Dracula The Undead Part 17

'No one,' my uncle gasps. 'My name is Andre Kovacs. I found you, I came to you, only to put myself at your service, Count Dracula.'

His words sound unconvincing, even to me. My beloved shakes him, beginning to squeeze his throat. 'Why?'

'You are Dracula, Lord of the Undead. Whom else should I serve? Teach me; in return I give my loyalty -'

'You are lying,' Dracula says quietly. 'You attacked me, as if you would help Van Helsing and those others.'

'Please - in life he was a friend of mine - but -'

I see - having moved as close as I dare - Dracula's mouth open wide, the long teeth shining. My uncle's face changes, becoming aggressive, feral. He seems to trans.m.u.te, shrinking, slipping out of Dracula's grasp. I cannot believe what I am seeing. Before my eyes, Uncle Andre changes into a wolf.

Dark-grey like a shadow, he slips under Dracula's arms and runs out into the grounds, away down a path through the thickly woven trees. A moment later, my Dark Companion, too, has changed. His wolf-form is bigger than my uncle's, and a brighter, silvery grey. I run after them, fighting between twigs and thorns and brambles, but cannot keep up. I lose them and, turning, see them pa.s.sing me again on the far side of the thicket; a dim shadow and a bright one.

I want no harm to come to my uncle. But I cannot protect him against Dracula. I can only watch as they run, snapping and snarling, along the tortuous overgrown paths, the thick briars and brambles.

I lose sight of them. I run, trying to find them, until I have a st.i.tch in my side, and my dress is wet from the dripping trees. When I come upon them again, on the bank of the deep, still lake, I see the lighter wolf bowl the darker one over, and pin it down, and close its jaw on its hairy throat. The darker one howls, surrendering.

They become human again. It is a kind of unfolding, the way a new-born animal unfolds itself; and it is a strange blurring from one state to the other, so that the eyes cannot quite capture it in the twilight.

I come closer, trembling, as Dracula lifts my uncle up by the throat and shakes him. Poor Uncle, he looks wild with fear. My love drags him, a prisoner, back into the dank black crypt. I follow. As we enter the chapel, Dracula says, 'Elena, bolt the door.'

I do so, and remain. It is so dark I can barely see, even though my eyes are attuned to darkness now. But I sense and hear the two vampires in the darkness, one tormenting the other, and I feel myself to be utterly alone with them, and with rats and blind insects and the bones of the dead.

'Now,' says Dracula, 'the truth.'

He has my uncle against a wall, his wrists pinned to the damp stonework with one hand, the other hand pressed to his throat.

'Who made you Undead, who sent you?'

My uncle breaks very quickly. Who can blame him, when my beloved's will is so hard to resist? Uncle was a good man, but I think he never had much strength. He was never good at keeping secrets, either. Too honest.

'I found the Scholomance. A vampire there, Beherit, he fed upon me, killed my companion, made me like this. And then he sent me to you.' Uncle says more, but this is the essence. It makes more sense to Dracula than to me; I think only of poor Miklos, dead.

Poor Miklos. I did not love him, but still I feel sad.

'Beherit?' Dracula's voice is a dry whisper of disbelief. 'Why?'

'To serve you. To learn from you.'

'I think not.' He makes a movement; my uncle gives a gruff, soul-racked scream.

'He told me to keep you away from the Scholomance at all costs. There is something there that, should you find it, will make you too powerful.'

'What thing is this?'

'He said . . . the powers of h.e.l.l. He said, your soul.'

There is a brief, heavy silence. My uncle continues, 'He wishes you no harm, only that you keep away from him!'

'And he sent you,' Dracula says mockingly, 'you, a dry scholar, initiated two months into Undeath, fragile as a mayfly, to ensure that I never go back to the Scholomance? Four hundred years have made Beherit no less of a fool.'

Dracula thrusts my uncle away, so hard that he flies across the chapel, hits the wall and slides down. Then my Dark Companion goes to help Mina from the tomb where he trapped her for safe keeping; I hear her gasps of relief, of shuddering misery. He takes her away into the house. d.a.m.n them.

I run to where my uncle lies, groaning like a dying man; all hope, all spirit gone from him. I see that a piece of ornate metal with a cross at one end, part of some old chapel decoration, long since toppled from its place, has fallen against his hand; and the cross has burned its black image on to my uncle's pale flesh.

Chapter Fourteen.

ELENA KOVACS'S JOURNAL (Continued)

I remain a long time with my uncle.'Elena, dear Elena,' he says in a voice of cracked leather. 'Leave me. It is not safe for you to be with me.'

As he speaks I ease myself alongside him, amid the spilled earth and cobwebs. I do not care that my clothes are caked with the damp and grime of this place; I feel part of it. 'No, no,' I whisper. 'No danger. You are not alone, Uncle.'

