Bram Stoker's Dracula Page 14

  Quincey Morris, as puzzled as ever about the exact nature of the enemy, but determined to stand by his friends, was walking beside the doubly bereaved Arthur Holmwood—who had now, upon the death of his father, inherited the title of Lord Godalming.

  Both Quincey and Arthur were even more in the dark than Dr. Seward regarding the purpose of this foray, and both were coming along more or less reluctantly. Both had been horrified and mystified at Van Helsing's claim that some vitally important task must be accomplished in the Westenra family mausoleum tonight.

  The four men stayed in a tight group as they left the house by a side door and entered the section of the grounds where the Westenra family were interred. Once they were inside the borders of the graveyard, passing the headstones of distant cousins and family retainers, Van Helsing led them straight toward the imposing aboveground entrance of the old family crypt.

  According to Lucy's will, Arthur Holmwood had inherited all of the young woman's property, including that which had been her mother's; therefore Arthur was now armed with all the keys of the estate. Reluctantly, at an imperious signal from the old man and a confirming nod from Seward, Holmwood now opened the iron gates defending the vault in which for centuries members of the immediate family had been interred. The lock worked smoothly; it had been oiled for the double funeral only a few days ago.

  Silently Van Helsing, who was carrying one of the lanterns, led his followers in, and down.

  As he followed his mentor down the echoing stone stairs, Seward could remember with painful clarity how the tomb had looked in the daytime, at the burial of Lucy and her mother. Then the interior of the mausoleum, though wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough. But now, in the light of the lanterns the men were carrying, the flowers were already beginning to hang lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns. Here the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; and time-discolored stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron and tarnished brass, and clouded silver plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle. The effect, thought Seward, was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined.

  On reaching the vaulted underground mausoleum, Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Handing his lantern to another, he lighted a candle and held it so he could read the coffin plates. By these means he ascertained which coffin was Lucy's. It rested in a kind of sarcophagus, under a lid of heavy stone, which, at his direction, the men soon moved aside.

  Holmwood cleared his throat, a startling sound in the chill silence. Abruptly he said: "Must we desecrate Lucy's grave? She died horribly enough—"

  Van Helsing, having arranged several lights to his satisfaction, raised a hand. His manner was didactic, almost that of a professor lecturing. "If Miss Lucy is dead, we can do no wrong to her tonight. But, on the other hand, if she is not—"

  At this suggestion Holmwood almost collapsed. "My God, what are you saying—has she been buried alive?"

  The professor looked at him calmly enough. "I go no further than to say she is undead."

  Van Helsing gestured, and at his order Seward, and a moment later Quincey Morris, took up screwdrivers and began to undo the coffin's outer sealing.

  Arthur, looking on, was swiftly becoming an emotional wreck. " 'Undead'? What does that mean? Jack? Quincey?"

  Quincey Morris only shook his head; he was determined at least to get to the bottom of things.

  Holmwood continued his protest. "This is insanity! What did poor Lucy do that I should allow this desecration? She died horribly enough—"

  Matter-of-factly Van Helsing loosened the last screw and swung the lid of the outer coffin up, revealing the inner casing of airtight lead beneath.

  The sight was almost too much for Holmwood.

  Striking the screwdriver down through the thin lead sheeting, with a swift stab, Van Helsing created a hole big enough to admit the point of a small fretsaw. Some of his audience drew back—Seward, with his medical experience, was more than half expecting a rush of noxious gases from the decayed body—but nothing of the kind happened, and the professor never stopped for a moment.

  He sawed a couple of feet along one side of the lead coffin, then across and down the other side. Taking hold of the loose flange thus created, he bent it back toward the foot of the coffin, stood back a step, and motioned for the others to look.

  One by one, with Arthur Holmwood the last to do so, they drew near and peered in. The coffin was empty.

  Holmwood, quite pale, backed away from it. "Where is she?" His voice cracked. "What have you done with her, Van Helsing?"

  The old man's words fell like the blows of a hammer. "She is vampire. Nosferatu, as they say in Eastern Europe. Undead. She lives beyond the grace of God, a wanderer in the outer darkness. They become almost immortal when infected by another nosferatu."

  Quincey threw down the tool he had been holding and gave voice to an incoherent groan. It was a sound compounded of outrage and derision, as if he would still refuse to credit what his own experience now compelled him to believe.

  But Arthur grabbed Van Helsing. "This is insane! The transfusion of my blood has made Lucy my bride." No one had ever told the intended bridegroom of the other three transfusions, and certainly no one was going to do so now. "I will protect her from this outrage!"

  The professor thumped the palm of his hand on the empty inner coffin. The curved lead sheeting sounded hollowly. "As you see, she is not here. The undead must go on, age after age, feeding on the blood of the living."

  "Lies! You cannot prove this. Old man! Old lunatic! What have you done with her?"

  In the next instant Holmwood had actually snatched a revolver from the belt of the surprised Quincey and impulsively leveled the weapon at Van Helsing.

