Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 3

R.M.R.'s notes 9 August 15 flies, 4 spiders

10 August 12 flies, 2 spiders Attempt to obtain a sparrow interfered with by attendant-fool! I must be more careful. So much depends upon my strength.

Dreams of moonlight, and of the long stair that led from the little coastal town up to the churchyard on the cliffs above. Renfield felt himself again aware of every living thing in that town, sleeping now, sleeping deep: each child dreaming of pony-rides or magic palaces, each man of stammering unprepared through cla.s.sroom-lessons unlearned. He saw the dark houses with their windows shuttered, the pretty gardens robed in darkness. Saw the white slip of movement, as a blond girl in a nightdress strolled unconcerned through the town with a sleep-walker's unseeing stare. She was beautiful, and Renfield's heart was touched by her. Where the night-breeze flattened the thin batiste against her body, it showed a shallow breast, the sharp point of a too slender hip, a delicate form childlike and vulnerable without the womanly defenses of corsetry and draped silk. She was not many rears older than his daughter. Loosed for sleep, her flaxen hair shivered to her hips.

The girl climbed the stairs-hundreds of stairs. Slabs of stone, or carved into the living rock of the cliff, and Renfield knew what waited for her at the top. He wanted to cry out to her, to wake her, to warn her, but he knew what Wotan would do to him if he did this-Wotan would not be pleased.

Wotan would withhold from him the gift of life that he so desperately needed. Worse, Wotan would whisper into the dreams of others, of Georgina Clayburne and that stone-faced harridan mother of hers of where Catherine and Vixie lay sleeping tonight.

Then all would be in vain!

Heart pounding, body quaking with pity and with cold, Renfield watched as the blonde girl walked past him-for he seemed to be standing on the long stair from the town-and on up to the churchyard on the cliff.

A tomb lay close to the cliff's gra.s.s-grown edge. For a moment Renfield thought that the thing that lay on it was a dog or a wolf, but the next moment the dark form rose, elongating into the unmistakable shadow of a cloaked man, and red eyes gleamed where they caught the moon's sickly light. From the top of the steps Renfield watched, as the sleep-walker pa.s.sed among the graves with the confidence of a child. The figure beside the tomb held out its hand. Renfield's ears seemed to be filled with the buzz of swarming flies.

Don't do it! he wanted to shout to her. Don't go to him! He was aware of her face, relaxed in sleep as Catherine's was all those nights beside him, like Vixie's when she was little, when he'd go into her room to check on her and see her asleep in the night- light's tiny glow. Please don't hurt her ...

Wotan gathered the girl into his arm, the white of her nightdress disappearing in the velvet folds of the cloak. His hand, huge and coa.r.s.e, with pointed nails like claws, cupped the side of her face, turning her head aside to expose the big bloodvessels of the throat. The roar of flies swamped Renfield's mind and for a time his dream was only that he was sitting in his room at Rushbrook, with the window wide open and flies buzzing in, landing happily on his hands, on his knees, on the pillow of his bed, and letting him eat them like candy while spiders lined up in an expectant file, waiting their turn.

The glow of life washed over him, filled him, burning, warming, intoxicating. For a few moments every cell in his body was conscious, and cried aloud with relief from a lifelong hunger he had never even known had weighed upon him so heavily, until that instant of release.

His mouth sang with the metallic flavor of fresh blood. His brain, with the scent of the girl.

He thought she cried out.

Distant and dim, as if seeing with someone else's eyes, he became aware of the girl again, lying on the cliffside tombstone as if upon a bed. Beyond her, the moon shone with a cold pewter gleam on the shingle-beds of the harbor where the tide had gone out.

It made the feathery coils of her hair pale as ivory, where they lay over the edge of the granite slab, and trailed on the ground.

Renfield heard a girl's voice call softly, "Lucy!" and saw a second girl striding among the graves. She was a little taller and of st.u.r.dier build, hurriedly dressed in shirtwaist and walking-skirt. Her dark hair was already coming out of a hasty braid that slapped between her shoulders as she ran.

