Slave Of Dracula (23 page)

“And what smell?”

She said, “Earth. Salt. Blood.” A little blood, from the car-cass of the dead rat, clutched still in the
Count’s hand. Does he know I’m aware of him like this? The thought that in the dark ness his eyes
might open, his mind might reach out to hers, filled her with terror. She knew that if he said to her, Come,
she would move Earth and Heaven to go to him.

But he slept.

She heard Van Helsing say, “Sleep now, Madame Mina, and when you wake, you will wake
refreshed.” It was how he always left her, and she heard his voice and Jonathan’s, quietly, as they left the
bedroom: “All still seem as it was. This is good. When we leave tonight . . .”

The door closed. Mina knew they were leaving-for Transyl-vania, she assumed-but had made the five
men swear never to speak to her of destinations or plans. If she could listen to Drac-ula’s dreams, there
was the chance that he could listen to hers. Only in this way could she help them, she knew. Only in
sur-render, in making herself the object she had all her life struggled not to be. All her life she had been a
doer, an organizer, memo-rizing train-schedules and typing notes and taking correspon-dence courses.
Now it was as if a hand had been laid on her head, saying, Learn stillness. Only by quietness, stillness,
ab-solute trust could she fight back to reclaim her own soul and her own life.

But the thought that she was linked to the Count-the thought of her flesh changing, as Seward had told
her poor Lucy’s flesh had changed as the result of drinking the vampire’s blood–revolted her. She found
herself filled with a loathing for her own body that she could not describe. In that dark dawn when they
had driven the Count from her bedroom, after the Count had held her mouth to his bleeding chest and
forced her to drink, she had screamed, “Unclean! Unclean!” She doubted whether any of the men even
understood, or could begin to understand, her sense of horror at the thought of her own flesh, her own
organs. Daily she felt herself sliding toward double change, alien from them in body and in every thought
and perception of her mind.

Each day she looked in her mirror for signs of further change. Each day she tried to see the reflection of
herself in Jonathan’s eyes. He was-they all-were becoming strangers to her, and in some ways that was
more terrible than all those surreptitious probings with her tongue at her gums and teeth.

Each day she tried to pretend that she didn’t smell the blood in Jonathan’s veins. That she didn’t dream
about waking beside him, hungry and changed; that she didn’t dream of leaning over him, pressing the
soft skin of his throat between her lips. His blood would be delicious. And more delicious still, his dying
de-spair as he opened his eyes and knew himself utterly betrayed.

It was dreams like this that brought her sobbing from sleep at night, to lie trembling, staring at the ceiling
in the dark. Jona-than had enough to bear, without her waking him to share her horrors. She slipped so
easily under Van Helsing’s quiet-voiced commands, and slept so deeply afterward, because most nights
she lay awake.

Poor Lucy, she thought, as she slid deeper into sleep. Poor, sweet Lucy, who had had to go through
this alone, not knowing what was happening to her …

Or would it have been better not to know? Not to hope? Had she dreamed of drinking Arthur’s blood,
before she died? Her dream shifted, images sliding from what she knew to the tantalizingly half-familiar.
She thought for a moment she was seeing Lucy in her dream, but the next instant knew it was not so. The
chamber where the blonde girl knelt belonged to an-other place, another time, furnished with pieces of
Louis XV or an imitation of it, delicate against the heavy stone of the walls. A great window opened into
distant vistas of mountains and trees, to a sunset bleeding itself to death in streaks of cinnabar and gold.
The girl who knelt beside the great bed was praying, but as Mina watched, she groped in her
old-fashioned coiffure of wheat-gold curls and drew out a jeweled comb, whose golden interior was at
the base smooth and flat enough to serve her for a mirror. There was no other mirror in the room.

The girl angled the comb to the branch of candles burning beside the bed, opened her mouth, and drew
back her upper lip in the exact fashion that Mina did several times a day. On her throat Mina could see
the white, mangled punctures of the vam-pire’s bite. The comb slid from the girl’s hands and she dropped
across the bed again, hands clasped as in prayer, but what she whispered was, “Papa … Mama . . .”

