She was tall and handsome rather than beautiful, with a knowing look, her auburn hair swept back and down across a dress of sheer green gossamer, with jewels at her throat, and nothing at all on her feet. She stood with her left side turned to me, so that I could not help but notice the exaggerated posture of her breasts. It was as though she intended them to incite my admiration. The effect was indecent, but nothing to the effect produced when she turned to face me directly, for the front panel of the dress was cut away below her waist to reveal—well, her entire personal anatomy. Stupified by her brazenness, wondering if she was perhaps ill, I found myself unable to move as she approached. Upon reaching my chair she slid the outstretched fingers of her right hand inside my shirt, shearing off each of the buttons with her nails. I was acutely aware that the naked part of her was very close to me. Then, reaching inside the waistband of my trousers, she grasped at the very root of my reluctantly extended manhood and brought it forward, bursting through the garment’s fly-buttons. When I saw that she intended to lower her lips to this core of my being, every fibre of my body strained to resist her brazen advances.
Here, though, my mind clouds with indistinct but disagreeable impressions. A distant cry of anger is heard, the woman retreats in fear and fury, and I awake, ashamed to discover my clothing in considerable disarray, the victim of some delirious carphology.
~ * ~
From The Journal of Jonathan Harker, 7 October —.
The snow has started falling. During these increasingly frequent squalls, all sights and sounds are obscured by a deadening white veil that seals us in the sky. From my bedroom window I can see that the road to the castle is becoming obscured. If the Count does not return soon, I really do not see how I shall be able to leave. I suppose I could demand that a carriage be fetched from the nearest village, but I fear such an action would offend my absent host, who must surely reappear any day now.
I am worried about my Mina. I have not heard from her inside a month, and yet if I am truthful part of me is glad to be imprisoned here within the castle, for the library continues to reveal paths I feel no Englishman has ever explored.
I do not mean to sound so mysterious, but truly something weighs upon my mind. It is this; by day I follow the same routine, logging the books and entering them into the great ledgers my host provided for the purpose, but each night, after I have supped and read my customary pages before the fire, I allow myself to fall into a light sleep, and then—
—then my freedom begins as I either dream or awaken to such unholy horrors and delights I can barely bring myself to describe them.
Some nights bring swarms of bats, musty-smelling airborne rodents with leathery wings, needle teeth and blind eyes. Sometimes the ancestors of Vlad Drakul appear at the windows in bloody tableaux, frozen in the act of hacking off the howling heads of their enemies. Men appear skewered on tempered spikes, thrusting themselves deeper onto the razor-poles in the throes of an obscene pleasure. Even the Count himself pays his respects, his bony alabaster face peering at me through a wintry mist as though trying to bridge the chasm between our two civilizations. And sometimes the women come.
Ah, the women.
These females are like none we have in England. They do not accompany themselves on the pianoforte, they do not sew demurely by the fire. Their prowess is focused in an entirely different area. They kneel and disrobe each other before me, and caress themselves, and turn their rumps toward me in expectation. I would like to tell you that I resist, that I think of my fiancée waiting patiently at home, and recite psalms from my Bible to strengthen my will, but I do not, and so am damned by the actions taken to slake my venomous desires.
Who are these people who come to me in nightly fever-dreams? Why do they suit my every morbid mood so? It is as if the Count knows my innermost thoughts and caters for them accordingly. Yet I know for a fact that he has not returned to the castle. When I look from the window I can see that there are no cart-tracks on the road outside. The snow remains entirely unbroken.
There are times now when I do not wish to leave this terrible place, for to do so would mean forsaking the library. And yet, presumably, it is to be packed up and shipped to London, and this gives me hope, that I might travel with the volumes and protect them from division. For the strength of a library exists in the sum of its books. Only by studying it—indeed, only by reading every single edition contained within—can one hope to divine the true nature of its owner.
~ * ~
From The Journal of Jonathan Harker, 15 November—.
Somewhere between dreams and wakefulness, I now know that there is another state. A limbo-life more imagined than real. A land of phantoms and sensations. It is a place I visit each night after darkness falls. Sometimes it is sensuous, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes foul beyond redemption. It extends only to the borders of the library, and its inhabitants, mostly in states of undressed arousal, are perfumed with excrement. These loathsome creatures insult, entice, distract, disgrace, shame and seduce me, clutching at my clothes until I am drawn amongst them, indistinguishable from them, enthralled by their touch, degraded by my own eagerness.
I think I am ill.
By day, my high stone world is once more quiet and rational. Would that it were not, for there is no comfort to be had from the news it brings me. The road leading to and from the castle is now quite impassable. It would take a team of mountaineers to scale the sharp gradient of the rock face beneath us. The Count has failed to return, and of his impending plans there is no word. My task in the library is nearly over. The books—all save one single final shelf -have been quantified and, in many cases, explored.
