Bram Stoker's Dracula

by Fred Saberhagen

  At a little before six in the morning, Van Helsing came in to relieve his younger colleague, and bent over the patient for a close examination.

  As soon as the old man got a close look at Lucy's face, Seward could hear the hissing intake of his breath.

  "Draw up the blind," the professor commanded. "I want light!"

  Seward hastened to comply.

  Van Helsing now removed the garlic flowers, and a silk handkerchief Lucy had been wearing about her throat.

  "The devil's whore!" he murmured, in a despairing tone.

  Seward hastened to look for himself, and as he did a queer chill came over him.

  The wounds on the throat had absolutely disappeared.

  For fully five minutes Van Helsing stood looking at the young patient, with his face at its sternest. Then he turned to Seward and said calmly: "She is dying; it will not be long now. Wake that poor boy, and let him come see the last. He trusts us, and we have promised him."

  Seward accordingly went to the nearby room where Holmwood was and awakened him, assuring Arthur that Lucy was still asleep, but conveying as gently as he could the opinion of both doctors that the end was near.

  When the two returned to Lucy's room, Seward noted that Van Helsing had been putting matters straight and making everything look as pleasant as possible. He had even brushed Lucy's hair, so that it lay on the pillow in its usual bright ripples.

  When Holmwood came into the room, she opened her eyes and, seeing her fiancé, whispered softly: "Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come!"

  He was stooping to kiss her when Van Helsing motioned him back. "No, not yet. Hold her hand. It will comfort her more."

  So Arthur, after giving the old man a questioning look, obediently took Lucy's hand and knelt beside her, and she looked her best, with all the soft lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes. Then gradually her eyes closed, and she sank to sleep. For a little bit her breast heaved softly, and her breath came and went like that of a tired child.

  And then, insensibly at first, there followed the strange change that Seward had noticed before. Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, somewhat drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever.

  In a sort of sleepwalking, vague, unconscious way Lucy opened her eyes, which Seward now perceived as being both dull and hard at once. She said again in a soft, voluptuous voice: "Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!"

  This time Arthur bent eagerly over the woman he loved to kiss her; but at that instant Van Helsing, who, like Seward, had been startled by her changed voice, swooped upon him, and catching him by the neck with both hands, dragged him back with furious strength and actually hurled him almost across the room.

  "Not for your life!" he said. "Not for your living soul and hers!" And he stood between the couple like a lion at bay.

  Arthur was so taken aback that he did not for a moment know what to do or say; and before any impulse of violence could seize him, he realized the place and the occasion, and stood silent, waiting.

  Lucy at first snarled—there was no other word for it, thought Seward—at Van Helsing when he intervened so forcefully, but a minute later, in a last softening of her appearance and her manner, she blessed and thanked him.

  "My true friend!" she said in a faint voice, pressing Van Helsing's hand hard with her wasted fingers. "My true friend, and his. Oh, guard him, and give me peace."

  Van Helsing dropped solemnly to one knee beside her bed. "I swear it!"

  And then Lucy's breathing became stertorous again, and all at once it ceased.

  Shortly after sunrise, with Arthur Holmwood numbly still in attendance, Dr. Seward pronounced the patient dead, and within the hour had signed her death certificate.

  By noon, Lucy, looking pure and lovely, lay peacefully on white satin in her glassy funeral coffin, in the great hall, surrounded by masses of lilies and roses.

  Every hour, Seward mused privately, gazing at the figure under glass, seemed to be enhancing Lucy's loveliness. It frightened and amazed him somewhat, and he was not surprised that Arthur should tremble, and finally be shaken with real doubt.

  There came a moment when Holmwood leaned toward him and asked in a faint whisper: "Jack, is she really dead?"

  The physician had to assure his friend that it was so.

  Meanwhile Lucy's invalid mother had collapsed upon being told the news; there was no way the bitter truth could be any longer kept from her. Mrs. Westenra was being attended to by her maids, and by her own physician, in her own room. Seward expected to hear at any moment that the mother had followed her daughter.

