Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  “And sometimes I think you would sooner sit and read your precious Shakespeare than hunt for the blood that keeps us all alive,” retorted the Countess, and her deep voice was edged with scorn. She turned back to me. “It is an easy thing for a man to hire servants, to pay solicitors to rent him or buy him houses, to open bank-accounts so that he is not paying in the gold coins of long-dead Sultans whenever he wishes his boots blacked. For women it is otherwise. Especially foreign women.”

  Her dark eyes fixed upon mine, and had my life depended on doing so, I do not think I could have turned my gaze away.

  She said, “You are a wealthy man, I understand, Herr Renfield.”

  The breath seemed to go out of my body, the strength from my knees.

  I stammered, “I…I am a prisoner here, a prisoner like the others.”

  “Not quite like the others.” They say that tigers purr; I think they speak the truth. “You have house property. Many houses, from what the assistant keeper in this place babbled in drink to our servant Gelhorn. Houses that now stand empty.”

  “Gelhorn!” I cried. “The German poet Gelhorn, who came here some days ago? He is your servant?”

  “He is the servant mostly of opium, and of his own illusions,” replied the Countess, with deepest contempt. “He was on a walking-tour of the Carpathians in July, and it took my sisters and I endless nights of singing to him as we combed our hair, to wind our images and our words into his drunken dreams, so that he would find his way—finally!—to the castle. We convinced him we are spirits of the mountains and the woods—I never thought I should live to thank Nomie for all those silly romances she reads—and that we must come to England to retrieve magic gold that was stolen so that we could sleep again in peace.”

  I smiled, and met the girl Nomie’s blue eyes. “So he actually believes he is traveling in company with the Rhine Maidens?”

  And her eyes twinkled, suddenly very human, in response. “I think he feels safer traveling with the Rhine Maidens than with the Valkyries. But it is a terrible bore, to speak only of matters touched upon by Wagner and the Brothers Grimm.”

  And I remembered my own dream of speaking to Wotan the Traveler in the hold of the ship.

  “Gelhorn is a fool,” sneered the Countess. “And fools have their uses—up to a point. But the man understands nothing of money, has no concept of how to obtain or even rent property in this country. He can barely make sense of a railway time-table and he came close to killing the three of us, through his stupidity, a dozen times on our journey to England in his company. We traced our lord here—”

  She gestured again to the window, and I thought I heard the curl of bitter anger in her voice as she spoke of their lord.

  “Yet before we confront him, we must have our own place of safety, our own refuge in which we may rest. We could hire no gypsies to fill up box after box with the earth of our homeland…” She glanced sidelong at Nomie, who cast down her eyes, and I guessed that she, at least, had wed, and died, and been buried in a land far from her childhood home. “We have each a trunk of such earth, and these we must guard as we guard our lives. You will help us, I think.”

  All this while I had knelt before them, and now I looked up, aghast, into those coal-dark eyes with their red demon gleam.

  “These houses that you have…”

  “Yes, yes, of course!” I cried, springing to my feet. My heart pounded—Catherine, Catherine, forgive me, but if that imbecile Hennessey spoke to their creature Gelhorn about my holding several different properties, who knows what else he might have said? I did not think all those places that you and I bought in secret were known. You were far too clever for that, my beautiful one!

  But it has been five months, my darling, five months in which anything can have happened! I think that if you and Vixie had been forced for whatever reason to change your hiding-place, or to abandon the names by which you and I arranged for you to be known, you would have found some way to let me know. I pray that this is so, for I could not risk—I dared not risk—this clever and terrible woman beginning to make investigations on her own. The thought of you falling into her power—or into the power of that Thing, that monster, that these women now tell me is the vampire Count Dracula—is more than I can bear!

  Forgive me, Catherine, but I told them about the house in Kentish Town, the money we cached there, and the papers that would give them introduction to the bank under the name of Moira Tentrees and her daughter Elaine. I felt fairly certain that you and Vixie would not have had call to use that particular refuge—if you were discovered (may God forfend!) by Lady Brough and her minions, you would likelier have gone to the Cambridge House, or even fled to France (though as I said, I hope you would in that event have been able to inform me of it).

