to remember the exact moment when you fell asleep. But yes! With a little effort he now clearly recalled being half-marched, half-carried up the steps.
The fierce, dark eyes of the executioner, the great shock of the falling knife—and also the sharp tug on his recently shortened hair, as the executioner displayed his head—or someone's—to the routinely cheering crowd.
But wait a minute! He could not possibly have watched, looking on as a spectator, seeing from the rear his own head being held up for display. Oh yes, he'd recognized his head; there was even the small white bandage on the crown…
Whatever the answer, however the mystery of what had happened on the scaffold might finally be explained, here he was now, alive—yes, alive—in what was certainly a cemetery. Peering around him in the darkness, he at last made out, at a distance of some thirty or forty yards, the raw earth mounded beside a trench.
At least the gravediggers had not ripped the clothes from his body. That, he had learned in prison, was what those predatory vultures often did.
The clothes Radcliffe had been wearing when he was arrested, and while he was in prison, had been only ordinary. His coat had been taken from him when his wrists were bound, and the collar of his shirt had been ripped open. Small wonder that the petty thieves in the cemetery had not bothered with what was left, if they'd had the chance. There had lately been no shortage of finer garments for their selection.
If he'd had a hat, they'd certainly have taken that. Hats must be one item they very seldom encountered in the course of business. The idea of a man wearing a hat to his own beheading suddenly struck Radcliffe as tremendously amusing, and he began to chuckle, an ugly sound. But of course he'd been hatless when his would-be murderers had dragged him from his cell to have his head cut off.
While these thoughts were running through his mind, unconsciously he had started walking again, toward the pale blob that he thought must represent a mound of raw earth.
In prison he'd also heard the gruesome details about the burial mound, the endlessly long mass grave whose active end was excavated every morning for the day's harvest of bodies, and filled in every evening—that was the place where Marie and Melanie sometimes came to do their work.
His feet slowed to a stop, dragging through the grass. Suppose, just suppose, he'd never been in the hands of the gravediggers at all.
Slowly Radcliffe came to realize that some clue to the solution of his mystery might lie in the fact that he had come to himself lying perhaps forty or fifty yards from the place where the bodies were routinely dumped—and where the gravediggers had been, or ought to be, industriously at work.
He wanted to see the place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. He set out to reach it.
When he had covered half of the remaining distance to his goal, stalking stiff-legged toward the mass grave, a pair of young lovers burst up from the ground like startled birds, almost at Radcliffe's feet. Tripping on their own half-shed clothing, they ran away screaming through the darkness when he came toward them. Alarmed by this eruption, he almost turned and ran in the opposite direction.
In his imagination, recalling his nightmare, Radcliffe pictured his headless body separating itself from the jumbled, gory pile, finding his head and putting it back on. Then his reconstituted self had tottered away, under his own power, before the gravediggers had been given a chance to do anything at all with him. The shadow of a nightmare, already almost forgotten, came to plague him again.
He shuffled slowly forward.
Yes, damn it all, his head
But now his head was definitely on his shoulders, as firmly attached as it had ever been.
If Sanson and his great machine hadn't been able to kill him, that meant, according to all Connie had told him, that he, Philip Radcliffe, had become a vampire. What other possible explanation could there be?
The marks left on his throat by Connie's fangs—
He drew a deep breath of pride. Pride more in his own sanity, in the integrity of his memory, rather than on the occasion of his joining a gloriously different race of men. Connie, as he remembered her, was real.
But in the next moment, drawing a deep breath, he realized that everything wasn't settled yet. Ought he, as a vampire still to be breathing?
What might have been the basis for an alternate explanation loomed in his exhausted mind: Were all his recent memories, including his trip to the scaffold, only the fabric of a hideous dream? But maybe all of life was one great dream; that answered nothing.
In Radcliffe's current mental state, only one thing seemed incontestably true: He was no longer in prison. And for that he could be devoutly thankful.
At last approaching closely the mound of fresh earth, Radcliffe was afforded his first good look at the Revolution's most recent crop of corpses. Tonight's shift of gravediggers had not yet finished their job. Now he could hear their voices rising from a little distance and see the indirect glow of a small light, where they had taken shelter under an awning stretched out from the side of a wagon. They were distracted in some dispute among themselves, perhaps over some clothing or other valuables taken from the latest batch of victims.
But it was the silent victims, or their bodies rather, most of their arms still bound behind their backs, that drew Philip with a sickly fascination.
He shuffled toward them to take a closer look.
He recoiled from their staring eyes, reflecting faint gleams of stars and moon, or distant torches.
Some of the mouths in the head-pile were open, and their eyes indifferently looked at him, and at each other, like the eyes of dead fish. Dazedly, feeling that what he did was no more than was now expected of him, he picked one up. This, Marie had told him, was what Melanie did, helping out her helpful cousin.
He maneuvered his hands carefully, to avoid touching the raw neck-stump (odd, but most of the neck seemed to have disappeared) and to touch the face as little as possible.
If Melanie could do this, he could too.
The hair offered the easiest and surest grip. The weight was not surprising, seeming neither too little nor too much.
He threw aside the peculiar object. The modest weight went bouncing, rolling, across the muddy and uncaring earth.
Someone, he supposed, would pick it up again and bring it back.
The rain was slackening off.
There was a burst of laughter from where the gravediggers had gathered. Now their meeting, whatever it had been for, was breaking up. They were grumbling and laughing, and he could see their lantern bobbing toward him.
How long he stumbled to and fro in the long grass around the border of the churchyard, making his way from one tall fence to another, looking for a gate, anxious to do something but not knowing what to do next, he was never able to determine. When the sky in the east began to brighten, behind clusters of leaden clouds, he remembered certain promises that Legrand and Connie had made, warnings they had given him while he was in prison. And Radcliffe expected that the morning sunlight when it appeared was going to kill him.
Suddenly the wonder concerning his own miraculous survival was overridden by an obsessive urge to locate Melanie. In his shock and amazement he had almost forgotten the plan of escape Legrand had outlined to him. There were certain things that he, Radcliffe, was required to do once he had left the prison walls behind. Somewhere he would be given forged papers, providing a new identity for himself… though whether a vampire would need papers or not… and Melanie would be given hers…
He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Yes, Melanie. Once he had found her, everything else could be made to come out all right And Philip clearly remembered the address where she was to be found. And the directions for getting there.
Rain fell intermittently throughout the remainder of the night, keeping Radcliffe's short, raggedly cut hair wet, and running down his face.
Running his hand through his hair at one point, he noticed vaguely that his bandage was gone. It must have
