Dracula's Ghost - Chapter 1
Part I: The Shadow of Carfax Abbey
When I had prayed sufficiently to the dead, I cut the throats of the two sheep and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus – brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men killed in battle, with their armor still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. When I saw them coming I told the men to be quick and flay the carcasses of the two dead sheep and make burnt offerings of them, and at the same time to repeat prayers to Hades and Persephone; but I sat where I was with my sword drawn and would not let the poor feckless ghosts come near the blood till Teirsias should have answered my questions. Homer, The Odyssey (Book XI)
Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. John 21:18-19
Chapter 1
Somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains
1893
The dead have no memory. If one were to ask, perhaps he would look up from his book and glance out the window at the stars. The women would be out there, somewhere in the darkness as they hunted for lost travelers or lonely shepherd boys. For this occasion, he would have banished them to a small corner of the castle, so they prefer to be away. It is just as well, for he finds their company tiresome.
He was, or so he tells the few living souls that he encounters, a prince at one time – a voivode. He would expound at length of armies and great battles, though he would be unsure if the memories are his own, or whether he has gleaned them from others. If he were truly honest, he would tell of Scholomance, the great school of science and magic where the Devil claims every tenth scholar as his own, of an experiment gone horribly wrong. If he were honest - he is an incorrigible liar, and his own memory, at least the part that he trusts, dates back no more than two hundred years. Perhaps he fears sometimes that he is no voivode, but simply a ghoul that has haunted this place long before the stones of the castle were laid. If so, he pushes such thoughts aside, for old memories are unreliable, and the dead have their own dark places that they fear to explore.
It has taken a hundred years to come up with the workings of a plan. He begins to accumulate information through the use of buried treasure or doomed acolytes, foolish souls who wager that their service will bring wealth or power. Much as I did once. In 1812 (for by now, he has remembered to track the passing of time), he hears of a great empire to the west - a young empire, and full blooded – that has burned a city of rebellious subjects. He thrills at the notion of these “Anglish” kings, flaying and impaling their subjects who importunately named their capital after a rebellious general. He has solved the problem of travel (for the dead are bound inexorably to the grave) with the reason of the Enlightenment philosophers, and the mad ideas over which he has labored for two centuries will come to fruition. The excavation of the chapel has already begun, and the boxes of earth that he will carry to London are being filled. Only one item remains.
Few have heard his secrets, and fewer still have survived to carry that knowledge to the outside world. Jonathan Harker knows none of these things as he is greeted at the threshold of the castle.
“Enter freely and of your own will.”
Later, when he emerges from the madness that nearly consumes him, Jonathan will realize that the greeting is an omen, a dark portent that he has missed. He is in Transylvania to transfer a piece of London property - an important assignment for a young solicitor’s clerk on behalf of Peter Hawkins. Jonathan’s recent engagement to Mina Murray, the orphaned girl who Mr. Hawkins has raised as his own daughter, only adds to his determination to perform his duties well.
Yet the signs are there, for those with eyes to see.
I.
London
1933
The rain had abated to a cold drizzle by the time he entered the grounds of the cemetery. Rivulets of water ran down the path and accumulated as broad puddles in the low-lying areas. Wisps of fog drifted, ghostlike, through the trees as Jonathan Harker stood before the mausoleum. Somewhere to the east, beyond the clouds and fog, the sun was rising.
I am old, Mina, he said to himself. Old and weary through long years of mourning the dead. Jonathan ran his fingers through the thinning strands atop his head. It was an apt phrase, one remembered form a time and place he would rather forget. But we always return, don’t we? We run faster, we get older, but our track always runs in a circle. He would turn sixty-five at year’s end if the reaper didn’t catch him first. Where has the time gone? The hours were slow and filled with pain, but even in the depths of his grief, the years had flown. Mina had died nine years ago today.
Boots sloshed wetly behind him, and Jonathan turned to regard the large man coming up the path. The Ulster topcoat was cut from the finest tweed, and its bulk added to the wearer’s sizable girth. The dark beard, out of fashion with all but the oldest men, was long but well-groomed. The beard itself was streaked with salt and pepper, but the curly hair that protruded from the felt derby retained its youthful vigor. Jonathan felt a twinge of envy – what remained of his own hair had been entirely gray by forty.
