“Yes, very much like these, but grander. The scale of the place is overwhelming. It takes your breath away.”
“Oh,” I said. “Could I get another drink, please?”
My father glared at me suddenly, but it was too late. Now I knew that he had been to Istanbul himself.
Chapter 12
December 16, 1930
Trinity College, Oxford
My dear and unfortunate successor:
At this point, my history has almost caught up with me, or I with it, and I must narrate events that will bring my story up to the present. There, I hope, it will stop, since I can hardly bear the thought that the future may contain more of these horrors.
As I have related, I eventually picked up my strange book again, like a man compelled by an addiction. I told myself before I did it that my life had returned to normal, that my experience in Istanbul had been odd but was surely explicable and had taken on exaggerated proportions in my travel-wearied brain. So I literally picked the book up again, and I feel I should tell you about that moment in the most literal terms.
It was a rainy evening in October, only two months ago. Term had begun, and I sat in pleasant solitude in my rooms, whiling away an hour after supper. I was waiting for my friend Hedges, a don only ten years older than myself of whom I was extremely fond. He was an awkward and eminently good-natured person, whose apologetic shrugs and kind, shy smile disguised a wit so keen that I often felt thankful he turned it on eighteenth-century literature and not on his colleagues. Except for his shyness, he could have been at home among Addison, Swift, and Pope, gathering in some London coffeehouse. He had only a few friends, had never so much as looked directly at a woman not related to him, and fostered no dreams that reached beyond the Oxford countryside, where he liked to walk, leaning over a fence now and then to watch the cows chewing. His gentleness was visible in the shape of his big head, his meaty hands, and his soft brown eyes, so that he seemed rather bovine himself, or badgerlike, until that clever sarcasm of his suddenly stung the air. I loved to hear about his work, which he discussed in a modest but enthusiastic way, and he never failed to urge me on in my own pursuits. His name was—well, you could find it in any library, with a little poking around, since he brought several of England’s literary geniuses back to life for the lay reader. But I will call him Hedges, a nom de guerre of my own devising, to give him in this narrative the privacy and decency that were his in life.
This particular evening Hedges was to drop by my rooms with drafts of the two articles I had squeezed out of my work at Crete. He had read and corrected them for me, at my request; although he couldn’t comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of my descriptions of trade in the ancient Mediterranean, he wrote like an angel, the sort of angel whose precision would indeed have allowed him to dance on the head of a pin, and he often suggested polish for my style. I anticipated half an hour’s friendly critique, then sherry and that gratifying moment when a true friend stretches his legs at your fireside and asks you how you’ve been. I wouldn’t tell him the truth about my rattled and still-healing nerves, of course, but we might discuss anything and everything else.
While I waited I poked up the fire, added another log, set out two glasses, and surveyed my desk. My study also served me for a sitting room, and I made sure it was kept as orderly and comfortable as the solidity of its nineteenth-century furnishings demanded. I had completed a great deal of work that afternoon, supped off a plate brought up to me at six o’clock, and then cleared the last of my papers. Dark was coming in early already, and with it arrived a gloomy, slanting rain. I find this the most appealing kind of autumn evening, not the most dismal, so I felt only a faint shiver of premonition when my hand, searching for ten minutes’ reading, fell casually on the antique volume I had been avoiding. I’d left it tucked among less disturbing items on a shelf above my desk. Now I sat down there, feeling with lurking pleasure the suede-soft old cover fitting into my hand again, and opened the book.
Immediately I became aware of something very strange. A smell rose from its pages that was not merely the delicate scent of aging paper and cracked vellum. It was a reek of decay, a terrible, sickening odor, a smell of old meat or corrupted flesh. I had never noticed it before, and I leaned closer, sniffing, unbelieving, then shut the book. I reopened it after a moment, and again stomach-turning fumes rose from its pages. The little volume seemed alive in my hands, yet it smelled of death.
This unsettling malodor brought back to me all the nervous fear of my return trip from the Continent, and I stilled my feelings only with a concerted effort. Old books rotted, that was fact, and I had travelled with this one through rain and storm. The smell could surely be explained thus. Maybe I would take it to the Rare Book Room again and get some advice on having it cleaned, or fumigated, whatever was required.
