Slave Of Dracula (13 page)

Seward recalled Van Helsing’s insistence upon leaving a golden cross on Lucy’s body, and his rage
with the maid who’d stolen it. Remembered his appearance, late on the night of her death, in Seward’s
room at Hillingham House, whispering of the ghastly ritual he wanted to undertake: to cut off her head, to
take out her heart.

Is he mad? Seward wondered dimly. Or am I?

You have for many years trust me; you have believe me for weeks past, when there
be things so strange that you might have well doubt. Believe me yet a little, friend
John …

And such was the urgent intelligence in those coldly bright blue eyes, the warm strength of the
Dutchman’s roughened hands, that Seward did believe. Credo sed incredulis …

Grotesque interviews with solicitors. Van Helsing’s fit of hys-terical laughter in the carriage after the
funeral. Arthur’s face as he gazed down at Lucy in her coffin: Jack, is she really dead? And that
blithe and golden young man, all the world’s darling, weeping brokenly in the arms of their tall Texan
friend. Oh Jack, Jack, what shall I do? The whole of life seems gone from me all at
once!

Quincey’s face had been still, like a man bleeding to death inside.

She is gone. She’s really gone.

Seward knew he should feel something, and didn’t. Only the numbness of exhaustion, and the sweating
hunger for chloral hydrate.

Lucy was in her coffin, in her tomb. The quiet tomb of the Westenras on Hampstead Hill, solitary in the
twilight groves with the rain pattering softly against the marble, away from the noise of London. Van
Helsing had returned to Amsterdam, Art-accompanied by Quincey-to Ring, to bury his father.

And he, John Seward, had only a madhouse to return to, the madhouse he’d once been insane enough
to think he could bring Lucy to as a wife. He had worked hard to come to this position of responsibility,
he reminded himself. These people were his charge and his study: to learn the nature of madness, to help
those lost in its nightmare mazes without the hope of get-ting free.

But tonight he could only lie here, sweating in the dark, lis-tening to the rain and to the lunatics
screaming in the deep si-lences of the night.

***

Renfield, too, dreamed of Lucy Westenra, lying in her coffin. And the dream filled him with horror.

She looked, in veriest truth, as if she only slept. How he could see, he did not know, for the tomb was
shut and sealed, the lamps and candles of the mourners long gone. Her lead-lined coffin had been
screwed shut, but he could see her in it still, fair hair lying on her shoulders, flesh fine as porcelain and
little less white than the graveclothes they’d dressed her in. The bloodless look she’d had, in those other
visions during her long crucifixion on the edge of death, was gone. She was relaxed, smiling almost, all
her daytime care dissolved, happy in sleep.

There was something about her sleep that reminded him of something, something he would rather not
see. That he didn’t want to think about.

Then he seemed to be standing in the dark of that stone tomb, looking down at the two coffins-for her
mother was buried beside her-hearing the whisper of the rain on the roof of the tomb, smelling old
smoke, the clinging remains of incense, the first sickening harbingers of decay. And it seemed to him that
at the feet of those two coffins, the shadows began to solidify, coa-lescing into a column of darkness
blacker than the utter night within the tomb. Red eyes burned within that darkness, and a voice
whispered, Beloved.

Within the coffin, Renfield was conscious of it when Lucy opened her eyes.

***

He came awake gasping, trembling. Heat and cold flashed through him in waves-shock, terror, despair.
Distantly, he could hear the dim howling of old Lord Alyn, but other than that, the room-the house-was
utterly silent. It was the dead hour of the night, and still.

Renfield stumbled from his bed, staggered to the window of his room. Hennessey had had the catch
replaced on the case-ment with a stout metal bolt. Beyond the glass, the garden lay in dim spiky shapes
beneath the pattering rain.

The trees were losing their leaves, the last of the flowers were dead. I have been bere since April,
thought Renfield despairingly, and now the year is nearly gone. Oh, Catherine, has it all been for
nothing? He pressed his forehead to the glass, the cold of it like sweet water in his brain. He felt

emptier, hungrier, than he could remember feeling in his life.

He rubbed his eyes, blinked, for it seemed to him that fog drifted above the garden, mingling with the
fitful glimmer of in-termittent moonlight on the rain. For a moment he thought it was only the effect of
tiredness, or perhaps advancing age. But after he rubbed his eyes again, they were still there.

