Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 19

She is freezing to death, thought Renfield despairingly. And as her body drifted toward death, so her soul was drawn toward the other three, whom the Count had chosen, seduced, and killed. He saw the Countess smile, and point at Mina with glinting malice; saw her lean to speak with Sarike. But Nomie, floating behind them, only gazed across the barrier of the Holy circle at the dark-haired woman poised between living and dark Un-Death, and Renfield saw pity in her eyes.

Through the night he climbed the Pa.s.s, struggling against the slashing winds, trembling with hunger and exhaustion. Renfield felt the dawn coming, as he waded breast-deep in the new-fallen snow, and briefly debated transforming himself into a bat, for he knew he was still many miles from the Castle.

But the winds were still too strong for him to fly against, and by day, he knew he would be nearly blind. Then, too, he thought, he would not be able to shift his form again until the stroke of noon.

A bat could not take on a man.

So he fought his way through the drifts, and with the rising of the sun, the wind grew less. The world was transformed, ice-white and blinding, the rocks standing out against the marble of the snow like cinder-colored walls. Under his paws the snow squeaked a little, the only sound in the birdless woods. A little before noon he reached the road that turned aside up toward the Castle, and saw a man's churned tracks.

They were reasonably fresh, not more than two hours. The outer gate was barred, but the small wicket cut into the larger leaf of iron-strapped wood had been forced, the wood around its rusted hinges glaring yellow where a crowbar had ripped. Wolf-Renfield slipped through, following the tracks across the deep drifts of the courtyard, to the stair that led up to the half-open door. He'll search the chapel and the vaults, thought Renfield frantically. The place must have a labyrinth o f crypts and sub- cellars. I may still be in time. If I can hold him off, delay him until noon, when Nomie and the others can change their form, move about...

If I can kill him ...

Did they hear? he wondered. Were they aware of this man's footfalls, of the scent of the blood in his veins? Could they read his resolution in their uneasy dreams, as he searched through the vaults, pushed open the long-rusted hinges of those secret doors, descended the narrow, twisting stairs? With the preternatural senses of a wolf, Renfield listened, scented, seeking the faint creak of boot-leather, the reek of burning lamp-oil.

What he smelled, as he came to the top of a flight of descending steps, was blood.

A lot of blood.

Stumbling, trembling with weariness, Renfield slipped down the stairs.

He found the body of the poet Gelhorn at the bottom, curled together and with a look on his sheep-like face of shocked despair.

He'd been dead for about two weeks. The Countess and Sarike must have killed him as soon as they safely reached the Castle.

Throat, wrists, and chest-visible through his shirt, which had been half-torn from his body-were all marked with gaping punctures, and with smaller marks that had half-healed at the time of his death.

Wolf-Renfield sniffed briefly at the body, then pa.s.sed it by.

Dr. Van Helsing's Memorandum*

5 November I knew that there were at least three graves to find-graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, til sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present a kiss-and man is weak ...

Sarike lay in the crypt beyond. Her head had been cut off, and a stake of fire-hardened wood protruded from beneath her left breast. Her thin white dress, and the velvet lining of her coffin, were both soaked with blood. Blood splattered her face and arms, and dotted the white garlic-flowers stuffed into her half-open mouth. It was their stench, rather than that of the blood, that turned Renfield's stomach, and he would have vomited, had there been anything within him to throw up.

Van Helsing had trodden in the blood, and his sticky track wove back and forth among the half-dozen tombs within that small crypt. The lids had been all wrenched off, and lay shattered on the floor. Renfield went straight to the last of them, the tomb where the Countess Elizabeth lay.

She was already beginning to crumble into dust. He knew it was she by the dark coils of her raven hair, and by the gold ring on her hand. By the b.l.o.o.d.y footprint beside the coffin, Van Helsing had stood here for a long time, looking down at her as she slept.

Blood-tracks led out the door, into the deeper dark of the inner crypts.

Nomie, thought Renfield frantically, Nomie, please be there ...

Please have hidden yourself, have concealed your sleeping-place, that he won't find you ... That he won't come on you until I can be there to stop him, to kill him, to do whatever I have to ...

That he won't come on you until noon, when you can wake, and sit up, and flee. When I can turn from wolf to man ... He listened, but though he smelled the fishy whiff of lampoil, he heard no sound, no creak of boot-leather.

A descending stair, in the wake of the blood-tracks and the smoke.

Then the far-off glimmer of lantern-light.

