Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 14

"Do not," said Renfield quietly, "name your sister to me. Certainly not in the same breath as complaints about trust-funds." He stood only a yard from the enraged woman now, close enough to smell the musty lavender of her dusting-powder, close enough to see the broken veins in her cheeks, the caked rice-powder at the corners of her lips. He towered over her. With a sudden move she dropped the lamp to the flagstone floor and fled, das.h.i.+ng up the steps, Renfield following with a vampire's preternatural speed, leisurely as a shadow. He let her dash before him up the kitchen steps and through the pantry, hearing the rush and roaring of the spreading lamp-oil as it ignited the broken shelves, the trailing sheets, the roses and the table ...

He caught her, easily, just inside the front door.

Deep in sleep, Mina Harker heard Dr. Van Helsing's gentle voice, coming to her from far off, as she had heard it now for nearly a week. "What can you hear, Madame Mina?"

Through lips that felt as if they belonged to someone else, she mumbled, "Water. Water lapping at the hull."Darkness lay around her. She was aware of that dark mind, sleeping, hungry-wary as a wolf. Angry as a wolf, that flees back to its lair with a burned nose. The thoughts of revenge colored the black darkness like a blood-colored cloud. She was glad Van Helsing, when he hypnotized her like this, never asked her about what she felt.

"And what smell?"

She said, "Earth. Salt. Blood." A little blood, from the carca.s.s of the dead rat, clutched still in the Count's hand. Does he know I'm aware of him like this? The thought that in the dark ness his eyes might open, his mind might reach out to hers, filled her with terror. She knew that if he said to her, Come, she would move Earth and Heaven to go to him.

But he slept.

She heard Van Helsing say, "Sleep now, Madame Mina, and when you wake, you will wake refreshed." It was how he always left her, and she heard his voice and Jonathan's, quietly, as they left the bedroom: "All still seem as it was. This is good. When we leave tonight . . ."

The door closed. Mina knew they were leaving-for Transylvania, she a.s.sumed-but had made the five men swear never to speak to her of destinations or plans. If she could listen to Dracula's dreams, there was the chance that he could listen to hers. Only in this way could she help them, she knew. Only in surrender, in making herself the object she had all her life struggled not to be. All her life she had been a doer, an organizer, memorizing train-schedules and typing notes and taking correspondence courses. Now it was as if a hand had been laid on her head, saying, Learn stillness. Only by quietness, stillness, absolute trust could she fight back to reclaim her own soul and her own life.

But the thought that she was linked to the Count-the thought of her flesh changing, as Seward had told her poor Lucy's flesh had changed as the result of drinking the vampire's blood-revolted her. She found herself filled with a loathing for her own body that she could not describe. In that dark dawn when they had driven the Count from her bedroom, after the Count had held her mouth to his bleeding chest and forced her to drink, she had screamed, "Unclean! Unclean!" She doubted whether any of the men even understood, or could begin to understand, her sense of horror at the thought of her own flesh, her own organs. Daily she felt herself sliding toward double change, alien from them in body and in every thought and perception of her mind.

Each day she looked in her mirror for signs of further change. Each day she tried to see the reflection of herself in Jonathan's eyes. He was-they all-were becoming strangers to her, and in some ways that was more terrible than all those surrept.i.tious probings with her tongue at her gums and teeth.

Each day she tried to pretend that she didn't smell the blood in Jonathan's veins. That she didn't dream about waking beside him, hungry and changed; that she didn't dream of leaning over him, pressing the soft skin of his throat between her lips. His blood would be delicious. And more delicious still, his dying despair as he opened his eyes and knew himself utterly betrayed.

It was dreams like this that brought her sobbing from sleep at night, to lie trembling, staring at the ceiling in the dark. Jonathan had enough to bear, without her waking him to share her horrors. She slipped so easily under Van Helsing's quiet-voiced commands, and slept so deeply afterward, because most nights she lay awake.

Poor Lucy, she thought, as she slid deeper into sleep. Poor, sweet Lucy, who had had to go through this alone, not knowing what was happening to her ...

