Slave Of Dracula (17 page)

He is coming.

From the window of his room Renfield watched the glow of Dr. Seward’s study lamp, the shadows
that moved back and forth across it on the laurels of the garden. Once the men came out into the dark
garden, and Renfield saw Seward point across the lawn and through the leafless trees, to the wall of
Carfax.

So they know.

He didn’t know how they’d learned of it, but in his bones he was sure of it. They were on Dracula’s
trail.

And Dracula was on theirs.

Renfield clung to the bars, watching the moving white blurs of shirt-cuffs, collars, the golden glint of the
study lamplight on Lord Godalming’s hair. Heads nodding. Seward pointing in the direction of the shed,
where the ladder was kept.

Dear God! Dear God, save me!

One by one, the other lights in the house went out. Seward made his rounds, pale and distracted. A
little later Renfield heard Langmore come off duty at midnight, heard Hardy settle into the chair. Renfield
paced the room, sweating. They are going to Carfax tonight.

They are leaving Mrs. Harker here alone.

Christ had prayed in the Garden, Let this cup pass from me. Renfield pressed his face to the bars,
staring out into the dark-ness, then turned to pace again. He remembered the wolf, bro ken from its
home in the Zoo and sent loping through the streets of London, to force a way into the house that
Dracula could not enter on his own. I open the ways for all my servants, Dracula had said to him, but it
was the servant-the wolf whose mind Renfield had felt in his dream-who had opened the way for the
Master. He will hang in the darkness before my window, mate-rializing out of the moonlight and
fog.

He will whisper to me, Let me in.

Renfield knew that it was physically impossible for him to do other than say, Come.

What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

The study lamp was dimmed down. A brief bar of very faint light, like a lantern’s, shone out as the front
door opened, shut. No one emerged, but in a moment they would …

Renfield flung himself against the door of his room. “Hardy!” he shouted through the Judas. “Hardy,
send for Dr. Seward! Bring him here, at once, this moment! I must see him!”

The big guard’s whiskery face appeared in the Judas. “Wot, at this hour? It’s two in the morning!”

“If I’d wanted a report on the time, I’d have sent for the town crier! I have something urgent to tell Dr.
Seward, something des-perate! He’s awake, he and his guests, I’ve just seen their lights. Please fetch

him. Please.” Renfield clutched at the bars, as if he could reach through them and wrest the promise from
the guard. He fought to keep from shouting. “Please.”

Shaking his head, Hardy withdrew. Renfield pressed his face to the Judas and saw him walk
downstairs, then sank to the floor before the door.

He will know. He will guess, and he will punish.

He will come here tonight. He will use me, use me to destroy Mrs. Harker, use me as a cat’s-paw
as he tried to use me before. The one person of all of them, who treated me as a man and not a
beast.

Footsteps in the corridor. Renfield scrambled to his feet. The clank of the lock.

“What is it, Renfield?” Lamplight in the cell, the lamp held aloft by the tall Quincey Morris in his blue
American Army coat. Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Lord Godalming were with Seward also, all
five men dressed rough, as if they were go-ing burgling, which Renfield guessed they were.

“Dr. Seward.” Renfield spoke in his most calm and careful voice. “I have a most special favor to ask of
you. You must have been aware, in the past day or two, of my return to sanity. I’m certain that only the
press of your duties as host to your friends has prevented you from fulfilling the legal and medical
techni-calities of my release. Though I hesitate to seem impatient or importunate, still I must request, as a
matter of considerable importance, that you release me tonight. Now, in fact. Release me, and send me
home.”

To Catherine, he thought, trying to keep the wild elation from his face, to Vixie. I can take them and
be gone from this country, from my dread Master’s awareness, before morning. He cannot cross
water, we can flee to France.

“I’m afraid,” said Seward calmly, “that even did I judge you restored to complete sanity, those
technicalities could not be dealt with at this hour, and in this fashion. We could not . . .”

“I appeal to your friends,” coaxed Renfield, reminding him-self that screaming at Seward and knocking
him against the wall would probably not serve him well. “They will, perhaps, not mind sitting in judgement
on my case. By the way, you have not introduced me.”

