by Stoker, Bram
LATER: THE MORNING OF 16 MAY.—God preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me, that to him alone I can look for safety, even though this be only whilst I can serve his purpose. Great God! Merciful God, let me be calm, for out of that way lies madness indeed. I begin to get new lights on certain things which have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say,
“My tablets! Quick, my tablets!
‘tis meet that I put it down,” etc.,”
for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.
The Count’s mysterious warning frightened me at the time. It frightens me more now when I think of it, for in the future he has a fearful hold upon me. I shall fear to doubt what he may say!
When I had written in my diary and had fortunately replaced the book and pen in my pocket I felt sleepy. The Count’s warning came into my mind, but I took pleasure in disobeying it. The sense of sleep was upon me, and with it the obstinacy which sleep brings as outrider. The soft moonlight soothed, and the wide expanse without gave a sense of freedom which refreshed me. I determined not to return tonight to the gloom-haunted rooms, but to sleep here, where, of old, ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars. I drew a great couch out of its place near the corner, so that as I lay, I could look at the lovely view to east and south, and unthinking of and uncaring for the dust, composed myself for sleep.
I suppose I must have fallen asleep. I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly real, so real that now sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep.
I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it. I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on.
One said, “Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin.”
The other added, “He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all.” I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires. The thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal. With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back. It was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. In a voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to cut through the air and then ring in the room he said:—
“How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.”
The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him. “You yourself never loved. You never love!” On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear. It seemed like the pleasure of fiends.
Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper, “Yes, I too can love. You yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! Go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.”
“Are we to have nothing tonight?” said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror. But as I looked, they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag. There was no door near them, and they could not have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely faded away.
Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.
No, Stoker did not have to pick up the story where he left off. Consider the ending of the previous chapter: cliff-hanger! That moment makes readers ask, “What happens next?” But who says you have to tell them? Bram Stoker didn’t have to, but he chose to anyway. Writers have the proverbial abundance of riches and can make their own unique choices.
Harker is panic-stricke
n! At the root of the panic state is the feeling of loss of control, and Harker perceives himself to be (temporarily) insane.
And now Harker’s back to rationality, yet also despair. Harker is a three-dimensional character, as he must be if we are to care about him, and he is a character we understand because his reactions to his situation are just what they would be: the reactions of a real person in a bad situation.
And even if Harker could slip out of the castle, his language skills are not such as to make it possible to find an ally, nor can he know what persons or institutions to trust. Harker is a “stranger in a strange land!” Was Dracula subtly reminding Harker of the solicitor’s own situation, rather than considering his own (Dracula’s) life in England when they had their little tête-à-tête?
Harker gets it, and let’s say he did not need Sherlockian skills to follow these clues. The reader was way ahead of him, right? And what does that do for the reader’s level of engagement? Though the novel is subtitled A Mystery, the story is hardly meant to be a classic “match wits with Dupin/Holmes/Vance” tale. By letting the reader catch on before Harker does, Stoker puts the reader in the place of a film viewer who sees the trip wire that will trigger the explosive device before the unaware hero has an inkling the place might be booby-trapped.
Harker is moving from his “Easter and Christmas” style of general Christianity to a deeper consideration of the Spiritual—of Good and Evil.
Because he is doing so, we do so. And in our doing, we once more have reason to place Dracula on the Literature shelf and not in the recycle box of “beach-read entertainment.”
Somehow guile does not seem a strong factor in Harker’s personality. British reserved, yes, and thus not overly outgoing, but sneaky? He vows to be clever, and we think, Lots of luck, Mister.
Dracula’s histrionic monologue sounds like a “true history” (although there are some scholars who’d dispute it), but he is also revealing genuine feelings about “vanished glory” and “precious blood,” i.e., seeking new glory and new blood. Dracula’s motivations for his journey to England become clear.
Hemingway frequently alludes to a writer’s giving the reader the “tip of the iceberg” and allowing her to sense the submerged nine-tenths mass beneath the waterline. Stoker’s craft provides just what we need to do our intuiting.
Nice authorial in-joke. So happens that Stoker was good friends with the Orientalist, author, world traveler, and translator Richard Burton—who’d translated The Arabian Nights.
The twentieth-century horror giant H.P. Lovecraft included a character named Robert Blake in his story “Haunter of the Dark”; the story was dedicated to Lovecraft’s friend and pen pal, then-youthful Robert Bloch, who’d go on to write Psycho. References to the author’s relatives and friends can be a nice touch—for the author. Too often, however, that sort of thing can cause a momentary cessation of the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Handle cautiously.