Or would it have been better not to know? Not to hope? Had she dreamed of drinking Arthur's blood, before she died? Her dream s.h.i.+fted, images sliding from what she knew to the tantalizingly half-familiar. She thought for a moment she was seeing Lucy in her dream, but the next instant knew it was not so. The chamber where the blonde girl knelt belonged to another place, another time, furnished with pieces of Louis XV or an imitation of it, delicate against the heavy stone of the walls. A great window opened into distant vistas of mountains and trees, to a sunset bleeding itself to death in streaks of cinnabar and gold. The girl who knelt beside the great bed was praying, but as Mina watched, she groped in her old-fas.h.i.+oned coiffure of wheat-gold curls and drew out a jeweled comb, whose golden interior was at the base smooth and flat enough to serve her for a mirror. There was no other mirror in the room.

The girl angled the comb to the branch of candles burning beside the bed, opened her mouth, and drew back her upper lip in the exact fas.h.i.+on that Mina did several times a day. On her throat Mina could see the white, mangled punctures of the vampire's bite.

The comb slid from the girl's hands and she dropped across the bed again, hands clasped as in prayer, but what she whispered was, "Papa ... Mama . . ."

"Papa? Mama?" Mina knew the sneering voice. Would recognize it, hear it, in her dreams, she thought, for the rest of her life. He stood in the shadows beside the bed, his eyes glinting red in the candle-light. Mina knew he had not been there before. "You vowed that you would forsake all others, little Goldfinch." His deep, harsh voice spoke in German. She wondered at it that she would be dreaming in that language, though she had spoken it a great deal, traveling to Buda-Pesth to bring Jonathan home. "How is this that you will be forsworn so quickly?" He advanced to put his hands on her shoulders, and she jerked away, sprang from him, sobbing, to the window. He only smiled, long teeth gleaming. "And will you forswear all those times that you said you loved me? Even in the presence of the priests of G.o.d?"

Her eyes were huge in her emaciated face. "I knew not to whom I spoke."

"You spoke to me, little Goldfinch." He pressed a mocking hand to his breast, where his long old-fas.h.i.+oned waistcoat of black silk was embroidered with crimson flowers like a spattering of blood. "I have not changed." His voice was soft, his eyes mockingly amused, as he had been amused at Mina's struggles to turn her head aside from the bleeding gash in his chest.

With a sudden motion the girl jerked open the cas.e.m.e.nt of the window, making all the candle-flames bend and her blonde hair stir around her face. She stood on the window-seat, framed in the darkening abyss.

"What, do you seek to part already?" Dracula did not move, and at his voice the girl looked back into the room. "'Til death do us part, you said, before that G.o.d by whom you set such store. But you will find, I think, if you do jump, that death will not part us. That we will never be parted." He walked slowly toward her, holding out his hand. "That is what you wanted, is it not? It is what you said you wanted, upon all those occasions when you were in my arms."

The girl clung to the side of the open cas.e.m.e.nt, trembling, tears running down her face now as she watched him advance; Mina guessed from her quick glance, quickly averted, how deep and terrible was the drop beyond. Dracula reached her, his hand still held out; the girl cried, "I hate you!"

"Ah, but you will love me, my sweet bride, my treasure, my winepress. You will have no choice."

She wavered, irresolute, and in that instant he moved, with the panther-like speed Mina had seen. In an eye-blink he was beside her in the window, his dark velvet arm circling her waist, bending her backward over it, out the window and over the abyss. Her feet groped for purchase, toes scrabbling frantically as they were lifted from the window-seat, so that she was forced to cling to his arms. He bent down, as she hung above the empty fall, fastened his lips to her throat.

The girl was still breathing, though gasping for air, when he drew her back inside. He released her, and faded away into the shadows, leaving her lying on the window-seat with her golden hair streaked with blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Strasbourg. Munich. Vienna with its pink-and-gold buildings looking as if some mad cake-decorator had a.s.saulted them with frills of b.u.t.tercreme.

Sunset. Darkness. Intolerable thoughts. A day of watching trees and villages and distant mountains flash past, of listening to Art and Quincey play endless games of cribbage. Night again.

