by J. S. Barnes
I dare say that it is the entirely explicable consequence of recent events, yet these past two nights I have been troubled for the first time in years (almost, indeed since motherhood) by bad dreams, much like the dreams of old. I woke this morning, too early and fatigued, from a nightmare of the most vivid sort, in which a wolf, a great grey beast, its eyes blazing with fire, howled with appetite and desire.
Such things belong, I know, to the last century, to that portion of our lives of which we do not speak. Yet it troubled me greatly and it has lingered in my mind.
* * *
9 November. Our state of siege continues. Van Helsing remains lost to us. An atmosphere of dark disquiet is felt throughout the house. Jonathan went to work this morning – the reading of a will in Summertown and another difficult family to placate and console – after which I persuaded Quincey to leave the house, practically for the first time since the tragedy, and to take a constitutional with me about the fringes of the village.
I fear that his is not an age at which one might expect communication with his mother to be conducted with any degree of open-hearted ease. Nonetheless, as we stepped beyond the bounds of Shore Green, and as we circled those fields which lie beyond it, we managed something in the way of meaningful conversation.
Neither a child any longer nor yet quite a man, Quincey’s behaviour slides between one state and the other with curious speed. At times, as of when we spoke again of the horrible demise of poor Auguste, he might be almost half a decade more junior than he is in actuality. At others, when we talked of his schoolwork and of those mature labours which will succeed it, I could have been speaking with a young man freshly come down from the university. He seems nowadays to envisage not a career in the law, of which he once spoke with a boyish enthusiasm, derived, no doubt, from frank admiration of his father; but rather, following in the path of Jack Seward, to specialise in the treatment of the human mind.
As what was once called a ‘New Woman’ (how quaint an expression that seems today!) I believe that the destiny of each individual is their own to form and shape as they see fit. I am content to encourage our boy in any direction that he chooses. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering whether his new enthusiasm is born not wholly from his intellectual interests but rather from a growing disappointment with Jonathan, who has in recent months seemed ever more listless and disengaged. Perhaps our son, by charting this change in course, means to arrest my husband’s attention? My own task is to listen, to understand and conciliate. It is important work and I do it gladly. Is there still a part of me, however, that feels something like wistfulness for those days when I was so much more than a domestic diplomat?
These are foolish, girlish thoughts.
Those parts of the conversation done, our discourse first faltered, then flagged, then ceased altogether, for Quincey would not speak of the fate of that dear old gentleman who slumbers in our home, but rather grew sullen and withdrawn.
When we arrived home, Jonathan had returned from his professional errand but had already taken recourse in what he called an aperitif but which looked to me rather more like neat gin. I went upstairs and sat beside the Professor. I watched the rise and fall of his breast, his ragged irregular breathing, the spittle at the edges of his lips, the utter reduction of that great personage. I felt an overwhelming sadness at the necessary progress of time, its inexorable forward motion, and I wondered at the injustice of it all.
Yet I knew someone once – as did we all – who had, through diabolic means, been placed above such processes and beyond the reach of time. He was in essence immortal, for all that his weird gifts allowed him to choose different forms: a bat, a rat, a column of mist. But what had that availed him save for fathomless misery? What had agelessness granted him except for the opportunity, across long centuries, to inculcate within his soul unmatched wickedness and hunger?
* * *
Later. Jonathan lies beside me, sleeping too heavily and perspiring, dead to the world. I do wish that he would not lean so upon the bottle at times such as these.
I think that there is at least a partial explanation for such a resort. Although he has spoken of the man but rarely, I do believe his late father made of strong drink a similar crutch. I try to understand. Yet how, at such moments, do I miss the best of my husband. For I have just woken from another startling dream.
I dreamed again of howling and of sharp white teeth and, silhouetted in the moonlight, the crouched and feral outline of the wolf.
