Count Dracula's Journal
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"He has all along, since his coming, been trying his power,
slowly but surely. That big child-brain of his is working. Well
for us, it is as yet, a child-brain. For had he dared, at the
first, to attempt certain things he would long ago have been
beyond our power. However, he means to succeed, and a man who
has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.
Festina lente may well be his motto."
Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, MD, Ph.D., D. Lit.,
etc., etc., to Jonathan Harker and Dr. John Seward |
Today is the day the solicitor from Exeter arrives. Harker. Harker Jonathan. Nay, nay. Jonathan Harker. Patronymic second. Must remember that. I had the Szygany gypsies deliver me some groceries and I have been tidying nonstop since sunset, but I am afraid the place is still something of a dreary old mess. There is just no getting around it. It is an old castle and I am an old monster, and it is not as if I have any help around here. I do have better things to do than don an apron and run around the castle with a feather duster. I am busy preparing for my move. Transylvania and Castle Dracula are the past, and not to be dwelled upon, not when the future beckons so imminently. Moving house is a tedious task under the best of circumstances, and moving to another country brings with it a whole new set of complications. And of course I have my own special needs. There are certain privacy considerations, several different estates, each involving different solicitors, and there is the shipping of all the earth boxes to consider.
I am Dracula. I move in shadow. My plans are complex and brilliant. I will not be hurried, and I will certainly not be criticized. Thus if Harker dares so much as to look askance at the state of my household, I shall tear his puny head from his neck! The thought of it brings on the rage! I will brook no insult! I will not!
And yet already I recover, I am calm, for I am the master of my own emotions, and nothing shall deter me from my audacious intention. Calmness. Breathing. I will not kill him. I will not kill him.
This is business. Simply business. It is an ordinary business transaction and there is nothing the least bit unearthly about it and I will not kill the solicitor. I can do this and he will live and I can go to England and blend in among the people in an atmosphere free of Transylvanian superstition. There are to be no suspicions raised during his visit, no fare for gossip engendered. My house, and all within it, shall be orderly, clean--reasonably clean, reasonably--and normal. I have vowed it. It shall be so.
Thank goodness he is not to arrive until almost midnight. There are still the late night snacks to prepare, and I would like at least to give the bathroom floors a good scrubbing.
I have made a decision. I shall simply seal off most of the castle, keeping young Harker completely away from most of its hallways and chambers. There is no way I am going to be able to make it all presentable in time. Just as well. Obviously I was going to have to seal a great deal of it anyway, tidy or not. It would not do to have him stumbling across the tombs, or to have my vampire wraith slave women get at him and rend him to pieces before we have had a chance to complete our little business.
I really should have started cleaning ages ago, for in truth I have had decades to prepare, but bah! Enough. There are limits to my patience. I, Dracula, Lord of the Night, can stand only so much of this menial work, no matter how glorious the ultimate end. I cannot be bothered! In any case it is a miracle that I have been able to accomplish as much as I have, all on my own. I sometimes think I ought to get some help in here again. But then I remember the last time I tried that.
What was it, thirty years ago? Yes. Autumn, I'm sure. First I tried the Szygany woman, an old hag named Glympy or something like that. No good. Did not work out at all. She was a kleptomaniac, for one thing, and she whistled incessantly. I was forced to dismiss her at once. The woman was lucky to leave the castle alive. I do not believe she even appreciated my generosity of spirit in literally letting her go. I have long since abandoned the hope of being appreciated, but that is another story entirely. Anyway, I did then arrange to have proper, professional maid service at the castle for a time. Nothing ostentatious, just a cleaning woman once a week. Dust the place up a bit, keep the books put back on the shelves and so on. A small extravagance, it hardly needs justification.
They sent a young thing, dark hair, terribly frightened. Elena, that was her name. Nice girl. Well, I killed her. Plain and simple. Couldn't help myself, there she was, teasing me with that "oh my god somebody help me" look on her face all the time, the little minx. Did she even finish her first day of work? I do not think so. I think I killed her at lunchtime.
I can laugh now, in my own special way, but at the time it created quite a stir. I still remember the crowds outside with their torches blazing and their pitchforks held high in the air. Who knew she was such a popular girl? I killed many and did much worse as a mortal, and no one dared make such a fuss. People quite lose their equanimity when there is the slightest hint of vampirism about the simplest macabre occurrence. Thank goodness for the wolves, or that could have been quite an unpleasant scene. Quite an unpleasant scene indeed.
