Slave Of Dracula - Renfield Part 18

1 November--evening No news all day; we have found nothing of the kind we seek. We have now pa.s.sed into the Bistritza ... We have overhauled every boat, big and little ... Some of the Slovaks tell us that a big boat pa.s.sed them, going at more than the usual speed as she had a double crew on board ...

Dr. Seward's Diary*

2 November Three days on the road. No news, and no time to write it if there had been ...

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 G.o.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 tomorrow.

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 repair, 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 wilderness 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 G.o.dalming'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 exactly 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 G.o.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 sh.o.r.e-party of riders, show myself to them, and ask them what I asked Dr. Seward as we rode the Orient Express: 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.ned can pray in h.e.l.l-for her eventual release.

Whatever happens tomorrow night, please know that throughout, 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. G.o.dalming 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 experience. He knew to the split instant when the tide would turn, and was ready for it; could feel the dawn coming with the exactness 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dalming 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 ash.o.r.e 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; G.o.dalming 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 G.o.dalming 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 difficulty, 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 c.o.c.ks 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.

G.o.dalming 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, G.o.dalming at the prow beside the electric searchlight, Harker amids.h.i.+ps 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 slos.h.i.+ng 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 engine 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 s.h.i.+fted 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.

Though it was after midnight, the sh.o.r.e 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 wondering 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 moonlight 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, G.o.dalming can pilot the launch, Morris is the best rider and shot. They are the Rooks and the Knights ... and they send a p.a.w.n 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 ridiculously tiny beneath the Texan's six-feet-plus height-s.h.i.+ed, and that soft Texas voice drawled, "Don't you go jigger on me, you slab-sided vinigaroon, I been sc.r.a.pped 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. "d.a.m.n blast it to f.u.c.ken' h.e.l.l. 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 d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d knows what the road's like up Borgo Pa.s.s, 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 Pa.s.s? A qualm pa.s.sed through him of sickness, of shock.

Van Helsing was going up the Borgo Pa.s.s. 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 Asylum 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 contend."

Nomie.

Renfield felt a chill pa.s.s 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 mountains 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 Pa.s.s.

Just before nightfall he pa.s.sed a band of gypsy men, riding their s.h.a.ggy 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 a.s.sumed, and wondered how Dracula 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 pa.s.ses of the Hindu Kush.

Like the Afghani robbers, Renfield thought, they almost certainly 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 morning'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 difficult, 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 Pa.s.s. It stood on a coign of rock where the eastward end of the Pa.s.s first narrowed, guarding the road that the Turks must traverse to invade the green lands beyond. Towers and battlements overhung 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 Pa.s.s 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 G.o.dalming 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 Pa.s.s, 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 forcing the dark-haired woman to drink his blood, as Renfield had drunk the blood of Nomie and her sisters, to begin the transformation 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 Renfield 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, reflected 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 gigantic 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 s.h.i.+vering 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 sisters 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 terror in her eyes as she saw her fate.