Slave Of Dracula (21 page)

The Countess Elizabeth is fearsome, cold and deadly as a steel blade, yet she pales in comparison to
her husband, Dracula the Impaler, Viovode of Transylvania in the cruelest time of its history. The meeting
between them can only be compared to the clash of storm winds against raging tidal floods, elemental,

vio-lent, appalling. He flung her to the floor as if she were a rag-doll, struck the others and hurled them
against the walls with such force as to destroy the shelves, cursed them in German and in Magyar. He
made the three of them crawl, as the Countess had made me crawl. My soul-if I can still speak of myself
as pos-sessing such a thing-trembles for poor Mrs. Harker, if and when he should claim her as his own.

“I am pursued by human rats, by the yapping curs of this land,” he stormed at the three women, who
crouched bloody on the floor before his boots. “Jealous suitors all, swearing vengeance, as the impotent
Turk and the beaten Slav threw stones at me when I rode in triumph through their towns! Dogs! I spit
upon their vengeance!” There was a fading red scar across his forehead, where, Nomie had told me,
Jonathan Harker had struck him with a shovel as he lay sleeping in his coffin, and the front of his vest and
coat had been ripped open, as if by the stroke of a knife.

“Vengeance! It is they who shall learn the meaning of that word to their sorrow! I have taken the soul
of this girl they loved, and I have in my hand the soul of the other. She is mine, whatever time it is that she
die, if it be seventy years from now! They play against me with their tiny mortal lives, but it is I who bear
as my weapon the sword of Time. Against that they can do naught.”

His red eyes raked the three women and he stooped down, caught the Countess Elizabeth by the thick
coils of her hair, dragged her head back so that her eyes met his. “And you, wil-ful sluts! You dared
pursue? You dared leave the castle that is my fortress, to follow me to this place?”

“And you dared to leave us?” retorted the Countess, and Dracula struck her across the face, so that
blood trickled from her lip.

“Silence, hag!” In their locked gazes there was a fearful un-derstanding, the fermented knowledge of
the very depths of one another’s minds, as only hatred can be when it is rooted in the confidences once
exchanged in love. Then he thrust her to the floor again.

“In one way and one way only is it well that you have come,” he said. “The ant can be crushed beneath
the boot, but still the bite of an ant can poison the limb, and so kill the man. I return now to my own
country, to Transylvania-to the place that I left in your charge, faithless trulls! You will go before me, to
make ready my fortress.” The red gaze moved to Nomie, crouching with bowed head, “And you will
travel behind me-with that cringing Judas who once called me Master!-and you will pick off any who
straggle or lag. For they will follow.” And he laughed, a hollow and dreadful sound. “They will follow to
their deaths.”

He reached into his coat and drew out a handful of bank-notes and golden sovereigns, which he threw
to the floor be-tween the three women, the gold tingling musically on the stone.

His voice changed, and he drew the Countess to her feet, speaking to her in Hungarian rather than
German as before, and I caught the words haboru-war-and ver, blood, spoken in the tones of tenderest
love. He cupped her cheek in his hand, and swiftly turning her head, she bit the fleshy heel of his thumb,
so that the blood spattered on his cuff.

At this he laughed, as if at some uproarious jest, and when I raised my head, he was gone.

***

Now they, too, are gone, my beloved, my treasure. I write this kneeling at your side. The Countess and
Sarike have departed to find their little poet Gelhorn, who has all this time been meeting them for midnight
suppers and walks along the Serpentine. They will make arrangements to cross the Channel under his
care, since Van Helsing knows nothing of their presence in this coun-try and will not be watching for
them, and travel by rail back to Klausenberg, and so up the mountains to Dracula’s castle once again.

Dracula himself will travel by ship, as he came to this coun-try, packed in the single box of his native
earth that Van Helsing and his cohorts have not found and sterilized with holy things.

After they had gone, I tried to comfort Nomie, whose face was cut and bruised by Dracula’s violence.
But she slipped away from me as mist. The night is deepening to morning’s small hours. Soon I must
return to Highgate, to the only earth that will give me rest.

