!Warning: M (16+)-rated themes: Sexual content.
- II -
In A Fantasy
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.
– Lord Byron
He had been watching her for some time now, the lady in white. What a lovely young woman she was! Her petite figure, all clad in pearly lace, whose delicate porcelain features and fiery hair contrasted with her cerulean eyes so perfectly – a beauty he could never touch, never possess. But what most fascinated him was her otherworldly aura which had captivated him since he had first seen her pass by in the cemetery.
He had visited Vanessa Ives's grave back then, when out of the far mist a ghostly woman had appeared, walking – or floating – across the fields. Despite the distance, the apparition had seemed so close to him, like the wavy fabric of her dress could touch his skin any time. Not believing his eyes, he had cautiously approached her. She, however, had vanished in the mist again before he reached her. From this day on he had waited by the cemetery portal whenever he could, and when he finally saw her again, he had, like enchanted, followed her every step.
Today Dr Frankenstein's firstborn creature – now going by the name of John Clare – had been hiding behind the cypresses opposite the compound he knew to be Bethlem Royal Hospital and wondered what the lady in white was doing in an unpleasant place like this. Was she visiting a patient there? A family member? Or her husband? He had never seen her with anybody. She was always walking alone. Alone just like himself.
He was therefore all the more surprised when he witnessed her exiting the building in company of a young man. The ragged appearance of the lank lad did not in the slightest fit her ethereal beauty, but he talked to her, even kissed her hand, then followed her out through the main gate. Curious to find out more about the strange pair, John moved on, remaining in the shadows as he pursued them.
When Dr Jekyll had recovered from what he now considered a state of trance, he found himself sitting on the barber's chair in his laboratory. How had he come to rest here? What had he done in the last hours? His first thought went to his serum. Had he dared to test it on himself? Panic-stricken he sprang from his seat and rolled up his sleeves, checking for puncture marks – nothing. He searched the work bench – the syringe he had prepared for that fly eating lunatic was still lying there, untouched.
Suddenly Henry stopped in his tracks, staring at the blue liquid shimmering through the glass. That insectivorous madman, what was his name again? He could not remember. Why the hell couldn't he remember his name? The chemist reached for the syringe, putting it in his pocket. He would go visit him, surely then he would recall it.
Heading down the corridor he experienced a déjà-vu, certain that he had already walked this way today. To his surprise the door to the nameless man's cell stood ajar and whistling could be heard from inside. Jekyll rushed into the small room, startling the baldheaded janitor, who had just begun mopping the floor.
"My, my, Doctor, ye scared the wits outta me! Why so inna hurry?"
Henry's eyes flickered through the dark and empty cell, then he suddenly grabbed the old man's lapel.
"Where's the patient? That spider eating brat, where is he?!" he demanded angrily, but with an almost terrified undertone to his voice.
"Ye mean Renfield?" the janitor answered, baffled. "But Sir, ye signed his discharge papers yerself only hours ago!"
Jekyll released the employee whereupon he almost fell backwards and over his mop. He had discharged that raving madman?! Why on earth would he do that?! What in all the gods' name had happened? Was he standing here in the heart of his lunatic workplace, going mad himself?
Henry sucked in the foul air, unsuccessfully trying to calm himself. He needed to speak with somebody about this strange event, confidentially of course. He needed to talk to a friend. He needed to contact Victor.
When the moon is on the wave,
And the glow-worm in the grass,
And the meteor on the grave,
And the wisp on the morass;
When the falling stars are shooting,
And the answer'd owls are hooting,
And the silent leaves are still
In the shadow of the hill,
Shall my soul be upon thine,
With a power and with a sign.
Though thy slumber may be deep,
Yet thy spirit shall not sleep,
There are shades which will not vanish,
There are thoughts thou canst not banish;
By a power to thee unknown,
Thou canst never be alone;
Thou art wrapt as with a shroud,
Thou art gathered in a cloud;
And for ever shalt thou dwell
In the spirit of this spell.
