“If I were free to speak, I should not hesitate a moment, but I am not my own master in the matter. I can only ask you to trust me. If I am refused, the responsibility does not rest with me.”
“Come, friends,” said Seward, who seemed, Renfield thought, to have a fairly small repertoire of closing remarks. “We have work to do. Good-night.”
He turned from the room. Renfield cried, “Please!” and threw himself to his knees before him. “You don’t understand what you’re doing, keeping me here! Let me implore you, to let me out of this house at once! Send me away how you will and where you will; send keepers with me with whips and chains; let them take me in a strait-waistcoat, even to a jail, but let me go out of this! You don’t know what you’re doing by keeping me here!”
Seward’s face hardened, as if this outburst was something expected and much more in line with his ideas of how small-hours interviews with lunatics should be conducted. Renfield wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. But that, he knew, would only result in the strait-jacket, and the thought of being so bound when Dracula came was more than he could bear.
“By all you hold dear—by your love that is lost—by your hope that lives—for the sake of the Almighty, take me out of this and save my soul from guilt!” Tears of frustration and despair rolled down his face. “Can’t you hear me, man? Can’t you understand? Will you never learn? Don’t you know that I am sane and earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul? Let me go! Let me go!”
Seward caught the hand Renfield raised in pleading, pulled him to his feet. “Come! No more of this; we have had quite enough already. Get to your bed and behave more discreetly.”
“Discreetly?” Renfield bit back a crack of hysterical laughter. For a time he stood, looking into Seward’s eyes in the glow of Quincey’s lamp, seeing in them the man’s blind grief, his blind pride in being the doctor, the keeper, the Man Who Is Sane. He felt, suddenly, exactly as he’d felt while trying to argue with Lady Brough, with Catherine’s sister the obnoxious Georgina, trying to convince them that to take Vixie away from him and Catherine, to lock her into one of their “select young ladies’ academies” would be the death of that fragile, lively, passionate girl’s soul.
To do otherwise was simply Not Done.
Without a word, Renfield walked back to his bed, and dropped down to sit on its edge.
He saw Seward’s shoulders relax, as if, though he did not smile, all things had been restored to the way he knew they should be.
The other men filed out. As Seward turned, last of all, to shut the door, Renfield raised his head. “You will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the justice to bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince you tonight.”
From his window Renfield watched the hooded yellow blink of the lantern bob its way across the abyss of the garden. Watched it ascend what he knew to be the wall, invisible beyond the leafless trees. Watched it vanish.
Pallid moonlight outlined the nearest tree-trunks, slipped away. Returned, to show the thin streak of white mist that had begun to steal across the garden, mist that glittered in the faint reflections of Seward’s study lamp, and from another window where the gas was also turned down low. Somewhere a dog was howling, and Renfield pressed his face to the bars and cried “Dear God! Dear God!” though he could not have said whether he prayed to the disapproving God of whom he’d been taught in childhood, or to Wotan, whose red eyes he saw flickering, flickering in the heart of the mists.
As the black form took shape, hanging in the darkness outside Renfield’s window, he thought, That is where I saw Jonathan Harker. In my dream of the Valkyries. It is he who was the prisoner. He could even now hear Nomie’s silvery voice: I am called Nomie, Jonathan…
But it was not Nomie and her sisters who took shape outside the window now, but Wotan—Dracula—with his red eyes burning through the mist like malign spots of flame.
Black moths beat against the window, crawled through the narrow slot of the nearly shut casement, flopped limply on the floor in the moonlight around Renfield’s feet. Though it was night, and chill, big steely black flies swarmed with them, and spiders crawled from the cracks in the paneling, and still the black form took shape in the darkness outside the window.
I am here.
Renfield whispered, “Master.”
I am here. You have sworn your love for me; lo, I have brought you good things. Will you not bid me welcome?
