Dracula Sequence - The Dracula Tape Part 3

She looked at me as calmly as if it were midday, and I no more than some peculiar, quaint grave marker to be studied. She shifted her gaze to the fleeing clouds; the shattered pile of the abbey, whose tumbled stones may have witnessed sights stranger than a vampire in their time; she gazed upon the intermittent moon; then she looked back at me. You will remember that I had been at work to alter my appearance, and I suppose she saw my hair crisp curling brown instead of sere and white, my face perhaps almost unlined.

"Why, then, I am dreaming still," she murmured. "Good sir, what do you in my dreams? I have but lately had three men ask for my hand; am I to hear another wordy proposal of marriage still? But no, you have more the aspect of some old Viking, wrapped in his cape, come to ravish me away across the northern seas." And without her face showing any fear she gave a long shivering shudder, an altogether delicious movement that began somewhere about her throat and undulated down until one set of white toes went out of sight behind the other.

"Perhaps more Hun than Viking, my dear lady," I said, and left my shadow to walk a little closer. "As to the ravishing, that will be largely up to you. But it appears to me that you have already made up your mind in that regard."

She did not draw back as I approached, although she grew a little paler than before. Her eyes, lidding as if toward sleep again, were fixed on mine. "I ask only that you do not smother me with words," she murmured. "I am weary, oh G.o.d, so weary, with all the words of men in waking life."

My fangs were aching in my upper jaw. Without another word she came into my arms, as smoothly and willingly as any wench that I have ever clasped to lips or loins.

She trembled as I kissed her throat, and with my first touch above the jugular her knees were weakening. I led her to a bench nearby, and stood behind her as she sat, and bent to nuzzle at her neck.

A heavy clock somewhere below struck one in sullen tone. The warm salt richness of her life was trickling in its grateful radiance through my cold veins when I heard a name called: "Lucy! Lucy!" in a girl's voice that seemed to me far off, but was not so.

Lucy stirred beneath my mouth and hands, but when I would have raised my head to see who called her fingers knotted in my hair to clamp my parted lips against her skin. I raised my head anyway-drawing from Lucy a little disappointed moan-and saw and heard the other girl coming in our general direction from the head of the long stairs. Of course it was dear Mina, though I did not know her yet, and saw her only as a cursed interruption of my joy. She was hurrying forward purposefully, and had probably seen the two of us there on the bench; but her path led 'round St. Mary's church and for a few moments she would be out of sight again.

"Tomorrow night," I promised Lucy, holding her cheeks in my hands and looking down into her eyes, which were now almost closed. She was no more than half awake now-not from loss of blood, for the amount drained had been trivial to a healthy girl of nineteen. I saw unforced consent there in her eyes and heard it in her slowly calming breath. With women, of course, s.e.x is far less localized anatomically than it is with most men.

By the time Mina came hurrying 'round the little church, and another racing cloud had fled to bare the moon, I was melted invisibly back into the shadows. Mina ran straight to where Lucy still half reclined upon the bench. Lucy's eyes were now fully closed in almost-self-convincing sleep, though her breathing was still heavy with the excitement of our embrace. Mina, murmuring maidenly endearments and expostulations, hastened to cover my erstwhile victim with a shawl, and stooped to put her own shoes protectively on Lucy's feet. I remarked to myself that this new girl, wearing a full robe over her own nightdress, was also attractive, though in a different way. Where Lucy was slight and dainty, the newcomer was st.u.r.dy, but yet graceful with her air of robust health.

As the girls left the churchyard, Mina leading her half-roused friend, I followed at some distance, wanting to discover where Lucy lived. I was somewhat puzzled to see Mina-whose name I still did not know-stop beside a puddle and daub each of her now-bare feet with mud; it came to me that she must be doing this in order that any chance pa.s.serby would think her shod. Why this should have been of any great importance I did not know; another vagary of the English mind for me to ponder.

After seeing the girls safely home and noting that they evidently dwelt in the same house I took me to an early rest and slept well through the day.

As for Lucy, Mina was relieved to note in the morning that she showed no ill effects from her night's adventure: "... on the contrary, it has benefited her, for she looks better this morning than she has done for weeks. I was sorry to notice that my clumsiness with the safety pin hurt her. Indeed, it might have been serious, for the skin of her throat was pierced... there are two little red points like pin p.r.i.c.ks, and on the band of her nightdress was a drop of blood. When I apologized and was concerned about it, she laughed and petted me, and said she did not even feel it. Fortunately it cannot leave a scar, as it is so tiny."

