Slave Of Dracula (26 page)

Then something moved beside the dilapidated privy sheds. A woman, her gold hair hanging tangled
over the muddied re-mains 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 sway-ing drunkards back toward the safety
of our pensione. Searching for her, I had been plagued by the recurring fear that I’d en-counter 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 cen-tury 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 re-turn 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 flow-ers, 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, quest-ing 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 ly-ing on the rose plush sofa of the suite’s over-decorated 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 fad-ing, 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. Go-dalming pacing, Dr. Seward reading or
pretending to read a medical journal, though he did not turn the pages, Morris play-ing 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 pen-sione 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, paus-ing for too long, then going on its way.

***

Telegram, Rufus Smith, Lloyd’s, London, to Lord Godalming care of HAM 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 hypernatural senses.

A letter? Money? Did it matter?

He remembered his dreaming visions of laudanum and mad-ness 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 Go-dalming’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 Ameri-can 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 hat-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 dis-covered a day or so later, all
the rest of them had taken to wear-ing crucifixes, to Renfield’s disgust.

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 retreat-ing tap of
Nomie’s heels.

Heart cold within him, Renfield dissolved himself more com-pletely into mists, flowed like water along
the dim-lit hotel cor-ridor 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 ob-scenities 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 morn-ing, 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 Metro-pole’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.