A Sharpness on the Neck

least. 'It had better be good.' He picked up the cartridge, noted that it was unlabeled, and loaded it into the VCR.

In another moment June and Phil were seated side by side on the sofa in front of the television. Philip picked up the remote control and turned on both machines.

When the tape began to play, Radcliffe's immediate hopes were dashed. The opening scene did not offer any dazzling enlightenment. It showed Mr. Graves, seated behind a table in what appeared to be the same room where the audience was now sitting, and looking earnestly toward the camera. Graves's image was dressed in what looked like the same dark suit in which he had carried out the kidnapping of the couple who were now his audience.

'Pay close attention,' the taped image urged the two prisoners. 'For I am about to introduce you to the man who has sworn to drink the blood of Philip Radcliffe.' A pause. 'And to cut off his head.'

That last line was followed by a longer pause, which Phil thought must have been calculated, scripted, for dramatic effect. Certainly it got the full attention of the small audience for whom it was intended.

Mr. Graves's image on the TV screen looked into the camera, speaking quietly and unhurriedly. He admitted at the start, with disarming casualness, that he had not been present at many of the events which he was about to relate. 'But there is enough information to reconstruct certain important scenes with a high degree of reliability.'

Mostly he spoke while looking directly into the camera, but now and then dropped his compelling gaze to some scribbled notes on the table before him. The earnest tone of the presentation put at least one of the audience in mind of a speech from the Oval Office.

As the first minutes passed, the keen attention of the audience began to waver, and they looked at each other unhappily; the session began to seem an ordeal by nonsense.

Already the very gentleness and consideration in minor matters with which the Radcliffes were being treated had begun to arouse in them suspicions that the whole kidnapping might be a monstrous joke, perpetrated by some of their supposed friends.

'Junie, is this all a gag?' Philip hissed, at a moment when he thought he would not be overheard. 'Some kind of a gigantic… put-on?'

June looked back at him in quiet desperation. 'I don't know. The thought crossed my mind, too. But who do we know who'd do a thing like this?'

Despite the inroads of weariness, even with hysteria not far away, it was difficult to think of anyone.

The tape played on.

Philip and June sat side by side on the cheap sofa, holding hands most of the time, frequently exchanging looks but seldom comments, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. On the small screen the videotaped image of the man who seemed their chief persecutor was now well into what was evidently going to be a long narrative of the past.

And it wasn't working.

It was not that the speaker raved or rambled. No, he spoke coherently and calmly enough. Having got a brief introduction out of the way, he began the body of his story by recalling another year that, like 1996, had once been called the best of times and the worst of times.

Still, Phil and June were looking at each other in dismay; far from offering any reasonable explanation, the story seemed only to confirm that they were in the hands of hopeless lunatics.

The scene opened (according to the narration of the thoughtful, dry-voiced image on the screen) in the city of London, in the year 1790, just as the Revolution and its Terror were taking over across the Channel in France. Months earlier, the Bastille had fallen to the Parisian mob, and in that country all titles of hereditary nobility had been abolished. King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were prisoners of the new government in all but name, though still clinging, tenuously, perilously, ambiguously, to some pretense of authority.

'The very year,' observed the image of Graves on screen, 'of the death of Benjamin Franklin—who, as I am sure you know, Mr. Radcliffe, is your own ancestor.' The dark eyes looked into the camera…

Yes, he, Philip Radcliffe, had known that about Franklin. He had been well aware, at least, that it was an old tradition in the Radcliffe family. But what connection could there be between randy old Franklin and the craziness of Mr. Graves and his associates two hundred years later? If the ancestral Franklin really had something to do with their behavior, maybe he, Radcliffe, could talk them out of it… but with the best will in the world, it was hard to concentrate under these conditions of captivity. Radcliffe fidgeted on the sofa, moment by moment expecting one of their deranged kidnappers to come in and say or do something outrageous. Nothing of the kind happened, but he kept looking for it all the same. And June, beside him, was in no better shape.

On top of the other craziness, the watchers soon found themselves being intermittently distracted by what looked like technical difficulties; sometimes the image of the man on screen turned transparent, colorless, and strangely insubstantial. Then again, for intervals of several seconds the man and his clothing, along with the pen or pencil that he was holding in his hand, disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, all other objects in the picture, including the narrator's table and chair, remained rock-steady.

'Why is the picture doing that?' June whispered.

'I don't know.' Philip looked around again, as he did on an average of once every thirty seconds, to see if anyone was listening. 'Maybe that's someone's idea of really super special effects, that are certain to impress us.'

'But all this stuff he's saying about vampires and oaths doesn't make sense…'

'Shh. I know, but listen…'

Twentieth-century Philip and June, seeing and hearing Vlad Dracula's version of Philip's ancestor's adventures of two hundred years ago, tried to convince each other that it would afford them some clue to the madness of the people who were holding them prisoner.

Guardedly keeping an eye out for any of their captors, who were maintaining a steady though relaxed presence in the other room, Radcliffe and his bride exchanged a few terse comments. The implication had been that they would be left undisturbed while they watched the tape, and so far their kidnappers were holding to that plan. None of the masked figures appeared to be observing them at all closely. Now neither Connie nor Graves had been heard from for a considerable time…

Beside Phil, June made a small noise, like a young woman caught in the grip of an unpleasant dream. His attention jerked back to discover his wife staring at the screen in apparent fascination.

'What is it?' Phil demanded.

She had paused the tape, and now gestured nervously toward the frozen image on the screen. 'What did he say? I thought he said that someone, the man in the coffin in the London cemetery, had had his head cut off before he was buried… but then his head and body somehow came back together again?'

'I heard the same thing.'

'Let me rewind, run that bit over again.'

They did so. But instant replay proved to be of little help. The words spoken had been correctly heard, but that fact brought no real enlightenment. Neither watcher could derive from the tape much more than seeming confirmation that the narrator, the creator of this tale, had to be a madman.

The voice of the storyteller was calm, the sentences and thoughts coherent. But overall, the picture he painted was growing more and more disturbing. This so-reasonable voice detailed horrors, and more than horrors: a fantasy of survival in and beyond the grave, of centuries of life—or of extravagantly and grotesquely transformed existence.

The kidnapping victims looked at each other, each thinking how exhausted the other looked. At first there seemed no possibility of swallowing the story—long-lived vampires, grotesque and monstrous mutilations—as fact. But the narrator plodded on, implacably. All these things were true, he seemed to be saying, with calm infuriating arrogance. Take it or leave it.

After half an hour or so, Philip and June, uneasy and unable to concentrate, decided it was time to take a break, and stopped the tape. Outside, the day was heating up, and they turned on the small window air conditioners with which their prison had been provided. They went to make themselves their first meal in the small kitchen. As they entered, the pair of masked guardians who had been sitting at the little kitchen table got up at once, and with some murmured politeness withdrew into the living room.