Slave Of Dracula (9 page)

Unless you need me, sir, I shall remain in London until the wedding, which as you know has been
moved up to the 28th September. The change of date has made for a great deal of busi-ness, and though
Lucy handles it all as adeptly as a matron of thirty, still if I can be of service to her and her mother here, I
should like to put myself at their disposal.

I look forward very much to seeing you here on the 20th, if that is still your plan.

Until then,

Your loving son, Arthur

***

He knows where she is!

Through the heat of the endless summer afternoon Renfield twisted in his chains, emerging again and
again from the cloudy delerium of laudanum to the horror of waking knowledge.

He is only waiting for the night, to take her!

He could not say it, could not speak. Wotan in his coffin would hear him, know his betrayal. But he
could not keep silent, and like an animal, trapped in rage and in pain, he screamed, and kicked at that
filthy gnome Langmore, the whiskey-smelling Hennessey, when they came into the padded room, to
dump more laudanum down his throat.

Don’t send me back there! If she is to die tonight I don’t want to see it!

As if he lay naked, chained like Prometheus to the vulture–haunted rocks, Renfield could feel the
passage of the sun across the sky, the inevitable approach of the night.

Someone save her! Someone warn her!

What I do not have yet, Wotan whispered, grinning with his sharp white teeth, shall I make
you a present of shameful one? How many flies will you have to devour, my little
Mime, to gain all that one single drink of living blood will bestow?

The blood is the life. You know this.

In India, Renfield remembered, there were sects-whole vil-lages in places-devoted to Kali, the
many-handed black-skinned goddess who danced on the corpse of a dead demon, a necklace of human
heads about her throat. They said she was the wife of Shiva, Lord of Change, but there was something in
her that Ren-field sensed was older, deeper, primal as the rotting flesh from which next year’s corn
sprouted. He’d ridden out one night with a sergeant named Morehouse and a couple of Punjabi
policemen to raid the camp of a robber-band along the Grand Trunk: they’d taken two men prisoners,
and killed two others in the fighting. I lie rest had fled. In the camp they’d found the clothes and money of
at least twenty-five travelers, some of whose bodies they’d located in ditches near the road the next day.

Are they leftovers from the Mutiny? Renfield had asked, when the screaming, spitting robbers
had been bound, gagged, loaded into one of their own bullock-carts for transport back to Calcutta and
trial. Even then-thirty years ago almost-the great uprising against the British rulers had been over for a
decade, but Renfield remembered it still: the grilling sun beating down On the empty parade-ground at
Meerut, the horror of blood and hacked-up bodies he’d seen, when with the relieving troops he’d looked
down the Well at Cawnpore.

Narh, said Morehouse, and spit. They’s just robbers.

And one of the Punjabis, a man named Akbar Singh, had said, They existed long before the
uprising, Renfield Sahib. In those days they were called Thugs, and they were better
organized, but it was much the same. Indeed, it was forbidden among them to rob the
Gora-log, the English, proof enough that it was only money that interested them,
though they claimed to have their Goddess’s blessing. It is a poor country, Sahib,
and even if a man has a farm, or part of a farm that he shares with many brothers,
he often cannot feed his family. Men of this brotherhood speak of harvesting
travelers, as if they were wheat, standing in fields that the Goddess had given them.
There are many such.

In his years of living in India after that, Renfield had found that this was so.

Singh’s words came back to him, through that endless day, as he felt the yellow fires of the Traveler
God’s hunger seep into his dreams: harvesting. Harvesting.

And in his dreams he caught glimpses of her, despite all he could do: running up the stairs with a tray of

tea and muffins for her mother, who lay yet in bed; having a chat with the housekeeper-“I worry about
her, Mrs. Dennis, she says she feels fine but I know she isn’t well . . .” Giving her maid a quick, friendly
hug before she snatched up her broad-brimmed straw hat, skipped down the stairs to meet her
handsome Arthur, wait-ing smiling in the hall, or sitting beneath the flapping sun-shade of a small
steam-launch that Arthur piloted up the river.

The sun moved across the sky, and the Earth’s concealing shadow crawled over the curve of the
world. Renfield screamed his despair, and in his mind Wotan only laughed.

