by Syrie James
The patient’s muted cries became louder than ever. Although I could not distinguish a word he said, I recognised in his tone some kind of passionate entreaty on his part. There came the sound of a struggle. I was suddenly frightened, although from what cause I could not say. I assumed the attendants were dealing with Mr. Renfield, and surely he did not present any particular danger to me.
Taking care that the window was shut and the door securely locked, I crept back into bed and pulled the clothes over my head. For some long minutes I lay trembling in the dark, uncertain why I felt so overwhelmed by fear and wishing that the men had not all quit the premises together, leaving me so entirely alone. Despite the bed-clothes that covered me, I soon began to sense that the air in the room had somehow grown heavier, and seemed dank and cold.
I threw off the covers and sat up. To my astonishment, the room was filling with white mist, which I saw pouring in through the joinings of the door. My heart began to pound in terror and confusion as I watched the mist become thicker and thicker, until it seemed to concentrate into a sort of pillar of cloud in the centre of the room. What was this? What was happening? Suddenly the horror burst upon me that it was in this same manner that Jonathan had seen those awful vampire women at Castle Dracula growing into reality through the whirling mist in the moonlight.
Then, before my terrified eyes, the ghostly column took the form and shape of a dazzling, handsome young man:
Mr. Wagner.
I wanted to scream but was powerless to do so. My limbs felt so leaden, I could not move. Had I lost my senses? Was I dreaming? How could Mr. Wagner suddenly appear out of a mist before me?
“Please. Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly.
I was so stunned, I could scarcely think. It was one thing to be told a story about a living creature appearing out of mist or thin air; but to see the actual phenomenon take place right before one’s eyes—it was petrifying, and enough to make one doubt one’s very sanity!
All at once, a chaotic jumble of memories and images descended on my brain: how I had met Mr. Wagner on the very day that the Demeter had arrived at Whitby; the speed with which he had rescued my errant hat; how he never ate or drank while in my presence; how it had seemed that he cast no reflection in the river-water; the magnetic powers of persuasion he had exhibited over strangers; how cool his fingers had always felt against my skin; the smoldering look in his eyes as he had stared at my throat, before shoving me away; his ability to read the street numbers so well in the dark; the odd sensation that I was being watched from the house next door, and his sudden appearance shortly thereafter on the train.
“No!” I gasped, staring at him. “It cannot be true! You cannot be he!”
“I am sorry, Mina, that you had to find out this way. I had planned to tell you very differently. However—” He let out a rueful laugh and went on bitterly: “I just discovered that you and those men of yours—based on some misguided notion that I mean you harm—are plotting to kill me.”
THIRTEEN
I LEAPT FROM MY BED AND SHRANK BACK AGAINST THE FAR wall in terror and confusion. Was it possible? Could the man I loved be the very monster that I despised…and the same beast that we were all committed to destroy? All that had come before this, everything “Mr. Wagner” and I had shared—was it just part of some devious, incomprehensible plot? Was he here to murder me?
If so, I was entirely at his mercy. I was clad in nothing but a thin white nightdress, and left alone in a house with no one but incarcerated madmen and a few servants and attendants who resided in a separate wing. I was heartbroken, bewildered, terrified, and aghast, all at the same time.
“How?” I whispered. “How can it be? Jonathan said that Count Dracula was an old man, but you are—”
“When I met your Mr. Harker in Transylvania, I took the form that I present to the locals. I had not fed in a long while. The peasants, with their superstitious fears, take care to guard both themselves and their livestock against me.”
“So it is true, then?” I cried in horror. “The reason you have come to England is to gorge yourself on our defenseless citizens—to murder them and create more of your own kind?”
He let out a groan of frustration and disgust, eyeing me with such fury that I feared he might leap across the room and kill me on the spot. “So this is what your precious Professor Van Helsing has told you of me? I guessed as much when I heard your plans earlier this evening. What fallacies mankind creates, in its ignorance! Mina: do you really imagine that I have been murdering the innocent residents of London? Have there been any such reports in the newspapers? With the Ripper killings still so fresh in everyone’s minds, if people were turning up dead in alleys at night with bite marks on their throats, do not you think someone would have noticed?”
Faintly, I managed: “I—suppose so. But—”
“I know of your professor by reputation.” Dracula seemed to be straining every nerve he possessed to hold his anger in check as he paced the room. “He fancies himself something of a vampire expert—although to my knowledge he had never seen one, let alone killed one, until yesterday at Hampstead cemetery. What other lies has this ‘expert’ told you about me? I have little interest in making more of my own kind, Mina. The other vampires I have met or known are mostly foul creatures with whom I have nothing in common besides a thirst for blood. The last thing I would wish is to populate the earth with more of them.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I left Transylvania because after centuries of stagnation in the darkness, surrounded by people who hate and fear me, I wished to live in the light and the world again. I wished to be amongst interesting, energetic, educated people who were doing things: to enjoy and experience the delights of culture and the wonders of science and technology, which I could only read about from afar. That this great city offers me more opportunities to feed, I cannot ignore. I survive as I must—as any one would do. It is a law of nature. In truth, my eating habits are not all that different from yours, Mina: blood for me; a cooked bird or animal for you.”
