by Karen Essex
“Everyone present saw that I was attacked by a man who was obsessed with my late wife,” he said calmly. “And if you choose to disagree, let me remind you that you are an escapee from a mental asylum and hardly a credible witness.” He gestured to the men. “And the rest of you are accomplices, are you not?” Neither Von Helsinger nor Seward responded, but Jonathan said, “I am taking Mina out of here.”
Jonathan took my arm, but I shook him off. I began to feel my fury rise, the same savage vehemence that had set me on Ursulina. Jonathan must have been aware of what was happening because he stepped back, giving me room. I felt the surge inside me gathering strength, filling me with the excitement of taking revenge. I envisioned myself flying through the air and landing on the murderer, attaching my teeth to his neck and sucking the essence from him until he was dead. I saw it all happen in my mind’s eye. I would not make the incision neatly as I had done with the lamia. No, this time, I would do it savagely with my teeth, tearing into him like an animal, causing him the most severe pain possible. Revenge for Lucy. Revenge for Morris.
Without any effort, my body propelled itself toward him. I did not feel myself moving, but found myself with my legs wrapped around him, suctioned to his body, his hair in my fist, and my hand jerking his head back, exposing his long white neck. His hair felt oily and thin, and he smelled like sweat and gunpowder, nauseating to my stomach, but I would not let that stop me. I heard the gun drop from his hand and onto the floor.
“Help me,” Arthur cried out, his voice strained because I had jerked his neck back so far.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Von Helsinger stoop to pick up the gun, when Jonathan’s boot stepped on his big, meaty hand, and the doctor cried out in pain. “Do what you must, Mina,” Jonathan said.
In as savage a moment as I have ever experienced, I sank my teeth deep into Arthur’s neck. I am certain that all the men were yelling, but I was too focused on my task to give them my attention. Hissing and growling like a wild beast, I did not merely take his blood from one wound, but made a network of incisions on his neck, tearing the flesh each time, causing him fresh agony. I would have drained him to death, but I could not bear the taste or scent of him—acrid, like vinegar left too long on a poultice.
I backed off him and left him slumped and bleeding on the floor. I coughed, spitting the taste of him out of my mouth. I wiped my lips clean and I turned to Seward, who was pale and in shock, clutching a table as if that inert piece of wood could save him. “Your turn, John. You wanted me, and now you are going to have me.”
Before he could move, I sped across the room and had my hand around his neck and his body pinned against the wall. Looking into his gray eyes and remembering what he had done to me, I was overtaken with an urge to kill. My teeth were touching his skin when the door flew open, and a strong, cold wind blew through the room. I felt it swirl around me, caressing my face and body, and chilling me to the bone. With it came a haunting sound, a woman’s voice keening a funereal lament. Lonesome and sorrowful, the cry filled the room, and I knew either intuitively or from a long-distant memory that it was the song of the banshee.
I released Seward from my grip, but he remained backed up against the wall, whether more afraid of me or of whatever had entered the room, I did not know. I looked about for the source of the screeching wind, but saw nothing. The song grew louder and louder to the point of intolerable, and I wondered if the Count had unleashed some malevolent force upon us. The men were trying to dodge the presence as it circled and encircled them, toying with them. The volume continued to grow, coming from no one and no direction, escalating until its weeping and wailing was unendurable. The very room was shaking with it, and I put my hands over my ears and noticed that everyone else had done the same.
All of us were hugging ourselves now, shivering. Arthur was still slumped on the floor, bleeding and in a daze. The air around him began to shimmer, forming the familiar shape of a young woman. I watched Arthur’s face contort with horror as he realized who was standing before him. Her long blond hair was loose and hanging almost to her knees, and layers of white and gold energy draped about her like a diaphanous gown.
Arthur screamed, cowering against the wall, sliding to his knees, his bruised eyes staring up at her in terror. I could not see her face, but from the horror in Arthur’s eyes and the revulsion of the other two men, and from the hideous wailing that seemed to originate in her ghostly being but penetrated into every crevice of the room, I am sure that she appeared as her husband had once described—vengeful and angry, eyes dripping with blood like one of the Furies. She did not attack Arthur but dropped to the floor, draping herself over Morris’s corpse, her gossamer gown spreading like wings until he was entirely covered. She continued to howl with such intensity that I thought the sound would permanently deafen us.
Jonathan grabbed me by the hand and pulled me toward the door, but I resisted him.
“The baby, Mina. You must think of the baby,” he said, yelling over Lucy’s preternatural cries, which were reverberating so furiously in the very core of my body that I had to wonder if indeed the child might be harmed by it. He put his hand on my stomach as if to emphasize his point, and I let him pull me away from the horrific scene, my eyes riveted to it until he slammed the door behind us.
