Fred Saberhagen - Dracula 03 - Vlad Tapes

The Vlad Tapes

Table of Contents

AN OLD FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

THORN

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

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TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

EPILOGUE

The Vlad Tapes

Fred Saberhagen

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57878-2

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, July 2000

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Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

VAMPIRE

You'll have to hold me," she whispered, shivering violently. "I'm here and I can't help myself, you know.

At least, hold me so I won't be so cold."

He laughed. "Oh, I'll hold you, okay. You'll get to like it here. Think of it as home, maybe, even. . . ."

Then he seemed to descend upon her like a great slow wave from the black lake. . . .

There were feet on the stairs, several heavy people coming up. Voices outside the door, then in the

room with her.They'll take me home , Kate thought,they'll snap me out of this .

One took her arm to lift it. But it clung to her side, resisting his pull without the least effort on her part.

He said, "My own guess is two, three days since she died."

BAEN BOOKS by Fred Saberhagen

The Dracula Tape

The Vlad Tapes

Pilgrim

Berserkers: The Beginning

AN OLD FRIEND OF THE

FAMILY

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ONE

It looked like the North Atlantic raging at the Devon coast, Kate told herself, recalling a childhood trip

to Europe, and the enduring memory of the ocean pounding at those rough English rocks. Now, under

the glare of the close-ranked floodlights along the Outer Drive, she saw the black lake reach a fist in past

the wintry void, where summer knew a strip of sunwhite beach. Above the ice-draped slats of snowfence

the fist shook spume at city and civilization, then crashed down, dissolving itself in an open-handed splash

that washed across six of the eight lanes of forty-mile-per-hour traffic. The traffic wavered, minimally

slowing, some of it skidding perilously in the freezing wet. If things kept on this way, the police were

going to have to close the Drive.

Twenty or thirty yards inland, on pavement separated from the Drive and the reaching waves by a wide

divider strip of frozen parkland, Kate's Lancia purred sedately south. Most of her attention was

concentrated upon the task of reading addresses from the endless row of tall apartment buildings fronting

on Drive and park and lake. The particular numbers she had been looking for now suddenly appeared,

elegantly backlighted against a towering granite wall. She slowed and turned. The righthand curve of

driveway went down to a basement garage, but she stayed with the left branch, rolled past two parked

Cadillacs and a Porsche, and pulled up under the building's canopy.

Despite the heatlamps fighting down against the wind and cold, the uniformed doorman wore earmuffs

above the collar of his winter jacket. His eyeglasses were so thick as to resemble frosted protective

goggles of some sort. Taller than he, Kate swept in through the door that he held open for her, meanwhile

pulling back the hood of her warm blue jacket from natural blond curls.

"I'd like to see Craig Walworth. Tell him Kate Southerland is here," she told the man when he had

followed her into the lobby. A few moments later, after the intercom had brought down Craig's

acceptance of her visit, she was alone in a small elevator.

If Joe were with her now, he'd be worrying about what the doorman was going to do with the car—or

about something else, about anything, maybe just about dropping in on a party unannounced. But then if

Joe were with her tonight, she wouldn't be coming here at all. Which, of course, was really the whole

point. She hadn't made any commitment to Joe—not yet. If and when she did, things would be different.

And how they would.

Maybe the real point was the fact that she felt compelled to make the point. If she was so certain of her

present freedom, why was she here trying to prove something to herself? She could have gone Christmas

shopping instead. And she probably should have. For one thing she still faced the problem of a gift for

Joe, who was certain to spend too much of his money buying one for her . . .

The elevator, having gone as high as it could go, eased almost imperceptibly to a stop and let Kate out

into a small marble lobby from which two massive doors of handcarved black wood, one at each end,

led to two apartments. A small decorative table, ivory colored to contrast with the doors, stood in the

middle of the lobby facing the two elevators. On the wall just above the table there hung a picture, or

perhaps it was a mirror, of which only an edge of antique gilt frame was visible. Someone had draped an

old, worn-looking raincoat over it, perhaps thinking that the loser of the garment would be sure to see it

there if he came back. He'd need something warmer than that if he came back tonight.

