Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 12

"And as for you," Dracula whispered, standing over him, a towering shadow, like Satan rising up from the floor of h.e.l.l. "Judas.

Are you like them now, who pit their puny brains against me? Who would go against me, with their weak mortality? Who would separate me from what is my own? See how I deal with those who would betray me!"

He bent down and lifted Renfield as if he were a child, raised him over his head. In final despair, Renfield blocked his lips, his mind, from screaming Catherine's name as he was hurled down into darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-.

ONE.

Catherine!

Renfield's eyes opened in panic. He saw only darkness, felt the close bounds of the coffin against his arms and his thighs, but that didn't trouble him. Trust, Nomie had said, and he had trusted.

It had all taken place, exactly as the Countess Elizabeth had promised: the dark terror, the horrifying agony of separating from his dying body, the dark and hideous intimacy of those three minds cradling his soul among them ...

And then the dreams. Dear G.o.d, the dreams! Catherine ...

Renfield brought up his hands to the coffin-lid just above his breast, and thrust. In life he had been a strong man. The lid gave way like cardboard, with a sound that was shocking in the deep silence.

The damp melancholy smell of dying leaves, of turned earth, came to him above the mouldy stink of mortality and wet stone and rats.Renfield was a little surprised. He was in the family tomb at Highgate. He recognized it, from when they'd buried his parents. He'd have bet money Lady Brough and Georgina would have given instructions that he be sent to a medical college for dissection.

Or was it beneath the dignity of the Brough family to have even a disgraced in-law anatomized by such low creatures as students?

Looking back, with a sense that was not quite sight, he saw that the coffin was of cheap pine. Apparently they drew the line at putting forth a single extra penny on a mere tradesman, an India-merchant who'd had the temerity to refuse their advice about how his daughter should be brought up. As a living man he could have ripped his way out of it, never mind one of a vampire's preternatural strength. The clothes he wore were those he'd been found in, wandering the streets of London raving last April. They hadn't even cleared out the pockets: his handkerchief, a few bus-tickets, an old key.

The lingering smell of parafin within the tomb, and the freshness of the tracked mud near the door, told him he'd been put there that day. Even in total darkness he knew it was sundown that had wakened him. His back no longer hurt, nor his face. He raised his hand to feel his skull above the right ear, where Van Helsing had trephined to relieve the pressure of the blood, and the skin was smooth.

Had they even noticed? he wondered. Or had Seward been so shocked and disoriented by Dracula's a.s.sault on poor Mrs.

Harker that he'd simply signed the death certificate and left that drunken imbecile Hennessey to take care of the details?

All this went through his mind in a few distracted moments, as he stood before the tomb's marble door. None of it mattered to him, nor formed more than a candle's weak glow against the blazing sun of the thought: I must get to Catherine.

The horror of his dream hammered in his mind.

The door of the tomb was locked. Renfield thought he could have broken it, but he'd seen the other vampires pa.s.s through tiny cracks, keyholes and slits, in the form of mist. If they could do it, surely he could, too.

It was a most curious sensation.

He was, as he'd thought, in Highgate Cemetery.

Catherine, he thought again. I must get to her. I must tell her...

He began to run.

He had dreamed about Catherine, dreamed terrible things. Georgina and Lady Brough were going to take Vixie, take her and lock her up, send her away. Teach her shame and squeamishness. Teach her that everything she loved and felt and cared about was wrong.

He had dreamed about Catherine weeping, weeping until she was ill, by the glow of the lamps in the bedroom of the house they'd taken in Kensington, under the name of Marshmire. Renfield had pleaded with her, pointed out again and again to her that they'd covered their tracks well. They'd made provisions, taken other bank accounts, established still other names, other ident.i.ties ...

They'll never find us, he said to her, and she'd only shaken her head, her long red hair shining in the soft glow of the gas- lights.

They will. They will.

The dreams turned to horror after that.

He had dreamed he'd gone mad, had been locked up in an asylum full of fools, only the fools weren't in the cells, but running the place. Drunken fools like Hennessey, or stubborn small-minded hidebound ones like Seward. Fools who couldn't see the larger world if it loomed before them and bit them and drank their blood.

