Anno Dracula

by Kim Newman

Chapter 13

 

  STRANGE FITS OF PASSION

  Dr Seward's Diary (kept in phonograph)

  26 SEPTEMBER

  In the Hall, the mornings are quiet. Whitechapel slumbers between sunrise and what we used to call lunch-time. The new-borns scurry for their earth-boxes. The warm of the area have never been day people. I leave instructions with Morrison that I am not to be disturbed and seclude myself in this office with my supposed work. Records, I tell him. I am not lying. Keeping records is a habit. It used to be so with us all. Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Van Helsing. Even Lucy, with her beautiful hand and horrid spelling, wrote long letters. The Professor was strict about the documents. History is written by the victors; Van Helsing, through his friend Stoker, always intended to publish. Like his foe, he was an empire-builder; an account of his successful treatment of a scientifically-corroborated nineteenth-century case of vampirism would have added lustre to his reputation. As it is, the Prince Consort took care to blot out our history: my diary was destroyed in the fire at Purfleet, and Van Helsing is remembered as a second Judas.

  He was not then Prince Consort, just Count Dracula. He deigned to notice our little family; to strike at us again and again until we were smashed and scattered. I have rough notes, cuttings and mementos, kept here under lock and key. I believe it necessary for my eventual justification, to recreate the original records. This is the task I have set myself for the quiet hours.

  Who can say where it began? Dracula's death? His resurrection? The laying of his colossal schemes against Great Britain? Harker's dreadful experiences in Castle Dracula? The wreck of the Demeter, washed ashore at Whitby with a dead man lashed to the helm? Or, perhaps, the Count's first sight of Lucy? Miss Lucy Westenra. Westenra. A singular name: it means light of the West. Yes, Lucy. For me, that was where it began. With Lucy Westenra. Lucy. The 24th of May, 1885. I can scarcely believe the Jack Seward of that morning, twenty-nine and newly appointed to the supervision of Purfleet Asylum, ever really existed. The times before are a golden haze, half-remembered scraps from boys' adventures and medical directories. I had, I am assured, a most brilliant career: I studied and observed; I travelled; I had eminent friends. Then, things changed utterly.

  I do not believe I truly loved Lucy until after her rebuff. I had reached the point in life when a man must consider the making of a match; she was simply the most suitable of my acquaintances. We were introduced by Art. Arthur Holmwood then, not yet Lord Godalming. At first, I thought her frivolous. Silly, even. After days among the screaming insane, sheer silliness was appealing. The convolutions of complex minds - I still believe it gross error to assert that the mad are simple-minded - led me to consider as ideal the prospect of a girl as open and obvious as Lucy. On that day, I laid out my proposal. I had a lancet in my pocket for some reason and I fancy I fiddled with it throughout the preliminaries. Before my prepared speech - about how dear she was to me, though I knew her so little - was delivered, I knew I'd no hopes. She commenced a giggle, then covered her embarrassed amusement with forced tears. I extracted from her the confession that her heart was not her own. I knew at once I'd been cut out by Art. She didn't name him, but there was no doubt. Later, with Quincey Morris - incredibly, another of the guileless Lucy's conquests - I endured an evening of Art's prattling of future happiness. The Texan was all open-hearted decency, clapping Art's back for being the better man and all that. Fool smile plastered on my face, I downed tumbler after tumbler of Quincey's whisky, remaining sober as the good fellows joked towards inebriation. Lucy, meanwhile, packed herself off to Whitby, intent on subjecting Mina to an extended gloat. She had netted the future Lord Godalming, while the best her school-teaching friend could manage was a barely qualified Exeter solicitor.

  I threw myself into work, the standard cure for a broken heart. I hoped poor Renfield would make my name. To be the discoverer of zoophagous mania would mark me as a coming man. Of course, in considering the merits of prospective fiances, ladies of breeding still unaccountably prefer an inherited title and unearned wealth to the isolation of unheard-of strains of mental disorder. That summer I followed the queer logic of Renfield's mania as he collected tiny lives. At first he aped the nursery rhyme: feeding flies to spiders, spiders to birds, birds to a cat. He intended to consume the accumulated life energy by eating the cat. When that proved impractical, he ate anything alive that happened by. He nearly choked to death disgorging feathers. My monograph was taking shape when I observed another obsession intermingled with zoophagia, a fixation upon the dilapidated estate neighbouring the grounds of the asylum. As the tourists now queueing for penny tours know, Carfax was the Count's first home in England. Several times, Renfield made an escape and rushed for the Abbey, babbling of the Coming of His Master and Salvation and the Distribution of Good Things. I assumed, with some disappointment, that he was developing an entirely commonplace religious mania, reinvesting the long-abandoned house with its sacred purpose. I was, for the first fatal time in the case, completely in error. The Count had established dominance over the madman, who was to be his catspaw. If it were not for Renfield, for the cursed clamp of his teeth about my hand, things might have been different. As Franklin has it, 'for the want of a nail. . . '

  In Whitby, Lucy was taken sick. We did not know it, but Art had in his turn been cut out. In this world of titles, a Wallachian Prince trumps an English Lord. The Count, having come ashore from the Demeter, fixed his sights on Lucy and began to make a vampire of her. No doubt the fickle girl welcomed his advances. In the course of an examination, when she was brought to London and Art called me in, I ascertained that her hymen had been ruptured. I deemed Art a swine of the first water to so pre-empt his marriage vows. Having kicked about the world with the future Lord Godalming, I'd no illusions as to his respect for the sanctity of maidenhood. Now I can find it in myself to feel sorry for the Art of those days, worried sick over his worthless girl, made as big a fool as I by the Light of the West, who would submit by night to the Beast of the East.

