He had just found my house in Piccadilly, ripe for plundering; but had to record regretfully that he could not tell the other men of the day's great discovery whilst his wife was hanging about.

So after dinner-followed by a little music to save appearances even amongst ourselves-I took Mina to her room and left her to go to bed. The dear girl was more affectionate with me than ever, and clung to me as though she would detain me; but there was much to be talked of and I came away. Thank G.o.d, the ceasing of telling things has made no difference between us.

So many a cuckolded husband has comforted himself, I should imagine, as his last chance to retain first place in his girl's heart slips through his hands, unnoticed by himself.

Now come we to a night that formed another major turning point for all of us.

When after dark I slipped into Renfield's room I found him seated moodily on a stool in the middle of his small floor. All day he had evidently been brooding, and had convinced himself that I had deliberately tricked and misled him, promised him Mina and then s.n.a.t.c.hed her away for my own enjoyment. He looked sidelong at me as I came in and for the first time did not rush to fawn over me and protest his loyalty. His very stillness made me slow my pa.s.sage through his chamber and look at him well, and mark the cunning of violent madness that gleamed so in his eyes.

He addressed me then in a most soft and beseeching voice, and wearing the face of perfect sanity that he put on periodically in his discussions with Seward and the rest; but Seward had never been taken in by this appearance, and no more was I.

Renfield pressed me again to grant him Mina for his obscene delight, as if she were some slave or chattel, whose favors and very flesh and blood were mine to do with as I chose. When I would hear no more, and made to walk past him in man-form to reach the door, he at last exploded in frustrated wrath.

"G.o.d! G.o.d! G.o.d!" he screamed. "Then I shall take her for myself. Twice before I have escaped and fled to plead my cause with you; the next time I go straight to her and do with her what I will!" He had a little more to say, namely some details of his plans, that I shall not repeat. And with that he hurled himself upon me, maniacal fingers reaching for my throat.In all the years since I first rose from the grave I have never felt a stronger human grip; but if Renfield's strength in his full fit of madness was that of four stout men or five, why mine is normally that of four or five such robust raving madmen as himself; and when I heard his threats against Mina my sinews too were amplified by rage.

It gave me savage satisfaction to come to honest grips with a foeman at last. I lifted him like a scarecrow and slammed him to the floor, once, again, how many times I do not know. I heard bones grind and break, and when I let him go I marked the twisted way in which he lay. His blood, his life, poured freely out from several lacerations on his head and face. The last I saw of Renfield was that spreading scarlet pool, which I disdained as carrion as I turned my back on him and hastened to where my beloved waited in her rooms.

The struggle made noise enough to rouse the dozing attendant in the hallway. He, after a quick look in through the door's observation panel, hurried to tell Seward of the "accident." I had made myself nearly invisible before the man looked in at the door, and by the time Seward had got himself down to Renfield's room I was up above in Mina's, where Harker snored in bed, with honest oafish weariness, and where my lady sat in her nightdress gazing out the window, as if she sought the solace of the moon, or mayhap a pair of flapping wings.

My entry was utterly silent, but in a moment she was somehow aware of my tall presence near the door, and looked around with an intake of breath.

"What are you doing?" she cried to me in a fierce whisper, her gaze meanwhile darting to her husband's sleeping form and back to mine.

I glanced at him and listened to his breath, and marked the rhythms of his heart and sleeping brain.

"Jonathan will not heed us," I remarked, and went on: "There is some news. The madman Renfield downstairs was utterly determined to supplant your husband and myself as well; I cooled his ardor as I pa.s.sed, so you may still sleep easily tonight."

"Sleep easily?" she cried. "G.o.d, Vlad, how may that be?" Mina stared a long moment at me as if she had never truly seen me before. "Is Renfield dead, then?"

I bowed slightly. "It was done to protect your life, my lady, which is dearer to me now than my own."

"Oh, Vlad." Her voice lowered briefly to a whisper of pure horror. "And you and Jonathan stalking each other like-like-"

"I am not stalking him, dear heart." A blase snore came from the bed. I went on: "I now have relatively secure lodgings available elsewhere, away from Carfax, and I am going to abandon my estate. We shall be neighbors no longer."

Mina came to my arms, moaned softly as I nuzzled her, and then stood back, raising her head proudly to look me in the eye. "Take me with you," she demanded.

There was a brief silence, in which I could find nothing soft or smooth to say. Again, a faint and flaccid snore came from the bed. Downstairs, feet ran, and an attendant's footsteps climbed rapidly to our level but did not approach our door. I could hear the man tapping at another door, probably Van Helsing's, and then talking in low, urgent tones.

