MINA.

by Marie Kiraly.

FOREWORD

In writing Mina, I have tried to remain as faithful to the story of Dracula as possible. The novel Dracula is written as a series of first-person accounts by Van Helsing, Jonathan and Mina Harker and the others. Near the end of the story, Mina's first-person accounts are abandoned and her feelings about her ravishment by the vampire never described save by the men. Perhaps Stoker was uncomfortable dealing with the musings of the d.a.m.ned. Perhaps he was attempting to convey the notion that Mina was being lost to the men as Lucy had been earlier in the story. In any case, Mina's voice, so strong through the early parts of the novel, is abruptly silent.

I begin my novel here.

While faithful to the original novel, I restore Mina to her rightful place in the final struggle with Dracula, then follow her back to London, and to the new struggle to move into the future with a memory that, like Bram Stoker's novel, and Dracula himself, can never really die.

PART ONE: Dracula

ONE

From the journal of Mina Harker, written on the train to Varna.

October 13. I am writing this account in a small notebook separate from the diary I keep in my traveling bags. That diary, which details our desperate search for Dracula, is too public, and though Van Helsing would never read it without good reason, I fear there may be reason enough before this journey is done. This notebook will record my most private thoughts. I intend that it stay with me always. It is written in shorthand so that should it ever be lost or should I die, the others will require the help of my husband in order to transcribe it. My dear Jonathan, if they ask this of you, I beseech you to read no further. If I am dead, truly dead, burn it. If I am missing, gone to him or lost during our quest, keep it safe for me, for these thoughts are mine alone to share only as I see fit.

I shall begin this account on the night at Dr. Seward's that I can never forget. We met after dinner in the doctor's study. There, the five of us who had been involved in the sad affair since the beginning-Quincey Morris; Arthur Holmwood, Lord G.o.dalming; Jack Seward; Jonathan and I-listened as Professor Van Helsing told of the nature of the creature we faced. As Van Helsing requested, I wrote down everything he said. I made only a few references to my own thoughts, and those were centered on my concern for Jonathan. During his journey into the count's feral land, his dark hair had become streaked with grey. Though he was scarcely twenty-two, lines of worry were permanently etched on his handsome face. He had been through so much at that fiend's castle that I feared even a discussion of the vampire's nature would tax his sanity.

As if Van Helsing didn't tax all of ours. In an accent that grew thicker as he went on, he described bats, wolves, mist, dust with terrible relish, as if we were all children and he some s.a.d.i.s.tic uncle filling us with fear of the night. The inmate Renfield had sounded saner on my visit that afternoon than Van Helsing seemed that night. If I had not heard Dr. Seward's account of poor Lucy's true death, I would have laughed at how seriously the others listened. Instead, with my free hand pressed tightly to Jonathan's, I listened with horror all the stranger for my belief.When he had finished, the men did something that I have never attempted to understand. In spite of all my a.s.sistance to them, they decided to shield me from any knowledge of what they would do from then on. In the months before this, I had traveled alone to Budapest to be at Jonathan's bedside. I had helped nurse him. I had listened to what had seemed at the time to be his ravings of pale female monsters, and of some obsessive fixation on their incredible seductive beauty. I listened to it all, knowing that somewhere within the fever and delirium my dear Jonathan was trapped. I never mentioned his ravings after he recovered. Until the others asked me to transcribe his shorthand diary, I never read them. Once I knew the truth, I accepted it with as much courage as any of them, yet these men, these dear, brave men, felt the need to protect me. For my own part, I felt no resentment for their chivalry. No, my only resentment was self-directed for I was too well bred to say an honest word of protest, though I recited enough of them inwardly in the hours that followed.

When the men had left to go to the ruins at Carfax and begin their hunt for Dracula's coffins, I went upstairs to bed. Everything Van Helsing had said that evening weighed heavy on my mind, and now that I was alone to reflect on his account, I felt a terrible fear. Jonathan had described the creature they would face. Van Helsing seemed to know even more about Dracula's powers, yet he led them to the abbey to begin their search at night rather than in the light of day, when the vampire is most helpless. I knew the men went with sacred hosts, holy water and crosses, but after so many centuries, would a creature who Jonathan reported had rejoiced at having a church on his property really be repelled by blessed symbols that were not even of our own faith?

Had the vampire been buried in consecrated ground the first time? Had he, like some profane messiah, risen anyway? Crosses.

Holy water. Fools!