“Hello John,” Jack Seward said. “You’re never home when I come calling, so I came here.”
“Hello Jack. It’s good to see you again.”
“Is it?” Seward pulled a metal flask from the Ulster and took a long drink. He had been a frail, somewhat insecure fellow, not quite thirty years old, at their first meeting. Now, nearing seventy, he had grown large; an aging, great-hearted bull of a man. He stepped around the puddles with a grace that belied his years and offered him the flask. Jonathan drank as Seward read the inscription on the tomb.
“I spend a fair amount of time away.” The liquid burned at his throat. “The last few years have been busy.”
“I imagine they have.” The big man took another swig. “When the trap door opens under a man’s feet and life goes to shit, some men cry and others pray. You work. Always gadding about somewhere – Edinburgh, Antwerp, Rome, Paris, Berlin-”
“Not Berlin,” Jonathan interjected.
“So I came here. One day of the year, every year, I know exactly where to find you. Rain or shine, war or peace.” The flask disappeared into the topcoat, neat as a conjurer’s trick.
“You’re right, of course,” Jonathan said. “I should have called on you, but with Mina’s death, Sarah’s marriage, and so many other things, it was easier to stay busy.”
“How is your lovely daughter?” Seward’s face brightened considerably.
“Still in India. Returning home while His Majesty Archibald the First completes his final tour at sea.”
“And His Majesty Archibald the Second?”
Jonathan smiled. “A precocious little brat, if you believe his mother’s letters. I’m looking forward to spoiling him even more.”
“Serves her right, I’m sure. I’ve been thinking-” He saw the look on Jonathan’s face and flushed beneath the beard. “You already know what I’m going to ask, aren’t you?”
“I do. And you know my answer.”
“No interest in finding the last one?” Jonathan shook his head, and Seward nodded in resignation. “I suppose I can’t blame you. While we’re here, we should go and visit Arthur.”
“Not today, Jack. I’m not in the mood.”
“And when were you in the mood, John?” He spoke quietly, but there was annoyance in Seward’s voice. “In 1920? 1910? 1904, for God’s sake? Take another drink and follow me.” Seward tossed him the flask and headed up the path, boots splashing petulantly through the puddles.
“It was last week.” Jonathan took a long pull from Seward’s flask. He had been a regular visitor since 1916, when John Quincy came home from the War.
They came to an older section of the cemetery. The mausoleums in this section were larger, more ornate, than Mina’s simple vault. Jonathan and Seward read the inscription together.
Sir Arthur Holmwood, OBE
1866-1904
“I’m always surprised,” Jonathan said. He touched the big man on the shoulder. “I always thought Arthur would be buried closer to-” his eyes darted westward. On the horizon, the morning sun peered weakly through the fog.
“Don’t be a fool, John. Do you think Kate would have allowed that?”
“No. I suppose not.”
“And who could blame her?”
A gust of wind hit them, and Seward pulled the Ulster tightly around his shoulders. Jonathan kept his mouth tightly shut. The matter of Katherine Holmwood was another point of disagreement that could only devolve into argument.
“The girl poured out her life for him, and what did she get in return?”
“A big house, for one thing.”
“Stop it, John, you know it wasn’t her fault!”
And around they would go, exhuming the buried corpses of the last twenty-nine years. In all likelihood, Jonathan knew, Seward was correct. Scotland Yard dragged her into the mess of 1908 along with the rest of us. As for Arthur’s death, the basic facts were clear enough, whatever the contortions the inquest made for the sake of nobility. Still, Jonathan couldn’t resist a single shot, fired across Seward’s bow for the sake of honor.
“She blames me for South Africa. You know that.”
“Foolishness again, Harker. Arthur would have gone to war with or without you.” Seward glanced at his pocket watch. “I need to be going, Johnny. Business to attend.”
“Of course.” Seward’s business was likely a bottle of gin and the company of a young barmaid. Impressive that he can carry on at our age. A thought rose unbidden in his mind, and Jonathan pushed it aside. Seward eyed him balefully.
“What? Come on, out with it, Harker.”
“Do you ever visit her tomb?”
“Every year. Early afternoon, the same day in September.” Seward looked westward, toward the older section of the cemetery. “I’m not one for churches or vicars, John, but I visit her tomb and say a prayer for her. For us.”
“She’s better off this way,” Jonathan said.
