Dracula's Child

by J. S. Barnes

  * At this point, the clipping of this rather strange obituary by my mother is torn away in my father’s journal. Closer inspection reveals evidence of singeing. Odder still, my attempts to locate the original of the newspaper, both in the British Library and at the offices of The Times itself, have revealed only gaps in the archives.

  FROM THE LETTERS PAGE OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

  4 January

  Sir,

  Further to that recent and necessary debate in these pages with respect to the continuing and lamentable decline of morals and conduct in the younger generation, I should like to crave your indulgence and add a small item of testimony of my own which will, I believe, shed some welcome light on this widespread phenomenon.

  For reasons of personal business, which need not detain the reader, I was last night hurrying home rather later than would ordinarily be the case when I chanced to pass through a somewhat regrettable district in the easternmost quadrant of our capital. There being no hansoms available at such an hour, I had before me no alternative but to make for my destination on foot. Naturally, being of a highly respectable appearance, I endeavoured to render myself as inconspicuous as possible lest I become the object of criminal attention.

  As matters turned out, the streets were all but empty and so I was left unmolested. The one exception to this statement was that same encounter which has moved me to pen this epistle. For it was when I passed by the church of St James, a beacon of Christianity amid those heathen rookeries, that I witnessed for myself the most shameful of displays. A young woman, scarcely out of girlhood and (some would say), with her blonde hair and pulchritude, being of considerable personal attractions, ran in a most unladylike fashion from a darkened alley and all but hurled herself at the locked door of the temple, upon which she began, noisily, to plead for entrance. The girl appeared decidedly dishevelled and there was blood upon upon her face – clear symptoms of drunkenness. Her manner was wearisomely frantic, her tone one of coarse agitation.

  Both bewildered and unsettled, I stood and watched this unnecessary performance for some moments before a group of pale men of a slightly older generation – no doubt her uncles – emerged and, in the teeth of considerable weeping and much animated objection from the lady in question, dragged her away.

  I should like to applaud their efforts in ridding the streets of so egregious a public nuisance. Never in previous centuries have youth and beauty been offered as excuses for poor behaviour, and I fail to see why this state of affairs should be in the least different in the present epoch.

  Happily, I returned home unscathed, and I share this incident with your readers solely as a means of detailing the poor standard of the worrying majority of our present young people. Surely, there are difficult questions now to be asked of all those who have responsibility for the young, and of teachers and parents in particular?

  Your daily reader,

  A Pedestrian

  LETTER FROM MISS SARAH-ANN DOWELL TO DR JOHN SEWARD (ENVELOPE UNOPENED)*

  5 January

  Dear Doctor,

  I wonder if you will ever read this letter for I have heard it said that you are missing now. I have heard you have gone a-wandering, out of London and off to God knows where. If this is true I know it cannot be all of your own choosing. For you would never leave your friends and your work if you was thinking in your right mind. I trust you, Dr Seward, and I know you are a good man. I know you will believe me too when I tell you what has befallen me.

  In case you was wondering why I am writing to you now it is to tell you my story and, I am afraid to say, goodbye.

  First, you ought to know I left the house in the country where you sent me. I ran away in the night. The old man had passed over and I did all I could. But there was a kind of clumsiness, sir, between the master of the house and me. And there is something wrong with their strange boy. He cannot speak of it but it is there. I want you to know I never thought of fleeing before things got so bad.

  I don’t think you ever knew, Doctor, that I had myself a sweetheart. His name was Thom Cawley and though he was in many ways a bad one I still believe he had an honest heart. His start in the world was not of the easiest sort and he fell easily into evil company. He ran for a time with the Giddis Boys and was well known to the police. Yet he was different when he was with me. He was softer and kinder and he sought only the love which had so long been denied him.

  When I left the house of the Harkers, I came at once to London. I sent word to Thom and told him I’d meet him at six the next evening at a place where we’d met many times before, beneath the clock in the railway station at Waterloo. You can hide there, sir, in plain sight. You can hide amid the bustle of the people and pass unseen in that big crowd.

  So I stood and waited, sir, and even then I still had hope in me. Time slid by and I grew worried. I waited till the best part of an hour was up. Something in me urged me to go. A voice in my head pleaded with me to run. And I felt my instincts implore me to turn on my heels. I ignored them all, sir. How dearly I wish now that I had listened!

  For it was just before seven that I saw him walk towards me out of the mass of people. He smiled with his lips closed and I saw straight away that something was wrong.

  ‘Hello, petal,’ he said and he sounded so different, sir, distant and cold. His skin was too pale and in the light of the station his eyes seemed to gleam red, like those of the Harker boy.

  I turned and I went to run but Thom had others with him, other men (other things) like him. They surrounded me, sir, and they moved me away, out of the station and into a coach as was waiting. Not one person who we passed seemed to notice what was being done to me. Thom held me in his gaze all the while. With his red eyes on me I found I could do nothing, neither call out or dash away.

