Renfield
                                           - Slave of Dracula -

                                            Barbara Hambly
                                            Copyright © 2006


For George

With special thanks to Neil Gaiman


* All passages indicated with an asterisk are taken verbatim from Bram Stoker’s Dracula *




                                      CHAPTER ONE

  R.M.R.'s notes

  20 May

  7 flies, 3 spiders

  I've filled many notebook pages and scraps of paper with these daily reckonings. Sometimes I look at
them and they make no sense to me, nothing at all but scratchmarks. In more sensible moments, I think
the counting is just a sad form of mental mis-chief. It's a way to avoid thinking about the truly essential
question, which is, of course, what does a single housefly mean?



  000



  Letter, Miss Mina Murray to Miss Lucy Westenra 20 May

  My dearest Lucy,

  I am writing this to you in the happiest of moods. Can you guess why? Yes, I've heard from Jonathan
today! He writes from Bistritz, the post-town nearest Castle Dracula-to receive a letter a mere two
weeks after it was posted is a miracle, for Transylvania. What a great thing it is, to be living so close to
the threshold of the twentieth century! He still has heard little con-cerning his client the Count, save that
he is rumored to keep not one but three beautiful wives. This may be proper form beyond the woods
and east of the Danube, but I know you will agree that it is two wives too many. I've always felt that I am
too trust-ing or too unimaginative to know the pangs of envy. Still, I must admit to a moment of jealousy,
and in my idle dreams these women cannot help but notice how fine a man my Jonathan is.
  I know that it would be unreasonable of me to expect Jonathan's business with the Count-the purchase
of property here in England somewhere-to be finished in more than a few days, yet already I begin to fret
that he has not outdistanced his own letter and arrived on my doorstep before it. I will write Mr.
Hawkins, Jonathan's employer, that after Jonathan and I are married, when my husband must travel so on
company business, I must go with him. Naturally I will tell Mr. Hawkins that I can be of great benefit to
his firm with my record-keeping and skill at the typewriter, and further, that the company need not pay
me a shilling. I don't know if I could bear another such separation, and I know that Jonathan surely feels
the same-when he can turn his thoughts from the Count's captivating wives.

  Well, dear Lucy, you mentioned that you will be having din-ner soon at Rushbrook House. I have not
met your Dr. John Seward, but you have written that he is handsome and quite out of the ordinary. I
should suppose so. No ordinary man would in-vite a young lady to dine at a madhouse.

  Your loving, Mina



  000



  “Cook says, must she obey every order from that Mr. Blaine? Because if she does, she says she won't
be able to get the chicken on the table in time."

   Dr. John Seward briefly closed his eyes and didn't even try to imagine what contradictory order given
by the elegant butler Blaine-borrowed for the occasion from the local baronet, Sir Ambrose Poole-would
preclude Mrs. Davies having the chicken ready for dinner with Mrs. Westenra and her daughter.
Ordinar-ily, the maid's question would have intrigued him. (Did he com-mand her to polish the borrowed
silver tureen that Sir Ambrose brought along with him? To fetch newer and fresher lettuce-leaves
wherewith to line the platter?) Now it represented yet one more minor monster tussling with his
trouser-leg as he prepared for the major encounter of the evening.

  In the quiet, steady voice he'd perfected in a decade of deal-ing with the insane, he replied, "Please tell
Mrs. Davies to use her best judgment, and to refer Mr. Blaine to me if there seems m be a conflict. Tell
them both that getting the food on the table for dinner is my first priority."

  The housemaid Mary nodded, the expression in her eyes clearly proclaiming that there was some major
portion of Sew-a rd's instructions which she hadn't understood, and she darted back through the door of
the little pantry and clattered down the corridor to the kitchen. Seward wondered if he should go af-ter
her and ascertain what part of his instructions were going to be garbled in transmission this time, but the
chiming of the pantry clock claimed his attention like the salvo of a battle's opening guns.

  Eight.

  Dear God, they would be here any minute.
You've confronted cannibal savages in the South Seas on that round-the-world voyage with Lord
Godalming's daffy brother, Seward reminded himself. You've faced of f against Comancheros in
Texas out to murder you and your friends for your boots. Can one respectable English matron out
to secure A Good Match for her daughter be worse?
  O f course she can.
  As he passed through the dining-room-its faded silk wall-papers and graceful proportions a reminder
of the house's patri-cian origins-he encountered Dr. Hennessey, his night surgeon, pouring himself what
was clearly his third or fourth cognac of the evening.
   "Cheer up, Johnny," encouraged the older man with a rather hazy grin. "This girl-she has money, eh?
And she's pretty? How about this mother of hers, then ... She has money, too?"
   Seward blenched at the thought of the fat-bellied and sweaty Irishman-the best that Rushbrook
Asylum could get for its rather limited funds-sidling up to Mrs. Westenra with proposi-tions of a double
wedding, and said, "I believe the money is all secured in an unbreakable trust," a patent fabrication that
he hoped would hold for the evening. "As for Miss Westenra . . ."
   The bell pealed and the attendant Langmore, bedight in liv-ery borrowed like everything else for the
evening from Sir Am-brose, strode through from pantry to hall, shouting, "I'm comin', then, keep your .
. ."
   Seward strode ahead of him, cutting him off at the hall door and preceding him into the small and
rather gloomy entryway that had been carved out of what had once been the house's li-brary. All the
grand rooms in the main block of Rushbrook House had years ago been converted for the use of the
doctors and the patients: the original dining-room into a clinic with a dispensary in the pantry, the
drawing-room into a day-room for the quieter patients, the morning-room for hydrotherapy, and the
billiard-room-rather grimly equipped with several patent “tranquilizing chairs” and a Swing. Many of the
rooms of the wing allotted to the Staff had a tinkered-with look, where a side door had been given the
trappings of a main entrance and rooms originally spacious had been divided to approximate a normal
household.
   Mrs. Westenra was taking in all these alterations with a cold blue eye that missed not a halved window
nor a single square inch where brick had been substituted for marble. "How very cozy," she said as
Seward escorted her and her daughter across the threshold, and through the hall into the rest of the
original library, now doing duty as drawing-room for the Superintende-nt, i.e. himself. "What a very
clever use of space."
   "I think it's charming." Lucy shrugged her wrap into Lang-more's waiting hands, giving the
attendant-cum-footman one of those sweetly dazzling smiles that, even glancing, had won Seward's heart
the night he'd first encountered her at a party at Lord Godalming's. Then she turned the full brightness of
her eyes on him. "Are those hyacinths from the garden here at Rushbrook, Dr. Seward? I thought we
saw a garden, didn't we, Mama, as we drove up?"
   "You did indeed, Miss Westenra. Several of our patients enjoy working with plants and flowers. Not
only enjoy it, but seem to find it calming to their minds and nerves." He took her gloved hand, and guided
her to a chair: a delicate girl, too thin for her medium height, her flaxen hair dressed in a feathery chignon
that further emphasized this ethereal quality.
   Mrs. Westenra gave an exaggerated shudder. "I hope you didn't have them coming into this part of the
house and arranging the flowers, too, Dr. Seward." Like her daughter, she was a thin woman, her pallor
an exaggeration of Lucy's alabaster del-icacy, her eyes the chill antithesis of her daughter's hopeful trust.
She glanced pointedly at Langmore. "Or do you use them in your household? I daresay it would take
more courage than I possess, to live never knowing when I'd come through the door and find myself
face-to-face with a lunatic." She turned as she said it, and drew back a little as Dr. Hennessey entered,
red--faced and swaying slightly, a now-full-again glass of cognac in his hand.
  "Dr. Hennessey," Seward introduced through slightly clenched teeth, “who is in charge here at night."
And sleeps it off during the day. Hennessey was a relative of Lady Poole-upon whose husband's
patronage Rushbrook House depended-and his em-ployment here owed as much to this fact as to his
willingness to work for what Seward was able to pay. Seward was familiar with such links. His own stint
of shepherding Lord Godalming's brother, the erratic Harry Holmwood, through South America, Russia,
and the South Seas had resulted in his acquaintance and friendship with his patient's nephew, the
Honorable Arthur Holmwood: the true prize, Seward knew, in the widowed Mrs. Westenra's
matrimonial quest.

  And why not? he reflected, as Blaine entered to announce din-ner. The Honorable Arthur was as
handsome as a Burne-Jones engraving of Sir Galahad, curly-haired, square-chinned, unfailingly polite
(even to the pavement-nymphs they'd patronized in Tampico, San Antonio, Vladivostok, and Singapore),
and stood to inherit a very large fortune and the title of Viscount Godal-ming. Seward had watched his
young friend's eyes at that party at the Godalming town-house and knew he adored Miss Westenra. The
only problem was that Seward adored her, too. Even at nineteen, she had the tact, taste, and vivacity to
make a perfect London hostess. But she also, Seward guessed, watching her as he seated her at his left
at the cramped dining-room table, had the instinctive empathy to be a doctor's wife.

  Even a mad-doctor's.

  As Blaine brought forth the fish course-a sorry turbot adorned with a half-lemon carved into a
crown-and Hennessey launched into a rambling Nietzschean toast, Seward reflected that it was going to
be a long evening.

  "Sor?"

  It was Langmore, tiptoeing out of the pantry to whisper in his ear. The attendant's livery was mussed,
his old-fashioned stock pulled askew.

  "It's the big new 'un, sor. He's scarpered."

   Mrs. Westenra was questioning Hennessey-since Seward's answers had proven unsatisfactory-about
the number and vari-ation of patients represented at Rushbrook, turning every now and then to Lucy with
little cries of, "How horrible!" when the Dubliner doctor obliged her with a particularly bizarre example of
behavior. Unlike many private asylums, Seward had insisted, when he'd been hired, on treating all
prospective patients, not merely those who were easiest or least troublesome. Hennessey was regaling
the ladies with accounts of Mrs. Strathmore's as-sault on Mrs. Jaimeson with the scissors, and Seward
only hoped he wouldn't go on to detail the more revolting aspects of the notorious "Lord Spotty," as the
attendants called him.

  "Please excuse me," said Seward, rising. "There's a small matter that needs my attention. I'll be back in
a moment."

  Dr. Hennessey, refilling his glass, didn't even think to ask if help was needed. Probably, reflected
Seward, just as well.
  As he was leaving, Mrs. Westenra said, "Those cries! Do the poor souls always howl so?"
  Seward paused in his tracks, and reflected that he must be well-fitted to his business. It had been some
time since he'd even been aware of the howling.

  000

  Letter , R. M. Renfield to his wife
  (Undated)
  My beloved Catherine,

  I hope this letter finds you in excellent health and the most congenial of spirits. I'm aware that it's been
some time since I've written to you, and I beg both your understanding and your for-giveness. It's been a
busy time for me, as I slowly grasp the changed nature of my life. I must accept new ways, puzzling
ways, sometimes inhuman ways-but toward what final design? I do not know.

  I have barely a moment to myself each morning and again each night. That's certainly not enough quiet
time for me to or-der my thoughts and compose such letters as deserve your at-tention. In fact, I was
hoping against reason that you would visit me this last week-end. We might have enjoyed some tranquil
time together, you and I, to speak or share the silent moments as we always did.

  It's spring and the air here is scented with honeysuckle, the sweetness of England for which I so longed
among the heavy perfumes of foreign lands. But these are not the flowers you tended so carefully, nor the
blossoms that cheered me nightly when I returned home from the City. Without you all things have lost
their savor.

  Please consider visiting next week-end, or the one thereafter. I will believe that you are arriving soon,
bringing with you every-thing that gives color and freshness to the dawn, and rest and comfort to the
twilight. And-I need not say this, I'm certain--please tell our precious Vixie that she will always be the joy
in my life wherever I go, howsoever we are separated, and that she (and you, my dear Catherine) will go
with me everywhere, always.

  Please believe me,

  Forever your most loving husband,

  R. M. Renfield
                                           Chapter Two

  A slanted coign of roof sheltered the rear door of the Staff wing of Rushbrook House. Beyond it, rain
that had started during the soup course pattered sadly in the darkness. Rushbrook House stood a few
miles from the last houses of Purfleet, and beyond the wall of the extensive grounds, the Thames marshes
lay as they had lain since time immemorial. Even the grounds, though planted with trees and crossed by
two or three drainage canals discreetly disguised as ornamental brooks, tended to squishy muckiness and
standing pools in the slightest rain.

 "How long ago did he escape?" Seward shrank in spite of himself from the idea of a chase through the
morass in his single presentable evening-suit.

  "Just now, sir, when Hardy was takin' him his supper." Lang-more had acquired a lantern in one hand,
a strait-jacket rolled up under the other arm. The patient Renfield, though gray-haired, stood over six feet
tall and was built like an oak-tree.

  "Bashed me up against the wall like I was a kid, sir," added Hardy, stepping out the door behind
Seward. He was easily Ren-field's size, towering over Seward's five-feet-ten-inch slightness. The side of
his face was purpling where he'd been struck. "And him so quiet and gentlemanly-like." He shrugged into
an oil-skin mac.

  "Like I's tellin' you, Hardy." Langmore shook his grizzled head. "It's the quiet ones you gotta watch.
Sly, they is." He glanced at Seward, like a soldier waiting for his captain to lead him to battle.

  Seward took a deep breath. "Check along the wall by the road first," he said. "Then check the east
wall. That's the lowest, and in the worst repair. If he goes over there, he'll just find him-self in the grounds
of Carfax. Thank God the place is deserted, and the house well-locked. Blow your whistles if you need
assis-tance."

  The two burly night attendants looked momentarily non-plussed as it sank in that Seward wasn't going
to go with them, then took a second look at their employer's dinner-jacket and polished shoes, and
nodded, belatedly putting two and two to-gether. Seward supposed, as they faded into the utter
darkness beyond the thin pools of gaslight from Rushbrook's windows, that if they had even average
intelligence, they would have been able to find employment as something other than hired strong-men at a
madhouse.

  Yet having dispatched them to an adventure he considered himself too well-dressed to participate in,
Seward found himself unable to simply return to the house. It was his duty to make sure Renfield got
back to his room in safety. He had branded himself already in his own eyes as a shirker by staying here
on the relatively dry rear step. He could not further betray his trust by settling down to a comfortable
dinner with the girl he loved while one of his patients was loose-the more so because he was fairly certain
that if Renfield wasn't found, neither Langmore nor Hardy would interrupt him at his dinner a second
time.

  Damn it. Seward fumbled in his pocket for his cigarette case. Curious, how the mad always had
such fiendish timing in their outbursts. As if they could tell which were the most important events
in the lives of those around them, and waited for the most utterly disruptive moment to make their
move.
  Could they? he wondered. Did they have an extra sensitivity, an extra faculty o f observation?
He shivered, for the night was raw and bitterly cold. Everyone speaks of the connection be-tween
madness and artistic talent-do both states share roots in a greater capacity for perception o f
detail? He would, he reflected, have to write to his old teacher in Amsterdam about the matter. Van
Helsing was always fascinated by such connections.

 His heart warmed a little at the thought of the sturdy old Dutchman, a pleasant recollection washed
away entirely by a gust of wind that blew rain over him, soaking the shoulders of his jacket.

  So he might as well have gone out running through the mire after all.

  Good God, what horrors was Hennessey telling Miss West-enra and her mother in his absence?

   Lanterns flashed dimly through the trees, jogging up and down as if the men were running. They
vanished then, but Sew-ard's jaw tightened. Along the eastern wall, then, which being built of large stones
rather than bricks made it far easier to climb. He strained his ears for the sound of the whistles. If
Ren-field got over the dilapidated barrier that divided Rushbrook's park from that of Carfax, the
long-neglected estate immediately to the east, it could easily take them the rest of the night to lo-cate him.
Like Rushbrook, Carfax was an enormous house, but it was infinitely older and falling into ruin. When
first he'd come to Rushbrook, Seward had gone over the wall himself and as-certained that the old house
and its attendant chapel were at least tightly locked. An escapee would have had a hard time go-ing to
earth inside. But its park was a jungle, nearly twenty acres of overgrown groves and woods, mired with
standing pools around a small lake.

  Damn, thought Seward again. Damn, damn, damn ...

  A fine future I have to offer poor Miss Westenra. What made me ever think she'd consider my
offer? He recalled his own in-ner smile when, a few days ago, his friend Quincey Morris had spoken to
him of his own adoration for the delicate blonde girl. Quincey was a stringy, awkward-handed Texan
whom Seward and the Honorable Arthur had met during their adventurous year of travel in the company
of the Honorable Uncle Harry. Arthur had invited Quincey to spend a season in London with him, and
though the Texan's speech still bore the twang of the American plains, his manners were meticulously
good and his self-made fortune-in land, cattle, and Colorado gold-had made him mar-ginally acceptable
to a certain segment of the more impoverished Society mamas.

  Though Seward liked Quincey enormously, he had never for a moment considered him genuine
competition for Lucy West-enra's hand. He couldn't imagine that lively, sociable girl agree-ing to go live
in a ranch-house in San Antonio, be it never so spacious and comfortable. The memory of his own
patronizing attitude sliced him now like a flaming whip: And you think she would be any more
likely to revel in "cozy" quarters in Rush-brook House, listening to the screaming of
the mad on still nights?
  But the flare of hope was like a little white flame somewhere behind his sternum. She might ...
  And the memory of the scent of her hair, and the thoughtful pucker between those delicate brows,
warmed him again. She was an exceptional girl. He would assure her that this situation was only
temporary-
  Darkness thickened in the darkness, first a bumbling outline, then a Laocoon that resolved itself into
three inter-tangled shapes, Renfield's bowed gray head and enormous shoulders seeming to dominate the
attendants who walked on either side. All three were covered with mud. The lanterns had gone out.
Renfield was strait-jacketed and there was blood on Langmore's lined face, but there was no suggestion
of violence now, only a kind of sly petu-lance in Renfield's eyes as he was pushed into the reflected light
near the house.
  "I'm not trouble," he muttered, twisting his head to look down at Langmore. "I'm not trouble to
anyone."
  "If you're not trouble, mate, I'd like to see what is," retorted the little attendant. "But you come along
quiet, and we'll go easy with you this time. Won't even put you on the Swing, will we, Hardy?"
  Renfield flinched at the mention of the Swing, something Seward noticed with annoyance. Hennessey
swore by the Swing, claiming that the motion of being swooped up and down blind-folded for hours
calmed the patients' minds. In the six months he'd been Superintendant, it had not escaped Seward that
for all Hennessey's claims of theraputic value, his colleague had only to threaten its use for most patients
to calm down immedi-ately, in terror at the nausea and disorientation the "calming" device produced.
  "We'll be kind to you, oh, yes," agreed Hardy, with a bad--tempered look. "First one's free, innit?"
  "I'm not the one you should be looking for," added Renfield, turning his head over his shoulder to
speak to the bigger atten-dant. "I'm not the one."
  "He did come along quiet, once we'd both laid hold on him, sor." Langmore wiped the raindrops from
his eyes to look at Seward. "Gave us a nasty run, though. You want him in a crib for the rest of the
night?"
  Seward, watching Renfield's face, again saw the twitch of dread at mention of being locked into what
was to all intents and purposes a latticework metal coffin, barely the depth of a man's breast or the width
of his shoulders. Unable to move, un-able to turn over, unable even to reach one arm across to scratch
an itch ...
  More humane than chaining, of course, but in Seward's opin-ion, not much more. All very well to
go on about moral treat-ment, lad, Hennessey had said patronizingly, when Seward had begun
making changes in the House's patient routines. You just see how your "moral treatment"
answers when you've got some foaming mooncalf coming at you swinging his bed
round his head like a club. You'll be putting those wall-rings back into the cells quick
enough.
  He pushed the soaked hair out of his eyes. "No, take him to his room and strap him to his cot. I'll be
along in a moment and give him some chloral hydrate. He should sleep through 'til morning. Once you've
done that, please go on back to the dining-room. I'm sure Simmons and Mr. Blaine need your help."
  Langmore's grin was wry. "Like nuthin' never happened, sor."

  "Exactly." Seward shivered with the cold, and crushed out his cigarette on the wet stone of the
doorstep as he turned back to his recaptured patient. Standing on the step, he was at eye level with the
bigger man. Dark blue eyes, Seward noted again, under an almost anthropoid shelf of brow. Though
Renfield's hair was graying, his heavy eyebrows were still nearly black. "Mr. Renfield, your family-and
you yourself-have been as-sured that there's nothing to fear from me or from anyone else at Rushbrook
House. Why did you flee?"

 Under the dripping brows, the muck-plastered hair, the dark blue gaze was calm and altogether sane.
"My question," Ren-field replied, "is, Why do you not?"



  000



  Lucy got quickly to her feet as Seward came back into the dining-room, and would have crossed to
him in the pantry doorway had not her mother halted her with a glare. The girl hesitated, napkin still in
hand, then asked, "Is everything all right? Did they find the poor man?"

  "'Course they did, acusbla." Dr. Hennessey jovially lifted his glass to Seward in a mock toast. "Told
you they would. That Langmore has a nose on him like a bloodhound. And he's a good tracker besides!"
And he relapsed into gales of inebriated chortles of appreciation at his own jest.

  Across the curdled remains of the fish course, which had not been removed in the nearly seventy-five
minutes that had elapsed since Langmore's hesitant summons, Mrs. Westenra regarded Seward with a
gaze like frozen slag.

  "My dear Mrs. Westenra!" Seward cried, identifying the im-mediate priority in the situation, "I am most
terribly sorry! I in-structed Simmons to carry on in my absence. I cannot imagine what happened . . ." He
held Lucy's chair for her as she re-seated herself. "Yes, Miss Westenra, to answer your question, the
patient was brought back safely and unhurt. I've just come now from giving him a sedative injection . . ."

  And changing into gray tweeds that looked hopelessly out of place next to Hennessey's rumpled and
straining dinner clothes, and the expensive silks of the two ladies.

  "You don't actually let your patients roam loose about the house, as Dr. Hennessey said?" Lucy looked
timidly up over her shoulder at Seward. "Do you?" To her left, Hennessey grinned drunkenly and winked.

 When Langmore and Simmons brought in the Hindle Wakes-a German specialty slightly beyond
Cook's skills-the chicken was stone cold and the lemon-cream sauce had separated.

  The rest of the dinner proceeded in silence.

  "I told you how it would be, Lucy," Seward heard Mrs. Westenra's voice as their carriage pulled away.
"I doubt that even that absurd American would have subjected you to . . ."

  Rain, darkness, and the sloppy squish of hooves and wheels obliterated the rest. Seward quietly closed
the door, made his night rounds of the thirty-six lost souls under his charge-most of them sleeping heavily
under the calming magic of laudanum, chloral hydrate, or tincture of Cannabis indica-then returned to
his room, to dictate the account of Renfield's escape and re-capture into the phonographic daybook.
That chore accom-plished, the entire fiasco of the dinner-party began to unfurl itself, like infinitely
repeating performances of a bad play, across his mind. Of course there had been no question of asking
Lucy's mother for her daughter's hand after deserting her to Hen-nessey's company.

  I'll be in London Tuesday, he told himself. I shall send a note to their house on Chatham Street,
call on them. They aren't leaving for Whitby until next week. There is still time to speak to her,
still time to ask her--

  Plans for the future produced more anxiety, if anything, than a review of the immediate past. At last,
Seward went downstairs to the dark dispensary, made up an injection of chloral hydrate for himself, and
returning to his room, joined Renfield and the others in the relief of oblivion and dreams.



  000



  Renfield felt the cold, heard the howling of the wolves long be-fore the rest of the dream came into
focus.

  He shivered. He had always hated cold, always hated the bleak chill of London, the gray dreary
wintertides in Notting-ham after the thick heat and riotous color of India. Since his return from half a
lifetime in the East, the sounds of England had seemed harsh to him, like dropped money clanking on
stone. Clattering carriages, rattling shoe-heels, nattering nasal voices, after the slower rhythms, the
multifarious voices of bird-calls, the eternal hum of insects.

  His dream was a dream of silence. The silence of the dead.

  It was raining there, too, a bitter whisper against stone walls. Renfield saw firelight, like handfuls of
jewels, nearly lost in an immense hearth whose overmantle was supported by carved grotesques,
wolf-faces whose shadow-cloaked grins mocked the young man imprisoned in that unknown room.
Renfield knew he was a prisoner because he saw him try the door, not once but many times-saw him
pace like a caged animal, as he himself, Renfield reflected, had paced for days now in his cell. When the
young man came near the hearth, he saw his face, hollow and haunted under a tumbled shock of dark
hair.

   Saw his breath, a whisper of flame-dyed smoke when he walked more than a stride or two from the
fire.

  Saw him cross to the window and jerk aside the velvet cur-tains, revealing an ill-fitting casement of tiny
panes, and beyond it-when he pulled it impatiently open-bars.

  The young man struck the wall with the hammer of his fist, once, twice, the tired motion of a man who
has pounded that wall, who has confronted those bars, for weeks.

  Renfield watched dispassionately, knowing what it was, to pound a wall.

  Firelight leaking through the window sparkled on shimmer-ing rain, like an infinity of gold and blood.
The rain fell through fog, and in the darkness the fog coalesced, until it seemed to Renfield that the forms
of three women hung in the air outside the window, their pale dresses and their long hair drifting about
them like seaweed beneath the sea. The young man at the win-dow saw them-Renfield heard the intake
of his breath-but said nothing. Only gazed, like a man hypnotized or under a spell.

  It seemed to Renfield that the eyes of all three gleamed red in the darkness, catching the firelight like the
eyes of rats.

  Two were dark, the third, luminously fair. They stretched out their arms to the prisoner, and it was the
fair one who spoke, in a voice like crystal tapped with a silver spoon. "Jonathan," she said, "Jonathan, let
me come to you," and Renfield noted with interest that the language she spoke was the sweetly musical
German of the south.

 He thought wonderingly, They are the Valkyries, just as in the opera. And in his heart the music of
Wagner, god-genius of Bayreuth, stirred like the breathing of the Earth.

  They are the Choosers of the Slain. The ones who lay their hands upon the men who will die.

  "I am called Nomie, Jonathan. You have only to wish it, and I will come."

  The man Jonathan stood now so close to the bars that his face pressed against them, his hands clutched
the wet iron. He was trembling with terror and desire. "I wish it," he murmured. "Come."

  A noise, like the crashing of a cannon, boomed and echoed through Renfield's dream. Jonathan fell
back a pace from the window but did not-maybe could not-turn around to see what might have been
behind him, and Renfield, too, saw only the three women-Valkyrie, Graces, goddesses, or the
fate-weaving Norns-hanging in the whispering dark. One of the dark-haired women screamed a curse in
German, and slowly, flesh and hair and garments dislimned once more into lightless mist. Only for a time
their red eyes remained, glittering in the night like unholy stars.

  Jonathan staggered, as if waking from some terrible dream, and whirled. Renfield saw then what he
saw, that the sound had been the chamber's door, slammed open with stunning violence against the wall.

  The doorway was empty. Only darkness lay beyond it.

  But the prisoner did not flee. Instead he shrank from the open, empty doorway, his breathing fast with
terror. Though the night was icy, sweat jeweled his face. For a long time he stood, only staring at the
open door, and the thin mist that curled across the flagstones. Then slowly he edged forward, like a man
approach-ing a coiled snake, extended a hand visibly trembling, and with a quick move, slammed his
prison door shut again.

  Then he stumbled to the fire and collapsed on his knees on the hearth, his face buried in his hands.
                                   CHAPTER THREE

  R.M.R.'s notes

  21 May

  8 flies, 1 spider



  22 May

  9 flies, 2 spiders

   I find my facility of patience and focus increases with practice. There is a knack to trapping a fly, as
much mental and percep-tual as physical. I find myself hampered in my efforts by the abject stupidity of
the attendants here. Like all men of petty in-tellect, they cling to regulations as to spars in the storm which
the world appears, to them, to be. I have explained repeatedly the nature of my mission here, yet the man
Langmore persists in removing the baits I put down, and even in freeing my quarry. Incapable of
perceiving underlying patterns, his system, like those of his fellows, seems capable only of animal fear,
like buf-falo fleeing a thunderclap because they imagine that the release of atmospheric electrical tensions
has something to do with them.

  Prune madecoine and beef obtain best results



  23 May

  10 flies, 4 spiders



  24 May

  10 flies, 3 spiders



  25 May

  16 flies, 4 spiders

 A long talk with Dr. Seward today. Though I explained my busi-ness to him carefully, I came away
with the impression that he understands nothing. He seems to me a man of good heart but decidedly
mediocre mind. Still, though nearly as rigid-mindedly fearful of change as all the others, he did agree with
my request that the cook include quantities of honey, sugar, and various confitures in my rations here.
  000



  Letter , R. M. Renfield to his wife

  25 May

  My beloved Catherine,

  Simply the writing of your name raises my spirits, setting be-fore me as it does your lovely face. I must
be brief, for I cannot make the fools here understand my need for paper not only to communicate with
you and our lovely Vixie, but also to pro-ceed with my work. It is a matter I dare not yet take up with
Dr. Seward, the Superintendant, though he and I have begun to come to an understanding regarding the
work itself. I thought, in my conversation with him today, that he appeared downcast.

  Rumor among the attendants is that he has suffered a reverse in love. If that is so, my heart goes out to
him in pity. What it would have cost me, my dearest one, had your family prevailed in their opposition to
me, and prevented our union, I cannot bring myself to think.

  The dreary rains of spring have ceased at last, and the garden here riots with hyacinth, iris, and the first
sweet roses of sum-mer. From my elevated window I look down on the marshlands beside the river, and
see them gay with wildflowers, spangled with reflected light, and alive with the birds of the air.

  I understand the difficulties you are having in getting letters to me here. Better that I should suffer a
pang or two for want of your dear comfort, than that those who seek to keep us apart should learn of
your whereabouts, and so undo all our plans and strivings. Kiss my dearest Vixie for me, and tell her that
her papa shall be with her by and by.

  I remain forever,

  Your most devoted husband, R. M. Renfield



  000



  "Lady Clayburne." Dr. Seward set down the card that had been sent in, got to his feet as Mary showed
his visitors into the office. "Lady Brough."

  The younger of the two, a stylish matron of Mrs. Westenra's type, extended two kid-gloved fingers
with the air of one who hoped Seward would not actually touch them. The elder, erect and disapproving
in extremely stylish mourning weeds, simply folded her thin hands more tightly around the ebony head of
her cane and regarded Seward with a reflexive and ingrained con-tempt.

  "Please sit down." Seward fetched them both chairs. Lady Brough scrutinized the seat of hers as if to
make sure no one had inadvertently left fresh pig entrails on it, then perched on the edge. Her daughter,
Lady Clayburne, settled a little more firmly, but Seward had the impression that she, like her mother, had
been carefully schooled that no lady ever let her spine touch the back of any chair she sat on, under pain
of death. His aunts and his sister subscribed to that belief as well. "Mary, please bring tea."
   As the housemaid departed, Seward resumed his own seat behind his desk and switched off the
phonograph into which he'd been dictating his notes. "You are here to see Mr. Renfield?" He had not had
the impression, when Ryland Renfield's family brought him to Rushbrook House, that they were the sort
of people who would remain in London past the fashion-able season for their afflicted relative's sake.
"I'm sure he will be most gratified to have visitors."

  "We are here to see you, Dr. Seward, not my brother-in-law." Georgina, Lady Clayburne, folded her
elegantly gloved hands and the permanent grooves of disapproval which bracketed the knife-slit of her
mouth deepened slightly. "I am certain there is little to be gained by an interview with Ryland himself.
How does he here?"

  "Much the same as when he was brought in," answered Sew-ard. "On one occasion only he attempted
to escape, but of-fered no resistance when apprehended." He cringed inwardly at the memory of that
disastrous dinner-party. At the recollection of how Lucy's eyes had filled with tears, when he'd knelt to
pro-pose marriage yesterday-had it been only yesterday?-at her mother's villa of Hillingham. How she
had blushed when he'd asked her, Is there someone else?

  Knowing full-well that there was.

   "Beyond that, he has been the most cooperative of patients. He occupies his time with trapping
flies-spiders and flies, I should say. Did your sister ever mention his keeping such odd pets?"

  "My sister does not hold with pets, Dr. Seward, and never would have them in the house. As for flies, I
am shocked that you permit such a filthy pastime." She looked around the of-fice as if expecting to see
assorted tumblers and fruit-jars on every windowsill and in every corner, roaring and buzzing with
captives.

  Lady Brough added, in a thin harsh voice, "I thought my son-in-law was brought here to restore the
balance of his mind, not to have his crochets indulged."

 "Of course that is so, Lady Brough," agreed Seward. "But sometimes one cannot discover the key to
madness without ob-serving the tendency of its delusions."

  "Nonsense. My second daughter-Lady Norrington, she is now, and we never thought to make so
respectable a match for her-conceived the notion when she was a girl that she was in danger of
contagious infection whenever she went out of her bedroom, and insisted on remaining there and having
her meals sent up. A few sound whippings broke her of that caprice." The old lady's gaze flicked back to
Seward, a bleached and colorless hazel, and cold as stone. "Has my daughter been here to see her
husband?"

  "As a physician," said Seward carefully, "that matter is be-tween my patient and myself."

  "Don't mouth platitudes, young man," snapped Her Lady-ship, "as if you were a priest under seal of the
confessional. Nei-ther my daughter Catherine nor my granddaughter Vivienne has been seen by any
member of the family since Ryland's incarcer-ation, nearly four weeks ago. Catherine, of course, may do
as she chooses. She always has." There was both contempt and loathing in the old woman's voice. "But
Georgina and I have a responsibility to Vivienne and we will not be turned aside."

  "It is very like Catherine," added Lady Clayburne, "to go into hiding in this melodramatic fashion and
leave my mother and myself to deal with this most unpleasant and awkward situ-ation." Where Lady
Brough's voice was soft and cold, like the silk of a garrot, her daughter's had the clang of a headsman's
ax. "Completely aside from the outrageous fees demanded in this place"-she gestured impatiently around
her-"there is the mat-ter of the funds settled upon Catherine by my late father, money which it was
understood was to be used in ,educating Vivienne and establishing her creditably in the world. This
Catherine--encouraged by her husband-has not done. I blame Ryland en-tirely. What can one expect of
a money-grubbing merchant who's spent all his life in heathan parts among tradesmen?"

  "Catherine was always as bad," put in Lady Brough, "With her séances and her Theosophical Society
lectures and her An-cient Music."

  "Of course she is, Mama," agreed Lady Clayburne quickly. "You are quite right. But at least one had
some control over Catherine. But Vivienne-Vixie, she is called in the family-is due for her come-out next
year. The poor child has been raised on a rubbish of philosophers and economists, with the result that
when she does come out, unless something is done to take her education in hand, she will be entirely too
outré to make anything resembling a respectable parti. Catherine should have known better, but of
course neither Mother nor I could ever tell her a thing. Now that Ryland is, thank goodness, out of the
way, Mother and I agreed that it is the perfect opportunity to take that poor child under our wings and
make something of her be-fore it is too late."

  "I see." Seward reflected that if Lady Brough were his grand-mother, he'd go into hiding, too.

  Mary entered with the tea-tray, and dipped a little curtsey to the two ladies as she set it down on the
corner of Seward's desk. What there was about the tea things that didn't meet Lady Clay-burne's
standards, Seward had no idea. Neither the cups nor the saucers were visibly chipped, the
bread-and-butter was fresh, no sugar had been spilled, and the milk was wholesome. But Lady
Clayburne's thin mouth compressed still further, as Mrs. West-enra's had when Seward had re-entered
the dining-room the other night in his gray tweeds, and Lady Brough regarded the tea-cup Seward
offered her through her lorgnette for a long mo-ment before, reluctantly, accepting it.

  Lady Clayburne demanded, "Has my sister come to see Ryland?"

  "It remains a matter between herself and me, as Mr. Ren-field's physician, but no, she has not." Quite
possibly, guessed Seward, because Mrs. Renfield suspected that her family would attempt to trace her in
precisely this fashion. But it was curious, he thought, that Renfield had mentioned to him neither wife nor
child. "The girl Vivienne is Mr. Renfield's only child?"

  Lady Clayburne sniffed derisively. "The dear Lord only knows what he got up to in India, all the years
he was there, but Vivi-enne is my sister's only child."

   "Ryland was married in India." Lady Brough set her tea aside untasted. "My solicitor, Joseph
Wormidge, has instituted inquiries among the business and Army communities of Calcutta and has found
little against him save his passion for Wagner. Horrible, dreary racket!" Her pale eyes narrowed.
"Nevertheless, the in-quiry is not yet concluded."

  "When his first wife died-I understand she was an invalid for many years-Ryland returned to England to
manage his business from here," went on Lady Clayburne. "He met Catherine at one of those dreadful
theosophical lectures she was pa-tronizing that year. We did everything in our power, Mother and I, to
keep her from throwing herself away on a tradesman and a man twenty years older than herself into the
bargain. Well!" She took the tiniest sip of her tea, with the air of one making a heroic sacrifice to prevent
her host from killing himself with well-deserved chagrin, and set the cup and saucer firmly aside. So
much for THAT. The bread-and-butter she simply ignored.

  "Understand me, Dr. Seward. Mother and I have only Vixie's good at heart. Goodness knows how
we're to keep it quiet that there is insanity in the family long enough to find her a husband, even with a
year or two at a good Swiss boarding-school to straighten her out ... the cost of which Mother and I are
quite prepared to shoulder. Once we locate them, of course, we have instructed Wormidge to begin
proceedings to re-claim Father's trust funds, which Catherine has quite clearly misused."

  Seward said nothing. A parson's son who had been raised on the edges of Society, he knew with
deadly exactness what op-tions lay open to a woman once control of her own money was taken out of
her hands.

  "Neither Catherine nor Vivienne, as I have said, have com-municated with any member of the family
since Ryland was found wandering the streets of London in what can only be de scribed as confusion."
Anger glinted in Lady Brough's soft voice. "Their house in Nottingham was closed up, and when
Wormidge effected an entrance, he found their clothing missing, as if for a long stay elsewhere. Ryland's
house in London has clearly not been re-opened, but he was a wealthy man even before he mar-ried
Catherine and helped himself to her inheritance. Because his solicitor, Mr. Lucius Bolton, dropped out of
sight at the same time, we suspect that Catherine and Vivienne are in hiding somewhere, and using Bolton
as a go-between. We intend to find them."

   The cold determination in her voice, and the self-righteous expression on Lady Clayburne's face,
reminded Seward of the reminiscences Lucy had shared with him of her one nightmarish year in a French
finishing-school. She had begged her mother to at least let her return to England, to go to school with her
friends.

   Lady Clayburne opened her tiny reticule of jet beads, with-drew a card-case. "A young lady's future is
at stake, Dr. Seward," she said, and laid a card on the desk. "Please do not make her life more difficult
than it will already be with an impossible tradesman-let alone a lunatic-for a father. When she comes
here-if she comes-please do what you can to urge Catherine to return to Mother and myself. In any case,
I expect to be noti-fied of her visit."

 She slid a second card across the desk at him. "This is Mr. Wormidge's card-our solicitor, in Bedford
Row. If Ryland should make any reference to Catherine, or say anything that might indicate where
Catherine or Vivienne might be found, please contact either myself or Mr. Wormidge."

  Seward murmured, "Of course," and slipped both her card and the solicitor Wormidge's into his desk
drawer. It was his duty, as Superintendant, to keep Rushbrook House a paying proposition, entirely
apart from the fact that his usefulness to its patients depended on his remaining on good terms with their
families. At least Lady Brough and Lady Clayburne were not ob-viously insane themselves, as were the
relatives who had had Lord Alyn locked up.

   He wondered if Vixie Renfield had begged her parents not to send her to "a good Swiss
boarding-school" to "straighten her out." Had pleaded to be allowed to remain in England, with her
friends.



  000



  Letter, Miss Mina Murray to Miss Lucy Westenra

  Dearest Lucy,
  No time for more than a note, as this is the busiest time of year at the school. The weather has turned
hot here, and damp. How I envy you, walking along the cliffs and downs of Whitby!

  It seems like a year, instead of only a month, until I join you. Tell your mother again how much I look
forward to it, and how grateful I am for the invitation.

  One of the dearest aspects of true friendship is that, in all the years we've played together and worked
together over those dreadful samplers at Mrs. Druggett's school, whenever one of us has been sorrowful
or afraid, the other has been able to cheer her up. Lucy, I am both sorrowful and afraid now. I have had
no letter from Jonathan since the middle of May-nearly two weeks now-and though I know perfectly well
that they do not have the penny post in far parts of the world, and that I cannot expect him to take time
from his work to write to me often, still I cannot rid myself of the fear that he is in some terrible trouble.

  There! Now tell me I'm being a goose-as I know perfectly well that I am.

  So good that your dear Arthur is in civilized parts (or as civ-ilized as Ireland ever gets!) and you can
get those daily notes you write of. They do, indeed, bring the sound of the voice, the sight of the face,
before our eyes-as your notes to me have done all this week.

  Thank you, my dearest friend, for being my dearest friend. You know and I know that wherever he is,
Jonathan is just fine.

  All my love, Mina
                                    CHAPTER FOUR

  R.M.R.'s notes

  5 June

  14 flies, 1 spider

  I knew this would happen. Seward ordered me to "get rid of" my "pets" as he calls them, though I have
explained to him-or thought I explained-the critical importance of what I do. I ob-tained three days'
grace. What can one expect, when surrounded by the pettiness of ordinary minds?



  Dr. Seward's Journal (kept on phonograph)*

  18 June

  [Renfield] has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got sev-eral very big fellows in a box. He keeps
feeding them with his flies, and the number of the latter has become sensibly dimin-ished, although he has
used half his food in attracting more flies from outside to his room.



  1 July

  His spiders are now becoming as great a nuisance as his flies, and today I told him that he must get rid
of them. He looked very sad at this, so I said that he must clear out some of them, at all events. He
cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave him the same time as before for the reduction. He disgusted me
much while with him, for when a horrid blow-fly, bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room,
he caught it, held it exul-tantly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and, be-fore I knew
what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and ate it. I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it
was very good and very wholesome; that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him ...



