The Elixir

by George Willson

  “My dear Dr. Seward,” Renfield said, “thank you so much for coming at this early (Or is it late?) hour. I must implore you for my freedom.”

  “On what grounds?” Seward asked.

  “On the grounds of my sanity, of course,” Renfield said. “Was I not perfectly sane to you and Mrs. Harker earlier?”

  “Is it sane to have such a meeting so early in the morning?” Seward asked.

  “It is sane to release a man when he is ready,” Renfield said. “But I see we have more guests, and I apologize for my neglect in having you introduce them. Please.”

  “This is Jonathan Harker,” Seward began having intended to introduce them all in rapid succession and then continue, but Renfield interrupted him immediately.

  “I know Mr. Harker,” Renfield said. “I remember your face from some time in my past. You were younger then. I want to say it was not by much, but you appear to have aged considerably in so short a time. A man is the sum of his experiences, and the more he sees, the older he feels. Am I right?”

  “It is true that I’ve seen and experienced much since I saw you off from Mr. Hawkins’ office only a few short months ago,” Jonathan agreed. “We’ve often wondered what happened to you out there.”

  “I confess that I was not myself for a time, but this wonderful place has given me the time I needed to find myself once more,” Renfield said. “Pray continue, doctor.”

  “This is Lord Arthur Holmwood Godalming,” Seward said, and once more, Renfield interrupted him.

  “Ah, the young Holmwood,” Renfield said. “Your family has done much for the people, though the passing of your fiancée is unfortunate. A loss of one so young and so close is certainly a blow, but you’re young. You’ll be fine.”

  “I appreciate your concern, sir,” Arthur said stiffly, “as well as your words of kindness for my family.”

  “And this is Bram Stoker,” Seward continued.

  “I know the manager of the Lyceum Theatre where we little people can witness the great Henry Irving,” Renfield said. “I saw the production of Macbeth last year, and it took my breath away. As I recall, Sir Sullivan’s music elevated the bard’s work to a level of heaven reserved for angels.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Renfield,” Stoker said.

  “I also recall a publication some years ago in an Irish magazine,” Renfield continued. “The Primrose Path, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Stoker said. “I’m surprised you remember it.”

  “I enjoyed it is all,” Renfield said. “I’m kind of surprised I remembered it as well, but it was your name that stuck in my mind more than anything else. Are you writing anything lately?”

  “Well, I’ve submitted the manuscript for a story called The Snake’s Pass which should be released in the next year or so,” Stoker said. “Perhaps you’ll read it as well.”

  “Perhaps I will,” Renfield said, and his attention turned to Van Helsing who was approaching from the back of the group. “And you… You’re different.”

  “This is Professor Abraham Van Helsing of Amsterdam,” Seward said.

  “What are you?” Renfield asked.

  “How do you mean?” Van Helsing asked in return, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “I mean, you are different from them,” Renfield said. “You smell … different.”

  “Your sense of smell has improved recently?” Van Helsing asked.

  “Since I’ve been here,” Renfield said. “Originally, the smell of the other inmates was overpowering, but once I grew accustomed to it, I’ve been able to scent out many things I never thought possible. I know when someone is ill. I know when Dr. Seward returns, and when he has guests. I smell many things that a man would prefer not to. But you… Something about your smell is very pleasant. Almost familiar in a way.”

  “Familiar how?” Van Helsing asked.

  “Please, Dr. Seward,” Renfield said, ignoring Van Helsing. “You can see my sanity. I am no danger to anyone. Let me go.”

  “Why are you so desperate to leave?” Seward asked.

  “My reasons are wholesome and unselfish, I promise,” Renfield said. “Well, perhaps a little selfish, but I cannot explain. Not now.”

  “While I might be persuaded by anyone else were they to assume your state of mind as it appears now,” Seward said, “for you Mr. Renfield, I will need more to go on than that.”

  “I’m sure if you explain yourself to Dr. Seward,” Van Helsing said, “he would certainly honor your desire to go.”

  “I really could not say,” Renfield said. “I’m sorry, but if you do not allow me to go, that decision will be on your heads, not mine.”

  “What is out there making you so desperate?” Van Helsing asked.

  “He was here,” Renfield said.

  “Who?” Stoker asked.

  “I thought you might be him when I perceived you were inside these walls, but I know now you are not,” Renfield said. “I smelled him close yesterday. You aren’t like him. You are like the ones who are in the house there.” Renfield pointed out his window in the direction of the Carfax Abbey.

  “So there was someone out there who was like you yesterday?” Van Helsing asked.

  “Is he a Mutation?” Arthur asked, but Van Helsing put up a hand to stay the question.

  “He made me who I am,” Renfield continued. “He was the one who stole my mind, though I promise I have regained it. He is the one who stole my life, but I am ready to restore it.”

  “And who is that?” Van Helsing asked.

  “I don’t know,” Renfield replied. “But you have to let me go. Let me get far from this place. I won’t hurt anyone. I don’t want him to hurt any of you.”

  “I’m sorry, Richard,” Seward said, “but for the time being, you will need to stay here.”

