Bitter Waters

Sleep will not come for him tonight. In his pleasantly outfitted berth on the Orient Express, as they speed east toward their ultimate object, Jack is contemplating chemical transports. He scarcely has sufficient forewarning from the sound of footfalls in the corridor to stow the bottle of chloral in his bag and to affect some sort of careless repose. Quincey Morris presses past the door like a steer and settles down opposite him in that peculiarly American way of his that brooks no pretty distinctions in times of crisis.

They’ve scarcely exchanged words in private since the dreadful disclosure on the 18th of September, and all that their party have been called upon to do. Quincey’s bluffness is a balm to him; he comes with a bottle of unrecognizable spirits tucked under his arm, and before Seward can object he is pillaging the water-decanter set out out on the nightstand. If he carries on at this rate Seward will be forced to take his dosage by injection, and damn the consequences.

“Would you take a glass for your health, or should I wake up Art?” Morris kicks off his boots and shakes out of his coat.

“It would be better saved for someone who deserves it.” Someone with something to celebrate. An unshakeable dark mood has fallen on Seward like a pall, and the dread of what is ahead of them looms insurmountable.

“You should bear the greatest honors of any of us. You’ve tangled with madmen and driven the Count to ground, you’ve kept a perfect record of everything as it’s transpired, why, you’ve stood guard over Miss Lucy night and day—” He must realize he’s said the wrong thing. Quincey catches himself up immediately, but not before Jack’s flinching displeasure shows on his face. His own face falls, and his hands freeze in the middle of the motion of unbuttoning his collar.

“Not quite that, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, Jack — forgive me, I’ve made a real horse’s ass of myself.”

“I’ve failed Lucy most of all, can’t you see that?”

“Why, you loved her as much as Art, or I, or any of us. What could you possibly have done to harm her? How have you conceivably fallen short?”

A rhetorical question, surely, but Jack can only give him an answer. Has he known all this while, and relied on his preferred chemical assistance to wipe out the memory of his own shame — or has the scene only emerged from the depths of forgetfulness the closer they get to their quarry? The mind plays such tricks with memory — still more so, in such dire straits as these.

“The night when I was tasked with guarding Lucy’s bedroom, lest she rise in the night and go walking… she did wake. I woke to find her standing over my place on the couch. I remember it now, Quincey, and I haven’t told a living soul — I haven’t even dared to set it down on record.”

“Sleepwalking again?”

“She drew me by the hand, to her bed. In every way, she was like any other sleepwalker — any ordinary sleepwalker, in the hold of an ordinary idiopathic condition. I suppose I thought her to be recovering from her condition — I must have, or I would never have consented to follow her. I don’t remember it now — only that I went. "

“So you followed her.”

“I’m sure you must think less of me for it —"

“It could have happened to any one of us. Not one man of us would have done differently.”

The toss of Quincey’s head sends his dark hair tumbling boyishly. All his rough and dashing manners can’t conceal that he is the youngest of all of them. Jack gathers his memory and proceeds. The interior of the compartment shrinks away, and in its place the darkened bedroom at Hillingham, the darkened hall. The soundless carpet beneath his feet, the feeling of being drawn as if on a single thread, tugged.

“Lucy’s hair was loosed from its pinnings, and it hung in front of her eyes like a curtain — I thought if I could only brush it aside, I could be sure whether she was truly awake or in the midst of some attack. So I crept closer, even as she made to retreat to the open doorway.” At least, that’s the only reason he can think of. “As she turned from me her hair fell away from her face in one golden sheet and I saw a bloody thumbprint marking that white forehead. She was already bleeding.”

More than a few drops. The spillover of some fearfully red stream, in a smudge made by no human hand. Quincey murmurs some words of concern. He is thinking of Mina now, and the fearful mark of the holy wafer disfiguring her lovely brow. Seward can see it in his face, his innocent vigorous American face. If not for the firsthand knowledge of everything the two of them have battled through together, not only in these past months but over the whole course of their acquaintance, the sunny innocence in that face would turn Jack’s stomach.