  000



  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  (undated-early July)

  My dearest Catherine,

  I trust that this letter finds you in the best of good health, and that you and Vixie are enjoying the
mellow beauty of this En-glish summer. It gives me daily comfort to picture your sweet faces. Though I
now realize how difficult it would be for you to visit, still I hope and pray that one day you and she may
find a way to do so without drawing undue attention to yourselves, for I miss you sorely.
   My work proceeds apace, though unbelievably hampered by the stupidity of my colleagues here.
Seward is well-meaning, but beyond imbecilic. His mania for regulations has forced me to begin on the
next stage of my efforts prematurely. I pray that no ill will come of it, knowing how much depends upon
its suc-cessful progress. His colleague, Hennessey, is not only venal, but dangerous. Only yesterday, in
Dr. Seward's absence, he entered my room with three young gentlemen from one of the London
colleges-not medical students, but simply young rakes who paid him half-a-crown apiece "to see the
loonies," as they put it. When I was moved to protest, he threatened me with the Swing, a most appalling
"treatment" that "calms" through nausea and dizziness. Valuable in dealing with the truly mad, of course,
but as horrifying to a normal man as the rigors of the Spanish In-quisition.

   So I am reduced to accomplishing what I can, with what I have. You know that I would do, quite
literally, anything, in or-der to assure your safety; that there are no lengths to which I would not go to
protect our beautiful daughter from harm.

  Your loving husband, forever,

  R.M.R.



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  3 July

  10 flies, 2 spiders, 1 sparrow

  -7 flies ? spiders

  -5 spiders ? sparrow



  6 July

  9 flies, 2 spiders, 1 sparrow

  -6 flies ? spiders

  -4 spiders ? sparrows

  Seward in Town again today. Hennessey admitted a pair of young gentlemen who wanted to "observe"
the lunatics, in particular, they said, the women, and did any of them rip off their clothing in their fits? I
thought Langmore would object, but he said noth-ing. I have noted that Langmore frequently seems the
worse for opium, whose symptoms became tediously familiar to me in my years of dealing, not only with
the native Indians and coolie Chinese, but with the colonial clerks and wives as well. I have also
frequently overheard Hardy and Simmons speak of Lang-more's abstractions of chloral hydrate from the
dispensary. If they know of this, Hennessey certainly must.

  Oh, to be attempting such a work as mine, and to be sur-rounded by such human detritus!
  9 July

  8 flies, 3 spiders, 1 sparrow

  -9 flies ? spiders

  -12 spiders ? sparrows



  l0 July

  10 flies, 6 spiders, 2 sparrows

  -9 flies ? spiders

  -6 spiders ? sparrows



  000



  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  11 July

  My dearest Catherine,

   A line in haste. This afternoon from my window I observed the execrable Hennessey walking along the
tree-lined avenue that leads to the high road, a most unaccustomed exercise for a man who raises sloth to
an art form. Following him with my gaze, I saw him stand talking by the high-road gate to a short, stout
gentleman in a green coat, who even at that distance was clearly recognizable as Lady Brough's solicitor
Wormidge. Though the trees on the avenue prevented my seeing clearly, I thought they talked for some
little time, and that something-papers? money? letters?-was passed from hand to hand.

  The sight filled me with rage and despair. Not so much that I fear your discovery-indeed, the fact that
your mother seeks to trace you through me here reassures me that she has no clue con-cerning the false
identities and alternate bank accounts we es-tablished for your concealment-but because I understand
that it will be that much more difficult for you to contact me, much less see me.

  Still I remain, as Shakespeare says, "rich in hope." Watch and wait, my darling-my darlings-and all
things will be made well.

  Forever your loving husband,

  R. M. R.
  000



  Dr. Seward's Diary (phonograph)*

  19 July

  We are progressing. My friend has now a whole colony of spar-rows, and his flies and spiders are
almost obliterated. When I came in, he ran to me and said he wanted to ask me a great favor . . . "A
kitten, a nice little, sleek playful kitten, that I can play with and teach, and feed-and feed-and feed!" I was
not unprepared for this request, for I had noticed how his pets went on increasing in size and vivacity, but
I did not care that his pretty family of tame sparrows should be wiped out in the same manner as the flies
and the spiders ...

  10 p.m.-I have visited him again today and found him sit-ting in a corner brooding. When I came in, he
threw himself on his knees before me and implored me to let him have a cat; that his salvation depended
upon it. I was firm, however, and told him he could not have it.

  20 July

  Visited Renfield very early, before the attendant went his rounds. Found him up and humming a tune.
He was spreading out his sugar, which he had saved, in the window, and was manifestly beginning his
fly-catching again ... I looked around for his birds, and not seeing them, asked him where they were. He
replied, without turning round, that they had all flown away. There were a few feathers about the room
and on his pillow a drop of blood.

  11 a.m.-The attendant has just been to me to say that Ren-field has been very sick and has disgorged a
whole lot of feath-ers. "My belief is, Doctor," he said, "that he has eaten his birds, and that he just took
and ate them raw!"

  11 p.m.-I gave Renfield a strong opiate tonight, enough to make even him sleep ...



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  21 July

  HE IS COMING!!!



  000



  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
  21 July

  My darling Catherine,

  Something has happened which alters everything! How well I remember when you used to chide me
for my attitude of materialism-so strange in one who espouses the romantic ideals of Wagner, you said.
And I, in my blind superiority, would reply that romanticism, while all very well to inspire the heart and
the spirit, cannot put bread and butter on the table. Blind, blind, foolish and blind, to say those very
words!

  Yet the gods hear even the maunderings of fools. And some-times, their eternal hearts are moved to
compassion by the very blind stubbornness of those who deny them.

  Oh, my beloved, forgive me for the blindness that continued my work, my mission, in the selfsame
narrow crevice of scien-tific methodology for which I so scorned my poor benighted colleagues here!
That I continued it stubbornly, seeing nothing beyond what I thought was "truth," while all the while a
greater truth was approaching, like the inexorable descent of thunder-clouds from the Simla hills to the
plain!

  He is coming, and we all of us-you, me, Vixie-will be saved!



  000



   Dreams of blood. Dreams of life, like specks of flame, coursing and sparkling through his veins. Deep
in opiated sleep, it seemed to Renfield that he was yet awake, aware of each separate life in the world,
like individuated atoms of searing light.

  When he had taken opium in India, he had had such a vision. He had felt himself separately conscious
of every beetle, every monstrous roach, every solitary white ant in the swarms that dwelt beneath his
bungalow, every bird in the trees and every snake in the weeds, aII of them: a seething mass of life
soul-shaking and wonderful in its hugeness.

  Even in this thin chilly climate, he was aware. Flies, spiders, sparrows ... the brilliant dots of their
individual lives glittered and danced in his veins. The kitchen cat he'd seen through the window the other
day, who had fired him with such wild hopes, so cruelly and unnecessarily dashed. Fools, all of them ... !
From the window he'd seen her looking at him, gazing across the space between them with round golden
eyes.

  In his dream those eyes returned to him, drawing him to them through darkness. But he saw now that
they were a man's eyes. Cold gripped him, the damp cold to which even eighteen years back in his native
country had not accustomed him. Cold, and the smell of the ocean. In his dream he was standing, and
underfoot the rough boards of a ship's hold rocked. He heard the slosh of waves against the hull, smelled
the familiar stinks of a cargo-hold, rats and bilge-water and dirty leather and rope, and above all else the
thick, mouldy smell of earth. The ship was transporting boxes of dirt-Renfield mentally calculated the cost
per pound of shipping, and concluded that someone must be both rich and mad. In Rome he had visited
a monastery whose chapels had been floored with earth brought from Jerusalem, that the monks who
died might be buried in the holiest ground in Christendom without the inconvenience of making an actual
pilgrimage. Was there, he wondered sardonically, some equally pious coward still at large in England?
  How did he know the ship was bound for England?

  Then he saw the eyes. Not gold now, but red, gleaming from a dark shape which rose up from among
the earth-boxes. A cloaked form, hiding power in the folds of its garments, like the Pilgrim God in
Wagner's Siegfried: the Wanderer stepping from the shadows, concealing yet unable to conceal all of
what he is.

 Renfield sank to his knees. "Who are you?" he whispered, and to his lips came the words in German of
Mime the Dwarf from that opera. "’Who has tracked me to this retreat?’"

  A voice which seemed to emanate less from the column of darkness before him, as from the dark at the
back of his mind, whispered, echoing the words of Wagner, "’Wanderer' the world calls me:
wide are my wanderings; I roam at my will all the earth around.’"

  A vast shudder shook Renfield's bones. He managed to breathe the name, "Wotan . . ." but could
make no other sound. The dark shape continued: "’I've mastered much and trea-sured much;
I've told wondrous tales to men. Men have believed Their wisdom great, but it is not
brains that they should treasure. ‘"

  "`I have wit enough,"' Renfield gasped-Mime gasped. "’I want no more ...’" Yet in his mind,
in his heart, he saw the dozens of glass tumblers begged singly from Langmore and I tardy, with his
painstakingly collected flies buzzing beneath them. Saw the crumpled sorry boxes of spiders, the
hard-won fragments of his great work kicked aside by fools and Fate, as in the opera the sword
Nothung had been shattered, beyond his poor power to re-forge.

  "’What was good, straightway I gave them,’" murmured that deep, harsh voice from out of
the shadows. "’Spoke, and strengthened their minds.’"

  Renfield whimpered, "Lord . . ."

  His head bowed into his hands, he only heard the sough of the great cloak as that column of darkness
stepped forward-as Wotan the Wanderer, lord of the gods, stepped forward-and smelled the rank,
intoxicating stench of graveyard earth and de-caying blood. The hand that rested on his head was heavy,
cold as the hand of a corpse.

  "’Behold, the bridegroom cometh,’" said Wotan's voice, in the dark at the back of Renfield's
mind. All around them the waters surged against the boat's wooden hold, but though the lightless space
stank of rats, not a single whisper of their skitter-ing did Renfield hear. "’And ye know not the day
or the hour.’ But I come. Then those who are known to me shall have their reward."

  It seemed to Renfield then that he was back in his bed in Rushbrook House, back in his opiated sleep.
But his mind was awake and aware, aware of everything: of the voices of Lang-more and Simmons as
they played their endless, stupid games of cribbage at the little deal table at the far end of the hall; of the
kitchen-cat hunting in the long grass and poor old Lord Alyn in the next room crying and mumbling over
and over to himself how he did not deserve to live, how great his sins were and how powerless he was to
stop himself ... Of the soft deadly clinking in the study directly below him, as Dr. Seward made up for
him-self his now-nightly injection of chloral hydrate, so that he could enjoy the sleep he so blithely handed
out to his patients. He was aware of the fog that lay on the marshes, of the boats moving down the broad
estuary to the sea.

   He was aware of the sea. Of a small ship with tattered sails, driven on by storm-winds that moaned in
its rigging, of the pounding of waves on distant rocks. It seemed to him that he could rise from his bed
and fly on the wings of that storm-on the crest of that darkness.

  Fly to the ship, where Wotan waited ... where the Wanderer God sat in darkness, with all his power
and wisdom gathered into his strong hands, to help those who did as he willed.

  Fly to Catherine ...

   He saw her, auburn hair half-untangled from its nightly braid, face peaceful in sleep. Like the Prince in a
fairy-tale, he thought he stood over her, her beauty breaking his heart as it always did, always had, since
first she'd stood up at that theosophical lecture and questioned the lecturer about the astral plane. So
many nights when she would turn over and sleep, after their final good-night kiss, he had simply sat
awake, looking at her slum-bering face by the glow of his little reading-lamp, relaxed and so young with
all its small daily worries sponged away. Joy be-yond joy.

  I will save her, he thought. Wotan will help me. I will make him help me.

  The thought of that terrible ally filled Renfield with dread, for he knew to the marrow of his bones that
the thing in the hold of the ship was not to be trusted. I will make him help me, but I cannot, must not,
ever, ever let him know where Catherine and Vixie are hidden.

 He didn't know quite why this was so, or what the nature of the danger was. But the column of shadow
within shadow, dark-ness within dark, had glowed with a nimbus of peril.

  I will be clever, he vowed. Clever and strong. I can get his help without his knowing. I can keep
that secret, buried in my heart. Then no one will put my Catherine or our beautiful Vixie in
dan-ger, ever again.
                                      CHAPTER FIVE

                 Mrs. Violet Westenra Requests the honour of your presence
                                   At the marriage of her daughter
                                                Lucy Marie
                                                      To
                                 The Honorable Arthur Holmwood
                                     Saturday, the 8th of October
                                         At twelve o'clock noon
                              St. George's Church, Hanover Square


                           Breakfast and reception immediately follow
                                                       At
                                            Godalming House
                                            Grosvenor Square


  Dr. Seward turned the invitation over in his fingers. Even the paper was rich as creamy velvet in the
patch of strong August sun-light that lay upon his desk.

 It interested him that he felt no pain. Only a kind of dull ,,hock, as if he had taken a mortal hurt but
wasn't yet aware that u would kill him.

  A ridiculous conceit, he thought numbly. Of course I'm not going to die of love. I shall recover
from this, as I recovered from a rattlesnake bite on the Texas plains and from nearly hav-ing my
head cut off on the Marquesa Islands.

   Oh, Lucy. Was this your idea, or Art's? Two people he loved equally-of course they'd both want him
to be there, when they Leave themselves over wholly into one another's keeping. He recalled how Lucy
had wept when he'd asked for her hand, how she'd blushed when he'd asked, Is there someone else?
Of course there was. He'd seen how Art watched the fair-haired girl at that Ball at Godalming House,
how his young friend had maneuvered always to be close at hand when she wanted a cup of punch or a
sliver of cake. He'd seen, too, the melting approval in Mrs. Westenra's chilly eyes, that had turned to
daggers whenever Seward had claimed Lucy's attention.

  Get away from my daughter, you ... you mad-doctor. Can't you see she's fascinating the heir to
a Viscount who has twenty thousand a year?

  Not for one instant did Seward doubt that young Arthur Holmwood loved Lucy Westenra to
distraction. He would make her a fine husband, and knowing the man as he did, Seward would take oath
that-pavement-nymphs in Tampico notwithstanding--his friend would never give her the slightest cause
for suspicion or tears.

  And at nineteen, Lucy was old enough to know her own mind, Seward recognized.

  And yet what returned to his thoughts again and again was Mrs. Westenra's satisfied voice as the
carriage pulled away into the rain: I told you how it would be, Lucy.

  And the deprecating contempt in her tone as she looked around the tiny drawing-room: What a clever
use o f space. What else had she said to her daughter, to steer her thoughts away from a man who had
no fortune, to one who had a great one? All for Lucy's own good, as that harridan Lady Clayburne had
spoken of taking Vivienne Renfield from her mother and sending her to a finishing-school in Switzerland,
so that she could later make "an eligible parti."

  Growing up as he had, with the standards and position of an old family to maintain though the money to
do so was long since gone, Seward had had a front-row seat on how the ladies of So-ciety could damn
with faint praise, could manipulate the hearts and thoughts of their daughters with that agonizing amalgam
of duty, love, and guilt.

  Was that why, after he'd received the small legacy which had raised him from Out of the Question to
modest eligibility, he had never trusted those hopeful lures tossed out by the daugh-ters of the lesser
social ranks?

  Seward sighed, and raised his head, to gaze out the window of his study into the green of the walled
park. Through the trees he could see the black roof-slates of Carfax Hall. Last week the FOR SALE
sign had been taken down from its rusted gates, and hired men had gone in yesterday to scythe clear the
drive. So the place had found a buyer. Wealthy, one hoped, for it would cost a fortune to put that
dilapidated pile back into anything resem-bling livable condition.

  Through the endless months of June and July, while he had buried himself in work to forget the ache of
hopes raised only to be dashed, he had written to Lucy in Whitby, where she was staying for the summer
with her mother. She had written back once or twice, polite notes about country walks with her
school-friend Mina, or descriptions of the old churchyard on the East Cliff, where the headstones would
occasionally tumble down to the sea beneath: copybook exercises in friendly correspondence that could
have been addressed to anyone.

 Yet what did he expect? Declarations of love? He didn't know whether these cordial letters were
worse, or better, than nothing at all.

  He turned the invitation over again in his fingers. Octo-ber eighth. Sixty days away. Time enough to
determine whether he could not endure to be there, or could not endure to stay away.

  With a sigh he leaned across to the cabinet and wound up his phonograph, set the needle on the wax
cylinder, and picked up the small mouthpiece. If nothing else, there was still work. Though everything
seemed to taste of ashes these days, at least he could do some good for someone, no matter what he
was feeling inside.

  "August seventh. With the prohibition against sparrows in effect, Renfield's mania for flies and
spiders has returned full-- force, and his room is now filled again with his boxes and jars. In
addition to feeding the flies to the spiders, both Langmore and Hardy have seen Renfield eating
both species, confirming my hypothesis of a new type of mania, zoophagy. For two weeks it has
seemed to me that the man has grown more secretive, and I have come upon him repeatedly with
his face pressed to the window bars, in an attitude of listening. . . "



  000



  Letter, R M. Renfield to his wife
  9 August
  My dearest one, in haste--

 If I have hitherto hoped that you would somehow find a way to visit me here, now I must-and you
must-put that thought from our minds.

  Well did the ancients depict their gods bearing saving fire in one hand, and in the other the bow of
death! Salvation walks side by side with destruction, and wise indeed is the man who can steer the
course between them.

  HE IS HERE. His feet tread English soil, and nightly he whis-pers in my dreams. I saw as in a vision
the ship that bears his sleeping body driven ashore by the storm-winds that are in his keeping. Where he
made landfall, I do not know. Amid rain and fog I was aware of picturesque small houses, of cliffs
looming over the harbor, crowned with a tiny church and its tombstones. But through the very ground
beneath this house it seemed to me that I felt the press of his foot, somewhere in this island realm.

  And he is coming here! I know this as I know my name. And I fear for my very soul.

  Guard yourself, my beloved! Compared to him, such crea-tures as your mother and Wormidge are
nothing! Take every precaution against discovery. Only the knowledge that you are safe-that Vixie is
safe-gives me the strength to carry on.

  I am taking what steps I can, to strengthen my soul against his power, that I may not be utterly
swallowed up.

  The light of his majesty floods my mind, yet I tremble. As I tremble, your name is on my lips. It is all,
all, for you.

  Forever your beloved husband,

  R.M.R.



  000


R.M.R.'s notes
9 August
15 flies, 4 spiders


  10 August

  12 flies, 2 spiders

  Attempt to obtain a sparrow interfered with by attendant-fool! I must be more careful. So much
depends upon my strength.



  000



  Dreams of moonlight, and of the long stair that led from the lit-tle coastal town up to the churchyard on
the cliffs above. Renfield felt himself again aware of every living thing in that town, sleeping now, sleeping
deep: each child dreaming of pony-rides or magic palaces, each man of stammering unprepared through
classroom-lessons unlearned. He saw the dark houses with their windows shuttered, the pretty gardens
robed in darkness. Saw the white slip of movement, as a blond girl in a nightdress strolled unconcerned
through the town with a sleep-walker's un-seeing stare.

  She was beautiful, and Renfield's heart was touched by her. Where the night-breeze flattened the thin
batiste against her body, it showed a shallow breast, the sharp point of a too slender hip, a delicate form
childlike and vulnerable without the womanly defenses of corsetry and draped silk. She was not many
rears older than his daughter. Loosed for sleep, her flaxen hair shivered to her hips.

  The girl climbed the stairs-hundreds of stairs. Slabs of stone, or carved into the living rock of the cliff,
and Renfield knew what waited for her at the top. He wanted to cry out to her, to wake her, to warn her,
but he knew what Wotan would do to him if he did this-Wotan would not be pleased.

  Wotan would withhold from him the gift of life that he so desperately needed. Worse, Wotan would
whisper into the dreams of others, of Georgina Clayburne and that stone-faced harridan mother of hers
of where Catherine and Vixie lay sleep-ing tonight.

  Then all would be in vain!

  Heart pounding, body quaking with pity and with cold, Ren-field watched as the blonde girl walked
past him-for he seemed to be standing on the long stair from the town-and on up to the churchyard on
the cliff.

  A tomb lay close to the cliff's grass-grown edge. For a mo-ment Renfield thought that the thing that lay
on it was a dog or a wolf, but the next moment the dark form rose, elongating into the unmistakable
shadow of a cloaked man, and red eyes gleamed where they caught the moon's sickly light. From the top
of the steps Renfield watched, as the sleep-walker passed among the graves with the confidence of a
child. The figure beside the tomb held out its hand. Renfield's ears seemed to be filled with the buzz of
swarming flies.

  Don't do it! he wanted to shout to her. Don't go to him! He was aware of her face, relaxed in
sleep as Catherine's was all those nights beside him, like Vixie's when she was little, when he'd go into
her room to check on her and see her asleep in the night-light's tiny glow. Please don't hurt her ...
  Wotan gathered the girl into his arm, the white of her night-dress disappearing in the velvet folds of the
cloak. His hand, huge and coarse, with pointed nails like claws, cupped the side of her face, turning her
head aside to expose the big blood-vessels of the throat. The roar of flies swamped Renfield's mind and
for a time his dream was only that he was sitting in his room at Rushbrook, with the window wide open
and flies buzzing in, landing happily on his hands, on his knees, on the pillow of his bed, and letting him
eat them like candy while spiders lined up in an expectant file, waiting their turn.

  The glow of life washed over him, filled him, burning, warm-ing, intoxicating. For a few moments every
cell in his body was conscious, and cried aloud with relief from a lifelong hunger he had never even
known had weighed upon him so heavily, until that instant of release.

  His mouth sang with the metallic flavor of fresh blood. His brain, with the scent of the girl.

  He thought she cried out.

  Distant and dim, as if seeing with someone else's eyes, he be-came aware of the girl again, lying on the
cliffside tombstone as if upon a bed. Beyond her, the moon shone with a cold pewter gleam on the
shingle-beds of the harbor where the tide had gone out. It made the feathery coils of her hair pale as
ivory, where they lay over the edge of the granite slab, and trailed on the ground. Renfield heard a girl's
voice call softly, "Lucy!" and saw a second girl striding among the graves. She was a little taller and of
sturdier build, hurriedly dressed in shirtwaist and walking-skirt. Her dark hair was already coming out of
a hasty braid that slapped between her shoulders as she ran.

  "Mina?" the blonde girl whispered, as her dark-haired friend sat beside her on the tomb, raised her up
in her arms. The blonde head fell back, turned aside, curtained by that cascade of moon colored silk. Her
breath dragged in thick frantic gasps. The dark girl, with brisk decisiveness, wrapped Lucy in the heavy
figured shawl from around her own shoulders, pinning it at the throat. Then she took the shoes from her
own feet and put them on Lucy's before turning to the task of fully waking her. Renfield heard her voice,
a gentle, lovely alto, speaking soft nothings as his consciousness drew back from them. Their image grew
smaller and smaller, tiny in the light of that enormous moon, but just before it winked out, Renfield saw
Mina get Lucy to her feet, and help her back toward the stairway that would lead them down to the
town.

  He awoke ravenous, starving, the yellow moonlight a glow-ing shawl dropped on the floor of his room.
Hand trembling, he emptied confused flies and sleepy spiders from their boxes and tumblers and jars,
devoured them without even stopping to chew. Spiky legs, brittle wings.

  Their tiny lives sparkled like electricity in his veins. But his hunger was not even touched.
                                       CHAPTER SIX

  R.M.R.'s notes

  12 August

  14 flies, 5 spiders, 2 slugs (sugar-water dripped on sill)

 Must have more. Asked for extra sugar, received it. Know not to try for sparrow. Always they watch
me. He watches me, too.



  000



  "Dr. Seward?" Renfield spoke for the first time during Seward's visit that evening, rousing himself from
his desperate preoccu-pation of mind. He had to be careful, he knew, yet even as he hoped to wrest
from Wotan the additional life that he needed, it might be possible to use Seward, unsuspecting, to obtain
the knowledge that-as Wotan had so accurately said-men treasure.

  Renfield reflected that the young doctor was stupid enough be manipulated into telling him anything.

  "What is it, old chap?" Seward turned back from the door, which Renfield noticed Langmore was
quick to lock again. They feared him, did they?

  Anger flashed through him. He'd give them cause to fear. The anger must have shone in his face,
because Seward hesi-tated. Renfield forced his rage down. "As a doctor of the mind, have you-or
anyone in your field-come to any theory of what dreams are, and why we have them? Are they truly-or
can they be-agents of communication, as even the ancient Stoics ar-gued? Or do you believe, like Freud,
that they are merely the mind's way of ordering the events of the past, of sorting them into larger mental
categories determined by past experience?" A spider tiptoed in through the open window, past the bars;
Renfield caught it with the adeptness of long practice and popped it at once into his mouth, dug his
notebook from his shirt-pocket and added it to the tally, then turned back for Seward's reply.

   "I believe they can serve the mind as a means of assimilating experience," agreed Seward, his dark
eyes watchful on Renfield's face, as if-which Seward so often did-he sought to guess what lay behind the
question. He went on, "I have heard-both here and in America, and in the islands of the South
Seas-stories of how dreams do communicate events of the past or present, though as a scientist I'm
inclined to wonder how such a thing could be proven empirically. My old teacher-a Dutchman from
Amsterdam-is of the opinion that the ability to dream devel-oped as human intelligence grew to the point
that men were in danger of harming themselves and others through too exclusive a reliance on that
intelligence. That God gave man the ability to dream as a channel to deliver warnings from sources that
can-not be quantified. But he may have been joking." And Seward smiled.

  "And if one dreams of things that are taking place far away- evil things, events that bring danger to the
innocent-is there a way to warn those one sees in danger? A way to know where these events are taking
place, or whom to warn?"
  Seward's eyes narrowed sharply. "What do you mean?" he asked. "Did you dream about your wife,
for instance? Cather-ine, I believe her name is? Or your daughter?"

  Georgina Clayburne has been to see him. Rage seared through Renfield, as if a match had
been dropped on a trail of kerosene. He felt his face heat, forced himself to look at the wall beyond
Seward's shoulder. Forced from his mind the delicious joy it would bring him to pick the slightly built
doctor up and smash his brains out against the wall, to twist his head from his shoulders.

  They would strait-jacket him. Put him in the Swing. Give him castor-oil and ipecac to weaken him with
vomiting.

  When Wotan came, he would not be ready.

  Breathing hard, Renfield said, "I didn't dream about nobody, sir." He knew he should make up a
convincing tale but he couldn't think. His mind was filled with the roaring buzz of flies. "I was just asking."



  000



  When Seward left, Renfield returned to the window, pressed his face to the bars to drink in the
evening's cool. Rushbrook House was set at an angle to the road, so that through his window he could
see the gates to the high-road, as well as a portion of the crumbling wall and overgrown trees of the
estate next door.

  Yesterday he'd seen a handsome new carriage come through the gates, its team of matched blacks
familiar to him. He had thought the woman inside looked like Georgina Clayburne.

  And he didn't think it was the first time she'd come to call on Seward.

  Asking what? What did she know already? What had she guessed, and what information had she
bought from Hennessey? She had almost certainly had the house in Nottingham searched. That didn't
trouble Renfield particularly, for he had made sure, when he, Catherine, and Vixie had left it, that no trace
of paper remained to tell where they'd gone. The other houses in London, like the bank accounts he and
Catherine had set up, were under other names.

  Was that why Seward watched him so closely, took down notes of what he said? Was he sending
every word, every specu-lation, on to Georgina and that ghastly mother, even as Hen-nessey was doing?

  He watched the shadow of Rushbrook House stretch out over the garden, reaching toward the dark
wall, the dark trees, of Carfax. The voices of the attendants rose like incongruous bird-calls in the air, as
they began to close up the windows, put up the shutters for the night. From a room near-by, the woman
the attendants referred to as Queen Anne began her nightly howling. Many of the patients, Renfield had
observed, grew worse at this hour, pounding on the walls and babbling, or sink-ing into uncontrollable
tears. Footsteps hurried in the halls, to give Her Majesty the drugs that would silence her, would push her
over the edge into her own dreams.

  What if those dreams, like some of his own, were infinitely more dreadful than the waking that she
could not struggle back to no matter how much she tried?
  Renfield closed his eyes, and told himself that he must be strong.

  That night he dreamed of the girls again, as he had dreamed the night before. Dreamed-as he had last
night-that he was in their bedroom, looking down on them as they slept, and their faces were relaxed in
sleep, as sweet and young as Catherine's looked in the mysterious blue radiance of the waxing moon.
Mina, the dark-haired girl, wore a little pucker between her brows. Though she was probably no older
than her friend, she had the air of a young woman who has had to make her own way in the world. The
nightgown-sleeve that lay on the tufted counterpane was plain muslin, and much worn, in contrast to the
fantasia of batiste and lace that swaddled the delicate Lucy.

   When fear came into the room, and the chilly breath of the grave, Renfield tried to reach out to Mina,
tried to shake her shoulder-or he thought he tried ... or he wanted to try. He is coming, he thought as the
air in the room grew colder and colder and a small black shadow began to circle erratically out-side the
moon-drenched window. Wotan is coming.

  His heart pounded in terror. He had to wake them up, so they could flee.

  He had to wake up himself, so that he wouldn't see what would happen.

  But he could neither move, nor waken.

  Mina whispered, "Jonathan," in her sleep, and sank deeper, almost into the sleep of death, Renfield
thought. But Lucy turned on her pillow, her shut eyes seeming to seek the window, and in the moonlight
Renfield could see now that the thing outside was a bat, fluttering and beating its wings at the casement.

  He pressed back into the shadows, his hands covering his mouth.

  Wotan would see him. And seeing him, would take his ven-geance, not only on him, but on Catherine
and Vixie as well. Oh, Catherine, Catherine, he thought wildly, if I can see this, if I can be here, why
can't I be at your side instead?

  But he shut the thought from his mind like the slamming of a door, lest Wotan hear him and know then
that someone named Catherine even existed.

   Lucy rose from her bed, her head lolling, and with the pre-ternatural clarity of dreams Renfield saw the
wound on her neck, the two tiny punctures above the vein, unhealed, white-edged and mangled-looking.
All the moonlight seemed to be failing in the room, and the shadow of the bat grew still, seeming to swell
in size, so that it covered the whole of the window in its wings. Out of that shadow its red eyes gleamed,
like the far-off lamps of Hell. When Lucy stumbled to the casement and fumbled open the latch, the dark
form of Wotan stepped through as if he had strode there upon the air of night.

  Lucy sagged forward into his arms. In the moonlight Wotan smiled-or the thing in the ship's hold that
had spoken to Ren-field with Wotan's words. He could not be Wotan, thought Ren-field muzzily,
for he has two eyes, not one like the Wanderer God: eyes as red and reflective as the
eyes of a rat. But then, when Wotan had spoken those words to Mime the Dwarf, he had not yet
traded his eye for wisdom. His mustaches were long and iron-gray, his face was not the face of a god,
but of a man who has gone beyond what other men are, into some unknown zone of experience.

  A face of power. A face like iron, that no longer recalls what it was to be a man. A face maybe that
never knew in the first place.

  He cupped the side of Lucy's face in his short-fingered pow-erful hand, drew back his lips from long
canine teeth, like an animal's fangs. Renfield closed his eyes as the blood began to flow down, hid his
mind in thoughts of flies. Big fat horse-flies the size of lichis, each bursting with the electrical fires of life.
He did not even dare think, Let her alone ...

  Wotan-or whatever that thing was truly called-would not like that.

 Already Renfield understood that what that shadowy deity wanted, maybe more than life, was power.
For him, there could be no disloyalty.



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  19 August

  The bride-maidens rejoice the eyes that wait the coming of the bride; but when the bride draweth nigh,
then the maidens shine not in the eyes that are filled.



  000



  "It's Renfield, sir." Grizzled little Langmore blinked in the dimmed gas-light of the hall. He'd clearly
expected to find Seward -in bed. "He's escaped."

  Seward had been expecting it. All day Renfield had been rest-less, prowling his room by turns wild
with excitement and darkly sullen. When Seward had turned in after his final round ,rmong the patients,
though depressed himself, he had elected not to inject the chloral hydrate which had, he realized, become
something of a habit over the past three months. Instead he'd prepared for bed, but sat up re-reading
I_ucy's latest note, short and polite though underlain with sadness, for she suspected her mother was far
more ill than she was letting on ... all the while listening, as if he knew there would be trouble with
Renfield as the night grew deeper.

  "I seen him not ten minutes ago, when I looked through the Judas, sir." Hardy pushed open the door of
Renfield's room as Seward and Langmore came striding down the hall. "Sly, he is. Layin' on his bed
lookin' like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

  The muggy cool of the night-breeze met them as they entered the room, where the window-sash had
been literally wrenched from its moorings in the wall, bars and all. Seward shivered, thinking of the
strength that would have taken.

  A sudden paroxysm of rage or terror? He hoped so. The thought of the madman being actually that
strong at all times was not a pleasant one. He glanced around the little room, to make sure there wasn't
some clue, but it looked much the same in the light of the attendants' lanterns: the narrow cot-like bed
had not been displaced from its position along the right-hand wall, the assortment of tumblers, cups, and
boxes that contained Renfield's living larder were still neatly ranked on the floor op-posite.
  Stepping to the window, he caught the pale flash of what might have been a nightshirt, dodging among
the trees by the intermittent whisper of the waning moon. The yellow gleam of a lantern told Seward that
Simmons was already on the trail. Heading for Carfax, it looked like.

  "Bring a ladder and follow us to the east wall," he instructed Hardy, took his lantern, and hung it on his
belt. With more than a slight qualm, he slithered through the torn-out ruin of the window, hung by his
hands from the sill for a moment, then dropped to the ground. Langmore at his heels, he set out through
the darkness on Renfield's trail.
                                  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "There he goes, sir," Langmore whispered, and Seward held up his hand. Renfield's hearing was
sharp-he'd demonstrated more than once his ability to track a fly by its buzzing above the sound of
conversation-and he'd be listening for the smallest noise of pursuit. Or would he? Seward had
encountered madmen and madwomen who seemed to think that mere escape was enough; that they
could elude pursuers as if they were birds.



    With a heart of furious fancies,

    Whereof I am commander; sang the old ballad-

    With a burning spear

    And a horse of air

    To the wilderness I wander ...



  Not for the first time he wished his old friend Quincey Mor-ris were with him, Quincey who'd learned
tracking from a cou-ple of Commanche who'd worked on his father's Texas ranch. Quincey could be
relied upon to keep quiet and obey orders without question, something Seward wasn't sure he could
count on from most of the attendants.

 The white blur of Renfield's nightshirt shone against the dark of the Carfax wall long before the pursuers
were anywhere near him, then vanished as he dropped down the other side.

  Seward cursed. In addition to exploring the Carfax park it-self, he'd walked around the perimeter wall,
both outside and in, and knew it to be badly dilapidated, low enough in several places for a man to easily
climb. It might take Renfield a little time to find such spots, but the thought of chasing him through open
countryside in the dead of a pitch-black night made him shudder.

  Thank God at least Hardy had the wits to move quietly, or as quietly as a big man carrying an
eight-foot ladder without a lantern might be expected to-

  "Stay here," Seward breathed, as Hardy set up the ladder against the wall. "He may think he's safe for
the moment; if he thinks we're on his heels, he'll be away like a hare." When he put his head over the
fern-grown capstones, he could glimpse Ren-field again, making his way toward the dark bulk of the
house. "Slip over as quietly as you can and spread out," he whispered, retreating down the ladder a few
steps and looking down at the upturned faces of the three attendants. "Hardy, circle around to the right,
Simmons and Langmore to the left-whatever you do, try to keep him from getting out the gate onto the
high road."

  Had the new tenants-or at any rate the carters who'd lugged in the dozen huge crates of their goods
that afternoon--remembered to lock those rusted gates of oak and iron? Had they been able to make the
crazy old locks work, either on the gates or on the house?
  Seward tried to push the thought away. "And for God's sake, keep quiet." he added. "Keep your
lanterns as dark as you can manage. If you hear me shout, come running." At any rate, thank goodness,
he reflected as he slipped over the wall in what he hoped was an inconspicuous fashion, Carfax wasn't
inhabited yet. He might have to go chasing a semi-naked madman down the highroad and into the
marshes, but at least he wouldn't have to deal with neighbors enraged or terrified by a midnight
incur-sions. Since the FOR SALE sign had disappeared from the gates, he'd watched for signs of
habitation-or even of preparation for habitation, so as to get the address of someone to write to-but so
far there had been nothing. It was as if, having purchased the place, the buyers had been content to let
Carfax sit in its crum-bling Gothic glory, as it had sat since at least the Napoleonic wars.

  Tangled ivy crunched underfoot. Something-fox or rabbit--darted wildly away through the undergrowth
that choked most mf the park. Carfax had clearly begun life as a small castle, of which part of the keep
and a chapel remained, a ruinous appen-dix clinging to the side of a four-square, mostly Tudor dwelling
now largely swallowed up in ivy. The gardens were in as poor a state as the house; twice Seward's path
was blocked by tangles of overgrown hedge, and once he found a fragment of cotton nightshirt snagged
up on a half-dead rosebush. He could hear Renfield's footsteps, a dry harsh rustle in decades of dead
leaves, making still for the house.

  I shall have to find the new owners somehow, thought Sew-ard, and speak to them about
having that wall repaired. The house agent must have warned them, in any case, that they were
buying property next door to a lunatic asylum. The thought of Renfield breaking out again after the
new owners were in residence flitted nightmarishly through his mind. Probably no danger to them, but
God help Fido or Puss if he happens to en-counter them in the park.

  “. . . Master . . ."

  The word breathed in the darkness, and Seward froze. A mutter of speech. Speaking to whom?

  Seward could have sworn the house was empty.

  He crept nearer, not breathing, straining to listen as he rounded the corner of the black leaf-shrouded
bulk.

  The clouds had parted, letting through a thread of moonlight that showed him the half-circle of the
chapel, the stained but-tresses ragged with ivy and the arched clerstory windows sunken eyeless sockets
in the wall. There was a door set in the wall, flanked by columnar attenuated saints leperous with moss.
Ren-field's white nightshirt made a blur in the embrasure.

  "I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful."
He brought his hands up, filthy and stained with moss, as if to caress the iron handle, the padlocked bars.
"I have worshipped you long and afar off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will
not pass me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribu-tion of good things?"

  Selfish old beggar, thought Seward, suddenly amused. He be-lieves he's in the Real
Presence o f God and his first thought is for the loaves and fishes-particularly the
fishes.

  Still, there was something in the intensity of Renfield's hissing voice that set alarm-bells ringing in his
mind. Religious mania took a number of truly unpleasant forms. He wouldn't want to deal with the
complications it would add to the existing obses-sion with zoophagy ...

  "Who is there?" Renfield swung around, his square, lined face convulsed like a demon's.
  Lantern-light flashed in the darkness. Langmore, Simmons, and Hardy threw themselves out of the
shrubbery, catching Renfield as he tried to bolt. Seward, who'd sprung forward and seized Renfield's
arm, was thrown back against the chapel wall as if he had no weight at all. For a moment it seemed to
him, watching the struggling men, that the madman would hurl them all aside and disappear into the night.
Renfield bellowed and cursed, then screamed like an animal as Langmore twisted his arm, but Seward
thought the madman would have gone on struggling, letting the attendant break his bones, had not Hardy
struck Renfield a stunning blow on the head. The big man sank to his knees; Langmore whipped forward
the arm he held, and Simmons jammed it, and the other, into the sleeves of the strait-jacket they'd
brought.

  Whatever momentary fears Seward felt about that blow dis-solved on the way back to Rushbrook
House. Renfield kicked, thrashed, howled like an animal until he was gagged; twisted like a man in the
throes of convulsions. At one point Seward feared that the lunatic would manage to tear himself free of
the strait-jacket, and when they got him into the house-with all the other patients setting up a cacophony
in sympathy like the howling of the damned in Hell-ordered extra bindings strapped around him before he
was chained to the wall of the padded room.

 When Seward returned to his own bedroom, he was shaken to the bones: Dear God, and I once
harbored the delusion that I could bring Lucy to live with me in this place?

  He sank down onto the bed, trembling. The transformation of a man whom he'd thought of as basically
harmless, to other human beings if not to himself or to any fly or bird that came within his reach, brought
home to him what his old teacher Van Helsing had said to him once: "We are the guardians of the frontier
of darkness, my friend. And that means that for the most part, we must stand our watches alone."

 Ah, Lucy, he thought despairingly, you deserve better than this-better than the danger
you would be in, living here with me, no matter what I could do to protect you. I
underestimated the dangers of that dark frontier: I will not do so again.

  In the east-facing windows of his room, past the irregular darkness of Carfax's broken roof-line, the
summer sky was al-ready staining with first light. Through the walls of his room Seward could hear his
patients howling. And above their cries, a powerful voice bellowed like that of a Titan in chains:

  "I shall be patient, Master! It is coming-coming-coming!"

  Seward injected himself with chloral hydrate and passed out without even removing his clothes.



  000



  Letter , R. M. Renfield to his wife

  Undated (late August?)

  My beloved,

  I beg your forgiveness for not having written. I was unavoid-ably prevented, by the stupidity and, I
fear, downright malice of the men with whom I am forced to work in this place. Nothing but the most
urgent consideration would have kept my pen from paper, would have silenced the words of love that
every day dwell in my heart.

 Tell our Vixie that her papa loves her, and will be with her again by-and-by.

 Your own,

 R.M.R.
  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hanging in chains on the wall of the padded cell, Renfield dreamed.

  For three days he hung there, raving and sobbing at what he saw, at what he knew was happening,
would happen. They gave him laudanum to quiet him, forcing it down his throat when he twisted his head
aside in a vain effort to refuse further dreams.

  Don't send me back there! he wanted to scream at them. He is hunting her, stalking her as a
hunter stalks a doe! Waiting for her to come.

  But these words he dared not say aloud, for Catherine's sake, for Vixie's and his own.

  Wotan was near. Wotan was present, was there, not just in England but less than half a mile distant,
lying open-eyed in his coffin in the crumbling chapel of Carfax, blood-stained hands folded on his breast.

  Waiting.

