The Historian

by Elisabeth Kostova

  “Well, we can’t go into the church for one,” I pointed out unnecessarily.

  “I’ve got my lighter.” Barley took it out of his pocket. I hadn’t known he smoked. He flicked it on for a second, held it above the steps, and we descended together into darkness.

  At first it was dark indeed, and we were feeling our way down the steepness of the ancient steps, and then I saw a light flickering in the depths of the vault-not Barley’s lighter, which he relit every few seconds-and I was terribly afraid. That shadowy light was somehow worse than darkness. Barley gripped my hand until I felt the life draining out of it. The stairwell curved at the bottom and when we came around the last turn I remembered what my father had told me, that this had been the nave of the earliest church here. There was the abbot’s great stone sarcophagus. There was the shadowy cross carved in the ancient apse, the low vaulting above us, one of the earliest surviving gestures of the Romanesque in all of Europe.

  I took this in peripherally, however, because just then a shadow on the other side of the sarcophagus detached itself from deeper shadows and straightened up: a man holding a lantern. It was my father. His face looked ravaged in the shifting light. He saw us in the instant we saw him, I think, and he swore-“Jesus Christ!” We stared at each other. “What are you doing here?” he demanded in a low voice, looking from me to Barley, holding up the lantern in front of our faces. His tone was ferocious-full of anger, fear, love. I dropped Barley’s hand and ran to my father, around the sarcophagus, and he caught me in his arms. “Jesus,” he said, stroking my hair for a second. “This is the last place you should be.”

  “We read the chapter in the archive at Oxford,” I whispered. “I was afraid you were -” I couldn’t finish. Now that we had found him, and he was alive, and looked like himself, I was shaking all over.

  “Get out of here,” he said, and then caught me closer. “No. It’s too late-I don’t want you out there alone. We have a few more minutes before the sun sets. Here”-he thrust the light at me-“hold this, and you”-to Barley-“help me with the lid.” Barley stepped forward at once, although I thought I saw his knees shaking, too, and he helped my father slide the lid slowly off the big sarcophagus. I saw then that my father had propped a long stake against the wall nearby. He must have been prepared for the sight of some long-sought horror in that stone coffin, but not for what he actually saw. I lifted the lantern for him, wanting but not wanting to look, and we all gazed down into the empty space, dust. “Oh, God,” he said. It was a note I had never heard in his voice before, a sound of absolute despair, and I remembered that he had looked into this emptiness once before. He stumbled forward, and I heard the stake clatter on the stone. I thought he was going to cry, or tear his hair, bent over that empty grave, but he was motionless in his grief. “God,” he said again, almost whispering. “I thought I had the right place, the right date, finally-I thought -”

  He did not finish, because then there stepped from the shadows of the ancient transept, where no light pierced, a figure completely unlike anything any of us had ever seen. It was so strange a presence that I couldn’t have screamed even if my throat hadn’t immediately closed. My lantern illuminated its feet and legs, one arm and shoulder, but not the shadowed face, and I was too terrified to raise the light higher. I shrank closer to my father and so did Barley, so that we were all more or less behind the barrier of the empty sarcophagus.

  The figure drew a little nearer and stopped, its face still shadowed. I could see by then that it had the form of a man, but he did not move like a human being. His feet were clad in narrow black boots indescribably different from any boots I’d ever seen, and they made a quiet padding sound on the stones when he stepped forward. Around them fell a cloak, or perhaps just a larger shadow, and he had powerful legs clothed in dark velvet. He was not as tall as my father, but his shoulders under the heavy cloak were broad, and something about his dim outline gave the impression of much greater height. The cloak must have had a hood, because his face was all shadow. After the first appalling second I could see his hands, white as bone against his dark clothing, with a jeweled ring on one finger.

  He was so real, so close to us that I could not breathe; in fact, I began to feel that if I could only force myself to go nearer to him I would be able to breathe again, and then I began to long to go a little closer. I could feel the silver knife in my pocket, but nothing could have persuaded me to reach for it. Something glinted where his face must have been-reddish eyes? teeth, a smile?-and then, with a gush of language, he spoke. I call it a gush because I have never heard such a sound, a guttural rush of words that might have been many languages together or one strange language I had never heard. After a moment it resolved itself into words I could understand, and I had the sense that they were words I knew with my blood, not my ears.

  Good evening. I congratulate you.

  At this my father seemed to come to life again. I don’t know how he found the strength to speak. “Where is she?” he cried. His voice trembled with fear and fury.

  You are a remarkable scholar.

  I don’t know why, but at that moment, my body seemed to move toward him slightly of its own volition. My father put his hand up at almost the same second and gripped my arm very hard, so that the lantern swayed and terrible shadows and lights danced around us. In that second of illumination, I saw something of Dracula’s face, just a curve of drooping dark mustache, a cheekbone that could have been actual bone.

  You have been the most determined of them all. Come with me and I will give you knowledge for ten thousand lifetimes.

  I didn’t know, still, how I could understand him, but I thought he was calling out to my father. “No!” I cried. I was so terrified at having actually spoken to that figure that I felt my consciousness sway inside me for a moment. I had the sense that the presence before us might be smiling, although his face was in darkness again.

