Dracula Read online

  The palm of my right hand was bleeding from a deep wound, it was stinging, quite painful. Somehow, Dracula had made a deep cut in my palm and I remember wondering how that could have happened when the outside of my right hand was nearest to him. It was much later when I realized that Dracula may have taken a swipe at the palm of my hand as he flew up behind me and came to a stop just in front of me.

  Having very little choice because Dracula was now blocking my way, I came to an abrupt stop. However, I did have the presence of mind to say to him, “I have tainted blood in my body, I have had a blood transfusion in the past”. Although there was an intense, serious type of look on his face, Dracula smiled at me and said, “Yes I know, your quite safe”.

  I then realized that he had already taken a blood sample from the palm of my hand to have known that. Still greatly shocked and horrified at his appearance, my mind was struggling for something else to say to him. The situation took a more friendly turn when I suddenly said for some silly reason, “How old are you”.

  Dracula smiled again and replied that he did not know exactly how old he was and added that he had seen many generations of people come and go over quite a few hundreds of years. There was something familiar about his face but whilst my mind was registering total fear I could not afford to spend the time thinking about that.

  I was still quite sure that Dracula was going to attack me in some way very shortly. I cannot remember how the conversation started but Dracula, speaking in a clear voice without a trace of any foreign accent was saying that there were mysteries within the earth that mankind would never, ever know about. The stars were mentioned and so were the planets but I could not follow the thread of what he was saying about them.

  I did not know anything about the planets at that time in my life. I had heard of venus, mars and jupiter of course but that was about the extent of my knowledge concerning the heavens. Dracula started talking about ‘ground gases’ and was explaining that the gases that came from the ground would continue to keep mankind in a state of stupidity for many years to come yet, in some areas.

  It appeared from what Dracula was trying to explain to me that he was obviously greatly educated but it was all lost on me. I was still thinking more about whether he was going to harm me after all. Some mention was made about my companions still sleeping soundly in the tent and I am not too sure about this but I seem to have a hazy memory that Dracula agreed to leave them alone, which I thanked him for.

  I cannot remember much else of our conversation, (well, Dracula did most of the talking anyway). The next thing that I remember was waking up, wringing wet with sweat and gasping for breath. A voice that I recognized as Philip’s said very quietly, “Are you okay, you were screaming and making some awful noises in your sleep, you sound as though you were having a nightmare or something”.

  After a some time I just said, “Yes, I was having a bad dream”. Philip was a very sensible sort of person, he was a bridge engineer, a very practical person. I had known Philip for almost twenty years and I knew that it would not be advisable to discuss any specific details of this very horrific dream with him. I could not settle down to sleep again, I turned and twisted in my sleeping bag.

  Because I was too frightened to go to sleep again, I asked Philip if he would sit outside with me whilst I had a piss and smoked a cigarette. Philip agreed and he was soon sitting on his sleeping bag only a couple of yards away from where Dracula had been standing a little earlier in my dream.

  The conversation got round to Philip’s wife and I heard for the first time more about Philip’s married life. He appeared at first to be quite bitter about what had happened in his marriage but ended up taking a philosophical view of it all. He explained that he had been a good provider, a good husband and that he had done his best to be a decent husband to her.

  An hour or so passed in this way listening to Philip and I said that I was very sorry to hear of his troubles with his wife. During this conversation we had walked to the camp-fire and Philip had got the fire re-started and I started to get a bit warmer once the fire really got going. We continued to talk which was mostly small talk anyway but during all this time sitting outside of the tent, I kept a good lookout (un-beknown to Philip of course) for any re-appearance of anything with wings on it.

  Yes, I was still petrified, but I managed to hide it from Philip who I just knew would not understand if I told him about the details of my dream. An hour or so before dawn, I suggested to Philip that we take a walk because I needed to get away from that camp site for a little while. To my mind, something dreadful had occurred there, it had greatly shocked me and I was still trying to come to some sort of terms with it.

  Even though I now realized that it had all been a dream, there was still something very unusual about it all, it had been so vivid. As I said before, I have had my share of dreams, but I cannot remember having any dream as horrible as that one.

  This dream was different, it was so vivid, even the long grass in the next field and the un-even ground, the wire fence and the other tents beside our own were so real. It was as though I was actually there, outside in the dark with Dracula chasing me. Yes, it had been a horrible, terrifying experience and I was doing my best to think of other things as we walked along the narrow lane back towards the village.

  With the fast approaching dawn, the village came into view. As we passed a white painted stone set into the grass verge, the black lettering on it said ‘Speldhurst’ which meant nothing to me so I hardly took any notice of it. The daylight was rapidly increasing now and as we came level with the church I looked into the churchyard and saw someone standing by a grave.

  My head started to go funny, it was like a belt tightening around my forehead, I suddenly felt very, very faint and had to eventually lower myself slowly to the ground because my legs would no longer support me.

