1In May 1893 the young solicitor Jonathan Harker travelled east across the Danube to settle a London house sale for a Transylvanian nobleman. At Klausenburgh he dined on fiery paprika hendl and noted in his journal: 'Mem., get recipe for Mina.'2At the Golden Krone in Bistritz a letter from Count Dracula awaited him: a carriage would meet him at the Borgo Pass. But when Jonathan asked about the Count, the landlord and his wife crossed themselves and said nothing more.3As he left, the landlady fell to her knees and begged him not to go. 'It is the eve of St. George's Day, when all the evil things in the world have full sway.' At last she hung her own crucifix round his neck.4As the coach pulled out, the crowd crossed themselves and pointed two fingers at him, a guard against the evil eye. Jonathan had already looked up their whispered words: Satan, hell, witch, and vrolok, meaning werewolf or vampire.5All afternoon the coach climbed toward the snowy Carpathians, and after dark the driver whipped the horses on frantically. Near the Borgo Pass the frightened passengers pressed garlic and little charms on Jonathan, each with a blessing and the sign of the cross.6No carriage waited at the pass. Then a black calèche raced up, its tall driver's face hidden by a great hat, and he helped Jonathan across with a grip like steel. A passenger whispered, 'For the dead travel fast.'7Through the night the calèche seemed to cover the same ground again and again. Wolves howled, snow fell, and whenever a faint blue flame flickered beside the road, the driver jumped down to mark the spot with stones.8Then the moon broke through, and Jonathan saw a silent ring of wolves surrounding them. He shouted and beat on the calèche, but it was the driver who stood in the road, raised his long arms, and drove them back into the dark.9When the clouds cleared, the wolves were gone and the driver was back in his seat. Too afraid to speak, Jonathan climbed on through the dark until they pulled up in the courtyard of a vast, ruined, unlit castle.10Left alone at a great iron-studded door, Jonathan heard bolts draw back. A tall old man in black, holding a silver lamp, waited until Jonathan crossed the threshold. "Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!"11The Count carried the luggage up himself to a warm room where supper waited, and watched from beside the fire as Jonathan ate. "Excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup."12Up close, Jonathan noticed the Count's sharp white teeth, pointed ears and hairy palms, and shuddered at his cold touch. At dawn wolves howled in the valley, and the Count's eyes gleamed. "Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!"13In a library full of English books, the Count spoke of longing for London's crowded streets. Over the deeds, the Count bought Carfax, an old walled estate at Purfleet with a chapel. "I am glad that it is old and big."14With no mirrors in the castle, Jonathan shaved by the window with his own small glass. A hand fell on his shoulder and the Count said good morning, yet the glass showed no reflection of him at all.15Startled, Jonathan cut his chin. The Count's eyes blazed at the blood and he clutched at his throat, but when his hand touched the crucifix beads, his fury vanished. "Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country."16Then the Count seized the shaving glass. "It is a foul bauble of man's vanity. Away with it!" He flung it from the window to shatter on the courtyard stones far below, and left without another word.17Exploring alone, Jonathan found a window above a thousand-foot precipice. Everywhere else there were doors, doors, doors, all locked and bolted. The truth struck him: the castle was a prison, and he was its prisoner.18After rushing about like a rat in a trap, Jonathan resolved to hide his fears. Through a crack by the hinges he saw the Count laying the table: there were no servants. So the Count himself had driven the coach and held back the wolves.19When Jonathan asked about Transylvanian history, the Count paced the room, boasting of the Szekelys and of old battles as if he had fought in them all. "Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace."20The Count made Jonathan write that he would stay another month, and Jonathan glimpsed letters to Whitby and London. The Count warned him to sleep only in his own chamber. "But if you be not careful, then—" He rubbed his hands as if washing them.21Later, at the south window in the moonlight, Jonathan saw the Count emerge from a window below and crawl face down over the dreadful abyss, gripping