I begin to understand the strangely parasitic nature of my host. His thirst for knowledge and his choice of literature betray his true desires. There are volumes in many languages here, but of the ones I can read, first editions of Nodier’s Infernalia, d’Argen’s Lettres Juives and Viatte’s Sources Occultes du Romantisme are most familiar. Certain medical periodicals and pertinent copies of The London Journal add subtler shades to my mental portrait of the Count. Of course I knew the folk-tales about his ancestry. They are bound within the history of his people. How could one travel through this country and not hear them? In their native language they do not seem so fanciful, and here in the castle, confabulations take on substantiality. I have heard and read how the Count’s forefathers slaughtered the offspring of their enemies and drank their blood for strength—who has not? Why, tales of Eastern barbarism have reached the heart of London society. But I had not considered the more lurid legends; how the royal descendants lived on beyond death, how they needed no earthly sustenance, how their senses were so finely attuned that they could divine bad fortune in advance. Nor had I considered the consequence of such fables; that, should their veracity be proven, they might in the Count’s case suggest an inherited illness of the kind suffered by royal albinos, a dropsical disease of the blood that keeps him from the light, an anaemia that blanches his eyes and dries his veins, that causes meat to stick in his throat, that drives him from the noisy heat of humanity to the cool dark sanctum of his sick-chamber.
But if it is merely a medical condition, why am I beset with bestial fantasies? What power could the Count possess to hold me in his thrall? I find it harder each day to recall his appearance, for the forbidden revelations of the night have all but overpowered my sense of reality. And yet his essence is here in the library, imbued within each page of his collection. Perhaps I am not ill, but mad. I fear my senses have awoken too sharply, and my rational mind is reeling with their weight.
I have lost much of my girth in the last six weeks. I have always been thin, but the gaunt image that glares back at me in the glass must surely belong to a sickly, aged relation. I appear as a bundle of blanched sticks by day. I have no strength. I live only for the nights. Beneath the welcoming winter moon my flesh fills, my spirit becomes engorged with an unwholesome strength, and I am sound once more.
&
nbsp; I really must try to get away from here.
~ * ~
From The Journal of Jonathan Harker, 18 December—.
The Count has finally returned, paradoxically bringing fresh spirits into the castle. For the life of me I cannot see how he arrived here, as one section of the pathway below has clearly fallen away into the valley. Last night he came down to dinner, and was in most excellent health. His melancholy mood had lifted, and he was eager to converse. He seemed physically taller, his posture more erect. His travels had taken him on many adventures, so he informed me as he poured himself a goblet of heavy claret, but now he was properly restored to his ancestral home, and would be in attendance for the conclusion of my work.
I had not told him I was almost done, although I supposed he might have intuited as much from a visit to the library. He asked that we might finish the work together, before the next sunrise. I was very tired—indeed, at the end of the meal I required Klove’s helping hand to rise from my chair—but agreed to his demand, knowing that there were but a handful of books left for me to classify.
Soon we were seated in the great library, warming ourselves before the fire, where Klove had set bowls of brandy out for us.
It was when I studied his travelling clothes that I realized the truth. His boots and oil-cloth cape lay across the back of the chair where he had supposedly deposited them on his return. As soon as I saw that the boots were new, the soles polished and unworn, I instinctively intuited that the Count had not been away, and that he had spent the last six months here in the castle with me. I knew I had not imagined what I had seen and done. We sat across from each other in two great armchairs, cradling our brandies, and I nervously pondered my next move, for it was clear to me that the Count could sense my unease.
“I could not approach you, Jonathan,” he explained, divining my thoughts as precisely as an entymologist skewers a wasp. “You were simply too English, too Christian, too filled with pious platitudes. The reek of your pride was quite overpowering. I saw the prayerbook by your bed, the cross around your neck, the dowdy little virgin in your locket. I knew it would be simpler to sacrifice you upon the completion of your task.” His eyes watched mine intently. “To suck your blood and throw your drained carcass over the battlements to the wolves.” I stared back, refusing to flinch, not daring to move a single nerve-end.
“But,” he continued with a heartfelt sigh, “I did so need a good man to tend my library. In London I will easily find loyal emissaries to do my bidding and manage my affairs, but the library needs a keeper. Klove has no feeling for language. To be the custodian of such a rare repository of ideas requires tact and intellect. I decided instead to let you discover me, and in doing so, discover yourself. That was the purpose of the library.” He raised his arm, fanning it over the shelves. “The library made you understand. You see, the pages of the books are poisoned. They just need warm hands to activate them, the hands of the living. The inks leaked into your skin and brought your inner self to life. That is why Klove always wears gloves in this room. You are the only other living person here.”
I looked down at my stained and fragrant fingers, noticing for the first time how their skin had withered into purple blotches.
