An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) by Fred Saberhagen (the two towers ebook txt) 📕

of extraordinary trouble, I certainly do not mean the simple deaths, diseases, cripplings; the common tragedies. Deserting husbands. Financial failures. Those God sends to us all.”

   Grandmother Harker leaned forward in her chair, and something in her eyes came so to life that Clarissa, a sensible woman of thirty-four who had come bravely through the Blitz and her first widowhood, involuntarily leaned away. The old woman went on: “I mean a day when the powers of hell seem well and truly to have you in their grip…use it then, and not before. And in God’s name, I say again, never in frivolity. I should never dare to give it, if I thought it might be so abused.”

   “Use it?”

   “Oh, don’t be addle-pated! I can’t abide that in a girl with brains, of which you have a few, though perhaps you don’t like to use them. And while I think of it, mind you go to church when you’re in America. There won’t be Church of England, I suppose, but go.” Then, observing Clarissa’s troubled face, Grandmother Harker at last showed pity. “Simply open the book to the marked page, and do what it says. You remember your Latin, don’t you? Most of the ninnies who might open it up by accident will not, I’m sure, which is a blessing.”

   “Thank you, Grandmother.” In her own mind, Clarissa lighted suddenly on the explanation—though she was not entirely able to believe it—that the old lady must have developed some senile religious mania.

   When she got home from the visit Clarissa opened the old, old book and read the page marked by a ribbon. She looked at the lock of hair secured to the page by an incongruous strip of cellophane tape, and tried to laugh. And then she shut up the book for more than thirty years.

* * * * * * *

   With the momentary feeling that those thirty years had never been, she spread the thick book open now, on a small library table of dark wood. ‘You remember your Latin, don’t you?’ Candel at any rate gave no trouble.

   Nothing was said about using a particular kind of candle, and Clarissa went out of the library again, past a detective using the telephone in the hall, to extract a cherry-red taper from the Christmas centerpiece in the great empty dining room. Some matches from a holder near the elbow of the man still busy on the phone. Then back into her sanctuary. Candle in hand but still unlighted, she scanned the ancient print with the aid of bifocals and Tensor lamp.

   As the door opened softly behind her, Clarissa started as if caught in a kidnapping herself.

   It was Judy. Like the rest of the surviving household she was face-swollen and dazed. But she took one look at her grandmother and shut the door behind her.

   “What are you doing, Granny?” The words were hushed; despite the open book the question was not, ‘what are you reading?’

   It crossed Clarissa’s own dazed mind that in an earlier century Judy, in adolescence, would have been just ripe for witchery and hysteria. Perhaps that thought was what made Clarissa want her help. Or perhaps it was only a sudden fear of being left alone again that made the older woman beckon and put on a smile. “Come here, Judy. Help me read these words. I know you’ve had your schoolroom Latin, just as I did once.”

   Judy came to stand beside her. The old head and the young one, almost blond, bent over the old paper. A page cracked when it turned.

   “What is it, Gran, an old prayer book?”

   “About the closest thing to a prayer left in my life.”

   Each read in silence for a little while.

   “It says to use a mirror, Grandmother.” Not Gran or Granny; not just now.

   Clarissa did what passed for thinking in her present state of shock. “Go fetch that small one from the wall, down the hallway near your room.”

   Young legs in brown slacks, soft-shoed and silent, sprang away (something to be done at last!), were back in only seconds.

   Another minute or two of cooperation and preparations were complete. Stacks of books held the mirror propped vertically upon the table, so that the pages of the old book, opened flat before the mirror, were reflected. And now the words of what was to be read aloud, printed in reverse, sprang to legibility in the glass. The candle burned, stuck clumsily with its own melted wax to the fine wood of the table, and leaning a trifle over the open book.

   Now Clarissa pulled from the page the primitive tape, which in thirty years had deteriorated more than the old paper had in three hundred. It came free easily, and immediately gave up into her fingers the small lock of hair; mixed gray and black. More resilient than either the paper or the tape, as if it might have been trimmed off only this morning. Whose? It did not look or feel at all like Grandmother Harker’s own brown-gray curls, as Clarissa recalled them.

   Side by side the candle flame and Tensor lamp stared at their own reflections in the mirror. Plenty of light but the words would not come clear for Clarissa. She started reading aloud, stumbled, tried to make sense out of them. All higgledy-piggledy nonsense, about the falling of the sun, the rising of the night. More, just as absurd. Not evil-sounding, no, not the black and evil thing—although right now she might have risked that too—for there in the text were the names of God and Jesus set down to be sworn by with respect She could see that much, although the words all swam together now…

   “Grandmother…lean back. Rest, please. Shall I read it for you?”

   “Oh yes, my dear. It’s so important. My own dear grandmother once told me…” Clarissa had to pause, or faint.

   Judy put back the brown hair from