Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  As usual, Seward gave no sign of having heard a thing.

  Like Seward, like Lord Godalming, like the American Morris, this young woman had been Lucy’s friend. She must still have been abroad in Europe—with her ailing husband?—when Lucy was taken ill, for Renfield couldn’t imagine Catherine, for instance, not being constantly in the house of a friend who was slowly dying as Lucy had died.

  Yet what was she doing here?

  Seward will tell her, thought Renfield, pressing his forehead to the iron window bars. They were cold, like the day outside. Wind jerked and twisted at the bare branches of the garden trees. Seward will tell her of the scene in the graveyard, of the bitten children.

  And what then?

  Seward was pale and silent as he made his rounds, and did not seem to notice that Renfield had devoured his entire stock of spiders and flies. As the house grew quiet that night, Renfield thought he could hear, in the study downstairs, the rapid clatter of typewriter keys, hurrying and pausing, hurrying and pausing, as if to keep up with some unheard dictation, far into the night.

  R. M. R.’s notes

  30 September

  25 flies, 10 spiders

  Nomie my friend, you are the only one who has offered me the smallest actual assistance in this terrible time!

  Has it not occurred to Seward to wonder at the continued presence of so many flies in this chilly weather? Yet it is typical of the smallness of the man’s scope.

  Another visitor today, Madame Mina’s husband Jonathan Harker, Langmore tells me. A tallish thin man whose black clothing hangs loose on an emaciated frame, the souvenir of those weeks of brain-fever in Buda-Pesth. The brim of his hat hid his face as he passed around the corner of the house, but he moved like a young man, and looked around him with a kind of nervous alertness: another echo of brain-fever as well? There is something that troubles me about the sight of him, something familiar in his walk and his frame, as if I have seen him somewhere before, and I have a terrible sense of urgency about the lost memory. Could it be that he is one of Lady Brough’s creatures, or one of her vile elder daughter’s? Langmore says he is a solicitor.

  Later—indeed the eagles gather! I have just seen young Lord Godalming and the American Mr. Morris descend from the Godalming brougham (with a team in harness at five hundred guineas the pair, if they were a shilling!). Morris wore a perfectly respectable derby hat in place of the wide-brimmed American slouch he had on last night, his long sandy hair sweeping out beneath it. Curious, to see these men in the flesh whom I recognize from dreaming—could I have seen Jonathan Harker in dream?

  But when? And why?

  The sight of them gathering fills me with dread, for as the sun sinks I feel, stronger and stronger, Dracula’s growing anger, as he lies within his coffin. Like mine, his mind was touched by Lucy’s agony this afternoon as that handsome young lordling drove a stake into her heart. Wherever he now lies—in some hideaway in London to which he transported his boxes of earth—in his sleep he heard her screams, tasted her blood, felt her death. Like me, he saw the faces of her killers in his dreaming.

  Did he love Lucy Westenra? Perhaps, as he understands the word, he did. But what I feel in his dreaming is not grief, but rage.

  He had claimed her by his blood, and she was his.

  In life he was not a man to forgive the smallest slight: Nomie told me that men who broke his law, in the smallest degree, were impaled upon iron stakes on the roadsides, and left to slowly die: thus he had his name. Four hundred years of hunting humankind has not taught him either mercy or tolerance.

  His rage is like the storm that builds above the Himalayas in the summer heat, lightning hoarded in murderous dark. I feel it coming. When the storm strikes, God have mercy on us all!

  “Renfield?” The tap on the door had to be Seward. He was the only one in Rushbrook House who ever knocked, and he not always. And indeed, he did not wait to be invited to unlock and enter the room.

  Renfield turned from the window, beyond which the hazy red sun was burning itself out in the sky above London’s lurid smokes.

  “There is a lady here, who would like to see you.”

  Renfield had caught a glimpse, through the door as it opened, of Mina Harker’s black dress. Indeed it would have been far too much to hope, that Catherine would have come at this time. He kept his voice steady with an effort. “Why?”

  “She is going through the house, and would like to see everyone in it.”

  Renfield wondered if Seward had any idea just how many other people went through the house and saw everyone in it, behind his back. “Oh, very well. Let her come in, by all means. Just wait a moment while I tidy up.” He gulped down the spiders and the flies hastily, without the joy of savoring them. He had a feeling he would need all the strength he could get. “Let the lady come in.”

  He went to sit on the edge of the bed, so that he could see Mrs. Harker as she entered the room. Seward kept within striking-distance—as if I could not knock his brains out against the wall if I wished it!—but Mrs. Harker walked in without either fear or hesitation, and held out her black-gloved hand.

  “Good-evening, Mr. Renfield. Dr. Seward has told me of you.”