Staggering, Renfield limped down, to where a barred iron door closed the entrance to the deepest of the castle crypts. In the lantern-light beyond it Renfield saw the high tomb in its center, graven only with the name DRACULA, and all around it the torn- up flagstones where the gypsies had dug out fifty boxes' worth of graveyard earth for shipment to London. He pressed himself to the bars, invisible in the darkness, sick with horror and shock.

A smaller tomb lay perpendicular to the foot of the large one. Beside this Van Helsing stood in his shirtsleeves despite the brutal cold, the lantern at his feet, gazing down into the coffin, and on his face was a look that mingled pity and burning desire.

Blood splattered his face and splotched his clothing, dripped from his white side-whiskers and hair. He held a hammer in one hand, a fresh, unbloodied stake in the other, and on the coffin's edge lay a foot-long scalpel. Renfield wanted to scream, Nomie!

but could not.

He could feel the hour of noon, slipping to its slow zenith overhead. In the silence of the crypt Van Helsing's breathing was very loud. It was slow and thick, and his eyes had the look of a man hypnotized, caught by some terrible dream of self-loathing and l.u.s.t.

Dr. Van Helsing's Memorandum*

Presently, I find in a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister which, like Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of the mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my s.e.x to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion . . .

Having spent years among the strange temptations of India, and months in the asylum at Rushbrook, Renfield knew that look very, very well.

We lure by our beauty, he remembered Nomie saying to him in London: It is how we hunt. We disarm the mind through the senses and the dreams. How else would we survive? Men see us, and follow, despite all they know, drawn by their need.

Van Helsing's mouth trembled, like that of a man beholding a vision; his hands shook, on hammer and stake.

The splattered blood, the violence with which the stakes had been driven into Sarike's body, and that of the Countess, told their own tale. Furiously, desperately, Van Helsing had been killing, not only the vampires, but his own frantic desire for them. His own overwhelming shame.

His breath laboring, moving as if stake and hammer were both wrought of lead, Van Helsing brought them up. Braced the stake beneath Nomie's breast. Then stood again, hammer half-raised, looking down into the coffin with sweat pouring from his face and eyes stretched with madness.

Had he had human lips, a human voice, Renfield would have whispered, Nomie, no ...

The crypt was silent, the lantern-flame unwavering on the vampire-hunter's motionless face and shaking hands.

Renfield felt the touch of noon in the crypt's darkness, through the snowy layers of cloud overhead. But even as he flowed into human shape in the darkness, laid hands upon the bars of the door, he saw Nomie sit up in her coffin. Gold hair tumbled over her shoulders, white sleeves fell back from white arms.

Stake and hammer slithered from Van Helsing's hands.

Blue eyes looked into blue. But while Nomie's gaze was calm, ready, filled with the peace of one who has pa.s.sed decades beyond hope, Van Helsing's was wide with horror, shame, despair-and with the exquisite unbreathing antic.i.p.ation of surrender.

Then Nomie leaned forward, took the old man's face between her hands, and very gently kissed his lips.

An instant later she dissolved into mist and shadows, and flowed away across the stone floor, to vanish into the darkness.

Dr. Van Helsing's Memorandum*

But G.o.d be thanked ... before the spell could be wrought further upon me, I had nerved myself to my wild work ...

Had it been but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three! ...

G.o.d be thanked, my nerve did stand ...

CHAPTER THIRTY-.

TWO.

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife (Undated) My dearest heart, It seems that there is after all yet more to write.

After arriving at Castle Dracula, and witnessing Nomie's escape from the vampire-hunter Van Helsing-through circ.u.mstances curious enough to const.i.tute a miracle-I followed Nomie in the form of mist, down through the dark of the crypts and through the crevices of a vault that had been bricked up long ago. But time had had its way with the mortar between the stones, enough to admit the two of us before the short moments of noon had pa.s.sed. There was no coffin in that crypt, only chest after chest of gold coins, and the skeleton of the wretched woman who had coveted them above all things. Yet the earth beneath the flagstones was the hallowed soil of the family tombs nevertheless, and in it, twined in Nomie's arms, I slept.

In my sleep I could feel the Count's approach, as once I had felt it while chained in the padded chambers of Rushbrook Asylum.

He was coming, and even in his sleep, even with his mind closed against us, his wrath was like a pillar of cloud and darkness, approaching from the east and south.

