Renfield Read online

  It’s spring and the air here is scented with honeysuckle, the sweetness of England for which I so longed among the heavy perfumes of foreign lands. But these are not the flowers you tended so carefully, nor the blossoms that cheered me nightly when I returned home from the City. Without you all things have lost their savor.

  Please consider visiting next week-end, or the one thereafter. I will believe that you are arriving soon, bringing with you everything that gives color and freshness to the dawn, and rest and comfort to the twilight. And—I need not say this, I’m certain—please tell our precious Vixie that she will always be the joy in my life wherever I go, howsoever we are separated, and that she (and you, my dear Catherine) will go with me everywhere, always.

  Please believe me,

  Forever your most loving husband,

  R. M. Renfield

  CHAPTER TWO

  A slanted coign of roof sheltered the rear door of the Staff wing of Rushbrook House. Beyond it, rain that had started during the soup course pattered sadly in the darkness. Rushbrook House stood a few miles from the last houses of Purfleet, and beyond the wall of the extensive grounds, the Thames marshes lay as they had lain since time immemorial. Even the grounds, though planted with trees and crossed by two or three drainage canals discreetly disguised as ornamental brooks, tended to squishy muckiness and standing pools in the slightest rain.

  “How long ago did he escape?” Seward shrank in spite of himself from the idea of a chase through the morass in his single presentable evening-suit.

  “Just now, sir, when Hardy was takin’ him his supper.” Langmore had acquired a lantern in one hand, a strait-jacket rolled up under the other arm. The patient Renfield, though gray-haired, stood over six feet tall and was built like an oak-tree.

  “Bashed me up against the wall like I was a kid, sir,” added Hardy, stepping out the door behind Seward. He was easily Renfield’s size, towering over Seward’s five-feet-ten-inch slightness. The side of his face was purpling where he’d been struck. “And him so quiet and gentlemanly-like.” He shrugged into an oilskin mac.

  “Like I’s tellin’ you, Hardy.” Langmore shook his grizzled head. “It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch. Sly, they is.” He glanced at Seward, like a soldier waiting for his captain to lead him to battle.

  Seward took a deep breath. “Check along the wall by the road first,” he said. “Then check the east wall. That’s the lowest, and in the worst repair. If he goes over there, he’ll just find himself in the grounds of Carfax. Thank God the place is deserted, and the house well-locked. Blow your whistles if you need assistance.”

  The two burly night attendants looked momentarily nonplussed as it sank in that Seward wasn’t going to go with them, then took a second look at their employer’s dinner-jacket and polished shoes, and nodded, belatedly putting two and two together. Seward supposed, as they faded into the utter darkness beyond the thin pools of gas-light from Rushbrook’s windows, that if they had even average intelligence, they would have been able to find employment as something other than hired strongmen at a madhouse.

  Yet having dispatched them to an adventure he considered himself too well-dressed to participate in, Seward found himself unable to simply return to the house. It was his duty to make sure Renfield got back to his room in safety. He had branded himself already in his own eyes as a shirker by staying here on the relatively dry rear step. He could not further betray his trust by settling down to a comfortable dinner with the girl he loved while one of his patients was loose—the more so because he was fairly certain that if Renfield wasn’t found, neither Langmore nor Hardy would interrupt him at his dinner a second time.

  Damn it. Seward fumbled in his pocket for his cigarette case. Curious, how the mad always had such fiendish timing in their outbursts. As if they could tell which were the most important events in the lives of those around them, and waited for the most utterly disruptive moment to make their move.

  Could they? he wondered. Did they have an extra sensitivity, an extra faculty of observation? He shivered, for the night was raw and bitterly cold. Everyone speaks of the connection between madness and artistic talent—do both states share roots in a greater capacity for perception of detail? He would, he reflected, have to write to his old teacher in Amsterdam about the matter. Van Helsing was always fascinated by such connections.

  His heart warmed a little at the thought of the sturdy old Dutchman, a pleasant recollection washed away entirely by a gust of wind that blew rain over him, soaking the shoulders of his jacket.

