Slave Of Dracula (11 page)

“Miss Lucy?” Renfield stared at him.

“Miss Lucy Westenra. Pretty as a daffy-down-dilly, I thought, the night she come here to take dinner
with him-with that ma of hers standin’ right over her to make sure the pair of ‘em didn’t have a moment to
theirselves for the Doc to pop the question, as I hear he planned to that night. And him borrowin’ a
but-ler and silverware and what-all else from Sir Ambrose Poole for the t’occasion. Well, ’tis an ill wind
that blows no one good.” The grizzled little man cocked an eyebrow at Renfield. “You marry a maid, you

marry her ma, and Christ help the man ends up with that old man-trap for a mother-in-law. You know
what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Renfield softly, thinking of cold-eyed Lady Brough … though of course, Catherine was
nothing at all like her mother. And that hatchet-faced harridan Georgina Clay-burne, who wanted nothing
more than to re-claim Catherine’s share of their father’s money for her precious “family.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

Sometimes in sleep he could see Catherine, in that London house they’d bought under the name of
Marshmire, dozing by lamplight. Or in his dreams he’d walk up the stairs of their old house in
Nottingham, as he’d used to years ago, to see Vixie in her nursery, that bright-eyed nymph face relaxed
in sleep, a black curl falling over her forehead. These dreams comforted him deeply, for he missed them
both. Even had they been able to get word to him without Georgina and Lady Brough hearing of it and
finding a way to trace them-to take Vixie away–communication was now doubly perilous.

And sometimes he would dream of Vixie, waking in her nursery room in that house in Nottingham, not
a little girl but the young lady that she was now, sixteen and beautiful, wearing I_ucy Westenra’s
night-dress.

In these dreams she would wake, and sit up in bed, dark eyes wide in the darkness. Outside the
window rain fell through fog, and the tiny glow of her night-light sparkled on it as she got out of bed,
crossed to the window, threw open the casement. Ren-field Would struggle to reach her, struggle to cry
out to her, Vixie, don’t!

And He was outside her window. Slowly coalescing from the shadow;, as the three Valkyries had
coalesced from the dark-ness, fog, and rain in Renfield’s long-ago dream of the hopeless prisoner named
Jonathan. The thing in the chapel, the thing Renfield still sometimes called Wotan, though he knew now
that it was something else, some other Traveler. Wind lifted and stirred Wotan’s black cloak, and in the
darkness his eyes were red as flame, staring into Vixie’s.

Vixie, no!

Then Renfield would waken himself screaming, and those imbecile attendants would come with their
laudanum and chlo-ral hydrate, like rescuers determined to shove a drowning man back down under the
waves.

And they wondered that he fought them!

Yet more often, Renfield dreamed of Lucy Westenra: dreamed, knowing he participated in the dreams
of the thing in the chapel, that could touch Lucy’s sleeping mind. He dreamed of Lucy waking in the
darkness and stumbling to the window, dreamed of the floating shadow, the crimson eyes. Dreamed of
the fangs that pierced her throat, of those coarse hands with their claw-like nails, caressing her as if he
would mould her flesh into what he sought her to be. Once Renfield saw Wotan push back his sleeve and
tear open the vein of his own arm, and press Lucy’s white lips to the wound.

“Drink,” Renfield heard him breathe. “Drink, or you will die.”

Half-swooning, Lucy whispered, “Please … I don’t want to die . . .” and the dark intruder pulled back
her head by a hand-ful of her fair hair, and held the dripping cut up over her mouth, so that his blood
dropped down onto her lips.

“Then drink, my beautiful, my beloved one. Drink, and you shall never die. For the blood is the life.”

Droplets of the blood splashed on her cheek, mixing with her tears of terror and shame.

Renfield was aware of the old man Seward brought to see Lucy, a short, sturdy septuagenarian with
long white hair that hung to his shoulders and a jaw like a pugnacious bulldog’s. He guessed it was Dr.
Van Helsing, whom Hennessey had spo-ken of as Seward’s teacher and master: “Weird old sod, and
studies every spook and fairy-tale like they was Freud and Char-cot,” the Irishman said, when he came
in to check on Renfield a few days after Renfield’s conversation with Langmore about mothers-in-law.
“Couldn’t stick it, myself. Just give me the facts, and keep the metaphysics out of it.”