Lucy herself, as she later confided to me, was still uncertain as to whether her sleepwalking adventure had been a dream or not. She said no more about it as the girls went picnicking, accompanied by Lucy's widowed mother, who was with them on their seaside holiday as chaperone. It was probably fortunate for Mrs. Westenra that neither of the girls mentioned the nocturnal experience to her, for she was even then suffering from a severe form of heart disease; though Lucy, at that time, was as ignorant of her mother's illness as I was.

I had Lucy's name and knew the house in which she slept; and on the following night, true to my word, I called for her. Called silently, my mind to hers, as I was able to do since we had partially become one flesh. Wordlessly there came to Lucy the urgent fact of her lover's nearness and his desire for her; but she shared a room with Mina and could not readily get out. Lucy feigned walking in her sleep again but this ploy was foiled; her dependable and practical roommate, not wanting another midnight climb to the east cliff, had locked the bedroom door and tied the key to her own wrist. Lucy was led firmly back to bed and almost sat on till she was still. An hour or two later I called again, whilst perched in bat-form at the girls' window. This time Lucy was truly sleeping as she rose and tried the door. Mina was quickly wakened, and thwarted me as efficiently as before.

As you have doubtless read somewhere, it is one of the peculiarities of the vampire nature that we may enter into no house where we have never been invited. This being so, there was nothing more that I could do for the moment with regard to Lucy.

Disappointed, I made a lonely tour of the town in bat-shape, and gained some additional evidence that when in their rooms and beds, and sure of being un.o.bserved, the Englishman and the Central European were not very much different after all.

On the following evening, that of August fourteenth if I recall correctly, my persistence was rewarded. Mina was out for a stroll when I arrived at the girls'

window. With a clear field it was no great trick to silently persuade the sleeping girl to open the window and lean out her head, stretching her white and slender throat in the moonlight upon the sill. With my small bat's mouth I tasted from first one wound and then the other of the two my man-sized canines had so delicately made. The dear girl moaned a bit and had a very pleasant dream.Not enough blood could have been drawn into my little bat belly, surely, to have made any real difference in Lucy's health. But she was not robust. Next day she pined and seemed fatigued, and had no explanation to offer to her dearest friend.

I called again the next night but Mina was home and once more kept Lucy from sticking her nose out of the room. I was taking a minor but definite delight in this young conquest of mine, and smiled to myself whenever in memory I heard her call me "Viking." As a matter of fact I took such interest in this dalliance that I almost forgot, for a time, that London was my goal.

Still, my att.i.tude toward my affair with Lucy was casual, I confess, more suited to the late twentieth century, or to the mid fifteenth, my breathing days, than to the time and place when it occurred. Perhaps it was my att.i.tude, more than my verifiable deeds of blood, that brought that pack of murderers down in full cry upon my trail at last. Really, it was my fickleness, I sometimes think, that they found unendurable. If I had restricted myself to only one of their sweet girls, and married her, and chewed her neck in private, I suppose I might, like an eccentric cousin, have been made almost welcome among family and friends in the circle of the hearth. But perhaps I misjudge what degree of eccentricity even an Englishman can tolerate.

Never mind. I came near to forgetting about London, as I say, and it was something of a shock when on the evening of August seventeenth I focused my well- rested eyes to find that the box in which I had slept away the day was being loaded aboard a train, along with its forty-nine fellows. I felt a little bit like one of those thieves who occupy the oil jars in Ali Baba.

That journey of some three hundred kilometers on the Great Northern Railway was my first train ride, and it was no joy. The stench of burning coal that wafted back from steam engine to goods carriages had something organic, almost food-like, in it that tried my endurance over the long hours.

When we had been chugging on our way some fifteen minutes, it being then practically dark, I oozed out through an imperfection in my crate and stood in man- form to reconnoiter. Swaying with the motion of the train in the long summer twilight, I tallied up my boxes, making sure that none had been left behind. With a roar of hollow, howling steel, a bridge pa.s.sed under the wheels of the closed carriage in which I and my home-earth rode. Through a c.h.i.n.k I caught the faint glimmer of a stream below, and I nodded in appreciation of how effortlessly the flying train could draw me over running water without a tug or pause, such as the strongest horses sometimes gave when freighted with a vampire.

