Count Dracula travels to England, where he is about to lose his heart . . .
COUNT DRACULA RECALLS how he was irresistibly drawnto Mina Harker (née Murray), the wife of a London real estateagent. Her husband had sold him a place called Carfax. This was adilapidated structure next door to a noisy institution for the insane.Their incessant racket was not undisturbing to one who was, amongother things, seeking peace. An inmate name Renfield was the worstoffender.
One time the Harkers had Count Dracula over for the evening,and Jonathan (his agency’s top man) asked him how he liked Carfaxwith regard to location, condition of the house and property, andjust all around. “Ah, such architecture,”said Count Dracula whilegazing uncontrollably at Mina, “is truly frozen music.”
Count Dracula is descended from the noble race of the Szekelys, apeople of many bloodlines, all of them fierce and warlike. He foughtfor his country against the invading Turks. He survived wars, plagues,the hardships of an isolated dwelling in the Carpathian Mountains.And for centuries, at least five and maybe more, he has managedto perpetuate, with the aid of supernatural powers, his existence asa vampire. This existence came to an end in the late 1800s. “Why her?” Count Dracula often asked himself.
Why the entire ritual, when one really thinks about it. What does abeing who can transform himself into a bat, a wolf, a wisp of smoke,anything at all, and who knows the secrets of the dead (perhaps of death itself) want with this oily and overheated nourishment? Whowould make such a stipulation for immortality! And, in the end,where did it get him? Lucy Westenra’s soul was saved, Renfield’s soul was never in any real danger . . . but Count Dracula, one of thetrue children of the night from which all things are born, has no soul.Now he has only this same insatiable thirst, though he is no longerfree to alleviate it. (“Why her? There were no others such as her.”) Now he has only this painful, perpetual awareness that he is doomedto wriggle beneath this infernal stake which those fools –Harker,Seward, Van Helsing, and the others– have stuck in his tremblingheart. (“Her fault, her fault.”) And now he hears voices, commonvoices, peasants from the countryside.
“Over here,” one of them shouts, “in this broken down conventor whatever it is. I think I’ve found something we can give to thosedamned dogs. Good thing, too. Christ, I’m sick of their endlesswhining.”
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