Slave Of Dracula (14 page)

Yet I trembled as I gave them the instructions about contact-ing solicitors and bankers-as I tremble
now, at the thought that somehow, the count may learn that I have met with his wives, and taken their
side against him.

“What do you fear?” demanded the Countess coldly. “He has deserted you, as you said. He has gone
away to London, to be with his new little bride, his little blonde snow-maiden.” Her lifted lip showed the
glint of a pointed fang. “In a week he will not recall your name.”

“If he has not forgotten it already,” I said. I took a deep breath, and added, “I trust that you ladies will
not similarly forget?”

“Because you know the truth of who `Moira Tentrees’ and her `daughter’ are,” asked the Countess,
looking up at me with those cold dark eyes, “and who it is who will actually be living at 15 Prince of
Wales Road?”

Nomie replied in her soft voice, “Because even as we have the right to demand protection and care of
our lord, so now Ryland has the right to demand it of his ladies. Is it not so?”

The Countess Elizabeth raised one brow, black and sharp as a night-moth’s antenna, and regarded her
sister-wife with specu-lation, but Nomie did not back down. At length the Countess turned to me and
said, “Indeed you shall find that it is so. We shall not forget, Ryland Renfield.”

“And you will send me things to eat?” I pressed. “Flies, spi-ders, sparrows-anything that has life, that I
can eat and grow strong, even as you grow strong from the drinking of blood.”

She looked startled, then smiled sidelong, like the Serpent in the Garden. “Is that truly your wish?”

I nodded earnestly, and her smile widened, but it was not a pretty smile.

“We will be far from you for a time, my servant, but yes, one of us will come and make sure that you
have your heart’s fill of the vermin of the earth. Does that content you?”

I said, “It does.”

They faded then, dissolving into moonlight, and I dropped to my knees on the floor again and remained
there long, shudder-ing with waves of shock and fear. The thought of going against Dracula, of playing a
double game with his rebellious Wives, petrifies me. Yet he has forgotten me, he has not fulfilled any of
the prayers I have prayed to him.

And I need strength, my beloved, I shall need strength so badly, if all is to come well for us and for our
beloved child! I cannot let her be taken from us, cannot let your mother and your sister drag her away
and drink her spirit, vampire-like, un-til like the victims of the vampires she turns into one of them!

A curse on money, without which those two hags would have no use for Vixie-without which those
three night-hags who stood here in the moonlight would have no use for me!

Yet they were beautiful, and as I write this, their faces swim before my mind again, two dark and one
fair, and all perilous as the Angels of Death.

Oh, Catherine, how I long for your advice in this matter! I pray I have done well, and I think that I can
control them, can obtain from them what I must have! But I have only done as I must, as I could! How I
long only to see your face again, to touch your hands, to hear your voice, the voice of a true woman
instead of the cold voices of Dracula’s demon Wives!

I kiss this letter, begging all the gods above that it should come to you; praying that when I sleep
tonight, it will be your lovely face that I see in my dreams.

Your own, forever,

R.M.R.

R.M.R.’s notes

23 September

25 flies, 10 spiders, 6 moths

24 September

28 flies, 4 spiders, 10 moths

-16 flies ? spiders

Sparrow-Langmore took it from me. What use has he for a sparrow?

25 September

24 flies, 8 spiders

-18 flies ? spiders

Last night as the spiders came crawling from the cracks of the walls, I chanced to look down into the
garden and saw Nomie there, golden hair bleached to ivory by moonlight. I think she saw me for she
lifted her hand.

When I slept, I dreamed of Lucy, rising from her tomb. Her eyes are blank, and glow from within with
the red flame of the demon. She wears her soiled grave-shroud as she moves through the quiet streets
around Hampstead Heath in the darkness, as if unconscious of how she would appear were any to see
her, and she sings, soft and sweet, to the wretched little children who live in poverty there, whose
parents-if they have parents-are too gone in gin to care whether they come in at night or not. She took a
child, a boy of six or so, cradled him in her arms as she bit into his throat. When she walked away,
leaving him under some gorse bushes on the heath, blood spotted the bosom of her white shroud.

No more moths-Seward has had the broken pane repaired.

