Bram Stoker's Dracula Page 6

  Harker recoiled from the window, feeling the dread of the horrible place overpowering him; he was in fear—in awful fear—and there was no escape…

  Gradually Harker managed to control his nerves. Feeling at least assured that the count had left the castle for the time being, he nerved himself for a bolder attempt at exploration.

  He went quickly back to his rooms and, taking a fresh lamp, from there down the stone stairs to the hall where he had entered the castle originally. He found he could pull back the bolts of the front door easily enough and, with some effort, unhook the great chains; but still the door was locked and the key was gone.

  There were no tools at hand with which he might hope to attack the formidable barrier successfully; and, as usual, he could hear the wolves howling at no very great distance beyond it. He feared he would not long survive the opening of this door tonight.

  But he was not going to give up. From the great hall he went on to make a more methodical examination than before of all the various stairs and passages to which he had access, and to try the doors that opened from them. One or two small rooms near the hall were open, but there was nothing to see in them except old furniture.

  At last he found one door, near the top of the highest accessible stairway, which he had not yet tried to open. Though this door seemed at first to be locked, when Harker leaned his weight against the surface, it yielded a little under pressure.

  The young man put his shoulder to the old wood and tried again. It gave a little more.

  When Harker strained his muscles to the limit, the barrier suddenly gave way—the door had not been locked, but only stuck—and he fell into the room beyond.

  Slowly, brushing dust from hands and knees, he got to his feet. It was almost as if he had entered a new world entirely. Picking up his lamp from where he had set it down, he advanced slowly, holding the lamp high, moving through room after room.

  Here, high, broad windows, protected by the sheer precipice below from any danger of enemy attack, admitted a flood of moonlight. This, Harker decided, must have been the portion of the castle that had been occupied by the ladies in bygone centuries. Somehow the furniture—and there was quite a bit of it—had more air of comfort. He thought a feminine touch was clearly detectable in the arrangement and the decoration.

  The big windows were completely free of any drape or curtain, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through diamond panes, enabled one to see even colors… The intruder's lamp, which he now raised again, seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant, silent moonlight.

  Slight, swift motion at the corner of his eye caught Harker's attention—it was that of a long-legged spider scampering across the top of an old and beautiful vanity or dressing table, its mirror draped with what appeared to be a silken cloth.

  The top of the antique dressing table was almost crowded with bottles and combs, brushes and powders. Harker stood beside it, touching one item after another on its top. He noticed that his fingers trembled. Yes, women had lived here… Almost it appeared to the intruder that they still did.

  One perfume bottle in particular appeared so fragile and lovely in the half-magical illumination that Harker felt compelled to touch it again to make sure that it was real. Gently he lifted the small container from the dust in which it rested. Without thought his fingers found and pulled out the stopper, releasing a faint drop of delicious scent, which he could not identify, but which made his senses tingle. He thought he saw the droplet clearly for a moment, but then it seemed to vanish immediately into the air.

  The air itself felt like it was pulsating around him. He put the perfume bottle down again.

  Moving now with the feeling of having entered a dream, he turned away from the small table, to find himself confronted by silken hangings and piles of many pillows. What he had thought at first sight might be a divan was actually a large bed, which spread itself invitingly before him.

  Dully Harker noticed, without giving the fact much thought, that his lamp had gone out, and he put it on the floor. His legs were suddenly very tired, and he sat down upon the edge of the bed to rest. Again a wave-not of dust, but of perfume—as before impossible to identify but delicious, entrancing, rose about him, even more subtly than before.

  Truly, his arms and legs were weakened with fatigue, with the long strain of fear. Here in this chamber, on this bed, it seemed possible that fear could be forgotten. If only he could rest… the silks of the soft bed invited him to recline. They seemed to undulate, to fit themselves beneath his body and around it.

  In the dreamlike state he had now entered, it came as no shock to Harker to discover that he was no longer alone. The beautiful tenants of these women's quarters were with him now—and it seemed he had known for a long time that they must be.

  Three of them, all young, all ladies by their dress and manner, though two were dark as Gypsies, with great dark piercing eyes that seemed almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon—he noted with interest, but with no terror as yet, that snakes moved in the hair of one. All three women had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips.

  The third, the youngest as Harker supposed her to be, was fair as fair can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair, and eyes like pale sapphires.

  And it seemed to the young man who was now lying on her bed—he knew it must be hers—that he had somehow in the past known this blond girl's face, in connection with some dreamy fear, but at the moment he could not recollect how or where the meeting had occurred.

  Though the moonlight fell from behind the women, their bodies seemed to throw no shadows on the floor. And now Harker could see quite plainly that the three of them were wearing very little more than moonlight, only moonlight and the faintest gossamer… The three whispered together, and then they laughed—such a silvery, musical laugh, but hard, as hard as metal, as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It struck the man's ears like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of music made on the rims of wineglasses, played by a cunning hand.

  The fair girl, looking straight at Harker now, shook her head coquettishly, and the others seemed to urge her on.

  The voice of one of the dark women, she who seemed somehow a little older than the others, had the same quality of sound as their sweet laughter.