,John Seward closed his eyes and wished with everything in him that he could just give himself an injection of chloral hydrate and sleep for days. Months, if possible.

Sleep without seeing Lucy's face as he'd seen it in Hampstead Cemetery, with blood dripping down her chin and fervid l.u.s.t in her eyes. Sleep without hearing her scream when Art hammered the stake into her breast, without seeing her hands scratch and claw at the hammer, the wood, Art's wrists. Sleep without seeing Van Helsing gently lift up her severed head to make sure of its disattachment, then lay it down again and stuff the mouth with the blossoms of the garlic plant, whose scent Seward had come to so profoundly hate.

Oh, my dearest one, he thought, his heart wrung with emotions he could not even name, much less let himself actually feel.

Thank G.o.d your mother was dead before that came to pa.s.s. She might have pulled you out of my arms, but she did not deserve that.

And I could not have saved you.

He opened his eyes again. More little fairy-tale villages against the dark slopes of pine-woods. He'd asked Jonathan Harker about them yesterday, and to his surprise the younger man had kept them all in a ripple of laughter about strange old beliefs and curious customs he'd encountered on his journey here last April. "Of course, I didn't travel in such luxury as this," Harker had added, gesturing around him at the little compartment with its small sofa and table, its Turkey carpet and wood paneling, and had gone on to recount tales of the other occupants of the second-cla.s.s coach cars at night-blessed, blessed relief of laughter. The compartment door opened and Seward thought it must be a porter, come to light the lamps that tinkled with their continuous silvery music in time to the rattle of the train. He realized the compartment was almost pitch dark. Time and past time, he reflected, to go next door to Art and Quincey's compartment, to play cards while Van Helsing pored over those arcane books he'd brought and the Harkers chatted as gently as any married couple might ...

"Dr. Seward?" said the shadow that loomed over him in the dark.

Whose voice is that?

"Yes?" He sat up on the little sofa, felt for a match, but his visitor closed the door and struck a light, held the springing little flame to the lamp-wick as Seward apologized. "I'm sorry, I'm half asleep. Travel in this part of the world . . ."

His voice trailed off.

"Yes," said Renfield. "It's me." He replaced the lamp-globe. And all Seward could think was, Dear G.o.d. Dear G.o.d ... "It never occurred to you, did it," said Renfield, "that the Count would make anyone his victim-and his slave-in that house but Mrs.

Harker? You never thought to check the state of my teeth and gums before you turned my body over to Lady Brough's solicitor for burial?"

Dear G.o.d ... Seward felt exactly as if someone had rammed him in the chest full-force with the end of a barge-pole. Unable to breathe, and for a moment unable to think. Then another inference lept to his mind, another shock ...

"No," smiled Renfield, as if in his widening eyes he read Seward's horrified thought. "To the best of my knowledge the Count- now my Master-limited his depredations to two. I doubt that even he could cope with Emily Strathmore. How is Mrs. Harker?"

Seward collected himself, his mind racing now. He settled back a little on the sofa, gestured to the single chair. "She is not well,"

he said, "as you must know. Will you sit? Are you a pa.s.senger on this train yourself, then?"

"Good Heavens, no!"

"Then how . . ."

"That is my own affair." Renfield smiled again, and this time Seward could see the length and whiteness of his canine teeth.

Seward noticed also that his former patient had lost the unhealthy flabbiness that had begun to blur his burly frame in the months at Rushbrook House. He looked, in fact, younger than the sixty-three years Georgina Clayburne had given as his age, as if even in the short time since his death he were slipping back into the prime of his strength.

"I'm not an apparition, if that's what you're thinking," added Renfield, and held out one powerful hand. "Put your finger here, and see my hands," he quoted Jesus' words to Thomas the Doubter in the Bible, "and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing."

Quietly, Seward said, "I believe. If the Count is, indeed, your Master, what do you want? Why are you here?" Renfield wore a dark suit and good linen, well-fitting and very different from the clothes he'd been brought in and the clothes he had worn to be buried. Where had he gotten them? He was also able to observe, watching Renfield carefully, that he was not breathing.