  In the early afternoon, Holmwood and Quincey Morris, both near tears and unable to sleep, were sitting a vigil near the head of Lucy's coffin.

  Van Helsing and Seward, both grief-stricken also, had been conferring at a little distance. Now, after Van Helsing signaled Seward with a look, the two physicians turned away and walked into the conservatory, where it would be possible to hold a more private conversation.

  The elder man said: "I know you loved her deeply. What I discovered last night came too late to save her life." He paused. "But there is worse still to be feared."

  Seward could feel his own face twitching; he could only stare at his old mentor aghast. "Worse! In God's name, Professor, what could be worse than what we have endured?"

  "Jack, will you trust me?"

  "To do what?"

  If Van Helsing was bothered by the new lack of unqualified trust, he did not comment. His gaze had become remote; his mind was busy planning out his own agenda.

  His voice, when he spoke again, was calm. "I want you to bring me, today or tomorrow, a set of postmortem knives."

  "Then must we make an autopsy?" Seward's tone was almost despairing.

  "Yes, and no. I want to operate, but not as you think. Let me tell you now, but not a word to another." The philosopher's voice was chillingly matter-of-fact. "I want to cut off her head and take out her heart."

  Seward uttered a wordless gasp.

  "Ah, you a surgeon, and so shocked—but I must not forget, my dear friend John, that you loved her."

  "I did indeed."

  "Still, you must help me… I would like to do it tonight, but for Arthur's sake I must not; he will be free after his father's funeral tomorrow, and he will want to see his beloved again before interment.

  "Then later, when she is coffined, whether in the vault or not, you and I shall come some night when all are asleep. We shall unscrew the coffin lid, and do our operation, and then replace all so that none know, save we alone."

  Seward had recovered somewhat from his shock, but was still depressed and puzzled. "But why do it at all, Professor? The poor girl is dead—why this mutilation? I see nothing to gain, no good to her, to us, to science, to human knowledge… ?"

  Van Helsing's attitude became one of great fatherly tenderness. "Friend John, I pity your poor bleeding heart. There are things you know not, but shall know—though they are not pleasant things.

  "Were you not amazed, nay horrified, when I would not let Arthur kiss his love—though she was dying—and snatched him away by all my strength?"

  "Frankly I was."

  "Yes! And yet you saw how she thanked me, with her so beautiful dying eyes, and she kiss my rough old hand and bless me?" Van Helsing held up the hand Lucy had kissed, and Seward saw that it was trembling slightly.

  "Yes, I did see that."

  The professor continued: "And did you not hear me swear promise to her, so that she closed her eyes grateful?"

  "Yes, I saw and heard all that as well."

  "Well, I have good reason now for all I want to do. Trust me, Jack. The best of reasons."

  Mrs. Westenra, as expected, survived by no more than a few hours the shock of the death of her only child.

  Seward wrote in his journal that in a double funeral the old lady had been laid to rest, beside her daughter Lucy, "in the tomb of her kin, a lordly de
ath house… away from teeming London, where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill, and where wildflowers grow of their own accord."

  Just before dawn on the edge of Hampstead Heath, a homeless urchin, dressed in rags and no more than seven or eight years old, was warming his chapped hands and bare feet beside a small fire of wooden scraps and scavenged bits of coal.

  The lad was distracted from his chronic hunger and discomfort, his attention very much engaged, by the sight of a young, pretty, red-haired woman walking toward him from the direction in which the sun was soon to rise. The lady was quite alone at the moment, dressed all in delicate and frilly white, so that her unsophisticated admirer wondered if she might be a bride. She smiled graciously at the small boy as he stared, openmouthed, at the passing vision of loveliness.

