Mina (28 page)

The
following Tuesday, she went to Gance.

She reached
his little house by a circuitous route that began with a walk to the center of
town to catch a cab. Once inside it, she

lowered her veil and waited
until they had traveled some distance before calling out the address.

The iron
gate was open, the outside door ajar. She barred it as she entered, then found
Gance in the solarium, a glass of wine in

his hand, a second poured and waiting for her. She said nothing,
not even a single word of greeting. Instead, she took off her bonnet, her
cloak, and began unbuttoning the high neck of the blouse she wore.

l understood why I had to treat him that way,
she wrote in
her journal that night. I
needed to make it clear to myself even more than to him
that he was not my friend, not even my lover, but a creature to whom I came to
to satisfy my basest needs, as I satisfied his. I could live with my
conscience then, the way Lucy might have lived with what remained of hers had
she continued to feed but not kill.

My remote behaviour confused him. I saw him
watching me undress, waiting for me to smile or even be so silly as to giggle
nervously. I did none of that, not even when I walked toward him, watching his
eyes move over my sunlit body.

Finally, when I was
close enough to touch him, I reached instead for my glass.

We coupled on the French divan, among the
drooping palms and heavy-scented gardenias. The sun had warmed the room, and
soon there was a sheen of sweat on his body, a musky undertone to the colognes
we wore. At the end, when I was almost beyond sated and he close to his final
release, I straddled him. He lay with his arms limp at his side, his head tilted
back against the pillows. And in the sunlight I could see the vein in his neck
pounding. Was it my imagination that it seemed so blue, his pulse so strong
and quick? No matter. Passion released my control. In the instant I felt his
body tense, his hips thrust upward to meet me, I lowered my head and placed my
lips over the pulsing vein, sucked in a fold of skin and bit.

Salty, yet sweet. I have
tasted my own blood, sucked from small wounds to cleanse them, yet that blood
was nothing like

this. It was as if I
tasted his passion and made it one with mine.

I had expected him to recoil. Instead his own
passion increased, and he held his hands against the back of my head as Dracula
had, holding my lips to the wound so I could not help but drink. We exploded
together and I pulled back. With his blood dripping from my lips, I began
riding him, feeling his blood move through me as his semen moved through my womb-both
the essence of life itself.

What must death feel
like? Do vampires kill because they cannot die?

She looked
down at the words she had just written and saw that her usually neat shorthand
ended in a hideous, almost illegible,

scrawl. She slammed the journal
shut, not caring that the ink had not dried, and placed it back in its hiding
place.

Why had she
put those last words on paper? Why had she thought of them at all?

She put her hands to her face and
inhaled deeply, but an act intended to calm her only made her more distressed.
She smelled Gance's cologne, his body. She licked her skin and tasted his
sweat. She stripped quickly and took a hot bath, scrubbing her skin until it
was scraped and red and smelled only of violet soap.

Gance had remained at the house.
That afternoon he also bathed, in the footed tub before the lace-covered
windows, examining the bite Mina had left on his neck in his shaving mirror.
The timing of her bite had been perfect. At that moment of passion he had never
felt the pain. Indeed, he might not have noticed it at all had he not seen her
face as she pulled away, the hunger with which she looked at the blood leaking
slowly from the cut and the terror when she saw that he was watching her.

It's high collars for a while, he
thought. He might have dismissed the act as nothing more than an extreme of
passion had it not been for Arthur's drunken tale. He could picture Arthur
believing anything while under the influence of alcohol or the suggestions of a
superior mind, but Mina was more intelligent, and far more levelheaded.

And such a
surprise. He had not thought of her as someone of such intense sexual needs,
indeed had not thought she would

accept his offer at all. But
she had intrigued him and that was enough.

Now, she
intrigued him even more. As soon as he was dressed, he made his way to the
train station, sent a wire to William

Graves and caught the next
express to London.

