The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar's Tale

by Reggie Oliver

  “I once asked Judas why the Master chose these fishermen as his closest familiars.

  “‘He speaks in such a way,’ replied Judas, ‘that the simple understand what those with greater minds fail to grasp. But what the Master does not see is that after he is gone — yes, he will die in the end like the rest of us — if his teaching and example is to endure, it will need men of intellect to form it into a coherent body of thought. The survival of belief and truth is dependent on organisation. The truth may be diminished by it, but that is in the nature of things.’

  “I wondered if he were right, and I still wonder. But he knew, as the other disciples did not, that our Master could not continue as an itinerant preacher, collecting crowds wherever he went, leading men and women away from safety. A crisis was sure to come. There would be a moment when he would either defeat the forces that were amassing against him or succumb to them. It was Iscariot’s view that to delay that moment would be to risk the greatest defeat of all.

  “It was the night before we entered Jerusalem. We were sleeping in the open as we often did. The disciples, as usual, had taken up the best positions round the fire while we lesser mortals crouched as near to it as we could. I could not see where the Nazarene was. I was angry at having to scramble for a place a little nearer the warmth. Had I not come to him of my own free will? Cold though it was, I decided that I would move out of the glow and sit alone on the edge of the hill that looked over Jerusalem.

  “A few faint lights flickered and moved in the streets. I felt that the time had come to leave the Nazarene and live my own life again. I had followed the Master for that one elusive phrase, ‘eternal life’. There had been times when, listening to him, I felt myself about to grasp the secret, but it had slipped away. Some quirk of my own intellect perhaps had tricked me, for the simple heard and believed. Presently I was aware of someone beside me, the Master. He sat down on the ground next to me and was silent for a long time as he hugged his knees and his eyes stared at the little lights below us. I wanted to speak and ask him a thousand questions, but I would not disturb him. No. He must break the silence. I would show him that I was free of his fascination.

  “We sat together for close on an hour without exchanging a word. Occasionally I glanced at him. Still he stared, his look impenetrable and his immobility absolute. He did not show by so much as a flicker that he was aware of my presence, and it made me rage. Every wounded feeling rose up in rebellion against him. What had he that I had not? Why should I give up everything for him and have so little to show for it? There he was, a little man with great round eyes, devouring the darkness with them. I knew his teaching now. I would go elsewhere and learn from others. Then he spoke.

  “‘Why is it that you follow me, Issachar?’ he said.

  “I was shocked. It was as if his voice had come out of my private thoughts. ‘Do you need to ask, Master?’ I replied, trying to play with him.

  “‘I do not need to,’ he said. ‘But you do. I ask the question for your sake.’

  “‘Do you have doubts about my reasons?’ I replied, still trying to gain an advantage.

  “‘What are your reasons?’ he asked. This time his enquiry was inescapable.

  “‘You have the secret of eternal life. I want it.’

  “‘Have you not already received it?’ he said.

  “‘No, Master.’

  “‘Then what makes you think you ever will?’

  “‘It is yours to give, Master,’ I said.

  “‘Only to those who know how to receive it.’

  “‘Then teach me how to.’ I was not looking at him but I thought I felt him smile.

  “‘You think wisdom is like a cup of wine or a piece of bread that can be taken and consumed easily and without reflection. But no man can receive unless he knows truly what he desires. And a man cannot know truly unless he knows with the heart and mind together. That is why I say that to him who has it shall be given, but from him that has not it shall be taken away even that which he has.’

  “‘Yes. I understand, master,’ I said. And I thought I did. There was a long silence and the sky grew grey at the edges. Morning approached. The Master spoke again.

  “‘Issachar, when I am dead, will you see that I am buried?’

  “‘But you will never die, master,’ I said.

  “‘The son of man must die in order that he may live,’ he said. Has your family a rock tomb cut in the hillside near here?’ I said that was so, astonished at his knowledge. “‘Bury me there,’ he said.

  “‘Show me the secret of eternal life, then.’

  “‘Do you bargain with me? Very well. Eternal life shall be yours and you may come to know its secret. But in time you will see that to possess something without knowing its meaning is the greatest burden. And you shall wait till I come for you again.’

  “All this was madness to me. I left him as he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem and went back to shoemaking. I was scorned on all sides, by some for leaving the Master, and by others for joining him in the first place, but it would have been useless to stay, since from that time onwards the Master was seeing no-one in private but the Twelve.

  “One afternoon Iscariot came to me. Without ceremony he led me to the back of my shop. He seemed in a curious state: excitement, anger and desperation were alive in every movement of his body.

  “‘I have seen fear on his face,’ said Judas. ‘I never expected it. When the priests and the scribes were questioning him I saw fear. Twice he has withdrawn himself completely from us and on the second occasion I found him myself in a friend’s orchard, not praying, but with his knees up to his chin and shivering like a child before a beating. He was afraid. And now I am afraid for his fear.’

  ‘“But why?’