the stones like a lizard. What manner of creature was this?22Ignoring the warning, Jonathan fell asleep in a moonlit wing and woke to find three young women watching him, casting no shadow. The dark ones urged on the fair one with a silvery laugh. "Go on! You are first, and we shall follow."23As her lips touched his throat, the Count burst in and hurled her back. "This man belongs to me!" He threw the women a bag that gave a half-smothered wail, like a child. They faded into the moonbeams, and Jonathan fainted.24On 19 May the Count suavely asked Jonathan to write three letters home, saying his work was nearly done, that he was leaving, and that he had reached Bistritz, dated June 12, 19 and 29. Those dates were the span of his life.25On 28 May Jonathan threw two secret letters and a gold piece to the Szgany camped in the courtyard. That night the Count brought them back and burned his shorthand letter to Mina. 'It is not signed. Well! so it cannot matter to us.'26Soon Jonathan's papers and travelling suit vanished. On 24 June he watched the Count crawl head-first down the sheer wall wearing that stolen suit, so that any evil done in the villages would be blamed on the Englishman.27Before dawn a woman beat on the great door. 'Monster, give me my child!' The Count called from the tower, wolves poured in through the gate, and soon her cries were stilled. Jonathan knew now what had become of her child.28Next morning, bold with daylight, Jonathan edged barefoot along the narrow ledge to the Count's window. The room was empty and thick with dust. There was no key, only a great heap of ancient gold, Roman, Greek and Turkish.29A winding stair led down to a ruined chapel reeking of fresh earth. Fifty great boxes of soil stood there, and in one lay the Count, eyes open and stony, without breath or pulse. Their look of hate sent Jonathan fleeing.30On 29 June the Count said Jonathan could leave tomorrow. When Jonathan asked to go at once, the Count opened the great door, and wolves leapt howling at the gap. 'Shut the door,' Jonathan cried. 'I shall wait till morning!'31That night Jonathan heard the Count outside his door: 'To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!' He flung it open and found the three terrible women licking their lips. They burst into horrible laughter and fled down the passage.32At dawn the great door was locked again, so Jonathan crept down to the chapel to search the Count for the key. Finding him in his box looking younger and bloated, Jonathan struck with a shovel, but the blade only gashed his forehead.33Then, to gipsy songs, the Szgany nailed down the boxes and carted all fifty away, leaving Jonathan locked in with the three women. He filled his pockets with gold and climbed out over the cliff. 'Good-bye, all! Mina!'34In London, Mina Murray, Jonathan's fiancée and an assistant schoolmistress, practised shorthand and typewriting late each night so she could help him after their marriage. She wrote to her dearest friend Lucy that Jonathan would be home within a week.35Lucy wrote back that she had received three proposals in a single day. The first came from Dr John Seward, young master of a lunatic asylum. When she admitted there was someone else, he took her hands and promised to remain her friend.36After lunch came Quincey P. Morris, a cheerful Texan. When Lucy confessed through tears that she loved another, he only smiled and asked for one kiss as a friend 'to keep off the darkness now and then'. Then he left without looking back.37The third suitor was Arthur Holmwood, and Lucy said yes with all her heart. 'I am very, very happy,' she wrote. The two rejected men stayed loyal friends: Quincey invited Arthur and Seward to his camp-fire the next night to drink a health to the happiest man in the world.38Heart-sore, Seward buried himself in work and studied one patient closely: Renfield, who fed flies to spiders, spiders to sparrows, and then begged for a cat. Refused, he ate his birds raw. Seward named him a 'zoöphagous' maniac, one who craved to swallow as many lives as he could.39In July Mina joined Lucy at Whitby. Their favourite seat was in the East Cliff churchyard below the ruined abbey, where old Mr Swales, nearly a hundred, scoffed that half the graves were empty: 'Lies all of them, nothin' but lies!'40Mina had no news from Jonathan for weeks, only one short line from Castle Dracula saying he was starting home. It did not read like him. Meanwhile Lucy had begun sleepwalking again, so Mina locked their door each night, and in her sleep Lucy searched the room for the key.41On a grey August day Mr Swales