"You do not know what you are asking me," I said at last.

"You do not want me with you, then? But I cannot enduring this-this tension- anymore."

Our voices were both near breaking and I could resist no longer. Mina raised her arms and I caught up and crushed her soft body-ah, so tenderly, gently, my hands of twentyfold strength held in such exquisiteness of control-crushed her against me, and my lips sought hers before they moved on down to worship at her throat...

Pa.s.sion blinded and deafened both of us for a while. Mina, drained and white, but shuddering with the aftermath of ecstasy, clung close against my chest when I at last released her. "Now I am yours entirely," she sighed. "And you must take me with you."

"Yes, yes, my darling. But first I must think, and find a way." I had capitulated; but in point of fact she was not fully mine as yet, not in the physically irreversible way she seemed to think. And therefore to take her with me would be a hare-brained plan, as she herself must realize soon enough, if the attempt were made. Though she could in time become a vampire-nay, must become one if things went on as they were-she was not a vampire yet. She could not give up normal food, or be immune to cold or heat, or sleep on mold and dust in airless places, or pa.s.s as I do through a hair's breadth c.h.i.n.k.

Nor would my enemies ever be persuaded to leave my trail, once I had taken her.

Most important of all, once she became a vampire our love, though it went on, would be platonic, almost incapable of physical expression. It would then be like incest, and worse, for us to try to suck each other's veins, and she would seek out breathing lovers, as would I... I did not want that, not for a long, long time to come.

Mina, in her temporarily weakened state, had turned back to the bed, and Harker's breathing altered slightly as she sank down beside him. I deepened his slumber somewhat, as I had done for the attendant outside Renfield's door.

And still I wanted with all my soul to carry Mina away with me, although I knew the plan was sheer romantic foolishness.

"Mina," I whispered, "in the eyes of the world you are my enemy's wife. But in both our hearts we know that you are mine."

"Yes, Vlad." Her whisper was small and frightened now.

"And we shall find a way to be together. Come, I will bind us with a further tie."

And, pulling open my clothing above my heart, I drew the sharp nail of my left forefinger across my flesh, deep enough to let the blood well out. "Drink."

Before she drank she murmured that her hands were cold, and I clasped both of them in one of mine-did you think that vampire flesh is always chill? Not so; it can be warming, too. And with my right hand I fondled the back of her strong neck as I raised her to a kneeling position on the bed. She stood higher for a moment, to kiss the scar her husband's shovel stroke had left upon my forehead. And then her lips came down to the level of my heart, and came tenderly against my bleeding wound, and she drank into herself some portion of my life...

Thus you, Mina, my best-beloved one, became flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful winepress...

In that position were we, heedless of all the world, when the door leading from the bedroom to the hall burst in with a sudden crash and Van Helsing, Seward, Morris, and Arthur nearly fell into the room. The professor actually did fall, and so impeded the first onrush of the others.

The two doctors had spent some time in attendance upon Renfield, since the noise of our brawl had drawn attention to his room. Van Helsing and Seward had performed on the spot a hasty trephining operation, which the patient did not long survive-not that the best of surgeons could have saved him then-and from his dying words they learned that I was his killer and had gained access to the house.

The doctors soon roused their male companions in the hunt, and all-except for Harker-quickly armed themselves with the same collection of symbols and rubbish that they had carried on their invasion of my house. They understood in just what room I was likely to be found, and with Renfield's battered corpse before them still chose not to be headlong in their pursuit.

Eventually, no doubt eyeing one another and trying to think of alternative plans, they climbed the stairs.

Outside the Harkers' door we paused. Art and Quincey held back and the latter said: "Should we disturb her?"

"We must," said Van Helsing grimly. "If the door be locked I shall break it in."

"May it not frighten her terribly? It is unusual to break into a lady's room."

Regardless of who might have been terribly frightened, they finally brought themselves to the unusual act. When they hurled their bodies at the door it crashed in quite satisfactorily, and there I was, clasping Mina on the bed.

Taken unawares and at a peak of pa.s.sion, I was prepared to react in a most uncivilized way to this intrusion. Pushing Mina back on the bed, out of harm's way, I turned on them with a loud snarl. The professor, who had just started to regain his feet, fell down again and all the others cowered back.

A whiff of stale garlic came from the crowd of them, standing there in their garlands, foreshadowing malodorous flower children of a much later age. In trembling hands they waved at me their small white envelopes, like supplicants before St. Peter at the gates who think they have the proper admission tickets in their hands but are still a little doubtful all the same.

