Dracula's Child

by J. S. Barnes

  As we approached the madhouse along the familiar winding driveway, and as the place itself hove inexorably into view, I saw that Wakefield’s boasts of modernisation had been well founded. The very shape of the building appeared to have changed. Whereas once it was squat and barrack-like it looked now, following its recent renovation, rather as though it had been elongated, stretched into something sleeker and less distinct.

  Alighting from the fly and thanking my sullen driver, I saw that Dr Wakefield stood waiting at the entrance.

  ‘Seward!’ He stepped forward, with one hand outstretched. A small, neatly maintained man, he is more than a decade my junior, although (with a surge of schadenfreude of which I am now ashamed), I noted that he is in possession of considerably less hair than I. His always scanty straw-coloured thatch creeps backwards across his pate like a retreating tide. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said. ‘I appreciate that we at Purfleet are a little out of the convenient way of things.’

  ‘Not at all. I am quite accustomed to the journey. In the old days, I made it often enough. But I confess myself curious as to the precise reason for your invitation.’

  ‘Come in, my dear fellow, and I shall make everything plain.’

  I stepped over the threshold, into what was once my asylum. Even the smell of the place had changed since my time. The hallway was clear, clean and well kept and there was everywhere a scent composed in equal parts of turpentine, soap and some unfamiliar fragrant polish. I dare say that there are a goodly number of reasons why such surroundings might be deemed more conducive to the recovery of the sick in mind than those of my era. Nonetheless, I found myself missing the character and spirit of the old place. All at once I felt, not for the first time, achingly aware of my years.

  ‘Well now,’ Wakefield went on, his manner briskly seigneurial, ‘I thought we could begin with tea in my office, followed by a tour of the facilities. We shall hardly lack for conversation.’

  ‘Dr Wakefield. I know how hectic your job can be. So why do you not simply tell me precisely what it is that has caused you to bring me here today?’ I tried to smile. ‘I make the suggestion, you understand, purely in order to provide a mechanism by which I might inconvenience you to the smallest possible degree.’

  He looked startled by my candour. ‘Very well. If that is what you wish. Naturally, I appreciate your consideration. Nonetheless, I believe that I can do more than simply state my reasons for this invitation. I can show you. Please. Come with me.’

  He strode away. I followed, purposely leisurely in my gait. Wakefield led me out of the entrance hall and into the main body of the asylum. We passed a succession of antechambers of a sort more befitting a clerk’s office than a realm which had purportedly been built with the objective of making whole shattered minds.

  This region conquered, we moved into the engine room of the institute – the cells in which the patients were kept. Unlike in my own time, many of these now possessed a clear glass frontage and I was able to perceive, as clearly as one might penned animals at a zoo, the lunatics themselves. Their conduct surprised even me – one who has seen all that any practitioner in my field might be expected to see, as well as a good deal else which lies beyond the general run of experience.

  For tears, anguish and exhortations of every kind I was quite prepared, my heart having been hardened and my sensitivities dulled by experience. What I encountered, however, as we passed along the rows of these clinical quarters was wholly without precedent.

  With no exception, every patient was silent and still. They stood at the edges of their rooms or, more commonly, sat as though at the commencement of prayer upon their narrow cots, closed-lidded or with blank and incurious stares. All, to a man, were singularly listless.

  ‘How have you done this?’ I asked the keeper of these convalescents as he trotted with self-importance before me. ‘Indeed, sir, why have you done this?’

  ‘Medication,’ he said, neither slowing his pace nor looking back. ‘A very considerable dosage for all concerned. I find it keeps them docile and allows the necessary time for their wounds to heal.’

  ‘So you simply maintain them,’ I protested, ‘in this state of dulled compliance?’

  ‘The results have been significant,’ said Wakefield, as mild as a curate rebuking a parishioner over some liturgical wrangle, ‘and the benefits have gone beyond all reasonable expectation. You may have seen a paper of mine upon the subject in the Lancet last year?’