"I heard the creak and gnashing of the wood, as the old man wrenched the doorways from their hinges," whispered Nomie into my dreams. In dreaming I could see again the coffin of the Countess Elizabeth, but the blood had dried upon her white gown and her black hair. Only dust remained, and a few fragments of bone, with the stake propped upright among them. The white garlic- flowers were still fresh, spilling from the mouth of the skull.

"Elizabeth had sensed Mina's coming from afar and said that she would be drawn to the Castle. We all thought Dr. Van Helsing was a servant she'd brought with her, or a man she'd ensorcelled to follow her, the way Elizabeth ensorcelled that poor little fool Gelhorn. When I asked why that 'servant' would have a consecrated Host with him-a thing not at all easy to obtain in these days- she only laughed, and said Mina would take care of that.

"'He thinks she will freeze to death in the night, and seeks to hold her within the circle so he can kill her,' Elizabeth said. 'Simple man. You saw his eyes, when he looked at her and saw the vampire beauty in her face. You saw how he watched her, and watched her, hungry and terrified of the hunger within him. He will not have the heart to drive in the stake. And if he does'-and she shrugged-'so much the worse. More kisses for the rest of us.' She never thought, you see, that he would have the tools in the carriage, to break through the Castle doors."

Van Helsing would be trudging back to his little camp in the Pa.s.s, where Mrs. Harker waited within the holy circle. I hoped they had armed her, and taught her to use weapons, for the wolves that would be drawn by the carca.s.ses of the horses would have little concern for the Host, consecrated though it might be. I wondered what the Count would eat, when he returned to the Castle, for there was nothing there but bats. Even rats will not dwell where the inhabitants do not eat human food.

"To keep the Szgany loyal he never would permit us to touch them," Nomie remarked, a gentle voice within my dreams. "The villagers were wary and cautious, and travelers are few. For months, sometimes, we would live on bats. Can you wonder we were enraged at his plan to go away and leave us here to guard this place, until it might occur to him to return? And doubly so, to learn he'd started a second harem in your land to replace us? He'll choose another city now, another country to occupy. With you as his servant, it will probably be India."

"He could do worse," I said. "The governing cla.s.ses all speak English, which he already knows."The gold that filled the chests in our little crypt-filled them and overflowed onto the floor-would guarantee his welcome anywhere, and from Nomie's conversation while we traveled together, I knew that this was only a t.i.the of the treasure hidden in the castle.

"He, and you, will have access to books and to such culture as there is there," I went on. "Not like London, I admit, but better than re-reading Davila's histories of French insurgencies in the library here for the thousand and fifth time. And because of the European community there, neither he nor you will stand out. In fact, because the whites are perceived as superior in all ways to the natives, you will have a great deal more lat.i.tude than you would have even in London."

In our sleep I could feel her sadness, as if she laid her palm to my cheek. "And you, sweet friend?"

I thought of Van Helsing, gathering up provisions now-bedrolls, food, blankets against the freezing snowstorm that came sweeping down the Pa.s.s. "I will do what I must, sweet friend."

Writers-and certainly your appalling mother and your late unlamented sister, my love-speak casually and often of "a fate worse than Death," without understanding that such a thing can actually be. I, who have pa.s.sed through death, or a half-death at least, have experienced that which is worse: eternal Un-Life, with my soul, my mind, my body at the command of an ent.i.ty in love with both power and the pain of others.

He was coming. I felt his wrath from afar. Van Helsing, though he'd strewn the crumbled Host in the Count's actual tomb, had by no means "cleansed" even a quarter of the places where the Un-Dead could actually find repose, and of course the Host that he'd mortared around the broken-open Castle door would have no effect on a bat, or a trail of mist, floating in over its walls. The Castle would have had to be dynamited to render it unfit for the Count to hide in, and before that could be effected, even with G.o.dalming's money, Dracula's gypsies would have dealt with the invaders.

It was indeed his Valhalla, offering both rest and the renewal of his strength.

"Why did you kiss him?" I asked her, and I felt her smile.

"Because he so much wanted it," she said. "And maybe a little, because he killed Elizabeth and Sarike, who have made me wretched for so many decades-made me wretched in the way that only those whom we live with, whom we rub along with night in and night out, year in and year out, can do. And perhaps to show him," she added softly, "that not all those who become Un-Dead are wholly monsters."

"Whyever you did it," I replied, "it was a fit revenge on the man. For you've given him something that doesn't fit in with his theories. Trying to make it do so will be a torment to him for the remainder of his days."

