Dracula Unbound (18 page)

“And we'll have a cigar,” said Stoker. “At least, I will.”

This response excited Joe into a less lethargic state.

“We won't delay. I may be no Christian, but this is a kind of Christian quest.” As he spoke, he took a New Testament from a side table and waved it aloft as if in proof. “We start tomorrow.”

“And we prepare tonight,” said Stoker, through his cigar.

When Stoker was out of the room, his wife came to Bodenland's side.

“My dear father was full of wisdom—as befitted a man who was a lieutenant colonel and served in the Crimea. One thing he told me was that many impossible things happen. The important thing is to decide which impossible things to believe and which not to.”

“Sound advice, ma'am.”

“My father's advice was always sound. I'm undecided as yet about your impossibilities, but I'd like to ask you, if I may—supposing it were somehow possible to venture into the future, as one ventures into London—would I be able to establish if dear Bram's latest novel will be a success?” She laughed, as if thinking it was a silly question for a colonel's daughter to ask.

“Bram will call it
Dracula
, as I advised, whatever it may be called now. It will be a great success, and translated into many languages. Maybe I could ask you a question in return, Mrs. Stoker?”

“By all means.”

“What do you think your husband's novel is about?”

“He assures me he hopes to reassert the proper womanly role of Christian English decency, matronly, angelic …”

“Sexless?”

“Please do not be coarse. We do not speak of such things.” She lifted a hand in delicate reproach.

“I apologize, ma'am. Most readers regard
Dracula
as a horror tale, whatever Bram says. His own mother back in Ireland will write and tell him it is more frightening than Mary Shelley's marvelous
Frankenstein
. The last time I saw my new daughter-in-law Kylie … well, perhaps the last time bar one … she was reading Bram's novel. Everyone on the planet—in China, in the Amazon basin—probably knows the name of Dracula. Fame on an almost unprecedented scale, Mrs. Stoker.”

“Well, I'm sorry about that villain Dracula's fame, though glad about all the rest. Some names, like some bodies, are best buried and forgotten.”

9

It was growing dark in the woods below the house. Sunset was overcast. Spinks the gardener, assisted by the two men, was loading Stoker's homemade bullets and some rifles on the time train.

This remarkable vehicle had been inspected with many a whistle of admiration from Stoker and many a scratch of the head from Spinks. The latter was philosophical.

“If it works, then it works, sir, and you needn't worry. My stomach works, but I don't need to know the whys and wherefores of it.”

“A sensible approach,” Stoker agreed. “The less you know about your stomach, the better it works, no doubt. Light a storm lantern, Spinks, will you? It's dark early this evening.”

As the darkness encompassed the three men, as the Earth revolving moved into its own shadow, so the ancient forces of darkness began to emerge. Not being subject to life, they were tireless. While the time train was being loaded, Bella, who had once been alive, was descending some crumbling stairs leading down to a crypt.

She was newly roused from the oblivion which overtook her in the holy hours of daylight. Her hair lay about her shoulders. About her lips was a deadly pallor. Her fragility expressed itself in the lingering way she descended the broken stair. No living man, regarding her, could have resisted the lure of a ruined madonna, fearing his own weakness.

Yet she herself, the magnet for terror, was also subject to terror. She went to a rendezvous with her Lord.

Some reassurance was to be drawn from the atmosphere of the crypt, which was dark and rank. Her keenly attuned ear caught the drip of moisture, the whisper of a spider in its web, and all the sharp-toothed harmonies of decay. It suited her, too, that the stained glass window to one side allowed in only the barest stain of light, red-tainted from the dregs of sunset.

Tombs stood all about. An open coffin lay nearby, lending its gamey flavor to the air. Bella stood by it, slightly luminous, waiting in absolute stillness.

At a sign of some kind, perhaps a change of pressure in the morbid dampness, she sank to her knees, lifting her white hands up to her breast. Her mouth opened and her pale gums made her teeth look longer and sharper than ever.

