The Dracula Dossier

by James Reese

  I trudged upstairs. I settled at my makeshift desk. My neck was slack from want of sleep. My head swayed. My eyes were tearful from tiredness and more. Oh, but there was work to be done, and no-one to see to it but Stoker.

  Now, dealing as I do with reams of Henry’s letters, I have of course developed habits. One such is the patent refusal to open an envelope by hand: the resultant flaps and tears and tiny cuts are a torment to me. Yet as my preferred, pearl-handled letter opener wasn’t ready to hand, and as I was too tired to search it out, I sought a secondary blade and settled, stupidly, upon the same knife Henry insists upon using onstage as Shylock. It was in my possession, as often it is when our host theatres provide no safer keep; for indeed I value it highly. It is a kukri knife of the type used by the Gurkhas when they fought for us in India, and it was gifted to me by Burton himself.11

  Do you know Burton? I think not; and so let me say, Caine, that men such as he are rare, rare indeed. He is steel itself, and runs through fools like a sword. His talk is legendary; and as he offers it, his upper lip rises to reveal canines gleaming like daggers. The effect is prodigious indeed, and I have remarked it on many well-remembered occasions, not the least of which was that night, two years past, when Irving invited Sir and Lady B. to dine with us after the first night of our Faust. This was the night of the knife, which gift was accompanied by the tale of its having once been put to purpose by the giver, Sir B.:

  Often, on his journeys to Mecca, Burton has had to pass himself off as a Mohammedan, and carefully so; for the slightest breach of the multitudinous observances of that creed would call attention to his not belonging, the mere suspicion of which would warrant instant death at the hands of his hosts. In a moment of forgetfulness, or rather inattention, Burton made some small infraction of rule, whereupon he saw that a lad had noticed and was quietly stealing away. Sir B. faced the situation at once and, coming after his would-be assasin in such a way as not to arouse suspicion, suddenly stuck his knife, now my knife, into his heart.

  As Burton offered this last detail, Lady B. excused herself from the dining room; whereupon Burton averred that the tale was quite true, and that the telling of said truth had never troubled him from that day to this, the moment at which he was speaking. Said he—and I quote confidently—“The desert has its own laws, and there—supremely of all the East—to kill is a small offence. In any case what could I do? It had to be his life or mine!” Then he went on to say that such explorations as he had embarked on were not to be entered into lightly if one had qualms as to the taking of life. That the explorer in savage places holds, day and night, his life in his hand; and if he is not prepared for every emergency, he should not attempt such adventures.

  Meet Burton if ever you may, Caine; but here let me resume my red tale, saying:-

  So it was that, with a tool wholly out of scale to the task, I cut the band holding Henry’s correspondence and scattered the lot of it upon the desk. Amidst this mass of scribbled supplication and sycophancy—such was my mood—there stood a silver frame featuring Florence and our nine-year-old Noel: la famille, whom I last saw some months ago as they stood quayside, waving as the S.S. Britannic set out to sea with all the Lyceum Co. aboard.

  See me, Caine: There I sat at my desk in the Brunswick Hotel, naught before me but hours of sleep-depriving work to be done amidst a framed reminder of a family that is far away in every sense. That Noel is nine I know all too well, for I missed the related festivities December last, the Company having been summoned to Sandringham on short notice, Prince Eddy asking, nay commanding, that Irving please the Queen with some bits from the Bard and the second act of The Bells, in which H.I. leaves not a stick of scenery unchewed. Nine years of life, and Noel, it seems, hardly knows me. (Tell me differently as regards your Ralph, please.) Indeed, I shall admit to you, friend Tommy, a certain shame as regards my son: His English is accented, for he has learned it neither from myself nor his mother but rather a governess come over from Dieppe. Is that not shaming, Caine? Of course, I might enter a plea of not guilty, or rather not present, and blame the owl’s hours I keep at Irving’s insistence, but still there is shame in such filial distancing, whether the blame be his mother’s or mine.

