Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

  “I’ve had that pleasure, thank you. My name is Joseph Bodenland, known as Joe, as in jovial.”

  “Ah, then you’re a son of Jupiter—an auspicious star. Are you a military man, Mr. Bodenland?”

  “No, by no means.”

  “Both Florence and I are of military stock. That’s why I ask. My grandfather was Thomas Thorley of the Forty-third Regiment. Fought against Bonaparte, later took part in the conquest of Burma, 1824. Florence’s father, Lt. Colonel James Balcombe, served in India and the Crimea, with great distinction.”

  “I see. Came through all right?”

  Florence Stoker said, to cover her guest’s awkwardness, “You Americans are expert at business, so I hear, and all extremely prosperous.”

  “I know your compatriot, Mark Twain,” Stoker said, turning to give an anxious tug at the curtains. “Most amusing chap, I thought. I tried to get him to write us a play.”

  Genially taking Bodenland’s elbow, he led him through a maze of tables on which various keepsake albums and other mementos lay, toward a cheerful log fire.

  Over the fireplace hung a large oil, its eroticism not entirely out of keeping with the luxury of the rest of the room. A naked pink woman sat fondling or being fondled by a cupid. Another figure was offering her a honeycomb in one hand and holding a scorpion’s sting in the other. The figure of Time in the background was preparing to draw a curtain over the amorous scene. Bodenland regarded it with some amazement.

  “Like it?” Stoker asked, catching his glance. “Nice piece of classical art. Bronzino’s celebrated Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. An all-embracing title.” He laughed and shot a glance at his wife. “It’s a copy, of course, but a good one.”

  When they had settled down in armchairs, and Mrs. Stoker had rung the bell and summoned the maidservant, and the maidservant had adjusted the curtains to everyone’s satisfaction—“That girl has no feeling for the symmetry of folds,” said Mrs. Stoker severely—they lapsed into general conversation over a glass of sherry.

  At length Bodenland said, “Of course, I know your name best as the author of Dracula.”

  “Is that a play you would be speaking of?”

  “A book, Mr. Stoker, a novel. It’s world-famous where I come from.” After a long pause, he added, “All about vampires.”

  “What do you know about vampires, may I ask?” Looking suspicious.

  “A fair deal, I guess. I’m given to believe I have locked one in your garden shed.”

  At this news, Stoker pulled again at his beard. He went further and pulled at his lip. Then he got up rapidly from his chair, wended his way across the room, and peered through the curtains, muttering.

  He came back, still muttering, frowning, his broad and rugged face all a-twitch.

  “I shall have to see about that later. Anyhow, you’re mistaken, allow me to say. It does so happen that I am writing a novel at present all about vampires, which I intend to entitle ‘The Un-Dead’ … Hm, all the same, I like the starkness of that as a title: ‘Dracula’ … Hm.”

  “He works too hard, Mr. Bodenland,” said Mrs. Stoker. “He’s never home till after midnight. He’s back today only because tomorrow is a special day for Mr. Irving.”

  She rose. “Excuse me, sir. I must confer with Maria, our cook. Dinner, at which we hope you will join us, will be ready at eight o’clock prompt.”

  When the two men were alone, Stoker leaned forward to poke the fire, saying as he stared into the flames, “Tell me, do you have any theories regarding vampires?”

  “I assume they are products of the imagination. As I rather assume you are too.”

  Stoker then gave him a hard look, holding out a glowing poker.

  “Is that some sort of joke? I don’t find it funny.”

  “I’m sorry, I apologize. I meant that to be sitting here with you, a famous man, seems to me like wild fantasy.”

  “Wilde? Oscar Wilde? He was once engaged to my Florence. Well, he’s got himself into a real pickle now, to be sure … Let me ask you this. Men are made to feel guilty about the sexual side of their natures. Do you believe that sex and guilt and disease and vampires are all related?”

  “I never thought of it.”

  “I have reasons to think of it—good reason.” These words, spoken with a morbid emphasis, were accompanied by equally emphatic wags of the poker, as though the ginger man were conducting the last bars of a symphony. “Let me ask you a riddle. What does the following refer to, if not to planets: ‘A night on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury’?”