***

“What is wrong with her?” Renfield asked, when that night he managed to work the window-bolt
through the bars, and Nomie walked up from the garden-as light and as casually upon the air as if
walking up a stair-and drifted through the slit and into his room. “I see her in my dreams, and she is like a
sleep-walker, a revenant. Yet you and your sisters-and your lord as well–you speak, and act, and

reason.”

“Now I do.” Nomie held out her finger, and a huge black–winged moth blundered against the
casement, crawled through the gap. She smiled as Renfield took it by the wings and popped it into his
mouth. “When first I wakened from death into Un–Death, I was much the same as she. A part of me
knew what had happened to me, for during all those terrible months when I was a prisoner in his castle,
helpless, separated from my family while he came to me night after night, I knew what would become of
me in the end. But my mind went into retreat, like the poor souls here in Rushbrook House. I hunted,
mostly children, for they have not an adult’s caution and experience to escape. But I do not think I spoke
for almost a year.”

“It is not then because children are weak?” Renfield wiped a dust of wing-scales from his lip.

For answer, Nomie reached out and casually pulled one of the iron bars from the window, then taking
it in her two hands, bent it into a horseshoe. “The living are weak,” she said. “But it takes some of us time
to learn our strength.”

***

R.M.R. ’s notes

26 September

28 flies, 9 spiders

-20 flies ? spiders

Dreamed again of Lucy Westenra. He walked beside her through the dark of Hampstead Heath, a
shadow with burning eyes. Seward seemed better this morning, a little more of his old self, for which the
gods be thanked. One can have only so much of Hennessey’s care. Yet just after noon a cab drove up
the av-enue and Van Helsing sprang out, jaw jutting like a bulldog’s and a newspaper clutched in one
hand. I felt cold to see it, cold with apprehension, knowing what it would mean. When Seward made his
afternoon rounds, he seemed like a man stunned, struck over the head, as if like poor Lucy he had been
wakened into a world and a manner of life that he could not comprehend.

“Gor blimey, what’d that Dutchman tell him?” I heard Sim-mons whisper in the corridor to Hardy, and
Hardy replied, “Not the foggiest. They was shut up in his study and I heard the Doc hit the table like a
gunshot and yell, `Are you mad?’ but I guess after a little discussion they come to the conclusion he
weren’t, ‘cos they’re off to town this evenin’. Good job, too, ‘cos old

Hennessey’s got a couple of payin’ customers comin’ in to have a look at the loonies at eight.” And their
voices drifted away. Later I saw Seward’s fly brought round to the front of the house, and Seward and
Van Helsing get in, their faces like stone.

27 September

25 flies, 13 spiders, 1 moth

***

Seward whispered, “My God,” as the coffin lid was removed and the pale afternoon sunlight fell
through the half-open door of the tomb and across the face of the girl within.

Yesterday, he recalled-the day Van Helsing had brought to him the newspaper, had told him that
fantastic tale of the Un–Dead-had been Lucy’s birthday. She would have turned twenty.

He breathed, “Is it a juggle?” For last night, when Van Helsing had brought him here, the coffin had
been empty. Van Helsing had claimed that the white figure they’d seen among the yew trees at the edge
of the cemetery had been Lucy, and of a certainty they’d found a four-year-old Italian girl asleep and
half-frozen under the bushes where the white figure had cast its burden aside. But there had been on that
tiny neck no such puncture-wounds as had been found on the throats of the other children that had been
attacked over the past week.

No such puncture-wounds as he had seen on Lucy’s throat, in the weeks before she’d died.

They had taken the child to Northern Hospital, and returned to Hampstead Hill Cemetery only in the
golden light of the fol-lowing afternoon.

“Are you convinced now?” asked Van Helsing softly, and when Seward did not reply, reached into the
coffin and drew back the young woman’s delicate lips. “See,” he said, “the teeth are even sharper than
before. With this and this” -the blunt brown finger touched those long canines, upper and lower, like a
wolf’s or a cat’s- “the little children can be bitten. Are you of belief now, friend John?”

Seward backed away, shaking his head. The newspaper had spoken of children being attacked. Van
Helsing had said it was Lucy. Lucy!

