Part 9 (1/2)

”I-I have not your strength.” She dropped her eyes and turned away.

”Vile men,” I muttered, and let the cross fall into its components on the sward.

”Perhaps for the present, though, it is better that your brand remain. Van Helsing might take its sudden disappearance, whilst I still live, as a bad sign.” I had in mind his reaction to the disappearance of Lucy's throat marks shortly before that poor girl breathed her last; Mina had said the record showed the professor to have been very much shocked by that, and convinced from that moment that Lucy would inevitably walk as a vampire.

I put my hands on Mina's quivering shoulders and turned her round to face me.

”But all is far from lost,” I went on. ”Tell me, am I right in thinking that life with your husband, though having its drawbacks for an intelligent woman like yourself, is not without its compensations also? In short, that for Jonathan's good as well as your own-I can see how he must need you-you are not prepared to give him up entirely?”

She looked up; it was as if my understanding had lifted at least a part of the crus.h.i.+ng burden of worry from her breast. ”You are right, Vlad! Oh, how good and wise and kind of you! I love you, as you know. And yet I find I have not ceased to love Jonathan. The poor dear needs me now... you would hardly recognize him, he is so changed today.”

”How so?”

”He is gray and haggard, and looks at me strangely sometimes, though he speaks as lovingly as before. And I have seen him sitting alone, mumbling to himself, and whetting an enormous knife that I think Lord G.o.dalming or Quincey Morris must have given him. I feel it would be too terrible to leave him now; but still, however am I to stay when he is whetting that knife for your heart and praying for a chance to plunge it in?”

”Dear lady, I have conceived a strategy that, if all goes well, will resolve this painful dilemma for you. If the future can be fitted to my design, you will be able to stay safely with a contented husband, yet you and I need never be more than a few hours apart, and we can continue to see each other frequently.”

Mina seized my hand and covered it with kisses. ”Dear Vlad! How can I thank you?

What is this plan and what may I do to further it?”

I began to explain to her my scheme. It turned on my being able to convince the men that I had fled from England, with no intention of returning. Within a month or two after I was supposedly gone-actually I would be lying very low in London, in one of my still-secret lairs-Van Helsing would presumably have gone back to the Continent, perhaps hoping to pick up my trail there, and the rest of the vigilantes would have relaxed their vigilance. Mina and I would then be able to resume the enjoyment of each other's company on an occasional basis, which was all that would really be good for her, husband or not.

To set the scheme in motion required one more confrontation between me and my hunters. I pledged to Mina to do all in my power to a.s.sure that this encounter was nonviolent, and she in turn agreed to do what she could to arrange it for me.

Therefore as soon as I took leave of her, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, she sent a telegram to Van Helsing at my Piccadilly house, where we knew he was likely to be at that hour. I wanted the gang to wait for me there, whilst I visited Bermondsey and Mile End, checking some hidden caches of home-earth to make sure they were still usable.

The message, composed at my direction, advised the professor to ”look out for D.

He has just now, 12:45, come from Carfax hurriedly and hastened toward the south.

He seems to be going the round and may want to see you.” It was signed of course by Mina.

Leaving her to see the telegram dispatched, I sent out toward the south just as it said. In going the round of my other houses known to the enemy, in Bermondsey and Mile End, I found to my satisfaction that the Eucharist had been placed in all of the boxes that I had left, so to speak, on display for visitors. The hunters would feel certain that these places were denied to me as refuges, and if necessary I could use them with impunity.

It was a little after two when I reached number 347, Piccadilly, and although the old house appeared from the outside to be untenanted I felt confident that my uninvited guests were still within. On reaching the front door I noted a few fine scratches around the lock, where their hired locksmith had been at work to open the house for them and provide a key. Who would question His Lords.h.i.+p Arthur in such a matter? Not the tradesmen, surely, and apparently not the policemen on the beat.