The righthand door stood slightly ajar, and through this opening came sounds of subdued partying:

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music, an alto laugh, a glassy clink, and voices murmuring. Kate pushed the thick door fully open and

slowly walked on in. She stood in a brick-floored vestibule, from which two interior hallways led off at

right angles to each other. A third wall was taken up by a great guest closet, open now to show a modest

miscellany of coats and scarves, some fallen from their hangers. It didn't seem that any very large party

was going on.

"Hi." The greeting was conspiratorially low. Simultaneously a black-haired, black-bearded head bobbed

into Kate's view from two rooms down the hallway to her right. Craig Walworth was three or four years

older than her twenty. No more than an inch taller, but so wide across the chest that he looked larger

than he was. Often, as now, his shirt was worn halfway open down the front to display some hair and

muscle; and he tended to have his large hands planted on his hips—one of them was there now, the other

holding a drink—so that standing near him put you at some risk of jutting elbows. "Glad you could make

it, Kate. I was starting to think you were really out of circulation." The drink he had been holding

somehow already stashed away, he took her jacket as she slipped it off, and with a toss consigned it to

the closet's minor chaos.

"You put out a standing invitation for Friday nights, Craig. I'm just taking you at your word."

"I'm just delighted that you are, sweetie. Our little group here will never be the same—thank God."

Craig's voice was still low, uncharacteristically near the whispering level, and now he glanced about, a

man checking to see if he might be overheard. "Now listen, Doll, there's a little house rule I've got to

mention before you join the group."

"Rules? That's not quite what I would have expected at your parties."

"Well, you see, it's not your basic expectable kind of rule." As they talked, he had started her moving

down the hall toward the still rather muffled sounds of partying, with an arm round her waist that she

somehow minded more than the expected cheek-kiss following. "The thing is, everyone—except me, of

course—takes a new name for the evening, and pretends to be someone other than they are. Sabrina

Something, and I'll say that you're an old friend of mine from Canada. How's that?"

"Well, I did think of becoming Sabrina once, believe it or not. When I was about thirteen years old."

They had now come to a room where four or five people were gathered, all standing, as if none of them

had been here very long. Kate so rarely remembered names the first time round that sometimes she was

tempted to give up trying; and since these were supposedly all aliases anyway, she made no effort to

retain anything from the round of introductions.

Beside Kate stood a tall girl wearing an odd shawl who wanted to find out how much Kate knew about

Tarot cards. When she heard the answer was nothing at all, she wanted to explain them at great length.

Kate tried for a little while to make sense of it, and then, as the group shifted, took the first opportunity to

move away. She was offered a drink, declined, then thought that the next time she would accept. In the

background she could hear a heavy door, probably the front door of the apartment, being firmly closed.

Craig had excused himself, and was somewhere around a corner, talking on the phone.

"Try a joint?" This from a stocky young man with thick glasses who had not been in the group the first

time round—no doubt there might be other people she had not met, in other rooms; it must be a huge

apartment. The man making the offer got too close, and stared at Kate intensely. Being given a man's full

attention is a thrilling experience for a woman—well, sometimes. Hadn't she seen him somewhere else

recently? But she had no intention of asking that aloud.

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Kate puffed twice and put the thing down. As expected, she felt nothing from it just at first. The few

times that she had tried, in school, nothing at all had happened to her. The few times after that had always

resulted in a pleasant high, with slow onset and letdown. She wouldn't be surprised if it was nothing at all

again tonight; quite likely she was just too keyed up, too nervous, though why she should be . . .

". . . play games in a little while, you know, identities and such." Craig was back at her side, finishing a

statement whose beginning Kate had somehow missed. "And someone else is coming, Sabrina, someone

I want you to meet. I've mentioned you to him, and he's very interested."

"Oh? My Canadian background?"

Craig's eyes were sparkling with some inner amusement under their dark brows. But now his attention

was forced away by someone else, a blondish boy with a loud mouth, who had some interminable

anecdote to tell him, as one insider to another. Craig responded with off-hand but deliberate insults,

which the loud one laughed at foolishly.

Kate almost tripped over the tall girl, then sat down beside her on the thick, burgundy-colored carpet.

"What sort of games is he talking about?" Kate asked. The girl said something Kate couldn't catch. Very

loud music was starting in the next room. The Pointer Sisters?