  Philip got hold of my arm and tried to pull me to my feet but I refused to budge and just sat in the middle of the lane, staring at the church wall. My mind was trying to accept and deal with what I had just seen the other side of the church wall. My brain seemed to be sort of rolling backwards, trying to get away from what it knew it had seen. It was a very strange sensation and my brain did not seem to be part of me just at that time.

  Then two things hit me simultaneously in the face, not physically, but two things slammed into my mind with a sickening thud. It was like getting a cricket bat full force in the face, twice in quick succession. Philip just looked at me in alarm, he knew something serious was happening to me but he had no way of knowing what it could be and he just continued to stare at me, still holding my arm with both his hands.

  I waved Philip’s worries about heart attacks away with my hand and muttered to him that it was not a medical problem that was bothering me. The white painted stone with the black lettering saying ‘Speldhurst’ that I had seen as we came into the village now came into my mind and I suddenly realized that this was the same village and the same church that I had visited with John all those years ago.

  But far worse than that, the face of the man standing beside the grave in the churchyard many years ago also came into my mind. I now recognized that face as being the same face I had just seen moments ago on the other side of the church wall.

  Still feeling the sensation that my brain was moving backwards away from me, I had to press my hand as hard as I could against the tarmac of the lane to try and bring this ‘brain spinning’ motion to a stop. Slowly, very slowly my brain started to slow down and stop spinning.

  The moment did not last for very long though, because now my brain was trying to process and accept that the face in the church yard was also the face of Dracula that I had seen in my dream almost three hours earlier.

  Chapter Six

  Afterwards

  One of my first reactions after getting myself to my feet and trying to compose my mind about all of it was one of anger that John had led me into this situation. It had been his stupid idea in the first place.
I had only gone with him for something to do yet I had now been witness to something that was pure horror and it was nothing to do with me.

  It was something that I wanted nothing to do with anyway. John should have had his own brain screeching and screaming instead because that’s what it felt like and it made me very angry that he had long gone and that I was the one left with the searing brain out of it all.

  It affected me for years afterwards and I spent countless hours going over every part of it in detail in order to try and come to terms with it all. However often this incident comes into my mind, all I can do nowadays is shrug my shoulders, pull a face and raise my eyebrows. I have done all the thinking possible and it still remains a complete mystery to me.

  It is something that I will never get to the bottom of but my common sense has told me to keep well clear of Speldhurst and the surrounding area in the future and so far I have kept to that. Dracula, is supposedly a fictitious character spawned from the mind of Bram Stoker. According to historical records, Dracula was some sort of ‘war-lord’ that had a habit of impaling his enemies heads on spikes just to brighten up his extensive gardens.

  However, only Bram Stoker knows the true origins of his fictitious character Dracula. I am left wondering if Dracula knows the true origins of Bram Stoker which I think he did as I later explain. Philip was never the same with me after this nightmare incident. I could never tell him what it was about because he would never have understood or believed me anyway.

  We were never close friends afterwards like we had been before this incident. He did ask a few days later whether me falling down outside the church was connected to my nightmare and I just said yes. For a long time afterwards, I would catch Philip looking at me sometimes and I knew instinctively that he was still wondering about it all.

  I spent a further two days at the campsite then made an excuse to leave and got a taxi to Tonbridge Wells. As usual, I waited almost two hours for a bus back to the Medway Towns. It was an absolutely shocking bus service.

  I left the campsite because my nerves wouldn’t stand it anymore and it seemed to be the best thing to do. My mind was still whirling from it all and I do not mind telling you that I was too scared to stay there any longer and that’s the truth.

  A few days later I heard something from David about the Speldhurst camp-site that rather alarmed me. Apparently David, being the cook and head bottle-washer as he always had been on our camping holidays, had noticed something strange. Butter, margarine, milk and eggs went bad shortly after being purchased and brought to the camp-site.

  Even packets of cheese went sweaty and smelled foul after being on the camp-site for just over an hour. David consistently noticed this over an eight day period and insisted that it was impossible to keep any dairy products fresh for much more than an hour or so on that camp-site.

  What brought this more to David’s attention was when some agricultural people from the Ministry came to visit the field with the farmer. For some reason the corn would not grow properly in that field. Yet the surrounding fields were able to produce corn quite okay. David said that the agricultural people took many samples from different parts of the field. The farmer said to him later that these ministry people did not know why the corn was so deformed and stunted, they could not explain it.

  David ended that conversation by saying that he thought the camp-site and especially the woods were a rather spooky place. He also said that he would never want to go camping there again.

  I can offer no explanation or reason why the eight or so ‘soldiers’ that were walking behind Dracula were wearing what looked like grey ‘Confederate’ uniforms or for their presence there. I don’t know what a psychiatrist would make of all this. He or she would probably prescribe some pills, pat my head and say that it may have been some kind of mind aberration and not to worry too much about it all.

  Many years separated the two times that I saw the same person standing next to a grave in that churchyard. My eyesight is quite good and it enabled me to recognize Dracula’s face, even though I was supposed to be dreaming. I do not know how I recognized Dracula in the dream, I can offer no explanation for that.

