Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  Renfield called out, “Vixie!” into the stuffy silence of the dark house, but received no reply. “Catherine!”

  Only the smell of dust, and of mice, and of rooms unaired.

  Renfield climbed the stairs. On the second floor, Vixie’s water-colors hung in the drawing-room, her sitar propped on the window-seat where she’d used to practice it. The bright cushions Catherine had made bloomed like incongruous flowers on the black slick horsehair of the previous tenant’s chairs. On the third floor, Catherine’s yellow silk kimono lay across the foot of the unmade bed, and Renfield knelt, pressed the sheets to his face, then the silk, inhaling the lingering scents of her perfume, her body, her hair. It was as if she had lain there only last night. But he knew it had been longer than that.

  On the third floor, Vixie’s bed was likewise disordered in the small room that had been hers. Her brush still lay on the little dresser, and the jeweled combs she’d used to put up her hair. Lavender kid gloves, like withered flowers. The torn-up pieces of the letter that Bolton, Renfield’s solicitor, had delivered to her from her grandmother Brough, still on the floor where she’d left them.

  Renfield picked one up, saw in the hated handwriting the name of Madame Martine’s Select Academy for Young Females, in Lausanne, and the phrase, “…Wormidge will be by in the morning to take you to the station…”

  Slowly, Renfield descended the stairs.

  The other papers Bolton had delivered from Wormidge lay where he’d left them back in April, on the marble-topped dresser in the hall.

  He called out softly, “Catherine?” and only the rustle of mice answered him, from the open pantry door.

  Through the pantry he descended to the kitchen. It’s a cold night, he thought. The servants might have the night off. They’ll be keeping warm in the kitchen.

  Mice scattered at his tread; the stink of them rose to him like a cloud. Split bins, chewed-open sacks, apples and cheese long spoiled, the nasty stink of the mortality of all things. Renfield looked about him at the dark clammy room, the unwashed dishes piled on the counters—had Catherine fired the servants altogether? His gaze went three times past the little door that led to the sub-cellar, because of course there was no reason for them to go down there.

  But it always came back.

  It was locked. The key was in the pocket of his jacket, with the handkerchief and the bus tickets. He could have passed through the keyhole or under the door in a mist, but he unlocked it, and descended the slippery damp steps.

  They didn’t want to be found, he told himself. They don’t dare be found. That’s why they’re sleeping in the sub-cellar.

  So Georgina won’t find them.

  So Lady Brough won’t find them.

  So they won’t take Vixie away.

  “Catherine?” he said softly, hoping against hope that his dream had been, in fact, only a dream.

  But it hadn’t.

  He’d known that, from the moment he’d opened his eyes in the tomb.

  They were where he’d left them. There was a table in the middle of the room where boots or silverware could be cleaned, or wine transferred from bottles to decanter. That night back in April he’d laid every tablecloth he could find on it, before bringing them down there to sleep, and the damask cloths were brown and crusted with the fluids of their mortality. The whole hot summer’s worth of dead flies crunched like little curls of parched paper beneath his feet. It had been six months, but he could still distinguish between them, by Catherine’s beautiful red hair, and Vixie’s dark curls.

  Renfield knelt at his wife’s side, gathered up a double-handful of her hair, and kissed it. “I’m sorry, Catherine,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Standing again, he took off his jacket, pushed up his shirt-sleeve, to tear open the vein of his arm with his nails, as Nomie had done, and Dracula. He held his arm over Catherine’s mouth and let the blood drip down onto her lips—or what was left of her lips. The coroner had taken away his notebooks, but he knew exactly how many flies he’d consumed—three thousand, four hundred and eight—plus nine hundred spiders, six hundred and fifteen moths, seven sparrows, and four mice, and a little tiny bit of Dr. Seward’s blood, though that probably didn’t count. Surely life enough?

  Wasn’t it?

  Please?

  He didn’t know how long after that it was—not midnight, he didn’t think—when he felt the cold whiff of mist flowing down the sub-cellar stairs. He was still weeping, and did not turn around. He knew it was Nomie.

