The Dracula Tape

TRACK ONE

Let me not start at the beginning of my life. Even penned in here, listening at close range to the words from my own lips, you would find the story of those breathing, eating days of mine too hard to believe. Later on, it may be, we will have some discourse of them. Had you noticed that I do not breathe, except to get the wind to talk? Now watch me as I speak and you will see.

Maybe a good point to start from would be that early November day in 1891, at the Borgo Pass, in what is now Romania. Van Helsing and the rest thought that they had me, then, and brought their chronicle to its end. It was snowing then, too, and my gypsies tried, but with only knives against rifles they could not do much when the hunters on horseback caught up with me at sunset and tipped me out of my coffin, and with their long knives went for my heart and throat…

No. I have the feeling that I would be telling too much backward if I began there. How's this? I'll start where the other chronicle begins, the one that you must be familiar with. It starts early in the previous May, with the arrival in my domain in Transylvania of one Jonathan Harker, a fledgling solicitor sent out from England to help me with the purchase of some property near London.

You see, I had been rousing myself from a period-somewhat extended-of great lethargy, quiescence, and contemplation. New voices, new thoughts, were heard in the world. Even on my remote mountaintop, green-clad in the forests of centuries, well-nigh unreachable, I with my inner senses could hear the murmurings across Europe of the telegraph, the infant splutterings of the engines of steam and internal combustion. I could smell the coal smoke and the fever of the world in change.

That fever caught in me and grew. Enough of seclusion with my old companions-if one could call them that. Enough wolf howlings, owl hoots, bat flutterings, half-witted peasants hissing at me from behind contorted fingers, enough of crosses waved like so many clubs, as if I were a Turkish army. I would rejoin the human race, come out of my hinterlands into the sunlit progress of the modern world. Budapest, and even Paris, did not seem great enough or far enough to hold my new life that was to be.

For a time I even considered going to America. But a greater metropolis than any of the New World was nearer at hand, and more susceptible to a preliminary study. This study took me years, but it was thorough. Harker, when he arrived at my castle in May of 1891, took note in his shorthand diary of the "vast number of English books, magazines, and newspapers" I had on hand.

Harker. I have rather more respect for him than for the others of the man-pack that was later to follow Van Helsing on my trail. Respect is always due courage, and he was a courageous man, though rather dull. And as the first real guest in Castle Dracula for centuries, he was the subject of my first experiments in fitting myself acceptably back into the mainstream of humanity.

Actually I had to disguise myself as my own coachman to bring him on the last leg of his long journey from England. My household help were, as some of the wealthy are always wont to say, undependable, even if they were not so utterly nonexistent as Harker was later to surmise. Outcast gypsies. Superstitiously loyal to me, whom they had adopted as their master, but with no competence as servants in the normal sense. I knew I was going to have to look after my guest myself.

The railroad had brought Harker as far as the town of Bistrita, from which a diligence, or public stagecoach, traveled daily to Bukovina, a part of Moldavia to the north and west. At the Borgo Pass, some eight or nine hours along the way from Bistrita, my carriage was to be waiting, as I had informed my visitor by letter, to bring him to my door. The stagecoach reached the pass at near the witching hour of twelve, an hour ahead of schedule, just as I, taking no chances, drove my own caleche with four black horses up close behind the diligence where it paused in the midnight landscape, half piny and half barren. I was just in time to hear its driver say: "There is no carriage here, the Herr is not expected after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return tomorrow or the next day; better the next day."

At this point some of the peasants on board the stage caught sight of my arrival and began a timorous uproar of prayers and oaths and incantations; I pulled up closer, and in a moment appeared limned in the glow of the stagecoach's lamps, wearing the coachman's uniform and a wide-brimmed black hat and false brown beard as additional disguise, these last props having been borrowed from a gypsy who had once traveled as an actor.

"You are early tonight, my friend," I called over to the stagecoach driver.

"The English Herr was in a hurry," the man stammered back, not meeting my eye directly.

"That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift." I smiled at the coach windows full of white, scared faces, and someone inside it muttered from Lenore: "Denn die Todten reiten schnell [For the dead travel fast]."

"Give me the Herr's baggage," I ordered, and it was quickly handed over. And then my guest himself appeared, the only one among the passengers who dared to look me in the eye, a young man of middle size and unremarkable appearance, clean-shaven, with hair and eyes of medium brown.

As soon as he was on the seat beside me I cracked my whip and off we went. Holding the reins with one hand, I threw a cloak round Harker's shoulders, and a rug across his knees, and said to him in German: "The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz underneath the seat, if you should require it."

He nodded and murmured something, and though he drank none of the brandy I could feel him relax slightly. No doubt, I thought, his fellow passengers in the coach had been filling him with wild tales, or, more likely and worse, just dropping a few hints about the terrible place that was his destination. Still, I had great hopes that I could overcome any unpleasant preconceptions picked up by my guest.

I drove deliberately down the wrong road at first, to kill a little time, for that chanced to be the night, the Eve of St. George, on which all treasure buried in those mountains is detectable at midnight by the emanation of apparent bluish flames. The advance arrangements for my expedition abroad had somewhat depleted my own store of gold, and I meant to seize the opportunity of replenishment.

Now you are doubting again. Did you think that my old home was much like any other land? Not so. There was I born, and there I failed to die. And in my land, as Van Helsing himself once said, "There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been volcanoes… waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify." English was not Van Helsing's mother tongue.

Never mind. The point is that I took the opportunity of that night to mark out a few sites of buried wealth, of which there were likely to be several, as we shall see. My passenger was quite naturally curious at these repeated stoppings of the carriage, at the eerie glow of faint, flickering blue flames appearing here and there about the countryside, and at my several dismountings to build up little cairns of stone. With these cairns to guide me on future nights when I was alone, I would be able to recover the treasure troves at my leisure.

I had expected Harker's natural curiosity at these events to break forth at once in questions, whereupon I, in my coachman's character, would be able to demonstrate irrefutably that marvels unmet in England existed here in Transylvania. Thus he would be led by degrees into a frame of mind receptive to the real truth about myself and vampires as a race.

What I had not reckoned with was the-in this case-damnable English propensity for minding one's own business, which in my opinion Harker carried to lengths of great absurdity, even for a discreet and tactful young solicitor. There he sat, upon the exposed seat of my caleche, watching my antics with the cairns but saying nothing. He called out at last only when the wolves, my adopted children of the night, came from the darkness of the forest shadows into the moonlight close around the carriage, staring silently at him and at the nervous horses. And when I came back from marking my last trove of the evening, and with a gesture moved the wolves away and broke their circle, Harker still had no questions, though I could sense his stiffness when I climbed into driver's seat again, and knew that he was quite afraid. Harker's tenseness did not ease during the remainder of our ride, which ended when I drove into "the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky," as he was shortly to describe my home.

