Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 16

A little later I became aware of Mina Harker's mind, questing to touch that of the Count, in the hold of that ship that was being driven by the winds he commanded, cloaked in the fogs he had summoned to blindfold its captain and crew. "What is it that you hear?" asked Van Helsing's deep voice. "What is it that you smell?"

And then, more softly, "Friend John, what do you think? Do her teeth remain as they were, no longer nor no sharper than they were before?"

And Seward's voice, toneless and careful, "I can see no change in them, nor in her."

Far off it seemed to me that I could see them, like images I'd formed up in my mind to cheer my little Norn: Mrs. Harker lying on the rose plush sofa of the suite's over-decorated parlor, Van Helsing and Seward on chairs by her head. The others were gone, presumably attending, during the hours of day, to all those necessary tasks so that they could remain all together through the hours of darkness.

"Nor I, Friend John," Van Helsing replied. "But you must watch her, watch her as a doctor stands guard upon an ailing child, for the first sign of change. For if this change commence in her, it is not only her soul that is in peril, but she become a weapon in his hand against us all."From there I slipped back into waking, with the soft warm winds of the Black Sea stirring the curtains of the window. And when Nomie sat up in her coffin, and shook back her golden hair, the bruises left by the Slovak brutes at the harbor were fading, and every cut nearly healed. Every hurt, that is, save the wound of fear that lay like a shadow deep within her eyes.

20 October 5 mice, 2 Slovaks

21 October Owl, 3 mice, 1 Slovak Nomie is teaching me the finer points of the vampire way.

22 October 12 rats, 27 spiders Searched for the other Slovaks who a.s.saulted Nomie. They seem to be lying low.

Transformation into a bat! What an astonishing sensation!

23 October 10 rats, 13 spiders, an enormous c.o.c.kroach that crawled dazed and stupid from a bale of rugs from Samarkand. The taste of Oriental spices!

In bat-form flittered at the window of the Odessus Hotel. G.o.dalming pacing, Dr. Seward reading or pretending to read a medical journal, though he did not turn the pages, Morris playing patience, and Harker sharpening his knife. Mrs. Harker asleep on the sofa, dark hair braided like a schoolgirl's. Van Helsing rose from his seat beside her and crossed to the window. I flew away at once, knowing that above all none of them must suspect that the Count has harrying forces in Varna. I do not think he saw me, yet he stood for a long time at the opening of the curtains, gazing with those sharp blue eyes into the dark.

I worry about Nomie, about the way the landlord of the pensione and his wife draw aside from her and whisper when she and I go up and down the stairs. In my sleep I sometimes hear the tread of heavy boots in the street below our window, pausing for too long, then going on its way.

Telegram, Rufus Smith, Lloyd's, London, to Lord G.o.dalming care of HAM Vice-Consul, Varna.*

24 October Czarina Catherine reported this morning from Dardanelles.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

"What could go wrong?" Young G.o.dalming had a voice like an operatic hero's, a Heldentenor, a Siegfried, a Radhames. Drifting as half-dematerialized mist in the darkness of the bedroom that was Mina Harker's by day, Renfield Pictured the Viscount in his mind. Pacing, by the creak of the floor and the infinitesimal rise and fall of his voice. Golden hair tumbled on his forehead in the lamplight. Black-clothed as Hamlet, holding to the uniform of grief, keeping faith with the girl who had been his wife in his heart.

"Rostov-the Catherine's owner-never questioned my story that the box may contain something stolen from me. This should be enough to convince the Captain to let us open it."

Paper rattled softly, audible only to Renfield's hypernatural senses.

A letter? Money? Did it matter?

He remembered his dreaming visions of laudanum and madness in Rushbrook House, seeing those two goldenly beautiful young people on the sunlit deck of G.o.dalming's little steam launch one afternoon on the Thames. Remembered how he had envied them their joy as much as their freedom. Recalled the agony of knowing that Dracula even then had put his mark upon the girl; that their delight in the afternoon lay under shadow of horror.

