Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  Sometimes in sleep he could see Catherine, in that London house they’d bought under the name of Marshmire, dozing by lamplight. Or in his dreams he’d walk up the stairs of their old house in Nottingham, as he’d used to years ago, to see Vixie in her nursery, that bright-eyed nymph face relaxed in sleep, a black curl falling over her forehead. These dreams comforted him deeply, for he missed them both. Even had they been able to get word to him without Georgina and Lady Brough hearing of it and finding a way to trace them—to take Vixie away—communication was now doubly perilous.

  And sometimes he would dream of Vixie, waking in her nursery room in that house in Nottingham, not a little girl but the young lady that she was now, sixteen and beautiful, wearing Lucy Westenra’s night-dress.

  In these dreams she would wake, and sit up in bed, dark eyes wide in the darkness. Outside the window rain fell through fog, and the tiny glow of her night-light sparkled on it as she got out of bed, crossed to the window, threw open the casement. Renfield would struggle to reach her, struggle to cry out to her, Vixie, don’t!

  And He was outside her window. Slowly coalescing from the shadows, as the three Valkyries had coalesced from the darkness, fog, and rain in Renfield’s long-ago dream of the hopeless prisoner named Jonathan. The thing in the chapel, the thing Renfield still sometimes called Wotan, though he knew now that it was something else, some other Traveler. Wind lifted and stirred Wotan’s black cloak, and in the darkness his eyes were red as flame, staring into Vixie’s.

  Vixie, no!

  Then Renfield would waken himself screaming, and those imbecile attendants would come with their laudanum and chloral hydrate, like rescuers determined to shove a drowning man back down under the waves.

  And they wondered that he fought them!

  Yet more often, Renfield dreamed of Lucy Westenra: dreamed, knowing he participated in the dreams of the thing in the chapel, that could touch Lucy’s sleeping mind. He dreamed of Lucy waking in the darkness and stumbling to the window, dreamed of the floating shadow, the crimson eyes. Dreamed of the fangs that pierced her throat, of those coarse hands with their claw-like nails, caressing her as if he would mould her flesh into what he sought her to be. Once Renfield saw Wotan push back his sleeve and tear open the vein of his own arm, and press Lucy’s white lips to the wound.

  “Drink,” Renfield heard him breathe. “Drink, or you will die.”

  Half-swooning, Lucy whispered, “Please…I don’t want to die…” and the dark intruder pulled back her head by a handful of her fair hair, and held the dripping cut up over her mouth, so that his blood dropped down onto her lips.

  “Then drink, my beautiful, my beloved one. Drink, and you shall never die. For the blood is the life.”

  Droplets of the blood splashed on her cheek, mixing with her tears of terror and shame.

  Renfield was aware of the old man Seward brought to see Lucy, a short, sturdy septuagenarian with long white hair that hung to his shoulders and a jaw like a pugnacious bulldog’s. He guessed it was Dr. Van Helsing, whom Hennessey had spoken of as Seward’s teacher and master: “Weird old sod, and studies every spook and fairy-tale like they was Freud and Charcot,” the Irishman said, when he came in to check on Renfield a few days after Renfield’s conversation with Langmore about mothers-in-law. “Couldn’t stick it, myself. Just give me the facts, and keep the metaphysics out of it.”

  Renfield had read Van Helsing’s work since the Dutchman’s original studies of Chinese and Indian healing practices in the forties, and had been deeply impressed. But since Hennessey had never demonstrated much interest even in such facts as how many grains of chloral hydrate might be lethal to a screaming patient, or whether there was any way of dealing with recalcitrance other than the truncheon, Renfield didn’t attempt to answer. He only continued to stare from his window at the darkening evening sky.

  Hennessey went on, “It’s his idea old John stay with her tonight—she was took bad last night, seemingly—though the dear Lord knows what he might do if she’s took sick again. Wave a bit of incense about the bed, maybe, or chant a wee verse of the Mass?” He shrugged, and scratched his belly, under the gaudy waistcoat dribbled with food-stains. “It’s what you’d expect, of a man who says he’s a doctor of the mind and then goes and marries a woman who’s been locked in a padded room for the past decade. So how’s the flies this evenin’?” He hadn’t noticed that Renfield had ceased to trap flies three days before, when Wotan’s concerted attacks on Lucy had redoubled.