If I had not been studiously avoiding my reaction to this unpleasant presence, I would’ve dropped the thing, put it away again. But now, for the first time in many weeks, I made myself turn to that extraordinary central image, the wide-winged dragon snarling over his banner. Suddenly, with jarring accuracy, I saw something afresh and comprehended it for the first time. I have never been gifted with great sharpness in my visual understanding of the world, but some flicker of heightened senses showed me the outline of the whole dragon, his spread wings and looped tail. In a spasm of curiosity I rummaged through the package of notes I had brought back from Istanbul, which had lain ignored in my desk drawer. Fumbling, I found the page I wanted; torn from my own notebook, it showed a sketch I had made in the archives in Istanbul, a copy of the first of the maps I’d found there.
You will remember that there were three of those maps, graduated in scale to show the same unnamed region in greater and greater detail. That region, even sketched in my inartistic if careful hand, had a most definite shape. It looked for all the world like a symmetrically winged beast. A long river wound away from it to the southwest, curling back as the dragon’s tail did. I studied the woodcut, my heart fluttering strangely. The dragon’s tail was barbed, tipped with an arrow that pointed—here I almost gasped aloud, forgetting all the intervening weeks of recovery from my former obsession—towards the spot that corresponded on my map to the site of the Unholy Tomb.
The visual resemblance between the two images was too striking to be coincidence. How had I not noticed, in the archive, that the region represented on those maps had exactly the brooding, spread-winged shape of my dragon, as if he cast his shadow over it from above? The woodcut I had puzzled over so deeply before my trip must hold a definite meaning, a message. It was designed to threaten and intimidate, to commemorate power. But for the persistent, it might be a clue; its tail pointed to the tomb as surely as any finger points to the self: this is me. I am here. And who was there, in that central point, that Unholy Tomb? The dragon held up his answer in cruelly sharpened talons: DRAKULYA.
I tasted an acrid tension, like my own blood, at the back of my throat. I knew I must hold myself back from these conclusions, as my training warned me, but I felt a conviction deeper than reason. None of the maps showed Lake Snagov, where Vlad Tepes was supposed to have been buried. Surely this meant Tepes—Dracula—rested somewhere else, someplace not even legend had recorded reliably. But where was his tomb, then? I grated out the question aloud, in spite of myself. And why had its location been kept a secret?
As I sat there trying to fit these pieces together, I heard the familiar sound of footsteps along the college hall—Hedges’s shuffling, endearing walk—and I thought distractedly that I must hide these materials, go to the door, pour out sherry, rearrange myself for convivial talk. I had half risen, gathering papers, when I suddenly heard the silence. It was like an error in music, a note held one beat too long, so that it arrested the listener in a way no definite chord could have done. The familiar, good-natured steps had stopped outside my door, but Hedges hadn’t knocked, as he usually did. My heart echoed that perceptibly skipped beat. Over the rustling of my pap
ers and the spat of rain on the gutter above my window, now darkened, I heard a hum—the sound of my blood rising in my ears. I dropped the book, hurried to the outer door of my rooms, unlocked it, and pulled it open.
Hedges was there, but he lay sprawled on the polished floor, his head thrown backwards and his body twisted sideways, as if a great force had hurled him down. I realized with a thrill of nausea that I hadn’t heard him cry out or fall. His eyes were open, staring hard past me. For an endless second I thought he was dead. Then his head moved and he groaned. I crouched beside him. “Hedges!”
He moaned again and blinked rapidly.
“Can you hear me?” I gasped, almost sobbing with relief because he was alive. At that moment his head rolled convulsively, revealing a bloody gash in the side of his neck. It wasn’t large, but it looked deep, as if a dog had leapt up and torn at the flesh, and it was bleeding profusely down his collar and onto the floor by his shoulder. “Help!” I shouted. I doubt anyone had so violently broken the hush of that oak-panelled hall in the centuries since it was built. And I didn’t know if it was any use; this was the night when most of the fellows dined with the college master. Then a door flew open at the far end and Professor Jeremy Forester’s valet came running, a nice chap named Ronald Egg who has since left the house. He seemed to take everything in at once, his eyes bulging, and then he knelt to tie his handkerchief over the wound on Hedges’s neck.