“Our business here is done,” he said with finality. We looked each other in the eye, and there was a silent understanding between us. Hand in hand, we walked away from the mansion and into the muted twilit evening.
Epilogue
London, 31 December 1897
Dear reader, my tale is not yet done. I fear that more blood is on my hands. Early in the year 1891, Kate Reed and I wrote a story exposing the doctors at Lindenwood for administering blood transfusions that killed at least two patients. Authorities began an investigation after the story was published, but before evidence could be gathered, John Seward committed suicide, and Dr. Von Helsinger disappeared, possibly going back to Germany. Kate and I visited the asylum with a lunacy commissioner, and Mrs. Snead told us that the night before, a red-haired man with a bump on his forehead came for the doctor and drove him away. I suppose that together they concocted the far-fetched tale with which some of you are already familiar.
Soon after our story was published, Kate got pregnant by Jacob, who married her, left the newspaper business, and became a partner in her father’s textile company. Kate’s editor fired her, claiming that no respectable man would employ a pregnant woman. I see Kate often; our sons are the same age, though her daughter is five years old and mine is still an infant. Kate continues to attend meetings of organizations that are fighting for women’s equality. For myself, I am still relieved to not have the responsibility of voting, but I suspect that my daughter and her generation will feel different. It was Kate who showed me the newspaper announcement that Lord Godalming was engaged to another heiress, though I have heard that he is thin and pale, that his health is not good, and that he has a recurring problem with insomnia.
Perhaps of all of us, Headmistress came to the most surprising and happiest end. As Kate predicted, Miss Hadley’s School for Young Ladies of Accomplishment closed its doors as wider doors of education opened to girls. At the age of sixty-five, Headmistress finally used the skills she had taught to other females for almost fifty years and married a handsome, widowed grandfather five years her junior.
Though I do muse on what might have been, I do not regret my decision to stay with Jonathan. He and I do not bring up the past, but our exploits with the immortals opened up a world of infinite sensuousness, which we continue to explore with each other and enjoy. Jonathan no longer has the youthful exuberance that had drawn me to him, but I recognize that I am largely responsible for its loss. On the other hand, he is a well-respected solicitor and a loving father.
Our son, Morris, is a sanguine child. As a baby, he nursed furiously—almost violently—but since that time, he has proven to be a happy little boy. Our daughter, Lucy, is just a baby,
and I am not sure what sort of temperament she will develop. My labor with her was shockingly easy. She came out of me without a cry, and when the midwife lifted her up, she stared back at me with my own green eyes. “Look at this,” the midwife said, pointing to the wine-colored stain on her thigh. “She has the exact same birthmark as her mother.”
As for me, I have evidence that I still have my powers, and that if I desired, I could develop them. I often hear others’ thoughts, which is not as interesting as it sounds, for with the exception of children, most minds are cluttered with the mundane. I cannot say that I crave blood, though I look forward to a time when I will drink it again—and this I will do, though I cannot say when. Once while Jonathan and I were making love, he was at the height of arousal and encouraged me to take his blood. Though it brought both of us ecstasy, it later made him feel weak and ill, so I have not done it again.
When people see me, they always comment that I have not changed in many years, but I am only just approaching my thirtieth birthday. We shall see what the future brings.
A few weeks after the death of Morris Quince, Jonathan went into his office to discover that the title to the Count’s London mansion had been transferred to my name, along with a substantial endowment for its upkeep. The Count’s staff had disappeared, so I hired my own minimal one. We do not live there—we are more comfortable in our home in Pimlico—but I visit it often by myself, reading the Count’s books or lying in the big bed in which I found myself after he had rescued me from the asylum. It is in these two rooms that I most feel his presence. He has not come to me since the day he vanished, but I am aware of him, though I cannot locate him in time or space. Yet I know that he still exists somewhere, and, as he said before he vanished, it is not finished between us.
I have no idea what happened after Jonathan and I left the mansion on that last evening. By the time I took possession of the house, it had been long cleared and tidied, looking exactly as if the Count still lived there. No one was charged with a crime, and, undoubtedly owing to Godalming’s name and connections, there were no newspaper reports, nor was there a public scandal of any sort. Morris’s body was to be sent back to his family in New York but was lost at sea in a shipwreck and never recovered. My heart bleeds for his parents, and if I ever find myself in America, I will pay them a visit and tell them what a heroic man their son was.
