Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

  “August seventh. With the prohibition against sparrows in effect, Renfield’s mania for flies and spiders has returned full-force, and his room is now filled again with his boxes and jars. In addition to feeding the flies to the spiders, both Langmore and Hardy have seen Renfield eating both species, confirming my hypothesis of a new type of mania, zoöphagy. For two weeks it has seemed to me that the man has grown more secretive, and I have come upon him repeatedly with his face pressed to the window bars, in an attitude of listening…”

  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  9 August

  My dearest one, in haste—

  If I have hitherto hoped that you would somehow find a way to visit me here, now I must—and you must—put that thought from our minds.

  Well did the ancients depict their gods bearing saving fire in one hand, and in the other the bow of death! Salvation walks side by side with destruction, and wise indeed is the man who can steer the course between them.

  HE IS HERE. His feet tread English soil, and nightly he whispers in my dreams. I saw as in a vision the ship that bears his sleeping body driven ashore by the storm-winds that are in his keeping. Where he made landfall, I do not know. Amid rain and fog I was aware of picturesque small houses, of cliffs looming over the harbor, crowned with a tiny church and its tombstones. But through the very ground beneath this house it seemed to me that I felt the press of his foot, somewhere in this island realm.

  And he is coming here! I know this as I know my name.

  And I fear for my very soul.

  Guard yourself, my beloved! Compared to him, such creatures as your mother and Wormidge are nothing! Take every precaution against discovery. Only the knowledge that you are safe—that Vixie is safe—gives me the strength to carry on.

  I am taking what steps I can, to strengthen my soul against his power, that I may not be utterly swallowed up.

  The light of his majesty floods my mind, yet I tremble. As I tremble, your name is on my lips. It is all, all, for you.

  Forever your beloved husband,

  R. M. R.

  R. M. R.’s notes

  9 August

  15 flies, 4 spiders

  10 August

  12 flies, 2 spiders

  Attempt to obtain a sparrow interfered with by attendant—fool! I must be more careful. So much depends upon my strength.

  Dreams of moonlight, and of the long stair that led from the little coastal town up to the churchyard on the cliffs above. Renfield felt himself again aware of every living thing in that town, sleeping now, sleeping deep: each child dreaming of pony-rides or magic palaces, each man of stammering unprepared through classroom-lessons unlearned. He saw the dark houses with their windows shuttered, the pretty gardens robed in darkness. Saw the white slip of movement, as a blond girl in a nightdress strolled unconcerned through the town with a sleep-walker’s unseeing stare.

  She was beautiful, and Renfield’s heart was touched by her. Where the night-breeze flattened the thin batiste against her body, it showed a shallow breast, the sharp point of a too-slender hip, a delicate form childlike and vulnerable without the womanly defenses of corsetry and draped silk. She was not many years older than his daughter. Loosed for sleep, her flaxen hair shivered to her hips.

  The girl climbed the stairs—hundreds of stairs. Slabs of stone, or carved into the living rock of the cliff, and Renfield knew what waited for her at the top. He wanted to cry out to her, to wake her, to warn her, but he knew what Wotan would do to him if he did this—Wotan would not be pleased.

  Wotan would withhold from him the gift of life that he so desperately needed. Worse, Wotan would whisper into the dreams of others, of Georgina Clayburne and that stone-faced harridan mother of hers of where Catherine and Vixie lay sleeping tonight.

  Then all would be in vain!

  Heart pounding, body quaking with pity and with cold, Renfield watched as the blonde girl walked past him—for he seemed to be standing on the long stair from the town—and on up to the churchyard on the cliff.

  A tomb lay close to the cliff’s grass-grown edge. For a moment Renfield thought that the thing that lay on it was a dog or a wolf, but the next moment the dark form rose, elongating into the unmistakable shadow of a cloaked man, and red eyes gleamed where they caught the moon’s sickly light. From the top of the steps Renfield watched, as the sleep-walker passed among the graves with the confidence of a child. The figure beside the tomb held out its hand. Renfield’s ears seemed to be filled with the buzz of swarming flies.

