“And I swear if he’s gone back to marry that Cossack woman, he can blame well stay in Siberia, for all of me,” Quincey said, and handed the binoculars disgustedly to Art. “We can tell your pa he got himself killed by them headhunters in Singapore and I’ll trim up the mustaches on that shrunken head the doc here bought so it’ll look enough like him to pass muster with your aunts.”
Art turned to Seward. “What do you think, Jack? You’re Uncle’s nanny, after all.”
Seward, whose shoulder still smarted from a Cossack bullet collected two days before, said, “I think we should leave him.”
“What?” said Art. “Who?”
“What?” Seward opened his eyes. He was in the wood-paneled compartment of a wagon-lit. Arthur was bending over him, holding up a lamp. In that first instant he thought, We must have tracked Uncle Harry back to the Cossacks… Then he saw that Art wore the black of mourning—saw Van Helsing in the doorway behind him, and gray-haired Jonathan Harker—and memory fell into place.
He blinked, grasping at fading images. “I had—I had the most extraordinary dream…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Don’t leave me, Ryland!” As Nomie tugged him from the corridor into their lamp-lit compartment in the next car, her hands were shaking, her blue eyes pleading.
He put his hands on either side of her face, trying to quiet the desperation from her eyes. “My little Norn, I’ve made every provision for you! You’ll be in no danger, all arrangements are made to get you across the Danube at Giurgiu, to get you onto the next train to Varna…”
“I don’t want arrangements!” She pulled from him, shook her head, caught his wrists in her small white hands that were so strong and so cold. “I want a friend!”
Renfield said nothing, and she pressed her face to his hands.
“Do you know how long it has been,” she whispered, “since I have had a friend to talk to, as I talk to you?”
The compartment had been set up for night, the small bunks unhooked from the walls. The bedding was all made up, for “Mr. and Mrs. Marshmire” to disarray before they slipped through cracks and knotholes into the baggage-wagon shortly before morning. They had made arrangements to travel with a dozen rabbits in cages: Renfield knew well how meticulously the Orient Express kept track of its passengers and personnel. He had been careful to tip the porters heavily and had explained to them that since his wife disliked being cooped up, they might be anywhere on the train, day or night.
He guided her to the little sofa, took her gently into the circle of his arm. She rested her head on his shoulder: more beautiful than the most beautiful of living women he had ever seen, with the exception of Catherine and Vixie. Yet he felt for her none of the physical need that at times during his incarceration seemed almost on the point of setting his flesh on fire. That, too, it appeared, was a thing of the body.
And the deep affection he felt for her, evidently, was not.
“Days are no less long for the Un-Dead than for the Living,” she murmured after a time. “I married the Count—God help me!—in 1782, and for over a hundred years now have had no one but him, and the Lady Elizabeth, and Sarike for companionship. I read…except that I dare not be seen to favor anything too much, for when we disagree, or are angry with one another, the others are spiteful and destructive. For them, there is nothing but the hunt. They laugh at the idea that one might be interested in the lives of people long dead, like Heloise and Abelard, or who never existed, like Beatrice and Benedict.”
He was silent, remembering Vixie’s tears the first time she read Notre Dame de Paris. Georgina Clayburne had called all novels “rubbish” and had urged him and Catherine to burn Vixie’s.
For Georgina, as for the Countess, there was only the hunt.
“I used to be a good Catholic girl.” Nomie’s sob might have been the softest of rueful chuckles, and she sat up a little, and wiped a tear like cold crystal from her eye. “Our priest back in Augsburg used to tell us, as a threat, that those things that we loved above God, we would find ourselves shackled to in Hell, for all of Eternity. As a little girl I would have terrible visions of myself dragging a long chain of dolls and pretty dresses and storybooks through a wasteland of flaming mud and devils. But at least, I told myself, I’d still have them. But he was right,” she finished sadly. “He was right.”
“What a ghastly thing to tell a child.” Renfield recalled some of the things his own parish priest had told him about what became of little boys who couldn’t control their tempers.