The others are no doubt fast asleep, as soundly as anyone can sleep on a speeding train after such a series of dreadful shocks. They are in no danger of exposure by eavesdroppers — or at any rate, Seward would be loath to change places with any listener who thought to tangle with a well-armed Texan under such circumstances. Seward must continue — the absurdity of what he says is impressed on him, even as he steels himself to go on.

“How that squares with the state in which Van Helsing discovered her in the morning, I don’t know. There was a loss of blood, yes, but if at the time I had possessed even the slightest idea—”

What a fool he’d been — some great loss of blood, but no cause and no trace, when knowledge of the cause had been within his grasp all this long while, locked inside his own heart.

“Are you certain that you’re not imposing your present understanding on past events? You couldn’t have known then. I scarcely believe it even now.”

“That’s what frightens me.” What had Jack known then, about the true nature of what beset poor Lucy in her last weeks — how it transgressed the bounds of his own science, and how dearly he would need Van Helsing’s quaint glosses to even begin to comprehend it? And yet he had seen.

“It’s all right to be frightened. We’re past being frightened now, we’re on the brink of action.” Quincey knows the gravity of what he is asking. He draws close to Jack, and lowers his voice. “When you followed her into her bedchamber, what happened then? What did she do?”

Jack swallows tightly, closing his eyes. The awful hush of their sleeping compartment lends the unsettling air of the Roman Catholic confessional.

“I saw him there, hanging back behind her amid the draperies and furnishings — only a shape in the darkness, not a bat or a wolf or a cat but the shape of a man. He drew me forward, and I followed him.”

Lucy had tumbled down upon the bed like a puppet with its strings cut — tumbling nervelessly in a spill of white nightdress, the slips of bare skin at ankle and wrist and collar almost as colorless as the naked bedsheets. Like a doll when a child has had enough of playing with it — or an hysteric after the convulsive fit has left her utterly enervated. He must think of this analytically — but he cannot.

“The Count took my face in his hands, and he looked into my eyes — there was a terrible gentleness in those animal eyes, something that impressed itself on me. It was as if I was seeing myself in a dream, gazing into a mirror.”

As if he were only a mind trapped in an unresponsive body, turning his thoughts first to one thing and then to another — to raising a hand, to shrinking back, even to closing and opening one’s eyes, any of the most automatic movements that would come to a person in such a state, and achieving nothing. He could scarcely even focus his eyes — and in the queer half-darkness it was as if he saw everything and nothing, lit as strangely and starkly as a tableau in the theater.

“He bade me—”

Lie down on the bed. Whether it came from Lucy’s mind or the Count’s, he could not distinguish, and even now he cannot say — his conscious mind worse than helpless, sinking down beneath the surface, poised on the razor’s edge between waking and sleeping.

The next command came, Hold her, and he had — he had taken her up, pressed to Lucy’s bleeding throat in the perverse parody of a lover’s clinch, with the coils of her hair snaking into his mouth and nose, tangling around his neck like a noose. Jack’s body crushed and noncompliant, as if it were utterly divorced from the control of his mind— and that long dark figure bent over them both, a shape like a great cat, a monstrous pampas bat with leathern wings, a massive wolf of the sort that hasn’t stalked English groves and glades since Roman times — no, a man, only a man, gloating and exultant in his mastery.

Jack’s throat has gone tight, his knuckles stand out against the bed-frame.

“He made me drink too. I know not for what purpose — only that I did.”

Under the power of those eyes, in the grip of some terrible persuasion greater than himself — helpless to resist it, but not so helpless as to forget the natural horror of what he was about to do. He will go mad with the memory of it, mad under the burden of it like a white-hot coal — he has never known Lucy Westenra’s kiss, and he never will, but he knows the taste of her young blood. Pressed and entwined with limbs and locks and mouths, Lucy’s soft uncorseted body crushed against his and the taste of blood filling his mouth and nose, making him choke — even as the Count’s snaking white hand with its terrible long nails pressed to his throat and began to stroke, like a mother coaxing her sick child to swallow medicine. Horrible, horrible and unforgettable, even now in recounting it his fingers creep to the sharp edge of his collar and feel at the raw skin of his throat.

