by Dacre Stoker
I would disagree with both, for I believe in neither.
* * *
• • •
PEN IN HAND, I wrote:
She stood in front of me, right in the moonlight, and I cannot remember ever to have seen a girl of such breathtaking beauty. I am not going to provide a detailed description, as words can do her no justice, but she had golden blond hair, which was bound in a chignon. Her eyes: blue and large.
Our Ellen. My Ellen.
Those eyes again, they are just the same.
I coughed into my handkerchief, my favorite, for some time ago Mother had embroidered it with delicate purple flowers, reminding me of the wild orchids that grew in the fields we roamed near our old home. The white cloth was riddled with stains of crimson, both old and new, signs of death unwilling to come out in the wash. When I coughed into it again, my red spittle glistened. No longer Ellen’s blood but now solely my own. Her blood gone from my body over the years, its healing properties gone with it. I felt the aches and pains of my childhood illness creeping back, waking from a patient slumber.
The time, the gift, that Ellen gave me drawing to an end.
Dracul had said he would return for me upon my death, and I believed him. Yesterday I made arrangements to be cremated immediately upon passing, a final checkmate in this game of ours.
I promised Ellen I would never come for her, not while he lived. This promise burns at me each of my borrowed days.
Not while he lives.
The walnut box sat upon my desk and I went back to it; I dug to the very bottom, shuffling through the pages, until I found what I was looking for—the small folded piece of paper Ellen had given me in those final moments.
I carefully unfolded it and smoothed the edges, now yellowed and crinkled with time’s careless caress. I looked down at her writing, faded but still readable:
END HIM
LATITUDE 47
LONGITUDE 25.75
My arm has not itched in some time, but today it has, and the itching has not ceased. For after Whitby, I knew where I was to go next, my path decided for me long ago. My words the only bread crumbs I leave behind.
It was finally time I paid Dracula a visit, long overdue, the sharpest of stakes in hand.
—Bram Stoker
EPILOGUE
PATIENT # 40562
CASE RECORD
WM. THORNLEY STOKER, M.D.
17 October 1890—The walls bleed water; that is the cause of the musty odor and stink in the air, of that I am fairly certain. At least that is what I tell myself whenever I take the stairs down to this level and traverse the halls, a walk I undertake religiously every Tuesday and Friday, and have for more than twenty years now. Years that have not been kind to me, for I feel them with every ache and pain in my bones. Today, this festering comes from my right leg—a bit of gout, I am afraid, but it is too early to tell.
I brought her dinner with me. Perhaps this is the real purpose of my twice weekly visits—knowing only I can bring her dinner. Of course, plates of food are presented to her daily by the hospital staff, but they are rarely touched; it is my dinners that sustain her.
Her door is at the far end of the hall, a large, heavy monstrosity with only a small slit to pass the tray through at the very bottom and a simple wall vase mounted to its center holding a single wild white rose. I pluck out Tuesday’s blossom, now dry and quite dead, and replace it with a fresh one from the garden I maintain. The walls of her room are constructed of thick stone, with no windows to speak of.
She has not tried to escape for some time, but I take comfort in knowing that the white roses seem to keep her contained, although I will not pretend to understand how.
I slide the tray under the door through the slit. She grabs it quickly and pulls it through. This action is followed by a thin slurping I wish not to hear. When she finishes, she speaks to me, her voice so clear and perfect an angel could sound no better. “I have something to tell you, Thornley. Something best told in a whisper. Let me out so I may find your ear?”
I lean against the door, placing my hand on the wood. I long to touch her, to feel her touch on me, the tenderness of her kiss. And yet I know it can never be.
“You know I cannot.”
“But I long for your touch.”
“And I for yours.”
She slips her fingers through the slit, and I lower myself to the floor so I may rest my hand on hers. She is cold, always so cold, but this is my Emily, and I care nothing about that; it is the contact I long for.
You can tell much by a person’s hands, the smoothness or roughness of them, the color of their skin, how they groom their fingernails. As I glance down at our hands intertwined on this stone floor, the differences between us glares back at me. While admittedly I do not possess the hands of a worker but those of a surgeon, time still shows upon them. My skin has taken on a patchwork of colors, the start of age spots and thick veins. My fingers have grown plump. They are not my father’s hands, and I sometimes wonder if they are even my own, they have changed that much over the years.
Emily’s finger twitches in mine; she likes to do this when we hold hands, her fingers rarely still, perhaps her way of letting me know she is still there, thinking of me. Her finger twitches, and I look down upon it, so smooth and soft, the skin of a child untouched by time.