  "Go on!" she urged the youngest. "You are first, and we shall follow."

  The younger brunette added her incitement: "He is young and strong, there will be kisses for us all."

  It seemed to Harker that it was quite impossible for him to move—it would be hopeless even to attempt the effort. He decided this, with satisfaction, as the fair girl, moving in utter and unnatural silence, came closer to him and knelt beside the couch. Then she bent over him until it seemed that he could smell and taste the unbearable sweetness of her breath, like honey with something quite different under it, the bitterness of the smell of blood.

  Suddenly sharp fingernails were on his chest, his arms, his legs, biting his skin like insects, slitting his clothing like steel knives, catching in the fabric and peeling it away. He could do nothing, and he wanted to do nothing.

  The blond girl arched her neck and licked her lips, and in the moonlight he could see her body, all of it, the last gossamer covering now gone, and the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth.

  The blond hair came billowing over Harker's face like a cloud of perfume as the girl bent down. He was aware now that sharp teeth were biting at the cord of his small silver crucifix—let the cross go, he thought, and there it went. And now the other women, too impatient after all to wait their turns, had come to join him on the bed, and their bodies pressed upon him, and their dark hair, snakes and all, was trailing everywhere over his exposed flesh. And still he could not move. Could not. And at the same time he was afraid even to breathe, to stir a finger, lest they should cease what they were doing. And now he could feel their l
ips, three pairs of lips, three tongues.

  And now their teeth, so exquisitely sharp.

  So sweet…

  Out of nowhere, as it seemed, interruption came.

  Somewhere nearby, very close at hand, the storm of fury was rushing on…

  Harker groaned with a sharp sense of loss. Insupportable deprivation. His eyes snapped open involuntarily, just in time to see the count's white hand, inhumanly hairy on the palm and inhumanly strong, clamp itself onto the slender neck of the fair woman.

  The young man caught only a brief glimpse of her furious blue eyes before Dracula, with a fierce sweep of his arm, hurled her away across the room. Threw her bodily, as if she had been only a child, a doll.

  "How dare you touch him?" The master's voice was low, but the anger and the danger in it might have crumbled stone. "How dare you, when I have forbidden it? This man belongs to me!"

  The youngest, lying in the moonlight where he had thrown her, lying in an awkward, almost insectlike pose, raised a face transformed with fury. "To you? You never loved. You never love!"

  The other two women had distanced themselves from Harker now, and it seemed to him that all of them were clothed again. Still he lay in the exact position where they had left him. He felt himself possessed by a languorous, unnatural lethargy, and wondered if he might be dreaming. Again his eyes closed, without his willing it.

  When Harker slitted open his lids and looked again, the three women had all crept close, submissively, to Dracula.

  In a different voice, more controlled, the count was saying to them: "Yes—I, too, can love. You yourselves can tell it from the past—you have all been my brides—and I shall love again."

  He gestured contemptuously in Harker's general direction. "I promise you, when I have done with him—it is a matter of business—then you shall kiss him at your will."

  The youngest of his brides was pouting, sulking. "Are we to have nothing tonight?"

  Silently, the tall, dark figure of their master pulled out a bag from under his cloak and cast it on the floor. There came to Harker's ears a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child; and with that sound, horror overcame him utterly, and he knew no more.

  6

  Even now, weeks after the fact, Dr. Jack Seward's thoughts were still more than half-occupied with the bitter knowledge that Lucy Westenra had refused to marry him.

  It hardly helped to know that she had also turned down Quincey Morris, the wealthy Texan who had been Seward's frequent companion in big-game hunting, or that Quincey was also hard hit by his rejection. In Dr. Seward's case, his work, challenging intellectual work, seemed the only effective and honorable remedy for his bruised pride; and at least in the asylum there was work aplenty for the physician.

  The asylum of which bright, still-youthful Dr. Seward had been given the superintendency was an old building in suburban London. It stood comfortably secluded amid its own extensive, wooded, walled-in grounds, as was only fitting for an establishment catering almost exclusively to a wealthy clientele. Once it had been a mansion, like Carfax, the long-deserted house on one of the adjoining estates. The asylum was old, though by all accounts not nearly so old as Carfax; and it had been recently remodeled, largely at Seward's direction, into the architectural configuration required for a more or less efficient and humane hospital, meeting the latest medical standards of these last years of the nineteenth century.

  At the moment Dr. Seward was halfway through his evening rounds. Around him, from behind one barred door after another, arose, as usual, the outraged and incoherent cries of the insane. Seward was accustomed to them, and heard them with only half an ear.

  Lucy, Lucy! Not only was the young girl lovely, physically provocative enough to threaten a suitor's mental health, but since she was the heiress to Hillingham as well, it was definitely understating the case to say that she was well-to-do.

  When Lucy's mother died—an event which, given the parlous state of the old lady's heart, lay probably not very far in the future—Lucy ought to be in line to inherit…

  But enough of that. The fact remained that Lucy Westenra had rejected him, a handsome and prosperous physician, rapidly making his way toward the top of his profession. She had tendered her refusal with a flattering suggestion of reluctance, but still very definitely. And who could blame her, when she had the chance to marry, in the person of Art Holmwood, a future earl?