Without doubt, that magic afternoon on the river was in G.o.dalming's mind as well.

"What could go wrong?" he demanded again, louder, and Renfield could almost see Van Helsing's shushing gesture as well as hear the hiss of his breath.

"A thousand thousand things, my friend." Van Helsing's whisper re-enforced Renfield's awareness of Mina Harker's deep, sleeping breath. From her hypnotic sleep at sunset she often drifted so into true slumber, like the Sleeping Beauty awaiting her ultimate fate. "It is why we watch, and wait."

Did Sleeping Beauty dream?

"Can't be much longer now." Quincey Morris's flat American drawl was calmly matter-of-fact. "Wind's from the south. Queer, how it swung around that way so sudden from the east. But it'll drive the ship into our arms neat as a grand-right-and-left. Should arrive sometime tomorrow, strong as it's blowin'."

"And we will be there," said G.o.dalming, almost gloating, "to greet him."

In his sleep that afternoon, Renfield, too, had felt the wind shift. At sunset, in the hat-form that still filled him with delight, he had flittered high in the lemon-hued sky to look south toward the forty-mile strait. Though he saw with a vampire's keen sight rather than with a bat's weak little eyes, the hills of Turkey had been veiled in mists whose white curtains had stretched far out over the sea.

But when G.o.dalming and Morris left the suite to go down to the hotel's smoking-room, Van Helsing murmured, "I do not like this, friend John. There is a feel in the air, as they say. A feel in my bones. Like the old wound who smart when the weather turns, my skeleton say to me, Beware."

They're armed, thought Renfield, as he'd thought whenever any of the men departed the suite for the smoking-room or the lavatories; and as they went out, he heard the minute clink of silver on porcelain as each man took from a bowl beside the door the rosaries Van Helsing insisted they carry when not in Mina's presence. An agnostic himself, Renfield had been both appalled and fascinated, four nights ago, when he'd killed the first of the Slovak boatmen who'd a.s.saulted Nomie. The man's companion had had a crucifix around his neck and the energy from it, like a searing white heat, had driven Renfield back from killing him as well. When the bodies of two others of the band had been discovered a day or so later, all the rest of them had taken to wearing crucifixes, to Renfield's disgust.

Does G.o.d indeed protect men who'd beat a young woman for being blonde and German, if only they wear His sign?

Or is there something else operating here, something I don't understand?

But through the hotel's thick walls he heard other men's voices from the street, hoa.r.s.e and jeering: "Vrolok, " one of them cried, and another, " Stregoica!" And he heard the quick retreating tap of Nomie's heels.

Heart cold within him, Renfield dissolved himself more completely into mists, flowed like water along the dim-lit hotel corridor and down the stair. He pa.s.sed G.o.dalming and tall Quincey Morris outside the smoking-room door-Morris looked around sharply, as if at a sound-and gaining the outer door, Renfield melted into the shape of a bat, flew toward the alley where the white blur of boatmen's clothing swam in the shadows.

They were following Nomie, not very closely, shouting obscenities and calling names. She could not, Renfield knew, slip away from them into another form without revealing that she was, indeed, what they labeled her, vampire and witch. So she only walked, very sensibly, down the center of the widest street she could toward the largest hotel immediately available that wasn't the Odessus, where there was the chance that Jonathan Harker might see her in the lobby. This was the Metropole, some three streets away. At this hour, close to one in the morning, the streets were nearly deserted, the fog that had all evening wreathed the southern hills creeping in thick over the town. There was no one to stop the mob from trailing only a few steps behind her, gaining courage as they gained numbers from the workingmen's taverns they pa.s.sed. When she reached the Metropole's front steps, they fell back, and Renfield melted into mists again as the doorman opened the doors for her.

"Come in, come in, Madame! Ah, truly they are savages in this place!"

