Slave Of Dracula (20 page)

They’ll never find us, he said to her, and she’d only shaken her head, her long red hair shining in
the soft glow of the gas-lights.

They will. They will.

The dreams turned to horror after that.

He had dreamed he’d gone mad, had been locked up in an asylum full of fools, only the fools weren’t in
the cells, but run-ning the place. Drunken fools like Hennessey, or stubborn small–minded hidebound
ones like Seward. Fools who couldn’t see the larger world if it loomed before them and bit them and
drank their blood.

Catherine, he whispered, as he ran-ran lightly, half-invisible, like a great jumble of flying newspaper
whipped along by the wind, as a man would run in dreams. Homebound clerks turned to stare at him as
they clambered aboard omnibuses or clustered on the dark wind-swept corners; costermongers and
tattered women in black shawls shrank back into the glare of lights from the public-houses and cafes.
Catherine, I’m coming! He passed through the dark of Regent’s Park, the bright-lit streets of the West
End, dodging hansoms and growlers, omnibuses and car-riages. In Hyde Park the cats fled from him,
and dogs barked wildly at his passing shadow.

Kensington. Abingdon Road. The dark brick face of the house that belonged on paper to Mr.
Marshmire-“Oh, pick a gloomier name, why don’t you?” Catherine had teased, laugh-ing. Lightless
windows. Locked doors.

She was inside. Renfield knew they were both inside.

On either side the tall pleasant houses were gas-lit. The au-tumn evening, still early, was cold. Renfield

was conscious of the chill without particularly minding it, though he remembered how cold he had found
England, how bone-gnawingly damp, after the languid heat of India. He had heard it said-by the
Countess?–that vampires could not enter any place unless and until they had been invited, but it was his
house, he had bought it.

Was that why vampires generally started their feeding on their own families?

He stood on the steps, looking down at the windows of the kitchen areaway and up at those of the
drawing-room above, dark as the eyes of a dead man. He had run from Highgate across London to
Kensington, close to five miles. Yet he felt no weariness.

Only enormous hunger. He passed into the house.

It was as he remembered it, that last night he’d been there. They’d bought it furnished from its previous
owners, lest Geor-gina or Lady Brough grow suspicious. Vixie had whooped with laughter over the
old-fashioned furniture, the stuffy Biblical oleo-graphs on the walls. To Vixie it had all been a giant
adventure, a gamine delight in outfoxing the grandmother and aunts she had always loathed.

Renfield called out, “Vixie!” into the stuffy silence of the dark house, but received no reply. “Catherine!”

Only the smell of dust, and of mice, and of rooms unaired. Renfield climbed the stairs. On the second
floor, Vixie’s water-colors hung in the drawing-room, her sitar propped on the window-seat where she’d
used to practice it. The bright cushions Catherine had made bloomed like incongruous flowers on the
black slick horsehair of the previous tenant’s chairs. On the third floor, Catherine’s yellow silk kimono lay
across the foot of the unmade bed, and Renfield knelt, pressed the sheets to his face, then the silk,
inhaling the lingering scents of her perfume, her body, her hair. It was as if she had lain there only last
night. But he knew it had been longer than that.

On the third floor, Vixie’s bed was likewise disordered in the small room that had been hers. Her brush
still lay on the little dresser, and the jeweled combs she’d used to put up her hair. Lavender kid gloves,
like withered flowers. The torn-up pieces of the letter that Bolton, Renfield’s solicitor, had delivered to
her from her grandmother Brough, still on the floor where she’d left them.

Renfield picked one up, saw in the hated handwriting the name of Madame Martine’s Select Academy
for Young Females, in Lausanne, and the phrase, “. . . Wormidge will be by in the morning to take you to
the station . . .”

Slowly, Renfield descended the stairs.

The other papers Bolton had delivered from Wormidge lay where he’d left them back in April, on the
marble-topped dresser in the hall.

He called out softly, “Catherine?” and only the rustle of mice answered him, from the open pantry door.

Through the pantry he descended to the kitchen. It’s a cold night, he thought. The servants might
have the night off. They’ll be keeping warm in the kitchen.

