Dracul

by Dacre Stoker

  “You are at my home deep within the Carpathian Mountains, near the Borgo Pass. You are safe here.”

  “Carpathian Mountains? Transylvania?”

  He nodded.

  “I wish to go home. I wish to leave immediately,” I told him.

  His face remained as rigid as stone at this request, his expression revealing nothing. Nearly five minutes passed before he spoke again. This pause was not unusual for us; time was of so little consequence, as I would later learn.

  “I have saved your life and opened my home to you. I cared for you and provided nothing but love, yet you rebuff me. Had I not already been familiar with you and that which happened to you, I would take offense at this. But you have been through much, and I am patient; I can forgive such hostilities.”

  “I wish to leave,” I said again.

  The dark man leaned back in his chair. “You have not even asked me my name.”

  “I have no desire to know your name.”

  Again, we stared at each other for a long while. Next to me, the heartbeat of the young peasant girl began to quicken; I could see the vein pulsing at her neck. She, too, wished to leave and could not. I think this man somehow knew my thoughts had drifted to her, for he raised his hand and summoned her to his side. She walked around the table with trepidation, her heart quickening still.

  At first, he did not acknowledge her presence beside him; his eyes remained fixed on me, then he reached for her hand, taking it slowly, deliberately slow. He raised her arm to his nose and smelled her, taking in her scent, her essence. When his lips curled back, when his teeth pierced her skin, the girl tried to remain strong, to appear brave, yet I knew better. The fear coursed through her.

  He then drank of her blood.

  The girl tensed yet did her best to remain still. Within a few moments, her eyes became heavy, her skin pasty. I feared he may drain the life from her—a queer thought, considering how many lives I have ended without regard, but a thought that occurred to me nonetheless. Just when I was about to tell him to stop, he released her. The girl stumbled backwards until she found purchase with the wall, where she slid to the floor and lost consciousness.

  “You belong amongst your own kind,” the dark man said, ignoring the small drop of blood trailing down his lip. “It may take time, but you will someday understand that.”

  He reached for a bell on a table to one side of him and rang it. An older woman appeared from a door at his left. She glanced down at the girl on the floor and quickly turned away.

  “Please return the countess to her room,” the dark man instructed.

  “The countess?” I exclaimed aloud.

  A small grin played at the corners of his mouth, but he said nothing to this. The older woman bowed and took me by the arm, leading me back to my room. The door locked behind me, and again I was alone.

  I found pen and paper and wrote a letter to my beloved, the first of many. I knew they would never reach him because I had no means of posting them, but I took comfort in writing the words to him, in knowing he was out there.

  When the sun began to rise, I removed the gown, put my stained white dress back on, climbed into the box, and slept until the following night.

  * * *

  I AWOKE TO A THIN VOICE. The young peasant girl from the previous night was standing over me.

  “Countess Dolingen? The master has requested your presence.”

  The girl seemed to have recovered from the blood loss. She was still a bit pale but otherwise seemed normal.

  “He is not my master,” I replied.

  She said nothing to this response, only offered a hand to help me step from the box that became my bed.

  Again she led me to the dining room.

  Again he sat at the head of the table.

  Again I sat opposite him, our nonexistent meal laid out before us on the empty table. “I was dead; how did you bring me back?” I blurted this out before he had a chance to speak.

  It was clear this man was not accustomed to someone challenging his authority, defying him, and he seemed taken aback by the thrust of my words, then slightly bemused. “Your killer stabbed you in the heart, this is true, but he stabbed you with a knife made of steel. Not even silver, mind you, steel. All he accomplished was to stun the heart until the blade was extracted, nothing more. Had he employed a wooden stake, you would not be sitting here this evening. But you were fortunate. His incompetence saved your life.”

  For this man to say something so harsh about my beloved, I wanted to dive across the table and rip out his throat. The anger that motivated me to slay so many when I was first reborn surged through my body—I forced it back, I forced it away. I did not want to be that hateful person, not anymore.

  The dark man’s eyes narrowed. Could he read my thoughts? I began to believe that he could. If he could, he must know I was so—

  “You must eat,” he said. “The rabbit’s life may have sustained you, but only human blood will help you fully heal. You grow weaker by the hour.”

  At this admonition, the young servant girl came back into the room and stood beside the table. She was joined by a youth of no more than twelve. He came in behind her and stood tentatively at her side, his eyes turned to the ground.

  “Choose,” the dark man said.

  “I choose to return home to my beloved; I want nothing more from you.”

  “Choose, or I will drain them both.”

  His eyes grew dark at this, a deep red the color of burning embers. The urge to take advantage of either the boy or the girl swelled within me. The blood coursing through their veins—I could see it, taste it. Still, I did not make a move.

  The dark man slammed his fist down on the table and crossed the room in a blur. He lifted the boy by his neck and pushed his head aside. I heard his teeth tear into the flesh a moment before the scent of blood filled the room and yet I remained perfectly inert. When he finished his macabre meal, he threw the boy’s limp body at me. The corpse landed on the table and slid across it, coming to a stop mere inches from me. The boy’s glassy stare reassured me he was, indeed, dead.

