by Brian Ripley
Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Co.
E-book edition © 2013
All rights reserved – Brian Ripley
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, from the publisher.
Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.
12620 FM 1960, Suite A4-507
Houston, TX 77065
www.sbpra.com
ISBN: 978-1-62857-029-8
All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any character, living or dead is purely co-incidental.
Cover art is by the author and is copyright protected.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One …. Looking For Dracula
Chapter Two …. The Maidstone and District Bus Company
Chapter Three …. Getting Back
Chapter Four …. 34 Years Later
Chapter Five …. Finding Dracula
Chapter Six …… Afterwards
Chapter Seven …. Bram Stoker and the novel Dracula.
Introduction
Bram Stoker wrote his novel Dracula in Whitby, a town that has now apparently attracted the Gothic community to regularly visit certain locations there. Because of the Gothic interest in Dracula, I hope the sub-title ‘Gothic Classical Horror’ does proper justice to that interest. Although I know nothing about the Gothic culture, I am so pleased about their intense interest in Dracula.
My internet researches reveal that the Gothic culture is worldwide and hopefully, many Gothic’s will read this e-book about my meeting with Dracula. As the main title states, this is a true story and tells of an encounter with Dracula. Everybody knows that Count Dracula was the product of Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker’s imagination which of course means that he does not exist in reality.
Well that’s not true, Dracula does exist and you should find that the last chapter provides you with some very interesting information about that. I stand by every word of this e-book, its all quite true, it all happened to me as it is written.
Chapter One
Looking For Dracula
On that sunny morning in 1962, whilst looking through the house-boat porthole at the other house-boats and small craft hitched to their moorings in the river Medway. It seemed to me that it promised to be a very good day. Weather wise, it was a very good day but that day was the beginning of a very strange and peculiar experience which had its final (hopefully) conclusion a little over 30 years later.
Although I have spent many hours during those intervening years trying to make some sort of sense out of it all, it is still an experience that has left me completely puzzled. That is mainly because it was so vivid, and so real. That day, I was at peace with the world and I counted my blessings as the wooden house-boat gently lifted up and down with the incoming tide.
It was my day off, I had already had breakfast and had returned to my cabin to write a letter to my mother in Oxford when there was a knock on my cabin door. It was John, a workmate of mine and a fellow lodger on the huge house-boat that was permanently moored to a concrete wall on the river Medway in Kent.
John was holding a paperback book and seemed quite excited as he came into my cabin. With a broad smile he explained that he was reading a story about Dracula and added that Dracula was buried in a churchyard roughly twenty or so miles from the Medway Towns in Kent, where we were presently located. Looking even more excited, John asked me if I would go with him to the churchyard mentioned in the book and try to find Dracula’s last resting place.
It was then my turn to smile as I explained to John that Dracula was a fictitious character invented by a novelist called Bram Stoker way back in eighteen something or other. Not deterred in the slightest and pointing to his paperback book, John still insisted that what was left of Dracula was buried in the grounds of St Mary’s Church, Speldhurst, Kent. Once again he asked me to go with him to this village church to try and find Dracula’s grave.
I had known John for about six months, when I had first met him he had given me a black eye for drinking his beer by mistake. I had given him a sore jaw for the next three days in return. We did become friends after that and I got him a job on the motorway with me, but being a physically weak specimen, he was clearly not used to that type of heavy outside work. It was plainly a struggle for him to do the required work.
What I liked about John was his determination, he knew the job was physically too much for him but he would not give in and would accept no help from other labourer’s. All our gang liked John because of that and the foreman would try to find him easier jobs to do instead. He landed up with the best job on the site and spent the majority of his time sitting in an old broken deck chair.
His job was keeping a tally of how many loads of soil the big earth scraping machines had completed during the day. Up to that point in my life, I had not had that many jobs myself but this job paid well so I took it. That was not the only reason for taking this job, one of my many relatives thought it might be a good idea to get me ‘fattened up’, and he also thought that being a labourer on the new motorway would be the best way to do this.
Your first reaction to that might be to tell the old bastard to mind his own business, and I would love to have done that, but it is not as simple as that. I belong to a very large family of ‘Didicoys’ which is just another name for gypsy’s. In the whole of the Medway Towns, which comprises of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham, you will find a ‘Ripley’ about every four hundred yards. Well, it seems that way, their everywhere and if it aint a pure bred Ripley, it is one of our very close relatives.
The situation is very much complicated because there are many other large families of gypsy’s living in the Medway Towns. Not so much these days, but in the past our family were involved in ‘gypsy wars’ with other gypsy families. Anyhow, that’s my background and if I want to keep my nose clean with my relatives, it would be best if I took this labouring job and just got on with it.