“Papa? Mama?” Mina knew the sneering voice. Would rec-ognize it, hear it, in her dreams, she
thought, for the rest of her life. He stood in the shadows beside the bed, his eyes glinting red in the
candle-light. Mina knew he had not been there before. “You vowed that you would forsake all others,
little Goldfinch.” His deep, harsh voice spoke in German. She wondered at it that she would be dreaming
in that language, though she had spoken it a great deal, traveling to Buda-Pesth to bring Jonathan home.
“How is this that you will be forsworn so quickly?” He ad-vanced to put his hands on her shoulders, and
she jerked away, sprang from him, sobbing, to the window. He only smiled, long teeth gleaming. “And
will you forswear all those times that you said you loved me? Even in the presence of the priests of God?”

Her eyes were huge in her emaciated face. “I knew not to whom I spoke.”

“You spoke to me, little Goldfinch.” He pressed a mocking hand to his breast, where his long
old-fashioned waistcoat of black silk was embroidered with crimson flowers like a spattering of blood. “I
have not changed.” His voice was soft, his eyes mockingly amused, as he had been amused at Mina’s
struggles to turn her head aside from the bleeding gash in his chest.

With a sudden motion the girl jerked open the casement of the window, making all the candle-flames
bend and her blonde hair stir around her face. She stood on the window-seat, framed in the darkening
abyss.

“What, do you seek to part already?” Dracula did not move, and at his voice the girl looked back into
the room. “‘Til death do us part, you said, before that God by whom you set such store. But you will
find, I think, if you do jump, that death will not part us. That we will never be parted.” He walked slowly
toward her, holding out his hand. “That is what you wanted, is it not? It is what you said you wanted,
upon all those occasions when you were in my arms.”

The girl clung to the side of the open casement, trembling, tears running down her face now as she
watched him advance; Mina guessed from her quick glance, quickly averted, how deep and terrible was
the drop beyond. Dracula reached her, his hand still held out; the girl cried, “I hate you!”

“Ah, but you will love me, my sweet bride, my treasure, my winepress. You will have no choice.”

She wavered, irresolute, and in that instant he moved, with the panther-like speed Mina had seen. In an

eye-blink he was be-side her in the window, his dark velvet arm circling her waist, bending her backward
over it, out the window and over the abyss. Her feet groped for purchase, toes scrabbling frantically as
they were lifted from the window-seat, so that she was forced to cling to his arms. He bent down, as she
hung above the empty fall, fastened his lips to her throat.

The girl was still breathing, though gasping for air, when he drew her back inside. He released her, and
faded away into the shadows, leaving her lying on the window-seat with her golden hair streaked with
blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY -FOUR

Strasbourg. Munich. Vienna with its pink-and-gold buildings looking as if some mad cake-decorator
had assaulted them with frills of buttercreme.

Sunset. Darkness. Intolerable thoughts. A day of watching trees and villages and distant mountains flash
past, of listening to Art and Quincey play endless games of cribbage. Night again.

,John Seward closed his eyes and wished with everything in him that he could just give himself an
injection of chloral hy-drate and sleep for days. Months, if possible.

Sleep without seeing Lucy’s face as he’d seen it in Hampstead Cemetery, with blood dripping down her
chin and fervid lust in her eyes. Sleep without hearing her scream when Art hammered the stake into her
breast, without seeing her hands scratch and claw at the hammer, the wood, Art’s wrists. Sleep without
seeing Van Helsing gently lift up her severed head to make sure of its disattachment, then lay it down
again and stuff the mouth with the blossoms of the garlic plant, whose scent Seward had come to so
profoundly hate.

Oh, my dearest one, he thought, his heart wrung with emo-tions he could not even name, much less
let himself actually feel. Thank God your mother was dead before that came to pass. She
might have pulled you out of my arms, but she did not deserve that.

And I could not have saved you.

He opened his eyes again. More little fairy-tale villages against the dark slopes of pine-woods. He’d
asked Jonathan Harker about them yesterday, and to his surprise the younger man had kept them all in a
ripple of laughter about strange old beliefs and curious customs he’d encountered on his journey here last
April. “Of course, I didn’t travel in such luxury as this,” Harker had added, gesturing around him at the
little com-partment with its small sofa and table, its Turkey carpet and wood paneling, and had gone on
to recount tales of the other oc-cupants of the second-class coach cars at night-blessed, blessed relief of
laughter.

