Reconciliation Day

by Christopher Fowler

  In the courtyard, the castle was criss-crossed with narrow open-sided corridors, winding staircases, spires, turrets and a deep well that conjured up memories of old Hammer films. There were hardly any other visitors.

  I was just thinking about how to raise the subject of the book when Mikaela said, “I can take you to Viscria if you want.”

  From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, October 7th, 1893

  The snow has started falling. During these increasingly frequent squalls, all sights and sounds are obscured by a deadening white veil that seals us in the sky. From my bedroom window I can see that the road to the castle is already becoming obscured. If the count does not return soon, I really do not see how I shall be able to leave. I suppose I could demand that a carriage be fetched from the nearest village, but I fear that such an action would offend my host, who must surely reappear any day now. I am worried about my beloved Mina. I have not heard from her inside a month, and yet if I am truthful there is a part of me that is glad to be imprisoned here within the castle, for the library continues to reveal paths I feel no decent God-fearing Englishman has ever explored.

  I do not mean to sound so mysterious, but truly something strange weighs upon my mind. It is this; by day I follow the same routine, logging the books and entering them into the great ledgers my host provided for the purpose, but each night, after I have supped and read my customary pages beside the fire, I allow myself to fall into a light sleep and then—

  —then my freedom begins as I dream or awaken to such unholy horrors and delights that I can barely bring myself to describe them.

  Some nights bring swarms of bats, musty-smelling airborne rodents with leathery wings, needle teeth and blind eyes. Sometimes the ancestors of Vlad Drakul appear at the windows in bloody tableaux, frozen in the act of hacking off the heads of their enemies. Men appear skewered on tempered spikes, thrusting themselves deeper onto the razor-sharp poles in the throes of obscene pleasure. Even the count himself pays his respects, his bony alabaster features peering at me through the wintry mist as if trying to bridge the chasm between our two civilisations. And sometimes the women come.

  Ah, the women.

  These females are unlike any we have in England. They do not accompany themselves on the pianoforte, they do not sew demurely by the fire. Their prowess is focussed in an entirely different area. They kneel and disrobe each other before me, and caress themselves, and turn their rumps toward me in expectation. I would like to tell you that I resist, that I think of my fiancée waiting patiently at home, and recite psalms from my Bible to strengthen my will, but I do not, and so I am damned by the actions I take to slake my decadent desires.

  Who are these people who come to me in nightly fever-dreams? Do I conjure them or do they draw something from me? It is as if the count knows my innermost thoughts and caters for them accordingly. Yet I know for a fact that he has not returned to the castle, for when I look from the window I see that there are no cart-tracks on the road outside. The snow remains entirely unbroken.

  Yesterday I tried the main door and found it locked. Yet there are times when I do not wish to leave this terrible place, for to do so would mean forsaking the library. Presumably it is to be packed and shipped to London, and this gives me hope, that I might travel with the volumes and protect them from division. For the strength of a library exists in the sum of its books. Only by studying it as a whole—indeed, only by reading every single edition contained within—can one hope to divine the true nature of its owner.

  “Is this it?”

  I tried to see through the windshield but one wiper had stopped working. It was snowing lightly as we passed another walled village that had barely been altered in a millennium. Only a couple of cars parked by a church set us in the present. Everything else looked like a medieval woodcut.

  “It’s at the end of this road,” said Mikaela. “Everyone makes the same mistake with Viscria. The original walled village died and the descendants moved further back to the last town we passed. I thought I’d get to know them. They’re helpful when you run out of gas, kind even, but in the year I’ve been here I haven’t gotten to know a single one well. There’s too much history. It’s hard to comprehend what these people have been through.”

  “You’re going to tell me they hang garlic and crucifixes out at night,” I joked, then wished I hadn’t, as we passed a seven foot painted Jesus in a field.

  “No, the locals aren’t vampires,” said Mikaela with a straight face, “but they believe in Vlad Drakul. The guy cast a long shadow. That’s why you still find paintings in bars and cafés that show him gorily impaling victims. It’s his memory they honor, not Bram Stoker’s. The book is just a useful means to an end, a way to hook tourists into coming here. It’s a pity the area’s solely associated with the vampire trade. There’s a lot more to discover in places like Sibiu.”

  I’d heard about Transylvania’s capital. It boasted a magnificently rococo French-style square as grand as anything you’d find in Paris or Lyon, but typically the locals didn’t feel the need to brag about it, and visitors rarely got that far.

  “So what happened to the library at Castle Bran?” I asked.

  “What happened to anything here under the Communists?” Mikaela said with a shrug. “It disappeared along with everything and everyone else that genocidal maniac Ceaușescu came into contact with. The one thing he couldn’t take from these people was their belief system.”

  I was thinking of the one thing I could take from them.

  We passed a peculiar arrangement of low wooden benches rooted in a circle about thirty yards across, around what looked like a blackened tree with upright branches. The green paint on the benches looked new. “I thought you said that the village was dead.”

  “It is, but the villagers still gather here several times a year. Old customs never die.”

