Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 15

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife 13 October My beloved, How could I turn my back upon that poor child?

The cynical will doubtless cry, Coward, to hide his own craving for a life eternal, stolen from the lives of others, behind a farce of pity! Child forsooth! This woman is an Un-Dead murderess who seeks to keep a servant with no more expenditure than a tugged heartstring or two.

Perhaps I would have said so myself, before I knew what h.e.l.l is. Before I had seen, close-to, the naked essences of those mon- sters that go by the names of Dracula, of Elizabeth, of Sarike the Turk.The cynic might also point out that, as Nomie said, To be vampire is to fascinate ... And accuse Nomie of setting out to fascinate me, as the Count fascinated her.

But I know you, Catherine, as I know my own heart, clearer now that the vampire state has healed me of madness. You were no cynic in life. Death, Dante and others tell us, clarifies the awareness even of the d.a.m.ned, and how much more so of the blessed! I know you will understand.

Nomie is what she is, no saint, but no demon either, and lonely as for half a year I was lonely in the terrible walls of Rushbrook Asylum.

I long to be with you as a child longs for his mother's breast. I would count the days until I see you again, face to face in the light, save that I do not know how many they shall be.

They shall be as few as possible, my truest love. I am torn between the duties of friends.h.i.+p, my love for you and Vixie, and the cruel constraints of Time. I will do what I can for my pretty little Norn, to make easier the slavery into which she was tricked by her love, all those years ago.

But that being done-if it can be done-I shall come to you, in whatever fas.h.i.+on I can contrive. If G.o.d is kind, He will allow me to tell you, face to face, on the threshold of the Heaven you now inhabit, how sorry I am, before consigning me to eternal sleep. This is the best that I can hope for, and to this I look forward as to light in blackness.

My love, until that day, I am, Forever, your husband, R.M.R.

R.M.R.'s notes 13 October 3 rabbits, 4 spiders

14 October 3 rabbits, 2 rats

15 October Baggage-thief in luggage shed at Varna My self-disgust is no less intense than my horror at the degree to which the drinking of human blood-the taking of human life exhilarates me, sharpens my mind and my senses and, more frighteningly, increases the speed with which I can move and with which I can dislimn myself to pa.s.s through knotholes and cracks. I find that Nomie's superiority in the so-called supernatural aspects of the vampire state is only in part a function of her greater age and experience. In part these abilities depend upon her greater readiness to consume the psychic energies of the human brain at death.

What am I to make of this?

"What a pity," sighed Nomie, as we stowed the body of the dead robber beneath the wheels of one of the coal-cars in the maze of sidings in the railway yard, "that we cannot find a village of robbers, upon whom we could feast nightly without concern about whether their wives or their mothers will find themselves in want at their deaths, or whether their children will weep. I used to pick and choose, to kill only the bandits and horse-thieves who inhabit the wild countryside: men whom I could not pity. But such men are wary, unless they're in drink, and walk in bands. And sometimes the craving becomes too much."

"Ah, my Nornchen, I have seen such villages," I replied, a trifle flown, I admit, on the alcohol-content of our victim's blood. "Up the country, as they say of the Indian hills, there are places where the Thugee make a habit of murdering travelers, and families hand the profession down for generations, as surely as the butchers of cattle and pigs do in other lands. The Governor-General would give us a medal for our conduct, rather than sending pompous Dutchmen and crazed solicitors" clerks after us with Ghurka knives." From somewhere-I suspect from young Lord G.o.dalming-Jonathan Harker has acquired a curve-bladed Ghurka kukri even longer and more savage-looking than the bowie-knife Quincey Morris habitually wears sticking out of his boot-top. He spent a great deal of our three days on the Orient Express sharpening it, as he sat at the bedside of his poor lovely wife, who slept most of the journey.

It is clear to me that knowledge of Dracula's a.s.sault upon his wife has driven Harker a little insane. This is not to be wondered at.

What man, knowing Mina Harker's kind spirit and lively intelligence, could not love her to distraction? What husband, seeing the woman he adored infected with the terrible poison that slowly transforms the human flesh into vampire flesh and brings the human soul into thrall of the demon, could remain wholly sane?

