CHAPTER IX.

      Mina Harker stood on the small balcony and looked out into the night, longing for something, but for what, she couldn’t say. She shivered at the sound of the chimes ringing from the nearby cathedral, though she was not cold. Above the cathedral, what looked like an unnatural crimson fog was descending from the clouds, as if the sky itself were bleeding. The fog moved swiftly toward her, against the wind. Her eyes widened as she stepped back into her husband’s study and closed the shutter doors. In a wave of panic, she dashed from window to window, slamming them shut. Mere moments later, an angry wind pounded the glass so forcefully that Mina backed away for fear it would shatter.

      The howling wind grew louder and louder. Then, in an instant, there was nothing, only a deafening silence. Mina strained to listen for any sound, any movement. Daring at last to peer through the shutters, she saw that the house was enveloped. She couldn’t see an inch past the window.

      A loud, hollow knock upon the front door echoed to the high rafters of the foyer and Mina jumped violently. Another knock came, and then another. The pounding grew louder, more forceful.

      She did not move. She could not move. She wanted to run, but found herself frozen by the dark fear that it could be him, returned. She knew it was impossible. He was dead. They had all watched him die. There came the sound of glass breaking from the floor below. Mina could hear the front doors swing open and the sound of something being dragged along the marble floor. Jonathan had gone out, as usual. Manning, the butler, had been dismissed for the evening. But now someone else—or something—was in the house with her. Mina backed into a corner, cowering in fear. She was angry with herself for being so weak; she would not be a prisoner in her own home, to anyone or anything, least of all to herself. Her previous experiences with the supernatural had taught her that shrinking away like a frightened schoolgirl would not force evil to recede. Confronting it head-on was the only way to combat the darkness.

      She snatched a ceremonial Japanese sword from the wall, a gift from one of Jonathan’s clients. Ironically, she had always despised the prominent place Jonathan had given it in the room. Nearing the top of the grand staircase, Mina knelt to peer through the banister’s ornate iron rails. The front door was wide open. A meandering trail of smeared blood stained the floor from the threshold, across the foyer, and into the drawing room. The frightful thought that Jonathan had returned home and was somehow injured banished all her fears, and she raced down the stairs and into the drawing room. Following the bloody path to a corner, she found a man huddled beneath the portrait that hid the family wall safe. A bolt of lightning ripped through the sky, illuminating the study. She gasped, shocked at the ghastly appearance of a man she knew.

      “Jack?”

      Not only was Jack Seward covered from head to foot in blood, but he looked so frail and ill, vastly different from the robust man she had once known. He looked up at her, opened his mouth, and tried to speak. Blood gurgled out instead of words. Dropping the sword, she knelt beside him. “Jack, don’t try to speak. I’ll fetch a physician.”

      As she rose, Seward grabbed her arm. He shook his head vigorously. He pointed to the floor, where he had written with his own blood: “B-E-W-A-R.”

      “Beware?” Mina implored. “Beware of what…of whom?”

      Seward screamed, but it was abruptly silenced. He fell back, his face frozen in horror.

      Jack Seward was dead.

      Her own screams woke Mina from the nightmare.

      She was safe in her own chambers, in her own bed, tangled in her sheets. In those few disorienting seconds between the dream state and reality, Mina was certain that she saw the crimson fog seep out of her bedroom window and into the night. Although she was sure that she felt a presence in her room, she dismissed it as the last dissipating fragment of her vision. She sighed and dropped back into her pillow, watching the curtains billowing in the wind.

      She had shut the window before retiring to bed. She vividly remembered fastening the lock.

      The cathedral bells rang, and Mina glanced at the clock resting on the mantelpiece. It was a quarter past twelve.

      She ran to the window and reached to grab the latch handle. She froze. The crimson red fog was in her front courtyard, slithering around the hedges and trees as it retreated from the house.

      After drawing the curtains, Mina raced down the hall to Jonathan’s bedroom to find comfort in her husband’s arms but was disheartened to find his room empty. The bedsheets had not even been turned back. He had not yet come home.

      “Damn him,” Mina cursed. He was supposed to have been on the 6:31 train from Paddington, arriving at St. David’s station by 10:05. She looked back into the night, wondering if she should ring up Mark at the Half Moon down the lane to see if Jonathan had stumbled in from the station. Then she remembered the embarrassing incident from the last time when Jonathan had traded blows with a fellow drunkard over the favors of an aged consumptive whore. Mina had been forced to endure the shame of traveling into town to bail her husband out of the police station’s cells.

      Despite that dreadful incident, she still wished Jonathan were here. He was rarely home of late. Now that her son, Quincey, was away at the Sorbonne, Mina often found herself alone in this grand, empty house. Tonight her loneliness was poignant and the house was like a tomb.

      She gazed at the row of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. What had happened to all those people? Some were deceased, but most had simply drifted away. How did my whole life crash on the rocks? Mina’s eye fell upon one of her favorite photographs, and she picked it up, a portrait of Lucy and herself, taken before the darkness came into their lives. Before she made her fateful choice. The naïveté of youthful innocence in those smiles comforted her. She could still clearly remember that beautiful August day in 1885 when she had first met the love of her life, Jonathan Harker, at the Exeter Summer Fair.

      Lucy had looked radiant in her new Parisian garden dress. She had waited for months to show it off. Mina was fortunate enough to fit into the dress that Lucy had worn two summers before, though she found it stifling. She did not quite have Lucy’s eighteen-inch waist, and the corset made her feel as if her breasts were being pressed up to her chin. The revealing décolleté was much more Lucy’s style. Though it made Mina feel uncomfortable, she couldn’t help but enjoy the looks it was attracting from the young men as they passed by.

      Lucy was trying to introduce Mina to some guests from London, most notably Arthur Fraser Walter, whose family had owned