A sudden paroxysm of rage or terror? He hoped so. The thought of the madman being actually that strong at all times was not a pleasant one. He glanced around the little room, to make sure there wasn’t some clue, but it looked much the same in the light of the attendants’ lanterns: the narrow cot-like bed had not been displaced from its position along the right-hand wall, the assortment of tumblers, cups, and boxes that contained Renfield’s living larder were still neatly ranked on the floor opposite.
Stepping to the window, he caught the pale flash of what might have been a nightshirt, dodging among the trees by the intermittent whisper of the waning moon. The yellow gleam of a lantern told Seward that Simmons was already on the trail. Heading for Carfax, it looked like.
“Bring a ladder and follow us to the east wall,” he instructed Hardy, took his lantern, and hung it on his belt. With more than a slight qualm, he slithered through the torn-out ruin of the window, hung by his hands from the sill for a moment, then dropped to the ground. Langmore at his heels, he set out through the darkness on Renfield’s trail.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“There he goes, sir,” Langmore whispered, and Seward held up his hand. Renfield’s hearing was sharp—he’d demonstrated more than once his ability to track a fly by its buzzing above the sound of conversation—and he’d be listening for the smallest noise of pursuit. Or would he? Seward had encountered madmen and madwomen who seemed to think that mere escape was enough; that they could elude pursuers as if they were birds.
With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander;sang the old ballad—
With a burning spear
And a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander…
Not for the first time he wished his old friend Quincey Morris were with him, Quincey who’d learned tracking from a couple of Commanche who’d worked on his father’s Texas ranch. Quincey could be relied upon to keep quiet and obey orders without question, something Seward wasn’t sure he could count on from most of the attendants.
The white blur of Renfield’s nightshirt shone against the dark of the Carfax wall long before the pursuers were anywhere near him, then vanished as he dropped down the other side.
Seward cursed. In addition to exploring the Carfax park itself, he’d walked around the perimeter wall, both outside and in, and knew it to be badly dilapidated, low enough in several places for a man to easily climb. It might take Renfield a little time to find such spots, but the thought of chasing him through open countryside in the dead of a pitch-black night made him shudder.
Thank God at least Hardy had the wits to move quietly, or as quietly as a big man carrying an eight-foot ladder without a lantern might be expected to—
“Stay here,” Seward breathed, as Hardy set up the ladder against the wall. “He may think he’s safe for the moment; if he thinks we’re on his heels, he’ll be away like a hare.” When he put his head over the fern-grown capstones, he could glimpse Renfield again, making his way toward the dark bulk of the house. “Slip over as quietly as you can and spread out,” he whispered, retreating down the ladder a few steps and looking down at the upturned faces of the three attendants. “Hardy, circle around to the right, Simmons and Langmore to the left—whatever you do, try to keep him from getting out the gate onto the high road.”
Had the new tenants—or at any rate the carters who’d lugged in the dozen huge crates of their goods that afternoon—remembered to lock those rusted gates of oak and iron? Had they been able to make the crazy old locks work, either on the gates or on the house?
Seward tried to push the thought away. “And for God’s sake, keep quiet,” he added. “Keep your lanterns as dark as you can manage. If you hear me shout, come running.” At any rate, thank goodness, he reflected as he slipped over the wall in what he hoped was an inconspicuous fashion, Carfax wasn’t inhabited yet. He might have to go chasing a semi-naked madman down the high road and into the marshes, but at least he wouldn’t have to deal with neighbors enraged or terrified by a midnight incursion. Since the FOR SALE sign had disappeared from the gates, he’d watched for signs of habitation—or even of preparation for habitation, so as to get the address of someone to write to—but so far there had been nothing. It was as if, having purchased the place, the buyers had been content to let Carfax sit in its crumbling Gothic glory, as it had sat since at least the Napoleonic Wars.
Tangled ivy crunched underfoot. Something—fox or rabbit—darted wildly away through the undergrowth that choked most of the park. Carfax had clearly begun life as a small castle, of which part of the keep and a chapel remained, a ruinous appendix clinging to the side of a foursquare, mostly Tudor dwelling now largely swallowed up in ivy. The gardens were in as poor a state as the house; twice Seward’s path was blocked by tangles of overgrown hedge, and once he found a fragment of cotton nightshirt snagged up on a half-dead rosebush. He could hear Renfield’s footsteps, a dry harsh rustle in decades of dead leaves, making still for the house.
I shall have to find the new owners somehow, thought Seward, and speak to them about having that wall repaired. The house agent must have warned them, in any case, that they were buying property next door to a lunatic asylum. The thought of Renfield breaking out again after the new owners were in residence flitted nightmarishly through his mind. Probably no danger to them, but God help Fido or Puss if he happens to encounter them in the park.
“…Master…”
The word breathed in the darkness, and Seward froze. A mutter of speech. Speaking to whom?
Seward could have sworn the house was empty.
He crept nearer, not breathing, straining to listen as he rounded the corner of the black leaf-shrouded bulk.