  They took me to a low house down East where they keep me locked up. I know now, sir, what Thom and the others are. I know what they’ve been made into. There are many who would not believe me, sir, many who would call me a silly girl with a head full of old stories, but somehow, sir, I know that you will know I speak the truth.

  Yes, Dr Seward, I see what they are – the whole evil nest of them. There is a woman at their head, dark and beautiful. She can transform, sir, into a bat or into mist. I have heard whispers of their plans and though I understand only bits of it, I am sore afraid for my city.

  Last night, I tried to escape and looked for sanctuary but they found me and dragged me back. They mean to change me, sir, into you know what. They think I can be useful to them.

  There is a certain chapel – St Sebastian in the West – and a certain priest – who it is said I am meant for. My part is already written and they mean for me to follow it to the letter.

  I have thrown myself at my Thom’s feet but he only laughed and told me it will all be better when I is made like him.

  This letter I have given to one of their human servants who cares for them during the hours of daylight. She has agreed to take this from me but will help me no further. She is afraid of them and they are making her rich.

  If you ever see this letter, sir, please do what I could not and run. Run from the city. Run from the creatures. Run from the dark one who is coming.

  I am sorry, sir, that I could not love you.

  Goodbye, Dr Seward,

  Your Sarah-Ann

  * I believe myself to have been the first to read this piece of correspondence, discovered in the course of my researches, more than a decade after its composition.

  FROM THE PRIVATE DIARY OF AMBROSE QUIRE,

  Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis

  6 January. It was at one time a dearly held, albeit an intensely private wish of mine that the cream of these diaries might be presented in some handsomely bound form to the reading public. I had hoped that such a volume might provide much that would be of interest to a general audience. It would shine a light upon all that good work which is carried out by the men of the Force and dramatise those very particular stresses and res
ponsibilities which belong to those who, like myself, dwell at the top of the chain of command.

  In recent days, the underworld of the metropolis remains in a state of high anxiety, skittish and quick to anger. Dickerson has been adamant that he should lead an investigatory party to uncover the reasons for these disturbances amongst the tribes. I have, according to my instructions, been successful in the thwarting of his subordinates’ ambitions.

  I know that by any calculus of morality those obstructions which I have placed before my own men are profoundly wrong. I know too that I am quite helpless in the grip of my mistress and that I have no alternative but to obey. Yet it is also clear to me that what that lady has already wrought – the turning of one pack of savages upon another – is, in its own fashion, rather beautiful; a scouring away of human blight and a necessary amputation of disease.

  Yet all of this is prologue to what I have now to confess. My sleep has in recent days been fitful and unsatisfying. Such dreams as those which have visited me are filled with terror and despair and have brought me, perspiring and a-tremble, too often back to consciousness.

  In consequence, I have become accustomed to taking a small glass of spirit before attempting slumber, laced liberally with laudanum. Last night, my sleep was fast and without dreams.

  I ought to have been suspicious of such an apparent respite, for I was woken deep in the night by an all but intolerable pressure on my chest. I struggled into wakefulness, gasped for air and forced my eyes to see what was before me in the gloom. It was Ileana who sat upon me, her hands at my upper torso, pressing down hard, her palms splayed outwards.

  She was in her most natural state. Her mane of hair billowed out behind her. As she saw that I was awake, she leaned closer, digging her nails into my skin. She smiled and showed me her teeth. She moistened her plump lips with motions of her tongue. At the realisation that I was once again to fall under her spell I shuddered involuntarily three times.

  Ileana smiled as she placed her slender pale left hand between my legs.

  ‘Poor policeman. So sad a little man.’

  I moaned once and was silent.

  ‘You have done well, my servant. I come to tell you there is to be a second blast. Tomorrow night in the kingdom of the Giddis Boys. Be keeping your men clear and do not interfere. For this you will be well rewarded.’

  I moaned once more and shivered in my humiliation. ‘Madam, that will only serve to stoke the flames. There will be pandemonium.’

  She moved against me. ‘And from that pandemonium will come… order. Do not speak now, little Englishman, but nod to show me you understand.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good,’ she purred. ‘You will obey?’

  I nodded once again. In a single expert motion, she was on me and she was piercing a vein and she was drinking, drinking deep.

  I sank into delirium. When I awoke she was gone, aside from the marks upon me and the animal scent of her upon my sheets. With the merciful coming of the dawn, I set down these words and wait, in a state of exhilarated agony, for the next attack.

  MINA HARKER’S JOURNAL

  6 January. I suppose that what we accomplished this afternoon – the laying to rest of the mortal remains of Professor Abraham Van Helsing in the ground of the churchyard here at Shore Green – ought to have provided to all of us a firm full stop in this difficult stretch of our lives. The occasion ought to have given us an opportunity to mourn, to display our grief by whatever means we thought fit and then to start to piece together again all which we used to have in our small but happy existences. Yet, for reasons which I shall unfold, the event seemed to offer no conclusion, but rather a sense that fate is pressing in upon us and that some dreadful velocity is now being reached. To what destination it all tends I do not dare consider.