  Come with me, or let your daughter come.

  “What?” my father asked me, almost inaudibly. It was at this moment that I knew he could not understand Dracula’s words, and perhaps could not even hear Dracula. My father was answering my cry.

  The figure appeared to think for a while in silence. He shifted his strange boots on the stone. There was something about his shape under the ancient clothes that was not only gruesome but also graceful, an old habit of power.

  I have waited a long time for a scholar of your gifts.

  The voice was soft now and infinitely dangerous. We stood in a darkness that seemed to flood us from that dark figure.

  Come with me of your own volition.

  Now my father seemed to lean toward him a little, his grip still on my arm. What he couldn’t understand he could apparently feel. Dracula’s shoulder twitched; he shifted his terrible weight from one leg to another. The presence of his body was like the actual presence of death, and yet he was alive and moving.

  Do not keep me waiting. If you will not come I will come for you.

  Now my father seemed to gather all of his strength. “Where is she?” he shouted. “Where is Helen?”

  The figure rose up and I saw an angry gleam of teeth, bone, eye, the shadow of the hood swinging over his face again, his inhuman hand clenching at the margin of the light. I had the terrible sense of an animal crouched to pounce, of a leaping toward us, even before he moved, and then there was a footfall on the shadowy stairs behind him, and a flash of motion that we felt in the air because we could not see it. I raised the lantern with a scream that seemed to me to come from outside myself, and I saw Dracula’s face-which I can never forget-and then, to my utter astonishment, I saw another figure, standing just behind him. This second person had apparently just come down the stairs, a dark and inchoate form like his, but bulkier, the outline of a living man. The man was moving rapidly, and he had something bright in his raised hand. But Dracula had sensed his presence already, and turned with his arm out, and pushed the man away. Dracula’s strength must have been prodigious, becau
se suddenly the powerful human figure collided with the crypt wall. We heard a silent thud, then a groan. Dracula was turning this way and that in a kind of horrible distraction, first for us, and then toward the groaning man.

  Suddenly there was again the sound of footsteps on the stairs-light ones, this time, accompanied by the beam of a strong flashlight. Dracula had been caught off balance-he turned too late, a blur of darkness. Someone searched the scene swiftly with the light, raised an arm, and fired once.

  Dracula did not move as I’d expected a moment earlier, hurtling over the sarcophagus toward us; instead he was falling, first backward, so that his chiseled, pale face surfaced again for a moment, and then forward and forward, until there was a thud on the stone, a breaking sound like flung bone. He lay convulsed for a second and at last was still. Then his body seemed to be turning to dust, to nothing, even his ancient clothes decaying around him, sere in the confusing light.

  My father dropped my arm and ran toward the flashlight’s beam, skirting the mass on the floor. “Helen,” he called-or maybe he wept her name, or whispered it.

  But Barley was pushing forward, too, and he had caught up my father’s lantern. A large man lay on the flagstones, his dagger beside him. “Oh, Elsie,” said a broken English voice. His head oozed a little dark blood, and even as we watched in paralyzing horror, his eyes grew still.

  Barley threw himself into the dust next to that shattered form. He seemed to be actually strangling with surprise and grief. “Master James?”

  Chapter 79

  The hotel in Les Bains boasted a high-ceilinged parlor with a fireplace, and the maître d‘ had lit a fire there and stubbornly closed the parlor doors against other guests. “Your trip to the monastery has tired you” was all he had said, setting a bottle of cognac near my father, and glasses-five glasses, I noted, as if our missing companion were still there to drink with us-but I saw from the look that my father exchanged with him that much more than that had passed between them.

  The maître d‘ had been on the phone all evening, and he had somehow made things right with the police, who had questioned us only in the hotel and released us under his benevolent eye. I suspected he’d also taken care of calling a morgue or a funeral parlor, whatever one used in a French village. Now that everyone official was gone, I sat on the uncomfortable damask sofa with Helen, who reached over to stroke my hair every few minutes, and tried not to imagine Master James’s kind face and solid form inert under a sheet. My father sat in a deep chair by the fire and gazed at her, at us. Barley had put his long legs up on an ottoman and was trying, I thought, not to stare at the cognac, until my father recollected himself and poured us each a glass. Barley’s eyes were red with silent weeping, but he seemed to want to be left alone. When I looked at him, my own eyes filled with tears for a moment, uncontrollably.

  My father looked across at Barley, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, too. “He was very brave,” my father said quietly. “You know that his attack made it possible for Helen to shoot as she did. She would not have been able to shoot through the heart like that if the monster had not been distracted. I think James must have known in the last moments what a difference he had made. And he avenged the person he had loved best-and many others.” Barley nodded, still unable to speak, and there was a little silence among us.

  “I promised I would tell you everything when we could sit quietly,” Helen said at last, setting down her glass.

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t like me to leave you alone?” Barley spoke reluctantly.