If you will turn aside from the harvest, will you then turn aside from the living bounty that it
yields?

He felt Wotan’s waking like the breaking of a strangler’s noose. It was dark in the padded room, and
silent, for once, in the hall outside. The smelly air was warm and thick as dirty wa-ter. Renfield hung for a
time, weeping, in the straps, but twisted his head to one side to dry his eyes on his shoulder when he
heard Hardy’s footsteps in the corridor. He murmured a pleas-ant, “Good-evening, Hardy-did you
manage to beat Simmons at cribbage today?” and the attendant unlocked the straps, re-leased the metal
catches on the back of the strait-jacket, pulled the heavy garment from Renfield’s arms.

“There, now, y’old villain, you gonna be good this evenin’?”

“My dear Hardy . . .” Renfield widened his eyes at the big man. “Have I not been good as gold for
three days now? Mali-cious witnesses rise up; they ask me of things that I know not / They requite
me evil for good, and my soul is forlorn.”

But Hardy, who did not appear to know more of the Bible than a few names and a Commandment or
two (if that), only shook his head, and took his leave, to bring, Renfield knew, the usual unpalatable
dinner of tepid stew and bread. So he stood in the corner farthest from the room’s tiny barred window,
head down and hands folded in an attitude of passive dejection. When Hardy returned with the plate in
his hand, he was ready for an attack, but Renfield only dodged past him, slammed the door on him, and
shoved the bolt shut.

The padded cell was on the ground floor: Hardy’s whistle shrilled in Renfield’s ears as he ran, but he
knew the keepers would go first to the outer doors, not upstairs. He plunged up the small service flight,
then along the hall, where the door of his own old room still stood open, awaiting the glaziers who would
fix the casement he’d torn out. Let them catch him in time, if only he could reach the dark chapel, if only
he could plead with Wotan to find someone else. Surely there were robbers and mur-derers in England,
spiritual brothers of the Thugs, upon whom his hunger could feast?

Darkness outside, the wild smells of summer night and free-dom. Shrubs lashed his bare legs, damp
grass like a carpet of velvet under his naked feet-it seemed to him almost that he was flying in a dream,
flying like the Valkyries, with their wild music in his ears. It would be moonrise soon, moonrise when
Wotan would walk out, would make his way to Hillingham House, where, Renfield knew, he had marked
the very window of Lucy’s bedchamber.

“Master, no!” He threw himself against the iron-strapped oak of the chapel doors. “Master, listen!”

The next instant Seward and his attendants seized him, dragged him back from the door. Renfield
screamed in frustra-tion and rage, turned in their grip, and lunged at Seward. Fool and worse than fool,
understanding nothing! You will be the death of that innocent girl, who never did you harm! But
the anger that had all of Renfield’s life come and gone from his brain overwhelmed him in red blindness,
and the sounds that came from his mouth were inchoate howls of fury. His hands closed around the
mad-doctor’s skinny throat and he squeezed, twisted, knowing nothing beyond the fact that this man
would thwart him, thwart him from doing what he knew to be right.

And as the madness of anger swept over him, he heard laugh-ter, far back down some dark corridor
of his burning brain: the laughter of contempt.

Then Wotan was gone.

Renfield stood trembling, shivering, for in the fight his night-shirt had been ripped half off him, and

sweat painted his body and soaked his hair. Hardy, Simmons, Hennessey, and Langmore clutched his
arms, while Seward leaned against the corner of the chapel wall, gasping and clutching at the collar of his
shirt, which had been all but torn away. These things Renfield noted distantly, of less importance than the
black wheeling shape of a bat, flittering above their heads in the light of the dropped lanterns and the
new-risen crescent moon.

As Renfield looked up, the bat circled overhead, and for one instant Renfield saw the red gleam of its
eyes. Then it flew away, not erratically as such creatures fly, but straight, like a homing bird, westward
toward London.

Emptiness swept him, and despair.

Langmore had his wrist, clamped under his armpit while he pulled the sleeve of the strait-jacket over
Renfield’s hand. Ren-field looked around him at the men as if waking from a dream. There was so much
fear, such deadly grimness in their faces, that it seemed to him almost comical, were it not that he knew
what would happen, must happen, tonight.