I left Harker and his baggage at the massive, closed front door and drove the horses on back to the stables, where I roused with a kick the least undependable of my snoring servants to take care of them. Ridding myself on the way of false beard, hat, and livery, I sprinted back through the clammy lower passages of Castle Dracula to resume my own identity and welcome in my guest.

As I paused in the corridor outside the rooms I had made ready for his lodging there came into the dark air beside me a shimmering that would have been invisible to eyes any less attuned to darkness than my own; came voices tuneful as computer music and no more human; came the substantiation in the air of faces three and bodies three, all young in appearance and female in every rich detail, save that they wore without demur their clothes a century out of date. Not Macbeth on his moor ever saw three shapes boding more ill to men.

"Is he come?" asked Melisse, the taller of the dark pair of the three.

"How soon may we taste him?" Wanda, the shorter, fuller-breasted one inquired. With the corner of her smiling ruby lips she chewed and sucked a ringlet of her raven hair.

"When will you give him to us, Vlad? You've promised us, you know." This from Anna, radiantly fair, the senior of the three in terms of length of time spent in my service. Service is not the right word, though. Say rather in terms of her endurance in a game of wit and will, which all three played against me without stop, and which I had wearied of and ceased to play long decades since.

I strode into the rooms I had prepared for Harker, poked up the hearth fire previously laid and lit, moved dishes that had been warming on the hearthstone to the table, and sent words over my shoulder into the dim hallway outside. "I've promised you just one thing in the matter of the young Englishman, and I'll repeat it once: If any of you set lip against his skin you'll have cause to regret it."

Melisse and Wanda giggled, I suppose at having irritated me and having gotten me to repeat an order; and Anna as always must try to get the last word in. "But there must be some sport, at least. If he stray out of his rooms then surely he shall be fair game?"

I made no answer-it has never been my way to argue with subordinates-but saw that all was in readiness for Harker, as far as I could make it so. Then, an antique silver lamp in hand, I dashed down to the front door, which I threw open hospitably, to reveal my now-doubtful guest still standing waiting in the night, his bags on the ground beside him.

"Welcome to my house!" I cried. "Enter freely and of your own will!" He smiled at me, this trusting alien, accepting me as nothing more nor less than man. In my happiness I repeated my welcome as soon as he had crossed the threshold, and clasped his hand perhaps a little harder than I ought. "Come freely!" I enjoined him. "Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!"

"Count Dracula?" Harker, trying to unobtrusively shake life back into his painfully pressed fingers, spoke questioningly, as if there might still be some reasonable doubt.

"I am Dracula," I answered, bowing. "And I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill and you must need to eat and rest." I hung my lamp on the wall and went to pick up Harker's luggage, overriding his protests. "Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort myself." He followed as I carried his things upstairs and to the quarters I had prepared for him. One log fire flamed in the room where the table was spread for supper, and another in the large bedroom where I deposited his bags.

With my own hands I had prepared the supper that awaited him-roast chicken, salad, cheese, and wine-as I did most of the meals that he consumed during the weeks of his stay. Help from the girls? Bah. They affected to be like infants, who can sometimes be stopped from doing wrong by threat of punishment but cannot be forced to do things properly. It was part of the game they played with me. Besides, I did not want them ever in his rooms if I could help it.

So with my own hands, hands of a prince of Wallachia, the brother-in-law of a king, I picked up and threw away his dirty dishes and his garbage, not to mention innumerable porcelain chamber pots. I suppose I could have brought myself to scrub the dishes clean, like any menial, had there been no easier way. True, most of the dishes were gold, but I was determined not to stint on my guest's entertainment. Also, should I ever return to the castle from my projected sojourn abroad, I had little doubt of being able to recover the golden utensils from the foot of the three-hundred-meter precipice which Castle Dracula overlooked and which provided an eminently satisfactory garbage dump. The dishes would be there, dented by the fall no doubt, but cleansed by the seasons and unstolen. I have always had a dislike of thieves, and I believe the people of the villages nearby understood me on this point, if probably on nothing else.

In the month and a half that he was with me my increasingly ungrateful guest went through a sultan's ransom in gold plate, and I was reduced to serving him on silver. Toward the end, of course, I might have brought his food on slabs of bark, and he would scarcely have noticed it, so terrified was he by then at certain peculiarities of my nature. He misinterpreted these oddities, but never asked openly for any explanation, whilst I, wisely or unwisely, never volunteered one.

But to return to that first evening. When my guest had refreshed himself from his journey and rejoined me in the dining room he found me leaning against the fireplace and awaiting him in eagerness, as hungry for intelligent conversation and first-hand news of the great outer world as he was for good food.

I gestured him to the table, saying: "I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup."

Whilst Harker attacked the chicken I read through the letter he had handed me. It was from his employer, Hawkins, who described his young deputy as "full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition," and also as "discreet and silent."

This was all to my liking and I at once began a conversation that went on in the dining room for hours, as Harker ate and then accepted a cigar. We discoursed mainly on the circumstances of his journey-I was particularly interested in trains, which at that time I had never seen, and I enjoyed our talk immensely.

Toward dawn a companionable silence fell between us, broken shortly by the howling, from down the valley, of many wolves.

"Listen to them," I said, for a moment unthinking. "The children of the night. What music they make!" A momentary look of consternation came into my guest's face; I had forgotten that only a few hours earlier, as I in my guise of coachman brought him up the winding mountain road, he had seen wolves at disturbingly close range.

I quickly added: "Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter." And shortly we took our separate ways to rest.

Not having gone to bed till dawn, and being wearied from his journey, Harker naturally slept until late in the day, and as I thought would not have been surprised not to see or hear from me until after sunset. When I looked for him at that hour I was briefly alarmed at not finding him in his own rooms. I had not wished to shatter the spell of that first evening of human society by trying to explain to him how dangerous to him certain parts of the castle could be.

To my relief, he had strayed no farther than my nearby library, where to his "great delight," as he recorded in his journal, he discovered "a vast number of English books… magazines, and newspapers… the books were of the most varied kind-history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law-all relating to England and English life and customs and manners."

"I am glad you found your way in here," I said with honesty, "for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These companions"-I gestured at the books-"have been good friends to me, and for some years, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the rush and whirl of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I know your tongue only through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak."

"But, Count," Harker expostulated, "you know and speak English thoroughly!"

"I thank you, my friend," I responded, "for your all too flattering estimate, but yet I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them."

"Indeed, sir, you speak excellently."

