Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  “I do not want to go to bed,” I said. “I want to hear the rest of the story.”

  “That will take a very long time,” he said. “I would prefer if you would rest. You will need your strength in Ireland. It is not a kind climate at this time of year.”

  I had been listening to the rain beat down on the ship as we sailed. I wanted him to lie next to me so that I could fall asleep safely beside him. “Will you sleep as well?”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “Sometimes I sleep for long periods of time, years at a time, and sometimes I do not sleep at all. If I am bored, if I do not admire the ways and customs of an era, if my physical body is wounded or fatigued, I go into a deep sleep, an altered state during which the body is preserved. You would call it hibernation or a very long trance. I have entered this state before when you broke my spirit with your rejection. When I reenter the world, it has inevitably changed.”

  “I do not think I can sleep. I will lie awake thinking of you and of all that you have told me,” I said. There was no use in lying to him.

  “Then I will put you to sleep myself,” he said.

  Before I could object, he swooped me into his arms, carrying me out of the library and down the stairs to my quarters, kissing me lightly on the face and lips along the way. I wrapped my arms around his neck, wishing for the journey to never end, relishing the strange and electric touch of his lips, and marveling at their power to ignite all the small cells of my body.

  He opened the door to my cabin. The mysterious staff that had unpacked my things had been inside, lighting low lamps and laying out a satin nightdress. He put me down, standing me in front of the mirror, and he stood behind me. As I watched our reflections, he reached around, unbuttoning the front of my dress and slipping it off my shoulders. He ran his lips along one side of my neck. “The scent of you is as familiar to me as my own.”

  I shivered, which I know he felt. Nibbling my ear, he slowly pulled the pearl pins out of my hair until he removed the last of them, and the tresses tumbled down upon my shoulders. He grasped my hair in his hand, tugging so that I could not move my head. “I once told you long ago that you were like a wild horse that I would control by its mane.” I pictured him as he was in my dream, pulling my hair as he bit into my neck. I held my breath, hoping that he would do it again, right now, and resurrect that strange ecstasy.

  “You are not strong enough for that, Mina,” he said, reading me. He released my hair, and it fell down my back.

  He unlaced my corset and pulled it apart, loosening it, and letting it fall to the floor. I stepped out of the clothes, and he knelt in front of me, sliding his hands up my legs and rolling down my garters. He sat me on the bed while he unlaced my shoes and removed them. Then, one at a time, he slowly glided my stockings down my legs, making all the hair on my body bristle with excitement. With his fingers, he caressed the bottoms of my feet, and then sank his lips into one of the arches, and then the other, and I moaned.

  “You have always loved your pleasure, Mina. It is no different this time, despite the armor you have put around yourself.”

  Holding my hands, he pulled me up, putting the nightdress over my head and then smoothing it along my body until it fell fluttering at my feet. He swooped me up in his arms again and laid me on the bed.

  “There is another way to taste you,” he said. He pulled my gown up and slid his hand up my thigh, parting my legs as it reached my private place. With one fingertip, he separated the lips. “How often have I worshipped at this altar.”

  I closed my eyes to enjoy the pleasure, slipping into dreamy arousal.

  Do not look away from me.

  I opened my eyes again, and he locked them to his. When he looked at me this way, I had no will. Modesty has no place between us. Do you understand?

  “I do,” I said. I was his to do with whatever he wished.

  Spread your legs wider for me.

  I did as he said, and his hands pushed them far apart, while his mouth sucked and tasted me. I wanted to scream with pleasure, but my voice was choked inside me and I could not breathe. My mouth was locked open and my head thrown back as I reached for something I could not name. His tongue snaked its way into me, and it seemed to expand there, electrifying my insides, and then he pulled it out and carpeted the whole of my opening. I felt his lips lock onto my flesh, and he took as much of me as he could inside his mouth, sucking there as I had earlier sucked his tongue. I started to rock with pleasure, just as the sea rocked beneath us, but he grabbed my thighs in his viselike grip so that I could not move at all. I was on the threshold of some kind of ecstasy but afraid that he would bite into me in that most vulnerable of places. I wanted him to do whatever he pleased, for I anticipated that anything he did would bring unimaginable thrills. But I also held the memory of his wolf dog blood-drenched fangs, and it was impossible to know if he would tire of giving pleasure and choose evisceration.

