Slave Of Dracula (15 page)

Yes, thought Seward, looking down at the moss-stain on Lucy’s sleeve, the blood-spot on her breast.
Not to be sure … Not to ever be sure who or what that white form was that he’d glimpsed last night,
flitting among the graves with the sleeping child in her arms.

A part of him thought, But Art will never know …

But he’d nursed troubled minds long enough to be aware that there was no certainty whatever that
Arthur wouldn’t come to this tomb himself. Would sneak here, drawn as if against his will, too ashamed
to breathe a word of his secret to his friends …

And find what?

And what would that do to him, make of him, thereafter? Es-pecially coming, as it did, in tandem with
his father’s sudden death from stroke?

All that awareness was in Van Helsing’s voice, too. “I know that he must pass through the bitter waters
to reach the sweet,” said the old man softly. “He must have one hour that will make the very face of
heaven grow black to him; then we can act for good all around, and send him peace.”

Seward helped Van Helsing fold the coffin’s lead lining back over Lucy’s face and upper body; helped
him replace the heavy lid. He felt numb and strange, as if everyone around him had suddenly begun
speaking a foreign language, and wondered if this was what it was like for the men and women in his
charge, when first they began to go mad. Since his smallest childhood he had quested to know Why, and
had followed those longings down the road of logic and science. Indeed, only on meeting Lucy had he
begun to doubt that all things could be explained in terms of matter, logic, and the physiology of the
nervous system. Could the Un-Dead be some physical phenomenon unknown as yet to science? Some
illness, some condition of the flesh or the brain?

Van Helsing didn’t seem to think so.

Was Van Helsing mad? Seward wondered again.

Was he himself?

Through the night as Van Helsing kept watch in the graveyard, he asked himself the same question.

Am I mad?

He’d asked himself that at intervals throughout his long life, and had never come to a satisfactory
conclusion.

He leaned his back to one of the pale-barked sychamores that grew near the Westenra tomb in
Hampstead Cemetery, touched with uneasy fingers the thick links of silver chain he’d wrapped around his
throat. He wore them on his wrists as well-a woman in Thibet had instructed him in this-and in his hand
he carried n rosary twined with garlic flowers. He did not fear Lucy Westenra so much, for he had
carefully chinked up every crack in the tomb’s door with a paste of flour and water, mixed with
frag-ments of a consecrated Host, and had hung another crucifix over the keyhole of the door.

But he guessed that Lucy did not always hunt alone.

He shuddered, as Lucy’s sweetly beautiful face returned to his mind.

He had encountered the Un-Dead before, in Egypt, in Con-stantinople, and in Paris; had heard of them
in India and Thibet. Three times had he found himself, looking down into their faces as they slept after
their kills-one of those had been a woman he’d known in life. And always it was the same.

They were so beautiful.

He knew what they were. He had seen them kill, and seen the chaos of horror and doubt they left in
their wake. He had seen them prey on those closest to them, those whose grief made them willing to
believe whatever their returning beloveds told them. He had seen them make others of their own kind,
through an exchange of blood with chosen victims, victims who did not merely die but became predators
in their turn. He had seen their callousness and absolute selfishness as they chose the death of others over
their own discomfort, their own craving for blood.

It was unspeakable, that he should look on the faces of vam-pire women, and feel what he felt.

Desire so overwhelming as to almost blot out thought.

He closed his eyes, then opened them again almost at once. Fool, these thoughts will only weaken
you. You close your eyes, you open them to see Him, to see Dracula, this Dracula that Jonathan
Harker write of, Jonathan Harker that marry the sweet Madame Mina, who share with me the
letters Miss Lucy write. He tried to push from his mind the admission of wanting Lucy, to bury it under
loathing of what she had become, under ironic amusement at the recollection of poor Arthur
Holm-wood’s passionate ramblings about how the transfusion of his blood into Lucy’s veins had made
them husband and wife in the sight of God.

And am I, then, too, her husband? And your friends John and Quincey? Are we all co-husbands
together in a harem?

He tried to picture Lucy as he knew she must be now, a beau-tiful body inhabited by a demon, a
damned soul, that lured chil-dren to her and drank their blood. That would not stop with children; that

was growing stronger each night.