"Not so. Did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. And that is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one: men know him not-and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pauses in his speaking if he hears my words, 'Ha ha! a stranger!' I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me awhile, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today, but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand."

Harker pledged his willingness to help me with my English and then asked if he might use the library at will. This seemed like a good time to issue my warnings, so I said:

"Yes, certainly. You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge you would perhaps better understand."

"I am sure I would, sir."

But I knew that he could not begin to understand, as yet, and I tried to press the point, still without giving away too much. "We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of what strange things there may be."

Thus having led the conversation into the murky region of Strange Things, and seeing my guest nodding soberly in apparent agreement, I momentarily hesitated, on the brink of trying to Tell All; but no, I decided, I must first make Harker my good friend.

He now took the opportunity to ask what I could tell him of the mysterious blue flames that he had glimpsed on the night of his arrival, and about the odd behavior of the "coachman." In reply I told him a substantial portion of the truth.

"Transylvania is not England," I repeated, "and there are things here which reasonable men, men of business and science, may not be able to understand. On a certain night of the year-last night, in fact, when all evil spirits were supposed by the peasantry to rule unchecked-a blue flame is seen over any place where treasure has been concealed. That much treasure has been concealed in this region, there can be but little doubt; for this is ground fought over for centuries by the Walachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil hereabouts that has not been enriched by the blood of patriots and invaders." Speaking of the past began to bring it back to me, as it does now; again I felt the movement of the warhorse beneath me as his ears picked up the sounds of battle, the clash of metal and the cries of terror. Again I smell the stinks of war; and see the banners and the blood. I remember the treachery of the boyars, and recall the beautiful, beautiful loyalty to me, the voivode, warlord, of the men who worked the land and knew me to be fair. How good it was to breathe the air with them… but never mind.

To Harker I went on: "In old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out to meet them-men and women, the aged and the children too-and awaited their coming on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on them with artificial avalanches. When the invader was triumphant he found but little in the way of gold or precious stuff, for all had been sheltered in the friendly soil."

Harker was now at least halfway to believing the tiny marvel of the flames and treasure. "But how," he asked, "can treasure have remained so long undiscovered when there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look?"

I smiled. "Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool!" The villagers below in 1891, I had in mind. "These flames only appear on one night, and on that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors."

We drifted into other matters, and back at last to real estate.

"Come," I enjoined my guest, "tell me of London and the house which you have procured for me." Whilst Harker was getting his business papers together in another room I took the chance to clear the table of his latest meal, linen cloth and all in a bundle a-down the cliffside from a western window, where for a thousand feet the soiled dishes sang in air before the garbage was knocked off them on the rocks. By the time he rejoined me I had lit the lamps and was lying on a sofa reading Bradshaw's Guide.

The paperwork connected with house buying was complex but Harker seemed competent to lead me through its mysteries. He remarked once on my knowledge of the estate's neighborhood-that of Purfleet, some fifteen miles east of the center of London, on the north bank of the Thames-which I had managed to gain even from my remote location, and I replied: "Well, but, my friend, is it not needful that I should? When I go there I shall be all alone, and my friend Harker Jonathan-nay, pardon me, I fall into my country's habit of putting your patronymic first-my friend Jonathan Harker will not be at my side to correct and aid me. He will be in Exeter, a hundred miles and more away, probably working at papers of the law with my other friend, Peter Hawkins. So!"

I signed what seemed innumerable papers, which were then wrapped for posting back to Hawkins. My gypsies, Szgany as I called them then, were at the castle frequently, and through both fear and loyalty they were, in what touched my own person, most dependable. They carried mail for me, as well as bringing me horses and caring for them. They brought me food sometimes-I will discourse of my eating habits later-and formed for a long time a useful although shaky bridge twixt me and other men.

When we were done with signing and mailing Harker read to me his notes describing my new estate and how he had located it. I remember the description well, as I remember the rest of my enemies' journals for that year. I am not likely to forget a word.

"At Purfleet, on a by-road, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust."

"The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it, which make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, dark-looking pond or small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear and flows away in a fair-sized stream. The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to medieval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my Kodak views of it from various points. There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum. It is not, however, visible from the grounds." This last was not an accurate statement, as I later discovered; but of course I was ready to make a few allowances for salesmen's puffery.

"I am glad that it is old and big," I said when he had finished his description. "I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times… I am no longer young and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth… I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may."

We spent a long evening, similar to the last; and this, the night of May seventh to eighth, 1891, was the last for a long time, many months, when either of us felt that things were going well, indeed, when we were not pondering each other as enemies, at least in potential.

I had naturally taken the precaution of removing all mirrors from the rooms of the castle that I expected my guest to occupy or visit. On the third morning of Harker's stay, however, I entered his room early in the hours of daylight-an uncomfortable time for me-to find him shaving with the aid of his traveling mirror.

It had been a conceit of mine that when I began to be fully and unquestioningly accepted in the normal world as human, the psychology of most men and women would not permit them to credit the objective fact that I cast no reflection in a mirror, at least none ordinarily perceptible to the human eye. Let me say here parenthetically that film and the cathode ray tube are something else again. But whatever the outcome of research along this line is to be, on that morning I had deluded myself into thinking that this reasonable, unsuperstitious Englishman would not be allowed by his own psychology to perceive the exact truth: that when I entered the room behind him as he shaved, my figure cast no reflection in the glass.

I was wrong. When I said, "Good morning!" almost in his ear, he was so startled that he reacted physically and his straight razor made a slight cut on his chin. At the same time I was made aware that he had indeed noted my image's absence from the mirror, for he alternated his glance from me to it not once but several times whilst he struggled not to let his bafflement show on his face. This was a blow to me, the first indication that my plans were indeed impossible, and it hit me hard, though I struggled to maintain composure.

After a moment Harker gave up looking for me in his glass, returned my greeting in a flustered way, then put his razor down and began to look for some sticking plaster in his kit. His chin was beading blood.

Hemophile that I am known to be (in the true sense of the word), it is not true that the mere sight of blood under any and all circumstances is enough to trip me into a paroxysm of lust for the good red stuff. According to Harker's journal, which is unforgettable to me and from which I quote verbatim, my "eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury" as soon as I saw his blood, and I "suddenly made a grab" at his throat.

Now I ask you-you enjoy a good rare beefsteak, perhaps? Naturally. Now, suppose you stroll into the dining room where a guest of yours is finishing his lunch, and observe a morsel of meat left on his plate. Does the sight make your eyes blaze with demoniac fury? Or suppose that under circumstances of perfect propriety one guest in your house is a young lady, an attractive one, let us say. And suppose further that through some truly innocent mistake upon her part or yours you open a door and discover her unclad-are you so automatically provoked that you literally make a grab at her, without thought for the consequences? No more am I provoked in comparable situation. Great heaven, if male hemoglobin were all that I desired I should hardly have gone to all the trouble and expense of buying an estate in London so they should send me a ruddy young solicitor.