“Perhaps,” he said quietly. “But I never told you the whole story, John - some things are too painful to speak aloud.”
His somber mood lifted, and Seward clapped Jonathan on the back, staggering him a little. “Anyhow, you should come visit sometime! We’ll be gone soon enough, and there’ll be no more visits!”
Seward tipped his bowler at two well-dressed strangers and disappeared around a bend. Jonathan acknowledged the men with a brief nod and followed his own path. The meeting interrupted in his weekly routine, and he had one more duty to perform.
At Mina’s insistence, they had purchased their own mausoleum well in advance, but the smaller plot had been an unexpected addition. The grave was unobtrusive, and the name was inscribed deeply in the granite, along with a brief regimental inscription. Jonathan played his fingers across the grooves in the stone.
Jonathan Quincy Harker
1895-1916
He stayed by his son’s grave for a long time, lost in thought.
II.
Some things are too painful to speak aloud. Seward’s words needled at his conscience on the trip home. What did Van Helsing call him? A necromancer – one who summons the dead. A parasite, dead himself, who maintains a simulacrum of life by preying upon the innocent. And it was my own work, undertaken with such innocence, that brought him to London.
“Working today, sir?”
Jonathan passed her his coat and hat. Mrs. Cobham was the last of his remaining staff, and despite their differences in age and social class – he had a good ten years on her – she fretted over him like a mother hen. The aroma of Seward’s gin hung about him like a miasma, and the tang of alcohol would worry her into a frenzy of housework for the remainder of the day. Later, she would favor him with a sizeable meal and an indirect, but pointed, admonition to take better care of himself.
“Not today,” he said. The subtext passed unspoken between them. One day of the year, my schedule is always free. “I’ll be in the study if you need me.”
He went upstairs and locked the door to his office. Jonathan lingered at Mina’s portrait on the heavy desk, then glanced at the other photographs - a portrait of Sarah at two years old, John Quincy in his military uniform, a photograph of himself with Arthur in South Africa. The brim of Jonathan’s slouch hat was pinned on the right side, giving him a rakish look, and Arthur wore that awful pith helmet that marked him as the regimental commander. Both of them wore mustaches. God, we were innocent in those days. After all that we had gone through, we were still babes. He poured another drink from the crystal decanter and raised a silent toast to Arthur’s memory.
In the dream, the wind is blowing hot and dry across the grassland. Jonathan remembers that terrible summer, the sun burning their skin, the taste of cotton in his mouth as their water runs out. He is certain that he will die on that awful plain, that Mina will live out her days without him. John Quincy, five years old, will know his father from framed photographs and a few vague memories. Sarah, dear little Sarah, will not even be born, because he will be dead before he returns to London. With his own mortality looming, Jonathan knows feels surprisingly content. Some things are worse than dying in the light of day.
The dreams began in earnest after his return from South Africa, and Jonathan shrugged them off for the most part - he had seen enough in his waking hours for the nightmares to have little impact. Last night, perhaps in anticipation of the visit to Mina’s tomb, the dream had recurred with unusual vividness.
Arthur is moving among the ranks, encouraging the survivors. The Boers rarely favor pitched battles, but the volunteers are cut off from relief, and the enemy attacks in waves, dozens followed by hundreds, then thousands – so many that they blot out the horizon. In real life, Jonathan knows that Holmwood’s London Volunteers fought perhaps two hundred men that day. Dreams, like memories, are funny things, infinitely malleable. In life, they eventually reached Cape Town, exhausted and half-mad with thirst, but even Arthur pulled through in the end. In the dream, of course, everyone dies, Arthur last of all, and Jonathan faces the horde of Boers alone. He awakens at the moment of his own death.
He lit a cigar from the humidor and walked to the window. They had moved from Exeter to London in 1895 to be closer to Arthur and Seward. Be honest, he thought. We came to keep a closer eye on Arthur. He had been restless and troubled in those days, but Jonathan believed that Arthur’s courtship with Kate Reed would settle his mind. Kate had known Mina and Lucy… before… but if she was troubled by the specter of Arthur’s dead fiancé, she gave no sign. Mina knew better, didn’t she? His wife, gently but firmly, counseled caution to both. Nonetheless, the courtship proceeded to marriage, and Arthur seemed better for a while.