I do not know what will become of the red-haired writer’s story. Despite its sensational tone and its gripping narrative, it has failed to sell many copies or capture critical acclaim. Like almost all works of fiction, I am sure that it will be read by a few, and in the coming years, all copies not thrown out with the rubbish or lost in fires or other disasters will rot in musty libraries until the shelves are purged to make way for newer and more relevant stories. But I have said my piece and corrected the record so that in the future, my children, should they ever come to associate their parents with that work of fiction, will know the truth.
Author’s Notes
My dear Mina, why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?”
“A brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble.”
Bram Stoker wrote these lines and many like them in his novel Dracula without a trace of irony. Today, the text is often read as a cautionary tale against the unbridling of female sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. In this vein, I wanted to turn the original story inside out and expose its underbelly or its “subconscious mind,” by illuminating the cultural fears, as well as the rich brew of myths and lore, that went into Stoker’s creation.
At the time Dracula was written, while some women were taking to the streets for emancipation, the majority clung feverishly to Victorian ideals of purity and piety, which were considered the norm. I chose to portray Dr. Seward’s asylum as it would have been—not with an insect-eating madman but full of female patients incarcerated for what we today would consider normal sexual appetites. My portraits of the asylum’s cases are largely taken from original late-nineteenth-century physicians’ notes in the archives of Bethlem Royal Hospital, once known as Bedlam. (The obvious exceptions are Von Helsinger’s experiment to improve the female sex through the transfusion of male blood, and the inference that Lucy and Vivienne died of hemolytic reactions from receiving incompatible blood types.)
I experienced two extraordinary coincidences in conducting my research. I had set the place of Mina’s birth as Sligo before I discovered that Stoker’s mother was born there and had raised her son on its ghost stories and folklore. Secondly, I had fabricated the character of a journalist who had been Mina’s school chum and named her Julia Reed long before I read in Stoker’s notes that he had toyed with including a character named Kate Reed who was to be Mina’s friend. Stoker’s original setting for Dracula’s home was Styria, and I decided to use that location, if only to remind vampire fans that the Count’s Transylvanian origin was Stoker’s invention, and that he entertained other possibilities.
The vampire that sprang from Bram Stoker’s mind has subsequently spawned hundreds of variations. I wanted to illuminate the historical and mythological sources for the creature that so ignited my childhood imagination, while revisiting the lost landscape of female magical power that clearly informed Stoker’s tale and shaped vampire lore. My fond hope is that both readers and the eternal essence of Mr. Stoker, whom I revere for his ingenious work, will take the book in the spirit of fun and adventure in which it was written.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank not only those who helped with this novel but everyone who continues to make my literary life possible. At Doubleday, Bill Thomas and Alison Callahan gave me room to venture into new territory, and Alison, with her sure hand, keen instincts, and collaborative spirit, wrestled with and for me in its creation. I appreciate the genuine enthusiasm and creative thinking of Todd Doughty and Adrienne Sparks, and also of Russell Perrault and Lisa Weinert at Vintage/Anchor. I thank creative director John Fontana for giving me beautiful books; Nora Reichard for her patience and diligence; and the support I receive from everyone on the staffs. I am blessed to call Doubleday and Vintage/Anchor my publishers.
Amy Williams in New York, and Jennie Frankel and Nicole Clemens in Los Angeles, are not only representatives but creative partners and loyal friends. I would be lost without this triumvirate of dynamic women.
In London, Katie Hickman opened up her home, family, and community of friends to me and made many things possible. Caroline Kellett-Fraysse has been a true companion in the search for all things esoteric. On that side of the pond longtime friends Virginia Field, Elaine Sperber, and Nick Manzi keep me royally entertained and keep my spirits high.
For fifteen years, Bruce Feiler (“Council of Bruce”) has listened to my ambitions and concerns and has put his considerable energy into helping me shape my writing life and career. Michael Katz is always willing to support in every way. Beverly Keel injects razor sharp humor and warmth when I need it most. C. W. Gortner is the compassionate listener and collaborative friend on the other end of the phone. My brother, Richard, reads everything I write with enthusiasm, a red pen, and a Jesuit education. My mom and stepfather alienate strangers and friends by shamelessly promoting me.
In Los Angeles, I depend upon eternal optimists Vince Jordan and Jayne McKay for long, soulful conversations, and the more cynical humor of Keith Fox, purveyor of excellent food and wine, and provider of airline tickets to exotic locations. My daughter, Olivia, has the true spirit of a Muse, and continues to inspire and inform my characters. For her tremendous bravery and her resilience, it is to her that I dedicate this novel.
a cognizant v5 original release september 12 2010
DOUBLEDAY
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Karen Essex
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Essex, Karen.
Dracula in love / by Karen Essex. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3555.S682D73 2010
813′.54—dc22 2010005657
eISBN: 978-0-385-53361-4
v3.0