again, he was standing in the same place, as if what I had just seen had not happened at all.
“You are famished,” he said. “Sit down and have something to eat.”
The aroma of bacon and of the sugary confections neatly laid out on silver platters overwhelmed me, and I came into the room and loaded a plate with the sweet and savory treats.
“Exposure to my frequency leaves one very hungry,” he said. “You will find that.”
“Frequency?” I asked, spreading cream over a scone, savoring the delicious blend of flavors in my mouth.
“Every being has a frequency, a certain vibration. A scientist would call it electromagnetism. The electromagnetism of my being is greater than that of a mortal. That is why being in my presence, or in the presence of any immortal, depletes one’s own life forces.”
“Is that what happened to Jonathan in Styria?” I asked. As soon as I mentioned his name, my voice started to shake.
“Yes,” he said implacably.
After he had abandoned me to the doctors, I did not want to care about Jonathan. Of course he had had the shock of his life seeing me in the photograph with the Count. And perhaps he believed Seward and thought that by allowing the doctors to treat me, they were curing me. One thing was certain: if not for the Count’s obsession with me, Jonathan would still be the man he was when I met him, and perhaps he and I would have been happy together.
“Jonathan was innocent until you brought him into your world, and now he may never recover,” I said. I chewed a rasher of bacon and waited for him to elaborate on what had happened to Jonathan in Styria, but the Count was silent. Had I really expected this prodigious being to explain himself as if he were an ordinary man?
“He was never innocent,” he said. “He might have left Styria after we concluded our business, but he wanted Ursulina from the moment he saw her. He chose to remain at the castle, just as you chose to stay with me. I invited you to leave my home in London. Instead, you laid out the clothes you selected for the trip and came with me on this voyage.”
I had no rebuttal to this.
“Mina, all of your life, since you were a child, you called out to me in ways that you do not yet acknowledge. I had vowed to reveal myself to you after you reached your twenty-first birthday, but that was when Jonathan Harker appeared; and in a short time, it became obvious that you were determined to marry and settle into a life of convention.”
“I did not call out to you. I was not aware of your existence,” I said.
“You do not call out with your voice but with the hum of your desire. Think of us as musical instruments that vibrate with the same note. A note is struck, and it is heard by the note that must answer it.”
He sighed. “I will try to explain it to you. I was able to involve Harker in my affairs because he desired such a commission. I left him with Ursulina because that is what he wanted. This is what the religious among you call free will. They are accurate about its existence. The doctrine governs all human behavior.”
“Why did you leave him in Styria? Was it to come to me in Whitby?”
“Frankly, I thought that, like most of the humans who succumbed to her, Harker would perish. He is a stronger rival than I anticipated.” He laughed a very bitter, human laugh. “I chartered the
I shuddered remembering the sight of the dead captain tied to his ship, his bloody corpse battered by the rain and the sea.
“I know what you are thinking. You are not responsible for his death, or for the deaths of the crew. Human greed is to blame. I had to come for you, Mina. Your longing was intense. I answered your call. It is against my very being to resist.”
“And the creatures who seduced my husband? Did he call out to them?”
His impatience with me was the same sort that I sometimes experienced with my students when they refused to grasp the truth.
“Dr. Von Helsinger called them vampire women, the undead-monsters who made themselves immortal by draining the blood of their prey. Is that what they are?” I asked.
“The creature that he imagines is but a ghoul that represents men’s fears. But the stories of the immortal blood drinkers are not fantasy.”
He must have read my confusion because he continued. “The German doctor misunderstands. It is not the blood draining that weakens and kills the prey but the exposure to our power. My being carries an electrical current similar to that of a lightning rod. You know this because you have felt it. When we interact with the body of a human-call it making love if you wish-even though this current brings great pleasure, it acts as a kind of electrocution. Over time, the mortal’s energy is depleted. Depending upon the weakness of the human, they may either get sick or in extreme cases go mad or die. It is nothing to do with draining the blood, unless one takes too much of it. The men who gave your friend Lucy their blood-did they die? No, they poured pints of their own blood into her but it did not affect them. I have never killed anyone by draining their blood, unless I meant to kill them anyway.”
“Is that what I have done by calling you to me? Have I signed my own death warrant? Will I go mad? Will I die?” I felt locked into my fate with him, but I still feared it.
“You are not like your husband and other mortals. At a juncture of history, the blood of the immortals entered your bloodline, introducing certain powers. Within that blood is the key to immortality, to being able to live within a body but to also exist without it, to walk on both sides of the veil in worlds seen and unseen. They say that at one time, it was a common trait, but over the millennia, humans have lost the ability.”
Jonathan had explained to me the science of how humans evolved with certain traits but not others. “Perhaps, if one is to believe the theories of Mr. Darwin, the trait was not advantageous to humankind,” I said.
“I have spent centuries studying science, medicine, philosophy, metaphysics, and the occult. I believe that it is a natural step in the evolutionary process, a step toward the merging of the mortal and the immortal. Eventually, the veil between the worlds will shatter. The warrior monks believed that Jesus was trying to teach this when He rose from the dead and ascended into the unseen world. But the knowledge was buried by the Church, which wanted power over its members and so kept true knowledge from them.”
“You should have no trouble believing. You and others like you have a seventh sense, something beyond telepathy. Within you is the ability to fully integrate the body with eternal consciousness, to fuse flesh with spirit. If you do not embrace your gifts, they will forever be a plague to you, Mina. And I do mean forever.”
Part Seven
IRELAND
Chapter Fifteen