He dined
with the diplomat at a quiet table in the rear of Tyburn Pub. Graves seemed
pleased with his company, even more when

Gance picked up the bill and
ordered them a second round of absinthe drips and dessert.

"Did
the woman I referred to you ever make an appointment?" Gance asked.

"Oh, yes. She seemed very determined and a little nervous.
Odd, since she said that the book was nothing more than fiction." "Did
you do the translation?"

Graves shook his head. "I
couldn't. I referred her to a Romanian I once knew, though I did not have his
address. She apparently hired someone else but not before she contacted Ion
Sebescue. Recently, his son came to see me and asked about the book." Graves
sipped his drink, commented on its excellence, then went on in a low,
conspiratorial tone. "Did you ever meet anyone who you thought was truly
lethal?"

Gance
laughed. "Daily, William. You lead a sheltered life."

"And
you should choose your friends with more care," Graves retorted.
"James Sebescue is a dangerous man. When we talked, I

felt that he was weighing the consequences of killing me after
we'd finished. I became so certain of it that I walked him into the outer
office while we concluded our meeting. Later, I decided that I might be
reacting to the intensity with which he had spoken.

And yet I'm sorry I gave him any assistance at all. Now ... well,
I try to remind myself that I don't really know what's in the journal, so
there is no reason to harm me."

"I
suppose," Gance agreed, then added wickedly, "unless he means to harm
the translator or the journal's owner, in which case he

may want to dispose of anyone
who could link him to the crime. Did you give him my friend's name?"

"He
never asked, and I certainly didn't volunteer the information. But the young
woman can rest easy. You see, he referred to her

a number of times as Mrs.
Beason."

"Ah!"
Gance responded, with only a fleeting pause. "Where else do you think my
friend might have found someone to do the

work?"

"The
consulates, though I think I would have heard mention of it if she had. The
museum is an even more likely place. I'm

surprised I didn't think of
it when she came to me."

After Graves left, Gance sat alone at the table and considered his
next step. Though he intended to warn the women, he likewise wanted to learn
more about what the journal contained. Arthur's ravings had been helpful.
Quincey Morris, whom he'd met when Arthur brought him round to the Marlborough
Club for drinks, was dead. Jonathan ... No, it was best to keep well away from
the husband.

And then
there was Seward. Gance hated the man-his petty superiority, as if he had some
monopoly on the human mind, his

supercilious manners, his
arrogant temperance. No, it would be better to find the translator, he decided.
He paid the bill and left.

The night
was beautiful, warmer than February ought to be. The breezes gave hints of the
spring soon to come. He breathed in

the damp air and started back
toward his house on Carlton.

It had
rained that afternoon, and the streets were still dotted with puddles. As he
traveled through them, he had a strange floating

sensation, as if, like Jesus,
he walked on water.

A woman sitting on a bench near the
roadway looked up at him. He thought at first that she had lost her way, until
she let the shawl drop from one shoulder to reveal the plunging neckline of
her dress. He looked closer, wondering what tart would have the gall to
solicit in the shadow of Buckingham Palace. As he moved toward her, he smelled
the liquor on her breath, saw the insanity in her glazed eyes. And her age-her
lined face, the thin skin on her fingers, the spots on her hands.

A crone
could be tolerated but not a woman who was almost beautiful. He recoiled,
ignoring her harsh laughter, the mad taunts

that followed him as he
walked quickly away.

Anton Ujvari was used to shadows. In the corners of the museum
rooms where he worked. On the streets he traveled on his way home at night. In
the doorway of his house. He had always welcomed them, and the mystery they
held. Not any longer. The journal was the source of his fear-that and the
myths he had learned as a child.

Before he
began the translation for Mina Harker, Ujvari had carefully copied the picture
on the old Hungarian coin. He'd softened

the lines of the young
countess's face, given texture to the hair. She had been so beautiful, and her
disappearance such a mystery.

His own
mother was only a vague memory from his youth, but the memory he had of her was
of someone who resembled the

countess. They had the same
nose and jaw. And they had both disappeared without a trace.