Renfield had read Van Helsing’s work since the Dutchman’s original studies of Chinese and Indian
healing practices in the forties, and had been deeply impressed. But since Hennessey had never
demonstrated much interest even in such facts as how many grains of chloral hydrate might be lethal to a
screaming patient, or whether there was any way of dealing with recalci-trance other than the truncheon,
Renfield didn’t attempt to answer. He only continued to stare from his window at the dark-ening evening
sky.

Hennessey went on, “It’s his idea old John stay with her tonight-she was took bad last night,
seemingly-though the dear Lord knows what he might do if she’s took sick again. Wave a bit of incense
about the bed, maybe, or chant a wee verse of the Mass?” He shrugged, and scratched his belly, under
the gaudy waistcoat dribbled with food-stains. “It’s what you’d ex-pect, of a man who says he’s a doctor
of the mind and then goes and marries a woman who’s been locked in a padded room for the past
decade. So how’s the flies this evenin’?” He hadn’t no-ticed that Renfield had ceased to trap flies three
days before, when Wotan’s concerted attacks on Lucy had redoubled.

In too many dreams had the flies had Lucy’s face. Or Vixie’s.

“In rollicking good health,” replied Renfield, which sent Hen-nessey away in peals of laughter and a
strong odor of gin. Renfield returned to his window, gazing out at the darken-ing sky.

Seward was gone all night. Renfield saw the smart black car-riage turn in at the gates with the coming
of dawn. As luck would have it, it was one of the days when Farley, one of the charity patients and a
man of erratic violence, went on the ram-page; Renfield could hear him screaming from the other side of
the building, and the spreading uproar as the other patients be-came frightened and took up the din.
Renfield shook his head, feeling nothing but pity for those poor weak-minded souls, and indeed for poor
Dr. Seward, who looked worn to a rag when he made rounds early in the afternoon.

But shortly before sunset Seward had his rather pedestrian team of brown geldings harnessed to the fly
again, and Renfield watched him drive off through the gates and along the London road. And he felt, as
the sun sank, the sullen boil of anger that he knew came from outside himself: Wotan waking in his coffin,
in the dark of the ruined chapel. Wotan reaching out with his hand, with his mind, with all his dark
powers, to take the woman for himself.

Seward did not come back that night, nor in the morning. In his dreams Renfield had seen him, sleeping
on the mauve silk cushions of a little couch beside a parlor fire, while visible through the doorway in the
next room the shadow of Wotan had bent over the weeping Lucy. And Renfield, too, had wept. When
Seward returned late in the afternoon, and made a con-scientious round of the patients before dark, he
was as white and shaky as if the Traveler had drunk his blood as well as hers.

The thought of this possibility filled Renfield with horror. Would Seward, then, be able to see into his

dreams, his thoughts, as Wotan did? Wotan sleeping in his coffin, gorged with blood? Renfield dared not
ask.

Seward drove away the following afternoon, and though he returned that evening, after that Renfield
saw little of him, save in the tangled torment of dreams. He saw confused images of Seward operating to
transfuse blood from old Van Helsing’s arm into Lucy’s, Lucy who lay white and gasping, like a corpse
al-ready, among a bower of garlic-blossoms twined around the posts of her bed. Saw Lucy sleeping, her
blonde hair tumbled about her, the white flowers of the garlic-plant filling the room like funerary garlands.
Sometimes Van Helsing, sometimes Sew-ard, slept in the chair at her bedside, and in the darkness of her
flower-draped window a black shape beat against the panes.

You must kill him, you know, whispered Wotan in Renfield’s ear, as the sun set over London and
Renfield stood at his window, wondering what Catherine and Vixie were doing, and how he could
accomplish his mission and return to them if he did not go back to eating spiders and flies. So far he’d
managed to hold his hunger at bay.

Wotan was angry. Renfield had felt that anger growing, for four days now. In the darkness he’d seen
the black bat fly from the window of Carfax chapel; he’d seen it come back, before the breaking day.
And Wotan was hungry, frantic hunger that Ren-field understood as he understood the hammering of the
blood in his neck-vein. Hunger for life, multiplied beyond Renfield’s own overwhelming hunger a
thousand times.

You must kill him, said Wotan again, and the hazy autumn evening began to blur around Renfield. In
his ears throbbed the music of Act Two of Die Walkure, Wotan’s voice commanding Brunhilde to slay
Sigmund, and somewhere in the deeps of his mind he thought he could also hear the wild howling of a
wolf. What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind? Then the music faded, and
only that terrible whispering voice remained. Without the glory and the beauty, with only hunger and the
lust for power. I will open the way for you, as I open the ways for all my servants.

