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had not appeared to him to offer any genuine explanation of the upset. At the
moment of crisis, of course, he had given little thought to causes, but
expected it would be relatively easy to make sure that both girls were safe.
We urged him to tell the whole story again, this time as truthfully as
possible, and he agreed. When he had come up, gasping, to the surface after
his initial plunge, Armstrong had immediately seen
Becky struggling to stay afloat; he swam to her and guided her to shore, which
was the work of less than a minute.
"Then Becky and I looked at each other. And both of us said the same thing at
the same moment: 'Where's Louisa?'
"There was the rowboat, now floating almost placidly, drifting
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire upside down. There were the two oars. I
seem to recall seeing a floating banjo and a picnic basket. But no sign at all
of Louisa. I
wondered, was she on the other side of the boat, or had she come up underneath
it?"
In a strained voice, Martin went on to tell us that he had stripped off his
light summer coat, which was already sodden, and then his shoes, and in light
summer trousers and shirt-sleeves, plunged back into the stream. Quickly, he
made sure that no one was trapped under the boat. He came out from under it
and dived again, thinking that surely, surely, his fiancee's head must appear
above the water at any moment...
"I did find her hat did I mention that before, gentlemen? Yes, her hat, in the
water... but that was all."
Time dragged on, the horrible minutes following the capsizing of the boat
lengthening into a full hour, and extending themselves endlessly after that...
Rebecca, of course, had summoned aid as quickly as possible. But dusk, which
was gathering at the time the boat tipped, had deepened almost totally into
night before there were answering shouts and lights coming through the trees.
"We searched on, of course, through the night. Men and boys from the
neighboring houses and farms, as well as from Norberton
House, looking along the shore and in the water. Gradually, we all lost hope.
No one found... found her... until broad daylight. By then, the girl, whoever
she was, had been dead for hours. Her... her body lay on the bank, nearly a
mile downstream." Briefly overcome by emotion, the young man had to pause.
"Oh, God! Oh, God, when I
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire thought that was Louisa "
In the morning, as we already knew, there had been the limp, white,
unbreathing body to be taken up, carried home and mourned over.
Drowning was the obvious cause of death. As we had earlier learned, there had
been no visible injuries certainly no more than a few scratches, including the
two small marks upon the white, still throat.
Within a day or so, an inquest had been held upon "the poor girl, in the full
belief that she was Louisa," and her body had been duly interred.
When Armstrong had concluded his story, Rebecca Altamont took his hand and did
her best to comfort him; and I remember that at the time, it crossed my mind
that when grief and terror had been surmounted, there might be the chance of a
more tender attachment growing between them.
Presently the young American, recovering himself a little, proposed a plan in
which several of we men would return in the same rowboat to the scene of the
catastrophe, and one or more might strip and jump into the water to try the
experiment of tipping the craft over, just to see how difficult it was, even
where the river was shallow enough to allow more or less solid footing on the
muddy bottom.
"If it proves really impossible to capsize the boat that way," he concluded,
"then perhaps I was hallucinating after all."
No one answered that directly. I could see Dracula smile faintly, no doubt at
the thought of himself going for a bathe in the bright morning daylight. In a
moment, the prince murmured that he would
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire decline to take part in such an
exercise. "Running water and I are not always on the best of terms," he added.
"Not to mention my tendency to sunburn." I could see that this refusal and
comment both rather puzzled the young American.
Holmes commended Armstrong's plan of reenactment as worthy, possibly useful.
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