Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  Spider season. Although I have access now to the hot blood of rodents, I still find a special pleasure in the sharp sparkle of these predatory smaller fry. Though I do enjoy moths. Having only the night to hunt in, birds are no longer a possibility. Dogs I will not kill, though I have found that I can summon them with my thought, as Dracula summoned the wolf from the London Zoo to break through the shut windows of Hillingham and tear away Van Helsing’s protective wreaths of garlic. Dogs are faithful, and it is ill to reward such innocent helpfulness with death. The cats with which Highgate abounds stare in disbelieving affront at my summons, then sneer at me and run away. A pity—Puss eats of many mice and sparrows in her life. Is that why she has nine of them?

  6 October

  22 mice, 4 rats, 18 spiders, 2 moths

  In Regent’s Park this evening a child of eleven or so accosted me, tawdrily clad in a grown woman’s cast-offs. She fell into step with me, winked, and said, “Cold night, eh, guv?” and looking down into her calculating eyes I was filled with such blinding hunger, such overwhelming need, that I could literally smell the blood that coursed in her veins. I bared my teeth at her—like Dracula’s, and the Countess’s, and Nomie’s now, long and sharp as a wolf’s fangs—and widened my eyes like the horrors of a Kabuki mask, and snarled in a good imitation of Emily Strathmore when she was getting ready to slide into a fit, “Cold indeed, little posset.” I lunged at her, giving her ample time to flee down the path, for indeed she needed a lesson, poor child, about better picking her clients.

  But as I watched her go, I wondered how long it would be before I began simply to troll the streets of the East End in earnest, and take that poor child’s older and more slatternly sisters as my victims. Though God knows, with the amount of alcohol and opiates I would imbibe with the blood I should undoubtedly stumble back to Highgate drunk as a muleteer. The blood of rats—the energy of their fierce little minds—lessens the desperate fire in my own veins, but it does not cure the scraping, searing need in me.

  That need, Nomie tells me, is assuaged only by human blood, and the psychic inhalation of human death. It is from the death, as well as the blood, that we imbibe our strength. We need the one as greatly as we need the other. I do not know how long I can survive before I become even as Dracula is.

  Was he different in his first century of Un-Life? His second?

  Somehow I think not.

  I pray that I will engineer my death—my true death—at the hands of Seward and Van Helsing before I become in my heart as he is now.

  I was in Regent’s Park to meet the Countess, Sarike, Nomie, and their human agent Gustav Gelhorn, whom I recognized at once, at one of the new cafés on the Circle near the Boating Lake. In the glowing jewel-box of lamps and passers-by that pasty-faced little man seemed more anaemic than ever, his pale blue eyes traveling with reverent adoration from the face of one woman to the face of the other, and barely glancing at my own. I am positive he made not the slightest association between the “Mr. Marshmire” who wrote him out a cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds on the Merchants’ Bank to pay expenses for himself and his “beautiful spirits” to journey back to their native mountains, and the screaming wretch he had seen in the padded room at Rushbrook House.

  He was a very unpleasant little man, a disciple of Gobineau and Marr and other writers of the Volkish Movement, and full of his own importance as a member of the “pure Aryan race.” An astonishing combination of smug vanity and self-pity. At one point, in between endless ramblings about the “German race-soul” and the dire international plots of “degenerates” like Jews and homosexuals, he made reference to the “special circumstances” of the journey, with a covert glance at the Countess, who merely looked amused. Nomie said to him, “Our dear friend Marshmire is aware of our…limitations, Friend Gustav,” at which he slid his gaze sidelong at me with wary disbelief not innocent of jealousy.

  In my loftiest German, I said, “Because a man passes by an English name, Herr Gelhorn, does not mean that he shares the soul of this island race of debased counter-jumpers. Did you think yourself the only man who has heard the Rhinemaidens sing, as they combed their hair upon the rocks in the moonlight? For the voices of the spirits of the German Race-Soul carry far, across rivers and mountains, and even the seas.”