Sliding the door of the goods carriage a trifle open, I peered awhile at the Yorkshire moors through which we were pa.s.sing at such remarkable speed. Then, not wishing to precipitate anything remotely like the disaster of my first ocean voyage-I envisioned terrified train crewmen leaping off at sixty miles an hour, landing with fatal impact in pastures and manure heaps-I soon retired once more within my crate. Throughout the remainder of the night, and for most of the next day as I lay in my usual daylight stupor, we chugged and rolled into the south, with frequent stops for cargo, pa.s.sengers, and fuel.

At what must have been nearly the scheduled time, half past four in the afternoon of Tuesday, August eighteenth, 1891, shouts dimly heard gave me to understand that we were arriving at King's Cross station, London. I roused somewhat with my inner excitement, and was awake as my box was slid among its fellows from the doors of the goods carriage directly onto a heavy wagon of some kind. With only the briefest of delays the carters took their seats and used their whips, the horses pulled, and we were off to my newly acquired estate, Carfax.

I listened to London on the way, although I could not see beyond my box. There were perhaps six million souls alive and breathing in the great metropolis through which I then moved for the first time; whistling, coughing, cursing, singing, praying, selling, calling to one another in joy and fury and fellowship, whilst their horse-drawn vehicles innumerable went past mine on all sides. I reveled in the symphony until at length it faded to inaudibility below the steady noise of my own wagon.

Purfleet, where my house Carfax stood, was, as I may have mentioned before, a semiurban district of Ess.e.x on the north bank of the Thames, some fifteen miles east of the heart of London. The teamsters grumbled and used good English words that I had never heard from Harker's lips, or read in books, as they heaved and pushed, and carried and slid the lord of the manor into his new home. My own delivery instructions, pa.s.sed along through Dillington and Son, were followed faithfully enough, and by about eight-thirty in the evening my installation had been completed.

The footsteps of the last laborer departed and there came to my glad ears the sound of the doors being pulled shut behind him. At about nine o'clock in the evening I emerged from my coffin, eager as a child to explore my new home.

I found myself standing in a ruined chapel, obviously built before my time, and giving evidence of having stood untenanted by breathing folk for perhaps as long as my own castle. Such remote, comforting privacy for my retreat, and London hardly more than walking distance off. I blessed Harker and Hawkins, stretched my arms high in my joy, and came near laughing for the first time since my first wife killed herself... a dear girl, but she became quite mad, and jumped from a castle parapet back near the middle of my breathing days. There was not much softness in me before that bitter day, but ever since there has been almost none at all...

Where was I? Yes, describing my first evening at Carfax. A memorable night.

Eagerly I toured the vast, deserted, crumbling house, talking now and then to rats, and then I explored the surrounding wooded acreage. Also I remembered to unpack from its nest of mold and earth my traveling bag with its freight of money and new clothes. The latter I hung up where they might stay free of damp and remain in a presentable condition until I should have occasion to try them in society. What foolish thoughts I doted on...

During the centuries of my existence it has become my firm conviction that they are right who maintain the nonexistence, in a strict sense, of such a thing as sheer coincidence. Yes, I nursed foolish thoughts. How could I have known that Carfax, purchased by myself from a thousand miles away, adjoined a lunatic asylum governed by a man, Dr. John Seward, who had recently, though unsuccessfully, proposed marriage to my slender, pa.s.sionate blonde of the churchyard and windowsill? And this fact is not the only, nor perhaps the most remarkable, link in the chain of "coincidence"-for want of a better term-that bound my fate so inextricably with those of Harker, Mina, Lucy, Van Helsing, and the rest. Who could have guessed that the st.u.r.dy young woman who had come to succor Lucy in the Whitby churchyard was in fact the fiancee, and would soon be the bride, of young Harker, whom I had left behind me in Castle Dracula? He at that very moment was tossing deliriously with what was then called brain fever, in a hospital bed in Budapest, unidentifiable by the good sisters who had him in their care. After climbing down the castle wall with a pocketful of stolen gold, he made his way somehow to the railway station at Klausenberg, where he had rushed in shouting incoherently for a ticket home.

Employees in the station, "seeing from his violent demeanor that he was English,"

hastened to accept most of his money and put him on a train going in the proper direction. He got only to Budapest before he had to be hospitalized for what would now be called a nervous breakdown.

