0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (5 page)

In my tenth week I started upon the high barred shelves, and what I find there surprises, delights and occasionally revolts me. Little histories, human fables set in years yet to be, that reveal how little our basest nature changes with the passing decades. These books interest me the most.

I had not intended to begin reading any of the volumes, you understand, for the simple reason that it would slow my rate of progress to a crawl, and there are still so many shelves to document. Many books require handling with the utmost care, for their condition is so delicate that their gossamer pages crumble in the heat of a human hand. However, I now permit myself to read in the evenings, in order that I might put from my mind the worsening weather and my poor, pining Mina.

The light in the library is good, there being a proliferation of candles lit for me, and the great brocaded armchair I had brought down from my bedroom is pulled as close to the fire as I dare, deep and comfortable.

Klove leaves his master's guest a nightly brandy, setting down a crystal bowl before me in the white kid gloves he always wears for duties in this room. Outside I hear the wind loping around the battlements like a wounded wolf, and in the distant hills I hear some of those very creatures lifting their heads to the sky. The fire shifts, popping and crackling. I open the book I have chosen for the evening and begin to read.

From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, August 30th 1893

I have the strangest feeling that I am not alone.

Oh, I know there are servants, four, I think; a raw-looking woman who cooks and cleans, her husband the groom, an addle-pated under-servant born without wits who is only fit for washing and sweeping (he might be the son of the cook; there is a resemblance), and Klove, an unsmiling German butler whom I take to be the Count's manservant. I mean to say that there is someone else here. I sense his presence late at night, when the fire has banked down to an amber glow and the library is at its gloomiest. I can feel him standing silently at the windows (an impossibility, since they overlook a sheer drop of several hundred yards) but when I turn to catch a glimpse of this imagined figure it is gone.

Last night the feeling came again. I had just finished cataloguing the top shelves of the library's west wall, and was setting the iron ladders back in their place when I became aware of someone staring at my back.

A sensation of panic seized me as the hairs stood on my neck, prickling as though charged with electricity, but I forced myself to continue with my task, finally turning in the natural course of my duty and raising my gaze to where I felt this mysterious watcher to be standing.

Of course, there was nothing corporeal to see - yet this time the feeling persisted. Slowly, I made my way across the great room, passing the glowing red escarpment of the fire, until I reached the bank of mullioned windows set in the room's north side. Through the rain that was tickering against the glass I looked out on the most forsaken landscape imaginable, grey pines and burned black rock. I could still feel him, somewhere outside the windows, as if he had passed by on the wall itself, and yet how was this possible? I am a man who prides himself on his sensitivity, and fancied that this baleful presence belonged to none other than my host. Yet the Count was still away and was not due to return for a further fourteen days (I had been informed by Klove), having extended his trip to conclude certain business affairs.

This presents me with a new problem, for I am told that winter quickly settles in the mountains, and is slow to release the province from its numbing grip. Once the blizzards begin the roads will quickly become inundated, making it virtually impossible for me to leave the castle until the end of spring, a full seven months away. I would truly be a prisoner here in Castle Dracula. With that thought weighing heavily on my mind I returned to my seat beside the fire, fought down the urge to panic, opened a book and once more began to read.

I must have dozed, for I can only think what I saw next was a hallucination resulting from a poorly digested piece of mutton. The Count was standing in the corner of the library, still dressed in his heavy-weather oilskin. He seemed agitated and ill-at-ease, as if conducting an argument with himself on some point. At length he reached a decision and approached me, gliding across the room like a tall ship in still seas.

Flowing behind him was a rippling wave of fur, as hundreds of rats poured over the chairs and tables in a fanned brown shadow. The rodents watched me with eyes like ebony beads. They cascaded over the Count's shoes and formed a great circle around my chair, as if awaiting a signal. But the signal did not come, so they fell upon one another, the strongest tearing into the soft fat bellies of the weakest, and the library carpet turned black with blood as the chamber filled with screams...

I awoke to find my shirt as wet as if it had been dropped into a lake.

The book I had been reading lay on the floor at my feet, its spine split.

