“Van Helsing knows what he’s doing. I trust his judgement more than that of any man living, and I think Mrs. Harker will be safer in his company, even on the threshold of our enemy, than she would be back in Galatz with one less experienced in the ways of the things that we fight. Harker told us, remember, that once at his Castle again he will have command of the gypsies who acknowledge him their lord. We’ll be hard-pressed to fight all of them. And once we get close to the Castle, the Count won’t be the only vampire with which we’ll have to contend.”
Nomie.
Renfield felt a chill pass over him, as he had at the moment of his own death.
He melted into the form of a bat, and flew away into the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
At the tide’s turn he crossed the river and, taking on the form of a wolf, ran on into the growing day. The country here was truly rough and broken, thick forest alternating with stony meadows where sheep pastured in the summer. Ahead of him, the mountains were heavily curtained with snow-clouds, the wind bitterly cold. Though there was little direct sun, the daylight made Wolf-Renfield woozy and sick. At times he could barely recall who he was or what he was doing, save that he knew he had to reach the Castle. That he had to follow the twisting track up to the Pass.
Just before nightfall he passed a band of gypsy men, riding their shaggy ponies around a leiter-wagon, a sort of loosely built, skeletal farm-cart he had glimpsed negotiating the turns of the winding road as he’d followed the river northwest. The Count’s mortal servants, he assumed, and wondered how Dracula communicated with them, and what bargain had been struck between the old boyar and the hetman of their tribe. There were about twenty of them, mustachioed and indescribably dirty, armed with knives but only a few decrepit flintlocks, very like the badmashes who robbed travelers in the passes of the Hindu Kush.
Like the Afghani robbers, Renfield thought, they almost certainly scorned the laws of the settled lands. Like the Afghani robbers, they would recognize and obey only strength.
His own resting-place far behind him, he loped on into the night.
He saw the Castle just after dawn on the second day. In morning’s splendor, Wotan had sung—the real Wotan, the Wotan of Das Rheingold—it lay masterless, and gloriously beckoned to me.
The night had refreshed him, but he knew the weariness of daylight would be crueler still and harder to bear; it was difficult, even now, to set one aching paw down before the other. The Castle seemed unreachably distant, from the place where he came out of the woods, where the road climbed toward the Pass. It stood on a coign of rock where the eastward end of the Pass first narrowed, guarding the road that the Turks must traverse to invade the green lands beyond. Towers and battlements over-hung the way, nearly five hundred feet above it. Indeed the morning’s splendor dyed the grim walls pale gold, but all around it the snow-clouds made a pall of shadow. Even as Renfield watched, they closed upon it like a ghostly hand, hiding the walls from sight.
By the smell, it was snowing in the Pass before noon.
Through the day he trotted, stumbling with weariness and unable to rest. At the Castle he could rest, he thought—Nomie had told him that the earth of the Master would shelter the fledgling, and vice versa. He wondered what the adventures of the Countess and Sarike had been on their way back home, and whether, when night came, they would watch from the walls for their Master’s return.
By this time the steam-launch must have crippled itself trying to ascend the upper Bistritzia’s rapids: Harker and Godalming would be forced to abandon it, and continue on whatever horses they could find.
Their delay would probably give Dracula time to reach the Castle in safety, but it would not affect Van Helsing’s implacable mission. And the only thing that Renfield could think of more horrible than Dracula winning his race and summoning Renfield back to the Castle to be his slave, was the thought that he must serve him through Eternity alone.
When lying still in the shadows of the icy afternoon, he tried to sink his mind into half-sleep, to reach out to Nomie and warn her to flee, but he could not.
He could only stagger to his feet and trot on, praying he would reach the castle before Van Helsing did.