  The dirty chalk-white walls of the old village appeared around the next corner, leaning back from the road and tapering to red clay rooftops. We parked in a sloping field full of turkeys and made our way to the entrance.

  An ancient woman with a face like a dried apple greeted us at the gate and took two RON from each of us by way of an entrance fee. On the inside, there were derelict houses beneath the thick circular wall, homes which once afforded the protection of the chapel.

  “That’s a lard tower,” said Mikaela, pointing to one of the many turrets in the wall. “The villagers wrote their house numbers on their lard skins and kept careful accounts. They still live a communal life. And they love their books. The collection is in the Reconciliation Tower, such as it is.”

  We climbed the dusty plank staircase to the top of the chapel’s central tower, past looms and farm instruments. In a single bookcase at the end of the top floor I glimpsed a number of leather-bound volumes. “Reconciliation Tower?”

  “Reconciliation Day is when the residents present their annual statement of accounts, costs of births, funerals, crops and so on. It has to be signed by every elder, and there are severe penalties for disrespect and disobedience.”

  “You mean that’s what the burned tree was back there? The elders sit in a circle on their benches and watch while debtors are chained up and set on fire?”

  “You’ve been reading too much Stoker,” Mikaela laughed.

  I went to the book-cupboard and opened the glass case.

  “I don’t think you should do that,” she said. “I’m just having a little look is all,” I told her.

  The volumes inside were old but of no interest. Most concerned crop planting and animal husbandry. All were printed in Romanian.

  Mikaela seemed to make up her mind about something. “Look out of the window,” she said. “See what the babushka is doing.”

  Old Apple-Face had retired to the outside wall and was sitting on a kitchen chair in the lightly falling snow, wearing just a thin shawl around her shoulders, doing not
hing and apparently feeling no cold.

  “Okay, come with me.” We crossed the tower floor to a rough wooden chest of drawers. “They keep the more valuable items in here,” said Mikaela. I studied the chest. It was fastened shut with a fat rusty lock.

  “Is there any way we can get inside?” “What? No.” Mikaela shook his head. “Absolutely not. I once asked if I could open it and they told me it was not for outsiders.”

  Mikaela had always been timid and culturally over-respectful. I’d told her she needed to look at the bigger picture and think about how the world might share in the value of these finds.

  “You want to get lost for a few minutes?” I asked her.

  “No, you can’t just break in, Carter. It’s a federal offence to remove anything from a state building. You’ll go home tomorrow and I still have to live here.”

  “Go downstairs. I’m not going to steal anything, I swear, I’m just going to take a look, okay? I won’t touch a thing.”

  As soon as she had gone, I dug out my Swiss Army knife and worked on the lock. It slid open with embarrassing ease.

  From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, November 15th, 1893

  Somewhere between dreams and wakefulness, I now know there is another state. A limbo-life more imagined than real. A land of phantoms and sensations. It is a place I visit each night after darkness falls. Sometimes it is sensuous, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes foul and depraved beyond redemption. It extends only to the borders of the library, and its inhabitants, mostly in states of disrobed arousal, are obscenely perfumed. These creatures insult, entice, distract, disgrace, shame and seduce me, clutching at my clothes until I am drawn among them, enthralled by their touch, degraded by my own eagerness to participate in their rituals.

  I think I am ill.

  By day, my high stone world is silent and rational. The road to the castle is now quite impassable. It would take a team of mountaineers to scale the sharp gradient of the rock face beneath us. The count has failed to return, and of his impending plans there is no word. The servants will not be drawn on the subject. My task in the library is nearly over. The books—all save one final shelf—have been annotated and explored.

  I begin to understand the strangely parasitical nature of my host. His thirst for knowledge and his choice of literature betray his true desires. There are volumes in many languages here, but of the ones I can read, first editions of Nodier’s Infernalia, d’Argen’s Lettres Juives and Viatte’s Sources Occultes du Romantisme are the most familiar. One element unites the works—they are all the product of noble decadence, inward-looking, inbred and unhealthy.

  Of course I knew the folk-tales about the count’s ancestry. They are bound within the history of his family. How could one travel through this country and not hear them? In their native language they appear less fanciful, but here in the castle confabulations take on substantiality. I have read how the count’s forebears slaughtered the offspring of their enemies and drank their blood for strength—who has not read these histories? Why, tales of Eastern barbarism have reached the heart of London society, although they are only spoken of after the ladies have left.

  But I had not considered the more lurid legends; how the royal descendants lived on beyond death, how they needed no earthly sustenance, how their senses were so finely attuned that they could divine bad fortune in advance. I had not considered the consequence of such fables; that, should their veracity be proven, they might in the count’s case suggest an inherited illness of the kind suffered by royal albinos, a dropsical disease of the blood that keeps him from the light, an anaemia that blanches his eyes and dries his veins, and causes meat to stick in his throat, and drives him from the noisy heat of humanity to the dark sanctum of the sick-chamber.

