Thinking quickly and decisively, as is his wont, Charcot abruptly announced that he had decided to try hypnotism. In a few minutes we had adjourned to a small room that is kept reserved for such experiments. There he soon began to employ his preferred method of inducing trance, which is visual fixation on a small flame—a candle against a background of dark velvet.
Lucy was seated in a chair, directly facing the candle. Charcot stationed himself just behind her, murmuring in a low, soothing voice, whilst I stood somewhat farther back. What happened next I cannot explain. It seemed that even as the girl began to sink into a trance I could feel the same darkness reaching for me, as if my mind and Lucy's were already somehow bound together.
I fell, losing my balance as awkwardly as some weak woman in a faint. At the last moment I roused enough to try to catch myself by grabbing the seat of a nearby chair, breaking my fall to some extent but seriously spraining my left thumb.
* * *
Charcot helped me to a private room where he insisted that I lie down until I was fully recovered from my "faint." Meanwhile, as he provided a rather awkward splint and bandage for my thumb, I had the chance for a private consultation with the famous doctor. Charcot confessed himself intrigued by my behavior in the presence of the girl. I began to tell him something of my case, and confessed my overwhelming fear.
He nodded, and prepared to give me a quick examination. But another detail still bothered him. "What was that word—neither French nor English . . . something, she said, that her princely abductor had caused her to become."
"It is in the old language of Ireland: dearg-due, meaning the sucker of red blood."
"Yes . . . I see." After a thoughtful pause he added, "Having some connection with her behavior with regard to the rat."
"Yes," I agreed. "No doubt that was it."
Charcot examined me briefly, I suppose as thoroughly as possible without advance preparation. He then gave me some hope, as a world expert on tabes dorsalis, by saying that while he certainly could not rule out the possibility in my case, he thought it unlikely that the dreams, or delusions, which I described were due to any organic lesion of the brain.
Instead, Charcot suggests that a kind of displacement has taken place: the girl in the hospital only resembles the one of whom I dreamed, and my unconscious mind has somehow altered my memory of the dream to fit the available reality.
Would that the matter could be that easily explained. But I fear that it cannot.
Tuesday, 17 July, morning—
Lucy came to me again last night, here in my hotel. Before retiring, I had made doubly sure of the room's single window being closed (it is utterly inaccessible from outside, two stories above the street) and locked the door and blocked it with a chair, which has become my nightly habit. This morning after her departure, when I examined the window in broad daylight, after my strange visitor's departure, a thin caking of dust and an intact small spiderweb offered proof that it had not been opened.
If the girl in the asylum be real, as must be the case, can her shade or spirit in my room at night be anything but a figment of my own disordered reason?
In the course of last night's visit, she said to me: "From the moment I first heard you speak in London, my little man, I knew great hunger for your sweet Irish blood."
Flat on my back in bed, I still did not know if I was dreaming. But I was curious. "Where did you hear me speak?"
"It was at the back door of your Lyceum Theater."
"And is it that you love the theater, then? You come to watch my employer, the great Henry Irving, on the stage?"
"Oh aye, he's marvelous. And I love the darkness and the lights, the curtains that can hide so much, the painted faces and the masks . . . "
Still murmuring, she bent over me, and all was as before. It seems that when her touch is upon me, my uninjured hand is as powerless to resist as the sprained one.
Thursday, 19 July, late afternoon—
This will be my last entry in this journal. The business has come to a conclusion in the most startling and amazing way.
Lucy appeared in my room again last night, and events followed their usual frightening course, of grotesque horror mingled with indescribable pleasure—until, at the last moment before our intimacy reached its peak, she abruptly broke off and pulled away from me.
Raising myself dazedly on one elbow, I became aware of a new presence in the room.
Though the tall figure standing near the window was visible only in outline, I could be sure it was a man. Lucy cowered away before him.
Moving silently at first, this new apparition (very shadowy in darkness, hard to see distinctly) advanced toward the bed.