Taking shape. Growing more solid as he watched.

A dream, he thought, a dream I once had … When?

Red eyes gleaming in the darkness. Long hair drifting like seaweed beneath the sea. Pale gowns, and
pale forms borne up on the dark air of the night: two dark and one fair.

Valkyries.

Choosers of the Slain.

Graces, goddesses, or the Norns of fate, hanging in the dark air before his window, red eyes looking
into his.

“You have only to wish it,” whispered the fair-haired girl in German, the tongue of Wagner, the tongue
of Goethe, the tongue of Kant. “You have only to wish it, Ryland, and I will come.”

Renfield breathed, “I wish it.” And returning to his bed, he took the thin pillow and wrapped it around
his hand, to protect his fist as he drove it through the glass.

Catherine, Catherine, we stand balanced upon the blade of a ra-zor! Either we triumph, or we are
utterly undone!

His wives are here! Tonight I have learned much, and the knowledge fills me with terror-with the dread
of more terror yet to come!

They came to my room, stepped through a hole in the glass of the window no bigger than my fist,
though they seemed not to change shape or size. It was indescribable as the things one sees in dreams.

He is not Wotan, as I saw him in my dreams, but is called Dracula, that was known as The Impaler in
his lifetime, four hundred and fifty years ago. A great lord and a great sorcerer, he lives on, vampire,
feeding upon the living and making of them the Un-Dead. He has come to London, to England, to hunt,
to make for himself a new life, for the countryside of the Carpathian

Mountains that were his home has grown poor, and the few peasants that remain are wary, and employ
those things inimical to him and his kind: the flowers of the garlic and the whitethorn, the silver that he
cannot touch and the mirrors that refuse to re-produce his image, the Holy things that burn his demon
flesh as with fire.

“He has come to make new life here,” groused the Countess Elizabeth, the eldest and strongest of his
wives, “and left us three, alone, in a crumbling castle in a hostile countryside, without even the service of
the Szgany gypsies that are his to command.” She is a woman fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and
terrible as an army with banners, as the Bible says: dark-haired, Roman–nosed, tall and with aquiline
features, a Hungarian princess who in centuries past fought at Dracula’s side against the invading Turks.
“He flees from us, and what does he, before the foam of the sea is even dried upon his clothing, but take
for himself an-other bride, to begin another harem more to his choosing, more apt to his commands?
Pah!”

Her long canine teeth gleamed against bloodless lips.

“We have served him,” said fair Nomie, in her voice like glass chimes tapped with rods of thin silver.
“Surrendered our souls and our wills to him, not once but time and again. For this at least he owes us
something.” She is the youngest of them, German by her speech, sweet-faced and almost childlike in her
thoughtful beauty, her eyes sky-blue and her hair the color of corn-silk.

The third wife, Sarike, only smiled, like an animal with her sharp white teeth.

“He learned to speak English, and how to go on in this country, from a solicitor’s clerk whom he had
sent out to him in Transylvania,” went on the Countess, pacing up and down my narrow room with her
long black hair hanging down over her shoulders, her pale clinging dress like a shroud in the moonlight
that came and went through the fleeting clouds. “Our kind can-not cross water, save at the turning of the
tide. Nor do we have the power to read and influence people’s thoughts, nor to come and go as we
will-as we do . . .” She gestured with her long hand, pale and ringed in ancient gold, to the tiny hole in the
window-glass. “. . . while the sun is in the sky. By day we grow sleepy, and our minds are dulled. We
can be taken and killed by those who know who we are, what we are. Only at night are we strong.”

“He needs-we need-the earth of our burial-place, if we are to rest.” Nomie turned to the window, as if
she could see through the darkness the thick-clustering trees that surrounded Carfax. “It was an easy
matter for him to purchase property here in England, to have boxes of the earth from the chapel in the
vaults of his castle shipped here. He must sleep in it, and re-new his strength as mortal men do, by rest:
that knits, as your poet says, the ravel’d sleeve of care. Sometimes I think your Shakespeare must have
suffered sleepless nights himself, for him to write of them so feelingly as he does.”