told Mina gently that he felt death coming: 'It's in the air; I feel it comin'.' Afterwards the coastguard pointed out a Russian ship drifting strangely offshore, as if no hand was on her wheel.42Out of a dead calm broke one of the suddenest storms on record at Whitby. In the glare of the searchlight a foreign schooner raced between the piers under full sail, and the watching crowd shuddered: no living hand was steering her.43A dead captain was lashed to the wheel, his hands tied over a crucifix. The instant the ship ran aground by Tate Hill Pier, an immense dog sprang up from below, leapt ashore and raced up the cliff toward the churchyard.44The ship was the Demeter, out of Varna, carrying sand and great boxes of earth. Her captain's log told of men vanishing one by one from their night watches, and of a tall, thin stranger seen walking the deck.45On 3 August the mate went down to open the boxes in the hold. He came up screaming, 'I know the secret now,' and threw himself into the sea. Alone, the captain tied his hands to the wheel to save his soul.46Whitby hailed the dead captain as a hero. On the morning of his funeral, old Mr Swales was found dead on Mina and Lucy's favourite seat, his neck broken and his face frozen in fear and horror.47Since the storm Lucy had been walking in her sleep. In the small hours Mina woke with a horrible sense of fear and found Lucy's bed empty. Lucy's dress still hung in its place. She had gone out into the night in nothing but her nightdress.48Mina ran through the silent town and up the abbey steps. On their seat something long and black bent over Lucy. 'Lucy! Lucy!' she cried. It raised a white face with red, gleaming eyes. When Mina arrived, Lucy was alone and asleep.49Mina led Lucy home in her shawl, fastened with a big safety-pin, and promised to tell no one. Next morning she found two little red points on Lucy's throat and blamed the pin. But the tiny wounds did not heal.50Lucy grew paler by the day. One moonlit night Mina found her sitting up asleep, pointing at the window, where a great bat wheeled in circles before flitting away across the harbour toward the abbey.51On 17 August fifty boxes of earth went by rail to Carfax, an empty old house near London. Then came news at last: Jonathan was alive, ill with brain fever in a hospital at Buda-Pesth. Mina left the next morning to nurse him and bring him home. Lucy seemed better.52That night Renfield escaped from Dr Seward's asylum and climbed the wall into Carfax. Seward found him pressed against the ironbound chapel door, where the boxes now lay. "I am here to do Your bidding, Master," he whispered. It took several men to drag him back to the padded room.53Mina hurried to a convent hospital in Buda-Pesth, where Sister Agatha had nursed Jonathan through brain fever. He was thin and broken, his hair white. He gave her his journal: 'Read it if you will, but never let me know.'54That afternoon a chaplain married them at Jonathan's bedside. Afterwards Mina wrapped the journal in white paper, tied it with blue ribbon and sealed the knot with wax and her wedding ring, a sign that they would trust each other all their lives.55In London, Dr Seward's patient Renfield broke out one moonlit night to the old chapel door at Carfax and fought the attendants. Then he went suddenly still, watching a great bat fly silently west. 'You needn't tie me; I shall go quietly!'56At Hillingham, Lucy grew weaker every day. She woke pale and breathless, her throat sore, remembering only bad dreams and a scratching, flapping at the window at midnight. Arthur, alarmed, begged his friend Seward to examine her, and Seward sent to Amsterdam for his old master, Professor Van Helsing.57Van Helsing examined Lucy gravely. She rallied for a few days, then Seward wired: 'Terrible change for the worse. Come at once.' Looking on her chalk-white face, the Professor warned that she would die for sheer want of blood.58There was no time to lose. Arthur arrived, swearing he would give the last drop of his blood for her. While Lucy slept, Van Helsing transfused Arthur's blood into her arm, and colour crept back into her cheeks.59As Van Helsing settled her pillow, the black velvet band Lucy always wore slipped from her throat, and he drew a sharp, hissing breath. Later Seward loosened it and found two small punctures over the vein, their edges white and worn.60Three nights later Seward fell asleep on watch, and at dawn they found Lucy whiter than ever. 