Slave Of Dracula (6 page)

She was beautiful, and Renfield’s heart was touched by her. Where the night-breeze flattened the thin
batiste against her body, it showed a shallow breast, the sharp point of a too slender hip, a delicate form
childlike and vulnerable without the womanly defenses of corsetry and draped silk. She was not many
rears older than his daughter. Loosed for sleep, her flaxen hair shivered to her hips.

The girl climbed the stairs-hundreds of stairs. Slabs of stone, or carved into the living rock of the cliff,
and Renfield knew what waited for her at the top. He wanted to cry out to her, to wake her, to warn her,
but he knew what Wotan would do to him if he did this-Wotan would not be pleased.

Wotan would withhold from him the gift of life that he so desperately needed. Worse, Wotan would
whisper into the dreams of others, of Georgina Clayburne and that stone-faced harridan mother of hers
of where Catherine and Vixie lay sleep-ing tonight.

Then all would be in vain!

Heart pounding, body quaking with pity and with cold, Ren-field watched as the blonde girl walked
past him-for he seemed to be standing on the long stair from the town-and on up to the churchyard on
the cliff.

A tomb lay close to the cliff’s grass-grown edge. For a mo-ment Renfield thought that the thing that lay
on it was a dog or a wolf, but the next moment the dark form rose, elongating into the unmistakable
shadow of a cloaked man, and red eyes gleamed where they caught the moon’s sickly light. From the top
of the steps Renfield watched, as the sleep-walker passed among the graves with the confidence of a
child. The figure beside the tomb held out its hand. Renfield’s ears seemed to be filled with the buzz of
swarming flies.

Don’t do it! he wanted to shout to her. Don’t go to him! He was aware of her face, relaxed in
sleep as Catherine’s was all those nights beside him, like Vixie’s when she was little, when he’d go into
her room to check on her and see her asleep in the night-light’s tiny glow. Please don’t hurt her …

Wotan gathered the girl into his arm, the white of her night-dress disappearing in the velvet folds of the
cloak. His hand, huge and coarse, with pointed nails like claws, cupped the side of her face, turning her
head aside to expose the big blood-vessels of the throat. The roar of flies swamped Renfield’s mind and
for a time his dream was only that he was sitting in his room at Rushbrook, with the window wide open
and flies buzzing in, landing happily on his hands, on his knees, on the pillow of his bed, and letting him
eat them like candy while spiders lined up in an expectant file, waiting their turn.

The glow of life washed over him, filled him, burning, warm-ing, intoxicating. For a few moments every
cell in his body was conscious, and cried aloud with relief from a lifelong hunger he had never even
known had weighed upon him so heavily, until that instant of release.

His mouth sang with the metallic flavor of fresh blood. His brain, with the scent of the girl.

He thought she cried out.

Distant and dim, as if seeing with someone else’s eyes, he be-came aware of the girl again, lying on the
cliffside tombstone as if upon a bed. Beyond her, the moon shone with a cold pewter gleam on the
shingle-beds of the harbor where the tide had gone out. It made the feathery coils of her hair pale as
ivory, where they lay over the edge of the granite slab, and trailed on the ground. Renfield heard a girl’s
voice call softly, “Lucy!” and saw a second girl striding among the graves. She was a little taller and of
sturdier build, hurriedly dressed in shirtwaist and walking-skirt. Her dark hair was already coming out of
a hasty braid that slapped between her shoulders as she ran.

“Mina?” the blonde girl whispered, as her dark-haired friend sat beside her on the tomb, raised her up
in her arms. The blonde head fell back, turned aside, curtained by that cascade of moon colored silk. Her
breath dragged in thick frantic gasps. The dark girl, with brisk decisiveness, wrapped Lucy in the heavy
figured shawl from around her own shoulders, pinning it at the throat. Then she took the shoes from her
own feet and put them on Lucy’s before turning to the task of fully waking her. Renfield heard her voice,
a gentle, lovely alto, speaking soft nothings as his consciousness drew back from them. Their image grew
smaller and smaller, tiny in the light of that enormous moon, but just before it winked out, Renfield saw
Mina get Lucy to her feet, and help her back toward the stairway that would lead them down to the
town.