  Gelhorn looked properly chastened, and for an instant I met Nomie’s eyes and was hard put not to burst into laughter, at the shared mental picture of some fat American railroad baron waking in the night in his mail-order castle in Chicago crying, The Rhinemaidens! The enchanted spirits of the German Race-Soul require my help!

  Gelhorn even mumbled, as we shook hands in parting, “Thank you, mein Herr, for your assistance to these spirits, these wandering elementals, in their quest across lands and seas. You and I are privileged beyond the part of most of the Mortal Race, to look upon their faces, to realize that the true spirits of the Fatherland still walk this earth and extend their friendship to men of pure blood.”

  His bespectacled gaze lingered reverently on the Countess, whom Sarike was helping into her very stylish sable pelisse—where Gelhorn thinks she acquired the two hundred guineas that such a garment costs, I cannot imagine. Rhine gold, perhaps?

  “I swear to you,” Gelhorn went on, “that I shall protect these spirits with my very life, on the cross-Channel boat, and on the train from Paris, until they are returned again to their sacred mountains.”

  I inclined my head, and let him pay the bill. I don’t think he was aware that I—supposedly human—had sipped no more of the coffee than had the three representatives of the German Race-Soul he was helping. Nomie and I stood at the edge of the café’s golden lights, and watched him escort the Countess and Sarike away into the thick mists that lay beneath the park’s leafless trees.

  “Fortunate for the Countess,” I remarked, “that she found him,” and Nomie regarded me with surprise.

  “Fortune has little to do with the hunt, Ryland. To be vampire is to fascinate, men and women both. We lure by our beauty: it is how we hunt. We disarm the mind through the senses and the dreams. How else would we survive? Men see us, and follow, despite all they know, drawn by their need like your poor friend Jonathan. Else why would they go with us to lonely places in the dark, and yield to the kisses of a stranger? Will you hunt with me tonight?”

  “The taking of lives has no savor for me, Nornchen,” I answered—Little Norn, a jest between us: a sweet-faced sad little Valkyrie, riding with her sisters to choose who will be slain tonight. The protest was a complete lie and she saw it, glancing up into my face. When your soul has lain naked and helpless in the mind of another while you watch your body’s death, there is no such thing as deceit. But she only smiled agreement at me, and said nothing. “I think I will return to Kensington, and sit for a time beside them whom I will never cease to love.”

  She touched my hand, and whispered, “Then give them greeting from me, and tell them I am glad, that they have found the path that leads to happiness.”

  And so saying she melted away into the lamplight and the fog. For a moment I heard a winnowing in the air, as if a bat was flying somewhere in the dark overhead. Then she was gone.

  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  7–8 October

  My dearest one,

  Please forgive my not coming to you tonight. I grudge the hours of my absence, the lost occasion stolen from our short time together, but now even more than when I hung chained in a strait-waistcoat to the wall of a padded room, I am not master of my own movements. Nomie begs your pardon for the necessity, a consideration which I find most sweet in her. She cannot, any more than can I, shirk what it is required of us both that we do.

  Shortly after sunset we journeyed to Purfleet, where the marsh mists required only the very slightest effort on Nomie’s part to thicken to the point where we could walk up to the windows of the house with absolute impunity. As the Count had suspected, preparations were clearly afoot to pursue him: Van Helsing at least knew the sig
nificance of the Count’s exchange of blood with Mrs. Harker. By listening in a meditative state, akin to that of the yogis I met in India, Nomie and I could hear clearly all that passed in Seward’s study, and pieced together their plan. They will take the boat-train to Paris on the morning of the 12th, and there board the Orient Express for Varna, to intercept the Russian freighter Czarina Catherine upon which Dracula’s single remaining earth-box is being shipped.

  For a man with a great deal of money—as I now have under the names of Marshmire and Bloem, complete with all identity papers, Catherine’s accounts as well as my own—it is a simple matter, to make arrangements to have half a dozen of my own earth-boxes, as well as Nomie’s, shipped under reliable guard to Paris, and put on the same train on the 12th. So now I know, my beloved, how many more nights I can pass at your side, before we depart!