By his speech the doorman was French. Nomie turned, to look back at the some thirty men gathered before the hotel, who spat at her and made the two-fingered sign against the evil eye. Renfield let himself be seen for a moment, swirling as mist across the steps behind her, to let her know he was near. The mob didn't notice him, because of the general fog of the night: the lights of the hotel's door were blurred by it, and the sound of the sea at the foot of the esplanade m.u.f.fled.

"Oh, M'sieu," he heard Nomie gasp as she went in, "it is only because I am a German, not even an Austrian as they say-"

She was still shaking when she joined Renfield outside fifteen minutes later, and in the form of bats they made their way back toward the pensione in Blachik Street. "You have to go back to the Castle," he said, when they'd seeped into their own room again in the form of mist. "It will be only a matter of time before the men from the taverns and the docks find out where you sleep, or before our landlady's husband hears one too many things in the tavern and decides we aren't paying him enough to mind his own business."

"We can't do that," whispered Nomie. "You know we can't." Renfield knew. Yesterday, and the day before, the Count had risen like a cloud of darkness into his dreams, demanding why Van Helsing and the others still lived. They twist that woman, that traitorous wh.o.r.e, to their wills, with their puny hypnotism and their canting piety! Fools! Fools and hypocrites, who whine that I have made her my tool, and all the while use her as theirs! But they will pay.

And that morning, too, in the dark of his coffin, Renfield dreamed again of the dark gloating, the burning stench of the Count's delight in the antic.i.p.ation of his vengeance.

When they see what I shall make of her, my bride, my slave, and my winepress, then shall their hearts weep beneath my heel. Even death will to them bring no comfort.

Destroy them! Destroy them all, except for Van Helsing. Him you let live, to see their deaths.

His words, his thoughts, crushed Renfield with terror, and it seemed to him that he knelt again in the hold of the doomed ship Demeter, confronting that column of shadow, those red, burning eyes.

But in his dream, this time, Nomie was with him. Nomie slim and beautiful, standing at his side.

Lord, we cannot, she said, and Dracula struck her, with casual violence that threw her back against the slimy dark wall of the ship's bulkhead.

Cannot? You say "cannot" to me?

They never go out alone! protested Renfield, springing to his feet. They are armed, they cannot be finished off all together. - He broke off with a gasp, the grip of Dracula's mind on his like a band of heated iron crushing his skull. Renfield sank to the deck- boards, the pain of his own death at Dracula's hands-bones breaking, flesh battered-returning to the reality of the dream.

You will find a way, said the Count, the voice in Renfield's mind deadly soft. You will find a way, or it will go the worse with you.

Then he was gone, and far off, deep in shattered sleep, Renfield heard Nomie weep. The morning sun climbed over the blue-- black sparkle of the Black Sea, the strange southerly wind flicked foam from its waves. Far out over the water, Renfield was con- scious of unseasonal banks of drifting fog, and in the dark of his dream, of Mina Harker dreaming about chasing Lucy as she sleep- walked down the halls of the school where they'd met.

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife 25 October My beloved, my beloved, he is gone!At noon I felt it, noon being the single period of the daylight hours when we of the vampire kind have the powers that the darkness gives us: to change our form, to utilize the strength of our Un-Dead state.

He has closed his mind against Mina Harker's probing, but in so doing, also against us!

Once when he turned away from me I wept, and ranted, and fought like the madman I then was. Today in my coffined sleep I could almost have cried like a child with relief. When sunset freed me of the daylight's thick thrall, I sat up shivering with dread that it was only a dream, but no! For Nomie sat up in the same moment, her golden hair hanging thick about her shoulders, and stared at me with huge eyes.

"Is it true?" she whispered. And scrambling from our coffins, we clung to each other in the narrow s.p.a.ce between them, not daring to believe.

"I'm taking you back to the Castle," I said, and she shook her head.

"Ryland, you cannot. I cannot. He will know. When he comes there, he will know. And he will punish."