  She said, “I am sorry, Ryland.”

  “I hoped it was a dream,” he said, after some time. “Just a dream I had. Part of my madness, like the letters I wrote her. Six months now I’ve hoped.” He turned then and looked at her, a blurred pale shape through the blindness of his tears. “Can you do it? I’ve only eaten flies—mice—moths…You’ve consumed life, real life, men and women. You are strong…”

  “No one of us is that strong, Ryland. Not my lord Dracula, not those dark ancients that haunt the mountains of Thibet and the deserts of Egypt. We are the Angels of Death, and the Angels of Un-Death—the Choosers of the Slain, you have called us. We can avert death, but we cannot bring them back through the Gate, once they have passed through to the Other Side.”

  She laid her hand on Renfield’s as she spoke, and turning, he caught her in his arms and clung to her like a drowning man, weeping against the golden silk of her hair.

  “They were going to take Vixie,” he stammered, his body shaking with sobs. The words came out of him as if, like a sick man, his body had to expel them or die. “Lady Brough—her vile solicitors—Catherine’s hag of a sister…They dug up old scandals, old rumors about me when I was in India. They were having me declared unfit to care for my own daughter! And because Catherine was a free soul and had lived an unconventional life, long before she met me, she, too, was to be disbarred from ever seeing Vixie, was to be cut out of the family. That was what they wanted. Her money, and control of mine! I did it only to keep Vixie from them, to keep them from killing her by inches, smothering her spirit, turning her into one of them and worse in their damned Select Academies! I would rather be dead, Papa, she said, the night those damned letters came, those damned papers…The night Bolton brought them to the house. I would rather be dead. Those were her very words.”

  “And you killed her?”

  Renfield nodded. “I was in red rage. Bolton had the temerity, the nerve, to follow me to this house. I knocked his brains out with the fire-shovel, there in the hall. My mind was swimming with the smell of his blood. Blood has always…had that effect upon me,” he added, a little hesitantly. “In India I used to kill…kill…snakes, and…and mongeese…and drink their blood. I came upstairs and she was weeping, weeping herself sick on her bed, and I…I did it very gently. Broke her neck…held her against me as she died, as she…she passed beyond where they could get her, change her, make her what she would hate to be. She was such a free soul, Vixie. Such a beautiful soul. Then Catherine came in, and screamed…”

  His arms tightened around Nomie, and he wept afresh. “I thought if I ate enough flies, consumed enough life…”

  “You did what you could,” Nomie whispered, and held him close as fresh gusts of weeping shook him like a storm-tossed oak. “You only did as you knew how. But it is done. You did your best, and your bravest, but they cannot be brought back.”

  “Then send me with them!” sobbed Renfield. “Let me go, too. They were my life!”

  “And your life is over.” At the sound of that deep cold contralto, Nomie and Renfield broke apart. The Countess and Sarike stood on the steps of the sub-cellar, the garnets in the Countess’s hair twinkling darkly, like droplets of blood. “You are now one of us.”

  Revulsion seared through Renfield like a bitter poison. Shoving Nomie from him, he snatched up from its shelf the long, sharp chisel that the Cook had used to open crates, drove it with all his strength toward his chest…

  And doubled over, paralyz
ed with shock, before the iron touched his body. Gasped as if his brain had been sliced apart with broken glass, as if his body were turned inside-out by icy claws, and in his mind as well as in his ears he heard the Countess’s voice: “Don’t.”

  Sobbing, he tried to press the chisel toward his flesh again and pain—and something worse and stronger than pain—closed around his body and his mind like a crushing vise.

  She said, “Drop it.”

  He was back within her mind, where he had clung like a terrified child while his body died. He saw his hands open. Heard the iron clatter on the flagstone floor.