There was, as always-I admit it-a certain pang of longing at the sight of blood. But it was concern for Harker's welfare, nothing else, that prompted me to reach out a hand in the direction of the wound. The bitter shock of realization that he had noticed my absence from the mirror was augmented severely at the moment when my outstretched hand brushed the open collar of his shirt, and just beneath it touched the string of beads which an old woman in Bistrita had forced upon him when she learned his destination.

String of beads? Of course at the moment I discovered them I knew they were a rosary, and at its end I knew the cross was hung. And since I had already learned in one of our conversations that Harker was a staunch Protestant, an English Churchman as he put it, there was but one interpretation that I could put upon his wearing of a crucifix-he had acquired it, or at least it had been thrust upon him and accepted, as armor for his journey into a vampire's lair.

I, who had begun to think of myself as already accepted by society, had my fool's hopes dashed before they were well launched. In the moments before I could get them off the ground again, and counsel myself to patience, I behaved rashly. My first impulse was to tear the beads from around his neck but reverence held me back from that-I am a Catholic myself, you know, though born into the Orthodox faith, and in my days of breathing I endowed five monasteries. With a moment in which to reflect I realized the injustice of an assault upon the person of Harker, an ignorant, well-meaning youth who doubtless did not understand fully the implications of the good-luck charm he had been given to wear.

"Take care," said I, whilst struggling to master my anger and disappointment, "take care how you cut yourself, for it is more dangerous than you think in this country." I had in mind Anna, Wanda, and Melisse, whose reaction to the sight and scent of fresh young male blood was sure to be much less restrained than my own. "And this is the thing that has done the mischief!" I cried out, forced by the strains upon my soul to take some kind of violent action, and seizing on the symbol of my alienation as its object. "It is a foul bauble of man's vanity. Away with it!" I wrenched open the heavy window and threw out Harker's shaving glass, to be splintered by the fall to the courtyard.

Not trusting myself to say more at the moment, I left the room. My months and years of careful, meticulous preparation, had they all gone for nothing? Would Harker carry home the truth and the terrible lies about me, all mixed up, and find a way to make them all believed? Would I arrive on the quay at Whitby, or in Charing Cross station in London, and find exorcist priests and stinking garlic-mongers drawn up in a phalanx to repel me?

Whilst I, on that fateful morning, was trying to regain my composure and rethink my plans, Harker, as he records in his journal, began a rather panicky exploration of those parts of the castle not sealed off from him by locked doors: finding a great many of the latter, he at once adopted the idea that he was a prisoner.

Not that he ever told me so straight out, or plainly asked me if it were true. As he wrote: "… it is no use making my ideas known to the count. He knows well that I am imprisoned; and as he has done it himself, and has doubtless his own motives for it, he would only deceive me if I trusted him fully with the facts… I am, I know, either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears, or else I am in desperate straits."

A little later Harker returned to his room, as I was making his bed, and we exchanged a few polite words, neither of us alluding to the incident of the shaving mirror. Later, in the evening, my spirits rose again, for my young visitor sat down with me to chat as usual, and began to question me on the history of my land and of my family.

He understands, I thought, at least he begins to understand, and he does not prejudge me, but continues to greet me and speak to me as a friend. It was all true, then! True, what I had heard and read, of the noble English respect for the private affairs of every man! Though it had seemed to me earlier that Harker carried this tradition of respect too far, now I saw how valuable such an attitude could be for my purposes.

Pacing the floor and pulling my mustache in excitement, I spoke of the glorious history of my family and my race; of Viking ancestors come down from Iceland to mate and mingle with the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame "until," I cried, "the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" And I held up my arms-like this.

"Is it a wonder," I went on, "that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?" I recounted with love and joy the feats of the decades of my own breathing life: "Who was it but one of my own race who crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, and we of the Dracula blood were amongst the leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys-the very name means 'guardians of the frontier'-and the Dracula as their hearts' blood, their brains, and their swords-can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. But now the warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonorable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told."

I raved and praised myself, as I say, and my little Englishman was tolerant of it all, but he was dull, dull, dull. A brooder, but no dreamer, he. There was no imagination in him to be fired. But then to be honest I must admit that with more imagination he might have fared even worse in Castle Dracula than he did.

On the next evening, that of May eleventh, I had a last lengthy discussion with Harker on the conduct of business affairs in England, which concluded by my asking him to write some letters home.

I inquired: "Have you written since your first letter to our friend Mr. Peter Hawkins, or to any other?"

"I have not," he answered, some bitterness audible in his voice, "as I have not yet had opportunity of sending letters to anybody."

"Then write now, my young friend," I said, putting a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. "Write to our friend Hawkins and to any other, and say, if it will please you, that you shall stay with me until a month from now."

"Do you wish me to stay so long?" His lack of enthusiasm at the prospect could not be concealed. He was obviously brooding upon some difficulties of his own, but I still had high hopes of being able to win him over.

"I desire it much," I said. "Nay, I will take no refusal. When your master, employer, what you will, engaged that someone should come on his behalf, it was understood that my needs only were to be consulted. I have not stinted. Is it not so?"

He acquiesced with a silent bow, but had on such a troubled face that I knew I had better take an interest in the contents of the letters he sent out. I therefore added: "I pray you, my good young friend, that you will not discourse of things other than business in your letters, except of course that it will doubtless please your friends to know that you are well, and that you look forward to getting home to them. Is it not so?"

On taking my leave of him that evening, with his letters in my hands along with some correspondence of my own relating to my projected trip, I paused at the door, my conscience somewhat troubled.

"I trust you will forgive me," I said-Harker only looked up, his face closed against me-and I went on, "but I have much work to do in private this evening." Our larder was depleted. "You will, I hope, find all things as you wish." He continued to be sulky, and I had a strong premonition of plans going wrong, trouble just ahead.

Before going out I added, "Let me advise you, my dear young friend-nay, let me warn you with all seriousness-that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be warned! Should sleep ever be like to overcome you, then haste to your own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be safe. But if you are not careful in this respect, then-" And I finished my speech with a hand-washing motion. Still he only continued to look at me, a dour and increasingly frightened man.