Hardly knowing what to make of this development, I could only stammer out: "But you are real!"
A deep voice answered, speaking English in a strange accent that was neither French nor Irish: "I am as real as life and death." In the next moment the newcomer turned to the girl, who was still cowering away. His voice was softer now, and almost tender.
"Lucy, my dear, your sisters are waiting for you at home, in the land beyond the forest. I am ready to take you to them."
"I do not want to go!"
"But you cannot continue in this way." He might almost have been a parent, remonstrating with a wayward child. "Your vanishing from the hospital. Your toying with this man."
She dared to raise her eyes, and pleaded piteously. "He is my sweet little—"
The man took another step toward her, and spoke in a tone now charged with menace. "Silence! These games you play will bring again the hunters down upon us, with their crosses and their garlic and their stakes!"
When Lucy struggled, he knocked her down with a single blow from the flat of his hand.
That was not to be borne, and the instinct of manhood in me sent me springing out of bed, bent on defending the girl. Honorable as my intentions were, and sincere my effort, the only result was that the nightmare seemed to close upon me with new force. Seizing me by the throat, in a one-handed grip of iron, my opponent forced my body back upon the bed, meanwhile murmuring something of which the only two words I could hear clearly were "misplaced chivalry."
Meanwhile Lucy had regained her feet, and she in turn tried to come to my aid. But with his right hand the tall man caught her by the hair, and forced her to her knees, saying, "You will see him no more."
Those were the last words I heard from either of my visitors. Struggle as I might, I could not loosen the dark man's grip by even a fraction of an inch. I doubt whether I could have succeeded even had I been able to use both hands, which of course I could not. And once more darkness overcame me.
* * *
When I recovered consciousness this morning, there were no blood spots on my pillow. But there were bruises on my throat beneath my beard, five small purpling spots that must have been made by the grip of a single hand, a left hand, of overpowering strength—and it is blessedly clear to me that with my own left hand, injured as it is, I could never have done this to myself.
Charcot, when I managed to see him today at the hospital, confirmed the reality of the bruises—as indeed the internal soreness of my throat had already done, to my own full satisfaction. To explain them to the doctor I made up some tale of a scuffle with a would-be robber in the street.
I am ecstatic with a sense of glorious relief: the man who with one hand overpowered me was a terrible opponent, fit to inhabit a nightmare—but he was real! So was Lucy, my girlish "succubus," truly in my room, and so were all the visits she has paid me. Nothing that has happened was the product of an infected and disordered brain. Whether or not Lucy is ever to appear to me again, and whatever the ultimate explanation of the mystery, it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with locomotor ataxia.
One might think this knowledge a new occasion for terror, this time of the supernatural. But the dominant emotion it arouses in me is a relief so strong that it is almost terrible in quite a different way.
I do not, aft
er all, find myself doomed, hopelessly succumbing to the tertiary stage of syphilis. I can hope to avoid that stage entirely, as do most victims of the disease. Whatever bizarre powers may have intruded in my life, and whether or not they are of occult derivation, my fate is at least not that.
* * *
I find I must add a postscript to this journal. I visited Charcot again this afternoon, and thanked him for his efforts as I paid his bill. I told him nothing of last night's events. The doctor, as might be expected, sympathizes with my bruised throat. But Charcot remains unable to regard my nocturnal experiences with Lucy as anything but dreams or delusions. He still doubted that a physical lesion of the brain, caused by disease, was likely to be responsible. In this glorious conclusion I heartily concur.
Charcot's parting advice to me echoed that of the London specialist: rest, good food, and exercise. Then: "If these fantasies continue to trouble you, Mr. Stoker, my advice is to continue to record them with pen and ink."
I believe that l shall soon be writing another book.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Bram Stoker died in London in 1912, of locomotor ataxia, or tertiary syphilis, leading to "exhaustion."
THE END
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