I opened the door with my own key and entered, moving at a casual pace but with great care. To underestimate the enemy is the surest prescription for disaster in any war. If they should be waiting in ambush with wooden spears or lances, in some room filled with numbing daylight, then I could be killed or seriously hurt. Still I thought that I should probably have to face, at worst, nothing more dangerous than silver bullets. Van Helsing had shown me that he did not really know his game.

Once I had got inside the house I could quite plainly hear their ten taut lungs like so many boilers working under pressure whilst their owners strove for calm and silence after hearing my key turn in the door. I could hear that the men were gathered behind the closed doors of the dining room; in the silent, dusty hall outside I paused, making certain of the number of my enemies and estimating their several positions within. There was Harker's familiar breath, that I had heard for two months in my castle; and over there was Van Helsing's slightly aging wheeze.

I drew a deep breath of my own-not from necessity, of course, but by a habit that still clings from days of old-and threw the dining-room door open as suddenly as I could. Bounding forward with the same motion, I leaped into the room, confronting them.

My leap carried me a little beyond the center of the room, so if any ambush had been planned for me at the door I was past it before it could be sprung; but I saw at once that nothing of the sort was being attempted. The men were in scattered positions about the room, a couple near the door by which I had just entered, others near the windows, and Harker alone before another door, which led into the front room of the house. Their plan, insofar as they had one, was evidently to bar my egress now that I had come. So far no one had spoken. I glared about at them in silence and saw unhappily that this time no one was cowering back from me. Of my entry Seward wrote a little later.

There was something so pantherlike, something so inhuman, that it seemed to sober us all... it was a pity that we had not some organized plan of attack, for even at the moment I wondered what we were to do. I did not myself know whether our lethal weapons would avail us anything. Harker evidently meant to try the matter, for he had ready his great Kukri knife and made a fierce and sudden cut...

I got out of the knife's way, wis.h.i.+ng of course to avoid its pain and also to give the impression that I was not immune to being slain by such weapons. One might have thought that Harker, who had seen what small effect was had on me by a full swing with a metal shovel, might not have placed his chief reliance on a knife; but sound judgment, when away from the law courts, was not the bulwark of his character.

The blade came close enough to cut open a pocket of my coat, from which spilled coins and banknotes in a jumbled stream; I cursed the inconvenience as they tumbled to the floor. A good part of my wealth was there. While avarice is probably not my greatest fault, money in this war as in any other was a vital resource, and its loss was to be mourned. Yes, d.a.m.ned inconvenient; but I hardly felt like stopping to pick it up whilst they belabored me from all sides with painful steel and lead.

My enemies, too, ignored the dropped money for the moment; evidently they had plenty of their own. While Harker still brandished his knife, Seward and the others moved to the attack with crucifixes and envelopes held aloft. ”It was without surprise,” as Seward wrote, that they: saw the monster cower back... it would be impossible to describe the expression of hate and baffled malignity-of anger and h.e.l.lish rage-of extreme annoyance, not to be redundant, which came over the count's face. His waxen hue became greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes, and the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound. The next instant, with a sinuous dive he swept under Harker's arm and, grasping a handful of the money from the floor, dashed across the room and threw himself at the window. Amid the crash and glitter of the falling gla.s.s he tumbled into the flagged area below.

I saw no reason for leaving all my treasure to those thieves and it gave me some satisfaction that whilst running to the window I managed to knock Van Helsing off his feet once more. My plunge through the gla.s.s and fall onto stone caused me no noticeable damage and I sprang up immediately and rushed across the paved rearyard to make my ”escape” through the stable. At its door I paused, having reached a place where I could deliver my message hinting at retreat without Harker's antics with his knife distracting the rest of my listeners.

”You think to baffle me, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!” I called back to them. ”With your pale faces all there in a row, like sheep in a butcher's! You shall be sorry yet, each one of you. You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more.” To date, you see, they had found forty-nine of my fifty boxes, and desecrated Hosts within them; my idea was to keep them thinking about the one box they had not found, and turn their minds away from speculation on whether some of the forty-nine might be fakes, or might still be quite comfortable to me despite the sacrilegious treatment to which they had been subjected.

