The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar's Tale

by Reggie Oliver

  Then Vlad turned and began once more to skate towards his sanctuary, the Monastery of the Black Monks of Snagov.

  I left Transylvania that night with the help of the Princess, alone except for one servant, but with sufficient money and documents of passage to ease my journey. I thought I might escape the horrors to come; such is the optimism of youth. I still had much to learn. It was an end and a beginning.

  EPILOGUE

  by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing

  This concludes the first packet of documents relating to the early life of the being whom we knew as Count Dracula. The reader can now readily understand the impossibility of putting these extraordinary papers before the general public. I had half a mind in fact to destroy them altogether, but was dissuaded from this course of action by my old and valued friend Mr. William Ewart Gladstone who thought that a few wise men, well acquainted with the ways of the world and yet not tainted by them, might derive some instruction and profit from these strange narratives. In this he was seconded by The Right Rev. Alan Becher Webb, former fellow of this college, now Bishop of Bloemfontein and Grahamstown. He reminded me that we must never be without evidence of the extreme sinfulness of humankind. And so I bowed to the wishes of the great statesman and the learned divine.

  There are three more packets of documents which relate to the life of this extraordinary man. Their material is perhaps even more shocking and terrible than the foregoing. These I have labelled and placed with the Bishop who will dispose of them as he sees fit. The first I have entitled “The Monk’s Tale” and deals with Prince Vladimir’s time among the Black Monks of Snagov, his subsequent wanderings and how at length he acceded to the throne of Transylvania and the principate of Wallachia. The second I have called “The Soldier’s Tale” and deals with his reign, his triumph over the Turks and his deposition from the throne at the hands of his own countrymen. The final packet, entitled “The Sorcerer’s Tale and the Epilogue of the Dwarf” deals with Vlad’s exile, his pilgrimage to the Scholemance and Black Cathedral and what he saw there, of the way he seized power again in Transylvania and how he met what many supposed to be his death. But it was not his death as I myself have elsewhere testified.

  ABRAHAM Van HELSING

  University College Oxford December 1892

  AFTERWORD

  By one of those strange coincidences which some people call fate, the Bishop Webb referred to by Dr. Van Helsing happens to have been my great grandfather, a remarkable man in many ways, but one I would scarcely have associated with these lurid documents. It is therefore quite possible that the further instalments of this curious story are to be found in one of the deed boxes which contain the Bishop’s voluminous and hitherto unread sermons and other documents. If this is the case I hope to risk my ancestor’s posthumous anger and bring them shortly before the world.

  REGGIE OLIVER

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Fred, John, Bob, Sally, Sarah, Collin, Mary, Tim.

  Coming…

  The Dracula Papers, Book II: The Monk’s Tale, by Reggie Oliver. The second panel of the great Gothick tetraptych is revealed.

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  For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/

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