  Chapter Seven

  Bram Stoker and the novel Dracula.

  Researching the history of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I thought that this part of my research was very interesting. All of which I quote from relevant material on the internet. Before writing Dracula, Bram Stoker spent seven years researching both European and more especially Romanian folklore, legends and superstitions.

  These researches included stories of vampires which have well known ancient roots in North Western Romania. Being also most influenced by Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay ‘Transylvania Superstitions’. That text contains accounts of vampirism so it can be adduced that Stoker did in fact base the character Dracula, on a male vampire from those parts.

  Just why Mr Stoker had this initial interest in these matters may not now ever be revealed. But for some reason he was caused to take a detailed and prolonged interest in Romanian folklore, legends and superstitions for a long time. Then, rather surprisingly, Bram Stoker actually met Dracula and I will explain how that came about later in this chapter.

  Despite being the most well-known vampire novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was not the first of such novels. Apart from Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay ‘Transylvania Superstitions’ just mentioned, it was also preceded by Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 ‘Carmilla’. That effort was about a lesbian vampire who preyed on lonely young woman. Another was ‘Varney the Vampire’ a popular ‘penny dreadful’ serial publication from the mid-Victorian period. Written by James Malcolm Rymer, he often referred to the same area as being the origin of vampirism and of course vampires.

  The image of a vampire portrayed as an aristocratic man was first created by John Polidori in ‘The Vampyre’ 1819. This publication partly influenced Stoker to depict his vampire as an aristocratic ‘Count’. Stoker’s notes show that his first choice for the name of his intended count was ‘Count Wampyr’.

  Originally, the manuscript for his novel was entitled ‘The Dead Un-Dead’ but Stoker changed the title to ‘Dracula’. Apparently, Stoker became intrigued by the name ‘Dracula’ after reading William Wilkinson’s book ‘Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them’ (London 1820).

  Stoker found this book in the Whitby Public Library, and it is known that he consulted it a number of times during his visits to Whitby in the 1890s.

  Once again, it becomes clear that Stoker fully intended to write a novel about an ‘immortal being’ that transcended death. Most peculiar, this ‘immortal being’ was based on a real entity, in fact, a male vampire who could not die in the normal way, hence his first choice of title being ‘The Dead Un-Dead’.

  More changes …

  Stoker’s notes reveal that the name Dracula, was the family name of the descendants of Vlad 11 of Wallachia, who took the name ‘Dracul’ after being invested into the Order of the Dragon in 1431. In the Romanian language, the word dracul (Romanian drac “dragon” + -ul “the”) can mean either “the dragon” or, especially in the present day, “the devil”.

  Although Dracula is a work of fiction, it does contain some historical references due to his considerable research efforts about vampire legends and the folk-lore of Romania. “Vlad the Impaler” (1456–1462), is said to have killed from 40,000 to 100,000 European civilians, political rivals, criminals and anyone else he considered, useless to humanity.

  Vlad 11 killed them by impaling them on a sharp pole. The main sources dealing with these events are the records of Saxon settlers in neighbouring Transylvania, who had frequent clashes with Vlad III.

  Vlad III is revered as a folk hero by Romanians for driving off the invading Turks and impaling up to 100,000 victims, most of whom were Turks. In that region and at that time, Vlad the Impaler was also known as Vlad Dracula. Quite independently from yet another source there is confirmation that
the name Dracula is derived from a secret fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon.

  This Order was founded by Sigismund of Luxembourg, the king of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia and also the Holy Roman Emperor. The Order’s aim was to uphold Christianity and defend the Empire against the Ottoman Turks. This source also confirms that Vlad 11 Dracul, father of Vlad 111, was admitted to the Order around 1431 because of his bravery in fighting the Turks.

  From 1431 onward, Vlad II wore the emblem of the Order and later, as ruler of Wallachia, his coinage bore the dragon symbol. It was in this was that Vlad 11 became initiated into the very secret Order of the Dragon. After years of devotion to that Order, Vlad 11 was anointed in invisibility and immortality.

  That Stoker did base his ‘Count Dracula’ on ‘Vlad the Impaler’ is further verified by Professor Van Helsing. Another character in the Dracula novel, he explicitly confirms Dracula as being ‘Vlad the Impaler’ by saying, ‘He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land’. (Chapter 18, pp 145)”.

  The Dracula legend as Stoker created it and as it has been portrayed in films and television shows, may be a compound of various literary influences as just stated. Stoker may also have drawn on yet other source stories such as the ‘Sidhe’, some of which feature blood-drinking women.

  Others suggest that Stoker was influenced by the history of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was born in the Kingdom of Hungary. Bathory is suspected to have tortured and killed anywhere between 36 and 700 young women over a period of many years. It was commonly believed that she committed these crimes in order to bathe in or drink their blood. Her belief being that this preserved her youth. That may explain why Stoker’s Dracula was depicted as appearing younger after drinking the blood of victims.