We know Dracula is plotting and learning the rules by which he must “play the English game.” We don’t understand his scheme, but we know we are in the presence of clues.
Harker gets another incident that reveals Dracula’s special intelligence: We have thus far seen the Count’s physical strength, nobility, arrogance, and craftiness. He is a fully fleshed-out character and certainly a compelling one.
This gesture, that of a parent or grandparent giving a polite command (but nonetheless a command!) to a powerless child is masterful writing!
There has been a subtle and controlled buildup to Harker’s understanding of Dracula’s power over him. We’ve had one frenzied moment at the start of this chapter and then Harker regained himself, meaning that Stoker can continue to build.
Or, to put it another way, you do not open the circus with the diver leaping from a 200-foot- tall platform into a six-inch-deep kiddie pool. If you do, your audience isn’t going to show much interest in later events: the clowns with floppy shoes and flowerpot hats, the pretty girls swinging on ropes, etc. Give readers a taste of excitement and then continually build, as Stoker has here by staggering moments of panic and fear with Harker’s British resolve.
Forcing Harker to write letters saying that “all is well” is another credible action for our Count. In modern times, thousands of concentration camp prisoners had the same communications options as Harker—and some of them vowed and did find ways to get out more truthful missives.
As we see Dracula becoming more and more oppressive and controlling, let’s consider this question: Who is the protagonist of the book?
The answer might surprise you. While the case can be argued that Harker is the protagonist in this scene, or that Mina Murray Harker is the protagonist of the whole book in that the greatest number of words in the story are devoted to her, Dracula himself, Undead and All Evil, is the one who commands our attention.
If we jettison the definition of protagonist as “the good guy,” and instead say a protagonist is simply the most compelling character, the character upon whom we focus, then it’s Dracula all the way. It’s true that we do not identify with Dracula, nor do we root for him, anymore than we do for Hannibal Lecter, the serial-killing cannibal psychiatrist of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, but it is the Transylvanian Bloodsucker whose desires dictate the actions and reactions of all the other characters.
He is the central character—and definitely the most interesting.
Besides, this is an eponymous novel (we’re getting in a new literary term!): The book is named for a character. Dracula is the eponymous protagonist of the novel.
The power of the cross, an obvious symbol, as Harker’s “leap to faith” is credibly motivated by his fear.
One of the most accomplished setups in horror fiction: More than a tad frazzled, Harker finds the beauty of nature inducing a feeling of peace and serenity just as the Romantic poets he would have studied assure him. And then …
Something is moving. Stoker prolongs suspense by not giving us a full reveal.
We begin to get the words that will burn the image on the mental movie screen, but Stoker toys with us for a bit more: Oh, look, there’s Dracula. I wonder what the old weirdo is up to?
Oh, he’s just crawling down the castle wall. Upside down. (Remember, please, at the time of Dracula’s writing, Spider-man had not yet been in a single comic book, let alone megahit movies.) With splendid word precision, Stoker gives us the image of Dracula descending, his cape seeming to disobey gravity and spreading like wings rather than flopping down over his head. This is one of the great shock moments in fiction and the image chosen for the cover of a number of editions of Dracula.
Though cinema had only begun to emerge in Stoker’s time, his writing here is markedly cinematic. He makes it even more so with this aptly created lizard simile. A simile is a figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. And not only does this simile give us a clarifying image, it provides an evocative one. With evocative language, a writer provides clues as to what the reader should feel. Stoker has described a lizard man—and I don’t care how many hours of cable “Nature is Good” shows are programmed weekly, lizards are creepy.
Stoker wants to creep you out.
Does a good job, eh?
Stoker has built to this moment. Harker is “encompassed about with terrors,” and we’ve seen those terrors because we’ve been inside his head all the way, sharing his thoughts—and, as important, seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears, etc.
Hey, we’ve seen the movies, Halloween LVI, Sleepaway Camp 99, and we know what ought to happen now: Harker has been warned to stay out of rooms in the castle, and someone or some thing is going to catch him in the act!
And yet it doesn’t happen.
Consider Stoker’s pace. Pace is the “feeling of movement” between one story scene and the next, or the rate of revelation within a scene. To achieve a slower pace, an author can use longer sentences, digression, speculation, description, or expo
sition. The faster pace is attained with presentation of action, dialogue, and short(er) sentences.