  Don’t do it! he wanted to shout to her. Don’t go to him! He was aware of her face, relaxed in sleep as Catherine’s was all those nights beside him, like Vixie’s when she was little, when he’d go into her room to check on her and see her asleep in the night-light’s tiny glow. Please don’t hurt her…

  Wotan gathered the girl into his arm, the white of her night-dress disappearing in the velvet folds of the cloak. His hand, huge and coarse, with pointed nails like claws, cupped the side of her face, turning her head aside to expose the big blood-vessels of the throat. The roar of flies swamped Renfield’s mind and for a time his dream was only that he was sitting in his room at Rushbrook, with the window wide open and flies buzzing in, landing happily on his hands, on his knees, on the pillow of his bed, and letting him eat them like candy while spiders lined up in an expectant file, waiting their turn.

  The glow of life washed over him, filled him, burning, warming, intoxicating. For a few moments every cell in his body was conscious, and cried aloud with relief from a lifelong hunger he had never even known had weighed upon him so heavily, until that instant of release.

  His mouth sang with the metallic flavor of fresh blood.

  His brain, with the scent of the girl.

  He thought she cried out.

  Distant and dim, as if seeing with someone else’s eyes, he became aware of the girl again, lying on the cliffside tombstone as if upon a bed. Beyond her, the moon shone with a cold pewter gleam on the shingle-beds of the harbor where the tide had gone out. It made the feathery coils of her hair pale as ivory, where they lay over the edge of the granite slab, and trailed on the ground. Renfield heard a girl’s voice call softly, “Lucy!” and saw a second girl striding among the graves. She was a little taller and of sturdier build, hurriedly dressed in shirtwaist and walking-skirt. Her dark hair was already coming out of a hasty braid that slapped between her shoulders as she ran.

  “Mina?” the blonde girl whispered, as her dark-haired friend sat beside her on the tomb, raised her up in her arms. The blonde head fell back, turned aside, curtained by that cascade of moon-colored silk. Her breath dragged in thick frantic gasps. The dark girl, with brisk decisiveness, wrapped Lucy in the heavy figured shawl from around her own shoulders, pinning it at the throat. Then she took the shoes from her own feet and put them on Lucy’s before turning to the task of fully waking her. Renfield heard her voice, a gentle, lovely alto, speaking soft nothings as his consciousness drew back from them. Their image grew smaller and smaller, tiny in the light of that enormous moon, but just before it winked out, Renfield saw Mina get Lucy to her feet, and help her back toward the stairway that would lead them down to the town.

  He awoke ravenous, starving, the yellow moonlight a glowing shawl dropped on the floor of his room. Hand trembling, he emptied confused flies and sleepy spiders from their boxes and tumblers and jars, devoured them without even stopping to chew. Spiky legs, brittle wings.

  Their tiny lives sparkled like electricity in his veins.

  But his hunger was not even touched.

  CHAPTER SIX

  R. M. R.’s notes

  12 August

  14 flies, 5 spiders, 2 slugs (sugar-water dripped on sill)

  Must have more. Asked for extra sugar, received it. Know not to try for sparrow. Always they watch me. He watches me, too.

  “Dr. Seward?” Renfield spoke for the first time during Seward’s visit that evening, rousing himself from his desperate preocc
upation of mind. He had to be careful, he knew, yet even as he hoped to wrest from Wotan the additional life that he needed, it might be possible to use Seward, unsuspecting, to obtain the knowledge that—as Wotan had so accurately said—men treasure.

  Renfield reflected that the young doctor was stupid enough to be manipulated into telling him anything.

  “What is it, old chap?” Seward turned back from the door, which Renfield noticed Langmore was quick to lock again. They feared him, did they?

  Anger flashed through him. He’d give them cause to fear.

  The anger must have shone in his face, because Seward hesitated. Renfield forced his rage down. “As a doctor of the mind, have you—or anyone in your field—come to any theory of what dreams are, and why we have them? Are they truly—or can they be—agents of communication, as even the ancient Stoics argued? Or do you believe, like Freud, that they are merely the mind’s way of ordering the events of the past, of sorting them into larger mental categories determined by past experience?”