It did not drive from his mind the white-hot flash of desire that had pierced him like a swordblade,
when she’d opened those smoky demon eyes and smiled at Arthur on her deathbed: Oh my love, I am
so glad you have come! Kiss me …

It did not drive from his mind his utter loathing at himself. It did not root out his fear that one day that
blind lust would prove too much for his strength, and would lead him, too, in ;pite of all he knew, into the
red nightmare of Un-Death.

And that he would enjoy it.

He drew in deep breaths of the cold air. It was autumn, the threshold of winter. Though Hampstead
Hill lay far from the Thames, the sooty reek of its fogs drifted through the graveyard, and through the
trees southward he could see the dull glow of the city’s gas-lamps. Here in the cemetery it was quiet, the
bird-less quiet of winter, save for the soft, terrible scratching at the marble door of the tomb.

Man is born to Sin, as the sparks fly upward. His friend and student John, who did such good work
among those troubled in their minds, might have been able to explain this curious, des-perate lust that
seemed to operate in tandem with his genuine affection for Lucy and for her friends, his deep horror and
pity !<,r the situation in which they all found themselves. John had proclaimed often that he held no belief
in Sin, nor in the doc-trines of Predestination and Fate.

Charcot was his god, and Bernheim and that young Austrian Freud. In them he would doubtless have
found some rational ex-planation for the feelings that, despite all he could do, scorched Van Helsing with
shame.

Or perhaps, he thought, I am only mad.

But mad or sane, it did not change what he knew to be facts, which others these days ignored, or
walked in ignorance of. That humankind was not alone upon the Earth.

That there were indeed more things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in the philosophy of
Hamlet’s friend Hora-tio or of anyone else: hidden powers whose aims and percep-tions were as
different from those of humankind as humans’ were from those of the sponges beneath the sea.

That the Un-Dead walked, as they had long walked. And that their bite would spread their condition to
others, if they were not stopped.

***

R.M.R.’s notes

28 September

27 flies, 9 spiders, 4 moths, 1 mouse

-19 flies, 4 moths ? spiders

-12 spiders ? mouse

Seward back, but so distracted as to be completely unaware of the mouse (a gift, I am sure, from
Nomie, my faithful little Nomie.) He is gray-faced and shaken, like a man who has looked down into
Hell.

How can Hell have shaken him? He rules one of its tinier Circles. Does he not yet know this?

28 September-night

Seward departed shortly before nine.

***

In the darkness of his dream, Renfield saw again Lucy Westenra’s tomb. Night lay thick on London,
thicker still on this sub-urban wilderness of headstones and tombs. He could smell the soot-laden fog,
hear the whooping screech of the owl, the fran-tic squeak of the mouse it seized. Taste the blood.

Four men came over the cemetery wall, Seward and old Van Helsing and two others. The younger of
these two-the youngest of the four-followed hard on Van Helsing’s heels as the old mail unlocked the
marble door of that ghostly pillared sepul-chre, a golden-haired godling in black, like a young Siegfried.
He looked inquiringly at the old professor as they gathered around the twin coffins, then at Seward. To
Seward, Van Helsing said, “You were with me here yesterday. Was the body of Miss Lucy in that
coffin?”

“It was.”

“You hear.” Van Helsing turned to the other two, Siegfried and a tall, stringy man with the faded
remains of a deep tan on his long-jawed face, a long sandy mustache and a rough blue greatcoat such as
Renfield had seen Americans wear, who got them second-hand from their Army. “And yet there is no
one who does not believe with me.” With that rather confusing dou-ble negative, Van Helsing took his
screwdriver, and unfastened the lid of the coffin. Siegfried-who was, Renfield guessed, Sew-ard’s good
friend and successful rival Arthur Holmwood, the new Lord Godalming-and the American both backed
away a step, and in the glow of the dark-lantern the American bore, Renfield could see they were
steeling themselves for the stink of a body ten days dead.

He could see their faces change when they smelled no such thing, even before they stepped forward to
look.

