Free Slave Of Dracula by Barbara Hambly Page A

coffin.
    NO!!!
    Renfield tried to twist his mind away as he became aware of that grinning, ironic, ancient thought

watching him, too. Enjoy-ing his pity for the sad-faced mother in her stylish walking-dress, deriving

wicked amusement from his fears for that too-fragile, too-pale fair-haired girl. Renfield tried to dream

something else, tried to think of something else: great pools and smears of trea-cle, spread aII over the

floor of his cell, and huge black horseflies roaring through the window to become mired in them, waiting

smilingly for his hand.
    Not the sparse and aenemic insects of England at all, but the meaty gargantuan fauna of India. White

ants swarming forth from wood like trails of animate milk, rice-beetles that would blunder and blunder at

the same wall without the wits to go around. Those were insects indeed!
    He tried to force himself to see them, to force himself to see the yellow buildings of Calcutta, the
    market-places aswarm with brown half-naked farmers, with Brahmins in their golden robes und shy-eyed

farm-girls and great white cows making their way through the dung and the dirt and the crowds. Tried to

will himself back to that place, where life dripped with the scents of clar-ified butter and spices and the

painted idols stared out from every street-corner and door.
    But it was as if he moved his eyes and the vision dissolved And he was back in that cool neat

train-platform in England, with the smell of the green fields in his nostrils and the taste of the salt sea

near-by, and Mina clasping the older woman’s hands saying, “There’s no way I can ever repay your

kindness in buy-ing me my tickets, Mrs. Westenra, and giving me money for the journey. But believe me,

I shall pay you back.”
    A smile twitched the wrinkled gray lips and Mrs. Westenra laid a loving hand on Mina’s cheek. “My

dear child, do you imagine it’s money out of my pocket? By the time you come back, Lucy will be the

daughter-in-law of Lord Godalming, and I shall have gotten the money out of her lord.”
    They all laughed merrily at that, as the conductor began to drone his call for travelers to board; in the

shadows at the back of the platform, Renfield could see the cloaked shadow of the Traveler, red eyes

glinting, white teeth glinting as he smiled.
    No!
    “We’ll take your trunk down to London the day after to-morrow. You must bring Jonathan to

Hillingham the very mo-ment he’s well enough to travel. Darling . . .”
    “Darling!”
    The girls embraced on the steps of the train, the bright silks and laces of the one like the most fragile of

flowers against the earthy brown linen of the other. Somewhere in his mind Renfield felt the gloating

greed, the amused pleasure, of the watching Traveler and he began to thrash in his dreaming, to scream,

Let her alone! Let her alone, you devil!
    He knew the girls would never meet again.
    The roaring of flies filled his mind, the taste of them in his mouth. A thousand flies, a million, all mired in

those sweet pools of treacle and all smiling up at him with Lucy Westenra’s face.
    ***
    He is hunting her. He is waiting for her to come.
    In those cool hours of release while the moon flooded Rush-brook’s lawns with wan silver, Renfield

tried to tell himself that he knew nothing of the girl Lucy. She might be stuck-up and cruel, as calculating

as her mother. She was, after all, about to marry a lord, and that sort of thing surely didn’t happen by

ac-cident. But this he could not believe. During the course of his second day of laudanum-induced

visions, of the gloating, grin-ning presence of the Traveler in his mind, he glimpsed Lucy and her mother in

the rock-walled garden of what seemed to be a small summer cottage, having tea with a golden young

Apollo in Bond Street tailoring. Saw with what exquisite care and tact the girl dealt with her mother,

fetching and carrying for her and laughingly denying that she did so out of worry.
    “Nonsense, darling.