And so it is just me, and has been ever since. I am capable, it is true, perfectly capable, and if there is one thing I never do it is whine, but it can nevertheless fairly be said that the vampire wraith slave women are no help whatsoever domestically. As soon as there is any housework to be done it is all circling mists in the moonlight and they're gone. They are really not good for much of anything, it has to be said plainly and there it is. I will write more of them at a later time. But that is it, that is my harem, as they call it in the Arab lands, at least for now. God help me!
It is not just the cleaning, either. I will have to look after Harker personally the whole time as well. He is going to need to be fed, and that means I will be on chef duty while he remains here as my guest. Setting tables, cooking meals, cleaning up, making his bed. Yet I will do no laundry. I will not! He can stink to high heaven for all I care, I have my limits! Yet already the rage passes and I am calm. I will do the laundry as well. I will do it. I will do it for it is nothing to me and it serves my greater glory.
At any rate, at least I can work quickly, and when he is not looking, so he will believe I have a full battalion of servants. As far as he knows it will be my servants who are cooking, who are cleaning, who are laundering and tending to his needs, and he will never see these servants but he will believe in them because he will expect them to exist. This is a matter of pride, a matter of decency. I am sure he would think it quite strange for a man of my stature not to have this sort of help, so I shall have to play the part; I shall have to play all the parts! Anyway, he would not understand, and he might even pity me. Me, Dracula, of the proud Szekelys, in whose veins flows the blood of Attila! The thought of it fills me with the rage! I will not brook the insult! I will not brook it! He can make his own dinner! I, Dracula, have better things to do!
And now I am calm, I have recovered. All is well and he is on his way and he will come and he will live unless I kill him which I will not for I choose not to. I, Dracula, am in perfect possession of myself. I am the picture of grace and serenity. This one is all business. All business, and no blood.
When I get to London, that is when I will be able to unwind a bit, let off a little steam. I will blend into my new environment and will find natural camouflage in the urban setting, where the citizens are not superstitious and all sorts of people with all manner of peculiar habits are tolerated without rash accusations of vampirism. It shall be a bloodbath! That is to say, a discreet, shadowy sort of bloodbath during which I will raise no suspicions whatsoever that there might be an otherworldly undead demon of the night in town who has been responsible for the mysterious inexplicable mayhem.
London. England. In truth I can hardly wait, although I am accustomed to taking my time. An immortal can afford to take things slowly. I fear nothing, yet I move deliberately, one cautious step at a time. It is when we rush that we make our mistakes. There will be no mistakes in my grand plan, and no rushing. Festina lente, that's my motto.
It has been a long time since I have been so excited about anything. London will be a nice change of pace, that will suit me just fine. And how long overdue! There is not a house left in eastern Europe that isn't covered in garlic and crosses, the superstitious simpletons. Even the most stubbornly uneducated peasant barricades himself indoors at sunset and will invite no stranger inside. One thing I cannot abide is entering a household without an invitation, and believe me I have tried everything in this town. "I just need to use the toilet, please, I beseech you." "A drop of ale for a weary traveler, please ma'am." "Looks like you've got termites, sir, better let me come in and give the place a good once over. I'm a professional sir. Trust me damn you." It has been years since any of these ploys has worked.
Indeed each time I leave the castle in search of victims, likely as not I will encounter only people draped from head to toe in religious ornamentation and clutching crumbling handfuls of the Sacred Host. Honestly, if I go one more night on dog's blood I shall go quite mad.
And so finally it is really happening, at last, after such long and careful planning. I have accumulated the wealth, acquired the properties, studied the language, the history, the customs. I am ready, oh yes; I am more than ready. It may take me a short while to blend in completely, but in six months' time I will wager I shall be able to walk into any pub in London without anybody batting an eye. I will stroll right in as casually as you please, nod my dangerous approval at the local women, feeling the heat of their blushing as I pass by. The men will instinctively defer, quite naturally recognizing my innate superiority, it is true, but they shall not think "vampire." They shall not think "my god, what on earth is this supernatural and obviously evil undead being doing here in our pub?" Nay.
