Slave Of Dracula (22 page)

She touched my hand, and whispered, “Then give them greet-ing from me, and tell them I am glad, that
they have found the path that leads to happiness.”

And so saying she melted away into the lamplight and the fog. For a moment I heard a winnowing in
the air, as if a bat was flying somewhere in the dark overhead. Then she was gone.

***

Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

7–8 October

My dearest one,

Please forgive my not coming to you tonight. I grudge the hours of my absence, the lost occasion stolen
from our short time together, but now even more than when I hung chained in a strait-waistcoat to the
wall of a padded room, I am not master of my own movements. Nomie begs your pardon for the
necessity, a consideration which I find most sweet in her. She cannot, any more than can I, shirk what it
is required of us both that we do.

Shortly after sunset we journeyed to Purfleet, where the marsh mists required only the very slightest
effort on Nomie’s part to thicken to the point where we could walk up to the windows of the house with
absolute impunity. As the Count had suspected, preparations were clearly afoot to pursue him. Van
Helsing at least knew the significance of the Count’s exchange of blood with Mrs. Harker. By listening in
a meditative state, akin to that of the yogis I met in India, Nomie and I could hear clearly all that passed
in Seward’s study, and pieced together their plan. They will take the boat-train to Paris on the morning of
the 12th, and there board the Orient Express for Varna, to intercept the Russian freighter Czarina
Catherine upon which Dracula’s single remaining earth-box is being shipped.

For a man with a great deal of money-as I now have under the names of Marshmire and Bloem,
complete with all identity papers, Catherine’s accounts as well as my own-it is a simple matter to make
arrangements to have half a dozen of my own earth-boxes, as well as Nomie’s, shipped under reliable
guard to Paris, and put on the same train on the 12th. So now I know, my beloved, how many more
nights I can pass at your side, before we depart!

Once when Mrs. Harker turned toward the windows of Sew-ard’s study, I was shocked to see a great
burn, nearly the size of a penny-piece, glaring crimson on her forehead within the frame of her dark hair. I
must have gasped, for Nomie looked up at me and said, “You did not know, then? Van Helsing burned
her-pressed the consecrated Host into her flesh, which has al-ready begun to assume some of the

qualities of the vampire. Had the changes in her been further advanced, it would have been much worse.”

“How do you know this?” I asked, shocked at the old man’s carelessness, if carelessness it had been.

“I felt it,” whispered Nomie. “In my dreaming I felt it, the af-ternoon that you were buried in Highgate.
We all did. We are bound to her now, you see, as we are bound to the Count. In some sense, our
dreams touch hers, as well as his. And in these dreams sometimes I see her, in the afternoons, alone in
her room here. She will stare and stare at herself in the mirror, then throw herself upon the bed and weep
like a beaten child.” Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact as she said this. Yet I heard in my mind
Vixie’s despairing voice: I would rather be dead, than turn into what they want me to be!

And poor Mrs. Harker has not even that option!

Nomie went on, “When Jonathan, or any of the men comes in, she is all smiles and cheerful calm.”

“Was Jonathan indeed the Count’s solicitor?” I asked, ob-serving that thin, alert man with haggard eyes
and white streaks starting in his hair as he stood talking to Van Helsing, his wife’s hand gently clasped in
his. “I dreamed of him-I think I dreamed of him-at the castle in Transylvania.”

“He was there,” agreed Nomie. “The castle itself stands upon a very high shoulder of rock, overlooking
the Borgo Pass into Bukovina. The only way out of the Castle is through the court yard. Sometimes the
peasants, or the village priest, will place holy things in the road, or on the gates, so that we cannot pass
them. It is a nuisance, no more, of course, as it is just as easy for us to come and go down the wall and
the cliff-face, or to fly in the form of bats. On the night that the Count left-left us there and fled to
England-Harker climbed down the wall and the cliff-face, a very difficult thing for a mortal man.”

She tilted her head on one side, watching from the darkness as Harker escorted his wife from the
study. Nomie must, I real-ized, know this deceptively gentle-looking young man well. He came back in
alone, and out of his wife’s view his face looked as if he’d aged ten years. “There was nothing different
this after-noon?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Van Helsing. “When Madame Mina is un-der the hypnosis, she only hears the lap of the
water on the ship’s hull, and the thud of feet upon the deck above. And so I think it shall be, until the
Czarina Catherine come into Varna, and we shall be there waiting for him, eh?”