It snowed that night. Guns will do them no good, if Mrs. Harker freezes to death, Quincey Morris had said. Huddled in a cup-shaped bay in the rocks at the very foot of the Pass, trying to recruit enough strength to go on, Wolf-Renfield remembered Mina Harker’s despairing scream, Unclean, unclean! and the touch of her mind as it sought for its Master. Recalled his dream, in the misty world between living and death, of the Count forcing the dark-haired woman to drink his blood, as Renfield had drunk the blood of Nomie and her sisters, to begin the transformation of human flesh into the deathless flesh of the vampire.
Once she had pressed her lips to the welling dark blood of the Count’s gashed chest, it wouldn’t matter whether Mina Harker died in the next moment or seventy years in the future. The change to vampire had begun in her flesh. If Dracula remained in the living world, her mind and soul would be drawn to his, to be upheld, cradled, while her body died, then returned to the changed flesh within the grave. She would know the Count with the terrible, unbreakable intimacy with which Renfield knew the Countess, and Sarike, and Nomie. She would be his slave, under his domination as the three vampire women were, as Renfield was.
Forever.
Were I not here, running in wolf-form to thwart them, reflected Renfield sadly, I would be one of Van Helsing’s hunters, trying to save you, too.
But that wasn’t true, either.
If I were not here, vampire, I would be back in Dr. Seward’s asylum, eating flies and trying to forget that I murdered my beautiful Catherine, my beautiful Vixie.
Though it was night and the strength of night was flowing into him, Renfield laid his head on his bruised and smarting forepaws and wondered if there was actually an answer to this conundrum somewhere, or if everything that had happened to him since the age of twelve—the age when those maniacal rages had first begun to twist at his mind—had simply been some gigantic celestial jest.
In his exhausted mind he saw her, one of the two people who had been unconditionally kind to him in his days at Rushbrook House. The only one who had talked to him as a man and an equal and not as a fractious, contemptible child. Far off, like the dim half-dream in which he’d seen the Count drink her blood, he was aware of her, her face pale in the wildly licking flare of a small campfire, her dark eyes following in fear as Van Helsing drew a circle around her and the fire, and with the meticulous care of an alchemist crumbled a Host, like a fine dust, into the snow of the circle. The air was filled with flying snowflakes, and Renfield was aware of the dark bulk of a small carriage, behind which sheltered four horses, horses who pulled at their tethers and thrashed their heads, their eyes catching the firelight in rolling terror.
Van Helsing, thickly bundled in a fur coat, was shivering with the cold. Mina, wrapped in rugs and sheepskins beside the fire, did not tremble, and her dark eyes seemed curiously bright. But when the old man came back to her, she clung to his arm, pressed her face to his shoulder.
Among the wildly whirling snowflakes, the firelight caught the red reflection of eyes. In his half-dream Renfield saw them, as Mina and Van Helsing saw them: the ghostly faces with their red-lipped smiles, the lift and swirl of the white dresses they wore. The gold of Nomie’s hair, wind-caught like a mermaid’s beneath the sea, and the storm-wrack of Sarike’s and the Countess’s.
As they’d hung in the air outside the Castle window in his earlier dream, calling to Jonathan Harker, they hung now in the mealy tumult of the blizzard, arms around one another’s waists, reaching out.
Calling to Mina to come to them, to be their sister.
Nomie would be good to her, thought Renfield. But he’d seen how the Countess treated the youngest of her sister-wives, alternating caressing sweetness with almost unbelievable spite, as sisters sometimes do. Would the Count protect his newest bride from t
he others? Of course not.
He saw Mina shrink against Van Helsing’s side, sickened terror in her eyes as she saw her fate.
She is freezing to death, thought Renfield despairingly. And as her body drifted toward death, so her soul was drawn toward the other three, whom the Count had chosen, seduced, and killed.
He saw the Countess smile, and point at Mina with glinting malice; saw her lean to speak with Sarike. But Nomie, floating behind them, only gazed across the barrier of the Holy circle at the dark-haired woman poised between living and dark Un-Death, and Renfield saw pity in her eyes.