  Despite the obvious good nature of his host, Bodenland was beginning to wish he had looked for a simple inn for the night.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Syphilis, Mr. Bodenland, that’s what I’m talking about. VD—the soldier’s term for it. Syphilis, the vampire of our amorous natures, that’s what. ‘Thou hast proved and visited mine heart in the night season.’ That’s what the psalm says, and a ghastly saying it is … Now, perhaps you’d care to have a wash before we go in to dinner.”

  This was a moment to be grasped, Bodenland saw, in which to explain how he had arrived, and how his country was more distant than even the imaginative Stoker might guess.

  Stoker listened with many a tug of the beard, many a dubious shake of the head, many a “Well, I’ll be jiggered!,” many a “Saints in heaven!” At the end, he remained stubbornly unbelieving, saying he had endured many a farfetched thing acted out on the stage, but nothing like this. He knew of occupants of the wards of the nearby lunatic asylum who believed themselves to be Napoleon, but even there none imagined they came from a future when their mothers were as yet unborn.

  “I come from an age where anything can be believed,” Bodenland said, halfway between amusement and irritation. “You evidently live in an age where nothing can be. Even when you have proof.”

  “What proof do you offer?”

  “Tomorrow, you shall see the vehicle by which I arrived here.”

  Nodding rather grimly, Stoker rose from his armchair. “Very well, then until that time I shall be forced to play the mistrustful host, who doubts the veracity of his guest and regards his account as merely a tall story told before dinner.”

  “I hope, sir, that over the soup you may reflect that my sincerity in this matter is some token of my honesty—”

  “—And by the cheese course I’ll have swallowed your every word!” With an explosion of laughter, Stoker led his guest from the room. His good humor went some way toward smoothing Bodenland’s ruffled feelings. It was only later that he came to realize how human beings come equipped with a defense mechanism which prevents them from accepting immediately anything which lies beyond their everyday experience; for so it was to prove in his own case.

  The dining room was decorated in scarlet, and less elaborately furnished than the drawing room. They sat down to a laden table under a large chandelier, the heat from which Bodenland found uncomfortable. Round the walls of the room mahogany dressers, sideboards, and carving tables gleamed, reflecting the light muzzily.

  Everything looked prosperous, safe, snug, repressive. Stoker peered through the curtains and muttered in Bodenland’s ear, “I’m worried about that hostage you put in my shed.” In other respects, he played the role of genial host.

  Clutching a decanter of red wine, he ushered his doctor in to the proceedings. Dr. Abraham van Helsing was a fussy little man with a sharp bright face and cold bony hands. He wore a velvet suit and smelled of cologne. He laughed and smiled rather much when introduced to Bodenland.

  “And you should be resting, Bram, my friend,” he said, wagging a finger at Stoker. “You should not be embarking on a heavy meal, you understand?”

  Bodenland thought there might be some truth in this observation, reluctantly though it was received by his host. Before them were laid a huge cold home-cured ham, a leg of mutton, ptarmigan, and a grand brawn jelly, which trembled slightly in its eagerness to be eaten. A little tablemaid cir
culated with a tureen of chicken and celery soup.

  “It’s the full moon tonight,” announced Stoker, tucking his linen napkin under his chin. “The lunatics will be restless.” Turning to Bodenland, he added by way of explanation, “The lunatic asylum is next door to us—quite a way through the trees, I’m happy to say. Used to be a priory, in the days before Oliver Cromwell. It’s quite a pretty place, as such places go. I thought I saw someone or something out on the terrace, by the way, but we won’t go into that. Mustn’t spoil our appetites.”

  “You’re like my father—nothing spoils your appetite,” said Florence Stoker affectionately, smiling at her husband.

  “I’m big and tough and Irish—and can’t help it.”

  “Nor can you ever take a holiday,” added van Helsing. “You’re too dedicated to work.”

  “And to Henry Irving,” said Mrs. Stoker.

  Stoker winked good-humoredly over his soupspoon at Bodenland.

