I regret that I must test your strength of purpose just once more. As a sign of good faith, I must ask a small quid pro quo for my hospitality. It is long since I have fed and I ask for a little of your blood. Please, hear me out. I intend you no harm and upon this you have the word of a Prince. No more than a sip, and then my story.
The choice is yours. If you do not agree, then I will honor your wishes and you may leave immediately with your gold. Although I must point out that the limousine driver who brought you here was instructed not to return until the morning. There is no telephone in this house nor is this the sort of area where one can find a taxicab, either by day or night. Furthermore, the roads are dark and treacherous and there are wild animals. You could so easily meet with a terrible accident if you were to attempt the many miles to the nearest village.
You are willing? Then I did not misjudge you. You have fire and determination and you are indeed a worthy guest. A sip, no more I guarantee. I promise that you will feel no pain; only perhaps a little lassitude, and possibly a tingle of ecstasy. If you will kindly bare your neck—yes, just there where I can see and scent the rich veins throbbing beneath the fine skin . . .
Thank you my dear. That was not so bad, was it? Here, a little more wine to fortify you. You will forgive me if I do not partake this time. I will not sully the bouquet of the wine that I have just enjoyed.
Now that we are both comfortable, I will tell you of Dracula and how he comes to be sitting before you rather than being ancient dust long since dispersed by capricious Carpathian winds.
Ask not how I came to be Nosferatu for I do not know. I died and then I awoke as I am now. It may be that somehow my behavior in life marked me, for I freely admit to being a cruel and unrelenting tyrant. But I lived in a different world to the one that you know and I was probably neither worse nor better than many other 15th-century rulers. I justify myself by saying that I was a man of my time.
With the condition of Unlife comes enhancements and limitations. My life is eternal, barring interference by those who have the knowledge and there can be few of them today. How grateful I am for your modern skepticism and cynicism.
I have supernormal strength and yet I can pass—wraith-like—through the merest crack in door or window. I can take the form of animals and mist and moonlight and as such go where I will, once I have been invited. The powers of mesmerism and persuasion are mine and I can hold the most strongly willed person in thrall when I so wish. I can control animals, bending them to my bidding, although I admit to a distaste for domesticated hounds, cringing, fawning wretches that they are. Within limits I can command the elements, bringing about localized storms and fogs and blizzards at will. I regret, though, that I am unable to retard or to stop time.
Balanced against all these is the fact that certain of my extraordinary powers are limited to the hours of darkness. Outside of these times my strength and swiftness remain constant but my ability to change is impaired. I cannot endure certain things held by men to be holy, but again—who today believes, save for a few scattered peasants in the old countries of Europe? Direct sunlight is anathema to me although I can walk abroad on cool and cloudy days. This is the result only of centuries of Unlife and a young Nosferatu exposed during the daylight hours would suffer the most agonizing death.
You have read Stoker’s novel? Good; I feared briefly that perhaps your exclusive education might have narrowed your mind against works so lacking in literary merit. Know that the book was literally true.
The general belief is that Stoker was inspired by earlier works, such as those of Le Fanu, and that his research among old books led him to select myself as his central character. Not so. The nature of Stoker’s work brought him in touch with many people at all levels of society, among them the person he called Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, although that was not the noble lord’s true name.
Like many who have endured traumatic experiences, Lord Godalming needed the catharsis of confiding in another, an outsider. In Stoker he found a sympathetic, if perhaps a doubting, ear.
Through him, Stoker became acquainted with the whole of that group. I am sure he did not believe their tale but he could see its potential as High Gothic romance. After long negotiation, all gave him permission to publish subject to concealment of their true identities. Moving in society, they did not wish to compromise their positions.
They handed to Stoker all of their diaries and papers and with careful editing and some dramatic license these became the novel Dracula. To avoid confusion, I will continue to refer to the persons involved by their fictional names.
I am sure that their underlying purpose in giving permission to Stoker was a foolish optimism that the world would come to believe in and take arms against we superior ones. Despite the depth and breadth of his learning, I believe that Van Helsing was naïve enough to seek such an outcome. Stoker was more worldly-wise. He would have realized that those most likely to believe—villagers and peasants and suchlike in the Balkans and surrounding lands—were the most unlikely to hear of or read the novel anyway. Stoker, I am sure, sought only fame and riches, and good fortune to him.
I know all these things because I made it my business to find out. Of necessity, Nosferatu cultivate useful acquaintances at all levels of society. Following the publication and success of Dracula, I had a private inquiry agent look into the matter for me. Stoker had been unable to resist dropping hints of the truth to theatrical friends of his and some of these, plied with strong liquor, were loose-tongued. You are curious, naturally, as to how I escaped oblivion during that apparently final confrontation. The answer is simple. It was not I in that coffin being borne to my home by the Szagany but a simulacrum which I had created. In more modern parlance, you would probably call it a ‘clone.’
You see, I realized very early on during my stay in England that I had made two grievous errors. The first was that in my arrogance I was certain that I would remain undiscovered and unexposed there, for was I not in a land of reason in an age of reason, a land where there was no room in the rational mind for creatures of legend?