Upon the wall that Kate was facing there hung an Escher print, the circle of lizards crawling up out of the

flat surface of the drawing-within-the-drawing, crawling up and around an improvised ramp of books and

geometric solids, to ease themselves at last down into the flat again, where in three shades of gray their

bodies formed a tessellated pattern. Kate willed for a moment to lose herself in the intricacies of the plan,

but her mind was too restless.

She looked around abruptly, with the feeling that someone, no one she knew, had just called her real

name: a loud, rude calling in a strange man's voice. But no one else seemed to have noticed it at all. And

the voice seemed to have come, now that she thought about it, directly into her mind, not through her

ears. Dear Kate, she warned herself, neither you nor Sabrina had better smoke any more tonight.

Restlessness pulled her to her feet. A bar-on-a-cart offered bottles and glasses and ice. Shouldn't mix

with the other stuff, but just a taste was not going to do her any harm. In her hand, a glass half-filled with

white wine, she wandered, mocking a slinky tall-model walk, up to a window of very solid, unopenable

glass that looked out far above the endless chains of headlights and taillights of the Drive. Beyond the few

additional streetlamps that were scattered through the park, the lake stretched out to the edge of

everything, a vast black invisibility like death.

One of the nameless boys she had just met came to the window too, ice cubes tinkling in his glass like

Christmas music. God, the shopping she had yet to do. What was she here for, anyway? Trying to prove

a point to Joe, who didn't know where she was, and who, when she told him, would fail to get the—

Her name again, but still unspoken.

Looking down a vista of the apartment's archways, Kate saw a huge, dark-haired man standing gazing

toward her. An early Orson Welles, but harder-faced, in a brown coat made of one of those rich

fake-furs, like her own blue. Or maybe in his case the fur was real. He was standing there as if he had

just arrived, though if her sense of the place was right, he was nowhere near the front entrance.

With a vague feeling that it was important, necessary for her to do so, Kate turned from the window and

walked toward the newcomer. No one else seemed to be paying either of them the least attention. The

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Pointer Sisters grew louder still, then faded abruptly as a door somewhere behind Kate was closed. She

was alone with the huge man in the hallway—no, not quite alone. From the corner of her eye Kate saw

Craig walk out of another doorway to her left. Craig fell into step beside her as she walked the last few

strides toward the big man who stood waiting.

They stopped. Craig put his hands on his hips, then at once let them slide off to hang fidgeting at his

sides. "Enoch Winter," he said, almost whispering again, "this is Kathryn Southerland."

The huge man said something (what?) to her in an offhand sort of greeting, and she replied. He was

really massive, and Kate was reminded of when she had met an All-American defensive end: perfect

proportions, but blown up larger than real life seemed to have the right to be.

Enoch Winter's dark hair was slightly curly, and worn shorter than that of most young men. There were

only the beginnings of lines in his face. Still, at second glance Kate would not have called him young if she

had had to set down a description. His eye were gray-blue, his broad, pale cheeks a little blue with what

would be heavy stubble in a few hours if he let it grow. He was smiling confidently at Kate, and all but

ignoring Craig. He spoke to her again; once more she somehow could not grasp what he had said.

There was a brief distraction as the short young man with thick eyeglasses appeared from somewhere to

stand at Kate's right, looking on in silence. The four of them in the hallway were closed off now by doors

on every side. Beyond the closed doors, the sounds of the party went on.

Enoch Winter spoke, and Kate stared at him, straining to understand. His voice was loud enough. And

she thought the pot would not take hold of her tonight. She shouldn't even have tasted the wine.

He chuckled, perhaps at something he had just said himself. He didn't seem to notice that she could not

comprehend what he was saying. Or else he did not care. With a faint inward start Kate realized that

Craig and Thick-glasses were no longer at her sides. They had gone away somewhere, leaving her

standing in the shut-off hall with Enoch Winter, who talked and talked, to her alone. She must not ever let

her attention waver from him for a moment, must not . . .

His whitish hand, raised, was so big that the great dark stone that rode one finger in a silver ring seemed

not only modest but scarcely adequate. Just past his waving hand Kate's eye caught sight of a phone on a

hall table, and it came to her with desperate force that there was something she must do at once.

"Excuse me a moment," she broke in clearly. "I've got to call home right away."

". . . hafta do that for?" His accent was midwestern, vaguely rural. All of a sudden he wasn't happy any

more.