The gold crucifix I always wear at my neck was hung on the arm of my chair, its clasp broken beyond repair. I resolved to eat earlier from that night on.

From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, September 22nd 1893

The weather has begun to worsen, and there is still no sign of the Count.

Klove has heard nothing of his master, and as the days grow shorter a forlorn darkness descends upon the castle. The skies are troubled, the clouds heavier now, ebbing to the west with their bellies full of rain. The library occupies my waking hours. It is like an origami model of Chinese paper, ever unfolding into new configurations. Just when I think I have its measure, new delights and degradations present themselves. Yesterday, I started on a further set of shelves housing nautical chart-books and maps, and while reaching across the ladder to pull one stubborn tome free, triggered the opening of a mahogany flap built in the rear of the shelf that folded down to reveal a hundred further volumes.

I carefully cleared a space and set these books in stacks according to their co-ordinated bindings, and only once they all stood free of their secret home did I start to examine them.

I find delicacy escapes me at this point; they were lexicons of erotica, frankly illustrated, alarmingly detailed, outlining practices above, below and altogether beyond the boundaries of human nature in such an overt and lascivious manner that I was forced to return them to their hiding place before Klove brought me my nightly brandy, for no gentleman would wish such volumes to fall into the hands of servants.

After he had left the room I took time to examine the single edition I had left out. It was much like the others, designed more to arouse the senses than to provide practical advice concerning the physical side of matrimony. The room grew hot about me as I turned the pages, and I was forced to move back from the fireplace. The drawings were shameless, representing actions one would scarcely countenance in the darkest woods, here presented in brightest daylight. Still more shocking was my discovery that the book was English, produced in London, presumably for foreign purchasers.

While I was examining this, I began to sense the presence once more, and this time as it grew I became aware of a smell, a sweet perfume akin to Atar of Roses - a scented water my own Mina would often dab at her swan-pale neck. The perfume, filled as it was with memories of home, quite overpowered me and I grew faint, for I fancied I saw a lady - no, a woman - standing on the staircase nearest the windows.

She was tall and handsome rather than beautiful, with a knowing look, her auburn hair swept back and down across a dress of sheer green gossamer, with jewels at her throat, and nothing at all on her feet. She stood with her left side turned to me, so that I could not help but notice the exaggerated posture of her breasts. It was as though she intended them to incite my admiration. The effect was indecent, but nothing to the effect produced when she turned to face me directly, for the front panel of the dress was cut away below her waist to reveal - well, her entire personal anatomy. Stupified by her brazenness, wondering if she was perhaps ill, I found myself unable to move as she approached. Upon reaching my chair she slid the outstretched fingers of her right hand inside my shirt, shearing off each of the buttons with her nails. I was acutely aware that the naked part of her was very close to me. Then, reaching inside the waistband of my trousers, she grasped at the very root of my reluctantly extended manhood and brought it forward, bursting through the garment's fly-buttons. When I saw that she intended to lower her lips to this core of my being, every fibre of my body strained to resist her brazen advances.

Here, though, my mind clouds with indistinct but disagreeable impressions. A distant cry of anger is heard, the woman retreats in fear and fury, and I awake, ashamed to discover my clothing in considerable disarray, the victim of some delirious carphology.

From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, October 7th 1893

The snow has started falling. During these increasingly frequent squalls, all sights and sounds are obscured by a deadening white veil that seals us in the sky. From my bedroom window I can see that the road to the castle is becoming obscured. If the Count does not return soon, I really do not see how I shall be able to leave. I suppose I could demand that a carriage be fetched from the nearest village, but I fear such an action would offend my absent host, who must surely reappear any day now.

I am worried about my Mina. I have not heard from her inside a month, and yet if I am truthful part of me is glad to be imprisoned here within the castle, for the library continues to reveal paths I feel no Englishman has ever explored.

I do not mean to sound so mysterious, but truly something weighs upon my mind. It is this; by day I follow the same routine, logging the books and entering them into the great ledgers my host provided for the purpose, but each night, after I have supped and read my customary pages before the fire, I allow myself to fall into a light sleep, and then...