"Mina?" the blonde girl whispered, as her dark-haired friend sat beside her on the tomb, raised her up in her arms. The blonde head fell back, turned aside, curtained by that cascade of moon colored silk. Her breath dragged in thick frantic gasps. The dark girl, with brisk decisiveness, wrapped Lucy in the heavy figured shawl from around her own shoulders, pinning it at the throat. Then she took the shoes from her own feet and put them on Lucy's before turning to the task of fully waking her. Renfield heard her voice, a gentle, lovely alto, speaking soft nothings as his consciousness drew back from them. Their image grew smaller and smaller, tiny in the light of that enormous moon, but just before it winked out, Renfield saw Mina get Lucy to her feet, and help her back toward the stairway that would lead them down to the town.

He awoke ravenous, starving, the yellow moonlight a glowing shawl dropped on the floor of his room. Hand trembling, he emptied confused flies and sleepy spiders from their boxes and tumblers and jars, devoured them without even stopping to chew.

Spiky legs, brittle wings.

Their tiny lives sparkled like electricity in his veins. But his hunger was not even touched.

CHAPTER SIX.

R.M.R.'s notes 12 August 14 flies, 5 spiders, 2 slugs (sugar-water dripped on sill) Must have more. Asked for extra sugar, received it. Know not to try for sparrow. Always they watch me. He watches me, too.

"Dr. Seward?" Renfield spoke for the first time during Seward's visit that evening, rousing himself from his desperate preoccu- pation of mind. He had to be careful, he knew, yet even as he hoped to wrest from Wotan the additional life that he needed, it might be possible to use Seward, unsuspecting, to obtain the knowledge that-as Wotan had so accurately said-men treasure.

Renfield reflected that the young doctor was stupid enough be manipulated into telling him anything.

"What is it, old chap?" Seward turned back from the door, which Renfield noticed Langmore was quick to lock again. They feared him, did they?

Anger flashed through him. He'd give them cause to fear. The anger must have shone in his face, because Seward hesitated.

Renfield forced his rage down. "As a doctor of the mind, have you-or anyone in your field-come to any theory of what dreams are, and why we have them? Are they truly-or can they be-agents of communication, as even the ancient Stoics argued? Or do you believe, like Freud, that they are merely the mind's way of ordering the events of the past, of sorting them into larger mental categories determined by past experience?" A spider tiptoed in through the open window, past the bars; Renfield caught it with the adeptness of long practice and popped it at once into his mouth, dug his notebook from his shirt-pocket and added it to the tally, then turned back for Seward's reply.

"I believe they can serve the mind as a means of a.s.similating experience," agreed Seward, his dark eyes watchful on Renfield's face, as if-which Seward so often did-he sought to guess what lay behind the question. He went on, "I have heard-both here and in America, and in the islands of the South Seas-stories of how dreams do communicate events of the past or present, though as a scientist I'm inclined to wonder how such a thing could be proven empirically. My old teacher-a Dutchman from Amsterdam-is of the opinion that the ability to dream developed as human intelligence grew to the point that men were in danger of harming themselves and others through too exclusive a reliance on that intelligence. That G.o.d gave man the ability to dream as a channel to deliver warnings from sources that cannot be quantified. But he may have been joking." And Seward smiled.

"And if one dreams of things that are taking place far away evil things, events that bring danger to the innocent-is there a way to warn those one sees in danger? A way to know where these events are taking place, or whom to warn?"

Seward's eyes narrowed sharply. "What do you mean?" he asked. "Did you dream about your wife, for instance? Catherine, I believe her name is? Or your daughter?"

Georgina Clayburne has been to see him. Rage seared through Renfield, as if a match had been dropped on a trail of kerosene. He felt his face heat, forced himself to look at the wall beyond Seward's shoulder. Forced from his mind the delicious joy it would bring him to pick the slightly built doctor up and smash his brains out against the wall, to twist his head from his shoulders.

They would strait-jacket him. Put him in the Swing. Give him castor-oil and ipecac to weaken him with vomiting.

When Wotan came, he would not be ready.

Breathing hard, Renfield said, "I didn't dream about n.o.body, sir." He knew he should make up a convincing tale but he couldn't think. His mind was filled with the roaring buzz of flies. "I was just asking."