"I have to. That's all." Walking to the phone was the most utterly wearying thing that Kate had ever

done. She managed to do it, though.

". . . careful whatcha say. All right." Enoch's voice had regained some of its good humor, and now

good-humoredly he fell silent.

Kate punched at buttons. She could hear the phone at home start ringing, and then a familiar voice.

"Hello, Gran. I just wanted to tell you . . ." What could she say? What was she able to say? "I didn't do

any shopping after all. So I couldn't get those things you wanted."

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"Well, goodness, dear. Don't worry about it. You sound upset, are you all right?"

"Fine."

"Well, I expect I'll be going out myself tomorrow, I can do my own shopping. Where are you?"

A leaden pause, in which Kate could feel her own mind groping. Crawling. Trying to get free, but

leashed. "Downtown," she got out at last. It was almost the truth, the closest thing to truth that she could

manage.

"Take care now, Kate, they say the roads are very nasty."

As she cradled the phone Enoch started talking to her again. In this case it really was flattering to have

such concentrated attention from a man, attention of a kind she could not get often enough from Joe.

Somehow or other they now were standing by the guest closet and Enoch was watching while she put

on her blue jacket. In some far-off room of the apartment voices were cheering now—probably a game

was being played. Craig was here again, though, to see them out in silence. Enoch tossed

a—condescending?—wink at Craig, whose own face displayed a vast . . . well, admiration, as though for

something Enoch was doing or had done. Kate puzzled over all this while she walked out to the elevator,

her hand on Enoch's arm.

Going down with Enoch, she thought for the most part about nothing at all. While he perhaps was

thinking of her, for once or twice he put out his huge, pale hand and brushed her cheek with it, rather as if

she were something that he had long coveted and had just allowed himself to buy. She wouldn't like it if

Joe behaved so possessively. But this was different . . . of course.

The elevator let them out in the subterranean garage, and there was her Lancia, keys and all. Kate

slipped into the driver's seat, Enoch waiting till he was invited to get in on the right. There was no

doorman to be seen, but gates opened ahead of them and out they went, into the cold and up the curving

driveway.

Kate drove, without having to think of where to go. As before, Enoch talked, and it seemed to her that

she could not understand a word. White needles filled bright globes of air around the streetlights. In some

clear corner of Kate's mind the thought occurred that nothing she had ever smoked before had hit her this

way. Once the situation struck her so ridiculous that she began to laugh, and laughed so hard and wildly

that it was difficult for her to see where she was steering. Enoch spoke sharply to her and she calmed

down. Then it was his turn to laugh, loudly and heartily, evidently at something Kate had just tried to say.

The trouble was that something in his laughter hurt Kate's ears, so she wanted to put her fingers into

them, but instead she had to go on driving.

They had already turned inland, away from the lake, leaving the Outer Drive and the Gold Coast behind.

Was this Diversey she was following now? She wasn't sure. Probably they were farther south. Presently

she turned again, going where she had to go. Here the street lamps were fewer, and gave a different light,

wan and wintry. It was surprising how in the city the neighborhoods could change from one block to the

next.

Now here was where they were to stop. Certainly no doorman here, in fact not even a break in the row

of dull vehicles parked along the frozen curb. Near the end of the block a fireplug-space at least was

open, and Kate halted just ahead of it and started to back in.

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A car just behind them turned into the same space headfirst, jounced to a halt there just as Kate also hit

her brakes. At the moment both vehicles had a tirehold on the precious space, but neither could occupy

it.

She turned to Enoch helplessly. There was an abstracted expression on his face; he opened his door and

got out. His head vanished from Kate's view, but from the attitude of his body it was plain that he was

facing back into the glare of their challenger's headlights. Cold air swirled in through the open door to

paw Kate's legs. An engine gunned behind them; the other car was backing away. Enoch slid in beside

her again and closed the door, the look on his face unchanged.

Kate parked the car—must have parked it, though the next thing she was aware of was walking along

the cracked and narrow sidewalk beside Enoch, whose arm encircled her but brought no warmth. The

footing was treacherous, half uneven pavement, half blackened ice in old refrozen mounds, all under a

powdering of new snow. When had she ever felt cold so intense before?

They passed beneath an ancient neon sign humming to itself and sizzling with unplanned flashes. A man

went by them, his face as hard and his clothes as grimy as the street itself. Suddenly there were two

wooden steps, a narrow door that yielded to Enoch's shoulder, and now at least the wind was gone.