  Yet I trembled as I gave them the instructions about contacting solicitors and bankers—as I tremble now, at the thought that somehow, the count may learn that I have met with his wives, and taken their side against him.

  “What do you fear?” demanded the Countess coldly. “He has deserted you, as you said. He has gone away to London, to be with his new little bride, his little blonde snow-maiden.” Her lifted lip showed the glint of a pointed fang. “In a week he will not recall your name.”

  “If he has not forgotten it already,” I said. I took a deep breath, and added, “I trust that you ladies will not similarly forget?”

  “Because you know the truth of who ‘Moira Tentrees’ and her ‘daughter’ are,” asked the Countess, looking up at me with those cold dark eyes, “and who it is who will actually be living at 15 Prince of Wales Road?”

  Nomie replied in her soft voice, “Because even as we have the right to demand protection and care of our lord, so now Ryland has the right to demand it of his ladies. Is it not so?”

  The Countess Elizabeth raised one brow, black and sharp as a night-moth’s antenna, and regarded her sister-wife with speculation, but Nomie did not back down. At length the Countess turned to me and said, “Indeed you shall find that it is so. We shall not forget, Ryland Renfield.”

  “And you will send me things to eat?” I pressed. “Flies, spiders, sparrows—anything that has life, that I can eat and grow strong, even as you grow strong from the drinking of blood.”

  She looked startled, then smiled sidelong, like the Serpent in the Garden. “Is that truly your wish?”

  I nodded earnestly, and her smile widened, but it was not a pretty smile.

  “We will be far from you for a time, my servant, but yes, one of us will come and make sure that you have your heart’s fill of the vermin of the earth. Does that content you?”

  I said, “It does.”

  They faded then, dissolving into moonlight, and I dropped to my knees on the floor again and remained there long, shuddering with waves of shock and fear. The thought of going against Dracula, of playing a double game with his rebellious Wives, petrifies me. Yet he has forgotten me, he has not fulfilled any of the prayers I have prayed to him.

  And I need strength, my beloved, I shall need strength so badly, if all is to come well for us and for our beloved child! I cannot let her be taken from us, cannot let your mother and your sister drag her away and drink her spirit, vampire-like, until like the victims of the vampires she turns into one of them!

  A curse on money, without which those two hags would have no use for Vixie—without which those three night-hags who stood here in the moonlight would have no use for me!

  Yet they were beautiful, and as I write this, their faces swim before my mind again, two dark and one fair, and all perilous as the Angels of Death.

  Oh, Catherine, how I long for your advice in this matter! I pray I have done well, and I think that I can control them, can obtain from them what I must have! But I have only done as I must, as I could! How I long only to see your face again, to touch your hands, to hear your voice, the voice of a true woman instead of the cold voices of Dracula’s demon Wives!

  I kiss this letter, begging all the gods a
bove that it should come to you; praying that when I sleep tonight, it will be your lovely face that I see in my dreams.

  Your own, forever,

  R. M. R.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  R. M. R’s notes

  23 September

  25 flies, 10 spiders, 6 moths

  24 September

  28 flies, 4 spiders, 10 moths

  -16 fliesspiders

  Sparrow—Langmore took it from me. What use has he for a sparrow?

  25 September

  24 flies,

  8 spiders -18 fliesspiders

  Last night as the spiders came crawling from the cracks of the walls, I chanced to look down into the garden and saw Nomie there, golden hair bleached to ivory by moonlight. I think she saw me for she lifted her hand.

  When I slept, I dreamed of Lucy, rising from her tomb. Her eyes are blank, and glow from within with the red flame of the demon. She wears her soiled grave-shroud as she moves through the quiet streets around Hampstead Heath in the darkness, as if unconscious of how she would appear were any to see her, and she sings, soft and sweet, to the wretched little children who live in poverty there, whose parents—if they have parents—are too gone in gin to care whether they come in at night or not. She took a child, a boy of six or so, cradled him in her arms as she bit into his throat. When she walked away, leaving him under some gorse bushes on the heath, blood spotted the bosom of her white shroud.

