Dracula Unbound

by Brian W Aldiss

“He was unwanted and rejected as a small kid. He needs me and I’m not prepared to do the dirty on him now. His whole career is dedicated to the pursuit of power and adventure and notoriety—well, it’s an antidote to the early misery he went through. I understand that.”

  The distant voice said, “Sounds like you have been talking to his shrink.”

  Mina looked up, momentarily distracted by something fluttering at the window. It was late for a bird. The dark was closing swiftly in.

  “His new shrink is real good. Joe is basically a depressive, like many famous men in history, Goethe, Luther, Tolstoy, Winston Churchill—I forget who else. He has enormous vitality, and he fends off a basic melancholia with constant activity. I have to live with it, he classifies as a depressive.”

  “Sounds like you should chuck Joe and marry the shrink. A real smart talker.”

  Mina thought of Carrie’s empty-headed woman-chasing husband, Adolphe. She decided to make no comment on that score.

  “One thing Joe has which I have, and I like. A little fantasy world of mixed omnipotence and powerlessness which is very hard to crack, even for a smart shrink. I have the same component, god help me.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Mina, Adolphe says all American woman are the same. They believe—”

  “Oh god, sorry, Carrie, I’ve got a bat in my room. I can’t take bats.”

  She put the phone down and stood up, suddenly aware of how dark it was in the room. The Moonlite sign flashed outside in puce neon. And the bat hovered inside the window.

  Something unnatural in its movements transfixed her. She stood there unmoving as the pallid outline of a man formed in the dusky air. The bat was gone and, in its place, a suave-looking man with black hair brushed back from his forehead, standing immaculate in evening dress.

  Fear brushed her, to be followed by a kind of puzzlement. Did I live this moment before? Didn’t I see it in a movie? A dream? …

  She inhaled deeply, irrationally feeling a wave of kinship with this man, although he breathed no word.

  Unconsciously, she had allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her nudity. The stranger’s eyes were fixed upon her—not upon her body, her breasts, the dark bush of hair on her sexual regions, but on her throat.

  Could there really be some new thrill, something unheard of and incredible, such as Joe seeks? If so … if so, lead me to it.

  This was a different hedonism from the aerial plunge from the womb of the speeding plane.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He smiled, revealing good strong white teeth with emphatic canines.

  “Like a drink?” she asked. “I was just getting stewed all on my ownsome.”

  “Thanks, no,” he said, advancing. “Not alcohol. You have something more precious than alcohol.”

  “I always knew it,” Mina said.

  Lack of motion. Stillness. Silence. “More goddammed trees!” Bodenland exclaimed.

  At least there was no swamp this time.

  He stepped over the driver, tied and cowering under his tarpaulin, and slid open the door. After a moment, he jumped down on solid earth. Somewhere a bird sang and fell silent.

  These were not the trees of the Carboniferous. They were small, hazel and birch and elder, graceful, widely spaced, with the occasional oak and sycamore towering above them. Light filtered through to him almost horizontally, despite heavy green foliage on every side. He guessed it was late summer. Eighteen ninety-six, near London, England, according to the driver and the coordinates. What was going on in England, 1896? Then he thought, Oh yes, Queen Victoria …

  Well, the old queen had a pretty little wood here. It seemed to represent all the normal things the time train, with its hideous freight, was not. He savored the clear air with its scent of living things. He listened to the buzz of a bee and was pleased.

  Seen from outside, the train when stationary was small, almost inconsiderable, no longer than a railroad boxcar. Its outside was studded and patterned with metal reinforcers, nothing was to be seen of the windows he knew existed inside. Somehow the whole thing expanded in the relativism of the time quanta and contracted when stationary. He stared at it with admiration and curiosity, saying to himself, “I’m going to get this box of tricks back to my own time and figure it all out. There’s power beyond the dreams of avarice here.”

  As he stood there in a reverie, it seemed to him that a shrouded female figure drifted like a leaf from the train and disappeared. Immediately the wood seemed a less friendly place, darker too.