Someone loved them, he thought, for
he was a romantic, and the aged, taciturn father who had raised him had
instilled only fear in him. For years after he had run away to England, he
waited for the man to reappear and drag him back to Romania, as if he were still
a little boy needing to hide.

Three days
after he had begun the translation, Ujvari pleaded illness and took a leave
from the museum. This document, certainly

not from the countess herself,
was so strange, so darkly sensual, that he did not want to stop the work until
he was done.

He
translated in longhand, stopping after the first dozen pages to copy the
account on a typewriter. Though they had not

discussed the matter, it occurred to Ujvari that his employer
might wish to see the first pages of the document as soon as possible, so he
made a carbon copy of the work. When he'd finished the first third of the
journal, he began to have difficulties with the language. He wrote Mrs. Harker
a quick note, sent it and the first pages of the translation off to her and
returned to work.

With no dictionary to help him, he
went through the translated books and documents, trying to find a similar
dialect that he could use as a reference for some of the words. There was
nothing, so he went into the storage rooms where uncataloged material from the
region was kept. There, among the mummified cats, worn Roman coins, dusty
scraps of medieval tapestries, and other paltry treasures, he found a box of
letters from the Hungarian empire, they and their translations alike musty and
crumbling from years of neglect.

Most were worthless save to the detail-oriented scholar. Many were
documents of the Habsburg bureaucracy; a few were personal letters written in
Hungarian. None were as interesting as the document on which Ujvari worked,
though one was in a similar hand.

Thinking he
might have discovered something else by the person who had translated the
countess's journal---or created a

fictitious one, he reminded
himself-he pressed the page between two panes of glass and took it to his
well-lit desk.

Though the document was not dated, the quality of the paper and
the ink used indicated something far older than the few decades of the journal
he worked on. In spite of this, the handwriting was nearly identical. The
language, however, was Hungarian---dated, but perfect. With the document close
to the light, he had no trouble reading what remained of it.

...
I do not like it here in
Vienna. It is pretty, but too many people seem to mar the beauty of the days,
too many lights hide the splendor of the night stars. And there have been too
many heartbreaks. I am sorry I am such a disappointment to you, but no one is
more disappointed than I. Mama tries to look cheerful, but both of us are ready
to come home.

The scrap
grew more ragged, the edges of lines missing.
I will do whatever you wish, though in
truth I would hope ... to wait

for ... understand that?
Did you not love Mother that way once?

Forgive me. I will do as
you ask . . .
Breaks in the final sentences, then the closure
...
to
understand. Your obedient

daughter, Kar ...

Ujvari
looked from the faded letter to the journal Mrs. Harker had left with him.
Could someone have duplicated the countess's

handwriting in an attempt to prove that the original journal had
really been written by her? Would it not have been easier to duplicate only
the first few pages of the journal in her hand? To continue the charade for the
entire journal where the quality of the paper was so modern seemed odd. And
yet, he had heard of cases in which forgers could easily continue in any
script.

More
importantly, he could think of no reason for anyone to bother. The young
countess's story was known to only a few

scholars. A forgery would
have no value.

Unless the
journal was not a forgery but the countess's own writing. What if one of these
creatures had captured the young

countess and had twisted her
childish rebelliousness into something dark and sinister?

This notion, the twisted logic of it
and his willingness to believe it, upset all Ujvari's assumptions about life
and death and his own past. Yes, he knew the legends, had shaken with fear as
the stories were told. But he had been a child then, hanging on his stern father's
every word. He was older now, and laughed at the superstitions of his native
land.

Not anymore.

He had not
thought his enthusiasm for this project could increase until now. He returned
to his translation, determined to remain at

his desk until the museum
closed, and to finish the entire work by the end of the week if possible.

The bright
lamps on his desk barely touched the darkness of the huge room in which he
worked. He went on, heedless of the

scurrying of mice in the
walls, the distant footsteps of the night watchman making his rounds in the
public halls, and the soft, steady