  The day began in ignominy and ended with a horrid sense of pregnancy. I had made all the arrangements for the interment of the Professor, thinking it best that this be a small, private affair to precede the public memorial to be held in London on the eleventh. As matters turned out, the ceremony was far too sparsely attended, marked by the absence of lost friends.

  Poor Jack is still amongst the missing (where is he, I ask myself ceaselessly, where is he, where is he?) and Miss Dowell, I sense, has left our lives for good. I had hoped to have by our sides Lord and Lady Godalming (for surely Arthur would want to mark the passing of that great Dutchman), yet I was in this to be disappointed. Shortly after ten this morning, two hours before the funeral, I was at work in my study when a brisk tap upon the door heralded the arrival of the maid.

  She announced that a gentleman was waiting to see me, having come up that morning from Sussex.

  ‘Is it Lord Godalming?’

  She shook her head in a tight, nervous semi-circle.

  ‘Well, who, then?’

  ‘He said his name is Amory, miss.’

  I bade her send him in and she scurried away to accomplish this instruction.

  When I saw Mr Amory again, as he stepped with visible melancholia into the room, dressed in black and wearing an armband in honour of the day, a wave of something like disquiet washed over me. That noble manservant seemed tired, lined and drawn, traits which I doubted had been fostered in him merely by the journey from his county to ours. Even his broad shoulders seemed slumped at the weight of events and his frame, which I should choose to characterise as displaying a kind of muscular stoutness, seemed to have been whittled down. He said: ‘I imagine you must be surprised to see me, ma’am, come to this house alone.’

  ‘Not to the degree which I would like,’ I admitted. ‘Am I to take it that you are here as a representative?’

  ‘That is so, ma’am. Lord and Lady Godalming have sent me in their stead.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Naturally, they also send their most abject apologies. I fear that for them to have come here today, for my mistress in particular, would have been most unwise. They despatched me with a letter to explain their failure to attend.’

  He drew from his pocket a slim manila envelope. Inside was a note from Arthur as clipped and formal in tone as one would expect of a man of his breeding, yet which seemed also to me to contain behind every stately syllable the intimation of a scream.

  That letter I have retained and pressed between these pages.

  LETTER FROM LORD ARTHUR GODALMING TO JONATHAN AND MINA HARKER

  6 January

  My dear Jonathan and Mina,

  You will by now, having seen Mr Amory arrive alone, have guessed the sad truth that Carrie and I shall not be with you at today’s event, a dereliction of my duty of which I am most heartily ashamed. I fear that you may also by now have divined the reason for our absence. My poor Caroline has not rallied since the loss of our unborn babe. Indeed, she has grown only steadily worse since last you were with her. I fear that her mind has begun to loose its moorings and that she drifts even now into a realm from which it will be a terrible challenge indeed to bring her home.

  Where is Jack Seward? There is no specialist in England to touch him! If only he were with us now, then I surely should not feel so acutely that my wife as we know her has begun to fade from my sight. She shouts often and calls out shrilly. She suffers from bad dreams. She cries when she wakes and has taken to stalking through the house during the hours of darkness. My servants – young Ernest Strickland in particular – have been both tolerant and compassionate, but their efforts have yet to prove efficacious in the soothing of my wife. In spite of all of these peculiarities her behaviour troubles me most greatly when she is simply quiet and still, for she wears at such moments an expression of near-absolute vacuity as though she is the subject of some horrible process of hollowing out. It is as if the essence of her is departing and leaving behind only a husk.

  Those quacks and apothecaries whom I have summoned assure me that this is natural and to be expected. They are to a man, however, both frightened of me and great lovers of my money, and so I suspect that they tell me only w
hat they think I wish to hear.

  My friends, I hope that you will forgive me for telling you of our travails at such length; I wished you to know that our failure today was not of our own making. I cannot leave her now. I shall do all that is within my power for us to be with you in London for the memorial service. Until then, please know in what high esteem I hold you all and how much your friendship means in these difficult times. Lay the old Dutchman safely in the ground. I shall say a prayer for him today in memory of how he once saved us all.

  I remain your loyal friend,

  Art

  MINA HARKER’S JOURNAL

  6 January * Continued. After I had read Lord Godalming’s letter, I folded it, returned it to its envelope and placed it upon my escritoire. Mr Amory was watching me with some concern.

  ‘Thank you for bringing this,’ I said.

  ‘’Twas no trouble, ma’am. No trouble at all.’

  I drew in a long, contemplative breath before I allowed myself to speak my mind. There is something inherently trustworthy in Mr Amory. He has a quality which all but invites the giving of confidences.

  ‘Is it very bad with them?’ I asked. ‘As bad as Arthur says?’

  ‘I fear, ma’am, that the noble lord may, doubtless from a wish to spare you, have held back the worst of the situation. The mind of my mistress is almost entirely shattered. In some fashion it does not seem to be capable of healing. Just when she appears to be on her way to recovery there is a sudden, inexplicable relapse.’

  There lay between us a gravid silence.