And that, of course, was the night on which he happened to see me leave the castle. Why, on that particular spring night, did I choose to crawl head first down the wall above the precipice, rather than fly out unnoticeably in the form of a bat, walk less terrifyingly on four legs, or even expectably on two? I can only answer that my various physical forms and modes of locomotion have each their own comforts and discomforts, their pleasures and predicaments; besides, if truth must be told-and that is why I am here, is it not, speaking into this machine?-I was trying to avoid Anna, with her ceaseless pleading to be allowed to sample Harker's blood, and thought a climbing egress from the castle best calculated to serve that end.

And so poor Jonathan, by chance gazing from a window out into the moonlight, observed me, as he wrote, "emerge from (another) window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings… it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones"-my boots I had tied by their laces to my belt-"just as a lizard moves along a wall. What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of a man?"

Three nights later Harker saw me leave again by the same means, and when I was absent he attempted to get out of the castle by the main entrance. I had left the door securely locked, for his own good, and he turned away, baffled, to seek another exit.

A door that I had neglected to fasten quite securely led him into the west wing. This was, he surmised, "the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days." He was led to this conclusion by the presence of "great windows… and consequently light and comfort" here where "sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach" because of the height and steepness of the cliffs below. Here he supposed that "of old, ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars." Fortunately the ladies of old were, like those of his own time, somewhat tougher and more capable than he ever gave them credit for being. His understanding of this point would have made a great difference, not only in his life but in my own. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Having forced his way into these closed-off rooms, Harker for a while admired their spacious, moonlit windows, and the furniture, which had "more air of comfort" than any he had seen elsewhere in the castle. Although he found in the suite "a dread loneliness" which chilled his heart, "still it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of Count Dracula, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me."

Of course, notwithstanding my most solemn warnings, the clodpate schooled his nerves until he fell asleep. I returned in time to save him, though barely, and even I was struck speechless for a moment by the extent of his folly.

Without even putting down the burden with which I had reentered the castle, I listened for his breathing in his own rooms and heard it not; then I sped, faster and faster, through the dark corridors, looking and listening for my guest, with ever-growing concern. When I found the open door to the west wing, which I had thought securely locked, I could only pray that I was not too late.

Barely in time for him, I say, I came upon them, in a chamber thick with moonlight that laid enchantment upon the prosaic ruin wrought by lime. Harker supine upon an ancient couch, where he had lain down oblivious to the dust. Wanda and Melisse stood at a little distance, Biding their time, waiting their turns, whilst over him crouched fair Anna, who had actually laid the pinpoints of her canines upon his throat. I came in man-form up beside her and put my hand around that fair white neck of hers; raised her soft body that had in it the strength of ten good normal men and hurled her staggering back, halfway across the room.

I shot a glance down at Harker and saw that his vessels had not yet been tapped. He was nearly unconscious at the time, in sleep and trance commingled; lips half parted in a fatuous smile and a sliver of eyeball gleaming beneath each sagging lid. Hoping that he would not remember this scene upon the morrow, or would recall it only as a dream, I held my voice to a whisper despite my rage.

"How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I have forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me."

Fair Anna, no doubt aching with frustration at being robbed of her delight when it had seemed so certain, let out a sick and bitter laugh and dared to answer back: "You yourself never loved; you never love!" And in her laughter the other women joined, when they saw I had not moved at once to punish her.

"Yes, I too can love," I answered softly. And in that moment my thoughts went back to a far different world, a world once sunlit and alive within that castle, within that very chamber that now held only dust and mold and ruin beneath the glamor of the moon.

But that world held in my memory was none of theirs, nor did I mean to give them material for mockery. "Yes, I can love," I said. "You yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go, go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done." These lies I told to be rid of the women without punishing them. I had no real wish to punish them for Harker's stupidity. I dislike cruelty, and am not cruel unless it is quite justifiable.

"Are we to have nothing tonight?" Melisse whined, pointing to the bag that I had brought, which now lay moving slightly on the floor. It contained the relatively poor results of my foraging expedition-a rather lean pig offered up to me by a peasant woman in hopes of my doing, in return, some damnable evil upon one of her rivals in love. I nodded, and the women sprang to surround the bag, and bore it away with them.

At this a faint gasp issued from Harker's recumbent form. I looked round sharply and could now be sure that he was quite dead to the world. What I did not then know was that he had witnessed the women pouncing upon my shopping bag, and had interpreted the porcine squealing therefrom, if his "ears did not deceive" him, as "a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child." My unimaginative solicitor had fainted.

Needless to say, there was no possibility of doing business with him that night, even if I had been so minded. I carried him, still oblivious to the world, back to his room and put him to bed; it was still my hope that he might interpret his evening with the girls as a mere nightmare if he remembered it at all. I also took the liberty of going through his pockets, and got my first look at his journal. But it was kept in shorthand, a code I did not understand until much later, and after pondering briefly I left the little book where I had found it.

"If I be sane," he wrote in it the next day, "then surely it is maddening to think that of the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone can I look for safety, even though this be only whilst I serve his purpose." And it had been my thought that, should he remember anything of the moonlit horrors he had so narrowly escaped, he would upon waking bless me as his protector and friend. Alas, for my innocent and long-persisting faith in human nature.

I began to realize that my problem was no longer so much how to win Harker's friendship as it was what to do with him, or do about him. Were I to send him home at once, he must at the very least have some strange stories to tell about me when he got there. My own departure was scheduled for June thirtieth, still more than a month away, and Harker could easily be back in London within a week, there to prepare for me a reception of the most unpleasant kind. His knowledge of my business affairs in England was so great that I could not hope to avoid such an outcome if he left Castle Dracula as my enemy and were given a head start. At the same time, he was as yet my guest, my responsibility, and honor and justice alike forbade that I should do him any harm. I yearned that he would either come out with open accusations to which I might openly reply, and demand his freedom if he minded the locked doors, or else that he would show himself my enemy, in order that I could justly kill him.

We came near reaching the latter solution when I discovered that he was attempting to smuggle out a secret letter. It was addressed to his fiancee, Miss Mina Murray, to whom he had written openly at my request only the day before. Harker threw this clandestine letter, along with another one, addressed to Hawkins, out the window along with gold, to some of my gypsys, who of course brought the letters to my attention.

The secret letter to Hawkins was very brief, and merely asked him to communicate with Mina Murray; but the letter to her was written in code, the same shorthand as Harker's secret journal. When I had examined it I came near going to his rooms to do him violence. I had to remind myself forcibly that my guest was still my guest, that he was in strange circumstances for an ordinary, untraveled Englishman, and that I did not really know that the coded missive contained anything untruthful about me or meant to cause me harm.

Still, I was angry. Rarely had I been so angry since the day I nailed the Turkish envoys' turbans to their heads when they refused to doff them for me. Remind me to tell you about that later. But in my greatest angers I show outward calm. Taking the two letters, I went to Harker's room and sat down beside him. He looked up at me with the guilty, hopeless, haggard look that now grew worse upon his face with every day.