I can but relate these intertwined events as they occurred, or as they appeared from my own viewpoint as they were happening. Some intellect more powerful than my own may find a thread or threads of natural causation running through and uniting them all; I can find no sensible explanation for these wild chains of "coincidence" without appealing to causes that are above and beyond nature as she is commonly understood.

But to return again to Carfax, on my first night. I was not long in being disabused of the idea of the security, safety, and relative isolation of my new estate. Shortly after two in the morning, as I stood gazing fondly into the small lake that graced my grounds, the fun began. It started with a scrambling upon the western side of the high stone wall that completely surrounded Carfax, as of someone trying to climb over.

What can this be? I thought, and hurried back inside my dusty, ruined chapel, where my precious boxes had been deposited and were yet in such vulnerable concentration.

To guard them was imperative.

I heard a single breathing being climb the wall and drop onto my ground uninvited. The hesitant quickness of the intruder's movements made me think of a fugitive, seeking shelter; but I could not be sure.

The general silence of the night was helpful to my ears, this far from the bustle of the central city. Whilst my visitor was still a hundred paces off I could hear him well enough to be sure he was a man, and not a woman or a child. Motionless and noiseless as a basking lizard myself-more so, for lizards have lungs that work-I waited in the rat-trodden dust of my chapel, listening. The feet of the approaching man seemed to be bare, and he wore some kind of a loose garment that swished about him as he walked. Now he was right outside the chapel wall, and he suddenly threw himself down there and began snuffling and groveling in the most b.e.s.t.i.a.l style. With a feeling of sinking dismay it came to me that he might be nosferatu himself. Was England aswarm already with such as I, and had Harker through some insane delicacy omitted to let me know? Then indeed were my hopes likely to be doomed. It was with some relief I noted that this man continually breathed.

Now the mysterious one had crept along to the iron-bound oak doors that closed the chapel, and now he strained what was evidently a powerful pair of arms to open them, so that the hinges creaked. But the doors held.

"Master, master!" he hissed then, lips close to the door. It was a whispered entreaty that was fierce and managed to be slavish at the same time. "Master, grant me lives, many lives!"

What Anglo-Saxon idiom of speech is this? I pondered, even as he went on: "Insects I have now, master, to devour by the scores and hundreds, and animals I may obtain... but I need the lives of people, master! Men, and children, and women, especially women. Women!" He made a sound between a gurgle and a laugh. "I must have them, master, and you must grant them to me!"

He went on for what seemed like many minutes in the same vein, whilst I stood just inside the door, no more than an arm's length away, like a priest in some mad confessional. With hands pressed to my temples I tried to think. Of one thing only could I be sure: this man knew that I was there, knew at any rate that some being beyond the ordinary was inside the chapel, and he had come to offer me a kind of self- serving worship. My secure anonymity, upon which I had just been congratulating myself, and toward which I had spent so much coin and effort, was already nonexistent.

Even as I stood there at a loss I heard the footsteps of others, four or five more men, climbing the wall in the area where my first visitor had climbed. In something like despair I at first visualized a whole troop of worshipers, with this their gibbering high priest who had found the shrine and was going to lead them in their litanies: "Women... master... lives... master... women..."

But instead of the madman's acolytes it was of course his keepers who were coming after him, Seward and three or four burly attendants the doctor had wisely brought along. Only at this point did I remember Harker's casual mention of the asylum adjoining my grounds, and begin to grasp the true state of affairs.

Outside, the newcomers rapidly came closer. They fanned out into a semicircle centered on the man who knelt at my chapel door, and continued a methodical advance.

Meanwhile he continued to pour forth his pleas. "I am here to do your bidding, master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshiped you long and afar off." To this day I am not certain whether this last statement was a lie meant to be ingratiating, a delusion generated in the sick man's brain, or actually the truth. Certainly Renfield-which was his name, as I later learned; a madman nearly sixty years of age, but of prodigious strength, and from a n.o.ble family-certainly, I say, Renfield was somehow aware of my presence as soon as I arrived at Carfax, and was subsequently able to detect my comings and goings there without leaving his own cell or room at the asylum.

He went on, almost slavering, in a repulsive hissing voice: "Now that you are here, I await your commands, and you will not pa.s.s me by, will you, in your distribution of good things?"

Behind and round him the other men were steadily closing in. Now I heard for the first time the voice of Seward, young, confident, and masterful: "Renfield, time to come back with us now, there's a good chap."