I admit, this time it was those envelopes that tipped the scales and held me back.

If I had followed my first impulse, and ground their bones to bits within their well-fed skins, or left them lying like so many Renfields in a bright lake of their own blood, it would have been impossible to avoid some further, grievous desecration of the Sacred Host. What else could it be they waved at me?

Infirm though my own faith may often be, and reprehensible my behavior on occasion, I draw the line at desecration of the Sacrament. And, when this reluctance on my part had given me a moment in which to take thought, I found my old objections to ma.s.s violence as valid as they had ever been. It must eventually array the overwhelming force of mult.i.tudes against me and bring down great sorrow and travail on Mina's head as well. That quick-witted girl was lying back now on the bed, with eyes closed as if she had been stunned...

Seward records that at this point he and his friends advanced, lifting their crucifixes, whilst it was the evil count who cowered back. To one unacquainted with mirrors it is always helpful to have the objective evaluation of others regarding little details of personal appearance, for example: The h.e.l.lish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into his face. His eyes flamed red with devilish pa.s.sion; the great nostrils of his white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge; and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, clamped together like those of a wild beast.

A moon-covering cloud momentarily plunged the room into full darkness and I bent down to whisper into Mina's ear: "Say that I took you by force; adieu for now."

And before the moon had brightened again I was gone, unseen out into the hall.

Scarcely had I left the room before she emitted the most bloodcurdling scream, so that even in mist-form I started with alarm, and came near going back to rescue her, should Van Helsing have his stake point already at her breast. I realized in time, however, that the outcry had been calculated for effect, and hurried on my way.

My path led down to Seward's study. Mina had mentioned to me in an earlier talk that the hunters' records of their search-diaries, journals, and so on-were now kept mostly in that room, and it seemed to me wise to stop there and feed the fireplace such of their papers as I could quickly find. This I did, piling on also in the flames as many of the wax cylinders from Seward's phonograph as came to hand. All burned, but it was largely wasted effort on my part, for by this time most of their records existed elsewhere in duplicate, ironically as a consequence of Mina's stenographic service.

I was not interrupted in the study nor confronted by my foe on my way out of the house afterward. Arthur and Quincey were the first to come downstairs in pursuit, and even they were not all that quick about it. Whilst making my departure in bat- form I observed young Quincey in the shadow of a yew tree, observing me; this time he did not shoot. Turning my back on Carfax, I flapped on toward the city to the west, hurrying from the first presagings of the dawn that marked the sky behind me.I could not win a war against all England but neither did I intend to give up, now that I had found her, the woman for whom my heart had yearned for centuries.

Subterfuge, and not brute strength, must carry the day if Mina and I were to survive and continue to enjoy each other's love.

TRACK SIX.

Mina of course was hounded for hours with questions, and although-or because- they were agonizingly sympathetic questions they were excruciatingly hard for her to face. She of course continued in her role of helpless victim of a vampire, I believe as much as to spare her husband as to save herself. As she told me later, the men all regarded even the victim's situation as such a horrible one that she dared not try to imagine their reaction if her true position as my lover were made known to them.

The men came and went from her side, making preparations to carry on the hunt, but at first Jonathan was with her continually, seeming to turn old and gray before her eyes. Also steadily at her side was Van Helsing, his usual domineering self, although more silent and watchful of her than was his wont. She sat or reclined-if she tried to get up and walk about one of the men would make her sit again-and told and retold her story.

She told them of waking from deep sleep to find beside her connubial bed "a tall, thin man, dressed all in black." She was quick to recognize: the waxen face... the parted red lips, with the white teeth showing between... I knew, too, the red scar on his forehead where Jonathan had struck him... I would have screamed out, only that I was paralyzed. In the pause he spoke in a sort of keen, cutting whisper, pointing to Jonathan: "Silence! If you make a sound I shall take him and dash out his brains before your very eyes." I was appalled and too bewildered to do or say anything. With a mocking smile he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so, "First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!" I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is part of the horrible curse that such is, when his touch is on his victim... it seemed that a long time must have pa.s.sed before he took his foul, awful, sneering mouth away. I saw it drip with the fresh blood!

To drink fresh blood from two small punctures on a living throat is difficult enough without trying to sneer at the same time; but Mina was giving her audience precisely what they wanted to hear, and none raised an awkward question. In her romance the evil count, once having imbibed his fill, announced that his fair victim was to be punished for what she had done to aid his enemies. To this end he forced her to taste his own blood; this was the tableau the men had witnessed on breaking down the bedroom door, and an explanation of it was naturally required.