  And as for Florence Balcombe Stoker? (I hear your kind inquiry, Caine.) Well, she is beautiful still, and portraitists clamor to capture her on canvas—she writes that she has lately sat for Whistler—but ours has long been what Noel’s Mlle Dupont would term un mariage blanc,12 and whilst we are apart, we conduct said marriage via telegraph with no appreciable loss of warmth and far fewer stops. (A good line, that. Must take care not to utter it in front of the larcenous Wilde when next we meet!)

  Alas & alack, still I urged myself toward work on the night in question. Stoker will see to it, as Henry is wont to say. Straightaway.

  There the letters lay in disarray. Would I sort them, answering by date of receipt, as typically I did, or would I cull from the lot those from persons most prominent? Perhaps I’d finger them, feeling for that thickness which betokens an invitation. I had settled on the latter course of action—lest any RSVPs be overlooked—when, in the course of shuffling the correspondence accordingly, I came upon a letter from the American Secretary of War. This I read first, for it bore upon our present trip:

  “…a pleasure to accept your offer, Mr. Irving, to play for our cadets,…an exception to the iron rule of discipline which governs the Military and Naval Academies of the United States,” &c. Nothing urgent; no need of reply. And so I set the Secretary’s letter aside; but his is the last letter I remember reading, for:

  I then picked up another that seemed to bear an ambassadorial seal, but when I made to open the envelope with the kukri—yes: the kukri—well…

  With a speed and strength for which I cannot account, I sliced deeply the padded area below my left thumb. The force of the up-slashing knife stunned me well before I felt the resultant pain, saw the resultant blood. It was as though the kukri were in a hand not my own. Indeed, though I saw the act as it happened, I did not realise, or rather did not understand, that I had cut myself until I felt the sting of it, until I saw the skin split and the red fount begin to flow.

  And still I sat staring, staring long after another man would have reacted. I stared as the stain spread upon these very pages, then piled before me and ready for “Henry’s” responses; oh, but that would be the least of the redness. Soon there’d be blood upon the letters themselves, upon the chair, upon the rug, upon the bed; for yes, quite inexplicably, when finally I stood, it was only to wander about the room like an arrow-struck buck.

  I had brought the blade quite close to that blue-green cross-hatching that sits at the wrist, the locus classicus for suicides seeking to marry melancholia to sharpened metal. Had that been my intent? Had the Black Hounds finally tree’d me, as it were, such that I saw no other way out of my present predicament? To you, friend—as to no other—I confess that I do not know.

  When finally I understood that I had cut myself, well…I did nothing commonsensical. I did not summon the hotel physician. Neither did I fashion a tourniquet from a neck-tie or towel. No. Instead I took up a bottle of whisky and went to the window. Throwing high the sash—sprays of blood upon the panes, upon the wall—I sat on the sill, left arm extended out over the city. The cold and the cut conspired: I grew woozy, and were I a man as small as yourself, Caine, and had I lost consciousness, I might well have slipped from that sill. But it was then that I roused myself by pouring the whisky over the cut. Oh, the sting of it, Caine! Yet there I sat, watching as the whisky married my blood and rained down red upon the street, freezing as it fell.

  The snow that had been all the talk for a half-day past had finally begun to fall. The sky was low and leaden, sunless despite the early hour. The rising wind brought the snow onto the sill, into the room. I lay my split flesh upon the sill. If I thought to stanch the flow with the cold of concrete and snow, I succeeded only in staining the sill. Alas, there I sat a long, long while
, watching my out-pulsing blood.

  Finally—being shy of blood, as ever I’ve been—I fell back into the room seeking only to stop its flow. No survival instinct, this: I sought to stop the blood simply because I did not wish to see it any longer.

  In the bathroom I swigged the last of the whisky before letting the bottle fall to shatter upon the tiles. Then the mirror and I shared a long moment that no man need describe to another.

  Coming from the bathroom, slipping upon the blood-slick tiles, I saw the kukri where it lay upon the table. Red, seeming somehow alive. I cannot recall donning my overcoat, but next thing I knew, I was walking out onto Fifth Avenue into the blowing white with the knife in hand.