LETTER FROM DR JOHN SEWARD TO JONATHAN AND MINA HARKER
10 November
My dear Jonathan and Mina,
I am sorry indeed to be still from your side at this difficult juncture. My work at present is seemingly without end – how very various and inventive are the maladies of the mind! – and I must fulfil my responsibilities. Nonetheless, I should hope that it needs no restatement from me that my thoughts are often with you, your family and the Professor.
May I take it that there is no change in his condition? Please let me know by telegram of the slightest sign of any alteration and I shall leave London immediately to be with you all.
Without the presence of Abraham Van Helsing my life would be infinitely poorer. Nonetheless, I am quite certain that, above all else, my old teacher would wish me to discharge my professional obligations. Yet it is from concern for his wellbeing as well as for the sanctity of your household that I write today.
I have a proposition. In my practice there is a very fine and dedicated young nurse by the name of Sarah-Ann Dowell. She has been in my employ for the whole of this year, in which time she has proved herself to be of an admirable character: patient, gentle, resourceful and skilled. She is a sober-minded young woman, with a considerable facility for healing and a desire to do good in the world wherever she is able.
Her family were, as I understand it, a somewhat deprived and troublesome brood, yet she has set aside these awkward beginnings and is determined to make her own way in society. I suggest that I send her to you forthwith, on secondment, to aid you in your continuing care of the Professor, a medical feat which must be placing strain upon yourselves and your servants. Miss Dowell’s fee and expenses will, of course, be paid in full by me for such time as she is to reside with you. I do hope that you will allow me to do this small thing in the name of our friendship.
Today it is my fervent consideration, as I know it is Arthur’s, that our circle remain unbroken no matter what manner of shadow may seek to engulf it.
Yours always,
Jack Seward
PS. Do give my warmest best wishes to your son. He is a sensitive soul at an uncomfortable age and I dare say that the events of his birthday feast were profoundly upsetting to him. That poor kitten! What a senseless waste. I find that I cannot quite rid my imagination of the streak of scarlet that it left upon the ground. It made me think for the first time in years of an odd proverb much beloved of that unhappy madman, R.M. Renfield. Do you recall? It was spoken by him over and over, as though it were some beneficial incantation. ‘The blood is the life,’ he used to say, all of a tremble, his mad eyes gleaming. ‘The blood is the life.’
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF MAURICE HALLAM
10 November. I cannot recall, at least in this drab century, experiencing so great a concentration of animal pleasure as that which I have these past two days enjoyed in the company of Mr Gabriel Shone.
Not, I should hasten at once to make clear, that there has been any shift in the nature of things. Hellenic matters still stand between us just as they did two nights past and just, I suspect, as they always will. I shall be permitted to drink my fill of him solely with my eyes and any more intimate congress will be perpetually out of bounds.
Under ordinary circumstances, I should refuse to accept such a ruling and seek sustenance elsewhere. The Shone case, however, is sui generis. In his company, whether strolling about the town or dining together in the hotel, my chief sensation is contented peace of the profoundest sort. Wi
th him, I have found an unfamiliar calm and, although our acquaintance can still be measured in mere hours, a curiously deep-rooted loyalty.
All this has emerged in the time that has passed since the night when first we spoke. In recent days, we have both played at being the idle traveller, washed up by chance in this place and determined to explore its every cranny. We have acted as fast friends and gone about together, quite inseparably. We know these shadow-dappled streets better, I dare say, than has any other Englishman in the whole history of the place.
Nonetheless, it would be accurate enough to state that Brasov has a finite set of attractions; a few days are sufficient to exhaust them all. If I – a man, surely, with a great deal more life behind him than that which lies ahead – feels this thing, then it is a certainty that Gabriel, so many years my junior and filled with the impatience of youth, does so with a still greater degree of intensity. He has within him a wanderlust, a questing thirst for fresh experience which will not lightly be sated.
We shall not be long now in Brasov. Mr Shone wishes to move on and I, God willing, intend to go with him wheresoever that may be.