  In too many dreams had the flies had Lucy’s face.

  Or Vixie’s.

  “In rollicking good health,” replied Renfield, which sent Hennessey away in peals of laughter and a strong odor of gin.

  Renfield returned to his window, gazing out at the darkening sky.

  Seward was gone all night. Renfield saw the smart black carriage turn in at the gates with the coming of dawn. As luck would have it, it was one of the days when Farley, one of the charity patients and a man of erratic violence, went on the rampage; Renfield could hear him screaming from the other side of the building, and the spreading uproar as the other patients became frightened and took up the din. Renfield shook his head, feeling nothing but pity for those poor weak-minded souls, and indeed for poor Dr. Seward, who looked worn to a rag when he made rounds early in the afternoon.

  But shortly before sunset Seward had his rather pedestrian team of brown geldings harnessed to the fly again, and Renfield watched him drive off through the gates and along the London road. And he felt, as the sun sank, the sullen boil of anger that he knew came from outside himself: Wotan waking in his coffin, in the dark of the ruined chapel. Wotan reaching out with his hand, with his mind, with all his dark powers, to take the woman for himself.

  Seward did not come back that night, nor in the morning. In his dreams Renfield had seen him, sleeping on the mauve silk cushions of a little couch beside a parlor fire, while visible through the doorway in the next room the shadow of Wotan had bent over the weeping Lucy. And Renfield, too, had wept. When Seward returned late in the afternoon, and made a conscientious round of the patients before dark, he was as white and shaky as if the Traveler had drunk his blood as well as hers.

  The thought of this possibility filled Renfield with horror. Would Seward, then, be able to see into his dreams, his thoughts, as Wotan did? Wotan sleeping in his coffin, gorged with blood?

  Renfield dared not ask.

  Seward drove away the following afternoon, and though he returned that evening, after that Renfield saw little of him, save in the tangled torment of dreams. He saw confused images of Seward operating to transfuse blood from old Van Helsing’s arm into Lucy’s, Lucy who lay white and gasping, like a corpse already, among a bower of garlic-blossoms twined around the posts of her bed. Saw Lucy sleeping, her blonde hair tumbled about her, the white flowers of the garlic-plant filling the room like funerary garlands. Sometimes Van Helsing, sometimes Seward, slept in the chair at her bedside, and in the darkness of her flower-draped window a black shape beat against the panes.

  You must kill him, you know, whispered Wotan in Renfield’s ear, as the sun set over London and Renfield stood at his window, wondering what Catherine and Vixie were doing, and how he could accomplish his mission and return to them if he did not go back to eating spiders and flies. So far he’d managed to hold his hunger at bay.

  Wotan was angry. Renfield had felt that anger growing, for four days now. In the darkness he’d seen the black bat fly from the window of Carfax chapel; he’d seen it come back, before the breaking day. And Wotan was hungry, frantic hunger that Renfield understood as he understood the hammering of the blood in his neck-vein. Hunger for life, multiplied beyond Renfield’s own overwhelming hunger a thousand times.

  You must kill him, said Wotan again, and the hazy autumn evening began to blur around Renfield. In his ears throbbed the music of Act Two of Die Walküre, Wotan’s voice commanding Brunhilde to slay Sigmund, and somewhere in the deeps of his mind he thought he
could also hear the wild howling of a wolf. What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind? Then the music faded, and only that terrible whispering voice remained. Without the glory and the beauty, with only hunger and the lust for power. I will open the way for you, as I open the ways for all my servants.

  You have not been a good master to me, Renfield whispered, and the crimson weight of those alien thoughts crushed him, hurt him. Darkness with teeth.

  A master is not a good master or a bad master—he is Master. And he is obeyed. This man must not leave this house tonight.

  Renfield whispered, No, Master.

