Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (54 page)

And it was as I sat thus that I became aware of a white figure that stole out from the castle by a door I could not see, and, with hands clasped, ran swiftly across the terrace to the wood. I had but a momentary glance, but I felt convinced that the figure was that of Jessica Davenant.

And instinctively I knew that some great danger was imminent. It was, I think, the suggestion of despair conveyed by those clasped hands. At any rate, I did not hesitate. My window was some height from the ground, but the wall below was ivy-clad and afforded good foot-hold. The descent was quite easy. I achieved it, and was just in time to take up the pursuit in the right direction, which was into the thickness of the wood that clung to the slope of the hill.

I shall never forget that wild chase. There was just sufficient room to enable me to follow the rough path, which, luckily, since I had now lost sight of my quarry, was the only possible way that she could have taken; there were no intersecting tracks, and the wood was too thick on either side to permit of deviation.

And the wood seemed full of dreadful sound—moaning and wailing and hideous laughter. The wind, of course, and the screaming of night birds—once I felt the fluttering of wings in close proximity to my face. But I could not rid myself of the thought that I, in turn, was being pursued, that the forces of hell were combined against me.

The path came to an abrupt end on the border of the sombre lake that I have already mentioned. And now I realised that I was indeed only just in time, for before me, plunging knee-deep in the water, I recognised the white-clad figure of the woman I had been pursuing. Hearing my footsteps, she turned her head, and then threw up her arms and screamed. Her red hair fell in heavy masses about her shoulders, and her face, as I saw it that moment, was hardly human for the agony of remorse that it depicted.

“Go!” she screamed. “For God’s sake let me die!”

But I was by her side almost as she spoke. She struggled with me—sought vainly to tear herself from my clasp—implored me, with panting breath, to let her drown.

“It’s the only way to save him!” she gasped. “Don’t you understand that I am a thing accursed? For it is I—I—who have sapped his lifeblood! I know it now, the truth has been revealed to me tonight! I am a vampire, without hope in this world or the next, so for his sake—for the sake of his unborn child—let me die—let me die!”

Was ever so terrible an appeal made? Yet I—what could I do? Gently I overcame her resistance and drew her back to shore. By the time I reached it she was lying a dead weight upon my arm. I laid her down upon a mossy bank, and, kneeling by her side, gazed into her face.

And then I knew that I had done well. For the face I looked upon was not that of Jessica the vampire, as I had seen it that afternoon, it was the face of Jessica, the woman whom Paul Davenant had loved.

And later Aylmer Vance had his tale to tell.

“I waited,” he said, “until I knew that Davenant was asleep, and then I stole into his room to watch by his bedside. And presently she came, as I guessed she would, the vampire, the accursed thing that has preyed upon the souls of her kin, making them like to herself when they too have passed into Shadowland, and gathering sustenance for her horrid task from the blood of those who are alien to her race. Paul’s body and Jessica’s soul—it is for one and the other, Dexter, that we have fought.”

“You mean,” I hesitated, “Zaida, the witch!”

“Even so,” he agreed. “Here is the evil spirit that has fallen like a blight upon the house of MacThane. But now I think she may be exorcised for ever.”

“Tell me.”

“She came to Paul Davenant last night, as she must have done before, in the guise of his wife. You know that Jessica bears a strong resemblance to her ancestress. He opened his arms, but she was foiled of her prey, for I had taken my precautions; I had placed That upon Davenant’s breast while he slept which robbed the vampire of her power of ill. She sped wailing from the room—a shadow—she who a minute before had looked at him with Jessica’s eyes and spoken to him with Jessica’s voice. Her red lips were Jessica’s lips, and they were close to his when his eyes opened and he saw her as she was—a hideous phantom of the corruption of the ages. And so the spell was removed, and she fled away to the place whence she had come—”

He paused. “And now?” I inquired.

“Blackwick Castle must be razed to the ground,” he replied. “That is the only way. Every stone of it, every brick, must be ground to powder and burnt with fire, for therein is the cause of all the evil. Davenant has consented.”

“And Mrs. Davenant?”

“I think,” Vance answered cautiously, “that all may be well with her. The curse will be removed with the destruction of the castle. She has not—thanks to you—perished under its influence. She was less guilty than she imagined—herself preyed upon rather than preying. But can’t you understand her remorse when she realised, as she was bound to realise, the part she had played? And the knowledge of the child to come—its fatal inheritance—”

“I understand,” I muttered with a shudder. And then, under my breath, I whispered, “Thank God!”

Bram Stoker

(1847–1912)

B
RAM
S
TOKER WOULD HAVE
been astonished at his current fame—his books analyzed by literary critics, his name appearing in movie titles, his villain not only a household name around the world but even the unofficial tourist mascot of Romania. No author left a greater mark on the genre than the creator of Dracula, the character whose name is now synonymous with
vampire.
Stoker lacked the urbanity of Sheridan Le Fanu and the champagne wit of M. R. James, but he possessed more than his share of passion and verve.

Abraham Stoker was born in 1847 in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin, his father a civil servant and his mother a social activist. In childhood he suffered from a mysterious illness—one whose nature was never satisfactorily diagnosed—that kept him bedridden until the age of seven. Then he experienced an almost total recovery. Later, at the University of Dublin, the former invalid was more athletic than scholarly, but he served as president of a philosophical debating society and gained renown for a paper prophetically titled “Sensationalism in Fiction and Society.” The author of the shamelessly sensational
Dracula
also wrote
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland.
But he didn’t stay long in such work. Dissatisfied with the civil-servant job he had let his father talk him into, he began writing theater criticism for the
Dublin Evening Mail
by the early 1870s—in which position Le Fanu was his editor—and also published his first short story. Then came three short novels in the single year of 1875, each published in the Dublin magazine the
Shamrock.