   Peace came with nightfall and moonrise, for in those hours Wotan's mind was elsewhere, occupied with
the business that men occupied themselves with during the day. The sense of re-lease, of relief, was
nearly unbearable. Renfield would lie on the floor of the padded cell each night when at Seward's orders
he was released from his bonds, listening only to the dim howling of the other patients, to the murmur of
Langmore and Simmons as they played their unceasing games of cribbage in the hall, to the steady soft
ticking of the hallway clock. Yet he was at all times aware of the Traveler, aware of his nearness. Aware
of his power.

  Wotan was there, Wotan who held the gift of life in his hand. Wotan whose anger infected his brain and
drove him to screaming rages in the daytime, so that he was chained again on the wall.

 Watch yourself, traitor, if you betray me now, Wotan had said to Loki, in the shivering music of
Das Rheingold. I, of all the gods your only friend ...

  Wotan, too, dreamed. In his dreams the Traveler God could hear and see, through those others whom
his mind had touched. His thoughts spread like poisoned mist through the air, making nothing of distance.
Wotan would know what Renfield said, if he shrieked to the guards what he knew, what he saw during
his daytime visions. Wotan would hear, and would not forgive.

  I do not want to see the kill!



  000



  That first day in the straps he saw the girls in the train-station. Pretty Lucy looked much better, with a
trace of rosiness return-ing to her delicate cheeks, and she hugged her dark-haired friend like a sister.
"You have your tickets?"

  "Exactly where they were when you asked five minutes ago." Mina patted her handbag, and Lucy
laughed. "You're in danger of forgetting that I'm the schoolmistress, you're the giddy young who goes
to parties and is going to be the daughter-in-law of Lord Godalming by the time I get back."

  "Darling!" Lucy giggled, her rosiness deepening, and the older woman who accompanied the girls-she
had Lucy's blue eyes, Renfield thought, and Lucy's flawless complexion-folded her gloved hands and
smiled.

  But her smile was wan. There was a haunted shadow in the back of those blue eyes, transforming what
had been the cold face of a lady of Society-a lady who reminded Renfield alarmingly of his sister-in-law
Georgina, Lady Clayburne-into a mask of exhaustion and deepest tragedy. She watched the girls w if it
were she, not the dark-haired Mina, who was about to depart, with a hungry longing and a terrible
regret. Her face was both puffy and sunken, with a waxy cast to it that Renfield knew well from long
acquaintance with his countrymen in In-dia's unhealthy clime.

  She has had her death-warrant, he thought, his heart aching suddenly for her as he never thought it
could have, not for that species of woman. She knows it, and her daughter does not.

  "And this Sister Agatha didn't say what had happened to Jonathan?" Lucy was asking. "Other than that
he had brain-fever?"

  "It was all she said." Mina reached into the pocket of her jacket-sensible brown linen and, like all her
other clothing, a little worn, a few years out of fashion-and drew out a much--folded square of yellow
paper. "Only that he rushed into the train-station at Klausenberg shouting for a ticket for home.
Klausenberg seems to be the central market-town of the Car-pathian plateau, if the atlas is correct and if
Klausenberg is the same as Cluj. There seems to be only one train per day there from Vienna, at
nine-fifteen in the morning. Since the night-train from Munich arrives at just before seven, that should give
me plenty of time-"

  "You and your railway timetables!" laughed Lucy's mother, her weariness dissolving into genuine
pleasure at the dark girl's company, and Lucy hugged her friend again impulsively.

  "Oh, darling, you're so brave! Going out like this to the ends of the world! Not even knowing the
language!"

  He is watching her, thought Renfield, aware of Wotan's mind, Wotan's shadow-aware of those red
eyes gleaming, like a rat's eyes, in the shadows of that cheerful provincial train-station. Watching her
and waiting for her ... and smiling. Smiling like a damned leering devil in the dark of his coffin.

  NO!!!

  Renfield tried to twist his mind away as he became aware of that grinning, ironic, ancient thought
watching him, too. Enjoy-ing his pity for the sad-faced mother in her stylish walking-dress, deriving
wicked amusement from his fears for that too-fragile, too-pale fair-haired girl. Renfield tried to dream
something else, tried to think of something else: great pools and smears of trea-cle, spread aII over the
floor of his cell, and huge black horseflies roaring through the window to become mired in them, waiting
smilingly for his hand.

  Not the sparse and aenemic insects of England at all, but the meaty gargantuan fauna of India. White
ants swarming forth from wood like trails of animate milk, rice-beetles that would blunder and blunder at
the same wall without the wits to go around. Those were insects indeed!

  He tried to force himself to see them, to force himself to see the yellow buildings of Calcutta, the
market-places aswarm with brown half-naked farmers, with Brahmins in their golden robes und shy-eyed
farm-girls and great white cows making their way through the dung and the dirt and the crowds. Tried to
will himself back to that place, where life dripped with the scents of clar-ified butter and spices and the
painted idols stared out from every street-corner and door.

   But it was as if he moved his eyes and the vision dissolved And he was back in that cool neat
train-platform in England, with the smell of the green fields in his nostrils and the taste of the salt sea
near-by, and Mina clasping the older woman's hands saying, "There's no way I can ever repay your
kindness in buy-ing me my tickets, Mrs. Westenra, and giving me money for the journey. But believe me,
I shall pay you back."

  A smile twitched the wrinkled gray lips and Mrs. Westenra laid a loving hand on Mina's cheek. "My
dear child, do you imagine it's money out of my pocket? By the time you come back, Lucy will be the
daughter-in-law of Lord Godalming, and I shall have gotten the money out of her lord."

  They all laughed merrily at that, as the conductor began to drone his call for travelers to board; in the
shadows at the back of the platform, Renfield could see the cloaked shadow of the Traveler, red eyes
glinting, white teeth glinting as he smiled.

  No!

 "We'll take your trunk down to London the day after to-morrow. You must bring Jonathan to
Hillingham the very mo-ment he's well enough to travel. Darling . . ."

  "Darling!"

  The girls embraced on the steps of the train, the bright silks and laces of the one like the most fragile of
flowers against the earthy brown linen of the other. Somewhere in his mind Renfield felt the gloating
greed, the amused pleasure, of the watching Traveler and he began to thrash in his dreaming, to scream,
Let her alone! Let her alone, you devil!

  He knew the girls would never meet again.

  The roaring of flies filled his mind, the taste of them in his mouth. A thousand flies, a million, all mired in
those sweet pools of treacle and all smiling up at him with Lucy Westenra's face.



  000



  He is hunting her. He is waiting for her to come.

   In those cool hours of release while the moon flooded Rush-brook's lawns with wan silver, Renfield
tried to tell himself that he knew nothing of the girl Lucy. She might be stuck-up and cruel, as calculating
as her mother. She was, after all, about to marry a lord, and that sort of thing surely didn't happen by
ac-cident. But this he could not believe. During the course of his second day of laudanum-induced
visions, of the gloating, grin-ning presence of the Traveler in his mind, he glimpsed Lucy and her mother in
the rock-walled garden of what seemed to be a small summer cottage, having tea with a golden young
Apollo in Bond Street tailoring. Saw with what exquisite care and tact the girl dealt with her mother,
fetching and carrying for her and laughingly denying that she did so out of worry.
  "Nonsense, darling. Arthur told me he liked helpful women and I'm trying very hard to impress him!"
When she passed his chair, young Arthur's gray-gloved hand sought hers. The look that passed between
his blue eyes and hers tore Renfield's heart.



  000



  Such prey is the source of his strength, he thought, lying the next night on the thick canvas
flooring of his cell, the reek of ancient filth and decades of carbolic rising dimly through it from the matted
coir beneath. Without her death, there would be no life in his hands, to give out to
those who serve him.

  Renfield pressed his face to the padded floor and wept. He wanted Catherine desperately, wanted only
to see her smile again, to hear her voice. Where Life flows, Loki had sung-Wagner's music had
sung-in Water, Earth, and Air ... What could a man find, mightier than the wonder o f
a woman's worth? ... In Water, Earth, and Air; the only Will is for love.

  How long had it been since her laughter had bubbled in his cars, sweet as spring rainfall? He could not
even recall. Now it was only with terror that he thought of her at all, fearing that even in these dark hours,
while Wotan's mind was elsewhere, Wotan would somehow learn of her, somehow know where she and
Vixie were hidden.

  Fearing that he would find them, as he would find Lucy no matter where she went.

  Renfield hugged himself, as if he could crush his bulky sixteen-stone-plus into a ball the size of an apple,
the size of an apple-seed ... too small to be found by those all-seeing crimson eyes. Hurting for comfort,
he called to mind-just once, like a quick glance at a photograph hastily stowed in hiding again,-
Catherine’s face as last he had seen it, asleep and so peaceful, with her long dark lashes veiling those
pansy-blue eyes and her wd hair unraveled over the pillow.

  Beautiful Catherine. Beautiful Vixie, as delicate as Lucy but ~,vith Miss Mina's exquisite darkness,
laughing over some passage in her Latin lesson or holding out her finger in breathless wonder as a yellow
butterfly floated in from the garden, landed on it with tiny pricking feet.

  Just let me be with them again, Renfield whispered to the God whom he knew Wotan would
never allow him to peti-tion. I know my sins are many ,, my offenses rank in your sight, but please,
please, let me finish my task here, and return to their side.

  Day was coming. They would strap him up again, pour lau-danum down his throat. He felt the
Traveler's mind, as the thing he knew as Wotan drew near to his lair in the rotting chapel at Carfax again,
seeking the bed of earth upon which he must sleep. Why earth? he wondered. Why that particular
earth, which he'd brought in such quantity upon the haunted ship? He wanted to ask, but dared not.
He was there only to serve, only to do the bidding of the Master who, for all his terror, was his best and
only hope.



  000
  Seward had left the door of the padded room unlocked through most of the night-Renfield heard them
whisper about it in the corridor. But beyond a flicker of contempt for such an obvious attempt at trapping
him, he felt no interest in the matter. The Traveler was abroad in the night; of what use was it to knock
upon the door of his empty house? And Renfield was weary, weary unto death, and hungry with a hunger
that he knew could never be filled. No fly, no spider, not the smallest ant crept into the dreary canvas
confines of the padded cell. Only, if he lis-tened, deep beneath the matting he could hear the rustle of tiny
creeping beetles, of crawling fleas.

  And they did him no good at all.

  Catherine, my darling, he thought as he felt the Traveler's mind begin sinking into its day-sleep, begin
to burn like creeping fire at the edges of his own, dream of me now, between your sleep and your
waking. Remember that I love you.
  He heard the key turn in the lock.
  Not many minutes after that he began to scream.



  000


  Letter, Dr. Patrick Hennessey, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.K.Q.C., P.I., etc., Rushbrook House,
to Georgina, Lady Clayburne
  22 August
  Received your check. Many thanks.

  I searched through Seward's correspondence again this week and found no attempt on the part of
Catherine Renfield to get in much with either her husband or Seward. Nor was there any letter in a hand
that matched the sample you sent to me. I will con-tinue to observe.

  R.M.R. has been under heavy restraint for two days, after an escape attempt on the 19th, and violent
much of that time. So far as any of the attendants has heard, he has not uttered your sister’s name, nor
given any clue as to her whereabouts or those of your niece.

  I will require another 10 s. per week, if I am to continue to collect information from the attendants.

  I remain, dear Madame,

  Your humble etc.




                                     CHAPTER NINE
  Letter, the Honorable Arthur Holmwood to Lord Godalming

  22 August

  Dearest Father,

  Please forgive my delay in coming up to Ring. I promised to escort Miss Westenra and her mother
down to London, and if you could see the uncertain state of Mrs. Westenra's health, I am sure you would
agree with my course-nay, command me to it. I hope your own health is improved?

  I cannot wait for you to make Miss Westenra's acquaintance. You will pronounce her-in Uncle Harry's
words-"sound as a roast." (One inevitably wonders what sort of roast he has in mind?) The two days I
have spent in Whitby with her, walking up to the Abbey on its overhanging cliffs, or rowing on the Esk,
have been among the happiest of my life, for she seems to carry sunlight about with her. Her mother is a
bit of a Tartar-I kept expecting her to tell me, a la Aunt Maude, that gentlemen do not

 wear double-breasted waistcoats-but good-hearted underneath. f think she fears to let Lucy go, for
with her own failing health ,he has come to rely on her in a thousand ways.

  By the by, the Westenras are not, as Aunt Maude would have at, "nobodies." Sir Clive Westenra left
Lucy £1100 a year upon her marriage, a quite respectable sum-to anyone but Aunt Maude! Their
villa-Hillingham-lies near Primrose Hill, a very quiet, countrified place, surrounded by the sort of
old-fashioned garden that makes one think one is deep in the country indeed. I installed the two ladies
there this afternoon, and spent a peace-ful hour listening to Lucy play the piano. I kept thinking how her
fingers would sound on the keys of your harpsicord at Ring, and hoping some day soon to hear the two
of you talk about Music together. (Her favorite is Brahms.)

  Tomorrow I have promised to take both ladies out on the Thames in the Guenivere, for it's been far
too long since I've had a tiller in my hands. I only wish you could be along as well, to wave at the little
sailing-craft as we steam grandly past!

  Unless you need me, sir, I shall remain in London until the wedding, which as you know has been
moved up to the 28th September. The change of date has made for a great deal of busi-ness, and though
Lucy handles it all as adeptly as a matron of thirty, still if I can be of service to her and her mother here, I
should like to put myself at their disposal.

  I look forward very much to seeing you here on the 20th, if that is still your plan.

  Until then,

  Your loving son, Arthur



  000



  He knows where she is!

  Through the heat of the endless summer afternoon Renfield twisted in his chains, emerging again and
again from the cloudy delerium of laudanum to the horror of waking knowledge.
  He is only waiting for the night, to take her!

   He could not say it, could not speak. Wotan in his coffin would hear him, know his betrayal. But he
could not keep silent, and like an animal, trapped in rage and in pain, he screamed, and kicked at that
filthy gnome Langmore, the whiskey-smelling Hennessey, when they came into the padded room, to
dump more laudanum down his throat.

  Don't send me back there! If she is to die tonight I don't want to see it!

  As if he lay naked, chained like Prometheus to the vulture--haunted rocks, Renfield could feel the
passage of the sun across the sky, the inevitable approach of the night.

  Someone save her! Someone warn her!

 What I do not have yet, Wotan whispered, grinning with his sharp white teeth, shall I make
you a present of shameful one? How many flies will you have to devour, my little
Mime, to gain all that one single drink of living blood will bestow?

  The blood is the life. You know this.

  In India, Renfield remembered, there were sects-whole vil-lages in places-devoted to Kali, the
many-handed black-skinned goddess who danced on the corpse of a dead demon, a necklace of human
heads about her throat. They said she was the wife of Shiva, Lord of Change, but there was something in
her that Ren-field sensed was older, deeper, primal as the rotting flesh from which next year's corn
sprouted. He'd ridden out one night with a sergeant named Morehouse and a couple of Punjabi
policemen to raid the camp of a robber-band along the Grand Trunk: they'd taken two men prisoners,
and killed two others in the fighting. I lie rest had fled. In the camp they'd found the clothes and money of
at least twenty-five travelers, some of whose bodies they'd located in ditches near the road the next day.

   Are they leftovers from the Mutiny? Renfield had asked, when the screaming, spitting robbers
had been bound, gagged, loaded into one of their own bullock-carts for transport back to Calcutta and
trial. Even then-thirty years ago almost-the great uprising against the British rulers had been over for a
decade, but Renfield remembered it still: the grilling sun beating down On the empty parade-ground at
Meerut, the horror of blood and hacked-up bodies he'd seen, when with the relieving troops he'd looked
down the Well at Cawnpore.

  Narh, said Morehouse, and spit. They's just robbers.

  And one of the Punjabis, a man named Akbar Singh, had said, They existed long before the
uprising, Renfield Sahib. In those days they were called Thugs, and they were better
organized, but it was much the same. Indeed, it was forbidden among them to rob the
Gora-log, the English, proof enough that it was only money that interested them,
though they claimed to have their Goddess's blessing. It is a poor country, Sahib,
and even if a man has a farm, or part of a farm that he shares with many brothers,
he often cannot feed his family. Men of this brotherhood speak of harvesting
travelers, as if they were wheat, standing in fields that the Goddess had given them.
There are many such.
 In his years of living in India after that, Renfield had found that this was so.
 Singh's words came back to him, through that endless day, as he felt the yellow fires of the Traveler
God's hunger seep into his dreams: harvesting. Harvesting.
 And in his dreams he caught glimpses of her, despite all he could do: running up the stairs with a tray of
tea and muffins for her mother, who lay yet in bed; having a chat with the housekeeper-"I worry about
her, Mrs. Dennis, she says she feels fine but I know she isn't well . . ." Giving her maid a quick, friendly
hug before she snatched up her broad-brimmed straw hat, skipped down the stairs to meet her
handsome Arthur, wait-ing smiling in the hall, or sitting beneath the flapping sun-shade of a small
steam-launch that Arthur piloted up the river.
   The sun moved across the sky, and the Earth's concealing shadow crawled over the curve of the
world. Renfield screamed his despair, and in his mind Wotan only laughed.
   If you will turn aside from the harvest, will you then turn aside from the living bounty that it
yields?
   He felt Wotan's waking like the breaking of a strangler's noose. It was dark in the padded room, and
silent, for once, in the hall outside. The smelly air was warm and thick as dirty wa-ter. Renfield hung for a
time, weeping, in the straps, but twisted his head to one side to dry his eyes on his shoulder when he
heard Hardy's footsteps in the corridor. He murmured a pleas-ant, "Good-evening, Hardy-did you
manage to beat Simmons at cribbage today?" and the attendant unlocked the straps, re-leased the metal
catches on the back of the strait-jacket, pulled the heavy garment from Renfield's arms.
   "There, now, y'old villain, you gonna be good this evenin'?"
   "My dear Hardy . . ." Renfield widened his eyes at the big man. "Have I not been good as gold for
three days now? Mali-cious witnesses rise up; they ask me of things that I know not / They requite
me evil for good, and my soul is forlorn."
   But Hardy, who did not appear to know more of the Bible than a few names and a Commandment or
two (if that), only shook his head, and took his leave, to bring, Renfield knew, the usual unpalatable
dinner of tepid stew and bread. So he stood in the corner farthest from the room's tiny barred window,
head down and hands folded in an attitude of passive dejection. When Hardy returned with the plate in
his hand, he was ready for an attack, but Renfield only dodged past him, slammed the door on him, and
shoved the bolt shut.
   The padded cell was on the ground floor: Hardy's whistle shrilled in Renfield's ears as he ran, but he
knew the keepers would go first to the outer doors, not upstairs. He plunged up the small service flight,
then along the hall, where the door of his own old room still stood open, awaiting the glaziers who would
fix the casement he'd torn out. Let them catch him in time, if only he could reach the dark chapel, if only
he could plead with Wotan to find someone else. Surely there were robbers and mur-derers in England,
spiritual brothers of the Thugs, upon whom his hunger could feast?
   Darkness outside, the wild smells of summer night and free-dom. Shrubs lashed his bare legs, damp
grass like a carpet of velvet under his naked feet-it seemed to him almost that he was flying in a dream,
flying like the Valkyries, with their wild music in his ears. It would be moonrise soon, moonrise when
Wotan would walk out, would make his way to Hillingham House, where, Renfield knew, he had marked
the very window of Lucy's bedchamber.
   "Master, no!" He threw himself against the iron-strapped oak of the chapel doors. "Master, listen!"
   The next instant Seward and his attendants seized him, dragged him back from the door. Renfield
screamed in frustra-tion and rage, turned in their grip, and lunged at Seward. Fool and worse than fool,
understanding nothing! You will be the death of that innocent girl, who never did you harm! But
the anger that had all of Renfield's life come and gone from his brain overwhelmed him in red blindness,
and the sounds that came from his mouth were inchoate howls of fury. His hands closed around the
mad-doctor's skinny throat and he squeezed, twisted, knowing nothing beyond the fact that this man
would thwart him, thwart him from doing what he knew to be right.
  And as the madness of anger swept over him, he heard laugh-ter, far back down some dark corridor
of his burning brain: the laughter of contempt.

  Then Wotan was gone.

  Renfield stood trembling, shivering, for in the fight his night-shirt had been ripped half off him, and
sweat painted his body and soaked his hair. Hardy, Simmons, Hennessey, and Langmore clutched his
arms, while Seward leaned against the corner of the chapel wall, gasping and clutching at the collar of his
shirt, which had been all but torn away. These things Renfield noted distantly, of less importance than the
black wheeling shape of a bat, flittering above their heads in the light of the dropped lanterns and the
new-risen crescent moon.

  As Renfield looked up, the bat circled overhead, and for one instant Renfield saw the red gleam of its
eyes. Then it flew away, not erratically as such creatures fly, but straight, like a homing bird, westward
toward London.

  Emptiness swept him, and despair.

  Langmore had his wrist, clamped under his armpit while he pulled the sleeve of the strait-jacket over
Renfield's hand. Ren-field looked around him at the men as if waking from a dream. There was so much
fear, such deadly grimness in their faces, that it seemed to him almost comical, were it not that he knew
what would happen, must happen, tonight.

  "It's all right," he said in a normal tone of voice. "You needn't tie me. I shall go quietly."



  000



  Lucy Westenra's Diary*

  Hillingham

  24 August

  Last night I seemed to be dreaming again just as I was at Whitby. Perhaps it is the change of air, or
getting home again. It was dark and horrid to me, for I can remember nothing; but am full of vague fear,
and I feel so weak and worn out. When Arthur came to lunch, he looked quite grieved when he saw me,
and I hadn't the heart to try to be cheerful ...
                                      CHAPTER TEN

R.M.R.’s notes

24 August

4 flies



25 August

6 flies. Sugar and treacle.

Won treacle from Hardy at riddles.



    A good man proclaimed by God and man,

    I sit with my family, two daughters, two wives, two sons.

    Each daughter with her only son,

    Each daughter's son with his two sisters,

    With his father, his uncle, his nephew.

    Five chairs there are round the table

    And each has a chair, none stands.

          Who am I?



26 August

5 flies, 1 spider

Spiders harder to catch in padding.



27 August

10 flies. Prune macedoirae.



28 August
  9 flies.

  His voice is silent. Even when I sleep, as I did in today's deep heat, nothing. He is sated.

  Every night I see him, standing on the air outside her win-dow, first a small darkness, like a bat, red
eyes burning, burning. She comes to the window, sleep-walking in her night-dress, blonde hair streaming
down her back and lifted by the breath of the night. Dear God, how thin she looks! Her face is drawn
and gaunt, her eyes sunk in shadows. He walks to her across the air and the face she raises to him is like
an exhausted child's, un-comprehending. His cloak covers her; he steps down, and into the dark of her
room.

  Treacle pudding at dinner. Won Langmore's from him at crib-bage. Hardy cheats.



  29 August

  12 flies, 1 spider

  Was it Dante who said that the true pain of Hell is exclusion from the beatific vision of God? All the
refinements of torment, the rain of fire and the pits of ice, the buffeting winds of the Circle of the
Passionate, all are only reflections of that fact: that those souls have forgotten God, and are forgotten by
Him.

  Wotan the Traveler has forgotten me.

  Oh, Catherine, forgive me my failure! I am utterly on my own.



  30 August

  Will he never make an end to her?



  000



  "John." Lucy rose from the wicker chair among the ferns of the Hillingham conservatory, held out her
hand. "It's good to see you."

  In the act of surrendering his hat to the maid, Seward froze. His heart seemed to stall in his chest. Art
had warned him that Lucy looked bad. But nothing could have prepared him for the ghastly whiteness of
her face, the way her stylish pink gown hung now from her attenuated shoulders, the transparent look to
her hands, and the faint blueness that lay like a ghost on her lips. Dear God!

  He forced himself to say, "And it's always good to see you, Miss Westenra," hoping his voice would
not betray his shock. He thanked God-and his long-dead nanny-from the bot-tom of his heart for the
existence of good manners and small talk, that allowed one to go on as if nothing unthinkable were
happening.
  "We'll be having lunch out here, if you don't mind." Lucy smiled, gesturing through the conservatory's
glass doors to the white-clothed table, the cheerful blue-and-,yellow china set out among the tubbed
feather-palms, the dark-leaved aspidistras. "It's so muggy today." With its long windows open onto the
walled garden, even the conservatory was warm, but Lucy kept a shawl draped over her shoulders, as if
her own flesh no longer sufficed to protect her bones from chill. From the other white wicker chair, Mrs.
Westenra half-rose with a friendly nod--friendly, reflected Seward, now that there was no danger of
Lucy giving her hand to one so unworthy as a mad-doctor who had no better social manners than to go
off in pursuit of one of his patients between the fish course and the entree.

  "And how are you, Madame?" he asked, holding out his hand to her. Lucy's appearance shocked him,
but her mother's sallow skin and puffy hands only filled him with deepest pity. Even had Arthur not
warned him about that, too, he would have seen the death-warrant written in her face.

  In the awful days following that disastrous dinner, Seward had frequently wished Mrs. Westenra ill.
Though he had no su-perstitious belief that mere sour wishes could bring ill to pass, the recollection of
them twisted within him, not out of guilt, but sorrow at how hastily a disappointed lover could hope for
fate's vengeance, little realizing that far worse was already in store.

  "I'm quite well, thank you, Dr. Seward." Her own nanny's strictly taught good manners allowed her to
smile as she lied. "I'm sorry Mr. Holmwood will not be able to join us."

  "His father was taken ill, at their ancestral home in Ring." The telegram had reached him that morning,
as he'd been writ-ing up instructions for Hennessey to look after various of the more difficult patients.
"Have you been there? It's in the Lake District, probably one of the most beautiful old houses I've ever
seen." He helped Mrs. Westenra to the little table, just as if she hadn't made sniffy remarks about his
quarters in Rushbrook House; held her chair for her and handed her her napkin before seating Lucy, then
himself. "I had occasion to spend a few weeks there, when I was first hired to escort Uncle Harry
Holmwood round the world and make sure he didn't kill himself or anyone else in the process."

  Tales of Uncle Harry kept both women entertained through luncheon-traveling with Uncle Harry had
given Seward a stock of stories that would have lasted him through two months in quarantine, and that
was only the repeatable ones. His ill-will against Violet Westenra dissolved as though it had never been,
petty in the face of mortality's shadow, and he exerted himself to entertain her. For her part, she met his
efforts with smiling cheer. Sometimes Seward, glancing at Lucy's face, saw dread and con-fusion in her
eyes as she looked at her mother, but Mrs. West-enra seemed already to be withdrawing from the world
of the living. If asked, she would probably agree that Lucy was too thin and did not look well. But she
did not seem to see the skull that stared at Seward from beneath Lucy's fragile skin.

  "If you young people will excuse me, it's become my custom to lie down for a little after luncheon . . ."

  And they were alone.

  The last time they had been so was back in May, when Lucy had confessed to him, weeping, that she
loved another: that her heart was not free.

  He wondered if his would ever be.

  The memory of the scene was in her eyes as she looked at him, and Seward said, as if speaking to a
new patient, "So tell me what's troubling you ... Miss Westenra. Or may I yet call you Lucy, as if you
were my sister?"

  Her fleeting smile showed gums nearly white, and sunken back horribly from her teeth. "I should like to
have a brother like you, Doctor ... Jack. One day . . ."

  The maid came in to clear up. Lucy glanced sidelong at her, and said, "Would you much mind coming
to my boudoir, if you're going to look in my eyes and at my tongue and all that?" She smiled brightly, but
in her eyes Seward saw the same worry that had been there when she'd watched her mother at lunch.

  Wondering how much her mother guessed; how much her mother saw.

  "Of course." He followed her through the well-remembered front hall, with its Queen Anne chest and
the big Chinese porce-lain bowl that held visitors' cards, and up to her room, over looking the back
garden on a little balcony and painted white and violet.

  The moment the door was closed, she sank onto a chair, her hands pressed to her brow to cover her
eyes, as if all her strength had deserted her and she had barely made it to refuge. For a mo-ment she said
nothing, but Seward could see the tears flowing from beneath her trembling fingers.

  "I can't tell you how I loathe talking about myself." Her voice was barely a whisper.

  "I understand," replied Seward softly. "But even were I per-sonally blackguard enough to speak of
what another tells me, a doctor's confidence is sacred. Arthur is my friend, and grievously anxious about
you, but your trouble is no more his business than the sufferings of any of my patients would be."

  "It isn't that." Lucy raised her head then, shook back the ten-drils of her hair that had come unpinned
around her face. "Tell Arthur everything you choose. It is his business, and no more than I would tell him
myself, were he here.

   "As for what's wrong ... I don't know what's wrong with me! That's what frightens me so. I feel so
weak, and I have trouble breathing, especially in the morning, as if there isn't enough air in the world to
fill my lungs. And I have dreams, terrible dreams . . ."

  "About what?" Seward asked, though the matter was clearly physical and not in the province of mental
fancies. Lucy ducked her head aside, the faintest flare of pink staining the ghastly white of her
cheekbones.

  "I-I don't recall." Her breath quickened to a sudden, rag-ged gasp. She got hastily to her feet and went
to the window, the pink cashmere shawl sliding from her shoulders in her confusion. Her hands fumbled
with the window-catch and the next moment she gave a little cry as the casement jerked up hard. She
pulled her hand back, where a corner of the pane cracked at the impact.

  Seward sprang to his feet and went to her. She was crying in earnest now, clutching her cut finger, from
weakness, he guessed, rather than genuine pain. Or shame perhaps, he thought, as he took her hand and
made sure that the cut was indeed superficial. He found it curious, how frequently young ladies were
overcome with shame they could not name, when they were exhausted, or hurt.

  He said nothing, only took a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket to tie up the cut. He didn't even
think Lucy noticed that he also extracted from the same pocket a small glass pipette, and took in it a few
drops of her blood.

  "I wish Mina were with me," Lucy whispered, as Seward guided her back to her chair. "Mina Murray,
who was in the Fourth Form at Mrs. Druggett's School when I was in the First. Of Course I can speak
to ... to Arthur about anything, but ... but sometimes a girl needs another girl to speak to."
  "Of course," said Seward. And in a gently rallying tone, added, "That's a well-known medical fact," and
was rewarded by Lucy's hesitant smile. "And I'm sorry," he went on more soberly, "that Arthur could not
be here to comfort you. Even were you not affianced, I could name no man better suited to the task."

  And she sighed and relaxed, relieved that Arthur's name was not forbidden between them. She turned
a little away from him, groping in her pocket for a handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

  "Can your Miss Murray not be sent for?" Seward asked. "She was the friend who went to Whitby with
you, was she not?"

  "She was, but she was called away suddenly, just before Mother and I came home. Her fiancé was
taken ill with brain-fever somewhere in Europe, and she had to go to him."

  Speaking of her friend's concerns seemed to steady her, and she held out her hand, and opened her
mouth, for his examina-tion of nails and gums, with the air of an obedient child. The mucous membranes
were nearly white, as he had observed be-fore. Chlorosis? he wondered, baffled. It was a form of
anaemia that struck girls of her age, but he'd never known it to come on so swiftly. In May she'd been
delicate-she was always prone to bronchial complaints-but she'd been pink as a rose and lively as a
kitten.

  "When did this start?" he asked, expecting her to say-as so many did-that she didn't really know, that it
had come on her gradually.

  Instead she replied at once, "In Whitby. I used to sleep-walk when I was at school, I think I told
you-poor Mina was forever chasing me down the hallways in the middle of the night! In Whitby I started
doing so again. One night I went right out of the house where we were staying, and walked clear up to
the churchyard that overlooks the town. Mina found me lying on one of the tombstones, like the heroine
of a play. We didn't tell Mama."

 Again the hesitation, the shadow of fear crossing her eyes--fear of what she half-guessed, fear that she
would not even speak of to Seward, and he a doctor. Fear that her fear for her mother was true.

  She went on, "I felt ill right after that. I thought I'd just taken a chill, and that it would pass off, and it
did, for a day or two. Then it came back, for three, perhaps four days. I felt better for a day or two just
before Mina left for Buda-Pesth, and when Arthur was in Whitby, we rode and walked and went
boating, and I thought all was well. But now . . ."

   She lowered her head to her hands again, and began to cry afresh. "A week ago it began again, the
dreams, and the sleep-walking, and this horrible feeling of being in some terrible danger that I cannot see.
Last night I woke up lying on the floor between my bed and the window, gasping as if I were drown-ing
and cold ... so cold! I've tried asking Mother if I may sleep with her and she doesn't want me to. She
says she sleeps so lightly she's afraid she will disturb me, or I her. I look at myself in the mirror and I look
like Death. I see myself in Arthur's eyes..."

 She broke off, her hands pressed to her mouth, her thin body trembling as if with bitter chill. "What's
wrong with me, jack?" Her voice thinned to barely a breath. "I know this isn't right. What's happening to
me?"

  "What's happening is that you're ill." Seward would have given his right arm to cup her thin cheek with
his hand; he took her hand instead. Long practice had given him the ability to put into his voice a calm
steadiness that he was far from feeling. "All pathologies have an explanation: we simply haven't found the
right one here yet. You show some symptoms of anaemia but the onset is all wrong. Are you able to
eat?"

  She shook her head. It was true she'd only toyed with her lunch.

  "The sleep-walking and the dreams may very well have some-thing to do with it, and with your very
natural concern over your mother's health. In my work with the human mind, I've ob-served many cases
of some mental stress or upset working its way out in physical symptoms. There's a great deal of new
work being done on this subject and it's apparently not at all uncom-mon. Would it be all right if I came
back for lunch the day after tomorrow, and brought a friend with me? He's the doctor I stud-ied with at
the University of Leyden, an expert in rare diseases. He may be able to take one look at you and say,
`Ach, it is polly-diddle-itis! She has only to bathe in goat's milk and she vill be vell again!"'

  Lucy burst into laughter, her whole emaciated face lightening, and she clasped Seward's hand in both of
hers. "Bring whom you will, dear Jack," she said. "Mother will be lunching out; we can be alone. And
thank you," she added, as she descended the stairs with him, and walked him to the door. "Thank you
more than I can say."

  Lucy's laughter, and the brightness that had replaced the frightened lethargy in her eyes, remained with
Seward through the long rattling journey back to Purfleet in the two-horse fly he kept-at rather more
expense than he liked-for such occasions. Simmons was driving, and came close to tangling axles with
half a dozen cabs, drays, and carts on the road.

  At Rushbrook House he took a quick glance at Hennessey's sloppy notes to make sure nothing
untoward had happened in his absence-Emily Strathmore had had to be put in the Swing again, and
"Lord Spotty" was up to his old tricks-then settled down to write a letter to Arthur Holmwood, and a
telegram to Abraham Van Helsing.
                                 CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For nearly three weeks Renfield watched, as if from a barred and distant window, as the thing in the
chapel at Carfax continued its attacks on Lucy.

   When the red-eyed bat had flown from the chapel window, leaving him behind in the hands of his foes,
he had feared that he must see the kill. He had had no idea, he thought now, of how long that kill would
take, of the drawn-out torment of cat-and--mouse that Wotan played, like a malicious child, with the
fright-ened girl. It was one thing, he told himself, cold with anger, to kill in the delirious uncontrollable
rush of rage or lust (How do I know that? he wondered: why did the brown face of an Indian girl wink
through his consciousness, lying sleeping on the char-poi at his side ... sleeping with open eyes ... ) It was
another to kill by inches, to leave Lucy swooning on the floor of her room, to come again another night
and draw her once more to the brink of death.

  Yet he could not speak of what he knew. Wotan held the power of life in his hand, life that Renfield
desperately needed. Not once in those three weeks did Wotan call upon him or speak his name, but
Renfield did not give up the hope-the certainty--that he would.

  "All over, all over, he has deserted me," he said one warm September afternoon when Seward came to
visit him-to visit him in his old room, whose repaired window looked out over the garden and the
tree-lined drive from the gates. He'd spread sugar from his tea over the window-sill, and had caught a
dozen flies in the final hour of the day. "No hope for me now unless I do it for myself." Seward, though of
too small a mind to com-prehend or even guess at Renfield's mission, sympathized and agreed to provide
an extra ration of sugar. It was astonishing, thought Renfield, shaking his head, how easily the man could
be manipulated.

  "He's off to visit that sweetheart of his, that's bound to marry a lord," provided Langmore shortly
thereafter, coming in with the extra sugar while Renfield sat at the open window watching Seward's smart
black fly rattle off down the drive and through the gates.

  "Is she having second thoughts?" inquired Renfield, and the little keeper hooted with laughter and
slapped his thigh. "Lord, let's hope not! That mother of her'n would ass-assinate him if she thought it!
What a griffin! No-the poor young lady's took ill." Langmore came over to the window, with a glance of
wary disgust at the little buzzing cardboard box at Renfield's elbow, and with his eyes followed the black
carriage through the gates, and out onto the London road. By his voice, and the pupils of his eyes,
Renfield could see the keeper had had a touch of poppy before coming on duty. Not enough to put him
to sleep, but enough to make him talkative.

  "Funny how a man can be cool and smart as a soldier, when the likes of old Emily Strathmore's tearin'
at him like a wildcat, yet since his Miss Lucy's been took ill-and her promised to an other man, and that
other man the Doc's best friend-it's like he's aged ten years."

  "Miss Lucy?" Renfield stared at him.

  "Miss Lucy Westenra. Pretty as a daffy-down-dilly, I thought, the night she come here to take dinner
with him-with that ma of hers standin' right over her to make sure the pair of 'em didn't have a moment to
theirselves for the Doc to pop the question, as I hear he planned to that night. And him borrowin' a
but-ler and silverware and what-all else from Sir Ambrose Poole for the t'occasion. Well, 'tis an ill wind
that blows no one good." The grizzled little man cocked an eyebrow at Renfield. "You marry a maid, you
marry her ma, and Christ help the man ends up with that old man-trap for a mother-in-law. You know
what I mean?"

  "Yes," said Renfield softly, thinking of cold-eyed Lady Brough ... though of course, Catherine was
nothing at all like her mother. And that hatchet-faced harridan Georgina Clay-burne, who wanted nothing
more than to re-claim Catherine's share of their father's money for her precious "family."

  "Yes, I know what you mean."

  Sometimes in sleep he could see Catherine, in that London house they'd bought under the name of
Marshmire, dozing by lamplight. Or in his dreams he'd walk up the stairs of their old house in
Nottingham, as he'd used to years ago, to see Vixie in her nursery, that bright-eyed nymph face relaxed
in sleep, a black curl falling over her forehead. These dreams comforted him deeply, for he missed them
both. Even had they been able to get word to him without Georgina and Lady Brough hearing of it and
finding a way to trace them-to take Vixie away--communication was now doubly perilous.

  And sometimes he would dream of Vixie, waking in her nursery room in that house in Nottingham, not
a little girl but the young lady that she was now, sixteen and beautiful, wearing I_ucy Westenra's
night-dress.

  In these dreams she would wake, and sit up in bed, dark eyes wide in the darkness. Outside the
window rain fell through fog, and the tiny glow of her night-light sparkled on it as she got out of bed,
crossed to the window, threw open the casement. Ren-field Would struggle to reach her, struggle to cry
out to her, Vixie, don't!

  And He was outside her window. Slowly coalescing from the shadow;, as the three Valkyries had
coalesced from the dark-ness, fog, and rain in Renfield’s long-ago dream of the hopeless prisoner named
Jonathan. The thing in the chapel, the thing Renfield still sometimes called Wotan, though he knew now
that it was something else, some other Traveler. Wind lifted and stirred Wotan's black cloak, and in the
darkness his eyes were red as flame, staring into Vixie's.

  Vixie, no!

  Then Renfield would waken himself screaming, and those imbecile attendants would come with their
laudanum and chlo-ral hydrate, like rescuers determined to shove a drowning man back down under the
waves.

  And they wondered that he fought them!

  Yet more often, Renfield dreamed of Lucy Westenra: dreamed, knowing he participated in the dreams
of the thing in the chapel, that could touch Lucy's sleeping mind. He dreamed of Lucy waking in the
darkness and stumbling to the window, dreamed of the floating shadow, the crimson eyes. Dreamed of
the fangs that pierced her throat, of those coarse hands with their claw-like nails, caressing her as if he
would mould her flesh into what he sought her to be. Once Renfield saw Wotan push back his sleeve and
tear open the vein of his own arm, and press Lucy's white lips to the wound.

  "Drink," Renfield heard him breathe. "Drink, or you will die."

  Half-swooning, Lucy whispered, "Please ... I don't want to die . . ." and the dark intruder pulled back
her head by a hand-ful of her fair hair, and held the dripping cut up over her mouth, so that his blood
dropped down onto her lips.
  "Then drink, my beautiful, my beloved one. Drink, and you shall never die. For the blood is the life."

  Droplets of the blood splashed on her cheek, mixing with her tears of terror and shame.

  Renfield was aware of the old man Seward brought to see Lucy, a short, sturdy septuagenarian with
long white hair that hung to his shoulders and a jaw like a pugnacious bulldog's. He guessed it was Dr.
Van Helsing, whom Hennessey had spo-ken of as Seward's teacher and master: "Weird old sod, and
studies every spook and fairy-tale like they was Freud and Char-cot," the Irishman said, when he came
in to check on Renfield a few days after Renfield's conversation with Langmore about mothers-in-law.
"Couldn't stick it, myself. Just give me the facts, and keep the metaphysics out of it."

  Renfield had read Van Helsing's work since the Dutchman's original studies of Chinese and Indian
healing practices in the forties, and had been deeply impressed. But since Hennessey had never
demonstrated much interest even in such facts as how many grains of chloral hydrate might be lethal to a
screaming patient, or whether there was any way of dealing with recalci-trance other than the truncheon,
Renfield didn't attempt to answer. He only continued to stare from his window at the dark-ening evening
sky.