  ‘I’m a little behind with my reading.’

  ‘Ah, well. Do let me know what you make of it once you catch up.’

  We reached the end of the corridor and paused before one last cell. It was immediately familiar.

  ‘You will notice,’ said Wakefield, turning to face me once more, ‘that this particular room is unoccupied.’

  ‘I know…’ I said softly. ‘I remember… And I believe that I can guess the reason, even now, for its vacancy.’

  ‘You recall then its former inmate?’

  ‘I am most unlikely,’ I said, ‘ever to forget Mr R.M. Renfield.’

  I pushed away those disagreeable memories which clamoured for my attention. I tried not to think of that zoophagous madman who had acted both as a servant to the Count and as an uncanny barometer of his movements. A sad, crazed fellow, who had communed with the evil one in all his forms, as bat, rat and pale mist, and who had met his end at the Transylvanian’s own hands. Such was the grisly fate of the vassal who longed in vain to be raised above that state.

  Wakefield bowed his head. ‘I wonder if you believe as I do, Dr Seward, that there are some people who are so potent and so forceful, and some brands of wickedness that are so pervasive, that they linger long after the physical death of the malefactor, permeating places which had for them a particular significance. Something in the way of…’ He paused, searching for the mot juste, ‘… quality or atmosphere. Some etheric aura.’

  ‘I understand your meaning. You believe that some such process has taken place here, in the late Mr Renfield’s cell?’

  ‘Dr Seward, we have tried our utmost… We have cleaned and swept and washed and tidied. We have stripped it bare and we have repainted. We have done everything within our power to make this cell habitable to those who have fallen into our care. Once we even invited a priest to speak some words of cleansing and bless our endeavours. Yet the situation became intolerable. Any patient we placed in this room, no matter how disturbed they were upon entry, had increased in that state tenfold by the time they left it. My attendants would skirt the edges of the room, avoiding it at all costs, and several workmen walked out unpaid after a day’s labours rather than face returning on the morrow. Oh, nothing was ever heard or seen. Rather, there exists a sense of some malevolent presence. Of some sinister, invisible watcher.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you believe me?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. Certainly I have heard of far stranger things. So what, in the end, is your solution to this… disturbance?’

  ‘We intend to use it as a storeroom. We want to leave it to be rarely used and overlooked. So that its memories might be allowed to fade. But – and this, Doctor, is the crux of my invitation today – in the course of that renovation work something was discovered.’

  Wakefield opened the door to the cell and stepped with obvious reluctance inside. I followed. Although the place looked rather different than it had in the time of my own tenure, I felt once again the power of history, seeking to submerge me.

  As I blinked I seemed to see the tortured face of Mr Renfield, pale and trembling, screaming his allegiance to his master, with his half-meaningless insistence that ‘the blood is the life’. My throat was dry. ‘You said that something was discovered?’

  Wakefield nodded. ‘We found that a portion of the wall had years ago been patiently removed, creating a narrow space in which something… secret was kept.’

  ‘And what was that?’ I asked, feeling an odd queasiness within me.

&
nbsp; Wakefield gestured to the sill of the barred and narrow window which let into that unhappy space a bare modicum of light. ‘We found this,’ he said and he pointed, warily, as though at some toxic substance.

  I saw that to which he gestured: a slim brown book.

  ‘A capsule from the past, Dr Seward. A message in a bottle from long ago.’

  ‘Whose book is that?’ I asked.

  ‘I think you know whose book it is.’

  ‘Is this why you called for me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Please. You must – that is, we want you to take it.’

  I stepped forward and moved to the window. As I came closer I saw that a white label, yellowing at the edges, had been fixed to the cover. Written there in spidery ink were the words: ‘The Diary of R.M. Renfield’.