Mice scattered at his tread; the stink of them rose to him like a cloud. Split bins, chewed-open sacks,
apples and cheese long spoiled, the nasty stink of the mortality of all things. Renfield looked about him at
the dark clammy room, the unwashed dishes piled on the counters-had Catherine fired the servants
altogether? His gaze went three times past the little door that led to the sub-cellar, because of course
there was no reason for them to go down there.

But it always came back.

It was locked. The key was in the pocket of his jacket, with the handkerchief and the bus tickets. He
could have passed through the keyhole or under the door in a mist, but he un-locked it, and descended
the slippery damp steps.

They didn’t want to be found, he told himself. They don’t dare be found. That’s why they’re
sleeping in the sub-cellar.

So Georgina won’t find them.

So Lady Brough won’t find them. So they won’t take Vixie away.

“Catherine?” he said softly, hoping against hope that his dream had been, in fact, only a dream.

But it hadn’t.

He’d known that, from the moment he’d opened his eyes in the tomb.

They were where he’d left them. There was a table in the middle of the room where boots or silverware
could be cleaned, or wine transferred from bottles to decanter. That night back in April he’d laid every
tablecloth he could find on it, before bring-ing them down there to sleep, and the damask cloths were
brown and crusted with the fluids of their mortality. The whole hot summer’s worth of dead flies crunched
like little curls of parched paper beneath his feet. It had been six months, but he could still distinguish
between them, by Catherine’s beautiful red hair, and Vixie’s dark curls.

Renfield knelt at his wife’s side, gathered up a double-handful of her hair, and kissed it. “I’m sorry,
Catherine,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Standing again, he took off his jacket, pushed up his shirt-sleeve, to tear open the vein of his arm with
his nails, as Nomie had done, and Dracula. He held his arm over Catherine’s mouth and let the blood drip
down onto her lips-or what was left of her lips. The coroner had taken away his notebooks, but he knew
exactly how many flies he’d consumed-three thousand, four hundred and eight-plus nine hundred spiders,
six hundred and fifteen moths, seven sparrows, and four mice, and a little tiny bit of Dr. Seward’s blood,
though that probably didn’t count. Surely life enough?

Wasn’t it? Please?

He didn’t know how long after that it was-not midnight, he didn’t think-when he felt the cold whiff of
mist flowing down the sub-cellar stairs. He was still weeping, and did not turn around. He knew it was
Nomie.

She said, “I am sorry, Ryland.”

“I hoped it was a dream,” he said, after some time. “,Just a dream I had. Part of my madness, like the
letters I wrote her. Six months now I’ve hoped.” He turned then and looked at her, a blurred pale shape
through the blindness of his tears. “Can you do it? I’ve only eaten flies-mice-moths … You’ve consumed
life, real life, men and women. You are strong . . .”

“No one of us is that strong, Ryland. Not my lord Dracula, not those dark ancients that haunt the
mountains of Thibet and the deserts of Egypt. We are the Angels of Death, and the Angels of
Un-Death-the Choosers of the Slain, you have called us. We can avert death, but we cannot bring them
back through the Gate, once they have passed through to the Other Side.”

She laid her hand on Renfield’s as she spoke, and turning, he caught her in his arms and clung to her
like a drowning man, weeping against the golden silk of her hair.

“They were going to take Vixie,” he stammered, his body shaking with sobs. The words came out of
him as if, like a sick man, his body had to expel them or die. “Lady Brough-her vile solicitors-Catherine’s
hag of a sister … They dug up old scandals, old rumors about me when I was in India. They were having
me declared unfit to care for my own daughter! And be-cause Catherine was a free soul and had lived an
unconventional life, long before she met me, she, too, was to be disbarred from ever seeing Vixie, was to
be cut out of the family. That was what they wanted. Her money, and control of mine! I did it only to
keep Vixie from them,-to keep them from killing her by inches, smothering her spirit, turning her into one
of them and worse in their damned Select Academies! I would rather be dead, Papa, she said, the night
those damned letters came, those dawned pa-pers … The night Bolton brought them to the house. I
would rather be dead. Those were her very words.”

“And you killed her?”

