Does God indeed protect men who’d beat a young woman for being blonde and German, if only they wear His sign?
Or is there something else operating here, something I don’t understand?
But through the hotel’s thick walls he heard other men’s voices from the street, hoarse and jeering: “Vrolok,” one of them cried, and another, “Stregoica!” And he heard the quick retreating tap of Nomie’s heels.
Heart cold within him, Renfield dissolved himself more completely into mists, flowed like water along the dim-lit hotel corridor and down the stair. He passed Godalming and tall Quincey Morris outside the smoking-room door—Morris looked around sharply, as if at a sound—and gaining the outer door, Renfield melted into the shape of a bat, flew toward the alley where the white blur of boatmen’s clothing swam in the shadows.
They were following Nomie, not very closely, shouting obscenities and calling names. She could not, Renfield knew, slip away from them into another form without revealing that she was, indeed, what they labeled her, vampire and witch. So she only walked, very sensibly, down the center of the widest street she could toward the largest hotel immediately available that wasn’t the Odessus, where there was the chance that Jonathan Harker might see her in the lobby. This was the Metropole, some three streets away. At this hour, close to one in the morning, the streets were nearly deserted, the fog that had all evening wreathed the southern hills creeping in thick over the town. There was no one to stop the mob from trailing only a few steps behind her, gaining courage as they gained numbers from the workingmen’s taverns they passed. When she reached the Metropole’s front steps, they fell back, and Renfield melted into mists again as the doorman opened the doors for her.
“Come in, come in, Madame! Ah, truly they are savages in this place!”
By his speech the doorman was French. Nomie turned, to look back at the some thirty men gathered before the hotel, who spat at her and made the two-fingered sign against the evil eye. Renfield let himself be seen for a moment, swirling as mist across the steps behind her, to let her know he was near. The mob didn’t notice him, because of the general fog of the night: the lights of the hotel’s door were blurred by it, and the sound of the sea at the foot of the esplanade muffled.
“Oh, M’sieu,” he heard Nomie gasp as she went in, “it is only because I am a German, not even an Austrian as they say—”
She was still shaking when she joined Renfield outside fifteen minutes later, and in the form of bats they made their way back toward the pensione in Blachik Street. “You have to go back to the Castle,” he said, when they’d seeped into their own room again in the form of mist. “It will be only a matter of time before the men from the taverns and the docks find out where you sleep, or before our landlady’s husband hears one too many things in the tavern and decides we aren’t paying him enough to mind his own business.”
“We can’t do that,” whispered Nomie. “You know we can’t.”
Renfield knew. Yesterday, and the day before, the Count had risen like a cloud of darkness into his dreams, demanding why Van Helsing and the others still lived. They twist that woman, that traitorous whore, to their wills, with their puny hypnotism and their canting piety! Fools! Fools and hypocrites, who whine that I have made her my tool, and all the while use her as theirs! But they will pay.
And that morning, too, in the dark of his coffin, Renfield dreamed again of the dark gloating, the burning stench of the Count’s delight in the anticipation of his vengeance.
When they see what I shall make of her, my bride, my slave, and my winepress, then shall their hearts weep beneath my heel. Even death will to them bring no comfort.
Destroy them! Destroy them all, except for Van Helsing—him you let live, to see their deaths.
His words, his thoughts, crushed Renfield with terror, and it seemed to him that he knelt again in the hold of the doomed ship Demeter, confronting that column of shadow, those red, burning eyes.
But in his dream, this time, Nomie was with him. Nomie slim and beautiful, standing at his side.
Lord, we cannot, she said, and Dracula struck her, with casual violence that threw her back against the slimy dark wall of the ship’s bulkhead.
Cannot? You say “cannot” to me?
They never go out alone! protested Renfield, springing to his feet. They are armed, they cannot be finished off all together—
He broke off with a gasp, the grip of Dracula’s mind on his like a band of heated iron crushing his skull. Renfield sank to the deck-boards, the pain of his own death at Dracula’s hands—bones breaking, flesh battered—returning to the reality of the dream.
