The Dracula Tape

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 passed 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 damned, as are those who frequent the Black Mass 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 association 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 passionate 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 passage 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-God 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 sturdy 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 glass 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 hell, and I am damned? 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?"

"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 crushing 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 Godalming 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 assure 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 Lordship 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, wishing 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, damned 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 hellish 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 glass 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 glass 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 bastards!" 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 God 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 hell I would do it!"

And Mina: "Oh, hush!… 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 ship 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 ship 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 passage 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 ship, 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 ashore. 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 ship 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 assurances 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 pronounced 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 ship… Tally Ho!… Now more than ever we must find him if we have to follow him to the jaws of hell!

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 ship. 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 appetite 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 damned 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 embarrass 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.

Actually my small, furry shape alighted on her bedroom windowsill just as she was packing her husband off to join the other men in their deliberations below. She closed the door of their sitting-room behind him with a sigh of relief, and came tripping gaily into the bedroom. Her face brightened further as she caught sight of the transformed count with bat nose pressed against the pane, impatiently awaiting audience.

She moved at once to open the window for me-that I might avoid the inconvenience of a shape change to get in-but her first glance at the bat-form as it hopped inside was not without an admixture of repugnance. I made haste to swell into human shape as soon as I was well within the room.

"Think of it as a mere disguise," I murmured when we had kissed. "No more than a suit I sometimes wear. But tell me, why such a joyous dance step, fair lady, as that with which you crossed the sitting room just now?"

"Besides the joy of seeing you again," Mina answered, "it was just sheer relief at not having to endure another of their meetings." She told me how she had just anticipated her re-exclusion by their leadership, and sighed as if at the removal of an ill-fitting shoe. "They all sit there, scowling or open-mouthed, listening to Van Helsing rant on about how hideous vampires are, as if that had no connection at all with me. That is, until one of them remembers the mark of Cain upon my forehead, and sneaks a look at it; and then his eyes slide almost guiltily away as soon as they come near to meeting mine. Even-even Jonathan is no longer quite willing to look me steadily in the face. He loves me still, I think, but it is as if-as if he has grown somewhat ashamed of me."

She raised her fingers to the red scar that marred her beauty. "Vlad, speak fully and honestly, as your love for me is full and true. What can be done about this? Is there no way to make it disappear?"

I was now sitting on her bed, my legs crossed, swinging one of a pair of stylish new English boots. I supposed I might possibly have applied some hypnotic powers of my own to rid her of the scar, but it had been my experience with similar hysterical manifestations that if they were suppressed in one form, without the root cause being removed, they were likely to reappear in some new form even more discomfiting.

"Not without considerable risk to you," I answered. "Not at present, anyway. Remember, Van Helsing would probably be gravely suspicious that you were truly turning vampire if the scar, or the small marks on your throat, were to suddenly disappear. But take heart, in time we shall find a way."

"But, Vlad, why should Dr. Van Helsing's touching me with the Host have left this hideous stain for all to see? I still cannot understand; be patient with me. Why must I bear this mark if-if I am not in fact…"

"Unclean and evil? Be assured that you are not. That mark can have come only through Van Helsing's mesmeric power, whether under his deliberate control or not, acting on your body through a part of your own mind that is not conscious."

"But how can a mind that is not conscious act?"

"I do not know how." In that year of 1891 a young doctor named Sigmund Freud was only beginning his researches into hysteria. "But I have seen similar things before. Mina, I myself may be evidence of a superior kind of hypnotic power."

"What do you mean, Vlad?"

"I mean a power basically similar to hypnotism, but carried to an extreme degree, far beyond what Van Helsing or Charcot or any of the regular practitioners of today can hope to accomplish. Surpassing their best efforts-or the best efforts I could consciously make-even as the steam locomotive transcends the power of the boiling tea kettle.

"I should have died of sword wounds, Mina, in the year of Our Lord 1476. My lungs stopped, and my heart, but I feared neither death nor life… do you know the writings of the American, Poe? Or of Joseph Glanville, your own countryman? 'Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only by the weakness of his feeble will.' It was no vampire woman's embrace that made me what I am."

She stared at me so strangely for a little while that I had to smile to reassure her. "But it is frightening, Vlad," was all she said.

"Any human life can frighten the one who lives it," I told her softly, "if he or she will let it do so." Still smiling, I caressed her cheek. "Then simply trust me. To frighten you again is the last thing that I want. In good time both our scars will disappear. Come, now, will you not smile again for me? Ah. That is one ray of bright sunshine that I find most pleasant."

After we had talked of happy matters for a little time I said: "I am very glad to have you with me now. But at the same time I could almost wish you were below at the men's council, that we might be fully informed of all their plans. Is your latest exclusion from their meetings permanent, do you think?"

"Oh, pooh! I can find some way to rejoin them, if you think that there is something truly vital I might learn."

"There are several questions whose answers may be vital to me. For example, when and by what means do they intend to pursue Czarina Catherine? I am sure they mean to do so somehow. And, have they telegraphed ahead of her, to authorities at the Bosporus, say, or perhaps somewhere nearer my homeland, in an attempt to have the box investigated or destroyed? Godalming is influential and they will not be above using bribery to hunt me down."

Mina was now sitting on my knee, rubbing her face against mine, then tilting back her chin so her long throat passed against my lips. "I will try to make certain, of course-ah. But as for telegraphing ahead, I think not. I think they want the satisfaction of destroying you with their own hands."

I held her at arm's length, and spoke with utmost seriousness. "And you had best take care, my sweet, that they never turn on you with the same thought in mind. I have seen things in Van Helsing's eyes, and heard things from his lips… his own wife's not in a madhouse for nothing, in my opinion. Give him any evidence that he can interpret as just cause and he'll be delighted to hammer a stake through your soft heart and watch you jump with every blow. Or, more likely, he'll talk dear Jonathan into doing it for your own good whilst he and the others watch. As he convinced Arthur to send his beloved Lucy on to her reward."

"I have thought about it." But now Mina did not seem especially frightened. She nodded, narrow-eyed, at me and smiled. "There is one almost infallible way by which a poor simple girl like me may turn away strong men from almost any course of action."

I loved her. "And that is?"

Her smile widened. Were her teeth, in truth, a very little sharper now? "Suggest it to them as my own idea, and keep on reminding them that it is mine."

And true to her word, a few days later she got all the men to swear that they would kill her should they ever decide she was so changed toward vampirism that such a move would be best for all concerned. She told me later that whilst she made her moving plea. Van Helsing for once rather sulked in the background. Needless to say, is it not, that the act never came near accomplishment?

She was able to pass on to me also some matters which were meant to be kept secret from her but which she was able to learn without difficulty from a servant who had been sent to arrange for railroad passage.

"They are going overland, Vlad, departing from Charing Cross station for Paris on the morning of October twelfth; in Paris they plan to board the Orient Express. Exactly how far they mean to go by rail, or what are their plans for intercepting you at their destination, I have not yet been able to learn. Oh, what will they do, what will I do to explain my faulty visions when it is discovered that the box is empty?"

"Mina, I have been giving the matter long thought, as you may well imagine. We must face facts. From what you tell me, Jonathan seems more mad than sane with the wish to do me harm, and if that were not enough to keep the others going, there is the professor, who will not let them turn back from the hunt. Nothing but evidence of my death is going to satisfy this crew. That box, when they open it, may not be empty after all."