Through the night he climbed the Pass, struggling against the slashing winds, trembling with hunger and exhaustion. Renfield felt the dawn coming, as he waded breast-deep in the new-fallen snow, and briefly debated transforming himself into a bat, for he knew he was still many miles from the Castle.
But the winds were still too strong for him to fly against, and by day, he knew he would be nearly blind. Then, too, he thought, he would not be able to shift his form again until the stroke of noon.
A bat could not take on a man.
So he fought his way through the drifts, and with the rising of the sun, the wind grew less. The world was transformed, ice-white and blinding, the rocks standing out against the marble of the snow like cinder-colored walls. Under his paws the snow squeaked a little, the only sound in the birdless woods. A little before noon he reached the road that turned aside up toward the Castle, and saw a man’s churned tracks.
They were reasonably fresh, not more than two hours. The outer gate was barred, but the small wicket cut into the larger leaf of iron-strapped wood had been forced, the wood around its rusted hinges glaring yellow where a crowbar had ripped. Wolf-Renfield slipped through, following the tracks across the deep drifts of the courtyard, to the stair that led up to the half-open door.
He’ll search the chapel and the vaults, thought Renfield frantically. The place must have a labyrinth of crypts and sub-cellars. I may still be in time. If I can hold him off, delay him until noon, when Nomie and the others can change their form, move about…
If I can kill him…
Did they hear? he wondered. Were they aware of this man’s footfalls, of the scent of the blood in his veins? Could they read his resolution in their uneasy dreams, as he searched through the vaults, pushed open the long-rusted hinges of those secret doors, descended the narrow, twisting stairs? With the preternatural senses of a wolf, Renfield listened, scented, seeking the faint creak of boot-leather, the reek of burning lamp-oil.
What he smelled, as he came to the top of a flight of descending steps, was blood.
A lot of blood.
Stumbling, trembling with weariness, Renfield slipped down the stairs.
He found the body of the poet Gelhorn at the bottom, curled together and with a look on his sheep-like face of shocked despair. He’d been dead for about two weeks. The Countess and Sarike must have killed him as soon as they safely reached the Castle. Throat, wrists, and chest—visible through his shirt, which had been half-torn from his body—were all marked with gaping punctures, and with smaller marks that had half-healed at the time of his death.
Wolf-Renfield sniffed briefly at the body, then passed it by.
Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum*
5 November
I knew that there were at least three graves to find—graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, ’til sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present a kiss—and man is weak…
Sarike lay in the crypt beyond. Her head had been cut off, and a stake of fire-hardened wood protruded from beneath her left breast. Her thin white dress, and the velvet lining of her coffin, were both soaked with blood. Blood splattered her face and arms, and dotted the white garlic-flowers stuffed into her half-open mouth. It was their stench, rather than that of the blood, that turned Renfield’s stomach, and he would have vomited, had there been anything within him to throw up.
Van Helsing had trodden in the blood, and his sticky track wove back and forth among the half-dozen tombs within that small crypt. The lids had been all wrenched off, and lay shattered on the floor. Renfield went straight to the last of them, the tomb where the Countess Elizabeth lay.
She was already beginning to crumble into dust. He knew it was she by the dark coils of her raven hair, and by the gold ring on her hand. By the bloody footprint beside the coffin, Van Helsing had stood here for a long time, looking down at her as she slept.
Blood-tracks led out the door, into the deeper dark of the inner crypts.
Nomie, thought Renfield frantically, Nomie, please be there…
Please have hidden yourself, have concealed your sleeping-place, that he won’t find you…That he won’t come on you until I can be there to stop him, to kill him, to do whatever I have to…
That he won’t come on you until noon, when you can wake, and sit up, and flee. When I can turn from wolf to man…
He listened, but though he smelled the fishy whiff of lamp-oil, he heard no sound, no creak of boot-leather.
A descending stair, in the wake of the blood-tracks and the smoke.
Then the far-off glimmer of lantern-light.
