The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen (best books to read for beginners txt) 📕

mystified. He felt the old man in the armpits and in the groin. Then he said to the woman: “I must take a blood sample.”

   “Ve must not spend too much time on this particular case. There are others to be tested. Results will be required of us, not specimens and theories.”

   “A blood sample is necessary, in my opinion. We cannot produce good results without knowledge.”

   The woman turned silently away. She was back shortly with a glass syringe that gleamed with sharpness.

   Two attempts upon the inner elbow of the old man’s right arm, where one vein stood up prominently, brought about a broken steel needle and some upper-class profanity. A new needle was obtained and the assault renewed. At last a trickle of red crawled into a glass tube. Meanwhile familiar heavy feet had been climbing the stair from the outside world. Their owner, masked but not gowned, came upon the scene just in time to witness this small success.

   “Ah, you’re back,” the doctor welcomed Rough-voice. “What luck?”

   “On’y indifferent, Guv’nor. Which is to say Barley ain’t got quite the numbers nor the quality we wants, as yet. But ’e ’as ’opes. Wot’s up ’ere?”

   “Hopes, has he? Our time is not unlimited. The twenty-second of June draws near. Well, we shall discuss that presently. Have you slept?”

   “Ar.” The workmen stretched his powerful frame, arms over head. “Could do wi’ a cuppa tea and bit o’ scrag, though.”

   “Well, before you breakfast, do have another word with the girl. I believe things went well enough here through the night, but best make sure. She seemed rather to have the wind up when we came in this morning.”

   “Ar.”

   Small glass-tubed sample of gore in hand, the doctor led the others from the room, meanwhile continuing their conversation. “And try to feed this one again when you get back; she said he took nothing but water. We want to maintain some strength in him to obtain a valid result. But mind you don’t touch him, or his bed.”

   “Wotcher think, I’m goin’ ter do that?” The door closed and they were gone.

   In a few minutes the doctor was back, a fresh hypodermic in hand. Above his mask he scowled at the old man as if insulted by him, and stabbed at him for more blood. The doctor did not believe what his microscope had just informed him regarding the first sample.

   Another needle splintered, a circumstance that the physician dismissed with no more than an impatient oath. No giant of research, he, to pounce upon this apparently small but truly significant phenomenon. Of course it might be claimed in his defense that he labored amid dangers and distractions notably absent from the ordinary laboratory. And there was no room in his thoughts for any truly great discovery, for they were fully occupied with the preparation of an equally great crime.

   A new needle was made to work, after a fashion. Following this second tapping of his veins, the old man may have fainted for a time. His weariness had grown steadily more insupportable; for him a bed of nails would have been as easy to rest on as that cart.

   From its wide summer arc the June sun lanced at the great city, striking through a worn blanket of clouds not yet changed from the night before. Pain in the head, and growing weariness, and—becoming gradually distinct from these—a most disquieting sense of something wrong. Intrinsically wrong with his existence, in the sense of something missing or crippled. As if an arm or leg were paralyzed, though that was not the case. He suffered a lack of powers that should have been his to call upon; and this lack was linked somehow with his want of a true name.

   Periods of insensibility pocked all the old man’s daylight hours that day, and a relatively full awareness returned to him only with the dawn of night.

   As the day died, the first fact to impress itself upon his returning consciousness was that of Sally’s presence in the room again. It was not yet quite dark, and she kept the blotched side of her face averted as she stood by his bed. Her shaking hands were extended towards the old man’s shackled right wrist, and in her fingers was a key.

   “Thank God yer awyke!” Her whisper was as tremulous as her fingers. “I found out they mean to… Can you walk?”

   “I can.”

   “I ’opes to God you can. Now I knows yer a gentleman. Pledge now, by your honor, that when yer free you’ll give me wot ’elp you can, in turn.”

   The old man quickly raised his head. “I pledge by all I hold most sacred, that I will help you and defend you afterward, if you can aid me now.”

   Her hand was on the steel, and yet she hesitated. “By helpin’, I means you not goin’ ter no perlice. I’ll blindfold you an’ lead you out o’ this, and then you just clear out and ferget about it. I never been party t’ no murder, and I can’t do it now. Not a gent like you, so sweet and brave, an’…an’ lovely.”

   “I swear to you that the police shall hear no word of this from me.” Hope pumped new power into his whispering voice, into the leanly cabled muscles of his confined limbs.

   “You say nothin’ t’ no one.” She hissed it like a deadly threat. “Or it’ll be my life an’ yours as well!”

   “To no one, then. Now quick, girl, quick!”

   As on the previous morning, he could hear them coming long before she did. They were still many rooms away. He tried to hurry her, then had to alter plan and interject a warning; she was still fumbling with the key at the first lock when their brisk feet were about to enter the adjoining room. She had barely time to replace the keys on the shelf, beside