Slave Of Dracula (31 page)

It snowed that night. Guns will do them no good, if Mrs. Harker freezes to death, Quincey Morris
had said. Huddled in a cup-shaped bay in the rocks at the very foot of the Pass, trying to recruit enough
strength to go on, Wolf-Renfield remembered Mina Harker’s despairing scream, Unclean, unclean! and
the touch of her mind as it sought for its Master. Recalled his dream, in the misty world between living
and death, of the Count forc-ing the dark-haired woman to drink his blood, as Renfield had drunk the
blood of Nomie and her sisters, to begin the transfor-mation of human flesh into the deathless flesh of the
vampire.

Once she had pressed her lips to the welling dark blood of the Count’s gashed chest, it wouldn’t matter
whether Mina Harker died in the next moment or seventy years in the future.

The change to vampire had begun in her flesh. If Dracula remained in the living world, her mind and
soul would be drawn to his, to be upheld, cradled, while her body died, then returned to the changed
flesh within the grave. She would know the Count with the terrible, unbreakable intimacy with which
Ren-field knew the Countess, and Sarike, and Nomie. She would be his slave, under his domination as
the three vampire women were, as Renfield was.

Forever.

Were I not here, running in wolf-form to thwart them, re-flected Renfield sadly, I would be one of
Van Helsing’s hunters, trying to save you, too.

But that wasn’t true, either.

If I were not here, vampire, I would be back in Dr. Seward’s asylum, eating flies and trying to
forget that I murdered my beautiful Catherine, my beautiful Vixie.

Though it was night and the strength of night was flowing into him, Renfield laid his head on his bruised
and smarting forepaws and wondered if there was actually an answer to this conundrum somewhere, or if
everything that had happened to him since the age of twelve-the age when those maniacal rages had first
begun to twist at his mind-had simply been some gi-gantic celestial jest.

In his exhausted mind he saw her, one of the two people who had been unconditionally kind to him in
his days at Rushbrook House. The only one who had talked to him as a man and an equal and not as a
fractious, contemptible child. Far off, like the dim half-dream in which he’d seen the Count drink her
blood, he was aware of her, her face pale in the wildly licking flare of a small campfire, her dark eyes
following in fear as Van Helsing drew a circle around her and the fire, and with the meticulous care of an
alchemist crumbled a Host, like a fine dust, into the snow of the circle. The air was filled with flying
snowflakes, and Renfield was aware of the dark bulk of a small carriage, behind which sheltered four
horses, horses who pulled at their tethers and thrashed their heads, their eyes catching the firelight in
rolling terror.

Van Helsing, thickly bundled in a fur coat, was shivering with the cold. Mina, wrapped in rugs and
sheepskins beside the fire, did not tremble, and her dark eyes seemed curiously bright. But when the old
man came back to her, she clung to his arm, pressed her face to his shoulder.

Among the wildly whirling snowflakes, the firelight caught the red reflection of eyes. In his half-dream
Renfield saw them, as Mina and Van Helsing saw them: the ghostly faces with their red-lipped smiles, the

lift and swirl of the white dresses they wore. The gold of Nomie’s hair, wind-caught like a mermaid’s
beneath the sea, and the storm-wrack of Sarike’s and the Countess’s.

As they’d hung in the air outside the Castle window in his earlier dream, calling to Jonathan Harker,
they hung now in the mealy tumult of the blizzard, arms around one another’s waists, reaching out.

Calling to Mina to come to them, to be their sister.

Nomie would be good to her, thought Renfield. But he’d seen how the Countess treated the youngest
of her sister-wives, alter-nating caressing sweetness with almost unbelievable spite, as sis-ters sometimes
do. Would the Count protect his newest bride from the others? Of course not.

He saw Mina shrink against Van Helsing’s side, sickened ter-ror in her eyes as she saw her fate.