“It’s all right,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “You needn’t tie me. I shall go quietly.”

***

Lucy Westenra’s Diary*

Hillingham

24 August

Last night I seemed to be dreaming again just as I was at Whitby. Perhaps it is the change of air, or
getting home again. It was dark and horrid to me, for I can remember nothing; but am full of vague fear,
and I feel so weak and worn out. When Arthur came to lunch, he looked quite grieved when he saw me,
and I hadn’t the heart to try to be cheerful …

R.M.R.’s notes

24 August

4 flies

25 August

6 flies. Sugar and treacle.

Won treacle from Hardy at riddles.

A good man proclaimed by God and man,

I sit with my family, two daughters, two wives, two sons.

Each daughter with her only son,

Each daughter’s son with his two sisters,

With his father, his uncle, his nephew.

Five chairs there are round the table

And each has a chair, none stands.

Who am I?

26 August

5 flies, 1 spider

Spiders harder to catch in padding.

27 August

10 flies. Prune macedoirae.

28 August

9 flies.

His voice is silent. Even when I sleep, as I did in today’s deep heat, nothing. He is sated.

Every night I see him, standing on the air outside her win-dow, first a small darkness, like a bat, red
eyes burning, burning. She comes to the window, sleep-walking in her night-dress, blonde hair streaming
down her back and lifted by the breath of the night. Dear God, how thin she looks! Her face is drawn
and gaunt, her eyes sunk in shadows. He walks to her across the air and the face she raises to him is like
an exhausted child’s, un-comprehending. His cloak covers her; he steps down, and into the dark of her
room.

Treacle pudding at dinner. Won Langmore’s from him at crib-bage. Hardy cheats.

29 August

12 flies, 1 spider

Was it Dante who said that the true pain of Hell is exclusion from the beatific vision of God? All the
refinements of torment, the rain of fire and the pits of ice, the buffeting winds of the Circle of the
Passionate, all are only reflections of that fact: that those souls have forgotten God, and are forgotten by
Him.

Wotan the Traveler has forgotten me.

Oh, Catherine, forgive me my failure! I am utterly on my own.

30 August

Will he never make an end to her?

***

“John.” Lucy rose from the wicker chair among the ferns of the Hillingham conservatory, held out her
hand. “It’s good to see you.”

In the act of surrendering his hat to the maid, Seward froze. His heart seemed to stall in his chest. Art
had warned him that Lucy looked bad. But nothing could have prepared him for the ghastly whiteness of
her face, the way her stylish pink gown hung now from her attenuated shoulders, the transparent look to
her hands, and the faint blueness that lay like a ghost on her lips. Dear God!

He forced himself to say, “And it’s always good to see you, Miss Westenra,” hoping his voice would
not betray his shock. He thanked God-and his long-dead nanny-from the bot-tom of his heart for the
existence of good manners and small talk, that allowed one to go on as if nothing unthinkable were
happening.

“We’ll be having lunch out here, if you don’t mind.” Lucy smiled, gesturing through the conservatory’s
glass doors to the white-clothed table, the cheerful blue-and-,yellow china set out among the tubbed
feather-palms, the dark-leaved aspidistras. “It’s so muggy today.” With its long windows open onto the
walled garden, even the conservatory was warm, but Lucy kept a shawl draped over her shoulders, as if
her own flesh no longer sufficed to protect her bones from chill. From the other white wicker chair, Mrs.
Westenra half-rose with a friendly nod–friendly, reflected Seward, now that there was no danger of
Lucy giving her hand to one so unworthy as a mad-doctor who had no better social manners than to go
off in pursuit of one of his patients between the fish course and the entree.

“And how are you, Madame?” he asked, holding out his hand to her. Lucy’s appearance shocked him,
but her mother’s sallow skin and puffy hands only filled him with deepest pity. Even had Arthur not
warned him about that, too, he would have seen the death-warrant written in her face.

In the awful days following that disastrous dinner, Seward had frequently wished Mrs. Westenra ill.
Though he had no su-perstitious belief that mere sour wishes could bring ill to pass, the recollection of
them twisted within him, not out of guilt, but sorrow at how hastily a disappointed lover could hope for
fate’s vengeance, little realizing that far worse was already in store.