Dracul

by Dacre Stoker

  Bram knows little of snakes, as Ireland is free of them, but he recognizes this one as an adder from books he has seen.

  Adders are venomous, he is aware, but he is not sure if they are deadly.

  Another hiss, this one from behind.

  Bram turns to find a smooth snake on the floor in the middle of the room. Smooth snakes do not carry poison, he knows, and with one swift motion he severs its head.

  Bram removes his coat and wraps it around his left arm, lunging at the adder. The snake jumps out and sinks its fangs into the makeshift shield, and Bram brings down the knife on the back of its neck, killing it instantly. He scoops up both snakes and throws them from the window, watching the pieces land at the feet of the man below.

  THE JOURNAL of BRAM STOKER

  14 August 1868, 12:58 a.m.—As the coach drove through Clontarf and on to Artane Parish, I had to wake Matilda. She had dozed off shortly after leaving the Hellfire Club. I could not blame her; neither of us had rested fully in days, and we only made stabs at it when not plagued with wild thoughts. She looked so peaceful in the moments before I woke her that I almost regretted doing it.

  Vambéry said little. When he finished with his notes, he turned to the window and watched the city roll away outside and make way for the countryside. I had forgotten how quiet it was out here, even more peaceful than Clontarf and the coast.

  The way to Artane Castle was well known, and the driver made good time with four horses traveling at a daring pace. When we came to a stop, the horses snorted and blew the night air. The leaders lunged forward; the wheelers held them steady, yet the carriage rocked. All four horses had seemed to enjoy what was surely a tiring gallop in contrast to their confined work in the city.

  The coach door opened, and the three of us stepped out.

  Artane Castle was gone.

  I stared at the place where the ruin had once stood and tried to summon words to describe what I felt, but nothing came. The tower was gone; only a bit of the original church remained, surrounded by a small number of tombstones standing cracked and tilted.

  In place of the castle stood a formidable structure still under construction. The building appeared to have four floors at the center, while the wings on either side had three. A fence encircled the entire site. A sign affixed to the gated entrance read:

  FUTURE SITE OF THE ARTANE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL FOR ROMAN CATHOLIC BOYS

  “It’s gone,” I heard Matilda say at my side. “Did you know of pending construction here?”

  “No,” I said. “With work and my reviews, there has been little time for much else.”

  Vambéry drew closer and pecked at the dirt with the tip of his cane. “I spent time in a place like this. I was injured as a toddler, and my leg was paralyzed. My father died when I was six. Soon after, my mother remarried and turned her attention to my stepfather and the children she bore for him. My mother relinquished me—I was orphaned, for all intents and purposes. There were hundreds of boys, many of whom were criminals by the age of ten. And me—a cripple with a cane—you can imagine my life was hell. Thankfully, I was quite clever and a good student, and was chosen to be a tutor for other boys. Still, I loathe my memories of that place. I knew I would be better off in the streets than incarcerated in that cesspool of abuse. I escaped at age twelve and never looked back.”

  I faced the remains of the church, the only remnant of the original structure. “The tower where we found the box stood right there.”

  “You said yourself everything you found had been removed the very next day. Had the castle still stood today, perhaps we would have found nothing of value inside,” Vambéry said.

  I turned to him, puzzled. “Then why are we here?”

  He turned towards the forest on our left and pointed at the trees with his cane. “You must take me to the bog you found as children. The castle may be gone, but the woods remain untouched.”

  At the mere mention of this, my thoughts went to the image of the hand reaching out from the water and snatching a dragonfly mid-flight. I saw Nanna Ellen walk from the shore into the murky water and disappear beneath. I saw all these things I had refused to see for so many years.

  “Do you recall where it was?”

  When last I stood here, I had been drawn to Nanna Ellen, pulled along behind her with Matilda following behind me. I had sensed her nearby. On this night, there was no tug at my mind, no invisible cord tethering me to her. No trail to follow.

  Regardless, I started towards the woods. I knew the location as well as my own hand. “This way.”

  Matilda gave me a knowing glance. When we had made this journey as children, I could see in the dark as if it were daylight. I think she wondered if the same held true now. The look I gave her told all, yet I dared not speak of it aloud; I could only imagine what Vambéry thought of me as it was.

  Although years had passed, I recalled each footfall, each twist through the brush. The ash trees had grown taller and wider, yet each one was familiar. I recognized the swirl of their bark, the roots protruding from the moist ground. Night creatures studied us from the brush, and I wondered if these were the same animals I spotted all those years ago, or their descendants now plodding away on the same grounds as their ancestors. Vambéry and Matilda swatted at mosquitoes and other irritating insects, none of which bothered me, not a single one.

  When the bog came into view, I saw the gloomy waters through the eyes of my seven-year-old self. This time Nanna Ellen was not standing upon the shore. This time we were alone.

  “Is this it?” Vambéry asked.

  I nodded.

  “You are certain?”

  “Yes.”

  He walked to the water’s edge and poked at the moss upon the surface with his finger. The oily black water beneath revealed itself for a moment.

  “Where did you see the hand?”