  And as the sun went down, he dreamed—it had to be a dream, he thought later—that Wotan stood beside him in his cell, formed up out of the gathering shadows, the last gleams of the reflected light burning in his red eyes. And as Renfield knelt to him, Wotan put his hand on Renfield’s head, and Renfield felt himself transformed into a wolf, as it was within Wotan’s power to transform himself into a wolf. Far away he heard another wolf howling, and when he howled in reply, Simmons came running. With a snarl, Renfield the Wolf sprang on him, knocking him back against the wall.

  Fleet as a wolf, hungry as a wolf, Renfield raced along the hallway, down the stair, to Seward’s study, where he smelled that the doctor would be. Wild wolf-thoughts dazzled his brain as he slammed the door open, plunged in, knife in hand that he’d snatched from the dining-room sideboard (No, that’s got to be wrong, he thought. I’m a wolf and I haven’t any hands.)

  Seward was behind his worktable making entries in the day book and Renfield crossed the room in two strides and sprang straight over the table at him, slashing with his knife. The dream wasn’t very clear, Renfield thought later—later when he woke up, in the strait-jacket again and chained to the wall of the padded cell. Seward took a glancing blow with the knife on his left arm, then punched Renfield straight and hard in the jaw with his right hand, sending him sprawling backward. Renfield lay, dazed, trying to work out how a man could punch a wolf in the jaw even in a dream, watching the blood stream down Seward’s fingers, splatter to the threadbare and rather vulgar Wilton carpet upon which Renfield lay.

  Attendants’ voices in the hall. Simmons—the moron!—and Hardy. Seward went to the door to speak to them, and Renfield, his hunger overwhelming him, crawled to the side of the table where Seward had been sitting, and licked up the blood.

  Drink, and you shall never die, Wotan had whispered to Lucy, as his own blood dribbled down to her chalky lips. The blood is the life. The blood is the life.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As he hung on the wall of the padded cell, his brain swimming in a fog of chloral hydrate, Renfield’s dream altered. He was a wolf indeed, running through the streets of London, running free and terrified. Smells hammered him, soaked his brain in the stenches of dung and coal-smoke, and the smaller curs of the alleyways fled yowling from his great swift-moving gray shadow.

  He knew where he was going. His Master had commanded, and though he did not understand—though terror filled him at this unknown noisy terrible place—still he had to do as his Master said. What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

  Renfield at least knew the house, for he’d seen it in other dreams. His wolf-self—or that other, genuine wolf whose mind he sensed in his dream—loped along the countrified high road, through the rambling gardens of the little villa, and Renfield saw the house ahead of him and saw no lights, no movement. He was aware, however, of the almost-silent winnowing of leathery wings in the dark behind his head. Was aware of his Master, the Master who had called on him, finally, after weeks of silence…

  The Master who would not forget him again.

  The tall French windows that looked onto the garden were draped with flowers of garlic, as Renfield had seen in earlier dreams, like the decorations of a funeral. He knew their presence enraged his Master, and he knew that he—the wolf whose dream he shared—was sent to open the way into the house, to tear down these fragile poisonous weeds so that the Master could pass through. Renfield’s mind was the mind of the wolf, and that mind was clouded with the Master’s commands. He smashed through the glass of the French door, saw with his night-seeing eyes the two women lying on the bed, clutching one another in terror, the older in the younger’s arms.

  The older woman half sat up, white hair streaming down the shoulders of her dressing-gown. Her mouth opened, but no sound came forth but a sort of gurgling gasp. The wolf—Renfield—howled, and howled again, and the older woman fell back, the younger pressing her hands to her mouth, staring with eyes enormous and bruised with loss of blood. As the wolf withdrew its head in pain from the shattered glass, Renfield heard the girl crying, “Mother! Mother!” Her voice was weak, thin, and indescribably fragile in the silence of the dark garden, the empty house.

  Before the broken window, shorn of its protective wreaths, the whirling motes of moonlight began to coalesce, Wotan’s red eyes burning within the core of their shadow.

  In his dreams Renfield began to howl, though so deep was he under the chloral hydrate that even that could not bring him out of his stupor, could not spare him the dream’s inevitable conclusion.

  He woke hanging in the straps of the padded room, sick from the chloral hydrate, the taste of blood and filth in his mouth. Footsteps in the hall, Hennessey’s sloppy shuffle and another: “’ere, Dr. Hennessey, you know Dr. Seward doesn’t ’old with strangers comin’ in an’ disturbin’ the patients.”