  I waited for the shock and pain of his wound, but instead, he pulled away, leaving me panting and desiring him to resume. As much as I was afraid of what he would do to me, I was more afraid for him to stop. The inside of me throbbed with violent contractions, searching for something to hold in its grip.

  “Though it would please me to do it, I am not going to taste your blood,” he said. “But I will give you what you want. What do you want?”

  He knew exactly what I wanted.

  “Yes, but I want to hear the melody of the words as you say it aloud,” he said.

  “I want you to fill me up, as you did in my dream,” I said, surprised to hear this request come from my mouth. “I want to feel the whole of you inside me.”

  He wasn’t even touching me now. Suddenly, it felt as if he had left the room. Had he disappeared? I looked around. All was dark but for a bluish orb of moonlight coming through the porthole.

  “Where are you? Please don’t go away. Please don’t leave me,” I shouted.

  Not ever?

  “No, not ever,” I said. I could feel him in the room again, even if I could not see him. I was so relieved that he had not left me, but I needed to see him again, to believe that he was real to me and that all this was not a dream.

  It’s not a dream, Mina.

  If it’s not a dream, then touch me.

  I waited. I took a deep breath, but before I could completely exhale, I felt a mad rush of heat, and he was between my legs again, and like some kind of eel or lamprey, he had sucked me into his mouth as if he was consuming all of me. I felt completely electrified, though I recognized that he was not moving but letting me feel the power of his being, the force of his vibration, for that is the only way I can describe it. He was flooding me with some sort of furious energy, like the gods of old who created storms by their whispers. He sent this power straight into the dark cavity of my sex, where it swirled and expanded, and then shot up my spine and into my head. At that moment, both ends of me exploded with staggering pleasure, as if my body had been ripped in half and my skull cracked wide-open, letting in the heavens. For a long moment, I felt nothing but elation.

  Welcome home, Mina.

  I heard the strum of the rain as it began to fall again on the sea. He pulled the covers over me, and I sailed on the rhythm of the waves into my dreams.

  I awakened alone the next morning to dark skies, a turbulent sea, and a chilly cabin. I tried to get out of bed, but the churning waters tossed me right back. I sat up and looked out the porthole when a wave came crashing against the glass with enough velocity to send me on my back again.

  I managed to stand up. A mysterious valet had been in my cabin and picked up last night’s discarded clothing and replaced it with a fresh dress, undergarments, stockings, and shoes, which I put on despite the efforts of the sea to knock me off my feet. In a box on the vanity, I found a bracelet made of ten black onyx snakes in figure-eight patterns, inlaid with ivory and diamonds and outlined in gold. The centerpiece was an exquisite angel’s face, which covered a watch face. The time was noon. I put
the dial to my ear, listening to the precision of its ticking and imagining my heart beating at the same steady rate.

  I am waiting for you.

  As soon as I heard his voice, I saw in my mind’s eye the lounge where he sat. I was able to walk directly to it by following some internal navigation that I understood now would always lead me to him. It was a small room with a fire burning. Breakfast and tea were laid out and waiting for me. He stood as I walked into the room. His very presence almost knocked the wind out of me. Light entered the room from small etched-glass windows, emphasizing his effulgent skin and his chiseled face, and last night’s pleasures rushed back to me.

  Suddenly, a blinding ray of light shot through the glass, creating strange prisms in the room. In that instant, I saw him, not as he was or as he had been last night, but as a different man in strange surroundings. He was younger, fiercer, and less ethereal, with a thick, dark beard and dress from another time and another place—an ermine-trimmed scarlet cape, a bright white tunic, a red cross slashed across the chest, a low-slung belt of gold. His eyes were a brighter blue, and they stared at me from a face desperate with either rage or love or desire or all those things. Feeling faint, I grabbed onto the doorframe for support, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was standing in the same place, as if what I had just seen had not happened at all.

