Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 17

Was she more beautiful than she had been yesterday? Pinker and healthier-looking, as Lucy had become when the vampire death stole over her? Harker hadn't seen his wife's dear friend succ.u.mb to Dracula's curse: he would not know what her livelier demeanor, her brighter spirits yesterday might mean. Van Helsing was conscious of the young man's dark gaze resting on his face, questioning, before Harker turned away.

But Seward knew. And Seward was watching him, too, as he looked at Mrs. Harker in the bedroom's dusk.

How can you think such thought as this? he asked himself again, hating what he felt. Hating the image that seemed to burn itself into his brain, of kissing those vampire lips, of holding that coldly perfect flesh in crushing embrace against his own. This woman, so clever and so logical and so good in her heart, she is fighting for her own soul, and for her husband's happiness and perhaps his very life as well, for it is certain that if she die, he will not leave her long alone in her grave.

Yet the flesh, like the heart, has reasons of its own, of which the reason knows nothing and cares less.

And as he saw the unearthly beauty of the vampire make its first inroads on that lively, lovely woman, that kind-hearted person whom he had come to love as a daughter, he felt the insane whisper of l.u.s.t chew at the inner corners of his brain.

Before they had left London, Mina Harker had made them read over her the Service for the Dead. Had made each man swear that before they would let her become vampire, they would stake her through the heart and cut off her head, as they had done with Lucy, and this oath Van Helsing knew he would force himself to honor, out of the love he bore her. The most he could do for her was that, and to dissemble his private madness so that she would continue to trust him as a friend. They were like a band of brothers to her, among whom she could sleep without a second thought; her only comfort, Van Helsing knew, in a time when she must have been living in a nightmare of hard-hidden terror.

He would die himself rather than take that comfort, that trust, away.

Yet when he lay down to sleep later that morning, it was of the vampire-Mina, the voluptuous smiling demon-Mina, that he dreamed.

Dr. Seward's Diary*

27 October No news yet of the ship we wait for ...

"Mrs. Marshmire will meet you at Bistritz," explained Renfield, as in the pre-dawn cold he, the shipping-agent Ross, and the hired drivers checked the harness and wagon for its journey up to the Borgo Pa.s.s. "She has made her own arrangements to get there, and you will find rooms for you and your men at the Golden Krone Hotel. She is going home to her family there to rest, and to recover a little of the tenor of her mind. Please bear with her fancies, and indulge them so far as you're able. I a.s.sure you, they are only fancies, and nothing of a serious nature. But it will disturb her very much if her will is crossed."

The slender, graying Virginian smiled reminiscently. "I did have an aunt that took it in her head that my daddy's roses were the re- born souls of the knights and ladies of Camelot," he remarked. "When I was about five, she took me out and introduced me to Sir Galahad and Sir Bors and Morgan le Fay, and told me all kinds of tales about their deeds on Earth before they became rose- bushes. It was kind of sweet, really."

Renfield smiled. Such conduct would hardly have raised an eyebrow at Rushbrook. "Exactly," he said. "I am glad and grateful that you understand." He gave the man fifty pounds for expenses, having the head shipping-agent's a.s.surance that in more than twenty years Ross's accounts had never showed so much as a penny's discrepancy; he had learned, in nearly twenty years in the India trade, to read men well.

"Please bear in mind," he added, "that this is a strange country, and Mrs. Marshmire comes from a very old family that is both eccentric and a little dangerous. In particular watch out for her sisters, should you encounter them. My wife will do all she can to a.s.sure your safety, once you get among the Szgany gypsies that owe them alliegence, but I need hardly tell you to watch your backs and not take any foolish risks."

"Won't be the first time I've been up the country in these parts," replied the Virginian, unperturbed. He pulled closer about him the sheepskin coat he wore, for once away from the warmth of the Black Sea the air had grown steadily colder, and the mountains before them were thick with clouds that smelled of snow. "And I'll do my possible to make sure it won't be the last. Thanks for your honesty with me, sir."

Not precisely honesty, reflected Renfield, watching the lights of the wagon dwindle into the icy iron twilight of the road out of town. But how many battles would you have ridden into, during your State's rebellion against the Federals, had your Gen- eral Lee been completely honest with you about the politics, bribery, and power-struggles that led up to the war?