She is freezing to death, thought Renfield despairingly. And as her body drifted toward death, so her
soul was drawn toward the other three, whom the Count had chosen, seduced, and killed. He saw the
Countess smile, and point at Mina with glinting malice; saw her lean to speak with Sarike. But Nomie,
floating behind them, only gazed across the barrier of the Holy circle at the dark-haired woman poised
between living and dark Un–Death, and Renfield saw pity in her eyes.

***

Through the night he climbed the Pass, struggling against the slashing winds, trembling with hunger and
exhaustion. Renfield felt the dawn coming, as he waded breast-deep in the new-fallen snow, and briefly
debated transforming himself into a bat, for he knew he was still many miles from the Castle.

But the winds were still too strong for him to fly against, and by day, he knew he would be nearly blind.
Then, too, he thought, he would not be able to shift his form again until the stroke of noon.

A bat could not take on a man.

So he fought his way through the drifts, and with the rising of the sun, the wind grew less. The world
was transformed, ice–white and blinding, the rocks standing out against the marble of the snow like
cinder-colored walls. Under his paws the snow squeaked a little, the only sound in the birdless woods. A
little before noon he reached the road that turned aside up toward the Castle, and saw a man’s churned
tracks.

They were reasonably fresh, not more than two hours. The outer gate was barred, but the small wicket
cut into the larger leaf of iron-strapped wood had been forced, the wood around its rusted hinges glaring
yellow where a crowbar had ripped. Wolf-Renfield slipped through, following the tracks across the deep
drifts of the courtyard, to the stair that led up to the half–open door.

He’ll search the chapel and the vaults, thought Renfield fran-tically. The place must have a
labyrinth o f crypts and sub-cellars. I may still be in time. If I can hold him off, delay him until
noon, when Nomie and the others can change their form, move about…

If I can kill him …

Did they hear? he wondered. Were they aware of this man’s footfalls, of the scent of the blood in his
veins? Could they read his resolution in their uneasy dreams, as he searched through the vaults, pushed
open the long-rusted hinges of those secret doors, descended the narrow, twisting stairs? With the
preternatural senses of a wolf, Renfield listened, scented, seeking the faint creak of boot-leather, the reek
of burning lamp-oil.

What he smelled, as he came to the top of a flight of de-scending steps, was blood.

A lot of blood.

Stumbling, trembling with weariness, Renfield slipped down the stairs.

He found the body of the poet Gelhorn at the bottom, curled together and with a look on his sheep-like
face of shocked de-spair. He’d been dead for about two weeks. The Countess and Sarike must have
killed him as soon as they safely reached the Castle. Throat, wrists, and chest-visible through his shirt,
which had been half-torn from his body-were all marked with gaping punctures, and with smaller marks
that had half-healed at the time of his death.

Wolf-Renfield sniffed briefly at the body, then passed it by.

***

Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum*

5 November

I knew that there were at least three graves to find-graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and
I find one of them. She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as
though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man
who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he
delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have
hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, til sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the
beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present a kiss-and man is
weak …

***

Sarike lay in the crypt beyond. Her head had been cut off, and a stake of fire-hardened wood
protruded from beneath her left breast. Her thin white dress, and the velvet lining of her coffin, were both
soaked with blood. Blood splattered her face and arms, and dotted the white garlic-flowers stuffed into
her half–open mouth. It was their stench, rather than that of the blood, that turned Renfield’s stomach,
and he would have vomited, had there been anything within him to throw up.

Van Helsing had trodden in the blood, and his sticky track wove back and forth among the half-dozen

tombs within that small crypt. The lids had been all wrenched off, and lay shattered on the floor. Renfield
went straight to the last of them, the tomb where the Countess Elizabeth lay.

She was already beginning to crumble into dust. He knew it was she by the dark coils of her raven hair,
and by the gold ring on her hand. By the bloody footprint beside the coffin, Van Helsing had stood here
for a long time, looking down at her as she slept.