”My revenge has just begun!” I raved on, waving my fist, shouting with what I hoped would sound like the bravado often used to cover a forced retreat. ”I spread it over centuries, for time is on my side, and I can afford to wait. Your girls that you all love are mine already, and through them you and others shall yet be mine-my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

With a final threatening wave I turned and fled. Of course I wanted to leave the impression that I was getting out of the country, but it would hardly have done to come right out and say so, and expect to be believed. I retired a short distance beyond Piccadilly Circus, into Soho, where I paused in a secret place to make sure that my fiftieth original box was still secure, then went to hire a cart to transport it to the docks.Van Helsing and his crew meanwhile returned to the asylum. Mina naturally heard of the day's exploits with breathless interest. Seward records in his diary that ”she grew snowy white at times when danger had seemed to threaten her husband, and red at others when his devotion to her was manifest.”

She also tried, in accordance with my plan, to encourage an end to hostilities. She hardly dared speak openly in my favor, of course, but attempted to at least plant some seed of sympathy: ”Jonathan... and you, all my true, true friends... I know that you must fight, that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. The poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all... you must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.”

Harker leapt to his feet for his reply: ”May G.o.d give him into my hand just long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond it I could send his soul forever and ever to burning h.e.l.l I would do it!”

And Mina: ”Oh, hus.h.!.+... you will crush me with fear and horror... I have been thinking all this long, long day of it-that perhaps... someday... I too may need such pity. And that some other like you-and with equal cause for anger-may deny it to me!”

According to Seward this appeal left the ”men all in tears,” and Mina ”wept too, to see that her sweeter counsels had prevailed.” Alas for her hopes, that gang of scoundrels was as determined as ever to impale me one day on a stake: that they might now be willing to murmur a prayer or shed a tear whilst murdering me was not, from my point of view, such a very great improvement.

Meanwhile I had got my fiftieth box hauled to Doolittle's Wharf, where I was pleased to locate the Czarina Catherine, a Russian s.h.i.+p bound for the Black Sea and thence on up the Danube. Visiting the docks, I wore a straw hat so that I could hardly fail to be noticed and engaged Czarina's captain in a rather conspicuous argument, even summoning up some fog to shroud his s.h.i.+p until I should have my box safely on board; subtlety of an order to challenge Sherlock Holmes was hardly in order against my present foe. The box I had conspicuously addressed to Count Dracula, Galatz, via Varna; and before leaving London I wrote to my agent Hildesheim in Galatz with instructions for its reception.

I of course booked no pa.s.sage for myself, the idea being that my hunters were to think I was in the box, even as I had made the outward trip. But at the turn of the tide I boarded the s.h.i.+p, ostensibly to see to the box's storage. This was after sunset, and none of the crew saw me again. They cast off, thinking I had gone ash.o.r.e. Soon they were right, for when the tide next turned-to transport myself over flowing water is much easier at the turning-I flew in bat-shape back to Southend-on-Sea, and thence made my way back to Purfleet before dawn, to obtain some much-needed rest in my hidden lair on the overgrown grounds of Carfax. I had taken care to bring with me from the s.h.i.+p some small splinters from her main mast and planks, and a little soil and mold from crevices below. With these materials at hand I could from afar keep track of Czarina Catherine's movements, and even provide her with my choice of winds.

Before sinking into a stupor at dawn I managed to transfer from my mind to Mina's, in her bedroom only a few yards away, my a.s.surances that all was going well so far and also my idea for the next step in our little game.

She thought it a clever plan and at once had Van Helsing awakened. She then suggested to the professor, as her own idea, that he should try to hypnotize her in order to discover my location through the mental bond that our exchange of blood was known to have forged between us. From a faked trance she soon reported darkness, and ”the lapping of water. It is gurgling by, and little waves leap...”

