Whatever it was, it’s gone now. And so I write to you, and think of you, old friend, who does know what that feels like, that invisible danger, waiting to strike.
Enclosed with this letter you’ll find my will. Once I thought to bring a gold-haired bride home to Caballo Loco, to make a whole lot of little Quinceys and ’Laios and Jacks and Lucys to take the place over; I know that won’t happen, now. Pa told me I had cousins back in Virginia, though I don’t know if any survived the War any more than my aunts and uncles of Pa’s family did. Do what you can to find them, and if any come out to take up their share of the land, please do what you can to knock some sense into their heads, seeing as how you’ll be their neighbor, on what’ll be your half of the ranch.
You think dark thoughts in the dark of the graveyard watch, out here on the eastern edge of the world. One day I pray I’ll take this letter out of your hands, and laugh, and tear it up. But that day seems far from me now, like a dream that I know damn well isn’t going to come true. By the time this gets to you, it’ll be over, one way or the other.
’Til that time it’s Hooray for Texas! And tell those lazy sons-of-bitches in the bunkhouse that their boss says Hi from the edge of the world.
Your pal,
Quincey Morris
R. M. R.’s notes
18 October
13 rats, 20 spiders, owl, 2 mice
I keep these records from habit, and as a means of reassuring myself that though I choose not to kill human beings, I am in no danger of starvation. My cravings spring from my mind and my blood, not my flesh.
My mind is still linked, in the hours of my sleep, to the Count’s. When his red eyes glare into my dreams and his deep hoarse voice demands why I have not yet slain Van Helsing or Godalming, I hear also the sighing lap of waves against the Czarina Catherine’s hull, and sometimes snatches of men’s voices from the deck. “It is the devil’s wind, and the devil’s fog, that drive us!” I heard a man cry in anguish, and a thick Scots voice replied, “I’ the de’il wants us to make Varna so quick, then Dickie Donelson’s na the one to say him nay!”
“Cast it overside, Captain! Cast that accursed box into the sea! Grief only will come of keeping it aboard!”
And there was a confusion of voices, and the meaty slap of a belaying-pin striking flesh as the sounds faded into the sea-rush of my dreams.
“He paid Captain Donelson well,” whispered Nomie to me later, as we stood in the balmy darkness across from the Hotel Odessus’s front doors, our shoulders touching slightly, watching the windows of Van Helsing’s suite. “As he has the men at Galatz, who will take the earth-box ashore and put it on a barge upriver, to where the Bistritza River curves below the Borgo Pass where the Castle stands. And he learned well his own lesson, to travel on a ship crewed with Scots and Frenchmen as well as Romanians and Greeks, and to let the crew alone. Coming to England on the Demeter in July, he would drink the blood of the crew. When it arrived, the ship was a ghost-ship, the captain chained dead to the wheel with a crucifix wound round his hands.”
“He was lucky his entire cargo of earth-boxes wasn’t confiscated by the customs authorities,” I remarked. “Or sunk in Whitby Harbor, for that matter.”
“He had long been fasting in Transylvania, with the impoverishment of the countryside. Now he has had three months, almost, of hunting in London’s dockside slums.”
“Do you still defend him, little Norn?” I asked her, smiling, and had she not been pale as bridal satin, she might have blushed. More gravely, I went on, “He killed the crew of the Demeter because he was greedy. He would kill that of the Czarina Catherine, and its Captain, too, if he thought he could do so and still make port safely in Galatz. You know that is so.”
She said with a trace of bitterness in her voice, “I know.”
We returned our attention to the warm rectangle of gas-light on the upper floor of the Hotel Odessus, crossed now and then by shadows. When one came near enough to its curtain, I pointed them out to her: “The tall one is Quincy Morris; that will be Lord Godalming, who is only a little shorter—”
“The handsome one with the golden hair?” She cocked a coquettish eye at me, the white lace of her jabot like flowers against the embroidered pink-and-blue of her jacket.