The clouds had parted, letting through a thread of moonlight that showed him the half-circle of the chapel, the stained buttresses ragged with ivy and the arched clerstory windows sunken eyeless sockets in the wall. There was a door set in the wall, flanked by columnar attenuated saints leperous with moss. Renfield’s white nightshirt made a blur in the embrasure.
“I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful.” He brought his hands up, filthy and stained with moss, as if to caress the iron handle, the padlocked bars. “I have worshipped you long and afar off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will not pass me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribution of good things?”
Selfish old beggar, thought Seward, suddenly amused. He believes he’s in the Real Presence of God and his first thought is for the loaves and fishes—particularly the fishes.
Still, there was something in the intensity of Renfield’s hissing voice that set alarm-bells ringing in his mind. Religious mania took a number of truly unpleasant forms. He wouldn’t want to deal with the complications it would add to the existing obsession with zoöphagy…
“Who is there?” Renfield swung around, his square, lined face convulsed like a demon’s.
Lantern-light flashed in the darkness. Langmore, Simmons, and Hardy threw themselves out of the shrubbery, catching Renfield as he tried to bolt. Seward, who’d sprung forward and seized Renfield’s arm, was thrown back against the chapel wall as if he had no weight at all. For a moment it seemed to him, watching the struggling men, that the madman would hurl them all aside and disappear into the night. Renfield bellowed and cursed, then screamed like an animal as Langmore twisted his arm, but Seward thought the madman would have gone on struggling, letting the attendant break his bones, had not Hardy struck Renfield a stunning blow on the head. The big man sank to his knees; Langmore whipped forward the arm he held, and Simmons jammed it, and the other, into the sleeves of the strait-jacket they’d brought.
Whatever momentary fears Seward felt about that blow dissolved on the way back to Rushbrook House. Renfield kicked, thrashed, howled like an animal until he was gagged; twisted like a man in the throes of convulsions. At one point Seward feared that the lunatic would manage to tear himself fre
e of the strait-jacket, and when they got him into the house—with all the other patients setting up a cacophony in sympathy like the howling of the damned in Hell—ordered extra bindings strapped around him before he was chained to the wall of the padded room.
When Seward returned to his own bedroom, he was shaken to the bones: Dear God, and I once harbored the delusion that I could bring Lucy to live with me in this place?
He sank down onto the bed, trembling. The transformation of a man whom he’d thought of as basically harmless, to other human beings if not to himself or to any fly or bird that came within his reach, brought home to him what his old teacher Van Helsing had said to him once: “We are the guardians of the frontier of darkness, my friend. And that means that for the most part, we must stand our watches alone.”
Ah, Lucy, he thought despairingly, you deserve better than this—better than the danger you would be in, living here with me, no matter what I could do to protect you. I underestimated the dangers of that dark frontier. I will not do so again.
In the east-facing windows of his room, past the irregular darkness of Carfax’s broken roof-line, the summer sky was already staining with first light. Through the walls of his room Seward could hear his patients howling. And above their cries, a powerful voice bellowed like that of a Titan in chains:
“I shall be patient, Master! It is coming—coming—coming!”
Seward injected himself with chloral hydrate and passed out without even removing his clothes.
Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
Undated (late August?)
My beloved,
I beg your forgiveness for not having written. I was unavoidably prevented, by the stupidity and, I fear, downright malice of the men with whom I am forced to work in this place. Nothing but the most urgent consideration would have kept my pen from paper, would have silenced the words of love that every day dwell in my heart.
Tell our Vixie that her papa loves her, and will be with her again by-and-by.
Your own,
R. M. R.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hanging in chains on the wall of the padded cell, Renfield dreamed.
For three days he hung there, raving and sobbing at what he saw, at what he knew was happening, would happen. They gave him laudanum to quiet him, forcing it down his throat when he twisted his head aside in a vain effort to refuse further dreams.
Don’t send me back there! he wanted to scream at them. He is hunting her, stalking her as a hunter stalks a doe! Waiting for her to come.
But these words he dared not say aloud, for Catherine’s sake, for Vixie’s and his own.
Wotan was near. Wotan was present, was there, not just in England but less than half a mile distant, lying open-eyed in his coffin in the crumbling chapel of Carfax, blood-stained hands folded on his breast.
Waiting.
Peace came with nightfall and moonrise, for in those hours Wotan’s mind was elsewhere, occupied with the business that men occupied themselves with during the day. The sense of release, of relief, was nearly unbearable. Renfield would lie on the floor of the padded cell each night when at Seward’s orders he was released from his bonds, listening only to the dim howling of the other patients, to the murmur of Langmore and Simmons as they played their unceasing games of cribbage in the hall, to the steady soft ticking of the hallway clock. Yet he was at all times aware of the Traveler, aware of his nearness. Aware of his power.
Wotan was there, Wotan who held the gift of life in his hand.
Wotan whose anger infected his brain and drove him to screaming rages in the daytime, so that he was chained again on the wall.
Watch yourself, traitor, if you betray me now, Wotan had said to Loki, in the shivering music of Das Rheingold. I, of all the gods your only friend…
Wotan, too, dreamed. In his dreams the Traveler God could hear and see, through those others whom his mind had touched. His thoughts spread like poisoned mist through the air, making nothing of distance. Wotan would know what Renfield said, if he shrieked to the guards what he knew, what he saw during his daytime visions. Wotan would hear, and would not forgive.