  So he might as well have gone out running through the mire after all.

  Good God, what horrors was Hennessey telling Miss Westenra and her mother in his absence?

  Lanterns flashed dimly through the trees, jogging up and down as if the men were running. They vanished then, but Seward’s jaw tightened. Along the eastern wall, then, which being built of large stones rather than bricks made it far easier to climb. He strained his ears for the sound of the whistles. If Renfield got over the dilapidated barrier that divided Rushbrook’s park from that of Carfax, the long-neglected estate immediately to the east, it could easily take them the rest of the night to locate him. Like Rushbrook, Carfax was an enormous house, but it was infinitely older and falling into ruin. When first he’d come to Rushbrook, Seward had gone over the wall himself and ascertained that the old house and its attendant chapel were at least tightly locked. An escapee would have had a hard time going to earth inside. But its park was a jungle, nearly twenty acres of overgrown groves and woods, mired with standing pools around a small lake.

  Damn, thought Seward again. Damn, damn, damn…

  A fine future I have to offer poor Miss Westenra. What made me ever think she’d consider my offer? He recalled his own inner smile when, a few days ago, his friend Quincey Morris had spoken to him of his own adoration for the delicate blonde girl. Quincey was a stringy, awkward-handed Texan whom Seward and the Honorable Arthur had met during their adventurous year of travel in the company of the Honorable Uncle Harry. Arthur had invited Quincey to spend a season in London with him, and though the Texan’s speech still bore the twang of the American plains, his manners were meticulously good and his self-made fortune—in land, cattle, and Colorado gold—had made him marginally acceptable to a certain segment of the more impoverished Society mamas.

  Though Seward liked Quincey enormously, he had never for a moment considered him genuine competition for Lucy Westenra’s hand. He couldn’t imagine that lively, sociable girl agreeing to go live in a ranch-house in San Antonio, be it never so spacious and comfortable. The memory of his own patronizing attitude sliced him now like a flaming whip: And you think she would be any more likely to revel in “cozy” quarters in Rushbrook House, listening to the screaming of the mad on still nights?

  But the flare of hope was like a little white flame somewhere behind his sternum. She might…

  And the memory of the scent of her hair, and the thoughtful pucker between those delicate brows, warmed him again. She was an exceptional girl. He would assure her that this situation was only temporary—

  Darkness thickened in the darkness, first a bumbling outline, then a Laocoön that resolved itself into three inter-tangled shapes, Renfield’s bowed gray head and enormous shoulders seeming to dominate the attendants who walked on either side. All three were covered with-mud. The lanterns had gone out. Renfield was straitjacketed and there was blood on Langmore’s lined face, but there was no suggestion of violence now, only a kind of sly petulance in Renfield’s eyes as he was pushed into the reflected light near the house.

  “I’m not trouble,” he muttered, twisting his head to look down at Langmore. “I’m not trouble to anyone.”

  “If you’re not trouble, mate, I’d like to see what is,” retorted the little attendant. “But you come along quiet, and we’ll go easy with you this time. Won’t even put you on the Swing, will we, Hardy?”

  Renfield flinched at the mention of the Swing, something Se
ward noticed with annoyance. Hennessey swore by the Swing, claiming that the motion of being swooped up and down blindfolded for hours calmed the patients’ minds. In the six months he’d been Superintendent, it had not escaped Seward that for all Hennessey’s claims of therapeutic value, his colleague had only to threaten its use for most patients to calm down immediately, in terror at the nausea and disorientation the “calming” device produced.

  “We’ll be kind to you, oh, yes,” agreed Hardy, with a bad-tempered look. “First one’s free, innit?”

  “I’m not the one you should be looking for,” added Renfield, turning his head over his shoulder to speak to the bigger attendant. “I’m not the one.”

  “He did come along quiet, once we’d both laid hold on him, sor.” Langmore wiped the raindrops from his eyes to look at Seward. “Gave us a nasty run, though. You want him in a crib for the rest of the night?”