Quite the contrary. They will envy me, if anything. Admire me. Embrace me. They will want to associate with me, to be my friends. But I shall remain largely aloof and mysterious, staying mainly to the shadows. I may take only a select few as my social acquaintances, those who deserve more than my indifference by virtue of their outstanding intellects, their worldly knowledge, their exquisite finery. I have studied their dialects and their ways, and I shall be able to enter the social halls, the centers of commerce, the opera houses and the museums, as easily as I will also lurk in the shadows, in each place comfortable, in each interaction masterful. I shall enter a place and control it, instantly, suavely surveying the room and asserting my superior charm and guile on all within my considerable range.
A normal man in all appearance. An obviously superior, that is, yet still in the main apparently mortal and non-threatening being to the casual observer. That is the thing for the vampire in the modern age here in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Oh, it was fine in the old days to play on the superstitions, to establish a grand and terrifying presence, to be the vampire terrible of their nightmares. One could indulge in a certain reputation for the past few centuries, and indeed thrive on it. Those were the days, indeed, those were the days. But you will not catch me getting all sentimental over it. Not I, not I. I perhaps suffer from a certain intangible fin de siecle malaise, but I sit not idly by and let it consume me. These waters are fished out, so to speak, and it is a mark of my cunning that I am able to perceive the wind changes and adapt so easily.
Do not suppose that it is easy to be an immortal! One can easily get comfortable in one's own habits, only to look up one century and find that the feudal system has been supplanted by a more dynamic mercantilism. These sorts of changes can affect one's life style quite profoundly. I have seen more than one of my kind destroyed because he failed to understand the significance of minor changes that belied a larger evolutionary trend. Not I. I am a survivor, and here today I can see where these winds are blowing easily enough. To the teeming masses of sweat and blood of the industrial city! To the whirl and rush of humanity!
I will blend in, and move among them, feeding silently, slipping in and out of the darkness. With their scientific minds they would be unable to believe there was a vampire among them if I changed into a bat as they watched and danced on their dressing tables. They will stand no chance against me, for they can have no idea of what awaits them. They cannot prepare for that which they cannot imagine. Life will indeed be a feast for me, and there will be nothing to stop me. And thus I can set my grander plan into motion.
In a country like England, I will be able, over time, to create a vast number of undead minions, unnoticed by humans until it is far too late for them to stop our inevitable tipping of the scales in our evolutionary favor. In a matter of a few years I will have greatly expanded the numbers of my kind, and we shall have our day of dominance. I have been too long from the throne! No longer hunted and scorned, vampires will rule. We will rule from the netherworld, establishing a reign of terror such as has never been seen before. The humans will at first believe there to be some new plague, and they shall be right. My plague, the plague of Dracula, will savage their land. And we shall feast--oh, how we will feast. Yes, this is the dawn of a new age for the Dracula legend; I shall take the reins of history and write the future in blood!
And tonight it all really begins. I've got Harker's dinner menu squared away and his room all made up. The toilet is clean, the pantry is full, and there is plenty of coffee and fresh baked goods. I have his stay all planned out, and all my little excuses ready. There are a certain few aspects of my behavior that may strike the young solicitor as peculiar. I shall explain my absence during the daylight hours by saying I have errands to run. My failure to eat meals with him? I have already eaten, and I never snack. My team of obedient servants? They are efficient, and terribly bashful. That should cover it, really. I do not see what could go wrong. A tidy little plan.
I have instructed Harker to stay at the Golden Krone Hotel on his way to my castle. The accommodations are clean, and quite reasonable, and the proprietors are well known to me and under my protection, as they have been for some time. I have reserved his place on the transport that will take him to me. Many have been my preparations in anticipation of this time. I have gone so far as to leave a note for him at the hotel, in which I wished to emphasize that he was not entering my castle as victim of a bloodthirsty demon, but as friend, yes, friend of Dracula. And so I wrote to him thus:
"My friend. Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight. At three tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.
"Your friend, Dracula."
Note how I repeated the word "friend" twice in the note, once to show that he was my friend, and once to show that I was his, that we had a friendship and that it was reciprocal, just to make sure he understood the point that I was in no way going to kill him upon his arrival in my home. Rather, ours would be a friendly visit with no killing. Further, I emphasized that happiness and enjoyment would be the characteristic hallmarks of his journey, rather than terror and despair. I hope I did not overdo it with excess friendliness and achieve unintentionally an alienating effect. Surely this is unlikely if not impossible, for Dracula is the master of the congenial note.
Well, the time has gotten short already. I think I will just make sure there are some clean hand towels in the guest washroom, and then I had better go hitch up the calèche. Harker should be at the Borgo Pass in half an hour!
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