In the gloom, very distant, a mighty figure materialized. It remained for an instant at the brink of visibility. Then it began its advance toward the kneeling woman. It had infinite space to cover, but it approached at infinite speed. Suddenly it was close, robed in smoldering darkness. Its face was long, pale, powerful. It had horns, rising on bosses from its thick, coarse hair.

It had no majesty. What it had was brute presence, before which Bella cowered.

She addressed him as Lord and Count, and said that Bodenland would soon be finished as thoroughly as the other grave-defiler, Clift. She would not let him escape. She spoke submissively, in her deep growling voice.

There was no doubting the monster's power when he stood forth as now, horned and in his true guise. There was no doubting the moral ugliness of his strength—or the note of sorrow in his voice when he made his reply.

“My bride and daughter, be not too certain. Nothing is ordained. Show confidence, inwardly fear. Bear in mind that the Fleet Ones must always remain the negative side of humanity, their dark obverse. Otherwise we hold no attraction for them.”

“Our attraction, our darkness, is our strength, Great Lord.”

She might as well not have spoken. His voice ground on, with the light of hell in his mouth as well as in his eyes.

“For all our strengths, we remain forever slaves to the human imagination. You deal with a man of more than ordinary imaginative power.”

“I shall conquer, Lord, for I have learned much from you.”

“Only in the realm of Death where humans cannot go have we total supremacy. Remember that, my daughter and bride.”

“I do and I will.”

“Then come to me.” He was already aroused. With a cry, Bella moved into his arms and gave her corpselike being to him.

It grew still darker in the woods below the house. Bodenland was inside the time train, stowing away ammunition, general supplies, and Stoker's cricket bat, which he swore was his lucky mascot; he had scored several centuries with it, which was a good omen for traveling through long periods of time.

Examining the old rifles, Bodenland called down to the ginger man to express his doubts about them.

“But we have proof they're effective,” Stoker said, pausing and looking up at his friend. “You're forgetting. It was a bullet from one of these that finished off the vampire in your friend's ancient grave. They'll do well. And don't forget, Joe, these ugly critters have guile but no real savvy—no human intelligence. A madman at the loony bin told me that.”

Bodenland squatted on his haunches in the entrance to the train.

“I was trying to think over that very problem in evolutionary terms.”

“You mean Darwinism?” Stoker's broad face was lit by the uncertain light of a storm lantern.

“Exactly. Listen, Bram, we now know that vampires evolved millions of years ago from some other form of life. They adapted to parasitism. They developed sucking mouth-parts, they developed a kind of hypnotic and semitelepathic power to attract victims. Those changes had to be at the expense of some other ability. Well, even over millions of years, as they came more or less to resemble
Homo sapiens
, they did not develop a neocortex.”

“But they can talk.”

“They can, but reluctantly, it seems. They have the classic one-track mind. Try them on the rules of baseball. Nix! I believe they also lost an ability. Does it make sense to you to say that their intense sexual power is generated because they are themselves sexually frustrated, having lost the power of reproduction?”

Stoker stared down at the trampled grass under his feet.

“Spinks,” he said to the young gardener, who was standing nearby with his arms akimbo, listening, “You'd better cut on back to the house. This conversation is not for you.” When the lad did as he was told, Stoker said, “I understand your meaning perfectly, Joe. Vampires can't get on the job, Dracula himself being an exception. All they do for sex is suck. Not
F
but
S
, you could say.”

“So how do they keep the species going?”

“That is a problem. If you can't get it up, the population goes down.”

“They recruit, don't they? It's all in your novel. They recruit humans into the ranks of the Un-Dead. And such ex-humans also face brain-extinction.”

Stoker leaned against the train and looked up through the canopy of leaves to the darkening sky, where a flight of rooks made belated wing overhead.

“You're saying there are two strains in the vampire kind, the way it needs blacks and whites to make up humanity. So one strain is ex-humans. What is the other?”

“Overgrown vampire bats. Or their equivalent back in the Mesozoic. That is, pterodactyls and pteranodons. From devouring carrion, it was a short step to preying on the half-living.”