Kind is the G.o.d who denies him knowledge of the depths to which the Count's domination will bring her, after death! Such knowledge would induce madness indeed.

And as if mere knowledge of his beloved's peril were insufficient, Harker had the daily reminder, upon the journey, of the chain that binds his beautiful one to her supernatural rapist. Daily, at dawn and sunset, Van Helsing would hypnotize Mrs. Harker, searching through her mind to touch her master's. In so doing he would touch my own, and Nomie's, where we lay in our coffins in the baggage-car.

I would be aware of such times, as I drifted off to sleep or back into waking, of Dracula's thought and sensation as he lay in his own single earth-box in the hold of the Romanian freighter the Czarina Catherine. I would hear, as Mrs. Harker heard, the lap of waves upon the hold, the thud of sailors' feet on the deck, and the creak of ropes; would hear, also, Van Helsing's voice gently probing with questions, and now and then one of the men mutter to another.

How could Harker be witness to all that taking place around the woman he loves, and not go a little mad?

But having been a madman myself, I do not look forward to having to deal with one at my Master's behest.

And though nothing will please me more than the sensation of that Ghurka knife in my own heart, and the severing of my own head that will bring me peace, I wonder how I can protect Nomie from a like fate without resorting to more human blood, more human deaths, to strengthen me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-.

SIX.

Jonathan Harker's Journal*

17 October Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome the Count on his return from his tour ... Van Helsing and Seward will cut off his head at once and drive a stake through his heart. Morris and G.o.dalming and I shall prevent interference, even if we have to use the arms which we shall have ready. The Professor says that if we can so treat the Count's body, it will soon after fall into dust ...

R.M.R.'s notes 17 October 12 rats, 27 spiders Coming from Paris on the Orient Express, Nomie told me of Count Dracula's intention: to divert the Czarina Catherine from its registered destination here in Varna to Galatz on the Danube mouth, leaving Van Helsing and his allies to await it here while we, Nomie and I, pick them off one by one.

Sleeping in my coffin during the day, in the small lodgings we rented, I feel the Count's impatient anger press upon me like a fever.

Anger at those who would dare to pursue and defy him. Anger at us, who cannot or will not guard his flanks. Through the boards of my coffin I hear Nomie cry out in terror, like a child in the grip of a nightmare she cannot wake from. And though I strive to break my own thick day-sleep to go to her, to comfort her, I can only lie in the clayey soil dug from Highgate Cemetery, and listen to her weep.

Letter, Quincey Morris to Galileo Jones Foreman, Caballo Loco Ranch San Antonio, Texas 17 October Pard, It's been too long, a thousand years it feels like, and stranger portents have come to pa.s.s than ever I wrote of in all those foot- loose traipses riding herd on that crazy English lord around the world. Doc Seward, and Art Holmwood, and I thought we saw the elephant then, and maybe we did.

This is something different, dark as the snake-caves along the dry washes in the hills and twice as deadly. I write because I could use the sight of your ugly face just now, and use even more you and six or seven of the boys from the bunkhouse.

When last I wrote, I said I'd been shot bad by Dan Cupid, shot in the heart with his little gold arrow: I said a lot of hopeful fal-lal and I hope to G.o.d you burned that d.a.m.n stupid poem. She turned me down for a man just as good as me and better in her mama's eyes, though straight and true as she was, I know that didn't weigh with her, and I knew even then I wouldn't get over it. May through to September, I kept telling myself I'd write and let you know how I was, when the pain let up some. But it never did.

I thought that was the worst wound I'd take in my life. I wish it had been.

I say of Miss Westenra, "was," because she died, not many days before her marriage to Art. And not many days after, we-Art and I and Doc-learned that she'd been killed, by the kind of man-monster the Commanche sometimes speak of, and the villagers deep back in the Mexican hills where modern times and modern blindness haven't yet touched.

And this is what I'm doing here, footloose again and heading East in country as wild as any we crossed coming west from Vladivastok. The place I'm at is called Varna (Wasn't "Varna" the name of that red-haired madam in Dodge? The one with the fingernails?), and it's a good-sized burg and pretty, near as warm as Texas for this late in the year. It's a port on the Black Sea and the crowds you see in the streets remind me of San Francisco, French and Greeks and English and Russians and Germans: same s.h.i.+ps in the harbor, with coal and timber and iron and German steel. The only difference is there's Arabs everywhere instead of Chinese, and the hills aren't as steep.