  Helen laughed, and I was surprised by the melody of her laugh, so different from her speaking voice. Even in that room half full of grief, her laugh did not seem out of place. “No, no, my dear,” she said to Barley. “We can’t do without you.” I loved her accent, that harsh yet sweet English of hers that I thought I already knew from so long ago I couldn’t remember the time. She was a tall, spare woman in a black dress, an outdated sort of dress, with a coil of graying hair around her head. Her face was striking-lined, worn, her eyes youthful. The sight of her shocked me every time I turned my head-not only because she was there, real, but because I had always imagined only the young Helen. I had never included in my imagination all her years away from us.

  “Telling will take a long, long time,” she said softly, “but I can say a few things now, at least. First, that I am sorry. I have caused you such pain, Paul, I know.” She looked at my father across the firelight. Barley stirred, embarrassed, but she stopped him with a firm gesture. “I caused myself an even greater pain. Second, I should have told you this already, but now our daughter”-her smile was sweet and tears gleamed in her eyes-“our daughter and our friends can be my witnesses. I am alive, not undead. He never reached me a third time.”

  I wanted to look at my father, but I couldn’t bring myself even to turn my head. It was his private moment. I heard, though, that he did not sob aloud.

  She stopped and seemed to draw a breath. “Paul, when we visited Saint-Matthieu and I learned about their traditions-the abbot who had risen from the dead and Brother Kiril, who guarded him-I was filled with despair, and also with a terrible curiosity. I felt that it could not be coincidence that I had wanted to see the place, had longed for it. Before we went to France, I had been doing more research in New York-without telling you, Paul-hoping to find Dracula’s second hiding place and to avenge my father’s death. But I had never seen anything about Saint-Matthieu. My longing to go there began only when I read about it in your guidebook. It was just a longing, with no scholarly basis.”

  She looked around at us, her beautiful profile drooping. “I had taken up my research again in New York because I felt that I had been the cause of my father’s death-through my desire to outshine him, to reveal his betrayal of my mother-and I could not bear the thought. Then I began to feel that it was my evil blood-Dracula’s blood-that had caused me to do this, and I realized that I had passed this blood to my baby, even if I seemed to have healed from the touch of the undead myself.”

  She paused to stroke my cheek and to take my hand in hers. I quivered under her touch, the closeness of this strange, familiar woman leaning against my shoulder on the divan. “I felt more and more unworthy, and when I heard Brother Kiril’s explanation of the legend at Saint-Matthieu, I felt that I would never be able to rest until I knew more. I believed that if I could find Dracula and exterminate him I might be completely well again, a good mother, a person with a new life.

  “After you fell asleep, Paul, I went out to the cloisters. I had considered going into the crypt again with my gun, trying to open the sarcophagus, but I thought I could not do it alone. While I was trying to decide whether or not to wake you, to beg you to help me, I sat on the cloister bench, looking over the cliff. I knew I should not be there alone, but I was drawn to the place. There was beautiful moonlight, and mist creeping along the walls of the mountains.”

  Helen’s eyes had grown strangely wide. “As I sat there, I felt the crawling of the skin on my back, as if something stood just behind me. I turned quickly, and on the other side of the cloister, where the moonlight could not fall, I seemed to see a dark figure. His face was in shadow, but I could feel, rather than see, burning eyes upon me. It was only the work of a moment more before he would spread his wings and reach me, and I was completely alone on the parapet. Suddenly I seemed to hear voices, agonizing voices in my own head that told me I could never overcome Dracula, that this was his world, not mine. They told me to jump while I was still myself, and I stood up like a person in a dream and jumped.”

  She sat very straight now, looking into the fire, and my father drew his hand over his face. “I wanted to fall free, like Lucifer, like an angel, but I had not seen those rocks. I fell on them instead and cut my head and arms, but there was a large cushion of grass there, too, and the fall did not kill me or break my bones. After some hours, I think, I woke to the cold night, and felt blood seeping around my face and neck, and saw the moon setting
and the drop below. My God, if I had rolled instead of fainting -” She paused. “I knew I could not explain to you what I had tried to do, and the shame of it came over me like a kind of madness. I felt I could never be worthy, after that, of you or our daughter. When I could stand, I got up, and I found that I had not bled so much. And although I was very sore, I had not broken anything and I could feel that he had not swooped down upon me-he must have given me up for lost, too, when I jumped. I was terribly weak and it was hard for me to walk, but I went around the monastery walls and down the road, in the dark.”

  I thought my father might weep again, but he was quiet, his eyes never leaving hers.

  “I went out into the world. It was not so hard to do. I had brought my purse with me-out of habit, I suppose, and because I had my gun and my silver bullets in it. I remember almost laughing when I found the purse still on my arm, on the precipice. I had money in it, too, a lot of money in the lining, and I used it carefully. My mother always carried all her money, too. I suppose it was the way the peasants in her village did things. She never trusted banks. Much later, when I needed more, I drew from our account in New York and put some in a Swiss bank. Then I left Switzerland as quickly as I could, in case you should try to trace me, Paul. Ah, forgive me!” she cried out suddenly, tightening her grip on my fingers, and I knew she meant her absence, not the money.