  The dark man crossed the chamber and picked me up by the neck, as he had the boy, and dragged me from the dining room down a series of hallways and staircases. I kicked at him as we went, but he was too strong for me. He carried me like I weighed nothing into the deepest heart of the castle. He carried me to a dungeon and tossed me inside. I scuttled to the far corner and cowered like a broken dog. I wanted to stand up to him, I wanted to show him I was not scared of him, but in that very moment I most certainly was afraid.

  Without a word, the door closed and the lock was engaged, and I found myself in utter darkness. At least a week passed, possibly two, and then the door was finally opened again, and an older woman was pushed inside with me. She fell to the floor at the center of the room, and again the door was locked. When she recovered from this rough treatment, when her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she discovered me in my corner. “My blood is your blood,” she said in a whisper.

  “I will not,” I told her. I was so weak; I needed it badly. I refused to hurt her, though; I would die before I hurt another.

  “My blood is your blood,” she repeated. “If you do not, he will kill one more of my children. I cannot bear to lose another.”

  Two more days passed. When I woke on the third day, the old woman was looming over me with a knife. “Do not let him hurt my children,” she said, before plunging the knife deep into the artery at her neck. Her body collapsed on top of me, and my mouth went to the wound and I drank. I drank until there was no more.

  When I was allowed to return to my room, my wooden box had been replaced with a stone coffin. The soil of my homeland filled the bottom, and I found this to be a welcome sight. A dozen other dresses hung in the armoire now, all tailored perfectly to fit my body. I washed myself at the basin, changed into
a new dress, sat at the desk, and wrote another letter to my beloved. I wrote until nearly dawn, before climbing into my new coffin and allowing sleep to wash over me.

  * * *

  SIX MONTHS PASSED LIKE THIS, always the same ritual. I marked time by counting the letters I wrote to my beloved, all of which were hidden beneath a loose stone in the floor. I awoke on my hundred and eighty-third night to find the stone pried aside and my letters gone. The door to my room stood open, the first time since I arrived here, and I went down the hallway alone. I found the dining room empty. Another door to the right of the dining room stood open; on all my previous forays, it had been closed and locked. I stepped inside and found myself in a library of sorts, with thousands of texts in varied languages, and most appearing extraordinarily old, lining the shelves. Tapestries, thick with dust, hung on some of the walls. On a table at the center of the room were all my letters to my beloved in a neat stack. Beside them stood another stack, this one all legal documents—deeds and trusts, property transferred to the name the man had given me, one Countess Dolingen.

  I wandered the halls of the castle and found no one. I considered leaving by way of one of the windows, but I had no place to go and little knowledge of where I was; the risk was too great. Instead, I searched room after room. I located the man’s chambers, and many others as well, most undisturbed for who knows how long. Some housed nothing more than broken furniture and shredded draperies, others were filled with riches, more gold than I ever conceived possible. There was no sign of the dark man or the few servants I had seen since arriving at the castle. The only sign of life was the rats scurrying about, the incessant tick, tick, tick of their tiny nails on the cold stone floor. I would end up drinking the blood of a number of these unsuspecting rats before the dark man finally returned.

  * * *

  I AM NOT SURE HOW LONG he was gone, but on a night shortly after the leaves of fall began to turn color I woke in my coffin to the sound of a scuffle outside. I went to my bedchamber window, which overlooked the castle’s courtyard, and found the man standing beside a coach drawn by a team of six large black horses. He looked up at me and smiled. “Ah, my lovely countess. Please join us. I have something for you!”

  He pulled a man from the coach and dropped him at the ground by his feet. His head was covered with a black sack, and his hands were tied behind his back. I did not need to see his face to know who he was; I recognized his scent even from where I stood.

  I launched myself through the open window and landed in a crouch on the cobblestone below.

  “That is impressive!” the dark man said. “I usually climb down.”

  I started towards him, and he raised a hand. “Stop!”

  In an instant, he had a blade pressed against his captive’s throat.

  “Do not hurt him!”

  The dark man pulled the sack from the man’s head, and my beloved looked back at me, seeing me for the first time in years. I knew I had not changed in his eyes, I had not aged even a minute since he last saw me, and I heard his heart beat wildly in his chest as he regarded me now. His blond hair had grayed a little, and his face appeared a little harder, but otherwise he had not changed much, either. I would not have cared, in truth, if he had aged into an old man, crippled and near death. The love that coursed through me burned, and I wanted to go to him, to hold him, to never let him go.

  “Is this the man you have been writing to? The man who owns your heart?”

  I could not help but nod, and even with a knife pressed to his throat, I saw a sparkle in my beloved’s eye that told me he felt the same about me. He loved me now, right now, more than ever before.

  The dark man frowned. “But how can that be? He left you in that castle as you were tortured for years. When you finally returned to him, he plunged a knife into your heart and buried you beneath a pile of rocks, left to rot into the earth. How can you love such a man?”