“Here,” he said to me. “We’ve got to get him sitting up, sir, elevate that cut, if he has no other injuries.” He felt carefully up and down Hedges’s rigid body, and when my friend didn’t protest, we propped him against the wall. I supported him on my shoulder, where he leaned heavily, his eyes closing. “I’m going for the doctor,” Ronald said and vanished down the hallway. I kept a finger on Hedges’s pulse; his head lolled next to me but his heartbeat seemed steady. I couldn’t help trying to call him back to consciousness. “What happened, Hedges? Did someone strike you? Can you hear me? Hedges?”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. His head listed to one side and half his face looked slack, bluish, but he spoke intelligibly. “He said to tell you . . .”
“What? Who?”
“He said to tell you he will brook no trespasses.”
Hedges’s head fell back against the wall, that big, fine head that sheltered one of England’s best minds. The skin crawled on my arms as I held him. “Who, Hedges? Who said that to you? Did he hurt you? Did you see him?”
Saliva bubbled at the corner of his mouth and his hands worked by his sides.
“Brook no trespasses,” he gurgled.
“Lie still now,” I urged. “Don’t talk. The doctor will be here in a few minutes. Try to relax and breathe.”
“Dear me,” Hedges murmured. “Pope and the alliterative. Sweet nymph. For argument.”
I stared at him, my stomach tightening. “Hedges?”
“‘The Rape of the Lock,’” Hedges said politely. “Without a doubt.”
The university doctor who admitted him to the hospital told me Hedges had suffered a stroke along with his wound. “Brought on by the shock. That gash on his neck,” he added outside Hedges’s room. “It looks as if it was made by something sharp, most likely sharp teeth, an animal. You don’t keep a dog?”
“Of course not. They aren’t permitted in college chambers.”
The doctor shook his head. “Very odd. I believe he was attacked by some animal on his way to your room, and the shock brought on a stroke that was perhaps waiting to occur. He’s pretty well off his head, for now, although he can form coherent words. There will be an investigation, I’m afraid, because of the wound, but it seems to me we’ll find someone’s nasty watchdog at the bottom of this. Try to think out what walk he would’ve taken to your digs.”
The investigation turned up nothing satisfactory, but neither was I indicted, since the police could find no motive and no evidence for my having hurt Hedges myself. Hedges was incapable of testifying, and they finally recorded the incident as “self-injury,” which seemed to me an avoidable blight on his reputation. One day during a visit to his rest home, I quietly asked Hedges to think about these words: “I will brook no trespasses.”
He turned incurious eyes on me, touching with idle, puffy fingers the red wound on his neck. “If so, Boswell,” he said pleasantly, almost humorously. “If not, begone.” A few days later he was dead, of a second stroke suffered during the night. No external injuries to the body were reported by the rest home. When the college master came to tell me, I swore to myself that I would work tirelessly to avenge Hedges’s death, if I could only figure out how.
I do not have the heart to record in detail the pain of the service held for him in our chapel at Trinity, the stifled sobs of his old father when the boys’ choir began their beautifully set psalms to comfort the living, the anger I felt towards the impotent Eucharist on its tray. Hedges was buried in his own village in Dorset, and I have visited the grave alone, on a mild November day. The stone says REQUIESCAT IN PACE, which would have been my exact choice, too, had the decision been mine. To my infinite relief, it is the quietest of country churchyards, and the parson speaks as mildly of Hedges’s interment as he might of any local honor. I heard no tales of an English vrykolakas at the pub on the high street, even when I dropped the broadest, blandest hints. After all, Hedges was attacked only once, not the several times Stoker describes as necessary to infect a living person with the contagion of the undead. I believe he was sacrificed as a mere warning—to me. And to you, as well, unfortunate reader?