  “You are famished,” he said. “Sit down and have something to eat.”

  The aroma of bacon and of the sugary confections neatly laid out on silver platters overwhelmed me, and I came into the room and loaded a plate with the sweet and savory treats.

  “Exposure to my frequency leaves one very hungry,” he said. “You will find that.”

  “Frequency?” I asked, spreading cream over a scone, savoring the delicious blend of flavors in my mouth.

  “Every being has a frequency, a certain vibration. A scientist would call it electromagnetism. The electromagnetism of my being is greater than that of a mortal. That is why being in my presence, or in the presence of any immortal, depletes one’s own life forces.”

  “Is that what happened to Jonathan in Styria?” I asked. As soon as I mentioned his name, my voice started to shake.

  “Yes,” he said implacably.

  After he had abandoned me to the doctors, I did not want to care about Jonathan. Of course he had had the shock of his life seeing me in the photograph with the Count. And perhaps he believed Seward and thought that by allowing the doctors to treat me, they were curing me. One thing was certain: if not for the Count’s obsession with me, Jonathan would still be the man he was when I met him, and perhaps he and I would have been happy together.

  “Jonathan was innocent until you brought him into your world, and now he may never recover,” I said. I chewed a rasher of bacon and waited for him to elaborate on what had happened to Jonathan in Styria, but the Count was silent. Had I really expected this prodigious being to explain himself as if he were an ordinary man?

  “He was never innocent,” he said. “He might have left Styria after we concluded our business, but he wanted Ursulina from the moment he saw her. He chose to remain at the castle, just as you chose to stay with me. I invited you to leave my home in London. Instead, you laid out the clothes you selected for the trip and came with me on this voyage.”

  I had no rebuttal to this.

  “Mina, all of your life, since you were a child, you called out to me in ways that you do not yet acknowledge. I had vowed to reveal myself to you after you reached your twenty-first birthday, but that was when Jonathan Harker appeared; and in a short time, it became obvious that you were determined to marry and settle into a life of convention.”

  “I did not call out to you. I was not aware of your existence,” I said.

  “You do not call out with your voice but with the hum of your desire. Think of us as musical instruments that vibrate with the same note. A note is struck, and it is heard by the note that must answer it.”

  He sighed. “I will try to explain it to you. I was able to involve Harker in my affairs because he desired such a commission. I left him with Ursulina because that is what he wanted. This is what the religious among you call free will. They are accurate about its existence. The doctrine governs all human behavior.”

  “Why did you leave him in Styria? Was it to come to me in Whitby?”

  “Frankly, I thought that, like most of the humans who succumbed to her, Harker would perish. He is a stronger rival than I anticipated.” He laughed a very bitter, human laugh. “I chartered the Valkyrie to come to you and persuade you to travel with me to London. But the ship’s crew discovered that my cargo contained gold and other priceless treasures. The fools attempted to murder me and steal my belongings. I regret that they did this because I had to kill them while keeping their captain alive long enough to bring the boat to safety but not long enough to tell what he had seen.”

  I shuddered remembering the sight of the dead captain tied to his ship, his bloody corpse battered by the rain and the sea.

  “I know what you are thinking. You are not responsible for his death, or for the deaths of the crew. Human greed is to blame. I had to come for you, Mina. Your longing was intense. I answered your call. It is against my very being to resist.”

  “And the creatures who seduced my husband? Did he call out to them?”

  I have already explained this to you.

  His impatience with me was the same sort that I sometimes experienced with my students when they refused to grasp the truth.

  “Dr. Von Helsinger called them vampire women, the undead—monsters who made themselves immortal by draining the blood of their prey. Is that what they are?” I asked. Is that what you are?

  “The creature that he imagines is but a ghoul that represents men’s fears. But the stories of the immortal blood drinkers are not fantasy.”