... then my freedom begins as I either dream or awaken to such unholy horrors and delights I can barely bring myself to describe them.

Some nights bring swarms of bats, musty-smelling airborne rodents with leathery wings, needle teeth and blind eyes. Sometimes the ancestors of Vlad Drakul appear at the windows in bloody tableaux, frozen in the act of hacking off the howling heads of their enemies. Men appear skewered on tempered spikes, thrusting themselves deeper onto the razor-poles in the throes of an obscene pleasure. Even the Count himself pays his respects, his bony alabaster face peering at me through a wintry mist as though trying to bridge the chasm between our two civilisations.

And sometimes the women come.

Ah, the women.

These females are like none we have in England. They do not accompany themselves on the pianoforte, they do not sew demurely by the fire. Their prowess is focussed in an entirely different area. They kneel and disrobe each other before me, and caress themselves, and turn their rumps toward me in expectation. I would like to tell you that I resist, that I think of my fiancee waiting patiently at home, and recite psalms from my Bible to strengthen my will, but I do not, and so am damned by the actions taken to slake my venomous desires.

Who are these people who come to me in nightly fever-dreams? Why do they suit my every morbid mood so? It is as if the Count knows my innermost thoughts and caters for them accordingly. Yet I know for a fact that he has not returned to the castle. When I look from the window I can see that there are no cart-tracks on the road outside. The snow remains entirely unbroken.

There are times now when I do not wish to leave this terrible place, for to do so would mean forsaking the library. And yet, presumably, it is to be packed up and shipped to London, and this gives me hope, that I might travel with the volumes and protect them from division. For the strength of a library exists in the sum of its books. Only by studying it -

indeed, only by reading every single edition contained within - can one hope to divine the true nature of its owner.

From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, November 15th 1893

Somewhere between dreams and wakefulness, I now know that there is another state. A limbo-life more imagined than real. A land of phantoms and sensations. It is a place I visit each night after darkness falls.

Sometimes it is sensuous, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes foul beyond redemption. It extends only to the borders of the library, and its inhabitants, mostly in states of undressed arousal, are perfumed with excrement. These loathsome creatures insult, entice, distract, disgrace, shame and seduce me, clutching at my clothes until I am drawn among them, indistinguishable from them, enthralled by their touch, degraded by my own eagerness.

I think I am ill.

By day, my high stone world is once more quiet and rational. Would that it were not, for there is no comfort to be had from the news it brings me. The road leading to and from the castle is now quite impassable. It would take a team of mountaineers to scale the sharp gradient of the rock face beneath us. The Count has failed to return, and of his impending plans there is no word. My task in the library is nearly over. The books -

all save one single final shelf - have been quantified and, in many cases, explored.

I begin to understand the strangely parasitic nature of my host. His thirst for knowledge and his choice of literature betray his true desires.

There are volumes in many languageshere, but of the ones I can read, first editions of Nodier's
Infernalia
, d'Argen's
Lettres Juives
and Viatte's
Sources Occultes du Romantisme
are most familiar. Certain medicalperiodicals and pertinent copies of
The London Journal
add subtler shades to my mental portrait of the Count. Of course I knew the folk-tales about his ancestry. They are boundwithin the history of his people. How could one travel through this country and not hear them? In their native language they do not seem so fanciful, and here in the castle, confabulations take on substantiality. I have heard and read how the Count's forefathers slaughtered the offspring of their enemies and drank their blood for strength - who has not?Why, tales of Eastern barbarism have reached the heart of London society. But I had not considered the more lurid legends; how the royal descendants lived on beyond death, how they needed no earthly sustenance, how their senses were so finely attuned that they could divine bad fortune in advance. Nor had I considered the consequence of such fables; that, should their veracity be proven, they might in the Count's case suggest an inherited illness of the kind suffered by royal albinos, a dropsical disease of the blood that keeps him from the light, an anaemia that blanches his eyes and dries his veins, that causes meat to stick in his throat,that drives him from the noisy heat of humanity to the cool dark sanctum of his sick-chamber.