After they had spent a good part of the morning with their questions, and with exchanging over her head silent looks of horror that she found harder to bear even than the questioning, they left her alone in her bedroom for a little time, to rest, as they said, and to ponder what might be her fate. She could already picture Van Helsing coming in with his black bag, which was long enough to carry a yard-long wooden stake.

Gray, trembling Jonathan soon looked in on her, but he could scarcely find a word of comfort for her. And sometimes he looked at his wife as if she were a stranger on that terrible morning. And soon he was gone again, to sit in on the councils of the other men.

And then my darling Mina, to whom I now seemed at moments no more than the phantasm produced by a fevered brain, was left alone in truth. Throughout the long, slow hours, marked by the heavy ticking of a clock that seemed to signal some approaching doom, Van Helsing would look in on her at intervals and murmur something that he no doubt meant to be soothing and probe her eyes with his that seemed so bright and wise.

Poor child! She told me later, sobbing, how during that endless day she became more than half convinced, in a way at once delicious and terrible, that she was d.a.m.ned, as are those who frequent the Black Ma.s.s and the Coven.

It seemed to her late in the day, but was really no more than normal breakfast- time when they came to call her to join their conferences-for some reason the men had decided that now nothing, "no matter how painful," must be kept from her.

Harker, when this formal council got underway, urged an immediate raid upon my house in Piccadilly, where, as they had learned, nine of my earth boxes had recently been transferred. Others agreed with Jonathan; it seemed to all that this house, because of its central location in the metropolis, was the most probable site for my new headquarters.

"We are losing time," Jonathan urged. "The count may come to Piccadilly sooner than we think."

"Not so," said Van Helsing, holding up his hands. "But why?"

"Do you forget," he said, with actually a smile, "that last night he banqueted heavily, and will sleep late?"

Mina, as she later told me, was left totally at a loss for enacting an innocent maiden's proper response to a remark so supremely churlish. She came near speaking out after all, to defend me as an honorable gentleman; but wisely settled for covering her face with her hands, shuddering and moaning in a style that could not fail to draw sympathy.

Seward records of Van Helsing that "when it struck him what he had said, he was horrified at his thoughtlessness and tried to comfort her." But it is my opinion that the remark was a test, uttered callously and deliberately by the professor, that he might discover from her reaction whether her a.s.sociation with me had been in any way voluntary.

He may have had a similar test in mind a short time later, when in a purported effort to "guard" Mina against further evil influences he approached her solemnly and touched to her forehead a "piece of sacred wafer in the name of the Father, and the Son, and-"

She screamed, this time in authentic pain. Harker records that the host "had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal."

I have in my time seen the effects on human flesh of divers metal objects at a wide range of temperatures, and I count this claim as something of an exaggeration. Still, I am sure that Mina felt real pain, and certainly a blistered and unhealing wound.

Today I suppose it would be called a psychosomatic effect. Any good hypnotist working with a good subject can achieve a similar result. Van Helsing certainly had the forceful personality required to hypnotize; and his questioning and that of the other men must have brought forward all the subconscious guilt and fear that Mina was experiencing as a result of pa.s.sionate embraces with a man who was not her husband.

In fact I had not "banqueted heavily"-the bliss between lovers has little to do with fluid volumes-nor was I sleeping late. Dimly and at a distance I felt Mina's pain as she was scarred, and raised my head and growled, earth crumbling from my fingernails, but there was nothing I could do to help her then. At that moment I was in my Piccadilly house, even as Harker had surmised. Frozen in man-form for the hours of daylight, I was at work in the backyard, prizing up some of the flagstone pavement with my fingers, and exchanging good London earth for Transylvanian so as to make myself another secret resting place. I could work in daylight as the yard was quite secure from observation, there being only windowless walls in sight except for the rear of my own house. Ah, it grieved me to give up that dwelling! From its upper windows I loved to look over the trees of Green Park, to Buckingham Palace less than half a mile away-and I did not mean to give it up entirely.

The men who were gathered round Mina when she was branded looked on with a mixture of pity, horror, and disbelief. But I am compelled to give Jonathan Harker his due. It was on this day that he wrote: To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.

Of course if the semantic bludgeons hideous and ghastly are omitted from this pa.s.sage it may provoke the thoughtful hearer to a quite different evaluation of the matter.