You will find a way, said the Count, the voice in Renfield’s mind deadly soft. You will find a way, or it will go the worse with you.
Then he was gone, and far off, deep in shattered sleep, Renfield heard Nomie weep. The morning sun climbed over the blue-black sparkle of the Black Sea, the strange southerly wind flicked foam from its waves. Far out over the water, Renfield was conscious of unseasonal banks of drifting fog, and in the dark of his dream, of Mina Harker dreaming about chasing Lucy as she sleep-walked down the halls of the school where they’d met.
Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
25 October
My beloved, my beloved, he is gone!
At noon I felt it, noon being the single period of the daylight hours when we of the vampire kind have the powers that the darkness gives us: to change our form, to utilize the strength of our Un-Dead state.
He has closed his mind against Mina Harker’s probing, but in so doing, also against us!
Once when he turned away from me I wept, and ranted, and fought like the madman I then was. Today in my coffined sleep I could almost have cried like a child with relief. When sunset freed me of the daylight’s thick thrall, I sat up shivering with dread that it was only a dream, but no! For Nomie sat up in the same moment, her golden hair hanging thick about her shoulders, and stared at me with huge eyes.
“Is it true?” she whispered. And scrambling from our coffins, we clung to each other in the narrow space between them, not daring to believe.
“I’m taking you back to the Castle,” I said, and she shook her head.
“Ryland, you cannot. I cannot. He will know. When he comes there, he will know. And he will punish.”
“I will return here and deal with the pursuit,” I said firmly. “I will tell him that because of the Slovaks you had become a liability, and it is only a matter of time before Van Helsing—who speaks Slovak, and like all men of science is a natural-born snoop whose inquisitiveness rivals the worst grandmother in the world—hears of a fair-haired German girl whom the boatmen call vrolak, and puts two and two together. You must go back, little Norn. I will come to you when I can.”
It was a lie, Catherine, and I knew it was a lie as the words came out of my mouth. She flung her arms around me and kissed me like a schoolgirl, and the lie burned me as if she had pressed a crucifix, or Van Helsing’s Host, into the living flesh of my heart.
All this evening I have made preparations, visiting the shipping offices of Hapgood Company, in which as you recall I own considerable stock, and under my own name hiring a reliable agent, an expatriate Virginian named Ross who has spent over two decades in this part of the world. For his assistants I hired two Germans, Berliners who don’t believe in anything. In this far corner of Europe, no one had yet heard of the incarceration or death of one of Hapgood’s leading shareholders, and one of the office clerks, who had formerly worked in Calcutta, knew me well by sight. Tomorrow morning we take the 6:30 train to Veresti, where it will be possible to hire wagons to deliver Nomie, boxed within the coffin of her native earth, to the Castle Dracula above the Borgo Pass.
For my own coffin the instructions were more complex. Having brought five boxes of earth from Highgate Cemetery on the Orient Express, I rented space in Hapgood’s Varna warehouse to store three of them until sent for by either myself or by the fictitious Mr. Marshmire. On
e earth-box I emptied, dividing the earth therein into four parts. Three of these I used to line, much more shallowly, boxes large enough to shelter me, which were to be stored until sent for in Veresti and in Bistritz, guaranteeing me a place of shelter near-by the Castle, should I require one. The fourth portion of my native earth I loosely stored in a fine cotton casing three layers thick, in fact, the emptied bags of three child-sized eiderdowns, which may be spread out in case of emergency and give me some semblance of rest, at least for the time that remains to me.
The remainder of the night, my dearest Catherine, I have spent in drawing up the various legal documents that will serve to transfer our money, and ownership of our secret accounts, into Nomie’s hands. At some time in the future she may succeed in breaking free of Dracula’s hold; the greatest gift I can offer her, who has been my friend in this terrible halfway house of Un-Death, is the freedom that money can bring.
