The Other Teddy Roosevelts Page 7

  “I don’t read popular literature,” said Roosevelt with an expression of distaste.

  “Well, if you change your mind, sir,” said the other officer, “it’s called Dracula.”

  “I think I heard someone mention it once or twice,” said Roosevelt with no show of interest.

  “It’s about this guy who can’t be hurt, at least at night. He drinks people’s blood…”

  “Enough!” said a third officer, who was examining Zuckerman’s corpse. “I’d like to eat dinner again sometime before I die.”

  “Sorry,” said the officer.

  “All right,” said Roosevelt. “Let’s get these men inside before the sun comes up and we attract a crowd. Take them both down to the morgue, find out what killed Zuckerman (though I can hazard a pretty good guess right now), and have someone contact Officer Jacobs’ widow.”

  “Shouldn’t that be your job, sir?”

  “It should be, but we’ve got a killer on the loose, a killer that bullets don’t stop. I’ve got to find out what will stop him.” He paused. “I suppose we should put a guard around O’Brien, but it wouldn’t stop this man, and I’m not going to lose any more officers before I find out how to defeat him.”

  He went back into the building, climbed the stairs, and retrieved his hat and his walking stick from the corner of his office. Then he went back outside. A few minutes later he was walking up Park Avenue. After a mile he turned onto 34th Street, then turned left on Lexington. He wandered the city, considering the problem, discarding one approach after another, and suddenly realized that it was daylight.

  He stopped by a newsstand to pick up a paper, was pleased to see that neither murder had been reported yet, and saw a full-page ad for the hot new bestseller, Dracula—the same book his officers had been talking about. He waited until the library opened, walked inside, picked up a copy, and skimmed the first sixty or seventy pages.

  It was a flight of fancy. Well-written, though the man couldn’t hold a candle to Austen or the Brontes, or Americans such as Mark Twain or Walt Whitman. But the similarities between the fictional Dracula and the very real Demosthenes were striking, and finally he put the book back where he’d found it and began searching through the non-fiction section, trying to find the legends that Bram Stoker had used as his source material. It wasn’t easy. There were references to a Nosferatu, and to Wampyres, and to other creatures, but they were so far-fetched that he couldn’t see them being of any use. Still, they were something, and that was more than he could find anywhere else.

  He carried a dozen source books to a table and began taking notes, researching the legend as meticulously as he researched ornithology or naval strategy. He created two columns. The first contained suppositions that three or more sources held in common. When he couldn’t find at least three, or when they were contradicted by another source, they were moved to the second column.

  By late afternoon he had only two items remaining in the first column. Sooner or later every other “fact”, every supposition, had come into conflict with some other legend’s or purported history’s facts and suppositions.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but he decided he couldn’t wait. Demosthenes wasn’t going to stop killing, but once he delivered O’Brien—and that was if he delivered O’Brien; he knew that no payment would made—there was every chance that Roosevelt would never see him again.

  It would take perhaps half an hour to prepare, but although the sun was low in the sky, he didn’t really expect to see Demosthenes before midnight. His three other appearances had always been between midnight and dawn.

  Roosevelt stopped by the apartment to have dinner with Edith. Then he finished his preparations, told Edith that he would probably be spending the night at the office, promised to find a cot and not sleep in his chair, and finally took his leave of her, after selecting a book to read, and stuffing a pile of personal correspondence that required answers into a leather case.

  He reached the office at about 8:00 PM, told the policemen on duty to pass the word that if Demosthenes showed up, even if he was carrying a corpse, not to try to stop him. They looked at him as if he’d been drinking, but he was the Commissioner of Police and finally they all agreed.

  Roosevelt entered his office, sat down at his desk, immediately pulled out and destroyed all existing copies of the photo of himself with Baldy and Eye-Patch. After all, he reasoned, they’d done their duty, even if no one had foreseen the consequences. An avid letterwriter, he spent the next three hours catching up on his correspondence. Then he picked up a copy of F. C. Selous’ latest African memoir and began reading it. He was soon so caught up in it that he didn’t realize he was no longer alone until he heard the thud of a body being dropped to the floor.

  “O’Brien,” announced Demosthenes, gesturing toward the pale corpse.

  “Why do you keep bringing them to me?” asked Roosevelt. “Our agreement has been abrogated.”

  “I am bound by a different moral code than you.”

  “Clearly,” said Roosevelt, barely glancing at the body. “I’d like you to tell me something.”

  “If I can.”

  “Did you kill Pericles and Sophocles too, or is this a recent aberration?”

  A cold smile crossed the tall man’s face. “Ah! You know! But of course you would. You are not like the others, Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “I most certainly am,” said Roosevelt. “I am a man. It is you who are not like the others, Demosthenes.”

  “They are sheep.”

  “Or cattle?” suggested Roosevelt. “You have relatives that live on cattle, do you not?”

  Another smile. “You have done your homework, Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “Yes, I have. Enough that I find it difficult to believe you ever suggested that the warrior who runs away will live to fight another day.”