  A spider tiptoed in through the open window, past the bars; Renfield caught it with the adeptness of long practice and popped it at once into his mouth, dug his notebook from his shirt-pocket and added it to the tally, then turned back for Seward’s reply.

  “I believe they can serve the mind as a means of assimilating experience,” agreed Seward, his dark eyes watchful on Renfield’s face, as if—which Seward so often did—he sought to guess what lay behind the question. He went on, “I have heard—both here and in America, and in the islands of the South Seas—stories of how dreams do communicate events of the past or present, though as a scientist I’m inclined to wonder how such a thing could be proven empirically. My old teacher—a Dutchman from Amsterdam—is of the opinion that the ability to dream developed as human intelligence grew to the point that men were in danger of harming themselves and others through too exclusive a reliance on that intelligence. That God gave man the ability to dream as a channel to deliver warnings from sources that cannot be quantified. But he may have been joking.” And Seward smiled.

  “And if one dreams of things that are taking place far away—evil things, events that bring danger to the innocent—is there a way to warn those one sees in danger? A way to know where these events are taking place, or whom to warn?”

  Seward’s eyes narrowed sharply. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Did you dream about your wife, for instance? Catherine, I believe her name is? Or your daughter?”

  Georgina Clayburne has been to see him. Rage seared through Renfield, as if a match had been dropped on a trail of kerosene. He felt his face heat, forced himself to look at the wall beyond Seward’s shoulder. Forced from his mind the delicious joy it would bring him to pick the slightly built doctor up and smash his brains out against the wall, to twist his head from his shoulders.

  They would strait-jacket him. Put him in the Swing. Give him castor-oil and ipecac to weaken him with vomiting.

  When Wotan came, he would not be ready.

  Breathing hard, Renfield said, “I didn’t dream about nobody, sir.” He knew he should make up a convincing tale but he couldn’t think. His mind was filled with the roaring buzz of flies. “I was just asking.”

  When Seward left, Renfield returned to the window, pressed his face to the bars to drink in the evening’s cool. Rushbrook House was set at an angle to the road, so that through his window he could see the gates to the high-road, as well as a portion of the crumbling wall and overgrown trees of the estate next door.

  Yesterday he’d seen a handsome new carriage come through the gates, its team of matched blacks familiar to him. He had thought the woman inside looked like Georgina Clayburne.

  And he didn’t think it was the first time she’d come to call on Seward.

  Asking what? What did she know already? What had she guessed, and what information had she bought from Hennessey? She had almost certainly had the house in Nottingham searched. That didn’t trouble Renfield particularly, for he had made sure, when he, Catherine, and Vixie had left it, that no trace of paper remained to tell where they’d gone. The other houses in London, like the bank accounts he and Catherine had set up, were under other names.

  Was that why Seward watched him so closely, took down notes of what he said? Was he sending every word, every speculation, on to Georgina and that ghastly mother, even as Hennessey was doing?

  He watched the shadow of Rushbrook House stretch out over the garden, reaching toward the dark wall, the dark trees, of Carfax. The voices of the attendants rose like incongruous bird-calls in the air, as they began to close up the windows, put up the shutters for the night. From a room near-by, the woman the attendants referred to as Queen Anne began her nightly howling. Many of the patients, Renfield had observed, grew worse at this hour, pounding on the walls and babbling, or sinking into uncontrollable tears. Footsteps hurried in the halls, to give Her Majesty the drugs that would silence her, would push her over the edge into her own dreams.

  What if those dreams, like some of his own, were infinitely more dreadful than the waking that she could not struggle back to no matter how much she tried?

  Renfield closed his eyes, and told himself that he must be strong.

  That night he dreamed of the girls again, as he had dreamed the night before. Dreamed—as he had last night—that he was in their bedroom, looking down on them as they slept, and their faces were relaxed in sleep, as sweet and young as Catherine’s looked in the mysterious blue radiance of the waxing moon. Mina, the dark-haired girl, wore a little pucker between her brows. Though she was probably no older than her friend, she had the air of a young woman who has had to make her own way in the world. The nightgown-sleeve that lay on the tufted counterpane was plain muslin, and much worn, in contrast to the fantasia of batiste and lace that swaddled the delicate Lucy.