It is when we hold hands like this I see the years between us grow, the distance between us lengthen. We will grow old together, our hands ever entwined, but only mine will age.
“Will you stay with me for a while?” she asks softly.
“I will stay with you always.”
AUTHORS’ NOTE
For many of us, Dracula is a formative novel. A book we pick up as children or young adults and revisit as the years pass, a constant on the bookshelf, an old friend. In fact, it might be so familiar that the question of the story itself, how it came to be, hasn’t occurred to us. Yet, like Jonathan Harker’s journey in the classic novel, the events that led to publication are ripe with mystery. When Bram Stoker first brought his manuscript to his publisher in the United Kingdom, Archibald Constable & Company, he opened the conversation with one simple line.
This story is true.
From the original preface of Dracula:
The reader of this story will very soon understand how the events outlined in these pages have been gradually drawn together to make a logical whole. Apart from excising minor details which I considered unnecessary, I have let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way; but, for obvious reasons, I have changed the names of the people and places concerned. In all other respects I leave the manuscript unaltered, in deference to the wishes of those who have considered it their duty to present it before the eyes of the public.
I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight. And I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent incomprehensible, although continuing research in psychology and natural sciences may, in years to come, give logical explanations of such strange happenings which, at present, neither scientists nor the secret police can understand. I state again that this mysterious tragedy which is here described is completely true in all its external respects, though naturally I have reached a different conclusion on certain points than those involved in the story. But the events are incontrovertible, and so many people know of them that they cannot be denied.
Bram also clearly claimed that many of the characters in his novel were real people. The preface goes on to say:
All the people who have willingly—or unwillingly—played a part in this remarkable story are known generally and well respected. Both Jonathan Harker and his wife (who is a woman of character) and Dr. Seward are my friends and have been so for many years, and I have never doubted th
at they were telling the truth; and the highly respected scientist, who appears here under a pseudonym, will also be too famous all over the educated world for his real name, which I have not desired to specify, to be hidden from people—least of all those who have from experience learnt to value and respect his genius and accomplishments, though they adhere to his views on life no more than I.
* * *
• • •
BRAM STOKER did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction but as a warning of a very real evil.
Worried of the impact of presenting such a story as true, his editor pushed the manuscript back across the desk with a single line of his own: No.
Otto Kyllman, his editor at Archibald Constable & Company, went on to tell Bram that London was still recovering from the horrible murders in Whitechapel—and with the killer still on the loose, they couldn’t publish such a story without running the risk of generating mass panic. He would have to make changes.
At that point, Stoker nearly pulled the book, knowing compromise would mean his message might get lost. But at the same time he knew that without a publisher, his message wouldn’t be seen at all. Ultimately, he relented, and over the coming months Stoker worked with Kyllman to reshape the novel, the two often butting heads over what should stay and what could not. Even the title of the book was changed from The Un-Dead to Dracula.
When the novel was finally published, on May 26, 1897, the first 101 pages had been cut, numerous alterations had been made to the text, and the epilogue had been shortened, changing Dracula’s ultimate fate as well as that of his castle. Tens of thousands of words had vanished, the preface reduced to:
How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.
* * *
• • •
WITH THAT BEGAN A GAME, a mystery we’ve only begun to unravel more than 120 years later. Today, general practice has the author submitting a copy of his novel to his publisher in his home country, then that publisher, or the author’s literary agent, distributes it to the rest of the participating publishers worldwide. Essentially, all publishers work off the same original draft. In Bram’s time, such wasn’t the case. Bram personally mailed a draft of the novel to each of his publishers around the globe. When he agreed to Kyllman’s changes, he did so knowing those changes would impact only the U.K. edition; to other publishers, he could send his original story.
So Bram had found a way to tell his tale.
Throughout Dracul, you will find references to Makt Myrkranna, the recently translated Icelandic version of Dracula. Makt Myrkranna—which means “Powers of Darkness”—is not the Dracula known to us. The changes go far beyond simple variances in translation. There are different characters, different locations, different story lines. While both novels begin in a similar fashion, the endings could not be further apart. Dracula had a love interest, a woman his equal in many ways, a woman he knew as Countess Dolingen von Gratz—whom Bram believed to be Ellen. When one reads Makt Myrkranna, the tale we thought we knew as Dracula becomes less concrete, unsettlingly fluid. The sensation of reading it is Bram whispering in our ears, telling us there is far more to the story.
What was in those missing 101 pages? Bram left a trail of bread crumbs, and you only have to know where to look and be willing to follow them. First editions worldwide appear to be the key to discovering the entire tale he wished to tell.
[“I once knew a little boy who put so many flies into a bottle that they had not room to die!!!” quoted in Part II of Dracul.]