And another, wheedling, in accents of the lower cla.s.s: "Come on now, ducky. Easy does it... whup!"

Masterful words or sweet ones would not do the trick for them that night. Though they were four or five to one, the struggle was not easy. Renfield's was no ordinary strength, as I discovered later for myself. Later also I read of how he had actually torn a window and its casing from the wall of his cell in making his escape that night.

Seward and his men at length subdued him, and packed him away, bound like some wild animal to be bundled back over the wall; and stillness and the night were mine once more. But from the noise of that struggle I was well able to believe that, as Seward wrote of his patient on that very night: "He means murder in every turn and movement."

And my dreams of a new life had received another powerful blow.

TRACK THREE.

I would have followed the keepers and their prisoner back to the asylum at once to learn if I could from what source Renfield derived his powers, but I expected that he would detect my presence there, and no doubt make such a fuss about it that those in charge of him, who so far seemed to think there was no point to his madness, would be impelled to further investigation.

Besides, there were my boxes, without which I would be homeless and soon doomed in this alien land. I saw now that I dared not leave them vulnerable to easy attack or even casual vandalism for so long as an hour, and I therefore spent the rest of the night making my position somewhat more secure, at least on my own grounds.

It took me a few very worthwhile hours to replace the good Transylvanian earth in several of the boxes-even at this late date I am not going to tell you exactly how many-with English soil, equally good by most standards but not nearly as hospitable to me. One small portion of my homeland I transplanted into the ground within the Carfax chapel, and the contents of some other boxes I buried elsewhere on the grounds, in heavily thicketed places where no chance discovery of my digging work was likely.

Next day I could rest with some confidence through the hours of light, and by the following evening I had convinced myself that the madman's incursion was not so important after all. I did not want to spend the night lurking round an asylum, anyway; I wanted to see London, and I did.

Or I began to see her. There is of course no end to such an enterprise. Taking to my small leathery wings at dusk, I made short work of fifteen miles. Before I came within a mile of London's heart the roar of her never-quiet streets a.s.saulted my ears and the glow of the metropolis dazzled my bat eyes. It was night, and summer, and many of the coal fires were out that on a winter's day would have quite blackened the sky about me.

There wound the Thames, girded by great bridges and giving back a million sparkling lights. There beyond the Green Park was the palace wherein Victoria herself graced the last years of her long reign; there sounded, close below me, the deep and solemn notes of Big Ben. The larger thoroughfares were all crowded, and my eye picked out here and there the unfamiliar, unnatural steadiness of electric light. The fronts of stores and restaurants glowed along Piccadilly and in the Strand; the Abbey, towering remnant of an age long gone, looked out and pondered on a changing world.

A few lights burned in Parliament, where government of a far-flung empire no doubt could not afford to wait till morning.

Below me now St. Paul's Cathedral raised its dome; now pa.s.sed the crooked streets and savage slums of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green...

But I could talk for hours on London, and I must not. Let me now say only that night after night I came to her, and each night was more enraptured than the last.

Meanwhile...

I suppose it cannot be counted as remarkable coincidence that Lucy came down to London-or rather to its northern environs, where stood her family's house called Hillingham-some five days after I did. London was and is the Rome toward which all English roads must tend. It was at about this same time that she began to keep a diary, recording rather gloomy thoughts. It may be that after a few episodes of life lived keenly with her Viking she found the prospect of life with Arthur Holmwood no longer attractive.

Holmwood-shortly to become Lord G.o.dalming, on the death of his father-was easily the wealthiest and most influential of Lucy's three breathing suitors, and he was the one she had accepted. I was to learn about him shortly. Dr. Seward, as I have said, was another. The third we will come to in a little while.

Since Lucy and I had come to be of one blood I vaguely sensed her geographic closeness when I awoke on the evening of August twenty-fourth. But I only smiled fondly to myself and went out to look at London once again, to taste the psychic nectar of her crowds, to mingle with her great ma.s.ses of vital humanity, to study in her houses, streets, and monuments the records of her enormous past. Each hour I spent in these activities tempted me to spend two more, and it was only with difficulty that I could force myself to allot time for necessary business: the dispersal of my nests.

I now began to get about regularly during the daylight hours, and walked into the office of a carter's firm to arrange for the removal of some of the boxes from Carfax to secondary depots about the city. I was delighted to find that the proprietor and clerks, upright daytime citizens all of them, dealt with a vampire in a courteous and businesslike way: they observed my coin and paid little attention to my face.