  For a long moment shocked silence reigned in the tomb. Quincey Morris was stunned, Holmwood half-mad with grief and bewilderment, the heavy revolver shaking in his hand. Seward, trying to decide how best to restrain Holmwood, was attempting also to retain his grip on his own professional calm. And Van Helsing himself seemed only to await, with stony resignation, whatever fate might send him in the next moment.

  Then Van Helsing tilted his head, listening; he raised a hand, imperiously enjoining silence.

  In the moments following, the sound of a soft feminine voice singing, crooning a kind of lullaby, came drifting to the men's ears from somewhere not far outside the subterranean vault.

  The younger men all stared at each other in wonder.

  With commanding gestures Van Helsing continued to enforce silence. Quickly he herded his companions, with their lights, into a kind of recess between old sarcophagi, just out of sight of the stair. As soon as they were all there, he blew out the candles they had been carrying and shuttered the lantern.

  In darkness the four men waited, listening, holding their collective breath. Only a faint glow of moonlight came down into the vault through the upper entrance to the crypt. Seward recalled that they had left the iron gate there open.

  What he was expecting at that point he could not have said; but not what happened. Presently a white descending figure, cradling something small in both arms and crooning a soft lullaby, became visible in a faint ghostly way upon the stairs.

  The figure paused once, giggling in a familiar way, then the lullaby resumed, the white shape once more descending.

  Seward could feel his hair rising on his scalp, and Van Helsing's grip tightened like iron on his arm. The voice of the apparition was recognizably that of Lucy—of a woman Seward himself had certified as medically dead, and had seen entombed—but it sounded drunken, almost incoherent, as it sang softly.

  At a word from their leader the four men now stepped out from their place of concealment, and Van Helsing drew open the lantern's slide, releasing a beam of concentrated light in the direction of the figure on the stairs.

  The face and the red hair of the woman were undoubtedly Lucy's; and in the harsh beam that now
fell upon her face all four men could see how her lips were crimsoned with fresh blood, and how the stream had trickled over her chin and stained the purity of the white gown—its talkie now wantonly, carelessly torn at the breast—that was to have been her wedding dress.

  With a careless motion, callous as a devil, Lucy flung to the ground the child that up to now she had been clutching strenuously to her breast. Snarling at the men confronting her, exposing inhumanly sharp teeth, she retreated, backing down the remainder of the stairs and maneuvering toward her coffin.

  Seward at once darted forward and picked up the child, which cried lustily; dazedly his physician's instincts registered that the babe did not seem to have been much harmed.

  The face of Quincey Morris, as he confronted the apparition, was a study in silent horror. By instinct the Texan had drawn his bowie knife and held it ready.

  Holmwood had been through too much—far too much—and his knees were buckling.

  Now Lucy, actually standing beside her coffin, appeared to take notice, for the first time, of her fiancé's presence in the vault. Immediately, as if by magic, the wantonness and evil faded from her appearance.

  She seemed as beautiful and virginal as ever in life, when she advanced on him, saying: "Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come and we can rest together. Come to me, my husband, come—"

  Seward, dazed with shock, was still capable of registering the fact that there was something diabolically sweet in the tones in which Lucy spoke, something of the tinkling of glass when struck.

  Holmwood, moving as in a trance, had started toward her, opening his arms in response to her plea. "Lucy…"he choked.

  Van Helsing, as once before, jumped between the couple, this time brandishing a crucifix.

  Lucy recoiled,, hissing and grimacing, from the object he thrust at her. Never had Seward beheld such baffled malice. He thought that if ever a face meant death—if looks could kill—he saw it at that moment.

  Van Helsing, steadily holding up the cross, without taking his eyes from the vampire, demanded of Holmwood: "Answer me now, my friend! Am I to proceed with my work?"

  Arthur, groaning, had fallen to his knees, his face buried in his hands. "Do as you will, Van Helsing." His voice was scarcely audible.

  As if the crucifix were projecting some invisible, all-powerful force, the old man used it to urge the snarling woman back. Suddenly she leaped, and with a grotesque, unnatural movement in the air, withdrew inside her coffin, vomiting blood upon Van Helsing just before she disappeared.

  Several minutes had now passed since Jonathan Harker had left his new wife waiting on the London street. Mina's fear for her husband's safety, at first acute, had subsided into serious but not desperate worry. She had spent the first minutes of his absence glancing through his journal—the written record of his trip through Transylvania—concentrating particularly upon the later entries, those covering the last days of the period Jonathan had spent as Dracula's guest—or as his prisoner. She still found it impossible to tell which of the horrors related in these entries were to be understood as real, and which were only the products of her husband's disordered fancy.

  Mina's efforts to consider the problem calmly were spoiled by a few words her husband had said to her tonight, just before rushing away from the cab. These words kept coming back to her. At each return they seemed more horrifying, more laden with an implication, a suggestion, that so far she was refusing to confront directly.

  Jonathan had said: It is the man himself. The count. I saw him. He has grown young.

  As time passed and Jonathan still did not return, Mina's fears for him mounted steadily. Frequently she looked up from the pages of the horrible journal, on each occasion staring out the window of the hansom cab into the anonymous fog-shrouded throng of London. Every time she looked out for her husband she wondered if she ought to attempt to follow him; but of course if she were to leave the cab, Jonathan might return to it while she was gone…

  The instant she heard someone at the hansom's other door, she looked around with quick relief. "Jonathan?"

