Dracula's Child

by J. S. Barnes

  Something in this painterly scene made an appeal to my soul so that, having disembarked, I did not board the coach again but found instead, at the edge of the square, the town’s only hotel, the name of which, according to its stout, aged proprietress, can be translated approximately from the Roumanian as ‘The Most High and Treacherous Mountain Path’. It is a peculiar name for such a humble establishment, if charmingly whimsical and old-world.

  Having stowed my bag in my surprisingly comfortable room, I left to take a stroll about the town. The place is quiet and peaceful. There is little enough to see but its strange, beguiling character is easy to imbibe. The people are mostly of peasant stock, though there are some tradesmen, merchants and commercial travellers. They view me with curiosity but without any suggestion of suspicion or hostility. I dare say that I represent to them, in my frock coat and cravat and my hair worn down to my shoulders, something of a figure of fascination and glamour – a dash of the ’90s in this forgotten corner of the world.

  A little beyond the square, facing, as if in defiance, towards that cyclopean mountain range, stands what is known to these people as ‘The Black Church’, so called because of its charred exterior, the result of a terrific fire some two hundred and fifty years ago, a conflagration which, so far as I can tell, all but scourged these streets. No doubt in its costly and destructive fashion it was also a boon in its eradication of the plague, which still at that time lingered here.

  The charred walls of the temple lend it a forbidding aspect which is not supported inside – a large, light and rather graceful space, if, at least to my metropolitan eyes, a trifle lurid and idolatrous. A statue of the suffering Christ upon the cross seemed even to me, one who has never shied away from any dramatic flourish, to be so overstated in its depiction of that brand of agony which dwells at the extremities of human endurance that I doubt I shall sleep altogether soundly for some time. The expression upon our Saviour’s face seemed too authentic, the blood with which his sinewy form was daubed too realistically painted. I hurried on with my tour of the place and it was with some relief that I emerged from the Black Church into the world beyond, just as twilight was falling.

  The atmosphere in the shrine must have affected my imagination more than I had at first believed, for when I came into the street I could have sworn that there was a young man standing in the shadows upon the edge of the footpath and that he was watching the entrance to the house of prayer. I blinked in the fading light and rubbed my eyes. When I looked again there was nothing at all to be seen.

  I write in my room, shortly before I am to go down for dinner, in a state of complete sobriety. I stress this point in order to make plain that the following claim is not the product of any excess or indulgence. I am almost certain that the watching figure whom I glimpsed was the selfsame Englishman who so arrested my attention yesterday in that grimy, sin-sodden avenue in the old town.

  * * *

  8 November. The first spokes of a new dawn are slanting into my chamber. I am joyful and inflamed. Yesterday I discovered a wholly original passion; strange fire now surges through my veins.

  Returning to the hotel after my visit to the Black Church, and having composed a few paragraphs concerning the chief incidents of my day, I fell into a light doze from which I woke dry-mouthed and cobwebbed, tired from the journey and, I dare say, from sundry diversions also. As I approach my half century I find that I am no longer as robust in my constitution as once I was. Struggling upright, I anointed my face with cold water, dressed for dinner as best I could – my supper raiment being by now just a little threadbare – and went down to eat. What awaited me was both profoundly improbable and entirely thrilling.

  The room in which the good proprietress serves her repasts is darkened and narrow. Its walls are bedecked with mountain views and gloomy forest landscapes. The food offered here is, as is the case throughout the kingdom, composed in large part of numerous meats (with especial emphasis placed upon the versatility of the sausage) accompanied by a great many dishes of cabbage, alternately boiled and stewed. All this – from furnishings to victuals – I might have guessed before I had even descended the staircase. Yet there was one element in that mean dining hall of which I would hardly have dared to dream.

  The room was quite empty of any other visitor – entirely predictable in this autumnal and isolated burgh – save for one gentleman whose face, form and charming mien were to me immediately and marvellously familiar.

  The young man from the back street in Bucharest and from the church yesterday afternoon looked up as I entered. He glanced over in my direction. I found that I paused, even that I stumbled for a moment, at the sight of him. Righting myself, I managed to form the words ‘good evening’.

  He smiled in return. ‘You are English?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am.’

  ‘Well…’ He gestured about the empty room. ‘Would you care to join me? One Englishman, breaking bread with another in a foreign land.’

  ‘I should be delighted.’ I drew nearer and offered the youth my hand. ‘Please, let me introduce myself. I am Maurice Hallam.’

  ‘Charmed.’ His grip was firm, his skin soft and smooth. ‘Gabriel Shone.’

  ‘How splendid.’ I relinquished his hand with some regret and took the chair that was set opposite him. ‘How splendid to meet you properly at last.’

  Shone looked at me with some bemusement. ‘Have we seen one another before?’

  ‘I do believe we have,’ I said as coolly as I was able. ‘Perhaps… Yes. By the Black Church?’

  ‘Oh! Of course. I think I remember that now, Mr Hallam.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, leaning forward. My manner was confidential while striving simultaneously for wry charm, ‘You ought to call me Maurice.’

  ‘Maurice it is, then. And so to you I shall be Gabriel.’