  Whatever did I mean to do? Did I imagine myself a Mohammedan, searching out some infidel? Or was I myself the infidel deserving of slaughter?

  Here I misremember the facts as they passed; and I can report only that I wandered the streets of the city as they went quiet and white. The Manhattanites sought shelter. Storefronts shuttered. Transit fell still. And there I was, wandering through the blowing white and leaving a blood-red wake.

  The wound, Caine, was of course quite serious. I know that now. And when finally I returned to the Brunswick some several hours later, the hotel surgeon closed it with eleven stitches whilst impressing upon me how lucky I was, how lucky indeed. But as I wandered through the storm, I must have seemed a madman indeed to any who saw me, who saw the red-state of my ill-wrapped hand or the hilt of the knife it yet held. Oh, I am attached to the kukri, true; but still, to have brought it from the Brunswick with me? Was I intent on mutilating myself the more? Questions, Caine. So many questions to which I did not, do not, want the answers.

  I wended southwards through the storm, and next I knew it I sat staring out through the greasy windows of a gin house deep in the bowels of the Bowery. There, having drunk away some small part of the pain, I summoned sense enough to tell the publican the tallest of tales as to what had happened. Of the knife in my pocket I made no mention. I paid her, too, for the provision of a none-too-clean pillowcase fetched down from an upstairs room, the type of room that rents in hourly increments. The kindly, cunning publican—too skilled in lying to swallow mine—nursed me nonetheless: she ripped the pillowcase into strips, washed my still-running wound, and wrapped my hand mummy-tight. As the makeshift bandage reddened right away, she impressed upon me the need to see a surgeon. Indeed she denied my request for an upstairs room, doubtless thinking I meant to die within it, and instead sent a boy out onto the snowy streets to summon a fly.

  I must have let slip the name of the Brunswick, for soon the aforesaid fly had brought me back to the hotel. Hours had elapsed. This was attested to by the depth of the snow that had drifted into the room over the bloodied sill. It was mounded now in the room’s corners. The carpet was white. And the room itself was, of course, frigid beyond description. Still, I dared not touch the window. I dared not touch anything; for now it seemed I’d returned to a murder site. Oh, the red of it all! Only when I knew, knew, that all the red was mine, only then did I summon the hotel surgeon, first breaking a window-pane with a boot: another story to concoct. (Which stories, which lies, Caine, comprise the sum total of the creativity I’ve engaged in of late.)

  While awaiting the surgeon, I sat at the desk on which Henry’s letters were strewn. I was tired, Caine, mortally tired. I cannot say that I was yet myself, not at all. On the subject of Self, however, I can report that through heavy lids I saw an envelope addressed to me. The hand was somehow familiar. Could it be? I stared at the letter, which seemed to gleam now like stream-bed gold, and I dared to hope, dared to dream, that it might be from him, from Whitman.13

  And indeed it was: Word had finally come from the Master himself! How had I missed it when earlier I’d sat shuffling Irving’s correspondence like a cardsharp? How had I failed to recognise a hand so long cherished?

  Of course, I’d written Whitman some months earlier, informing him of the impending tour and asking if finally we might meet. An audience, it would be, Caine, with the Poet of Poets, the Pope of Mickle Street.14 Whitman had responded that he was not wholly well, and that I should write again nearer the desired date of our meeting; this I’d done the week prior. And here now was his response. I tore the envelope with my teeth and shook the note free.

  “FRIEND ABRAHAM,” began his note, the block letters of the salutation fast ceding to a scrawl: “My dear young man.—Your letters have long been most welcome to me—welcome to me as a Man and then as an Author—I don’t know which most. You have done well to write me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately all these years.—And now you are in Need.”