  “My heart belongs to him; it always has, it always will,” I said softly, holding back the tears that clouded my eyes with a red mist.

  The dark man scoffed at this. “I saved you from death. I give you everything you could possibly desire, yet you feel nothing for me. You and I are of the same kind and we belong together, not you and this man—do you not realize that? He will be dead soon, just a pile of bones, while you and I will live on. Together, there is so much we can do; you only need to open your eyes and see it. Open your heart and let me in.”

  He never said such things to me before; and, until that very moment, I thought of myself as nothing more than his prisoner. The idea of loving such a man filled me with dread. I could not do it.

  As this thought passed through my mind, the man’s eyes narrowed, and he let out a ferocious scream, one so loud it echoed off the mountains around us. The howls of a thousand wolves answered him, so loudly I heard nothing else. In an instant, he raised my beloved to his feet. It was then that I realized just how weak my beloved truly was, how sallow his skin appeared. It was then that I saw the marks upon his neck and realized the dark man had drunk of him, had drained his blood nearly to the point of death.

  The dark man raised his own wrist to his mouth and tore it open with his sharp fangs, then pressed it to the lips of my beloved. I froze in horror as he drank, for I then knew this was not the first time. They had made this exchange a number of times on the trip back from Ireland to this forsaken place; more of the dark man’s blood flowed through his veins, in fact, than his own. My beloved drank until he could drink no more. Then the dark man released him, letting his body crumple to the floor.

  The loss of blood weakened the dark man, but only for a moment. He forced himself to stand erect to his full height and snapped his long, bony fingers. A dozen men appeared—Szgany, I was to learn later, gypsies from the local area. Four came up behind me and bound me with ropes laced with silver. I tried to break free, but the silver somehow held me still, and where it touched my skin it burned. I struggled, but they were able to hold me, each tugging their rope taut so I was held captive in the middle of them, unable to reach any one of them. I cursed the fact that I had drunk nothing but rat blood for so long. With human blood, I might have been able to overpower the Szgany, but now I was too weak. I was a prisoner once again.

  I watched my beloved turn.

  I watched as the last of the life left his body and the blood of this man took over. For much of the night, in truth, I could do nothing but watch. All the while, the dark man stood over him while the Szgany continued holding me still.

  When my beloved finally awoke and looked out upon the world with reborn eyes, the dark man removed one of his rings and slipped it onto my beloved’s finger. “This is in case anyone should wonder to whom you belong,” he said.

  The dark man stood over him and again snapped his fingers. The Szgany unhitched the horses and positioned them in a circle around my beloved. Then they began to tie their silver ropes to my beloved’s limbs and around his neck, the other ends fastened to the horses’ harnesses, and I realized what was about to transpire and cried out, but my protest fell on deaf ears. The dark man held on to my beloved until the ropes were secured and he was now at the center of this pinwheel of horses. I cried out to him to try to break free, but he was still lost, groggy and disoriented, unaware of the predicament he was in. The Szgany stood at the ready beside the horses.

  “Please, do not do this,” I pleaded.

  “You have done this to yourself. You brought this upon him.” The dark man snapped his fingers again, and each of the Szgany brandished a small dagger and plunged it into his horse’s flank. As if one, the horses screamed in pain, lunged forward, and began to run.

  I watched in horror as my beloved was torn to pieces, his arms, legs, and head separated from his torso with sickening snaps. The gypsies had closed the gates to the courtyard, so the horses had no escape. After a few minutes, they stopped their wild run to nowhere, and the pieces of
what used to be a man littered the ground around us.

  The dark man walked over to my beloved’s violated torso and plunged his hand into the chest, pulling out the still-beating heart. He held it out to ensure I saw what he had done.

  I could say nothing at this point, my voice silenced. I would not have been capable of hearing anyway over the screams reverberating in my mind. I collapsed to the ground and cried as the Szgany kept me held fast with their silver ropes.

  The Szgany gathered the remains and deposited them into wooden boxes, then loaded the boxes onto the floor of the coach. My beloved’s heart was placed in a box all its own, a small red oak box with gold clasps, also loaded onto the coach. When they were finished, the horses were harnessed again and the dark man gave instructions to the driver and sent him on his way.

  At this point, the Szgany released me, too. It mattered little; I could not have moved even if I had wanted to.

  The dark man came over and knelt at my side. “My men have been ordered to bury each piece of him in a separate cemetery, never to be found. His body will never die. His soul will suffer for eternity as a member of the legions of the undead. All of this brought on by you. If you wish to hate me, so be it; now you have good reason.”

  He stood up and started for the castle door, adding, “It will be light soon; return to your room. Tomorrow, I have commissioned someone to paint your portrait. I wish to capture this moment forever.”

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, an artist did arrive, and the dark man made me pose for the artist, just as he said he would. I was too distraught to argue and did as I was told. I even wore the diamond necklace with the ruby at the center. Shortly after we began, the dark man presented me with a belt with a brooch at its center with a depiction of a dragon; I wore this trinket also. The painting was atrocious, looking nothing like me.