For I do not mean to return to her, after I send her on her way from Veresti. Before I can return to Varna, the Czarina Catherine will make port in Galatz, where the shipping agents will duly wire news of her arrival to Lord Godalming, and thither Van Helsing and the others shall go. I will do what I can to delay pursuit, lest Nomie suffer punishment for my negligence. Yet I shall make sure that in so doing, I meet at last the joy of my own end, to be with you, however briefly, before a merciful God releases me to whatever Eternity He shall in His wisdom choose.
Yet just as poor little Nomie once said she would happily share eternity in Hell with the man she loved, so will I accept it with equanimity, if before I enter its gates I may see you and our lovely Vixie one last time.
Until then, I am,
Forever, your husband,
R. M. R.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“What is it that you hear, Madame Mina?”
Under the closed lids, Van Helsing saw the young woman’s eyes move, as subjects’ often did under hypnosis. As if they looked around them, seeing who knew what? The soft flesh beneath the eyes drew up a little, the dark brows, fine as the strokes of Japanese penmanship, drew down.
In a more commanding voice, he repeated, “What is it that you hear? Tell me.”
She turned her head, like a fretful child avoiding the medicine-spoon. Harker, kneeling at the head of the sofa in the suite’s pink-and-gold parlor, gave his wife’s hand a gentle pressure, and glanced up into Van Helsing’s eyes.
“Tell me what you hear, Madame Mina. This I command.”
She brought in her breath, let it go in a sigh. Van Helsing leaned forward a little, to study, without seeming to—without letting Harker guess the direction of his eyes—the teeth set in those colorless gums.
When she lay dying, struggling against the changes that Dracula’s contaminating blood wrought in her flesh, Lucy Westenra’s teeth had lengthened to the sharp canines of the vampire, even before death had fully claimed her. Remembering that flaxen girl’s struggle, Van Helsing could not repress a shiver, nor could he put aside, or pretend to himself that he did not feel, the traitorous stir in his loins.
Vile, he thought, shameful and vile. Yet how beautiful Lucy Westenra had been, how exquisite, the beauty of life mingling with the cold wonder of death’s threshold.
And though her teeth had not yet begun to grow, nor her gums to shrink back, he thought he saw that unearthly vampire loveliness reflected now in Mina Harker’s too-thin face.
“Water,” she whispered. “Rushing waves…masts creaking.” She moved her head again, her hair like sable velvet against the pale linen of the sheets and pillows they’d brought in, every night, from her bedroom. Against the dark of her hair, the wax-white of her skin, the round scar left by the consecrated Host on her forehead seemed lividly red, almost like raw flesh. Yet even that, to his own disgust, the old man found deeply erotic.
Dear God, what kind of man am I to look upon her who fights so bravely for her own soul—and she the wife of a man who loves her like the breath of his lungs!—and to think such thoughts as this? It had been twenty-five years since his own wife, his own beautiful Elaine, had disappeared into the terrible labyrinths of madness, leaving only a frightened, raving creature who bore little resemblance to the girl he had loved. In the first few years he had been driven to the prostitutes of Amsterdam, but shame had blunted his manhood without in the tiniest degree decreasing his aching need.
For two decades the life of the mind—and certain disciplines of the flesh—had proved a distraction. But like the physician of the Bible, he had never been able to heal himself. Nor could he now.
“Sleep now,” he said gently, and passed his hand above her face. “Sleep now and dream, and when you wake, you shall be refresh, and full of hope.”
The morning sunlight that filled the room, as Quincey Morris parted its curtains, had a chilly cast to it, grayed with the fogs that had for two days drifted over Varna’s harbor. Jonathan Harker, haggard still but curiously ebullient since word had come, the day before yesterday, that the Czarina Catherine had been sighted in the Dardanelles, lifted his wife in his arms and bore her into their bedroom. Despite the morning’s coolness Morris opened the window, for the parlor smelled of lamp-oil and too many people sleeping on its chairs and floor. John Seward, rumpled and reminding Van Helsing very much of the thin, earnest young student he’d known in Leyden thirteen years ago, began rolling up the blankets on which he and the other three men had slept, turn and turn about, for eleven nights now.