  Had I written as much, or had the Master inferred it? I cannot recall; but doubtless I had hoped that Whitman would somehow save me. I wonder now if he hasn’t, for how I hold to his words! I will re-build my life upon them, Caine. Let it be a new Stoker you see when next we meet, when next you’re able to cut for me a slice of your London leisure, busy though you must be. The words to which I refer? Of course you will wonder, and so:

  Whitman’s handwriting was familiar to me from his many replies to the letters I’d written him whilst at Trinity,15 but now I found age in its forward slope, frailty in the slashed-at T ’s and dotless I ’s. I’d heard it said that Whitman was not well. I’d even heard his death rumoured on more than one occasion. And so I’d neither pressed for my audience with a second appeal nor held out much hope of having one granted. That said, reading Whitman’s denial of my request was a blow, a blow indeed:

  “My physique is entirely shatter’d—doubtless permanently—from paralysis, age and sundry ailments—And so it is, FRIEND ABRAHAM”—Whitman has always enjoyed teasing my name out so—“I cannot tell you to come at once to Camden. It seems that we two friends shall part this plane never having said Hello, but neither will we have to bear a last Good-bye. Death is a breath upon my neck now.—So it is that I return your younger letters under separate cover. Let it be you and not the coming crawlers o’er my estate who decide their Fate.” And indeed I found said packet amidst the massed letters.

  “I see the pain in your pen,” concluded Whitman. “And to assuage it I can only offer this—that each man must somehow sign God’s name to the letter of his life. Do so yourself, FRIEND. Good-bye.”

  Here then were my last words from Whitman. Worse: They told of his imminent death.16 Need I confess that tears fell anew, Caine? Here was news most unwelcome. My heart shattered as the whisky bottle had. And amidst the most jagged shards were a few Wildean ones, I confess it; for Wilde lately went to Mickle Street for an hour of claret and converse! It is a tale I’ve too often heard him tell. Oh, but pish, pish, to hell with Wilde. Better to read again the Master’s admonition:-

  “Each man must sign God’s name to the letter of his life. Do so yourself.”

  However will I, Caine, when my own name pales so, and my life seems absent of all purpose?

  Alas. Alack & Alas.

  Oh, but glad I am that Whitman took it upon himself to settle my letters. A reader with neither sympathy nor understanding might see in them a means of embarrassing me, or worse. More about said letters anon; but first let me tell the present tale to its end:

  The surgeon’s knock gave me a start. The man entered when I bade him do so, only to stand there, stupefied, staring at the bloodied sill, wall, sheets, &c. Soon he fell to shivering from both the sights and the chill. Luckily, the staffs of such hotels as the Brunswick are well schooled in discretion. Their guests pay a premium for its provision. Still, in the course of the extempore surgery, I sought to explain myself with sketchy references to whisky—now the room reeked of it—and stuck windows, &c. The medico listened with professional sympathy and made no further mention of the blood. Indeed, having sewn my skin, he offered to arrange for a second suite, one in which I could stay the night whilst the present room was ranged, set right. Soon I’d signed myself into these rooms as “Walter Camden,” bringi
ng with me naught but the passel of letters returned by Whitman and a draught which the surgeon said would help in the summoning of sleep. I thanked the man, stating, quite plainly, that “Mr. Irving need not be bothered with…all this.” And though the surgeon refused recompense, his nod told me I’d secured his silence.

  Thusly did I settle into that second suite saying To hell with Henry Irving, too, and about to re-read my old letters. You’ll not wonder, Caine, that I called up a bottle of the Brunswick’s best to ease the twin pains of surgery and squirm-inducing self-assessment; for I wrote the first of the letters sixteen years ago, when, aged twenty-four, I was certain, certain I’d found in the Master’s work words with which to anchor my soul.

  “I am,” I’d written to Whitman, “a man of less than half your age, reared a conservative in a conservative country, and who has heard your name cried down by the great mass of people who mention it.” And so it was at Trinity then: one read Whitman in private. I went on:17

  “I am writing to you because you are different from other men. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master…. You have shaken off the shackles, and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still—but I have no wings.” Mercifully, I grew somewhat more prosaic and presented The Facts which then seemed to me pertinent, though why I presumed Whitman would be interested in my biography I’ve no idea. The presumptions of youth, I suppose.