Meanwhile I also replaced the native earth in some more of my boxes with English soil. These refilled boxes I let sit in the Carfax chapel, whilst to hold the Transylvanian earth I employed some large boxes obtained at night, by stealth and strength, from a coffin monger's in Cheapside. I left some gold behind there, in payment more than adequate, but did not wish to attract attention by open purchase of such specialized items, when I was not an undertaker and had no stock of corpses to be exhibited on demand.

These modern double coffins I found to make delightful domiciles; with my native soil packed into the outer box, I could rest in perfectly clean comfort within the inner, leaden sh.e.l.l. One such double coffin I buried in the chapel, and another in the yard of a house at Mile End that I was already negotiating to acquire. A third box I kept in reserve, in a rented shed near Charing Cross. I tell you now quite freely where they were, for they are there no longer, though two of them are still in London.

It was not until the night of August twenty-sixth that I next saw Lucy, and then I came to her only in response to an appeal for help. Hers was a mental outcry of such vivid anguish that to refuse it lightly would have been cruel, and I think dishonorable as well. Therefore I found myself, late at night, waiting in man-shape outside the large suburban house called Hillingham, where Lucy lived with her ailing mother and a small squad of servants. I sent a mental message of rea.s.surance in to the sleepless girl; she arose and managed to leave the house without disturbing any of the other occupants.

I smiled and stretched forth my hands as I saw her slight figure, in its dressing gown, coming through the garden under the trees.

"So, then," she murmured, coming near, eyes wide as they sought mine, "it was not dreams and nothing else." Somewhat hesitantly she took my outstretched hands; I believe she was at that moment almost afraid of me, though we were hardly strangers.

I had given her much joy, and naught, so far as I knew, of any pain.

"My dear Lucy, lightbearer," I said. "Is that what so distresses you? That I am not a dream? You have but to wave your little hand, dismissing me, and never will your eyes rest on me again."

Her eyes were puzzled and full of pain. "You know, then, that I am distressed and afraid."

"Child, of course I know. I would not be here if you had not called to me, though only in your mind, for help."

"But how can such things be?" I was about to attempt an answer to this question when she presented me with another, that she evidently thought required answering more urgently. It came in the form of a bald statement: "I am to be married, you know."

"I had not known, but allow me now to extend such felicitations as may be welcome from a man in my position." I bowed.

"I really am going to marry Arthur, you know." Lucy blushed. "I love him-very much. And he loves me." She began telling me of Holmwood and his mannerisms and his prospects for wealth and position, till I began to feel rather disgustingly like a grim uncle or elder brother who had to be placated, his blessing sought. Of course at that moment Lucy had no other father figure in her life-Van Helsing had not yet come on the scene-and perhaps she did cast me most unsuitably in that role.

"... so I do love Arthur, and am going to marry him. And you-you are still like a dream, or something out of one." Had she hoped to provoke me to a jealous declaration? Now the anguish in her face, as she gazed on me, was obviously that of longing, and her voice broke. "I don't even know your name!"I was silent, not sure that I should tell it to her. Names have power, power that can cut both ways.

Nor was she quite sure, apparently, that she wanted to know more. "Hold me," was all she had left to say before coming with a slight tremble into my arms. Lucy understood only that what we did gave her supreme delight and that Arthur was not the only man she loved. We had held no theoretical discussions on vampirism, and I would wager that she had never even heard the word. It may be that I drank a bit too deeply on that night, for Lucy clung to me and would not let me go...

Her wedding was scheduled for September seventeenth, a few weeks off. Whether Lucy would have wanted to continue her affair with me beyond that date is something I cannot tell, for women are unfathomable. What do they want? I ask, with Freud, in periods of bleak masculine despair.

Lucy pined during the next few days. Also some signs of her repeated nocturnal dissipations must have been apparent to Arthur Holmwood, who was seeing her frequently again now that she was back near London, for her fiance a few days later called in Dr. Seward, his friend as well as Lucy's, to examine her. "She demurred at first," as Arthur complained in a letter. Well, perhaps she would have preferred a physician who was not a rejected suitor, or even more one whose specialty was not the study of mental illness. Though she had not Mina's capacity for st.u.r.dy independence, it is even possible that she resented not being able to decide such matters as the choice of a doctor for herself.