I brooked no expectation that that accursed nuisance Jonathan Harker would survive. I had surely believed that when and if I chose to return to my native soil I would find Harker to be such as I, a regent to partner my three consorts.
In time Harker could have become a power to reckon within the world, for he was an intelligent and determined man and from such spring the true Princes among us. He could have brought others to the fold and . . . But what use bemoaning now, for it was all so long ago.
And again, how could I have foreseen that a mere lunatic-master such as Seward would know a meddling old woman like Van Helsing? A doctor, Van Helsing called himself. A doctor! What right has a physician to know more of ancient lore than of his own profession? Forgive me, dearest Roisin. I came very close to losing my temper then. The thought of those interfering quacks still irks me from time to time. Well indeed that they are long dead and beyond my justice.
The second of my great errors was that I came, in my own way, to love. Yes, we can love, we denizens of the night. And like humans, when we love we yearn for the constant companionship of the loved one. Both Lucy Westenra and her friend Mina Murray—later Harker—attracted me greatly and I determined that both would be mine for eternity. I set out to convert them to this glorious enhancement of life, knowing full well that in their turn they would recruit their own loved ones to swell my empire.
It was when Lucy was destroyed that I realized someone had knowledge and posed a serious threat to me. As a precaution, I took a little of my blood and mingled it with the sacred soil of my homeland to create my replica. The ability to clone is something which a Nosferatu knows by instinct. It seems to be a survival instinct inherent when passing from human to superior life, as instinctive as the struggles of a newly born antelope on the African plain to gain its feet and run. My survival does, must always, take precedence over my loves. For I have a supreme importance in t
he great scheme of things.
As I said, I created my clone and sent it about my business. I am able to control my clones with my mind and their actions are as my actions would be, but when danger lurks then only the clones are in peril. It was the clone which compelled Mina to drink of its blood, it was the clone which made that mad dash for freedom from the house in Piccadilly.
I have admitted to my errors, but they too—Van Helsing and his crowd of whiter-than-white heroes—made theirs. They assumed that the four houses and the fifty boxes of earth comprised the total of my places of refuge. At different times, both Van Helsing and Harker had commented on my astuteness and ability to plan ahead. And yet in the end they so foolishly disregarded their own insight.
I had dealt with a number of English solicitors and agents and there were many more homes and boxes of Transylvanian earth in and around London for me to take refuge. When those wretches were contaminating my resting-places with their holy relics, they were doing little more than exposing to me the limits of their knowledge. I deliberately had the clone confront them, with the very purpose of making them think that my resources were exhausted but for a few paltry pounds. And the fools swallowed the bait. “His mind is that of a child,” bleated Van Helsing and his sheep bleated with him.
It was the clone that fled on the good ship Czarina Catherine; the clone that they pursued from London to Galatz, from Galatz to the Borgo Pass, from the Borgo Pass to my castle; the clone that was lying in the coffin when the blades flashed down in that so-called “final” sunset of Dracula; the clone which crumbled to dust when its heart was pierced and its head shorn from its body.
What a strange journey that had been, with our minds—Mina’s, the clone’s and my own—inextricably linked together. I could experience the darkness of the coffin in the ship’s bowels, could feel the sick lurching of the waves. I could sense the cold and snow where Mina and Van Helsing camped, could revel in the temptations from my three consorts that Mina, with the old man’s aid, had to resist.
I had hopes, almost, that my clone would triumph, for it was a close-run thing that final chase and battle. They all thought that the scar of the Sacred Host passed from Mina’s brow because of the “death” of Dracula, but really it passed because I chose to relinquish my hold on her. The importance of my survival, you see.
So there I was, safe in London. I decided that my emotions and activities must be curbed, lest Van Helsing and his cohorts suspect that I yet lived. Such abstinence is not so difficult. While a young Nosferatu can be dangerously greedy, one such as I may—like the spider—survive with little or no nourishment for a long time, for very many years if necessary. I could patiently outlive my adversaries, even their descendants, for what are decades to one with eternal life?
I surmised that it would take time for the Van Helsing party to return from Transylvania, for they had to bury Quincy Morris, that courageous and hot-headed American, and to recuperate from their ordeal. They believed me to be dead, they knew with certainty that my three consorts were dead and returned to the eternal dust thanks to that accursed old Dutchman, and they had massacred poor Lucy in her London tomb. They would have been in no hurry, for had not the horror ended?
I decided that it would be in my best interests to move away from London, in fact from England altogether. I would spend a few years lying low, perhaps alternating between Paris and one of the great German cities such as Berlin.
Before taking my leave from the land of my near downfall, I carefully reviewed the events of the recent months. One conclusion I did reach was that my boxes of native earth were the most easily traceable clues for their movement relied upon other parties, agents, carriers and the like. And why had it been so essential for me to transport so many boxes? Instinct, perhaps. Could I do without them?
Over a period of several weeks, I experimented. At the end of that time, I had come to realize that no more than a pinch of my consecrated soil was needed for rest and a filled portmanteau or two should suffice for very many years.