He has my heart and all that it might contain.
TELEGRAM FROM JONATHAN HARKER TO DR JOHN SEWARD
11 November
Letter received with thanks. Kind offer of service of Miss Dowell accepted. No change in Professor. Doctor visited earlier. Diagnosis: the longer VH sleeps, the less likely he will ever wake again.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF MAURICE HALLAM
11 November. My prophecies have come to pass. In the morning, we are to depart for those deep forests which lie upon the dark side of this quiet settlement and, from thence, into the Carpathian Mountains. Yet the manner in which these prognostications of mine came to pass was wholly unexpected.
A trinity of curious events took place today. The morning and afternoon were passed largely without incident, either in languid pleasure or else in conversation of an agreeably high-minded sort. Yet as twilight began to fall, we both came to realise that – a tray of meats which our landlady had brought to us shortly after noon aside – we had eaten very little for hours. We have taken many meals at this hotel but we elected tonight to eat at a tavern upon the opposite side of the town, a goodly walk from our accommodation. Its name translates into our own tongue as ‘The Gored Stag’, a strange title for an inn, for all that such oddities are in this land commonplace.
The decision to sup there was Gabriel’s. I should have been happy enough to linger once again in familiar haunts, but I am coming to understand that the search for novelty is a key constituent of his nature. In the first oddity of the day, our landlady became more animated in her opposition to our plan than I have ever seen her yet.
‘Please, good sirs. Be not going to that den of wickedness. It is no place for Englishmen. Or for any who still be having a shred of goodness in their hearts.’
Her face seemed to me to be suffused with vexation. As she spoke, she touched a small wooden cross which hung about her neck. The theatrical quality of the gesture rather appealed to me, though the poor woman seemed to be entirely in earnest. Her sincerity had not to do, I think, merely with the loss of that trifling sum which we would, had we stayed in the hotel for supper, have granted to her. Rather, it seemed derived from what appeared to be fear in its most potent form. Hearing her voice, Gabriel wore an expression of amused scepticism and, at the sight of his beauteous lips curled into something not so very far from mockery, I felt quite certain that her words had provided only fuel for the fire of his curiosity and added only weight to his compulsion to explore.
An old truth of the world is here presented: that to make a thing forbidden is to fill the souls of those who are warned against it with unquenchable thirst. Such I beheld then in the demeanour of Mr Shone.
Older than he and perhaps in possession of some accidental wisdom, I asked our hostess why she was so very adamant in her opposition to our visiting The Gored Stag.
‘I shall say, sirs, only this. The place is not itself a source of wickedness. But it is being an outpost of evil. It is an echo of the past. It is a gateway through which no man or woman may be passing unchanged.’
With these peculiar sentiments delivered, she turned away while my companion adopted a scoffing expression. At the door, she looked back: ‘I will be keeping my hotel open for you, sirs, but only tonight until midnight. After that hour I will grant entry to none. Not even, most noble sirs, to you.’
She vanished from our sight before we could reply, shutting the door with decided emphasis. When I glanced up at him again, Gabriel Shone was beaming.
‘Look lively, Hallam. For we leave at once for this site of immorality. This temple to transgression!’
‘Are you quite certain? There is much to value, is there not, in local knowledge?’
‘For men such as we, Maurice, I doubt that there shall be anything in this place which will shock or startle us in the least. Some illicit lust, perhaps, amongst the peasantry. Some overindulgence dressed up by superstition. I grow tired of Brasov. This bourgeois little town. Let us drink tonight from blacker waters. Let us indulge ourselves and see what lies in the shadows.’
Of course, in the light of his ideal smile, I could refuse him nothing.
