Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  But he knew he had not consumed life, gained even those small increments of life, for nearly two weeks.

  Without consuming life, he could not be strong.

  His pity for the flies, for Lucy, would destroy those he most loved.

  He raised his voice in an inarticulate wail of despair, as if his rib cage would burst from the effort to make his cry carry through the padding, through the walls, across the distance to Carfax, where Wotan slept, glutted and smiling, in his chapel.

  Help me, Master, for I have need of thee!

  R. M. R.’s notes

  18 September—evening

  1 spider

  And a paltry, half-dead creature at that. I had thought that brute Hennessey would leave me strapped to the wall of the padded cell for days, a raree-show for paying customers—yet better that, than to torment me with the aim of enraging me so that I will speak of Catherine, of Vixie. Yet I dare not speak of it to Seward—so low am I brought.

  Seward returned tonight, dazed and shaken-looking; exchanged a half-dozen words with me and ordered Langmore to release me and return me to my own room. I could have confessed to murdering the Queen and eating her heart and he would have paid no more heed to the words than he did to those that I actually did say. As Langmore locked me into the room, I heard him ask Seward in the hall, “And how is Miss Lucy, sor?” and to my surprise Seward responded, “She lives, but…she is in a terrible way. I must return there tonight, to keep watch beside her.”

  “Yes, sor.”

  Of course, Langmore made no mention of Hennessey turning the ravings of those poor souls in the other cells to his profit. With luck, the man will think more of making those little profits—and spending them—than of subjecting me to mental torments, hoping that in my rage I will reveal to him where Catherine and Vixie are hiding.

  How long will this terrible game of cat and mouse go on? How long will Seward be away, guarding her with his master Van Helsing and, probably, with the girl’s other suitors, those trusted friends of whom I have so often heard him speak?

  How long can I hold out against the demon of rage within myself?

  19 September

  9 flies, 4 spiders

  Not enough! Not enough! I must consume more, to make up for the time I have lost in pity and sentiment. I must be strong!

  I pray, yet receive no answer. Yet he is there, I know it. I feel him.

  Has he forgotten me? Or is this a test of my loyalties, my faith?

  20 September

  He is gone! He has left me!

  Dear gods, what shall I do?

  I was watching the last sparrows of autumn fluttering in the garden trees—not with ulterior motive, but merely taking joy in the sweetness of their song—when I saw a cart on the high road, making for the old house at Carfax. It stopped at the gates of Rushbrook House and one of the dirty villains at the reins came up the avenue, to ask the way—stupid bastards could not find their own trouser-buttons without instruction!—yet I knew in my heart that it was Carfax they sought. My anger surged up in me and I began to rate him for the thieving blackguard that he was, anger borne of terror…What shall I do, if my Master departs, leaving me here in the power of such as Hennessey and Seward?

  When the men had gone, Hennessey came in, asking what I meant by my anger—blind, puling fool!—and with terrible effort I concealed my rage, knowing now how he means to use it against me. He was half-drunk, having consumed his usual pints of gin with his dinner, though even stone sober (which he has not been since the reign of the Prince Regent, I shouldn’t imagine) he would believe anything anyone told him, if it would save him trouble. When he was gone, my rage overcame me, and I ripped the latches from my window and sprang to the ground, running up the avenue, desperate to catch the cart that I knew would be returning.

  I swarmed over the gate before the porter realized what was happening, leaped down onto the high road just as those monsters, those unspeakable bandits, drove their foul cart past, piled high with the boxes of earth taken from the Carfax chapel. He was in one of them, sleeping the sleep that is not truly sleep, for He hears, He knows.

  I beat on the side of the box, crying to him not to leave me among my foes. One of the carters cut at me with his whip and I dragged him from the box, blind with rage, knowing only that He must not leave me, He must not go without helping me.

  Hardy and Simmons were hard on my heels down the avenue, with Hennessey puffing and wheezing in the rear. As they dragged me back to my cell, I cried out in my despair: “Master, I will fight for you! They shan’t kill me by inches! They shan’t take you away!”