Staggering, Renfield limped down, to where a barred iron door closed the entrance to the deepest of the castle crypts. In the lantern-light beyond it Renfield saw the high tomb in its center, graven only with the name DRACULA, and all around it the torn-up flagstones where the gypsies had dug out fifty boxes’ worth of graveyard earth for shipment to London. He pressed himself to the bars, invisible in the darkness, sick with horror and shock.
A smaller tomb lay perpendicular to the foot of the large one. Beside this Van Helsing stood in his shirtsleeves despite the brutal cold, the lantern at his feet, gazing down into the coffin, and on his face was a look that mingled pity and burning desire.
Blood splattered his face and splotched his clothing, dripped from his white sidewhiskers and hair. He held a hammer in one hand, a fresh, unbloodied stake in the other, and on the coffin’s edge lay a foot-long scalpel. Renfield wanted to scream, Nomie! but could not.
He could feel the hour of noon, slipping to its slow zenith overhead. In the silence of the crypt Van Helsing’s breathing was very loud. It was slow and thick, and his eyes had the look of a man hypnotized, caught by some terrible dream of self-loathing and lust.
Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum*
Presently, I find in a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister which, like Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of the mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion…
Having spent years among the strange temptations of India, and months in the asylum at Rushbrook, Renfield knew that look very, very well.
We lure by our beauty, he remembered Nomie saying to him in London: It is how we hunt. We disarm the mind through the senses and the dreams. How else would we survive? Men see us, and follow, despite all they know, drawn by their need.
Van Helsing’s mouth trembled, like that of a man beholding a vision; his hands shook, on hammer and stake.
The splattered blood, the violence with which the stakes had been driven into Sarike’s body, and that of the Countess, told their own tale. Furiously, desperately, Van Helsing had been killing, not only the vampires, but his own frantic desire for them. His own overwhelming shame.
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His breath laboring, moving as if stake and hammer were both wrought of lead, Van Helsing brought them up. Braced the stake beneath Nomie’s breast. Then stood again, hammer half-raised, looking down into the coffin with sweat pouring from his face and eyes stretched with madness.
Had he had human lips, a human voice, Renfield would have whispered, Nomie, no…
The crypt was silent, the lantern-flame unwavering on the vampire-hunter’s motionless face and shaking hands.
Renfield felt the touch of noon in the crypt’s darkness, through the snowy layers of cloud overhead. But even as he flowed into human shape in the darkness, laid hands upon the bars of the door, he saw Nomie sit up in her coffin. Gold hair tumbled over her shoulders, white sleeves fell back from white arms.
Stake and hammer slithered from Van Helsing’s hands.
Blue eyes looked into blue. But while Nomie’s gaze was calm, ready, filled with the peace of one who has passed decades beyond hope, Van Helsing’s was wide with horror, shame, despair—and with the exquisite unbreathing anticipation of surrender.
Then Nomie leaned forward, took the old man’s face between her hands, and very gently kissed his lips.
An instant later she dissolved into mist and shadows, and flowed away across the stone floor, to vanish into the darkness.
Dr. Van Helsing’s Memorandum*
But God be thanked…before the spell could be wrought further upon me, I had nerved myself to my wild work…
Had it been but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three!…
God be thanked, my nerve did stand…
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
(Undated)
My dearest heart,
It seems that there is after all yet more to write.
After arriving at Castle Dracula, and witnessing Nomie’s escape from the vampire-hunter Van Helsing—through circumstances curious enough to constitute a miracle—I followed Nomie in the form of mist, down through the dark of the crypts and through the crevices of a vault that had been bricked up long ago. But time had had its way with the mortar between the stones, enough to admit the two of us before the short moments of noon had passed. There was no coffin in that crypt, only chest after chest of gold coins, and the skeleton of the wretched woman who had coveted them above all things. Yet the earth beneath the flagstones was the hallowed soil of the family tombs nevertheless, and in it, twined in Nomie’s arms, I slept.
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