The last meeting in Zagreb had ended the day before while I put the finishing flourish to my history homework. My father wanted me to study German now, too, and I was eager to, not because of his insistence but despite it; I would begin that tomorrow, out of a book from the foreign-language store in Amsterdam. I had a new short green dress and yellow kneesocks, my father was smiling over some unintelligible spoof that had passed between one diplomat and another that morning, and the Naranca bottles clinked together in our net bag. Ahead of us lay a low stone bridge, spanning the River Kostan. I hurried there for my first look, which I wanted to enjoy in private, without even my father beside me.
The river curved out of sight close to the bridge, and in its curve huddled a diminutive castle, a villa-sized Slav château with swans paddling below its walls and grooming themselves on the bank. As I watched, a woman in a blue coat opened an upstairs window, pushing it outward, making its latticed glass wink in the sun, and shook her dust mop. Below the bridge, young willows crowded together and swallows flew in and out of the mud bluffs at their roots. In the castle park, I saw a stone bench (not too close to the swans, whom I feared even now, in my teens) with chestnut trees leaning over it and the castle walls throwing a soothing shade on it. My father’s clean suit would be safe there, and he might sit longer than he’d intended and talk in spite of himself.
All the time I was looking through these letters in my apartment, my father said, wiping the traces of salami from his hands with a cotton handkerchief, something outside the whole tragic problem of Rossi’s disappearance kept nagging at the back of my mind. When I put down the letter recounting his friend Hedges’s gruesome accident, I felt too ill for a few moments to think clearly. I had stumbled into a world of sickness, a netherworld of the familiar academic one I’d known for many years, a subtext of the ordinary narrative of history I’d always taken for granted. In my historian’s experience, the dead stayed respectably dead, the Middle Ages held real horrors, not supernatural ones, Dracula was a colorful East European legend resurrected by the movies of my childhood, and 1930 was three years before Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in Germany, a terror that surely precluded all other possibilities.
So I felt sick, for a second, and corrupted, angry with my vanished mentor for having bequeathed me these nasty illusions. Then the regretful, gentle tone of his letters worked on me again, and I was filled with compunction for my disloyalty. Rossi depended on me-on me alone; if I refused to suspend disbelief because of some pedantic principle, I would surely never see him again.
And something else nagged at me. As my brain cleared a little, I realized it was my memory of the young woman at the library, whom I’d met only a couple of hours before, although it already seemed to me days. I remembered the extraordinary light in her eyes as she had listened to my explanation of Rossi’s letters, the masculine drawing together of her eyebrows in concentration. Why had she been reading about Dracula, at my table of all tables, that evening of all evenings, at my very elbow? Why had she mentioned Istanbul? I was rattled enough by what I had read in Rossi’s letters to suspend my disbelief further, to reject the notion of coincidence in favor of something stronger. And why not? If I accepted one supernatural occurrence, I should certainly accept others; it was only logical.
I sighed and picked up Rossi’s last letter. After this I would need only to review the other materials that had been hidden in that innocuous envelope and then I was on my own. Whatever the girl’s appearance meant-and it probably meant nothing out of the ordinary, didn’t it?-I did not have time yet to find out who she was or why we shared this interest in the occult. It was odd for me to think of myself as someone interested in the occult; I wasn’t, in the slightest, when you got right down to it. I was interested in finding Rossi.
The last letter, unlike the others, was handwritten-on lined notebook paper, in a dark ink. I unfolded it.
August 19, 1931
My dear and unfortunate successor:
Well, I cannot pretend you may not be out there for me still, somewhere, waiting to save me if my life one day collapses. And because I have a further bit of information to add to everything you have already (presumably) perused, I feel I should fill this bitter vial up to the brim. “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” my friend Hedges would have quoted. But he is gone, and gone as surely by my hand as if I had opened my study door, struck the blow myself, and then shouted for assistance. I didn’t do that, of course. If you have consented to read this far, you do not doubt my word.
But I finally doubted my own strength, a few months ago, and I did so for reasons connected with Hedges’s enraging and terrible end. I fled his graveside for America -almost literally; my appointment had become reality and I was already packing my boxes at the time I took a day out in Dorset to see where he rested in peace. After I departed for America, disappointing a few in Oxford and saddening my parents greatly, I’m afraid, I found myself in a new and brighter world, where the term (I have been appointed for three and will fight for more) begins earlier, and the students have an open and practical outlook unknown at Oxford. And even after all this I could not bring myself to drop entirely my acquaintance with the undead. As a consequence, apparently, he-It-could not bring himself to drop his acquaintance with me.
You will remember that on the night Hedges was attacked, I had unexpectedly discovered the meaning of the central woodcut in my sinister book and verified to myself that the Unholy Tomb on the maps I’d found in Istanbul must be the tomb of Vlad Dracula. I had spoken my remaining question aloud-where was his tomb, then?-as I had spoken aloud in the archive in Istanbul, conjuring up this second time some terrible presence, which wreaked its warning to me on my dear friend’s life. Perhaps only an abnormal ego would pit itself against natural forces-unnatural, in this case-but I swear to you that this punishment angered me beyond terror, for a time, and made me vow to ferret out the last clues and, if my strength held, to pursue my pursuer to his lair. This bizarre thought became as ordinary to me as the desire to publish my next article, or to earn a permanent place at the cheerful new university that was claiming my jaded heart.
After I had settled into the routine of academic duties, and prepared to return briefly to England at the end of term to see my parents and to turn the pages of my doctoral thesis over to that kind London press where I was increasingly well looked after, I set out once more on the scent of Vlad Dracula, the historical or the supernatural, whichever he might prove to be. It seemed to me that my next task was to learn more about my strange old book: whence it had come, who had designed it, how old it was. I gave it up (reluctantly, I admit) to the laboratories of the Smithsonian. They shook their heads there over the specificity of my questions and hinted that the consultation of powers beyond their own means would cost me more. But I was stubborn, and I didn’t think that a farthing of my inheritance from my grandfather, or my meagre savings from Oxford, should go to clothe or feed or entertain me while Hedges lay unavenged (but, thank God, at peace) in a churchyard that ought not to have seen his coffin for another fifty years. I was no longer afraid of consequences, since the worst I could have imagined had already befallen me; in this sense, at least, the forces of darkness had miscalculated.
But it was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.