“Minx. The slighter one is either my own friend Dr. Seward, or your friend Jonathan Harker—and don’t tell me you didn’t find him attractive, my girl…”
She laughed like the cold tinkling of silver chimes. “He was very sweet, really. I used to watch him at the Castle, from the shadows when he couldn’t see. He would sit at his desk, writing love-letters to his fiancée, or scribbling in his journal, as if his very life depended upon it. I would sometimes slip in just at dawn, when he slept, and try to read what he’d written to his Mina. Sometimes he wrote in English, sometimes in a code I could not understand, but while he wrote, he would sigh and speak her name. The others would laugh at me for it, and talk about how they would make him forget her, once they could have their way with him, and about how long they could make him last before he died. That is a game that vampires play.”
She returned her eyes to the window, where Van Helsing’s stocky form stood briefly, illuminated from within as he parted the curtain and looked out to the dark, cobbled street.
For the second night none of them emerged. When, in the small cold hours, Nomie and I drifted like wraiths into the hotel’s kitchen quarters at the welcoming behest of a venal servant-boy to whom we threw a coin, we found all the lights still burning in the avengers’ suite, and heard the muffled mutter of Godalming’s voice and Seward’s as they played pinochle, and the mingled breathing of sleepers.
Nomie left me to hunt. I remained in the corridor, or drifted into one bedroom after the other of the suite in the form of mist beneath the doors. All the bedrooms were empty, though the beds bore the scent and impress of those who slept in them at odd hours of daylight.
Our friends were taking no chances. While I was still there, I heard Seward wake Harker, and after that, there was only the soft scrape of whetstone on knife-blade, until the approach of dawn drove me from the building and back to my own earth-home.
19 October
When I returned to our hotel at dawn yesterday, I found to my great disquiet that Nomie was still out. She was going hunting, she said, on the docks, not a part of the city where any woman should be afoot.
Though vampires do not crumble into dust with the first touch of the sun’s rays, or spontaneously combust in daylight, as some penny dreadfuls would have it, once the sun is in the sky and until it vanishes behind the earth’s curve, we are as mortals. Worse off than mortals, in fact, for mortals may cross running water at their will, or touch such things as the garlic plant, the wild rose, and the emblems of their faith. Moreover, with the sun’s rising I was crushed by a wave of almost overwhelming sleepiness, and when I emerged from our little pensione in Balchik Street, I found that the morning sunlight made me giddy, and that I could barely see.
Nevertheless I stumbled in the direction of the dark blue sea, visible between the white buildings of the upper town.
Coming down Nessebur Street, I was passed by a gang of seven or eight Slovak boatmen, rough arrogant brigands with their baggy white trousers tucked into high boot-tops, who bring loads of timber down from the Carpathians. They glanced sidelong at me from under long, greasy black hair, and muttered to one another in their own tongue. Yet as they passed, I smelled blood upon them, and the ground-in whiff of Nomie’s perfume.
I saw where they’d come from, through a little gate into the yard behind a shut-up tavern. I ran in, and looked around: a narrow space between a warehouse and a chandler’s yard, filled with debris and stinking of privies years untended. For a moment, dazzled by the sunlight, I could see nothing but the shabby fence, the straggling waist-high stands of broomsedge.
Then something moved beside the dilapidated privy sheds. A woman, her gold hair hanging tangled over the muddied remains of her pink jacket,
blood dripping from the white hand that she held to her bruised and swollen face.
“I’ll be all right,” she whispered, as we staggered like two swaying drunkards back toward the safety of our pensione. Searching for her, I had been plagued by the recurring fear that I’d encounter Dr. Seward in the streets—though what the man would have been doing down by the shipyards I have no idea. Now the only thing that burned in my heart was rage. Rage and the desire to kill.
“The men surrounded me, I thought I could get away.” Her voice came thick through lips puffed and discolored. Her hand trembled as she tried to put up her hair again, so that people would not stare so at us as we made our way back through the town. “Two of them wore crucifixes, and I could not slip past them. They called me witch, and Austrian whore. It’s all they thought I was.”
I said nothing. I was shaking with fury.
“And then the sun came up…”
We came into the pensione by the back door, unseen by the servants who had been well paid to leave our room strictly alone during the day. They’d left water in the ewer, however, and with it I bathed Nomie’s cut face and bruised wrists. She fell asleep the instant I lifted her into her coffin. I dragged myself over to my own. Opium is not so black as the oblivion into which I plunged.