Seward interrupted his contemplation of his wealthy lunatics long enough to give her a cursory looking over and concluded that the basis of her-or rather, her fiance's-complaint "must be something mental." That was true, so far as it went. Ah, Lucy, Lucy which means "lightbearer"-Lucy of the delicate and trustful nature. I suppose you were not a very good girl; but like so many women of your era, you deserved much better than fate gave you.

She tried to fob off Seward with some vague tales of sleepwalking, which of course were true enough as far as they went. But he was a pretty good doctor, for his time; at least he had an acute eye, or instinct, for the unusual. Not that he showed great judgment in knowing what to do about it. Seward's first act after he had caught a hint of something truly remarkable in the case-my shadow or my flavor on the girl-was to send to Amsterdam for his old teacher, Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., Ph.D., D.Lit., et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Van Helsing...

Do any who hear my voice still fear my name? Is it believed by even my most timid hearers that I may represent a real danger? When I have made you understand the depths of the idiocy of that man, Van Helsing, and confess at the same time that he managed to hound me nearly to my death, you will be forced to agree that among all famous perils to the world I must be ranked as one of the least consequential.

Van Helsing tended to make a good impression, though, especially at first and with the young and inexperienced. Seward held, and stubbornly maintained, a very favorable opinion of this man, who he thought knew "as much about obscure diseases as anyone in the world." Well, perhaps. Medicine in the 1890s was in a miserable state. "He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than anyone else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician"- right there, Arthur Holmwood, for whom this sales pitch was written, should have been warned-"and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice brook, an indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration"-the latter not for vampires, of course-"exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats..."

And Mina, when she met him later, saw and described "a man of medium weight, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes one at once as indicative of thought and power; the head is n.o.ble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face, clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large, resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight... The forehead is broad and fine... such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big dark blue eyes are set widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man's moods."

Now let us see just what this paragon accomplished for us all. By the time he first examined Lucy, on September second, if I am not mistaken, she had recouped from our perhaps too-enthusiastic embraces of a few nights earlier, and was of course looking better. Van Helsing decided that "there has been much blood lost... but the conditions of her are in no way anemic." We must make allowance for the fact that English was not the professor's mother tongue. But neither was his knowledge of the blood and its disorders adequate, a circ.u.mstance we all had much cause to regret.

After shaking his head over Lucy's case, but saying little, he went back to Amsterdam to think.

For several days I had remained away from Lucy to allow her blood time to restore itself, and also to give serious consideration to the idea of breaking off with her permanently and at once. This I decided to do, and when I went back at night to Hillingham it was with the resolution that the time had come to say our last farewell.

This decision was for her welfare as well as my own.

Firstly, I did not want to make her a vampire, when in her ignorance-a state I felt she preferred-she could give no informed consent, could not intelligently weigh the perils and pleasures attendant upon such a momentous transformation. And for us to have continued our intercourse at its then current frequency would shortly have brought her to the point where the possibility of her transformation into a vampire would have to be faced seriously.

Secondly, I argued with myself, that enjoyable as Lucy was, there was many a peasant wench simpering in my native land who was just as hot-blooded, heavy- breathing, and well-shaped, who might have afforded me the same joys at a small fraction of the expense and effort. Surely it was not for downy skin and tender veins that I had made my odyssey. Alas! how pa.s.sion can make fools of us! On what was to have been my final visit, devoted to brief explanations and leave-taking, Lucy clung to me as before, and to my chagrin I once more left her noticeably weakened.Nevertheless my basic decision was unshaken, and I brought away with me conviction that the a.s.signation just concluded had been our last. The affair was over, I was certain, whether Lucy realized it or not. The chance of her becoming a vampire, which only a few hours earlier had still been relatively remote, had been brought by our most recent embrace to the status of a clear and present danger-or opportunity, depending upon one's point of view.

Of course on the next day, which I think was September sixth, Lucy looked somewhat wan and weak and strange again. Holmwood was off attending to his slowly dying father, but Seward looked in on her and did not like what he saw. Again he called in Van Helsing, who had requested that daily telegrams be sent to keep him informed of the patient's condition.

The professor hurried back to London, a gleam in his eye I have no doubt, and a bagful of his tools in hand. Before I could have the least inkling of what his intentions were, or even that he was attending Lucy-she had not mentioned to me his earlier visit-the fool had attempted to perform a blood transfusion, with Arthur Holmwood selected-for purely social reasons-as the donor.