Mina's imitation of the hypnotic state was superbly done, or at any rate done well enough to make Van Helsing take the bait. He soon p.r.o.nounced that now he knew: what was in the count's mind when he seized that money, though Jonathan's so fierce knife put him in danger... He meant escape. Hear me, ESCAPE! He saw that with but one earth box left, and a pack of men following like dogs after a fox, this London was no place for him. He have take his last earth box on board a s.h.i.+p... Tally Ho!... Now more than ever we must find him if we have to follow him to the jaws of h.e.l.l!

This was not the hoped-for reaction and Mina grew paler as she asked faintly: ”Why?”

”Because,” Van Helsing answered solemnly, ”he can live for centuries, and you are but mortal woman. Time is now to be dreaded-since once he put that mark upon your throat.”

And Mina, not knowing how else to reply, fell down in a faint beneath the professor's bright-eyed scrutiny. She was game, though, and tried him once more, later in the day, after the men had learned about Czarina's departure carrying an odd box placed aboard her by a vampirish man.

I asked him if it were certain that the count had remained on board the s.h.i.+p. He replied: ”We have the best proof of that-your own evidence when in the hypnotic trance this morning.” I asked him again if it were really necessary that they should pursue the count, for oh! I dread Jonathan leaving me, and I know that he would surely go if the others went.

Again Van Helsing's answer was yes. I paraphrase, omitting some five hundred words.

Mina persisted: ”But will not the count take his rebuff wisely? Since he has been driven from England, will he not avoid it, as a tiger does the village from which he has been hunted?”

Van Helsing, who had now somewhat modified his earlier ideas of my ”cunning more than mortal,” would not entertain the thought. ”Look at his persistence and endurance. With the child-brain that was of him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city... the glimpse that he have had, whet his appet.i.te only and enkeen his desire...” The other men, except for Mina's outraged husband, who was ready to take any risk to be avenged on me, were as I had expected losing their enthusiasm for the chase. Certainly by October fifth, only two days after I had supposedly fled the country, Seward for one was already having second thoughts: Even now, when I am gravely revolving the matter, it is almost impossible to realize that the cause of all our trouble is still existent. Even Mrs. Harker seems to lose sight of her trouble for whole spells; it is only now and again, when something recalls it to her mind, that she thinks of her terrible scar...

That d.a.m.ned scar hung there on her face, an ominous red warning to us all. The goings-on in Mina's subconscious-remember that at the time we did not know that word-had been channeled by Van Helsing's mesmeric powers into producing this stigma. And that the scar nearly matched the one I had received at her husband's hands must have been more than sheer coincidence-there's that profound or perhaps meaningless word again. And no one who could see both scars seems ever to have remarked upon their similarity-except for Mina, and one other, as I will shortly relate.

Van Helsing, now that the tiger had been-as he thought-driven far from the village, and perhaps beyond the hunters' reach forever, was, perhaps impelled by his own subconscious, looking for other potential game. ”Our poor dear Madam Mina is changing,” he confided to Seward at a moment when the two of them were alone. ”I can see the characteristics of the vampire coming into her face. It is now but very, very slight; but it is to be seen if we have eyes to notice without to prejudge. Her teeth are some sharper, and at times her eyes are more hard... there is to her the silence now often, as it was with Miss Lucy.”

Whilst Seward nodded, wide-eyed, the professor went on: ”Now my fear is this: If it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance, tell what the count see and hear, is it not more that he who have hypnotize her first, and have made her drink of his blood, should compel her mind to disclose to him what she know of us?”

Seward had to agree, and it was decided to again reverse policy and exclude Mina from all councils of war. On that evening, before they had been forced to break this sad news to her, ”a great personal relief was experienced” by both doctors, as Seward wrote, when ”Mrs. Harker... sent a message by her husband to say that she would not join us at present, as she thought it better that we should be free to discuss our movements without her presence to embarra.s.s us.” Mina of course had caught some hints from Jonathan as to which way the wind was blowing, and had also caught from me a mental signal that I was a-thirst to visit her that night.