'Elena,' he moans. 'If you do not leave me I will. . .'

'Do it,' I say, wrapping my arms around him and holding him close. 'I am not afraid.'

He turns his head away from me. 'No. Never! How did you come to this?'

'Uncle, how did you?'

As we tell each other our stories, the horror of what has happened to my uncle, the horror of everything, leaps into my brain with pitiless clarity, as if I have stepped outside myself, or been woken violently while sleepwalking. As I tell him about my father's death, tears roll down his face and his long teeth cut into his own lips, so that blood runs down with the tears. He looks grotesque, so plainly dead yet alive, so much the vampire that he has become, that my heart is broken. Yet I do not recoil from him. I have fallen in love with such horrors, with the transparent beauty of the unquiet dead.

He closes his eyes and tells me about the Scholomance, about Beherit, who, as dazzling as Lucifer, claimed and killed poor Miklos. All he tells me flares bright in my brain. I caress his head and draw his face into my neck; he protests, 'Do not, for I cannot stop myself!'

His attempt to hold me off is half-hearted. I slide my arms around his shoulders and hold him hard. He groans. I feel his eye- teeth lance my neck. We are locked together. More than uncle and niece. His hand comes to my cheek and I draw his forefinger into my mouth and bite it, sucking drops of blood from the tender, waxy tip.

Folklore tells us that those most in danger from vampires are the families of the deceased, for the Undead one's love survives the grave, and his thirst for the life of his best beloved will draw them with him into the grave.

I wish to die. I wish to be taken into Undeath now, for I have waited too long already, I fear my Dark Companion will never take me! But my uncle takes only a little blood from me. I could weep with my frustration.

'You must leave here now,' I tell him. 'Dracula will destroy you!'

'Then let him,' he sighs. 'I have nowhere to go. I cannot go back to Beherit; I have failed him utterly. I have no power to keep Dracula from the Scholomance! I wish you would go from me, Elena. I have lost those I loved; Emil, Miklos. Do not let me lose you also. Run away, back to the sunlight, before it is too late!'

'I care nothing for that!' I hold his shoulders. 'Take me into Undeath with you and you will never be alone!'

Anguish webs his face, turning lines to furrows. 'No. You do not know what you ask! I would not bring anyone into this darkness, least of all you, beloved Elena, sweetest, purest child.'

'I was never sweet. Never pure. If I seemed so it was all a facade, all for the benefit of my father and others who so arrogantly decide what a young woman must be. It was never me.'

'No!' he cries. 'Keep away!'

He thrusts me off with rigid arms; I rise, dizzy. I love him and pity him; I feel contempt for him, lying there broken. I say, 'Uncle, you should glory in this gift of immortality. You should carry yourself with pride and laughing arrogance. Yet all you can do is bemoan your fate! If you won't save yourself now, I can do nothing to help you.'

Leaving my uncle, I go in search of my Dark Companion. I am angry; I know he is with Mina, but I will not intrude upon them.

For a long time I wander alone through the great, dusty rooms of Carfax Abbey, feeling that some malign presence is watching me in every room. Am I becoming insane? I stop for breath on the half-landing of the great stone staircase in the hall. There, against the lattice of a tall, arched window, my beloved appears, as dark and still as the stone walls around us. I am startled.

'Why are you not with the child?' he asks in a harsh, thin tone.

I fear him again. 'The child was with his mother. What will you do with my uncle?'

'Do you care for him?'

'Yes.'

'More than you care for me?'

I feel defiant. 'No, but perhaps more than you care for me.'

His eyes narrow, reflecting red as a rat's eyes do. 'Do my attentions and my company not satisfy you?'

'If you hold Mina Harker in greater esteem than you do me, no, they do not.'

'This is childish,' he says wearily, and turns to put his foot on the next flight of stairs. 'Jealousy ill befits you, Elena.'

'Tell me!' I am fierce now. 'Would you make her Undead?'

'I would, if it pleases me to do so.'

'But not before me!' I run after him and catch the black cloth of his sleeve. 'Take me first. Do it now. One more kiss-'

He pulls my hand away from his arm; my wrist turns numb at the pressure. 'There are marks upon your neck that I did not make. How great is your respect for me, that you give yourself to another, that you seek to order my actions? You will become Undead when I wish it - not when you demand it.'

'Please. Do it now! I hate being human, I want to walk in the darkness with you, your companion, not your - your maidservant!'

'Servant?' he says, turning and raising my wrist so that I am held stiffly away from him. 'Did you not serve me, at every turn, of your own free will? I called you to me; you were not forced to answer the call. Others would have done as well. Every action you have performed, for my benefit or your own, you have performed of your own volition.'

I am furious now; the pain makes me angrier. 'Are you telling me that you owe me nothing - after all I have done to aid you?'

'I am not yours to command, Elena,' he answers coldly. 'If I displease you, you have only yourself to blame.'