  What shall I do? He has left me indeed.

  What shall I do?

  20 September—night

  It is over.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nightmares.

  Light rain pattered on the gabled windows of Rushbrook House. John Seward stared at the ceiling of his bedroom and tried to will himself not to dream.

  To sleep, perchance to dream…ay, there’s the rub…

  He hadn’t slept in two nights now. His body cried for sleep and cried, too, for chloral hydrate—cried, sweated, and shook. But Seward knew from terrible experience that sleep after long waking was particularly fraught with dreams. The thought of the drug holding his eyes sealed shut and his screaming mind in darkness was more than he could bear.

  Was this what his patients went through? Emaciated Rowena Kilmer, jerking from sleep a dozen times a night to howl and beat her head on the walls? Frantic Grayson, trying to crowd himself into the tiniest corner of the room, barricading himself behind the bed against the phantoms that only he could see?

  Dimly, like the ghostly moaning of the wind, Seward could hear them screaming, somewhere in the house.

  It was long past midnight.

  I open my eyes and see the ceiling, with stains on its blue-striped paper like old blood.

  Blood! Dear God, what happened to Lucy’s blood? The drops I took from her that first day of consultation were normal, without the deformed cell-structure of anaemia. It wasn’t anaemia she died of, but blood-loss. She bled to death, under our very noses, without a drop being spilled on her pillow.

  Through the grief that racked his heart cried the betrayed bafflement of a lifetime of scientific study: It shouldn’t have happened! It couldn’t have happened, not logically, not within the bounds of any science I’ve ever known! This is the modern age—we’re almost in the twentieth century, damn it, not back in the twelfth! I should have been able to save her!

  Yet all of them who loved her—young Arthur, and Quincey, and even Van Helsing, with all his wisdom—had been as powerless as he, to prevent her death.

  In his mind he saw Quincey Morris bending over Lucy’s body, gazing down at her face with mingled pity and bewilderment in his gray eyes, his leathery six-foot-plus seeming desperately out of place in the white and violet of her boudoir; saw the sharp sidelong look in the Texan’s eyes when they sat in the breakfast-room. “That poor pretty creature that we all love has had put into her veins the blood of four strong men! Man alive, her whole body wouldn’t hold it! What took it out?”

  I open my eyes and all those questions crowd in, questions that have no answers. I close them…

  And throw wide the gates to nightmare.

  I have dreams, terrible dreams, Lucy had said, in that same white-and-violet boudoir, but when Seward had asked after them, she’d put him off, hurried to occupy herself with opening the window. What would she have told him, he wondered, if she’d spoken the truth?

  Images rose to his exhausted mind, images as vivid as reality, that he could not erase. The cold, alien-looking aparatus of blood transfusion, that he’d operated, not once but again and again in those nightmare days, when they’d enter Lucy’s room and find her white and gasping on the spotless bed. The way Van Helsing’s breath had hissed, when in adjusting Lucy’s pillow he’d dislodged the velvet band she wore around her throat, and revealed those two pale, mangled pun
cture-wounds above the vein. The smell of the garlic the old man had insisted Lucy wear around her neck and with which he’d draped the windows of the room—draperies and necklet they’d found clutched in poor Mrs. Westenra’s hands, when they’d found her dead on the morning of the nineteenth.

  Images more disturbing still, as his mind drifted toward the gates of horn and ivory that poets said guarded the Realm of Morpheus.

  How Lucy, dying, had smiled up at Art Holmwood—Lord Godalming now, with his father’s sudden death. Her flaxen hair had seemed fairer still against the mourning he wore, and she had whispered, Kiss me, in languorous passion, her long canine teeth glinting against her bloodless gums. How Van Helsing had thrust Art away like a madman. And how at the funeral Van Helsing had looked sharply at the broken and weeping Arthur when Art had whispered over and over that the blood he’d given to Lucy had been their marriage-bond, since they were denied any other.

