It is a literary convention proper to the more sensational genres that a narrator attempt to explain, justify, or render believable his account of something truly unbelievable. “This is completely unlikely and even impossible,” the narrator admits, “and I wouldn’t have believed it myself, but it actually happened, and I saw it with my own eyes! Consequently, you ought to believe every ridiculous thing I say!”
As I write this apology to the reader, I feel keenly the implausibility of my tale. Beyond the usual experience of Robert Louis Stevenson and others in my youth, and intermittent forays into the Gothic (the most important of which is chronicled here), my training has been less in the niceties of these literary practices, and more in the concrete and practical exercise of the law. It is perhaps a sign of my legal training, more than the impulse to imitate that literary convention I described above, that I wish at the start to produce my credentials both as a sane man and a skeptic. I am not a writer of fiction, and the ease with which I have shifted into that role alarms me. In fact, I have spent a great deal of time in recent years questioning myself (and my sanity) because of this whole business.
When a close friend encouraged me to write a personal account of my experiences in connection with certain well-known incidents just after the turn of the century, I had too great respect for that friend to laugh in his face, but I did articulate my doubts. As I say, many of the events told here are known to the public and are duly recorded in official volumes that chronicle crime and urban unrest. Theorists of a spiritualistic bent have had their say; even politicians have weighed in. I have no desire to proclaim the backstory of those bloody, headline-worthy incidents—partly because it was all so strange and need not be revisited, and partly because it exposes so much that is personal to me. In fact, I hope no one (except the friend who requested it) bothers to read this. In case, by some cruel machination of fate, this book stumbles its way into popularity, I have changed all of the names of those involved.
To one other deliberate literary liberty I must confess. My own narrative is completely intertwined in my mind with that other novel. In fact, I found that Stoker’s demonic Count—rather in the manner of Copperfield’s Mr. Dick and the head of Charles I—would intrude himself upon my story whenever and wherever he pleased. To combat this assault, I have granted him his own due place, and set brief quotations from Dracula at the head of each chapter. I hope no evil may come of this calculated hospitality.
Beyond this, my motive is twofold: first, to provide my friend with the account he requested, which will be interesting to him as related to his work as a historian, with a particular focus on (and I feel absurd as I write it!) vampiric activity since the seventeenth century; and second, to garner for myself a clear picture of what did happen, and through it to exorcise the emotional, mental, and even spiritual remnants that still haunt me.
—B. R., Esq.
(hereafter “John Kemp”)
Chapter I
I May 1900: Somewhere between Budapest and London
(From Jonathan Harker’s diary) She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck and said . . .
“Pardon me.”
That was precisely the thing I was most unlikely to do, I thought to myself with wry bitterness as I looked up from the page and into the face of the little man who had invaded my course of light literary recreation. I did not often venture into the realm of Gothic absurdity, but when I did I certainly did not like to be interrupted by round-headed little men with pink faces and beady black bespectacled eyes, attired in flowing white dresses, with rattling beads strapped to their sides.
“Yes?” I replied, making a meager effort at keeping the irritation out of my voice.
“May I pass you, please,” asked the little man—he was some sort of a Roman priest or a monk, I could tell by his outlandish dress—“to open the window?”
I suppressed the urge to tell him that he would not be overwarm if he didn’t go about in that quaint ritual garb; instead I grunted a vague assent.
He smiled and began laboring with the heavy window.
It would be stuck, I thought with a self-pitying sigh. There was nothing for it. I put my novel aside (taking care to keep the title hidden, as there is nothing more irritating than having strangers comment on one’s choice of reading material, especially when it happens to be the latest and most sensationalized work of a melodramatic Irish novelist) and stood up to do battle in his stead. A few fierce heaves and it was open the desired smidgen. Meanwhile my coat sleeve had acquired a nasty-looking black smear—of grease, I had no doubt.
The priest thanked me and sat back in his place, nodding politely toward the elderly Frenchwoman sitting in the opposite corner. Her relief was visible.
My face flushed, partly from irritation at the ridiculous exchange, and partly from shame. I had not noticed the old woman’s discomfort and should have been observant enough to bring her relief without being pressed into service by the smiling Papist. It was a consequence of travel—trapped in that compartment, surrounded by five strangers (the elderly Frenchwoman, heavily shrouded in mourning; a Romanian or Hungarian man with black teeth, a goiter, and a plump wife; a thin woman severely attired in gray, probably a governess; and the Roman-English priest), and with an unusually uninspiring tract of Hungarian countryside hurtling by, I had been relieved to have Bram Stoker’s book into which to escape. At this