  Renfield studied her face for a few moments, taking in the frank dark eyes, the firm set of her mouth, the air of competence she had exuded even hunting for her friend in the moonlit churchyard. He almost said so, then remembered he was never supposed to have seen her before in his life. “You’re not the girl the doctor wanted to marry, are you? You can’t be, you know, for she’s dead,” he added, and saw Seward start.

  “Oh, no! I have a husband of my own, to whom I was married before I ever saw Dr. Seward, or he me. I am Mrs. Harker.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” He thought he sounded sufficiently genuine.

  “My husband and I are staying on a visit with Dr. Seward.”

  “Then don’t stay.”

  “But why not?”

  “And how did you know I wanted to marry anyone?” asked Seward, a little miffed—as if, thought Renfield, he didn’t know that it was common knowledge throughout the asylum.

  He rolled his eyes. “What an asinine question!”

  “I don’t see that at all, Mr. Renfield,” said Mrs. Harker, as if the conversation were taking place in a drawing-room instead of a bare cell with bars on the window.

  “You will understand, Mrs. Harker,” said Renfield, “that when a man is so loved and honored as our host is, everything regarding him is of interest in our little community. Dr. Seward is loved not only by his household and his friends, but even by his patients, who, being some of them hardly in mental equilibrium, are apt to distort causes and effects. Since I myself have been the inmate of a lunatic asylum, I cannot but notice that the sophistic tendencies of some of its inmates lean toward the errors of non causa and ignoratio elenchi.”

  The relief in having an actual conversation, with a young woman whom he was coming to like and respect, was unbelievable. He felt a flash of regret that he hadn’t saved out a single fly to offer her.

  She would need them, he knew, as much as he.

  “It may be that they cannot help it,” said Mrs. Harker. “I myself have not your experience, so I cannot judge, but even among the so-called sane of my acquaintance I have encountered some very curious beliefs.”

  Renfield laughed—the first time, he realized, he had laughed since coming to Rushbrook House. “And I’ll wager you would think them a very college of sanity, compared to some of the queer nabs I ran across in India. Why, I am myself an instance of a man who had a strange belief. Indeed, it was no wonder that my friends were alarmed, and insisted on my being put under control. I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things, no matter how low in the scale of creation, one might indefinitely prolong life. At times I held the belief so strongly that I actually tried to take human life. The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him
for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood—relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life.’ Isn’t that so, Doctor?”

  “Er—indeed it is.” Seward looked completely disconcerted, and glanced at his watch. “I fear it is time to leave, Mrs. Harker.”

  “Of course.” Mrs. Harker smiled, and took Renfield’s hand again. “Good-by, and I hope I may see you often, under auspices pleasanter to yourself.”

  Renfield rose, and bowed. “Good-by, my dear. I pray God I may never see your sweet face again. May He bless and keep you!”

  As the door was closed, the lock clashing harshly, Renfield knew without turning that the sun had disappeared behind London’s black sullen rooflines. He felt it: the flowing horror of bitter-cold air that precedes the storm like a moving wall, the inevitable terror of the lightning.

  Somewhere in the dark of London, Dracula woke.

  He knows they are here. That awareness went through him like a killing spear, dropping him to his knees, his breath laboring and sweat standing out on his face like a dying man’s.

  He is coming.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  From the window of his room Renfield watched the glow of Dr. Seward’s study lamp, the shadows that moved back and forth across it on the laurels of the garden. Once the men came out into the dark garden, and Renfield saw Seward point across the lawn and through the leafless trees, to the wall of Carfax.

  So they know.

  He didn’t know how they’d learned of it, but in his bones he was sure of it. They were on Dracula’s trail.

  And Dracula was on theirs.

  Renfield clung to the bars, watching the moving white blurs of shirt-cuffs, collars, the golden glint of the study lamplight on Lord Godalming’s hair. Heads nodding. Seward pointing in the direction of the shed, where the ladder was kept.

  Dear God! Dear God, save me!

  One by one, the other lights in the house went out. Seward made his rounds, pale and distracted. A little later Renfield heard Langmore come off duty at midnight, heard Hardy settle into the chair. Renfield paced the room, sweating. They are going to Carfax tonight.

  They are leaving Mrs. Harker here alone.

  Christ had prayed in the Garden, Let this cup pass from me. Renfield pressed his face to the bars, staring out into the darkness, then turned to pace again. He remembered the wolf, broken from its home in the Zoo and sent loping through the streets of London, to force a way into the house that Dracula could not enter on his own. I open the ways for all my servants, Dracula had said to him, but it was the servant—the wolf whose mind Renfield had felt in his dream—who had opened the way for the Master. He will hang in the darkness before my window, materializing out of the moonlight and fog.

  He will whisper to me, Let me in.

  Renfield knew that it was physically impossible for him to do other than say, Come.