Catherine, he whispered, as he ran-ran lightly, half-invisible, like a great jumble of flying newspaper whipped along by the wind, as a man would run in dreams. Homebound clerks turned to stare at him as they clambered aboard omnibuses or cl.u.s.tered on the dark wind-swept corners; costermongers and tattered women in black shawls shrank back into the glare of lights from the public-houses and cafes. Catherine, I'm coming! He pa.s.sed through the dark of Regent's Park, the bright-lit streets of the West End, dodging hansoms and growlers, omnibuses and carriages. In Hyde Park the cats fled from him, and dogs barked wildly at his pa.s.sing shadow.

Kensington. Abingdon Road. The dark brick face of the house that belonged on paper to Mr. Marshmire-"Oh, pick a gloomier name, why don't you?" Catherine had teased, laughing. Lightless windows. Locked doors.

She was inside. Renfield knew they were both inside.

On either side the tall pleasant houses were gas-lit. The autumn evening, still early, was cold. Renfield was conscious of the chill without particularly minding it, though he remembered how cold he had found England, how bone-gnawingly damp, after the languid heat of India. He had heard it said-by the Countess?-that vampires could not enter any place unless and until they had been invited, but it was his house, he had bought it.

Was that why vampires generally started their feeding on their own families?

He stood on the steps, looking down at the windows of the kitchen areaway and up at those of the drawing-room above, dark as the eyes of a dead man. He had run from Highgate across London to Kensington, close to five miles. Yet he felt no weariness.

Only enormous hunger. He pa.s.sed into the house.

It was as he remembered it, that last night he'd been there. They'd bought it furnished from its previous owners, lest Georgina or Lady Brough grow suspicious. Vixie had whooped with laughter over the old-fashioned furniture, the stuffy Biblical oleographs on the walls. To Vixie it had all been a giant adventure, a gamine delight in outfoxing the grandmother and aunts she had always loathed.

Renfield called out, "Vixie!" into the stuffy silence of the dark house, but received no reply. "Catherine!"

Only the smell of dust, and of mice, and of rooms unaired. Renfield climbed the stairs. On the second floor, Vixie's water-colors hung in the drawing-room, her sitar propped on the window-seat where she'd used to practice it. The bright cushions Catherine had made bloomed like incongruous flowers on the black slick horsehair of the previous tenant's chairs. On the third floor, Catherine's yellow silk kimono lay across the foot of the unmade bed, and Renfield knelt, pressed the sheets to his face, then the silk, inhaling the lingering scents of her perfume, her body, her hair. It was as if she had lain there only last night. But he knew it had been longer than that.

On the third floor, Vixie's bed was likewise disordered in the small room that had been hers. Her brush still lay on the little dresser, and the jeweled combs she'd used to put up her hair. Lavender kid gloves, like withered flowers. The torn-up pieces of the letter that Bolton, Renfield's solicitor, had delivered to her from her grandmother Brough, still on the floor where she'd left them.

Renfield picked one up, saw in the hated handwriting the name of Madame Martine's Select Academy for Young Females, in Lausanne, and the phrase, ". . . Wormidge will be by in the morning to take you to the station . . ."

Slowly, Renfield descended the stairs.

The other papers Bolton had delivered from Wormidge lay where he'd left them back in April, on the marble-topped dresser in the hall.

He called out softly, "Catherine?" and only the rustle of mice answered him, from the open pantry door.

Through the pantry he descended to the kitchen. It's a cold night, he thought. The servants might have the night off. They'll be keeping warm in the kitchen.

Mice scattered at his tread; the stink of them rose to him like a cloud. Split bins, chewed-open sacks, apples and cheese long spoiled, the nasty stink of the mortality of all things. Renfield looked about him at the dark clammy room, the unwashed dishes piled on the counters-had Catherine fired the servants altogether? His gaze went three times past the little door that led to the sub-cellar, because of course there was no reason for them to go down there.

But it always came back.

It was locked. The key was in the pocket of his jacket, with the handkerchief and the bus tickets. He could have pa.s.sed through the keyhole or under the door in a mist, but he unlocked it, and descended the slippery damp steps.

They didn't want to be found, he told himself. They don't dare be found. That's why they're sleeping in the sub-cellar.

So Georgina won't find them.

So Lady Brough won't find them. So they won't take Vixie away.

"Catherine?" he said softly, hoping against hope that his dream had been, in fact, only a dream.

But it hadn't.

He'd known that, from the moment he'd opened his eyes in the tomb.

