At this Mina allowed herself to be hurried away to the upstairs living quarters that had been prepared for her. But the loud cries of the madman followed her. "Doctor Jack! I am no lunatic! I'm a sane man fighting for his soul!"
On entering her suite of sitting room and bedroom, on the first floor above ground level, Mina went immediately to the nearest window, which offered a dim nighttime view of Carfax. Looking out over the stone dividing wall, which was almost invisible amid the bare branches of the intervening trees, she could plainly see the indirect glow of the lights carried by the party of men among whom was her husband.
And now, distantly, she could begin to hear the repeated thud of an ax, swung by strong arms, striking heavy wood.
The men were in deadly earnest, and there was no longer the slightest doubt in Mina's mind as to just who they were hunting. Her husband's mortal enemy was her own prince and lover. Bloody conflict seemed inevitable; Jonathan might be killed—at his hands. Or he might die, at Jonathan's—and Mina Harker did not know, could not decide, which outcome would be more terrible.
15
The heavy old doors of Carfax had been fitted with new locks, propped up in some cases with new timbers, and barred from the inside against intruders. They were decidedly sturdy doors. But Harker and his three bold companions, wielding ax and steel bars, soon succeeded in forcing an entrance to that ancient house—which still, from the outside, appeared to be abandoned.
Harker and his comrades, on pushing their way into the hall of Carfax through the splintered wreckage of the first demolished barrier, saw by the light of their electric torches and their burning lanterns that the whole place was thick with dust. In the corners were masses of spiderwebs, whereon the dust had gathered till they looked like old tattered rags as the weight had torn them partly down.
The professor paused to contemplate this for a moment. Then he spoke over his shoulder to Harker. Van Helsing's voice was uncharacteristically hushed, like that of a man wary of waking some nearby sleeper.
"You know this place, Jonathan, at least better than we others do. You have photographed it, and copied down the plan."
Harker stood gripping his ax impatiently in both hands. "How bitterly I regret ever having had anything to do with it!"
"Ja. Which is the way to the chapel?"
Silently Harker took one of the clumsy electric torches and motioned for the others to follow him.
Despite his earlier study of the floor plan, the layout of the huge house was confusing and the party took a couple of wrong turns. But within a minute, Harker still leading the way, they found their progress halted by a low, arched, oaken door, ribbed with iron bands.
This door, like that at the front entrance, proved to be locked and barred, but again the impatient ax in Jonathan's hands made an effective key.
Behind the oaken door an extensive chamber, vaulted with high Gothic arches, was revealed. Long disuse by any living lungs seemed to have made the air inside stagnant and foul. There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, Harker thought. But no one paid any attention now to such details. Lights flashing about in the hands of the investigators revealed rows of bulky coffin boxes, and a quick tally revealed that there were twenty-nine.
The searchers frowned at one another. There was no need for anyone to state the fact aloud: Unless they should be able to uncover the count here, and destroy him, it would be necessary to seek elsewhere—tomorrow, and for as many days as necessary—for the balance of the fifty.
Harker, his hands resting on the lid of one of the coffins, said in an emotional voice: "I have seen these very boxes at the count's castle. There he was… resting in one of them."
The professor grunted. Then, prying energetically, leaning his considerable weight upon a steel bar, he ruthlessly ripped the nailed-down lid from another of the containers. A moment later Van Helsing stood staring at the moldy stuff inside.
After scooping up a handful and throwing it aside, Van Helsing announced: "This is the sacred earth of his homeland. He must rest in it. Destroy every box. Sterilize the earth inside. Leave him no refuge. Let the exorcism begin!"
Harker, once more wielding the big ax, took the lead. He chopped up coffins, splintering their lids, fanatically driving the thick blade into one after another, with cries and gasps of rage. His anger and energy only seemed to increase as the work went on.
Van Helsing had a flask of holy water hanging about his neck, and with it he sprinkled the exposed earth in box after box, chanting: "In manus tuas, Domine!"
Into thy hand, O Lord.
Meanwhile Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, having pulled on sturdy gloves, were bending their backs and straining their muscles, opening the boxes as rapidly as Harker splintered them open, dumping out and exposing their moldy contents.
Harker paused for a moment to catch his breath and wipe away the sweat, which, despite the chill atmosphere, was running down his forehead. So far, to his growing disappointment, none of the coffins they had torn open contained the vampire's body. Suppose the fiend should somehow manage to outwit his pursuers?
Never! Taking a fresh stand before another of the boxes, he raised his ax again.
"In manus tuas, Domine …" Van Helsing chanted on, alternately sprinkling holy water and crumbling bits of consecrated wafer into the growing piles of Transylvanian soil.
At the asylum, Renfield's painful cries went on and on as if they were never going to cease. Mina, almost directly above him, plugged her ears with her fingers, praying silently that the poor sufferer below might find some kind of peace.
Then she relaxed with a little sob of gratitude; it appeared that this prayer, at least, had been answered.
But she did not know the reason for Renfield's sudden silence. It had been caused by the abrupt appearance of Dracula, in human shape, just outside the window of his cell.