Nomie sighed. “But you see, I did love the Count above God, above all mortal things. When he held me in his arms, I remember saying to him, I would count myself blessed to dwell forever in Hell, if I could dwell there at your side. I was very young.” A tiny fold touched the corner of her lips. “Not twenty.” She closed her eyes, and her long lashes dislodged another tear.
Renfield caught it on his fingertip. It was cold as winter rain.
Yet he put it to his lips, tasting it as in dying he’d tasted her blood.
The blood is the life, he thought. But the tears are something more.
Outside the windows, the Italian Alps flashed past in the darkness, moonlight cold upon their snows.
“And now here I am,” Nomie said softly. “Exactly where I wanted to be, dwelling forever in Hell at his side. With no one but Elizabeth for company, and Sarike, who has the heart of an animal. No, that’s unjust. Animals show kindness to their own, and even a wolfhound bitch will nurse an orphaned kitten. Sometimes still the Count will talk to me of Goethe, and Shakespeare, and Montaigne—he’s very widely read, and I think he valued me because I read, and he wanted someone to converse with. But for him, all of literature comes back to power, and to contempt for those who have none. To talk with him is sometimes like being beaten. To travel with you, to speak with you, heart to heart and not afraid, is like a chilled cloth upon my face after a long fever. Don’t take that away. At least…”
She opened her eyes, sat up straighter, as if ashamed of her weakness. “At least not for a little while yet.”
Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
13 October
My beloved,
How could I turn my back upon that poor child?
The cynical will doubtless cry, Coward, to hide his own craving for a life eternal, stolen from the lives of others, behind a farce of pity! Child forsooth! This woman is an Un-Dead murderess who seeks to keep a servant with no more expenditure than a tugged heartstring or two.
Perhaps I would have said so myself, before I knew what Hell is. Before I had seen, close-to, the naked essences of those monsters that go by the names of Dracula, of Elizabeth, of Sarike the Turk.
The cynic might also point out that, as Nomie said, To be vampire is to fascinate… And accuse Nomie of setting out to fascinate me, as the Count fascinated her.
But I know you, Catherine, as I know my own heart, clearer now that the vampire state has healed me of madness. You were no cynic in life. Death, Dante and others tell us, clarifies the awareness even of the damned, and how much more so of the blessed! I know you will understand.
Nomie is what she is, no saint, but no demon either, and lonely as for half a year I was lonely in the terrible walls of Rushbrook Asylum.
I long to be with you as a child longs for his mother’s breast. I would count the days until I see you again, face to face in the light, save that I do not know how many they shall be.
They shall be as few as possible, my truest love. I am torn between the duties of friendship, my love for you and Vixie, and the cruel constraints of Time. I will do what I can for my pretty little Norn, to make easier the slavery into which she was tricked by her love, all those years ago.
But that being done—if it can be done—I shall come to you, in whatever fashion I can contrive. If God is kind, He will allow me to tell you, face to face, on the threshold of the Heaven you now inhabit, how sorry I am, before consigning me to eternal sleep. This is the best that
I can hope for, and to this I look forward as to light in blackness.
My love, until that day, I am,
Forever, your husband,
R. M. R.
R. M. R.’s notes
13 October
3 rabbits, 4 spiders
14 October
3 rabbits, 2 rats
15 October
Baggage-thief in luggage shed at Varna
My self-disgust is no less intense than my horror at the degree to which the drinking of human blood—the taking of human life—exhilarates me, sharpens my mind and my senses and, more frighteningly, increases the speed with which I can move and with which I can dislimn myself to pass through knotholes and cracks. I find that Nomie’s superiority in the so-called supernatural aspects of the vampire state is only in part a function of her greater age and experience. In part these abilities depend upon her greater readiness to consume the psychic energies of the human brain at death.
What am I to make of this?
