I suppose you'll want to know, or others will, why I should bother with this apologia pro vita sua. Why, at this late date, attempt to defend my name? Well, I change as I grow older-yes, I do-and some things, for example a certain kind of pride, that were once of great moment to me are now no more than dust and ashes in my tomb. Like Van Helsing's desecrated fragment of the Host, which there went back to dust.
I have been there myself, there in my tomb, but not to stay. Not yet to stay beneath the massive stone on which the one word's carved, just… Dracula.
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.