  “Over there, to the right of that large root.”

  Vambéry followed my gaze, then circled around to the side of the bog, getting as close to the edge as possible. He dipped his cane into the water up to the handle without striking bottom. “It is very deep.”

  “When Ellen walked in, she disappeared beneath the surface only a few feet from shore.”

  Vambéry acknowledged this fact with a slight nod, then plucked a long, dead branch from the tree next to him. Like with the cane, he submerged it until his fingers brushed the water. “Still no bottom. This branch is my height; that gauges the depth at greater than six feet.”

  I pictured the hand reaching out from the depths and pulling the branch into the waters, then coming up again and taking Vambéry down, too. It would be over in an instant, nothing but a slight ripple on the surface of the water, then stillness. I shook off the morbid thought.

  Vambéry released the branch and it disappeared under the water. “Can you feel her, Bram?”

  “What?”

  “You said as a child you could feel her. Is she near us now? Is she in these waters somewhere?”

  “If she is nearby, I cannot tell.”

  “It is possible she can block the bond binding you to her. I have witnessed such things before, particularly with the more experienced. A wall, of sorts, severing the tie.”

  A single dragonfly buzzed past Matilda and she let out a startled gasp. My eyes immediately jumped to the other side of the bog, but I saw no other dragonflies, not like the last time.

  Vambéry saw, too, and followed my gaze. “Some of them have the ability to command nature. Not only small animals and insects, but larger mammals as well. I have heard of them even controlling the weather.”

  “How is that possible?” Matilda asked.

  “I am not going to pretend to understand; I can only tell you what I know. They enlist the weaker minds and deploy them for protection. How they influence the weather is anyone’s conjecture.”

  Then a thought fl
ooded my mind. “What was she protecting? The person I saw in the water?”

  “You did not see a person; you saw a hand, correct?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You saw a hand snatch a dragonfly from the air and disappear beneath the surface,” Vambéry said.

  “A hand cannot act alone.”

  Vambéry dismissed this with a wave. “In our world, perhaps that holds true. Tell me, Bram, was the hand you saw the same hand you saw in the box in the tower? Think hard on this; it is crucial. Was it a right hand emerging from the watery abyss or a left? And what of the appendage discovered in the tower? Right or left?”

  “The hand in the tower was left,” Matilda said.

  “Good,” Vambéry replied. “And the other?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and strained to remember. I pictured the fingers breaking the surface of the water, the green peat sliming away as the hand came into view and snatched—

  “Right,” I said. “It was a right hand.”

  “I see,” Vambéry said, turning back to the water. “Would you be willing to indulge in a little experiment?”

  “If it will help.”

  “I want you to stick your own hand into the water.”

  I thought about the creatures living in that water—eels, frogs, toads, newts—the surface clogged with sodden peat, immune to the moonlight’s attempts to penetrate the surface and illuminate what lurked beneath. The bog was deep, deeper than we could measure with a cane or a tree branch. I thought about the hand reaching up, grasping at the dragonfly, and pulling it below. Would that be my fate if I touched the water?

  “You only need to touch the surface.”

  “Why? What will that prove?”

  Vambéry walked over to me, carefully planting his feet on the firmer ground and avoiding the puddles of moss. “This link you have with Ellen Crone, have you ever tried to control it? Or to strengthen it?”

  “No, I—”

  “Water is a conductor of electricity, much like our very own brains. I believe water not only captures and transmits that energy but can also store it. I believe this bog may harbor many memories.”

  At first thought, this seemed ludicrous, and I almost told him so, but I could tell by the look in his eyes he believed it to be true.

  “What harm can come of trying?”

  I took a deep breath, prepared to argue, then thought better of it. I unbuttoned my sleeve and rolled it to my elbow, then knelt at the water’s edge. “Dip it in anywhere?”

  “It should not matter.”

  I took a deep breath and slipped my hand into the icy water. I was not prepared for what happened next.

  A surge shot through me; I can think of no other way to describe it. It began at my fingertips and quickly raced through every inch of my body, causing my muscles to go taut. Blinding white light obscured my vision, then went to black, as my sister and Vambéry disappeared from sight, replaced by a murky oil, a viscous filth that swirled all around me. Then I felt her—and with a connection far stronger than what I remembered. This was no cord binding us together; it was a chain. For this moment, she wasn’t a separate person, but an extension of me, and I of her, and together we shared not two minds but one. My thoughts were hers, and hers were mine.

  Then I saw the bog.

  I saw Ellen crouching on the shore of the bog, a large wooden trunk at her side. It was night, as it is now, but not this night. Then she was in the water, I was in the water. Not on the surface but standing on the bog’s mucky bottom. Creatures of all sorts slithered past, maneuvering through the water in search of a meal. They paid little mind to me, this person standing in their world. Ellen raised her hands, stretching out her arms and fingertips until they could extend no more. Then I heard her speak, a voice emanating from nowhere and yet from all around me. “Come to me, my love.”

