The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(26)

“Perhaps not,” Holmes said. He strode three paces into the house and crouched, looking at the floor. “But I perceive that our friend with the dirty shoes and shovel has been. Let us see what work has been done in the cellar.” His motion had somehow broken the subtle spell the house had cast over me, and I followed. Dracula, similarly galvanized, followed as well so that the two of us trailed Holmes, who lost no time locating the basement stairs in the kitchen and descending, with barely a moment taken to pull out his pocket lantern and light it.

Creaky wooden stairs led down into a dirt cellar. At the far end stood a pedestal of crates, all of them stacked together like an underground stage displaying a sordid theatre production. Standing in the centre of this makeshift stage was a black coffin, made with heavy, dark wood and wrapped all around with iron chains.

Dracula snarled. In half a heartbeat, he was at the chains, tearing them free as if they’d been constructed of mere cloth. They fell in a metallic clatter and Dracula tore at the box itself with fingernails like talons. Again, I felt a weight of fear fall on me regarding this man. It became clear at once that the Count was a man of powerful emotions held in check with an iron will, but that will had fallen away now. The wrath on his face was terrible to behold. His eyes blazed, his fangs protruded, and he looked more monster than he had ever before this.

When he hurled off the lid it split the side of the casket and something I’d been utterly unprepared for spilled out into the dirt. Water. Sea water by the scent of it. It poured out of the large, now broken coffin in a great gush.

“What in the world?” I said.

“What in the world, indeed,” Holmes murmured. Clearly, he’d been just as surprised by the contents as I had.

The Count, however, paid little attention to the water and plunged his arms into the depths of the coffin, tenderly lifting out the frail form within. She was a pale woman with dark hair and a beatific face that must have shone with a radiant life when alive, either as a human woman or as a vampire. But vampire or woman, the figure once known as Mina Murray was demonstrably dead now. The Count fell to his knees, heedless of the several inches of water and mud, and he let loose with something partway between a sob and snarl.

I turned away. As much as the man still seemed a monster to me, I could not help but feel pangs of sympathy at the profoundly raw and naked grief that savaged the Count’s face. I hadn’t believed him capable of a deep, abiding and profound love. I did now.

“Why?” Holmes murmured behind me. He crouched, also heedless of the wet, and fingered a large splinter of broken wood that had come from the coffin. “There is pitch here. Dried. Someone prepared a coffin in advance specifically to hold and drown a vampire? Why, when there would be far easier ways to perform the same task?”

I looked back at the Count, horrified at Holmes’s tactlessness in the face of such deep and debilitating sorrow. Dracula stood and carefully laid out the corpse of his great love. The final death.

“I foreswore all involvement with London,” Dracula said, very softly. Even my vampire ears had to strain to make out the words.

“Because London meant nothing to me,” the Count continued. “Only Mina. Only… Mina. Now, she is gone.” He turned, then, a tragic figure with the sodden corpse of his truest love behind him on the oversized pedestal of crates. Mina’s body looked wan and tired, inert, a physical shell bereft of anything that had given it importance. The important parts of Mina Dracula had all passed on.

“I am a man of my word,” Dracula said, his voice still low, but throbbing with awful force. “I swore that once Mina and I were reunited, we would return to my homeland and London would have nothing to fear from either of us.”

“I grieve for your loss,” Holmes said.

So quickly did Count Dracula cross the intervening space that I had absolutely no time to react. Holmes had reached for his own revolver, but Dracula seized his wrist with one hand, easily immobilizing him. Dracula’s eyes were wild, red, inhuman, his hair askew, his fangs protruding, the purely malevolent monster that I had feared him to be all along.

Dracula snarled. “But know this: London has taken Mina from me and London shall…”

“Vlad?” a soft voice said behind us.

“Mina?” The Count stopped. As quickly as he had come, he was gone, back on the other side of the room leaning over the body of his wife.

Mina, who, in some manner I could not begin to comprehend, was still alive.

“Mina, my love,” Dracula said. He bowed his head, brushing his face against hers in a gesture I found oddly tender and submissive from so fearsome a man. A soft sob escaped his lips. It was a flash of the vulnerable emotion that he had not allowed to show itself at her death, but now slipped free.

Dracula’s paralysing influence had evaporated its hold on me as quickly as it had come. I rushed to Holmes’s side, helping him to his feet. He ruefully rubbed his neck, but seemed otherwise unhurt.

I turned, finally lifting my revolver, but Holmes wordlessly put a restraining hand on my arm.

“But, Holmes!” I said. He merely shook his head and I did nothing.

“Vlad,” Mina said, listlessly trying to raise her hand to his face, but she was too weak. Dracula took her hand in his own and pressed his face to it, somehow seeming to come alive, to breathe, to exist, to thrive in a way he could not do alone, for all that Bram Stoker had wrongfully labelled him as one of the undead.