Slave Of Dracula (25 page)

Jonathan Harker’s Journal*

17 October

Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome the Count on his return from his tour … Van
Helsing and Seward will cut off his head at once and drive a stake through his heart. Morris and
Godalming and I shall prevent interference, even if we have to use the arms which we shall have ready.
The Profes-sor says that if we can so treat the Count’s body, it will soon af-ter fall into dust …

***

R.M.R.’s notes

17 October

12 rats, 27 spiders

Coming from Paris on the Orient Express, Nomie told me of Count Dracula’s intention: to divert the
Czarina Catherine from its registered destination here in Varna to Galatz on the Danube mouth, leaving
Van Helsing and his allies to await it here while we, Nomie and I, pick them off one by one.

Sleeping in my coffin during the day, in the small lodgings we rented, I feel the Count’s impatient anger
press upon me like a fever. Anger at those who would dare to pursue and defy him. Anger at us, who
cannot or will not guard his flanks. Through the boards of my coffin I hear Nomie cry out in terror, like a
child in the grip of a nightmare she cannot wake from. And though I strive to break my own thick
day-sleep to go to her, to comfort her, I can only lie in the clayey soil dug from Highgate Cemetery, and
listen to her weep.

***

Letter, Quincey Morris to Galileo Jones

Foreman, Caballo Loco Ranch

San Antonio, Texas

17 October

Pard,

It’s been too long, a thousand years it feels like, and stranger portents have come to pass than ever I
wrote of in all those foot-loose traipses riding herd on that crazy English lord around the world. Doc
Seward, and Art Holmwood, and I thought we saw the elephant then, and maybe we did.

This is something different, dark as the snake-caves along the dry washes in the hills and twice as
deadly. I write because I could use the sight of your ugly face just now, and use even more you and six
or seven of the boys from the bunkhouse.

When last I wrote, I said I’d been shot bad by Dan Cupid, shot in the heart with his little gold arrow: I
said a lot of hope-ful fal-lal and I hope to God you burned that damn stupid poem. She turned me down
for a man just as good as me and better in her mama’s eyes, though straight and true as she was, I know
that didn’t weigh with her, and I knew even then I wouldn’t get over it. May through to September, I kept
telling myself I’d write and let you know how I was, when the pain let up some. But it never did.

I thought that was the worst wound I’d take in my life. I wish it had been.

I say of Miss Westenra, “was,” because she died, not many days before her marriage to Art. And not
many days after, we–Art and I and Doc-learned that she’d been killed, by the kind of man-monster the
Commanche sometimes speak of, and the villagers deep back in the Mexican hills where modern times
and modern blindness haven’t yet touched.

And this is what I’m doing here, footloose again and heading East in country as wild as any we crossed
coming west from Vladivastok. The place I’m at is called Varna (Wasn’t “Varna” the name of that
red-haired madam in Dodge? The one with the fingernails?), and it’s a good-sized burg and pretty, near
as warm as Texas for this late in the year. It’s a port on the Black Sea and the crowds you see in the
streets remind me of San Francisco, French and Greeks and English and Russians and Germans: same
ships in the harbor, with coal and timber and iron and German steel. The only difference is there’s Arabs
everywhere instead of Chinese, and the hills aren’t as steep.

We’ve taken rooms-Art and the Doc and I, and other friends of Miss Westenra’s who are helping us
with the chase-and all we can do now is wait. Our bird is coming in on a freighter from London; he’ll find
us waiting for him on the dock. Between us we have five Winchesters and seven pistols, plus my Henry,
which is the best rifle man ever made, as well as my bowie and assorted other cutlery. More than any
weapon, we have minds that are made up and hearts bound in brotherhood.

What he-It-did lies beyond the proof of any law but God’s.

But you and I have both dealt with justice on those terms, out where the law doesn’t run.

And so we wait. One of our number, Mrs. Harker, as smart and sweet and good-hearted a woman as
ever wore shoe-leather, has suffered a terrible wound that may yet turn into her death because we
underestimated our friend, and it is like a knife in my heart every time I see the mark she bears of it. The
night she took that mark, I should have known better, and set a guard, even though there was no danger
in sight. There isn’t a night I don’t dream about doing it differently.