It’s the way we do things anyway, there is a lot of respect given to our elders and it probably made the old bastard happy that I took the job. This was the first stage in building the new motorway which the foreman told us would be called the M2. This new motorway would extend from the eastern coast of Kent right into the outskirts of London. Once all the trees and vegetation had been cut down and removed (which was quite an operation in itself) quite a few of these huge earth ‘scraper’ machines arrived to scrape the soil level in readiness for laying the tarmac road of the motorway.
After these huge earth scraping machines had been ‘scraping’ for just over a week and we were all surprised to see a long ribbon of red clay extending into the far distance in both directions from our own position at the end of that week. We had quite a few discussions during our tea-breaks about the futility of making such a huge wide road. We just could not see the sense of it all.
Even though we were told that this new motorway would be having an eastbound and westbound direction, we could still see no reason to make such a road so wide whatever the direction might be. All these years later it is a common thing for that motorway to be bumper to bumper at rush hours. Both sides of the motorway have had another lane added just to cope with the sheer volume of traffic these days.
But at that earlier time, Walter, the wisest of our gang of labourer’s agreed with us more stupid ones that the whole thing would be a complete waste of time because there was just not enough cars to use it anyway. Some weeks later, the long red ribbon of clay that extended for miles in both directions was covered with black tarmac. The shiny black tarmac was almost beautiful compared w
ith the previous ugly scar-like ribbon of red clay hacked out of the beautiful green countryside of Kent.
The morning sunlight made the new tarmac shine and it gave me a lot of pleasure to see and witness the beauty of this long swathe of black glistening tarmac. We had never seen a road like this before and had to be satisfied with the foreman’s sparse remarks about it (he probably did not know much more about it himself anyway). It being the labourer’s natural right to complain and ridicule everything concerning the construction industry in the UK, our ignorant jokes continued about the huge width of these two carriage-ways.
We were also amazed at the colossal amount of soil being heaped up to accommodate the ‘slip roads’ on to and off of this motorway. We just could not see the need for such huge piles of soil. Quite sure that some office boy had magnified the original plans for this motorway as a joke, we felt equally sure that the civil engineers in charge had not noticed that the plans were now four or five times their proper size.
Very often some of these civil engineers would look into our tea hut and scrounge a cup of tea. There was very often much laughter amongst us when they left which was usually about our agreement that most of them looked fairly thick and brainless anyway. If they had any brains, Walter would declare, they would be working on a proper job somewhere else anyway.
Anyhow, that’s how I met John and I went with him that Sunday just for something to do really. Socially, he was great company and could hold his beer but he did have a bad habit of picking fights which very often resulted in me helping him out with them. It was all a good laugh, we were both around nineteen years old, neither of us that bright but intelligence did not matter in those days whereas strength did.
John eventually acknowledged that Dracula was a fictitious character and was indeed the product of Bram Stoker’s imagination. However, he still wanted to go to this church yard to satisfy his own curiosity about it all. It was on that basis that I finally agreed to go with him but we both knew in our hearts that it would be a waste of time, but we went anyway.
Chapter Two.
Maidstone and District Bus Company.
I am happy and pleased to announce, correction, I am very happy and very pleased to announce to you that the Maidstone and District Bus Company went bust a few years ago. I personally went out and got blind drunk to celebrate their slow and very painful demise. They were quite a shower and good riddance to bad rubbish. They had some kind of monopoly to run a bus service and they treated their passengers with utter distain and sheer arrogance year after year after year.
They just did not care, and that was their consistent attitude for a goodly number of years. It was an attitude that extended from the top management right down to the bus conductors and bus drivers themselves. That bad attitude increased considerably when they got rid of the bus conductors and changed to snapping and snarling ‘driver only’ buses.
Whilst that is my own personal opinion of that crowd, (and probably thousands of others who suffered at their hands over the years) all I can say about them these days is that they deserved to go bust. Their successors, the Arriver Bus Company do run a proper bus service nowadays which is noticeably courteous and punctual, the bus drivers actually seeming to take a pride in their work.
Anyhow, being a Sunday, we lost a lot of time waiting for a bus to take us to Maidstone. At Maidstone, we intended to catch another bus to Tonbridge Wells, then another bus to this very small village where the ‘immortal’ remains of our quarry supposedly lay.
Arriving in Maidstone some three hours later we were told with twinkling eyes and hearty grins by the bus staff that because it was a Sunday, we would have to sit in the hot sun for about two hours before a suitable bus arrived to take us to Tonbridge Wells. We were also informed that we could count ourselves as being very lucky and fortunate indeed that the bus company had not discontinued that particular bus route on Sundays. However, we were assured, with more hearty grins that there were future, imminent plans to do just that.