"The Szgany have given me these," I began steadily. "Of which, though I know not whence they come, I will of course take care. See!"-and I reopened one letter-"one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other"-and I pulled from its envelope the one in code-"is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! So it cannot matter to us." And then and there I burned it, in the flame of Harker's lamp… ah, I really do not care for electric light.

"The letter to Hawkins," I continued, "I shall of course send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal." I handed Harker the letter and a fresh envelope, and watched him as he addressed and sealed the message anew. There was in his face such despair, with a nervous twitching at cheek and eye, there was such a tremor in the fingers with which he tried to write, that my sensibilities were touched and I was glad I had not been more severe.

I had at that time been a frequent observer of human beings under stress for more than four hundred years, and it was plain to me that Harker now teetered on the brink of mental breakdown. This was regrettable in itself, and also I felt at least some indirect responsibility; yet all the same I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. With any luck he was going to be a couple of months in a sanatorium after he left my domain, and no one would believe vampire tales from the mouth of one whose mental scales so obviously had tipped.

Hawkins might call upon me at Purfleet, I supposed, and perhaps Harker's much beloved Miss Mina Murray, too-her name had something interesting about it for me, even then-to see what might have happened in the Carpathians to upset the poor boy so. And I would be concerned and gracious, and would entertain them, for which purpose I meant to have my estate in part at least, renovated according to modern standards of comfort. By the time Harker had managed to make his stories credible, if he did not prudently choose instead to alter or disavow them, I should have managed to establish new English sanctuaries for myself, even to alter my appearance, and I might well be able to get beyond the reach of any investigation launched.

Meanwhile, there were the three predated letters I had wisely obtained from Harker a few days earlier, by making up some story for him about the uncertainty of posts. They were chatty, innocuous reports of good health and a pleasant journey, ostensibly written by him on the twelfth, the nineteenth, and the twenty-ninth of June, the third dated from Bistrita rather than from the castle. I had got these letters in anticipation of some unhappy ending to Harker's visit, and now my foresight was proven wise. If for some reason he failed to arrive home in good health, suspicion would be shifted from me.

When I took the readdressed-and now harmless-letter to Hawkins back to the gypsies to be posted, I informed the leader of their band that my guest was becoming non compos mentis and that we should all have to take good care of him. Tatra, a swarthy, compact man who could meld into a centaur with his horse, for some reason received this news with little surprise.

"On the day after I am gone, Tatra," I added, "I charge you to put on the coachman's uniform and drive him down to the Pass, so that he may in good time board there the diligence for Bistrita, where he may regain the railroad. Obey his orders or requests in any small matters that seem reasonable; nay, in anything that will not be dangerous for him. It is not his fault that he has suffered here, or at least not his alone."

Tatra bowed and swore that he would do as the master wished; I hoped silently that it was so.

My own mood was brighter than it had been for some days when I returned to Harker's rooms, unlocked his door-I had begun to fear he might do something truly rash-and went in, to find him asleep upon a sofa. He roused when I entered and looked up at me with haggard wariness. He looked almost too worn to be afraid.

"So, my friend, you are tired?" I asked, briskly rubbing my hands. "Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure to talk tonight, since there are many labors to me"-my stock of provisions for him was far depleted, he having consumed the greater part of the pig whose squeals had so alarmed him earlier-"but you will sleep, I pray."

He got up like a sleepwalker and went into his bedroom, where he threw himself face down upon the covers. Shortly he was indeed asleep again-as he wrote in his journal the next day, "despair has its own calms"-and I took the opportunity of removing his papers, money, and so on from his apartments for safekeeping. I also borrowed his best suit of clothes, so that some of the gypsy women might try their hand at preparing for me garments more in the English style, with Harker's as a pattern.

This task took them a couple of weeks, but I was able to wear the finished product when I left upon another provisioning errand on the night of June sixteenth. I wished to try my new clothes' fit and durability. Only much later, when the chance came for me to read Harker's journal in typescript, did I understand that he had spied on me again that night, and had imagined that I was wearing his own suit as I crawled down the wall-for the purpose, if you will believe it, of blackening his reputation; that "any wickedness" which I might do to the local people should be attributed to him. No, Mr. Harker, I assure you-can you hear me now, from your presumed post in heaven above?-other matters which I judged more important than besmirching your name were claiming all my energies. "Great God!" some yokel doubtless exclaimed upon that night, when he beheld my tall figure, white-haired, white-mustached, red-eyed, and decked out for Savile Row. "There goes the vampire in the clothes of the young Englishman. He must have eaten him."

Scarcely had I completed my night's labors and come back to Castle Dracula-lugging in my straining bag a newborn calf to give my girls some blood, and provide for my guest a taste of veal-when that poor woman from the nearest village came to the castle pleading for my help. That poor, brave woman whose face I never saw; not one in a thousand down there would have dared so much in bright sunshine, let alone the middle of the night. But the commands of motherhood give wonderous strength sometimes.

"Master, find for me my child!" the poor wretch called up to Harker, whose moonlit appearance at a high window she mistook for my own. Yes, I know, I know very well, that in his journal he sets down her words as: "Monster, give me my child!" But do you suppose that she spoke English? Or that he had ready his "polyglot dictionary" that he had needed in the coach from Bistrita, to talk with these same folk?

For my part, I knew perfectly well that the woman was there, without sticking my head out a window to see her. And I understood her words. Nor did I need to raise my voice to summon up a few pretty children of my own-the wolves-from a kilometer or two around. These set to work at my command. They combed the forest quickly and in the space of an hour had found the straying child. They herded it with nips and tugs into the courtyard, where the stupid woman-I suppose it was through some negligence of hers that the child had gotten lost-still beat her flabby hands upon my door, until she saw her infant come amid the howling escort. At that point she grabbed it up and ran for home, and small thanks I or my four-pawed rangers ever got. And Harker's book implies that, having stolen the child for my own snack, I then called up the wolves to eat the mother…

Now I see in your eyes that this time you do not believe my version of the event at all. Well, and why should I not have helped her, as I helped a thousand others when I ruled as Prince? She came to me in my capacity of lord, and asked for help, and I was duty-bound to render it. That actions so elementary and right, on her part and on mine, must be verified and spelled out shows how far the world has fallen… but there, I now sound like an old man.

Still you doubt. You will insist on believing that I would rather drink a baby's blood than dandle it on my knee. And you are right, or would be, were those the only two courses of behavior from which I had to choose.