  Hennessey went on, "It's his idea old John stay with her tonight-she was took bad last night,
seemingly-though the dear Lord knows what he might do if she's took sick again. Wave a bit of incense
about the bed, maybe, or chant a wee verse of the Mass?" He shrugged, and scratched his belly, under
the gaudy waistcoat dribbled with food-stains. "It's what you'd ex-pect, of a man who says he's a doctor
of the mind and then goes and marries a woman who's been locked in a padded room for the past
decade. So how's the flies this evenin'?" He hadn't no-ticed that Renfield had ceased to trap flies three
days before, when Wotan's concerted attacks on Lucy had redoubled.

  In too many dreams had the flies had Lucy’s face. Or Vixie's.

  "In rollicking good health," replied Renfield, which sent Hen-nessey away in peals of laughter and a
strong odor of gin. Renfield returned to his window, gazing out at the darken-ing sky.

  Seward was gone all night. Renfield saw the smart black car-riage turn in at the gates with the coming
of dawn. As luck would have it, it was one of the days when Farley, one of the charity patients and a
man of erratic violence, went on the ram-page; Renfield could hear him screaming from the other side of
the building, and the spreading uproar as the other patients be-came frightened and took up the din.
Renfield shook his head, feeling nothing but pity for those poor weak-minded souls, and indeed for poor
Dr. Seward, who looked worn to a rag when he made rounds early in the afternoon.

  But shortly before sunset Seward had his rather pedestrian team of brown geldings harnessed to the fly
again, and Renfield watched him drive off through the gates and along the London road. And he felt, as
the sun sank, the sullen boil of anger that he knew came from outside himself: Wotan waking in his coffin,
in the dark of the ruined chapel. Wotan reaching out with his hand, with his mind, with all his dark
powers, to take the woman for himself.

  Seward did not come back that night, nor in the morning. In his dreams Renfield had seen him, sleeping
on the mauve silk cushions of a little couch beside a parlor fire, while visible through the doorway in the
next room the shadow of Wotan had bent over the weeping Lucy. And Renfield, too, had wept. When
Seward returned late in the afternoon, and made a con-scientious round of the patients before dark, he
was as white and shaky as if the Traveler had drunk his blood as well as hers.

  The thought of this possibility filled Renfield with horror. Would Seward, then, be able to see into his
dreams, his thoughts, as Wotan did? Wotan sleeping in his coffin, gorged with blood? Renfield dared not
ask.

  Seward drove away the following afternoon, and though he returned that evening, after that Renfield
saw little of him, save in the tangled torment of dreams. He saw confused images of Seward operating to
transfuse blood from old Van Helsing's arm into Lucy's, Lucy who lay white and gasping, like a corpse
al-ready, among a bower of garlic-blossoms twined around the posts of her bed. Saw Lucy sleeping, her
blonde hair tumbled about her, the white flowers of the garlic-plant filling the room like funerary garlands.
Sometimes Van Helsing, sometimes Sew-ard, slept in the chair at her bedside, and in the darkness of her
flower-draped window a black shape beat against the panes.

  You must kill him, you know, whispered Wotan in Renfield's ear, as the sun set over London and
Renfield stood at his window, wondering what Catherine and Vixie were doing, and how he could
accomplish his mission and return to them if he did not go back to eating spiders and flies. So far he'd
managed to hold his hunger at bay.

  Wotan was angry. Renfield had felt that anger growing, for four days now. In the darkness he'd seen
the black bat fly from the window of Carfax chapel; he'd seen it come back, before the breaking day.
And Wotan was hungry, frantic hunger that Ren-field understood as he understood the hammering of the
blood in his neck-vein. Hunger for life, multiplied beyond Renfield's own overwhelming hunger a
thousand times.

  You must kill him, said Wotan again, and the hazy autumn evening began to blur around Renfield. In
his ears throbbed the music of Act Two of Die Walkure, Wotan's voice commanding Brunhilde to slay
Sigmund, and somewhere in the deeps of his mind he thought he could also hear the wild howling of a
wolf. What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind? Then the music faded, and
only that terrible whispering voice remained. Without the glory and the beauty, with only hunger and the
lust for power. I will open the way for you, as I open the ways for all my servants.

  You have not been a good master to me, Renfield whispered, and the crimson weight of those alien
thoughts crushed him, hurt him. Darkness with teeth.

  A master is not a good master or a bad master-he is Master. And he is obeyed. This man must
not leave this house tonight.

  Renfield whispered, No, Master.

  And as the sun went down, he dreamed-it had to be a dream, he thought later-that Wotan stood
beside him in his cell, formed up out of the gathering shadows, the last gleams of the reflected light
burning in his red eyes. And as Renfield knelt to him, Wotan put his hand on Renfield's head, and
Renfield felt himself transformed into a wolf, as it was within Wotan's power to transform himself into a
wolf. Far away he heard another wolf howling, and when he howled in reply, Simmons came run-ning.
With a snarl, Renfield the Wolf sprang on him, knocking him back against the wall.

  Fleet as a wolf, hungry as a wolf, Renfield raced along the hallway, down the stair, to Seward's study,
where he smelled that the doctor would be. Wild wolf-thoughts dazzled his brain as he slammed the door
open, plunged in, knife in hand that he'd snatched from the dining-room sideboard (No, that's got to be
wrong, he thought. I'm a wolf and I haven't any hands.)

  Seward was behind his worktable making entries in the day-book and Renfield crossed the room in
two strides and sprang straight over the table at him, slashing with his knife. The dream wasn't very clear,
Renfield thought later-later when he woke up, in the strait-jacket again and chained to the wall of the
padded cell. Seward took a glancing blow with the knife on his left arm, then punched Renfield straight
and hard in the jaw with his right hand, sending him sprawling backward. Renfield lay, dazed, try-ing to
work out how a man could punch a wolf in the jaw even in a dream, watching the blood stream down
Seward's fingers, splatter to the threadbare and rather vulgar Wilton carpet upon which Renfield lay.

  Attendants' voices in the hall. Simmons-the moron!-and Hardy. Seward went to the door to speak to
them, and Renfield, his hunger overwhelming him, crawled to the side of the table where Seward had
been sitting, and licked up the blood. Drink, and you shall never die, Wotan had whispered to Lucy, as
his own blood dribbled down to her chalky lips. The blood is the life. The blood is the life.
                               CHAPTER TWELVE

  As he hung on the wall of the padded cell, his brain swimming in a fog of chloral hydrate, Renfield's
dream altered. He was a wolf indeed, running through the streets of London, running free and terrified.
Smells hammered him, soaked his brain in the stenches of dung and coal-smoke, and the smaller curs of
the al-leyways fled yowling from his great swift-moving gray shadow.

  He knew where he was going. His Master had commanded, and though he did not understand-though
terror filled him at this unknown noisy terrible place-still he had to do as his Mas-ter said. What other
are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

  Renfield at least knew the house, for he'd seen it in other dreams. His wolf-self-or that other, genuine
wolf whose mind he sensed in his dream-loped along the countrified high road, through the rambling
gardens of the little villa, and Renfield saw the house ahead of him and saw no lights, no movement. He
was aware, however, of the almost-silent winnowing of leathery wings in the dark behind his head. Was
aware of his Master, the Master who had called on him, finally, after weeks of silence ... The Master
who would not forget him again.

  The tall French windows that looked onto the garden were draped with flowers of garlic, as Renfield
had seen in earlier dreams, like the decorations of a funeral. He knew their pres-ence enraged his
Master, and he knew that he-the wolf whose dream he shared-was sent to open the way into the house,
to tear down these fragile poisonous weeds so that the Master could pass through. Renfield's mind was
the mind of the wolf, and that mind was clouded with the Master's commands. He smashed through the
glass of the French door, saw with his night-seeing eyes the two women lying on the bed, clutching one
another in terror, the older in the younger's arms.

  The older woman half sat up, white hair streaming down the shoulders of her dressing-gown. Her
mouth opened, but no sound came forth but a sort of gurgling gasp. The wolf--Renfield-howled, and
howled again, and the older woman fell back, the younger pressing her hands to her mouth, staring with
eyes enormous and bruised with loss of blood. As the wolf with-drew its head in pain from the shattered
glass, Renfield heard the girl crying, "Mother! Mother!" Her voice was weak, thin, and indescribably
fragile in the silence of the dark garden, the empty house.

  Before the broken window, shorn of its protective wreaths, the whirling motes of moonlight began to
coalesce, Wotan's red eyes burning within the core of their shadow.

  In his dreams Renfield began to howl, though so deep was he under the chloral hydrate that even that
could not bring him out of his stupor, could not spare him the dream's inevitable con-clusion.



  000



  He woke hanging in the straps of the padded room, sick from the chloral hydrate, the taste of blood
and filth in his mouth. Footsteps in the hall, Hennessey's sloppy shuffle and another: "'ere, Dr. Hennessey,
you know Dr. Seward doesn't 'old with strangers comin' in an' disturbin' the patients."
   "Disturbing the patients?" Hennessey's fruity chuckle glinted with a knife of hardness underneath. "My
dear Langmore, those poor souls are so disturbed already I doubt they'd know the dif-ference between
my good Herr Gelhorn here and yourself, or care if they did know. And there's never been any proof that
it does them a particle of harm, no matter what Seward likes to say." His voice lowered. Renfield could
almost see the nasty sidelong gleam of his eyes, and smell the reek of gin on his breath. "But if we're
going to get into the subject of things Dr. Seward doesn't hold with, I'm sure he has opinions about
keep-ers who help themselves to the laudanum in the dispensary. Opinions just as strong as his crochets
about students of the hu-man condition being admitted to observe the lunatics."

  Keys jangled.

  "Now this gentleman, my dear Gelhorn, is a sad case indeed. A true wild man, he spends his days
catching and devouring spi-ders and flies, and sparrows, too, if he can get them. He's a sort of pet of our
good Dr. Seward, whom he repaid last night by a murderous attack. When the keepers laid hold of him,
he was crawling on his belly, licking up Dr. Seward's blood from the study floor."

  That's a lie! Renfield wanted to scream at them, as the door opened to reveal Hennessey and his latest
paying "friend," a weedy and anaemic-looking young man clothed in the old-fashioned tailoring typically
found east of the Rhine. Drunken bastard, it is a lie! That was only my dream. How dare you speak
of my dreams?

  Young Herr Gelhorn stepped back in alarm, blinking pale eyes behind the square lenses of his
spectacles. "How he glares," he whispered. "You are right, Herr Doktor Hennessey. It is a beast indeed."
And he licked his pale lips, fascinated.

  "He was a nabob, an India merchant," Hennessey went on, with an Irishman's deep delight in telling a
tale to an obviously riveted audience. "They say he did murder any number of Hin-doo savages over
there, in his murderous rages."

  Renfield screamed, "Liar!" and Hennessey's red face beamed at having elicited a response.

  "When he was brought in here, having been found wander-ing raving through the streets of London, he
never would say where his wife and daughter were, nor what had become of them. His wife's family
comes here time and again, begging if he's whispered a word of 'em . . ."

  "Lying blackguard!" Renfield hurled himself against the straps that bound him, feeling the red haze of
murderous rage surge like an incoming tide around his brain. "You bastard bog Irish, you keep your
tongue off a woman whose shoes you're not fit to lick!"

  Both men fell back, but Renfield saw Hennessey's head cock, listening, and a calculating light come into
his eyes. He sees a way to make me speak of Catherine! thought Renfield, with a sudden and terrible
clarity. He'll tell Lady Brough every word that I say!

  Swallowing his rage brought a physical convulsion, twisting in his bonds and slamming his head back
against the padded wall behind him, again and again, trying to blot out Hennessey's satisfied smirk.
Instead he brought to mind the image of his own big hands closing on the man's throat, twisting and
tearing. Bet-ter yet, his own teeth ripping into the man's veins, the gush of blood into his mouth, feeling
the buck of Hennessey's gross body beneath his own as the Irishman began to die. Smelling death,
hearing him gurgle and gasp as Renfield drank his blood.

  Renfield went limp in the straps, gasping himself. He was alone in the room. Voices retreated down the
hallway, "Is he ever so?" asked the German hesitantly. "I am a poet, you see, as I told you, Herr Doktor
Hennessey, a poet of the Gothic, of madness, of the inner secrets of the mind."

  "Ah, you've seen him at his best, laddie! Why, he's attacked me! Torn himself loose from those straps
on the wall and leaped upon me like a wolf. I thrust him back, and when he would have attacked me
again, I stared him down. I have this gift, you see, of controlling lunatics with the power of my eyes . . ."
Renfield screamed after them, "Liar! Liar!"

  If Lucy-and her white-haired mother-had died last night, Seward would be away all the day, maybe
more. Hennessey would be back, taunting him about Catherine, trying to force him into rage so intense he
didn't know what he was saying. Into revealing where they were hiding.

  I must be strong. I must be strong.

  But he knew he had not consumed life, gained small increments of life, for nearly two weeks. Without
consuming life, he could not be strong.

  His pity for the flies, for Lucy, would destroy those he most loved.

  He raised his voice in an inarticulate wail of despair, as if even those his ribcage would burst from the
effort to make his cry carry through the padding, through the walls, across the distance to Carfax, where
Wotan slept, glutted and smiling, in his chapel. Help me, Master, for I have need of thee!



  000



  R.M.R.'s notes

  18 September-evening

  1 spider

  And a paltry, half-dead creature at that. I had thought that brute Hennessey would leave me strapped
to the wall of the padded cell for days, a raree-show for paying customers-yet better that, than to
torment me with the aim of enraging me so that I will speak of Catherine, of Vixie. Yet I dare not speak
of it to Seward-so low am I brought.

  Seward returned tonight, dazed and shaken-looking; ex-changed a half-dozen words with me and
ordered Langmore to release me and return me to my own room. I could have con-fessed to murdering
the Queen and eating her heart and he would have paid no more heed to the words than he did to those
that I actually did say. As Langmore locked me into the room, I heard him ask Seward in the hall, "And
how is Miss Lucy, sor?" and to my surprise Seward responded, "She lives, but ... she is in a terrible way.
I must return there tonight, to keep watch beside her."

  "Yes, sor."

  Of course, Langmore made no mention of Hennessey turn-ing the ravings of those poor souls in the
other cells to his profit. With luck, the man will think more of making those little profits-and spending
them-than of subjecting me to mental torments, hoping that in my rage I will reveal to him where
Catherine and Vixie are hiding.
  How long will this terrible game of cat and mouse go on? How long will Seward be away, guarding her
with his master Van Helsing and, probably, with the girl's other suitors, those trusted friends of whom I
have so often heard him speak?

  How long can I hold out against the demon of rage within myself?



  19 September

  9 flies, 4 spiders

  Not enough! Not enough! I must consume more, to make up for the time I have lost in pity and
sentiment. I must be strong!

  I pray, yet receive no answer. Yet he is there, I know it. I feel him.

  Has he forgotten me? Or is this a test of my loyalties, my faith?



  20 September

  He is gone! He has left me! Dear gods, what shall I do?

  I was watching the last sparrows of autumn fluttering in the garden trees-not with ulterior motive, but
merely taking joy in the sweetness of their song-when I saw a cart on the high road, making for the old
house at Carfax. It stopped at the gates of Rushbrook House and one of the dirty villains at the reins
came up the avenue, to ask the way-stupid bastards could not find their own trouser-buttons without
instruction!-yet I knew in my heart that it was Carfax they sought. My anger surged up in me and I began
to rate him for the thieving blackguard that he was, anger borne of terror ... What shall I do, if my Master
departs, leaving me here in the power of such as Hennessey and Seward?

  When the men had gone, Hennessey came in, asking what I meant by my anger-blind, puling fool!-and
with terrible effort I concealed my rage, knowing now how he means to use it against me. He was
half-drunk, having consumed his usual pints of gin with his dinner, though even stone sober (which he has
not been since the reign of the Prince Regent, I shouldn't imag-ine) he would believe anything anyone told
him, if it would save him trouble. When he was gone, my rage overcame me, and I ripped the latches
from my window and sprang to the ground, running up the avenue, desperate to catch the cart that I
knew would be returning.

  I swarmed over the gate before the porter realized what was happening, leaped down onto the high
road just as those mon-sters, those unspeakable bandits, drove their foul cart past, piled high with the
boxes of earth taken from the Carfax chapel. He was in one of them, sleeping the sleep that is not truly
sleep, for He hears, He knows.

 I beat on the side of the box, crying to him not to leave me among my foes. One of the carters cut at
me with his whip and I dragged him from the box, blind with rage, knowing only that He must not leave
me, He must not go without helping me.

  Hardy and Simmons were hard on my heels down the av-enue, with Hennessey puffing and wheezing
in the rear. As they dragged me back to my cell, I cried out in my despair: "Master, I will fight for you!
They shan't kill me by inches! They shan't take you away!"

 What shall I do? He has left me indeed.

 What shall I do?



 20 September-night

  It is over.
                               CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nightmares.

  Light rain pattered on the gabled windows of Rushbrook House. John Seward stared at the ceiling of
his bedroom and tried to will himself not to dream.

  To sleep, perchance to dream ...

  ay, there's the rub ...

  He hadn't slept in two nights now. His body cried for sleep and cried, too, for chloral hydrate-cried,
sweated, and shook. But Seward knew from terrible experience that sleep after long waking was
particularly fraught with dreams. The thought of the drug holding his eyes sealed shut and his screaming
mind in darkness was more than he could bear.

  Was this what his patients went through? Emaciated Rowena Kilmer, jerking from sleep a dozen times
a night to howl and heat her head on the walls? Frantic Grayson, trying to crowd himself into the tiniest
corner of the room, barricading himself behind the bed against the phantoms that only he could see?

  Dimly, like the ghostly moaning of the wind, Seward could hear them screaming, somewhere in the
house.

  It was long past midnight.

  I open my eyes and see the ceiling, with stains on its blue--striped paper like old blood.

  Blood! Dear God, what happened to Lucy's blood? The drops I took from her that first day of
consultation were nor-mal, without the deformed cell-structure of anaemia. It wasn't anaemia she
died of, but blood-loss. She bled to death, under our very noses, without a drop being spilled on
her pillow. Through the grief that racked his heart cried the betrayed bafflement of a lifetime of scientific
study: It shouldn't have hap-pened! It couldn't have happened, not logically, not within the bounds
of any science I've ever known! This is the modern age--we're almost in the twentieth century,
damn it, not back in the twelfth! I should have been able to save her!

 Yet all of them who loved her-young Arthur, and Quincey, and even Van Helsing, with all his
wisdom-had been as power-less as he, to prevent her death.

  In his mind he saw Quincey Morris bending over Lucy's body, gazing down at her face with mingled
pity and bewilder-ment in his gray eyes, his leathery six-foot-plus seeming desper-ately out of place in the
white and violet of her boudoir; saw the sharp sidelong look in the Texan's eyes when they sat in the
breakfast-room. "That poor pretty creature that we all love has had put into her veins the blood of four
strong men! Man alive, her whole body wouldn't hold it! What took it out?"

  I open my eyes and all those questions crowd in, questions that have no answers. I close them ...

  And throw wide the gates to nightmare.

  I have dreams, terrible dreams, Lucy had said, in that same white-and-violet boudoir, but when
Seward had asked after them, she'd put him off, hurried to occupy herself with opening the window.
What would she have told him, he wondered, if she'd spoken the truth?

  Images rose to his exhausted mind, images as vivid as reality, that he could not erase. The cold,
alien-looking aparatus of blood transfusion, that he'd operated, not once but again and again in those
nightmare days, when they'd enter Lucy's room and find her white and gasping on the spotless bed. The
way Van Helsing's breath had hissed, when in adjusting Lucy's pillow he'd dislodged the velvet band she
wore around her throat, and revealed those two pale, mangled puncture-wounds above the vein. The
smell of the garlic the old man had insisted Lucy wear around her neck and with which he'd draped the
windows of the room-draperies and necklet they'd found clutched in poor Mrs. Westenra's hands, when
they'd found her dead on the morning of the nineteenth.

  Images more disturbing still, as his mind drifted toward the gates of horn and ivory that poets said
guarded the Realm of Morpheus.

  How Lucy, dying, had smiled up at Art Holmwood-Lord Godalming now, with his father's sudden
death. Her flaxen hair had seemed fairer still against the mourning he wore, and she had whispered, Kiss
me, in languorous passion, her long canine teeth glinting against her bloodless gums. How Van Helsing
had thrust Art away like a madman. And how at the funeral Van Helsing had looked sharply at the
broken and weeping Arthur when Art had whispered over and over that the blood he'd given to Lucy
had been their marriage-bond, since they were denied any other.

  Seward recalled Van Helsing's insistence upon leaving a golden cross on Lucy's body, and his rage
with the maid who'd stolen it. Remembered his appearance, late on the night of her death, in Seward's
room at Hillingham House, whispering of the ghastly ritual he wanted to undertake: to cut off her head, to
take out her heart.

  Is he mad? Seward wondered dimly. Or am I?

 You have for many years trust me; you have believe me for weeks past, when there
be things so strange that you might have well doubt. Believe me yet a little, friend
John ...

 And such was the urgent intelligence in those coldly bright blue eyes, the warm strength of the
Dutchman's roughened hands, that Seward did believe. Credo sed incredulis ...

   Grotesque interviews with solicitors. Van Helsing's fit of hys-terical laughter in the carriage after the
funeral. Arthur's face as he gazed down at Lucy in her coffin: Jack, is she really dead? And that
blithe and golden young man, all the world's darling, weeping brokenly in the arms of their tall Texan
friend. Oh Jack, Jack, what shall I do? The whole of life seems gone from me all at
once!

  Quincey's face had been still, like a man bleeding to death inside.

  She is gone. She's really gone.

  Seward knew he should feel something, and didn't. Only the numbness of exhaustion, and the sweating
hunger for chloral hydrate.

  Lucy was in her coffin, in her tomb. The quiet tomb of the Westenras on Hampstead Hill, solitary in the
twilight groves with the rain pattering softly against the marble, away from the noise of London. Van
Helsing had returned to Amsterdam, Art-accompanied by Quincey-to Ring, to bury his father.
  And he, John Seward, had only a madhouse to return to, the madhouse he'd once been insane enough
to think he could bring Lucy to as a wife. He had worked hard to come to this position of responsibility,
he reminded himself. These people were his charge and his study: to learn the nature of madness, to help
those lost in its nightmare mazes without the hope of get-ting free.

  But tonight he could only lie here, sweating in the dark, lis-tening to the rain and to the lunatics
screaming in the deep si-lences of the night.



  000



  Renfield, too, dreamed of Lucy Westenra, lying in her coffin. And the dream filled him with horror.

   She looked, in veriest truth, as if she only slept. How he could see, he did not know, for the tomb was
shut and sealed, the lamps and candles of the mourners long gone. Her lead-lined coffin had been
screwed shut, but he could see her in it still, fair hair lying on her shoulders, flesh fine as porcelain and
little less white than the graveclothes they'd dressed her in. The bloodless look she'd had, in those other
visions during her long crucifixion on the edge of death, was gone. She was relaxed, smiling almost, all
her daytime care dissolved, happy in sleep.

  There was something about her sleep that reminded him of something, something he would rather not
see. That he didn't want to think about.

  Then he seemed to be standing in the dark of that stone tomb, looking down at the two coffins-for her
mother was buried beside her-hearing the whisper of the rain on the roof of the tomb, smelling old
smoke, the clinging remains of incense, the first sickening harbingers of decay. And it seemed to him that
at the feet of those two coffins, the shadows began to solidify, coa-lescing into a column of darkness
blacker than the utter night within the tomb. Red eyes burned within that darkness, and a voice
whispered, Beloved.

  Within the coffin, Renfield was conscious of it when Lucy opened her eyes.



  000



  He came awake gasping, trembling. Heat and cold flashed through him in waves-shock, terror, despair.
Distantly, he could hear the dim howling of old Lord Alyn, but other than that, the room-the house-was
utterly silent. It was the dead hour of the night, and still.

  Renfield stumbled from his bed, staggered to the window of his room. Hennessey had had the catch
replaced on the case-ment with a stout metal bolt. Beyond the glass, the garden lay in dim spiky shapes
beneath the pattering rain.

  The trees were losing their leaves, the last of the flowers were dead. I have been bere since April,
thought Renfield despairingly, and now the year is nearly gone. Oh, Catherine, has it all been for
nothing? He pressed his forehead to the glass, the cold of it like sweet water in his brain. He felt
emptier, hungrier, than he could remember feeling in his life.

   He rubbed his eyes, blinked, for it seemed to him that fog drifted above the garden, mingling with the
fitful glimmer of in-termittent moonlight on the rain. For a moment he thought it was only the effect of
tiredness, or perhaps advancing age. But after he rubbed his eyes again, they were still there.

  Taking shape. Growing more solid as he watched.

  A dream, he thought, a dream I once had ... When?

  Red eyes gleaming in the darkness. Long hair drifting like seaweed beneath the sea. Pale gowns, and
pale forms borne up on the dark air of the night: two dark and one fair.

  Valkyries.

  Choosers of the Slain.

  Graces, goddesses, or the Norns of fate, hanging in the dark air before his window, red eyes looking
into his.

  "You have only to wish it," whispered the fair-haired girl in German, the tongue of Wagner, the tongue
of Goethe, the tongue of Kant. "You have only to wish it, Ryland, and I will come."

  Renfield breathed, "I wish it." And returning to his bed, he took the thin pillow and wrapped it around
his hand, to protect his fist as he drove it through the glass.
                              CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Letter, R M. Renfield to his wife
22 September
  Catherine, Catherine, we stand balanced upon the blade of a ra-zor! Either we triumph, or we are
utterly undone!

  His wives are here! Tonight I have learned much, and the knowledge fills me with terror-with the dread
of more terror yet to come!

  They came to my room, stepped through a hole in the glass of the window no bigger than my fist,
though they seemed not to change shape or size. It was indescribable as the things one sees in dreams.

  He is not Wotan, as I saw him in my dreams, but is called Dracula, that was known as The Impaler in
his lifetime, four hundred and fifty years ago. A great lord and a great sorcerer, he lives on, vampire,
feeding upon the living and making of them the Un-Dead. He has come to London, to England, to hunt,
to make for himself a new life, for the countryside of the Carpathian

   Mountains that were his home has grown poor, and the few peasants that remain are wary, and employ
those things inimical to him and his kind: the flowers of the garlic and the whitethorn, the silver that he
cannot touch and the mirrors that refuse to re-produce his image, the Holy things that burn his demon
flesh as with fire.

  "He has come to make new life here," groused the Countess Elizabeth, the eldest and strongest of his
wives, "and left us three, alone, in a crumbling castle in a hostile countryside, without even the service of
the Szgany gypsies that are his to command." She is a woman fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and
terrible as an army with banners, as the Bible says: dark-haired, Roman--nosed, tall and with aquiline
features, a Hungarian princess who in centuries past fought at Dracula’s side against the invading Turks.
"He flees from us, and what does he, before the foam of the sea is even dried upon his clothing, but take
for himself an-other bride, to begin another harem more to his choosing, more apt to his commands?
Pah!"

  Her long canine teeth gleamed against bloodless lips.

  "We have served him," said fair Nomie, in her voice like glass chimes tapped with rods of thin silver.
"Surrendered our souls and our wills to him, not once but time and again. For this at least he owes us
something." She is the youngest of them, German by her speech, sweet-faced and almost childlike in her
thoughtful beauty, her eyes sky-blue and her hair the color of corn-silk.

  The third wife, Sarike, only smiled, like an animal with her sharp white teeth.

  "He learned to speak English, and how to go on in this country, from a solicitor's clerk whom he had
sent out to him in Transylvania," went on the Countess, pacing up and down my narrow room with her
long black hair hanging down over her shoulders, her pale clinging dress like a shroud in the moonlight
that came and went through the fleeting clouds. "Our kind can-not cross water, save at the turning of the
tide. Nor do we have the power to read and influence people's thoughts, nor to come and go as we
will-as we do . . ." She gestured with her long hand, pale and ringed in ancient gold, to the tiny hole in the
window-glass. ". . . while the sun is in the sky. By day we grow sleepy, and our minds are dulled. We
can be taken and killed by those who know who we are, what we are. Only at night are we strong."
  "He needs-we need-the earth of our burial-place, if we are to rest." Nomie turned to the window, as if
she could see through the darkness the thick-clustering trees that surrounded Carfax. "It was an easy
matter for him to purchase property here in England, to have boxes of the earth from the chapel in the
vaults of his castle shipped here. He must sleep in it, and re-new his strength as mortal men do, by rest:
that knits, as your poet says, the ravel'd sleeve of care. Sometimes I think your Shakespeare must have
suffered sleepless nights himself, for him to write of them so feelingly as he does."

  "And sometimes I think you would sooner sit and read your precious Shakespeare than hunt for the
blood that keeps us all alive," retorted the Countess, and her deep voice was edged with scorn. She
turned back to me. "It is an easy thing for a man to hire servants, to pay solicitors to rent him or buy him
houses, to open bank-accounts so that he is not paying in the gold coins of long-dead Sultans whenever
he wishes his boots blacked. For women it is otherwise. Especially foreign women."

  Her dark eyes fixed upon mine, and had my life depended on doing so, I do not think I could have
turned my gaze away.

  She said, "You are a wealthy man, I understand, Herr Renfield.

  The breath seemed to go out of my body, the strength from my knees.

  I stammered, "I ... I am a prisoner here, a prisoner like the others."

  "Not quite like the others." They say that tigers purr; I think they speak the truth. "You have house
property. Many houses, from what the assistant keeper in this place babbled in drink to our servant
Gelhorn. Houses that now stand empty."

  "Gelhorn!" I cried. "The German poet Gelhorn, who came here some days ago? He is your servant?"

  "He is the servant mostly of opium, and of his own illu-sions," replied the Countess, with deepest
contempt. "He was on a walking-tour of the Carpathians in July -, and it took my sis-ters and I endless
nights of singing to him as we combed our hair, to wind our images and our words into his drunken
dreams, so that he would find his way-finally!-to the castle. We convinced him we are spirits of the
mountains and the woods-I never thought I should live to thank Nomie for all those silly romances she
reads-and that we must come to England to retrieve magic gold that was stolen so that we could sleep
again in peace."

  I smiled, and met the girl Nomie's blue eyes. "So he actually believes he is traveling in company with the
Rhine Maidens?" And her eyes twinkled, suddenly very human, in response. "I think he feels safer
traveling with the Rhine Maidens than with the Valkyries. But it is a terrible bore, to speak only of matters
touched upon by Wagner and the Brothers Grimm."

  And I remembered my own dream of speaking to Wotan the Traveler in the hold of the ship.

  "Gelhorn is a fool," sneered the Countess. "And fools have their uses-up to a point. But the man
understands nothing of money, has no concept of how to obtain or even rent property in this country. He
can barely make sense of a railway time-table and he came close to killing the three of us, through his
stupid-ity, a dozen times on our journey to England in his company. We traced our lord here-"

  She gestured again to the window, and I thought I heard the curl of bitter anger in her voice as she
spoke of their lord.

  "Yet before we confront him, we must have our own place of safety, our own refuge in which we may
rest. We could hire no gypsies to fill up box after box with the earth of our home land. . ." She glanced
sidelong at Nomie, who cast down her eyes, and I guessed that she, at least, had wed, and died, and
been buried in a land far from her childhood home. "We have each a trunk of such earth, and these we
must guard as we guard our lives. You will help us, I think."

  All this while I had knelt before them, and now I looked up, aghast, into those coal-dark eyes with their
red demon gleam. "These houses that you have . . ."

  "Yes, yes, of course!" I cried, springing to my feet. My heart pounded-Catherine, Catherine, forgive
me, but if that imbe-cile Hennessey spoke to their creature Gelhorn about my hold-ing several different
properties, who knows what else he might have said? I did not think all those places that you and I
bought in secret were known. You were far too clever for that, my beau-tiful one!

  But it has been five months, my darling, five months in which anything can have happened! I think that if
you and Vixie had been forced for whatever reason to change your hiding-place, or to abandon the
names by which you and I arranged for you to be known, you would have found some way to let me
know. I pray that this is so, for I could not risk-I dared not risk-this clever and terrible woman
beginning to make investigations on her own. The thought of you falling into her power-or into the power
of that Thing, that monster, that these women now tell me is the vampire Count Dracula-is more than I
can bear!

  Forgive me, Catherine, but I told them about the house in Kentish Town, the money we cached there,
and the papers that would give them introduction to the bank under the name of Moira Tentrees and her
daughter Elaine. I felt fairly certain that you and Vixie would not have had call to use that particular
refuge-if you were discovered (may God forfend!) by Lady Brough and her minions, you would likelier
have gone to the Cambridge House, or even fled to France (though as I said, I h o p e y o u would in that
event have been able to inform me of it).

  Yet I trembled as I gave them the instructions about contact-ing solicitors and bankers-as I tremble
now, at the thought that somehow, the count may learn that I have met with his wives, and taken their
side against him.

  "What do you fear?" demanded the Countess coldly. "He has deserted you, as you said. He has gone
away to London, to be with his new little bride, his little blonde snow-maiden." Her lifted lip showed the
glint of a pointed fang. "In a week he will not recall your name."

  "If he has not forgotten it already," I said. I took a deep breath, and added, "I trust that you ladies will
not similarly forget?"

  "Because you know the truth of who `Moira Tentrees' and her `daughter' are," asked the Countess,
looking up at me with those cold dark eyes, "and who it is who will actually be living at 15 Prince of
Wales Road?"

  Nomie replied in her soft voice, "Because even as we have the right to demand protection and care of
our lord, so now Ryland has the right to demand it of his ladies. Is it not so?"

  The Countess Elizabeth raised one brow, black and sharp as a night-moth's antenna, and regarded her
sister-wife with specu-lation, but Nomie did not back down. At length the Countess turned to me and
said, "Indeed you shall find that it is so. We shall not forget, Ryland Renfield."

  "And you will send me things to eat?" I pressed. "Flies, spi-ders, sparrows-anything that has life, that I
can eat and grow strong, even as you grow strong from the drinking of blood."
  She looked startled, then smiled sidelong, like the Serpent in the Garden. "Is that truly your wish?"

  I nodded earnestly, and her smile widened, but it was not a pretty smile.

  "We will be far from you for a time, my servant, but yes, one of us will come and make sure that you
have your heart's fill of the vermin of the earth. Does that content you?"

  I said, "It does."

  They faded then, dissolving into moonlight, and I dropped to my knees on the floor again and remained
there long, shudder-ing with waves of shock and fear. The thought of going against Dracula, of playing a
double game with his rebellious Wives, petrifies me. Yet he has forgotten me, he has not fulfilled any of
the prayers I have prayed to him.

  And I need strength, my beloved, I shall need strength so badly, if all is to come well for us and for our
beloved child! I cannot let her be taken from us, cannot let your mother and your sister drag her away
and drink her spirit, vampire-like, un-til like the victims of the vampires she turns into one of them!

  A curse on money, without which those two hags would have no use for Vixie-without which those
three night-hags who stood here in the moonlight would have no use for me!

  Yet they were beautiful, and as I write this, their faces swim before my mind again, two dark and one
fair, and all perilous as the Angels of Death.

  Oh, Catherine, how I long for your advice in this matter! I pray I have done well, and I think that I can
control them, can obtain from them what I must have! But I have only done as I must, as I could! How I
long only to see your face again, to touch your hands, to hear your voice, the voice of a true woman
instead of the cold voices of Dracula's demon Wives!

  I kiss this letter, begging all the gods above that it should come to you; praying that when I sleep
tonight, it will be your lovely face that I see in my dreams.

  Your own, forever,

  R.M.R.
                                  CHAPTER FIFTEEN


  R.M.R.'s notes

  23 September

  25 flies, 10 spiders, 6 moths



  24 September

  28 flies, 4 spiders, 10 moths

  -16 flies ? spiders

  Sparrow-Langmore took it from me. What use has he for a sparrow?



  25 September

  24 flies, 8 spiders

  -18 flies ? spiders

    Last night as the spiders came crawling from the cracks of the walls, I chanced to look down into the
garden and saw Nomie there, golden hair bleached to ivory by moonlight. I think she saw me for she
lifted her hand.

  When I slept, I dreamed of Lucy, rising from her tomb. Her eyes are blank, and glow from within with
the red flame of the demon. She wears her soiled grave-shroud as she moves through the quiet streets
around Hampstead Heath in the darkness, as if unconscious of how she would appear were any to see
her, and she sings, soft and sweet, to the wretched little children who live in poverty there, whose
parents-if they have parents-are too gone in gin to care whether they come in at night or not. She took a
child, a boy of six or so, cradled him in her arms as she bit into his throat. When she walked away,
leaving him under some gorse bushes on the heath, blood spotted the bosom of her white shroud.

  No more moths-Seward has had the broken pane repaired.



  000



  "What is wrong with her?" Renfield asked, when that night he managed to work the window-bolt
through the bars, and Nomie walked up from the garden-as light and as casually upon the air as if
walking up a stair-and drifted through the slit and into his room. "I see her in my dreams, and she is like a
sleep-walker, a revenant. Yet you and your sisters-and your lord as well--you speak, and act, and
reason."

  "Now I do." Nomie held out her finger, and a huge black--winged moth blundered against the
casement, crawled through the gap. She smiled as Renfield took it by the wings and popped it into his
mouth. "When first I wakened from death into Un--Death, I was much the same as she. A part of me
knew what had happened to me, for during all those terrible months when I was a prisoner in his castle,
helpless, separated from my family while he came to me night after night, I knew what would become of
me in the end. But my mind went into retreat, like the poor souls here in Rushbrook House. I hunted,
mostly children, for they have not an adult's caution and experience to escape. But I do not think I spoke
for almost a year."

  "It is not then because children are weak?" Renfield wiped a dust of wing-scales from his lip.

   For answer, Nomie reached out and casually pulled one of the iron bars from the window, then taking
it in her two hands, bent it into a horseshoe. "The living are weak," she said. "But it takes some of us time
to learn our strength."



  000



  R.M.R. 's notes

  26 September

  28 flies, 9 spiders

  -20 flies ? spiders

  Dreamed again of Lucy Westenra. He walked beside her through the dark of Hampstead Heath, a
shadow with burning eyes. Seward seemed better this morning, a little more of his old self, for which the
gods be thanked. One can have only so much of Hennessey's care. Yet just after noon a cab drove up
the av-enue and Van Helsing sprang out, jaw jutting like a bulldog's and a newspaper clutched in one
hand. I felt cold to see it, cold with apprehension, knowing what it would mean. When Seward made his
afternoon rounds, he seemed like a man stunned, struck over the head, as if like poor Lucy he had been
wakened into a world and a manner of life that he could not comprehend.

  "Gor blimey, what'd that Dutchman tell him?" I heard Sim-mons whisper in the corridor to Hardy, and
Hardy replied, "Not the foggiest. They was shut up in his study and I heard the Doc hit the table like a
gunshot and yell, `Are you mad?' but I guess after a little discussion they come to the conclusion he
weren't, 'cos they're off to town this evenin'. Good job, too, 'cos old

  Hennessey's got a couple of payin' customers comin' in to have a look at the loonies at eight." And their
voices drifted away. Later I saw Seward's fly brought round to the front of the house, and Seward and
Van Helsing get in, their faces like stone.



  27 September
  25 flies, 13 spiders, 1 moth



  000



  Seward whispered, "My God," as the coffin lid was removed and the pale afternoon sunlight fell
through the half-open door of the tomb and across the face of the girl within.

  Yesterday, he recalled-the day Van Helsing had brought to him the newspaper, had told him that
fantastic tale of the Un--Dead-had been Lucy's birthday. She would have turned twenty.

   He breathed, "Is it a juggle?" For last night, when Van Helsing had brought him here, the coffin had
been empty. Van Helsing had claimed that the white figure they'd seen among the yew trees at the edge
of the cemetery had been Lucy, and of a certainty they'd found a four-year-old Italian girl asleep and
half-frozen under the bushes where the white figure had cast its burden aside. But there had been on that
tiny neck no such puncture-wounds as had been found on the throats of the other children that had been
attacked over the past week.

  No such puncture-wounds as he had seen on Lucy's throat, in the weeks before she'd died.

  They had taken the child to Northern Hospital, and returned to Hampstead Hill Cemetery only in the
golden light of the fol-lowing afternoon.

  "Are you convinced now?" asked Van Helsing softly, and when Seward did not reply, reached into the
coffin and drew back the young woman's delicate lips. "See," he said, "the teeth are even sharper than
before. With this and this" -the blunt brown finger touched those long canines, upper and lower, like a
wolf's or a cat's- "the little children can be bitten. Are you of belief now, friend John?"

 Seward backed away, shaking his head. The newspaper had spoken of children being attacked. Van
Helsing had said it was Lucy. Lucy!

 Van Helsing whom he trusted, whom he knew to see farther and deeper into the shadows of the human
mind than any scholar of his acquaintance ...

  "She may have been placed here since last night."

  "Indeed? That is so, and by whom?"

  "I don't know. Someone . . ."

  "And yet she has been dead one week. Most peoples in that time would not look so."

  No, thought Seward numbly. Most peoples in that time would not. Already, despite its lining of
lead, the body of Lucy's mother in the coffin beside hers had begun to faintly stink.

  His mind raced back and forth against the truth that he could not look at, like a rat thrown into a rat-pit,
before the dog is turned loose. Beside him, Van Helsing continued to look down at the girl in the coffin,
with grief and a kind of curious, hungry longing in his eyes.

  Other than the fact that her breasts did not stir with life's breath, she looked absolutely as if she were
peacefully asleep. The drawn whiteness of her last few days had vanished. Her lips were red, her cheeks
faintly stained with pink. Still living, she had resembled a corpse. It was her corpse that had the
appear-ance of a living woman.

  Dear God, did we bury her alive?

 But Seward had seen those bodies, too, after a week. Few medical students hadn't had some dealings
with the men of the resurrection trade. They "did not look so" either.

  "She was bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking," murmured Van Helsing, and
Seward glanced sharply at him, startled that he should know this. "In trance she died, and in trance she is
Un-Dead, too. Usually when the Un--Dead sleep at home . . ." His gesture took in the plastered walls of
the little tomb, the sealed niches with their marble plaques. "... their face show what they are. But this so
sweet that was when she not Un-Dead, she go back to the nothings of the com-mon dead. There is no
malign there. It make it hard that I must kill her in her sleep."