  No more moths—Seward has had the broken pane repaired.

  “What is wrong with her?” Renfield asked, when that night he managed to work the window-bolt through the bars, and Nomie walked up from the garden—as light and as casually upon the air as if walking up a stair—and drifted through the slit and into his room. “I see her in my dreams, and she is like a sleep-walker, a revenant. Yet you and your sisters—and your lord as well—you speak, and act, and reason.”

  “Now I do.” Nomie held out her finger, and a huge black-winged moth blundered against the casement, crawled through the gap. She smiled as Renfield took it by the wings and popped it into his mouth. “When first I wakened from death into Un-Death, I was much the same as she. A part of me knew what had happened to me, for during all those terrible months when I was a prisoner in his castle, helpless, separated from my family while he came to me night after night, I knew what would become of me in the end. But my mind went into retreat, like the poor souls here in Rushbrook House. I hunted, mostly children, for they have not an adult’s caution and experience to escape. But I do not think I spoke for almost a year.”

  “It is not then because children are weak?” Renfield wiped a dust of wing-scales from his lip.

  For answer, Nomie reached out and casually pulled one of the iron bars from the window, then taking it in her two hands, bent it into a horseshoe. “The living are weak,” she said. “But it takes some of us time to learn our strength.”

  R. M. R.’s notes

  26 September

  28 flies, 9 spiders

  -20 fliesspiders

  Dreamed again of Lucy Westenra. He walked beside her through the dark of Hampstead Heath, a shadow with burning eyes.

  Seward seemed better this morning, a little more of his old self, for which the gods be thanked. One can have only so much of Hennessey’s care. Yet just after noon a cab drove up the avenue and Van Helsing sprang out, jaw jutting like a bulldog’s and a newspaper clutched in one hand. I felt cold to see it, cold with apprehension, knowing what it would mean. When Seward made his afternoon rounds, he seemed like a man stunned, struck over the head, as if like poor Lucy he had been wakened into a world and a manner of life that he could not comprehend.

  “Gor blimey, what’d that Dutchman tell him?” I heard Simmons whisper in the corridor to Hardy, and Hardy replied, “Not the foggiest. They was shut up in his study and I heard the Doc hit the table like a gunshot and yell, ‘Are you mad?’ but I guess after a little discussion they come to the conclusion he weren’t, ’cos they’re off to town this evenin’. Good job, too, ’cos old Hennessey’s got a couple of payin’ customers comin’ in to have a look at the loonies at eight.” And their voices drifted away.

  Later I saw Seward’s fly brought round to the front of the house, and Seward and Van Helsing get in, their faces like stone.

  27 September

  25 flies, 13 spiders, 1 moth

  Seward whispered, “My God,” as the coffin lid was removed and the pale afternoon sunlight fell through the half-open door of the tomb and across the face of the girl within.

  Yesterday, he recalled—the day Van Helsing had brought to him the newspaper, had told him that fantastic tale of the Un-Dead—had been Lucy’s birthday. She would have turned twenty.

  He breathed, “Is it a juggle?” For last night, when Van Helsing had brought him here, the coffin had been empty. Van Helsing had claimed that the white figure they’d seen among the yew trees at the edge of the cemetery had been Lucy, and of a certainty they’d found a four-year-old Italian girl asleep and half-frozen under the bushes where the white figure had cast its burden aside. But there had been on that tiny neck no such puncture-wounds as had been found on the throats of the other children that had been attacked over the past week.

  No such puncture-wounds as he had seen on Lucy’s throat, in the weeks before she’d died.

  They had taken the child to Northern Hospital, and returned to Hampstead Hill Cemetery only in the golden light of the following afternoon.