  The words echoed through the water, reverberating off the shore and coming back to me. They held a strength unlike any other, and I realized they were not words but a command, a call. The bog floor vibrated at my feet and I felt her eyes, my eyes, look to the muddy earth and watch as something pushed through before us. The dirt and peat washed away, and I realized it was a leg, a full human leg. It drifted from the bog floor to the surface, rising inches from my face. To our left rose an arm, then another leg, a torso, a head—hair swirling all around, all of them floating past. Then I stood at the bog’s edge again, we stood at the bog’s edge, and I watched as Ellen reached for each of these limbs, these fragmented body parts, and took them gently from the water, placing them within the large wooden trunk.

  When the link severed, when the bond between Ellen’s and my memories broke, I found myself lying at the edge of the bog, my head cradled in Matilda’s lap, with Vambéry kneeling at my side.

  “You must tell us what you saw,” he said in a hushed voice.

  * * *

  • • •

  14 AUGUST 1868, 1:42 a.m.—We rode quietly in the coach back to Thornley’s house. The episode at the bog—and I thought of no other way to describe what had occurred—had drained me. I felt as if I could sleep for days.

  I told Vambéry and Matilda what I saw, Ellen somehow standing at the bottom of the bog, summoning body parts that then floated to the surface, where she loaded them into a trunk. In my dream state, this scenario had seemed perfectly logical, but now, granted the leisure to reflect, it seemed more the product of a fevered dream, becoming less real with each passing second.

  Matilda sat beside me, my hand in hers as she attempted to comfort me. My transgressions of earlier finally forgotten with the frightful moment. Until moments ago, I shook furiously, but that had finally calmed. Across from us, Vambéry wrote all in his notes. He asked me to describe the trunk, and I did as best I could.

  “It was a dark-stained wood with a flat top and silver hinges and locks.”

  “Silver? Are you sure of this?”

  “They were silver in color, but I cannot be certain as to the actual metal.”

  “What about the dimensions? How long and how wide?”

  I thought about this question for a minute, my mind picturing Ellen placing a leg inside the trunk, with plenty of room to spare. “At least four feet long and about two feet tall. Probably two feet wide as well.”

  “Any identifying marks or labels?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “But there may have been some?”

  “Possibly.”

  Through all of this, Matilda remained silent. She appeared to be writing in her own diary, but when she held up her sketchbook, I realized she had been drawing instead. “Did it look anything like this?”

  She had drawn the trunk in painstaking detail, and when I saw the image, I recognized it immediately. “Exactly like that.”

  Vambéry reached for Matilda’s sketchbook. “May I?”

  I leaned forward and studied the drawing. “There was an intricate pattern stenciling the trunk, something carved into the wood, the same image repeated over and over again. But only on the outside; its interior was plain, lined with felt or maybe velvet.”

  Vambéry made note of this, then returned his gaze to me. “This is important, Bram, so I wish for you to close your eyes and think hard. Think of the interior of the trunk first, since that is your strongest memory; picture it in your mind, every last detail.”

  I did as he said and forced my mind to focus on that horrible image: Ellen placing body part after body part within the trunk.

  Vambéry went on. “When you see the interior clearly in your mind, I wish for you to turn your attention to the outside of the trunk. The mind is a wonderful instrument, capable of so much more than we understand. You do not have to take in these images as a passive observer; if you concentrate, you can pause them. You can step closer to that trunk, so close that you can touch the wood with your hands and feel
the patterns with your fingertips.”

  Vambéry’s voice grew melodic, soothing. He spoke to me in a deliberately flat cadence; he would later explain he had subjected me to hypnosis, a phenomenon Professor Dowden had introduced to me at Trinity. When I heard his voice again, he sounded distant. I saw the trunk again, but this time Ellen was frozen, her hands about to place the torso inside, a male torso. She held it there so effortlessly, even though it probably weighed eighty to ninety pounds. I took a step closer to the trunk, then another, until I stood in front. I noticed the weight of its contents caused the trunk to sink slightly in the soft earth, and I couldn’t help but wonder how Ellen would move it from this place. She looked radiant in the moonlight, her face frozen in this memory, framed by her long hair, still wet from the bog. Her eyes were blue on this night, a deep blue, reminding me of the ocean at the moment the sun dipped beneath the horizon and night took hold. This was the Ellen I recalled from childhood, unchanged and vibrant. Concern filled her face, though, an urgency as she went about this business.

  “The trunk, Bram, focus on the trunk,” Matilda said, and I suddenly felt her beside me, the warmth of her hand again in mine.

  I turned back to the image of the trunk and leaned in hard.

  I imagined my fingers slipping over its surface, the engraving feeling as real as if I were kneeling right beside it. The pattern rendered was small and intricate, and I couldn’t decipher it. A series of grooves, really, each no more than half an inch long, one after the other. The entire outside was covered, not a single inch going untouched. “Crosses,” I whispered. “Thousands of tiny crosses.”

  My eyes snapped open, Matilda still beside me.

  The coach came to a stop just then as we arrived at Thornley’s home.

  * * *

  • • •

  14 AUGUST 1868, 2:18 a.m.—Thornley had the door open and had rushed us inside before our feet touched the cobblestones of Harcourt Street.