Last night’s dream is different. Only Arthur and Jonathan are left. As they face the final onslaught, Jonathan realizes that they are not facing the Boers. Instead, a horde of Szgany is riding toward them on black horses, and at the head of the army is a horse-drawn wagon carrying a rectangular box – a coffin. The sky is no longer blue, but red with the dying glow of the sun, and the riders bear down on them with blazing eyes and sharp teeth. As the sun sets, a familiar voice speaks from the box, and Jonathan wakes up screaming as something rises from the coffin. In the terrible interlude between sleep and awareness, he tries to remember the face.
III.
London to Cape Town
1899
Going to war was Arthur’s idea.
He came to Jonathan at the end of winter with the proposal to raise a regiment of London volunteers. For Queen and country, he said. Jonathan demurred, wanting no part of another adventure, and the discussion became heated.
“Haven’t you heard, John? An entire company overrun!” Lord Godalming paced relentlessly around the study. “Bloody fools were shooting over the heads of the Boers at fifty yards. Fifty yards! They had their rifles sighted for three hundred!”
“Well for God’s sake, why didn’t they lower their sights?”
“Because their commanding officer hadn’t given the order. I love the Empire, John, but we are lions led by asses.”
That night, after putting John Quincy (“not Quincy – John Quincy, like the American President,” the boy insisted) to bed, Jonathan raised the issue with Mina.
“Seriously, John? A British gentleman does not consult his wife in matters of state.”
“Don’t play games, Mina.”
“All right, then. If you choose to disregard my advice on proper etiquette, I will proffer my opinion. Arthur is a fool.”
“For going to South Africa?”
“For going to South Africa, for his continued pining over Lucy, for getting married - a fool. Anyhow, I think you should go.”
Mina was not given to pranks, and Jonathan stared into his wife’s face, flabbergasted. After several minutes of uncomfortable silence, he managed a single word.
“Why?”
She stood at the window, and Jonathan slipped an arm about her as they watched the sunset.
“Perhaps I’m an even bigger fool than Arthur. We aren’t nobility, but we’re expected to behave in certain ways - to do our duty to the Crown. If you don’t go, others will notice. Do you seriously not think of such things?”
“I did once. Since when does our social position matter to you?”
“It doesn’t. At least, not enough to warrant the loss of my husband. And yet…” She paused, breathing deeply, and the next words were spoken with difficulty. “Arthur is… not well. Perhaps you don’t see it, but I do, and it frightens me. What happens to us if the truth comes out? What happens to John Quincy?”
“Arthur would never speak unwisely.”
“Perhaps not, for now. He holds himself together well enough for the outside world. But go with him, John. Keep a close watch on him. And, for the love of God, try not to get yourself killed.”
Tears streamed down Mina’s cheeks, but she smiled wickedly as she wriggled from their embrace.
“Now you’ve made your wife sick with worry. Come to bed and comfort her.”
They raised the regiment in accordance with Arthur’s wishes, recruiting dock workers, teamsters, barmen, and the occasional petty criminal, and within six months, they were in Cape Town. Unfettered by old traditions or petty discipline, the irregulars performed brilliantly. The Boers could run circles around the regular army, but the volunteers copied their tactics and used speed, mobility, and terrain to fight the Dutch farmers to a standstill. Nine months into their term of service, Arthur was wounded by a stray bullet, a lucky shot from some distant sniper. Running low on water and ammunition, and with Arthur delirious from fever, they marched for three days before stumbling upon the outpost. Wincing at the stench that emanated from the far side of the fence, Jonathan presented himself to the commanding officer.
“What is this place?”
“Concentration camp. Orders from the top to separate the Boer army from its base of support.”
The camp was full of women and children – most sick, a few starving, all miserable. When Jonathan pointed out the prisoners would die without proper care, the officer shrugged off his protests. There’s nothing to be done, sir – we can barely care for ourselves. Same thing’s happening across the entire colony. They reached Cape Town a week later, and after Arthur’s evacuation, Jonathan took command and served out their remaining three months in a desultory manner. After seeing the camps, he had lost all taste for the war.
Jonathan did not see Arthur for months after his return, though he knew through Kate Reed (Katherine Holmwood, the Lady Godalming, he forced himself to remember), that Arthur remained ill and unsettled. In its cruel way, their year in South Africa was successful, for in their nine months on the veldt, in the hours and days of unrelenting boredom, Arthur began to talk of his own nightmares.