He turned his steps, not back into the yard of the modest inn where they'd spent the night, but toward the railway station, from which the train would leave for Galatz sometime before noon if he were lucky. He ached all over, from days without rest, pretending to be mortal and human for Ross's benefit and living only for the time when he could seep as mist through the holes in his coffin in the baggage-car, and rest in his native earth.

The thought that he was helpless, through the two days' rattling journey from Varna, had filled him with dread and had increased his hunger five-fold. A dozen times he'd had to leave the compartment lest the craving for blood overcome him and he attack Ross or the two hired drivers. Through the night, lying in his earth-box, he had whispered to Nomie as she lay awake in hers, rea.s.suring her and being rea.s.sured. It was good beyond measure not to be alone.

A look at the roads in this part of the world, glimpsed through the train windows during those two endless days playing cards with his hirelings, had demonstrated to Renfield at least why the Count had chosen to be conveyed back to his Castle by water instead of by land. Once past Bucharest and into the rising hinterlands, the roads deteriorated sharply, sometimes to little more than muddy tracks, and as the land rose toward the Carpathians, the trackless forest crowded in many places down to the road's edge.

On running water, the Count might be helpless, reflected Renfield, as he slipped into the open baggage-shed past the dozing guard, but there were fewer robbers on the water, and the direc tion of their attack was perforce more controlled. Having jour- neyed now so far from his native earth, he felt a deep and intense sympathy for the Count's obsessive precautions. Only the knowl- edge that his henchmen were skeptics-American and Germanhad given him the confidence to travel with them. Slovaks who'd grown up believing in vampires, or Englishmen who'd had their existence unarguably demonstrated to them, might have spotted him for one at once. And in daylight he was helpless.

As it was, he found it difficult to melt into mists, to flow into the earth-box labeled, R.M. RENFIELD-HAPGOOD'S- VARNA. Exhaustion seemed to have turned his Un-Dead flesh to lead. He cast a longing eye at the snoring guard, but knew it was too dangerous. Veresti was a small enough town that those who found an exsanguinated corpse would have no doubt in which direction to look for the killer. A box full of earth with small holes in its lid would be the first they'd open.

Nomie, thought Renfield, as he seeped finally through into the comforting darkness, Nomie be safe!

For a moment their minds touched, like hands questing for comfort in darkness. He saw her before him, in dreaming as she had looked in life, a sweet slender golden child in the flowing gauzes and striped satin jacket of that most graceful of eras in which she'd lived.

And in the distance, as if through her eyes, he saw the Castle Dracula, brooding half-ruined on the shoulder of cliff above the Borgo Pa.s.s. But it was shelter and safety to her, no matter what memories it held or what future; and there she could rest. In his mind he sang to her Wotan's song from Das Rheingold, the most beautiful piece of music Wagner ever wrote. The most beautiful, in its soul-deep soaring peace, of all the music of the earth:

"The evening beams O f the sun's eye sumptuously gild Those walls! ...

Near is night;From envy and grudge It shelters us now.

I greet this place!

Secure against horror and fear.

Come with me, Lady: In Valhalla dwell with me. "

Be safe, my child, my friend, he thought. I have done for you what I can.

R.M.R.'s notes Train, Veresti to Galatz 28 October 4 chickens What a thing it is to travel on a country train! There remain only two things left for me to do.

With luck, Van Helsing and his companions will still be in Galatz when I arrive, depending on how well the Count has covered his tracks. Money can buy silence, if one knows where to shop. But I suspect that Dracula does not.

The Count is a boyar, a n.o.bleman, like the great princes of India whom for twenty years I watched quite ordinary British middlemen bilk daily. His approach is, like theirs, a simple one: sword in one hand, a large pile of gold in the other. And no idea about how to finesse a believable story or which strings of influence to pull.

G.o.dalming is rich. Quincey Morris is rich. Any silence the Count can buy, they can undoubtedly purchase retail at a very small mark-up. Van Helsing speaks enough Russian and Ro manian that they can probably hire whatever vehicles they need for pursuit. If they guess, or are informed, this will probably be a vessel of some kind to pursue up-river with possibly outriders following along the sh.o.r.e. At a guess, they shall leave one of their number in Galatz with Mrs. Harker, and that one probably Seward, who is less accustomed to rough-and-tumble work than Morris. Harker has at least been to Castle Dracula, and his experience might be of value if they get that close to the Borgo Pa.s.s; besides, I cannot see him letting himself be done out of the kill.

