SOON IT WAS ESTABLISHED THAT THE MASTER OF CARFAX was indeed Count Dracula, and it was also widely rumored that the asylum run by Dr. Seward was in a state of complete chaos. Van Helsing and Morris made a trip there, but Seward was not present; instead some stranger seemed to be in charge. Van Helsing asked that Morris be admitted to the hospital, as the two of them were determined to find out what was happening there. They suspected that the people at Carfax had been paying the hospital regular visits.
The next day Van Helsing and the others met with Morris and Dr. Seward, their clothes torn from their bodies and reduced to rags. They looked more like ghosts than men. Both men had come from Carfax, where Morris had fetched the doctor who’d gone mad.350 Morris was hardly conscious and had wounds on his head. They were both admitted to another hospital on the same day Dr. Seward’s asylum burned to the ground, and no one knew how it had happened.
The next day the companions put their heads together and decided to pay the Count a visit at Carfax, as they’d learned where he was hiding out during the day. It was already late when they arrived there. They picked the lock on the door and went into the house, where they found themselves in a large foyer. Harker saw that the walls were decorated with the same kinds of pictures as in the barbarian temple in Castle Dracula. There were rooms to both sides, but no one was around. The group went through a door straight ahead of them, entering a kind of crypt. There were lights burning inside, and on the floor they could see a stone coffin made entirely of black polished marble. But they no longer had to continue their search, for in this sarcophagus lay Count Dracula, clad in the long red cloak Harker had seen him wearing at the sacrificial ceremony under his castle.
They all drew nearer to the coffin. Van Helsing, clenching his dagger in his hand, stared at the man in the casket—but the Count didn’t move.
All of a sudden the Count jerked—it was sundown! He opened his eyes and sat up, looking not at Van Helsing but directly at Harker. In a flash he jumped out of the coffin and attacked him, hacking and slashing at his chest. All became dark before Harker’s eyes, but in the same moment the Count fell lifeless, swimming in his own blood: Van Helsing had stabbed him through the heart with his dagger.
They left the body in the stone coffin, but immediately afterwards they saw the corpse began to change. It now looked as though the Count had been dead for several days. Then, nothing remained at all in the coffin, nothing but a small heap of dust.