When Seward left, Renfield returned to the window, pressed his face to the bars to drink in the evening's cool. Rushbrook House was set at an angle to the road, so that through his window he could see the gates to the high-road, as well as a portion of the crumbling wall and overgrown trees of the estate next door.

Yesterday he'd seen a handsome new carriage come through the gates, its team of matched blacks familiar to him. He had thought the woman inside looked like Georgina Clayburne.

And he didn't think it was the first time she'd come to call on Seward.

Asking what? What did she know already? What had she guessed, and what information had she bought from Hennessey? She had almost certainly had the house in Nottingham searched. That didn't trouble Renfield particularly, for he had made sure, when he, Catherine, and Vixie had left it, that no trace of paper remained to tell where they'd gone. The other houses in London, like the bank accounts he and Catherine had set up, were under other names.

Was that why Seward watched him so closely, took down notes of what he said? Was he sending every word, every specu- lation, on to Georgina and that ghastly mother, even as Hennessey was doing?

He watched the shadow of Rushbrook House stretch out over the garden, reaching toward the dark wall, the dark trees, of Carfax. The voices of the attendants rose like incongruous bird-calls in the air, as they began to close up the windows, put up the shutters for the night. From a room near-by, the woman the attendants referred to as Queen Anne began her nightly howling. Many of the patients, Renfield had observed, grew worse at this hour, pounding on the walls and babbling, or sinking into uncontrollable tears. Footsteps hurried in the halls, to give Her Majesty the drugs that would silence her, would push her over the edge into her own dreams.

What if those dreams, like some of his own, were infinitely more dreadful than the waking that she could not struggle back to no matter how much she tried?

Renfield closed his eyes, and told himself that he must be strong.

That night he dreamed of the girls again, as he had dreamed the night before. Dreamed-as he had last night-that he was in their bedroom, looking down on them as they slept, and their faces were relaxed in sleep, as sweet and young as Catherine's looked in the mysterious blue radiance of the waxing moon. Mina, the dark-haired girl, wore a little pucker between her brows. Though she was probably no older than her friend, she had the air of a young woman who has had to make her own way in the world. The nightgown-sleeve that lay on the tufted counterpane was plain muslin, and much worn, in contrast to the fantasia of batiste and lace that swaddled the delicate Lucy.

When fear came into the room, and the chilly breath of the grave, Renfield tried to reach out to Mina, tried to shake her shoulder- or he thought he tried ... or he wanted to try. He is coming, he thought as the air in the room grew colder and colder and a small black shadow began to circle erratically outside the moon-drenched window. Wotan is coming.

His heart pounded in terror. He had to wake them up, so they could flee.

He had to wake up himself, so that he wouldn't see what would happen.

But he could neither move, nor waken.

Mina whispered, "Jonathan," in her sleep, and sank deeper, almost into the sleep of death, Renfield thought. But Lucy turned on her pillow, her shut eyes seeming to seek the window, and in the moonlight Renfield could see now that the thing outside was a bat, fluttering and beating its wings at the cas.e.m.e.nt.

He pressed back into the shadows, his hands covering his mouth.

Wotan would see him. And seeing him, would take his vengeance, not only on him, but on Catherine and Vixie as well. Oh, Catherine, Catherine, he thought wildly, if I can see this, if I can be here, why can't I be at your side instead?

But he shut the thought from his mind like the slamming of a door, lest Wotan hear him and know then that someone named Catherine even existed.

Lucy rose from her bed, her head lolling, and with the preternatural clarity of dreams Renfield saw the wound on her neck, the two tiny punctures above the vein, unhealed, white-edged and mangled-looking. All the moonlight seemed to be failing in the room, and the shadow of the bat grew still, seeming to swell in size, so that it covered the whole of the window in its wings. Out of that shadow its red eyes gleamed, like the far-off lamps of h.e.l.l. When Lucy stumbled to the cas.e.m.e.nt and fumbled open the latch, the dark form of Wotan stepped through as if he had strode there upon the air of night.