“I beg your pardon.” Seward beckoned the others forward. “Lord Godalming; Professor Van Helsing;
Mr. Quincey Morris, of Texas; Jonathan Harker-Mr. Renfield.”

“Lord Godalming.” Renfield shook the young man’s hand. “I had the honor of seconding your father at
the Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the title, that he is no more.”

His young lordship blinked at the incongruity of Renfield’s small-talk in the barren cell, at two in the
morning, but made a polite bow.

“Mr. Morris, you should he proud of your great state. Its re-ception into the Union was a precedent
which may have far–reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the
Stars and Stripes.”

Morris inclined his head, throughly imperturbable. Renfield guessed he’d encountered stranger
situations.

“What shall any man say of his pleasure at meeting Van Hel-sing? Sir, I make no apology for dropping
all forms of conven-tional prefix. When an individual has revolutionized theraputics by his discovery of the
continuous evolution of brain-matter, conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him
to one of a class. And Mr. Harker, I can only congratulate you upon having the wisdom and
discrimination to find, in all the wide world, that pearl among women who is your beauti-ful wife.”

He hesitated, looking into the young solicitor’s face in the huge shadows, the upside-down lantern-light,
seeing it … when? By firelight? In a dream? Why did it look so familiar?

Not wanting to be seen staring, he turned quickly back to the others. “You, gentlemen, who by
nationality, by heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in
the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full
possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian and medico-jurist as well
as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional
cir-cumstances.”

“Indeed at all times I attempt to so deal with you, and everyone under this roof,” agreed Seward. “And
indeed, you do seem to be improving very rapidly. But it requires a longer inter view than this, to even
begin to think about taking steps to meet your wish.”

“But I fear, Dr. Seward, that you hardly apprehend my wish,” said Renfield. “I desire to go at
once-here-now-this very hour-this very moment, if I may. I am sure it is only necessary to put before so
admirable a practitioner as Dr. Seward so simple, yet so momentous a wish, to ensure its fulfillment.”
Seward’s face was like wood. Renfield looked past him to the others: Godalming, Morris, Harker, Van
Helsing. Imbeciles, do you understand nothing? “Is it possible that I have erred in my supposition?”

“You have,” said Seward.

No pleading on Renfield’s part would move them. He felt frantic, hampered by his terror of Dracula’s
reaction should he guess Renfield’s attempted defection; hampered, too, by his sense of the vampire’s
approach, stealing like a dark cloud down the silent river, across the Purfleet marshes, a cloud filled with
malice and wrath.

“Can you not tell frankly your real reason for wishing to be free tonight?” asked Van Helsing, speaking
like Mrs. Harker as an equal, and Renfield could only shake his head.

“If I were free to speak, I should not hesitate a moment, but I am not my own master in the matter. I
can only ask you to trust me. If I am refused, the responsibility does not rest with me.”

“Come, friends,” said Seward, who seemed, Renfield thought, to have a fairly small repertoire of
closing remarks. “We have work to do. Good-night.”

He turned from the room. Renfield cried, “Please!” and threw himself to his knees before him. “You
don’t understand what you’re doing, keeping me here! Let me implore you, to let me out of this house at
once! Send me away how you will and where you will; send keepers with me with whips and chains; let
them take me in a strait-waistcoat, even to a jail, but let me go out of this! You don’t know what you’re
doing by keeping me here!”

Seward’s face hardened, as if this outburst was something ex-pected and much more in line with his
ideas of how small-hours interviews with lunatics should be conducted. Renfield wanted to take him by
the shoulders and shake him. But that, he knew, would only result in the strait-jacket, and the thought of
being so bound when Dracula came was more than he could bear.

“By all you hold dear-by your love that is lost-by your hope that lives-for the sake of the Almighty, take
me out of this and save my soul from guilt!” Tears of frustration and despair rolled down his face. “Can’t
you hear me, man? Can’t you un-derstand? Will you never learn? Don’t you know that I am sane and
earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul? Let me go! Let me go!”