Ryland, she whispered into my dreams. Ryland, thank you. Thank you.
In my dream I reached out and gathered her into my arms. In my dream her face had already healed, beautiful and perfect as the young bride the Count had brought to his Castle, over a century ago.
Somewhere far off I could hear the Count shout at her, Fool! Bitch! You will undo us all! I only held her tighter, and felt her shake in my grip. Through the sickened dread that radiated from her I could feel, also, the bitter grief of disillusion. I would count myself blessed to dwell forever in Hell, she had said to him once, if I could dwell there at your side. When Dracula, in his coffin on-board the Czarina Catherine, finally released her mind from his grip, her soul clung to mine in the darkness of our mutual dreams and wept.
With shame that she had loved him once? I wondered. Or with sorrow that the love that once had upheld her in Un-Death was gone?
Catherine, Catherine, thank God that God spared you the deeper Hells of pain such as this!
To cheer her through the day, I told her tales of India as we slept, conjuring for her, like a wizard of dreams, temples domed with peeling gilt and muddy streets aswarm with dusky-skinned men and women, white cows and coiled pythons as big as fire-hoses, insects bigger than English birds, and the teeming hot electricity of life that seems to radiate from the very ground.
That is where we need to live, my Nornchen, you and I, I told her. We could sup like kings every night upon men who force their brothers’ widows into suttee in order to get their property, or who murder childless brides because they don’t want to return the dowries to their families! A thousand wolves of the Deccan hills would do our bidding, and we would sleep through the days in the crypts of demolished temples deep in the jungles, with cobras as our guards.
And would I weave you crowns of flowers, as they do for the gods of that country? she returned, and I could smell those flowers, like good German roses though the image I saw in her dream—my dream—was of fantastic blossoms whose like the waking earth has never seen. Would I play the flute for you in the jungle twilight, like the White Goddess of some blood-and-thunder romance?
A little later I became aware of Mina Harker’s mind, questing to touch that of the Count, in the hold of that ship that was being driven by the winds he commanded, cloaked in the fogs he had summoned to blindfold its captain and crew. “What is it that you hear?” asked Van Helsing’s deep voice. “What is it that you smell?”
And then, more softly, “Friend John, what do you think? Do her teeth remain as they were, no longer nor no sharper than they were before?”
And Seward’s voice, toneless and careful, “I can see no change in them, nor in her.”
Far off it seemed to me that I could see them, like images I’d formed up in my mind to cheer my little Norn: Mrs. Harker lying on the rose plush sofa of the suite’s overdecorated parlor, Van Helsing and Seward on chairs by her head. The others were gone, presumably attending, during the hours of day, to all those necessary tasks so that they could remain all together through the hours of darkness.
“Nor I, Friend John,” Van Helsing replied. “But you must watch her, watch her as a doctor stands guard upon an ailing child, for the first sign of change. For if this change commence in her, it is not only her soul that is in peril, but she become a weapon in his hand against us all.”
From there I slipped back into waking, with the soft warm winds of the Black Sea stirring the curtains of the window. And when Nomie sat up in her coffin, and shook back her golden hair, the bruises left by the Slovak brutes at the harbor were fading, and every cut nearly healed. Every hurt, that is, save the wound of fear that lay like a shadow deep within her eyes.
20 October
5 mice, 2 Slovaks
21 October
Owl, 3 mice, 1 Slovak
Nomie is teaching me the finer points of the vampire way.
22 October
12 rats, 27 spiders
Searched for the other Slovaks who assaulted Nomie. They seem to be lying low.
Transformation into a bat! What an astonishing sensation!
23 October
10 rats, 13 spiders, an enormous cockroach that crawled dazed and stupid from a bale of rugs from Samarkand. The taste of Oriental spices!