A pity, for I like Seward and trust him. Nevertheless, G.o.dalming, Morris, and Van Helsing all met me at the asylum-what a long time ago that seems! 'They will recognize me, and Van Helsing will certainly understand my request.

But I smile at my own foolishness even as I write these words. With G.o.dalming and Harker of the party, I won't even be put to the momentary embara.s.sment of explaining myself. They will slaughter me at sight.

What a deep sense of happiness that antic.i.p.ation brings me, as I settle for sleep, a stranger in a strange land, in the comfort of my native earth!

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Jonathan Harker's Journal*

30 October-night I am writing this in the light from the furnace door of the steamlaunch: Lord G.o.dalming is firing up. His is an experienced hand at the work, as he has had for years a launch of his own on the Thames ... Regarding our plans, we finally decided that Mina's guess was correct, and that if any waterway was chosen for the Count's escape back to his castle, the Sereth, and then the Bistrizia at its junction, would be the one ...

Lord G.o.dalming tells me to sleep for n while, as it is enough for the present for one to be on watch. But I cannot sleep-how can I with the terrible danger hanging over my darling ... My only comfort is that we are in the hands of G.o.d ...

We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things. G.o.dalming is shutting the furnace door.

"Not what you'd call a promising lot." Seward surveyed the six horses a.s.sembled in the livery stable yard. The best the town has to offer, the stableman had a.s.sured Quincey, and if that were indeed the case, Seward reflected, his heart bled for anyone in Varna who wanted to get anywhere in a hurry or in any kind of style.

"You by any chance referrin' to them banditos we just enlisted?" Quincey gestured with an eyebrow-he was the only man Seward had ever seen who could do such a thing-to the two Romanian grooms the Vice Consul's chief clerk had recommended to G.o.dalming on the strength of the fact that one of them, Chernak, allegedly spoke English and the other, Nagy, allegedly spoke what was alleged to be French, though you couldn't prove it by Seward.

And Seward had to admit that the scrubby, s.h.a.ggy, undersized horses did have a slightly more wholesome aspect than the men.

The thought of trusting his life to either group made him queasy.

Still, he went over to the two grooms and explained-with the stableman's questionable help---what he wanted of them: ride fast, rest seldom, change saddles when necessary to the remounts who'd carry the provisions. The expressions on their faces were hugely reminiscent of that worn by Mary the parlor-maid at Rushbrook House when she was in the process of hopelessly mis- understanding his instructions about rotating household linens or setting the table when Sir Ambrose Poole came for Sunday tea.

The recollection filled Seward with a curious sense of deep isolation, as if the Superintendant of Rushbrook House, who'd conscientiously recorded entries concerning every patient in his daily phonographic log and who'd dealt patiently with the Hen- nesseys and Lady Broughs and Ambrose Pooles of the world, were someone else entirely from the man who stood here now in the stable yard of a Black Sea town, trying to hire servitors in grammar-school French for- For what?

For the pursuit of a monstrosity that the Superintendant of Rushbrook House, back in August, would never have believed in.

For the vengeance he would wreak, on the thing that had first dishonored poor beautiful Lucy, and then had taken her life. And after that vengeance, what?

"Voars cornprenez?" he asked, and Chernak and Nagy regarded him with blank and total incomprehension before they both nodded vigorously.

I've come four and a half months and over a thousand miles and I feel like I'm back where I was explaining about getting supper on the table on time.

Which it wasn't, of course.

Renfield, he thought, as the two grooms turned away and went to gather their own bedrolls from the corner of the courtyard.

Supper didn't get on the table because Renfield escaped.

As if the name were a trigger to some obscure irritation of his nerves, for an instant a sense of horrified enlightenment flooded into his heart-Dear G.o.d, Renfield!-and then blurred away almost immediately into the cloudy sensation of a dream.

I dreamed about Renfield, he thought, his mind groping at what felt like an almost palpable barrier of oblivion. Dreamed about him on the train. Well-dressed, well-groomed, soft-spoken, sane.

He said ... He said ...

"They understand?" Quincey loomed up out of dark and torchlight beside him. The light of the wasting moon wickered through the breaking clouds, and though it was only a little after suppertime, it felt later.

Seward sighed. "Not a solitary thing."