Renfield nodded. “I was in red rage. Bolton had the temerity, the nerve, to follow me to this house. I
knocked his brains out with the fire-shovel, there in the hall. My mind was swimming with the smell of his
blood. Blood has always … had that effect upon me,” he added, a little hesitantly. “In India I used to kill
… kill … snakes, and . . . and mongeese … and drink their blood. I came upstairs and she was weeping,
weeping herself sick on her bed, and I … I did it very gently. Broke her neck … held her against me as
she died, as she … she passed beyond where they could get her, change her, make her what she would
hate to be. She was such a free soul, Vixie. Such a beautiful soul. Then Catherine came in, and screamed
. . .”

His arms tightened around Nomie, and he wept afresh. “I thought if I ate enough flies, consumed
enough life . . .”

“You did what you could,” None whispered, and held him close as fresh gusts of weeping shook him
like a storm-tossed oak. “You only did as you knew how. But it is done. You did your best, and your
bravest, but they cannot be brought back.”

“Then send me with them!” sobbed Renfield. “Let me go, too. They were my life!”

“And your life is over.” At the sound of that deep cold con-tralto, Nomie and Renfield broke apart.
The Countess and Sarike stood on the steps of the sub-cellar, the garnets in the Countess’s hair twinkling
darkly, like droplets of blood. “You are now one of us.”

Revulsion seared through Renfield like a bitter poison. Shov-ing Nomie from him, he snatched up from
its shelf the long, sharp chisel that the Cook had used to open crates, drove it with all his strength toward
his chest …

And doubled over, paralyzed with shock, before the iron touched his body. Gasped as if his brain had
been sliced apart with broken glass, as if his body were turned inside-out by icy claws, and in his mind as
well as in his ears he heard the Count-ess’s voice: “Don’t.”

Sobbing, he tried to press the chisel toward his flesh again and pain-and something worse and stronger
than pain-closed around his body and his mind like a crushing vise.

She said, “Drop it.”

He was back within her mind, where he had clung like a ter-rified child while his body died. He saw his
hands open. Heard the iron clatter on the flagstone floor.

Sounds came out of his mouth that weren’t words and were too suffocated to be cries. Still her grip

tightened, her rage in-supportable, slicing him as a grape is sliced by the sharpest of sil-ver razors. At her
will, he dropped to his knees-it was worse than dying, a thousand times worse-at her will, he sank to his
belly on the wet stone floor. At her will, he crawled to her, where she stepped down to the bottom of the
stairs-hating himself, hating her, fighting and sweating and hurting every inch of the way and not able to
keep himself from doing exactly as she willed-and kissed her feet.

He wanted to bite them. To tear her Achilles’ tendons with his teeth. She was aware of his want,
knowing him as intimately as if they had been lifelong lovers, and laughed at him; laughed harder as she
made him bring up his own arm and tear at the bare flesh of his hand, worrying it like a dog.

“Be glad it’s your own flesh I’m making you eat,” said her voice in his ears, “and not that of your wife
and your daughter.” He knew she could do it. When she let him go, he lay on the floor in smears of his
own blood and wept.

“Go on,” jeered the Countess, “weep. Weep now until all the tears are out of you, once and for all.
You are now our servant, Renfield. You were the one who clung to us, through the dark ness of death. It
was for this we kept you back from passing through the Gate. Do you understand?”

He could barely get the words out. “I understand, Lady.”

“You will do as you are bid, for you will find that you can-not do otherwise.”

He would have kept his silence but couldn’t. The words were squished out of him as if he were a frog
upon which she trod. “Yes, Lady.” To the bottom of his soul he understood then how they hated Dracula,
hated him with the hatred of intimacy, and why they had pursued him to this land. Why they would never,
could never, leave him.

Then like an icy storm-blast the room grew cold above him. He raised his head in shock and terror
even as the Countess turned, shrinking back from the column of darkness that loomed behind them,
above them on the steps.

“And you, my beautiful ones,” said a harsh, deep voice, “could do with a lesson yourselves, to do as
you have been bid.” And like the fall of night, Dracula came down into the cellar.

***

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

4 October

My most beloved Catherine, My most beloved wife-

I will be leaving England soon. In my misguided efforts to somehow make right the terrible wrong that I
did you, I have put myself into the thrall of monsters.