  He must have read my confusion because he continued. “The German doctor misunderstands. It is not the blood draining that weakens and kills the prey but the exposure to our power. My being carries an electrical current similar to that of a lightning rod. You know this because you have felt it. When we interact with the body of a human—call it making love if you wish—even though this current brings great pleasure, it acts as a kind of electrocution. Over time, the mortal’s energy is depleted. Depending upon the weakness of the human, they may either get sick or in extreme cases go mad or die. It is nothing to do with draining the blood, unless one takes too much of it. The men who gave your friend Lucy their blood—did they die? No, they poured pints of their own blood into her but it did not affect them. I have never killed anyone by draining their blood, unless I meant to kill them anyway.”

  “Is that what I have done by calling you to me? Have I signed my own death warrant? Will I go mad? Will I die?” I felt locked into my fate with him, but I still feared it.

  “You are not like your husband and other mortals. At a juncture of history, the blood of the immortals entered your bloodline, introducing certain powers. Within that blood is the key to immortality, to being able to live within a body but to also exist without it, to walk on both sides of the veil in worlds seen and unseen. They say that at one time, it was a common trait, but over the millennia, humans have lost the ability.”

  Jonathan had explained to me the science of how humans evolved with certain traits but not others. “Perhaps, if one is to believe the theories of Mr. Darwin, the trait was not advantageous to humankind,” I said.

  “I have spent centuries studying science, medicine, philosophy, metaphysics, and the occult. I believe that it is a natural step in the evolutionary process, a step toward the merging of the mortal and the immortal. Eventually, the veil between the worlds will shatter. The warrior monks believed that Jesus was trying to teach this when He rose from the dead and ascended into the unseen world. But the knowledge was buried by the Church, which wanted power over its members and so kept true knowledge from them.”

  Everything you are saying is against everyt
hing I have been taught to believe.

  “You should have no trouble believing. You and others like you have a seventh sense, something beyond telepathy. Within you is the ability to fully integrate the body with eternal consciousness, to fuse flesh with spirit. If you do not embrace your gifts, they will forever be a plague to you, Mina. And I do mean forever.”

  Part Seven

  IRELAND

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sligo County, 31 October 1890

  The black cliffs along the Irish coast sliced perpendicular lines into the sea, where watery tendrils sucked at the colossal jet walls with ferocity. The sun shone brightly upon the sea, but its rays did nothing to calm the water’s turbulence. The farther north we sailed, the more the landscape became austere and unforgiving. Black stone flags began to jut like tentacles into the ocean from the mainland. The gray-green waters merged on the horizon with purple-tinged skies, and the winds shimmied the waves into prancing white peaks.

  We watched the winds whipping the water from the glass-enclosed promenade deck of the steamer, where the Count wrapped me in a fur blanket against the chilly afternoon. About an hour before twilight, the steamer dropped its anchor off Sligo Harbor, where two rowboats met us to take us to shore. The sea spray left us wet, and me very cold, but a carriage and coachman greeted us to take us to the castle.

  For the last two days of the voyage, the Count had insisted that I rest. Not once did he touch me as he had on the first evening, though I am sure that he read my thoughts and knew that I craved it. Sometimes he dined with me, and at other times, he left me to myself, sending broths and potions in the evenings that would help me sleep. He insisted that I had to gather my strength for the days ahead. He would not even continue the story of his early life but promised that he would tell me the rest of it at the appropriate time once we were in Ireland. He often pressed his fingers to my pulse and listened to my body’s rhythms. Sometimes, he would say, “Good, good.” Sometimes he would frown and send me to bed. I yearned for him to come to my cabin with me, or to allow me into the quarters were he slept, but he refused on the grounds that I must have uninterrupted sleep. A silent and dutiful staff saw to my every need, often while remaining invisible. I was never certain who had been in my cabin while I slept, taking care of my clothing and preparing fresh dress for the following day, or who left the trays of nuts, fruits, and tea to refresh me upon waking from naps.