“What a pity,” sighed Nomie, as we stowed the body of the dead robber beneath the wheels of one of the coal-cars in the maze of sidings in the railway yard, “that we cannot find a village of robbers, upon whom we could feast nightly without concern about whether their wives or their mothers will find themselves in want at their deaths, or whether their children will weep. I used to pick and choose, to kill only the bandits and horse-thieves who inhabit the wild countryside: men whom I could not pity. But such men are wary, unless they’re in drink, and walk in bands. And sometimes the craving becomes too much.”
“Ah, my Nornchen, I have seen such villages,” I replied, a trifle flown, I admit, on the alcohol-content of our victim’s blood. “Up the country, as they say of the Indian hills, there are places where the Thugee make a habit of murdering travelers, and families hand the profession down for generations, as surely as the butchers of cattle and pigs do in other lands. The Governor-General would give us a medal for our conduct, rather than sending pompous Dutchmen and crazed solicitors’ clerks after us with Ghurka knives.”
From somewhere—I suspect from young Lord Godalming—Jonathan Harker has acquired a curve-bladed Ghurka kukri even longer and more savage-looking than the bowie-knife Quincey Morris habitually wears sticking out of his boot-top. He spent a great deal of our three days on the Orient Express sharpening it, as he sat at the bedside of his poor lovely wife, who slept most of the journey.
It is clear to me that knowledge of Dracula’s assault upon his wife has driven Harker a little insane. This is not to be wondered at. What man, knowing Mina Harker’s kind spirit and lively intelligence, could not love her to distraction? What husband, seeing the woman he adored infected with the terrible poison that slowly transforms the human flesh into vampire flesh and brings the human soul into thrall of the demon, could remain wholly sane?
Kind is the God who denies him knowledge of the depths to which the Count’s domination will bring her, after death! Such knowledge would induce madness indeed.
And as if mere knowledge of his beloved’s peril were insufficient, Harker had the daily reminder, upon the journey, of the chain that binds his beautiful one to her supernatural rapist. Daily, at dawn and sunset, Van Helsing would hypnotize Mrs. Harker, searching through her mind to touch her master’s. In so doing he would touch my own, and Nomie’s, where we lay in our coffins in the baggage-car.
I would be aware of such times, as I drifted off to sleep or back into waking, of Dracula’s thought and sensation as he lay in his own single earth-box in the hold of the Romanian freighter the Czarina Catherine. I would hear, as Mrs. Harker heard, the lap of waves upon the hold, the thud of sailors’ feet on the deck, and the creak of ropes; would hear, also, Van Helsing’s voice gently probing with questions, and now and then one of the men mutter to another.
How could Harker be witness to all that taking place around the woman he loves, and not go a little mad?
But having been a madman myself, I do not look forward to having to deal with one at my Master’s behest.
And though nothing will please me more than the sensation of that Ghurka knife in my own heart, and the severing of my own head that will bring me peace, I wonder how I can protect Nomie from a like fate without resorting to more human blood, more human deaths, to strengthen me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
R. M. R.’s notes
17 October
12 rats, 27 spiders
Coming from Paris on the Orient Express, Nomie told me of Count Dracula’s intention: to divert the Czarina Catherine from its registered destination here in Varna to Galatz on the Danube mouth, leaving Van Helsing and his allies to await it here while we, Nomie and I, pick them off one by one.
Sleeping in my coffin during the day, in the small lodgings we rented, I feel the Count’s impatient anger press upon me like a fever. Anger at those who would dare to pursue and defy him. Anger at us, who cannot or will not guard his flanks. Through the boards of my coffin I hear Nomie cry out in terror, like a child in the grip of a nightmare she cannot wake from. And though I strive to break my own thick day-sleep to go to her, to comfort her, I can only lie in the clayey soil dug from Highgate Cemetery, and listen to her weep.