The grip of his mind was like iron and ice, crushing and freezing at once. Renfield thought despairingly of that lovely young woman who had spoken so kindly to him, sleeping alone in this terrible house; thought of the long horror of Lucy’s death; of the three sisters and their power. He wept, but his voice choked on the name of God as if Dracula’s steel grip closed about his throat. In that moment he could have called upon neither God nor man.
“Rats,” Wotan whispered—Dracula whispered—the leitmotif of the Traveler God beating in Renfield’s brain, and across the lawn Renfield saw a dark mass creeping, like water spreading toward the house, a dark mass prickled by a thousand paired crimson flames. “Rats…” With a gesture of his long-nailed hand, Dracula brushed aside the mists that surrounded him, and Renfield saw them, smelled them, the sweet filthy unmistakable mustiness of their bodies. “Every one of them a life. And dogs to eat them, and cats, too. All lives—all red blood, with years of life in it, and not merely buzzing flies!”
Lives, thought Renfield. Strength. Strength for my great work.
“All these lives will I give you. Ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me. Will you not bid me welcome?”
With a sob, Renfield stumbled to the window, pushed at the casement through the bars. “Welcome, Master,” he breathed. “I bid you come in.”
The black shape before the window dislimned; the moonlight all but disappeared. White mist poured through the inch-wide crack in a thin stream that flowed down the wall, across the floor, and under the door of the cell. Then it was gone.
Renfield sank to the floor of his cell and wept.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Van Helsing came to see Renfield next morning, cheerful—cock-a-whoop, Renfield thought, observing the old man’s springy step and bright eye with a kind of numb bitterness. They must have found some of the Count’s crates of earth at Carfax. Of course, it would be Jonathan Harker who’d told them the Count had bought the old house, and shipped his crates of earth there, so that he could have a place where he could rest in this foreign land.
Renfield saw it all now. Harker was a solicitor. It must have been he, whom Dracula hired as his agent, as the Countess Elizabeth had said. Harker must have somehow escaped Dracula’s castle in the Carpathians.
Renfield shuddered at the thought. Enough to give one brain-fever indeed—he couldn’t imagine how anyone, mortal or Un-Dead, could escape the Count. There must be a great deal more to that young man than met the eye.
Yet for all their cleverness, he thought despairingly, for all their smug self-satisfaction, neither Van Helsing, nor Seward, nor His Handsome New Lordship Godalming, nor any of the others had seen the danger of the Count coming in behind them, taking Mrs. Harker while they were away counting earth-boxes and congratulating themselves. Mrs. Harker who was innocent and kind, who had gone walking through the midnight streets of a strange town to save her friend from social embarrassment and chill. The Count must not have killed her—Van Helsing showed no sign of even suspecting that a thing might be amiss. So there was to be another slow crucifixion, another tortuous game of cat-and-mouse, such as he had played with Lucy.
And with Nomie, a hundred and ten years before.
“Don’t you know me?” Van Helsing asked, clearly fishing, Renfield thought, for more compliments about revolutionizing therapeutics by his brilliant theories.
“I know you well enough,” snapped Renfield. “You are the old fool Van Helsing. I wish you would take yourself a
nd your idiotic brain theories somewhere else. Damn all thick-headed Dutchmen!”
Are you all blind?!?
Evidently they were, for when Seward came in a little later, and tried to engage him in a long discussion of devouring life and consuming souls, he, too, seemed blithe and cheerful, more cheerful than Renfield had seen him since the night of his disastrous dinner for Lucy and her mother, as if the problem of Dracula were well on the way to being solved.
He will come back! Don’t you understand that he will come back?
Renfield was hard put to keep his voice normal, to keep from shouting at Seward or striking him in sheer blazing frustration, as the doctor talked of lives and souls as if he knew the slightest thing about them. But at the stroke of noon—the brief period at which the vampire could move and have power—flies began to buzz in at the window again, and spiders creep out of the wall.
Maybe I have to sacrifice poor Mrs. Harker, thought Renfield, chewing wearily on a bluebottle, to save Catherine, and Vixie. It is after all for their sakes that I am doing all of this. Mrs. Harker’s kindness had touched his lonely pain, reminding him of how long it had been, since any woman had spoken kindly to him…
Any living woman.