– Lord Byron
Renfield lay in a luxurious bed, surrounded by soft silken sheets and pillows. What a contrast this was to the pallet in that damned asylum cell! But the feeling of the fine fabric against his naked skin was by far not the best experience he had at the moment. When he opened his eyes, he beheld her beautiful, slender frame above him. She was sitting on top of him, engarlanded by a flowing, lacy cloud.
Musings about all the different nuances of white crossed his mind, for this was no longer the colour of a saviour angel, but of a proud, radiant bride, not of an ethereal apparition, but of a carnal being. Oh, and how carnal she was! He noticed this as soon as she opened her legs, welcoming him inside her, and then began moving her hips, slowly and pleasurably riding him. Her ginger locks loosely fell to her shoulders like fiery rain, just like the waves of flames her movements sent through his body.
Her half lidded azure eyes almost glowed in the twilight, and she opened her red lips in a soft moan, revealing an even row of teeth. He wanted to seize her pale thighs, her small corseted waist, her perfect, barely lace-covered breasts, but she caught his wrists, pinning him down into the pillows. He did not bother. Completely under her spell he gave up all control, all containment and became one with his bride, his Lady, his Mistress.
He could smell a salty sweetness on her as she leaned down closer to him, the arousing flavour of the many lives she had consumed flowing through her veins. And it seemed she liked his scent, too, for her parted lips now revealed predatory canines. In unison with the rhythm of her breathing the movements of her hips accelerated, making him moan and squirm beneath her in pleasure.
He stared at the ornate ceiling, unfocussed, before his eyes rolled back into his head at the sensation of her soft tongue licking his neck. When her fangs finally pierced his sensitive skin in an exceptionally gentle way, he was close, so close to...
Suddenly a bolt of pain struck him, running from his throat through his whole body. His eyes fluttered open and aghast he witnessed the comfortable twilight turning to pitch black darkness, while a huge shadow came creeping over the walls and the sheets. The sweet scent of life abruptly became the stench of rotten flesh and his Mistress's kind presence vanished, replaced by a threatening infernal force, pressing down on him.
Fear exploded in his chest, rendering him motionless. He was afraid, so very afraid. Just like back then in the gloomy slaughterhouse where he first met... Him.
Then the saturnine phantom lifted his head from his neck and the sight made his heart stop. It was the face of the Master, covered in his blood, his fangs abnormally long and sharp, his features contorted in hateful rage, staring at him with blazing red eyes, and his demonic growl echoed through his victim's every bone, when he spoke:
Renfield, you have betrayed me.
Renfield woke with a start, covered in sweat and gasping for air. This had been the worst, ghastliest, most dreadful erotic dream he had ever had! He had to keep telling himself that both the pleasure and the horror weren't real. While he felt disappointed that the first part of his dream turned out to be only a fantasy, he was quite relieved that the second was also nothing more than an illusion. Dracula was gone and with him the endless dark had faded from the world.
Still panting from his fright, he run a hand through his messy hair and let his gaze wander across the room – not as luxurious as in his nightmare, but still a decent chamber, with functional furniture, a large window and an attached bathroom. An elegant black three piece suit and a white shirt hung on the wardrobe.
He remembered following Lady Godalming to her townhouse near Hampstead Heath, a marble building as white as her skin, protected by large trees and hedges. Entering the great entrance hall had been quite an impressive experience, but he had been far too tired to admire all the details of the elaborate interior. Now, despite the awful dream, he felt better.
After he had taken a bath and dressed himself in the new clothes, he stepped outside his room and headed down the stairway to where he recalled the parlour to be located. Although it was almost dusk and still foggy outside, the curtains were drawn and only a few gaslights lit, but thanks to his augmented sight he was able to easily make out the way.
Passing by a portrait gallery of lords and ladies, then the large oaken doors to the library and music room, he found himself at his destination, where he knew by intuition that he would find his Mistress. He knocked thrice and it did not take long until he heard her bell-like voice calling him in.