In those eleven days, no sign, no whisper of any paid agent of the vampire Count had so much as cast a shadow on their tracks. But Morris was right. Van Helsing knew this in his bones. It was not the time to take the slightest chance. Seward, Harker, and young Lord Godalming would all cat-nap during the day, as Van Helsing did himself, but for them all the main business of the day would be waiting.
Waiting for a telegram from the shipping agent, that would tell them that the Czarina Catherine was in port.
“It has to be today.” Godalming emerged from his room in a fresh jacket and tie, on his way downstairs to the barber’s and the baths. Morris, who’d proceeded laconically to his own morning routine of checking, cleaning, and loading every piece of the considerable arsenal they’d brought from London, only glanced up at his friend and scratched a corner of his long mustache.
Seward remarked, “I’m a little surprised it’s taking this long. They may have had to lay by because of the fog. You go on ahead, Art. I shall join you in a moment.” His brown glance touched Van Helsing’s as he gathered up the bedding. Van Helsing rose, and followed him to the door of Mina’s room, as Harker came out.
“She’s sleeping well,” the young solicitor said. “Better I think than she has in some time. Her color’s better, too, don’t you think?”
Van Helsing replied softly, “Even so.” The curtains of the bedroom were drawn; he could see the young schoolmistress sleeping in the gloom, dark braids laid gently on either side of her face.
Was she more beautiful than she had been yesterday? Pinker and healthier-looking, as Lucy had become when the vampire death stole over her? Harker hadn’t seen his wife’s dear friend succumb to Dracula’s curse: he would not know what her livelier demeanor, her brighter spirits yesterday might mean. Van Helsing was conscious of the young man’s dark gaze resting on his face, questioning, before Harker turned away.
But Seward knew. And Seward was watching him, too, as he looked at Mrs. Harker in the bedroom’s dusk.
How can you think such thought as this? he asked himself again, hating what he felt. Hating the image that seemed to burn itself into his brain, of kissing those vampire lips, of holding that coldly perfect flesh in crushing embrace against his own. This woman, so clever and so logical and so good in her heart, she is fighting for her own soul, and for her husband’s happiness and perhaps his very life as well, for it is certain that if she die, he will not leave her long alone in her grave.
Yet the flesh, like the heart, has reasons of its own, of which the rea
son knows nothing and cares less.
And as he saw the unearthly beauty of the vampire make its first inroads on that lively, lovely woman, that kind-hearted person whom he had come to love as a daughter, he felt the insane whisper of lust chew at the inner corners of his brain.
Before they had left London, Mina Harker had made them read over her the Service for the Dead. Had made each man swear that before they would let her become vampire, they would stake her through the heart and cut off her head, as they had done with Lucy, and this oath Van Helsing knew he would force himself to honor, out of the love he bore her. The most he could do for her was that, and to dissemble his private madness so that she would continue to trust him as a friend. They were like a band of brothers to her, among whom she could sleep without a second thought; her only comfort, Van Helsing knew, in a time when she must have been living in a nightmare of hard-hidden terror.
He would die himself rather than take that comfort, that trust, away.
Yet when he lay down to sleep later that morning, it was of the vampire-Mina, the voluptuous smiling demon-Mina, that he dreamed.
Dr. Seward’s Diary*
27 October
No news yet of the ship we wait for…
“Mrs. Marshmire will meet you at Bistritz,” explained Renfield, as in the pre-dawn cold he, the shipping-agent Ross, and the hired drivers checked the harness and wagon for its journey up to the Borgo Pass. “She has made her own arrangements to get there, and you will find rooms for you and your men at the Golden Krone Hotel. She is going home to her family there to rest, and to recover a little of the tenor of her mind. Please bear with her fancies, and indulge them so far as you’re able. I assure you, they are only fancies, and nothing of a serious nature. But it will disturb her very much if her will is crossed.”
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