"Because the Count is my Master, I was ordered to pursue you, to come upon you singly in the dark-as you observe that I have- and to pick you off, one by one, as the Count's irregular cavalry and his gypsy servitors picked off so many of his enemies in centuries gone by. As to what I want ... Because the Count is my Master, I should think that would be obvious." All the sly humor, the ironic amus.e.m.e.nt that had convinced Seward that this was in fact no apparition, but Renfield indeed, faded from his square- jawed face. "I want you to kill me."

Seward drew in his breath to speak, then let it out.

Dying, Lucy had kissed Van Helsing's hand, whispering her thanks that he had thrust Art from her in her trance-bound demon state.

On the night before their departure, Mina had made each of them swear to kill her-with stake and garlic and decapitation-before they would let her fall into Count Dracula's hands or service.

Renfield's eyes, though they had the curious reflective brightness of a vampire's, were entirely sane, and deeply sad as they looked down into his.

"Can you tell us . . ." Seward began, and Renfield shook his head.

"I am not offering to betray my Master," he said. "I cannot, for one thing, and for another, there is little I can tell you beyond what you have learned from poor Mrs. Harker. I am free to act only for a little time. While he is on the water, his power is limited, but if he becomes aware of what I've done, he can exercise it, at the moments of sunrise and sunset, at noon and at the slack and turn of the tide. Dr. Seward," he went on, holding out his big hands, "I was your patient for six months, and never during that time were you anything but humane, professional, and well-intentioned in the face of my admittedly erratic behavior. In my saner moments I never had a doubt that you would do all within your power to help me, not because you knew me or loved me, but because it is in your nature, as well as your profession, to help those who come to you for help.

"I am asking you," he went on earnestly, "I am begging you: call your friends in. Grant me peace, as you granted your poor beautiful Lucy peace. I would not serve Dracula, but while I exist, I cannot now do other than serve him. And I cannot do this thing myself."

"You are sure, then?" said Seward, deeply moved and at the same time profoundly curious. He had observed how with Lucy's death, and her transition to the vampire state, her body had become perfect, inhumanly beautiful and shed of its moral flaws.

Had this process extended to whatever flaws existed in Renfield's nervous system?

Which was more perilous, a mad vampire or a sane one? His mind chased this thought even as Renfield said, "I am certain," his voice sounding suddenly tremendously far off. Seward yawned hugely, his awareness drifting in spite of all he could do.

"Van Helsing," he said, making ready to rise and then sinking back onto the couch. "Van Helsing will know ... how to go about this . . ."

Then the next moment the gentle jostling of the train-cars trans.m.u.ted itself to the jogging of those ridiculous s.h.a.ggy ponies they'd bought from the villagers in Tobolsk, and he was gazing with Art and Quincey out across the endless barren brownness of the Russian steppe, looking for the slightest sign of the vanished Uncle Harry.

"And I swear if he's gone back to marry that Cossack woman, he can blame well stay in Siberia, for all of me," Quincey said, and handed the binoculars disgustedly to Art. "We can tell your pa he got himself killed by them headhunters in Singapore and I'll trim up the mustaches on that shrunken head the doc here bought so it'll look enough like him to pa.s.s muster with your aunts."

Art turned to Seward. "What do you think, Jack? You're Uncle's nanny, after all."

Seward, whose shoulder still smarted from a Cossack bullet collected two days before, said, "I think we should leave him."

"What?" said Art. "Who?"

"What?" Seward opened his eyes. He was in the woodpaneled compartment of a wagon-lit. Arthur was bending over him, holding up a lamp. In that first instant he thought, We must have tracked Uncle Harry back to the Cossacks ... Then he saw that Art wore the black of mourning-saw Van Helsing in the doorway behind him, and gray-haired Jonathan Harker-and memory fell into place.

He blinked, grasping at fading images. "I had-I had the most extraordinary dream . . ."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

"Don't leave me, Ryland!" As Nomie tugged him from the corridor into their lamp-lit compartment in the next car, her hands were shaking, her blue eyes pleading.

He put his hands on either side of her face, trying to quiet the desperation from her eyes. "My little Norn, I've made every pro- vision for you! You'll be in no danger, all arrangements are made to get you across the Danube at Giurgiu, to get you onto the next train to Varna . . ."