Very well. Now is as good a time as any, and we will discuss the drinking of the blood. You eat flesh. Do you eat that of man and woman? Maybe a playful love bite now and then, but not beyond that, hey? So, very approximately, the matter rests with me. My only material sustenance is blood, warm and preferably mammalian, but I am indifferent as to what species I use for nourishment. For now, take that as given. Later, if we have time, we will discuss how, as I believe, most of my needful energy comes to me by an as-yet-unmeasured radiation from the sun.

Another peculiarity of the vampirish existence is that the reproductive organs, along with other systems of excretion, cease to function; the body throws off neither seed nor waste. This is not to say that we are passionless; far from it. But whereas in breathing men and women there are many raging lusts-go without food two weeks, water two days, air two minutes, and see if I am using the wrong words-besides the lust for mere sexual activity, for us the blood is the life, the blood is all.

The love of women I have known all my life and for me its essence does not change. But its mode of expression had changed when I awoke from my mortal wounds of 1476. Since then, for me, the blood is all. Oh, I can do without the blood of sweet young women for two months, two years, two centuries, I suppose, if there were reason for such abstinence. I have told you that I never forced Lucy, or Mina, or any of the others.

But never mind. It was on the day following the poor village woman's visit that Harker, maddened by fear, dared to climb down the outside of the castle wall from his window, far enough to enter my own rooms. Then following an interior passage down to a lower chapel, he came upon the boxes of earth which I and my friends had been preparing for my journey. And snooping into the boxes, he found in one of them your obedient servant, resting. He might have destroyed me on the spot, had he been clever and malign enough, had his wits matched his foolhardy courage that let him dare that wall. For I, of course, was not aware at the time of his investigation.

The trance of daylight, which we usually-but not always-undergo between sunrise and sunset, actually marks, as I believe, our dependence upon the sun. As breathing men cannot healthfully engage in heavy exercise while eating and digesting food, we of the vampire persuasion are at best somewhat lethargic when in the presence of the sun; nor can any of us bear its unshielded rays for very long.

At any rate, he found me there, within the wooden box half full of soft, moist earth, in trance. The grip of this day-trance is hard to rouse from, as we shall see, and it is apt to be more open-eyed than common human sleep. We do not grow fatigued in the same sense that breathing humans do, yet eventually we must rest, and rest is possible only in the raw earth of the homeland. Why this is so I do not know; time later, maybe, for a theory or two of mine.

Not knowing what to make of my state, unbreathing, motionless, but somehow still undead as well, Harker went back to his rooms; nor, of course, did he mention his intrusion to me later. Four days later, on June twenty-ninth, my plans, and the labors of my helpers, were alike complete. In the late evening I went to Harker and said:

"Tomorrow, my friend, we must part. You return to your beautiful England and I go to some work which may have such an end that we will never meet again. Your last letter home has been dispatched; tomorrow I shall not be here, but all shall be ready for your journey. In the morning come the Szgany, who have some labors of their own here, and also come some Slovaks. When they have gone, my carriage shall come for you and bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence from Bukovina to Bistrita. But I am in hopes that I shall see more of you at Castle Dracula." Need I add that I was sometimes more diplomatic than truthful in my conversations with Harker? I most heartily wished never to lay eyes on him again.

My unexpected statement came to him as a shock, beyond a mere surprise. It had a tonic effect; he started to his feet, and I could see his modest store of wits returning whilst he summoned up reserves of courage to confront me, evidently a harder feat than scaling a sheer stone wall.

In a firm voice he finally asked, straight out: "Why may I not go tonight?"

"Because, my dear sir, my coachman and horses are away on a mission." In bald fact, Tatra, the only one of the Szgany whom I would have considered entrusting with a delicate mission out of my presence, was at that moment in a village of Bukovina, negotiating for a new horse; the three dear ladies of my household had drained a black stallion of its life the night before, and I expected the Slovaks and their dogs to munch the stallion's flesh upon the morrow.

Harker actually smiled, as if he had trapped me now-it was a smooth, soft, diabolical smile, if I may say so-and I feared from what I saw in his eyes that he was a little mad already, an expectable outcome of his long brooding over fears and doubts rather than having them out with me in open argument. He said: "But I would walk with pleasure; I want to get away at once."

"And your baggage?"

"I do not care about it. I can send for it some other time." When he had written about it in his journal, though, he had cared, accusing me of stealing his good suit and his overcoat and rug, as well as threatening his life and sanity. But now he stood firmly on his feet, looking for the first time in weeks like the confident and capable young man who had come to Castle Dracula in early May.

I sighed inwardly. I did not completely trust the Szgany, even Tatra, to carry out to the letter my instructions regarding Harker, not once I myself was boxed and shipped. So, I thought, why not take him at his word and let him walk down to the pass? The only real danger I foresaw was from wolves, and a word from me to some of them before he started would provide him with such an escort that his safety would be assured at least until he reached the domain of ordinary men, after which he would have to take his chances like the rest of us.

So let him walk, I thought, it is only a few kilometers down to the pass; and though the road was poor it did not branch and it went downhill nearly all the way. I suppose I assumed without thinking about it that he still had some money of his own in his pockets, along with the diary he still retained. I suppose also I really should not complain about the gold coin he stole from me on his departure, as I, or rather my household, was at the same time left in possession of a letter of credit, his best suit of clothes-which I had got a gypsy wench to clean, with lamentable result-and the overcoat and traveling rug mentioned earlier, along with railroad timetables, et cetera, et cetera.

I stood aside from the door of his room, relieved that my guest had finally plainly expressed his obvious desire to leave, and that I could accede to it so quickly and directly that his opinion of me was bound to be improved. I intended to press into his hands at the last moment a few weighty pieces of antique gold, as mementos of his visit. My grand, elaborate scheme was all going to work out after all, I thought. Once Harker had won back to reasonable human surroundings he would change his mind about what had actually happened under my roof, or change his story about it anyway. And going home might do him so much good that any mental breakdown could be avoided after all.

As Harker notes in his journal, it was at this point that I said to him, with a "sweet courtesy" that made him rub his eyes because "it seemed so real":

"You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars: 'Welcome the coming, speed the departing guest.' Come with me, my dear young friend. Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will, though sad am I at your going, and that you so suddenly desire it. Come!"

I took up a lamp and went ahead of Harker down the stairs, he following hesitantly, testing every footstep as if suspicious of some trap. Meanwhile, using that inner utterance with which I converse with animals, I summoned up to the castle the three or four wolves presently lurking in the woods not far below, which I intended should provide my visitor with safe conduct on his way. I meant to bring them in and introduce them to my guest and let them lick his hands and learn that he was to be treated with good will. They were howling in the courtyard by the time we reached the front door from inside, and as I began to open it they threw themselves into the widening gap. I stood in their way till I could calm them enough to make my wishes clear.