He awoke ravenous, starving, the yellow moonlight a glow-ing shawl dropped on the floor of his room.
Hand trembling, he emptied confused flies and sleepy spiders from their boxes and tumblers and jars,
devoured them without even stopping to chew. Spiky legs, brittle wings.

Their tiny lives sparkled like electricity in his veins. But his hunger was not even touched.

R.M.R.’s notes

12 August

14 flies, 5 spiders, 2 slugs (sugar-water dripped on sill)

Must have more. Asked for extra sugar, received it. Know not to try for sparrow. Always they watch
me. He watches me, too.

***

“Dr. Seward?” Renfield spoke for the first time during Seward’s visit that evening, rousing himself from
his desperate preoccu-pation of mind. He had to be careful, he knew, yet even as he hoped to wrest
from Wotan the additional life that he needed, it might be possible to use Seward, unsuspecting, to obtain
the knowledge that-as Wotan had so accurately said-men treasure.

Renfield reflected that the young doctor was stupid enough be manipulated into telling him anything.

“What is it, old chap?” Seward turned back from the door, which Renfield noticed Langmore was
quick to lock again. They feared him, did they?

Anger flashed through him. He’d give them cause to fear. The anger must have shone in his face,
because Seward hesi-tated. Renfield forced his rage down. “As a doctor of the mind, have you-or
anyone in your field-come to any theory of what dreams are, and why we have them? Are they truly-or
can they be-agents of communication, as even the ancient Stoics ar-gued? Or do you believe, like Freud,
that they are merely the mind’s way of ordering the events of the past, of sorting them into larger mental
categories determined by past experience?” A spider tiptoed in through the open window, past the bars;
Renfield caught it with the adeptness of long practice and popped it at once into his mouth, dug his
notebook from his shirt-pocket and added it to the tally, then turned back for Seward’s reply.

“I believe they can serve the mind as a means of assimilating experience,” agreed Seward, his dark
eyes watchful on Renfield’s face, as if-which Seward so often did-he sought to guess what lay behind the
question. He went on, “I have heard-both here and in America, and in the islands of the South
Seas-stories of how dreams do communicate events of the past or present, though as a scientist I’m
inclined to wonder how such a thing could be proven empirically. My old teacher-a Dutchman from
Amsterdam-is of the opinion that the ability to dream devel-oped as human intelligence grew to the point
that men were in danger of harming themselves and others through too exclusive a reliance on that
intelligence. That God gave man the ability to dream as a channel to deliver warnings from sources that
can-not be quantified. But he may have been joking.” And Seward smiled.

“And if one dreams of things that are taking place far away- evil things, events that bring danger to the
innocent-is there a way to warn those one sees in danger? A way to know where these events are taking
place, or whom to warn?”

Seward’s eyes narrowed sharply. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Did you dream about your wife,
for instance? Cather-ine, I believe her name is? Or your daughter?”

Georgina Clayburne has been to see him. Rage seared through Renfield, as if a match had
been dropped on a trail of kerosene. He felt his face heat, forced himself to look at the wall beyond
Seward’s shoulder. Forced from his mind the delicious joy it would bring him to pick the slightly built
doctor up and smash his brains out against the wall, to twist his head from his shoulders.

They would strait-jacket him. Put him in the Swing. Give him castor-oil and ipecac to weaken him with
vomiting.

When Wotan came, he would not be ready.

Breathing hard, Renfield said, “I didn’t dream about nobody, sir.” He knew he should make up a
convincing tale but he couldn’t think. His mind was filled with the roaring buzz of flies. “I was just asking.”

***

When Seward left, Renfield returned to the window, pressed his face to the bars to drink in the
evening’s cool. Rushbrook House was set at an angle to the road, so that through his window he could
see the gates to the high-road, as well as a portion of the crumbling wall and overgrown trees of the
estate next door.

Yesterday he’d seen a handsome new carriage come through the gates, its team of matched blacks
familiar to him. He had thought the woman inside looked like Georgina Clayburne.

And he didn’t think it was the first time she’d come to call on Seward.