  “I tried,” Renfield said as he sat on his bed and then curled into a ball. “I tried to spare you all. He is strong, you know. He is cruel, and he will come for you. Once he finds me, he will come for you.”

  Seward ushered everyone out of the room, and they returned to the study upstairs.

  “Well, that was interesting,” Stoker said as they walked. “Have you ever heard anything so foreboding? I really must start making note of these things. It would make a most interesting story.”

  “John, I would like to know more about Mr. Renfield,” Van Helsing said. “I presume he has trouble with water.”

  “Oh yes,” Seward nodded. “He refuses all the water we give him. In fact, the main thing he eats right now is raw meat. We’ve taken to getting scraps from the butcher, and Renfield eats them. I’ve tried other things, but honestly, his ingesting raw meat is one reason I am hesitant to release him. I assumed it was part of his zoophagia.”

  “It’s actually part of his hemophagia,” Van Helsing said.

  “But hemophagia is subsisting on blood,” Seward protested.

  “Surely, after all we’ve gone through, you’ve worked it out,” Van Helsing smiled. “Our Lord Godalming certainly did back there. Mr. Renfield is eating the meat, not for its protein, but for the blood still contained in it. He gets what he can out of it, but what he needs desperately is the blood. You’re only able to hold him because he is so weak from lack of it. If he were to get enough in his system, he would find his true strength, and you’d never be able to keep him.”

  “He is strong enough,” Seward said. “It often takes two or three men to restrain him.”

  “Much like it took all of us, including me, to restrain Lucy, wouldn’t you say?” Van Helsing noted. “And Mr. Renfield noted that he was an associate of Mr. Harker.”

  “He went to Transylvania first,” Jonathan said. “I was actually his replacement when he returned like that.”

  “Remarkable,” Van Helsing breathed. “Usually, they become animals, but here we have a second one that has kept his sanity. Or most of it anyway. I can’t help but wondering what is going on with them.”

  “So you’re saying that Mr. Renfield is a creature like Luc
y had become?” Seward asked. “One of your Mutations?”

  “Yes, and as long as you have him here the way you do, he appears to be manageable, which is truly a testament to your care,” Van Helsing said. “I cannot help but wonder about the implications of this.”

  “Will his fate, then, be the same as Lucy’s?” Stoker asked.

  “It will have to be, eventually, but it can wait for now,” Van Helsing said. “Here, we can talk to him, and he seems to be under control, which is rare for them. If he were released, he would need blood, and eventually, he could be persuaded to murder in order to get it. Blood is not something that a Christian society provides to simply imbibe as he requires. Besides, he will never regain his sanity, and if he ever realizes how strong he is, you’ll lose him entirely. As it is, he has just enough of his conscious mind to disbelieve the power he has. Much like the elephant on the small chain does not believe he can escape, Mr. Renfield sees himself in chains, and does not believe he has the strength to break them through his human years of the perception of his strength.”

  “So who is it he said came around yesterday?” Arthur asked. “This Karian fellow you talked about?”

  “Probably,” Van Helsing said. “We know there are Fempiror next door, and he definitively said I was more like them than the other person, who is likely a Mutation.”

  “Speaking of next door,” Jonathan reminded them.

  “Yes,” Van Helsing agreed. “The problem we’re going to run into is what I’ve run against every time I’ve tried to visit with them. The doors are locked and they won’t answer. Mr. Harker, would your firm still have keys to the house.”

  “No,” Jonathan shook his head. “When we sell it, we absolve ourselves of all responsibility, and hand over all copies of the keys to the place. We would have nothing.”

  “I have keys for it,” Seward said. “I almost forgot about them, but many years ago, the former owners gave a set of keys to the asylum in case they needed help. No one ever asked for their return, so they’ve just been sitting in a drawer.”

  “Then let’s go,” Van Helsing said.

  The five of them left the asylum and walked along the sidewalk to the front of the Abbey. As before, Van Helsing knocked loudly on the front door, but there was no answer.

  “I hate the idea of breaking in, but we need to get to the bottom of this,” Van Helsing said. “John, if you please.”

  Seward produced the keys and tried them in the lock until he found one that opened the door. They entered the old house together, and found the sitting room to be in good order and well appointed.

  “I recognize some of the furniture here from the castle,” Jonathan said. “We’re definitely in the right place. It feels weird seeing it again – like crossing into a dream.”

  “Voivode Draculya,” Van Helsing called out. “Please, we don’t want to hurt you. We just need to talk.”

  There was no answer. They called out several times more as they walked through the house, no one ever answered. The house was empty. After a thorough search, they met back up in the living room by the front door.

  “Now what?” Arthur asked.

  “There is a chapel around back,” Seward said. “We can check there as well.”

  “It’s through here,” Jonathan said, and he led them through the house out a back door to where the old chapel stood. It was a near ruin compared to the house, but even so, it still appeared solid. Seward used his keys once more to open the door.

  They entered the chapel, and unlike the house, the place was covered in a layer of dust showing that while they lived in the house, they ignored the chapel. The dust was only disturbed in one area, and this area was populated by a large number of wooden crates.