Yours in profoundest grief, Bartholomew Rossi
My father stirred the ice in his glass, as if to steady his hand and give himself something to do. Afternoon heat was relaxing into a calm Venetian evening, making the shadows of tourists and buildings stretch long across the piazza. A mass of pigeons started up off the paving stones, frightened by something, and wheeled overhead, enormous in flight. The chill from all those cold drinks had finally reached me, seeped into my bones. Someone laughed, far away, and I could hear seagulls crying above the pigeons. As we sat there a young man in a white shirt and blue jeans came loping up to speak with us. He had a canvas bag slung over one shoulder and his shirt was spotted with colors. “Buy a painting, signore?” he said, smiling at my father. “You and the signorina are the stars of my painting today.”
“No, no, grazie,” my father replied automatically. The squares and alleys were full of these art-student figures. This was the third scene of Venezia we’d been offered that day; my father hardly glanced at the picture. The young man, still smiling and perhaps unwilling to leave us without at least a compliment for his work, held it up for me to see, and I nodded sympathetically, glancing at it. A second later he was bobbing away in search of other tourists, and I sat frozen, watching him go.
The painting he had shown me was a richly hued watercolor. It depicted our café, and the edge of Florian’s, a bright and unprovoking impression of the afternoon. The artist must have been stationed somewhere behind me, I thought, but fairly close to the café; he had caught a splotch of color that I recognized as the back of my red straw hat, with my father in blurry tan and blue just beyond. It was an elegant, casual piece of work, the image of summer indolence, something a tourist might well want to keep as the souvenir of an unblemished Adriatic day. But my glance at it had shown me a lone figure sitting beyond my father, a broad-shouldered, dark-headed figure, a crisp black silhouette among the cheerful colors of awning and tablecloths. That table, I recalled clearly, had been vacant all afternoon.
Chapter 13
Our next trip took us east again, beyond the Julian Alps. The little town of Kostanjevica, “place of the chestnut tree,” was indeed full of chestnuts at this time of year, some already underfoot, so that if you set your shoe down wrong on the cobbled streets you slid precariously on a sharp burr. In front of the mayor’s house, originally built to shelter an Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat, the nuts in their wicked-looking shells lay e
verywhere, a swarm of tiny porcupines.
My father and I walked slowly along, enjoying the end of a warm autumnal day—in the local dialect, this was called gypsy summer, a woman in a shop had told us—and I reflected on the differences between the Western world, a few hundred kilometers away, and this Eastern one, just a little south of Emona. Here everything in the stores looked like everything else, and the shop clerks, too, seemed to me exactly like one another, in royal blue work coats and flowered scarves, their gold or stainless steel teeth glinting at us over the half-empty counter. We had bought an enormous chocolate bar to supplement our picnic of sliced salami, brown bread, and cheese, and my father carried bottles of my favorite Naranca, an orange drink that reminded me already of Ragusa, Emona, Venezia.
The last meeting in Zagreb had ended the day before while I put the finishing flourish to my history homework. My father wanted me to study German now, too, and I was eager to, not because of his insistence but despite it; I would begin that tomorrow, out of a book from the foreign-language store in Amsterdam. I had a new short green dress and yellow kneesocks, my father was smiling over some unintelligible spoof that had passed between one diplomat and another that morning, and the Naranca bottles clinked together in our net bag. Ahead of us lay a low stone bridge, spanning the River Kostan. I hurried there for my first look, which I wanted to enjoy in private, without even my father beside me.
The river curved out of sight close to the bridge, and in its curve huddled a diminutive castle, a villa-sized Slav château with swans paddling below its walls and grooming themselves on the bank. As I watched, a woman in a blue coat opened an upstairs window, pushing it outward, making its latticed glass wink in the sun, and shook her dust mop. Below the bridge, young willows crowded together and swallows flew in and out of the mud bluffs at their roots. In the castle park, I saw a stone bench (not too close to the swans, whom I feared even now, in my teens) with chestnut trees leaning over it and the castle walls throwing a soothing shade on it. My father’s clean suit would be safe there, and he might sit longer than he’d intended and talk in spite of himself.
The Historian Page 10