  Seward recalled Van Helsing’s insistence upon leaving a golden cross on Lucy’s body, and his rage with the maid who’d stolen it. Remembered his appearance, late on the night of her death, in Seward’s room at Hillingham House, whispering of the ghastly ritual he wanted to undertake: to cut off her head, to take out her heart.

  Is he mad? Seward wondered dimly. Or am I?

  You have for many years trust me; you have believe me for weeks past, when there be things so strange that you might have well doubt. Believe me yet a little, friend John…

  And such was the urgent intelligence in those coldly bright blue eyes, the warm strength of the Dutchman’s roughened hands, that Seward did believe. Credo sed incredulis…

  Grotesque interviews with solicitors. Van Helsing’s fit of hysterical laughter in the carriage after the funeral. Arthur’s face as he gazed down at Lucy in her coffin: Jack, is she really dead? And that blithe and golden young man, all the world’s darling, weeping brokenly in the arms of their tall Texan friend. Oh Jack, Jack, what shall I do? The whole of life seems gone from me all at once!

  Quincey’s face had been still, like a man bleeding to death inside.

  She is gone. She’s really gone.

  Seward knew he should feel something, and didn’t. Only the numbness of exhaustion, and the sweating hunger for chloral hydrate.

  Lucy was in her coffin, in her tomb. The quiet tomb of the Westenras on Hampstead Hill, solitary in the twilight groves with the rain pattering softly against the marble, away from the noise of London. Van Helsing had returned to Amsterdam, Art—accompanied by Quincey—to Ring, to bury his father.

  And he, John Seward, had only a madhouse to return to, the madhouse he’d once been insane enough to think he could bring Lucy to as a wife. He had worked hard to come to this position of responsibility, he reminded himself. These people were his charge and his study: to learn the nature of madness, to help those lost in its nightmare mazes without the hope of getting free.

  But tonight he could only lie here, sweating in the dark, listening to the rain and to the lunatics screaming in the deep silences of the night.

  Renfield, too, dreamed of Lucy Westenra, lying in her coffin.

  And the dream filled him with horror.

  She looked, in veriest truth, as if she only slept. How he could see, he did not know, for the tomb was shut and sealed, the lamps and candles of the mourners long gone. Her lead-lined coffin had been screwed shut, but he could see her in it still, fair hair lying on her shoulders, flesh fine as porcelain and little less white than the graveclothes they’d dressed her in. The bloodless look she’d had, in those other visions during her long crucifixion on the edge of death, was gone. She was relaxed, smiling almost, all her daytime care dissolved, happy in sleep.

  There was something about her sleep that reminded him of something, something he would rather not see. That he didn’t want to think about.

  Then he seemed to be standing in the dark of that stone tomb, looking down at the two coffins—for her mother was buried beside her—hearing the whisper of the rain on the roof of the tomb, smelling old smoke, the clinging remains of incense, the first sickening harbingers of decay. And it seemed to him that at the feet of those two coffins, the shadows began to solidify, coalescing into a column of darkness blacker than the utter night within the tomb. Red eyes burned within that darkness, and a voice whispered, Beloved.

  Within the coffin, Renfield was conscious of it when Lucy opened her eyes.

  He came awake gasping, trembling. Heat and cold flashed through him in waves—shock, terror, despair. Distantly, he could hear the dim howling of old Lord Alyn, but other than that, the room—the house—was utterly silent. It was the dead hour of the night, and still.

  Renfield stumbled from his bed, staggered to the window of his room. Hennessey had had the catch replaced on the casement with a stout metal bolt. Beyond the glass, the garden lay in dim spiky shapes beneath the pattering rain.

  The trees were losing their leaves, the last of the flowers were dead. I have been here since April, thought Renfield despairingly, and now the year is nearly gone. Oh, Catherine, has it all been for nothing? He pressed his forehead to the glass, the cold of it like sweet water in his brain. He felt emptier, hungrier, than he could remember feeling in his life.

  He rubbed his eyes, blinked, for it seemed to him that fog drifted above the garden, mingling with the fitful glimmer of intermittent moonlight on the rain. For a moment he thought it was only the effect of tiredness, or perhaps advancing age. But after he rubbed his eyes again, they were still there.