  Seward drew a deep breath. The words hit his brain like a chisel on rock, with a cold sound and a
sharp pain that changes forever the shape of what has been.

  If she were dead already, what would it matter if Van Helsing mutilated her body, as he had proposed
to mutilate it before the funeral-after the cleaning-woman had stolen the golden cross that he had placed
on Lucy's lips "for protection."

  "I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic," Van Helsing continued, in answer to Seward's
whispered question. "And I shall drive a stake through her body." That at least Seward remembered from
the night before the funeral, the night when Van Helsing had searched Lucy's room and asked that all her
papers and her mother's be sealed, for him to read. This morning, when he'd met Van Helsing in the
lobby of the Berke-ley Hotel, where both had spent the night, he'd seen his old mas-ter had a satchel
with him.

  But to do this to Lucy ...

  He looked back at that radiant face, sleeping so gently. So beautiful was she that he had at first not
seen the dirt and moss--stains that marked her white grave-clothes, the small brown spots on its bosom.

  Then his gaze returned to Van Helsing's face. To those clear light-blue eyes, filled with tenderness, pity,
longing ... and some-thing else.

  Van Helsing tore his gaze from Lucy's face, turned to Seward with an air of decision. "If I did simply
follow my inclining, I would do now, at this moment, what is to be done." He wet his lips. "But there are
other things to follow, and things that are a thousand times more difficult in that them we do not know.
This is simple."

  He glanced, quick and sidelong, at Lucy's face again, as if his eyes were drawn to her against his will.

  "We may have to want Arthur," he said, "and how shall we tell him of this? If you, who saw the wounds
on Lucy's throat, and saw the wounds so similar on the child's at the hospital; if you, who saw the coffin
empty last night and full today with a woman who have not change only to be more rose and more
beautiful in a whole week, after she die-if you know of this and know of the white figure who brought the
child to the church-yard, and yet of your own senses you do not believe, how can I expect Arthur, who
know none of those things, to believe?"
  He tore himself as if with physical force from the side of the coffin, paced to the door, shoes crunching
the brown leaves they had tracked in from outside. "He doubted me when I took him from her kiss when
she was dying," he said, as if speaking to himself, and Seward shivered at the memory of Lucy's face
then, the way her lips drew back from those long, sharp teeth, the gleam of unholy greed in her eyes. "I
know he has forgiven me because in some mistaken idea I have done things that prevent him say
good-by as he ought; and he may think that in some more mistaken idea this woman was buried alive;
and that in most mistake of all we have killed her. Yet he never can be sure, and that is the worst of all."

   Yes, thought Seward, looking down at the moss-stain on Lucy's sleeve, the blood-spot on her breast.
Not to be sure ... Not to ever be sure who or what that white form was that he'd glimpsed last night,
flitting among the graves with the sleeping child in her arms.

  A part of him thought, But Art will never know ...

  But he'd nursed troubled minds long enough to be aware that there was no certainty whatever that
Arthur wouldn't come to this tomb himself. Would sneak here, drawn as if against his will, too ashamed
to breathe a word of his secret to his friends ...

  And find what?

  And what would that do to him, make of him, thereafter? Es-pecially coming, as it did, in tandem with
his father's sudden death from stroke?

  All that awareness was in Van Helsing's voice, too. "I know that he must pass through the bitter waters
to reach the sweet," said the old man softly. "He must have one hour that will make the very face of
heaven grow black to him; then we can act for good all around, and send him peace."

   Seward helped Van Helsing fold the coffin's lead lining back over Lucy's face and upper body; helped
him replace the heavy lid. He felt numb and strange, as if everyone around him had suddenly begun
speaking a foreign language, and wondered if this was what it was like for the men and women in his
charge, when first they began to go mad. Since his smallest childhood he had quested to know Why, and
had followed those longings down the road of logic and science. Indeed, only on meeting Lucy had he
begun to doubt that all things could be explained in terms of matter, logic, and the physiology of the
nervous system. Could the Un-Dead be some physical phenomenon unknown as yet to science? Some
illness, some condition of the flesh or the brain?

  Van Helsing didn't seem to think so.

  Was Van Helsing mad? Seward wondered again.

  Was he himself?
                               CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Through the night as Van Helsing kept watch in the graveyard, he asked himself the same question.

  Am I mad?

  He'd asked himself that at intervals throughout his long life, and had never come to a satisfactory
conclusion.

  He leaned his back to one of the pale-barked sychamores that grew near the Westenra tomb in
Hampstead Cemetery, touched with uneasy fingers the thick links of silver chain he'd wrapped around his
throat. He wore them on his wrists as well-a woman in Thibet had instructed him in this-and in his hand
he carried n rosary twined with garlic flowers. He did not fear Lucy Westenra so much, for he had
carefully chinked up every crack in the tomb's door with a paste of flour and water, mixed with
frag-ments of a consecrated Host, and had hung another crucifix over the keyhole of the door.

  But he guessed that Lucy did not always hunt alone.

  He shuddered, as Lucy's sweetly beautiful face returned to his mind.

  He had encountered the Un-Dead before, in Egypt, in Con-stantinople, and in Paris; had heard of them
in India and Thibet. Three times had he found himself, looking down into their faces as they slept after
their kills-one of those had been a woman he'd known in life. And always it was the same.

  They were so beautiful.

  He knew what they were. He had seen them kill, and seen the chaos of horror and doubt they left in
their wake. He had seen them prey on those closest to them, those whose grief made them willing to
believe whatever their returning beloveds told them. He had seen them make others of their own kind,
through an exchange of blood with chosen victims, victims who did not merely die but became predators
in their turn. He had seen their callousness and absolute selfishness as they chose the death of others over
their own discomfort, their own craving for blood.

  It was unspeakable, that he should look on the faces of vam-pire women, and feel what he felt.

  Desire so overwhelming as to almost blot out thought.

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again almost at once. Fool, these thoughts will only weaken
you. You close your eyes, you open them to see Him, to see Dracula, this Dracula that Jonathan
Harker write of, Jonathan Harker that marry the sweet Madame Mina, who share with me the
letters Miss Lucy write. He tried to push from his mind the admission of wanting Lucy, to bury it under
loathing of what she had become, under ironic amusement at the recollection of poor Arthur
Holm-wood's passionate ramblings about how the transfusion of his blood into Lucy's veins had made
them husband and wife in the sight of God.

  And am I, then, too, her husband? And your friends John and Quincey? Are we all co-husbands
together in a harem?

  He tried to picture Lucy as he knew she must be now, a beau-tiful body inhabited by a demon, a
damned soul, that lured chil-dren to her and drank their blood. That would not stop with children; that
was growing stronger each night.

  It did not drive from his mind the white-hot flash of desire that had pierced him like a swordblade,
when she'd opened those smoky demon eyes and smiled at Arthur on her deathbed: Oh my love, I am
so glad you have come! Kiss me ...

  It did not drive from his mind his utter loathing at himself. It did not root out his fear that one day that
blind lust would prove too much for his strength, and would lead him, too, in ;pite of all he knew, into the
red nightmare of Un-Death.

  And that he would enjoy it.

  He drew in deep breaths of the cold air. It was autumn, the threshold of winter. Though Hampstead
Hill lay far from the Thames, the sooty reek of its fogs drifted through the graveyard, and through the
trees southward he could see the dull glow of the city's gas-lamps. Here in the cemetery it was quiet, the
bird-less quiet of winter, save for the soft, terrible scratching at the marble door of the tomb.

  Man is born to Sin, as the sparks fly upward. His friend and student John, who did such good work
among those troubled in their minds, might have been able to explain this curious, des-perate lust that
seemed to operate in tandem with his genuine affection for Lucy and for her friends, his deep horror and
pity !<,r the situation in which they all found themselves. John had proclaimed often that he held no belief
in Sin, nor in the doc-trines of Predestination and Fate.

  Charcot was his god, and Bernheim and that young Austrian Freud. In them he would doubtless have
found some rational ex-planation for the feelings that, despite all he could do, scorched Van Helsing with
shame.

  Or perhaps, he thought, I am only mad.

 But mad or sane, it did not change what he knew to be facts, which others these days ignored, or
walked in ignorance of. That humankind was not alone upon the Earth.

  That there were indeed more things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in the philosophy of
Hamlet's friend Hora-tio or of anyone else: hidden powers whose aims and percep-tions were as
different from those of humankind as humans' were from those of the sponges beneath the sea.

  That the Un-Dead walked, as they had long walked. And that their bite would spread their condition to
others, if they were not stopped.



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  28 September

  27 flies, 9 spiders, 4 moths, 1 mouse

  -19 flies, 4 moths ? spiders
  -12 spiders ? mouse

 Seward back, but so distracted as to be completely unaware of the mouse (a gift, I am sure, from
Nomie, my faithful little Nomie.) He is gray-faced and shaken, like a man who has looked down into
Hell.

  How can Hell have shaken him? He rules one of its tinier Circles. Does he not yet know this?



  28 September-night

  Seward departed shortly before nine.



  000



  In the darkness of his dream, Renfield saw again Lucy Westenra’s tomb. Night lay thick on London,
thicker still on this sub-urban wilderness of headstones and tombs. He could smell the soot-laden fog,
hear the whooping screech of the owl, the fran-tic squeak of the mouse it seized. Taste the blood.

  Four men came over the cemetery wall, Seward and old Van Helsing and two others. The younger of
these two-the youngest of the four-followed hard on Van Helsing's heels as the old mail unlocked the
marble door of that ghostly pillared sepul-chre, a golden-haired godling in black, like a young Siegfried.
He looked inquiringly at the old professor as they gathered around the twin coffins, then at Seward. To
Seward, Van Helsing said, "You were with me here yesterday. Was the body of Miss Lucy in that
coffin?"

  "It was."

   "You hear." Van Helsing turned to the other two, Siegfried and a tall, stringy man with the faded
remains of a deep tan on his long-jawed face, a long sandy mustache and a rough blue greatcoat such as
Renfield had seen Americans wear, who got them second-hand from their Army. "And yet there is no
one who does not believe with me." With that rather confusing dou-ble negative, Van Helsing took his
screwdriver, and unfastened the lid of the coffin. Siegfried-who was, Renfield guessed, Sew-ard's good
friend and successful rival Arthur Holmwood, the new Lord Godalming-and the American both backed
away a step, and in the glow of the dark-lantern the American bore, Renfield could see they were
steeling themselves for the stink of a body ten days dead.

  He could see their faces change when they smelled no such thing, even before they stepped forward to
look.

  "Professor, I answered for you," said the American. "Your word is all I want. I wouldn't ask such a
thing ordinarily-I wouldn't so dishonor you as to imply a doubt; but this is a mystery that goes beyond any
honor or dishonor. Is this your doing?"

  Van Helsing replied, with no more emotion in his voice than if the question had been one of hat-size
rather than honor, "I swear to you by all that I hold sacred that I have not removed nor touched her."
And he explained, with the calm of a man in the witness-box, the events of two nights before. "Last night
there was no exodus, so tonight before the sundown I took away my garlic and other things. And so it is
we find this coffin empty. So" -he shut the slide of his lantern, leaving them in the dark -"now to the
outside."

  Renfield turned in his sleep, whimpered with fright. Someone was watching, someone was listening,
someone standing very near them in the darkness. Someone who could smell the blood in the veins of the
four men, who could see them clearly, even when the heavy scudding clouds concealed the moon.

  Someone who drew back, even as Godalming and the Amer-ican leaned forward to see what Van
Helsing was doing as he worked his flour paste through his fingers again, caulked up the chinks in the
door. "Great Scott," said the American, pulling a foot-long bowie knife from a sheath at his belt to cut
tobacco for himself, "is this a game?"

  "It is."

  "What is that which you are using?" asked Godalming, and Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he
answered.

  "The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indul-gence."

  You mean you have a priest who believes, like you, in the power of the Un-Dead,
thought Renfield. He knew perfectly well that no Pope, nor any member of the organized Church, would
issue an Indulgence for such use of the consecrated wafer. By their silence-Godalming, as a true-blooded
scion of an En-glish noble house, was by definition Church of England, and most Americans couldn't
have described the difference between :I Catholic and a Druid-both men were struck dumb with
su-perstitious reverence: the American even endeavored to spit his tobacco in a quiet and seemly
manner. In the darkness the watcher-watchers, Renfield could feel their minds-stirred, then stilled. They
could feel Lucy's approach long before Van Helsing whispered, "Ach!"

  Moonlight flickered on something white in the avenue of yews. A child cried out, in fear or pain. Or
perhaps, thought Renfield, deep in the well of sleep, it was his own cry that he heard. The light of Van
Helsing's lantern fell on Lucy's face, on the crimson glisten of blood on her mouth, which trailed down to
dribble her white gown.

  "Arthur." With a casual motion she threw to the ground the child she had been carrying in her arms,
held out her hands. The men standing ranged before the tomb might have seen only the demon fire in her
eyes, but Renfield thought, too, that she was still a revenant, still tangled in the madness of new death and
animal hunger.

   His own mouth burned with the memory of the spiders he'd eaten-each sweetly charged with the
flickering energy of the flies-with the murky deliciousness of the blood he'd sucked out of the mouse that
morning. Had Langmore come then and tried to take it from him, he thought he, too, would have turned
on him, with just such wildness in his eyes.

  "Come to me, Arthur," she whispered, and moved forward, her bare arms outstretched. "Leave these
others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you." The words whispered like a half-heard echo of
dreams of passion, never filled ... Never filled by Arthur, in any case. "Come, husband . . ."

  With a desperate sob, young Lord Godalming opened his arms for her, but Van Helsing-as Renfield
knew he would--stepped between them, holding out a small gold crucifix upon a silver chain. Lucy drew
back with a cry, and Renfield felt it again, the minds of those who watched from the darkness be-yond
the tomb. The shiver, at the burning energy that focussed in sacred things. It was as if, seeing with their
eyes, he saw the deadly glow that could sear otherworldly flesh, shining forth not only from the crucifix
but from the caulking that sealed the door of the tomb.

  Lucy swung around a few feet from the door, mouth open in rage to show blood on the long white
teeth, trapped and furious. In a quiet voice Van Helsing asked, "Answer me, o my friend! Am I to
proceed with my work?"

  Godalming slipped to his knees to the damp gravel of the path, buried his face in his hands. By the light
of Van Helsing's lantern Renfield saw Seward's face, as he looked down on the golden head of the
younger man. Godalming's voice was barely audible. "Do as you will, friend. Do as you will."

  It was the American-Morris, Renfield remembered his name was, Quincey Morris-who helped bring
Godalming back to his feet, while Van Helsing moved cautiously past Lucy to un-caulk the putty from the
door. In Lucy's place, Renfield sup-posed he would have simply fled, yet where could she go? If, in fact,
she could find no rest other than in the place where she had been buried, where could she fly?

  Like Catherine, he thought, before he and she had bought those other houses for her and Vixie to
disappear into. Before they'd set up bank accounts, and papers, proving that she and her daughter were
people other than the women Lady Brough was looking for, to take their money back for her own.

   Lucy slipped through the chink in the door like smoke, like the figure in a dream, as Nomie, Elizabeth,
silent Sarike had come through the broken pane of glass into Renfield's room eight nights ago. Van
Helsing prodded the putty back into place, then went to where the unconscious child still lay in the
moonlight of the path. "Come now, my friends." He lifted the little boy in his arms. "We can do no more
'til to-morrow. There is a funeral at noon, so here we shall all come before long after that. The friends of
the dead will all be gone by two . . ."

   So intent were the men, grouped around Van Helsing, that they glimpsed nothing of the three shadows
that followed them along the avenue toward the low point in the wall. The three Wives had, Renfield
noticed-seeing them clearly in his dream for the first time-disposed of their own pale old-fashioned
;;owns and wore now dark modern walking-dresses, stylish and nearly invisible in the thick gloom of the
gathering clouds.

 "As for this little one, he is not much harm, and by to-morrow night he shall be well. We shall leave him
where the police will find him, as on the other night; and then to home." Darkness drifted then into
Renfield's mind, and his dream segued into the thick heat of India, the stink of the Hoogly River, and
white ants crawling in armies up a tree in his garden in Calcutta ...

  But he thought, as Van Helsing laid the sleeping child down against the cemetery wall, that he heard the
                                        Countess Elizabeth laugh.
                              CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They killed Lucy at a little after two.

  Renfield felt it, like the distant memory of pain, stabbing his chest and darkening his eyes. Far more
clearly he felt Dracula's fury, like the mutter of thunder and the taste of ozoneous storm-winds sweeping
down the mountains, to tear the valleys to pieces in their wrath.

  He sank onto his bed and crushed his hands over his ears, then over his eyes, then over his heart, trying
to blot out what he heard and saw and felt. Mostly what he was conscious of was terror.

  He'll find them-Elizabeth, Sarike, Nomie. He'll say Lucy's death was their doing.

 He'll say I helped, or kept my silence, o f my own accord. The Wives are too
powerful for him to burn, and the men--Van Helsing and Seward and the others-too
wary now, and too prepared.

  But within the coming growl of that terrible storm he knew that Dracula would massacre someone in his
revenge, and would not much care who it was.

  In a frenzy of terror Renfield scrambled to his feet and ran to his boxes, to devour every spider, every
fly, every moth, and even the second mouse that Nomie had caused to crawl under the door of his room
early that morning.

  None of it helped.



  000



  Late in the afternoon Seward returned from London, with a sweet-faced, pretty, dark-haired woman
whom Renfield, watch-ing the driveway from his window, recognized as Lucy's friend Mina. She seemed
both smaller and older than she had appeared in his dreams, more delicate and yet stronger than steel.
She had come a long way, he thought, since she'd giggled and hugged Lucy and Mrs. Westenra in the
Whitby train-station, saying good-by to them for what turned out to be the last time. Like her other
clothes, her mourning-dress was worn and a little out of fashion. She carried a small traveling-bag, and as
Seward helped her down from the carriage, he took from beside her feet a small, heavy square box
which Renfield recognized as the case of a portable typewriter. As they passed around the corner of the
house toward the shallow front steps, Renfield heard old Lord Alyn in his barred front bedroom begin to
howl, the others along the hallway taking up the din, until the cacophony blew around the eaves of the
house like the screech of storm-winds in the dead of night. Mina-Renfield wished he knew her surname,
for the sake of good manners-broke stride with a shudder, then steeled herself and followed Dr. Seward
out of sight around the corner, and into the house.

  As usual, Seward gave no sign of having heard a thing.

   Like Seward, like Lord Godalming, like the American Mor-ris, this young woman had been Lucy's
friend. She must still have been abroad in Europe-with her ailing husband?-when Lucy was taken ill, for
Renfield couldn't imagine Catherine, for instance, not being constantly in the house of a friend who was
slowly dying as Lucy had died.

  Yet what was she doing here?

  Seward will tell her, thought Renfield, pressing his forehead to the iron window bars. They were cold,
like the day outside. Wind jerked and twisted at the bare branches of the garden trees. Seward will tell
her of the scene in the graveyard, of the bitten children.

  And what then?

  Seward was pale and silent as he made his rounds, and did not seem to notice that Renfield had
devoured his entire stock of spiders and flies. As the house grew quiet that night, Renfield thought he
could hear, in the study downstairs, the rapid clatter of typewriter keys, hurrying and pausing, hurrying
and pausing, as if to keep up with some unheard dictation, far into the night.



  000



  R.M.R.'s notes

  30 September

  25 flies, 10 spiders

  Nomie my friend, you are the only one who has offered me the smallest actual assistance in this terrible
time! Has it not occurred to Seward to wonder at the continued presence of so many flies in this chilly
weather? Yet it is typical of the smallness of the man's scope.

   Another visitor today, Madame Mina's husband Jonathan Harker, Langmore tells me. A tallish thin man
whose black clothing hangs loose on an emaciated frame, the souvenir of those weeks of brain-fever in
Buda-Pesth. The brim of his hat hid his face as he passed around the corner of the house, but he moved
like a young man, and looked around him with a kind of nervous alertness: another echo of brain-fever as
well? There is something that troubles me about the sight of him, something familiar in his walk and his
frame, as if I have seen him some-where before, and I have a terrible sense of urgency about the lost
memory. Could it be that he is one of Lady Brough's crea-tures, or one of her vile elder daughter's?
Langmore says he is a solicitor.

  Later-Indeed the eagles gather! I have just seen young Lord Godalming and the American Mr. Morris
descend from the Go-dalming brougham (with a team in harness at five hundred guineas the pair, if they
were a shilling!). Morris wore a perfectly respectable derby hat in place of the wide-brimmed American
slouch he had on last night, his long sandy hair sweeping out be-neath it. Curious, to see these men in the
flesh whom I recognize from dreaming-could I have seen Jonathan Harker in dream? But when? And
why?

  The sight of them gathering fills me with dread, for as the sun sinks I feel, stronger and stronger,
Dracula's growing anger, as he lies within his coffin. Like mine, his mind was touched by Lucy's agony
this afternoon as that handsome young lordling drove a stake into her heart. Wherever he now lies-in
some hideaway in London to which he transported his boxes of earth-in his sleep he heard her screams,
tasted her blood, felt her death. Like me, he saw the faces of her killers in his dreaming.

  Did he love Lucy Westenra? Perhaps, as he understands the word, he did. But what I feel in his
dreaming is not grief, but rage.

  He had claimed her by his blood, and she was his.

  In life he was not a man to forgive the smallest slight: Nomie told me that men who broke his law, in the
smallest degree, were impaled upon iron stakes on the roadsides, and left to slowly die: thus he had his
name. Four hundred years of hunting hu-mankind has not taught him either mercy or tolerance.

 His rage is like the storm that builds above the Himalayas in the summer heat, lightning hoarded in
murderous dark. I feel it coming. When the storm strikes, God have mercy on us all!



  000



  "Renfield?" The tap on the door had to be Seward. He was the only one in Rushbrook House who
ever knocked, and he not al-ways. And indeed, he did not wait to be invited to unlock and enter the
room.

  Renfield turned from the window, beyond which the hazy red sun was burning itself out in the sky
above London's lurid smokes.

  "There is a lady here, who would like to see you."

  Renfield had caught a glimpse, through the door as it opened, of Mina Harker's black dress. Indeed it
would have been far too much to hope, that Catherine would have come at this time. He kept his voice
steady with an effort. "Why?"

  "She is going through the house, and would like to see every-one in it."

  Renfield wondered if Seward had any idea just how many other people went through the house and
saw everyone in it, be-hind his back. "Oh, very well. Let her come in, by all means. Just wait a moment
while I tidy up." He gulped down the spi-ders and the flies hastily, without the joy of savoring them. He
had a feeling he would need all the strength he could get. "Let the lady come in."

  He went to sit on the edge of the bed, so that he could see Mrs. Harker as she entered the room.
Seward kept within striking--distance-as if I could not knock his brains out against the wall if I
wished it!-but Mrs. Harker walked in without either fear or hesitation, and held out her black-gloved
hand. "Good-evening, Mr. Renfield. Dr. Seward has told me of you."

  Renfield studied her face for a few moments, taking in the frank dark eyes, the firm set of her mouth,
the air of compe-tence she had exuded even hunting for her friend in the moonlit churchyard. He almost
said so, then remembered he was never supposed to have seen her before in his life. "You're not the girl
the doctor wanted to marry, are you? You can't be, you know, for she's dead," he added, and saw
Seward start.

  "Oh, no! I have a husband of my own, to whom I was mar-ried before I ever saw Dr. Seward, or he
me. I am Mrs. Harker."

  "Then what are you doing here?" He thought he sounded sufficiently genuine.

  "My husband and I are staying on a visit with Dr. Seward."

  "Then don't stay."

  "But why not?"

 "And how did you know I wanted to marry anyone?" asked Seward, a little miffed-as if, thought
Renfield, he didn't know that it was common knowledge throughout the asylum.

  He rolled his eyes. "What an asinine question!"

  "I don't see that at all, Mr. Renfield," said Mrs. Harker, as if the conversation were taking place in a
drawing-room instead of a bare cell with bars on the window.

  "You will understand, Mrs. Harker," said Renfield, "that when a man is so loved and honored as our
host is, everything regarding him is of interest in our little community. Dr. Seward is loved not only by his
household and his friends, but even by his patients, who, being some of them hardly in mental
equilib-rium, are apt to distort causes and effects. Since I myself have been the inmate of a lunatic
asylum, I cannot but notice that the sophistic tendencies of some of its inmates lean toward the er-rors of
non causa and ignoratio elenchi."

  The relief in having an actual conversation, with a young woman whom he was coming to like and
respect, was unbeliev-able. He felt a flash of regret that he hadn't saved out a single fly to offer her.

  She would need them, he knew, as much as he.

  "It may be that they cannot help it," said Mrs. Harker. "I myself have not your experience, so I cannot
judge, but even among the so-called sane of my acquaintance I have encoun-tered some very curious
beliefs."

   Renfield laughed-the first time, he realized, he had laughed since coming to Rushbrook House. "And I'll
wager you would think them a very college of sanity, compared to some of the queer nabs I ran across in
India. Why, I am myself an instance of a man who had a strange belief. Indeed, it was no wonder that my
friends were alarmed, and insisted on my being put under control. I used to fancy that life was a positive
and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things, no mat-ter how low in the scale of
creation, one might indefinitely pro-long life. At times I held the belief so strongly that I actually tried to
take human life. The doctor here will bear me out that m one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose
of strength-ening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of
his blood-relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, `For the blood is the life.' Isn't that so, Doctor?"

  "Er-indeed it is." Seward looked completely disconcerted, and glanced at his watch. "I fear it is time to
leave, Mrs. Harker."

  "Of course." Mrs. Harker smiled, and took Renfield's hand again. "Good-by, and I hope I may see you
often, under auspices pleasanter to yourself."

 Renfield rose, and bowed. "Good-by, my dear. I pray God I may never see your sweet face again.
May He bless and keep you!" As the door was closed, the lock clashing harshly, Renfield knew without
turning that the sun had disappeared behind Lon-don's black sullen rooflines. He felt it: the flowing horror
of bitter-cold air that precedes the storm like a moving wall, the in-evitable terror of the lightning.

  Somewhere in the dark of London, Dracula woke.

  He knows they care here.

  That awareness went through him like a killing spear, dropping him to his knees, his breath labor-ing
and sweat standing out on his face like a dying man's.

  He is coming.
                               CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  From the window of his room Renfield watched the glow of Dr. Seward's study lamp, the shadows
that moved back and forth across it on the laurels of the garden. Once the men came out into the dark
garden, and Renfield saw Seward point across the lawn and through the leafless trees, to the wall of
Carfax.

  So they know.

   He didn't know how they'd learned of it, but in his bones he was sure of it. They were on Dracula's
trail.

  And Dracula was on theirs.

  Renfield clung to the bars, watching the moving white blurs of shirt-cuffs, collars, the golden glint of the
study lamplight on Lord Godalming's hair. Heads nodding. Seward pointing in the direction of the shed,
where the ladder was kept.

  Dear God! Dear God, save me!

   One by one, the other lights in the house went out. Seward made his rounds, pale and distracted. A
little later Renfield heard Langmore come off duty at midnight, heard Hardy settle into the chair. Renfield
paced the room, sweating. They are going to Carfax tonight.

  They are leaving Mrs. Harker here alone.

  Christ had prayed in the Garden, Let this cup pass from me. Renfield pressed his face to the bars,
staring out into the dark-ness, then turned to pace again. He remembered the wolf, bro ken from its
home in the Zoo and sent loping through the streets of London, to force a way into the house that
Dracula could not enter on his own. I open the ways for all my servants, Dracula had said to him, but it
was the servant-the wolf whose mind Renfield had felt in his dream-who had opened the way for the
Master. He will hang in the darkness before my window, mate-rializing out of the moonlight and
fog.

  He will whisper to me, Let me in.

  Renfield knew that it was physically impossible for him to do other than say, Come.

  What other are you, if not the tool of my power, willing and blind?

  The study lamp was dimmed down. A brief bar of very faint light, like a lantern's, shone out as the front
door opened, shut. No one emerged, but in a moment they would ...

  Renfield flung himself against the door of his room. "Hardy!" he shouted through the Judas. "Hardy,
send for Dr. Seward! Bring him here, at once, this moment! I must see him!"

  The big guard's whiskery face appeared in the Judas. "Wot, at this hour? It's two in the morning!"

  "If I'd wanted a report on the time, I'd have sent for the town crier! I have something urgent to tell Dr.
Seward, something des-perate! He's awake, he and his guests, I've just seen their lights. Please fetch
him. Please." Renfield clutched at the bars, as if he could reach through them and wrest the promise from
the guard. He fought to keep from shouting. "Please."

  Shaking his head, Hardy withdrew. Renfield pressed his face to the Judas and saw him walk
downstairs, then sank to the floor before the door.

  He will know. He will guess, and he will punish.

  He will come here tonight. He will use me, use me to destroy Mrs. Harker, use me as a cat's-paw
as he tried to use me before. The one person of all of them, who treated me as a man and not a
beast.

  Footsteps in the corridor. Renfield scrambled to his feet. The clank of the lock.

  "What is it, Renfield?" Lamplight in the cell, the lamp held aloft by the tall Quincey Morris in his blue
American Army coat. Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Lord Godalming were with Seward also, all
five men dressed rough, as if they were go-ing burgling, which Renfield guessed they were.

  "Dr. Seward." Renfield spoke in his most calm and careful voice. "I have a most special favor to ask of
you. You must have been aware, in the past day or two, of my return to sanity. I'm certain that only the
press of your duties as host to your friends has prevented you from fulfilling the legal and medical
techni-calities of my release. Though I hesitate to seem impatient or importunate, still I must request, as a
matter of considerable importance, that you release me tonight. Now, in fact. Release me, and send me
home."

  To Catherine, he thought, trying to keep the wild elation from his face, to Vixie. I can take them and
be gone from this country, from my dread Master's awareness, before morning. He cannot cross
water, we can flee to France.

  "I'm afraid," said Seward calmly, "that even did I judge you restored to complete sanity, those
technicalities could not be dealt with at this hour, and in this fashion. We could not . . ."

  "I appeal to your friends," coaxed Renfield, reminding him-self that screaming at Seward and knocking
him against the wall would probably not serve him well. "They will, perhaps, not mind sitting in judgement
on my case. By the way, you have not introduced me."

 "I beg your pardon." Seward beckoned the others forward. "Lord Godalming; Professor Van Helsing;
Mr. Quincey Morris, of Texas; Jonathan Harker-Mr. Renfield."

  "Lord Godalming." Renfield shook the young man's hand. "I had the honor of seconding your father at
the Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the title, that he is no more."

 His young lordship blinked at the incongruity of Renfield's small-talk in the barren cell, at two in the
morning, but made a polite bow.

  "Mr. Morris, you should he proud of your great state. Its re-ception into the Union was a precedent
which may have far--reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the
Stars and Stripes."

   Morris inclined his head, throughly imperturbable. Renfield guessed he'd encountered stranger
situations.
  "What shall any man say of his pleasure at meeting Van Hel-sing? Sir, I make no apology for dropping
all forms of conven-tional prefix. When an individual has revolutionized theraputics by his discovery of the
continuous evolution of brain-matter, conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him
to one of a class. And Mr. Harker, I can only congratulate you upon having the wisdom and
discrimination to find, in all the wide world, that pearl among women who is your beauti-ful wife."

  He hesitated, looking into the young solicitor's face in the huge shadows, the upside-down lantern-light,
seeing it ... when? By firelight? In a dream? Why did it look so familiar?

  Not wanting to be seen staring, he turned quickly back to the others. "You, gentlemen, who by
nationality, by heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in
the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full
possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian and medico-jurist as well
as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional
cir-cumstances."

  "Indeed at all times I attempt to so deal with you, and everyone under this roof," agreed Seward. "And
indeed, you do seem to be improving very rapidly. But it requires a longer inter view than this, to even
begin to think about taking steps to meet your wish."

  "But I fear, Dr. Seward, that you hardly apprehend my wish," said Renfield. "I desire to go at
once-here-now-this very hour-this very moment, if I may. I am sure it is only necessary to put before so
admirable a practitioner as Dr. Seward so simple, yet so momentous a wish, to ensure its fulfillment."
Seward's face was like wood. Renfield looked past him to the others: Godalming, Morris, Harker, Van
Helsing. Imbeciles, do you understand nothing? "Is it possible that I have erred in my supposition?"

  "You have," said Seward.

  No pleading on Renfield's part would move them. He felt frantic, hampered by his terror of Dracula's
reaction should he guess Renfield's attempted defection; hampered, too, by his sense of the vampire's
approach, stealing like a dark cloud down the silent river, across the Purfleet marshes, a cloud filled with
malice and wrath.

   "Can you not tell frankly your real reason for wishing to be free tonight?" asked Van Helsing, speaking
like Mrs. Harker as an equal, and Renfield could only shake his head.

  "If I were free to speak, I should not hesitate a moment, but I am not my own master in the matter. I
can only ask you to trust me. If I am refused, the responsibility does not rest with me."

  "Come, friends," said Seward, who seemed, Renfield thought, to have a fairly small repertoire of
closing remarks. "We have work to do. Good-night."

  He turned from the room. Renfield cried, "Please!" and threw himself to his knees before him. "You
don't understand what you're doing, keeping me here! Let me implore you, to let me out of this house at
once! Send me away how you will and where you will; send keepers with me with whips and chains; let
them take me in a strait-waistcoat, even to a jail, but let me go out of this! You don't know what you're
doing by keeping me here!"

  Seward's face hardened, as if this outburst was something ex-pected and much more in line with his
ideas of how small-hours interviews with lunatics should be conducted. Renfield wanted to take him by
the shoulders and shake him. But that, he knew, would only result in the strait-jacket, and the thought of
being so bound when Dracula came was more than he could bear.
  "By all you hold dear-by your love that is lost-by your hope that lives-for the sake of the Almighty, take
me out of this and save my soul from guilt!" Tears of frustration and despair rolled down his face. "Can't
you hear me, man? Can't you un-derstand? Will you never learn? Don't you know that I am sane and
earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul? Let me go! Let me go!"

  Seward caught the hand Renfield raised in pleading, pulled him to his feet. "Come! No more of this; we
have had quite enough already. Get to your bed and behave more discreetly."

  "Discreetly?" Renfield bit back a crack of hysterical laughter. For a time he stood, looking into
Seward's eyes in the glow of Quincey's lamp, seeing in them the man's blind grief, his blind pride in being
the doctor, the keeper, the Man Who Is Sane. He felt, suddenly, exactly as he'd felt while trying to argue
with Lady Brough, with Catherine's sister the obnoxious Georgina, trying to convince them that to take
Vixie away from him and Cather-ine, to lock her into one of their "select young ladies' academies" would
be the death of that fragile, lively, passionate girl's soul. To do otherwise was simply Not Done.

  Without a word, Renfield walked back to his bed, and dropped down to sit on its edge.

  He saw Seward's shoulders relax, as if, though he did not smile, all things had been restored to the way
he knew they should be.

  The other men filed out. As Seward turned, last of all, to shut the door, Renfield raised his head. "You
will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the justice to bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince
you tonight."



  000



  From his window Renfield watched the hooded yellow blink of the lantern bob its way across the
abyss of the garden. Watched it ascend what he knew to be the wall, invisible beyond the leaf-less trees.
Watched it vanish.

  Pallid moonlight outlined the nearest tree-trunks, slipped away. Returned, to show the thin streak of
white mist that had begun to steal across the garden, mist that glittered in the faint reflections of Seward's
study lamp, and from another window where the gas was also turned down low. Somewhere a dog was
howling, and Renfield pressed his face to the bars and cried "Dear God! Dear God!" though he could not
have said whether he prayed to the disapproving God of whom he'd been taught in childhood, or to
Wotan, whose red eyes he saw flickering, flick-ering in the heart of the mists.

  As the black form took shape, hanging in the darkness out-side Renfield's window, he thought, That is
where I saw Jonathan Harker. In my dream o f the Valkyries. It is he who was the pris-oner. He
could even now hear Nomie's silvery voice: I am called Nomie, Jonathan ...

 But it was not Nomie and her sisters who took shape outside the window now, but
Wotan-Dracula-with his red eyes burn-ing through the mist like malign spots of flame.

  Black moths beat against the window, crawled through the narrow slot of the nearly shut casement,
flopped limply on the floor in the moonlight around Renfield's feet. Though it was night, and chill, big
steely black flies swarmed with them, and spiders crawled from the cracks in the paneling, and still the
black form took shape in the darkness outside the window.
  I am here.

  Renfield whispered, "Master."

 I am here. You have sworn your love for me; I have brought you good things. Will you not bid
me welcome?

  The grip of his mind was like iron and ice, crushing and freez-ing at once. Renfield thought despairingly
of that lovely young woman who had spoken so kindly to him, sleeping alone in this terrible house;
thought of the long horror of Lucy's death; of the three sisters and their power. He wept, but his voice
choked on the name of God as if Dracula's steel grip closed about his throat. In that moment he could
have called upon neither God nor man.

  "Rats," Wotan whispered-Dracula whispered-the leitmo-tif of the Traveler God beating in Renfield's
brain, and across the lawn Renfield saw a dark mass creeping, like water spreading toward the house, a
dark mass prickled by a thousand paired crimson flames. "Rats . . ." With a gesture of his long-nailed
hand, Dracula brushed aside the mists that surrounded him, and Renfield saw them, smelled them, the
sweet filthy unmistakable mustiness of their bodies. "Every one of them a life. And dogs to eat them, and
cats, too. All lives-all red blood, with years of life in it, and not merely buzzing flies!"

  Lives, thought Renfield. Strength. Strength for my great work. "All these lives will I give you. Ay,
and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and wor-ship me. Will you not
bid me welcome?"

 With a sob, Renfield stumbled to the window, pushed at the casement through the bars. "Welcome,
Master," he breathed. "I bid you come in."

  The black shape before the window dislimned; the moonlight all but disappeared. White mist poured
through the inch-wide crack in a thin stream that flowed down the wall, across the floor, and under the
door of the cell. Then it was gone.

  Renfield sank to the floor of his cell and wept.
                               CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Van Helsing came to see Renfield next morning, cheerful-cock-a-whoop, Renfield thought, observing
the old man's springy step and bright eye with a kind of numb bitterness. They must have found some of
the Count's crates of earth at Carfax. Of course, it would be Jonathan Harker who'd told them the Count
had bought the old house, and shipped his crates of earth there, so that he could have a place where he
could rest in this foreign land.

  Renfield saw it all now. Harker was a solicitor. It must have been he, whom Dracula hired as his agent,
as the Countess Eliz-abeth had said. Harker must have somehow escaped Dracula's castle in the
Carpathians.

  Renfield shuddered at the thought. Enough to give one brain--fever indeed-he couldn't imagine how
anyone, mortal or Un--Dead, could escape the Count. There must be a great deal more to that young
man than met the eye.

  Yet for all their cleverness, he thought despairingly, for all their smug self-satisfaction, neither Van
Helsing, nor Seward, nor His Handsome New Lordship Godalming, nor any of the others had seen the
danger of the Count coming in behind them, taking Mrs. Harker while they were away counting
earth-boxes and congratulating themselves. Mrs. Harker who was innocent and kind, who had gone
walking through the midnight streets of a strange town to save her friend from social embarassment and
chill. The Count must not have killed her-Van Helsing showed no sign of even suspecting that a thing
might be amiss. So there was to be another slow crucifixion, another tortuous game of cat-and-mouse,
such as he had played with Lucy.

  And with Nomie, a hundred and ten years before.

  "Don't you know me?" Van Helsing asked, clearly fishing, Renfield thought, for more compliments
about revolutionizing theraputics by his brilliant theories.

  "I know you well enough," snapped Renfield. "You are the old fool Van Helsing. I wish you would take
your yourself and your idiotic brain theories somewhere else. Damn all thick-headed Dutchmen!"

  Are you all blind?!?

  Evidently they were, for when Seward came in a little later, and tried to engage him in a long discussion
of devouring life and consuming souls, he, too, seemed blithe and cheerful, more cheerful than Renfield
had seen him since the night of his disas-trous dinner for Lucy and her mother, as if the problem of
Drac-ula were well on the way to being solved.

  He will come back! Don't you understand that he will come back?

  Renfield was hard put to keep his voice normal, to keep from shouting at Seward or striking him in
sheer blazing frustration, as the doctor talked of lives and souls as if he knew the slightest thing about
them. But at the stroke of noon-the brief period at which the vampire could move and have power-flies
began to buzz in at the window again, and spiders creep out of the wall.

  Maybe I have to sacrifice poor Mrs. Harker, thought Ren-field, chewing wearily on a bluebottle, to
save Catherine, and Vixie. It is after all for their sakes that I am doing all o f this. Mrs. Harker's
kindness had touched his lonely pain, reminding him of how long it had been, since any woman had
spoken kindly to him ...

  Any living woman.

  Oh, my darling, Renfield whispered, the time is coming. When this is done, and poor Mrs. Harker
is his, I shall ask that he let me out o f here as a reward, that he let me go. Then I will return to
you, and we will all three of us be free.

  The thought brought him comfort for a time. He returned to catching flies with a lighter heart.



  000



  Seward put an extra guard in the corridor that night. Renfield saw Harker return late, and prayed that
the presence of Mina's husband would be enough, to keep the Count away. Yet he watched by the
window in the deeps of the night, and saw the thread of mist creep across the garden, crawl like a
vaporous serpent up the wall, through the chinks in the window casement. Out in the corridor he could
hear Hardy's snoring deepen--Nomie had told him of how the Count could command sleep, paralyzing
the limbs of his victims or those who sought to guard them. He remembered his dream, of Seward
sleeping like a dead man on Lucy's mauve satin sofa, while through the open door in the dim firelight the
Count drank Lucy's blood.

   The Count neither materialized, nor troubled to speak to him. Only the mist flowed across the floor,
and beneath the door of Renfield's cell, while Renfield crouched on the bed watching it in sickened
silence. When it had passed, he fumbled open his boxes, devoured every spider and fly within them.

 Catherine, he thought, oh my beloved, forgive me! And Mrs. Harker, my dear sweet Madame
Mina, forgive me, too!