We've taken rooms-Art and the Doc and I, and other friends of Miss Westenra's who are helping us with the chase-and all we can do now is wait. Our bird is coming in on a freighter from London; he'll find us waiting for him on the dock. Between us we have five Winchesters and seven pistols, plus my Henry, which is the best rifle man ever made, as well as my bowie and a.s.sorted other cutlery. More than any weapon, we have minds that are made up and hearts bound in brotherhood.

What he-It-did lies beyond the proof of any law but G.o.d's.

But you and I have both dealt with justice on those terms, out where the law doesn't run.

And so we wait. One of our number, Mrs. Harker, as smart and sweet and good-hearted a woman as ever wore shoe-leather, has suffered a terrible wound that may yet turn into her death because we underestimated our friend, and it is like a knife in my heart every time I see the mark she bears of it. The night she took that mark, I should have known better, and set a guard, even though there was no danger in sight. There isn't a night I don't dream about doing it differently.

For that reason I've gone back to my trail-driving days, and have insisted that while we're here we stick together, and stay within- doors from sundown til sunup, which is when our friend likes to mosey around. Most nights I take the graveyard watch, like I did on the trail, that dark pit from three 'til the first birds start to wake, when even the wh.o.r.es sleep and the streets are so still you can hear the clink of the tackle down in the harbor.

This is the hour in which I write to you. The others sleep, bedrolls on the parlor carpet around Mrs. Harker's couch, comical unless you knew the reason for it. Like on the trail, what name each man mutters in his sleep the others forget come morning. I've been to the window, and through the other rooms of our suite, three times since I came on watch, knowing our friend is still on the high seas someplace: I've seen nothing and yet the air p.r.i.c.kles and whispers. There's danger here, closer than the Doc or his Doc- old Doc Van Helsing-think or know. I smell it, like a longhorn smells thunder. n.o.body who hasn't taken a herd through Indian country can know what that's like.

Whatever it was, it's gone now. And so I write to you, and think of you, old friend, who does know what that feels like, that invisible danger, waiting to strike.

Enclosed with this letter you'll find my will. Once I thought to bring a gold-haired bride home to Caballo Loco, to make a whole lot of little Quinceys and 'Laios and Jacks and Lucys to take the place over; I know that won't happen, now. Pa told me I had cousins back in Virginia, though I don't know if any survived the War any more than my aunts and uncles of Pa's family did. Do what you can to find them, and if any come out to take up their share of the land, please do what you can to knock some sense into their heads, seeing as how you'll be their neighbor, on what'll be your half of the ranch.

You think dark thoughts in the dark of the graveyard watch, out here on the eastern edge of the world. One day I pray I'll take this letter out of your hands, and laugh, and tear it up. But that day seems far from me now, like a dream that I know d.a.m.n well isn't going to come true. By the time this gets to you, it'll be over, one way or the other.

Til that time it's Hooray for Texas! And tell those lazy sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes in the bunkhouse that their boss says Hi from the edge of the world.

Your pal, Quincey Morris

R.M.R.'s notes 18 October 13 rats, 20 spiders, owl, 2 mice I keep these records from habit, and as a means of rea.s.suring myself that though I choose not to kill human beings, I am in no danger of starvation. My cravings spring from my mind and my blood, not my flesh.

My mind is still linked, in the hours of my sleep, to the Count's. When his red eyes glare into my dreams and his deep hoa.r.s.e voice demands why I have not yet slain Van Helsing or G.o.dalming, I hear also the sighing lap of waves against the Czarina Catherine's hull, and sometimes s.n.a.t.c.hes of men's voices from the deck. "It is the devil's wind, and the devil's fog, that drive us!" I heard a man cry in anguish, and a thick Scots voice replied, "I' the de'il wants us to make Varna so quick, then d.i.c.kie Donelson's na the one to say him nay!"

"Cast it overside, Captain! Cast that accursed box into the sea! Grief only will come of keeping it aboard!"

