The Summary of Dracula
Men make the journey to Carfax, and have objects for protection. Dracula is not in the chapel, but it smells very bad. Rats begin to fill the chapel, they use a whistle to summon dogs that will chase away the rats. Van Helsing is happy that twenty one boxes are missing out of the fifty. Van Helsing asks to see Renfield again when he reaches the Asylum. Van Helsing wants an interview of him but Renfield curses him and fails to cooperate. Mina records her anxieties in her diary. She wakes up to her strange sounds from Renfield’s room and finds out that her window is open. Mina stares out the window at a thin streak of white mist the slowly creeps across the yard. There is a “pillar of cloud” in her room and sees a “livid white face” bending over to her and assumes that this is part of her dream.
Harker investigates, reveals twelve of the remaining boxes of Earth were deposited in two houses in London. He finds the other nine boxes in Piccadilly, in a London suburb. Seward finds rapid changes in Renfield’s behavior. He shows that he has given up interest in Zoophagy. The following evening Renfield is lying in his cell covered in blood. Dying. Renfield admits to the other men that Dracula often visited him, by promising to give him flies, spiders and other animals which helps him gain strength for his obedience. Later Mina visited him, Renfield noted that she is pale and realized that Dracula had been “taking the life out of her.” Dracula went into his room and Renfield tried to seize him but Dracula’s vampire eyes burned him, and was flung across the room as Dracula slipped away. Four men rush upstairs to Harker’s room. Finding it locked, they break down the door while Johnathan lies unconscious, Mina kneels on the edge of the bed, and the count stands over her as she drinks from the wound from her breast. Dracula’s eyes flame on the men and Van Helsing holds up a sacred Communion wafer and the count retreats. The men light up a gas lamp and there is a faint vapour escaping under the door. Morris chases the bat flying away from Carfax. Mina says that she awoke that night to find Johnathan unconscious beside her. The count threatened to kill her husband if she made a sound. He sliced his own chest open, and he made her drink the blood from his chest.
Harker recounts the end of Renfield’s story: before escaping the asylum, Count arrives and breaks his neck and killing him. Harker and his men go to Carfax the next day and place a Commonium wafer in each of Dracula’s boxes of Earth. Van Helsing seals Mina Murrays’s room with wafers. The men get keys to Dracula’s other houses around the city. Holmwood and Morris go to London to put the wafers in the twelve boxes and Harker and Van Helsing go to put the other nine boxes in Piccadilly. The men arrive and only find eight of the nine boxes. Mina tells them that Dracula leaves Carfax to go to Piccadilly to protect his boxes. Dracula taunts and Van Helsing thinks that the count is probably frightened, knowing that he has only one box remaining a safe resting place. Van Helsing’s band discovers that the Count has boarded a ship named The Czarina Catherine, which is bound for Varna. Van Helsing declares that it is necessary to defeat Dracula for the good of mankind. The men hunt for Dracula by intercepting him in Varna. Mina insists that she should come to help aid for their search. As the days pass, Mina grows weaker. After more than a weak of waiting in Varna, the band receives word that Dracula’s ship has bypassed Varna and arrived at the port of Galatz by accident. As they board Galatz, Van Helsing suggests that Mina’s connection to Dracula may have enabled the count to learn of their ambush. When the Communion wafer singes Mina’s forehead, the fight against Dracula’s evil takes on added meaning. The men decide that their efforts also represent a fight to restore a woman to her unpolluted. Mina never truly emerges as a complex or particularly believable character.