  “These are the crates I saw at the castle,” Jonathan said. “They were used to ship everything over here by boat.”

  “Including that Mutation based on the Demeter log,” Stoker said solemnly.

  “I would have to guess that whoever it was saw the crates as the only way to follow Voivode,” Van Helsing reasoned. “That would be the only way he would have ended up on a boat. He lost track of them, but he found these and knew they would get him here. When he found himself spending weeks on a ship, he panicked. I wonder if they left anything at the castle.”

  “That wouldn’t matter,” Jonathan said. “The castle is gone.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Van Helsing said.

  “Knowing everything I saw was real, I definitely remember this,” Jonathan said. “In the rain when I was running away from the castle, the whole place went up in a huge blast like they lined the place with gunpowder and set it off.”

  “They destroyed a castle?” Arthur said, stupefied. “Why would they do that?”

  “Clearly, no one is home at present, but we have to come back and talk to them,” Van Helsing said. “I want to know what was there to lead them to destroy their former home, and who the Fempiror is with Draculya. This Fempiror has faced off against our Mutation at least once, so he holds most of the missing pieces to our puzzle. There is more going on here than just us, and we need to find out what that is.”

  When they returned to the asylum after locking the Abbey, Seward provided rooms for them all. However, when Jonathan had gone to his room, he found that Mina was already asleep. Rather than disturb her, he elected to sleep on the couch in the study. Van Helsing was not certain how well everyone would sleep considering how much information had been dumped on them, and the prospect of more excitement to come, but he hoped it would be well enough because there was much to do.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  In the light of day, Karian returned to the street where he had traced the people who had killed Lucy the previous evening in an attempt to find the killers. His investigation of the hotel yielded nothing that he could conclusively follow, and so he found his way back to the point where the trail most likely ended.

  Along the street here was an asylum next door to a building called the Carfax Abbey, neither of which appeared to be promising, and under the stifling scent of humanity pouring out of the asylum, he could not smell anything else. He climbed over the wall separating the asylum from the world and looked at the building. A series of small windows dotted its exterior which would allow its inmates to see something of the outside, but not allow them to escape.

  Karian walked along the wall as he looked into each window to see what he could see of the place. Most of the people there paid him no attention at all as they whimpered or spent their time curled on their bed or floor, and in some instances, the cell was empty. He was surprised when he reached a window where a man appeared to be waiting for him, staring directly out.

  “You’re here,” the man said. Karian stared at him curious as to who he might be. He sniffed of the air, and somewhere within the overpowering stench, he caught the whiff of familiarity.

  “Who are you?” Karian asked.

  “You came,” the man said. “You came all the way here for me.”

  “Do I know you?” Karian asked, and as he did, he was finally able to smell past the human stench to find the man standing before him was a Mutation. “How do you know me?”

  “We met in Transylvania, remember?” the man said. “Surely, you remember me.”

  Karian stared at him for a long time, and then he remembered. “I found you walking up the mountain to the castle of Voivode Draculya,” Karian said. “You disappeared: the one that got away. I thought you were dead. What is your name?”

  “Richard Mark Renfield,” the man said. “Have you come to free me? Please don’t hurt these people. They’re good people.”

  “What happened to you, Richard? How did you get here?” Karian asked, part of him shocked that he was carrying on a conversation with another of his transmutations that somehow managed to keep his intelligence enough to speak.

  “I thought I was dying,” Renfield said. “I slept in a barn for a couple of days before I found civilization again. They shipped me back to England, but
when I got back, I was sick for a few days before they realized I wasn’t entirely myself. That’s when I ended up here.”

  “Do you remember why you were in Transylvania?” Karian asked.

  “I suppose it was to find you,” Renfield shrugged. “It must be.”

  “I see,” Karian said. He knew the general reason why he was in Transylvania, but he was hoping for details. Unfortunately, Renfield’s mind was as much a shadow of its former state as Lucy’s had been. He had some vague memories here and there, but most of it was stuck in the moment without much in the way of usable knowledge. He needed to keep investigating the building.

  “Are you all right in there for the moment, Richard?” Karian asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Renfield replied, “but I am at least better now.”

  “I want you to remain there for now,” Karian said. “I will return for you later.”

  Renfield nodded and quietly sat down to wait, looking contented. Karian climbed onto the wall of the building to look in the windows of the second floor. He noted that several rooms looked like normal bedrooms as opposed to the veritable prison cells below, and curiously, there were people sleeping in them at this time of day.

  He reached a room near the middle of the structure and was surprised to find the woman he remembered as Mina sleeping in the bed. He opened the window and crawled through to look at her. As he approached, Mina turned in her bed and opened her eyes long enough to look directly at him. He froze, but no sooner had she seen him without reaction than she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

  Seeing her here meant that he had a bargaining chip to use against David if he found him again. David held some kind of affection for this woman based on his reaction to the picture of her he had seen. He thought of Renfield again. The man went to Transylvania to sell a property to Draculya, and if he were exceptionally lucky, Renfield might be able to draw some memory of the location and take him there.

  He left Mina’s room and closed the window behind him. He crawled down the wall to Renfield and drew his attention.