  ‘The greatest,’ I murmured, ‘of all the archangels. Most revered and exalted of divine messengers. Chief consoler of Adam before the Fall.’

  He smiled at me as we sat down together, a pair of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims in this land of blood and shadow. There was wine upon the table and we drank our fill of it. At first, the conversation, at least in my half of the equation, was a trifle halting and unsure (unaccustomed as I have lately been to conversing with anyone other than tinkers, hoteliers and guardsmen). Nonetheless, I saw at once that Mr Shone was cut from singular cloth. In addition to the glory of his youth, he possessed both a radiant humility and true, impermeable glamour.

  ‘So how did you come to be in Brasov?’ I asked as I settled upon the chair. ‘You seem – forgive me – almost as much out of place here as I.’

  He lowered his head in acquiescence. ‘There is some truth in that.’ His voice was smooth and well-modulated, yet without that braying quality which so often marks the aristocrat. ‘My story is perhaps too ugly for the dinner table. At least in its specifics. Suffice for now to say that my birth was a low one, that I was rescued from the penury of the orphanage by a noble benefactor, Lord Stanhope, whose recent demise has granted me both the motive and the wherewithal to leave England and explore.’

  Intrigued by this unusual sketch I was considering ways in which I might enquire further without appearing too eager or impertinent, when our landlady bustled once more into the room.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ she declared in her charmingly broken English. ‘I trust that you are both being fully settled in this so humble establishment?’

  Naturally, we insisted that we were. Glowing with pleasure, she disappeared almost at once, departing amid voluble promises of the excellence of our imminent supper.

  When she had gone, Gabriel looked me in the eye and said: ‘And you, Maurice? How came you to Roumania?’

  ‘Oh, I dare say that my tale is common enough. It is the narrative, perhaps, of all émigrés. Towards the end of the last century I simply came to find England too small in its imagination, too unkind in its attitudes and too unbeautiful in its aspect for me to countenance remaining wi
thin its limits. While my own country convulsed in pettiness and intolerance, I struck out for continental climes and fresh adventure.’

  Gabriel inclined his blond head again at this speech of mine and, at the gesture, I felt that he had somehow understood me and my motives entirely.

  ‘How interesting.’ He raised his chin once more so that I might admire without difficulty that delicious profile. ‘Well, what is a loss to the motherland is doubtless the continent’s gain.’ He paused and peered. ‘Forgive me, Maurice, but it seems to me that, notwithstanding our recent, glancing encounters, I seem also to recognise you from the past. That is to say, from England.’

  I managed a brisk shrug of world-weary unconcern. ‘I suppose that such a thing is possible.’

  ‘How so?’

  For emphasis, I moved my plump left hand through the air. ‘Long ago in the old country, back when you were very young, it is true that I enjoyed some small renown.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘As an actor, dear boy, upon the London stage.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gabriel Shone. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Perhaps you saw me as a child? As a boy, awe-struck from the stalls? My Petruchio? My Berowne? Or perhaps,’ I went on, thinking of the description which he had provided of his earliest years, ‘perhaps you simply glimpsed my likeness upon a playbill or spied me upon the street, pursued by admirers, spectators and gentlemen of the press.’

  ‘I dare say that might be so,’ said Gabriel and, at the thought of this intertwining of our biographies, a silence fell between us. ‘Strange, are they not,’ he said at last, ‘the invisible patterns of our lives? And their unseen connections?’

  I was about to reply that my own thoughts were running upon very similar lines but then, our hostess was with us again, bearing platters of meat and another carafe of wine, providing copious felicitations and good wishes, full of a slightly clucking concern that all should be well with her pair of English guests. In the wake of this intrusion, our conversation shifted into less philosophical territories and we spoke, with increasing ease and comfort, of more general matters – touristic, gastronomic, historical, geographical and pecuniary. I spoke a little of the old days, of London in the ’90s, and of my now slumbering career, while Gabriel talked not at all of the past but exclusively of the future.

  ‘I am,’ he announced when our plates were empty and almost all the wine was drunk, ‘that most dangerous of things – a man with a fortune in want of a purpose.’

  ‘So there is nothing in particular,’ I asked, ‘which you wish to achieve? No especial goal?’

  ‘There must be,’ he sighed, and seemed for a moment suffused with sadness, ‘but I have yet to find it. This great objective of mine.’

  ‘You want, I imagine,’ I said, ‘to do good in some fashion?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, sounding most uncertain, ‘although I think that it might be rather more accurate to say that I desire some manner of change. And change, after all, has no morality. It is neither benign nor maleficent. Merely transformative.’

  ‘Fascinating. I had thought you some new Adonis. I see now that you are, in truth, the very spirit of Proteus.’

  At this he smiled, more widely than he had all evening. He locked his gaze onto mine and there passed between us some manner of silent communication. I saw that we were in some essential fashion the same, twin spirits in this distant and isolated place, drawn together – let it simply now be said – by some Uranian magnetism.

  The hour that followed this wordless exchange was one of painful anticipation, a gavotte of pleasantries and play-acting, of glances and proximities, of more wine and cigars and instances of physical contact, designed to appear inadvertent but possessed instead of warm-blooded intent. At last, the old dance done, we both retired to our chambers.