  Watching the woman disappear out of sight on her effortless but swift passage in the general direction of Hillingham, he murmured to himself: "Coo… wot a bloofer lady, she is…"

  But moments later, looking back in the direction from which the apparition had come, the urchin caught sight of a motionless pair of legs no bigger than his own, protruding from some bushes.

  Practical matters first. Approaching the apparently lifeless victim, the shivering child began to remove the shoes from the small feet, thinking that he himself had greater need of them. Whereupon the owner of the shoes stirred and sat up, crying feebly—it was another boy, perhaps a little younger than the first. His skin had been drained of color, and he was disoriented.

  On his neck were a pair of tiny wounds, still fresh, each marked with a drop of blood.

  Later that same day, Van Helsing, having been shocked by a newspaper account of this strange event, swore in German and muttered in Seward's hearing: "So soon! So soon!"

  Taking the paper, Seward read:

  THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE, 25 SEPTEMBER

  A HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY

  We have just received intelligence that another child, missed last night, was discovered late in the morning under a furze bush at the Shooter's Hill side of Hampstead Heath, which is, perhaps, less frequented than the other parts. It has the same tiny wound in the throat as has been noticed in other cases. It was terribly weak, and looked quite emaciated. It, too, when partially restored, had the common story to tell of being lured away by the "bloofer lady."

  Within the hour the professor, accompanied by Dr. Seward, was in the charity ward of the North Heath Hospital. There the two visiting physicians, having quickly established their credentials with the doctor in charge, were shown to the bedside of a small patient who had been recently admitted.

  Van Helsing began by presenting a candy. Then, deftly lifting a bandage, he looked at the wounds on the childish throat, making sure that Seward got the chance to see them also.

  Then the professor restored the bandage and sat back in his chair. "Now, lad—I need your help. Dr. Vincent tell me it is his idea that some animal bit you. Maybe it was a rat? Maybe a bat?"

  The boy shook his head. "It was 'at bloofer lady."

  "A lady who was beautiful, you say, if I have understanding—yes?"

  A nod.

  "Good. Well now, this lady's hair was—gray, perhaps? Or was it black?"

  The small head shook from side to side. The sweet had already vanished into the small hungry mouth, and Van Helsing, when prodded by Seward, offered another.

  Speaking around the candy clenched in his teeth, the young lad told them firmly: "No, sir, guv'nor. She got 'air all red. Bright. Like an angel. But she bit me, she did."

  A few minutes later Seward and Van Helsing were walking out of the hospital.

  "Mein Gott!" the old man was murmuring to himself again. "So soon, so soon!"

  Seward cleared his throat, and stated the one point in the whole affair he had been able to grasp firmly. "The small puncture wounds were exactly like poor Lucy's. Presumably it is the same in the case of the other children also."

  His mentor's eyes looked at him sideways from under their heavy brows. "Certainly they were alike. And what do you make of that?"

  "Simply that there is some cause in common—the small holes in the children's throats were made by the same agency that injured Lucy."

  "Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were so! But alas, no. It is worse, far, far, worse."

  Seward stopped in surprise, confronting his companion. "In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?"

  The old man made a despairing gesture. "They were made by Miss Lucy!"

  It was on that same day that Jonathan and Mina Harker returned to England as man and wife, having been married at the convent hospital in Budapest. An additional time of convalescence, and the presence and attentions of his loving bride, had now restored Harker, at least as far as outward appearances were concerned, to something approaching a normal state of health. A pallor and a limp, the latter assisted by a cane, were the most highly visible remaining signs of his ordeal.

  The couple arrived at Dover by boat-train from France, then proceeded by another train to London.

  At Dover they had been greeted by a telegram from Van Helsing, bringing them the news, sad but not unexpected, of the almost simultaneous deaths of Lucy and her mother.

  The professor also requested the Harkers to get in touch with him as soon as possible in London, where he had taken a room at the Berkeley Hotel.

  On reaching London, the Harkers disembarked from their train at Victoria Station. Since Jonathan was still on convalescent leave, with pay, from his employer, they decided that they might as well stay at the Berkeley themselves.