And there was a confusion of voices, and the meaty slap of a belaying-pin striking flesh as the sounds faded into the sea-rush of my dreams.

"He paid Captain Donelson well," whispered Nomie to me later, as we stood in the balmy darkness across from the Hotel Odessus's front doors, our shoulders touching slightly, watching the windows of Van Helsing's suite. "As he has the men at Galatz, who will take the earth-box ash.o.r.e and put it on a barge upriver, to where the Bistritza River curves below the Borgo Pa.s.s where the Castle stands. And he learned well his own lesson, to travel on a s.h.i.+p crewed with Scots and Frenchmen as well as Romanians and Greeks, and to let the crew alone. Coming to England on the Demeter in July, he would drink the blood of the crew. When it arrived, the s.h.i.+p was a ghost-s.h.i.+p, the captain chained dead to the wheel with a crucifix wound round his hands."

"He was lucky his entire cargo of earth-boxes wasn't confiscated by the customs authorities," I remarked. "Or sunk in Whitby Harbor, for that matter."

"He had long been fasting in Transylvania, with the impoverishment of the countryside. Now he has had three months, almost, of hunting in London's dockside slums."

"Do you still defend him, little Norn?" I asked her, smiling, and had she not been pale as bridal satin, she might have blushed.

More gravely, I went on, "He killed the crew of the Demeter because he was greedy. He would kill that of the Czarina Catherine, and its Captain, too, if he thought he could do so and still make port safely in Galatz. You know that is so."

She said with a trace of bitterness in her voice, "I know." We returned our attention to the warm rectangle of gas-light on the upper floor of the Hotel Odessus, crossed now and then by shadows. When one came near enough to its curtain, I pointed them out to her: "The tall one is Quincy Morris; that will be Lord G.o.dalming, who is only a little shorter-"

"The handsome one with the golden hair?" She c.o.c.ked a coquettish eye at me, the white lace of her jabot like flowers against the embroidered pink-and-blue of her jacket.

"Minx. The slighter one is either my own friend Dr. Seward, or your friend Jonathan Harker-and don't tell me you didn't find him attractive, my girl . . ."

She laughed like the cold tinkling of silver chimes. "He was very sweet, really. I used to watch him at the Castle, from the shadows when he couldn't see. He would sit at his desk, writing love-letters to his fiancee, or scribbling in his journal, as if his very life depended upon it. I would sometimes slip in just at dawn, when he slept, and try to read what he'd written to his Mina.

Sometimes he wrote in English, sometimes in a code I could not understand, but while he wrote, he would sigh and speak her name. The others would laugh at me for it, and talk about how they would make him forget her, once they could have their way with him, and about how long they could make him last before he died. That is a game that vampires play."

She returned her eyes to the window, where Van Helsing's stocky form stood briefly, illuminated from within as he parted the curtain and looked out to the dark, cobbled street.

For the second night none of them emerged. When, in the small cold hours, Nomie and I drifted like wraiths into the hotel's kitchen quarters at the welcoming behest of a venal servant-boy to whom we threw a coin, we found all the lights still burning in the avengers' suite, and heard the m.u.f.fled mutter of G.o.dalming's voice and Seward's as they played pinochle, and the mingled breathing of sleepers.

Nomie left me to hunt. I remained in the corridor, or drifted into one bedroom after the other of the suite in the form of mist beneath the doors. All the bedrooms were empty, though the beds bore the scent and impress of those who slept in them at odd hours of daylight.

Our friends were taking no chances. While I was still there, I heard Seward wake Harker, and after that, there was only the soft sc.r.a.pe of whetstone on knife-blade, until the approach of dawn drove me from the building and back to my own earth-home.

19 October When I returned to our hotel at dawn yesterday, I found to my great disquiet that Nomie was still out. She was going hunting, she said, on the docks, not a part of the city where any woman should be afoot.

Though vampires do not crumble into dust with the first touch of the sun's rays, or spontaneously combust in daylight, as some penny dreadfuls would have it, once the sun is in the sky and until it vanishes behind the earth's curve, we are as mortals.