  The cold deepened. The little camel-back clock in Seward's study spoke three sweet tones. But sleep
would not come, and instead of lessening with Dracula's departure from the house-as surely he must have
departed already?-Renfield's agitation grew.

  Mist gathered in the garden, before his window.

  Dear God, has he come back for me? Come back to give me my reward?

  The red glint of eyes. Six of them.

  Renfield flattened against the wall in terror.

  They took shape, and seeped around the casement of the window like a mist.

  "So this is how you say, `help'?" The Countess Elizabeth strode forward in a towering rage, and
Renfield buried his face in the meagre pillow of his bed. "We say, that our erring hus-band is not to go
about England taking other wives who please him better, and this is how you go about serving us? By
saying, `Come,' when he comes knocking at your window like a lover singing a serenade? Get your face
out of your bedclothes and sit up like a man!"
  Renfield obeyed. The Countess's eyes blazed red as fire, her lips were drawn back over fangs like a
wolf's. Sarike, at her shoulder, grinned though she probably couldn't understand the Countess's
thick-accented German, and licked her sharp teeth.

  There was blood on the dark ruffles of her walking-dress, both dried and fresh.

  "What could I do?" whispered Renfield. "He would kill me!"

  "He will kill you, once he can come into this house!" re-torted the Countess. "But until you invited him
in, you were as safe as if you sat on the altar of a church!"

 "There are a dozen madmen whose minds our husband could have touched in dreaming," broke in
Nomie. "You know what he is, with those who pledge their word and then betray it."

  "Coward!" The Countess's voice was like the hiss of a ser-pent. Her red eyes narrowed, and she
reached to Renfield with her clawed hand, and picked the wing of a fly from the corner of his mouth.
"Glutton. You would betray us for pottage."

  For lives, thought Renfield, too paralyzed with terror even to whimper. For Catherine.

  "So now he drinks the blood of this-this Englishwoman. This schoolmistress. This type-writer
lady whose husband leaves her alone, like a fool, to be cuckolded by the Lord of Darkness! He of all
men should know better than that."

  Sarike's smile widened and her eyes gleamed with demon evil, and she said, "Jonathan," in her sweet
crystal voice.

  The Countess sniffed. "He'll be her first kill-I'll bet you my pearl earrings on that." Her eyes slid
sidelong to Nomie. "And I'll further bet that the bitch won't share."

  Then she looked back at Renfield. "If he completes his kill. Pah! He fools with them and fools with
them, whispers to their dreams, until they come willingly, swooning at his feet." Nomie looked away.

  The Countess went on, "You know, do you not, that it is only those who drink the vampire's blood in
their turn, who be-come vampires-and then only those who have the strength, the will, to hold on as
death rolls over them; to hold on to the will of their master. That is why he seduces them. He makes them
love him too much to let go of their lives."

  In the silence that followed these words, Nomie gazed out the window as if she were enduring a
beating; only once, very quickly, she pressed her hand to her mouth.

  "She has a core of steel in her, that one." The Countess's deep voice was hard. Her black hair, where it
trailed in tendrils from her chignon, made streaks of night across a face white as the waning moon. "He
will use her against me-against us," she added, with a glance at her sisters. To Renfield she said, with an
outstretched finger of command, "Stop him."

  Renfield gasped. "How?"

  "By doing what you should have done last night. By raising an alarm. By showing some courage."

  "I am a madman, in case you haven't noticed!" protested Renfield. "I am locked in a cell! I did
everything I could, every-thing!"
  "You did what you could to be taken out of the house," re-torted the Countess. "I notice that not one
word passed your lips concerning the precious Madame Mina's being taken out of the house."
Renfield reflected that this business of seeing things in dreams obviously worked both ways. "That
imbecile poet Gelhorn could have done better."

  "Then why didn't he?" Renfield straightened up a little from his crouch. "Why don't you send him to
rescue Mrs. Harker, or to warn her husband of the danger in which she stands?"

  "If you'd ever seen him trying to get his luggage back from a railway porter, you wouldn't be asking
that."

  "Because you are the braver man," said Nomie softly, and turned back from the window to look at
him. "And the more intelligent one, I think. Do this for us, and we will do what we can-I will do what I
can-to have you released, or to sunder these bars and spirit you away."

  "Fail," added the Countess grimly, "and it will be the worse for you, to a degree that you cannot even
imagine."

  And Sarike, like an animal, only smiled again and licked her lips.

  Then they were gone.



  000



   Renfield saw Mrs. Harker briefly the following day, pale and thin, like tea after too much water has
been added to the teapot. Her eyes were sunken and bruised-looking, as if from too much sleep or too
little. Other than that brief glimpse, as she stood on the gravel driveway bidding farewell to Lord
Godalming and Mr. Morris-God knew where they were off to, Harker had left early in the morning-he
saw none of the little band of conspir-ators against the vampire Count. According to Dr. Hennessey, who
made Seward's rounds for him, Van Helsing had gone to the British Museum. Seward himself was
closeted in his study, making preparations and plans of his own.

  Somehow, Renfield couldn't bring himself to tell Hennessey of Mrs. Harker's danger: Hennessey who
reeked of gin and whose smutty-minded speculations about the female patients had been audible to
Renfield night after night when the Irishman had chat-ted with the keepers.

  In any case, there was no telling what he'd do with that in-formation.

  Though the day was chill, flies swarmed to the little sugar he put out. He didn't even trouble to put them
in boxes, simply caught them and ate them, desperate to increase his strength, to build up the forces of his
own life to meet what he knew would come.

  Seward has to make evening rounds, thought Renfield. I'll tell him then. That will be time to get
her out o f the house.

  But Lord Godalming and Morris arrived just at sunset, met by Seward in the avenue. He must have
been watching from his study window. An hour later Van Helsing's cab pulled up at the door, and
some time after that, Hennessey came again on Sew-ard's rounds: "Very took up with Dr. Van Helsing,
he is," the Irishman reported. "As well he might be-great man like that. And he was most kind, most kind
indeed, when I told him at supper last night of my own observations and experiments with training the
demented to behave themselves. Why, he said he'd seldom encountered a system as original as mine!"

  Renfield could almost feel pity for the elderly Dutchman, trapped at the supper-table with Hennessey in
full cry.

  "If you would, Dr. Hennessey," said Renfield, "could you please tell Dr. Seward that I must see him. As
soon as may be, this evening certainly, before the house retires to bed. It is vital."

  "'Course I'll tell him," agreed Hennessey. "'Course I will." He unscrewed and sipped his flask as he
went out the door. Ren-field could hear him trading a crude joke with Simmons in the hall. I might just
as well, Renfield reflected wearily, have asked one o f my spiders to take a message.

   Seward didn't come. Harker arrived at nine, springing up the steps like Sir Lancelot after dispatching a
not-very-fearsome dragon. Renfield waited at the window, watching the reflected splotches of golden
light from the asylum's windows perish one by one against the night-shrouded laurels, until only one
re-mained.

  Somewhere in the darkness, a dog began to bark. Other dogs, everywhere in the neighborhood, took
up the cry, and in the padded room, muffled by the coir mats of the walls, Lord Alyn howled as if in
response. Like the dogs, the other patients added their voices to his, Renfield picking them out as
Cockneys pick out the voices of the City's churchbells.



    Oranges and lemons,

    Say the bells o f St. Clemmons.

    Demons scratch at my door,

    Screams Emily Strathmore.

    How the dark night has fall'n,

    Howls Andrew, Lord Alyn.



  Mist began to creep over the garden wall. In the veiled sky, the moon was barely more than a
fingernail, yet Renfield saw clearly the slow seep of those winding vapors toward the house. Terror filled
him. He rushed to the door, pressed his face to the Judas, but Simmons was gone from the hall; it
seemed every man on the wing had begun to scream and pound the walls, and Ren-field's cries were
swept away in the not-uncommon torrent that Seward and Hennessey had long since ceased to hear.

  "Dr. Seward!" Renfield screamed. "He is coming! He is com-ing! Get Mrs. Harker out of the house!"

  The gas-lights showed him a hallway blank and empty as if it were a thousand feet underground.

  Chill touched him, like an evil wind. Turning, Renfield saw the first curls of mist seeping under the
casement, flowing down the wall.
  He turned back to the window, spread out his hands. "Get out! I forbid you to enter this place!"

  Outside the window, the mists congealed in the thin glow of the moon. Renfield saw the glaring red
eyes, the red mouth open and laughing, a terrible laugh. Saw the sharpness of the white teeth.

  "Get out, I tell you! I renounce you and all your works! Be-gone, and trouble this house no more!"

  And in his mind, Wotan's voice whispered against the pound-ing leitmotif of Wagner, It is too late for
that.

  The mists pooled, where the small glow of the gas-light from the hall fell through the Judas. Flowed
upward in a column, in which burned two crimson eyes.

   Renfield shrieked, "Leave her alone, for she has never harmed you!" and threw himself at the shadow
                       that was forming within those mists, behind the burning eyes.
                                  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In agony, Renfield dreamed.

  He saw Mina Harker in her room-it had the same wall-paper as Dr. Seward's study and the hall in the
men's wing of the house-and the sickly light of that fingernail moon barely touched the edges of the
window-frame, the bedposts, the china ewer on the dresser. Jonathan Harker lay beside her, so deeply
asleep that Renfield thought the Count must have broken his back, as he had broken Renfield's ...

  ... broken it and left him lying in agony, dying in a pool of blood on the floor of his cell.

 From a great distance Renfield was aware of himself, of pain like a thousand sawing red-hot knives. He
was aware, just as vividly, of the Count, standing beside the bed in the guest-room downstairs.

  The Count held Mina Harker in the iron circle of his arm, the black of his clothing and his cloak like
enfolding storm-cloud around the simple white linen of her night-dress. Her head lay back against his
shoulder, her black hair, escaping from its braid, a marvelous inky torrent flowing to her waist. She made
no sound, raised no cry, but her dark eyes were open, staring up at the Count's face in revulsion, horror,
fear that had nothing in it of panic blankness.

  She knew what was being done to her.

  The Count's head was bent over hers, his mouth pressed to her throat. Blood ran down her breast onto
her night-dress.



  000



  More pain. The dream splintered as if every bone in Renfield's body were shattering with it. Renfield
opened his eyes, saw Van Helsing's face.

  He couldn't breathe. His whole body felt as if every joint, every muscle were locked in vises of
incandescent iron. Tangled memories of Dracula hurling him to the floor, beating his head on the boards.

  He tasted blood in his mouth, smelled it everywhere in the room. Lamplight burned his eyes. Quincey
Morris had a lamp, so did Lord Godalming, both men tousled in pyjamas, hair hang-ing in their eyes. Van
Helsing was dressed, in shirtsleeves, Sew-ard likewise. There was blood on their sleeves, glaringly dark
in the orange light, like Mrs. Harker's, trickling down her night-dress.

  "I'll be quiet, Doctor," Renfield whispered. "Tell them to take off the strait-waistcoat. I have had a
terrible dream."

  I dreamed I was insane.

  I dreamed that I was locked in a madhouse, from April to the threshhold of bitter winter, with no one
to care for me, no one to love me, no one to touch me or talk to me in the deep o f the night. I dreamed
of Catherine, lying asleep in the moonlight of our room ...
  He blinked. "It has left me so weak that I cannot move. What's wrong with my face? It feels swollen ...
smarts . . ." He tried to move his head, and darkness came over him.

  "Tell us your dream, Mr. Renfield," said Van Helsing softly. "Van Helsing,"

  Renfield whispered. "It is good of you to be here. Water . . ."

  Darkness again. Darkness and pain, and the yawning abyss where more pain waited for him-pain and
the horrors of things he could barely see and didn't want to. Then brandy burned his lips, and he opened
his eyes again. Van Helsing was still there.

  "No," Renfield whispered. "It was no dream."

  He was dying, and the knowledge gave him a kind of exhila-ration, a lightness. There was nothing
further that Dracula could do to him. Catherine, he thought, Catherine, I have failed you.

   But Mina, at least ... Mina-Mrs. Harker-could be saved. Freed by the knowledge of
coming death, he told them of Dracula's visits, stammeringly at first, then with greater confi-dence. Of the
flies, of Dracula's promises; of the Count's coming that night and of how he had tried to stop him, to save
Mrs. Harker who had been so kind. Surely, he thought, as he tried to gather breath and strength to
speak again, surely now one of them-Van Helsing-will understand, and will go to
Catherine, will understand the danger she and Vixie are in, will save them. But as he
was trying to form the words, Van Helsing straight-ened up away from him: "We know the worst now,"
he said to the others. "He is here, and we know his purpose! It may not be too late! Let us be armed . .
."

  Renfield whispered desperately, "Catherine ... Promise me..."

  But they were already rushing to the door, crowding one an-other in it in their desperation to go, the
lamplight jostling their shadows wildly over the walls.

  "Please . . ." Renfield breathed.

  But they were gone. He heard their footsteps thudding down the hall, felt the jarring of their race down
the stairs. The gas-light of the hall fell through the open door over him, the thin distant howling of some of
the women patients sweeping through the building like the whistle of wind.

 He thought, despairingly, Catherine, forgive me! I've botched it all up! I only did it for
you. It was all for you. And now I will never see you again.

  He could not move, and the tears that flowed from his eyes ran down the sides of his face to the
bloodied boards of the floor. Catherine ...

  Mist curled before his eyes.

 Dracula, he thought. Wotan. He has done with Mrs. Harker and he has come to drink
my life. Come for the final insult, the final triumph ...

  Red eyes glowing in the mist.

  Then the pale oval of a gentle face, materializing out of the reflected gas-light of the hall. Fair hair like
the sunlight that beats on the yellow rocks of the Khyber Pass. The red light died, leaving the eyes that
looked into his as blue as pale sapphires, like the deeps of the up-country sky above the Simla Hills.

  She asked, "Will you stay, or go?"

 Renfield's tears flowed harder, grief and guilt and pain. He managed to whisper, ". . . work yet to do. I
must ... save them. Help me."

  Without another word, Nomie bent her slim body down, and like gentle kisses drank the blood that
was still trickling from the gashes Dracula's nails had opened in Renfield's face, from the open wound
where Van Helsing had trephined the skull to re-lieve the haemorrhage inside. Then she undid the pearl
buttons of her sleeve, pushing the fragile figured lawn up to reveal an arm no less white than the fabric,
and with her long nails slit open the veins.

 Somewhere in the house came the rending crash of a door be-ing broken open, men's voices shouting.
Nomie turned her head, listening for an instant, then pressed her bleeding arm to Ren-field's lips. "Trust
me," she breathed, "and drink."

  Her blood tasted coppery on his tongue, sweet and salt at once, like the blood of the men who'd died
in the Mutiny, all those years ago under the broiling Indian sun.

  "He is ours," whispered the Countess's voice, and opening his eyes again, Renfield saw the other two
standing behind her. "If he will be so, he will be of us all, my sister." Kneeling, she ripped the black silk
sleeve of her dress, and opened the flesh be-neath; while Renfield drank of the blood of her arm, she
pressed her lips to his throat. He felt her teeth tear into his flesh, but the sensation was distant, as all
sensation was failing.

  Sarike opened her bodice, tore the vein above the dusky satin of her breast; lapped the blood off his
face like a greedy cat. "You are ours now," whispered the Countess, kneeling above him, her uncoiled
black hair hanging down to brush his face. "We will carry you through the dark of death. Your soul will
be cradled within ours, until such time as it returns to your death--changed flesh. But a portion of that
soul will remain forever in our keeping, so long as we ourselves inhabit this world. Do you understand?"

  Renfield's lips formed the words, I understand.

  Somewhere in the house a woman screamed, the frantic scream that had nothing in it of insanity, but of
too-clear aware-ness. Mrs. Harker's voice, thought Renfield, drifting on the bor-derlands of oblivion.
Men's voices clamoring, then Mrs. Harker's crying above them, "No! No, Jonathan, you must not leave
me!"

  Cold began to seep into the room. At first, Renfield thought it was only his own body sinking into
death, but the Countess turned her head sharply, whispered, "He is coming." She and Sarike stood.
Nomie remained kneeling beside Renfield, and the Countess reached down and dragged the girl to her
feet. For a moment Nomie's eyes met Renfield's, before all three women faded into the thready glimmer
of the moonlight.

  The next moment, the Count was in the room. His face was like a steel mask, with blood smeared
down his mouth and streaking the front of his shirt. Shirt and the black silk waistcoat above it were open
to the waist, and a bleeding gash on the pec-toral muscle showed Renfield where Mrs. Harker's mouth
must have been pressed, to drink of the vampire's blood. In his cloak Renfield could smell the clinging
remains of her dusting-powder, vanilla and sandalwood mingling with the reek of gore.

  "And as for you," Dracula whispered, standing over him, a towering shadow, like Satan rising up from
the floor of Hell. "Judas. Are you like them now, who pit their puny brains against me? Who would go
against me, with their weak mortality? Who would separate me from what is my own? See how I deal
with those who would betray me!"

  He bent down and lifted Renfield as if he were a child, raised him over his head. In final despair,
Renfield blocked his lips, his mind, from screaming Catherine's name as he was hurled down into
darkness.
                           CHAPTER TWENTY -ONE

  Catherine!

  Renfield's eyes opened in panic. He saw only darkness, felt the close bounds of the coffin against his
arms and his thighs, but that didn't trouble him. Trust, Nomie had said, and he had trusted.

  It had all taken place, exactly as the Countess Elizabeth had promised: the dark terror, the horrifying
agony of separating from his dying body, the dark and hideous intimacy of those three minds cradling his
soul among them ...

  And then the dreams. Dear God, the dreams! Catherine ...

  Renfield brought up his hands to the coffin-lid just above his breast, and thrust. In life he had been a
strong man. The lid gave way like cardboard, with a sound that was shocking in the deep silence.

 The damp melancholy smell of dying leaves, of turned earth, came to him above the mouldy stink of
mortality and wet stone and rats.

  Renfield was a little surprised. He was in the family tomb at Highgate. He recognized it, from when
they'd buried his par-ents. He'd have bet money Lady Brough and Georgina would have given
instructions that he be sent to a medical college for dissection.

  Or was it beneath the dignity of the Brough family to have even a disgraced in-law anatomized by such
low creatures as students?

  Looking back, with a sense that was not quite sight, he saw that the coffin was of cheap pine.
Apparently they drew the line at putting forth a single extra penny on a mere tradesman, an
India-merchant who'd had the temerity to refuse their advice about how his daughter should be brought
up. As a living man he could have ripped his way out of it, never mind one of a vam-pire's preternatural
strength. The clothes he wore were those he'd been found in, wandering the streets of London raving last
April. They hadn't even cleared out the pockets: his handker-chief, a few bus-tickets, an old key.

  The lingering smell of parafin within the tomb, and the fresh-ness of the tracked mud near the door, told
him he'd been put there that day. Even in total darkness he knew it was sundown that had wakened him.
His back no longer hurt, nor his face. He raised his hand to feel his skull above the right ear, where Van
Helsing had trephined to relieve the pressure of the blood, and the skin was smooth.

  Had they even noticed? he wondered. Or had Seward been so shocked and disoriented by Dracula's
assault on poor Mrs. Harker that he'd simply signed the death certificate and left that drunken imbecile
Hennessey to take care of the details?

  All this went through his mind in a few distracted moments, as he stood before the tomb's marble door.
None of it mattered to him, nor formed more than a candle's weak glow against the blazing sun of the
thought: I must get to Catherine.

  The horror of his dream hammered in his mind.

  The door of the tomb was locked. Renfield thought he could have broken it, but he'd seen the other
vampires pass through tiny cracks, keyholes and slits, in the form of mist. If they could do it, surely he
could, too.

  It was a most curious sensation.

  He was, as he'd thought, in Highgate Cemetery.

  Catherine, he thought again. I must get to her. I must tell her...

  He began to run.



  000



  He had dreamed about Catherine, dreamed terrible things. Georgina and Lady Brough were going to
take Vixie, take her and lock her up, send her away. Teach her shame and squea-mishness. Teach her
that everything she loved and felt and cared about was wrong.

  He had dreamed about Catherine weeping, weeping until she was ill, by the glow of the lamps in the
bedroom of the house they'd taken in Kensington, under the name of Marshmire. Ren-field had pleaded
with her, pointed out again and again to her that they'd covered their tracks well. They'd made
provisions, taken other bank accounts, established still other names, other identities ...

  They'll never find us, he said to her, and she'd only shaken her head, her long red hair shining in
the soft glow of the gas-lights.

  They will. They will.

  The dreams turned to horror after that.

  He had dreamed he'd gone mad, had been locked up in an asylum full of fools, only the fools weren't in
the cells, but run-ning the place. Drunken fools like Hennessey, or stubborn small--minded hidebound
ones like Seward. Fools who couldn't see the larger world if it loomed before them and bit them and
drank their blood.

  Catherine, he whispered, as he ran-ran lightly, half-invisible, like a great jumble of flying newspaper
whipped along by the wind, as a man would run in dreams. Homebound clerks turned to stare at him as
they clambered aboard omnibuses or clustered on the dark wind-swept corners; costermongers and
tattered women in black shawls shrank back into the glare of lights from the public-houses and cafes.
Catherine, I'm coming! He passed through the dark of Regent's Park, the bright-lit streets of the West
End, dodging hansoms and growlers, omnibuses and car-riages. In Hyde Park the cats fled from him,
and dogs barked wildly at his passing shadow.

 Kensington. Abingdon Road. The dark brick face of the house that belonged on paper to Mr.
Marshmire-"Oh, pick a gloomier name, why don't you?" Catherine had teased, laugh-ing. Lightless
windows. Locked doors.

  She was inside. Renfield knew they were both inside.

  On either side the tall pleasant houses were gas-lit. The au-tumn evening, still early, was cold. Renfield
was conscious of the chill without particularly minding it, though he remembered how cold he had found
England, how bone-gnawingly damp, after the languid heat of India. He had heard it said-by the
Countess?--that vampires could not enter any place unless and until they had been invited, but it was his
house, he had bought it.

  Was that why vampires generally started their feeding on their own families?

  He stood on the steps, looking down at the windows of the kitchen areaway and up at those of the
drawing-room above, dark as the eyes of a dead man. He had run from Highgate across London to
Kensington, close to five miles. Yet he felt no weariness.

  Only enormous hunger. He passed into the house.

  It was as he remembered it, that last night he'd been there. They'd bought it furnished from its previous
owners, lest Geor-gina or Lady Brough grow suspicious. Vixie had whooped with laughter over the
old-fashioned furniture, the stuffy Biblical oleo-graphs on the walls. To Vixie it had all been a giant
adventure, a gamine delight in outfoxing the grandmother and aunts she had always loathed.

  Renfield called out, "Vixie!" into the stuffy silence of the dark house, but received no reply. "Catherine!"

  Only the smell of dust, and of mice, and of rooms unaired. Renfield climbed the stairs. On the second
floor, Vixie's water-colors hung in the drawing-room, her sitar propped on the window-seat where she'd
used to practice it. The bright cushions Catherine had made bloomed like incongruous flowers on the
black slick horsehair of the previous tenant's chairs. On the third floor, Catherine's yellow silk kimono lay
across the foot of the unmade bed, and Renfield knelt, pressed the sheets to his face, then the silk,
inhaling the lingering scents of her perfume, her body, her hair. It was as if she had lain there only last
night. But he knew it had been longer than that.

   On the third floor, Vixie’s bed was likewise disordered in the small room that had been hers. Her brush
still lay on the little dresser, and the jeweled combs she'd used to put up her hair. Lavender kid gloves,
like withered flowers. The torn-up pieces of the letter that Bolton, Renfield's solicitor, had delivered to
her from her grandmother Brough, still on the floor where she'd left them.

  Renfield picked one up, saw in the hated handwriting the name of Madame Martine's Select Academy
for Young Females, in Lausanne, and the phrase, ". . . Wormidge will be by in the morning to take you to
the station . . ."

  Slowly, Renfield descended the stairs.

 The other papers Bolton had delivered from Wormidge lay where he'd left them back in April, on the
marble-topped dresser in the hall.

  He called out softly, "Catherine?" and only the rustle of mice answered him, from the open pantry door.

 Through the pantry he descended to the kitchen. It's a cold night, he thought. The servants might
have the night off. They'll be keeping warm in the kitchen.

  Mice scattered at his tread; the stink of them rose to him like a cloud. Split bins, chewed-open sacks,
apples and cheese long spoiled, the nasty stink of the mortality of all things. Renfield looked about him at
the dark clammy room, the unwashed dishes piled on the counters-had Catherine fired the servants
altogether? His gaze went three times past the little door that led to the sub-cellar, because of course
there was no reason for them to go down there.
  But it always came back.

  It was locked. The key was in the pocket of his jacket, with the handkerchief and the bus tickets. He
could have passed through the keyhole or under the door in a mist, but he un-locked it, and descended
the slippery damp steps.
  They didn't want to be found, he told himself. They don't dare be found. That's why they're
sleeping in the sub-cellar.
  So Georgina won't find them.
  So Lady Brough won't find them. So they won't take Vixie away.
  "Catherine?" he said softly, hoping against hope that his dream had been, in fact, only a dream.

  But it hadn't.

  He'd known that, from the moment he'd opened his eyes in the tomb.

   They were where he'd left them. There was a table in the middle of the room where boots or silverware
could be cleaned, or wine transferred from bottles to decanter. That night back in April he'd laid every
tablecloth he could find on it, before bring-ing them down there to sleep, and the damask cloths were
brown and crusted with the fluids of their mortality. The whole hot summer's worth of dead flies crunched
like little curls of parched paper beneath his feet. It had been six months, but he could still distinguish
between them, by Catherine's beautiful red hair, and Vixie's dark curls.

 Renfield knelt at his wife's side, gathered up a double-handful of her hair, and kissed it. "I'm sorry,
Catherine," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."

  Standing again, he took off his jacket, pushed up his shirt-sleeve, to tear open the vein of his arm with
his nails, as Nomie had done, and Dracula. He held his arm over Catherine's mouth and let the blood drip
down onto her lips-or what was left of her lips. The coroner had taken away his notebooks, but he knew
exactly how many flies he'd consumed-three thousand, four hundred and eight-plus nine hundred spiders,
six hundred and fifteen moths, seven sparrows, and four mice, and a little tiny bit of Dr. Seward's blood,
though that probably didn't count. Surely life enough?
  Wasn't it? Please?
 He didn't know how long after that it was-not midnight, he didn't think-when he felt the cold whiff of
mist flowing down the sub-cellar stairs. He was still weeping, and did not turn around. He knew it was
Nomie.

  She said, "I am sorry, Ryland."

   "I hoped it was a dream," he said, after some time. ",Just a dream I had. Part of my madness, like the
letters I wrote her. Six months now I've hoped." He turned then and looked at her, a blurred pale shape
through the blindness of his tears. "Can you do it? I've only eaten flies-mice-moths ... You've consumed
life, real life, men and women. You are strong . . ."

  "No one of us is that strong, Ryland. Not my lord Dracula, not those dark ancients that haunt the
mountains of Thibet and the deserts of Egypt. We are the Angels of Death, and the Angels of
Un-Death-the Choosers of the Slain, you have called us. We can avert death, but we cannot bring them
back through the Gate, once they have passed through to the Other Side."

   She laid her hand on Renfield's as she spoke, and turning, he caught her in his arms and clung to her
like a drowning man, weeping against the golden silk of her hair.
  "They were going to take Vixie," he stammered, his body shaking with sobs. The words came out of
him as if, like a sick man, his body had to expel them or die. "Lady Brough-her vile solicitors-Catherine's
hag of a sister ... They dug up old scandals, old rumors about me when I was in India. They were having
me declared unfit to care for my own daughter! And be-cause Catherine was a free soul and had lived an
unconventional life, long before she met me, she, too, was to be disbarred from ever seeing Vixie, was to
be cut out of the family. That was what they wanted. Her money, and control of mine! I did it only to
keep Vixie from them,-to keep them from killing her by inches, smothering her spirit, turning her into one
of them and worse in their damned Select Academies! I would rather be dead, Papa, she said, the night
those damned letters came, those dawned pa-pers ... The night Bolton brought them to the house. I
would rather be dead. Those were her very words."

  "And you killed her?"

   Renfield nodded. "I was in red rage. Bolton had the temerity, the nerve, to follow me to this house. I
knocked his brains out with the fire-shovel, there in the hall. My mind was swimming with the smell of his
blood. Blood has always ... had that effect upon me," he added, a little hesitantly. "In India I used to kill
... kill ... snakes, and . . . and mongeese ... and drink their blood. I came upstairs and she was weeping,
weeping herself sick on her bed, and I ... I did it very gently. Broke her neck ... held her against me as
she died, as she ... she passed beyond where they could get her, change her, make her what she would
hate to be. She was such a free soul, Vixie. Such a beautiful soul. Then Catherine came in, and screamed
. . ."

  His arms tightened around Nomie, and he wept afresh. "I thought if I ate enough flies, consumed
enough life . . ."

   "You did what you could," None whispered, and held him close as fresh gusts of weeping shook him
like a storm-tossed oak. "You only did as you knew how. But it is done. You did your best, and your
bravest, but they cannot be brought back."

  "Then send me with them!" sobbed Renfield. "Let me go, too. They were my life!"

  "And your life is over." At the sound of that deep cold con-tralto, Nomie and Renfield broke apart.
The Countess and Sarike stood on the steps of the sub-cellar, the garnets in the Countess's hair twinkling
darkly, like droplets of blood. "You are now one of us."

   Revulsion seared through Renfield like a bitter poison. Shov-ing Nomie from him, he snatched up from
its shelf the long, sharp chisel that the Cook had used to open crates, drove it with all his strength toward
his chest ...

  And doubled over, paralyzed with shock, before the iron touched his body. Gasped as if his brain had
been sliced apart with broken glass, as if his body were turned inside-out by icy claws, and in his mind as
well as in his ears he heard the Count-ess's voice: "Don't."

  Sobbing, he tried to press the chisel toward his flesh again and pain-and something worse and stronger
than pain-closed around his body and his mind like a crushing vise.

  She said, "Drop it."

  He was back within her mind, where he had clung like a ter-rified child while his body died. He saw his
hands open. Heard the iron clatter on the flagstone floor.

  Sounds came out of his mouth that weren't words and were too suffocated to be cries. Still her grip
tightened, her rage in-supportable, slicing him as a grape is sliced by the sharpest of sil-ver razors. At her
will, he dropped to his knees-it was worse than dying, a thousand times worse-at her will, he sank to his
belly on the wet stone floor. At her will, he crawled to her, where she stepped down to the bottom of the
stairs-hating himself, hating her, fighting and sweating and hurting every inch of the way and not able to
keep himself from doing exactly as she willed-and kissed her feet.

  He wanted to bite them. To tear her Achilles' tendons with his teeth. She was aware of his want,
knowing him as intimately as if they had been lifelong lovers, and laughed at him; laughed harder as she
made him bring up his own arm and tear at the bare flesh of his hand, worrying it like a dog.

  "Be glad it's your own flesh I'm making you eat," said her voice in his ears, "and not that of your wife
and your daughter." He knew she could do it. When she let him go, he lay on the floor in smears of his
own blood and wept.

 "Go on," jeered the Countess, "weep. Weep now until all the tears are out of you, once and for all.
You are now our servant, Renfield. You were the one who clung to us, through the dark ness of death. It
was for this we kept you back from passing through the Gate. Do you understand?"

  He could barely get the words out. "I understand, Lady."

  "You will do as you are bid, for you will find that you can-not do otherwise."

  He would have kept his silence but couldn't. The words were squished out of him as if he were a frog
upon which she trod. "Yes, Lady." To the bottom of his soul he understood then how they hated Dracula,
hated him with the hatred of intimacy, and why they had pursued him to this land. Why they would never,
could never, leave him.

  Then like an icy storm-blast the room grew cold above him. He raised his head in shock and terror
even as the Countess turned, shrinking back from the column of darkness that loomed behind them,
above them on the steps.

  "And you, my beautiful ones," said a harsh, deep voice, "could do with a lesson yourselves, to do as
you have been bid." And like the fall of night, Dracula came down into the cellar.



  000



  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  4 October

  My most beloved Catherine, My most beloved wife-

  I will be leaving England soon. In my misguided efforts to somehow make right the terrible wrong that I
did you, I have put myself into the thrall of monsters.

  The Countess Elizabeth is fearsome, cold and deadly as a steel blade, yet she pales in comparison to
her husband, Dracula the Impaler, Viovode of Transylvania in the cruelest time of its history. The meeting
between them can only be compared to the clash of storm winds against raging tidal floods, elemental,
vio-lent, appalling. He flung her to the floor as if she were a rag-doll, struck the others and hurled them
against the walls with such force as to destroy the shelves, cursed them in German and in Magyar. He
made the three of them crawl, as the Countess had made me crawl. My soul-if I can still speak of myself
as pos-sessing such a thing-trembles for poor Mrs. Harker, if and when he should claim her as his own.

  "I am pursued by human rats, by the yapping curs of this land," he stormed at the three women, who
crouched bloody on the floor before his boots. "Jealous suitors all, swearing vengeance, as the impotent
Turk and the beaten Slav threw stones at me when I rode in triumph through their towns! Dogs! I spit
upon their vengeance!" There was a fading red scar across his forehead, where, Nomie had told me,
Jonathan Harker had struck him with a shovel as he lay sleeping in his coffin, and the front of his vest and
coat had been ripped open, as if by the stroke of a knife.

  "Vengeance! It is they who shall learn the meaning of that word to their sorrow! I have taken the soul
of this girl they loved, and I have in my hand the soul of the other. She is mine, whatever time it is that she
die, if it be seventy years from now! They play against me with their tiny mortal lives, but it is I who bear
as my weapon the sword of Time. Against that they can do naught."

  His red eyes raked the three women and he stooped down, caught the Countess Elizabeth by the thick
coils of her hair, dragged her head back so that her eyes met his. "And you, wil-ful sluts! You dared
pursue? You dared leave the castle that is my fortress, to follow me to this place?"

  "And you dared to leave us?" retorted the Countess, and Dracula struck her across the face, so that
blood trickled from her lip.

  "Silence, hag!" In their locked gazes there was a fearful un-derstanding, the fermented knowledge of
the very depths of one another's minds, as only hatred can be when it is rooted in the confidences once
exchanged in love. Then he thrust her to the floor again.

   "In one way and one way only is it well that you have come," he said. "The ant can be crushed beneath
the boot, but still the bite of an ant can poison the limb, and so kill the man. I return now to my own
country, to Transylvania-to the place that I left in your charge, faithless trulls! You will go before me, to
make ready my fortress." The red gaze moved to Nomie, crouching with bowed head, "And you will
travel behind me-with that cringing Judas who once called me Master!-and you will pick off any who
straggle or lag. For they will follow." And he laughed, a hollow and dreadful sound. "They will follow to
their deaths."

  He reached into his coat and drew out a handful of bank-notes and golden sovereigns, which he threw
to the floor be-tween the three women, the gold tingling musically on the stone.

  His voice changed, and he drew the Countess to her feet, speaking to her in Hungarian rather than
German as before, and I caught the words haboru-war-and ver, blood, spoken in the tones of tenderest
love. He cupped her cheek in his hand, and swiftly turning her head, she bit the fleshy heel of his thumb,
so that the blood spattered on his cuff.

  At this he laughed, as if at some uproarious jest, and when I raised my head, he was gone.



  000
  Now they, too, are gone, my beloved, my treasure. I write this kneeling at your side. The Countess and
Sarike have departed to find their little poet Gelhorn, who has all this time been meeting them for midnight
suppers and walks along the Serpentine. They will make arrangements to cross the Channel under his
care, since Van Helsing knows nothing of their presence in this coun-try and will not be watching for
them, and travel by rail back to Klausenberg, and so up the mountains to Dracula's castle once again.

  Dracula himself will travel by ship, as he came to this coun-try, packed in the single box of his native
earth that Van Helsing and his cohorts have not found and sterilized with holy things.

  After they had gone, I tried to comfort Nomie, whose face was cut and bruised by Dracula's violence.
But she slipped away from me as mist. The night is deepening to morning's small hours. Soon I must
return to Highgate, to the only earth that will give me rest.

  A burning hunger rises in my flesh. I caught mice-nearly a dozen, fattened for months on the spoiled
flour and rotting veg-etables in this kitchen when the servants could not return to the locked house. I can
now move with great speed and can, to some extent, dull their animal minds. As I have long suspected,
their blood does indeed in part quench the ravening hunger of the vampire.

  But only in part. I know not how long it will be before I, too, begin to kill the innocent, like the children
that Lucy Westenra took in her state of revenant shock.

   And so I must depart. I will return with fall of night, beloved. Mortality and the effects of time hold no
horrors for me, and to me your face is as beautiful now as it was that first moment I saw you, at the
lecture-hall in Leicester Square, in that gown of iris-colored silk. We depart for Transylvania, Nomie and
I, probably next week. It depends on how long it takes Seward and young Lord Godalming to wind up
their affairs in this country, and Van Helsing to make his preparations. With your permis-sion I will come
here to be with you every night until then. For six months I longed for nothing but to sit beside you and to
look upon your lovely face, and now nothing can prevent me from doing so, for what time is left to me.

  And if I can arrange it, that time will be short, please God. Between enslavement to the Countess
Elizabeth, and through her to the terrible Count, there is nothing whatsoever to choose. Hell itself cannot
be as dreadful as that occupation for eternity. Poor Lucy Westenra's suitors will be in pursuit of the
Count, and in them lies my hope. They hunger for revenge as I do for blood. It will be no difficult matter
to place myself in their path, to embrace the oblivion I seek, and the way through the Gate on whose
other side you and Vixie wait.

 My darling, I want nothing now but to be with you. When that is accomplished-when we do indeed
meet on the Other Side-I can only beg that you understand, for I know that I can-not hope that you
might forgive.

  Still I remain, in spite of all, forever,

  Your loving husband,

  R.M.R.
                          CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  R.M.R.’s notes

  5 October

  17 mice, 6 rats, 3 moths

  Flies scarce even in London with advancing cold.

  Spider season. Although I have access now to the hot blood of rodents, I still find a special pleasure in
the sharp sparkle of these predatory smaller fry. Though I do enjoy moths. Having only the night to hunt
in, birds are no longer a possibility. Dogs I will not kill, though I have found that I can summon them with
my thought, as Dracula summoned the wolf from the London Zoo to break through the shut windows of
Hillingham and tear away Van Helsing's protective wreaths of garlic. Dogs are faith-ful, and it is ill to
reward such innocent helpfulness with death. The cats with which Highgate abounds stare in disbelieving
af-front at my summons, then sneer at me and run away. A pity--Puss eats of many mice and sparrows in
her life. Is that why she has nine of them?



  6 October

  22 mice, 4 rats, 18 spiders, 2 moths

  In Regent's Park this evening a child of eleven or so accosted me, tawdrily clad in a grown woman's
cast-offs. She fell into step with me, winked, and said, "Cold night, eh, guv?" and looking down into her
calculating eyes I was filled with such blinding hunger, such overwhelming need, that I could literally smell
the blood that coursed in her veins. I bared my teeth at her-like Dracula's, and the Countess's, and
Nomie's now, long and sharp as a wolf's fangs-and widened my eyes like the horrors of a Kabuki mask,
and snarled in a good imitation of Emily Strath-more when she was getting ready to slide into a fit, "Cold
in-deed, little posset." I lunged at her, giving her ample time to flee down the path, for indeed she needed
a lesson, poor child, about better picking her clients.

  But as I watched her go, I wondered how long it would be be-fore I began simply to troll the streets of
the East End in earnest, and take that poor child's older and more slatternly sisters as my victims. Though
God knows, with the amount of alcohol and opiates I would imbibe with the blood I should undoubtedly
stumble back to Highgate drunk as a muleteer. The blood of rats-the energy of their fierce little
minds-lessens the desper-ate fire in my own veins, but it does not cure the scraping, sear-ing need in me.

  That need, Nomie tells me, is assuaged only by human blood, and the psychic inhalation of human
death. It is from the death, as well as the blood, that we imbibe our strength. We need the one as greatly
as we need the other. I do not know how long I can survive before I become even as Dracula is.

  Was he different in his first century of Un-Life? His second?

  Somehow I think not.

  I pray that I will engineer my death-my true death-at the hands of Seward and Van Helsing before I
become in my heart as he is now.
  I was in Regent's Park to meet the Countess, Sarike, Nomie, and their human agent Gustav Gelhorn,
whom I recognized at once, at one of the new cafes on the Circle near the Boating hake. In the glowing
jewel-box of lamps and passers-by that pasty-faced little man seemed more anaemic than ever, his pale
blue eyes traveling with reverent adoration from the face of one woman to the face of the other, and
barely glancing at my own. I am positive he made not the slightest association between the "Mr.
Marshmire" who wrote him out a cheque for three hun-dred and fifty pounds on the Merchants' Bank to
pay expenses for himself and his "beautiful spirits" to journey back to their native mountains, and the
screaming wretch he had seen in the padded room at Rushbrook House.

  He was a very unpleasant little man, a disciple of Gobineau and Marr and other writers of the Volkish
Movement, and full of his own importance as a member of the "pure Aryan race." An astonishing
combination of smug vanity and self-pity. At one point, in between endless ramblings about the "German
race soul" and the dire international plots of "degenerates" like Jews and homosexuals, he made reference
to the "special circum-stances" of the journey, with a covert glance at the Countess, who merely looked
amused. None said to him, "Our dear friend Marshmire is aware of our ... limitations, Friend Gus-tav," at
which he slid his gaze sidelong at me with wary disbelief not innocent of jealousy.

  In my loftiest German, I said, "Because a man passes by an English name, Herr Gelhorn, does not
mean that he shares the soul of this island race of debased counter-jumpers. Did you think yourself the
only man who has heard the Rhinemaidens sing, as they combed their hair upon the rocks in the
moonlight? For the voices of the spirits of the German Race-Soul carry far, across rivers and mountains,
and even the seas."

  Gelhorn looked properly chastened, and for an instant I met Nomie's eyes and was hard put not to
burst into laughter, at the shared mental picture of some fat American railroad baron wak-ing in the night
in his mail-order castle in Chicago crying, The Rhinemaidens! The enchanted spirits of the German
Race-Soul require my help!