"I will return here and deal with the pursuit," I said firmly. "I will tell him that because of the Slovaks you had become a liability, and it is only a matter of time before Van Helsing-who speaks Slovak, and like all men of science is a natural-born snoop whose inquisitiveness rivals the worst grandmother in the world-hears of a fair-haired German girl whom the boatmen call vrolak, and puts two and two together. You must go back, little Norn. I will come to you when I can."

It was a lie, Catherine, and I knew it was a lie as the words came out of my mouth. She flung her arms around me and kissed me like a schoolgirl, and the lie burned me as if she had pressed a crucifix, or Van Helsing's Host, into the living flesh of my heart.

All this evening I have made preparations, visiting the shipping offices of Hapgood Company, in which as you recall I own considerable stock, and under my own name hiring a reliable agent, an expatriate Virginian named Ross who has spent over two decades in this part of the world. For his a.s.sistants I hired two Germans, Berliners who don't believe in anything. In this far corner of Europe, no one had yet heard of the incarceration or death of one of Hapgood's leading shareholders, and one of the office clerks, who had formerly worked in Calcutta, knew me well by sight. Tomorrow morning we take the 6:30 train to Veresti, where it will be possible to hire wagons to deliver Nomie, boxed within the coffin of her native earth, to the Castle Dracula above the Borgo Pa.s.s.

For my own coffin the instructions were more complex. Having brought five boxes of earth from Highgate Cemetery on the Orient Express, I rented s.p.a.ce in Hapgood's Varna warehouse to store three of them until sent for by either myself or by the ficti- tious Mr. Marshmire. One earth-box I emptied, dividing the earth therein into four parts. Three of these I used to line, much more shallowly, boxes large enough to shelter me, which were to be stored until sent for in Veresti and in Bistritz, guaranteeing me a place of shelter near-by the Castle, should I require one. 'The fourth portion of my native earth I loosely stored in a fine cotton casing three layers thick, in fact, the emptied bags of three child-sized eiderdowns, which may be spread out in case of emergency and give me some semblence of rest, at least for the time that remains to me.

The remainder of the night, my dearest Catherine, I have spent in drawing up the various legal doc.u.ments that will serve to transfer our money, and ownership of our secret accounts, into Nomie's hands. At some time in the future she may succeed in breaking free of Dracula's hold; the greatest gift I can offer her, who has been my friend in this terrible halfway house of Un-Death, is the freedom that money can bring.

For I do not mean to return to her, after I send her on her way from Veresti. Before I can return to Varna, the Czarina Cather- ine will make port in Galatz, where the shipping agents will duly wire news of her arrival to Lord G.o.dalming, and thither Van Helsing and the others shall go. I will do what I can to delay pursuit, lest Nomie suffer punishment for my negligence. Yet I shall make sure that in so doing, I meet at last the joy of my own end, to be with you, however briefly, before a merciful G.o.d releases me to whatever Eternity He shall in His wisdom choose.

Yet just as poor little Nomie once said she would happily share eternity in h.e.l.l with the man she loved, so will I accept it with equanamity, if before I enter its gates I may see you and our lovely Vixie one last time.

Until then, I am, Forever, your husband, R.M.R.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

"What is it that you hear, Madame Mina?"

Under the closed lids, Van Helsing saw the young woman's eyes move, as subjects' often did under hypnosis. As if they looked around them, seeing who knew what? The soft flesh beneath the eyes drew up a little, the dark brows, fine as the strokes of j.a.panese penmanship, drew down.

In a more commanding voice, he repeated, "What is it that you hear? Tell me."

She turned her head, like a fretful child avoiding the medicine-spoon. Harker, kneeling at the head of the sofa in the suite's pink- and-gold parlor, gave his wife's hand a gentle pressure, and glanced up into Van Helsing's eyes.

"Tell me what you hear, Madame Mina. This I command." She brought in her breath, let it go in a sigh. Van Helsing leaned forward a little, to study, without seeming to-without letting Harker guess the direction of his eyes-the teeth set in those colorless gums.