“No, no,” said Stoker vehemently. “I'll not believe it. I'll not believe that such creatures—brainless—could make this amazing vehicle and travel on it through all the years of time. You can't explain that, Joe, can you?”

Bodenland laughed as he jumped to the ground.

“Nope. But I will …”

“Let's get back to the house.” They trudged uphill through the copse, chatting companionably, agreeing to make a start early the following morning.

As they reached the lawn, with the house in view, van Helsing approached. Seeing that he had a speech ready on his lips, Stoker grinned and held up a hand.

“Don't tell me, Van. Joe and I are on a crusade, and nothing is going to stop us.”

“You are not fit, Mr. Stoker, believe me.”

“Fit or not, I'm going. I arranged it with Irving. We believe the vampires can be stopped, and we're going to do it. Why not come with us?”

Van Helsing looked appalled.

“If you indeed are going on this dangerous errand, it is my graven duty to stay here to protect Mrs. Stoker.”

Stoker patted him on the arm. “That's right, Van. I applaud your keen sense of duty.”

He sniffed the breeze. “I have a feeling that bad things may be abroad again later, Joe—without wishing to scare the doctor here.”

“‘Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night …'”

Stoker completed the quotation for him “… ‘Nor for the arrow that flieth by day. For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.' Sounds as if the old psalm-writers were regularly plagued by our friends, doesn't it?”

It was growing darker still on the extensive grounds of the lunatic asylum next door. Dim lights burned in the building, none outside it. The ruin of the old abbey behind the asylum had known no candle since Cromwell's artillery had struck its ancient walls. As for the extensive and neglected grounds, so close to London yet so near to the archaic, they retained the nature of wilderness everywhere, embracing darkness early, surrendering it late.

In his cell on the north corner of the north wing of the asylum, Renfield was on his knees, praying, counting, humming, reciting nursery rhymes, wagging his head like a pendulum as the fit took him. Like Bram Stoker, he had scented something on the breeze, and knew ill things were abroad. In a corner of his brain he remembered the big bronze sound of the Salvation Army band playing in the gutter outside the mean room which his family rented; he banged the tune with his fists on the drafty stonework now: “The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling,” with a clash of the cymbals on the word “Hell”; while he, almost naked and the size of a shrimp, cowered with an even tinier brother under the one bed in the room, powerless not to watch his drunken ogre of a father battering his mother to death with a chair leg; and the brass band played on triumphantly outside, drowning her last cries—“For you but not for me-a-lee-a-lee,” went his fist now on the gray stone.

On one of the walls of his cell, out of reach, was an electric light, protected from vandalism by a mesh.

A junior warden looked into the cell, saying cheerfully, “Lights out, Renfield, old sport. Going to be all right, are we?”

The madman rolled on his back.

“Please don't switch the darkness on, Bob. Leave me the light, I beg. Something's going on in the crypt, worse than slugs and snails and puppydogs' tails. Leave me the light. Ummm-mm.”

“Sorry, old cocker, orders is orders, got to put it out. Nine o'clock.”

“
Ruff, ruff, ruff!
” He rolled on the floor, barking. “Bob, Bob, there's a big dog in here, got in with me. Going to eat me. Leave me the light—my last words …”

“Sorry, me old cock-sparrer, I don't see no dog.”

He slammed the cell door, switching off the madman's light from outside the cell.

The wolf arrived immediately.

It appeared from wind-tossed bushes a long way distant and made straight for Renfield at a good sharp trot. Renfield at once set up a great hullabaloo and ran to the far corner of the cell. The wolf trotted the faster. Great was the distance, as great its speed.

The cell was awhirl with something like snow as the wolf closed on its prey. At the last minute, it changed shape. It became Count Dracula.

Renfield compressed himself into his corner, again the size of a shrimp, watching powerless, as once he had watched murder.

“Ummm-mm.”

Count Dracula was brilliantly robed. He had a cow face and horns and a powdery blue complexion. Sometimes Death comes as a clown.