Once we had dressed as extravagantly as we dared for this supposed bazaar of iniquity, we left our residence (the landlady doubtless sequestered prayerfully within) and set out for The Gored Stag. Although it was entirely dark and the evening was crisp to the degree that our breath billowed from our mouths, the promenade proved pleasant enough. I moved through the silent streets of Brasov with this remarkable man whose earlier display of petulance had not in me invoked – as it would surely have done had the perpetrator been any but he – irritation or regret, but only an exaggerated indulgence.
That the formation of such an attachment upon my part will lead only to heartbreak and loneliness is plain to me, even now, at this early moment, the acme of infatuation.
Old actor that I am, I find myself quite content to speak the lines that fate has written. I will stand wherever destiny wishes for me to stand and I shall give my bow at the very instant that it is decreed by that unseen dramatist.
As we walked to the far side of the town the houses became more humble in aspect, more rickety and indicative of poverty. Away from the calm of the square and the melancholy grandeur of the Black Church, the atmosphere underwent a further modulation. We were the object of gazes from the shadows which were frank in their hostility. We were peered at by peasants who seemed of quite a different class and stock from our homely landlady. The menfolk slouched against walls and looked at us with envious contempt, while their women peered despondently from beneath their heavy lids. All was dispiritment, hopelessness and the dreadful ugliness of poverty. I should have been more than happy to turn around and go back to safer streets, yet Gabriel Shone strode on with such gleeful resolution that I knew better than to suggest retreat.
We reached the outskirts of the town and I saw a large square building, almost a barn, outside which stood a cracked and faded sign, swinging in the cool night breeze.
Beyond the establishment there was but a thin, unwelcoming road, scarcely used and disappearing into dense, dark forest. After this were only mountains.
From the tavern came a low hum of conversation and merriment. I was put in mind not of any joyous celebration but rather of an insect hive angered by the approach of human beings and set to roaring with pent-up fury.
We paused before the place, whose very exterior made plain its nature. For a moment, I even thought that Gabriel might be considering a volte-face, that his languid brand of bravado might dissipate in the face of simmering menace. In this I was incorrect, for Shone had turned his gaze towards the mirk of trees and seemed almost to be sniffing the air, like a creature scenting the approach of peril.
‘Fascinating, isn’t it? Dark and deep and lonely.’
‘You mean the forest?’
; He nodded. ‘What would it be like, I wonder, to step into that ancient realm? To move with utter liberty in so wild a place?’
I was about to suggest that the dream of such a thing might very well prove to be superior to the experience itself when we heard, from somewhere beyond our sight, a low and guttural sound, unmistakably the growl of an animal.
I moved closer to my companion. ‘Gabriel?’
Out of the darkness it padded then, the great grey wolf. Its fur was thick and matted. Its eyes blazed in the night. Its jaws were open wide to reveal sharp, yellow teeth and thick ropes of saliva hanging from its maw. So absolute a terror seized me at the sight, so primitive a shrinking fear, that I could do nothing, neither move nor speak.
To my horror, the wolf growled again, tensed and sprang forward. There was in my mind no uncertainty that the animal meant to kill us both. An absurd thought flashed like a magnesium flare – that I was meant to die in some London gaol and not in Transylvania at all, not so achingly far from home.
Yet something curious took place. For Gabriel Shone stretched out a hand and, in his high and eloquent tones, cried: ‘No! This is not for today.’
The effect upon the beast was extraordinary, for the wolf behaved as though it had leapt not into the air but rather directly into some invisible wall. It fell at once upon the earth, snarling in frustration and anger. Shamed, it loped away, as if it had just endured a rare humiliation.
I looked at Gabriel, whose face was now slick and shining with perspiration. I breathed his name with something like reverence.
‘What happened?’
‘Maurice, my dear old fellow, I have not the slightest notion. I acted instinctively, thinking that the beast might be startled or distracted. Such results as those we have witnessed were by me wholly unthought of.’
I saw that he shook. His hands and arms trembled in the aftermath of our sudden, unheralded proximity to death. He smiled again with what I took to be relief and I was able to reply in kind.