He releases me, begins to mount the stairs; I run after him and clutch at him. 'You cannot refuse me! Change me!'

He spins round, his face h.e.l.lish with anger. I wait for a blow, though he has never struck me before. Instead he seizes me, and the pain in my throat is so exquisite, as knife-cuts are exquisite, that all the strength goes from me and I lean back like a dancer across his arm. I almost fall; he catches me and lets me down gently on to the half-landing.

We crouch there under the latticed window, Dracula holding my head to his chest and stroking my hair until it falls about my shoulders. 'Patience, Elena. You must continue in the light a little while longer. I need you to look after the child. Only do this for me now, and you will walk beside me in the darkness; it will not be long.'

His voice is tender. He tells me what he requires of me, and I promise to obey. I don't want it, I cannot bear to be parted from him although he says it will only be for a short time. But what else can I do? To seal the bond he pierces his breast with a fingernail, and I seal my mouth over the blood, and swallow. It is liquid gold, precious metal.

MINA BARKER'S JOURNAL.

15 November There is little time left, I am certain.

I spent some time at my window, listening to the hysterical barking of the dogs. I did not know what it meant, could "see only the most tantalizingly vague movement of figures through the trees, and yet my heart turned over with fear. It must be Jonathan and our friends. And they were putting not only themselves in danger, but Quincey, too!

I ran down to Quincey's room; Elena let me in and I gathered the boy in my arms.

Some minutes later, Dracula came in and ordered us to go to the chapel with him. 'Make them understand,' he said with a callousness that chilled me, 'that their heroic attempt to rescue you is ill-conceived. If they try again, the child will die.'

How desperate and sorrowful were their faces -Jonathan's, Van Helsing's and Dr Seward's - and how it pained me to tell them, 'Go!'

Then something extraordinary happened. A man appeared from nowhere - that is, I didn't see where he came from - and attacked the Count. This man seemed familiar, although I could not place him; it was too dark to see clearly. He was gaunt, with thick silver-grey hair; I was unsure whether he was man or vampire! Dracula knocked him back.

The next I knew, Dracula was lifting Quincey and myself bodily and thrusting us into the darkness of a tomb.

I cried out to no avail. When the heavy marble lid slid into place above my head I was terrified. I struck the lid, shouting, but I could hear not a word from outside.

Quincey and I were cut off from all contact, in utter blackness. A dreadful terror overcame me; I hope I never experience its like again. All that kept me from screaming and beating my fists against the stone was my son. For his sake I must keep calm.

He must have noticed me trembling, however, and felt the pounding of my heart. Strangely - because he is so young, I a.s.sume - he didn't seem frightened at all. His little body was warm and relaxed against mine. I tried to frame some light-hearted phrase about this being only a game. He replied in an eerily calm tone, 'Don't worry, Mama. Don't be afraid. The darkness can't hurt you, while I am with you.'

I tried not to think of what it would be like to die here; to lie in the darkness, day after day, until we both slowly expired. Or to die and rise again without a soul, with only thirst for the blood of my loved ones to animate me .. . This seemed almost a comforting idea, soft and sweet as sleep .. .

After a pa.s.sage of time that seemed unending, I heard the lid sc.r.a.ping back. Quincey had fallen asleep by then. Dracula helped us out; I was too shaken to express anger, relief, anything. He took Quincey in one arm and helped me with the other. I was weak with shock, but Dracula appeared forbidding, una.s.sailable.

Jonathan and the others were gone. Dracula says they left without harm; I don't know whether to believe him or not. At least Quincey seems none the worse for his ordeal. We returned to my room - our prison cell, I should say, in the keep. I didn't see Elena. Dracula himself brought us tea and brandy to revive us. Quincey was soon sleeping peacefully on my bed with the abandonment of a child, his mouth open and his curled hands flung behind his head.

Then Dracula sat by me at the fireside. It took all my strength to regain my dignity and to keep hidden from him how afraid I had been. 'You must forgive me, Mrs Harker,' he said quite gently. 'I could not risk you being s.n.a.t.c.hed away by your so-loyal husband and friends, nor risk you running away. You would have been in danger from the dogs."

'The dogs!' I gasped. His gentleness seemed a mockery. 'You were protecting us from those savage hounds? You need not have been so solicitous.'

'Then I beg your pardon. But there may come a time when the tomb holds no such horrors for you.''No, for when I die I shall rest in peace.'

He smiled a little, and his eyes glittered. 'I fail to see why your menfolk can never take me at my word. I warn them not to follow; they follow, as if they can never let anything rest until they have proved themselves fools.'

'Were any of diem harmed?'

'Not to my knowledge. They left the way they had come.'

'And the other man who was there?'

Dracula looked away from me, as if he were troubled, but trying to seem indifferent. 'He is of no importance. I will tell you all in time; not now.'