Up to this point Carfax had still been available for my use, though my enemies had actually known for three days that it was my base and believed they had the means at hand to deny it to me-G.o.d send my foe such generalship in every war. But on the morning of October third, only an hour or so after Mina's forehead received its mark, Van Helsing acted at last, leading his troops in another invasion of my lands and house. To their disappointment they once more "found no papers, or any signs of use in the house; the great boxes looked just as we had seen them last." Their leader set about to distribute fragments of the Host in all the boxes; in order to deny the vampire his base of operations, he judged it necessary to: sterilize this earth, so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant land for such fell use.

He has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still.

Faith and reason are whipped together from the temple.

My own business in Piccadilly was finished before midday, and I came back by train and cab to Purfleet, walking the last half mile home to Carfax. In a lair lined with my native earth deep-hidden in a thicket on my grounds I rested, needing rest yet still wanting to be near Mina should she suddenly and urgently need help. I rested in the gloom of heavy undergrowth but did not truly sleep; and I heard the hunters when they came to bang about inside my house once more. If I listened attentively I could tell when they opened a box and when they closed its lid down tight again and could pick out their individual coughs and curses as they choked on dust. It was an opportunity to seek the further confrontation with them required by the plan that I had formed; but Mina did not know that plan as yet and I considered that her full cooperation would be vital.

After a while I heard the vandals leave, driving away on the road that fronted Carfax rather than going back to the asylum. I rested a little more, then walked out onto my overgrown lawn before my house, from which vantage point the upper front of the asylum, where Mina's windows were, was visible. In the hazy autumn daylight of England, mild and cloudy to the eyes of breathing men but enervating desert glare to me, I sought, as some weary traveler might seek the sight of an oasis, a glimpse of my beloved-and behold! To my great joy I saw her come and stand there in a window, waving, beckoning to me.

In one moment I was running toward the wall that separated our grounds, and in another I had leapt lithely up and over it. Intervening trees on the asylum grounds now kept me from seeing Mina's window. I was working my way toward the building, taking care not to be seen by others, when with a leap of my heart I beheld Mina's st.u.r.dy figure come running gracefully toward me through the trees. It might have been impossible for me to have entered the asylum in the daylight, forbidden to change forms, without some servant observing me. But Mina could stroll out into the grounds without attracting any particular attention, and she had done so.

After our first quick, tight embrace I held her at arm's length. "Mina, my dear one, it is a joy unutterable to see you... how is it with you now?" I was gazing with concern at the cruel mark that marred the whiteness of her forehead.

"You may see how I am," she replied, taking note of the direction of my gaze.

There was a tremor in her voice but yet the words were clear and brave. "I have looked in the gla.s.s at the scar you wonder at, and have seen that it is nearly a mirror image of your own. For good or ill, it seems that I have in truth been delivered into your possession. Oh, Vlad, what is my life to be?"

"This," I answered, and gathered her, as willing as ever before, into my arms.

Again we exchanged blood, there in the deep shadows underneath the trees. This time I took but little, so as not to weaken her.

"But," I added firmly, holding her at arm's length once again, "because I truly love you, I do not want to take you into my land now."

"To your land? You are going to leave England?" I thought I detected the smallest undercurrent of relief in her demeanor.

"Mina, my princess, my land is the country of the vampire. It exists here in England as well as abroad, but it is different from any country you have ever known.

And were I to bring you there, those men would inevitably pursue us, and never rest until they had destroyed us both. Do you think you would be spared because they love you now, or say they do? Remember Lucy's fate."

Mina shuddered, and raised one hand so that its fingers almost touched her scar.

"I know I would not be spared." And suddenly she poured out in some detail the story of her terrible morning: the questions and the isolation, Van Helsing's suddenly pressing the Host against her skin, the conviction that followed at once amongst them all, that she had been contaminated. "Vlad, does this mark truly mean that you are a fiend from h.e.l.l, and I am d.a.m.ned? When you hold me I feel no sense of evil force, but rather joy."

I shook my head. "You are not evil, love." I had seen something of mesmerism before, had seen folk paralyzed or blinded, and blisters raised on unharmed skin, by nothing but the power of the mind. "Have you a crucifix about your neck, or anywhere upon your person?"

She recoiled slightly. "Oh, no. After this branding I would not dare to try to touch one."

I looked about me, found a dry branch on the ground, picked it up, and snapped it into two pieces, one a little longer than the other. These I held up in the form of the crux immissa, the fingers of my right hand clenched about the joining. "Touch it," I urged her.

Mina put forth her hand, then hesitated. "I... I dare not try," she breathed. "The pain was terrible."

"Touch it! If I can hold a cross, what have you to fear?"