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, damn it! They had dragged him up there on the scaffold, and& he could almost
remember the impact of the falling blade&
All right, everything wasn't exactly clear, just at the vital point. Go back a
little farther. Far enough so that memory was plain and unequivocal. Somewhere
sense and sanity must be attainable.
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Very clearly the young man remembered having his hands bound by one of the
jailers before he'd left the prison. Even now his wrists were sore, in
evidence of that. Then he remembered being in the narrow courtyard where the
great carts were loaded with the condemned, its stone walls seemingly
threatening to crush him. No doubt about that either. Then the ride to the
scaffold, in a large cart pulled by a team of horse and crowded with his
fellow victims. There had been jeering crowds along the way.
Very little time had elapsed between the termination of that ride and the
moment when the lights went out for Philip Radcliffe. It was the events just
before the end of consciousness which were hard to pin down like trying to
remember the exact moment when you fell asleep. But yes! With a little effort
he now clearly recalled being half-marched, half-carried up the steps.
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The fierce, dark eyes of the executioner, the great shock of the falling
knife
and also the sharp tug on his recently shortened hair, as the executioner
displayed his head or someone's to the routinely cheering crowd.
&
the great shock of the falling knife
&
But wait a minute! He could not possibly have watched, looking on as a
spectator, seeing from the rear his own head being held up for display. Oh
yes, he'd recognized his head; there was even the small white bandage on the
crown&
Whatever the answer, however the mystery of what had happened on the scaffold
might finally be explained, here he was now, alive yes, alive in what was
certainly a cemetery. Peering around him in the darkness, he at last made out,
at a distance of some thirty or forty yards, the raw earth mounded beside a
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trench.
At least the gravediggers had not ripped the clothes from his body. That, he
had learned in prison, was what those predatory vultures often did.
The clothes Radcliffe had been wearing when he was arrested, and while he was
in prison, had been only ordinary. His coat had been taken from him when his
wrists were bound, and the collar of his shirt had been ripped open. Small
wonder that the petty thieves in the cemetery had not bothered with what was
left, if they'd had the chance. There had lately been no shortage of finer
garments for their selection.
If he'd had a hat, they'd certainly have taken that. Hats must be one item
they very seldom encountered in the course of business. The idea of a man
wearing a hat to his own beheading suddenly struck Radcliffe as tremendously
amusing, and he began to chuckle, an ugly sound. But of course he'd been
hatless when his would-be murderers had dragged him from his cell to have his
head cut off.
While these thoughts were running through his mind, unconsciously he had
started walking again, toward the pale blob that he thought must represent a
mound of raw earth.
In prison he'd also heard the gruesome details about the burial mound, the
endlessly long mass grave whose active end was excavated every morning for the
day's harvest of bodies, and filled in every evening that was the place where
Marie and Melanie sometimes came to do their work.
His feet slowed to a stop, dragging through the grass. Suppose, just suppose,
he'd never been in the hands of the gravediggers at all.
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Slowly Radcliffe came to realize that some clue to the solution of his mystery
might lie in the fact that he had come to himself lying perhaps forty or fifty
yards from the place where the bodies were routinely dumped and where the
gravediggers had been, or ought to be, industriously at work.
He wanted to see the place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. He
set out to reach it.
When he had covered half of the remaining distance to his goal, stalking
stiff-
legged toward the mass grave, a pair of young lovers burst up from the ground
like startled birds, almost at Radcliffe's feet. Tripping on their own
half-shed clothing, they ran away screaming through the darkness 'when he came
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toward them. Alarmed by this eruption, he almost turned and ran in the
opposite direction.
In his imagination, recalling his nightmare, Radcliffe pictured his headless
body separating itself from the jumbled, gory pile, finding his head and
putting it back on. Then his reconstituted self had tottered away, under his
own power, before the gravediggers had been given a chance to do anything at
all with him. The shadow of a nightmare, already almost forgotten, came to
plague him again.
He shuffled slowly forward.
Yes, damn it all, his head had been cut off. He could remember the event& or
at least parts of it, a moment here and there. But no, he couldn't actually
remember his hands groping for his head, pulling it into place.
But now his head was definitely on his shoulders, as firmly attached as it had
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ever been.
If Sanson and his great machine hadn't been able to kill him, that meant,
according to all Connie had told him, that he, Philip Radcliffe, had become a
vampire. What other possible explanation could there be?
The marks left on his throat by Connie's fangs
they had been real enough
were genuine. They didn't hurt, but he could locate them with the sensitive
surface of a fingertip, like tiny pimples.
He drew a deep breath of pride. Pride more in his own sanity, in the integrity
of his memory, rather than on the occasion of his joining a gloriously
different race of men. Connie, as he remembered her, was real.
But in the next moment, drawing a deep breath, he realized that everything
wasn't settled yet. Ought he, as a vampire still to be breathing?
What might have been the basis for an alternate explanation loomed in his
exhausted mind: Were all his recent memories, including his trip to the
scaffold, only the fabric of a hideous dream? But maybe all of life was one
great dream;
that answered nothing.
In Radcliffe's current mental state, only one thing seemed incontestably true:
He was no longer in prison. And for that he could be devoutly thankful.
At last approaching closely the mound of fresh earth, Radcliffe was afforded
his first good look at the Revolution's most recent crop of corpses. Tonight's
shift of gravediggers had not yet finished their job. Now he could hear their
voices rising from a little distance and see the indirect glow of a small
light, where they had
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