A burning hunger rises in my flesh. I caught mice-nearly a dozen, fattened for months on the spoiled
flour and rotting veg-etables in this kitchen when the servants could not return to the locked house. I can
now move with great speed and can, to some extent, dull their animal minds. As I have long suspected,
their blood does indeed in part quench the ravening hunger of the vampire.

But only in part. I know not how long it will be before I, too, begin to kill the innocent, like the children
that Lucy Westenra took in her state of revenant shock.

And so I must depart. I will return with fall of night, beloved. Mortality and the effects of time hold no
horrors for me, and to me your face is as beautiful now as it was that first moment I saw you, at the
lecture-hall in Leicester Square, in that gown of iris-colored silk. We depart for Transylvania, Nomie and
I, probably next week. It depends on how long it takes Seward and young Lord Godalming to wind up
their affairs in this country, and Van Helsing to make his preparations. With your permis-sion I will come
here to be with you every night until then. For six months I longed for nothing but to sit beside you and to
look upon your lovely face, and now nothing can prevent me from doing so, for what time is left to me.

And if I can arrange it, that time will be short, please God. Between enslavement to the Countess
Elizabeth, and through her to the terrible Count, there is nothing whatsoever to choose. Hell itself cannot
be as dreadful as that occupation for eternity. Poor Lucy Westenra’s suitors will be in pursuit of the
Count, and in them lies my hope. They hunger for revenge as I do for blood. It will be no difficult matter
to place myself in their path, to embrace the oblivion I seek, and the way through the Gate on whose
other side you and Vixie wait.

My darling, I want nothing now but to be with you. When that is accomplished-when we do indeed
meet on the Other Side-I can only beg that you understand, for I know that I can-not hope that you
might forgive.

Still I remain, in spite of all, forever,

Your loving husband,

R.M.R.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

R.M.R.’s notes

5 October

17 mice, 6 rats, 3 moths

Flies scarce even in London with advancing cold.

Spider season. Although I have access now to the hot blood of rodents, I still find a special pleasure in
the sharp sparkle of these predatory smaller fry. Though I do enjoy moths. Having only the night to hunt
in, birds are no longer a possibility. Dogs I will not kill, though I have found that I can summon them with
my thought, as Dracula summoned the wolf from the London Zoo to break through the shut windows of
Hillingham and tear away Van Helsing’s protective wreaths of garlic. Dogs are faith-ful, and it is ill to
reward such innocent helpfulness with death. The cats with which Highgate abounds stare in disbelieving
af-front at my summons, then sneer at me and run away. A pity–Puss eats of many mice and sparrows in
her life. Is that why she has nine of them?

6 October

22 mice, 4 rats, 18 spiders, 2 moths

In Regent’s Park this evening a child of eleven or so accosted me, tawdrily clad in a grown woman’s
cast-offs. She fell into step with me, winked, and said, “Cold night, eh, guv?” and looking down into her
calculating eyes I was filled with such blinding hunger, such overwhelming need, that I could literally smell
the blood that coursed in her veins. I bared my teeth at her-like Dracula’s, and the Countess’s, and
Nomie’s now, long and sharp as a wolf’s fangs-and widened my eyes like the horrors of a Kabuki mask,
and snarled in a good imitation of Emily Strath-more when she was getting ready to slide into a fit, “Cold
in-deed, little posset.” I lunged at her, giving her ample time to flee down the path, for indeed she needed
a lesson, poor child, about better picking her clients.

But as I watched her go, I wondered how long it would be be-fore I began simply to troll the streets of
the East End in earnest, and take that poor child’s older and more slatternly sisters as my victims. Though
God knows, with the amount of alcohol and opiates I would imbibe with the blood I should undoubtedly
stumble back to Highgate drunk as a muleteer. The blood of rats-the energy of their fierce little
minds-lessens the desper-ate fire in my own veins, but it does not cure the scraping, sear-ing need in me.

That need, Nomie tells me, is assuaged only by human blood, and the psychic inhalation of human
death. It is from the death, as well as the blood, that we imbibe our strength. We need the one as greatly
as we need the other. I do not know how long I can survive before I become even as Dracula is.

Was he different in his first century of Un-Life? His second?

Somehow I think not.

I pray that I will engineer my death-my true death-at the hands of Seward and Van Helsing before I
become in my heart as he is now.