  “A misattribution,” said Demosthenes with a shrug. “I do not retreat—ever.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “It nevertheless would have been good advice for you,” said Demosthenes. “I intuit that you think you know enough to harm me. Do not believe everything you believe you have learned. For example, it is said that a vampire may not cross over water, and yet I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to find fresh feeding grounds. They say the sunlight will kill me, yet I have walked down Fifth Avenue at high noon. They say I cannot enter a building without being invited, but you know that no one has invited me here.”

  “All that is true,” agreed Roosevelt. “And it is all irrelevant.”

  “I admire you, Mr. Roosevelt. Do not do anything foolish that will force me to harm you.”

  “You are not going to harm me,” said Roosevelt, getting to his feet.

  “I warn you…” said Demosthenes.

  “Save your warnings for those who are afraid of animals,” said Roosevelt. “I told you before: I am a hunter.”

  “We are both hunters, each in our own way,” said Demosthenes. “Do you think to slay me with your fabled Winchester rifle?” he added with a contemptuous smirk.

  “No,” answered Roosevelt, picking up his weapon and positioning himself between Demosthenes and the door. “We both know that bullets have no effect on you.”

  “Ah!” said Demosthenes with a smile. “You expect to beat me to death with your walking stick?”

  “I have a motto,” said Roosevelt. “Thus far I’ve shared it with very few people, but someday I think I shall make it public, for it has served me well in the past and will serve me even better tonight.” He paused. “It is: Speak softly and carry a big stick.” He removed the metal tip from his wooden walking stick, revealing the sharp point that he had whittled earlier in the evening. “This is my big stick.”

  “So you’ve learned that much,” said Demosthenes, unperturbed. “Has any of your research told you how to drive a wooden stake into the heart of a being with fifty times your strength?”

  “Let’s find out,” said Roosevelt, advancing toward him.

  Demosthenes rea
ched out confidently and grabbed the walking stick with his right hand. An instant later he shrieked in agony and pulled his hand back as the flesh on it turned black and began bubbling.

  “The wooden stake was not the only thing I learned this afternoon,” said Roosevelt. “I took the liberty of rinsing my walking stick with holy water on the way here.”

  Demosthenes uttered a scream of rage and leaped forward. “If I die, I will not die alone!” he snarled as the point of the stick plunged deep into his chest and his hands reached out for Roosevelt’s throat.

  “Alone and unmourned,” promised Roosevelt, standing his ground.

  A minute later the creature named Demosthenes was no more.

  ***

  It didn’t take long for new kingpins to move into the positions vacated by Pascale, Zuckerman and O’Brien. Somehow, after Demosthenes, they didn’t seem like the insurmountable problems they might have been a month earlier.

  The Commissioner of Police looked forward to the challenge.

  1898:

  The Roosevelt Dispatches

  On the way home from the 1994 Worldcon in Winnipeg, Kevin Anderson approached me in the airport and asked me to write a story for his anthology, War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches. Each story in the book would proceed on the premise that H. G. Wells’ Martian invasion had actually occurred, and various historical characters would have to react to it.

  Of course I accepted, and of course I chose Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, it was set in 1898, and here a man who was a naturalist, a taxidermist, a politician, a hunter, and military leader who had just led his men in a successful charge up San Juan Hill. Who in all the world was better qualified to face the Martians?

  Kevin gave me permission to place it with a magazine before the anthology appeared, and it ran in F&SF.

  ***

  Excerpt from the Diary of Theodore Roosevelt (Volume 23):

  July 9, 1898: Shot and killed a most unusual beast this afternoon. Letters of inquiry go off tomorrow to the various museums to see which of them would like the mounted specimen once I have finished studying it.

  Tropical rain continues unabated. Many of the men are down with influenza, and in the case of poor Westmore, it looks like we shall lose him to pneumonia before the week is out.

  Still awaiting orders, now that San Juan Hill and the surrounding countryside is secured. It may well be that we should remain here until we know that the island is totally free from any more of the creatures that I shot this afternoon.

  It’s quite late. Just time for a two-mile run and a chapter of Jane Austen, and then off to bed.

  ***

  Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to F. C. Selous, July 12, 1898: My Dear Selous:

  I had the most remarkable experience this week, one that I feel compelled to share with you.

  I had just led my Rough Riders in a victorious campaign in Cuba. We were still stationed there, awaiting orders to return home. With nothing better to do, I spent many happy hours bird-watching, and the event in question occurred late one afternoon when I was making my way through a riverine forest in search of the Long-billed Curlew.

  Afternoon had just passed into twilight, and as I made my way through the dense vegetation I had the distinct feeling that I was no longer alone, that an entity at least as large as myself was lurking nearby. I couldn’t imagine what it might be, for to the best of my knowledge the tapir and the jaguar do not inhabit the islands of the Caribbean.

  I proceeded more cautiously, and in another twenty yards I came to a halt and found myself facing a thing the size of one of our American grizzlies. The only comparably-sized animal within your experience would probably be the mountain gorilla, but this creature was at least thirty percent larger than the largest of the silverbacks.

  The head was round and was totally without a nose! The eyes were large, dark, and quite widely spread. The mouth was V-shaped and lipless and drooled constantly.