These were the thoughts racing through my head and keeping me from sleep, until sleep became impossible even if I had been ready. Dogs began barking outside. Their cries apparently roused Renfield, for I heard his mad screams in the asylum wing of the house, screams soon echoed by the other inmates until the asylum resembled less some orderly haven than the bedlam of a pauper's madness. It occurred to me then that I was utterly alone, and terribly vulnerable.

In this state of mind, fear began to multiply until I longed for relief. I went to the table near the hearth and poured myself a gla.s.s of sherry. As I did, some motion in the crack between the heavy velvet drapes caught my eye. With my arm extended so I could keep my body as far from the window as possible, I slowly pulled one drapery back. Though I expected to see a bat or worse staring in at me, there was nothing but the usual evening fog rising from the murky waters of the Thames. As I let the curtain fall, a new sound shattered the pressing silence of the night.

I wish that I could say that I thought the cry had come from Jonathan or one of the others exploring the ruins of Carfax, for that would have been a far better excuse for opening the window than the cry of an animal in pain. I thought that perhaps one of Seward's dogs had wounded a rabbit or hedgehog and the poor animal was suffering in the bushes beneath my room. Knowing the dangers that night now held, I ran to the bed stand and found the blessed crucifix Van Helsing had asked me to keep with me always. With this firmly in my hand, I unlocked the window and pulled it open.

A cold, damp breeze poured over me, carrying with it a heady scent like some exotic perfume. Though I wanted to shut the window, I backed away. A mist too thick to be natural rose outside. I saw eyes glowing red in the center of it.

A face slowly formed in the cloud, a face that could only he Dracula's. His expression was lonely, defiant, as if he read my thoughts and mirrored them. In his hand, he held the limp body of a rabbit. The blood glistened as it seeped from the wound in the animal's side, and I knew it was the poor creature that I had heard cry out, the animal Dracula had killed to meet his terrible needs.

He looked younger than Jonathan had described, hardly older than Jonathan or I. It seemed that he was telling me that any blood would satisfy him, that he did not need to kill men to survive.

He was dressed entirely in black. His face and hands were pale in the wan firelight and his deep-set green eyes that had been red-perhaps mirroring the use of his dread power-were human now, though dark and strangely lightless, like those of a dead man whose tears no longer moistened them.

Yet he had an arresting face-with high, arched brows and a long, rather thin nose with flared nostrils. I had expected a mustache, for that was how Jonathan had described him, but now he was clean-shaven, his hair the length of any proper Victorian gentleman, his sideburns neatly trimmed. He had mirrored Jonathan's grooming so well that he would fit in perfectly in London. n.o.ble, rich, foreign, he would be the rage at social gatherings where the exotic-in food, drink and guests-was always revered. He had laid his plans so well, save for Van Helsing's arcane knowledge and the determination of our little band.

I suddenly longed to meet the creature the men feared. To hear his voice. To learn, perhaps, what he intended to do about the threat my husband and the others gave him.

I, not Renfield, invited him inside; not with a word but with my heart and my thoughts and my d.a.m.ned curiosity. In the moment when his body separated from the mist and stood before me, I understood. The dark powers at his command could touch some pa.s.sion deep within the human heart and use it for his end.He stared at me, and for a moment, I had an astonishing revelation of where his mesmerizing power lay. All his thoughts were fixed on me as no other man's had ever been. Even Jonathan, on the day i agreed to be his wife, had a portion of his mind elsewhere. But with Dracula, I was the center of all his attention, the one who could satisfy his terrible need, give him strength. The others were protecting me. This creature would use me-willing or no-for his own ends. The understanding gave a heady feeling that made me weak with a desire I found horrifying. The room closed in around me. At the end, blind, entranced, I felt only his arm supporting me, his pale hand, as cold as the death that had come to him centuries before, brushing away the hair that covered my outstretched neck. His eyes were fixed on mine. I smelled the cloying sweet scent of his hair as it brushed against my face. The quick p.r.i.c.k of pain which followed led to-I can only admit it now!-an ecstasy I had never imagined could exist in this life or the next.

It was nearly dawn when I heard Jonathan tiptoe into the room. Shamed, wanting to wait and sort out the night's terrible events before I confessed to what I had done, I kept my eyes shut. Jonathan's hand touched my forehead, and he left me. As soon as I was alone, I glanced at the window and saw that the drapes were drawn, the sash latched. I stood in front of a mirror and examined myself carefully. There were no marks on my skin. Last night had been a dream, or a delusion born from worry, nothing more.

I vowed to keep my dream a secret. The men were being strong for me; I would be the same for them. I closed my eyes and slept. When I woke, the clock in Dr. Seward's study was chiming eleven.