Their noise, however, and the sight of those fanged muzzles, red-tongued and slavering, extending under my arm as I stood in the doorway holding my children back, were too much for Harker. In his diary he credits me with the "diabolical wickedness" of wanting him eaten alive by the wolves, as well as plotting to have him drained of blood by the three women; two mutually exclusive fates, as it seems to me, beyond even the power of Count Dracula to inflict on the same victim.

"Shut the door!" he cried out, and I turned my head with some surprise to behold him sagging in despair against the wall, hands covering his face. "I shall wait till morning!"

Obviously, he was after all in no state to be allowed to wander on the mountainside at night. I was bitterly disappointed-with some violence I threw the last howling child out into the darkness, and slammed the great door shut-but I said nothing more to Harker then. In silence I walked with him back to the library, where I bade him a very brief goodnight. I did not know until I read his journal that later those three damnable women came to whisper seductive invitations outside his door, taunt him with their lip-smackings and their laughter, and even imitate my whispered voice in pretended dialogue with them thus: "Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have patience! Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours!"

No, Jonathan Harker, if you can hear me, I suppose that I can hardly blame you for what you later did to me. Nor did I feel much pity for Melisse, Wanda, and fair Anna when Van Helsing the sadist eventually came calling…

But I must adhere to the order of my story. On my last night before leaving Castle Dracula I supped full well, on bright beef blood-not from mere appetite, though I had that, but with a view to acquiring a more youthful look. Of course I had not seen my own face in a mirror for some four hundred years-it may be evidence of some benign plan for the world, that neither do I have a regular need to shave-but from certain words dropped now and then by my occasional companions, I had gathered that my recent appearance was that of an old man, white of hair and mustache though quite hale, and on occasion red-eyed like some animal caught in a beam of one of the new electric lights. This aspect I could alter by regular heavy feeding, and meant to do so in case Harker should after all have the hue and cry out for me by the time I reached England.

I supped well, as I say, and expected to rest well too, trying out another of my stout new traveling beds. There is not much can rouse a vampire in bright day, when he has gone, fully sated, to his earth. One sure alarm clock of course is the sharp point of the wooden stake entering his rib cage, with a strong and determined arm hammering behind it. This I know, though of course not yet by direct experience. What is it about wood that makes the stuff, under the proper conditions, so utterly, no-nonsense lethal to my kind? That it itself was once alive but is no more? Metal, that hacks up in such fine style the flesh of breathing men and draws out the rich red streams of life from them, is alien to us and cannot find its way to kill. It bounces off, disperses through, and interpenetrates our peculiar flesh, but cannot transfer fatal force to us. Silver bullets? Their efficacy is mere superstition as far as vampires are concerned.

But metal hurt me in my box that day, a sharp-edged spade swung in the desperate grip of Harker, who once more had dared the castle's slippery outer wall to gain my rooms, who once more ransacked my chambers and my vaults in hopes of finding there a key or other means of getting out in daylight on his own. He found me in a box again, and, this time yielding to the impulse to do murder, snatched up the nearby digging implement.

Imagine the deepest sleep that you have ever slept, the hardest to break free from, and multiply its inertia by tenfold. In dreamless near-oblivion I lay so, a leaden lethargy, a numbness, wound like chains on all my limbs. He might have found me, searched me, raped me, and I would neither have known nor cared until sundown. But when he took up the spade, the psychic blow, the impulse of wholehearted murder came singing through the vaulted air to rouse me, to begin my rousing, well before the whistling blade itself struck home.

"Bloody bastard." His voice was only a faint wheezing moan but yet I heard it clearly. "Monstrous bloody bloated leech."

My eyes were open, had been open all along, but only slowly, blurrily, did the blindness of trance clear from them. I realized that the lid of my box had been pulled open, for there was the groining of the stone above. There was light, faint daylight whispering down through many a room and passageway. And off in one corner of my vision, Harker's face, at first only a whitish oval blur, and then as my sight cleared and my eyes began to focus, a mask of madness, the face of breathing Man as he exists in all the vampire nightmares that ever were, mask of the hunter, persecutor, stake pounder, who would cleanse his world by making sacrificial goats of the undead.

Coming so very slowly and hopelessly up out of trance-I would not be in time, I knew, to act effectively in self-defense-I realized for the first time and with detachment that Harker had lost weight as my guest-his arms were thinner in their dirty sleeves-that his hair hung down disheveled around an evilly transformed face, that his shaving had been spotty at best during the weeks since he had lost his mirror.

"Bloody bastard!" he grated out again, and in the midst of that last word his voice broke on a sob. And with a little whining screech of indrawn breath he raised the spade, held it high in both hands for an edge-down swing straight at my face.

I am not boasting when I say I was not terrified. Later on I will discourse of fear. I say now only that I watched, unhappily, as that heavy blow came down. Impossible to do more than turn my head and try to glare at my attacker. The shovel struck in the middle of my forehead, and I took the shock and pain of it through my head, and tried to no avail to move my hands and feet, and thought that in a second more the blow would come again.

And Harker? What saw he? "… a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semidemons to batten on the helpless… I seized a shovel… and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned and the eyes fell full upon me with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead." In rebuttal I can only reiterate that the sight of Harker swinging a shovel at my head was somewhat perturbing to me as well.

Unnerved by my movement and by the failure of this first attack to destroy me, he let the shovel slip from his hands and it somehow brought the box lid slamming down, leaving me to wait in darkness for his next move. It is perhaps fortunate for those interested in this history that at this point our tete-a-tete was interrupted, by "a gypsy song sung in merry voices," offstage but approaching, and accompanied by other noises of the Szgany who were coming with heavy wagons into the courtyard to begin my move. Harker fled back upstairs to scribble more into his journal. As soon as the coast was clear of gypsies he took the daring chance of climbing down the whole surface of the castle wall, and shortly got clear away upon his own initiative. My carriage rested empty that day, and Tatra put on his coachman's livery for nothing.

Had my guest stayed with me a little longer and put his wits to work he might well have done me serious or even fatal damage. Of course a simple attack with a metal tool was doomed to fail, a point Harker might profitably have remembered later, when he and I resumed our social intercourse. By now the mark has entirely disappeared from my forehead-wouldn't you say?-or at least my fingers can no longer find the ridgelike scar, and no one has remarked upon it for some decades.

But I had been given a throbbing head, and some fresh food for thought, viaticum for my journey; I was in no state to communicate with the loyal Szgany as they nailed down my lid and began to roll me down the long road to the sea.