I set sail for France in mid-December when the nights were long and such daylight weather as there was would most likely be overcast and gloomy. Travelling on an evening fast packet from Dover, we arrived in Calais well before the morning. I arranged for my baggage to be sent on to Paris, where I had negotiated to rent an old house in a run-down district, and then set out to find refuge for I was weary.
By now I habitually carried several ounces of Transylvanian soil in a pocket for times of need and in principal I could have rested anywhere. But almost always I have a compulsion to seek somewhere old to make my repose.
Assuming bat form, I circled the town until on the outskirts I discovered a small church which bore all the outward signs of dereliction. Surrounding the church was its graveyard and into this I descended, taking on my human shape once more.
A heavy, misty drizzle permeated the air and the whole area lacked adequate street lighting which made the pre-dawn gloom impenetrable and unwelcoming—to a human. For me conditions were perfect, presenting no difficulty as I can see in the dark. The churchyard was neglected and overgrown, the graves no more than shapeless hummocks thick with weeds and surmounted by time-weary headstones in varying states of decrepitude and collapse.
I searched about until eventually I came upon a disused family vault, its outer walls dripping moisture and stained by moss and fungus growths. Such a place as was perfect for my needs. The vault door was loose and hanging ajar and inside were niches containing rotting coffins together with some half-dozen stone sarcophagi in the center of the floor.
I heaved the lid from the largest of these and threw out the moldering bones which were all that remained of the occupant. I could stay here comfortably for a day or two before continuing my journey to Paris.
As I was scattering the pathetic bones, a man’s voice, coarse and querulous, cried out from the shadows. Although his speech was thick with regional accent, my French is good and I understood him easily enough. “What’s this?” he called. “Who’s intruding in my hideaway?”
From behind another sarcophagus he staggered into sight, an unshaven ruffian with dulled eyes and rotten teeth. One filthy, scarred hand clutched an absinthe bottle to his chest and everything about him reeked of dipsomaniac. “What d’you want? Bugger off, this is my place!”
“Take great care,” I warned him. “You should beware of how you address strangers for you do not know what they can be capable of. I need refuge for a day or two and then I will be gone from here. Until then, disregard me and I will disregard you.”
“Oh, a bloody toff,” the man sneered, “I’ll wager that you can spare me a few sous. Come on, hand over your money.” Gripping his bottle by the neck, he made a threatening gesture.
All the pent-up fury inside me erupted, a fury which had been simmering since Van Helsing and his cronies had thwarted my schemes. Seizing the oaf, I dashed him to the floor and he cried out in agony as bones shattered. “Non, m’sieu!” he screamed out, “I meant nothing by it. The vault is yours, only let me be!”
Reaching down I pulled him to me like a rough child hugging a kitten, and giving no thought to soothing mesmerism I plunged my fangs deep into his jugular. I had determined to abstain from gluttonous feeding but realized that one good feast would sustain me for some time to come. I drank deeply until at last the shrieking animal subsided, near to expiring. His blood was foul, no doubt the result of many years of imbibing filth, but it would have to do for the while.
Then I cursed myself for what I had done, not from remorse—for this is an emotion foreign to me—but for the fact that I had infected a creature not worthy to join the ranks of Nosferatu. Casting him down, I tore aside his ragged shirt, ripped open his body and shredded the still living heart with my talons. At last, rage abated, I was calmer. Leaving the carcass where it had fallen, I settled myself into the tomb and rested well.
In Paris I was met and greeted by a neat and prissy little man, Monsieur Jeanmaire, the agent
through whom I was to rent my new home. He took me in his carriage and gradually we passed from the fashionable thoroughfares through streets which became meaner and meaner and more crowded, from these into places largely abandoned and housing only vagrants and the very poorest, until at last we reached my proposed new abode.
It was a four-sided house—probably imposing a century or so previously but now heading toward ruin—standing in several acres which were overrun with tall grasses, tangled weeds and ancient trees, dark and gnarled and leafless. The grounds were surrounded by a high brick wall topped with sharp iron spikes which were in surprisingly good condition.
“This appears to be admirable,” I told Jeanmaire. “I must explain that I am a scholar and a recluse and I will brook no disturbance. Can you guarantee me the solitude I require in this place?”
“The locals consider it to be a haunted house, m’sieu,” he replied, pressing a delicate hand to his mouth to suppress a little snigger. “Believe me, none will so much as venture beyond the gateway.”
“Let me see inside,” I commanded.
The interior, unmodernized and unfurnished, comprised six rooms on each of two floors together with several large basements, dank-smelling and dungeon-like. Thick wooden shutters, through which only the merest glimmer of daylight penetrated, were fastened over the windows, while the dust of years lay thick everywhere, turning opaque the festoons of cobwebs hanging from ceilings and walls. I was exceptionally pleased with the basement which was well below ground level and which I could fortify with ease.
I told Jeanmaire that I would take the property and at the rent asked, offering to pay a substantial sum in advance.
The agent toyed with his silly toothbrush moustache, a look of doubt on his face. “Herr Szekely—” (for such was the name I had assumed) “—is obviously a man of quality,” he said. “Possibly even of the nobility. To offer the Herr such a place, even although it is as stipulated, does not seem right. I can find the Herr somewhere far more suitable at very little more rent.”
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 23
