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

   Sally automatically started to get up, as if to do what the old man had bidden her. Then she caught herself. “Ahh, it’s the storm you’re hearin’,” she decided, and sat down. Still, in doing so, she unconsciously hitched her chair a little closer to the old man, though this caused the light to fall more dimly on her book.

   Next time the thunder came he could hear, beneath her patched dress, the life pump more quickly through young veins and arteries. He thought: Look up, and her eyes lifted and were caught on his.

   Ah, that old man could hypnotize, sometimes. But his broken memory made him uncertain of himself, and his powers of concentration were flawed by injury. More important, this particular young girl was quite reluctant to deliver her own will completely to another. She might have fought free of the softest, most enticing web he could have woven on his best day.

   Still, in some corner of her heart, she must have welcomed this approach so much like wooing—even as, with a shake of her head, she spurned it. “Look ’ere, lemme get you another drink at least.”

   “That would be kind.” And while she was out, this time, he turned his head and regurgitated, in a clear stream that vanished into the visual mosaic of that experienced floor, the small amount of water he had swallowed earlier.

   This movement of his head, with neck stretched out as much as he could manage, dislocated the poor oilcloth pad from under his bruised skull. Sally’s first instinct when she returned to him was to reach out and set this right; and when she leaned over the old man, his mind was dazzled by the soft throbbing in her slender throat of the great vessels there that tinged the fair skin blue above them.

   She put the pad straight, and then remembered orders and stood back a step. “I wasn’t to touch you, not your bed even. Very firm on that point, ’e was, and I shouldn’t be surprised if ’e should ’ave some means o’ tellin’.”

   “I would never betray one who sought to help me.”

   She stood there without answering, and held the glass of water for him as before.

   He drank, as if it were a great boon, and lay back exhausted by the effort. “Thank you.”

   “Ah well. Now I s’pose I could hand yer the bedpan or bottle if y’ wish. I’ve done a bit o’ nursin’ in me time.”

   “No thank you. Sally.” He paused to look at her with yearning concentration. “You do have the kind hands of a nurse, I see. The body of a good graceful dancer. And that mask cannot hide your beauty from me.”

   “Ar,” she said, and started looking round to see where she had left her book. She was quite good at not letting any feelings show. More than a decade she must have practiced that, since first she looked into a mirror with understanding.

   “Of course I do not know your face. But what I mean is, even if you had no face at all, or if your face were far from what the world calls pretty, yet when I saw it your beauty would be just the same, unmarred for me.”

   Sally hardly hesitated as she turned away and went to where her book lay on the chair. The rain roared suddenly upon the nearby roofs. He let his tensed neck-sinews soften; his head lolled back upon the pad that she had straightened for him. Why oilcloth? Easy to clean? But nobody cared about that, as a rule.

   And somewhere in his upper jaw a faintly delicious aching had begun. To be precise, the ache lay at two points, the toothroots of his canines. But the continuing skull pain soon squashed this interesting sensation jealously out of perception’s range, continuing to hold for itself the center of the stage.

   “I wish I had my memory intact,” he said. “Then I could tell you the name of that great beauty…a certain girl I knew when I was young, who is recalled to me when I behold your youth and grace.”

   “Oh, sir.” What with one thing and another, he had her upset now, enough so that she gave up trying to conceal it. Dismayed, angered, delighted all at once. She must have been aware with one part of her mind that he was telling her some wild tales, but she was greatly taken with them all the same.

   The violinist’s fingers warmed and flew. If his old brain had not been quite so traumatized, he could have found the precise words, the exactly right expression. The girl and victory should have been his, in full, before the muddy dawn came round. But as true history went, he had some fuddled moments, in which he lost his best line of attack. Unable to put off wondering who he was, he said to her: “Has none of them ever spoken my name in front of you?”

   “No sir. I doubt they knows your name.” Then she feared that she had said more than was prudent.

   “Sally. If this unjust, cruel imprisonment must end in my death—if it must, then let it be my heart’s last wish, that my eyes may behold your beauty near me, as they close.” Oh yes, I know. But really it was not the words he said so much as the way he said them; nor even the way the old man said them, so much as the hunger of the girl who listened. And at the time and place of which I write, real men and women really entreated one another in these and similar terms. People were moved by words like these to weep real tears—as Sally wept that night, before the dawn. In the late twenty-first century we all—all of us who are still quick above the ground—shall marvel at