  But if it is merely a medical condition, why am I beset with bestial fantasies? What power could the count possess to hold me in his thrall? I find it harder each day to recall his appearance, for the forbidden revelations of the night have all but overpowered my sense of reality. His essence is here in the library, imbued within each page of his collection. Perhaps I am not ill, but mad. I fear my senses have awoken too sharply, and my rational mind is reeling with their weight.

  I have lost much of my girth in the last six weeks. I have always been thin, but the gaunt image that glares back at me in the glass must surely belong to a sick and aged relation. I have no strength by day. I live only for the nights. Beneath the welcoming winter moon my flesh fills, my spirit becomes engorged with an unwholesome strength and I am sound once more.

  I really must try to get away from here.

  I set the lock on one side.

  Inside the drawers were a number of gaudy icons, all fake, priests’ robes embroidered with red silk, brocaded white christening dresses, hand-stitched blankets and at the bottom, a few books. I removed the stack, checking out of the window.

  Mikaela was stumping about in the courtyard, trying not to look suspicious.

  The blue cover jumped out. It was entirely blank, with one gold word embossed on the spine. Dracula.

  I had to take a moment. After all this time, thinking that maybe it didn’t exist—

  The book had never been opened—you can always tell a virgin copy by the way the pages seem reluctant to leave one another, the tiny ticking sound the spine makes as it’s stretched for the first time, the reluctance of the covers to move further apart. It was unsullied, probably the first and last one, the only one.

  Stupidly, I’d forgotten to bring my cotton gloves. I didn’t want to release sweat-marks onto the pages, but I had to open it and check. The book’s crimson edges had dried so that their coloring had turned powdery and dusted off on my fingertips, but its snow-white interior had no discoloration and the smell of the print was still strong.

  The publication date matched. The ending was brief but new to my eyes, describing the utter destruction of the castle. It seemed desultory and flatly written, as if it had been tacked on because the author had no other way of ending the story. I could see why he had subsequently removed it. Turning to the early section, easily the best part of the book in my opinion, I searched to see if there were any other additions. Somehow I already knew what I was going to find. The chapter about Harker and the library was there, intact. I wanted to sit down and read it right then but had to content myself with riffling through the pages, just to prove that I was not hallucinating.

  Without wasting another second, I removed the copy I’d had made from my rucksack and put it in the original’s place. The only thing I’d failed to realize was that the real edition had painted edges. I felt sure no-one here would know or care, but I wondered if it had been printed that way, or if the priest had marked it himself. Whatever—back home the literary world would sit up and take notice when they saw what I had. My name would live on, forever linked to Stoker’s Dracula.

  Replacing the lock and closing it, I made my way back downstairs—but Mikaela had disappeared and my car had gone.

  The babushka was still on her chair, basking in the lightly falling snow as if it was a summer’s day. As my fingers were crimson with dye I made sure they were tucked away in my pockets.

  “Have you seen my friend?” I asked, but she had no English and would only gesture in the direction of the turkey field. Mikaela was a heavy smoker. Figuring that she had gone off to find cigarettes I made my way over to where we had parked, the precious cargo in my backpack weighing me down.

  From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, December 18th, 1893

  The count has finally returned, paradoxically bringing fresh spirits into the castle.

  For the life of me I cannot see how he arrived here, as one section of the pathway has fallen away into the valley. Last night he came down to dinner, and was in most excellent health. His melancholy mood had lifted and he was eager to converse. He seemed physically taller, his posture more erect, his colour
higher. His travels had taken him on many adventures, so he informed me as he poured himself a goblet of heavy claret, but now he was properly restored to his ancestral home and would be in attendance for the conclusion of my work.

  I had not told him I was almost done, although I supposed he might have intuited as much from a visit to the library. He asked that we might finish the work together, before the next sunrise. I was very tired—indeed, at the end of the meal I required a helping hand to lift me from my chair—but agreed to his demand, knowing that there were but a handful of books left for me to classify.

  Soon we were seated in the great library, warming ourselves before the crackling fire with bowls of brandy. It was when I studied the count’s travelling clothes that I realised the truth. His boots and oil-cloth cape lay across the back of a chair where he has supposedly deposited them after his return. But the boots were new, the soles polished and unworn. I intuited that the count had not been away, and that he had passed his time in the castle here with me.

  I had not imagined what I had seen and done. We sat across from each other in the two great armchairs, cradling our brandies, and I nervously pondered my next move, for it was clear to me that the count could sense my unease.

  This, I felt sure, was to be our most fateful encounter.

  I waited for what felt like an age but Mikaela didn’t return. I started to get cold. The turkeys were now eyeing me with suspicion. It was beginning to snow more heavily. I set down the backpack and looked at the low hills surrounding us. At first I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. I thought maybe the turkeys had escaped to the nearest ridge and were now lining up to peer down at me.

  Then I realized that I was looking at a line of black felt hats.

  The hats rose to reveal a row of men, walking steadily toward me. It looked like a village deputation, the precursor to a lynching. They were talking quietly with one another. Each one carried a small leather-bound book.