Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 10

He knows they care here.

That awareness went through him like a killing spear, dropping him to his knees, his breath laboring and sweat standing out on his face like a dying man's.

He is coming.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

From the window of his room Renfield watched the glow of Dr. Seward's study lamp, the shadows that moved back and forth across it on the laurels of the garden. Once the men came out into the dark garden, and Renfield saw Seward point across the lawn and through the leafless trees, to the wall of Carfax.

So they know.

He didn't know how they'd learned of it, but in his bones he was sure of it. They were on Dracula's trail.

And Dracula was on theirs.

Renfield clung to the bars, watching the moving white blurs of shirt-cuffs, collars, the golden glint of the study lamplight on Lord G.o.dalming's hair. Heads nodding. Seward pointing in the direction of the shed, where the ladder was kept.

Dear G.o.d! Dear G.o.d, save me!One by one, the other lights in the house went out. Seward made his rounds, pale and distracted. A little later Renfield heard Langmore come off duty at midnight, heard Hardy settle into the chair. Renfield paced the room, sweating. They are going to Carfax tonight.

They are leaving Mrs. Harker here alone.

Christ had prayed in the Garden, Let this cup pa.s.s from me. Renfield pressed his face to the bars, staring out into the darkness, then turned to pace again. He remembered the wolf, bro ken from its home in the Zoo and sent loping through the streets of London, to force a way into the house that Dracula could not enter on his own. I open the ways for all my servants, Dracula had said to him, but it was the servant-the wolf whose mind Renfield had felt in his dream-who had opened the way for the Master. He will hang in the darkness before my window, materializing out of the moonlight and fog.

He will whisper to me, Let me in.

Renfield knew that it was physically impossible for him to do other than say, Come.

What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

The study lamp was dimmed down. A brief bar of very faint light, like a lantern's, shone out as the front door opened, shut. No one emerged, but in a moment they would ...

Renfield flung himself against the door of his room. "Hardy!" he shouted through the Judas. "Hardy, send for Dr. Seward! Bring him here, at once, this moment! I must see him!"

The big guard's whiskery face appeared in the Judas. "Wot, at this hour? It's two in the morning!"

"If I'd wanted a report on the time, I'd have sent for the town crier! I have something urgent to tell Dr. Seward, something des- perate! He's awake, he and his guests, I've just seen their lights. Please fetch him. Please." Renfield clutched at the bars, as if he could reach through them and wrest the promise from the guard. He fought to keep from shouting. "Please."

Shaking his head, Hardy withdrew. Renfield pressed his face to the Judas and saw him walk downstairs, then sank to the floor before the door.

He will know. He will guess, and he will punish.

He will come here tonight. He will use me, use me to destroy Mrs. Harker, use me as a cat's-paw as he tried to use me before. The one person of all of them, who treated me as a man and not a beast.

Footsteps in the corridor. Renfield scrambled to his feet. The clank of the lock.

"What is it, Renfield?" Lamplight in the cell, the lamp held aloft by the tall Quincey Morris in his blue American Army coat. Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Lord G.o.dalming were with Seward also, all five men dressed rough, as if they were going burgling, which Renfield guessed they were.

"Dr. Seward." Renfield spoke in his most calm and careful voice. "I have a most special favor to ask of you. You must have been aware, in the past day or two, of my return to sanity. I'm certain that only the press of your duties as host to your friends has prevented you from fulfilling the legal and medical technicalities of my release. Though I hesitate to seem impatient or importunate, still I must request, as a matter of considerable importance, that you release me tonight. Now, in fact. Release me, and send me home."

To Catherine, he thought, trying to keep the wild elation from his face, to Vixie. I can take them and be gone from this country, from my dread Master's awareness, before morning. He cannot cross water, we can flee to France.

"I'm afraid," said Seward calmly, "that even did I judge you restored to complete sanity, those technicalities could not be dealt with at this hour, and in this fashion. We could not . . ."

"I appeal to your friends," coaxed Renfield, reminding himself that screaming at Seward and knocking him against the wall would probably not serve him well. "They will, perhaps, not mind sitting in judgement on my case. By the way, you have not introduced me."

"I beg your pardon." Seward beckoned the others forward. "Lord G.o.dalming; Professor Van Helsing; Mr. Quincey Morris, of Texas; Jonathan Harker-Mr. Renfield."