I asked her about her own journey, and whether the Countess and Sarike had attempted any a.s.sault on my agent Ross and his men. "Sarike tried," she said. "But Elizabeth and I drew her away. T told Elizabeth that it might be better, if instead of killing Ross, we kept his address and good will, in case we should need it later."

"And Gelhorn?"

"A truly obnoxious man," sighed Nomie. "He was forever boring on about the superiority of the Teutonic Race and its destiny to rule the world, and he seemed to think that because I am German I would agree with him. Heaven help the world-Heaven help Germany-if this 'Volk' idea gets taken up by politicians! Yet even so, I'm not sure he deserved his fate."

Knowing the Count would return in a mood of black fury, we discussed the preliminaries for the India scheme, which we knew would appease him. Which banks to use, and which of my false names would be safest for purposes of investment and transfer of another network of earth-boxes and safe-houses in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Kathmandhu. I did everything I could to keep the names of my Indian friends and contacts out of it, knowing that these men and women would become the Count's likeliest early victims. With luck, I would find some way into true death before he could prise such information out of my mind.

The snowstorm now howled around the Castle's walls. Even in our dreams in the deep-buried crypt we could hear its cries. "I have heard," I said to her, "rumor and legend of Masters who dwell in the mountains of Thibet, deathless creatures who were once mortal men. I wonder how the Count will get along, in proximity to them?"

"It would be interesting," said Nomie, "to seek them out." "And more interesting still," I added, "to see if they would let you do so."

On that we truly slept, but in visions I could see the gypsy riders lashing their horses through the swirling flakes, see the rough- coated little ponies stumbling as they hauled the heavy leiter-wagon up the road that led to the Pa.s.s. I knew-for it seemed to me that the whole of the countryside around Castle Dracula breathed and whispered its secrets up to the Castle-that Van Helsing and Mrs. Harker had taken refuge in that little bay, high in the rocks, where I had lain exhausted that morning, and from its narrow entrance looked out over the plain below.And as if I stood at Mrs. Harker's side-as if I rode on the wings of the snow-winds overhead-I saw the leiter-wagon's approach, within its ring of gypsy riders, thrusting on against the tempest. The earth-box in the wagon rocked and swayed, and I wondered if the Count were conscious, and if so, what he thought, helpless as a mortal man and drowsy with daylight. When the winds lessened and the clouds broke through, I could see the sun sinking toward the rack of storm above the mountains. With its disappearance, he would be free, and within striking-distance of his home.

From the south I could see riders coming, Harker's white hair like a blink of snow where his hat blew back, visible only to the far-seeing eyes of vampire dream. They must somehow have repaired the launch's engines, to make safe landfall hot on Dracula's trail.

Two men with six horses were galloping from the east, galloping hard: Morris and Seward, with their long hunting-rifles in their hands. In the sicklied yellow light of sinking sun and storm-wrack I saw them close on the leiter-wagon, saw the Szgany form themselves into a ring around it, knives and pistols flashing in the dying light. They were right below the rocks where Van Helsing and Mrs. Harker stood with rifle and pistol, blocking their path up to the Castle. Seward, Morris, Harker, and G.o.dalming rode into the press of the gypsies and sprang-or were pulled-from their horses, striking and struggling where quarters were too close to shoot.

Harker and Morris sprang up onto the cart, Morris clutching his side where blood poured down. As the final rays of the sunset stabbed through the snowclouds, they wrenched the top from the earth-box, and in that instant I could hear Dracula's shriek, of rage and hatred and summons as the still went down. Then Harker's huge Ghurka knife flashed in that last second of golden sunlight, and Morris's bowie.

The image vanished from my mind. Great stillness filled my heart.

Nomie and I lay awake, in one another's arms, in the gold-stuffed crypt of the Castle Dracula.

And we both knew we were free.

We climbed to the snow-padded southern battlement of the Castle, and stood in the swift-gathering dark, looking down at the Pa.s.s.

The Szgany were riding away in all directions, leaving the leiter-wagon in the road. The wolves that the Count had summoned from all corners of the mountains trotted back to their interrupted repast on Van Helsing's four dead horses.

I supposed Nomie and I would be having bats for dinner. If I had dinner at all.

I could see, against the clear violet of the twilight-veiled snow, five forms gathered around the leiter-wagon, bent over the sixth that lay on a spread-out blanket on the ground. Probably only a vampire could have smelled Morris's blood at that distance. By the stillness of the others, the lack of even the smallest attempt at aid, I could tell the Texan was dead.