  I waited for almost a quarter of an hour, trembling and heart-sick, before I stole along the corridor to Gabriel’s room. There, as I had hoped with every fibre of my jaded soul, he was waiting for me, disrobed and upon his bed, with only a strip of pale white cotton to ensure his modesty.

  ‘Gabriel,’ I breathed, worshipful in my approach and prepared utterly to submit.

  He smiled. ‘Sit down, Maurice.’

  He pointed to a chair beside the bed which would provide me with an ideal vantage point.

  ‘You may never touch me as you wish to touch me,’ he said at once and with firmness. ‘Never. But you may, according to my own desires, be permitted to watch.’

  And as he slid away that white shroud he began to speak, not of those courteous things which had engaged our attention downstairs but rather of the truth of his life, his secret life. He told me of his days as a child upon the London streets, of his time in the orphanage and of the terrible mercy of his benefactor, Lord Stanhope. I did absolutely as Gabriel had instructed and, aflame with desire, I watched and listened and gave more of myself to him than I have given to any other human being for more than a quarter of a century. As I write at the brink of dawn I feel a surge of such feeling, unknown to me for so long, that I had almost forgotten the taste and the tang of it.

  I cannot even say for certain precisely what the nature of that emotion may be. Yet this seems to me to be beyond question – that if Mr Gabriel Shone wants me for any purpose or reason then I am his, body and soul.

  * * *

  Later. A strange postscript to the above. As the light of morning illuminated my chamber and as I put down those preceding lines of fervour and desire, I heard from somewhere in the streets beyond what seemed to be the barking and snapping of a wild dog, a phenomenon by no means uncommon in this country, where such unhappy creatures are often to be spied languishing dolefully in public places or begging by restaurants for scraps. Having finished the last of my sentences – that ringing, heartfelt exhortation – I flung myself, in a kind of frenzied and exhausted joy, into bed where, amongst those tangled sheets, I fell at once into Morpheus’ arms.

  When I woke, only a few minutes ago, the noise of the dog had not ceased or diminished but had rather grown very much louder, sounding so uproarious and proximate that it seemed as if the animal must be almost at the very doors of this establishment.

  Rising with as much alacrity as I could muster, I hurried to my little leaded window and peered into the street below. What I saw there inspired within me a shudder of atavistic fear. For, standing on the road outside was a great grey wolf, bigger than any that I have ever seen in captivity.

  The creature’s appearance was wild and unkempt, desperate and so hungry. Its eyes, doubtless bloodshot with fatigue (for it must be frantic indeed to have ventured so far into this municipality), seemed to flash crimson as it turned its head upwards, as if to meet my gaze. At the sight of me it loosed a howl, chilling and terrible to hear. I cannot rightly say whether it was a sound born of fear or despair, or of some weird triumph I have yet to wholly understand.

  MINA HARKER’S JOURNAL

  8 November. How unhappy have been the hours that have passed since last I wrote here, and how sorrowful is my duty to record now the details of that time. It is as though a great, glowering cloud has descended upon our once happy home. Van Helsing lies upstairs, breathing but otherwise lost to us, comatose, fading and weak. What a procession of medical men have there been through these doors! Godalming’s London specialist, two friends of Jack Seward’s and, again, our local physician from the village, Dr Scott, who arrived this time with the unmistakable scent of liquor on his breath.

  Amongst our circle there is certainly no shortage of funds, though not a penny of it seems capable of offering the slightest comfort. Indeed, it serves only to emphasise the puniness of man and his devices when set against the irrefutable laws of life. Such thoughts are often with me when I visit with the Professor and see with what awful swiftness the attack has reduced him. He looks so very frail, lying in that narrow bed as if in state, unshaven, untidy, breathing with a dreadfully pained quality as if every exhalation is for his old bod
y a desperate exertion. The others have been kept informed of this, though all have stayed away. It would distress poor Carrie, I know, to a near intolerable degree, so I understand well her and Arthur’s absence. Van Helsing has no surviving family of whom I have ever heard.

  I do not know how long our household can continue in this state of constant alertness and utter impotence. The strain is visible on us all. Jonathan says little and drinks more than he ought, but I see in his eyes the sorrow which he struggles to contain. Quincey has reacted with a kind of exaggerated stoicism. There is a blankness in his face and, when he speaks, an extreme neutrality of tone which I find most troubling. He will not talk of it, nor of the calamity which claimed the life of his kitten. We have promised to buy him a replacement although, at least for now, he insists that he does not wish for one.

  He was due to return to school but has not done so. Jonathan and I made this decision – much, I suspect, to the baffled irritation of the Headmaster, Dr Harris – for it seemed more important to us that he stay at home awhile longer, at least until we know the fate of Van Helsing.

  Jonathan and I both possess regrets as to our absences from the death-beds of loved ones. If it comes to that in this instance, we would not wish such guilty confusion upon our boy. So we wait for some sign about the noble Dutchman. We all owe him our lives. Such a dutiful standing guard as that upon which we are now engaged is nothing less than just and fitting. We wait. We keep watch, and we pray.