“It was like a magnetism — stronger than any report I’ve ever read in a book. I could scarcely resist it, even in my own thoughts — even in my own mind, and Lucy was only a girl, contending against that hateful thing alone. Even now—”

In all his fevered focus on the inner workings of the lunatic mind, he had all but forgotten some awful truth of medicine that precedes all else, first among all things — the terrible redness of blood, and its profusion. That creature, that thing in the shape of a man, pulling the life’s blood from Lucy’s faint frame — Lucy’s feeble hand reaching for him helplessly in the dark of her bedroom. That is the most piercing sense-memory of all, the creeping of her bloodless fingers in the dark, grasping for some consolation against this horror and not finding it.

In his darkest moments Jack is still there, pressed in that obscene embrace, feeling the involuntary convulsions of Lucy’s beloved body like the throes of something far worse —that black indeterminate figure is pressing him in a kiss, those cruel lips are forcing his jaws apart. Awful and animal and male, stirring him against his will.

“Christ, Jack, you’ve gone pale.” Quincey looks frightfully faint himself; he’s thrust out a hand to steady himself. “Don’t say any more, I understand you now. I understand you perfectly.”

“You don’t understand — I am contaminated. Something is lurking inside me like a germ. If I had related this sooner, our Lucy would still be alive. You must think I’m beastly, now, a beastly fool—”

“How could you tell anyone anything that you yourself could not remember? You had every reason to believe it was a dream, Jack. Nothing more. We found you there none the worse for wear, you’re unharmed, you’ve done every imaginable thing—”

Jack laughs sharply. “You don’t believe that. If there was even the slimmest chance that a — that the recollection of a queer dream could have saved Lucy, I should have been obliged to communicate it. I failed her, and I’ve failed you now.”

If Lucy knew who was there beside her in her bed, if she knew at all what beset her — what a betrayal she was in the midst of, what a perverse tableau in which her sleeping body was the centerpiece, she would have fled from him. The young do not tell themselves to the young. But to breathe a word of this to Van Helsing, not only what transpired but how it felt — the thought of it fills him with nausea and cold dread. What would Arthur say, if he only knew — no more old fellow, no more friendship between them whatsoever if he only knew what a part Jack had in the despoiling of their beloved, in her utter ruin. Complicity! Total complicity.

“In all our years, have you ever known me to lie? Not even to spare your feelings. I’ve been told it’s not one of my finer points.” Quincey smiles at him wryly. “I’m glad you told me this. There might be some advantage in it, even now, some insight. I trust you all to pieces, Jack. If you wish me to tell Dr. Van Helsing what you’ve told me now, on your behalf—”

“What good would it do?”

Despair and disgust are choking him, the memory is as material and present as a third individual in the room with them and it makes him shudder. What good has it done to unburden his soul, if it has made his dearest living friends think inescapably less of him? Quincey clasps his hand against his knee, worrying the backs of his fingers with a neat rough thumb — if they were women here, they might weep together openly, but as men they must stifle their anguish and carry on.

“It would clear your conscience and mine, both. In the meantime, you should spare the needle tonight, Jack. I get lonesome.”

He’s teasing him now, making a show of his bravado. Jack allows himself to be embraced. If this brings comfort to an innocent party, then perhaps it is harmless — to allow himself to be comforted, even if he scarcely deserves it. And with Quincey Morris and his Winchesters in his bedchamber, how could any man fail to be protected?

“Yes — yes. For your sake, yes.”

No chloral tonight. He must live with what he has done. The memory of Lucy in her last moments, and the memory of that cruel face in the night — that cruel hand stroking his throat, and the cruel red mouth.