Clothed in a flowing white gown Lucy Holmwood, Lady Godalming sat on a comfortable sofa, a coffee table with a silver decanter and two matching goblets within reach. She put away the newspaper she had been reading and beckoned him to come closer.
"Good evening, Mr Renfield, have you rested well?" she asked.
According to the heat he felt rising to his cheeks and ears, he must have been blushing in shame as he recalled the dream of her being in bed with him.
He desperately tried to clear his dry throat.
"Well...yes, well, very well indeed, very well."
Renfield tended to repeat himself when he got nervous – and he often did. He hated that mannerism of his, but had never been successful in getting rid of it.
"Like a log, actually," he added, which wasn't quite an improvement to his previous statement.
"You sound so hoarse, you must be thirsty," she observed. "Come sit with me and have a drink."
His eyes flickered across the parlour in search of an additional chair, but there was no other furniture available besides the sofa and so he had no other choice than to reluctantly sit down right next to her. A sweet smile lit up her features at his rather clumsy approach and he could have sworn he saw her blue eyes glowing before she turned to the table, filling up the goblets with the rich red liquid he so much longed for. The enthralling smell of fresh blood emanated from the silver tableware and he had to restrain himself not to just snatch it from her hand.
"To your new life." She raised her cup, still smiling warmly.
"To my Lady Saviour." He managed to briefly smile as well before he took a large mouthful.
Never having drunk blood from a goblet before, he felt how much more sophisticated this was compared to nibbling a hung up corpse's calf. In addition, this blood tasted much sweeter and purer than anything he had consumed in the slaughterhouse.
"Lady Godalming, I am so undescribably thankful," he expressed his gratitude. "If you had not saved me from that hideous place, I would be dead by now, I'm sure of it, as sure as fate. But if I may inquire, how did you find me? How did you know I was in there?"
She took a sip from her cup, the liquid bedewing her crimson lips, reddening them even more.
"My perception for the night creatures' call is highly advanced," she explained. "More than is common for our kind, sometimes more than I would like. I heard your whispered pleas when I walked past Bethlem."
Impressed he raised his eyebrows. "Although we do not share a bond as creator and descendant?"
Even now, after he had tasted her blood, his mind seemed not connected to hers like it had been with the Master's.
"We are both children of the same progenitor," she stated in a cold, emotionless voice and suddenly her tender features appeared hard and edgy, as if recalling some unpleasantness.
So it was true, she was Dracula's offspring. Strangely, Renfield had never heard him speak of her, had never seen her sweet face in the endless stream of images that had come with their connection, not even a single fragment. He wondered why. Had she managed to completely separate her mind from the Master's? Was that even possible? She also seemed to have a profound understanding of their enhanced senses' nature. He would have liked to ask her so many things, but her icy tone kept him from interrogating her further about these matters. Instead he cleared his throat and changed the subject.
"Now that I have the honour of being employed here, what can I do for you, Mistress?"
Her gentle expression returned, softening her features again.
"You worked as a secretary, right? Do you have any knowledge of real estate business?"
The question positively surprised him.
"I have, my dear Lady, I have," Renfield was all smiles. "I served my apprenticeship at a solicitor's office."
"Perfect!" She gathered the abandoned newspaper and rose from the sofa. "Follow me then."
John Clare sat on a bench on the verge of Hampstead Heath from where he, shadowed by trees and bushes, could make out the entrance to the lady's mansion. He had watched her and the man from Bethlem walk inside yesterday, then he had left for the night and returned early this morning.
Nothing seemed to have happened since, the curtains still drawn and everything silent. John closed his eyes and felt the humid air on his cold skin, before taking out a piece of paper and pen.