For that reason I’ve gone back to my trail-driving days, and have insisted that while we’re here we stick
together, and stay within-doors from sundown til sunup, which is when our friend likes to mosey around.
Most nights I take the graveyard watch, like I did on the trail, that dark pit from three ’til the first birds
start to wake, when even the whores sleep and the streets are so still you can hear the clink of the tackle
down in the harbor.

This is the hour in which I write to you. The others sleep, bedrolls on the parlor carpet around Mrs.

Harker’s couch, com-ical unless you knew the reason for it. Like on the trail, what name each man
mutters in his sleep the others forget come morning. I’ve been to the window, and through the other
rooms of our suite, three times since I came on watch, knowing our friend is still on the high seas
someplace: I’ve seen nothing and yet the air prickles and whispers. There’s danger here, closer than the
Doc or his Doc-old Doc Van Helsing-think or know. I smell it, like a longhorn smells thunder. Nobody
who hasn’t taken a herd through Indian country can know what that’s like.

Whatever it was, it’s gone now. And so I write to you, and think of you, old friend, who does know
what that feels like, that invisible danger, waiting to strike.

Enclosed with this letter you’ll find my will. Once I thought to bring a gold-haired bride home to
Caballo Loco, to make a whole lot of little Quinceys and ‘Laios and Jacks and Lucys to take the place
over; I know that won’t happen, now. Pa told me I had cousins back in Virginia, though I don’t know if
any sur-vived the War any more than my aunts and uncles of Pa’s family did. Do what you can to find
them, and if any come out to take up their share of the land, please do what you can to knock some
sense into their heads, seeing as how you’ll be their neigh-bor, on what’ll be your half of the ranch.

You think dark thoughts in the dark of the graveyard watch, out here on the eastern edge of the world.
One day I pray I’ll take this letter out of your hands, and laugh, and tear it up. But that day seems far
from me now, like a dream that I know damn well isn’t going to come true. By the time this gets to you,
it’ll be over, one way or the other.

Til that time it’s Hooray for Texas! And tell those lazy sons–of-bitches in the bunkhouse that their boss
says Hi from the edge of the world.

Your pal,

Quincey Morris

***

R.M.R.’s notes

18 October

13 rats, 20 spiders, owl, 2 mice

I keep these records from habit, and as a means of reassuring myself that though I choose not to kill
human beings, I am in no danger of starvation. My cravings spring from my mind and my blood, not my
flesh.

My mind is still linked, in the hours of my sleep, to the Count’s. When his red eyes glare into my
dreams and his deep hoarse voice demands why I have not yet slain Van Helsing or Godalming, I hear
also the sighing lap of waves against the Cza-rina Catherine’s hull, and sometimes snatches of men’s
voices from the deck. “It is the devil’s wind, and the devil’s fog, that drive us!” I heard a man cry in
anguish, and a thick Scots voice replied, “I’ the de’il wants us to make Varna so quick, then Dickie
Donelson’s na the one to say him nay!”

“Cast it overside, Captain! Cast that accursed box into the sea! Grief only will come of keeping it
aboard!”

And there was a confusion of voices, and the meaty slap of a belaying-pin striking flesh as the sounds
faded into the sea-rush of my dreams.

“He paid Captain Donelson well,” whispered Nomie to me later, as we stood in the balmy darkness
across from the Hotel Odessus’s front doors, our shoulders touching slightly, watching the windows of
Van Helsing’s suite. “As he has the men at Galatz, who will take the earth-box ashore and put it on a
barge upriver, to where the Bistritza River curves below the Borgo Pass where the Castle stands. And he
learned well his own les-son, to travel on a ship crewed with Scots and Frenchmen as well as Romanians
and Greeks, and to let the crew alone. Com-ing to England on the Demeter in July, he would drink the
blood of the crew. When it arrived, the ship was a ghost-ship, the cap-tain chained dead to the wheel
with a crucifix wound round his hands.”

“He was lucky his entire cargo of earth-boxes wasn’t con-fiscated by the customs authorities,” I
remarked. “Or sunk in Whitby Harbor, for that matter.”

“He had long been fasting in Transylvania, with the impov-erishment of the countryside. Now he has
had three months, al-most, of hunting in London’s dockside slums.”