I do not want to see the kill!
That first day in the straps he saw the girls in the train-station. Pretty Lucy looked much better, with a trace of rosiness returning to her delicate cheeks, and she hugged her dark-haired friend like a sister. “You have your tickets?”
“Exactly where they were when you asked five minutes ago.” Mina patted her handbag, and Lucy laughed. “You’re in danger of forgetting that I’m the schoolmistress, you’re the giddy young thing who goes to parties and is going to be the daughter-in-law of Lord Godalming by the time I get back.”
“Darling!” Lucy giggled, her rosiness deepening, and the older woman who accompanied the girls—she-had Lucy’s blue eyes, Renfield thought, and Lucy’s flawless complexion—folded her gloved hands and smiled.
But her smile was wan. There was a haunted shadow in the back of those blue eyes, transforming what had been the cold face of a lady of Society—a lady who reminded Renfield alarmingly of his sister-in-law Georgina, Lady Clayburne—into a mask of exhaustion and deepest tragedy. She watched the girls as if it were she, not the dark-haired Mina, who was about to depart, with a hungry longing and a terrible regret. Her face was both puffy and sunken, with a waxy cast to it that Renfield knew well from long acquaintance with his countrymen in India’s unhealthy clime.
She has had her death-warrant, he thought, his heart aching suddenly for her as he never thought it could have, not for that species of woman. She knows it, and her daughter does not.
“And this Sister Agatha didn’t say what had happened to Jonathan?” Lucy was asking. “Other than that he had brain-fever?”
“It was all she said.” Mina reached into the pocket of her jacket—sensible brown linen and, like all her other clothing, a little worn, a few years out of fashion—and drew out a much-folded square of yellow paper. “Only that he rushed into the train-station at Klausenberg shouting for a ticket for home. Klausenberg seems to be the central market-town of the Carpathian plateau, if the atlas is correct and if Klausenberg is the same as Cluj. There seems to be only one train per day there from Vienna, at nine-fifteen in the morning. Since the night-train from Munich arrives at just before seven, that should give me plenty of time—”
“You and your railway timetables!” laughed Lucy’s mother, her weariness dissolving into genuine pleasure at the dark girl’s company, and Lucy hugged her friend again impulsively.
“Oh, darling, you’re so brave! Going out like this to the ends of the world! Not even knowing the language!”
He is watching her, thought Renfield, aware of Wotan’s mind, Wotan’s shadow—aware of those red eyes gleaming, like a rat’s eyes, in the shadows of that cheerful provincial train-station. Watching her and waiting for her…and smiling. Smiling like a damned leering devil in the dark of his coffin.
NO!!!
Renfield tried to twist his mind away as he became aware of that grinning, ironic, ancient thought watching him, too. Enjoying his pity for the sad-faced mother in her stylish walking-dress, deriving wicked amusement from his fears for that too-fragile, too-pale fair-haired girl. Renfield tried to dream something else, tried to think of something else: great pools and smears of treacle, spread all over the floor of his cell, and huge black horse-flies roaring through the window to become mired in them, waiting smilingly for his hand.
Not the sparse and aenemic insects of England at all, but the meaty gargantuan fauna of India. White ants swarming forth from wood like trails of animate milk, rice-beetles that would blunder and blunder at the same wall without the wits to go around. Those were insects indeed!
He tried to force himself to see them, to force himself to see the yellow buildings of Calcutta, the market-places aswarm with brown half-naked farmers, with Brahmins in their golden robes and shy-eyed farm-girls and great white cows making their way through the dung and the dirt and the crow
ds. Tried to will himself back to that place, where life dripped with the scents of clarified butter and spices and the painted idols stared out from every street-corner and door.
But it was as if he moved his eyes and the vision dissolved and he was back in that cool neat train-platform in England, with the smell of the green fields in his nostrils and the taste of the salt sea near-by, and Mina clasping the older woman’s hands saying, “There’s no way I can ever repay your kindness in buying me my tickets, Mrs. Westenra, and giving me money for the journey. But believe me, I shall pay you back.”
A smile twitched the wrinkled gray lips and Mrs. Westenra laid a loving hand on Mina’s cheek. “My dear child, do you imagine it’s money out of my pocket? By the time you come back, Lucy will be the daughter-in-law of Lord Godalming, and I shall have gotten the money out of her lord.”
They all laughed merrily at that, as the conductor began to drone his call for travelers to board; in the shadows at the back of the platform, Renfield could see the cloaked shadow of the Traveler, red eyes glinting, white teeth glinting as he smiled.
No!
“We’ll take your trunk down to London the day after tomorrow. You must bring Jonathan to Hillingham the very moment he’s well enough to travel. Darling…”
“Darling!”
The girls embraced on the steps of the train, the bright silks and laces of the one like the most fragile of flowers against the earthy brown linen of the other. Somewhere in his mind Renfield felt the gloating greed, the amused pleasure, of the watching Traveler and he began to thrash in his dreaming, to scream, Let her alone! Let her alone, you devil!
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