  Seward, watching Renfield’s face, again saw the twitch of dread at mention of being locked into what was to all intents and purposes a latticework metal coffin, barely the depth of a man’s breast or the width of his shoulders. Unable to move, unable to turn over, unable even to reach one arm across to scratch an itch…

  More humane than chaining, of course, but in Seward’s opinion, not much more. All very well to go on about moral treatment, lad, Hennessey had said patronizingly, when Seward had begun making changes in the House’s patient routines. You just see how your “moral treatment” answers when you’ve got some foaming mooncalf coming at you swinging his bed round his head like a club. You’ll be putting those wall-rings back into the cells quick enough.

  He pushed the soaked hair out of his eyes. “No, take him to his room and strap him to his cot. I’ll be along in a moment and give him some chloral hydrate. He should sleep through ’til morning. Once you’ve done that, please go on back to the dining-room. I’m sure Simmons and Mr. Blaine need your help.”

  Langmore’s grin was wry. “Like nuthin’ never happened, sor.”

  “Exactly.” Seward shivered with the cold, and crushed out his cigarette on the wet stone of the doorstep as he turned back to his recaptured patient. Standing on the step, he was at eye level with the bigger man. Dark blue eyes, Seward noted again, under an almost anthropoid shelf of brow. Though Renfield’s hair was graying, his heavy eyebrows were still nearly black. “Mr. Renfield, your family—and you yourself—have been assured that there’s nothing to fear from me or from anyone else at Rushbrook House. Why did you flee?”

  Under the dripping brows, the muck-plastered hair, the dark blue gaze was calm and altogether sane. “My question,” Renfield replied, “is, Why do you not?”

  Lucy got quickly to her feet as Seward came back into the dining-room, and would have crossed to him in the pantry doorway had not her mother halted her with a glare. The girl hesitated, napkin still in hand, then asked, “Is everything all right? Did they find the poor man?”

  “’Course they did, acushla.” Dr. Hennessey jovially lifted his glass to Seward in a mock toast. “Told you they would. That Langmore has a nose on him like a bloodhound. And he’s a good tracker besides!” And he relapsed into gales of inebriated chortles of appreciation at his own jest.

  Across the curdled remains of the fish course, which had not been removed in the nearly seventy-five minutes that had elapsed since Langmore’s hesitant summons, Mrs. Westenra regarded Seward with a gaze like frozen slag.

  “My dear Mrs. Westenra!” Seward cried, identifying the immediate priority in the situation, “I am most terribly sorry! I instructed Simmons to carry on in my absence. I cannot imagine what happened…” He held Lucy’s chair for her as she re-seated herself. “Yes, Miss Westenra, to answer your question, the patient was brought back safely and unhurt. I’ve just come now from giving him a sedative injection…”

  And changing into gray tweeds that looked hopelessly out of place next to Hennessey’s rumpled and straining dinner clothes, and the expensive silks of the two ladies.

  “You don’t actually let your patients roam loose about the house, as Dr. Hennessey said?” Lucy looked timidly up over her shoulder at Seward. “Do you?” To her left, Hennessey grinned drunkenly and winked.

  When Langmore and Simmons brought in the Hindle Wakes—a German specialty slightly beyond Cook’s skills—the chicken was stone cold and the lemon-cream sauce had separated.

  The rest of the dinner proceeded in silence.

  “I told you how it would be, Lucy.” Seward heard Mrs. Westenra’s voice as their carriage pulled away. “I doubt that even that absurd American would have subjected you to…”

  Rain, darkness, and the sloppy squish of hooves and wheels obliterated the rest. Seward quietly closed the door, made his night rounds of the thirty-six lost souls under his charge—most of them sleeping heavily under the calming magic of laudanum, chloral hydrate, or tincture of Cannabis indica—then returned to his room, to dictate the account of Renfield’s escape and re-capture into the phonographic daybook. That chore accomplished, the entire fiasco of the dinner-party began to unfurl itself, like infinitely repeating performances of a bad play, across his mind. Of course there had been no question of asking Lucy’s mother for her daughter’s hand after deserting her to Hennessey’s company.