The Texan spit a stream of tobacco-juice into the moist muck of gravel and hay underfoot. "Can't be worse than the Hakkas we hired in Singapore, and that worked out all right."Looking up into his tall friend's face, Seward felt again that great sense of distance, not from Quincey himself-that friend with whom he'd traveled three-quarters of the way around the world-but from Quincey's thoughts and heart. It occurred to him that since the horrible afternoon in Hampstead Cemetery, when they'd driven a stake through Lucy's heart, when they'd cut off her head and stuffed her mouth with garlic as if they were superst.i.tious savages and she some ritual beast, neither he, nor Art, nor Quincey had spoken one word to one another of what they'd done, or what they'd felt. All the way across the Channel and across the continent of Europe, Art had lapsed again and again into terrible silences, staring out the windows of trains or hotels struggling against tears, hand over his mouth and the muscles standing out on his temples with the tension of his jaws. At such times Seward, or Quincey, would sometimes drop a hand to his shoulder, or grip his arm in pa.s.sing.

Quincey's silence was something different.

"Do you ever wonder," Seward asked him now, as they walked to the corner where the saddles and bedrolls were heaped, "if it could have been different? If Lucy had accepted my offer, or yours, instead of Art's? If she'd stayed in London last summer. .."

"Or gone to America with me?" Quincey's gray eyes seemed dark in the torchlight, shadowed under the long sun-bleached brows, empty and infinitely tired. "Jack, there is not a day that it doesn't occupy the whole of my thought, from my waking until the moment sleep takes me. Had I known what was coming for her, I think I'd have carried her off like the villain in a play, and risked her mother shooting me dead. But I didn't. And you didn't. And maybe if she'd married you or married me or stayed in London or gone to the Moon, it would have been the same anyhow, like the philosophers say. And if it wasn't you and me standing here on the back-doorstep of the civilized world, it'd be two other guys avenging the death of some other gal, with just as much pain involved all around. And in any case it makes no difference."

He spit another line of tobacco, and picked up a saddle-a horrible Russian cavalry cast-off, stiff as a plank and entangled in a granny-knot of snarled straps. "From the time Miss Westenra said she would not have me, there was nothing for me, except her friendship, and yours, and Art's. It was that friendship that kept me in England, and that friendship that's drawn me here. Live or die, it does not matter to me anymore, for those two states are now to me exactly the same. Now let's get these f.u.c.ken' crow-baits saddled, and get on the road while there's still a Moon in the sky."

R.M.R.'s notes 31 October 2 chickens, 3 rats, Romanian pimp, 17 spiders Still no contact of the Count's mind upon my own. Nor can I sense him reaching out to Nomie. At sunset last night I was aware of Van Helsing speaking to Mrs. Harker in hypnotic trance, but with the Count's self-imposed isolation these impressions have become so attenuated that it is only by deep meditation that I can detect them at all, and at sunrise I was able to sense nothing. I do not know whether this is because of Dracula's defense against this probing, or because Van Helsing and his friends have guessed the direction of his flight and have set off in pursuit, leaving Mrs. Harker guarded in Galatz.

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife Galatz, Romania At the mouths of the Danube 31 October My beloved Catherine, Please forgive my negligence in writing lately; I blame the difficult conditions under which I have traveled. Nor do they appear likely to become easier, but I shall write when I can. I count, as ever, on your always-warm understanding.

The train from Veresti reached Galatz shortly after noon, after the usual maddening delays typical of this part of the world. I waked after an admittedly uneasy sleep in the hushed stillness of the goods shed, just at sunset. I went at once to the offices of Hapgood's and found the agents there still talking about the brutal murder of one of the contractors who hire crews of Slovak boatmen, an event which has thrown the whole riverfront community into superst.i.tious panic, though the man himself was apparently no social loss.

With only minimal inquiries I was able to ascertain that the Count had come ash.o.r.e on the 28th, hired a large, open barge with a double crew through this contractor, Skinsky, and de parted before dawn yesterday. That same day Van Helsing and his friends arrived, and by sunset had hired a steam-launch, purchased six horses and appropriate gear (for the roads become extremely problematical as little as thirty miles upriver), and hired two grooms, evidently meaning to travel fast.

This brought me, unfortunately, face-to-face with some of the more practical drawbacks of the vampire state. Now in my heart I can see you and Vixie smile, for you have surely been waiting for me to realize that this very complication would arise.