  It is possible that Lucy truly believed that she loved Art. However, it must have been a very surface love even before the arrival of the Count. Among the letters Van Helsing compiled was Lucy's account, gushed to Mina - who obligingly corrected the spelling in green ink - of the day upon which she supposedly received three proposals. The third was from Quincey, whom I suspect of sloshing a chaw of tobacco from side to side in his mouth in the Westenra drawing room, embarrassed by the absence of a spittoon, giving the impression of a longhorn idiot. Lucy expends much wordage crowing to Mina and, compressing the events of a week into a single day, considerably exaggerates the eventfulness of her work-free life. In fact, she is so intent upon celebrating the feat of the three proposals that she barely has space to mention, in a hurried post-script, which of her suitors she bothered to accept.

  Lucy's symptoms, now so familiar, were a complete puzzlement. The pernicious anaemia and the physical changes attendant upon her turning suggested a dozen different diseases. Her throat wounds were put down to everything from a brooch-pin to a bee-sting. I sent for my old teacher, Van Helsing of Amsterdam; he promptly hustled over to England and made a diagnosis which he proceeded to withhold. In that, he did much harm, although I concede that, a scant three years ago, we'd hardly have credited nonsense about vampires. His grave error, I now recognise, was an outmoded, almost alchemical, faith in folklore; scattering about him garlic flowers, communion wafers, crucifixes and holy water. If I had known then that vampirism was primarily a physical rather than a spiritual condition, Lucy might be un-dead still. The Count himself shared, and probably still does share, many of the Professor's misconceptions.

  Despite Van Helsing, despite blood transfusions, despite religious impedimenta, Lucy died. Everyone was dying. Art's reprobate father finally succumbed, making his son a Lord, leaving unsquandered a surprising portion of his fortune. Lucy's mother, shocked by a wolf in her bedroom, was carried off violet-faced by a
coronary. She also, having beaten the gun in altering her will, left her property to Art; which might have proved severely embarrassing if, offended by her intercourse with the Count, he had called off the engagement.

  Quite clearly, Lucy was - for a short time, at least - truly dead. Van Helsing and I both confirmed the condition. Now, much as it pains me, I have to allow it possible her death, which seems to have addled her mind more than her turning, was due not to the Count but to Van Helsing's transfusions. The procedure is notoriously dangerous. The Lancet has run a series of articles last year about blood, a subject now of overpowering interest to the medical profession. A young specialist suggests there might be sub-categories of blood, conventional transfusion being possible only between those with similar types. It is possible that my own blood was the poison that killed her. Of course, there are among us many who can transfuse blood into themselves without thought of sub-category.

  For whatever reason - and the repeated attentions of the Count can hardly have contributed to her well-being - Lucy died, and was interred in the Westenra vault in Kingstead Cemetery, near Hampstead Heath. There, she awoke in her coffin and rose as a new-born, emerging by night like a Drury Lane ghost, to seek out children to slake her newfound appetites. I understand from Genevieve that it is possible to pass from warmth to the un-dead state without an intervening period of true death. In her case, apparently, the turning was gradual. Vlad Tepes was killed, buried and - they say - beheaded, but transformed after death. Those of his bloodline tend to die before the change, although this is not true in every case. Art, for instance, has never died that I know of. It is possible the fact of death is vital in shaping the type of vampire one becomes. Everyone changes, but some change more than others. The Lucy who came back was much different from the Lucy who went away.

  A week after Lucy's death, we visited the tomb by day and examined her. She seemed asleep; I confess to thinking her more beautiful than ever. The triviality was gone; replaced by a certain cruelty of aspect, the effect was disturbingly sensual. Later, we spied, on the day she was to have been married, the new-born returning to her vault. She made advances to Art and may have bitten him slightly. I recall the red of her lips and the white of her teeth, and the strength of her slim body in its frail shroud. I remember the vampire Lucy, rather than the warm girl. She was the first such creature I had seen. Traits that are now commonplaces - the juxtaposition of apparent langour with bursts of snake-speed, the sudden elongation of teeth and nails, the characteristic hiss of the red thirst - were, taken all at once, overwhelming. Sometimes I see Lucy in Genevieve, with her quick smile and sharp eye-teeth.

  On the morning of the 29th, we trapped and destroyed her. We found her in the deathlike trance that comes upon new-borns in the hours of daylight, her mouth and chin still stained. Art did the deed, driving home the stake. I surgically removed her head. Van Helsing filled the mouth with garlic. After sawing off the top of the stake, we soldered shut her lead inner-coffin and screwed fast the wooden lid. The Prince Consort had her remains exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey. A plaque above her grave damns Van Helsing for a murderer and, presumably thanks to Art, naming only Quincey and Harker, both safely dead, as accomplices. Van Helsing told us, 'Now, my friends, one step of our work is done, one the most harrowing to ourselves. But there remains a greater task: to find out the author of all this our sorrow and to stamp him out. '