  Unable to help myself, caught in the riptide of the nineteenth century, I reached out and touched the book itself. As I did so, unexpectedly and without the slightest warning, we heard the most terrific uproar from outside: a sudden cacophony of bestial screeches and hopeless cries. It was as if – and we learned later that this was not so very far from the truth – all the inmates of the asylum had awoken as one and were screaming their rage, anguish and despair, their dreadful comprehension of the pitiable hopelessness of the future.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF MAURICE HALLAM

  30 November. When one is an infant one possesses not the slightest accurate notion of time. Rather one swims through existence much as might the hero of a fable, in which whole aeons pass in a sunlit afternoon or a single look of longing lasts for millennia.

  As one leaves boyhood and enters that most gilded passage of life, time no longer seems magical but merely leisured, as if this happy period shall be yours for ever, an eternal moment of grace and beauty. Such thoughts are an illusion, however, and one day, time speeds up, first quickening its pace, then doubling in speed, then hurtling frantically towards the waiting grave. Years pass by so fast that one is unable to savour them or to appreciate their variety until, without warning, one rises to discover that one has grown old.

  These thoughts I record here both as a way to order my own opinions and as a means by which I might approach the setting down of what has occurred to me since last I put pen to paper.

  I am told that this period has been of eleven days’ duration, though it seems to me as if months have gone past in scarcely any time at all, so tangled and confused has their chronology grown in my mind. There is much that is simply darkness, a void about which I can recall nothing. Whether this is due simply to unconsciousness or whether there are things that I cannot remember because my mind has blotted them out in order to spare my sanity, I cannot be sure. In daylight, I am able to believe the former. When night begins to fall, however, it is the second possibility which seems to me to be the only true reading of events.

  Suffice it to say, I have little enough to offer posterity concerning my memories of the time that we spent in Castle Dracula. The last thing that I remember from that doomed expedition is the tortured face of Gabriel Shone, the bloody gash where his left eye ought to have been and my own plaintive shrieks for mercy. Before that are only images and glimpses as of a shattered kaleidoscope.

  It is a dear hope of mine that no clearer or more detailed memories from that period are ever returned to me.

  * * *

  In my first real memory after the ordeal I woke in a soft clean bed and blinked into the light. Someone sat beside me, a stranger: a small, neatly attired man with dark hair, delicate pince-nez and an exactingly trimmed Mephistophelean beard, all of which served to put me in mind of that remarkable gentleman, M. Toulouse-Lautrec.

  He must have noticed me awakening, for he looked down with a smile that seemed both unguarded and benign.

  ‘I think,’ he began, ‘that you must at last be back with us. Welcome, Mr Hallam. I wanted to wait, you see, and to delay my departure until I was certain that you had been returned to the land of the living.’

  Naturally, I had a hundred questions concerning his identity, our location and the wellbeing of Mr Shone… Yet when I tried to form the words I found that my body had turned traitor, that tongue, mouth and teeth would not conspire to permit communication. The man beside the bed seemed kind.

  ‘Do not struggle, my dear fellow. Your recovery is likely to take time. Do not risk relapse by endeavouring to speak.’

  I could only look at him, striving, by the intensity of my gaze, to suggest my gratitude.

  ‘I saw you once upon the stage,’ he said, as cheerful and as conversational as though we shared some old acquaintance, ‘playing Banquo in the Scottish play. How well I recollect the feasting hall when the new king was surprised by your apparition.’ He warmed to this reminiscence, growing wistful. ‘You, Mr Hallam – all caked in white – a vengeful spirit from the past.’

  There must have been more, and this bearded enthusiast must have talked on, yet I can remember nothing more. For as he said these words of welcome praise, oblivion surged up again.

  * * *

  There was afforded to me one further glimpse before I regained my faculties in their entirety. When I again became aware of my surroundings some considerable time had elapsed, for the light in the room was of quite a different hue than before. It seemed to me also that I lay in fresh sheets. As I struggled free of the darkness, I understood that I was not alone. Of the eager man with the beard there was no sign at all.