You have not been a good master to me, Renfield whispered, and the crimson weight of those alien
thoughts crushed him, hurt him. Darkness with teeth.

A master is not a good master or a bad master-he is Master. And he is obeyed. This man must
not leave this house tonight.

Renfield whispered, No, Master.

And as the sun went down, he dreamed-it had to be a dream, he thought later-that Wotan stood
beside him in his cell, formed up out of the gathering shadows, the last gleams of the reflected light
burning in his red eyes. And as Renfield knelt to him, Wotan put his hand on Renfield’s head, and
Renfield felt himself transformed into a wolf, as it was within Wotan’s power to transform himself into a
wolf. Far away he heard another wolf howling, and when he howled in reply, Simmons came run-ning.
With a snarl, Renfield the Wolf sprang on him, knocking him back against the wall.

Fleet as a wolf, hungry as a wolf, Renfield raced along the hallway, down the stair, to Seward’s study,
where he smelled that the doctor would be. Wild wolf-thoughts dazzled his brain as he slammed the door
open, plunged in, knife in hand that he’d snatched from the dining-room sideboard (No, that’s got to be
wrong, he thought. I’m a wolf and I haven’t any hands.)

Seward was behind his worktable making entries in the day-book and Renfield crossed the room in
two strides and sprang straight over the table at him, slashing with his knife. The dream wasn’t very clear,

Renfield thought later-later when he woke up, in the strait-jacket again and chained to the wall of the
padded cell. Seward took a glancing blow with the knife on his left arm, then punched Renfield straight
and hard in the jaw with his right hand, sending him sprawling backward. Renfield lay, dazed, try-ing to
work out how a man could punch a wolf in the jaw even in a dream, watching the blood stream down
Seward’s fingers, splatter to the threadbare and rather vulgar Wilton carpet upon which Renfield lay.

Attendants’ voices in the hall. Simmons-the moron!-and Hardy. Seward went to the door to speak to
them, and Renfield, his hunger overwhelming him, crawled to the side of the table where Seward had
been sitting, and licked up the blood. Drink, and you shall never die, Wotan had whispered to Lucy, as
his own blood dribbled down to her chalky lips. The blood is the life. The blood is the life.

As he hung on the wall of the padded cell, his brain swimming in a fog of chloral hydrate, Renfield’s
dream altered. He was a wolf indeed, running through the streets of London, running free and terrified.
Smells hammered him, soaked his brain in the stenches of dung and coal-smoke, and the smaller curs of
the al-leyways fled yowling from his great swift-moving gray shadow.

He knew where he was going. His Master had commanded, and though he did not understand-though
terror filled him at this unknown noisy terrible place-still he had to do as his Mas-ter said. What other
are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

Renfield at least knew the house, for he’d seen it in other dreams. His wolf-self-or that other, genuine
wolf whose mind he sensed in his dream-loped along the countrified high road, through the rambling
gardens of the little villa, and Renfield saw the house ahead of him and saw no lights, no movement. He
was aware, however, of the almost-silent winnowing of leathery wings in the dark behind his head. Was
aware of his Master, the Master who had called on him, finally, after weeks of silence … The Master
who would not forget him again.

The tall French windows that looked onto the garden were draped with flowers of garlic, as Renfield
had seen in earlier dreams, like the decorations of a funeral. He knew their pres-ence enraged his
Master, and he knew that he-the wolf whose dream he shared-was sent to open the way into the house,
to tear down these fragile poisonous weeds so that the Master could pass through. Renfield’s mind was
the mind of the wolf, and that mind was clouded with the Master’s commands. He smashed through the
glass of the French door, saw with his night-seeing eyes the two women lying on the bed, clutching one
another in terror, the older in the younger’s arms.

The older woman half sat up, white hair streaming down the shoulders of her dressing-gown. Her
mouth opened, but no sound came forth but a sort of gurgling gasp. The wolf–Renfield-howled, and
howled again, and the older woman fell back, the younger pressing her hands to her mouth, staring with
eyes enormous and bruised with loss of blood. As the wolf with-drew its head in pain from the shattered
glass, Renfield heard the girl crying, “Mother! Mother!” Her voice was weak, thin, and indescribably
fragile in the silence of the dark garden, the empty house.