"Lord G.o.dalming." Renfield shook the young man's hand. "I had the honor of seconding your father at the Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the t.i.tle, that he is no more."

His young lordship blinked at the incongruity of Renfield's small-talk in the barren cell, at two in the morning, but made a polite bow."Mr. Morris, you should he proud of your great state. Its reception into the Union was a precedent which may have far-reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the Stars and Stripes."

Morris inclined his head, throughly imperturbable. Renfield guessed he'd encountered stranger situations.

"What shall any man say of his pleasure at meeting Van Helsing? Sir, I make no apology for dropping all forms of conventional prefix. When an individual has revolutionized theraputics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain-matter, conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him to one of a cla.s.s. And Mr. Harker, I can only congratulate you upon having the wisdom and discrimination to find, in all the wide world, that pearl among women who is your beautiful wife."

He hesitated, looking into the young solicitor's face in the huge shadows, the upside-down lantern-light, seeing it ... when? By firelight? In a dream? Why did it look so familiar?

Not wanting to be seen staring, he turned quickly back to the others. "You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian and medico- jurist as well as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional circ.u.mstances."

"Indeed at all times I attempt to so deal with you, and everyone under this roof," agreed Seward. "And indeed, you do seem to be improving very rapidly. But it requires a longer inter view than this, to even begin to think about taking steps to meet your wish."

"But I fear, Dr. Seward, that you hardly apprehend my wish," said Renfield. "I desire to go at once-here-now-this very hour-this very moment, if I may. I am sure it is only necessary to put before so admirable a pract.i.tioner as Dr. Seward so simple, yet so momentous a wish, to ensure its fulfillment." Seward's face was like wood. Renfield looked past him to the others: G.o.dalming, Morris, Harker, Van Helsing. Imbeciles, do you understand nothing? "Is it possible that I have erred in my supposition?"

"You have," said Seward.

No pleading on Renfield's part would move them. He felt frantic, hampered by his terror of Dracula's reaction should he guess Renfield's attempted defection; hampered, too, by his sense of the vampire's approach, stealing like a dark cloud down the silent river, across the Purfleet marshes, a cloud filled with malice and wrath.

"Can you not tell frankly your real reason for wishing to be free tonight?" asked Van Helsing, speaking like Mrs. Harker as an equal, and Renfield could only shake his head.

"If I were free to speak, I should not hesitate a moment, but I am not my own master in the matter. I can only ask you to trust me.

If I am refused, the responsibility does not rest with me."

"Come, friends," said Seward, who seemed, Renfield thought, to have a fairly small repertoire of closing remarks. "We have work to do. Good-night."

He turned from the room. Renfield cried, "Please!" and threw himself to his knees before him. "You don't understand what you're doing, keeping me here! Let me implore you, to let me out of this house at once! Send me away how you will and where you will; send keepers with me with whips and chains; let them take me in a strait-waistcoat, even to a jail, but let me go out of this! You don't know what you're doing by keeping me here!"

Seward's face hardened, as if this outburst was something expected and much more in line with his ideas of how small-hours interviews with lunatics should be conducted. Renfield wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. But that, he knew, would only result in the strait-jacket, and the thought of being so bound when Dracula came was more than he could bear.

"By all you hold dear-by your love that is lost-by your hope that lives-for the sake of the Almighty, take me out of this and save my soul from guilt!" Tears of frustration and despair rolled down his face. "Can't you hear me, man? Can't you understand? Will you never learn? Don't you know that I am sane and earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul? Let me go! Let me go!"

Seward caught the hand Renfield raised in pleading, pulled him to his feet. "Come! No more of this; we have had quite enough already. Get to your bed and behave more discreetly."

"Discreetly?" Renfield bit back a crack of hysterical laughter. For a time he stood, looking into Seward's eyes in the glow of Quincey's lamp, seeing in them the man's blind grief, his blind pride in being the doctor, the keeper, the Man Who Is Sane. He felt, suddenly, exactly as he'd felt while trying to argue with Lady Brough, with Catherine's sister the obnoxious Georgina, trying to convince them that to take Vixie away from him and Catherine, to lock her into one of their "select young ladies' academies" would be the death of that fragile, lively, pa.s.sionate girl's soul. To do otherwise was simply Not Done.