“They are entirely different! It is the difference between good and evil!”
“Is it? If so, then I believe your cooked bird is the act of evil—because I rarely feed to kill. I have no need to do so. I prefer human blood, but I will resort to animal blood if required. As a rule, I take but little, which the body easily replenishes. The wounds heal in time, the creature goes off unharmed, and, under my power of suggestion, rarely recalls a thing about it.”
Intense loathing welled up within me. “Lucy did not go off unharmed! It was you who attacked her in Whitby and London, was it not?”
“I would hardly use the term attacked; but yes, I did feed from her.”
“And then you killed her!”
“I did not kill Lucy. That was the work of Dr. Van Helsing.”
“What? How dare you say so! The professor only killed the false, vampire Lucy to save her soul. But you murdered my sweet friend! You made Lucy into a vampire! Do you deny it?”
“I have no wish to deny it. I made Lucy a vampire at her request, to save her life in the only way I could, because she was dying—dying because the professor was killing her with his blood transfusions.”
I stared at him, taken aback entirely. “What do you mean? What are you saying? Those transfusions were to try and save her.”
“And yet they killed her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mina,” he explained patiently, “Lucy told me that Van Helsing gave her four separate blood transfusions in ten days, from four different men. I am an expert of sorts when it comes to the blood. And I can tell you—even though modern science is as yet oblivious of the fact—there are, without question, different types and kinds of blood, and I am certain they do not mix. Why do you think so many—I should say most—of the patients who have been transfused in the past decades have died? It was the professor’s misguided medicine that killed Lucy. She may have seemed to benefit from
the first donation of blood, but it soon sickened her; and each subsequent transfusion only made her increasingly ill, until she died.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You are lying. Lucy was bloodless, they said, and ghostly pale—you took her blood time and again, and left her on the verge of death!”
“That is not true. In Whitby, I never took enough to sicken her or to change her. Perhaps she suffered from some other malady, like her mother. And I only came to her in London because she called to me.”
“She called to you?” I repeated incredulously. “Oh! Do you really expect me to believe that, Mr.—” I stopped myself, reminding myself that this was not Mr. Wagner; there had never been a Mr. Wagner. With increasing despair and disgust, I went on: “I believed you to be a man of character, yet you are no man at all. You are a…a Thing. An Un-Dead Thing. Unholy. Unreal. I know I have been blind and gullible up until now, but please do not further insult my intelligence by saying she ‘called to you.’ And take care not to sully my best friend’s memory! I loved Lucy truly, even as I thought I—” Tears sprang into my eyes, and I could not finish the sentence.
“I see I have much to explain if you are ever to understand the true facts of the case,” he said quietly.
“I do not wish to hear your explanations. You are a murderer and a monster! Get out of my sight! Go!”
“I will not leave, Mina; not until you hear what I have to say. I may never have this opportunity again. I overheard your little committee’s plans to-night. Your men are searching my house as we speak, hoping to defile the precious cargo I took such care to bring here. I could have stopped them; I could have killed every one of them; but I did not. I would not harm them, for your sake. I sent a small deterrent instead.”
“What deterrent?”
“A few thousand rats.”
“Oh!” I cried in repugnance.
“It will disrupt their activities to-night; however, I fear it will only put off the inevitable.” He whirled on me abruptly, his blue eyes smoldering at their centres now like red flames, a sight which made my blood run cold. “Do you think this is a little pleasure trip I have taken to your country, Mina? Do you imagine it was easy for me to get here? No. It is the culmination of five decades of planning! I learned your language. I studied your culture, your laws, your politics, your social life. It required an immense financial investment. It is the fulfillment of a dream. Now you and your men seek to destroy everything I have worked so hard to build. Somehow, I must make you understand the truth!”
He moved to the mantel, where he stood with his back to me for some moments, as if struggling to regain control over his temper and emotions. When he turned back to stare intently at me, his eyes had returned to their natural deep blue. “Allow me to tell you why I came to Whitby in the first place. It began with a photograph.”
“A photograph? Of whom?”
“Of you. Mr. Harker had brought it with him to Transylvania.”
I knew the photograph he spoke of. Jonathan had taken it with his Kodak camera shortly after we became engaged, and he used to carry it with him everywhere in his pocketbook.
“He showed the photograph to me one evening, and talked about you at length. I could see that you were not only a beautiful but a remarkable woman, and that he was deeply in love with you. I admit: I was…envious. It had been centuries since I had felt that kind of passion for a woman, or since any one had held such deep feelings for me. And then…your letters arrived.”
“The letters I wrote to Jonathan, which he never received!”
“Yes.” He glanced away, suddenly unable to look me in the eye.
“Why did you keep them from him? How could you?”
“Forgive me. I should not have opened those letters, Mina; but from the moment the first envelope touched my hand, I felt something that I cannot explain. I read your precious words. It was as if your spirit were emanating off the page. I could not bear to part with them.”