Asking what? What did she know already? What had she guessed, and what information had she
bought from Hennessey? She had almost certainly had the house in Nottingham searched. That didn’t
trouble Renfield particularly, for he had made sure, when he, Catherine, and Vixie had left it, that no trace
of paper remained to tell where they’d gone. The other houses in London, like the bank accounts he and
Catherine had set up, were under other names.

Was that why Seward watched him so closely, took down notes of what he said? Was he sending
every word, every specu-lation, on to Georgina and that ghastly mother, even as Hen-nessey was doing?

He watched the shadow of Rushbrook House stretch out over the garden, reaching toward the dark
wall, the dark trees, of Carfax. The voices of the attendants rose like incongruous bird-calls in the air, as
they began to close up the windows, put up the shutters for the night. From a room near-by, the woman
the attendants referred to as Queen Anne began her nightly howling. Many of the patients, Renfield had
observed, grew worse at this hour, pounding on the walls and babbling, or sink-ing into uncontrollable
tears. Footsteps hurried in the halls, to give Her Majesty the drugs that would silence her, would push her
over the edge into her own dreams.

What if those dreams, like some of his own, were infinitely more dreadful than the waking that she
could not struggle back to no matter how much she tried?

Renfield closed his eyes, and told himself that he must be strong.

That night he dreamed of the girls again, as he had dreamed the night before. Dreamed-as he had last
night-that he was in their bedroom, looking down on them as they slept, and their faces were relaxed in
sleep, as sweet and young as Catherine’s looked in the mysterious blue radiance of the waxing moon.
Mina, the dark-haired girl, wore a little pucker between her brows. Though she was probably no older
than her friend, she had the air of a young woman who has had to make her own way in the world. The
nightgown-sleeve that lay on the tufted counterpane was plain muslin, and much worn, in contrast to the
fantasia of batiste and lace that swaddled the delicate Lucy.

When fear came into the room, and the chilly breath of the grave, Renfield tried to reach out to Mina,
tried to shake her shoulder-or he thought he tried … or he wanted to try. He is coming, he thought as the
air in the room grew colder and colder and a small black shadow began to circle erratically out-side the
moon-drenched window. Wotan is coming.

His heart pounded in terror. He had to wake them up, so they could flee.

He had to wake up himself, so that he wouldn’t see what would happen.

But he could neither move, nor waken.

Mina whispered, “Jonathan,” in her sleep, and sank deeper, almost into the sleep of death, Renfield
thought. But Lucy turned on her pillow, her shut eyes seeming to seek the window, and in the moonlight
Renfield could see now that the thing outside was a bat, fluttering and beating its wings at the casement.

He pressed back into the shadows, his hands covering his mouth.

Wotan would see him. And seeing him, would take his ven-geance, not only on him, but on Catherine
and Vixie as well. Oh, Catherine, Catherine, he thought wildly, if I can see this, if I can be here, why
can’t I be at your side instead?

But he shut the thought from his mind like the slamming of a door, lest Wotan hear him and know then
that someone named Catherine even existed.

Lucy rose from her bed, her head lolling, and with the pre-ternatural clarity of dreams Renfield saw the
wound on her neck, the two tiny punctures above the vein, unhealed, white-edged and mangled-looking.
All the moonlight seemed to be failing in the room, and the shadow of the bat grew still, seeming to swell
in size, so that it covered the whole of the window in its wings. Out of that shadow its red eyes gleamed,
like the far-off lamps of Hell. When Lucy stumbled to the casement and fumbled open the latch, the dark
form of Wotan stepped through as if he had strode there upon the air of night.

Lucy sagged forward into his arms. In the moonlight Wotan smiled-or the thing in the ship’s hold that
had spoken to Ren-field with Wotan’s words. He could not be Wotan, thought Ren-field muzzily,
for he has two eyes, not one like the Wanderer God: eyes as red and reflective as the
eyes of a rat. But then, when Wotan had spoken those words to Mime the Dwarf, he had not yet
traded his eye for wisdom. His mustaches were long and iron-gray, his face was not the face of a god,
but of a man who has gone beyond what other men are, into some unknown zone of experience.

A face of power. A face like iron, that no longer recalls what it was to be a man. A face maybe that
never knew in the first place.

He cupped the side of Lucy’s face in his short-fingered pow-erful hand, drew back his lips from long