  Instead, conversing a few feet from me and paying me not the slightest mind, stood the figure of a stout stranger whom at first sight I took, being passingly familiar with the genus, to be a medical doctor. His interlocutor? None other than Mr Gabriel Shone, who stood with his back against me. I caught a fragment of their conversation.

  The Englishman to the physician: ‘But he has to be made well. He is vital to our plans.’

  The doctor, nodding: ‘It shall, mein Herr, be done just as you command.’

  ‘Money is no object and no treatment may be considered out of reach. Maurice has to be returned to us.’

  I struggled to speak but the effort exhausted me and produced not the slightest effect. As I sank once again into a vacant sleep, my eyes played the very oddest of tricks. For an instant, before the curtain fell, the shape and substance of my young friend appeared to shift and I seemed to see the outline of a very much taller, older man, clad entirely in black.

  The apparition began slowly to turn as though it meant to face me. With a thrill of horror, I understood that I could not bear to see his face, knowing that it would no longer be the visage of my companion but rather that of some altogether malevolent outsider.

  As before, my mind proved merciful. It snatched away this grim hallucination and in its place deposited the inky, starless void of my own internal night.

  * * *

  Then, this morning, I woke again in the bright light of a new day. My small room was empty. I must have lain alone for almost an hour as consciousness crept over me. As I grew again to know all my body’s aches and plentiful discomforts, I swallowed, cleared my throat and realised that I was able to move and make sounds. At this understanding I felt surge through me a feeling akin to exultation.

  I was on the brink of attempting to rise from my sickbed when the door to the chamber was opened delicately and Gabriel Shone stepped inside.

  The first thing that struck me about my friend was the large and messy bandage which had been applied to the left side of his face, an alteration which, while certainly disfiguring, lent him also a certain wounded nobility. My second observation was that he was smiling widely.

  ‘Maurice!’

  He closed the door and strode eagerly towards me, taking up the chair beside the bed. ‘Welcome back to us, my dear fellow.’

  ‘Yes.’ My voice sounded frail and hoarse and faraway. ‘Thank you. But I… have… so many questions. Your… eye…’

  Gabriel shrugged. ‘A terrible accident in a treacherous place.
Dreadful to be sure. It’s all rather hazy now but I think I must have slipped and fallen. Ileana meant to rob us, you see, and perhaps much worse than that, but somehow – yes – the bloodshed must have startled her into flight.’

  ‘We ought…’ I began haltingly, ‘… ought never to have trusted her…’

  ‘I know that, and I’ve learned the very harshest of lessons in the most unpleasant of circumstances. But we should put such grisly matters firmly in our past. We should improve ourselves by our mistakes and place our trust in the possibilities of the future.’

  ‘Where…’ I said, still struggling, ‘exactly are…’

  ‘We are back in Bucharest. At the hospital of the Children of Delilah. And as you can see, we have both been well cared for.’

  ‘How did this come to pass?’

  ‘We were not alone in the forest. There was another man – another Englishman – close by. He is an expert naturalist. A specialist in bats, who was searching for new specimens. His name is Haskell Lynch and he heard from that dread castle our cries of despair. Oh, courageous man! Oh, brave and mighty naturalist! For he entered alone and brought us safely to civilisation. We both owe him our lives.’

  ‘I believe that I have seen him,’ I said, ‘at least if he is a small man with a pointed beard…’

  ‘Aha! Then yes, that was most assuredly he!’

  ‘I must… thank him…’

  ‘Alas, he has returned to the forest. His work is far from complete.’

  ‘Then we have been the beneficiaries,’ I said, struggling with every syllable, ‘of some terrific miracle.’

  ‘We have indeed. The Lord has offered us both a second chance – an opportunity to make good use of our lives. It is a chance that I for one do not intend to squander.’ Almost absently, he brushed a cool hand against my brow.