After Stoker reviewed a production of
Hamlet
, its star, Henry Irving, became his correspondent and then close friend. In 1878 Irving offered Stoker the job of business manager of his new Lyceum Theatre in London. The same year, Stoker married the famously beautiful Florence Balcombe, who had been his childhood love but had since been courted by various men—including Oscar Wilde, of all people—and the next year she gave birth to a son. But Stoker was seldom home. He had begun the total absorption into the world of the theater and the life of Henry Irving that would occupy much of his time until Irving’s death in 1905. And, yes, from early on the relationship between them was described as vampiric, in that Irving seemed to take so much more than he gave.

Stoker published
Dracula
in 1897. “Rich in sensations,” said the
Daily News
, and the
Pall Mall Gazette
enthusiastically pronounced the novel “horrid and creepy to the last degree.” But a San Francisco paper called the
Wave
declaimed solemnly, “If you have the bad taste, after this warning, to attempt the book, you will read on to the finish, as I did,—and go to bed, as I did, feeling furtively of your throat.” The following story first appeared in the collection that Stoker’s widow published two years after his death,
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories.
“It was originally excised owing to the length of the book,” claimed Florence Stoker in her introduction, but most scholars now argue that she must have been mistaken; what we now call “Dracula’s Guest” must have been part of an earlier draft. For one thing, the narrator isn’t identified as Jonathan Harker, the character who first journeys to the Balkans in
Dracula.
He also behaves quite differently in his reckless disregard for danger.

The story takes place on Walpurgisnacht. This ancient holiday occurs on the last day of April, the eve of May Day, precisely the other side of the year from Halloween. Like Halloween, it is a time of celebration by default because of what follows it. Halloween is a party for the damned before their enemies come marching in on All Saints’ Day on November 1; Walpurgis Night is much the same before the feast of Saint Walburga on May 1. Just as early Christians timed Easter to coincide with the vernal equinox and established Christmas to supplant pagan carousing in honor of the winter solstice, so does the date for celebrating Walburga seem to have been prescribed as an antidote to the pagan antics on May Day, which honor the return of warmth and sunshine after the rigors of winter.

The Quatre Saisons (Four Seasons) hotel at which the narrator stays opened in 1858 under the auspices of King Maximilian and still stands in Munich under its German name, Vier Jahreszeiten, now part of the Kempinksi chain. This may be the only detail in the story that holds up under scrutiny; the rest of the plot demonstrates Stoker’s usual disregard for consistency. As Leslie Klinger points out, at first the narrator can’t speak German but later he can, and he has no trouble reading tombstone inscriptions that are in German and Russian. But as always, it isn’t Stoker’s details that we care about. It’s his crazy, over-the-top atmosphere.

Dracula’s Guest

W
HEN WE STARTED FOR
our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d’hôtel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door: “Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.” Here he smiled and added, “For you know what night it is.”

Johann answered with an emphatic,
“Ja, mein Herr,”
and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop: “Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?”

He crossed himself as he answered laconically: “Walpurgisnacht.” Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip, and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realized that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniffed the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high, wind-swept plateau. As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used and which seemed to dip through a little, winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop—and when he had pulled up I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest. Finally I said: “Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.” For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something—the very idea of which evidently frightened him, but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he crossed himself: “Walpurgisnacht!”

I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue—and every time he did so he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale and, looking around in a frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles and led them on some twenty feet. I followed and asked why he had done this. For answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left, and drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a cross, and said, first in German, then in English: “Buried him—him what killed themselves.”

I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross-roads: “Ah! I see, a suicide. How interesting!” But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened.

Whilst we were talking we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a bark. It was far away, but the horses got very restless and it took Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale and said, “It sounds like a wolf—but yet there are no wolves here now.”

“No?” I said, questioning him; “isn’t it long since the wolves were so near the city?”

“Long, long,” he answered, “in the spring and summer, but with the snow the wolves have been here not so long.”

Whilst he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away and a breath of cold wind seemed to drift past us. It was only a breath, however, and more in the nature of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out brightly again. Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and said: “The storm of snow, he comes before long time.” Then he looked at his watch again and, straightway, holding his reins firmly—for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads—he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey.

I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage.

“Tell me,” I said, “about this place where the road leads,” and I pointed down.

Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer before he answered, “It is unholy.”

“What is unholy?” I enquired.

“The village.”

“Then there is a village?”

“No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.” My curiosity was piqued. “But you said there was a village.”

“There was.”

“Where is it now?”

Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said, but roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; and sounds were heard under the clay and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life, and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living lived and the dead were dead and not—not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words. As he proceeded with his narration he grew more and more excited. It seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him and he ended in a perfect paroxysm of fear—white-faced, perspiring, trembling and looking round him, as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain. Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cried: “Walpurgisnacht!” and pointed to the carriage for me to get in. All my English blood rose at this and, standing back, I said: “You are afraid, Johann—you are afraid. Go home, I shall return alone; the walk will do me good.” The carriage door was open. I took from the seat my oak walking-stick—which I always carry on my holiday excursions—and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, “Go home, Johann—Walpurgisnacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.”

The horses were now more restive than ever and Johann was trying to hold them in, while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was deeply in earnest, but all the same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgotten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, “Home!” I turned to go down the cross-road into the valley.