It was too late for breakfast so I rang for a maid and asked for tea. While I waited for it, I reread the account I had made from all our notes and journals, looking for some clue that would help the men in their terrible task. A strange exhaustion had taken hold of me, and I found my mind wandering so often that I had to work to keep it on the task.

I thought of Lucy as I read the account. I miss her laughter, her jests, the gossip we shared with one another only months ago. I found it impossible to believe that she can really be gone. . .

No use dwelling on what cannot be changed. Nonetheless, the sorrow of her death brought tears to my eyes, and I might soon have been crying outright had the maid not arrived with my tea, biscuits and preserves. She also brought me a recent copy of Lippincott's Monthly, which featured the beginning of a new story by Oscar Wilde. Critics of The Picture of Dorian Gray implied that the piece was somehow scandalous. I found it intriguing, the moral that beauty could conceal terrible evil certainly apropos in our circ.u.mstance. Jonathan had long ago pa.s.sed judgment on Mr. Wilde, and I made certain that the magazine was returned to Dr. Seward's study before dinner so my husband would not find it in my possession.

Dinner was strained. Jonathan, especially, seemed pained by the thought that he must keep the men's actions from me. I have no idea what sort of horrors they had faced the night before, though I suspect my imagination is far more lurid than the truth would be.

I said good night to them early, hoping that sleep would come more easily. I was not so fortunate.

Instead, as on the night before, I dreamed of Dracula rising in the fog outside my window, of my hand throwing back the sash, of his white face above me and, dear Lord, his body pressing mine against the bed. When I woke, Jonathan slept beside me. He had stripped off only his outer clothes, and his shirt and pants smelled of smoke and dampness. His work is so dangerous, so important, I dared not disturb his sleep. I carefully rested my hand on his shoulder and closed my eyes once more. Dreams. How could I avoid them when Jonathan was in such danger and I could not be a part of it?

That thought was the last thing I recalled until I woke late that morning. As I slipped out of bed, a sudden dizziness made me grip the bedpost for support. I took a deep breath and steadied myself and went to the window and cracked open the drapes. The day was foggy, but in the distance I could just make out the crumbling walls of Carfax Abbey as nothing more than a dark shadow in the gray light. I turned and, as I had for the last two nights, examined my neck in the mirror. There did seem to be a pair of raised places on the skin, but these were hardly the seeping welts poor Lucy had on her neck. Perhaps these were nothing more than the product of my own hysteria, as the stigmata were for the medieval Catholic mystics and saints.

I decided I would not have the men worrying about me when they had so much else to think of. That night I drank a sleep potion that Dr. Van Helsing mixed for me. It was, as he promised, very light-so light that I recalled quite distinctly everything that happened that night and saw in the pattern of what occurred some semblance of the nights before it.

And much of what I told the men later was a lie. Dracula came as he had before, in a mist that flowed through the-cracks in my latched window. He needed no invitation; I had already brought down the barriers that might have kept him at bay. Though I could not move, I was more conscious than I had been on the nights before. I could see Jonathan lying beside me in a deep sleep. I was afraid to call his name because in the moment I saw who was in our room, Dracula told me that my husband's waking would mean his death.

I did not trust my body to remain pa.s.sive under the vampire's touch, so I slipped carefully away and stood in the center of the room, before the one I already thought of as my master."You shall be my vengeance," he whispered, moving closer but not yet close enough to be a threat.

Such a strange choice of words. "Vengeance?" I asked. "Vengeance for what?"

He did not answer, but for an instant only, I saw pain in his eyes.

I lifted the crucifix I wore around my neck, keeping the small bit of silver between us. "Not that," I said softly. His presence gave me a strange, desperate courage. When he had lived, he had been a barbarian prince, taking life as casually as he did in his eternal altered state. He could kill me if he wished, but I would not be his p.a.w.n.

"No?" He c.o.c.ked his head and smiled. His teeth were white and moist, the canines as Jonathan described them-long and pointed.

My hand shook. Then he did something I had never expected. His fingers wrapped around the silver cross, pushing it down and away with such ease that all my strength seemed no more than a child's against his. "Do you think such symbols really repel me, especially when wielded by one with so little faith?"

My voice no longer worked, yet my will if anything seemed stronger. I stared at him, determined that I would not cower even if I could not run. He untied the lacing of my nightdress, pulling back a flap to expose one shoulder. I trembled, but I was frozen, unable to do anything but stand helpless as he pressed his open lips against my skin, sucking in a bit of flesh, biting down.

He tasted me then drew back, his expression mocking. I fought down my fear and looked defiantly at his dark eyes. "I will not cower," I whispered, "not even at the moment of my death."