  He shivered. Strange anxieties passed through his mind. The isolation in which, through his own reckless actions, he found himself, closed in about him. Although he had always believed himself to have a firm grip on sanity—was not the world of science sanity’s loftiest bastion?—the nightmare events on the train caused him to wonder. Had that creature pinned to the torture-bench been merely a disordered phase of sadistic imagining?

  He forced himself to get back into the train and to search it.

  It had contracted like a concertina. In no way was it possible to enter any of the compartments, now squeezed shut like closed eyes. He listened for crying but heard nothing. The very stillness was a substance, lowering to the spirits.

  “Shit,” he said, and stared out into the wood. They had come millions of years to be in this place and he strained his ears as if to listen to the sound of centuries. “We’d better find out where the hell we are,” he said aloud. “And I need to eat. Not one bite did I have through the whole Cretaceous …”

  He shook himself into action.

  Hoisting the driver up by his armpit, he said, “You’re coming too, buddy. I may need you.”

  The smothered voice under the tarpaulin said, “You will be damned forever for this.”

  “Damned? You mean like doomed to eternal punishment? I don’t believe that crap. I don’t really believe in you either, so move your ass along.”

  He helped the creature out of the train.

  A path wound uphill, fringed with fern. Beyond, on either side, grew rhododendrons, their dark foliage hastening the approach of night. He peered ahead, alert, full of wonder and excitement. The trees were thinning. A moth fluttered by on powdery wing and lost itself on the trunk of a birch. A brick-built house showed some way ahead. As he looked, a dim light lit in one of its windows, like an eye opening.

  Tugging his captive, he emerged from the copse onto the lawn. The lawn was sprinkled with daisies already closing. It led steeply up to the house, which crowned a ridge of higher ground. A row of pines towered behind the roofs and chimneys of the house, which lay at ease on its eminence, overlooking a large ornamental pool, a gazebo, and pleasant flowerbeds past which Bodenland now made his way.

  A young gardener in waistcoat and shirtsleeves saw him coming, dropped his hoe in astonishment, and ran round the other side of the house. Bodenland halted to give his reluctant captive a pull.

  On a terrace which ran the length of the house stood classical statues. The sun was setting, casting long fingers of shadow which reached toward Bodenland. As he paused, another light was lit inside the house.

  Uncertain for once, he made toward the back door and took hold of the knocker.

  The ginger man was watching and listening again, an opera glass in his right hand. With his left hand, he stroked his red beard appreciatively, as if it had been a cat.

  He stood in the wings of the Lyceum Theatre with the delectable Ellen Terry in costume by his side, gazing on to the lighted stage.

  On the stage, before a packed auditorium, Henry Irving was playing the role of Mephistopheles in a performance of Faust. Dressed in black, with a black goatee and whitened face, the celebrated actor spread out his cloak like a giant bat’s wings. Back and forth he stalked, menacing a somewhat aghast Faust and chanting his lines:

  So great’s his Christian faith, I cannot grasp

  His soul—but I’ll afflict his body with

  Lament, and strew him with diverse diseases …


  Thunderous applause from the audience, all of whom believed in one way or another that they were in some danger of damnation themselves.

  When the play was finished, Irving took his bows before the curtain.

  As he made his exit into the wings, he passed the ginger man with a triumphant smirk and headed for his dressing room.

  Both Irving and the ginger man were smartly attired in evening dress when they finally left the theatre. The ginger man adjusted his top hat at a rakish angle, careful that some curls sizzled over the brim to the left of his head.

  The stagedoor keeper fawned on them as they passed his nook.

  “’Night, Mr. Irving. ’Night, Mr. Stoker.”

  The ginger man pressed a tip into his hand as they passed. Out in the night, haloed by a gas lamp, Irving’s carriage awaited.

  “The club?” Irving asked.

  “I’ll join you later,” said the ginger man, on impulse. He turned abruptly down the side alley to the main thoroughfare.

  Irving swung himself up into his carriage. “The Garrick Club,” he told his driver.