  Sounds came out of his mouth that weren’t words and were too suffocated to be cries. Still her grip tightened, her rage insupportable, slicing him as a grape is sliced by the sharpest of silver razors. At her will, he dropped to his knees—it was worse than dying, a thousand times worse—at her will, he sank to his belly on the wet stone floor. At her will, he crawled to her, where she stepped down to the bottom of the stairs—hating himself, hating her, fighting and sweating and hurting every inch of the way and not able to keep himself from doing exactly as she willed—and kissed her feet.

  He wanted to bite them. To tear her Achilles’ tendons with his teeth. She was aware of his want, knowing him as intimately as if they had been lifelong lovers, and laughed at him; laughed harder as she made him bring up his own arm and tear at the bare flesh of his hand, worrying it like a dog.

  “Be glad it’s your own flesh I’m making you eat,” said her voice in his ears, “and not that of your wife and your daughter.”

  He knew she could do it. When she let him go, he lay on the floor in smears of his own blood and wept.

  “Go on,” jeered the Countess, “weep. Weep now until all the tears are out of you, once and for all. You are now our servant, Renfield. You were the one who clung to us, through the darkness of death. It was for this we kept you back from passing through the Gate. Do you understand?”

  He could barely get the words out. “I understand, Lady.”

  “You will do as you are bid, for you will find that you cannot do otherwise.”

  He would have kept his silence but couldn’t. The words were squished out of him as if he were a frog upon which she trod. “Yes, Lady.” To the bottom of his soul he understood then how they hated Dracula, hated him with the hatred of intimacy, and why they had pursued him to this land. Why they would never, could never, leave him.

  Then like an icy storm-blast the room grew cold above him. He raised his head in shock and terror even as the Countess turned, shrinking back from the column of darkness that loomed behind them, above them on the steps.

  “And you, my beautiful ones,” said a harsh, deep voice, “could do with a lesson yourselves, to do as you have been bid.”

  And like the fall of night, Dracula came down into the cellar.

  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  4 October

  My most beloved Catherine,

  My most beloved wife—

  I will be leaving England soon. In my misguided efforts to somehow make right the terrible wrong that I did you, I have put myself into the thrall of monsters.

  The Countess Elizabeth is fearsome, cold and deadly as a steel blade, yet she pales in comparison to her husband, Dracula the Impaler, Viovode of Transylvania in the cruelest time of its history. The meeting between them can only be compared to the clash of storm winds against raging tidal floods, elemental, violent, appalling. He flung her to the floor as if she were a rag-doll, struck the others and hurled them against the walls with such force as to destroy the shelves, cursed them in German and in Magyar. He made the three of them crawl, as the Countess had made me crawl. My soul—if I can still speak of myself as possessing such a thing—trembles for poor Mrs. Harker, if and when he should claim her as his own.

  “I am pursued by human rats, by the yapping curs of this land,” he stormed at the three women, who crouched bloody on the floor before his boots. “Jealous suitors all, swearing vengeance, as the impotent Turk and the beaten Slav threw stones at me when I rode in triumph through their towns! Dogs! I spit upon their vengeance!” There was a fading red scar across his forehead, where, Nomie had told me, Jonathan Harker had struck him with a shovel as he lay sleeping in his coffin, and the front of his vest and coat had been ripped open, as if by the stroke of a knife.

  “Vengeance! It is they who shall learn the meaning of that word to their sorrow! I have taken the soul of this girl they loved, and I have in my hand the soul of the other. She is mine, whatever time it is that she die, if it be seventy years from now! They play against me with their tiny mortal lives, but it is I who bear as my weapon the sword of Time. Against that they can do naught.”

  His red eyes raked the three women and he stooped down, caught the Countess Elizabeth by the thick coils of her hair, dragged her head back so that her eyes met his. “And you, wilful sluts! You dared pursue? You dared leave the castle that is my fortress, to follow me to this place?”

  “And you dared to leave us?” retorted the Countess, and Dracula struck her across the face, so that blood trickled from her lip.