Renfield, on finding himself at last directly confronted by the one he had worshiped so long, for a moment seemed to be entirely struck dumb.
Then, clinging to the window bars, he whispered slavishly to the slender, dark-garbed figure just outside: "Master, Master… yes, Master… thy will be done."
Renfield paused suddenly, moving his lips in silence. It seemed to him that the figure outside was somehow, wordlessly, conveying its wish to him; and as soon as Renfield understood this, he hastened to grant the wish, to speak the invitation that was necessary before the vampire was empowered to enter this dwelling place.
Quickly he murmured: "Come in, Lord and Master!"
The figure outside inclined its head once, in acknowledgment. It did not appear to move in the ordinary human way; rather it became insubstantial in appearance, and did not turn opaque again until it had drifted in between the bars.
Once inside Renfield's cell, the prince regained solid human form. He stood in the middle of the small space staring coldly at his disciple, and at last spoke to him openly.
"Renfield—you have betrayed me."
The other giggled nervously, insanely. "I tried to warn her, but she would not listen!"
Dracula only stared at him.
Though Renfield now seemed unable to look directly at his long-awaited master, the madman's eyes glowed dangerously. "She must be spared; you cannot have her."
Scornfully Dracula, without deigning to reply, turned his back and would have left the cell through the barred door.
In that moment Renfield, like the lunatic he was, hurled himself upon the vampire.
As soon as he had seen Mina settled into her temporary quarters and had made sure of her security and comfort as well as he was able, Seward went downstairs again. There he heard a report from an assistant and was gratified to learn that there were no problems among the inmates requiring his immediate attention.
Presently Seward equipped himself with heavy gloves and another lantern. After a final word to his chief assistant, he left the building by a rear door and hastened out across the grounds of the asylum, feet scuffing noisily thro
ugh dead leaves. The young doctor intended to follow his comrades over the wall to Carfax, and there to share whatever dangers they might face, and whatever success they might achieve, in carrying out their work of destruction.
Seward, finding the first ruined door and then following the noise of coffin smashing and the glow of lights, experienced no difficulty in locating his four friends. He had just joined them inside the chapel when they all saw Quincey Morris step suddenly back from a corner of the paved floor he had been examining.
In another moment the men observed, swelling up in that corner, what Harker in his journal later described as "a whole mass of phosphorescence, which twinkled like stars." The bright spots were small eyes, reflecting lantern beams.
All of the men instinctively drew back. The whole place was becoming alive with rats.
The professor, interrupting his labors, cried: "This is his doing! Arthur, your dogs! Call them!"
Holmwood immediately blew on a silver whistle he had been wearing on a string around his neck. His trio of terriers, which had been exercising their curiosity by exploring other rooms in the old house, came scampering at once into the abandoned chapel, whining and snarling with their eagerness to fight the rats.
Arthur blew his whistle again, unnecessarily. The terriers were all accustomed to this game, and they all three used the same killing technique, which was swift and efficient: grab the rat, large or small, by neck or back, and lift it off the ground. A quick strong bite, augmented by a savage shake to ensure that the spinal cord was severed, and the lifeless victim was cast aside, to be replaced in a moment by another. For whatever reason, rat-killing dogs were seldom themselves bitten by the enemy.
The floor of the old chapel, already thick with the dust of decades, if not of centuries, was quickly littered with dead rats. Still the scurrying rodents in their ever-increasing numbers seemed to swarm over the place, till the lamplight, shining on their moving dark bodies and glittering, baleful eyes, made the place look like a bank of earth set with fireflies.
The dogs had already shaken the life out of scores of the enemy, but ever-greater numbers of the rats came on. When Seward arrived, the human hunters had been preparing to set fire to a rude woodpile made from Dracula's shattered coffin boxes. Now that plan had to be momentarily postponed while the humans defended themselves against what appeared to be a deliberately planned assault. It seemed to the men that sharp-toothed rodents were springing from every dark corner of the building, coming up out of the earth and out of the night itself, trying to swarm over the men.
The invaders cursed the flea-infested, disease-carrying creatures, plucked them with loathing from their coat sleeves and trouser legs, shot at them with Winchester and pistol, slew them right and left with swords, shovels, and axes.
Van Helsing doused the swarming rodents with holy water; then he tried coal oil, which he had brought along as a means of intensifying fire, and found it at least as effective.
After first making sure of a way out, for themselves and their ferocious allies the terriers, the men set fire to the stacked remnants of the coffin boxes, and gathering the most valuable of their tools and weapons, shielding their faces from the sudden roar of flame, they conducted an orderly withdrawal.
Back in the asylum Dracula easily overpowered the burly madman. In his rage the prince lifted Renfield bodily from the ground and smashed him several times against the bars of the cell door.
After pausing briefly to observe the result, Dracula went on his way—through that door, moving freely now into the interior of the building.
Renfield, still breathing but fatally injured, lay where he had been thrown down, collapsed against the bars. Pain, numbness, and paralysis, in different parts of his body, made him aware that he had been hideously hurt. Dimly, as through a haze of his own blood, he could see and hear the running feet of several keepers, hastening to his cell to investigate the unusual disturbance.