When she lay dying, struggling against the changes that Dracula's contaminating blood wrought in her flesh, Lucy Westenra's teeth had lengthened to the sharp canines of the vampire, even before death had fully claimed her. Remembering that flaxen girl's struggle, Van Helsing could not repress a shiver, nor could he put aside, or pretend to himself that he did not feel, the traitorous stir in his loins.

Vile, he thought, shameful and vile. Yet how beautiful Lucy Westenra had been, how exquisite, the beauty of life mingling with the cold wonder of death's threshold.

And though her teeth had not yet begun to grow, nor her gums to shrink back, he thought he saw that unearthly vampire loveliness reflected now in Mina Harker's too-thin face.

"Water," she whispered. "Rushing waves ... masts creaking." She moved her head again, her hair like sable velvet against the pale linen of the sheets and pillows they'd brought in, every night, from her bedroom. Against the dark of her hair, the wax-white of her skin, the round scar left by the consecrated Host on her forehead seemed lividly red, almost like raw flesh. Yet even that, to his own disgust, the old man found deeply erotic.

Dear G.o.d, what kind of man am I to look upon her who fights so bravely for her own soul-and she the wife of a man who loves her like the breath of his lungs!-and to think such thoughts as this? It had been twenty-five years since his own wife, his own beautiful Elaine, had disappeared into the terrible labyrinths of madness, leaving only a frightened, raving creature who bore little resemblance to the girl he had loved. In the first few years he had been driven to the prost.i.tutes of Amsterdam, but shame had blunted his manhood without in the tiniest degree decreasing his aching need.

For two decades the life of the mind-and certain disciplines of the flesh-had proved a distraction. But like the physician of the Bible, he had never been able to heal himself. Nor could he now.

"Sleep now," he said gently, and pa.s.sed his hand above her face. "Sleep now and dream, and when you wake, you shall be refresh, and full of hope."

The morning sunlight that filled the room, as Quincey Morris parted its curtains, had a chilly cast to it, grayed with the fogs that had for two days drifted over Varna's harbor. Jonathan Harker, haggard still but curiously ebullient since word had come, the day before yesterday, that the Czarina Catherine had been sighted in the Dardanelles, lifted his wife in his arms and bore her into their bedroom. Despite the morning's coolness Morris opened the window, for the parlor smelled of lamp-oil and too many people sleeping on its chairs and floor. John Seward, rumpled and reminding Van Helsing very much of the thin, earnest young student he'd known in Leyden thirteen years ago, began rolling up the blankets on which he and the other three men had slept, turn and turn about, for eleven nights now.

In those eleven days, no sign, no whisper of any paid agent of the vampire Count had so much as cast a shadow on their tracks.

But Morris was right. Van Helsing knew this in his bones. It was not the time to take the slightest chance. Seward, Harker, and young Lord G.o.dalming would all cat-nap during the day, as Van Helsing did himself, but for them all the main business of the day would be waiting.

Waiting for a telegram from the shipping agent, that would tell them that the Czarina Catherine was in port.

"It has to be today." G.o.dalming emerged from his room in a fresh jacket and tie, on his way downstairs to the barber's and the baths. Morris, who'd proceeded laconically to his own morning routine of checking, cleaning, and loading every piece of the considerable a.r.s.enal they'd brought from London, only glanced up at his friend and scratched a corner of his long mustache.

Seward remarked, "I'm a little surprised it's taking this long. They may have had to lay by because of the fog. You go on ahead, Art. I shall join you in a moment." His brown glance touched Van Helsing's as he gathered up the bedding. Van Helsing rose, and followed him to the door of Mina's room, as Harker came out.

"She's sleeping well," the young solicitor said. "Better I think than she has in some time. Her color's better, too, don't you think?"

Van Helsing replied softly, "Even so." The curtains of the bedroom were drawn; he could see the young schoolmistress sleeping in the gloom, dark braids laid gently on either side of her face.