Anyhow, the bus finally arrived and it seemed to take hours to get to Tonbridge Wells. Having had another thirty minutes of ‘argy bargy’ at Tonbridge Wells bus station about whether the bus would continue on to our final destination or not, we were beginning to wonder if we would ever get to this blasted churchyard.
Finally swopping buses for a very ancient looking bus we eventually departed the historic town of Tonbridge Wells and their dammed bus station and gazed out of the dirty windows at the very narrow country lanes that led to the village of Speldhurst.
Any place past Tonbridge Wells is deemed to be ‘in the sticks’ which is a term used for much wooded areas, miles from anywhere. Miles from the nearest human habitation, the county of Kent has many, many such areas that are considered by normal, civilized people to be ‘in the sticks’.
After what seemed like ages, the bus stopped outside of the Speldhurst village Post Office. We went in search of something wet and hot to drink and if we were really lucky, something to eat as well. We were both already very tired from this harrowing journey and felt most strongly that the bus that had brought us to this tiny village should have been in some kind of transport museum a long time ago.
Turning a corner, we saw a small shop on the other side of the narrow street. After ringing the bell and attracting the attention of the owner of the small shop, we did manage to obtain two cheese sandwiches each and the lady owner also supplied us with two hot cups of tea.
Whilst we did not say the exact reason that we had come to the village, John told the lady a lie about why we had come to Speldhurst. John told this very nice lady that we had come to look at the nearby church graveyard to look for the grave of John’s grandfather. Having quickly chosen a fictitious surname at random, John was informed by this very kind lady that she did not think that there was any grave bearing that name. She also said that she knew of no living person in the village with that same surname.
After scoffing the grub and drinking the tea, we said thank you very much, paid the bill and went into the church grounds and started to look for a grave with the name of John Patrick Talbot. (This name, being an assumed name of Dracula in John’s paperback book).
Looking closely at all the names chipped into the many headstones in that churchyard, it caused me to think about the vast amount of money relatives had spent on headstones in every churchyard in England. After spending half an hour or so looking, it became quite apparent that there was no grave with that name on it and so John’s curiosity had now been fully satisfied.
The daylight was by now beginning to rapidly fade and our minds started to think about how the hell we were going to get back to the Medway Towns. The reason being, that very kind lady that ran that small village shop had already informed us that the last bus out of the village had been the one we had arrived on.
As we made our way back from the graveyard to the churchyard front gates, a man standing next to one of the graves said to John, “Did you find what you were looking for” and John just replied “No, we didnt”. The man then looked at me, he had a strange face, he smiled and said, “Never mind” or something very similar.
Chapter Three
Getting Back.
As bad luck would have it, there was a new moon that Sunday evening and as darkness really began to set in, it became impossible to see my hand in front of my face. Making our way back in the direction we had entered Speldhurst, we were soon reduced to something similar to two blind people trying to walk on a tight-rope with three legs between us, very, very slowly.
The only way that we could make any progress at all on these country lanes was to take our socks off and roll the bottoms of our trousers up so that we could feel the grass verges rubbing on the skin of our lower legs. Making countless adjustments to keep a straight course in the total darkness using this method we soon got utterly fed up with doing it.
Despite this improved navigational technique, John managed to walk straight into quite a deep ditch filled with very co
ld, sinking stagnant water. With very great difficulty, he managed to somehow climb out again. I was on the other side of the lane at that time and could only hear his cries for assistance but could do very little to actually help him.
Stinking from the muddy and stagnant water in the ditch, you would have thought that it would have been an easy matter to locate him in the dark by the stinking smell of his shoes alone after that.
However, we got completely separated three times again and the urgency of our situation began to dawn on us so we kept fairly close to each other after that. We tied our shoelaces together and then tied the ends to our belts, which did serve to stop us from getting separated again but which did nothing to stop us from continually bumping into each other.
Taking street lighting for granted in whatever town I happened to be in, I had no idea just how dark it could be in the countryside. For the first time in my life, I noticed the stars which were shining brilliantly in the whole of the sky. I never said anything to John, but I was rather amazed at the amount of stars that were there.
Many times we just sat down on the grass verge and told each other jokes, sang songs, tested each others general knowledge and told each other some of our more heroic and daring exploits of the past. No doubt some embellishment took place in these stories but it was an emergency and so most of these ‘tall tales’ were tolerated by each other under these dire circumstances. John’s outright lies about the girls that he had supposedly had sex with did stretch my patience at times.
But in the main, we kept as cheerful as possible and avoided all mention of Mr bloody Dracula or his possible present whereabouts. At about two in the morning it began to rain very lightly but it was enough to soak us through to the skin in thirty minutes flat.
The rain just added to our miserable predicament while we waited for daylight to see where we were going. Often spending long periods of time in complete silence, just sitting on the grass getting even more soaking wet, we often dozed off but neither of us actually managed to fall asleep.
