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Saberhagen, Fred - [Dracula 05] Dominion or the state police, I can't just
tell them to look for a vampire."
"Obviously, Joe. It is possible that a man named Carados, from New Orleans, is
there also. His existence they believe in, his possible presence will greatly
interest them. But say nothing yet. The time is not yet ripe. More important
matters than I had dreamed are involved here."
"Why are you telling me now, then?"
"Someone besides myself should know, Joseph. If I should disappear, if I
should die. I am going to visit that castle presently. The duty I have assumed
compels me to. But the powers of evil there are greater than I knew, and it
may be that they will slay me."
SEVEN
When you had just been strangled to death it seemed not surprising that your
next experience should be a peculiar dream. But even under the circumstances
this was starting out to be a very peculiar dream indeed.
One moment Simon was nonexistent in nothingness, and the next he was adrift on
the Sauk in an old rowboat, very like a boat he had sometimes played in during
the summers of his childhood, when his grandmother with whom he usually lived
in Chicago brought him out to visit his aunt and uncle who ran the antique
shop, and the assorted cousins living in Frenchman's Bend and on some of the
farms around.
In this dream--he was almost sure it was a dream--Simon was a child again, or
not much more than a child. He was wearing green swimming trunks, like a pair
he had once worn. It was summer, and the rowboat that bore him was adrift,
oarless, among the islands of the Sauk. The lack of oars was nothing to worry
about. Whenever he wanted to get back to shore he could stick his feet out
over the stern and splash hard enough to propel the boat, even straight
against the sluggish current.
For a short while Simon was convinced that he was indeed a child again. Then
he looked down at his body, and thought about himself, and came to understand
that he was fifteen now. He was waiting for
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Vivian. That realization frightened him, but the fear was swallowed up in the
idea's overwhelming fascination.
He was expecting her to appear somewhere in the distance first, but instead
she burst up with a violent, surprising splash from the brown water right
beside his boat, something she had never done in real life, and Simon
understood that she must have come swimming underwater for a long distance
just to startle him. The effort succeeded; he jumped. Vivian, with green weeds
as from the ocean tangled in her dark curly hair, clung to the gunwale looking
at him wickedly.
"I am the lady--" she began, and then pantomimed biting her tongue, acting
broadly the part of one who has started to say something that must not be
revealed. She was unchanged, no older than when Simon had seen her last,
except that her eyes now danced more openly with evil. With a single lithe
splashing movement she now pulled herself completely up into the boat. There
was a sound as of a faint creaking of
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Saberhagen, Fred - [Dracula 05] Dominion bedsprings. At once Simon was
compelled to stare at her body, which was clothed in nothing but a very small
green bikini. Wetness gleamed on her tanned skin, and he gazed at her
helplessly, and Vivian smiled knowingly to see the effect that she was having
on him.
"I have to do this," Vivian told him in a whisper, and her voice was altered,
diffident, almost apologetic.
She lay down in the bottom of the boat, which was now conveniently furnished
with a mattress and white sheets. Then, "Take off your trunks," in the same
odd pleading whisper, at the same time whisking off her own bikini top. The
breasts revealed were all wrong, were large and pale and soft, but Simon
obeyed, and thrust his body toward her. He had no choice now, if he had ever
had.
The frightened face below his was not Vivian's, but that of the girl from the
antique shop, and they were in a bedroom, on a bed. Simon saw this but nothing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]