Blood-tracks led out the door, into the deeper dark of the in-ner crypts.

Nomie, thought Renfield frantically, Nomie, please be there …

Please have hidden yourself, have concealed your sleeping–place, that he won’t
find you … That he won’t come on you until I can be there to stop him, to kill him, to
do whatever I have to …

That he won’t come on you until noon, when you can wake, and sit up, and flee.
When I can turn from wolf to man …

He listened, but though he smelled the fishy whiff of lamp-oil, he heard no sound, no creak of
boot-leather.

A descending stair, in the wake of the blood-tracks and the smoke.

Then the far-off glimmer of lantern-light.

Staggering, Renfield limped down, to where a barred iron door closed the entrance to the deepest of
the castle crypts. In the lantern-light beyond it Renfield saw the high tomb in its cen-ter, graven only with
the name DRACULA, and all around it the torn-up flagstones where the gypsies had dug out fifty
boxes’ worth of graveyard earth for shipment to London. He pressed himself to the bars, invisible in the
darkness, sick with horror and shock.

A smaller tomb lay perpendicular to the foot of the large one. Beside this Van Helsing stood in his
shirtsleeves despite the bru-tal cold, the lantern at his feet, gazing down into the coffin, and on his face
was a look that mingled pity and burning desire.

Blood splattered his face and splotched his clothing, dripped from his white side-whiskers and hair. He
held a hammer in one hand, a fresh, unbloodied stake in the other, and on the coffin’s edge lay a
foot-long scalpel. Renfield wanted to scream, Nomie! but could not.

He could feel the hour of noon, slipping to its slow zenith overhead. In the silence of the crypt Van
Helsing’s breathing was very loud. It was slow and thick, and his eyes had the look of a man hypnotized,
caught by some terrible dream of self-loathing and lust.

***

Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum*

Presently, I find in a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister which, like

Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of the mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly
beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love
and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion . . .

***

Having spent years among the strange temptations of India, and months in the asylum at Rushbrook,
Renfield knew that look very, very well.

We lure by our beauty, he remembered Nomie saying to him in London: 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, despite all they know, drawn by their need.

Van Helsing’s mouth trembled, like that of a man beholding a vision; his hands shook, on hammer and
stake.

The splattered blood, the violence with which the stakes had been driven into Sarike’s body, and that
of the Countess, told their own tale. Furiously, desperately, Van Helsing had been killing, not only the
vampires, but his own frantic desire for them. His own overwhelming shame.

His breath laboring, moving as if stake and hammer were both wrought of lead, Van Helsing brought
them up. Braced the stake beneath Nomie’s breast. Then stood again, hammer half–raised, looking
down into the coffin with sweat pouring from his face and eyes stretched with madness.

Had he had human lips, a human voice, Renfield would have whispered, Nomie, no …

The crypt was silent, the lantern-flame unwavering on the vampire-hunter’s motionless face and shaking
hands.

Renfield felt the touch of noon in the crypt’s darkness, through the snowy layers of cloud overhead. But
even as he flowed into human shape in the darkness, laid hands upon the bars of the door, he saw Nomie
sit up in her coffin. Gold hair tumbled over her shoulders, white sleeves fell back from white arms.

Stake and hammer slithered from Van Helsing’s hands.

Blue eyes looked into blue. But while Nomie’s gaze was calm, ready, filled with the peace of one who
has passed decades beyond hope, Van Helsing’s was wide with horror, shame, despair-and with the
exquisite unbreathing anticipation of sur-render.

Then Nomie leaned forward, took the old man’s face be-tween her hands, and very gently kissed his
lips.

An instant later she dissolved into mist and shadows, and flowed away across the stone floor, to vanish
into the darkness.

***

Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum*

But God be thanked … before the spell could be wrought fur-ther upon me, I had nerved myself to my
wild work …

Had it been but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three! …

God be thanked, my nerve did stand …