Without a word, Renfield walked back to his bed, and dropped down to sit on its edge.He saw Seward's shoulders relax, as if, though he did not smile, all things had been restored to the way he knew they should be.

The other men filed out. As Seward turned, last of all, to shut the door, Renfield raised his head. "You will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the justice to bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince you tonight."

From his window Renfield watched the hooded yellow blink of the lantern bob its way across the abyss of the garden. Watched it ascend what he knew to be the wall, invisible beyond the leafless trees. Watched it vanish.

Pallid moonlight outlined the nearest tree-trunks, slipped away. Returned, to show the thin streak of white mist that had begun to steal across the garden, mist that glittered in the faint reflections of Seward's study lamp, and from another window where the gas was also turned down low. Somewhere a dog was howling, and Renfield pressed his face to the bars and cried "Dear G.o.d! Dear G.o.d!" though he could not have said whether he prayed to the disapproving G.o.d of whom he'd been taught in childhood, or to Wotan, whose red eyes he saw flickering, flickering in the heart of the mists.

As the black form took shape, hanging in the darkness outside Renfield's window, he thought, That is where I saw Jonathan Harker. In my dream o f the Valkyries. It is he who was the prisoner. He could even now hear Nomie's silvery voice: I am called Nomie, Jonathan ...

But it was not Nomie and her sisters who took shape outside the window now, but Wotan-Dracula-with his red eyes burning through the mist like malign spots of flame.

Black moths beat against the window, crawled through the narrow slot of the nearly shut cas.e.m.e.nt, flopped limply on the floor in the moonlight around Renfield's feet. Though it was night, and chill, big steely black flies swarmed with them, and spiders crawled from the cracks in the paneling, and still the black form took shape in the darkness outside the window.

I am here.

Renfield whispered, "Master."

I am here. You have sworn your love for me; I have brought you good things. Will you not bid me welcome?

The grip of his mind was like iron and ice, crushing and freezing at once. Renfield thought despairingly of that lovely young woman who had spoken so kindly to him, sleeping alone in this terrible house; thought of the long horror of Lucy's death; of the three sisters and their power. He wept, but his voice choked on the name of G.o.d as if Dracula's steel grip closed about his throat. In that moment he could have called upon neither G.o.d nor man.

"Rats," Wotan whispered-Dracula whispered-the leitmotif of the Traveler G.o.d beating in Renfield's brain, and across the lawn Renfield saw a dark ma.s.s creeping, like water spreading toward the house, a dark ma.s.s p.r.i.c.kled by a thousand paired crimson flames. "Rats . . ." With a gesture of his long-nailed hand, Dracula brushed aside the mists that surrounded him, and Renfield saw them, smelled them, the sweet filthy unmistakable mustiness of their bodies. "Every one of them a life. And dogs to eat them, and cats, too. All lives-all red blood, with years of life in it, and not merely buzzing flies!"

Lives, thought Renfield. Strength. Strength for my great work. "All these lives will I give you. Ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me. Will you not bid me welcome?"

With a sob, Renfield stumbled to the window, pushed at the cas.e.m.e.nt through the bars. "Welcome, Master," he breathed. "I bid you come in."

The black shape before the window dislimned; the moonlight all but disappeared. White mist poured through the inch-wide crack in a thin stream that flowed down the wall, across the floor, and under the door of the cell. Then it was gone.

Renfield sank to the floor of his cell and wept.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Van Helsing came to see Renfield next morning, cheerful-c.o.c.ka-whoop, Renfield thought, observing the old man's springy step and bright eye with a kind of numb bitterness. They must have found some of the Count's crates of earth at Carfax. Of course, it would be Jonathan Harker who'd told them the Count had bought the old house, and shipped his crates of earth there, so that he could have a place where he could rest in this foreign land.

Renfield saw it all now. Harker was a solicitor. It must have been he, whom Dracula hired as his agent, as the Countess Elizabeth had said. Harker must have somehow escaped Dracula's castle in the Carpathians.

Renfield shuddered at the thought. Enough to give one brain-fever indeed-he couldn't imagine how anyone, mortal or Un-Dead, could escape the Count. There must be a great deal more to that young man than met the eye.

