious anticipation in the shiver, a reaction no more controllable than that produced by a dousing in cold water.
Sheer food-hunger had for the moment been satisfied; in the far more delicate blood-draining that now ensued, there was a kind of love.
Smoothly and almost effortlessly, with a look and a touch and the murmur of a few soft words, Radu seduced the young man who had tried to despoil his body. The breathing youth was handsome, or at least made that impression on the vampire, who had been underground and dreaming nightmares for more than eighty years.
Before climbing out of the pit, Radu scraped up and gathered, from where it lay mixed with the wreckage of his coffin, the essential native earth that Vlad had seen to it was there to sustain his life. He bundled the earth into a piece of cloth that had once been Smith's coat, and put the bundle carefully under his arm.
Then Radu, like an insect newly emerged from his latest chrysalis, resumed his coupling with the young man, strengthening himself further and weakening his breathing victim.
Presently the two began to walk together toward the cemetery fence, and the murmuring night-sounds of the great city that lay beyond.
Before the sun had worked its way up into the cloudy sky to brighten London, Jerry Cruncher had come home to the room he shared with his girl, bringing with him a man she had never seen before, and who introduced himself to her as Mr. Shade. Jerry, looking unusually pale, seemed both pleased and put on edge by the newcomer.
'Who is he, then?' the girl whispered to Jerry when they had a moment to themselves.
'Never you mind who. I'd say the fewer questions you have t' ask, the better.'
She was intrigued to receive the attention of the handsome stranger who had now attached himself to Jerry.
But she was somewhat surprised when the suave newcomer almost at once pulled her to the bed and began to bite her throat. And she was even more surprised—though now her head was spinning in a haze of pleasure— when Jerry, responding to Mr. Shade's gesture of invitation, shed his clothes and climbed into the bed with them.
She'd never thought that Jerry was the kind of man who did such things with other men… but at the moment nothing mattered but what was happening to her. Pleasure unbelievable, delight that she had never imagined until now…
Gradually, in the hours and days following his fortuitous release from his drugged, nightmarish sleep, Radu satisfied himself that Vlad was nowhere in the immediate vicinity of the cemetery. Indeed there was no evidence that his hated elder brother had ever visited London at all, but instead had entrusted his younger brother's transportation and burial there to someone else.
The one who had been buried, freed now from unbearable dreams of hell, granted an escape from his coffin, knew basically what he had to do in these circumstances. He had played a very similar role in other scenes very much like this one, several times before, in other centuries—and so began the lengthy process of warily, methodically, ruthlessly, patiently learning and working his way into the changed society into which he had emerged.
Over the next few days he gave attention to his speech and wardrobe, bringing both up to date, equipping himself to move when necessary in both the highest and the lowest strata of society.
For a whole month following his latest emergence from a coffin, the pallid and handsome vampire spent most of his daylight hours drowsing indoors, in one poor room or another in the neighborhood of Hanging-sword-alley, Whitefriars, where Jerry Cruncher lived. The revenant, breathing only when he felt it necessary to get wind to speak, closed his nostrils against stench and tolerated ugliness and noise.
Ah, to be able to admire himself in a mirror! But that pleasure was permanently denied him. The eyes and faces of admirers were the only looking-glass he could ever use.
He kept his eyes open for the man who had run away in terror from the graveyard, and managed to learn his name from Jerry. But that man was gone from his old London haunts, vanished as if… yes, as if the earth had swallowed him.
Few men loved luxury more than did Radu, but few could be more patient in assessing the right priorities. In present circumstances, luxury could wait.
By night, now almost every night, he strengthened himself with the blood of youth, seeking and attracting both sexes to his couch. Coolly he gave thought as to who among these breathing folk, and how many, he should begin to recruit to his cause.
During this period he drowsed and daydreamed away many a daylight hour. But he did not really sleep at all. What Radu Dracula's soul demanded now was not rest—he had had enough and more than enough of that—but vengeance. Retribution, overwhelming and exquisite, on the man who had put in him the ground. Upon his elder brother. Upon Vlad, who had been, for most of the last three hundred years, true head of the House of Drakulya.
Through all the nights during the next several months, through all the long days of that time, during hours when bright sun made even shaded rooms uncomfortable, Radu's eyelids were seldom closed for more than a few moments consecutively. In that epoch he spent most of his hours lying in one cheap room or another, listening to the noises made by breathers enacting their wretched existences around him. Now and then he enjoyed the blood of one or another of the youthful, savory bodies who could be so easily persuaded—with a few words, a tender look, a gentle touch—to yield to his embrace.
But there were many hours when he was quite alone, resting wakefully in as dark a room as he could find, clinging to the bagful of his native earth he'd salvaged from what his buriers, determined that he should not die, had provided for him in his most recent grave.
