Free Dracula Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss

just made,” Larry shouted. “A beauty. Fifteen-foot wingspan. You should see it. Goes faster ’n the real thing!” He roared with laughter.
    Beneath them went the rushing phantom of the ghost train, its eerie luminance shining from the roof as from its sides.
    When they were hovering a few feet above the roof, Bodenland lowered himself cautiously on the helicopter’s wire rope. Clift was just above him, his boots almost touching Bodenland’s helmeted head. When Bodenland gave the thumbs-up signal, Larry switched on the improvised inertial beam. It shone down, vividly blue, encompassing the two men and the top of the train. From Larry’s careering viewpoint, they disappeared.
    â€œYou’ve gone!” he yelled to the rushing air. “Gone! The invisible men … That’s you and Kylie—both gone!” The train was getting away from him. Cursing, he tried to kick more power from the laboring engines, but it was not there.
    The train pulled away ahead and he gave up trying. When he switched off the inertial beam, the wire rope was empty. Bodenland and Clift had indeed gone. He wound in the rope.
    Larry’s feelings were mixed. He had had no opportunity to say anything about the quarrel with Kylie. His father had been too absorbed in this venture. His arrival had been taken for granted, to Larry’s mixed relief and disappointment. He had found Old John surrounded by vehicles and uniformed personnel from Bodenland Enterprises. The students were gone. Now the site of the two graves more resembled an armed camp than a dig.
    Only now, as he headed back alone to the camp, did it occur to Larry that perhaps his mother was feeling the same kind of anger with Joe as Kylie felt with him.
    â€œAh, I’ll call her in the morning, damn her,” he said. He sensed Joe’s warmth for Kylie, and dreaded his rebuke.
    As soon as the beam was off them, the outside world disappeared. They clung to the train roof, then edged themselves carefully through an inspection hatch and dropped down into a small compartment.
    Neither Bodenland nor Clift had any notions of what to expect. Such vague anticipations as they held were shaped by the fact that they were boarding what they had casually christened a ghost train.
    There was no way they could have anticipated the horrific scene in which they found themselves. It defied the imagination—that is, the everyday imagination of waking life; yet in some way it resembled a nightmare scene out of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, something in a horrible manner unconsciously prepared for.
    They had lowered themselves into a claustrophobic little den lined with numbers of iron instruments carefully stowed in cabinets behind glass doors. Separately, scarcely a one would have been recognized for what it was by an innocent eye. Ranked together, they presented a meaning impossible to mistake. They were torture instruments—torture instruments of a primitive and brutal kind. Saws, presses, screws, and spikes bristled behind the panes of glass, which gave back a melancholy reflection of the subdued light.
    Most of the compartment was filled by a heavily scarred wooden table. Pressed against the top of the table by a complex system of bars was a naked man. Instinctively, the two men backed away from this terrifying prisoner.
    His limbs were distorted by the pressure of the bars cutting into his flesh. The gag in his mouth was kept in place by a metal rod, against which his yellowed and fanglike teeth had closed.
    His whole body color was that of a drowned man. The limbs—where not flattened or swollen—were pallid, almost green, his cheeks and lips a livid white. Beyond the imprisoned wrists curled broken and bloody fingers.
    His head had been shaved and was scarred, as by a carelessly wielded open razor. A purple line had been drawn round the equator of his head, above his eyebrows.
    Bodenland and Clift took a moment to realize that the