“Do you still defend him, little Norn?” I asked her, smiling, and had she not been pale as bridal satin,
she might have blushed. More gravely, I went on, “He killed the crew of the Demeter because he was
greedy. He would kill that of the Cza-rina Catherine, and its Captain, too, if he thought he could do
so and still make port safely in Galatz. You know that is so.”

She said with a trace of bitterness in her voice, “I know.” We returned our attention to the warm
rectangle of gas-light on the upper floor of the Hotel Odessus, crossed now and then by shadows. When
one came near enough to its curtain, I pointed them out to her: “The tall one is Quincy Morris; that will be
Lord Godalming, who is only a little shorter-“

“The handsome one with the golden hair?” She cocked a co-quettish eye at me, the white lace of her
jabot like flowers against the embroidered pink-and-blue of her jacket.

“Minx. The slighter one is either my own friend Dr. Seward, or your friend Jonathan Harker-and don’t
tell me you didn’t find him attractive, my girl . . .”

She laughed like the cold tinkling of silver chimes. “He was very sweet, really. I used to watch him at
the Castle, from the shadows when he couldn’t see. He would sit at his desk, writing love-letters to his
fiancée, or scribbling in his journal, as if his very life depended upon it. I would sometimes slip in just at
dawn, when he slept, and try to read what he’d written to his Mina. Sometimes he wrote in English,
sometimes in a code I could not understand, but while he wrote, he would sigh and speak her name. The
others would laugh at me for it, and talk about how they would make him forget her, once they could
have their way with him, and about how long they could make him last before he died. That is a game
that vampires play.”

She returned her eyes to the window, where Van Helsing’s stocky form stood briefly, illuminated from
within as he parted the curtain and looked out to the dark, cobbled street.

For the second night none of them emerged. When, in the small cold hours, Nomie and I drifted like
wraiths into the ho-tel’s kitchen quarters at the welcoming behest of a venal servant–boy to whom we
threw a coin, we found all the lights still burning in the avengers’ suite, and heard the muffled mutter of

Godalming’s voice and Seward’s as they played pinochle, and the mingled breathing of sleepers.

Nomie left me to hunt. I remained in the corridor, or drifted into one bedroom after the other of the
suite in the form of mist beneath the doors. All the bedrooms were empty, though the beds bore the scent
and impress of those who slept in them at odd hours of daylight.

Our friends were taking no chances. While I was still there, I heard Seward wake Harker, and after
that, there was only the soft scrape of whetstone on knife-blade, until the approach of dawn drove me
from the building and back to my own earth–home.

19 October

When I returned to our hotel at dawn yesterday, I found to my great disquiet that Nomie was still out.
She was going hunting, she said, on the docks, not a part of the city where any woman should be afoot.

Though vampires do not crumble into dust with the first touch of the sun’s rays, or spontaneously
combust in daylight, as some penny dreadfuls would have it, once the sun is in the sky and until it vanishes
behind the earth’s curve, we are as mortals.

Worse off than mortals, in fact, for mortals may cross running water at their will, or touch such things as
the garlic plant, the wild rose, and the emblems of their faith. Moreover, with the sun’s rising I was
crushed by a wave of almost overwhelming sleepiness, and when I emerged from our little pensione in
Balchik Street, I found that the morning sunlight made me giddy, and that I could barely see.

Nevertheless I stumbled in the direction of the dark blue sea, visible between the white buildings of the
upper town.

Coming down Nessebur Street, I was passed by a gang of seven or eight Slovak boatmen, rough
arrogant brigands with their baggy white trousers tucked into high boot-tops, who bring loads of timber
down from the Carpathians. They glanced sidelong at me from under long, greasy black hair, and
muttered to one another in their own tongue. Yet as they passed, I smelled blood upon them, and the
ground-in whiff of Nomie’s perfume.

I saw where they’d come from, through a little gate into the yard behind a shut-up tavern. I ran in, and
looked around: a narrow space between a warehouse and a chandler’s yard, filled with debris and
stinking of privies years untended. For a mo-ment, dazzled by the sunlight, I could see nothing but the
shabby fence, the straggling waist-high stands of broomsedge.