In bat-form flittered at the window of the Odessus Hotel. Godalming pacing, Dr. Seward reading or pretending to read a medical journal, though he did not turn the pages, Morris playing patience, and Harker sharpening his knife. Mrs. Harker asleep on the sofa, dark hair braided like a schoolgirl’s. Van Helsing rose from his seat beside her and crossed to the window. I flew away at once, knowing that above all none of them must suspect that the Count has harrying forces in Varna. I do not think he saw me, yet he stood for a long time at the opening of the curtains, gazing with those sharp blue eyes into the dark.
I worry about Nomie, about the way the landlord of the pensione and his wife draw aside from her and whisper when she and I go up and down the stairs. In my sleep I sometimes hear the tread of heavy boots in the street below our window, pausing for too long, then going on its way.
Telegram, Rufus Smith, Lloyd’s, London, to Lord
Godalming, care of H.B.M. Vice-Consul, Varna.*
24 October
Czarina Catherine reported this morning from Dardanelles.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“What could go wrong?” Young Godalming had a voice like an operatic hero’s, a Heldentenor, a Siegfried, a Radhames. Drifting as half-dematerialized mist in the darkness of the bedroom that was Mina Harker’s by day, Renfield pictured the Viscount in his mind. Pacing, by the creak of the floor and the infinitesimal rise and fall of his voice. Golden hair tumbled on his forehead in the lamplight. Black-clothed as Hamlet, holding to the uniform of grief, keeping faith with the girl who had been his wife in his heart. “Rostov—the Catherine’s owner—never questioned my story that the box may contain something stolen from me. This should be enough to convince the Captain to let us open it.”
Paper rattled softly, audible only to Renfield’s hyper-natural senses.
A letter? Money? Did it matter?
He remembered his dreaming visions of laudanum and madness in Rushbrook House, seeing those two goldenly beautiful young people on the sunlit deck of Godalming’s little steam-launch one afternoon on the Thames. Remembered how he had envied them their joy as much as their freedom. Recalled the agony of knowing that Dracula even then had put his mark upon the girl; that their delight in the afternoon lay under shadow of horror.
Without doubt, that magic afternoon on the river was in Godalming’s mind as well.
“What could go wrong?” he demanded again, louder, and Renfield could almost see Van Helsing�
�s shushing gesture as well as hear the hiss of his breath.
“A thousand thousand things, my friend.” Van Helsing’s whisper re-enforced Renfield’s awareness of Mina Harker’s deep, sleeping breath. From her hypnotic sleep at sunset she often drifted so into true slumber, like the Sleeping Beauty awaiting her ultimate fate. “It is why we watch, and wait.”
Did Sleeping Beauty dream?
“Can’t be much longer now.” Quincey Morris’s flat American drawl was calmly matter-of-fact. “Wind’s from the south. Queer, how it swung around that way so sudden from the east. But it’ll drive the ship into our arms neat as a grand-right-and-left. Should arrive sometime tomorrow, strong as it’s blowin’.”
“And we will be there,” said Godalming, almost gloating, “to greet him.”
In his sleep that afternoon, Renfield, too, had felt the wind shift. At sunset, in the bat-form that still filled him with delight, he had flittered high in the lemon-hued sky to look south toward the forty-mile strait. Though he saw with a vampire’s keen sight rather than with a bat’s weak little eyes, the hills of Turkey had been veiled in mists whose white curtains had stretched far out over the sea.
But when Godalming and Morris left the suite to go down to the hotel’s smoking-room, Van Helsing murmured, “I do not like this, friend John. There is a feel in the air, as they say. A feel in my bones. Like the old wound who smart when the weather turns, my skeleton say to me, Beware.”
They’re armed, thought Renfield, as he’d thought whenever any of the men departed the suite for the smoking-room or the lavatories; and as they went out, he heard the minute clink of silver on porcelain as each man took from a bowl beside the door the rosaries Van Helsing insisted they carry when not in Mina’s presence. An agnostic himself, Renfield had been both appalled and fascinated, four nights ago, when he’d killed the first of the Slovak boatmen who’d assaulted Nomie. The man’s companion had had a crucifix around his neck and the energy from it, like a searing white heat, had driven Renfield back from killing him as well. When the bodies of two others of the band had been discovered a day or so later, all the rest of them had taken to wearing crucifixes, to Renfield’s disgust.
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