  “Silence, hag!” In their locked gazes there was a fearful understanding, the fermented knowledge of the very depths of one another’s minds, as only hatred can be when it is rooted in the confidences once exchanged in love. Then he thrust her to the floor again.

  “In one way and one way only is it well that you have come,” he said. “The ant can be crushed beneath the boot, but still the bite of an ant can poison the limb, and so kill the man. I return now to my own country, to Transylvania—to the place that I left in your charge, faithless trulls! You will go before me, to make ready my fortress.” The red gaze moved to Nomie, crouching with bowed head, “And you will travel behind me—with that cringing Judas who once called me Master!—and you will pick off any who straggle or lag. For they will follow.” And he laughed, a hollow and dreadful sound. “They will follow to their deaths.”

  He reached into his coat and drew out a handful of banknotes and golden sovereigns, which he threw to the floor between the three women, the gold tingling musically on the stone.

  His voice changed, and he drew the Countess to her feet, speaking to her in Hungarian rather than German as before, and I caught the words haboru—war—and ver, blood, spoken in the tones of tenderest love. He cupped her cheek in his hand, and swiftly turning her head, she bit the fleshy heel of his thumb, so that the blood spattered on his cuff.

  At this he laughed, as if at some uproarious jest, and when I raised my head, he was gone.

  Now they, too, are gone, my beloved, my treasure. I write this kneeling at your side. The Countess and Sarike have departed to find their little poet Gelhorn, who has all this time been meeting them for midnight suppers and walks along the Serpentine. They will make arrangements to cross the Channel under his care, since Van Helsing knows nothing of their presence in this country and will not be watching for them, and travel by rail back to Klausenberg, and so up the mountains to Dracula’s castle once again.

  Dracula himself will travel by ship, as he came to this country, packed in the single box of his native earth that Van Helsing and his cohorts have not found and sterilized with holy things.

  After they had gone, I tried to comfort Nomie, whose face was cut and bruised by Dracula’s violence. But she slipped away from me as mist. The night is deepening to morning’s small hours. Soon I must return to Highgate, to the only earth that will give me rest.

  A burning hunger rises in my flesh. I caught mice—nearly a dozen, fattened for months on the spoiled flour and rotting vegetables in this kitchen when the servants could not return to the locked house. I can now move with great speed and can, to some extent, dull their animal minds. As I have long suspected, their blood does indeed in part quench the ravening hunger of the vampire.

  But only in part. I know not how long it will be before I, too, begin to kill the innocent, like the children that Lucy Westenra t
ook in her state of revenant shock.

  And so I must depart. I will return with fall of night, beloved. Mortality and the effects of time hold no horrors for me, and to me your face is as beautiful now as it was that first moment I saw you, at the lecture-hall in Leicester Square, in that gown of iris-colored silk. We depart for Transylvania, Nomie and I, probably next week. It depends on how long it takes Seward and young Lord Godalming to wind up their affairs in this country, and Van Helsing to make his preparations. With your permission I will come here to be with you every night until then. For six months I longed for nothing but to sit beside you and to look upon your lovely face, and now nothing can prevent me from doing so, for what time is left to me.

  And if I can arrange it, that time will be short, please God.

  Between enslavement to the Countess Elizabeth, and through her to the terrible Count, there is nothing whatsoever to choose. Hell itself cannot be as dreadful as that occupation for eternity.

  Poor Lucy Westenra’s suitors will be in pursuit of the Count, and in them lies my hope. They hunger for revenge as I do for blood. It will be no difficult matter to place myself in their path, to embrace the oblivion I seek, and the way through the Gate on whose other side you and Vixie wait.

  My darling, I want nothing now but to be with you. When that is accomplished—when we do indeed meet on the Other Side—I can only beg that you understand, for I know that I cannot hope that you might forgive.

  Still I remain, in spite of all, forever,

  Your loving husband,

  R. M. R.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  R. M. R.’s notes

  5 October

  17 mice, 6 rats, 3 moths

  Flies scarce even in London with advancing cold.