The compartment door opened and Seward thought it must be a porter, come to light the lamps that
tinkled with their con-tinuous silvery music in time to the rattle of the train. He real-ized the compartment
was almost pitch dark. Time and past time, he reflected, to go next door to Art and Quincey’s
com-partment, to play cards while Van Helsing pored over those ar-cane books he’d brought and the
Harkers chatted as gently as any married couple might …

“Dr. Seward?” said the shadow that loomed over him in the dark.

Whose voice is that?

“Yes?” He sat up on the little sofa, felt for a match, but his visitor closed the door and struck a light,
held the springing lit-tle flame to the lamp-wick as Seward apologized. “I’m sorry, I’m half asleep. Travel
in this part of the world . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“Yes,” said Renfield. “It’s me.” He replaced the lamp-globe. And all Seward could think was, Dear

God. Dear God … “It never occurred to you, did it,” said Renfield, “that the Count would make
anyone his victim-and his slave-in that house but Mrs. Harker? You never thought to check the state of
my teeth and gums before you turned my body over to Lady Brough’s solicitor for burial?”

Dear God … Seward felt exactly as if someone had rammed him in the chest full-force with the end
of a barge-pole. Unable to breathe, and for a moment unable to think. Then another in-ference lept to his
mind, another shock …

“No,” smiled Renfield, as if in his widening eyes he read Seward’s horrified thought. “To the best of my
knowledge the Count-now my Master-limited his depredations to two. I doubt that even he could cope
with Emily Strathmore. How is Mrs. Harker?”

Seward collected himself, his mind racing now. He settled back a little on the sofa, gestured to the
single chair. “She is not well,” he said, “as you must know. Will you sit? Are you a pas-senger on this
train yourself, then?”

“Good Heavens, no!”

“Then how . . .”

“That is my own affair.” Renfield smiled again, and this time Seward could see the length and whiteness
of his canine teeth. Seward noticed also that his former patient had lost the unhealthy flabbiness that had
begun to blur his burly frame in the months at Rushbrook House. He looked, in fact, younger than the
sixty-three years Georgina Clayburne had given as his age, as if even in the short time since his death he
were slipping back into the prime of his strength.

“I’m not an apparition, if that’s what you’re thinking,” added Renfield, and held out one powerful hand.
“Put your fin-ger here, and see my hands,” he quoted Jesus’ words to Thomas the Doubter in the
Bible, “and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.”

Quietly, Seward said, “I believe. If the Count is, indeed, your Master, what do you want? Why are you
here?” Renfield wore a dark suit and good linen, well-fitting and very different from the clothes he’d been
brought in and the clothes he had worn to be buried. Where had he gotten them? He was also able to
observe, watching Renfield carefully, that he was not breathing.

“Because the Count is my Master, I was ordered to pursue you, to come upon you singly in the
dark-as you observe that I have-and to pick you off, one by one, as the Count’s irregular cavalry and his
gypsy servitors picked off so many of his enemies in centuries gone by. As to what I want … Because the
Count is my Master, I should think that would be obvious.” All the sly humor, the ironic amusement that
had convinced Seward that this was in fact no apparition, but Renfield indeed, faded from his
square-jawed face. “I want you to kill me.”

Seward drew in his breath to speak, then let it out.

Dying, Lucy had kissed Van Helsing’s hand, whispering her thanks that he had thrust Art from her in
her trance-bound de-mon state.

On the night before their departure, Mina had made each of them swear to kill her-with stake and
garlic and decapitation–before they would let her fall into Count Dracula’s hands or service.

Renfield’s eyes, though they had the curious reflective bright-ness of a vampire’s, were entirely sane,
and deeply sad as they looked down into his.

“Can you tell us . . .” Seward began, and Renfield shook his head.

“I am not offering to betray my Master,” he said. “I cannot, for one thing, and for another, there is little I
can tell you beyond what you have learned from poor Mrs. Harker. I am free to act only for a little time.
While he is on the water, his power is lim-ited, but if he becomes aware of what I’ve done, he can
exercise it, at the moments of sunrise and sunset, at noon and at the slack and turn of the tide. Dr.
Seward,” he went on, holding out his big hands, “I was your patient for six months, and never during that
time were you anything but humane, professional, and well-intentioned in the face of my admittedly erratic
behavior. In my saner moments I never had a doubt that you would do all within your power to help me,
not because you knew me or loved me, but because it is in your nature, as well as your pro-fession, to
help those who come to you for help.