  But when the door was yanked open from outside, it was the prince, her mysterious lover, and not her husband, who confronted her.

  When Mina recoiled instinctively, he pleaded: "No—I beg you. I had to see you. I am a madman without you—"

  Mina could not speak.

  He climbed halfway into the cab, arms reaching for her.

  Softly she endeavored to struggle free. "Please—you have no right—my husband—"

  "Mina"—and to the woman's ears it seemed for a moment that he had softly added another name—"I have crossed oceans of time to find you. Can you conceive of what I feel for you? It has been a constant search, hopeless, never-ending. Until the miracle happened. "

  At that very moment, back in the depths of the Westenra family vault, Van Helsing was carefully laying out upon a marble slab his autopsy knives and certain other implements of the specialist. Notable among these last were a wooden stake, more than two feet long and carefully sharpened, the point hardened by charring in a fire, and a heavy hammer, of the type used generally to break up lumps of coal.

  The woman in the coffin was unconscious now or comatose, eyes closed. With her pointed teeth, her bloodstained mouth, she seemed to all of the hunters present no more than a nightmare image of Lucy.

  Even Arthur's face grew hard as he looked. In a voice containing new strength he asked Van Helsing: "Is this really Lucy's body, or only a demon in her shape?"

  The old man grunted. "It is her body—and yet not. But wait awhile, and you shall see her as she was, and is."

  When he had arranged all of his implements to his satisfaction, the old man said: "Before we do anything, let me tell you this. When the undead become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality. They cannot die in the ordinary way, but must go on age after age adding new victims. For all that die from the preying of the undead become themselves undead. And so the circle goes on, ever-widening, like ripples from a stone thrown in the water.

  "The career of this so unhappy dear lady as a vampire is but just begun. Those children whose blood she sucks are not as yet so much the worse"—here all eyes turned to the unconscious child in Seward's arms—"but if she lives on, undead, then more and more by her power over them they come to her.

  "But if she die in truth, then the tiny wounds of the throats disappear, and they go back to their play, unknowing of what has been."

  The professor's voice grew more emotional as he went on. "But most blessed of all, when this now undead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free. She shall take her place with the other angels. So that it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free—the hand that of all she would herself have chosen, had it been to her to choose."

  Van Helsing paused, looking at his assembled followers. "Tell me if there be such a one among us?"

  All eyes turned to Holmwood.

  Holmwood, now having seen for himself the predatory horror—though he was still far from understanding it—had been convinced.

  He said to Van Helsing: "From the bottom of a broken heart I thank you. Tell me what I am to do."

  The directions were clinical and businesslike. "Take this stake in your left hand, place the point over the heart, and the hammer in the right. When we begin the prayer for the dead, strike, in God's name!"

  Holmwood again looked faint. But he accepted—stake in the left hand, hammer in the right—the tools that the professor handed him.

  "A moment's courage," the old man assured him, "and it is done!"

  Dracula still had his foot upon the step, and his body remained halfway into the cab. Meanwhile Mina had all but given up the hopeless struggle against her own feelings.

  Her prince was saying to her: "I lost you once, I'll not lose you again."

  She tried to think of Jonathan, but it was hop
eless. Mina whispered: "I can't fight my own feelings anymore…"

  Arthur, having positioned the sharp point of the long wooden stake against the whiteness of Lucy's exposed breast, raised the hammer. And struck hard.

  —in London at that instant, Mina to her horror and amazement, saw her lover's eyes go wide. Her prince staggered back from the cab, clutching his chest as if he himself had received a mortal wound. He uttered a hoarse scream: "They deny us!"

  —in the crypt, Lucy's eyes flew open with the impact of her true death, and she opened her mouth to scream.

  —Mina in London could only watch in fright as a staggering madman retreated from her, losing himself in the crowd, even as he helplessly cried out her name—

  —Van Helsing, a strong and determined surgeon, slashing with a huge razor-edged autopsy knife, severed Lucy's head from her body before she could utter a sound.

  Dracula had already disappeared into the London crowd.

  Mina, more desperate and terrified than ever, was leaning from the window of the cab. "Jonathan!" she shrieked out. "Jonathan!"

  Suddenly the door on the other side of the cab was once more jerked open from outside. This time it was Harker, disheveled, bruised, and hatless, who lunged in to take his wife in his arms.

  The four men in the crypt, all of them physically exhausted and emotionally drained, were now gathered quietly around the still-open coffin.

  Inside it, Lucy now lay in peace. Her head had been restored by the surgeon to its natural place. And Van Helsing with a saw from his bulging tool bag had sawn off the stake close to her breast, the sharp wooden point being left deliberately in the young woman's heart.

  The four men together gazed in shame and wonder at her face of unequaled sweetness and virginal purity. This, their most idealized memories told them all, was truly how they remembered Lucy's countenance from the days of her breathing life.

  After what seemed an endless silence, Van Helsing, spent and weary, had five more words to say to Holmwood.