IV.
London
1933
The Rolls Royce Twenty, purchased new in 1924, had been Seward’s pride and joy for nearly ten years. Now, the engine rattled, and clouds of dark smoke billowed from the exhaust. On her last legs, he thought glumly. Like me. Since retirement, he had made point of sleeping late – never watch a sunrise except at the end of a long night at the pub – and the morning visit with Harker left him exhausted. For a few extra shillings, his companion, a barmaid who sent money to her family in the North, allowed him several hours rest in her room. At half past one, he departed London for Purfleet, driving south and west in his dying automobile.
The drive allowed him to ruminate on the morning’s meeting with Jonathan Harker. They had been close, as thick as thieves, in the old days. We were thieves in those days, or criminals at any rate. Mina’s death had changed everything, and Jonathan had retreated inward, cutting the ties that bound him to the past. His son lost to the War and wife wasted away by illness - who could blame him? Still, it was inexcusable to dishonor their friend’s memory, and Seward wondered whether Jonathan harbored shame over Arthur’s final act.
He parked the car in front of the ramshackle building and unlocked the front door. The asylum had closed for good in 1911, and Seward had retired from the practice of medicine in 1918, but he saw no reason to move. Much as he enjoyed the bustle of London, the empty asylum was peaceful – a refuge from the outside world. The walled garden, tucked away behind his living quarters, was the best part. Much of the property had been used as a dumping ground for discarded equipment, kitchen rubbish, and the other detritus of a working hospital, and Seward avoided these areas for fear of stepping on an old syringe or impaling himself on a broken bedframe. The garden, however, was his private idyll. Unkempt, expansive, and disorderly, much like Seward himself, it was a thing of beauty. He found an unopened bottle of gin and headed outside, basking in the open air as the liquid soothed his body and mind. Seward loved the garden, even in the dullest weather.
The garden had another advantage. The rambling house and deserted asylum shielded it from the view of Carfax Abbey. Forty years on, the old place still left him with a bad feeling.
V.
They stood at the corner, one man observing the house as the other watched for approaching Bobbies. Hans explained repeatedly that the English would not arrest them, but that did not dissuade the larger man’s furtive glances in either direction.
“I say we go tonight,” Richard said. “Catch the old man in his sleep and ransack the house. Then find a good English pub and drink ourselves silly.”
Hans studied the windows that faced the street. Smaller than his companion, his body was thickly muscled from a childhood of farm labor and as he approached forty, he kept fit with gymnastics and punishing hikes. On occasion, the young brawlers of Berlin or Munich took his thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses for weakness. A harsh lesson, he supposed, to find that an old lion still has teeth.
“I think we should wait,” he said. “The other house is a better target – isolated, with no housekeepers or other witnesses.”
“Suit yourself.” Richard stamped his feet. “Otto left you in charge, but if it were up to me, I’d go tonight.”
Hans grimaced. Richard was as tough as the shoe leather he had eaten at War’s end, but he lacked imagination. The whole place was exposed, with streetlamps on every side, and they had no idea who was inside with the old man. The deserted madhouse was twenty miles from the city, and if the occupant was away from home, they could search at their leisure. To Hans, it was an obvious choice.
“Besides,” he said, “someone is watching from the window.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I was a sharpshooter in the War,” Hans said. “I used to watch across no man’s land for careless Tommies sticking their heads over the trenches. Know how I found them? Look for the glow of a cigarette.” He pointed toward the window. “Someone on the second floor is having a smoke.”
“I don’t see anything.” Richard watched for several minutes. “But what would I know? I was on the Eastern Front – bayonet charges, maneuver, burning a few villages. Good times.”
“Speak for yourself. I did my duty, but I wouldn’t call it a good time.”
“That’s because you were stuck in a hole with rats and corpses. Anyhow, I think we should go tonight.”
Hans watched the faint glow in the window. No, I don’t think so. The old manor in Purfleet was a dank ruin, but a secluded one. He lit a cigarette.
“Let’s get something to eat,” Hans said. “We’ll cable Munich tomorrow, then head back to Purfleet. We’ll break into the madhouse when no one is home and return here if we find nothing useful.” And if that doesn’t work, I have one more card to play.