  “Are you convinced now?” asked Van Helsing softly, and when Seward did not reply, reached into the coffin and drew back the young woman’s delicate lips. “See,” he said, “the teeth are even sharper than before. With this and this”—the blunt brown finger touched those long canines, upper and lower, like a wolf’s or a cat’s—“the little children can be bitten. Are you of belief now, friend John?”

  Seward backed away, shaking his head. The newspaper had spoken of children being attacked. Van Helsing had said it was Lucy. Lucy!

  Van Helsing whom he trusted, whom he knew to see farther and deeper into the shadows of the human mind than any scholar of his acquaintance…

  “She may have been placed here since last night.”

  “Indeed? That is so, and by whom?”

  “I don’t know. Someone…”

  “And yet she has been dead one week. Most peoples in that time would not look so.”

  No, thought Seward numbly. Most peoples in that time would not. Already, despite its lining of lead, the body of Lucy’s mother in the coffin beside hers had begun to faintly stink.

  His mind raced back and forth against the truth that he could not look at, like a rat thrown into a rat-pit, before the dog is turned loose. Beside him, Van Helsing continued to look down at the girl in the coffin, with grief and a kind of curious, hungry longing in his eyes.

  Other than the fact that her breasts did not stir with life’s breath, she looked absolutely as if she were peacefully asleep. The drawn whiteness of her last few days had vanished. Her lips were red, her cheeks faintly stained with pink. Still living, she had resembled a corpse. It was her corpse that had the appearance of a living woman.

  Dear God, did we bury her alive?

  But Seward had seen those bodies, too, after a week. Few medical students hadn’t had some dealings with the men of the resurrection trade. They “did not look so” either.

  “She was bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking,” murmured Van Helsing, and Seward glanced sharply at him, startled that he should know this. “In trance she died, and in trance she is Un-Dead, too. Usually when the Un-Dead sleep at home”—his gesture took in the plastered walls of the little tomb, the sealed niches with their marble plaques—“their face show what they are. But this so sweet that was when she not Un-Dead, she go back to the nothings of the common dead. There is no malign there. It make it hard that I must kill her in her sleep.”

  Seward drew a deep breath. The words hit his brain like a chisel on rock, with
a cold sound and a sharp pain that changes forever the shape of what has been.

  If she were dead already, what would it matter if Van Helsing mutilated her body, as he had proposed to mutilate it before the funeral—after the cleaning-woman had stolen the golden cross that he had placed on Lucy’s lips “for protection.”

  “I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic,” Van Helsing continued, in answer to Seward’s whispered question. “And I shall drive a stake through her body.” That at least Seward remembered from the night before the funeral, the night when Van Helsing had searched Lucy’s room and asked that all her papers and her mother’s be sealed, for him to read. This morning, when he’d met Van Helsing in the lobby of the Berkeley Hotel, where both had spent the night, he’d seen his old master had a satchel with him.

  But to do this to Lucy…

  He looked back at that radiant face, sleeping so gently. So beautiful was she that he had at first not seen the dirt and moss-stains that marked her white graveclothes, the small brown spots on its bosom.

  Then his gaze returned to Van Helsing’s face. To those clear light-blue eyes, filled with tenderness, pity, longing…and something else.

  Van Helsing tore his gaze from Lucy’s face, turned to Seward with an air of decision. “If I did simply follow my inclining, I would do now, at this moment, what is to be done.” He wet his lips. “But there are other things to follow, and things that are a thousand times more difficult in that them we do not know. This is simple.”

  He glanced, quick and sidelong, at Lucy’s face again, as if his eyes were drawn to her against his will.

  “We may have to want Arthur,” he said, “and how shall we tell him of this? If you, who saw the wounds on Lucy’s throat, and saw the wounds so similar on the child’s at the hospital; if you, who saw the coffin empty last night and full today with a woman who have not change only to be more rose and more beautiful in a whole week, after she die—if you know of this and know of the white figure who brought the child to the churchyard, and yet of your own senses you do not believe, how can I expect Arthur, who know none of those things, to believe?”