Oh, my darling, Renfield whispered, the time is coming. When this is done, and poor Mrs. Harker is his, I shall ask that he let me out of here as a reward, that he let me go. Then I will return to you, and we will all three of us be free.
The thought brought him comfort for a time. He returned to catching flies with a lighter heart.
Seward put an extra guard in the corridor that night. Renfield saw Harker return late, and prayed that the presence of Mina’s husband would be enough, to keep the Count away. Yet he watched by the window in the deeps of the night, and saw the thread of mist creep across the garden, crawl like a vaporous serpent up the wall, through the chinks in the window casement. Out in the corridor he could hear Hardy’s snoring deepen—Nomie had told him of how the Count could command sleep, paralyzing the limbs of his victims or those who sought to guard them. He remembered his dream, of Seward sleeping like a dead man on Lucy’s mauve satin sofa, while through the open door in the dim firelight the Count drank Lucy’s blood.
The Count neither materialized, nor troubled to speak to him. Only the mist flowed across the floor, and beneath the door of Renfield’s cell, while Renfield crouched on the bed watching it in sickened silence. When it had passed, he fumbled open his boxes, devoured every spider and fly within them.
Catherine, he thought, oh my beloved, forgive me! And Mrs. Harker, my dear sweet Madame Mina, forgive me, too!
The cold deepened. The little camel-back clock in Seward’s study spoke three sweet tones. But sleep would not come, and instead of lessening with Dracula’s departure from the house—as surely he must have departed already?—Renfield’s agitation grew.
Mist gathered in the garden, before his window.
Dear God, has he come back for me? Come back to give me my reward?
The red glint of eyes.
Six of them.
Renfield flattened against the wall in terror.
They took shape, and seeped around the casement of the window like a mist.
“So this is how you say, ‘help’?” The Countess Elizabeth strode forward in a towering rage, and Renfield buried his face in the meagre pillow of his bed. “We say, that our erring husband is not to go about England taking other wives who please him better, and this is how you go about serving us? By saying, ‘Come,’ when he comes knocking at your window like a lover singing a serenade? Get your face out of your bedclothes and sit up like a man!”
Renfield obeyed. The Countess’s eyes blazed red as fire, her lips were drawn back over fangs like a wolf’s. Sarike, at her shoulder, grinned though she probably couldn’t understand the Countess’s thick-accented German, and licked her sharp teeth. There was blood on the dark ruffles of her walking-dress, both dried and fresh.
“What could I do?” whispered Renfield. “He would kill me!”
“He will kill you, once he can come into this house!” retorted the Countess. “But until you invited him in, you were as safe as if you sat on the altar of a church!”
“There are a dozen madmen whose minds our husband could have touched in dreaming,” broke in Nomie. “You know what he is, with those who pledge their word and then betray it.”
“Coward!” The Countess’s voice was like the hiss of a serpent. Her red eyes narrowed, she reached to Renfield with her clawed hand, and picked the wing of a fly from the corner of his mouth. “Glutton. You would betray us for pottage.”
For lives, thought Renfield, too paralyzed with terror even to whimper. For Catherine.
“So now he drinks the blood of this—this Englishwoman. This schoolmistress. This type-writer lady whose husband leaves her alone, like a fool, to be cuckolded by the Lord of Darkness! He of all men should know better than that.”
Sarike’s smile widened and her eyes gleamed with demon evil, and she said, “Jonathan,” in her sweet crystal voice.
The Countess sniffed. “He’ll be her first kill—I’ll bet you my pearl earrings on that.” Her eyes slid sidelong to Nomie. “And I’ll further bet that the bitch won’t share.”
Then she looked back at Renfield. “If he completes his kill. Pah! He fools with them and fools with them, whispers to their dreams, until they come willingly, swooning at his feet.”
Nomie looked away.