Seward caught the hand Renfield raised in pleading, pulled him to his feet. “Come! No more of this; we
have had quite enough already. Get to your bed and behave more discreetly.”

“Discreetly?” Renfield bit back a crack of hysterical laughter. For a time he stood, looking into
Seward’s eyes in the glow of Quincey’s lamp, seeing in them the man’s blind grief, his blind pride in being
the doctor, the keeper, the Man Who Is Sane. He felt, suddenly, exactly as he’d felt while trying to argue
with Lady Brough, with Catherine’s sister the obnoxious Georgina, trying to convince them that to take
Vixie away from him and Cather-ine, to lock her into one of their “select young ladies’ academies” would
be the death of that fragile, lively, passionate girl’s soul. To do otherwise was simply Not Done.

Without a word, Renfield walked back to his bed, and dropped down to sit on its edge.

He saw Seward’s shoulders relax, as if, though he did not smile, all things had been restored to the way
he knew they should be.

The other men filed out. As Seward turned, last of all, to shut the door, Renfield raised his head. “You
will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the justice to bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince
you tonight.”

***

From his window Renfield watched the hooded yellow blink of the lantern bob its way across the
abyss of the garden. Watched it ascend what he knew to be the wall, invisible beyond the leaf-less trees.
Watched it vanish.

Pallid moonlight outlined the nearest tree-trunks, slipped away. Returned, to show the thin streak of
white mist that had begun to steal across the garden, mist that glittered in the faint reflections of Seward’s
study lamp, and from another window where the gas was also turned down low. Somewhere a dog was
howling, and Renfield pressed his face to the bars and cried “Dear God! Dear God!” though he could not
have said whether he prayed to the disapproving God of whom he’d been taught in childhood, or to
Wotan, whose red eyes he saw flickering, flick-ering in the heart of the mists.

As the black form took shape, hanging in the darkness out-side Renfield’s window, he thought, That is
where I saw Jonathan Harker. In my dream o f the Valkyries. It is he who was the pris-oner. He
could even now hear Nomie’s silvery voice: I am called Nomie, Jonathan …

But it was not Nomie and her sisters who took shape outside the window now, but
Wotan-Dracula-with his red eyes burn-ing through the mist like malign spots of flame.

Black moths beat against the window, crawled through the narrow slot of the nearly shut casement,
flopped limply on the floor in the moonlight around Renfield’s feet. Though it was night, and chill, big
steely black flies swarmed with them, and spiders crawled from the cracks in the paneling, and still the
black form took shape in the darkness outside the window.

I am here.

Renfield whispered, “Master.”

I am here. You have sworn your love for me; I have brought you good things. Will you not bid
me welcome?

The grip of his mind was like iron and ice, crushing and freez-ing at once. Renfield thought despairingly
of that lovely young woman who had spoken so kindly to him, sleeping alone in this terrible house;
thought of the long horror of Lucy’s death; of the three sisters and their power. He wept, but his voice
choked on the name of God as if Dracula’s steel grip closed about his throat. In that moment he could
have called upon neither God nor man.

“Rats,” Wotan whispered-Dracula whispered-the leitmo-tif of the Traveler God beating in Renfield’s
brain, and across the lawn Renfield saw a dark mass creeping, like water spreading toward the house, a
dark mass prickled by a thousand paired crimson flames. “Rats . . .” With a gesture of his long-nailed
hand, Dracula brushed aside the mists that surrounded him, and Renfield saw them, smelled them, the
sweet filthy unmistakable mustiness of their bodies. “Every one of them a life. And dogs to eat them, and
cats, too. All lives-all red blood, with years of life in it, and not merely buzzing flies!”

Lives, thought Renfield. Strength. Strength for my great work. “All these lives will I give you. Ay,
and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and wor-ship me. Will you not
bid me welcome?”

With a sob, Renfield stumbled to the window, pushed at the casement through the bars. “Welcome,
Master,” he breathed. “I bid you come in.”