Lucy sagged forward into his arms. In the moonlight Wotan smiled-or the thing in the ship's hold that had spoken to Renfield with Wotan's words. He could not be Wotan, thought Renfield muzzily, for he has two eyes, not one like the Wanderer G.o.d: eyes as red and reflective as the eyes of a rat. But then, when Wotan had spoken those words to Mime the Dwarf, he had not yet traded his eye for wisdom. His mustaches were long and iron-gray, his face was not the face of a G.o.d, but of a man who has gone beyond what other men are, into some unknown zone of experience.

A face of power. A face like iron, that no longer recalls what it was to be a man. A face maybe that never knew in the first place. He cupped the side of Lucy's face in his short-fingered powerful hand, drew back his lips from long canine teeth, like an animal's fangs. Renfield closed his eyes as the blood began to flow down, hid his mind in thoughts of flies. Big fat horse-flies the size of lichis, each bursting with the electrical fires of life. He did not even dare think, Let her alone ...

Wotan-or whatever that thing was truly called-would not like that.

Already Renfield understood that what that shadowy deity wanted, maybe more than life, was power. For him, there could be no disloyalty.

R.M.R.'s notes 19 August The bride-maidens rejoice the eyes that wait the coming of the bride; but when the bride draweth nigh, then the maidens shine not in the eyes that are filled.

"It's Renfield, sir." Grizzled little Langmore blinked in the dimmed gas-light of the hall. He'd clearly expected to find Seward in bed. "He's escaped."

Seward had been expecting it. All day Renfield had been restless, prowling his room by turns wild with excitement and darkly sullen. When Seward had turned in after his final round ,rmong the patients, though depressed himself, he had elected not to inject the chloral hydrate which had, he realized, become something of a habit over the past three months. Instead he'd prepared for bed, but sat up re-reading I_ucy's latest note, short and polite though underlain with sadness, for she suspected her mother was far more ill than she was letting on ... all the while listening, as if he knew there would be trouble with Renfield as the night grew deeper.

"I seen him not ten minutes ago, when I looked through the Judas, sir." Hardy pushed open the door of Renfield's room as Seward and Langmore came striding down the hall. "Sly, he is. Layin' on his bed lookin' like b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

The muggy cool of the night-breeze met them as they entered the room, where the window-sash had been literally wrenched from its moorings in the wall, bars and all. Seward shivered, thinking of the strength that would have taken.

A sudden paroxysm of rage or terror? He hoped so. The thought of the madman being actually that strong at all times was not a pleasant one. He glanced around the little room, to make sure there wasn't some clue, but it looked much the same in the light of the attendants' lanterns: the narrow cot-like bed had not been displaced from its position along the right-hand wall, the a.s.sortment of tumblers, cups, and boxes that contained Renfield's living larder were still neatly ranked on the floor opposite.

Stepping to the window, he caught the pale flash of what might have been a nightshirt, dodging among the trees by the intermittent whisper of the waning moon. The yellow gleam of a lantern told Seward that Simmons was already on the trail. Heading for Carfax, it looked like.

"Bring a ladder and follow us to the east wall," he instructed Hardy, took his lantern, and hung it on his belt. With more than a slight qualm, he slithered through the torn-out ruin of the window, hung by his hands from the sill for a moment, then dropped to the ground. Langmore at his heels, he set out through the darkness on Renfield's trail.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

"There he goes, sir," Langmore whispered, and Seward held up his hand. Renfield's hearing was sharp-he'd demonstrated more than once his ability to track a fly by its buzzing above the sound of conversation-and he'd be listening for the smallest noise of pursuit. Or would he? Seward had encountered madmen and madwomen who seemed to think that mere escape was enough; that they could elude pursuers as if they were birds.

With a heart of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander; sang the old ballad With a burning spear And a horse of air To the wilderness I wander ...

Not for the first time he wished his old friend Quincey Morris were with him, Quincey who'd learned tracking from a couple of Commanche who'd worked on his father's Texas ranch. Quincey could be relied upon to keep quiet and obey orders without question, something Seward wasn't sure he could count on from most of the attendants.

The white blur of Renfield's nightshirt shone against the dark of the Carfax wall long before the pursuers were anywhere near him, then vanished as he dropped down the other side.