After his boy's sad death, after he had abandoned his cruel wife, after with Miss Ives his only friend had passed away and he had been left behind with no home and no purpose, he had begun not just to read and recite other poets, but to write his own verses. He mused about noting a few lines on the lady in white, but then decided against it. Not yet, not while he still knew so little of her. After staring at the blank sheet for a while, the thought came to his mind, that he should start searching for words within himself first. Who was he now? What was he at this very moment? With a trembling hand he wrote down: I am...
Lady Godalming led him into her study, a tidy room with well arranged shelves, cabinets and a finely carved writing table and chair. Renfield waited for her to sit down at the latter, but she gestured for him to take her seat and stood right next to it, elegantly leaning at the desk top.
"As you can see, I have been looking for town estates to invest in, but I must admit I lack the expertise in these matters," she said, her tone rather disheartened, almost frustrated, and indeed, he could make out hundreds of clipped advertisements, notes and letters, planimetric maps and photographs of houses, gardens and interiors piled up before him.
She sighed, her eyes moving from the desk towards him. "Can you imagine all the aspects one needs to take into consideration before purchasing a mansion? And if I could ever decide which offer to accept, how can I know the vendor is not tricking me with anything?"
With a feathery light movement of her white gloved hand, she placed today's newspaper in the middle of the desk right in front of him. "This is where you come into play, Mr Renfield..."
Comfortably seated in the upholstered chair, he slowly let his gaze wander from the papers to the flowing fabric of her skirts and her slim, bodice-enwrapped waist, over her breast, heaving under layers of lace, her flawless neck, to those full lips and cerulean orbs, enframed by ginger locks.
Oh yes, he knew exactly where he would like to come into play!
If she were to raise one of those perfect legs of hers now and place it on the armrest, he would make sure to caress her fragile ankle through her silken stocking. Then his hand, just like his gaze, would soon travel further upwards, skilled fingers toying with satin garters, his lips meeting the pale flesh on the inside of her thigh. Accompanied by her accelerated breathing and mesmerised by her slight shivering, he would kiss his way up and up until at last he would savour her soft, hot, juicy...
"Mr Renfield! Are you listening?"
"Huh? Oh, I..." He stared at her displeased face, aghast, then desperately tried to swallow the lump in his throat. "I am sorry, Milady, so terribly sorry, I believe somehow I got... distracted."
"Distracted, really? By what?" She raised an eyebrow, her tone not amused, and he felt his cheeks burning again.
"By your beauty, your beauty, yes, your radiant beauty!" He struggled not to babble all too much, but wasn't able to stop himself.
Renfield expected the lady to become angry, feared she would throw him out for being such a miserable failure on his first day of employment, she, however, just sighed again.
"I tend to have that effect on men, and you seem to be no exception."
"I am surely no exception, not at all, Mistress, I'm absolutely unexceptional!" he prattled on.
A sweet, bell-like giggle escaped her lips at this unintended joke, then she turned to the papers, explaining his tasks to him for the second time.
After he had watched the lady's new employee – or whatever he was – leave the marble mansion in the afternoon, John Clare abandoned his post under the trees and carefully made his way to the door. He stood there for a long while, gazing up the facade, taking in all the detailed structures and ornaments. His hand hovered over the bell pull, but he did not dare to use it.
What would he say if someone opened the huge oaken portal? That he was a homeless stranger who had been stalking the lady of this house for days and now stopped by to introduce himself with a poem? He had not thought of a plan before coming here and now he felt utterly idiotic, like some schoolboy under the window of his first love's chamber.
Embarrassed by his own foolishness, he withdrew the sheet of paper from his left pocket and an old, empty envelope from another, put the former inside the latter and quickly shoved it into the letter box, before turning around and vanishing into the anonymising mist again.
London was still covered by a thick layer of yellowish tinged autumn fog, the gaslights, encircled by eerie halos, casting almost no shadows into the twilight, when Renfield returned from his first investigation on real estates. After his erotic daydream and being sharply brought back to the present by his Lady's words, he had frantically worked through the piles of paper on her desk until he had preselected five promising mansions, the first of which he had visited today.