  Once when Mrs. Harker turned toward the windows of Seward’s study, I was shocked to see a great burn, nearly the size of a penny-piece, glaring crimson on her forehead within the frame of her dark hair. I must have gasped, for Nomie looked up at me and said, “You did not know, then? Van Helsing burned her—pressed the consecrated Host into her flesh, which has already begun to assume some of the qualities of the vampire. Had the changes in her been further advanced, it would have been much worse.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked, shocked at the old man’s carelessness, if carelessness it had been.

  “I felt it,” whispered Nomie. “In my dreaming I felt it, the afternoon that you were buried in Highgate. We all did. We are bound to her now, you see, as we are bound to the Count. In some sense, our dreams touch hers, as well as his. And in these dreams sometimes I see her, in the afternoons, alone in her room here. She will stare and stare at herself in the mirror, then throw herself upon the bed and weep like a beaten child.” Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact as she said this. Yet I heard in my mind Vixie’s despairing voice: I would rather be dead, than turn into what they want me to be!

  And poor Mrs. Harker has not even that option!

  Nomie went on, “When Jonathan, or any of the men comes in, she is all smiles and cheerful calm.”

  “Was Jonathan indeed the Count’s solicitor?” I asked, observing that thin, alert man with haggard eyes and white streaks starting in his hair as he stood talking to Van Helsing, his wife’s hand gently clasped in his. “I dreamed of him—I think I dreamed of him—at the castle in Transylvania.”

  “He was there,” agreed Nomie. “The castle itself stands upon a very high shoulder of rock, overlooking the Borgo Pass into Bukovina. The only way out of the Castle is through the courtyard. Sometimes the peasants, or the village priest, will place holy things in the road, or on the gates, so that we cannot pass them. It is a nuisance, no more, of course, as it is just as easy for us to come and go down the wall and the cliff-face, or to fly in the form of bats. On the night that the Count left—left us there and fled to England—Harker climbed down the wall and the cliff-face, a very difficult thing for a mortal man.”

  She tilted her head on one side, watching from the darkness as Harker escorted his wife from the study. Nomie must, I realized, know this deceptively gentle-looking young man well. He came back in alone, and out of his wife’s view his face looked as if he’d aged ten years. “There was nothing different this afternoon?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Van Helsing. “When Madame Mina is under the hypnosis, she only hears the lap of the water on the ship’s hull, and the thud of feet upon the deck above. And so I think it shall be, until the Czarina Catherine come into Varna, and we shall be there waiting for him, eh?”

  Nomie and I traded a glance. “They are using Mrs. Harker to trace him,” I said.

  “Be glad then that it is only him, whom she and they seek with her mind.”

  The remainder of the night, Nomie and I spent making arrangements for our own travel and the shipment of the boxes of the soil in which we were buried. Nomie, she told me, along with her sister-wives, had had to dig up her own from the chapel floor of Castle Dracula, the Count alone being able to command the gypsies who provide what service there is at the Castle.

  We met with two gentlemen named Greengage and Bray, ex-soldiers and recommended to me by my old friend the publican at the Goat and Compasses as honest roughs, who for a price can be depended upon to make sure that the earth-boxes in which Nomie and I must be carried across the Channel will in fact be placed speedily and safely upon the Orient Express. We shall depart for Paris on the 11th, a day before Van Helsing and Company. Once in France, we shall of course be able to come and go through the chinks and holes in the boxes, as we do through the minute holes in the lids of coffins and the doors of tombs.

  Will you, my dearest, forgive me if I make financial arrangements for Nomie to have access to our money, once Van Helsing or one of his myrmidons makes blessed quietus for me? Once that happens, neither you nor I, nor our dearest Vixie, will ever require a penny, ever again. My little Nornchen has been so great a help to me, instructing me in the ways of getting along in my new, strange, vampire state—something the Lady Elizabeth taught her, rather than the Count—that I feel I cannot simply abandon her on a train in the midst of Bavaria without making some provision for her to return safely to her home.

  I beg for—and rely upon—your kindness toward one who has been most generous and helpful to me in a terribly difficult time.