The Countess went on, “You know, do you not, that it is only those who drink the vampire’s blood in their turn, who become vampires—and then only those who have the strength, the will, to hold on as death rolls over them; to hold on to the will of their master. That is why he seduces them. He makes them love him too much to let go of their lives.”
In the silence that followed these words, Nomie gazed out the window as if she were enduring a beating; only once, very quickly, she pressed her hand to her mouth.
“She has a core of steel in her, that one.” The Countess’s deep voice was hard. Her black hair, where it trailed in tendrils from her chignon, made streaks of night across a face white as the waning moon. “He will use her against me—against us,” she added, with a glance at her sisters. To Renfield she said, with an outstretched finger of command, “Stop him.”
Renfield gasped. “How?”
“By doing what you should have done last night. By raising an alarm. By showing some courage.”
“I am a madman, in case you haven’t noticed!” protested Renfield. “I am locked in a cell! I did everything I could, everything!”
“You did what you could to be taken out of the house,” retorted the Countess. “I notice that not one word passed your lips concerning the precious Madame Mina’s being taken out of the house.” Renfield reflected that this business of seeing things in dreams obviously worked both ways. “That imbecile poet Gelhorn could have done better.”
“Then why didn’t he?” Renfield straightened up a little from his crouch. “Why don’t you send him to rescue Mrs. Harker, or to warn her husband of the danger in which she stands?”
“If you’d ever seen him trying to get his luggage back from a railway porter, you wouldn’t be asking that.”
“Because you are the braver man,” said Nomie softly, and turned back from the window to look at him. “And the more intelligent one, I think. Do this for us, and we will do what we can—I will do what I can—to have you released, or to sunder these bars and spirit you away.”
“Fail,” added the Countess grimly, “and it will be the worse for you, to a degree that you cannot even imagine.”
And Sarike, like an animal, only smiled again and licked her lips.
Then they were gone.
Renfield saw Mrs. Harker briefly the following day, pale and thin, like tea after too much water has been added to the teapot. Her eyes were sunken and bruised-looking, as if from too much sleep or too little. Other than that brief glimpse, as she stood on the gravel driveway b
idding farewell to Lord Godalming and Mr. Morris—God knew where they were off to, Harker had left early in the morning—he saw none of the little band of conspirators against the vampire Count. According to Dr. Hennessey, who made Seward’s rounds for him, Van Helsing had gone to the British Museum. Seward himself was closeted in his study, making preparations and plans of his own.
Somehow, Renfield couldn’t bring himself to tell Hennessey of Mrs. Harker’s danger: Hennessey who reeked of gin and whose smutty-minded speculations about the female patients had been audible to Renfield night after night when the Irishman had chatted with the keepers.
In any case, there was no telling what he’d do with that information.
Though the day was chill, flies swarmed to the little sugar he put out. He didn’t even trouble to put them in boxes, simply caught them and ate them, desperate to increase his strength, to build up the forces of his own life to meet what he knew would come.
Seward has to make evening rounds, thought Renfield. I’ll tell him then. That will be time to get her out of the house.
But Lord Godalming and Morris arrived just at sunset, met by Seward in the avenue. He must have been watching from his study window. An hour later Van Helsing’s cab pulled up at the door, and some time after that, Hennessey came again on Seward’s rounds: “Very took up with Dr. Van Helsing, he is,” the Irishman reported. “As well he might be—great man like that. And he was most kind, most kind indeed, when I told him at supper last night of my own observations and experiments with training the demented to behave themselves. Why, he said he’d seldom encountered a system as original as mine!”
Renfield could almost feel pity for the elderly Dutchman, trapped at the supper-table with Hennessey in full cry.
“If you would, Dr. Hennessey,” said Renfield, “could you please tell Dr. Seward that I must see him. As soon as may be, this evening certainly, before the house retires to bed. It is vital.”
“’Course I’ll tell him,” agreed Hennessey. “’Course I will.” He unscrewed and sipped his flask as he went out the door. Renfield could hear him trading a crude joke with Simmons in the hall. I might just as well, Renfield reflected wearily, have asked one of my spiders to take a message.
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