They were where he'd left them. There was a table in the middle of the room where boots or silverware could be cleaned, or wine transferred from bottles to decanter. That night back in April he'd laid every tablecloth he could find on it, before bringing them down there to sleep, and the damask cloths were brown and crusted with the fluids of their mortality. The whole hot summer's worth of dead flies crunched like little curls of parched paper beneath his feet. It had been six months, but he could still distinguish between them, by Catherine's beautiful red hair, and Vixie's dark curls.

Renfield knelt at his wife's side, gathered up a double-handful of her hair, and kissed it. "I'm sorry, Catherine," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."

Standing again, he took off his jacket, pushed up his shirtsleeve, to tear open the vein of his arm with his nails, as Nomie had done, and Dracula. He held his arm over Catherine's mouth and let the blood drip down onto her lips-or what was left of her lips.

The coroner had taken away his notebooks, but he knew exactly how many flies he'd consumed-three thousand, four hundred and eight-plus nine hundred spiders, six hundred and fifteen moths, seven sparrows, and four mice, and a little tiny bit of Dr. Seward's blood, though that probably didn't count. Surely life enough?

Wasn't it? Please?

He didn't know how long after that it was-not midnight, he didn't think-when he felt the cold whiff of mist flowing down the sub- cellar stairs. He was still weeping, and did not turn around. He knew it was Nomie.

She said, "I am sorry, Ryland."

"I hoped it was a dream," he said, after some time. ",Just a dream I had. Part of my madness, like the letters I wrote her. Six months now I've hoped." He turned then and looked at her, a blurred pale shape through the blindness of his tears. "Can you do it?

I've only eaten flies-mice-moths ... You've consumed life, real life, men and women. You are strong . . ."

"No one of us is that strong, Ryland. Not my lord Dracula, not those dark ancients that haunt the mountains of Thibet and the deserts of Egypt. We are the Angels of Death, and the Angels of Un-Death-the Choosers of the Slain, you have called us. We can avert death, but we cannot bring them back through the Gate, once they have pa.s.sed through to the Other Side."

She laid her hand on Renfield's as she spoke, and turning, he caught her in his arms and clung to her like a drowning man, weeping against the golden silk of her hair.

"They were going to take Vixie," he stammered, his body shaking with sobs. The words came out of him as if, like a sick man, his body had to expel them or die. "Lady Brough-her vile solicitors-Catherine's hag of a sister ... They dug up old scandals, old rumors about me when I was in India. They were having me declared unfit to care for my own daughter! And because Catherine was a free soul and had lived an unconventional life, long before she met me, she, too, was to be disbarred from ever seeing Vixie, was to be cut out of the family. That was what they wanted. Her money, and control of mine! I did it only to keep Vixie from them,-to keep them from killing her by inches, smothering her spirit, turning her into one of them and worse in their d.a.m.ned Select Academies! I would rather be dead, Papa, she said, the night those d.a.m.ned letters came, those dawned papers ... The night Bolton brought them to the house. I would rather be dead. Those were her very words."

"And you killed her?"

Renfield nodded. "I was in red rage. Bolton had the temerity, the nerve, to follow me to this house. I knocked his brains out with the fire-shovel, there in the hall. My mind was swimming with the smell of his blood. Blood has always ... had that effect upon me,"

he added, a little hesitantly. "In India I used to kill ... kill ... snakes, and . . . and mongeese ... and drink their blood. I came upstairs and she was weeping, weeping herself sick on her bed, and I ... I did it very gently. Broke her neck ... held her against me as she died, as she ... she pa.s.sed beyond where they could get her, change her, make her what she would hate to be. She was such a free soul, Vixie. Such a beautiful soul. Then Catherine came in, and screamed . . ."

His arms tightened around Nomie, and he wept afresh. "I thought if I ate enough flies, consumed enough life . . ."

"You did what you could," None whispered, and held him close as fresh gusts of weeping shook him like a storm-tossed oak.

"You only did as you knew how. But it is done. You did your best, and your bravest, but they cannot be brought back."

"Then send me with them!" sobbed Renfield. "Let me go, too. They were my life!"

"And your life is over." At the sound of that deep cold contralto, Nomie and Renfield broke apart. The Countess and Sarike stood on the steps of the sub-cellar, the garnets in the Countess's hair twinkling darkly, like droplets of blood. "You are now one of us."

