Arranging the books as they would have been stored in the history collection of a normal library would take weeks or months, but since Dracula considered them sorted, according to his own interests, I would leave them as they were and merely try to distinguish one type of collection here from another. I thought the first collection began at the wall of the chamber near the immovable door and ranged through three cabinets and across two large tables: statesmanship and military strategy, I might call it.
Here I found more Machiavelli, in exquisite folios from Padua and Florence. I found a biography of Hannibal by an eighteenth-century Englishman and a curling Greek manuscript, dating back perhaps to the library of Alexandria: Herodotus on the Athenian wars. I began to feel a new chill as I turned through book after manuscript, each one more startling than the last. There was a dog-eared first edition ofMein Kampfand a diary in French-handwritten, spotted here and there with brown mould-that appeared from its opening dates and accounts to chronicle the Reign of Terror from the point of view of a government official. I would have to look at it more closely later-the diarist seemed not to have named himself anywhere. I found a large volume on the tactics of Napoleon’s first military campaigns, printed while he was on Elba, I calculated. In a box on one of the tables I found a yellowing typescript in the Cyrillic alphabet; my Russian is rudimentary, but I was certain from the headings that it was an internal memo from Stalin to someone in the Russian military. I couldn’t read much of it, but it contained a long list of Russian and Polish names.
These were some of the items I could identify at all; there were also many books and manuscripts whose authors or subjects were completely new to me. I had just begun a list of everything I could identify, dividing it roughly by century, when I felt a deepened cold, like a breeze where there was no breeze, and I looked up to see that strange figure standing ten feet away, on the other side of one of the tables.
He was dressed in the red-and-violet finery I’d seen in the sarcophagus, and he was larger and more solid than I seemed to remember from the night before. I waited, speechless, to see if he would attack me at once-did he remember my attempt to take his dagger? But he inclined his head slightly, as if in greeting. “I see you have begun your work. You will, no doubt, have questions for me. First, let us breakfast, and then we will talk of my collections.” I saw a glint in his face, through the dimness of the hall, perhaps a flash of gleaming eye. He led the way with that inhuman but imperious stride back to our fireside, and there I found hot food and drink again, including a steaming tea that brought some relief to my chilled limbs. Dracula sat watching the smokeless fire, his head erect on his great shoulders. Without wishing to, I thought about the decapitation of his corpse-on that point, all the accounts of his death agreed. How did he retain his head now, or was this all illusion? The collar of his fine tunic rose high under his chin, and his dark curls tumbled around it and fell to his shoulders.
“Now,” he said, “let us take a brief tour.” He lit all the candles again, and I followed him from table to table while he lit the lanterns there. “We shall have something to read by.” I did not like the way the light played on his face as he bent over each new flame, and I tried to look instead at more of the book titles. He came to my side as I stood before the rows of scrolls and books in Arabic I’d noticed before. To my relief, he was still five feet away, but an acrid smell rose from his presence and I fought off a little faintness. I must keep my wits about me, I thought; there was no telling what this night would bring. “I see you have found one of my prizes,” he was saying. There was a rumble of satisfaction in his cold voice. “These are my Ottoman holdings. Some of them are very old, from the first days of their diabolical empire, and this shelf here contains volumes from their last decade.” He smiled in the flickering light. “You cannot imagine what a satisfaction it was for me to see their civilization die. Their faith is not dead, of course, but their sultans are gone forever, and I have outlived them.” I thought for a moment that he might laugh, but his next words were grave. “Here are great books made for the sultan about his many lands. Here”-he touched the edge of a scroll-“is the history of Mehmed, may he rot in hell, by a Christian historian turned flatterer. May he rot in hell also. I tried to find him myself, that historian, but he died before I could reach him. Here are the accounts of Mehmed’s campaigns, by his own flatterers, and of the fall of the Great City. You do not read Arabic?”
“Very little,” I confessed.
“Ah.” He seemed amused. “I had the opportunity to learn their language and their writing while I was their prisoner. You know that I was in bondage to them?”
I nodded, trying not to look at him.
“Yes, my own father left me to the father of Mehmed, as a pledge that we would not wage war against the Empire. Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.” His voice was so fierce that I glanced at him in spite of myself and saw the terrible blaze in his face, the hatred, the sharp upwards curl of the mouth under its long mustache. Then he did laugh, and the sound was equally horrifying. “I have triumphed and they are gone.” He put his hand on a finely tooled leather binding. “The sultan was so much afraid of me that he founded an order of their knights to pursue me. There are still a few of them, somewhere inTsarigrad-a nuisance. But they are fewer and fewer, their ranks are dwindling to nothing, while my servants multiply around the globe.” He straightened his powerful body. “Come. I will show you my other treasures, and you must tell me how you propose to catalogue them all.”
He led me from one section to another, pointing out particular rarities, and I saw that my surmise about the patterns of his collecting were correct. Here was a large cabinet full of manuals of torture, some of them dating to the ancient world. They ranged through the prisons of mediaeval England, to the torture chambers of the Inquisition, to the experiments of the Third Reich. Some of the Renaissance volumes contained woodcuts of implements of torture, others diagrams of the human body. Another section of the room chronicled the church heresies for which many of those manuals of torture had been employed. Another corner was dedicated to alchemy, another to witchcraft, another to philosophy of the most disturbing sort.
Dracula paused in front of a great bookshelf and laid his hand on it affectionately. “This is of special interest to me, and will be to you, as well, I think. These works are biographies of me.” Each volume there was connected in some way to his life. There were works by Byzantine and Ottoman historians-some of them very rare originals-and their many reprints through the ages. There were pamphlets from mediaeval Germany, Russia, Hungary, Constantinople, all documenting his crimes. Many of them I’d neither seen nor heard of in my research, and I felt an unreasonable flare of curiosity before I remembered that I had no reason, now, to complete that research. There were also numerous volumes of folklore, from the seventeenth century on, ranging over the legend of the vampire-it struck me as strange and terrible that he included these so frankly among his own biographies. He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker’s novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.