"No?" he asked. I felt his mind release me, but I did not move; I did not flinch even when his pale hand brushed my cheek, wiping away a tear. Only then did I realize that I was weeping silently. Later I repeated to my husband and the others the words he had spoken. "Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. Kin of my kin. My bountiful winepress for a while." I knew that he meant my blood, my life, when he said those last words, but I felt little fear. As I watched silently, he exposed his own chest and, using one sharp nail, opened a wound above his heart. I recoiled at the sight of the blood welling across it, dark beads on the skin that seemed so white in the cold moonlight. Then he drew my head forward with such force that I had no choice but to press my lips against the wound, to drink.

His blood tasted familiar. I wondered if he had done this to me before. He had called me his vengeance, yet as I drank, I knew that I could be more than that. I sucked greedily. I tilted back my head so he could drink. I undid the rest of the lacings of my gown and pressed my bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his waiting hands. For the time that he held me, all the restraint I practiced in my nights with my husband vanished. For the time he held me, I was as wanton as the vampire women Jonathan had met in Dracula's castle. The women - my blood-kin.

This could not be d.a.m.nation. But if it were, the fire was far too sweet to resist.

"Jonathan," I whispered, looking back at my husband sleeping so innocently beside the place where I had lain. "He will not wake," Dracula whispered and kissed me.

I tasted my own blood. I tasted his. I reveled in both. I would have died and gladly that night, prepared to awaken into another life, had there not been the pounding of feet on the stairs, the trying of the locked door.

Dracula gripped my wrists to push me away, but I would not be denied one more taste of his dark eternity. As my lips pressed against the wound, he held me close for one final moment. I heard him draw in breath, then let it out in a human sigh of fulfillment.

Then the door slammed inward, and Quincey, Dr. Seward and Arthur rushed into the room.

With deliberate scorn, the count pushed me back against my sleeping husband. As the men advanced with crucifixes held out like swords against a mortal enemy, I watched Dracula slowly retreat. Was their faith so much stronger than mine, or did he only toy with them, making them think such trinkets could repel him?

The moon which had given the only light to the room vanished behind a cloud. When Quincey lit a match, Dracula was gone. The faint tendrils of mist curling across the red carpet on the floor gave the only sign that he had been anything more than a terrible dream among so many others.

I covered my face with my hands, trying to hide my shame. I recall nothing else, though Dr. Seward wrote that my expression was dazed and filled with terror, my moans pathetic to hear. Ah, if he had only known the guilt that was the cause of them. When at last Van Helsing and Dr. Seward managed to wake Jonathan, he comforted me without the slightest thought that I might have deserved some blame for my fate. It was in that moment, with his arms circling me with such fierce affection, that I decided to keep the terrible knowledge of my pa.s.sion a secret forever.

Nonetheless, we were allies against the monster. In the morning, I told them what I could recall of the night and the nights before it. The half-truths added to my guilt. In the hour that followed, as Jonathan held and comforted me, I found myself thinking of the future and the hopelessness of the men's task. I thought of the risks they would take for me, and death seemed suddenly the sweetest, easiest means to end my curse.

It was not like me to be so despondent. Nonetheless, the rightness of my decision seemed more clear the more I considered it.

Later that morning, when I hinted to the others that I would kill myself rather than harm any of them, Van Helsing said aloud what I had already suspected. "It is his blood already tainting you. In death, you would become as he is, condemned as he was. No, Madam Mina. You must not die. Especially not by your own hand."

Could they stop me? I suppose Seward could have put me in one of his padded cells, but otherwise the decision was mine. A single stroke of a knife would end my life. Or I could go to the river and throw myself from a high point on the bank. The water is brackish. My body would not be easily found. I would have time to wake, to walk the night as he does, perhaps even to search out my new kin.

Yes, though it was hard to accept, Van Helsing must have been right. The thought of suicide seemed so sweet because the vampire was already calling to me!

Yet the terrible, alluring thoughts that were not entirely my thoughts tumbled round in my mind. I managed to hide them well until the moment when Van Helsing had finished leading us in prayer then lifted the host above my head and called upon G.o.d to protect me. As the wafer touched my forehead, I thought of my pa.s.sion, of the vampire's blood flowing so willingly in my veins, and I felt the searing pain the host gave to my flesh.