  Jack Seward had come to realize over the past few weeks that it was not really Lucy Westenra's money or even her tantalizing body that he was going to miss the most. The hardest part, it seemed, was that he genuinely loved the girl…

  Now the door of yet another cell clattered open, unlocked by the hands of an attendant. Seward's professional interest quickened, temporarily driving even thoughts of Lucy from his mind. He had been looking forward to visiting this particular patient. Here, now, was a real oddity.

  The single window of the small stone cell, like most of the windows in the house, was coarsely barred to prevent human escape—or intrusion. But this window was currently open to the outside air, even to the passage of sparrows and other birds. That some of these small winged creatures were frequently lured in was attested to by the fact that the floor was encrusted with bird droppings. In the corners of the cell substantial quantities of food intended for the patient's nourishment had been deliberately crumbled and smeared, allowed to decay, in order to attract a multitude of flies.

  The two attendants who tonight were accompanying Dr. Seward on his rounds—both of them powerfully built men—stopped and waited just outside the cell.

  Seward himself stepped just inside the door, repressing an urge to gag at the smell. Perhaps in this case his favored policy of toleration for a patient's eccentricity had been a mistake after all.

  He said: "Good evening, Mr. Renfield."

  The cell's sole human occupant looked up. He was a balding, sturdy man of middle age, dressed in the coarse shirt and trousers usually issued to male patients. His person, in contrast to his cell, was neat and clean. He was wearing thick-lensed eyeglasses and, at the moment, a pleasant expression. Turning to Dr. Seward, Renfield revealed that he was holding in his right hand a plate of insects, worms, and spiders. Seward had the impression that all the creatures were alive but somehow immobilized.

  "Hors d'oeuvres, Dr. Seward? Canapes?" The voice was cultured, the manner calm.

  "No, thank you, Mr. Renfield. How are you feeling tonight?"

  "Far better than you, my lovesick doctor." And the madman casually turned his back upon his visitor.

  Carefully setting down his plate and its precious contents, Renfield squatted in a corner and deftly went about catching some of the many flies that swarmed about his bait of decomposing food heavily sprinkled with sugar. His strong, thick-fingered hands were quick and accurate at this task. Flies buzzed in protest as he carefully gathered them, alive, into one of his capable fists.

  Lovesick. Well, of course attendants and servants would often gossip in front of the patients. Seward, so far on this visit, was managing to keep his own reactions scientifically neutral.

  "Is my personal life of interest to you?" he inquired.

  "All life interests me," Renfield responded as he went blandly on with his self-appointed task.

  Then, with a gesture as of one about to drink a toast, he brought his handful of flies to his mouth. Only one or two escaped as he popped them in. With evident relish he chewed and swallowed.

  Tonight Seward was finding the scientific attitude very difficult to maintain. "Your diet, Mr. Renfield, is disgusting."

  The eyes of the former solicitor twinkled behind his glasses, as if to acknowledge a compliment. "Perfectly nutritious. Each life I ingest gives back life to me, augments my own vitality."

  He held up one more fly, large, blue black, and juicy looking, between thumb and forefinger for a moment. Then it went to join the previous handful.

  Seward was struggling to maintain some objectivity. "A fly gives
you life?"

  As Seward' had hoped, the patient tonight was willing, even eager, to discuss his theory. "The fly's sapphire wings are typical of the aerial powers of the psychic faculties. Therefore the ancients did well when they typified the soul of a man as a butterfly!"

  "Is this some philosophic insight that you gained during your recent visit to Eastern Europe?"

  No reply.

  "I think"—Seward sighed—"I shall have to invent a new classification of lunatic for you."

  "Really? Perhaps you can improve upon the classification devised by your old mentor, Professor Van Helsing: zoophagous arachnopkile—a carnivorous lover of spiders. Of course that does not really, fully, describe my case."

  With a deft movement Renfield bent over the plate he had set down, caught up one of the spiders from it, considered the creature momentarily, and ate it.

  "Yes, what about the spiders?" Seward was musing aloud, more to himself than to Renfield or the husky, impassive keepers who continued to stand by just outside the cell. "How do spiders fit into your theory? I suppose they eat the flies…"

  "Oh, yes, spiders eat them." Renfield's manner suddenly became that of a teacher coaxing a bright student toward an answer. He nodded at Seward encouragingly.

  The doctor was beginning to catch on—or so he thought. "And the sparrows?"

  "Yes, the sparrows!" Now the patient's excitement was growing rapidly.

  "They eat the spiders, I presume."

  "Yes, yes!"

  Seward nodded. "Thus we would come, by a logical progression, to… something… even larger, perhaps? Some creature capable of devouring sparrows?"

  Renfield, his agitation suddenly building toward frenzy, threw himself on his knees on the stone floor.

  He cried out, beseeching Seward in seeming desperation: "A kitten! A nice, little, sleek, playful kitten, that I can teach and feed and feed. No one would refuse a kitten—I implore you—"

  The doctor, his eyes narrowed, took a step backward to be free of the man's clutching hands. He could hear the pair of keepers behind him shifting their positions, ready to intervene if necessary.