  What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

  The study lamp was dimmed down. A brief bar of very faint light, like a lantern’s, shone out as the front door opened, shut. No one emerged, but in a moment they would…

  Renfield flung himself against the door of his room. “Hardy!” he shouted through the judas. “Hardy, send for Dr. Seward! Bring him here, at once, this moment! I must see him!”

  The big guard’s whiskery face appeared in the judas. “Wot, at this hour? It’s two in the morning!”

  “If I’d wanted a report on the time, I’d have sent for the town crier! I have something urgent to tell Dr. Seward, something desperate! He’s awake, he and his guests, I’ve just seen their lights. Please fetch him. Please.” Renfield clutched at the bars, as if he could reach through them and wrest the promise from the guard. He fought to keep from shouting “Please.”

  Shaking his head, Hardy withdrew. Renfield pressed his face to the judas and saw him walk downstairs, then sank to the floor before the door.

  He will know. He will guess, and he will punish.

  He will come here tonight. He will use me, use me to destroy Mrs. Harker, use me as a cat’s-paw as he tried to use me before. The one person of all of them, who treated me as a man and not a beast.

  Footsteps in the corridor. Renfield scrambled to his feet.

  The clank of the lock.

  “What is it, Renfield?” Lamplight in the cell, the lamp held aloft by the tall Quincey Morris in his blue American Army coat. Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Lord Godalming were with Seward also, all five men dressed rough, as if they were going burgling, which Renfield guessed they were.

  “Dr. Seward.” Renfield spoke in his most calm and careful voice. “I have a most special favor to ask of you. You must have been aware, in the past day or two, of my return to sanity. I’m certain that only the press of your duties as host to your friends has prevented you from fulfilling the legal and medical technicalities of my release. Though I hesitate to seem impatient or importunate, still I must request, as a matter of considerable importance, that you release me tonight. Now, in fact. Release me, and send me home.”

  To Catherine, he thought, trying to keep the wild elation from his face, to Vixie. I can take them and be gone from this country, from my dread Master’s awareness, before morning. He cannot cross water, we can flee to France.

  “I’m afraid,” said Seward calmly, “that even did I judge you restored to complete sanity, those technicalities could not be dealt with at this hour, and in this fashion. We could not…”

  “I appeal to your friends,” coaxed Renfield, reminding himself that screaming at Seward and knocking him against the wall would probably not serve him well. “They will, perhaps, not mind sitting in judgement on my case. By the way, you have not introduced me.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Seward beckoned the others forward. “Lord Godalming; Professor Van Helsing; Mr. Quincey Morris, of Texas; Jonathan Harker—Mr. Renfield.”

  “Lord Godalming.” Renfield shook the young man’s hand. “I had the honor of seconding your father at the Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the title, that he is no more.”

  His young lordship blinked at the incongruity of Renfield’s small-talk in the barren cell, at two in the morning, but made a polite bow.

  “Mr. Morris, you should be proud of your great state. Its reception into the Union was a precedent which may have far-reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the Stars and Stripes.”

  Morris inclined his head, thoroughly imperturbable. Renfield guessed he’d encountered stranger situations.

  “What shall any man say of his pleasure at meeting Van Helsing? Sir, I make no apology for dropping all forms of conventional prefix. When an individual has revolutionized theraputics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain-matter, conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him to one of a class. And Mr. Harker, I can only congratulate you upon having the wisdom and discrimination to find, in all the wide world, that pearl among women who is your beautiful wife.”

  He hesitated, looking into the young solicitor’s face in the huge shadows, the upside-down lantern-light, seeing it…when? By firelight? In a dream? Why did it look so familiar?

  Not wanting to be seen staring, he turned quickly back to the others. “You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian and medico-jurist as well as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional circumstances.”

  “Indeed at all times I attempt to so deal with you, and everyone under this roof,” agreed Seward. “And indeed, you do seem to be improving very rapidly. But it requires a longer interview than this, to even begin to think about taking steps t
o meet your wish.”

  “But I fear, Dr. Seward, that you hardly apprehend my wish,” said Renfield. “I desire to go at once—here—now—this very hour—this very moment, if I may. I am sure it is only necessary to put before so admirable a practitioner as Dr. Seward so simple, yet so momentous a wish, to ensure its fulfillment.”

  Seward’s face was like wood. Renfield looked past him to the others: Godalming, Morris, Harker, Van Helsing. Imbeciles, do you understand nothing? “Is it possible that I have erred in my supposition?”

  “You have,” said Seward.

  No pleading on Renfield’s part would move them. He felt frantic, hampered by his terror of Dracula’s reaction should he guess Renfield’s attempted defection; hampered, too, by his sense of the vampire’s approach, stealing like a dark cloud down the silent river, across the Purfleet marshes, a cloud filled with malice and wrath.

  “Can you not tell frankly your real reason for wishing to be free tonight?” asked Van Helsing, speaking like Mrs. Harker as an equal, and Renfield could only shake his head.