Slave Of Dracula (24 page)

“I am asking you,” he went on earnestly, “I am begging you: call your friends in. Grant me peace, as you
granted your poor beautiful Lucy peace. I would not serve Dracula, but while I ex-ist, I cannot now do
other than serve him. And I cannot do this thing myself.”

“You are sure, then?” said Seward, deeply moved and at the same time profoundly curious. He had
observed how with Lucy’s death, and her transition to the vampire state, her body had become perfect,
inhumanly beautiful and shed of its moral flaws.

Had this process extended to whatever flaws existed in Ren-field’s nervous system?

Which was more perilous, a mad vampire or a sane one? His mind chased this thought even as Renfield
said, “I am certain,” his voice sounding suddenly tremendously far off. Seward yawned hugely, his
awareness drifting in spite of all he could do.

“Van Helsing,” he said, making ready to rise and then sink-ing back onto the couch. “Van Helsing will
know … how to go about this . . .”

Then the next moment the gentle jostling of the train-cars transmuted itself to the jogging of those
ridiculous shaggy ponies they’d bought from the villagers in Tobolsk, and he was gazing with Art and
Quincey out across the endless barren brownness of the Russian steppe, looking for the slightest sign of
the vanished Uncle Harry.

“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 Un-cle’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 cor-ridor 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 pro-vision 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 cir-cle of his arm. She rested her head on his
shoulder: more beauti-ful 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 compan-ionship. I
read … except that I dare not be seen to favor any-thing 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 story-books
through a wasteland of flaming mud and devils. But at least, I told myself, I’d still have them. But he was
right,” she fin-ished 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 be-came 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 remem-ber 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 Shake-speare, 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 some-times 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 crav-ing for a life eternal, stolen from the
lives of others, behind a farce of pity! Child forsooth! This woman is an Un-Dead mur-deress
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 mon-sters 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 be-tween 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
for-ward 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 supernat-ural 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 hu-man 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 con-cern 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 tri-fle 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 fam-ilies 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, see-ing 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 insuffi-cient, 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 C z a r i n a
C a t h e r i n e . 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