Jonathan Harker’s Journal*
17 October
Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome the Count on his return from his tour…Van Helsing and Seward will cut off his head at once and drive a stake through his heart. Morris and Godalming and I shall prevent interference, even if we have to use the arms which we shall have ready. The Professor says that if we can so treat the Count’s body, it will soon after fall into dust…
Letter, Quincey Morris to Galileo Jones
Foreman, Caballo Loco Ranch
San Antonio, Texas
17 October
Pard,
It’s been too long, a thousand years it feels like, and stranger portents have come to pass than ever I wrote of in all those footloose traipses riding herd on that crazy English lord around the world. Doc Seward, and Art Holmwood, and I thought we saw the elephant then, and maybe we did.
This is something different, dark as the snake-caves along the dry washes in the hills and twice as deadly. I write because I could use the sight of your ugly face just now, and use even more you and six or seven of the boys from the bunkhouse.
When last I wrote, I said I’d been shot bad by Dan Cupid, shot in the heart with his little gold arrow: I said a lot of hopeful fal-lal and I hope to God you burned that damn stupid poem. She turned me down for a man just as good as me and better in her mama’s eyes, though straight and true as she was, I know that didn’t weigh with her, and I knew even then I wouldn’t get over it. May through to September, I kept telling myself I’d write and let you know how I was, when the pain let up some. But it never did.
I thought that was the worst wound I’d take in my life. I wish it had been.
I say of Miss Westenra, “was,” because she died, not many days before her marriage to Art. And not many days after, we—Art and I and Doc—learned that she’d been killed, by the kind of man-monster the Commanche sometimes speak of, and the villagers deep back in the Mexican hills where modern times and modern blindness haven’t yet touched.
And this is what I’m doing here, footloose again and heading East in country as wild as any we crossed coming west from Vladivastok. The place I’m at is called Varna (Wasn’t “Varna” the name of that red-haired madam in Dodge? The one with the fingernails?), and it’s a good-sized burg and pretty, near as warm as Texas for this late in the year. It’s a port on the Black Sea and the crowds you see in the streets remind me of San Francisco, French and Greeks and English and Russians and Germans: same ships in the harbor, with coal and timber and iron and German steel. The only difference is there’s Arabs everywhere instead of Chinese, and the hills aren’t as steep.
We’ve taken rooms—Art and the Doc and I, and other friends of Miss Westenra’s who are helping us with the chase—and all we can d
o now is wait. Our bird is coming in on a freighter from London; he’ll find us waiting for him on the dock. Between us we have five Winchesters and seven pistols, plus my Henry, which is the best rifle man ever made, as well as my bowie and assorted other cutlery. More than any weapon, we have minds that are made up and hearts bound in brotherhood.
What he—It—did lies beyond the proof of any law but God’s. But you and I have both dealt with justice on those terms, out where the law doesn’t run.
And so we wait. One of our number, Mrs. Harker, as smart and sweet and good-hearted a woman as ever wore shoe-leather, has suffered a terrible wound that may yet turn into her death because we underestimated our friend, and it is like a knife in my heart every time I see the mark she bears of it. The night she took that mark, I should have known better, and set a guard, even though there was no danger in sight. There isn’t a night I don’t dream about doing it differently.
For that reason I’ve gone back to my trail-driving days, and have insisted that while we’re here we stick together, and stay within-doors from sundown ’til sunup, which is when our friend likes to mosey around. Most nights I take the graveyard watch, like I did on the trail, that dark pit from three ’til the first birds start to wake, when even the whores sleep and the streets are so still you can hear the clink of the tackle down in the harbor.
This is the hour in which I write to you. The others sleep, bedrolls on the parlor carpet around Mrs. Harker’s couch, comical unless you knew the reason for it. Like on the trail, what name each man mutters in his sleep the others forget come morning. I’ve been to the window, and through the other rooms of our suite, three times since I came on watch, knowing our friend is still on the high seas someplace: I’ve seen nothing and yet the air prickles and whispers. There’s danger here, closer than the Doc or his Doc—old Doc Van Helsing—think or know. I smell it, like a longhorn smells thunder. Nobody who hasn’t taken a herd through Indian country can know what that’s like.
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