  Gelhorn even mumbled, as we shook hands in parting, "Thank you, mein Herr, for your assistance to
these spirits, these wander-ing elementals, in their quest across lands and seas. You and I are privileged
beyond the part of most of the Mortal Race, to look upon their faces, to realize that the true spirits of the
Fatherland still walk this earth and extend their friendship to men of pure blood."

  His bespectacled gaze lingered reverently on the Countess, whom Sarike was helping into her very
stylish sable pelisse-where Gelhorn thinks she acquired the two hundred guineas that such a garment
costs, I cannot imagine. Rhine gold, per-haps?

  "I swear to you," Gelhorn went on, "that I shall protect these spirits with my very life, on the
cross-Channel boat, and on the train from Paris, until they are returned again to their sacred mountains."

  I inclined my head, and let him pay the bill. I don't think he was aware that I-supposedly human-had
sipped no more of the coffee than had the three representatives of the German Race-Soul he was
helping. Nomie and I stood at the edge of the cafe's golden lights, and watched him escort the Countess
and Sarike away into the thick mists that lay beneath the park's leaf-less trees.

  "Fortunate for the Countess," I remarked, "that she found him," and Nomie regarded me with surprise.

   "Fortune has little to do with the hunt, Ryland. To be vampire is to fascinate, men and women both. We
lure by our beauty: 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, de-spite all they know, drawn by their need like your poor
friend Jonathan. Else why would they go with us to lonely places in the dark, and yield to the kisses of a
stranger? Will you hunt with me tonight?"

  "The taking of lives has no savor for me, Nornchen," I answered-Little Nomie, a jest between us: a
sweet-faced sad lit-tle Valkyrie, riding with her sisters to choose who will be slain tonight. The protest
was a complete lie and she saw it, glancing up into my face. When your soul has lain naked and helpless
in the mind of another while you watch your body's death, there is no such thing as deceit. But she only
smiled agreement at me, and said nothing. "I think I will return to Kensington, and sit for a time beside
them whom I will never cease to love."

  She touched my hand, and whispered, "Then give them greet-ing from me, and tell them I am glad, that
they have found the path that leads to happiness."

  And so saying she melted away into the lamplight and the fog. For a moment I heard a winnowing in
the air, as if a bat was flying somewhere in the dark overhead. Then she was gone.



  000



  Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife

  7--8 October

  My dearest one,

   Please forgive my not coming to you tonight. I grudge the hours of my absence, the lost occasion stolen
from our short time together, but now even more than when I hung chained in a strait-waistcoat to the
wall of a padded room, I am not master of my own movements. Nomie begs your pardon for the
necessity, a consideration which I find most sweet in her. She cannot, any more than can I, shirk what it
is required of us both that we do.

  Shortly after sunset we journeyed to Purfleet, where the marsh mists required only the very slightest
effort on Nomie's part to thicken to the point where we could walk up to the windows of the house with
absolute impunity. As the Count had suspected, preparations were clearly afoot to pursue him. Van
Helsing at least knew the significance of the Count's exchange of blood with Mrs. Harker. By listening in
a meditative state, akin to that of the yogis I met in India, Nomie and I could hear clearly all that passed
in Seward's study, and pieced together their plan. They will take the boat-train to Paris on the morning of
the 12th, and there board the Orient Express for Varna, to intercept the Russian freighter Czarina
Catherine upon which Dracula's single remaining earth-box is being shipped.

  For a man with a great deal of money-as I now have under the names of Marshmire and Bloem,
complete with all identity papers, Catherine's accounts as well as my own-it is a simple matter to make
arrangements to have half a dozen of my own earth-boxes, as well as Nomie's, shipped under reliable
guard to Paris, and put on the same train on the 12th. So now I know, my beloved, how many more
nights I can pass at your side, before we depart!

  Once when Mrs. Harker turned toward the windows of Sew-ard's study, I was shocked to see a great
burn, nearly the size of a penny-piece, glaring crimson on her forehead within the frame of her dark hair. I
must have gasped, for Nomie looked up at me and said, "You did not know, then? Van Helsing burned
her-pressed the consecrated Host into her flesh, which has al-ready begun to assume some of the
qualities of the vampire. Had the changes in her been further advanced, it would have been much worse."

  "How do you know this?" I asked, shocked at the old man's carelessness, if carelessness it had been.

   "I felt it," whispered Nomie. "In my dreaming I felt it, the af-ternoon that you were buried in Highgate.
We all did. We are bound to her now, you see, as we are bound to the Count. In some sense, our
dreams touch hers, as well as his. And in these dreams sometimes I see her, in the afternoons, alone in
her room here. She will stare and stare at herself in the mirror, then throw herself upon the bed and weep
like a beaten child." Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact as she said this. Yet I heard in my mind
Vixie's despairing voice: I would rather be dead, than turn into what they want me to be!

  And poor Mrs. Harker has not even that option!

  Nomie went on, "When Jonathan, or any of the men comes in, she is all smiles and cheerful calm."

  "Was Jonathan indeed the Count's solicitor?" I asked, ob-serving that thin, alert man with haggard eyes
and white streaks starting in his hair as he stood talking to Van Helsing, his wife's hand gently clasped in
his. "I dreamed of him-I think I dreamed of him-at the castle in Transylvania."

  "He was there," agreed Nomie. "The castle itself stands upon a very high shoulder of rock, overlooking
the Borgo Pass into Bukovina. The only way out of the Castle is through the court yard. Sometimes the
peasants, or the village priest, will place holy things in the road, or on the gates, so that we cannot pass
them. It is a nuisance, no more, of course, as it is just as easy for us to come and go down the wall and
the cliff-face, or to fly in the form of bats. On the night that the Count left-left us there and fled to
England-Harker climbed down the wall and the cliff-face, a very difficult thing for a mortal man."

  She tilted her head on one side, watching from the darkness as Harker escorted his wife from the
study. Nomie must, I real-ized, know this deceptively gentle-looking young man well. He came back in
alone, and out of his wife's view his face looked as if he'd aged ten years. "There was nothing different
this after-noon?" he asked.

 "Nothing," said Van Helsing. "When Madame Mina is un-der the hypnosis, she only hears the lap of the
water on the ship's hull, and the thud of feet upon the deck above. And so I think it shall be, until the
Czarina Catherine come into Varna, and we shall be there waiting for him, eh?"

  Nomie and I traded a glance. "They are using Mrs. Harker to trace him," I said.

  "Be glad then that it is only him, whom she and they seek with her mind."

  The remainder of the night, Nomie and I spent making ar-rangements for our own travel and the
shipment of the boxes of the soil in which we were buried. Nomie, she told me, along with her
sister-wives, had had to dig up her own from the chapel floor of Castle Dracula, the Count alone being
able to command the gypsies who provide what service there is at the Castle.

  We met with two gentlemen named Greengage and Bray, ex--soldiers and recommended to me by my
old friend the publican a; the Goat and Compasses as honest roughs, who for a price can be depended
upon to make sure that the earth-boxes in which Nomie and I must be carried across the Channel will in
fact be placed speedily and safely upon the Orient Express. We shall depart for Paris on the 11 th, a day
before Van Helsing and Company. Once in France, we shall of course be able to come and go through
the chinks and holes in the boxes, as we do through the minute holes in the lids of coffins and the doors of
tombs.
  Will you, my dearest, forgive me if I make financial arrange-ments for Nomie to have access to our
money, once Van Helsing or one of his myrmidons makes blessed quietus for me? Once that happens,
neither you nor I, nor our dearest Vixie, will ever require a penny, ever again. My little Nornchen has
been so great a help to me, instructing me in the ways of getting along in my new, strange, vampire
state-something the Lady Elizabeth taught her, rather than the Count-that I feel I cannot simply abandon
her on a train in the midst of Bavaria without making some provision for her to return safely to her home.

  I beg for-and rely upon-your kindness toward one who has been most generous and helpful to me in a
terribly difficult time. Autumn nights fall quickly, and last long. My deepest regret, in this strange
night-time life that now I lead, is that I will seldom see the flowers you so loved blooming in sunlight, and
never see them again without pain. That I will never catch, through our windows, the burnish of sunset on
your hair. Still every day brings me closer to joining you in fact, never to be parted again.

  Your own forever,

  R.M.R.



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  8 October

  18 mice, 10 rats, 20 spiders, 12 moths



  9 October

  22 mice, 11 rats, 9 spiders, 6 moths



  10 October

  16 mice, 13 rats, 4 spiders, 9 moths, & Georgina Clayburne
                         CHAPTER TWENTY -THREE

  Renfield heard the key turn in the front-door lock upstairs. Heard the click of shoe-heels-a woman's
shoes-on the hall floor, and felt the infinitesimal creak of weight mounting the stairs. Sitting quietly beside
the table in the sub-cellar-he'd brought down a chair from the kitchen, clean sheets to lay over the
bodies, ribbons for Vixie's hair-he debated about locking the sub-cellar door, moving boxes in front of it
and being gone before the visitor came downstairs. It was his last night in London-his last night with the
physical entities that had been Catherine and Vixie-and he didn't want to destroy the nostal-gic sweet
savor of his thoughts with some stranger's conven-tional expressions of horror and distaste.

  But it wasn't a stranger.

  He heard her, as she mounted the stairs, say, "Tch!" and knew it was Georgina, Lady Clayburne.

  Had she glimpsed him, when he stopped by the flower-sellers in Leicester Square to get some late
hothouse roses? He'd done so these past three nights, heaping the table with them. He'd walked as a man
does. She could have followed.

  Or had she somehow learned of the house, and had it watched?

  The anger that swept him at this thought was so intense that he felt the hair on his nape prickle, like a
savage dog's. His rage had nothing in it of the clouds of senseless crimson fury that had used to descend
upon him in life: that was something that seemed to have been rinsed away by dying. But this bitterness,
though colder, pierced deeper. He couldn't erase from his mind Vixie's frantic tears at the thought of
having to go live with Georgina and her vain and distant husband, the thought of be-ing pushed and
moulded by loneliness and emotional blackmail into a "proper young lady" who wasn't permitted to read
Freud or smoke and certainly wasn't permitted to paint nude models. He couldn't forget those horrible
scenes between Catherine and her sister that would leave Catherine ill with anxiety for days.

  He remained seated beside the table, holding the rotted and leathery fingers gently in his, and listened to
the footfalls explore the upper regions of the house, then descend the stairs again. Descend to the
kitchen.

  "Tch!"

  That was unfair. Renfield had been very careful about clear-ing away the sucked-dry carcasses of his
rats and mice.

  The sub-cellar door opened. The light of the lamp she held streamed down into the chilly darkness that
reeked of decay and roses.

  She gasped, "You!" and almost dropped the lamp.

  Renfield said, "Yes. Me."
She hesitated at the top of the steps. If she'd fled, he could have caught her, but she didn't. The
temptation to have a scene with him was far too strong.
  "I should have suspected you'd find a way to corrupt that fat clown Hennessey. I always did wonder if
you were paying him more than Mother and I were."
  The wave of anger recurred, prickling his hair again, but he remained sitting and said, "I take it you
didn't bother to attend the funeral?"

  "Good God, no!" She sounded startled at the idea that she might even have considered doing so. "With
all Wormidge had to do, to get hold of your solicitor's papers, finally . . ." She had reached the bottom of
the stair, and the lamplight widened into the room, illuminating the red hair coiled on the sheet, Vixie's
dark curls among the roses. Georgina's eyes grew wide, and fairly blazed in the dim orange glow.

  "You beast." She fairly spit the word at him. "You sneaking, greedy animal. That was your plan all
along, wasn't it? To marry her and to make away with her, so that Father's money would come to you.
Yes, and even to make away with your own daugh-ter, so you could have it all!"

  Renfield stood up at that, and Georgina fell back a step, her arm cocked a little, as if she'd throw the
lamp at him next. Dis-believingly, Renfield said, "That is all that you can say? All that you can see, in the
death of your lovely sister and your niece? The whereabouts of your father's money, that might go to me
in-stead of to you? That is the only thing that Catherine's death means to you?"

 "Of course not!" Georgina snapped quickly. "You should talk about what her death means! Murderer!
Brute! Thief!"

  "Thief?" Renfield took a step toward her. "I was married to Catherine for eighteen years, Georgina.
Had I been the fortune--hunter you always claimed I was-as if I had not found my own fortune in
India-would I not have made away with her earlier than that?"

  "Don't you argue with me!" shrieked the woman. "I know of your life in India. I've had Wormidge on to
that as well. Once we started asking, we learned about those girls who disappeared there! And what you
used to do with animals and snakes! You were unfit to speak to Catherine, let alone marry her, and
cer-tainly the pair of you were unfit to raise a granddaughter of Lord Brough's to be the ... the bohemian
suffragist sensual-ist you were turning Vivienne into! That you turned Cather-ine into as well, with your
theosophy and your heathan gods! Now I know that she is dead, whether you escape or not, we can put
an end to all this legal shilly-shallying with the trust funds."

  "Do not," said Renfield quietly, "name your sister to me. Cer-tainly not in the same breath as complaints
about trust-funds." He stood only a yard from the enraged woman now, close enough to smell the musty
lavender of her dusting-powder, close enough to see the broken veins in her cheeks, the caked
rice--powder at the corners of her lips. He towered over her. With a sudden move she dropped the lamp
to the flagstone floor and fled, dashing up the steps, Renfield following with a vampire's preternatural
speed, leisurely as a shadow. He let her dash before him up the kitchen steps and through the pantry,
hearing the rush and roaring of the spreading lamp-oil as it ignited the broken shelves, the trailing sheets,
the roses and the table ...

  He caught her, easily, just inside the front door.



  000



  Deep in sleep, Mina Harker heard Dr. Van Helsing's gentle voice, coming to her from far off, as she
had heard it now for nearly a week. "What can you hear, Madame Mina?"
  Through lips that felt as if they belonged to someone else, she mumbled, "Water. Water lapping at the
hull."

   Darkness lay around her. She was aware of that dark mind, sleeping, hungry-wary as a wolf. Angry as
a wolf, that flees back to its lair with a burned nose. The thoughts of revenge colored the black darkness
like a blood-colored cloud. She was glad Van Helsing, when he hypnotized her like this, never asked her
about what she felt.

  "And what smell?"

  She said, "Earth. Salt. Blood." A little blood, from the car-cass of the dead rat, clutched still in the
Count's hand. Does he know I'm aware of him like this? The thought that in the dark ness his eyes
might open, his mind might reach out to hers, filled her with terror. She knew that if he said to her, Come,
she would move Earth and Heaven to go to him.

  But he slept.

  She heard Van Helsing say, "Sleep now, Madame Mina, and when you wake, you will wake
refreshed." It was how he always left her, and she heard his voice and Jonathan's, quietly, as they left the
bedroom: "All still seem as it was. This is good. When we leave tonight . . ."

  The door closed. Mina knew they were leaving-for Transyl-vania, she assumed-but had made the five
men swear never to speak to her of destinations or plans. If she could listen to Drac-ula's dreams, there
was the chance that he could listen to hers. Only in this way could she help them, she knew. Only in
sur-render, in making herself the object she had all her life struggled not to be. All her life she had been a
doer, an organizer, memo-rizing train-schedules and typing notes and taking correspon-dence courses.
Now it was as if a hand had been laid on her head, saying, Learn stillness. Only by quietness, stillness,
ab-solute trust could she fight back to reclaim her own soul and her own life.

  But the thought that she was linked to the Count-the thought of her flesh changing, as Seward had told
her poor Lucy's flesh had changed as the result of drinking the vampire's blood--revolted her. She found
herself filled with a loathing for her own body that she could not describe. In that dark dawn when they
had driven the Count from her bedroom, after the Count had held her mouth to his bleeding chest and
forced her to drink, she had screamed, "Unclean! Unclean!" She doubted whether any of the men even
understood, or could begin to understand, her sense of horror at the thought of her own flesh, her own
organs. Daily she felt herself sliding toward double change, alien from them in body and in every thought
and perception of her mind.

  Each day she looked in her mirror for signs of further change. Each day she tried to see the reflection of
herself in Jonathan's eyes. He was-they all-were becoming strangers to her, and in some ways that was
more terrible than all those surreptitious probings with her tongue at her gums and teeth.

  Each day she tried to pretend that she didn't smell the blood in Jonathan's veins. That she didn't dream
about waking beside him, hungry and changed; that she didn't dream of leaning over him, pressing the
soft skin of his throat between her lips. His blood would be delicious. And more delicious still, his dying
de-spair as he opened his eyes and knew himself utterly betrayed.

  It was dreams like this that brought her sobbing from sleep at night, to lie trembling, staring at the ceiling
in the dark. Jona-than had enough to bear, without her waking him to share her horrors. She slipped so
easily under Van Helsing's quiet-voiced commands, and slept so deeply afterward, because most nights
she lay awake.
  Poor Lucy, she thought, as she slid deeper into sleep. Poor, sweet Lucy, who had had to go through
this alone, not knowing what was happening to her ...

  Or would it have been better not to know? Not to hope? Had she dreamed of drinking Arthur's blood,
before she died? Her dream shifted, images sliding from what she knew to the tantalizingly half-familiar.
She thought for a moment she was seeing Lucy in her dream, but the next instant knew it was not so. The
chamber where the blonde girl knelt belonged to an-other place, another time, furnished with pieces of
Louis XV or an imitation of it, delicate against the heavy stone of the walls. A great window opened into
distant vistas of mountains and trees, to a sunset bleeding itself to death in streaks of cinnabar and gold.
The girl who knelt beside the great bed was praying, but as Mina watched, she groped in her
old-fashioned coiffure of wheat-gold curls and drew out a jeweled comb, whose golden interior was at
the base smooth and flat enough to serve her for a mirror. There was no other mirror in the room.

  The girl angled the comb to the branch of candles burning beside the bed, opened her mouth, and drew
back her upper lip in the exact fashion that Mina did several times a day. On her throat Mina could see
the white, mangled punctures of the vam-pire's bite. The comb slid from the girl's hands and she dropped
across the bed again, hands clasped as in prayer, but what she whispered was, "Papa ... Mama . . ."

   "Papa? Mama?" Mina knew the sneering voice. Would rec-ognize it, hear it, in her dreams, she
thought, for the rest of her life. He stood in the shadows beside the bed, his eyes glinting red in the
candle-light. Mina knew he had not been there before. "You vowed that you would forsake all others,
little Goldfinch." His deep, harsh voice spoke in German. She wondered at it that she would be dreaming
in that language, though she had spoken it a great deal, traveling to Buda-Pesth to bring Jonathan home.
"How is this that you will be forsworn so quickly?" He ad-vanced to put his hands on her shoulders, and
she jerked away, sprang from him, sobbing, to the window. He only smiled, long teeth gleaming. "And
will you forswear all those times that you said you loved me? Even in the presence of the priests of God?"

  Her eyes were huge in her emaciated face. "I knew not to whom I spoke."

  "You spoke to me, little Goldfinch." He pressed a mocking hand to his breast, where his long
old-fashioned waistcoat of black silk was embroidered with crimson flowers like a spattering of blood. "I
have not changed." His voice was soft, his eyes mockingly amused, as he had been amused at Mina's
struggles to turn her head aside from the bleeding gash in his chest.

  With a sudden motion the girl jerked open the casement of the window, making all the candle-flames
bend and her blonde hair stir around her face. She stood on the window-seat, framed in the darkening
abyss.

  "What, do you seek to part already?" Dracula did not move, and at his voice the girl looked back into
the room. "'Til death do us part, you said, before that God by whom you set such store. But you will
find, I think, if you do jump, that death will not part us. That we will never be parted." He walked slowly
toward her, holding out his hand. "That is what you wanted, is it not? It is what you said you wanted,
upon all those occasions when you were in my arms."

  The girl clung to the side of the open casement, trembling, tears running down her face now as she
watched him advance; Mina guessed from her quick glance, quickly averted, how deep and terrible was
the drop beyond. Dracula reached her, his hand still held out; the girl cried, "I hate you!"

  "Ah, but you will love me, my sweet bride, my treasure, my winepress. You will have no choice."

  She wavered, irresolute, and in that instant he moved, with the panther-like speed Mina had seen. In an
eye-blink he was be-side her in the window, his dark velvet arm circling her waist, bending her backward
over it, out the window and over the abyss. Her feet groped for purchase, toes scrabbling frantically as
they were lifted from the window-seat, so that she was forced to cling to his arms. He bent down, as she
hung above the empty fall, fastened his lips to her throat.

  The girl was still breathing, though gasping for air, when he drew her back inside. He released her, and
faded away into the shadows, leaving her lying on the window-seat with her golden hair streaked with
blood.
                       CHAPTER TWENTY -FOUR

  Strasbourg. Munich. Vienna with its pink-and-gold buildings looking as if some mad cake-decorator
had assaulted them with frills of buttercreme.

  Sunset. Darkness. Intolerable thoughts. A day of watching trees and villages and distant mountains flash
past, of listening to Art and Quincey play endless games of cribbage. Night again.

  ,John Seward closed his eyes and wished with everything in him that he could just give himself an
injection of chloral hy-drate and sleep for days. Months, if possible.

  Sleep without seeing Lucy's face as he'd seen it in Hampstead Cemetery, with blood dripping down her
chin and fervid lust in her eyes. Sleep without hearing her scream when Art hammered the stake into her
breast, without seeing her hands scratch and claw at the hammer, the wood, Art's wrists. Sleep without
seeing Van Helsing gently lift up her severed head to make sure of its disattachment, then lay it down
again and stuff the mouth with the blossoms of the garlic plant, whose scent Seward had come to so
profoundly hate.

  Oh, my dearest one, he thought, his heart wrung with emo-tions he could not even name, much less
let himself actually feel. Thank God your mother was dead before that came to pass. She
might have pulled you out of my arms, but she did not deserve that.

  And I could not have saved you.

   He opened his eyes again. More little fairy-tale villages against the dark slopes of pine-woods. He'd
asked Jonathan Harker about them yesterday, and to his surprise the younger man had kept them all in a
ripple of laughter about strange old beliefs and curious customs he'd encountered on his journey here last
April. "Of course, I didn't travel in such luxury as this," Harker had added, gesturing around him at the
little com-partment with its small sofa and table, its Turkey carpet and wood paneling, and had gone on
to recount tales of the other oc-cupants of the second-class coach cars at night-blessed, blessed relief of
laughter.

   The compartment door opened and Seward thought it must be a porter, come to light the lamps that
tinkled with their con-tinuous silvery music in time to the rattle of the train. He real-ized the compartment
was almost pitch dark. Time and past time, he reflected, to go next door to Art and Quincey's
com-partment, to play cards while Van Helsing pored over those ar-cane books he'd brought and the
Harkers chatted as gently as any married couple might ...

  "Dr. Seward?" said the shadow that loomed over him in the dark.

  Whose voice is that?

  "Yes?" He sat up on the little sofa, felt for a match, but his visitor closed the door and struck a light,
held the springing lit-tle flame to the lamp-wick as Seward apologized. "I'm sorry, I'm half asleep. Travel
in this part of the world . . ."

  His voice trailed off.

  "Yes," said Renfield. "It's me." He replaced the lamp-globe. And all Seward could think was, Dear
God. Dear God ... "It never occurred to you, did it," said Renfield, "that the Count would make
anyone his victim-and his slave-in that house but Mrs. Harker? You never thought to check the state of
my teeth and gums before you turned my body over to Lady Brough's solicitor for burial?"

  Dear God ... Seward felt exactly as if someone had rammed him in the chest full-force with the end
of a barge-pole. Unable to breathe, and for a moment unable to think. Then another in-ference lept to his
mind, another shock ...

  "No," smiled Renfield, as if in his widening eyes he read Seward's horrified thought. "To the best of my
knowledge the Count-now my Master-limited his depredations to two. I doubt that even he could cope
with Emily Strathmore. How is Mrs. Harker?"

   Seward collected himself, his mind racing now. He settled back a little on the sofa, gestured to the
single chair. "She is not well," he said, "as you must know. Will you sit? Are you a pas-senger on this
train yourself, then?"

  "Good Heavens, no!"

  "Then how . . ."

  "That is my own affair." Renfield smiled again, and this time Seward could see the length and whiteness
of his canine teeth. Seward noticed also that his former patient had lost the unhealthy flabbiness that had
begun to blur his burly frame in the months at Rushbrook House. He looked, in fact, younger than the
sixty-three years Georgina Clayburne had given as his age, as if even in the short time since his death he
were slipping back into the prime of his strength.

  "I'm not an apparition, if that's what you're thinking," added Renfield, and held out one powerful hand.
"Put your fin-ger here, and see my hands," he quoted Jesus' words to Thomas the Doubter in the
Bible, "and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing."

  Quietly, Seward said, "I believe. If the Count is, indeed, your Master, what do you want? Why are you
here?" Renfield wore a dark suit and good linen, well-fitting and very different from the clothes he'd been
brought in and the clothes he had worn to be buried. Where had he gotten them? He was also able to
observe, watching Renfield carefully, that he was not breathing.

  "Because the Count is my Master, I was ordered to pursue you, to come upon you singly in the
dark-as you observe that I have-and to pick you off, one by one, as the Count's irregular cavalry and his
gypsy servitors picked off so many of his enemies in centuries gone by. As to what I want ... Because the
Count is my Master, I should think that would be obvious." All the sly humor, the ironic amusement that
had convinced Seward that this was in fact no apparition, but Renfield indeed, faded from his
square-jawed face. "I want you to kill me."

  Seward drew in his breath to speak, then let it out.

  Dying, Lucy had kissed Van Helsing's hand, whispering her thanks that he had thrust Art from her in
her trance-bound de-mon state.

  On the night before their departure, Mina had made each of them swear to kill her-with stake and
garlic and decapitation--before they would let her fall into Count Dracula's hands or service.

  Renfield's eyes, though they had the curious reflective bright-ness of a vampire's, were entirely sane,
and deeply sad as they looked down into his.
  "Can you tell us . . ." Seward began, and Renfield shook his head.

  "I am not offering to betray my Master," he said. "I cannot, for one thing, and for another, there is little I
can tell you beyond what you have learned from poor Mrs. Harker. I am free to act only for a little time.
While he is on the water, his power is lim-ited, but if he becomes aware of what I've done, he can
exercise it, at the moments of sunrise and sunset, at noon and at the slack and turn of the tide. Dr.
Seward," he went on, holding out his big hands, "I was your patient for six months, and never during that
time were you anything but humane, professional, and well-intentioned in the face of my admittedly erratic
behavior. In my saner moments I never had a doubt that you would do all within your power to help me,
not because you knew me or loved me, but because it is in your nature, as well as your pro-fession, to
help those who come to you for help.

  "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."



  000



  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.



  000



  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

  Jonathan Harker's Journal*

  17 October

 Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome the Count on his return from his tour ... Van
Helsing and Seward will cut off his head at once and drive a stake through his heart. Morris and
Godalming and I shall prevent interference, even if we have to use the arms which we shall have ready.
The Profes-sor says that if we can so treat the Count's body, it will soon af-ter fall into dust ...



  000



  R.M.R.'s notes

  17 October

  12 rats, 27 spiders

 Coming from Paris on the Orient Express, Nomie told me of Count Dracula's intention: to divert the
Czarina Catherine from its registered destination here in Varna to Galatz on the Danube mouth, leaving
Van Helsing and his allies to await it here while we, Nomie and I, pick them off one by one.

   Sleeping in my coffin during the day, in the small lodgings we rented, I feel the Count's impatient anger
press upon me like a fever. Anger at those who would dare to pursue and defy him. Anger at us, who
cannot or will not guard his flanks. Through the boards of my coffin I hear Nomie cry out in terror, like a
child in the grip of a nightmare she cannot wake from. And though I strive to break my own thick
day-sleep to go to her, to comfort her, I can only lie in the clayey soil dug from Highgate Cemetery, and
listen to her weep.



  000



  Letter, Quincey Morris to Galileo Jones

  Foreman, Caballo Loco Ranch

  San Antonio, Texas

  17 October

  Pard,
  It's been too long, a thousand years it feels like, and stranger portents have come to pass than ever I
wrote of in all those foot-loose traipses riding herd on that crazy English lord around the world. Doc
Seward, and Art Holmwood, and I thought we saw the elephant then, and maybe we did.

  This is something different, dark as the snake-caves along the dry washes in the hills and twice as
deadly. I write because I could use the sight of your ugly face just now, and use even more you and six
or seven of the boys from the bunkhouse.

  When last I wrote, I said I'd been shot bad by Dan Cupid, shot in the heart with his little gold arrow: I
said a lot of hope-ful fal-lal and I hope to God you burned that damn stupid poem. She turned me down
for a man just as good as me and better in her mama's eyes, though straight and true as she was, I know
that didn't weigh with her, and I knew even then I wouldn't get over it. May through to September, I kept
telling myself I'd write and let you know how I was, when the pain let up some. But it never did.

  I thought that was the worst wound I'd take in my life. I wish it had been.

  I say of Miss Westenra, "was," because she died, not many days before her marriage to Art. And not
many days after, we--Art and I and Doc-learned that she'd been killed, by the kind of man-monster the
Commanche sometimes speak of, and the villagers deep back in the Mexican hills where modern times
and modern blindness haven't yet touched.

  And this is what I'm doing here, footloose again and heading East in country as wild as any we crossed
coming west from Vladivastok. The place I'm at is called Varna (Wasn't "Varna" the name of that
red-haired madam in Dodge? The one with the fingernails?), and it's a good-sized burg and pretty, near
as warm as Texas for this late in the year. It's a port on the Black Sea and the crowds you see in the
streets remind me of San Francisco, French and Greeks and English and Russians and Germans: same
ships in the harbor, with coal and timber and iron and German steel. The only difference is there's Arabs
everywhere instead of Chinese, and the hills aren't as steep.

  We've taken rooms-Art and the Doc and I, and other friends of Miss Westenra's who are helping us
with the chase-and all we can do now is wait. Our bird is coming in on a freighter from London; he'll find
us waiting for him on the dock. Between us we have five Winchesters and seven pistols, plus my Henry,
which is the best rifle man ever made, as well as my bowie and assorted other cutlery. More than any
weapon, we have minds that are made up and hearts bound in brotherhood.

  What he-It-did lies beyond the proof of any law but God's.

  But you and I have both dealt with justice on those terms, out where the law doesn't run.

  And so we wait. One of our number, Mrs. Harker, as smart and sweet and good-hearted a woman as
ever wore shoe-leather, has suffered a terrible wound that may yet turn into her death because we
underestimated our friend, and it is like a knife in my heart every time I see the mark she bears of it. The
night she took that mark, I should have known better, and set a guard, even though there was no danger
in sight. There isn't a night I don't dream about doing it differently.

  For that reason I've gone back to my trail-driving days, and have insisted that while we're here we stick
together, and stay within-doors from sundown til sunup, which is when our friend likes to mosey around.
Most nights I take the graveyard watch, like I did on the trail, that dark pit from three 'til the first birds
start to wake, when even the whores sleep and the streets are so still you can hear the clink of the tackle
down in the harbor.

  This is the hour in which I write to you. The others sleep, bedrolls on the parlor carpet around Mrs.
Harker's couch, com-ical unless you knew the reason for it. Like on the trail, what name each man
mutters in his sleep the others forget come morning. I've been to the window, and through the other
rooms of our suite, three times since I came on watch, knowing our friend is still on the high seas
someplace: I've seen nothing and yet the air prickles and whispers. There's danger here, closer than the
Doc or his Doc-old Doc Van Helsing-think or know. I smell it, like a longhorn smells thunder. Nobody
who hasn't taken a herd through Indian country can know what that's like.

 Whatever it was, it's gone now. And so I write to you, and think of you, old friend, who does know
what that feels like, that invisible danger, waiting to strike.

  Enclosed with this letter you'll find my will. Once I thought to bring a gold-haired bride home to
Caballo Loco, to make a whole lot of little Quinceys and 'Laios and Jacks and Lucys to take the place
over; I know that won't happen, now. Pa told me I had cousins back in Virginia, though I don't know if
any sur-vived the War any more than my aunts and uncles of Pa's family did. Do what you can to find
them, and if any come out to take up their share of the land, please do what you can to knock some
sense into their heads, seeing as how you'll be their neigh-bor, on what'll be your half of the ranch.

   You think dark thoughts in the dark of the graveyard watch, out here on the eastern edge of the world.
One day I pray I'll take this letter out of your hands, and laugh, and tear it up. But that day seems far
from me now, like a dream that I know damn well isn't going to come true. By the time this gets to you,
it'll be over, one way or the other.

  Til that time it's Hooray for Texas! And tell those lazy sons--of-bitches in the bunkhouse that their boss
says Hi from the edge of the world.

  Your pal,

  Quincey Morris



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  18 October

  13 rats, 20 spiders, owl, 2 mice

   I keep these records from habit, and as a means of reassuring myself that though I choose not to kill
human beings, I am in no danger of starvation. My cravings spring from my mind and my blood, not my
flesh.

  My mind is still linked, in the hours of my sleep, to the Count's. When his red eyes glare into my
dreams and his deep hoarse voice demands why I have not yet slain Van Helsing or Godalming, I hear
also the sighing lap of waves against the Cza-rina Catherine's hull, and sometimes snatches of men's
voices from the deck. "It is the devil's wind, and the devil's fog, that drive us!" I heard a man cry in
anguish, and a thick Scots voice replied, "I' the de'il wants us to make Varna so quick, then Dickie
Donelson's na the one to say him nay!"
  "Cast it overside, Captain! Cast that accursed box into the sea! Grief only will come of keeping it
aboard!"

  And there was a confusion of voices, and the meaty slap of a belaying-pin striking flesh as the sounds
faded into the sea-rush of my dreams.

  "He paid Captain Donelson well," whispered Nomie to me later, as we stood in the balmy darkness
across from the Hotel Odessus's front doors, our shoulders touching slightly, watching the windows of
Van Helsing's suite. "As he has the men at Galatz, who will take the earth-box ashore and put it on a
barge upriver, to where the Bistritza River curves below the Borgo Pass where the Castle stands. And he
learned well his own les-son, to travel on a ship crewed with Scots and Frenchmen as well as Romanians
and Greeks, and to let the crew alone. Com-ing to England on the Demeter in July, he would drink the
blood of the crew. When it arrived, the ship was a ghost-ship, the cap-tain chained dead to the wheel
with a crucifix wound round his hands."

  "He was lucky his entire cargo of earth-boxes wasn't con-fiscated by the customs authorities," I
remarked. "Or sunk in Whitby Harbor, for that matter."

  "He had long been fasting in Transylvania, with the impov-erishment of the countryside. Now he has
had three months, al-most, of hunting in London's dockside slums."

  "Do you still defend him, little Norn?" I asked her, smiling, and had she not been pale as bridal satin,
she might have blushed. More gravely, I went on, "He killed the crew of the Demeter because he was
greedy. He would kill that of the Cza-rina Catherine, and its Captain, too, if he thought he could do
so and still make port safely in Galatz. You know that is so."

  She said with a trace of bitterness in her voice, "I know." We returned our attention to the warm
rectangle of gas-light on the upper floor of the Hotel Odessus, crossed now and then by shadows. When
one came near enough to its curtain, I pointed them out to her: "The tall one is Quincy Morris; that will be
Lord Godalming, who is only a little shorter-"

  "The handsome one with the golden hair?" She cocked a co-quettish eye at me, the white lace of her
jabot like flowers against the embroidered pink-and-blue of her jacket.

  "Minx. The slighter one is either my own friend Dr. Seward, or your friend Jonathan Harker-and don't
tell me you didn't find him attractive, my girl . . ."

  She laughed like the cold tinkling of silver chimes. "He was very sweet, really. I used to watch him at
the Castle, from the shadows when he couldn't see. He would sit at his desk, writing love-letters to his
fiancée, or scribbling in his journal, as if his very life depended upon it. I would sometimes slip in just at
dawn, when he slept, and try to read what he'd written to his Mina. Sometimes he wrote in English,
sometimes in a code I could not understand, but while he wrote, he would sigh and speak her name. The
others would laugh at me for it, and talk about how they would make him forget her, once they could
have their way with him, and about how long they could make him last before he died. That is a game
that vampires play."

 She returned her eyes to the window, where Van Helsing's stocky form stood briefly, illuminated from
within as he parted the curtain and looked out to the dark, cobbled street.

  For the second night none of them emerged. When, in the small cold hours, Nomie and I drifted like
wraiths into the ho-tel's kitchen quarters at the welcoming behest of a venal servant--boy to whom we
threw a coin, we found all the lights still burning in the avengers' suite, and heard the muffled mutter of
Godalming's voice and Seward's as they played pinochle, and the mingled breathing of sleepers.

  Nomie left me to hunt. I remained in the corridor, or drifted into one bedroom after the other of the
suite in the form of mist beneath the doors. All the bedrooms were empty, though the beds bore the scent
and impress of those who slept in them at odd hours of daylight.

  Our friends were taking no chances. While I was still there, I heard Seward wake Harker, and after
that, there was only the soft scrape of whetstone on knife-blade, until the approach of dawn drove me
from the building and back to my own earth--home.



  19 October

 When I returned to our hotel at dawn yesterday, I found to my great disquiet that Nomie was still out.
She was going hunting, she said, on the docks, not a part of the city where any woman should be afoot.

  Though vampires do not crumble into dust with the first touch of the sun's rays, or spontaneously
combust in daylight, as some penny dreadfuls would have it, once the sun is in the sky and until it vanishes
behind the earth's curve, we are as mortals.

  Worse off than mortals, in fact, for mortals may cross running water at their will, or touch such things as
the garlic plant, the wild rose, and the emblems of their faith. Moreover, with the sun's rising I was
crushed by a wave of almost overwhelming sleepiness, and when I emerged from our little pensione in
Balchik Street, I found that the morning sunlight made me giddy, and that I could barely see.

  Nevertheless I stumbled in the direction of the dark blue sea, visible between the white buildings of the
upper town.

  Coming down Nessebur Street, I was passed by a gang of seven or eight Slovak boatmen, rough
arrogant brigands with their baggy white trousers tucked into high boot-tops, who bring loads of timber
down from the Carpathians. They glanced sidelong at me from under long, greasy black hair, and
muttered to one another in their own tongue. Yet as they passed, I smelled blood upon them, and the
ground-in whiff of Nomie's perfume.

   I saw where they'd come from, through a little gate into the yard behind a shut-up tavern. I ran in, and
looked around: a narrow space between a warehouse and a chandler's yard, filled with debris and
stinking of privies years untended. For a mo-ment, dazzled by the sunlight, I could see nothing but the
shabby fence, the straggling waist-high stands of broomsedge.

  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.



  000



  "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.



  000



  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.



  000



  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.

  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 ca-sual 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, Ren-field 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 con-scious 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.



  000



  Letter, R. M. R enfield 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 shoul-ders, 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 lia-bility, 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 ship-ping 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. Hav-ing 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 ficti-tious Mr. Marshmire. One 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 semblence 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 Cather-ine 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 pur-suit, 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 equanamity, 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 be-neath 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 West-enra'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 creak-ing." 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 de-gree 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 Mor-ris 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 Sew-ard, 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 mus-tache.

  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 Hel-sing 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 live-lier 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 reason 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 per-son 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.



  000



  Dr. Seward's Diary*

  27 October

  No news yet of the ship we wait for ...



  000



  "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."

  The slender, graying Virginian smiled reminiscently. "I did have an aunt that took it in her head that my
daddy's roses were the re-born souls of the knights and ladies of Camelot," he re-marked. "When I was
about five, she took me out and intro-duced me to Sir Galahad and Sir Bors and Morgan le Fay, and
told me all kinds of tales about their deeds on Earth before they became rose-bushes. It was kind of
sweet, really."

  Renfield smiled. Such conduct would hardly have raised an eyebrow at Rushbrook. "Exactly," he said.
"I am glad and grateful that you understand." He gave the man fifty pounds for expenses, having the head
shipping-agent's assurance that in more than twenty years Ross's accounts had never showed so much as
a penny's discrepancy; he had learned, in nearly twenty years in the India trade, to read men well.
  "Please bear in mind," he added, "that this is a strange coun-try, and Mrs. Marshmire comes from a
very old family that is both eccentric and a little dangerous. In particular watch out for her sisters, should
you encounter them. My wife will do all she can to assure your safety, once you get among the Szgany
gyp-sies that owe them alliegence, but I need hardly tell you to watch your backs and not take any
foolish risks."

  "Won't be the first time I've been up the country in these parts," replied the Virginian, unperturbed. He
pulled closer about him the sheepskin coat he wore, for once away from the warmth of the Black Sea the
air had grown steadily colder, and the mountains before them were thick with clouds that smelled of
snow. "And I'll do my possible to make sure it won't be the last. Thanks for your honesty with me, sir."

  Not precisely honesty, reflected Renfield, watching the lights of the wagon dwindle into the icy iron
twilight of the road out of town. But how many battles would you have ridden into, during your
State's rebellion against the Federals, had your Gen-eral Lee been completely honest with you
about the politics, bribery, and power-struggles that led up to the war?

   He turned his steps, not back into the yard of the modest inn where they'd spent the night, but toward
the railway station, from which the train would leave for Galatz sometime before noon if he were lucky.
He ached all over, from days without rest, pretending to be mortal and human for Ross's benefit and
living only for the time when he could seep as mist through the holes in his coffin in the baggage-car, and
rest in his native earth.

   The thought that he was helpless, through the two days' rat-tling journey from Varna, had filled him with
dread and had in-creased his hunger five-fold. A dozen times he'd had to leave the compartment lest the
craving for blood overcome him and he at-tack Ross or the two hired drivers. Through the night, lying in
his earth-box, he had whispered to Nomie as she lay awake in hers, reassuring her and being reassured.
It was good beyond measure not to be alone.

  A look at the roads in this part of the world, glimpsed through the train windows during those two
endless days playing cards with his hirelings, had demonstrated to Renfield at least why the Count had
chosen to be conveyed back to his Castle by water in-stead of by land. Once past Bucharest and into
the rising hinter-lands, the roads deteriorated sharply, sometimes to little more than muddy tracks, and as
the land rose toward the Carpathi-ans, the trackless forest crowded in many places down to the road's
edge.

