Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2013-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

13.

I collected my case, took a candle from the sitting-room, and went down the steps into the cellars of the house. The ones nearest to the foot of the stairway had been wine-cellars once, but I had stripped out the racks when I had installed the false doors, and had thrown them away. What need had one such as I of vulgar intoxicants?

Laura lay in her coffin, perfectly at peace. Her wan face was lustrously clear and her dark eyes seemed almost luminous. The small star-like mark on the cheek beneath her left eye stood out very clearly. Her lovely hair was neatly gathered about her finely-chiseled features.

“Soon,” I whispered. “Soon, my love!”

She did not wake while I did my work; she might as well have been truly dead. She did not even wake when I pricked her arm with the needle, and slowly injected the drug into her arm.

“Never fear, my love,” I said to her. “There is a better world for such as you and I, and a path that shall lead us there, hand in hand. I have sown the seeds of my last nightmare, played my last cruel trick, and now the time has come for expiation and redemption. I have found my destiny, and I know at last that it is within my grasp.”

I found that I was weeping, and wiped the tears from my eyes with my sleeve. How could I, or any other man, ever have thought that I was heartless? How could I, or any other man, ever have condemned me as a monster, forever doomed to remain outside the human community: a thing made shabby by mockery and misfortune?

I filled the syringe again with the remainder of the portion of Edward Copplestone’s elixir of life that I had so carefully made up and measured out. No one else would ever be able to use it, I assumed, unless the world produced another man with Copplestone’s peculiar fascinations–and even then, the colonial powers would need to have refrained from obliterating the ancient but precarious wisdom of the tribesmen he had visited.

I could not believe that there would be any such man, or any such reprieve for the custodians of wisdom. The future for which I was bound was indeed the future of destiny. Nothing could threaten its masters now, whether or not they had the power and the wit to take protective action on their own behalf.

I had saved them.

I had made the world safe for vampirekind.

I was as certain that no one else could follow us into that glorious world–where violent, vapid mankind was nothing but a myth and a memory–as the Great Detective was that I was a vampire, who could and must be destroyed by a stake through the heart.

Before taking my appointed station and injecting the drug into my own arm I reached out to touch the cold forehead of the lovely victim of my lust. I wanted to feel the faint warmth of her forgiveness before I escorted her into the misty reaches of the worlds beyond the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.