  “Well, it was Henry’s Mephistopheles gave me the notion for my Count Dracula. I’m sure I shall have a hit, if I can ever get the damned book finished.”

  “When do you hope to finish?” asked Bodenland.

  Ignoring the question and lowering his voice, Stoker said, “It may be because I’m writing this novel that the house is surrounded by eerie forces. Van Helsing doesn’t seem to understand—in fact only the loonies next door seem to understand. Must be going loony myself, shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You’re sane, we live in a nice scientific world, and the soup’s delicious,” said van Helsing, soothingly. “Every single problem in the world will soon be capable of a scientific resolution. Just as the savage populations of the world are being brought into the arms of civilization, so the already civilized world will soon be turned into a utopian meritocracy.”

  The conversation became more general. Mrs. Stoker spoke of the happily married state of each of her sisters. Servants brought in more food. More wine was poured.

  As Bodenland was confronted by huge green blancmanges, plum pies with ornamental pastry crusts, bowls of cream, jellies, and trifles decorated with angelica, Stoker reverted to the subject of asylums, which seemed to prey upon his mind.

  “Many of the poor fellows in the asylum suffer great pain. Dementia and its sores are treated with mercury. It’s agonizing, I hear. It’s a matter of wonder why such suffering should be visited on humanity, Mr. Bodenland. Would you care to visit the asylum with me?”

  Bodenland shook his head.

  “I’m afraid all that interests me is getting home.”

  Stoker leaped from his chair with a sudden impulse and went to peer through the window again.

  “It’s a still night,” he declared, in the voice of one announcing the worst. “It would be ideal for cricket now, if only it was day.” He laughed.

  “Come and eat your trifle, Bram,” his wife said sharply.

  Certainly, the night was still. The full moon shone across the woods that choked the valley, to glitter on the massed slate roofs of the asylum. A bell in the small clock tower crowning the institution chimed midnight, spinning out its notes as if about to run down. The cool light glittered on rows of windowpanes, all barred. It sent a dagger of illumination plunging down through the narrow orifice of Renfield’s skylight to carve a square on the stones close by where he lay on his pallet of straw. During the day he had attacked a male nurse, and was in consequence secured in a straitjacket, his arms confined.

  He amused himself by alternately grinding his teeth and humming like a fly trapped in a jar.

  “Ummmm. Ummmm. Ummmmmmmm.”

  His eyes bulged in their sockets. He stared unblinkingly at the white square on the floor nearby. As minute by minute it slid nearer to him, it changed from rancid milk to pale pink, and then to a heartier color until it appeared to him as a square pan of blood.

  He stretched his neck to drink from it. At that moment, the whole cell was flooded with moonlight, and a great joyous humming sounded as if a thousand hornets were loose.

  Crying in triumph, Renfield sprang upward, arms above his head in the attitude of a diver. He was naked as the day he was born. He burst through the skylight and landed gracefully on the icy slant of the asylum roof, which stretched away into the distance like ski slopes.

  As he danced there, a great winged thing circled overhead. He called and whistled to it with a flutelike noise, playing imagined panpipes. Lower it came, red eyes fixed upon the naked dancer.

  “I know your secrets, little lord, I know. Come down, come down. I know how human blood makes you sick—it makes you sick, yet on it you have to depend, depend, deep end. Jump in the deep end, little lord …”

  It circled still, the beat of its wings vibrating in the air, scattering moonlight.

  “Yes, you come from a time when all blood was cool and thick and slow and lizard-flavored. That time of the great things, I know. They’ve gone and you have only us, Little lord. So take my blood at last, slopping in its jug of flesh just for you—and I shall poison you. Ummmm. Ummmm.”

  He pirouetted on the rooftree and the great winged thing swooped and took him. It enfolded him lasciviously, biting into him, into the creamy flesh like toffee-apple, as it wrapped him about with the great dry wings, biting, drinking deep with a love more terrible than fury—and then with disgust, as it flew off, vomiting back the blood into his empty face.

  Renfield sniggered in his sleep. His eyes remained open and staring like glass buttons on a child’s toy, but he dreamed his terrible dream.