  On running water, the Count might be helpless, reflected Ren-field, as he slipped into the open
baggage-shed past the dozing guard, but there were fewer robbers on the water, and the direc tion of
their attack was perforce more controlled. Having jour-neyed now so far from his native earth, he felt a
deep and intense sympathy for the Count's obsessive precautions. Only the knowl-edge that his
henchmen were skeptics-American and German-had given him the confidence to travel with them.
Slovaks who'd grown up believing in vampires, or Englishmen who'd had their existence unarguably
demonstrated to them, might have spotted him for one at once. And in daylight he was helpless.

  As it was, he found it difficult to melt into mists, to flow into the earth-box labeled, R.M.
R E N F I E L D - H A P G O O D ' S - V A R N A . Ex-haustion seemed to have turned his Un-Dead flesh to
lead. He cast a longing eye at the snoring guard, but knew it was too dan-gerous. Veresti was a small
enough town that those who found an exsanguinated corpse would have no doubt in which direc-tion to
look for the killer. A box full of earth with small holes in its lid would be the first they'd open.

  Nomie, thought Renfield, as he seeped finally through into the comforting darkness, Nomie be safe!
  For a moment their minds touched, like hands questing for comfort in darkness. He saw her before
him, in dreaming as she had looked in life, a sweet slender golden child in the flowing gauzes and striped
satin jacket of that most graceful of eras in which she'd lived.

  And in the distance, as if through her eyes, he saw the Cas-tle Dracula, brooding half-ruined on the
shoulder of cliff above the Borgo Pass. But it was shelter and safety to her, no matter what memories it
held or what future; and there she could rest. In his mind he sang to her Wotan's song from Das
Rheingold, the most beautiful piece of music Wagner ever wrote. The most beautiful, in its soul-deep
soaring peace, of all the music of the earth:



    "The evening beams

    O f the sun's eye sumptuously gild

    Those walls! ...

    Near is night;

    From envy and grudge

    It shelters us now.

    I greet this place!

    Secure against horror and fear.

    Come with me, Lady:

    In Valhalla dwell with me. "



  Be safe, my child, my friend, he thought. I have done for you what I can.



  000



  R.M.R.'s notes

  Train, Veresti to Galatz

  28 October

  4 chickens

  What a thing it is to travel on a country train! There remain only two things left for me to do.

  With luck, Van Helsing and his companions will still be in Galatz when I arrive, depending on how well
the Count has cov-ered his tracks. Money can buy silence, if one knows where to shop. But I suspect
that Dracula does not.

  The Count is a boyar, a nobleman, like the great princes of India whom for twenty years I watched
quite ordinary British middlemen bilk daily. His approach is, like theirs, a simple one: sword in one hand,
a large pile of gold in the other. And no idea about how to finesse a believable story or which strings of
influ-ence to pull.

  Godalming is rich. Quincey Morris is rich. Any silence the Count can buy, they can undoubtedly
purchase retail at a very small mark-up. Van Helsing speaks enough Russian and Ro manian that they can
probably hire whatever vehicles they need for pursuit. If they guess, or are informed, this will probably be
a vessel of some kind to pursue up-river with possibly outriders following along the shore. At a guess,
they shall leave one of their number in Galatz with Mrs. Harker, and that one probably Seward, who is
less accustomed to rough-and-tumble work than Morris. Harker has at least been to Castle Dracula, and
his ex-perience might be of value if they get that close to the Borgo Pass; besides, I cannot see him letting
himself be done out of the kill.

  A pity, for I like Seward and trust him. Nevertheless, Go-dalming, Morris, and Van Helsing all met me
at the asylum--what a long time ago that seems! 'They will recognize me, and Van Helsing will certainly
understand my request.

  But I smile at my own foolishness even as I write these words. With Godalming and Harker of the
party, I won't even be put to the momentary embarassment of explaining myself. They will slaughter me at
sight.

  What a deep sense of happiness that anticipation brings me, as I settle for sleep, a stranger in a strange
land, in the comfort of my native earth!
                         CHAPTER TWENTY -NINE

  Jonathan Harker's Journal*

  30 October-night

   I am writing this in the light from the furnace door of the steam-launch: Lord Godalming is firing up. His
is an experienced hand at the work, as he has had for years a launch of his own on the Thames ...
Regarding our plans, we finally decided that Mina's guess was correct, and that if any waterway was
chosen for the Count's escape back to his castle, the Sereth, and then the Bistrizia at its junction, would
be the one ...

   Lord Godalming tells me to sleep for n while, as it is enough for the present for one to be on watch. But
I cannot sleep-how can I with the terrible danger hanging over my darling ... My only comfort is that we
are in the hands of God ...

  We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and
dreadful things. Godalm-ing is shutting the furnace door.



  000



  "Not what you'd call a promising lot." Seward surveyed the six horses assembled in the livery stable
yard. The best the town has to offer, the stableman had assured Quincey, and if that were indeed the
case, Seward reflected, his heart bled for anyone in Varna who wanted to get anywhere in a hurry or in
any kind of style.

  "You by any chance referrin' to them banditos we just en-listed?" Quincey gestured with an
eyebrow-he was the only man Seward had ever seen who could do such a thing-to the two Romanian
grooms the Vice Consul's chief clerk had recom-mended to Godalming on the strength of the fact that
one of them, Chernak, allegedly spoke English and the other, Nagy, allegedly spoke what was alleged to
be French, though you couldn't prove it by Seward.

 And Seward had to admit that the scrubby, shaggy, under-sized horses did have a slightly more
wholesome aspect than the men.

  The thought of trusting his life to either group made him queasy.

  Still, he went over to the two grooms and explained-with the stableman's questionable help---what he
wanted of them: ride fast, rest seldom, change saddles when necessary to the remounts who'd carry the
provisions. The expressions on their faces were hugely reminiscent of that worn by Mary the parlor-maid
at Rush-brook House when she was in the process of hopelessly mis-understanding his instructions about
rotating household linens or setting the table when Sir Ambrose Poole came for Sunday tea. The
recollection filled Seward with a curious sense of deep isolation, as if the Superintendant of Rushbrook
House, who'd conscientiously recorded entries concerning every patient in his daily phonographic log and
who'd dealt patiently with the Hen-nesseys and Lady Broughs and Ambrose Pooles of the world, were
someone else entirely from the man who stood here now in the stable yard of a Black Sea town, trying to
hire servitors in grammar-school French for--

  For what?

  For the pursuit of a monstrosity that the Superintendant of Rushbrook House, back in August, would
never have be-lieved in.

  For the vengeance he would wreak, on the thing that had first dishonored poor beautiful Lucy, and then
had taken her life. And after that vengeance, what?

  "Voars cornprenez?" he asked, and Chernak and Nagy re-garded him with blank and total
incomprehension before they both nodded vigorously.

  I've come four and a half months and over a thousand miles and I feel like I’m back where I was
explaining about getting supper on the table on time.

  Which it wasn't, of course.

  Renfield, he thought, as the two grooms turned away and went to gather their own bedrolls from the
corner of the courtyard. Supper didn't get on the table because Renfield es-caped.

  As if the name were a trigger to some obscure irritation of his nerves, for an instant a sense of horrified
enlightenment flooded into his heart-Dear God, Renfield!-and then blurred away al-most immediately
into the cloudy sensation of a dream.

  I dreamed about Renfield, he thought, his mind groping at what felt like an almost palpable barrier of
oblivion. Dreamed about him on the train. Well-dressed, well-groomed, soft-spoken, sane.

  He said ... He said ...

 "They understand?" Quincey loomed up out of dark and torchlight beside him. The light of the wasting
moon wickered through the breaking clouds, and though it was only a little af-ter suppertime, it felt later.

  Seward sighed. "Not a solitary thing."

 The Texan spit a stream of tobacco-juice into the moist muck of gravel and hay underfoot. "Can't be
worse than the Hakkas we hired in Singapore, and that worked out all right."

   Looking up into his tall friend's face, Seward felt again that great sense of distance, not from Quincey
himself-that friend with whom he'd traveled three-quarters of the way around the world-but from
Quincey's thoughts and heart. It occurred to him that since the horrible afternoon in Hampstead
Ceme-tery, when they'd driven a stake through Lucy's heart, when they'd cut off her head and stuffed her
mouth with garlic as if they were superstitious savages and she some ritual beast, neither he, nor Art, nor
Quincey had spoken one word to one another of what they'd done, or what they'd felt. All the way
across the Channel and across the continent of Europe, Art had lapsed again and again into terrible
silences, staring out the windows of trains or hotels struggling against tears, hand over his mouth and the
muscles standing out on his temples with the tension of his jaws. At such times Seward, or Quincey,
would sometimes drop a hand to his shoulder, or grip his arm in passing.

  Quincey's silence was something different.
  "Do you ever wonder," Seward asked him now, as they walked to the corner where the saddles and
bedrolls were heaped, "if it could have been different? If Lucy had accepted my offer, or yours, instead
of Art's? If she'd stayed in London last summer. .."

  "Or gone to America with me?" Quincey's gray eyes seemed dark in the torchlight, shadowed under
the long sun-bleached brows, empty and infinitely tired. "Jack, there is not a day that it doesn't occupy
the whole of my thought, from my waking un-til the moment sleep takes me. Had I known what was
coming for her, I think I'd have carried her off like the villain in a play, and risked her mother shooting me
dead. But I didn't. And you didn't. And maybe if she'd married you or married me or stayed in London
or gone to the Moon, it would have been the same anyhow, like the philosophers say. And if it wasn't
you and me standing here on the back-doorstep of the civilized world, it'd be two other guys avenging
the death of some other gal, with just as much pain involved all around. And in any case it makes no
difference."

  He spit another line of tobacco, and picked up a saddle-a horrible Russian cavalry cast-off, stiff as a
plank and entangled in a granny-knot of snarled straps. "From the time Miss West-enra said she would
not have me, there was nothing for me, ex-cept her friendship, and yours, and Art's. It was that friendship
that kept me in England, and that friendship that's drawn me here. Live or die, it does not matter to me
anymore, for those two states are now to me exactly the same. Now let's get these fucken’ crow-baits
saddled, and get on the road while there's still a Moon in the sky."



  000



  R.M.R.’s notes

  31 October

  2 chickens, 3 rats, Romanian pimp, 17 spiders

  Still no contact of the Count's mind upon my own. Nor can I sense him reaching out to Nomie. At
sunset last night I was aware of Van Helsing speaking to Mrs. Harker in hypnotic trance, but with the
Count's self-imposed isolation these impres-sions have become so attenuated that it is only by deep
medita-tion that I can detect them at all, and at sunrise I was able to sense nothing. I do not know
whether this is because of Drac-ula's defense against this probing, or because Van Helsing and his friends
have guessed the direction of his flight and have set off in pursuit, leaving Mrs. Harker guarded in Galatz.



  000



  Letter , R. M. Renfield to his wife

  Galatz, Romania

  At the mouths of the Danube
  31 October

  My beloved Catherine,

  Please forgive my negligence in writing lately; I blame the dif-ficult conditions under which I have
traveled. Nor do they ap-pear likely to become easier, but I shall write when I can. I count, as ever, on
your always-warm understanding.

  The train from Veresti reached Galatz shortly after noon, af-ter the usual maddening delays typical of
this part of the world. I waked after an admittedly uneasy sleep in the hushed stillness of the goods shed,
just at sunset. I went at once to the offices of Hapgood's and found the agents there still talking about the
bru-tal murder of one of the contractors who hire crews of Slovak boatmen, an event which has thrown
the whole riverfront com-munity into superstitious panic, though the man himself was ap-parently no
social loss.

  With only minimal inquiries I was able to ascertain that the Count had come ashore on the 28th, hired a
large, open barge with a double crew through this contractor, Skinsky, and de parted before dawn
yesterday. That same day Van Helsing and his friends arrived, and by sunset had hired a steam-launch,
pur-chased six horses and appropriate gear (for the roads become extremely problematical as little as
thirty miles upriver), and hired two grooms, evidently meaning to travel fast.

  This brought me, unfortunately, face-to-face with some of the more practical drawbacks of the vampire
state. Now in my heart I can see you and Vixie smile, for you have surely been waiting for me to realize
that this very complication would arise.

  I understand from Nomie that the Count, with his vast abil-ities to dominate the minds of beasts as well
as of madmen like myself, is able to exert mastery over horses to the extent that he is able-for short
distances, and during the hours of darkness when his powers are acute-to actually ride them. He long ago
fell out of the habit of doing so, however, for the poor beasts did not bear him willingly, and would
tremble and sweat so terribly as to cause comment among every man who saw them, and him. For
myself, however, it is as much as I can do to harness them, and their fear at the scent of a predator is
such that they are dif-ficult to manage, and, I fear, are like to exhaust themselves in a very few miles.

  I purchased a small calèche and team of those scrubby little horses one finds in this part of the world,
barely larger than ponies, and a spare team in case I should not find a posting- house farther up the river.
At the recommendation of the Hap-good shipping agents, I hired a French-speaking Negro named
Salaman as a driver, and frequenting the riverfront taverns dur-ing the early portion of the evening, I
found a Suitably brutish and violent Romanian whose murder would cause me no qualms and whose
disappearance would not result in questions or pur-suit. I sensed then-and feel still more strongly
now--that I will need all the strength and power that I can achieve.

   When I was a child, I spake as a child, I reasoned as a child, says the Apostle, but
when I became a man I put away childish things. In my madness I consumed all life in the
illusory pursuit of exactly those things that, in the vampire state, the blood and the life give unto me; but
now I am not mad. I would like to say that I derive no pleasure from the drinking of human life, but oh,
Catherine, oh my beloved, that would be a lie. It is a plea-sure I will be glad to put by in the eternal sleep
of death, but it is one that I can no more deny than I could deny the rages of my madness.

  I am writing this in the back room of a little tavern near the waterfront, where Salaman is to meet me as
soon as there is enough dawnlight to drive. I have my roll of earth-imbued bed ding, and hope that I will
be able to get at least a little rest dur-ing the daylight hours. Yet sleep is not for me, for I must watch the
river, and the road, for my master's enemies-and my own deliverers. Moreover, I must watch for the
robbers who hear everything that goes on in the rough world of the river-traffic with the hinterlands, who
will know that an Englishman is trav-eling with money and horses and only a single servant. In the hours
of daylight I will be only as a man, and less strong than a living man in my own defense.

  No wonder the Countess Elizabeth wanted a better servant than that incompetent poet Gelhorn, to
defend her and her sister-wives in their journey to London! I can only assume that he lasted no longer
than their arrival at Castle Dracula; I cannot imagine she would have found in him the material to create
an-other vampire servant.

  And there, but for my little Nomie's friendship, go I.

  Here is Salaman, framed in the doorway in a halo of chill river-fog.

  My beloved, I remain,

  Ever and forever, Your husband,

  R. M. Renfield



  000



  Letter , R. M. Renfield to his wife

  The banks of the River Sereth, below Fundu

  1 November

  My beloved,

  We have journeyed through the day and through the night, and still I have no sight of Van Helsing and
his company. I have, however, found signs of their horses, and the occasional marks of a camp. They
seem to be taking a more inland route where possible, following narrower trails that climb the rolling
shoul-ders of the hills through which the river winds its way down from the mountains, the better to see
ahead along the river itself.

   In the calèche it is not possible to do this, owing to the steep-ness and broken nature of the ground.
Thus we can only press on night and day. Only once did robbers-Szgany gypsies-attempt to molest us.
Fortunately the time was dusk, and I was able to slip from the coach as a mist, and fall upon them from
behind in the form of a wolf. They fled almost before the confrontation had begun. I reassured Salaman,
who had thought me asleep in the calèche the whole of the time, and took the opportunity to hunt in the
woods in the form of a bat, and to take advantage of the presence of bona fide evildoers to refresh my
strength.

 Would that I could so refresh the strength of the horses, and of my servant. He is a small man of
Sudanese extraction, a slave for many years first in Arabia and then in Constantinople. He did not
mention the wolf and may not have seen me in that form, but he has become silent since then, and
watches me from the corner of his eye. He has taken to wearing about his neck a taviz, the silver
tube-shaped amulet in which a verse of the Holy Koran is sealed. I find the painful radience that
emanates from it to be the same as that which imbues the crucifixes of the Chris-tians. I long to know
whether such an amulet would protect an Unbeliever, or a crucifix to guard a good Mohammedan or
Hin-doo, but know not who I could ask.

  The Count himself, perhaps?

  As we approach the mountains, the cold deepens, and at night the air smells of snow. Tonight when
darkness falls, I shall ascend as high as possible in the form of a bat, and see if I can at least glimpse the
red glimmer of the steam-launch's smoke-stack ahead of me on the river in the blackness.

  If the saved can pray for the damned, pray for me, my beloved.

  Forever, your husband,

  R. M. Renfield



  000



  Jonathan Harker's Journal*

  1 November--evening

  No news all day; we have found nothing of the kind we seek. We have now passed into the Bistritza ...
We have overhauled every boat, big and little ... Some of the Slovaks tell us that a big boat passed them,
going at more than the usual speed as she had a double crew on board ...



  000



  Dr. Seward's Diary*

  2 November

  Three days on the road. No news, and no time to write it if there had been ...



  000



  Letter, R M. Renfield to his wife

  2 November
  My beloved Catherine, My adored Vixie,

  This is good-by. In the form of a bat I have seen Lord Go-dalming's steam-launch upon the river, going
much more slowly now owing to the narrowness of the Bistritza where it flows down out of the
Carpathians, and the many rapids that result from the river's greater fall. Likewise as the mountains close
in around the river and the valley sides steepen and draw near, it is no longer possible for Quincey Morris
and his party to range over so much countryside. They must be on the river road some ten miles ahead of
me. I will overtake both boat and riders to-morrow.

  The night is very cold, the mountains that rise up on all sides of us thickly wreathed in snow-clouds.
The road is in such ill re-pair, washed-out and undermined by repeated winter rains and floods, that a
carriage cannot proceed farther in any case. I have paid Salaman off, and sent him away with the caleche
and horses. He did not ask what I intend to do alone in this wilder-ness in the darkness before morning,
but looked at me strangely when I said, "Go with Allah, my friend."

  I am alone, as I have not been since I lay dead in Highgate Cemetery; since I knelt in such peace at
your side.

  Tomorrow night, in the form of a bat, I will overtake Lord Godalming's steam-launch, and will follow it
until the hour when the tide turns, when it will be possible for me to go aboard. I know not how much
crew they have, if any, nor ex-actly how long I will have before the tide's ebb in the distant ocean traps
me aboard.

  If the crew is small, it will be the work of moments to disable the pump that supplies water to the
boilers and, if possible, to open the drains on the boilers themselves. I doubt, with Go-dalming's careful
operation of the launch, that the boilers will remain untended so long as to explode, but they will certainly
be damaged by being run dry for even a short length of time.

  Then even the Count cannot punish Nomie, for deserting her task.

  And that done, I shall be free. In what remains of the night I will seek out the shore-party of riders,
show myself to them, and ask them what I asked Dr. Seward as we rode the Orient Ex-press: for the
quietus of death.

  When the Count reaches his Castle, he will send out his call to me again, and if I still exist, I will have
no choice but to go. To live as his servant always-to endure the company of the frightful Countess, the
savage Sarike-surely even Hell cannot be more terrible.

   And so my beloved ones, good-by. I shall, I hope, see you soon, if only briefly, but it will he a great
comfort to me to know that you and I are at least on the same side of the great Veil that separates the
living from the dead, and from the Un-Dead. I will miss my dear friend Nomie, and pray-if the damned
can pray in Hell-for her eventual release.

   Whatever happens tomorrow night, please know that through-out, my thoughts are only of you. When
I die, it will be with your names on my lips.

  With all my love, forever,

  R. M. Renfield
                                  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Renfield wondered, at various times during the following day, if the curious inability to enter any
dwelling uninvited extended to boats, and if so, what he was to do about that. As he trotted along
through the woods with the steady lope of a wolf-for it was in the form of a wolf that he ran-he glimpsed,
down on the road, the tight band of a half-dozen horses, and what he thought were two men. But he
could not see clearly in the brightness of the daylight, and dared not stop.

  There would be time, he thought, to return to them, in the dark of the night.

   When they'd skirted the town of Fundu, where the Bistritza River ran into the Sereth, it had looked to
him sufficiently large and modern to support a coal-yard. Godalming would have stocked up there.
Perhaps, Renfield reflected, he could have hired river-pirates there to attack the launch, but he doubted
it. He didn't speak Slovak, for one thing, and for another, the rough back-country men who comprised
the population of both boatmen and river-pirates seemed to have a wary instinct for the supernatural.

  This was something, he thought, that he'd have to do alone. For many nights now he'd timed the length
of that sensation of power, of heightened strength, that came at the turning of the far-off tide, just as,
during his days of enforced wakefulness on the way up to Veresti with Nomie in her earth-box, he'd
timed the period of his ability to change his shape at noon. Part of Dracula's skill, Nomie had told him
once, was simply his expe-rience. He knew to the split instant when the tide would turn, and was ready
for it; could feel the dawn coming with the ex-actness of a chronometer, and was poised to attack or
retreat when the final sliver of sunlight vanished behind the shadow of the earth.

  Still, for a novice vampire, Renfield didn't feel he did at all badly. He overtook the launch shortly after
sunset, trotting through the underbrush of the bank as the darkness thickened on the water. Icy wind
flowed down from the mountains, and the men on the few barges that he passed wore sheepskin coats
and hats of wolf or rabbit fur. The road here was little more than a tow-path, and a badly eroded one at
that. Here on the higher river the current was stronger, and the launch's engines labored, though Renfield
could see she was running at full steam. Now and then a soot-black figure would emerge from the
engine-room; in the ruddy glare from the door Renfield saw the young, clerkish face beneath hair growing
rapidly as white as an old man's.

  Jonathan Harker.

  And if he is stoking, is it likely there will be a hired crew? Wolf-Renfield watched, and for a long
time saw no one else.

  Then Godalming appeared, from the tiny cabin that was all the shelter on the launch's deck, roughly
clothed in a bargee's heavy jersey with a knitted cap over his golden hair. He looked dirtv and rumpled,
and given the small size of the launch, Renfield's suspicion was confirmed. There were only the two of
them.

  Van Helsing must be ashore then, with Morris.

  He felt it, the instant the tide began to turn. The launch had overtaken a small barge hauling iron, cloth,
salt, and other goods up-river toward the settlements of the foothills; Godalming turned the bright electric
searchlight on them, while Harker minded the tiller. The glare of the searchlight showed the big Romanian
flag prominently displayed on the launch's jackstaff. Renfield wondered whom Godalming had paid for
that, and how much.

  Mist already lay on the river, so it was the easiest thing in the world to slip into it, and so across.
Renfield didn't resume his human form until he was in the cramped dark of the engine room. He'd been
aboard a hundred such little steamers on the Hooghly and the Ganges, and found the pump without
diffi-culty, at the far end of the battery of cylindrical black boilers. With a screwdriver from the neatly
stowed repair kit, he ripped and shredded the leather drive-belt nearly through, then opened the cocks
on half a dozen of the boilers, to let the water drain away.

  In the dark of the engine-hold it might be hours before any problem was detected.

  As mist, he flowed up onto the deck. The little Romanian barge was disappearing behind them in the
freezing darkness. Godalming said, "We can't have taken the wrong way! If the Count continued up the
Sereth instead of coming this way, he'll add fifty or sixty miles to the overland part of his journey. In
country like this, and weather like this, that could be the better part of a week!"

 "He can command the weather," replied Harker quietly. "And to some extent, he can command men.
But Mina w-as right. Though he's paralyzed on running water, it's still the safest way for him to travel."
His hand stroked the hilt of the huge knife at his belt.

  Get closer to him! urged Renfield frantically. The two men stood six or eight feet apart, Godalming at
the prow beside the electric searchlight, Harker amidships at the wheel. Get closer and I can take you
both!

  Neither moved; the moments of freedom and mobility were sliding away. Stay in the hopes of being
able to strike both and run the launch aground, or flee to avoid being trapped ....

  His nerve broke. For an awful moment he thought he'd waited too long as it was, that he wouldn't be
able to leave the boat: couldn't summon the will, the physical ability, to cross the water.

  If they find me aboard, they'll know the engines have been tampered with.

  Nomie will be the one to suffer for it, if I cannot kill them both almost at once.

  If I throw myself into the river, I suppose I can wade out in twelve hours when the tide turns
again ...

   He flung himself forward, with a sensation of icy tearing, of bitter cold somewhere in his chest. Then his
flittering bat-wings bore him up, and he flopped, trembling, onto the river-bank.

  With a great sloshing of her screws, the steam-launch churned on toward the next set of rapids.
Renfield sat up in the wet weeds, chilled and exhausted from his daylong trot, wanting only rest and
knowing there would be none for him, for he had left his earthen bed-roll far behind.

  But he had succeeded, he thought. He had accomplished what the Count had ordered him and Nomie
to accomplish--the first time the launch tried to climb rapids, she'd tear her en-gine to pieces. Now, in the
few days at most that remained before the Count reached out to summon him to service once again, he
was free, to seek what doom he could.

  Drawing a deep breath, Renfield shifted that portion of his consciousness that controlled his shape, and
felt himself melt again into the guise of a wolf. With luck, he thought, he'd be dead-truly dead-by morning.
  000



  Though it was after midnight, the shore party was still on the move, some ten miles behind the barge.
Wolf-Renfield heard and smelled the horses before they came into sight in the broken and heavily
wooded country of the banks; smelled Quincey Morris's chewing-tobacco and the more bitter stench of
cigarettes. The scents of the night, the attenuated moonlight flickering on the water, were wildly
exhilarating, and he found himself wonder-ing if he could kill both men before he remembered that there
was no longer any need for him to do so.

  He was free. The night was his. His single dread was that the Count would feel himself safe enough to
re-establish contact and control before Renfield could hail his deliverers.

  He saw them now, from the shelter of the woods above the road. Six horses, two men, riding as swiftly
as the dim moon-light would permit. The moon would set soon, and as bad as the road was, Renfield
guessed they'd camp. Quincey Morris hadn't ridden the American cattle-trails for as long as he had
without learning how easy it was to break a horse's leg in the darkness. A little to Renfield's surprise, he
saw that the other rider was Dr. Seward, not Van Helsing as he had supposed.

  Which can't be right, he thought, alarm-bells ringing in his mind. Any o f the men could have been
left back in Galatz to guard Mrs. Harker. The logical guard is Seward: Harker knows the ground
around Castle Dracula, Godalming can pilot the launch, Morris is the best rider and shot. They
are the Rooks and the Knights ... and they send a Pawn out, to do the work o f the Queen-piece
that the Persians call the Vizier?

  Where is Van Helsing? Were they really so foolish as to leave Mrs. Harker alone, or under the
guard o f hired help?

   The horses would react to the smell of a wolf, the men, to the sight of a bat fluttering along in their
wake. As mist, Renfield flowed down close to the river-bank, drifting and curling between water and
road, listening for the voices of the men. Both were dog-tired, for they had been riding, Renfield guessed,
almost steadily for three days, most of it without benefit of grooms to do the added work of looking after
six horses. Once Morris's horse-a scrubby little Hungarian beast who looked ridicu-lously tiny beneath
the Texan's six-feet-plus height-shied, and that soft Texas voice drawled, "Don't you go jigger on me,
you slab-sided vinigaroon, I been scrapped with by real two-dollar Mexican plugs and you ain't even in
it," and Seward made a ghost of a chuckle. But neither man spoke to the other until the crescent moon
sank into the cloud-banks above the mountains.

  "That's it." Morris drew rein. "Damn blast it to fucken’ hell. How they look?"

  Seward dismounted, kindled a lantern that had been tied to the back of his saddle. "They seem all
right." He moved among the other horses, feeling legs and withers. "I don't like this cold, though, nor the
smell of the wind."

  "Too damn much like Siberia. Or Montana." Morris kindled a lantern of his own, led his mount to a
spot sheltered by rocks from the wind, and proceeded to cut and yank at the weeds and brush, to clear a
spot for a fire. "Van Helsing and Mrs. Harker'll be higher up than we by this time, and God knows what
the road's like up Borgo Pass, this time of year. All the guns in the world won't help, if they get caught in
a deep cold and Mrs. Harker freezes to death. I wish a thousand times we'd left her in Galatz."
  Seward said, "And I," but Renfield hardly heard him.

  Borgo Pass? A qualm passed through him of sickness, of shock.

  Van Helsing was going up the Borgo Pass. That would mean ...

  "I understand that he has to do it," Seward went on. "You know it's useless to pursue a fox unless his
earth has been stopped before him." He slipped bit and bridle from his horse's mouth, pulled free the
saddle. The springing color of Morris's firelight made Seward's unshaven face look younger, thin and
strange and very different from the neat, self-contained doctor Renfield had first encountered in the office
of Rushbrook Asy-lum in the spring.

  "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 threshhold 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 con-tend."

  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 moun-tains 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 Drac-ula
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 cer-tainly 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 morn-ing'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 diffi-cult, 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-None had told him that the earth of
the Master would shelter the fledgeling, 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 Bistritria'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 forc-ing the dark-haired woman to drink his blood, as Renfield had drunk the
blood of Nomie and her sisters, to begin the transfor-mation 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
Ren-field 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, re-flected 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 gi-gantic 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, alter-nating caressing sweetness with almost unbelievable spite, as sis-ters sometimes
do. Would the Count protect his newest bride from the others? Of course not.

  He saw Mina shrink against Van Helsing's side, sickened ter-ror 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.



  000



  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 fran-tically. The place must have a
labyrinth o f 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 de-scending 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 de-spair. 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.



  000



  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 ...



  000



  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 in-ner 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 cen-ter, 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 bru-tal 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 side-whiskers 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.



  000



  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 . . .



  000



 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.

  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 sur-render.

   Then Nomie leaned forward, took the old man's face be-tween 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.



  000
 Dr. Van Helsing's Memorandum*

 But God be thanked ... before the spell could be wrought fur-ther 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 es-cape from the vampire-hunter Van
Helsing-through circum-stances 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 be-neath the flagstones was the hallowed soil of the family tombs nevertheless, and in it, twined in
Nomie's arms, I slept.

  In my sleep I could feel the Count's approach, as once I had felt it while chained in the padded
chambers of Rushbrook Asy-lum. He was coming, and even in his sleep, even with his mind closed
against us, his wrath was like a pillar of cloud and dark-ness, approaching from the east and south.

  "I heard the creak and gnashing of the wood, as the old man wrenched the doorways from their
hinges," whispered Nomie into my dreams. In dreaming I could see again the coffin of the Countess
Elizabeth, but the blood had dried upon her white gown and her black hair. Only dust remained, and a
few frag-ments of bone, with the stake propped upright among them. The white garlic-flowers were still
fresh, spilling from the mouth of the skull.

  "Elizabeth had sensed Mina's coming from afar and said that she would be drawn to the Castle. We all
thought Dr. Van Hel-sing was a servant she'd brought with her, or a man she'd ensorcelled to follow her,
the way Elizabeth ensorcelled that poor little fool Gelhorn. When I asked why that `servant' would have
a consecrated Host with him-a thing not at all easy to obtain in these days-she only laughed, and said
Mina would take care of that.

  "`He thinks she will freeze to death in the night, and seeks to hold her within the circle so he can kill
her,' Elizabeth said. `Sim-ple man. You saw his eyes, when he looked at her and saw the vampire beauty
in her face. You saw how he watched her, and watched her, hungry and terrified of the hunger within
him. He will not have the heart to drive in the stake. And if he does'--and she shrugged-'so much the
worse. More kisses for the rest of us.' She never thought, you see, that he would have the tools in the
carriage, to break through the Castle doors."

  Van Helsing would be trudging back to his little camp in the Pass, where Mrs. Harker waited within the
holy circle. I hoped they had armed her, and taught her to use weapons, for the wolves that would be
drawn by the carcasses of the horses would have little concern for the Host, consecrated though it might
be. I wondered what the Count would eat, when he re-turned to the Castle, for there was nothing there
but bats. Even rats will not dwell where the inhabitants do not eat human food.

  "To keep the Szgany loyal he never would permit us to touch them," Nomie remarked, a gentle voice
within my dreams. "The villagers were wary and cautious, and travelers are few. For months, sometimes,
we would live on bats. Can you wonder we were enraged at his plan to go away and leave us here to
guard this place, until it might occur to him to return? And doubly so, to learn he'd started a second
harem in your land to replace us? He'll choose another city now, another country to occupy. With you as
his servant, it will probably be India."

  "He could do worse," I said. "The governing classes all speak English, which he already knows."

  The gold that filled the chests in our little crypt-filled them and overflowed onto the floor-would
guarantee his welcome anywhere, and from Nomie's conversation while we traveled to-gether, I knew
that this was only a tithe of the treasure hidden in the castle.

  "He, and you, will have access to books and to such culture as there is there," I went on. "Not like
London, I admit, but bet-ter than re-reading Davila's histories of French insurgencies in the library here
for the thousand and fifth time. And because of the European community there, neither he nor you will
stand out. In fact, because the whites are perceived as superior in all ways to the natives, you will have a
great deal more latitude than you would have even in London."

  In our sleep I could feel her sadness, as if she laid her palm to my cheek. "And you, sweet friend?"

  I thought of Van Helsing, gathering up provisions now--bedrolls, food, blankets against the freezing
snowstorm that came sweeping down the Pass. "I will do what I must, sweet friend."

  Writers-and certainly your appalling mother and your late unlamented sister, my love-speak casually
and often of "a fate worse than Death," without understanding that such a thing can actually be. I, who
have passed through death, or a half-death at least, have experienced that which is worse: eternal
Un-Life, with my soul, my mind, my body at the command of an entity in love with both power and the
pain of others.

  He was coming. I felt his wrath from afar. Van Helsing, though he'd strewn the crumbled Host in the
Count's actual tomb, had by no means "cleansed" even a quarter of the places where the Un-Dead could
actually find repose, and of course the Host that he'd mortared around the broken-open Castle door
would have no effect on a bat, or a trail of mist, floating in over its walls. The Castle would have had to
be dynamited to render it unfit for the Count to hide in, and before that could be ef-fected, even with
Godalming's money, Dracula's gypsies would have dealt with the invaders.

  It was indeed his Valhalla, offering both rest and the renewal of his strength.

  "Why did you kiss him?" I asked her, and I felt her smile.

  "Because he so much wanted it," she said. "And maybe a lit-tle, because he killed Elizabeth and Sarike,
who have made me wretched for so many decades-made me wretched in the way that only those whom
we live with, whom we rub along with night in and night out, year in and year out, can do. And per-haps
to show him," she added softly, "that not all those who be-come Un-Dead are wholly monsters."

  "Whyever you did it," I replied, "it was a fit revenge on the man. For you've given him something that
doesn't fit in with his theories. Trying to make it do so will be a torment to him for the remainder of his
days."

  I asked her about her own journey, and whether the Count-ess and Sarike had attempted any assault
on my agent Ross and his men. "Sarike tried," she said. "But Elizabeth and I drew her away. T told
Elizabeth that it might be better, if instead of killing Ross, we kept his address and good will, in case we
should need it later."

  "And Gelhorn?"

  "A truly obnoxious man," sighed Nomie. "He was forever boring on about the superiority of the
Teutonic Race and its des-tiny to rule the world, and he seemed to think that because I am German I
would agree with him. Heaven help the world--Heaven help Germany-if this `Volk' idea gets taken up by
politicians! Yet even so, I'm not sure he deserved his fate."

   Knowing the Count would return in a mood of black fury, we discussed the preliminaries for the India
scheme, which we knew would appease him. Which banks to use, and which of my false names would
be safest for purposes of investment and transfer of another network of earth-boxes and safe-houses in
Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Kathmandhu. I did everything I could to keep the names of my Indian
friends and contacts out of it, knowing that these men and women would become the Count's likeliest
early victims. With luck, I would find some way into true death before he could prise such information out
of my mind.

  The snowstorm now howled around the Castle's walls. Even in our dreams in the deep-buried crypt we
could hear its cries. "I have heard," I said to her, "rumor and legend of Masters who dwell in the
mountains of Thibet, deathless creatures who were once mortal men. I wonder how the Count will get
along, in proximity to them?"

  "It would be interesting," said Nomie, "to seek them out." "And more interesting still," I added, "to see if
they would let you do so."

  On that we truly slept, but in visions I could see the gypsy riders lashing their horses through the
swirling flakes, see the rough-coated little ponies stumbling as they hauled the heavy leiter-wagon up the
road that led to the Pass. I knew-for it seemed to me that the whole of the countryside around Castle
Dracula breathed and whispered its secrets up to the Castle--that Van Helsing and Mrs. Harker had
taken refuge in that little bay, high in the rocks, where I had lain exhausted that morning, and from its
narrow entrance looked out over the plain below.

  And as if I stood at Mrs. Harker's side-as if I rode on the wings of the snow-winds overhead-I saw the
leiter-wagon's approach, within its ring of gypsy riders, thrusting on against the tempest. The earth-box in
the wagon rocked and swayed, and I wondered if the Count were conscious, and if so, what he thought,
helpless as a mortal man and drowsy with daylight. When the winds lessened and the clouds broke
through, I could see the sun sinking toward the rack of storm above the moun-tains. With its
disappearance, he would be free, and within striking-distance of his home.

  From the south I could see riders coming, Harker's white hair like a blink of snow where his hat blew
back, visible only to the far-seeing eyes of vampire dream. They must somehow have re-paired the
launch's engines, to make safe landfall hot on Drac-ula's trail.

  Two men with six horses were galloping from the east, gal-loping hard: Morris and Seward, with their
long hunting-rifles in their hands. In the sicklied yellow light of sinking sun and storm-wrack I saw them
close on the leiter-wagon, saw the Szgany form themselves into a ring around it, knives and pistols
flashing in the dying light. They were right below the rocks where Van Helsing and Mrs. Harker stood
with rifle and pistol, blocking their path up to the Castle. Seward, Morris, Harker, and Godalming rode
into the press of the gypsies and sprang--or were pulled-from their horses, striking and struggling where
quarters were too close to shoot.
  Harker and Morris sprang up onto the cart, Morris clutching his side where blood poured down. As
the final rays of the sun-set stabbed through the snowclouds, they wrenched the top from the earth-box,
and in that instant I could hear Dracula's shriek, of rage and hatred and summons as the still went down.
Then Harker's huge Ghurka knife flashed in that last second of golden sunlight, and Morris's bowie.

  The image vanished from my mind. Great stillness filled my heart.

  Nomie and I lay awake, in one another's arms, in the gold--stuffed crypt of the Castle Dracula.

  And we both knew we were free.



  000



  We climbed to the snow-padded southern battlement of the Cas-tle, and stood in the swift-gathering
dark, looking down at the Pass.

 The Szgany were riding away in all directions, leaving the leiter-wagon in the road. The wolves that the
Count had sum-moned from all corners of the mountains trotted back to their interrupted repast on Van
Helsing's four dead horses.

  I supposed Nomie and I would be having bats for dinner. If I had dinner at all.

  I could see, against the clear violet of the twilight-veiled snow, five forms gathered around the
leiter-wagon, bent over the sixth that lay on a spread-out blanket on the ground. Probably only a vampire
could have smelled Morris's blood at that dis-tance. By the stillness of the others, the lack of even the
smallest attempt at aid, I could tell the Texan was dead.

  And I grieved with them, Catherine. A mere five weeks ago, with the recovery of my sanity, I realized
that I had lost yourself and Vixie, my only and dearest friends.

  Nomie's hand closed cold around my own. "Sweet friend," she said, and I looked down into her blue
eyes. "You can go down to them now. I will be all right."

  "What will you do?" I asked her, and she smiled.

  "Exactly what you and I planned for the Count. I will con-tact Mr. Ross, and take over the false
identities that you and your so-lovely Catherine established-and thank her for me, Ry-land, thank her,
and you, so much!-and travel to India, where I will live like a Queen upon men who do evil. I will never
forget you, Ryland."

  I smiled, my whole soul feeling light and free, with the world and eternity opening like a night-blooming
flower around me in the still iciness of the night. "Never is a long time, little Nornchen." With the Count's
death, the winds, like the wolves, had been released from his grip. The clouds were dispersing
over-head. The stars were like a thousand million lamps, each mark-ing the start of an untrodden road to
the future. In the stillness I felt that I could hear the earth breathe.

  "I only wish . . ." she began, then stopped herself, and shook her head. She put her hand to my cheek,
and whispered, "Good-by, Ryland. Kiss your Catherine for me when you see her, and your lovely
daughter. One day I may meet them, by-and-by."

  "When you do," I said, "they will welcome you with love. Until that time . . ."

  Our eyes met in the starlight. "What is it," I asked, "that you wish?"

  She shook her head. "It's better that you go."

  "Tell me."

  Her hands closed again around my own. Her voice was barely a murmur in the starry cold. "That you
could come with me, sweet friend. That we could go to India together. That we could be friends, if not
forever, at least for a very long time."

  Gently-for even as a mortal man I had been strong-I took her in my arms, and our mouths met in a
kiss.

  We spent the rest of the night gathering all the gold we could from the four corners of the Castle, and
before dawn I went down to Bistritz, to post a letter to Ross and another to my agents in Calcutta and
Delhi.

  My dearest Catherine, do you understand? I love you, and have always loved you-will always love
you, in living or dying or the shadow-world of Un-Death. One day, when it pleases God, you, and I, and
our lovely Vixie, and my beautiful Nomie will all meet, on the other side of the Veil, and after that, who
knows? Who can know?

  Until that time, we can only live as well as we can, and make our choices, as the ancient Persians said,
for the Light rather than the Darkness. For even those of us in the Darkness do, it appears, remember the
nature of Light.

  I write this to you in the train-station at Varna, whence we are about to depart for Constantinople and
points east. Already I seem to hear in my ears the music of sitars, and to taste upon my tongue the heady
flavor of rice-beetles and the indescribable savor of white ants!

  My beloved, I will write to you when we reach Calcutta. Until that time, and always, know me to be,

  Forever, your loving husband,

  Renfield