Dracula Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss Page A

viewpoint.
    â€œBring me boxes of spiders to eat. Spiders and sparrows. I need the blood. It’s life, kind sir. Life’s paper. Seven old newspapers make a week in Fleet Street. The Fleet Ones can eat up a week with their little fingers, this little finger on the right.”
    He started to scratch a figure with sharp teeth on the wall as he spoke.
    â€œTalk sense, man,” said the ginger man sternly.
    â€œThere soon will come a scientist who will say even stranger things about space and time. We can’t comprehend infinity, yet it’s in our heads.”
    â€œTogether with the blood?” He laughed impatiently, turning to the door to be released.
    As he rapped on the panel, the madman said, “Yes, yes, with the blood, with a whole stream of blood. You’ll see. It’s in your eyes, kind sir, she said. A stream of blood stretching beyond the grave, beyond the gravy.”
    He made a jump for the distant spider as the door slammed, leaving him alone.
    The ginger man walked with the doctor in the bloodstained coat. The doctor accompanied him gravely to the door of the asylum, where a carriage waited. As the ginger man passed over a guinea, he said, with an attempt at casual small talk, “So I suppose there’s no cure for dementia, is that so?”
    The doctor pulled a serious face, tilted his head to one side, gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.
    â€œI fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.”
    â€œYou wretches live in the dark,” Joe Bodenland said. “Don’t you hate your own sickness?”
    He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he fingertipped the keyboard in the train’s chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.
    â€œIf you’ve told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.”
    Bodenland watched the scattering figures on a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.
    As the time train slowed, the gray light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.
    â€œSave me—I’m photophobic. We’re all photophobic. Oh, please … it would be the end—”
    â€œWouldn’t that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.”
    Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift’s body.
    The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.
    Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.
    â€œWhat …” Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.
    They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.
    The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist, warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.
    As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.
    A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet—a dragonfly with a five-foot wing-span came dashing at him, its body armored in iridescent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn’t