  As the couple, with their modest baggage, boarded a hansom cab, Mina was musing, as much to herself as to her new husband: "I can't believe Lucy is gone… never to return to us. She was so full of life. How she must have suffered. Her life and mine were so different only a few months ago. All our hopes—our dreams—"

  Harker, who had barely been acquainted with Lucy, commiserated with his wife, but meanwhile he was looking greedily out the window of the cab, drinking in the cheerfully strenuous life of London, rejoicing in his own successful return to the homelike sights and sounds of the metropolis, which, in recent months, he had more than once despaired of ever seeing again.

  Amid the clamor, the ever-changing life of the familiar streets, he at last began truly to relax. This made the blow all the worse when, a few minutes later, with the hansom momentarily stalled in traffic, he got one of the worst shocks of his life.

  He saw Dracula, unmistakably the Carpathian count, though now looking young and vital and dressed in modern Western garb. The figure of Dracula was standing under a street lamp and gazing arrogantly back at Harker in his cab.

  Dracula, giving the impression that Harker's presence was no surprise at all, favored his former prisoner with a knowing look, then deliberately turned away and entered a pub.

  Harker tried to leap to his feet, but his worn nerves failed him for the moment and his knees buckled.

  Mina caught him, tried to cradle him, stared with alarm at her husband's eyes gone wild in terror and amazement.

  "Jonathan? What is it?"

  Harker pointed feverishly out the window as he stammered out his answer. "It—it is the man himself. The count. I s-saw him; he has grown young!"

  Mina felt a cold chill at her heart. She looked out of the cab, which still had not moved, but whoever had so excited her husband had disappeared.

  Harker was suddenly animated, his eyes and his voice once more lucid with purpose.

  "Carfax!" he exclaimed, snapping his fingers. "The bastard's there."

  "Carfax—the estate you sold him."

  Harker nodded. "One of them. Yes." Hastily digging into his traveling bag, he pulled out a slim volume. It was the journal the young man had kept while a prisoner in Dracula's castle, and which he had somehow managed to carry with him during his escape.

  Feverishly Harker pressed the book into Mina's hands.

  He gazed at her pleadingly. "Up to now,
my dear one, I have told you only the bare outline of events in that hellish place. Now I want you to read every word. You will understand… I pray you will…"

  Her hands closed on the slim volume. "What are you going to do, Jonathan?"

  "What I must!" And in the next moment Harker had jumped out of the cab and was moving, as swiftly as his cane and his limp would allow, in pursuit of Dracula.

  Elbowing his way across the crowded pavement, Harker hurried into the pub, where he stood peering desperately through the smoky haze of the interior.

  The traffic snarl was easing. Mina ordered the cabdriver to pull to the curb and wait, and when the man seemed disinclined to do so, she reinforced the command with a gift of coins.

  Inside the pub, Harker caught sight of the man he sought at the last instant, just as Dracula was leaving the smoke-filled room by a different door. Once again forcing people out of his way, ignoring their protests, Harker followed.

  Outside again, now in a foggy alley, he caught another tantalizing glimpse of the retreating count; a figure turning, smiling, almost beckoning to his pursuer.

  Again Harker followed—for the moment rage and indignation were enough to overcome fear, and even common sense.

  Suddenly the fog surrounding Harker was swirled by a whirlwind of force. The incredible figure of a bat, dark, gigantic, man-sized, exploded from the mist, hurling the man back.

  Harker, falling hard on cobblestones and wall, was stunned.

  13

  In the depth of the September night, amid chill and fog, four men burdened with tools, weapons, and lanterns were stealthily entering the cemetery at Hillingham.

  Van Helsing was of course the one who had instigated and organized this expedition, and he remained in charge, with Seward his tight-lipped and ill-informed assistant. The professor had chosen this dark hour in the hopes of avoiding observation by the servants and the potentially troublesome gossip that must inevitably follow.