“The books are dangerous to the Christian soul, malignant in their print and in their ideas. Now you have read my various histories, shared my experiences, and know I am corrupt, yet incorruptible. Perhaps you see that we are not so far apart. There is but one barrier left to fall between us.” He had risen from his chair without my noticing, and circled behind me. His icy tapered fingers came to rest on my neck, loosening the stiff white collar of my shirt. I heard a collar stud rattle onto the floor beneath my chair.
“After tonight you will no longer need to use my library for the fulfilment of your fantasies,” he said, his steel-cold mouth descending to my throat, “for your fantasies are to be made flesh, just as the nights will replace your days.” I felt the first hot stab of pain as his teeth met in my skin. Through a haze I saw the Count wipe his lips with the back of a crimson hand. “You will make a very loyal custodian, little Englishman,” he said, descending again.
~ * ~
Here the account ends. The library did not accompany Count Dracula on his voyage to England, but remained behind in his castle, where it continued to be tended by Mr Harker until his eventual demise many, many years later.
<
~ * ~
THOMAS LIGOTTI
The Heart of Count Dracula, Descendant of Attila, Scourge of God
THOMAS LIGOTTI is one of the foremost contemporary authors of supernatural horror literature. In this genre, he has been classed with Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.
His first collection of stories, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was published in 1986 (revised 2010). Other collections include Noctuary (1994) and Teatro Grottesco (2007). The recipient of numerous awards, including the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker award for his collection The Nightmare Factory (1996) and short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002), in 2010 Ligotti published The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, a study of the intersection between pessimistic philosophy and supernatural fiction.
Count Dracula travels to England, where he is about to lose his heart...
~ * ~
COUNT DRACULA RECALLS how he was irresistibly drawn to Mina Harker (nee Murray), the wife of a London real estate agent. Her husband had sold him a place called Carfax. This was a dilapidated structure next door to a noisy institution for the insane. Their incessant racket was not undisturbing to one who was, among other things, seeking peace. An inmate name Renfield was the worst offender.
One time the Harkers had Count Dracula over for the evening, and Jonathan (his agency’s top man) asked him how he liked Carfax with regard to location, condition of the house and property, and just all around. “Ah, such architecture,” said Count Dracula while gazing uncontrollably at Mina, “is truly frozen music.”
Count Dracula is descended from the noble race of the Szekelys, a people of many bloodlines, all of them fierce and warlike. He fought for his country against the invading Turks. He survived wars, plagues, the hardships of an isolated dwelling in the Carpathian Mountains. And for centuries, at least five and maybe more, he has managed to perpetuate, with the aid of supernatural powers, his existence as a vampire. This existence came to an end in the late 1800s. “Why her?” Count Dracula often asked himself.
Why the entire ritual, when one really thinks about it. What does a being who can transform himself into a bat, a wolf, a wisp of smoke, anything at all, and who knows the secrets of the dead (perhaps of death itself) want with this oily and overheated nourishment? Who would make such a stipulation for immortality! And, in the end, where did it get him? Lucy Westenra’s soul was saved, Renfield’s soul was never in any real danger ... but Count Dracula, one of the true children of the night from which all things are born, has no soul. Now he has only this same insatiable thirst, though he is no longer free to alleviate it. (“Why her? There were no others such as her.”) Now he has only this painful, perpetual awareness that he is doomed to wriggle beneath this infernal stake which those fools—Harker, Seward, Van Helsing, and the others—have stuck in his trembling heart. (“Her fault, her fault.”) And now he hears voices, common voices, peasants from the countryside.
“Over here,” one of them shouts, “in this broken down convent or whatever it is. I think I’ve found something we can give to those damned dogs. Good thing, too. Christ, I’m sick of their endless whining.”
<
~ * ~
MANDY SLATER
Daddy’s Little Girl
MANDY SLATER has lived most of her life in Canada, but in 1994 returned to her native England and presently lives in North London. Mandy Slater’s anthology appearances have included Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, Sex Macabre, 100 Twisted Tales of Torment, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams, Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror
and Zombie Apocalypse!
Additionally, she was the dialogue scriptwriter for the BBC’s The Animals of Farthing Wood CD-ROM and a contributor to the 2001 World Fantasy Convention CD-ROM.
She has also worked as an assistant film publicist in Romania (on Last Gasp, starring Robert Patrick and Joanna Pacula) while, as a media journalist, researcher and photographer, she has contributed to X-Pose, Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Locus, Sci-Fi Entertainment, Sci-Fi Wire, SFX, Science Fiction Chronicle, Sci-Fi Magazine and several volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series.
She lives in North London and currently works in PR & Communication for a well-known mobile phone company.
The decades pass, and Dracula travels widely, never staying for more than three or four years in one place. But now his past is about to come back to haunt him ...
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 5