Worse off than mortals, in fact, for mortals may cross running water at their will, or touch such things as the garlic plant, the wild rose, and the emblems of their faith. Moreover, with the sun's rising I was crushed by a wave of almost overwhelming sleepiness, and when I emerged from our little pensione in Balchik Street, I found that the morning sunlight made me giddy, and that I could barely see.

Nevertheless I stumbled in the direction of the dark blue sea, visible between the white buildings of the upper town.

Coming down Nessebur Street, I was pa.s.sed by a gang of seven or eight Slovak boatmen, rough arrogant brigands with their baggy white trousers tucked into high boot-tops, who bring loads of timber down from the Carpathians. They glanced sidelong at me from under long, greasy black hair, and muttered to one another in their own tongue. Yet as they pa.s.sed, I smelled blood upon them, and the ground-in whiff of Nomie's perfume.

I saw where they'd come from, through a little gate into the yard behind a shut-up tavern. I ran in, and looked around: a narrow s.p.a.ce between a warehouse and a chandler's yard, filled with debris and stinking of privies years untended. For a moment, dazzled by the sunlight, I could see nothing but the shabby fence, the straggling waist-high stands of broomsedge.

Then something moved beside the dilapidated privy sheds. A woman, her gold hair hanging tangled over the muddied remains of her pink jacket, blood dripping from the white hand that she held to her bruised and swollen face.

"I'll be all right," she whispered, as we staggered like two swaying drunkards back toward the safety of our pensione. Searching for her, I had been plagued by the recurring fear that I'd encounter Dr. Seward in the streets-though what the man would have been doing down by the s.h.i.+pyards I have no idea. Now the only thing that burned in my heart was rage. Rage and the desire to kill.

"The men surrounded me, I thought I could get away." Her voice came thick through lips puffed and discolored. Her hand trembled as she tried to put up her hair again, so that people would not stare so at us as we made our way back through the town.

"Two of them wore crucifixes, and I could not slip past them. They called me witch, and Austrian wh.o.r.e. It's all they thought I was."

I said nothing. I was shaking with fury. "And then the sun came up . . ."

We came into the pensione by the back door, unseen by the servants who had been well paid to leave our room strictly alone during the day. They'd left water in the ewer, however, and with it I bathed Nomie's cut face and bruised wrists. She fell asleep the instant I lifted her into her coffin. I dragged myself over to my own. Opium is not so black as the oblivion into which I plunged.

Ryland, she whispered into my dreams. Ryland, thank you. Thank you.

In my dream I reached out and gathered her into my arms. In my dream her face had already healed, beautiful and perfect as the young bride the Count had brought to his Castle, over a century ago.

Somewhere far off I could hear the Count shout at her, Fool! b.i.t.c.h! You will undo us all! I only held her tighter, and felt her shake in my grip. Through the sickened dread that radiated from her I could feel, also, the bitter grief of disillusion. I would count myself blessed to dwell forever in h.e.l.l, she had said to him once, if I could dwell there at your side. When Dracula, in his coffin on-board the Czarina Catherine, finally released her mind from his grip, her soul clung to mine in the darkness of our mutual dreams and wept.

With shame that she had loved him once? I wondered. Or with sorrow that the love that once had upheld her in Un-Death was gone?

Catherine, Catherine, thank G.o.d that G.o.d spared you the deeper h.e.l.ls of pain such as this!

To cheer her through the day, I told her tales of India as we slept, conjuring for her, like a wizard of dreams, temples domed with peeling gilt and muddy streets aswarm with dusky-skinned men and women, white cows and coiled pythons as big as firehoses, insects bigger than English birds, and the teeming hot electricity of life that seems to radiate from the very ground.

That is where we need to live, my Nornchen, you and I, I told her. We could sup like kings every night upon men who force their brothers' widows into suttee in order to get their property, or who murder childless brides because they don't want to return the dowries to their families! A thousand wolves of the Deccan hills would do our bidding, and we would sleep through the days in the crypts of demolished temples deep in the jungles, with cobras as our guards.

And would I weave you crowns of flowers, as they do for the G.o.ds of that country? she returned, and I could smell those flowers, like good German roses though the image I saw in her dream-my dream-was of fantastic blossoms whose like the waking earth has never seen. Would I play the flute for you in the jungle twilight, like the White G.o.ddess of some blood-and-thunder romance?