  “‘Don’t you see? If he runs away everything is lost. I am the only one who understands this.’ He told me that he intended to go to the Temple authorities and let them know where they might take him privately without meeting the opposition of a crowd. In this way, Judas said, he would force the master into the path of his true destiny so that he could not run away.

  “And so it happened, as it is written, that our Master was taken in the moment of his greatest fear and then was crucified. I did not see his death — I too was afraid — and so it came about that the Master was buried in another’s tomb.

  “As for Iscariot, the story is that he hanged himself. He was hanged, it is true, but not by his own hands. The hands that did it belonged to the Rock on which the Master built his church. Do not look so startled. You may disbelieve what I say if it suits you.”

  Let me say clearly — in case this narrative falls into other hands while I am alive — that I did not, nor do I believe the story of Issachar the Jew. I simply record it for posterity and deplore the infamous blasphemy of its Substance.

  “Not that I blame the Fisherman,” Issachar went on, “for Iscariot had no right to assume that the Master would run away. What drove him to betrayal was vanity and a taste for controlling events. His fears may not have been groundless, but there is also faith...

  “As for me, I never saw the Master again, nor did I bury him. Having deserted him, I felt no longer worthy of his promises of eternal life. I lived on and my hair grew grey and my skin withered as others did, but I did not fall ill. All round me my friends died and the face of my country changed, but I lived on. I was shunned by the young because of my great age. Those who had known my youth and still survived resented my continuing health, and so, in my ninetieth year, I began to travel. I found I could go for days on end without food or water. Burning deserts and icy mountains caused me pain but did not destroy me. My hair grew long and white. Strangers avoided me. It was in my hundredth year that I came to know I could not die.

  “Life became a burden and I decided to destroy myself. My body was withered but hard and resilient as steel. I suspected that eternal life was my destiny but hardly dared face the horror of it. Finally I took myself up onto a high mountain and hur
led myself off it. I felt my body fall and crash against rocks. I kept hoping with each jolt of excruciating pain that I would lose consciousness. When, after an age of agony, I came to rest at the bottom I must have passed into a kind of sleep. Waking, I found myself with a young body again and black hair, much as you see me now. For every hundred years I regain my youth and experience yet again the slow deterioration of age.

  “I will not tell you all that I have seen since then. I would still be talking to you on your deathbed. I can only say that, as the prophet says, there is nothing new under the sun. Men are still as ignorant as they ever were. And death, whatever may come after, is the great blessing. I know now what the Master truly meant: eternal life is not found in time but out of time, and I am Time’s prisoner until I am released.”

  “I will pray for your release,” I said. And occasionally, when I remember, I have prayed for him. Once or twice since that time I have heard of a Wandering Jew, now in Rome, then in Madrid, once even in England. It might not be the same person, for he always has a different name, but the same strange stories are told about him.

  In the following days, as we walked along, Issachar told me many things. He had been in his time a monk, a soldier, a great scholar, once even the ruler of a small nation, but always his immortality had dogged him: he had brought bad luck wherever he went and was forced to move on. A thousand times he had courted death — on the high seas, in battle, at the hands of executioners or in the torture chamber — but each time mortality eluded him. Once he had been decapitated by order of the Sultan in Constantinople. He described the sensation as being excruciatingly painful but, at the same time, liberating and thrilling. The separated members of his body were thrown into the Bosphorus where they were once more united in a most mysterious way. He was picked out of the sea by a passing slave trader bound for Alexandria and thereafter spent ten years in the galleys. Even after a hundred years I could detect the slight scar that circled his throat.

  His company passed the time admirably on the journey, and I think it relieved his misery a little to tell stories, but I could not help in the end feeling oppressed by his accounts of constant ill fortune. On the other hand I have, as a result of knowing him, always accepted illness or debility with a measure of calm. Pain is the messenger of Death and must be welcomed accordingly.

  We went our separate ways at last when Verney, the dwarf and I turned towards Bohemia while he and his companions made for Poland and the borders of Russia. Before we parted he gave me some advice which I have cause to remember: “The land where you are going is a land of extremes. Savagery and sainthood live side by side, sometimes in the same person. Beware of this. As a teacher you bear a heavy responsibility, for the corruption of the best is always the worst.”

  IV

  And so we came out of the German States and into Bohemia. We left the level roads and the placid wayside inns and entered a land of mountains and brigandage. Our paths plunged through dense pine forests, up rocky cataracts and over shaggy mountain meadows grazed by only a few wild goats and sometimes deer. These last were often dispatched by Razendoringer with his crossbow, so that we were rarely short of food even when we had no roof over our heads. Fortunately it was a hot part of early summer and we suffered little from sleeping under the stars. One day however, having lost some time when one of our horses went lame, we found ourselves towards evening toiling up a steep path. In the valley below the sun was sinking blood red under a grey swag of cloud. Gusts of rain began to sweep towards us and soon we were in a pelting hailstorm. The bitterness of the wind and weather was all the sharper for its sudden appearance.