  It was brown—not the brown of an impala or a koodoo, but rather the slick moist brown of a sea-slug, its body glistening as if greased. The thing had no arms as such, but it did have a number of long, sinewy tentacles, each seemingly the thickness and strength of an elephant’s trunk.

  It took one look at me, made a sound that was half-growl and half-roar, and charged. I had no idea of its offensive capabilities, but I didn’t like the look of those tentacles, so I quickly raised my Winchester to my shoulder and fired at almost point-blank range. I could hear the smack! of the bullet as it bounced off the trunk of the beast’s body. The creature continued to approach me, and I hurled myself aside at the last instant, barely avoiding two of its outstretched tentacles.

  I rolled as I hit the ground, and fired once more from a prone position, right into the open V of its mouth. This time there was a reaction and a violent one. The thing hooted noisily and began tearing up pieces of the turf, all the while shaking its head vigorously. Within seconds it was literally uprooting large bushes and shredding them as if they were no more than mere tissue paper.

  I waited until it was facing in my direction again and put a bullet into its left eye. Again, the reaction was startling: the creature began ripping apart nearby trees and screaming at such a pitch that all the nearby bird life fled in terror.

  By that point I must confess that I was looking for some means of retreat, for I know of no animal that could take a rifle bullet in the mouth and another in the eye and still remain not just standing but aggressive and formidable. I trained my rifle on the brute and began backing away.

  My movement seemed to have caught its attention, for suddenly it ceased its ravings and turned to face me. Then it began advancing slowly and purposefully—and a moment later it did something that no animal anywhere in the world has ever done: it produced a weapon.

  The thing looked like a sword, but when the creature pointed it at me, a beam of light shot out of it, missing me only by inches, and instantly setting the bush beside me ablaze. I jumped in the opposite direction as it fired its sword of heat again, and again the forest combusted in a blinding conflagration.

  I turned and raced back the way I had come. After perhaps sixty yards I chanced a look back, and saw that the creature was following me. However, despite its many physical attributes, speed was not to be counted among them. I used that to my advantage, putting enough distance between us so that it lost sight of me. I then jumped into the nearby river, making sure that no water should invade my rifle. Here, at least, I felt safe from the indirect effects of the creature’s heat weapon.

  It came down the path some forty seconds later. Rather than shooting it immediately, I let it walk by while I studied it, looking for vulnerable areas. The thing bore no body armour as such, not even the type of body plating that our mutual friend Corbett describes on the Indian rhino, yet its skin seemed impervious to bullets. Its body, which I now could see in its entirety, was almost perfectly spherical except for the head and tentacles, and there were no discernable weak or thin spots where head and tentacles joined the trunk.

  Still, I couldn’t let it continue along the path, because sooner or later it would come upon my men, who were totally unprepared for it. I looked for an earhole, could not find one, and with only the back of its head to shoot at felt that I could not do it any damage. So I stood up, waist deep in the water, and yelled at it. It turned toward me, and as it did so I put two more bullets into its left eye.

  Its reaction was the same as before but much shorter in duration. Then it regained control of itself, stared balefully at me through both eyes—the good one and the one that had taken three bullets—and began walking toward me, weapon in hand…and therein I thought I saw a way in which I might finally disable it.

  I began walking backward in the water, and evidently the creature felt some doubt about the weapon’s accuracy, because it entered the water and came after me. I stood motionless, my sights trained on the sword of heat. When the creature was perhaps thirty yards from me, it came to a halt and raised its weapon�
��and as it did so, I fired.

  The sword of heat flew from the creature’s hand, spraying its deadly light in all directions. Then it fell into the water, its muzzle—if that is the right word, and I very much suspect that it isn’t—pointing at the creature. The water around it began boiling and hissing as steam rose, and the creature screeched once and sank beneath the surface of the river.

  It took about five minutes before I felt safe in approaching it—after all, I had no idea how long it could hold its breath—but sure enough, as I had hoped, the beast was dead.

  I have never before seen anything like it, and I will be stuffing and mounting this specimen for either the American Museum or the Smithsonian. I’ll send you a copy of my notes, and hopefully a number of photographs taken at various stages of the post mortem examination and the mounting.

  I realize that I was incredibly lucky to have survived. I don’t know how many more such creatures exist here in the jungles of Cuba, but they are too malevolent to be allowed to survive and wreak their havoc on the innocent locals here. They must be eradicated, and I know of no hunter with whom I would rather share this expedition than yourself. I will put my gun and my men at your disposal, and hopefully we can rid the island of this most unlikely and lethal aberration.

  Yours,

  Roosevelt

  ***

  Letter to Carl Akeley, hunter and taxidermist, c/o The American Museum of Natural History, July 13, 1898: Dear Carl:

  Sorry to have missed you at the last annual banquet, but as you know, I’ve been preoccupied with matters here in Cuba.

  Allow me to ask you a purely hypothetical question: could a life form exist that has no stomach or digestive tract? Let me further hypothesize that this life form ingests the blood of its prey—other living creatures—directly into its veins.

  First, is it possible?

  Second, could such a form of nourishment supply sufficient energy to power a body the size of, say, a grizzly bear?