"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, spiders, 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, shuddering 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, until 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 G.o.ds 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.
"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 cas.e.m.e.nt, 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."
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 G.o.ds be thanked. One can have only so much of Hennessey"s care. Yet just after noon a cab drove up the avenue 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 Simmons 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
Seward whispered, "My G.o.d," 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 following 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 appearance of a living woman.
Dear G.o.d, 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 common 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. .h.i.t 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 Berkeley Hotel, where both had spent the night, he"d seen his old master 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 something 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 churchyard, 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? Especially 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 pa.s.s 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 c.h.i.n.ked up every crack in the tomb"s door with a paste of flour and water, mixed with fragments 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 Constantinople, 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 vampire 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 amus.e.m.e.nt at the recollection of poor Arthur Holmwood"s pa.s.sionate ramblings about how the transfusion of his blood into Lucy"s veins had made them husband and wife in the sight of G.o.d.
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 beautiful body inhabited by a demon, a d.a.m.ned soul, that lured children 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 ...