  Desperately we looked for any sign of shelter. It was Verney who saw, perched below an overhanging rock, a solitary house of stone with smoke curling from the chimney. Little windows, roughly glazed, punctured its walls. Glints of candle light came from them. The mere sight of the place warmed our hearts and we made for it without any intimation of danger.

  But the figure who answered our knocking was not calculated to encourage us. It was a woman, so vast in her proportions, with such powerful shoulders and thick, brawny limbs, that she would have been a match for almost any man. Her face was a great slab of flesh, the eyes and nose were small and meaningless, but her mouth was big and full of healthy teeth. Straight tow-coloured hair was scraped back from her great red forehead.

  She looked at us steadily without either welcome or reproach in her eyes. By means of gesture I indicated that we needed shelter and food, and would gladly pay for it. Without a word she ushered us in. Razendoringer went to stable the horses. Presently there entered a man who, I gathered, was the woman’s husband.

  He was certainly a match for her. Over six foot, and as broad as he was high, he was the most massive man I have ever seen. A great brown beard flowed over his chest and his hair was thick and reddish, except on the top of his head where he was bald. At first he glared at us, then, after a word from his wife, he began to exude a savage geniality.

  When Razendoringer entered from stabling the horses the man looked at him and roared with laughter. The dwarf stood his ground and stared back at the giant unflinchingly. The man turned and muttered something to his wife. Razendoringer stiffened and then tugged at the dripping sleeve of my coat.

  “Learned Doctor, we must go. It is not safe here.”

  “But how—?” I said, and then we were prevented from further talk by the sight of steaming food. Razendoringer’s remark made me uneasy since I had learned to trust his wisdom more than any other man’s. Verney paid no attention. He was fascinated by this pair; indeed it was hard not to be reminded of childhood tales of the Giant and Giantess.

  Each of us was given a great fragment of excellent bread and a bowl containing a thick meat stew, highly spiced and very palatable. Some of the meat was still attached to big pieces of bone. I tried to ask from what animal the meat had come but was met with either feigned or real incomprehension. With great grins and coarse gestures the man and his wife merely encouraged us to eat more heartily.

  Having satisfied our hunger our hosts offered us a drink from a barrel. It was a kind of beer, I think, and very strong. Verney and I drank sparingly of it, Razendoringer hardly at all, though out of politeness we made a great show of enjoying it.

  Presently we began to show signs of tiredness so our hosts showed us to a room upstairs. It had no bed in it but was dry with one small window and its floorboards were almost covered with a great number of sacks, some filled with straw, some with other materials that I could not identify from the feel. There, after many expressions of gratitude to the man and his wife, we lay down and presently I was asleep. The last thing that I heard was the sound of the two giants talking in the room below.

  Almost immediately it seemed I was being roughly shaken into consciousness. It was Razendoringer and he was carrying his crossbow which he had fetched from our baggage in the stables, having squeezed through the little window in our room and climbed back unobserved.

  “Learned doctor, wake! Those two! They mean to do away with us. They are robbers and worse.”

  I asked for an explanation.

  “You noticed I grew suspicious of them before dinner because of a remark of the husband’s I overheard and understood. I know the Bohemian language well, having been, in my youth, one of a band of strolling entertainers in these parts. Now when you were asleep I went to the landing outside our door from which, through cracks in the boarding, one can see into the room below. There I heard the man and his wife plotting our downfall.”

  “Are you sure of this?” I asked. Verney, who was also awake, merely scratched his head and stared.

  “If it is further proof you require, learned doctor, look in the sacks you are lying on.” And instantly he put his knife into one of those that did not contain straw. He made a long tear in it and began to pull out clothing of all kinds, some rich and costly, some poor and homespun. I did the same to another sack and, by the light of a candle, saw that many of the i
tems were stained with blood.

  “We must go at once,” I said.

  “I presume that window is our means of escape,” said Verney.

  “Can you not see?” said Razendoringer. “It is too small for you to pass through. No. We must rid the world of these evil vermin. Take the candle and follow me.” He shook his crossbow threateningly. Such was his air of confidence that we followed him without demur. Outside our room there was a narrow corridor panelled in wood on both sides and this led to the stairs. On bare feet, and terrified of the slightest creak, we crept out. Then Razendoringer eased out a loose panel on one side of the corridor and thereby gave us a clear view down into the main room where we had dined.

  There, in the ruddy glow of the firelight, sat the man and his wife facing each other across the table. They were engaged in some sort of dispute and from time to time they took great draughts of their strong beer from wooden mugs. From my own rudimentary Bohemian and from Razendoringer’s subsequent recollections I am able to reconstruct the following dialogue:

  The Wife: I say strangle them. I have here a good length of strong, slender rope. It is a clean way of killing and though it may cause the soiling of the underclothes, it leaves the more valuable garments completely free from stain, especially those of blood which are most troublesome.