"I don't want arrangements!" She pulled from him, shook her head, caught his wrists in her small white hands that were so strong and so cold. "I want a friend!"

Renfield said nothing, and she pressed her face to his hands. "Do you know how long it has been," she whispered, "since I have had a friend to talk to, as I talk to you?"

The compartment had been set up for night, the small bunks unhooked from the walls. The bedding was all made up, for "Mr.

and Mrs. Marshmire" to disarray before they slipped through cracks and knotholes into the baggage-wagon shortly before morning.

They had made arrangements to travel with a dozen rabbits in cages: Renfield knew well how meticulously the Orient Express kept track of its pa.s.sengers and personnel. He had been careful to tip the porters heavily and had explained to them that since his wife disliked being cooped up, they might be anywhere on the train, day or night.

He guided her to the little sofa, took her gently into the circle of his arm. She rested her head on his shoulder: more beautiful than the most beautiful of living women he had ever seen, with the exception of Catherine and Vixie. Yet he felt for her none of the physical need that at times during his incarceration seemed almost on the point of setting his flesh on fire. That, too, it appeared, was a thing of the body.

And the deep affection he felt for her, evidently, was not. "Days are no less long for the Un-Dead than for the Living," she murmured after a time. "I married the Count-G.o.d help me!-in 1782, and for over a hundred years now have had no one but him, and the Lady Elizabeth, and Sarike for companions.h.i.+p. I read ... except that I dare not be seen to favor anything too much, for when we disagree, or are angry with one another, the others are spiteful and destructive. For them, there is nothing but the hunt.

They laugh at the idea that one might be interested in the lives of people long dead, like Heloise and Abelard, or who never existed, like Beatrice and Benedict."

He was silent, remembering Vixie's tears the first time she read Notre Dame de Paris. Georgina Clayburne had called all novels "rubbish" and had urged him and Catherine to burn Vixie's.

For Georgina, as for the Countess, there was only the hunt. "I used to be a good Catholic girl." Nomie's sob might have been the softest of rueful chuckles, and she sat up a little, and wiped a tear like cold crystal from her eye. "Our priest back in Augsburg used to tell us, as a threat, that those things that we loved above G.o.d, we would find ourselves shackled to in h.e.l.l, for all of Eternity. As a little girl I would have terrible visions of myself dragging a long chain of dolls and pretty dresses and storybooks through a wasteland of flaming mud and devils. But at least, I told myself, I'd still have them. But he was right," she finished sadly. "He was right."

"What a ghastly thing to tell a child." Renfield recalled some of the things his own parish priest had told him about what became of little boys who couldn't control their tempers.

Nomie sighed. "But you see, I did love the Count above G.o.d, above all mortal things. When he held me in his arms, I remember saying to him, I would count myself blessed to dwell forever in h.e.l.l, if I could dwell there at your side. I was very young." A tiny fold touched the corner of her lips. "Not twenty." She closed her eyes, and her long lashes dislodged another tear.

Renfield caught it on his fingertip. It was cold as winter rain. Yet he put it to his lips, tasting it as in dying he'd tasted her blood.

The blood is the life, he thought. But the tears are something more.

Outside the windows, the Italian Alps flashed past in the darkness, moonlight cold upon their snows.

"And now here I am," Nomie said softly. "Exactly where I wanted to be, dwelling forever in h.e.l.l at his side. With no one but Elizabeth for company, and Sarike, who has the heart of an animal. No, that's unjust. Animals show kindness to their own, and even a wolfhound b.i.t.c.h will nurse an orphaned kitten. Sometimes still the Count will talk to me of Goethe, and Shakespeare, and Montaigne-he's very widely read, and I think he valued me because I read, and he wanted someone to converse with. But for him, all of literature comes back to power, and to contempt for those who have none. To talk with him is sometimes like being beaten. To travel with you, to speak with you, heart to heart and not afraid, is like a chilled cloth upon my face after a long fever. Don't take that away. At least . . ."

She opened her eyes, sat up straighter, as if ashamed of her weakness. "At least not for a little while yet."