His voice was filled with such emotion and apparent sincerity that—despite myself—it made a tiny chink in my wall of fear and hatred.
“I was overcome with the need to meet you; to know you,” he went on. “From your correspondence, I knew where and when you would be staying in Whitby. And so, out of all the ports I had been considering as my entry point into England, I chose Whitby. Perhaps it was foolish of me; I could have employed the ship to sail directly up the Thames to London harbour with far more expediency, and in the long run at far less expense. But I was determined to find you at any cost.”
I stared at him, bewildered. “You came to Whitby…because of me?”
“For no other reason.”
“But those sailors on the ship! You murdered them all!”
“I did not. I admit, I was obliged to kill one man under duress—but I never laid a hand on the others.”
“You did!”
“Mina: what possible reason could I have had for killing the crew of the Demeter? I needed them all alive and well to sail the ship, if I was to make safe harbour with my cargo. If that ship had sunk, my boxes of Transylvanian earth would have all been lost, and I would have been a thousand miles from home, with little hope of survival. Not to mention that a ship arriving with a missing crew would surely call attention to itself, something I greatly wished to avoid.”
I listened in growing wonder. How was it that none of this had occurred to Dr. Van Helsing or the rest of us when we had blamed the Count for the crew’s demise? “If you did not kill all those men, then what happened to them?” I demanded.
“I can only tell you what I know, for I spent the greater part of the voyage in the hold below. I had taken care to feed fully before I left Varna. I require very little blood any more, unless I am trying to maintain the healthy pink skin tone that is so pleasing to mortals. What little I needed to survive during the month-long voyage, I took from the rats on board. We were eleven days at sea, when, late one night, I went up on deck for some fresh air. This turned out to be a great blunder, as I was soon to discover. The next day, the entire crew came down to search the hold. I was safe in one of my boxes, which fortunately they did not think to open. From their conversation, I learned that one of the crew, Petrofsky—a man who they said was very fond of the drink—had mysteriously gone missing two nights earlier, and that a strange, tall man had been briefly spotted on deck by the man on watch the night before.
“I can only deduce that Petrofsky accidentally fell overboard in a drunken stupor. His disappearance, however, combined with the unfortunate sighting of me, gave rise to a panic of superstitious fear amongst the crew, who now feared that something or someone strange was aboard. Not wishing to cause any further trouble, I stayed in my box for the next six days straight, but such captivity and immobility is not easy to endure. At last I could stand it no longer. I went up on deck again, unaware that the watchman was in hiding, looking for me. He pounced on me with his blade. I had no choice but to kill him and throw him overboard.”
“Did you feed on him before you—”
“Would it matter if I did? The point is: my very survival was at stake. He would have told the others what he had seen, and they might have discovered my hiding place. I kept to the hold after that, but it appears that chaos soon ensued. The first mate, a superstitious Romanian, seems to have taken this second man’s disappearance as a sign, and—as the captain recorded in his log—the mate went virtually insane. As far as I can ascertain, he made it his mission to stab every member of the crew he encountered alone on deck at night and throw him to the sharks, perhaps hoping to protect them from becoming vampires, or fearing that they had already been turned. All this I only discovered when we had nearly reached our destination.”
“You are saying that you had nothing to do with their deaths? That it was the first mate who killed the rest of the crew?”
“Yes.”
“Why did the first mate say that when he later encountered the stranger on board, he knifed him—and his blade went throu
gh empty air?”
“Could I allow a repetition of earlier events? When he came upon me, should I have let him stab me? No; this time, I vanished to the hold. The mate himself described me as ‘ghastly pale’—which I assure you, Mina, would never have been the case, had I just fed on seven crew members in rapid succession. When he came down and spotted me again, I saw the terror in his eyes. He jumped off the ship of his own volition, to ‘save his soul’ you will find that, too, in the published log. As for the captain, when I realised that we were the only two left on board, I appeared before him and offered my help to sail his ship. I speak perfectly fluent Russian; however, the poor soul was too overcome with fear to listen. He went mad, and later lashed himself to the helm. I was obliged to steer the ship all on my own, by controlling the fog and wind and storm; no easy feat, I can tell you, for I have next to nothing in the way of experience as a sailor.”
I stared at him confounded, trying to make sense of all he was telling me. “And the dog—or wolf—they saw leaping off the ship?”
“People were watching, in the glare of the coastguard’s searchlight. It seemed the best method of locomotion at the time. A trail of mist or a blur of motion would have been far more strange and conspicuous.”
“Who…killed old Mr. Swales?”
“You mean the old man on the East Cliff? I regret to say that I appeared one night immediately before him. I believe it frightened him to death.”
I leaned back against the wall, my mind a whirl of confusion. Should I believe him? What if he was just inventing these explanations to win me to his side? I had no way to verify any of it, and surely he knew that. But…what if it was true? Could it be that this man was not the terrible monster that we all imagined?
“The day I met you on the cliff…” I said slowly, recalling the way my hat had blown off, and how he had rescued it for me. “Was that—”