  In the thoroughfare, bustle was still the order of the day, despite the lateness of the hour. Hansoms and other carriages plied back and forth in the street, while the elegant and the shabby formed a press on the sidewalks. And in doorways and the entrances to dim side-courts were propped those beings who had no advantages in a hard-hearted world, who had failed or been born in failure, men, women, small children. These shadowy persons, keeping their pasty faces in shadow, begged, or proffered for sale tawdry goods—matches, separate cigarettes, flowers stolen from graves—or simply lounged in their niches, awaiting a change of fortune or perhaps a rich target to relieve of his wallet.

  The ginger man was alert to all these lost creatures of the shadows, eyeing them with interest as he passed. A thin young woman in an old bonnet came forth from a stairway and said something to him. He tilted her head to the light to study her face. She was no more than fourteen.

  “Where are you from, child?”

  “Chiswick, sir. Have a feel, sir, for a penny, bless you, just a feel.”

  He laughed, contemptuous of the pleasure offered. Nevertheless, he retreated with her into the shadow of the stairs with only a brief backward look. Ignoring the two children who crouched wordless on the lower steps, the girl hitched up her dress and let him get one hand firm behind her back while with the other he rifled her, feeling powerfully into her body.

  “You like it, sir? Sixpence a quick knee-trembler?”

  “Pah, get back to Chiswick with you, child.”

  “My little brothers, sir—they’re half dead of starvation.”

  “And you’ve the pox.” He wiped his fingers on her dress, thrust a sixpenny piece into her hand, and marched off, head down to avoid being recognized.

  Newsboys were shouting, “Standard! Three-Day Massacre! Read all abart it!” The ginger man pressed on, taking large strides. He shook off a transvestite who accosted him outside a penny gaff.

  Only when he turned off down Glasshouse Street did he pause again, outside the Alhambra music hall, from which sounds of revelry issued. Here several better-dressed women stood, chatting together. They broke off when they saw a toff coming, to assume a businesslike pleasantness.

  One of them, recognizing the ginger man, came up and took his arm familiarly. Her face was thickly painted, as if for the stage.

  “Ooh, where are you off so fast, this early? Haven’t seen you for ages.” She fluttered her eyelashes and breathed cachou at him.

  This was a fleshy woman in her late twenties—no frail thing like the girl Stoker had felt earlier. She was confident and brazen, with large breasts, and tall for a streetwalker. Her clothes, though cheap, were colorful, and bright earrings hung from the fleshy folds of her ears. She faced him head on, grinning impudently, aware with a whore’s instinct that she looked common and that he liked it that way.

  “What have you been up to, Violet? Behaving yourself?”

  “Course. You know me. I’m set up better now. Got myself a billet round the corner. How about a bit? What you say? We could send out for a plate of mutton or summat.”

  “Are you having your period?” His voice was low and urgent.

  She looked up at him and winked. “I ain’t forgotten you likes the sight of blood. Come on, you’re in luck. It’s a quid, mind you.”

  He pressed up against her. “You’re a mercenary bitch, Violet, that you are,” he said jocularly, allowing the lilt of brogue into his speech. “And here’s me thinking you loved me.”

  As she led him down the nearest back street, she said saucily, “I love what you got, guv.” She slid a hand over the front of his trousers.

  He knew she would perform better for the promise of a plate of mutton. London whores were always hungry. Hungry or not, he’d have her first. The beef first, then the mutton.

  “Hurry,” he said snappishly. “Where’s this bleeding billet of yours?”

  The knocker was a heavy iron affair with a fox head on it. It descended thunderously on the back door.

  “Eighteen ninety-six,” said Bodenland aloud, to keep his spirits up. “Queen Victoria on the throne … I’m in a dream. Well, now—food and rest with any luck, and then it’s back to poor Mina. Can’t even phone her from here.” He laughed at the thought.

  The house loomed over him, at close quarters unwelcoming to a stranger’s approach.

  In the sturdy door was set a panel of bull’s-eye glass. He became aware that someone was studying him through it. Despite the gathering dusk, he saw it was a woman. There came the sound of bolts being drawn back. A lighted candle appeared, with a hand holding the candlestick and, somewhere above it, a plump and unfriendly woman’s face.