Renfield muttered: "Her salvation… is his destruction. And I am free…"
And with those words he understood that he was dying. It felt like a long dying, going on and on without end.
16
Mina was totally unaware of what was happening in Renfield's cell downstairs, and equally, helplessly, ignorant of what might be going on at Carfax. Once Jonathan and his companions had entered the old house there, even the indirect glow of their lights had ceased to be visible from her window in the asylum.
But whenever she closed her eyes, her active imagination showed her scenes of lurid horror. Even now her prince might be sharing the grisly fate of Lucy—decapitation and the stake. Or her husband might be overwhelmed by the same horror that had already left him gray and trembling, prematurely aged.
If Van Helsing and the others were right, and the prince was really there… but Mina had no way of knowing where he was. Dracula had vanished completely from her ken when he disappeared into the crowd along the London street.
If only she could know . . . but she could not.
Presently the young woman arose and turned away from her observation post at the window of her small apartment's sitting room. She tottered, exhausted, into the bedroom, and there, without undressing, threw herself down on the bed, telling herself that after a few minutes' rest she would resume her vigil.
Mina Harker was fast asleep minutes before the first red light of the flames at Carfax showed in the nearby window.
Hers was a brief, uneasy slumber, troubled by strange dreams.
And the strangest dream of all was that the prince, Mina's secret, incomparable lover, the man whose destiny seemed to have been entangled with hers for all eternity—the prince himself had somehow come to be with her now, in this very bed in this unfamiliar room on the upper floor of Dr. Jack's asylum.
And in the depth of Mina's dream it seemed to her no more than natural that he, the man she truly loved, should be here with her, lying at her side, beginning to embrace her, just as if he and not Jonathan were her true and rightful husband.
In her sleep the young woman murmured helplessly:
"Oh, my love—yes—you have found me."
And his voice when he replied was softer than she remembered it, but otherwise just the same.
"Mina… my most precious life—"
For the moment, in the glorious freedom of the world of dreams, she could be free of conflict, supremely happy.
Softly she acknowledged: "I have wanted this to happen. I know now that—I want to be with you always—"
Then with a great shock Mina Harker came wideawake. This was no dream. Or rather it was a dream somehow come true. Mina sat up with a gasp.
The presence of the prince, her lover, in the darkness of the bedroom was as firm and real as at any time on any of the occasions since she had met him.
Lying close beside her, he whispered: "Command me, and I will leave you. But no mere mortal man shall come between us. Will you command me to go?"
"No. No, I should, but I cannot. I was so afraid I would never feel your touch again. I feared you were dead—" Mina paused in fearful wonder. "But you are—you can be—no mere man."
In response her beloved prince raised himself to a sitting position and took her hand. Gently he placed her palm under her own breast first.
He said: "Your heart beats, here—" Then he moved her hand to his bare chest: "But here—"
She reacted in silent horror to what she felt; or rather, to what she could not feel. There was no heartbeat.
He told her solemnly: "There is no life in this body."
Mina involuntarily shrank back a little. "But you live. What are you? I must know. You must tell me."
"Can you bear the knowledge?"
"I must. I cannot bear to remain in ignorance."
"Very well. I am accounted lifeless, soulless. I am hated, and feared. I have endured oceans of time—committed unspeakable acts—to keep some grip on life, until I could find you."
"No!"
"Yes." His voice pursued
her relentlessly. "I am the monster that the breathing men would kill. I am Dracula."
There was a long pause in which Mina remained sitting in the bed, the coverlet pulled around her shoulders as if she were freezing cold. At last she said: "Then the old man is right. It is as I feared. You are the one who held Jonathan a prisoner. And it was you who made dear Lucy—what she became."
Dracula nodded slowly. "I confess those evil deeds, and worse."
"No—"
"Yes! I tell you that without you—without the life, the love you give me—I am dead to all humanity. Without you I am nothing more than a beast that feeds on human blood!"
On hearing this, Mina broke down, flailing her small fists at her lover in ineffective anger. Dracula only averted his face.
But in the next moment she had seized him, clutched at him desperately, with the grip of a drowning woman. "God forgive me! I love you! I do!"
She held her lover gently, stroked his long, dark hair. And the face that Dracula turned again to her was filled with tender and undying love.
At the same time, downstairs in Renfield's cell, a keeper was showing Seward and Van Helsing into the small, barred room where the critically injured patient, his body badly broken, lay on the floor in a small pool of his own blood.
Both physicians were smudged with dust and dirt, their clothing saturated with the smells of age and decay, of rats and smoke. Both were already physically worn from their recently concluded struggle at Carfax. But there was no chance now for either man to rest.
On entering the cell, Seward at once demanded more light, then knelt to pass skilled hands over the fallen figure.
At the doctor's touch, Renfield moaned feebly.
"Back broken, possibly," Seward reported grimly, a moment later. "And certainly cranial fractures. I don't see how he could do this to himself. One injury or the other, perhaps; not both."
Van Helsing, down on one knee nearby, frowned in sympathy with Seward's patient, and joined in the examination.
Bram Stoker's Dracula Page 16