Yet for all their cleverness, he thought despairingly, for all their smug self-satisfaction, neither Van Helsing, nor Seward, nor His Handsome New Lordship G.o.dalming, nor any of the others had seen the danger of the Count coming in behind them, taking Mrs.

Harker while they were away counting earth-boxes and congratulating themselves. Mrs. Harker who was innocent and kind, who had gone walking through the midnight streets of a strange town to save her friend from social embara.s.sment and chill. The Count must not have killed her-Van Helsing showed no sign of even suspecting that a thing might be amiss. So there was to be another slow crucifixion, another tortuous game of cat-and-mouse, such as he had played with Lucy.

And with Nomie, a hundred and ten years before.

"Don't you know me?" Van Helsing asked, clearly fishing, Renfield thought, for more compliments about revolutionizing theraputics by his brilliant theories.

"I know you well enough," snapped Renfield. "You are the old fool Van Helsing. I wish you would take your yourself and your idiotic brain theories somewhere else. d.a.m.n all thickheaded Dutchmen!"

Are you all blind?!?

Evidently they were, for when Seward came in a little later, and tried to engage him in a long discussion of devouring life and consuming souls, he, too, seemed blithe and cheerful, more cheerful than Renfield had seen him since the night of his disastrous dinner for Lucy and her mother, as if the problem of Dracula were well on the way to being solved.

He will come back! Don't you understand that he will come back?

Renfield was hard put to keep his voice normal, to keep from shouting at Seward or striking him in sheer blazing frustration, as the doctor talked of lives and souls as if he knew the slightest thing about them. But at the stroke of noon-the brief period at which the vampire could move and have power-flies began to buzz in at the window again, and spiders creep out of the wall.

Maybe I have to sacrifice poor Mrs. Harker, thought Renfield, chewing wearily on a bluebottle, to save Catherine, and Vixie.

It is after all for their sakes that I am doing all o f this. Mrs. Harker's kindness had touched his lonely pain, reminding him of how long it had been, since any woman had spoken kindly to him ...

Any living woman.

Oh, my darling, Renfield whispered, the time is coming. When this is done, and poor Mrs. Harker is his, I shall ask that he let me out o f here as a reward, that he let me go. Then I will return to you, and we will all three of us be free.

The thought brought him comfort for a time. He returned to catching flies with a lighter heart.

Seward put an extra guard in the corridor that night. Renfield saw Harker return late, and prayed that the presence of Mina's husband would be enough, to keep the Count away. Yet he watched by the window in the deeps of the night, and saw the thread of mist creep across the garden, crawl like a vaporous serpent up the wall, through the c.h.i.n.ks in the window cas.e.m.e.nt. Out in the corridor he could hear Hardy's snoring deepen-Nomie had told him of how the Count could command sleep, paralyzing the limbs of his victims or those who sought to guard them. He remembered his dream, of Seward sleeping like a dead man on Lucy's mauve satin sofa, while through the open door in the dim firelight the Count drank Lucy's blood.

The Count neither materialized, nor troubled to speak to him. Only the mist flowed across the floor, and beneath the door of Renfield's cell, while Renfield crouched on the bed watching it in sickened silence. When it had pa.s.sed, he fumbled open his boxes, devoured every spider and fly within them.Catherine, he thought, oh my beloved, forgive me! And Mrs. Harker, my dear sweet Madame Mina, forgive me, too!

The cold deepened. The little camel-back clock in Seward's study spoke three sweet tones. But sleep would not come, and instead of lessening with Dracula's departure from the houseas surely he must have departed already?-Renfield's agitation grew.

Mist gathered in the garden, before his window.

Dear G.o.d, has he come back for me? Come back to give me my reward?

The red glint of eyes. Six of them.

Renfield flattened against the wall in terror.

They took shape, and seeped around the cas.e.m.e.nt of the window like a mist.

"So this is how you say, 'help'?" The Countess Elizabeth strode forward in a towering rage, and Renfield buried his face in the meagre pillow of his bed. "We say, that our erring husband is not to go about England taking other wives who please him better, and this is how you go about serving us? By saying, 'Come,' when he comes knocking at your window like a lover singing a serenade? Get your face out of your bedclothes and sit up like a man!"