  “Who are you, pray?” He was surprised to see that as she spoke she held a small crucifix in front of her. Giving her a guarded explanation, he asked for Mr. Stoker and inquired if it would be possible to beg a night’s lodging.

  “Where are you from? Who’s that you have with you?”

  “Madam, I am from the United States of America. This is a criminal in my charge. I hope to return him to the USA. Perhaps we might lock him in one of your outhouses for the night.”

  “You actors—all the same! You will not learn to leave poor Mr. Stoker alone. You’re from an American troupe? I must say you look the part!” She eyed him suspiciously.

  In a submissive voice, Bodenland said, “I know Mr. Stoker will be interested in my role.”

  She sighed, peering at him before making up her mind.

  “He’s not well. He’s not well. He has the doctor to him. Still, I know he would not turn you away. He has a kind heart, like all Irish people. Come in.”

  They entered the rear hall, going through into a scullery which contained a large stone sink and a pump with a long curving iron handle. A maid in a mob cap was inefficiently stringing flowers up at the window. The woman, evidently Mrs. Stoker, ordered her to get the key to the toolshed.

  A male servant was summoned. He and the maid accompanied Bodenland out to a toolshed standing at the end of the terrace to the rear of the house. The male servant had lit a storm lantern. It was already very dark.

  The driver was whimpering, and refused food and drink.

  “I shall be gone from here by morning,” he said. “And you’ll have departed from human life.”

  “Sleep well,” Bodenland said, and slammed the door.

  When the back door was closed and the bolts drawn across, the little raw-handed maid picked up her flowers again.

  “What are you doing?” Bodenland asked curiously.

  “It’s the garlic, sir. Against the critters of the night.”

  “Is that an English custom?”

  “It’s Mr. Stoker’s custom, sir. You can ask the cook, Maria.”

  Mrs. Stoker returned. She was a solid middle-aged lady, impressively dressed in a gown of gray taffeta which reached to the floor. She had over it a small white frilled apron, which
she now removed. Her hair was brown, streaked with gray, neatly parceled into a bun at the back of her head. She was now smiling, all defensiveness gone from her manner.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Borderland.”

  “It’s Bodenland, ma’am. Originally of German extraction. German and English on my mother’s side.”

  “Mr. Bodenland, pardon my hesitation in letting you in. Life is a little difficult at present. Do please come through and meet my husband. We should be happy if you would consent to stay overnight.”

  As he uttered his thanks, she led him along a corridor to the front of the house. In a low voice she said, “My poor Bram works so hard for Mr. Henry Irving—he’s his stage manager, you know, and much else besides. At present he’s also writing a novel, which seems to depress his health. Not a happy subject. I’m not at all sure gloomy novels should be encouraged. My dear father would never allow us girls—I have four sisters, sir—to read novels, except for those of Mrs. Craik. Poor Bram is quite low, and believes strange forces besiege the house.”

  “How unfortunate.”

  “Indeed. Happily, I inherited my father’s strong nerves, bless him. He was a hero of the Crimea, don’t you know.”

  She showed Bodenland into a large drawing room. His first impression was of a room in a museum, greatly overfurnished with pictures—mainly of a theatrical nature—on the walls, plants in pots on precarious stands, ornate mahogany furniture, antimacassars on overstuffed chair-backs, books in rows, and heavy drapes at windows. Numerous trophies lay about on side tables. It seemed impossible to find a way through to a thick-set man busy adjusting garlic flowers over the far window. Better acquaintance with the room would enable Bodenland to appreciate its graceful proportions, its ample space, and its general air of being a comfortable if overloaded place in which to spend leisure hours.

  The man at the window turned, observed that it was almost dark, and came forward smiling, plucking at his ginger beard as if to hide a certain shyness. He put out his hand.

  “Welcome, sir, welcome indeed. I’m Abraham Stoker, known to friend and foe alike as Bram, as in bramble bush. And this is my wife, Florence Stoker, whom you have already met, I see.”