  “Disturbing the patients?” Hennessey’s fruity chuckle glinted with a knife of hardness underneath. “My dear Langmore, those poor souls are so disturbed already I doubt they’d know the difference between my good Herr Gelhorn here and yourself, or care if they did know. And there’s never been any proof that it does them a particle of harm, no matter what Seward likes to say.” His voice lowered. Renfield could almost see the nasty sidelong gleam of his eyes, and smell the reek of gin on his breath. “But if we’re going to get into the subject of things Dr. Seward doesn’t hold with, I’m sure he has opinions about keepers who help themselves to the laudanum in the dispensary, opinions just as strong as his crochets about students of the human condition being admitted to observe the lunatics.”

  Keys jangled.

  “Now this gentleman, my dear Gelhorn, is a sad case indeed. A true wild man, he spends his days catching and devouring spiders and flies, and sparrows, too, if he can get them. He’s a sort of pet of our good Dr. Seward, whom he repaid last night by a murderous attack. When the keepers laid hold of him, he was crawling on his belly, licking up Dr. Seward’s blood from the study floor.”

  That’s a lie! Renfield wanted to scream at them, as the door opened to reveal Hennessey and his latest paying “friend,” a weedy and anaemic-looking young man clothed in the old-fashioned tailoring typically found east of the Rhine. Drunken bastard, it is a lie! That was only my dream. How dare you speak of my dreams?

  Young Herr Gelhorn stepped back in alarm, blinking pale eyes behind the square lenses of his spectacles. “How he glares,” he whispered. “You are right, Herr Doktor Hennessey. It is a beast indeed.” And he licked his pale lips, fascinated.

  “He was a nabob, an India merchant,” Hennessey went on, with an Irishman’s deep delight in telling a tale to an obviously riveted audience. “They say he did murder any number of Hindoo savages over there, in his murderous rages.”

  Renfield screamed, “Liar!” and Hennessey’s red face beamed at having elicited a response.

  “When he was brought in here, having been found wandering raving through the streets of London, he never would say where his wife and daughter were, nor what had become of them. His wife’s family comes here time and again, begging if he’s whispered a word of ’em…”

  “Lying blackguard!” Renfield hurled himself against the straps that bound him, feeling the red haze of murderous rage surge like an incoming tide around his brain. “You bastard bog-Irish, you keep your tongue off a woman whose sh
oes you’re not fit to lick!”

  Both men fell back, but Renfield saw Hennessey’s head cock, listening, and a calculating light come into his eyes. He sees a way to make me speak of Catherine! thought Renfield, with a sudden and terrible clarity. He’ll tell Lady Brough every word that I say!

  Swallowing his rage brought a physical convulsion, twisting in his bonds and slamming his head back against the padded wall behind him, again and again, trying to blot out Hennessey’s satisfied smirk. Instead he brought to mind the image of his own big hands closing on the man’s throat, twisting and tearing. Better yet, his own teeth ripping into the man’s veins, the gush of blood into his mouth, feeling the buck of Hennessey’s gross body beneath his own as the Irishman began to die. Smelling death, hearing him gurgle and gasp as Renfield drank his blood.

  Renfield went limp in the straps, gasping himself. He was alone in the room. Voices retreated down the hallway. “Is he ever so?” asked the German hesitantly. “I am a poet, you see, as I told you, Herr Doktor Hennessey, a poet of the Gothic, of madness, of the inner secrets of the mind.”

  “Ah, you’ve seen him at his best, laddie! Why, he’s attacked me! Torn himself loose from those straps on the wall and leaped upon me like a wolf. I thrust him back, and when he would have attacked me again, I stared him down. I have this gift, you see, of controlling lunatics with the power of my eyes…”

  Renfield screamed after them, “Liar! Liar!”

  If Lucy—and her white-haired mother—had died last night, Seward would be away all the day, maybe more. Hennessey would be back, taunting him about Catherine, trying to force him into rage so intense he didn’t know what he was saying. Into revealing where they were hiding.

  I must be strong. I must be strong.