  Autumn nights fall quickly, and last long. My deepest regret, in this strange night-time life that now I lead, is that I will seldom see the flowers you so love blooming in sunlight, and never see them again without pain. That I will never catch, through our windows, the burnish of sunset on your hair. Still every day brings me closer to joining you in fact, never to be parted again.

  Your own forever,

  R. M. R.

  R. M. R.’s notes

  8 October

  18 mice, 10 rats, 20 spiders, 12 moths

  9 October

  22 mice, 11 rats, 9 spiders, 6 moths

  10 October

  16 mice, 13 rats, 4 spiders, 9 moths, & Georgina

  Clayburne

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Renfield heard the key turn in the front-door lock upstairs.

  Heard the click of shoe-heels—a woman’s shoes—on the hall floor, and felt the infinitesimal creak of weight mounting the stairs. Sitting quietly beside the table in the sub-cellar—he’d brought down a chair from the kitchen, clean sheets to lay over the bodies, ribbons for Vixie’s hair—he debated about locking the sub-cellar door, moving boxes in front of it and being gone before the visitor came downstairs. It was his last night in London—his last night with the physical entities that had been Catherine and Vixie—and he didn’t want to destroy the nostalgic sweet savor of his thoughts with some stranger’s conventional expressions of horror and distaste.

  But it wasn’t a stranger.

  He heard her, as she mounted the stairs, say, “Tch!” and knew it was Georgina, Lady Clayburne.

  Had she glimpsed him, when he stopped by the flower-sellers in Leicester Square to get some late hot-house roses? He’d done so these past three nights, heaping the table with them. He’d walked as a man does. She could have followed.

  Or had she somehow learned of the house, and had it watched?

  The anger that swept him at this thought was so intense that he felt the hair on his nape prickle, like a savage dog’s. His rage had nothing in it of the clouds of senseless crimson fury that had used to descend upon him in life: that was something that seemed to have been rinsed away by dying. But this bitterness, though colder, pierced deeper. He couldn’t erase from his mind Vixie’s frantic tears at the thought of having to go live with Georgina and her vain and distant husband, the thought of being pushed and moulded by loneliness and emotional blackmail into a “proper young lady” who wasn’t permitted to read Freud or smoke and certainly wasn’t permitted to paint nude models. He couldn’t forget those horrible scenes between Catherine and her sister tha
t would leave Catherine ill with anxiety for days.

  He remained seated beside the table, holding the rotted and leathery fingers gently in his, and listened to the footfalls explore the upper regions of the house, then descend the stairs again.

  Descend to the kitchen.

  “Tch!”

  That was unfair. Renfield had been very careful about clearing away the sucked-dry carcasses of his rats and mice.

  The sub-cellar door opened. The light of the lamp she held streamed down into the chilly darkness that reeked of decay and roses.

  She gasped, “You!” and almost dropped the lamp.

  Renfield said, “Yes. Me.”

  She hesitated at the top of the steps. If she’d fled, he could have caught her, but she didn’t. The temptation to have a scene with him was far too strong.

  “I should have suspected you’d find a way to corrupt that fat clown Hennessey. I always did wonder if you were paying him more than Mother and I were.”

  The wave of anger recurred, prickling his hair again, but he remained sitting and said, “I take it you didn’t bother to attend the funeral?”

  “Good God, no!” She sounded startled at the idea that she might even have considered doing so. “With all Wormidge had to do, to get hold of your solicitor’s papers, finally…” She had reached the bottom of the stair, and the lamplight widened into the room, illuminating the red hair coiled on the sheet, Vixie’s dark curls among the roses. Georgina’s eyes grew wide, and fairly blazed in the dim orange glow.

  “You beast.” She fairly spit the word at him. “You sneaking, greedy animal. That was your plan all along, wasn’t it? To marry her and to make away with her, so that Father’s money would come to you. Yes, and even to make away with your own daughter, so you could have it all!”

  Renfield stood up at that, and Georgina fell back a step, her arm cocked a little, as if she’d throw the lamp at him next. Disbelievingly, Renfield said, “That is all that you can say? All that you can see, in the death of your lovely sister and your niece? The whereabouts of your father’s money, that might go to me instead of to you? That is the only thing that Catherine’s death means to you?”