Nomie and I traded a glance. “They are using Mrs. Harker to trace him,” I said.

“Be glad then that it is only him, whom she and they seek with her mind.”

The remainder of the night, Nomie and I spent making ar-rangements for our own travel and the
shipment of the boxes of the soil in which we were buried. Nomie, she told me, along with her
sister-wives, had had to dig up her own from the chapel floor of Castle Dracula, the Count alone being
able to command the gypsies who provide what service there is at the Castle.

We met with two gentlemen named Greengage and Bray, ex–soldiers and recommended to me by my
old friend the publican a; the Goat and Compasses as honest roughs, who for a price can be depended
upon to make sure that the earth-boxes in which Nomie and I must be carried across the Channel will in
fact be placed speedily and safely upon the Orient Express. We shall depart for Paris on the 11 th, a day
before Van Helsing and Company. Once in France, we shall of course be able to come and go through
the chinks and holes in the boxes, as we do through the minute holes in the lids of coffins and the doors of
tombs.

Will you, my dearest, forgive me if I make financial arrange-ments for Nomie to have access to our
money, once Van Helsing or one of his myrmidons makes blessed quietus for me? Once that happens,
neither you nor I, nor our dearest Vixie, will ever require a penny, ever again. My little Nornchen has
been so great a help to me, instructing me in the ways of getting along in my new, strange, vampire
state-something the Lady Elizabeth taught her, rather than the Count-that I feel I cannot simply abandon
her on a train in the midst of Bavaria without making some provision for her to return safely to her home.

I beg for-and rely upon-your kindness toward one who has been most generous and helpful to me in a
terribly difficult time. Autumn nights fall quickly, and last long. My deepest regret, in this strange
night-time life that now I lead, is that I will seldom see the flowers you so loved blooming in sunlight, and
never see them again without pain. That I will never catch, through our windows, the burnish of sunset on
your hair. Still every day brings me closer to joining you in fact, never to be parted again.

Your own forever,

R.M.R.

***

R.M.R.’s notes

8 October

18 mice, 10 rats, 20 spiders, 12 moths

9 October

22 mice, 11 rats, 9 spiders, 6 moths

10 October

16 mice, 13 rats, 4 spiders, 9 moths, & Georgina Clayburne

CHAPTER TWENTY -THREE

Renfield heard the key turn in the front-door lock upstairs. Heard the click of shoe-heels-a woman’s
shoes-on the hall floor, and felt the infinitesimal creak of weight mounting the stairs. Sitting quietly beside
the table in the sub-cellar-he’d brought down a chair from the kitchen, clean sheets to lay over the
bodies, ribbons for Vixie’s hair-he debated about locking the sub-cellar door, moving boxes in front of it
and being gone before the visitor came downstairs. It was his last night in London-his last night with the
physical entities that had been Catherine and Vixie-and he didn’t want to destroy the nostal-gic sweet
savor of his thoughts with some stranger’s conven-tional expressions of horror and distaste.

But it wasn’t a stranger.

He heard her, as she mounted the stairs, say, “Tch!” and knew it was Georgina, Lady Clayburne.

Had she glimpsed him, when he stopped by the flower-sellers in Leicester Square to get some late
hothouse roses? He’d done so these past three nights, heaping the table with them. He’d walked as a man
does. She could have followed.

Or had she somehow learned of the house, and had it watched?

The anger that swept him at this thought was so intense that he felt the hair on his nape prickle, like a
savage dog’s. His rage had nothing in it of the clouds of senseless crimson fury that had used to descend
upon him in life: that was something that seemed to have been rinsed away by dying. But this bitterness,
though colder, pierced deeper. He couldn’t erase from his mind Vixie’s frantic tears at the thought of
having to go live with Georgina and her vain and distant husband, the thought of be-ing pushed and
moulded by loneliness and emotional blackmail into a “proper young lady” who wasn’t permitted to read
Freud or smoke and certainly wasn’t permitted to paint nude models. He couldn’t forget those horrible
scenes between Catherine and her sister that would leave Catherine ill with anxiety for days.