I understand from Nomie that the Count, with his vast abilities to dominate the minds of beasts as well as of madmen like myself, is able to exert mastery over horses to the extent that he is able-for short distances, and during the hours of darkness when his powers are acute-to actually ride them. He long ago fell out of the habit of doing so, however, for the poor beasts did not bear him willingly, and would tremble and sweat so terribly as to cause comment among every man who saw them, and him. For myself, however, it is as much as I can do to harness them, and their fear at the scent of a predator is such that they are difficult to manage, and, I fear, are like to exhaust themselves in a very few miles.

I purchased a small caleche and team of those scrubby little horses one finds in this part of the world, barely larger than ponies, and a spare team in case I should not find a posting house farther up the river. At the recommendation of the Hapgood shipping agents, I hired a French-speaking Negro named Salaman as a driver, and frequenting the riverfront taverns during the early portion of the evening, I found a Suitably brutish and violent Romanian whose murder would cause me no qualms and whose disappearance would not result in questions or pursuit. I sensed then-and feel still more strongly now--that I will need all the strength and power that I can achieve.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I reasoned as a child, says the Apostle, but when I became a man I put away childish things. In my madness I consumed all life in the illusory pursuit of exactly those things that, in the vampire state, the blood and the life give unto me; but now I am not mad. I would like to say that I derive no pleasure from the drinking of human life, but oh, Catherine, oh my beloved, that would be a lie. It is a pleasure I will be glad to put by in the eternal sleep of death, but it is one that I can no more deny than I could deny the rages of my madness.

I am writing this in the back room of a little tavern near the waterfront, where Salaman is to meet me as soon as there is enough dawnlight to drive. I have my roll of earth-imbued bed ding, and hope that I will be able to get at least a little rest during the daylight hours. Yet sleep is not for me, for I must watch the river, and the road, for my master's enemies-and my own deliverers. Moreover, I must watch for the robbers who hear everything that goes on in the rough world of the river-traffic with the hinterlands, who will know that an Englishman is traveling with money and horses and only a single servant. In the hours of daylight I will be only as a man, and less strong than a living man in my own defense.

No wonder the Countess Elizabeth wanted a better servant than that incompetent poet Gelhorn, to defend her and her sister- wives in their journey to London! I can only a.s.sume that he lasted no longer than their arrival at Castle Dracula; I cannot imagine she would have found in him the material to create another vampire servant.

And there, but for my little Nomie's friendship, go I.

Here is Salaman, framed in the doorway in a halo of chill river-fog.

My beloved, I remain, Ever and forever, Your husband, R. M. Renfield

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife The banks of the River Sereth, below Fundu 1 November My beloved, We have journeyed through the day and through the night, and still I have no sight of Van Helsing and his company. I have, however, found signs of their horses, and the occasional marks of a camp. They seem to be taking a more inland route where possible, following narrower trails that climb the rolling shoulders of the hills through which the river winds its way down from the mountains, the better to see ahead along the river itself.

In the caleche it is not possible to do this, owing to the steepness and broken nature of the ground. Thus we can only press on night and day. Only once did robbers-Szgany gypsies-attempt to molest us. Fortunately the time was dusk, and I was able to slip from the coach as a mist, and fall upon them from behind in the form of a wolf. They fled almost before the confrontation had begun. I rea.s.sured Salaman, who had thought me asleep in the caleche the whole of the time, and took the opportunity to hunt in the woods in the form of a bat, and to take advantage of the presence of bona fide evildoers to refresh my strength.

Would that I could so refresh the strength of the horses, and of my servant. He is a small man of Sudanese extraction, a slave for many years first in Arabia and then in Constantinople. He did not mention the wolf and may not have seen me in that form, but he has become silent since then, and watches me from the corner of his eye. He has taken to wearing about his neck a taviz, the silver tube-shaped amulet in which a verse of the Holy Koran is sealed. I find the painful radience that emanates from it to be the same as that which imbues the crucifixes of the Christians. I long to know whether such an amulet would protect an Unbeliever, or a crucifix to guard a good Mohammedan or Hindoo, but know not who I could ask.

The Count himself, perhaps?

As we approach the mountains, the cold deepens, and at night the air smells of snow. Tonight when darkness falls, I shall ascend as high as possible in the form of a bat, and see if I can at least glimpse the red glimmer of the steam-launch's smoke-stack ahead of me on the river in the blackness.

If the saved can pray for the d.a.m.ned, pray for me, my beloved.

Forever, your husband, R. M. Renfield

Jonathan Harker's Journal*