DRACULA: The Sailor's Apostle

Dr. Seward’s Diary

May 1.—I am puzzled afresh about Renfield. As I have written time and again, he is in the throes of a strange obsession, his mania expressing itself in a lurid zoophagy: consuming first spiders and moths, before progressing to bats and other earth-bound vermin. I had theorized at first, from his scattered, mad ramblings, that it was the soul he sought to consume, but he rebuffed this, insisting he had only a desire to drink ’life’; to consume that most precious vitality. Imagine my surprise when I found him in his quarters, this very morning, surrounded by cans of leafy green vegetables.

“Renfield!” I exclaimed, marvelling at the stacked pillars towering to the ceiling, the aggregate shape reminiscent of London’s skyline in miniature. “What is the meaning of this?!”

“Power!” He declared in a frenzy of excitement. “Raw, unyielding power!”

With a can in hand, he snapped the tab, tore off of the lid, and guzzled the verdant slurried contents, as if he were some inebriate knocking back a lager at the tavern.

“What of the flies?” I asked at a loss. “The rats and bats and—”

He finished the can, tossing it aside. “Folly!” He cried, seizing another. “All folly! This alone has the power to fell the devil. To siege the gates of heaven itself!”

So drastic was this change in Renfield’s manner that I myself felt untethered, unmoored from these surreal surroundings.

I rushed to his side. “Please wait, Renfield! I beg you to explain. Just yesterday you spoke of drinking life, of consuming the vitality of living, breathing creatures. Now you feast on mere plants! Make plain what has induced this change in you!”

He suddenly stopped and that old cunning look spread over his face, like a wind-sweep on the surface of the water. “You wish to know?”

“I insist.” I huffed, clinging to my composure.

“Very well!” He declared. “Listen well, dear doctor, for it is now the patient, the mad-man, who will make the insane sane!”

This is the story Renfield told:

On the previous eve, Walpurgis Night, Renfield crept into the chambers of Lady Oyl and ensconced himself in her armoire. Needless to say, I was taken aback by this brazen admission, this wretched violation of her privacy, but I did not wish to tell him so and incur his ire, lest he cease the telling.

Nonetheless, he sensed the revulsion in my demeanor and claimed, in his defense, that voyeurism was not his aim—and that she was too bundled in quilts and sheets for any leering eye to pry. Rather, he waited until she had fallen asleep and then went to her bedroom window, unlatched the lock, and invited in the Lord of the Night, that vile Nosferatu, Count Dracula himself!

Renfield watched as the Count crossed the room, in the manner of an eerie apparition, gliding on thin air. At her bedside, he tossed his cape back, and whispered, in his strange accent, “Now, my sweetest Olive, my succulent fruit, you shall join the Sisters of the Night as my Consort Eternal.”

There he knelt, his fangs bare, glistening ivory white, longing to sink into the slender neck of defenseless Lady Olive Oyl.

—TING—

A sound like a silver spoon striking a pewter platter resounded in the room.

The Count jerked back and discovered, to his and Renfield’s collective shock, that his fangs had sunk into the lid of a spinage can. All the more surprising was the identity of the occupant of the bed; for the face staring back at the count was not that of Lady Olive Oyl, indeed no lady at all, but the gruff visage of a seafaring man with a corncob pipe perched at the corner of his mouth. More shocking still, he lay clad in a woman’s sleeping gown!

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to kiss on the first date?” The man asked in a thick drawl. He reached out and snatched the can, leaving the lid stuck to the Count’s fangs.

“Who are you?” The Count stammered, staggering back, his voice muffled by the lid. “What are you?”

The seafaring man rose to his feet, knocking back the contents like a shot of gin. “I am what I am.” A strange energy suffused the man, his every muscle bulging, rippling with untamed power. “And that’s all that I am.”

With the hiss of a thousand cobras, the Count lunged.

The seafaring-man slung his arm in a winding motion, as if cranking a great water wheel, and swung his bulbous fist, punching the Count so hard that his entire body was knocked back.

A hell-beast scream tore from the Nosferatu’s gaping maw as he sailed across the room, out the open window, into the endless void of the pitch black night.

“Preposterous!” I yelled, thundering to my feet.

While I contended with total disorientation, baffled as I was at this strange, audacious telling, Renfield confessed a secret all the more remarkable: he had sworn off his allegiance to Count!

“King of the Vampires, hah!” He threw back his head, chortling with mocking glee. “The Count is nothing more than a mollycoddled milksop! A lickspittle poltroon!”

“Renfield!” I cried, certain I would faint at any moment. “No more, I beg!”

He cracked the tab on another can of spinage, a queer smile splitting his thin lips as he raised his forearm, revealing there, tattooed upon his pallid flesh, a dreadful anchor!

“He is my master now.” Ω