  When fear came into the room, and the chilly breath of the grave, Renfield tried to reach out to Mina, tried to shake her shoulder—or he thought he tried…or he wanted to try. He is coming, he thought as the air in the room grew colder and colder and a small black shadow began to circle erratically outside the moon-drenched window. Wotan is coming.

  His heart pounded in terror. He had to wake them up, so they could flee.

  He had to wake up himself, so that he wouldn’t see what would happen.

  But he could neither move, nor waken.

  Mina whispered, “Jonathan,” in her sleep, and sank deeper, almost into the sleep of death, Renfield thought. But Lucy turned on her pillow, her shut eyes seeming to seek the window, and in the moonlight Renfield could see now that the thing outside was a bat, fluttering and beating its wings at the casement.

  He pressed back into the shadows, his hands covering his mouth.

  Wotan would see him. And seeing him, would take his vengeance, not only on him, but on Catherine and Vixie as well.

  Oh, Catherine, Catherine, he thought wildly, if I can see this, if I can be here, why can’t I be at your side instead?

  But he shut the thought from his mind like the slamming of a door, lest Wotan hear him and know then that someone named Catherine even existed.

  Lucy rose from her bed, her head lolling, and with the preternatural clarity of dreams Renfield saw the wound on her neck, the two tiny punctures above the vein, unhealed, white-edged and mangled-looking. All the moonlight seemed to be failing in the room, and the shadow of the bat grew still, seeming to swell in size, so that it covered the whole of the window in its wings. Out of that shadow its red eyes gleamed, like the far-off lamps of Hell. When Lucy stumbled to the casement and fumbled open the latch, the dark form of Wotan stepped through as if he had strode there upon the air of night.

  Lucy sagged forward into his arms. In the moonlight Wotan smiled—or the thing in the ship’s hold that had spoken to Renfield with Wotan’s words. He could not be Wotan, thought Renfield muzzily, for he has two eyes, not one like the Wanderer God: eyes as red and reflective as the eyes of a rat. But then, when Wotan had spoken tho
se words to Mime the Dwarf, he had not yet traded his eye for wisdom. His mustaches were long and iron-gray, his face was not the face of a god, but of a man who has gone beyond what other men are, into some unknown zone of experience.

  A face of power. A face like iron, that no longer recalls what it was to be a man. A face maybe that never knew in the first place.

  He cupped the side of Lucy’s face in his short-fingered powerful hand, drew back his lips from long canine teeth, like an animal’s fangs. Renfield closed his eyes as the blood began to flow down, hid his mind in thoughts of flies. Big fat horse-flies the size of lichis, each bursting with the electrical fires of life. He did not even dare think, Let her alone…

  Wotan—or whatever that thing was truly called—would not like that.

  Already Renfield understood that what that shadowy deity wanted, maybe more than life, was power. For him, there could be no disloyalty.

  R. M. R.’s notes

  19 August

  The bride-maidens rejoice the eyes that wait the coming of the bride; but when the bride draweth nigh, then the maidens shine not in the eyes that are filled.

  “It’s Renfield, sir.” Grizzled little Langmore blinked in the dimmed gas-light of the hall. He’d clearly expected to find Seward in bed. “He’s escaped.”

  Seward had been expecting it. All day Renfield had been restless, prowling his room by turns wild with excitement and darkly sullen. When Seward had turned in after his final round among the patients, though depressed himself, he had elected not to inject the chloral hydrate which had, he realized, become something of a habit over the past three months. Instead he’d prepared for bed, but sat up re-reading Lucy’s latest note, short and polite though underlain with sadness, for she suspected her mother was far more ill than she was letting on…all the while listening, as if he knew there would be trouble with Renfield as the night grew deeper.

  “I seen him not ten minutes ago, when I looked through the judas, sir.” Hardy pushed open the door of Renfield’s room as Seward and Langmore came striding down the hall. “Sly, he is. Layin’ on his bed lookin’ like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.” The muggy cool of the night-breeze met them as they entered the room, where the window-sash had been literally wrenched from its moorings in the wall, bars and all. Seward shivered, thinking of the strength that would have taken.