“And sometimes I think you would sooner sit and read your precious Shakespeare than hunt for the
blood that keeps us all alive,” retorted the Countess, and her deep voice was edged with scorn. She
turned back to me. “It is an easy thing for a man to hire servants, to pay solicitors to rent him or buy him
houses, to open bank-accounts so that he is not paying in the gold coins of long-dead Sultans whenever
he wishes his boots blacked. For women it is otherwise. Especially foreign women.”

Her dark eyes fixed upon mine, and had my life depended on doing so, I do not think I could have
turned my gaze away.

She said, “You are a wealthy man, I understand, Herr Renfield.

The breath seemed to go out of my body, the strength from my knees.

I stammered, “I … I am a prisoner here, a prisoner like the others.”

“Not quite like the others.” They say that tigers purr; I think they speak the truth. “You have house
property. Many houses, from what the assistant keeper in this place babbled in drink to our servant
Gelhorn. Houses that now stand empty.”

“Gelhorn!” I cried. “The German poet Gelhorn, who came here some days ago? He is your servant?”

“He is the servant mostly of opium, and of his own illu-sions,” replied the Countess, with deepest
contempt. “He was on a walking-tour of the Carpathians in July -, and it took my sis-ters and I endless
nights of singing to him as we combed our hair, to wind our images and our words into his drunken
dreams, so that he would find his way-finally!-to the castle. We convinced him we are spirits of the
mountains and the woods-I never thought I should live to thank Nomie for all those silly romances she
reads-and that we must come to England to retrieve magic gold that was stolen so that we could sleep
again in peace.”

I smiled, and met the girl Nomie’s blue eyes. “So he actually believes he is traveling in company with the
Rhine Maidens?” And her eyes twinkled, suddenly very human, in response. “I think he feels safer
traveling with the Rhine Maidens than with the Valkyries. But it is a terrible bore, to speak only of matters
touched upon by Wagner and the Brothers Grimm.”

And I remembered my own dream of speaking to Wotan the Traveler in the hold of the ship.

“Gelhorn is a fool,” sneered the Countess. “And fools have their uses-up to a point. But the man
understands nothing of money, has no concept of how to obtain or even rent property in this country. He
can barely make sense of a railway time-table and he came close to killing the three of us, through his
stupid-ity, a dozen times on our journey to England in his company. We traced our lord here-“

She gestured again to the window, and I thought I heard the curl of bitter anger in her voice as she
spoke of their lord.

“Yet before we confront him, we must have our own place of safety, our own refuge in which we may

rest. We could hire no gypsies to fill up box after box with the earth of our home land. . .” She glanced
sidelong at Nomie, who cast down her eyes, and I guessed that she, at least, had wed, and died, and
been buried in a land far from her childhood home. “We have each a trunk of such earth, and these we
must guard as we guard our lives. You will help us, I think.”

All this while I had knelt before them, and now I looked up, aghast, into those coal-dark eyes with their
red demon gleam. “These houses that you have . . .”

“Yes, yes, of course!” I cried, springing to my feet. My heart pounded-Catherine, Catherine, forgive
me, but if that imbe-cile Hennessey spoke to their creature Gelhorn about my hold-ing several different
properties, who knows what else he might have said? I did not think all those places that you and I
bought in secret were known. You were far too clever for that, my beau-tiful one!

But it has been five months, my darling, five months in which anything can have happened! I think that if
you and Vixie had been forced for whatever reason to change your hiding-place, or to abandon the
names by which you and I arranged for you to be known, you would have found some way to let me
know. I pray that this is so, for I could not risk-I dared not risk-this clever and terrible woman
beginning to make investigations on her own. The thought of you falling into her power-or into the power
of that Thing, that monster, that these women now tell me is the vampire Count Dracula-is more than I
can bear!

Forgive me, Catherine, but I told them about the house in Kentish Town, the money we cached there,
and the papers that would give them introduction to the bank under the name of Moira Tentrees and her
daughter Elaine. I felt fairly certain that you and Vixie would not have had call to use that particular
refuge-if you were discovered (may God forfend!) by Lady Brough and her minions, you would likelier
have gone to the Cambridge House, or even fled to France (though as I said, I h o p e y o u would in that
event have been able to inform me of it).