He remained seated beside the table, holding the rotted and leathery fingers gently in his, and listened to
the footfalls explore the upper regions of the house, then descend the stairs again. Descend to the
kitchen.

“Tch!”

That was unfair. Renfield had been very careful about clear-ing away the sucked-dry carcasses of his
rats and mice.

The sub-cellar door opened. The light of the lamp she held streamed down into the chilly darkness that
reeked of decay and roses.

She gasped, “You!” and almost dropped the lamp.

Renfield said, “Yes. Me.”
She hesitated at the top of the steps. If she’d fled, he could have caught her, but she didn’t. The
temptation to have a scene with him was far too strong.

“I should have suspected you’d find a way to corrupt that fat clown Hennessey. I always did wonder if
you were paying him more than Mother and I were.”

The wave of anger recurred, prickling his hair again, but he remained sitting and said, “I take it you
didn’t bother to attend the funeral?”

“Good God, no!” She sounded startled at the idea that she might even have considered doing so. “With
all Wormidge had to do, to get hold of your solicitor’s papers, finally . . .” She had reached the bottom of
the stair, and the lamplight widened into the room, illuminating the red hair coiled on the sheet, Vixie’s
dark curls among the roses. Georgina’s eyes grew wide, and fairly blazed in the dim orange glow.

“You beast.” She fairly spit the word at him. “You sneaking, greedy animal. That was your plan all
along, wasn’t it? To marry her and to make away with her, so that Father’s money would come to you.
Yes, and even to make away with your own daugh-ter, so you could have it all!”

Renfield stood up at that, and Georgina fell back a step, her arm cocked a little, as if she’d throw the
lamp at him next. Dis-believingly, Renfield said, “That is all that you can say? All that you can see, in the
death of your lovely sister and your niece? The whereabouts of your father’s money, that might go to me
in-stead of to you? That is the only thing that Catherine’s death means to you?”

“Of course not!” Georgina snapped quickly. “You should talk about what her death means! Murderer!
Brute! Thief!”

“Thief?” Renfield took a step toward her. “I was married to Catherine for eighteen years, Georgina.
Had I been the fortune–hunter you always claimed I was-as if I had not found my own fortune in
India-would I not have made away with her earlier than that?”

“Don’t you argue with me!” shrieked the woman. “I know of your life in India. I’ve had Wormidge on to
that as well. Once we started asking, we learned about those girls who disappeared there! And what you
used to do with animals and snakes! You were unfit to speak to Catherine, let alone marry her, and
cer-tainly the pair of you were unfit to raise a granddaughter of Lord Brough’s to be the … the bohemian
suffragist sensual-ist you were turning Vivienne into! That you turned Cather-ine into as well, with your
theosophy and your heathan gods! Now I know that she is dead, whether you escape or not, we can put
an end to all this legal shilly-shallying with the trust funds.”

“Do not,” said Renfield quietly, “name your sister to me. Cer-tainly not in the same breath as complaints
about trust-funds.” He stood only a yard from the enraged woman now, close enough to smell the musty
lavender of her dusting-powder, close enough to see the broken veins in her cheeks, the caked
rice–powder at the corners of her lips. He towered over her. With a sudden move she dropped the lamp
to the flagstone floor and fled, dashing up the steps, Renfield following with a vampire’s preternatural
speed, leisurely as a shadow. He let her dash before him up the kitchen steps and through the pantry,
hearing the rush and roaring of the spreading lamp-oil as it ignited the broken shelves, the trailing sheets,
the roses and the table …

He caught her, easily, just inside the front door.

***

Deep in sleep, Mina Harker heard Dr. Van Helsing’s gentle voice, coming to her from far off, as she
had heard it now for nearly a week. “What can you hear, Madame Mina?”

Through lips that felt as if they belonged to someone else, she mumbled, “Water. Water lapping at the
hull.”

Darkness lay around her. She was aware of that dark mind, sleeping, hungry-wary as a wolf. Angry as
a wolf, that flees back to its lair with a burned nose. The thoughts of revenge colored the black darkness
like a blood-colored cloud. She was glad Van Helsing, when he hypnotized her like this, never asked her
about what she felt.