Located in a quiet neighbourhood, the house had seemed decent from the outside. As his Mistress had made clear that they never were to reveal their nature to mortals, he had, although tempted by the scent of life, acted perfectly normal and businesslike to the man who had showed him around. Unfortunately, it had not been the vendor himself, but a mere agent, who was unable to answer all his specific questions. In addition, the interior had not fully convinced him and so he hoped for the viewing of the next house to be more to his liking.
On his way back, he stopped at a victualler's to pick up a box Lady Godalming had ordered. It was quite bulky and heavy and he wondered what for they needed groceries in the first place. Were there mortal servants he had not met yet? If so, why wouldn't they go and buy their food themselves?
Back at Hampstead Heath, he fumbled the keys from his pocket, opened the oaken door and laboriously picked up several envelopes from the floor beneath the letter box. While heading for the kitchen to finally get rid of the groceries, he swiftly inspected the mail, finding it all to be real estate agents' offers, except one.
After he had placed the box on the kitchen table, he eyed the blank and unlabelled envelope, then decided to open it – he could not violate anyone's privacy of correspondence by doing so, could he? Inside there was only a single sheet with a few spidery handwritten lines. Renfield raised an eyebrow. It seemed to be a poem. Did Lady Godalming have a secret admirer who anonymously wrote verses on her? The text did not mention any love interest though, it rather was of a self-reflexive kind. Shrugging his shoulders, he folded the paper again and put it in the pocket of his waistcoat.
After he had gone through the new offers and sorted the results of his work, he found his Lady in her sitting room, where she stood before a large painting, silently gazing at the portrait of a young blond nobleman. His careful knock on the open door caused her to turn around, and there was such sadness on her beautiful face, that he forgot to greet her.
For a moment, an awkward silence filled the room, then, before he could think of asking, she spoke:
"My late husband, Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming. He passed away not yet a year ago."
There was even greater sadness in her voice than in her eyes, and Renfield did not know what to say or do. A formal, stiff expression of condolences seemed so out of place in this situation, but he dared not to approach her either, fearing he would be tempted to touch her, embrace her in an act of comfort. Instead, after taking a deep breath, he took out the piece of paper from his waistcoat, unfolded it and read it aloud.
I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below – above the vaulted sky.
A single tear ran down the lady's cheek.
"Oh, Mr Renfield, how beautiful!" she whispered, her voice almost broken. "Your words truly moved my heart."
To his relief, she did not ask who had written them and so he neither had to lie to her nor tell her about the anonymous poet. He cleared his throat and quickly changed the topic.
"May I talk to you about the results of today's viewing?"
Lady Godalming pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirts and wiped her cheek in an elegant movement.
"Of course, my dear, let's sit down." She tried to sound composed again, but he could still make out a hint of sadness in her sweet voice.
He took a chair near the fireplace and set out the papers and photographs on the coffee table. He noticed that he felt a lot more comfortable in her presence now. With the revealing of her emotions she had somehow lost a bit of her shining light as a transcendent apparition or unreachable fantasy, and instead had become more approachable to him, more human. One might actually say, she became a woman of flesh and blood.
After having a drink of that most delicious beverage, they discussed the various estates, locations and prices in a businesslike manner until the early morning hours, then he bid her goodnight and retired to his room.
Lucy watched her servant leave while stacking up the papers in a large pile. She knew him only for a few days, but she had already grown quite fond of him. He really seemed to know his work well and was making every effort to fulfil her wishes. She could not blame him for having unchaste thoughts and feelings about her, for almost every man had, and the way he tried to make excuses for being distracted she found rather endearing. In addition, that poetry reading of his had been so sensitively timed, it definitely had touched her.
Reaching for the last unsorted paper on the table, she found it to be exactly the one he had recited from and she let her gaze wander over the words again. The lines were scratchy, written with a trembling hand and totally unlike the neat notes Renfield had taken about the estates. She smiled when imagining him jittery and atwitter scribbling down his heart's deepest sentiment.