Where was I? Yes, describing my first evening at Carfax. A memorable night. Eagerly I toured the vast, deserted, crumbling house, talking now and then to rats, and then I explored the surrounding wooded acreage. Also I remembered to unpack from its nest of mold and earth my traveling bag with its freight of money and new clothes. The latter I hung up where they might stay free of damp and remain in a presentable condition until I should have occasion to try them in society. What foolish thoughts I doted on…
During the centuries of my existence it has become my firm conviction that they are right who maintain the nonexistence, in a strict sense, of such a thing as sheer coincidence. Yes, I nursed foolish thoughts. How could I have known that Carfax, purchased by myself from a thousand miles away, adjoined a lunatic asylum governed by a man, Dr. John Seward, who had recently, though unsuccessfully, proposed marriage to my slender, passionate blonde of the churchyard and windowsill? And this fact is not the only, nor perhaps the most remarkable, link in the chain of "coincidence"-for want of a better term-that bound my fate so inextricably with those of Harker, Mina, Lucy, Van Helsing, and the rest. Who could have guessed that the sturdy young woman who had come to succor Lucy in the Whitby churchyard was in fact the fiancee, and would soon be the bride, of young Harker, whom I had left behind me in Castle Dracula? He at that very moment was tossing deliriously with what was then called brain fever, in a hospital bed in Budapest, unidentifiable by the good sisters who had him in their care. After climbing down the castle wall with a pocketful of stolen gold, he made his way somehow to the railway station at Klausenberg, where he had rushed in shouting incoherently for a ticket home. Employees in the station, "seeing from his violent demeanor that he was English," hastened to accept most of his money and put him on a train going in the proper direction. He got only to Budapest before he had to be hospitalized for what would now be called a nervous breakdown.
I can but relate these intertwined events as they occurred, or as they appeared from my own viewpoint as they were happening. Some intellect more powerful than my own may find a thread or threads of natural causation running through and uniting them all; I can find no sensible explanation for these wild chains of "coincidence" without appealing to causes that are above and beyond nature as she is commonly understood.
But to return again to Carfax, on my first night. I was not long in being disabused of the idea of the security, safety, and relative isolation of my new estate. Shortly after two in the morning, as I stood gazing fondly into the small lake that graced my grounds, the fun began. It started with a scrambling upon the western side of the high stone wall that completely surrounded Carfax, as of someone trying to climb over. What can this be? I thought, and hurried back inside my dusty, ruined chapel, where my precious boxes had been deposited and were yet in such vulnerable concentration. To guard them was imperative.
I heard a single breathing being climb the wall and drop onto my ground uninvited. The hesitant quickness of the intruder's movements made me think of a fugitive, seeking shelter; but I could not be sure.
The general silence of the night was helpful to my ears, this far from the bustle of the central city. Whilst my visitor was still a hundred paces off I could hear him well enough to be sure he was a man, and not a woman or a child. Motionless and noiseless as a basking lizard myself-more so, for lizards have lungs that work-I waited in the rat-trodden dust of my chapel, listening. The feet of the approaching man seemed to be bare, and he wore some kind of a loose garment that swished about him as he walked. Now he was right outside the chapel wall, and he suddenly threw himself down there and began snuffling and groveling in the most bestial style. With a feeling of sinking dismay it came to me that he might be nosferatu himself. Was England aswarm already with such as I, and had Harker through some insane delicacy omitted to let me know? Then indeed were my hopes likely to be doomed. It was with some relief I noted that this man continually breathed.
Now the mysterious one had crept along to the iron-bound oak doors that closed the chapel, and now he strained what was evidently a powerful pair of arms to open them, so that the hinges creaked. But the doors held.
"Master, master!" he hissed then, lips close to the door. It was a whispered entreaty that was fierce and managed to be slavish at the same time. "Master, grant me lives, many lives!"
What Anglo-Saxon idiom of speech is this? I pondered, even as he went on: "Insects I have now, master, to devour by the scores and hundreds, and animals I may obtain… but I need the lives of people, master! Men, and children, and women, especially women. Women!" He made a sound between a gurgle and a laugh. "I must have them, master, and you must grant them to me!"
He went on for what seemed like many minutes in the same vein, whilst I stood just inside the door, no more than an arm's length away, like a priest in some mad confessional. With hands pressed to my temples I tried to think. Of one thing only could I be sure: this man knew that I was there, knew at any rate that some being beyond the ordinary was inside the chapel, and he had come to offer me a kind of self-serving worship. My secure anonymity, upon which I had just been congratulating myself, and toward which I had spent so much coin and effort, was already nonexistent.
Even as I stood there at a loss I heard the footsteps of others, four or five more men, climbing the wall in the area where my first visitor had climbed. In something like despair I at first visualized a whole troop of worshipers, with this their gibbering high priest who had found the shrine and was going to lead them in their litanies: "Women… master… lives… master… women…"
But instead of the madman's acolytes it was of course his keepers who were coming after him, Seward and three or four burly attendants the doctor had wisely brought along. Only at this point did I remember Harker's casual mention of the asylum adjoining my grounds, and begin to grasp the true state of affairs.
Outside, the newcomers rapidly came closer. They fanned out into a semicircle centered on the man who knelt at my chapel door, and continued a methodical advance.
Meanwhile he continued to pour forth his pleas. "I am here to do your bidding, master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshiped you long and afar off." To this day I am not certain whether this last statement was a lie meant to be ingratiating, a delusion generated in the sick man's brain, or actually the truth. Certainly Renfield-which was his name, as I later learned; a madman nearly sixty years of age, but of prodigious strength, and from a noble family-certainly, I say, Renfield was somehow aware of my presence as soon as I arrived at Carfax, and was subsequently able to detect my comings and goings there without leaving his own cell or room at the asylum.
He went on, almost slavering, in a repulsive hissing voice: "Now that you are here, I await your commands, and you will not pass me by, will you, in your distribution of good things?"
Behind and round him the other men were steadily closing in. Now I heard for the first time the voice of Seward, young, confident, and masterfuclass="underline" "Renfield, time to come back with us now, there's a good chap."
And another, wheedling, in accents of the lower class: "Come on now, ducky. Easy does it… whup!"
Masterful words or sweet ones would not do the trick for them that night. Though they were four or five to one, the struggle was not easy. Renfield's was no ordinary strength, as I discovered later for myself. Later also I read of how he had actually torn a window and its casing from the wall of his cell in making his escape that night. Seward and his men at length subdued him, and packed him away, bound like some wild animal to be bundled back over the wall; and stillness and the night were mine once more. But from the noise of that struggle I was well able to believe that, as Seward wrote of his patient on that very night: "He means murder in every turn and movement."