“Professor, I answered for you,” said the American. “Your word is all I want. I wouldn’t ask such a
thing ordinarily-I wouldn’t so dishonor you as to imply a doubt; but this is a mystery that goes beyond any
honor or dishonor. Is this your doing?”

Van Helsing replied, with no more emotion in his voice than if the question had been one of hat-size
rather than honor, “I swear to you by all that I hold sacred that I have not removed nor touched her.”
And he explained, with the calm of a man in the witness-box, the events of two nights before. “Last night

there was no exodus, so tonight before the sundown I took away my garlic and other things. And so it is
we find this coffin empty. So” -he shut the slide of his lantern, leaving them in the dark -“now to the
outside.”

Renfield turned in his sleep, whimpered with fright. Someone was watching, someone was listening,
someone standing very near them in the darkness. Someone who could smell the blood in the veins of the
four men, who could see them clearly, even when the heavy scudding clouds concealed the moon.

Someone who drew back, even as Godalming and the Amer-ican leaned forward to see what Van
Helsing was doing as he worked his flour paste through his fingers again, caulked up the chinks in the
door. “Great Scott,” said the American, pulling a foot-long bowie knife from a sheath at his belt to cut
tobacco for himself, “is this a game?”

“It is.”

“What is that which you are using?” asked Godalming, and Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he
answered.

“The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indul-gence.”

You mean you have a priest who believes, like you, in the power of the Un-Dead,
thought Renfield. He knew perfectly well that no Pope, nor any member of the organized Church, would
issue an Indulgence for such use of the consecrated wafer. By their silence-Godalming, as a true-blooded
scion of an En-glish noble house, was by definition Church of England, and most Americans couldn’t
have described the difference between :I Catholic and a Druid-both men were struck dumb with
su-perstitious reverence: the American even endeavored to spit his tobacco in a quiet and seemly
manner. In the darkness the watcher-watchers, Renfield could feel their minds-stirred, then stilled. They
could feel Lucy’s approach long before Van Helsing whispered, “Ach!”

Moonlight flickered on something white in the avenue of yews. A child cried out, in fear or pain. Or
perhaps, thought Renfield, deep in the well of sleep, it was his own cry that he heard. The light of Van
Helsing’s lantern fell on Lucy’s face, on the crimson glisten of blood on her mouth, which trailed down to
dribble her white gown.

“Arthur.” With a casual motion she threw to the ground the child she had been carrying in her arms,
held out her hands. The men standing ranged before the tomb might have seen only the demon fire in her
eyes, but Renfield thought, too, that she was still a revenant, still tangled in the madness of new death and
animal hunger.

His own mouth burned with the memory of the spiders he’d eaten-each sweetly charged with the
flickering energy of the flies-with the murky deliciousness of the blood he’d sucked out of the mouse that
morning. Had Langmore come then and tried to take it from him, he thought he, too, would have turned
on him, with just such wildness in his eyes.

“Come to me, Arthur,” she whispered, and moved forward, her bare arms outstretched. “Leave these
others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you.” The words whispered like a half-heard echo of
dreams of passion, never filled … Never filled by Arthur, in any case. “Come, husband . . .”

With a desperate sob, young Lord Godalming opened his arms for her, but Van Helsing-as Renfield
knew he would–stepped between them, holding out a small gold crucifix upon a silver chain. Lucy drew
back with a cry, and Renfield felt it again, the minds of those who watched from the darkness be-yond
the tomb. The shiver, at the burning energy that focussed in sacred things. It was as if, seeing with their

eyes, he saw the deadly glow that could sear otherworldly flesh, shining forth not only from the crucifix
but from the caulking that sealed the door of the tomb.

Lucy swung around a few feet from the door, mouth open in rage to show blood on the long white
teeth, trapped and furious. In a quiet voice Van Helsing asked, “Answer me, o my friend! Am I to
proceed with my work?”

Godalming slipped to his knees to the damp gravel of the path, buried his face in his hands. By the light
of Van Helsing’s lantern Renfield saw Seward’s face, as he looked down on the golden head of the
younger man. Godalming’s voice was barely audible. “Do as you will, friend. Do as you will.”