Seward cursed. In addition to exploring the Carfax park itself, he'd walked around the perimeter wall, both outside and in, and knew it to be badly dilapidated, low enough in several places for a man to easily climb. It might take Renfield a little time to find such spots, but the thought of chasing him through open countryside in the dead of a pitch-black night made him shudder.

Thank G.o.d at least Hardy had the wits to move quietly, or as quietly as a big man carrying an eight-foot ladder without a lantern might be expected to "Stay here," Seward breathed, as Hardy set up the ladder against the wall. "He may think he's safe for the moment; if he thinks we're on his heels, he'll be away like a hare." When he put his head over the fern-grown capstones, he could glimpse Renfield again, making his way toward the dark bulk of the house. "Slip over as quietly as you can and spread out," he whispered, retreating down the ladder a few steps and looking down at the upturned faces of the three attendants. "Hardy, circle around to the right, Simmons and Langmore to the left-whatever you do, try to keep him from getting out the gate onto the high road."

Had the new tenants-or at any rate the carters who'd lugged in the dozen huge crates of their goods that afternoon-remembered to lock those rusted gates of oak and iron? Had they been able to make the crazy old locks work, either on the gates or on the house?

Seward tried to push the thought away. "And for G.o.d's sake, keep quiet." he added. "Keep your lanterns as dark as you can manage. If you hear me shout, come running." At any rate, thank goodness, he reflected as he slipped over the wall in what he hoped was an inconspicuous fashion, Carfax wasn't inhabited yet. He might have to go chasing a semi-naked madman down the highroad and into the marshes, but at least he wouldn't have to deal with neighbors enraged or terrified by a midnight incursions.

Since the FOR SALE sign had disappeared from the gates, he'd watched for signs of habitation-or even of preparation for habitation, so as to get the address of someone to write to-but so far there had been nothing. It was as if, having purchased the place, the buyers had been content to let Carfax sit in its crumbling Gothic glory, as it had sat since at least the Napoleonic wars.

Tangled ivy crunched underfoot. Something-fox or rabbit-darted wildly away through the undergrowth that choked most mf the park. Carfax had clearly begun life as a small castle, of which part of the keep and a chapel remained, a ruinous appendix clinging to the side of a four-square, mostly Tudor dwelling now largely swallowed up in ivy. The gardens were in as poor a state as the house; twice Seward's path was blocked by tangles of overgrown hedge, and once he found a fragment of cotton nightshirt snagged up on a half-dead rosebush. He could hear Renfield's footsteps, a dry harsh rustle in decades of dead leaves, making still for the house.

I shall have to find the new owners somehow, thought Seward, and speak to them about having that wall repaired.

The house agent must have warned them, in any case, that they were buying property next door to a lunatic asylum. The thought of Renfield breaking out again after the new owners were in residence flitted nightmarishly through his mind. Probably no danger to them, but G.o.d help Fido or Puss if he happens to encounter them in the park.

". . . Master . . ."

The word breathed in the darkness, and Seward froze. A mutter of speech. Speaking to whom?

Seward could have sworn the house was empty.

He crept nearer, not breathing, straining to listen as he rounded the corner of the black leaf-shrouded bulk.

The clouds had parted, letting through a thread of moonlight that showed him the half-circle of the chapel, the stained b.u.t.tresses ragged with ivy and the arched clerstory windows sunken eyeless sockets in the wall. There was a door set in the wall, flanked by columnar attenuated saints leperous with moss. Renfield's white nightshirt made a blur in the embrasure.

"I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful." He brought his hands up, filthy and stained with moss, as if to caress the iron handle, the padlocked bars. "I have worshipped you long and afar off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will not pa.s.s me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribution of good things?"

Selfish old beggar, thought Seward, suddenly amused. He believes he's in the Real Presence o f G.o.d and his first thought is for the loaves and fishes-particularly the fishes.

Still, there was something in the intensity of Renfield's hissing voice that set alarm-bells ringing in his mind. Religious mania took a number of truly unpleasant forms. He wouldn't want to deal with the complications it would add to the existing obsession with zoophagy ...

"Who is there?" Renfield swung around, his square, lined face convulsed like a demon's.