I screamed. I cried. I was d.a.m.ned and would not be comforted, not even by Jonathan, who left a message in his journal that should I become vampiric, he would join me in my terrible eternity. He knew I would transcribe it with the others. Perhaps his decision was genuine, motivated by the love we have for one another. Perhaps he thought to give me one more reason to live. I cannot condemn him for that, but I have grown cynical in the days since I drank Dracula's blood. I see things more clearly, and I am not so trusting as I once was, not even with my husband. They all manipulate me.

When they saw the mark the host had made, the men became desperate. Though it pained Jonathan to leave me, they departed for London to search out more of Dracula's earth boxes and, perhaps, find the monster himself and destroy him when his powers were weakest. Van Helsing says they must do this. If Dracula escapes, I will never be free of him, and when I die, I will rise into his world of eternal night.

I remained at the asylum listening to the constant cries, the swearing of the guards, the smell of urine and feces that permeated even these private rooms. By afternoon, unable to bear the confinement any longer, I slipped outside. I was certain to let no one see me leave, for I did not know what orders Seward had given his staff concerning me.

The sky seemed unusually bright, the gra.s.s and trees of the sloping asylum grounds iridescent green. The brilliance of it hurt my eyes, and I hurried forward to the shade of a thick stand of trees that grew along the wall separating the asylum from the grounds of Carfax.

It was daylight. Mortal time, not his, and I felt the need to see what the men had done to his home, to see if he could indeed walk the exorcized grounds or sleep in the boxes defiled by hosts and holy water.

I searched the wall until I found a low wooden door hanging partway open, enough that I could squeeze my body through.

On the opposite side, the once beautiful gardens were overgrown with weeds and scrubby bushes. The abbey church that had undoubtedly once been beautiful was covered with dead ivy that surrounded the vaulted stone frames empty of their holy gla.s.s.

What had happened to the order that had once lived here? Did their ghosts still walk these quiet grounds, desolate souls among broken dreams?

Did the vampire's soul walk with theirs?

"Dracula," I called.

A sigh on the wind answered me, coming it seemed from the church.

I went into the building, through the dark, empty hole that had once held its doors. He might be waiting for me in its darkness, but he could not harm me any further. I was mated to him now. The worst had already been done.

Inside, I smelled the ancient earth scattered all around me. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness of the s.p.a.ce, I saw the broken boards, the scattered earth still damp with holy water, the crumbled hosts strewn above it. "Dracula," I called again.

No response, yet I knew I was not alone.

I walked toward the great stone of the altar and saw that it was slightly skewed from its base.

I did not see him, but I knew he rested in the hollow beneath it like some ancient saint. All I had to do was find a stake and a stone to drive it, and all our trials would be over.

"Revenge," I whispered, not as a warning for what I would do but as a justification.

The reply, too soft to be a whisper, formed in my mind. "For Lucy."

It was not my voice but his that spoke in my mind. I fled.

That night, as the men discussed the work they had done in London, I sat with them, picked at my food and said nothing about what I had seen or felt or heard.

And now it seems that Dracula is always with me. I see him on the edge of my sight, especially at night, when his dark eyes burn red in the center like a smoldering fire ready to flair and devour. His expression is filled with hunger and with l.u.s.t. Even now, when I am an accomplice of those committed to destroy him, I long for him as I longed for him the moment I first saw him, before his blood made me a part of him forever.

When Dracula left England, I made the men take me with them when they pursued him. I need to see the outcome of this chase with my own eyes. If Dracula escapes them or, worse, destroys them, I may as well face my doom at his side. If Dracula is destroyed, then his death is on my conscience for if I had not weakened and let him close to ire, only Van Helsing would have pursued him with such diligence.

Van Helsing is driven by a desire to destroy Dracula. If I dared, I would ask him what makes him such an expert cm vampirism and such an enemy to the creatures, but I am afraid to do so. The closer we get to Dracula's native land, the more often Dracula seems to be in my mind, and I would not wish to give the vampire some information that would put Jonathan and the others in danger. I would also not want Van Helsing to a.s.sume I am in an alliance with the vampire. He is so obsessed with this chase that I think he might kill me if he believed that. I am likewise certain that he would kill me if I became undead.

I have begun writing this account after telling the men that the smell of their cigar smoke nauseates me and their talking keeps me from sleep. They comment often on my lethargy but go to the smoking car to sit. I hope that they will do so often on this journey for I wish to be alone with my thoughts. I need this time to sort truth from lies and half-lies, my real feelings from those his blood has aroused in me as well as those the men believe I have. Through it all, I must practice deceit though it galls me to do so.

My world has suddenly become so filled with tragedy. I don't ... Wait, I hear Van Helsing and Dr. Seward speaking together in the hall outside our compartment. Later ...

TWO

I