Revulsion seared through Renfield like a bitter poison. Shoving Nomie from him, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up from its shelf the long, sharp chisel that the Cook had used to open crates, drove it with all his strength toward his chest ...

And doubled over, paralyzed with shock, before the iron touched his body. Gasped as if his brain had been sliced apart with broken gla.s.s, as if his body were turned inside-out by icy claws, and in his mind as well as in his ears he heard the Countess's voice: "Don't."

Sobbing, he tried to press the chisel toward his flesh again and pain-and something worse and stronger than pain-closed around his body and his mind like a crushing vise.

She said, "Drop it."

He was back within her mind, where he had clung like a terrified child while his body died. He saw his hands open. Heard the iron clatter on the flagstone floor.

Sounds came out of his mouth that weren't words and were too suffocated to be cries. Still her grip tightened, her rage in- supportable, slicing him as a grape is sliced by the sharpest of silver razors. At her will, he dropped to his knees-it was worse than dying, a thousand times worse-at her will, he sank to his belly on the wet stone floor. At her will, he crawled to her, where she stepped down to the bottom of the stairs-hating himself, hating her, fighting and sweating and hurting every inch of the way and not able to keep himself from doing exactly as she willed-and kissed her feet.

He wanted to bite them. To tear her Achilles' tendons with his teeth. She was aware of his want, knowing him as intimately as if they had been lifelong lovers, and laughed at him; laughed harder as she made him bring up his own arm and tear at the bare flesh of his hand, worrying it like a dog.

"Be glad it's your own flesh I'm making you eat," said her voice in his ears, "and not that of your wife and your daughter." He knew she could do it. When she let him go, he lay on the floor in smears of his own blood and wept.

"Go on," jeered the Countess, "weep. Weep now until all the tears are out of you, once and for all. You are now our servant, Renfield. You were the one who clung to us, through the dark ness of death. It was for this we kept you back from pa.s.sing through the Gate. Do you understand?"

He could barely get the words out. "I understand, Lady."

"You will do as you are bid, for you will find that you cannot do otherwise."

He would have kept his silence but couldn't. The words were squished out of him as if he were a frog upon which she trod. "Yes, Lady." To the bottom of his soul he understood then how they hated Dracula, hated him with the hatred of intimacy, and why they had pursued him to this land. Why they would never, could never, leave him.

Then like an icy storm-blast the room grew cold above him. He raised his head in shock and terror even as the Countess turned, shrinking back from the column of darkness that loomed behind them, above them on the steps.

"And you, my beautiful ones," said a harsh, deep voice, "could do with a lesson yourselves, to do as you have been bid." And like the fall of night, Dracula came down into the cellar.

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife 4 October My most beloved Catherine, My most beloved wife I will be leaving England soon. In my misguided efforts to somehow make right the terrible wrong that I did you, I have put myself into the thrall of monsters.

The Countess Elizabeth is fearsome, cold and deadly as a steel blade, yet she pales in comparison to her husband, Dracula the Impaler, Viovode of Transylvania in the cruelest time of its history. The meeting between them can only be compared to the clash of storm winds against raging tidal floods, elemental, violent, appalling. He flung her to the floor as if she were a rag-doll, struck the others and hurled them against the walls with such force as to destroy the shelves, cursed them in German and in Magyar. He made the three of them crawl, as the Countess had made me crawl. My soul-if I can still speak of myself as possessing such a thing- trembles for poor Mrs. Harker, if and when he should claim her as his own.

"I am pursued by human rats, by the yapping curs of this land," he stormed at the three women, who crouched b.l.o.o.d.y on the floor before his boots. "Jealous suitors all, swearing vengeance, as the impotent Turk and the beaten Slav threw stones at me when I rode in triumph through their towns! Dogs! I spit upon their vengeance!" There was a fading red scar across his forehead, where, Nomie had told me, Jonathan Harker had struck him with a shovel as he lay sleeping in his coffin, and the front of his vest and coat had been ripped open, as if by the stroke of a knife.

"Vengeance! It is they who shall learn the meaning of that word to their sorrow! I have taken the soul of this girl they loved, and I have in my hand the soul of the other. She is mine, whatever time it is that she die, if it be seventy years from now! They play against me with their tiny mortal lives, but it is I who bear as my weapon the sword of Time. Against that they can do naught."