I was in Regent’s Park to meet the Countess, Sarike, Nomie, and their human agent Gustav Gelhorn,
whom I recognized at once, at one of the new cafes on the Circle near the Boating hake. In the glowing
jewel-box of lamps and passers-by that pasty-faced little man seemed more anaemic than ever, his pale
blue eyes traveling with reverent adoration from the face of one woman to the face of the other, and
barely glancing at my own. I am positive he made not the slightest association between the “Mr.
Marshmire” who wrote him out a cheque for three hun-dred and fifty pounds on the Merchants’ Bank to
pay expenses for himself and his “beautiful spirits” to journey back to their native mountains, and the
screaming wretch he had seen in the padded room at Rushbrook House.

He was a very unpleasant little man, a disciple of Gobineau and Marr and other writers of the Volkish
Movement, and full of his own importance as a member of the “pure Aryan race.” An astonishing
combination of smug vanity and self-pity. At one point, in between endless ramblings about the “German
race soul” and the dire international plots of “degenerates” like Jews and homosexuals, he made reference
to the “special circum-stances” of the journey, with a covert glance at the Countess, who merely looked
amused. None said to him, “Our dear friend Marshmire is aware of our … limitations, Friend Gus-tav,” at
which he slid his gaze sidelong at me with wary disbelief not innocent of jealousy.

In my loftiest German, I said, “Because a man passes by an English name, Herr Gelhorn, does not
mean that he shares the soul of this island race of debased counter-jumpers. Did you think yourself the
only man who has heard the Rhinemaidens sing, as they combed their hair upon the rocks in the
moonlight? For the voices of the spirits of the German Race-Soul carry far, across rivers and mountains,
and even the seas.”

Gelhorn looked properly chastened, and for an instant I met Nomie’s eyes and was hard put not to
burst into laughter, at the shared mental picture of some fat American railroad baron wak-ing in the night
in his mail-order castle in Chicago crying, The Rhinemaidens! The enchanted spirits of the German
Race-Soul require my help!

Gelhorn even mumbled, as we shook hands in parting, “Thank you, mein Herr, for your assistance to
these spirits, these wander-ing elementals, in their quest across lands and seas. You and I are privileged
beyond the part of most of the Mortal Race, to look upon their faces, to realize that the true spirits of the
Fatherland still walk this earth and extend their friendship to men of pure blood.”

His bespectacled gaze lingered reverently on the Countess, whom Sarike was helping into her very
stylish sable pelisse-where Gelhorn thinks she acquired the two hundred guineas that such a garment
costs, I cannot imagine. Rhine gold, per-haps?

“I swear to you,” Gelhorn went on, “that I shall protect these spirits with my very life, on the
cross-Channel boat, and on the train from Paris, until they are returned again to their sacred mountains.”

I inclined my head, and let him pay the bill. I don’t think he was aware that I-supposedly human-had
sipped no more of the coffee than had the three representatives of the German Race-Soul he was
helping. Nomie and I stood at the edge of the cafe’s golden lights, and watched him escort the Countess
and Sarike away into the thick mists that lay beneath the park’s leaf-less trees.

“Fortunate for the Countess,” I remarked, “that she found him,” and Nomie regarded me with surprise.

“Fortune has little to do with the hunt, Ryland. To be vampire is to fascinate, men and women both. We
lure by our beauty: it is how we hunt. We disarm the mind through the senses and the dreams. How else
would we survive? Men see us, and follow, de-spite all they know, drawn by their need like your poor
friend Jonathan. Else why would they go with us to lonely places in the dark, and yield to the kisses of a

stranger? Will you hunt with me tonight?”

“The taking of lives has no savor for me, Nornchen,” I answered-Little Nomie, a jest between us: a
sweet-faced sad lit-tle Valkyrie, riding with her sisters to choose who will be slain tonight. The protest
was a complete lie and she saw it, glancing up into my face. When your soul has lain naked and helpless
in the mind of another while you watch your body’s death, there is no such thing as deceit. But she only
smiled agreement at me, and said nothing. “I think I will return to Kensington, and sit for a time beside
them whom I will never cease to love.”