Photo © E. Willis
Bram also left copious notes. He was rarely seen without a journal in his pocket. He documented everything from story ideas to family anecdotes to the weather. Portions of Dracul came from his journals, and as we searched through them, Bram’s words were resurrected.
© The Rosenbach Musuem & Library EL3.S874d MS
[“Vampire
Memo
no looking glasses in Count’s house
never can see him reflected in one—no shadow?
lights arranged to give no shadow
never eats nor drinks
carried or led over threshold
enormous strength
see in the dark
power of getting small or large
money always old gold—traced to Salzburg banking house
At Munich Dead House see face among flowers—think corpse—but is alive
III Afterwards when white moustache grown is same as face of Count in London
Doctor at Dover Custom house sees him or corpse
Coffins selected to be taken over—one wrong one brought”]
Early on, Bram detailed what vampires can and cannot do. Missing from his list? Sunlight. Bram felt vampires could go out during the day but did so without their powers. The deadly effect of sunlight on a vampire did not get tacked on to the legend until the film Nosferatu in 1922.
And what about the true origin of Bram’s monster?
Although most believe Dracula to be Vlad Dracul, there is no mention of Vlad the Impaler in any of Bram’s notes. They are the same in surname only.
© The Rosenbach Musuem & Library EL3.S874d MS
This connection between Vlad the Impaler and Dracula was not made by Bram; instead, it was a conjecture put forth by two professors from Boston College, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, in their book In Search of Dracula, published in 1972. The “Vlad the Impaler” story line was also advanced by Francis Ford Coppola in his 1992 feature film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Bram’s monster was far older than Vlad the Impaler. In fact, he was a product of the Scholomance as detailed in the first line of this note:
[“Scholomance = school in mountains where Devil teaches mysteries of nature. Only 10 pupils a time and retains one as payment.”]
That “one” was Dracul.
And as for how Bram first became fascinated by monsters? It began when he was a child, when his Nanna Ellen told him the tale of the Dearg-Due.
* * *
• • •
LIKE Dracula, Dracul finds its roots in truth. A few dates have been changed and events condensed, necessary when telling a story such as this. For a full, carefully researched history of the Stoker family, visit www.bramstokerestate.com.
By all accounts, Bram was a sickly child, unable to walk, at times near death, bedridden until the age of seven—when he was miraculously healed. By the time he entered Trinity College, he displayed no residual effects from his childhood illness. In fact, he excelled at athletics: rowing, swimming, gymnastics, rugby, and racewalking. The extended Stoker family included a number of physicians, including Dr. William Stoker (1773–1848), an expert on fevers and bloodletting, and his son, Dr. Edward Alexander Stoker (1810–1880), who treated Bram. When he was well enough, Bram was entertained with tales of banshees, blood-sucking fairies, the legend of the Dearg-Due—and his mother’s personal horror story. At fourteen, Charlotte survived a cholera epidemic in Sligo, which she later relayed to Bram. At his request, Charlotte wrote the stories down for him. Her graphic account, written in 1873, was in Bram’s surviving papers.
Charlotte and Abraham Stoker, Sr., lived in a town house at Marino Crescent from before Thornley’s birth in 1845 until they moved to Artane Lodge sometime before their third child, Tom, was born in 1849. A short distance away stood Artane Castle, a ruin by the time Bram was well enough to roam the area freely.
Thornley was one of Ireland’s most renowned surgeons. He held
many positions, including visiting surgeon to Swift’s Hospital for Lunatics, where it was said he performed surgeries so new that they had not yet been named.
Thornley’s wife, Emily, in fact was locked away in his asylum for the last years of her life, the reason known only to him, the man who institutionalized her. Though no one knows why, Thornley kept a lock of hair on his person for most of his adult life—a lock that belonged to Ellen Crone, who served as nanny to the Stoker family for many years.
Matilda was an artist from her earliest days. She was educated at the Dublin Art School, and was a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. She studied painting and ceramics, and as children she and Bram both won awards for their art. She and her younger sister, Margaret, went abroad with their parents when Abraham Sr. retired, first to France, then to Switzerland, then to Italy, where Matilda continued to study art. Matilda moved to London soon after her father died and lived first with Bram and Florence, then with her brother George and his wife, Agnes. In 1889, at the age of forty-three, she married Charles Petitjean, eleven years her senior.
Tom served in a variety of posts during his long career in the Indian Civil Service, notably as Chief Secretary to the Government Secretary. He returned to Blackrock, Dublin, to marry Enid Bruce in 1891. She accompanied Tom back to India where they lived until he retired in 1899.