  I’ll be in London Tuesday, he told himself. I shall send a note to their house on Chatham Street, call on them. They aren’t leaving for Whitby until next week. There is still time to speak to her, still time to ask her—

  Plans for the future produced more anxiety, if anything, than a review of the immediate past. At last, Seward went downstairs to the dark dispensary, made up an injection of chloral hydrate for himself, and returning to his room, joined Renfield and the others in the relief of oblivion and dreams.

  Renfield felt the cold, heard the howling of the wolves long before the rest of the dream came into focus.

  He shivered. He had always hated cold, always hated the bleak chill of London, the gray dreary wintertides in Nottingham after the thick heat and riotous color of India. Since his return from half a lifetime in the East, the sounds of England had seemed harsh to him, like dropped money clanking on stone. Clattering carriages, rattling shoe-heels, nattering nasal voices, after the slower rhythms, the multifarious voices of bird-calls, the eternal hum of insects.

  His dream was a dream of silence.

  The silence of the dead.

  It was raining there, too, a bitter whisper against stone walls. Renfield saw firelight, like handfuls of jewels, nearly lost in an immense hearth whose overmantel was supported by carved grotesques, wolf-faces whose shadow-cloaked grins mocked the young man imprisoned in that unknown room. Renfield knew he was a prisoner because he saw him try the door, not once but many times—saw him pace like a caged animal, as he himself, Renfield reflected, had paced for days now in his cell. When the young man came near the hearth, he saw his face, hollow and haunted under a tumbled shock of dark hair.

  Saw his breath, a whisper of flame-dyed smoke when he walked more than a stride or two from the fire.

  Saw him cross to the window and jerk aside the velvet curtains, revealing an ill-fitting casement of tiny panes, and beyond it—when he pulled it impatiently open—bars.

  The young man struck the wall with the hammer of his fist, once, twice, the tired motion of a man who has pounded that wall, who has confronted those bars, for weeks.

  Renfield watched dispassionately, knowing what it was to pound a wall.

  Firelight leaking through the window sparkled on shimmering rain, like an infinity of gold and blood. The rain fell through fog, and in the darkness the fog coalesced, until it seemed to Renfield that the forms of three women hung in the air outside the window, their pale dresses and their long hair drifting about them like seaweed beneath the sea. The young man at the window saw them—Renfield heard the intake of his breath—but said nothing. Only gazed, like a man hypnotized or under a spell.

  It seemed to Renfield that the eyes of all three gleamed red in
the darkness, catching the firelight like the eyes of rats.

  Two were dark, the third, luminously fair. They stretched out their arms to the prisoner, and it was the fair one who spoke, in a voice like crystal tapped with a silver spoon. “Jonathan,” she said. “Jonathan, let me come to you,” and Renfield noted with interest that the language she spoke was the sweetly musical German of the south.

  He thought wonderingly, They are the Valkyries, just as in the opera. And in his heart the music of Wagner, god-genius of Bayreuth, stirred like the breathing of the Earth.

  They are the Choosers of the Slain. The ones who lay their hands upon the men who will die.

  “I am called Nomie, Jonathan. You have only to wish it, and I will come.”

  The man Jonathan stood now so close to the bars that his face pressed against them, his hands clutching the wet iron. He was trembling with terror and desire. “I wish it,” he murmured. “Come.”

  A noise, like the crashing of a cannon, boomed and echoed through Renfield’s dream. Jonathan fell back a pace from the window but did not—maybe could not—turn around to see what might have been behind him, and Renfield, too, saw only the three women—Valkyrie, Graces, goddesses, or the fate-weaving Norns—hanging in the whispering dark. One of the dark-haired women screamed a curse in German, and slowly, flesh and hair and garments dislimned once more into lightless mist. Only for a time their red eyes remained, glittering in the night like unholy stars.

  Jonathan staggered, as if waking from some terrible dream, and whirled. Renfield saw then what he saw, that the sound had been the chamber’s door, slammed open with stunning violence against the wall.

  The doorway was empty. Only darkness lay beyond it.