The cold kept pace, though, as they walked up stairs, bare wood creaking underfoot beneath the gritty

crunching of a layer of grime. It would be terrible to have to face a night like this alone, but she would

not, no, she would not. She clung hard now to Enoch's arm.

He used a key, then brought her through a door into a room of utter cold, a wretchedly furnished room,

dark but for pale streetlight coming in through an undraped window. Kate saw smeared glass, one

broken pane with rags stuffed into it.

"You'll have to hold me," she whispered, shivering violently. "I'm here and I can't help myself, you know.

At least hold me so I won't be so cold."

He laughed. When he spoke now she could hear him plainly. "Oh, I'll hold you, okay. You'll get to like it

here. Think of it as home, maybe, even. Wise little rich-bitch." He had closed the door and was standing

right in front of her. "You think you know just what is gonna happen now. But you don't know at all, at

all."

Then he seemed to descend upon her like a great slow wave from the black lake.

TWO

In the rather more than thirty years since Clarissa Southerland had come to live in Glenlake, this was

almost the first time that anyone on the village police force had spoken to her in line of duty. And it

occurred to her to wonder now, somewhat belatedly no doubt, whether this aloofness from the cops was

after all not a continent-wide American peculiarity, but simply the result of living in a wealthy suburb. In

England as a girl and young woman she had chatted with the constables routinely; but England, of course,

was different.

Detective Franzen, a balding, sad-looking young man, was listening to Clarissa's account of Kate's last

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phone call home with every appearance of totally absorbed, sympathetic attention. His behavior was not

at all like that of the New York detectives, years ago, that time the jewels were taken at the hotel.

Meanwhile Kate's mother Lenore, was standing behind Franzen and worriedly eyeing her mother-in-law

as if Clarissa were some undependable child who might not perform creditably for the nice policeman.

Behind Lenore was the closed door to the study, and behindthat in turn was Andrew, busy talking on the

phone to his office, where people were sure to be working even on Saturday, working on something vital

that demanded some of Andrew's attention, even on the day of a missing daughter.

"Now, Mrs. Southerland, do you remember there being any unusual background noises on the phone?

Sometimes there's a typewriter, or . . ."

"Not at parties, there isn't very often." Suddenly Clarissa began to lose confidence in Franzen, nice

manners or not. It made her feel fidgety, and she wished she had taken a rocking chair, instead of this

plush one, which was too soft.

"Oh, you did hear partying noises then?"

"Yes, I believe I mentioned that before." Hadn't she? She couldn't confirm from Lenore's or Franzen's

expressions now whether she had or not. "People laughing, way in the background. Ice, tinkling in a

glass? No, I couldn't swear to that."

"And all she said about her location was that she was downtown?"

"Yes."

"Anyone call anyone by name?"

Clarissa took thought. Sometimes one gained impressions of things not exactly by hearing them, and later

it was hard to sort out what one had actually heard and what one had not. "Not that I recall."

Franzen, poker-faced, seated on a straight chair opposite, studied his notebook. "Well. You all tell me

that this staying out without letting someone know is not something that Kate's ever done—"

"It certainly isn't," put in Lenore.

"—and here it is well after noon. So, I think we'd better take it seriously enough to check it out. The

Chicago police, and so on." Franzen stood up, just as the door to the study opened. Andrew, balding

too, but athletic and aggressive in his mid-forties, came out to join the conversation.

"What progress have we made?" Andrew demanded with brisk intensity. Here was a man switching his

attention from one crisis to another, and someone had better have ready a satisfactory, concise briefing

for him if they wanted his advice and help on the problem of locating his daughter, because some new

emergency regarding business was surely going to come up soon and keep him from spending a lot of

time on this one.

This, at least, was the impression his mother got of him at the moment. Clarissa, feeling a twinge of guilt

because there were times when she just didn't like her own son very much, grunted and hand-fought her

way up out of the too-soft chair: the knees and hips were not too good today. Muttering a few words of

farewell to Detective Franzen, she left the search for her granddaughter in the hands of those who were

now in charge of running the world, and took herself off to the library, meaning to have a look at the lake

through her favorite window.

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Fred Saberhagen - Dracula 03 - Vlad Tapes

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