  Taking shape. Growing more solid as he watched.

  A dream, he thought, a dream I once had…When?

  Red eyes gleaming in the darkness. Long hair drifting like seaweed beneath the sea. Pale gowns, and pale forms borne up on the dark air of the night: two dark and one fair.

  Valkyries.

  Choosers of the Slain.

  Graces, goddesses, or the Norns of fate, hanging in the dark air before his window, red eyes looking into his.

  “You have only to wish it,” whispered the fair-haired girl in German, the tongue of Wagner, the tongue of Goethe, the tongue of Kant. “You have only to wish it, Ryland, and I will come.”

  Renfield breathed, “I wish it.” And returning to his bed, he took the thin pillow and wrapped it around his hand, to protect his fist as he drove it through the glass.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  22 September

  Catherine, Catherine, we stand balanced upon the blade of a razor! Either we triumph, or we are utterly undone!

  His wives are here! Tonight I have learned much, and the knowledge fills me with terror—with the dread of more terror yet to come!

  They came to my room, stepped through a hole in the glass of the window no bigger than my fist, though they seemed not to change shape or size. It was indescribable as the things one sees in dreams.

  He is not Wotan, as I saw him in my dreams, but is called Dracula, that was known as The Impaler in his lifetime, four hundred and fifty years ago. A great lord and a great sorcerer, he lives on, vampire, feeding upon the living and making of them the Un-Dead. He has come to London, to England, to hunt, to make for himself a new life, for the countryside of the Carpathian Mountains that were his home has grown poor, and the few peasants that remain are wary, and employ those things inimical to him and his kind: the flowers of the garlic and the whitethorn, the silver that he cannot touch and the mirrors that refuse to reproduce his image, the Holy things that burn his demon flesh as with fire.

  “He has come to make new life here,” groused the Countess Elizabeth, the eldest and strongest of his wives, “and left us three, alone, in a crumbling castle in a hostile countryside, without even the service of the Szgany gypsies that are his to command.” She is a woman fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners, as the Bible says: dark-haired, Roman-nosed, tall and with aquiline features, a Hungarian princess who in centuries past fought at Dracula’s sid
e against the invading Turks. “He flees from us, and what does he, before the foam of the sea is even dried upon his clothing, but take for himself another bride, to begin another harem more to his choosing, more apt to his commands? Pah!”

  Her long canine teeth gleamed against bloodless lips.

  “We have served him,” said fair Nomie, in her voice like glass chimes tapped with rods of thin silver. “Surrendered our souls and our wills to him, not once but time and again. For this at least he owes us something.” She is the youngest of them, German by her speech, sweet-faced and almost childlike in her thoughtful beauty, her eyes sky-blue and her hair the color of corn-silk.

  The third wife, Sarike, only smiled, like an animal with her sharp white teeth.

  “He learned to speak English, and how to go on in this country, from a solicitor’s clerk whom he had sent out to him in Transylvania,” went on the Countess, pacing up and down my narrow room with her long black hair hanging down over her shoulders, her pale clinging dress like a shroud in the moonlight that came and went through the fleeting clouds. “Our kind cannot cross water, save at the turning of the tide. Nor do we have the power to read and influence people’s thoughts, nor to come and go as we will, as we do”—she gestured with her long hand, pale and ringed in ancient gold, to the tiny hole in the window-glass—“while the sun is in the sky. By day we grow sleepy, and our minds are dulled. We can be taken and killed by those who know who we are, what we are. Only at night are we strong.”

  “He needs—we need—the earth of our burial-place, if we are to rest.” Nomie turned to the window, as if she could see through the darkness the thick-clustering trees that surrounded Carfax. “It was an easy matter for him to purchase property here in England, to have boxes of the earth from the chapel in the vaults of his castle shipped here. He must sleep in it, and renew his strength as mortal men do, by rest: that knits, as your poet says, the ravel’d sleeve of care. Sometimes I think your Shakespeare must have suffered sleepless nights himself, for him to write of them so feelingly as he does.”