  Red curtains closed over the eye of the moon as van Helsing pulled them together after a brief scrutiny of the terrace. The Stokers were leaving the dining room as they had entered, arm in arm. Bodenland was following when the doctor tugged at his sleeve and drew him back.

  “Permit me to ask—is there a pretty little Mrs. Bodenland back home where you come from?” He looked down at his nervous hands as he spoke, as if ashamed to pry.

  “I’m married, yes, doctor. In all but name. That’s one good reason why I am bent on getting home just as soon as I can.”

  He made to move on, but the doctor still detained him.

  “You understand why I enquire. I am in charge of Mr. Stoker’s health. The conjugal arrangements are not good in this household. As a result—as a direct result”—he paused, and then went on in a whisper—“Mr. Stoker has unfortunately contracted a vile disease from what the French call a fille de joie, a woman of the night. You understand?”

  Not being fond of the doctor’s fussy little ways, Bodenland made no reply, but stood solid to hear him out.

  Van Helsing tapped his temple.

  “His brain’s affected. Or he believes it affected. Which, in the case of brains, amounts to much the same thing. He believes—well, he believes that mankind has become the host for a species of parasite beings, vampires, who come from somewhere distant. I speak scientifically, you understand. From one of the planets, let’s say. He regards this as the secret of the universe, which of course he is about to reveal. You can never trust a man who thinks he knows the secret of the universe.”

  “I’m not so certain about that, Doctor. The secret of the universe—provided there is such a thing—is open to inquiry by anyone, by any interested party, just like the secrets of the personality.”

  “What secrets of the personality?”

  “Like why you rub one index finger against the other when you talk … No, wait, Doctor, I’m sorry. That was impertinent.”

  The doctor had turned on his heel in vexation, but Bodenland charmed him back, to ask what treatment he was giving Stoker for his disease.

  “I treat his sores with a mercury ointment. It is painful but efficacious.”

  Bodenland scratched his chin.

  “You won’t have heard of penicillin yet awhile, but maybe I could get ahold of some. And in a very few years Salvarsan will become available.”

  “You’re making no sense to me, sir.”

  “You know, Salvarsa
n? Let’s see, would you have heard of Dr. Ehrlich’s ‘magic bullets’ at this date?”

  “Oh.” The doctor gave a chuckle and nodded. “I begin to get your drift. Bram Stoker makes his own magic bullets—to kill off his imaginary vampires, you understand.”

  At that juncture, Stoker himself put his head round the dining room door.

  “There you are. I thought you must have gone into the study. Mr. Bodenland, perhaps you’d care to inspect my workshop? I generally spend an hour pottering in there after dinner.”

  As they went down a side passage, Stoker put an arm round Bodenland’s shoulders.

  “You don’t want to pay too much attention to what van Helsing says. He’s a good doctor but”—he put a finger to his temple, in unconscious imitation of van Helsing’s gesture of a few minutes past—“in some respects he has a screw loose.”

  On the door before them was a sign saying, WORKSHOP, KEEP OUT.

  “My private den,” said Stoker proudly. As they entered, he drew from an inner pocket a leather case containing large cigars and proffered it to Bodenland. The latter shook his head vigorously.

  He studied Stoker as the ginger man went through the rigmarole of lighting his cigar. The head was large and well shaped, the ginger hair without gray in it, though a bald patch showed to the rear of the skull. The features were good, although the skin, particularly where it showed above the collar, was coarse and mottled.

  Feeling the eyes of his visitor on him, Stoker looked sideways through the smoke.

  “Here’s my den. I must be always doing. I can’t abide nothing to do.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Life’s too short.”

  “Agreed. I am always ambitious to make something of myself.”

  “That’s it—cut a dash at the least, I say. Needs courage.”

  “Courage, yes, I suppose so. Do you reckon yourself courageous?”

  Stoker thought, squeezing his eyes closed. “Let’s put it this way. I’m a terrible coward who’s done a lot of brave things. I like cricket. You Yanks don’t play cricket?”

  “No. Business and invention—that’s my line. And a lot of other things. There are so many possibilities in the world.”