Van Helsing whom he trusted, whom he knew to see farther and deeper into the shadows of the human
mind than any scholar of his acquaintance …

“She may have been placed here since last night.”

“Indeed? That is so, and by whom?”

“I don’t know. Someone . . .”

“And yet she has been dead one week. Most peoples in that time would not look so.”

No, thought Seward numbly. Most peoples in that time would not. Already, despite its lining of
lead, the body of Lucy’s mother in the coffin beside hers had begun to faintly stink.

His mind raced back and forth against the truth that he could not look at, like a rat thrown into a rat-pit,
before the dog is turned loose. Beside him, Van Helsing continued to look down at the girl in the coffin,
with grief and a kind of curious, hungry longing in his eyes.

Other than the fact that her breasts did not stir with life’s breath, she looked absolutely as if she were

peacefully asleep. The drawn whiteness of her last few days had vanished. Her lips were red, her cheeks
faintly stained with pink. Still living, she had resembled a corpse. It was her corpse that had the
appear-ance of a living woman.

Dear God, did we bury her alive?

But Seward had seen those bodies, too, after a week. Few medical students hadn’t had some dealings
with the men of the resurrection trade. They “did not look so” either.

“She was bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking,” murmured Van Helsing, and
Seward glanced sharply at him, startled that he should know this. “In trance she died, and in trance she is
Un-Dead, too. Usually when the Un–Dead sleep at home . . .” His gesture took in the plastered walls of
the little tomb, the sealed niches with their marble plaques. “… their face show what they are. But this so
sweet that was when she not Un-Dead, she go back to the nothings of the com-mon dead. There is no
malign there. It make it hard that I must kill her in her sleep.”

Seward drew a deep breath. The words hit his brain like a chisel on rock, with a cold sound and a
sharp pain that changes forever the shape of what has been.

If she were dead already, what would it matter if Van Helsing mutilated her body, as he had proposed
to mutilate it before the funeral-after the cleaning-woman had stolen the golden cross that he had placed
on Lucy’s lips “for protection.”

“I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic,” Van Helsing continued, in answer to Seward’s
whispered question. “And I shall drive a stake through her body.” That at least Seward remembered from
the night before the funeral, the night when Van Helsing had searched Lucy’s room and asked that all her
papers and her mother’s be sealed, for him to read. This morning, when he’d met Van Helsing in the
lobby of the Berke-ley Hotel, where both had spent the night, he’d seen his old mas-ter had a satchel
with him.

But to do this to Lucy …

He looked back at that radiant face, sleeping so gently. So beautiful was she that he had at first not
seen the dirt and moss–stains that marked her white grave-clothes, the small brown spots on its bosom.

Then his gaze returned to Van Helsing’s face. To those clear light-blue eyes, filled with tenderness, pity,
longing … and some-thing else.

Van Helsing tore his gaze from Lucy’s face, turned to Seward with an air of decision. “If I did simply
follow my inclining, I would do now, at this moment, what is to be done.” He wet his lips. “But there are
other things to follow, and things that are a thousand times more difficult in that them we do not know.
This is simple.”

He glanced, quick and sidelong, at Lucy’s face again, as if his eyes were drawn to her against his will.

“We may have to want Arthur,” he said, “and how shall we tell him of this? If you, who saw the wounds
on Lucy’s throat, and saw the wounds so similar on the child’s at the hospital; if you, who saw the coffin
empty last night and full today with a woman who have not change only to be more rose and more
beautiful in a whole week, after she die-if you know of this and know of the white figure who brought the
child to the church-yard, and yet of your own senses you do not believe, how can I expect Arthur, who
know none of those things, to believe?”

He tore himself as if with physical force from the side of the coffin, paced to the door, shoes crunching
the brown leaves they had tracked in from outside. “He doubted me when I took him from her kiss when
she was dying,” he said, as if speaking to himself, and Seward shivered at the memory of Lucy’s face
then, the way her lips drew back from those long, sharp teeth, the gleam of unholy greed in her eyes. “I
know he has forgiven me because in some mistaken idea I have done things that prevent him say
good-by as he ought; and he may think that in some more mistaken idea this woman was buried alive;
and that in most mistake of all we have killed her. Yet he never can be sure, and that is the worst of all.”