'All our work is undone,' said Van Helsing. This time Seward gave his own blood, sworn to secrecy: Arthur must never know.61Next day a parcel of white flowers came from Haarlem. Lucy laughed that they were only common garlic, but Van Helsing replied sternly, 'I never jest!' He rubbed them over every window, door and fireplace, and hung a wreath round her neck.62On 13 September Mrs Westenra told the doctors she had cleared the strong-smelling flowers from Lucy's room and opened the window. When she left, Van Helsing broke down and sobbed. Then he rose: devils or no devils, they would fight on.63Upstairs Lucy lay waxen white again. Van Helsing locked the door and rolled up his own sleeve: 'To-day you must operate. I shall provide.' Four peaceful days followed, with a box of garlic arriving daily from Haarlem. Then the Professor left for Amsterdam, trusting Seward to watch over her.64The Pall Mall Gazette reported that Bersicker, a grey wolf at the Zoo, had escaped. His keeper remembered a tall, hook-nosed stranger with red eyes who had calmly stroked the wolf's ears. Next day the wolf trotted home, its head full of broken glass.65That evening Renfield attacked Seward with a dinner-knife and slashed his wrist, then crouched to lick the spilled blood, crying, 'The blood is the life!' Meanwhile Van Helsing's telegram ordering Seward to Hillingham went astray, arriving a day late.66That night a deep howl woke Lucy, and her frightened mother crept into bed beside her. Then glass crashed and a great grey wolf thrust its head through the window. Mrs Westenra tore the garlic wreath from Lucy's neck and fell dead of fright.67As the wolf withdrew, a myriad of specks whirled in like dust. The maids, given wine to steady their nerves, lay drugged with laudanum. Alone with her dead mother, Lucy wrote down everything and hid the paper in her breast: 'Good-bye, dear Arthur.'68Next morning Seward found the house locked and silent. With Van Helsing he forced the kitchen window and found Lucy cold beside her dead mother. The Professor listened at her breast: 'It is not yet too late!' A hot bath slowly revived her.69Quincey Morris gave his blood without a question. Afterwards he told Seward of a Pampas mare drained in one night by a vampire bat, and guessed four strong men had bled for Lucy. Then he held out his hand: 'Count me in.'70Mina's letter telling of Mr Hawkins's sudden death lay unopened, for Lucy was sinking. Asleep, she pushed the garlic away and her teeth looked longer and sharper. Awake, she clutched it close. At dawn Van Helsing lifted the silk handkerchief from her throat. 'Mein Gott!' The wounds had vanished.71Arthur came to Lucy's side. Her eyes turned hard, and she spoke softly: 'Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!' As he bent, Van Helsing hurled him across the room and stood between them like a lion at bay.72Then Lucy woke in all her softness, kissed Van Helsing's hand and begged him to guard Arthur. He swore it, and she died in peace. When Seward said it was the end, the Professor answered: 'Not so; alas! not so. It is only the beginning!'73Lucy and her mother died within days of each other. Death had given Lucy back all her loveliness. Grim and silent, Van Helsing strewed wild garlic around her and laid his little gold crucifix over her mouth before leaving her for the night.74That night a maid crept in where Lucy lay and stole the crucifix. Van Helsing caught her and took it back. "It is too late, or too early," he told Seward sternly, and gave up his secret plan to operate on the body.75Arthur came back from his father's funeral looking broken. Beside Lucy, whose beauty seemed to grow by the hour, he began to shake with doubt. "Jack, is she really dead?" Seward gently said it was so, and Arthur kissed her goodbye.76After Mr Hawkins's funeral, Jonathan and Mina were walking down Piccadilly when he gripped her arm hard. A tall man with a beaky nose stood staring at a pretty girl in a carriage. "It is the man himself!" The Count had grown young.77Lucy was buried in her family's tomb near Hampstead. Days later the Westminster Gazette reported 'The Hampstead Horror': small children lured away on the Heath at dusk, found next morning weak with tiny throat wounds. Each spoke of a 'bloofer lady.'78Back home in Exeter, Mina at last read Jonathan's journal from abroad, horrified. True or only fever, she could not tell. Meaning to be ready if a solemn duty ever came, she sat at her typewriter and began copying out every page.79Van Helsing came to Exeter to ask about Lucy, and Mina gave him her diary and Jonathan's journal, both typed out. That evening his letter came: "Strange and terrible as it is, it is true!" Jonathan's doubt vanished; it made a new man of him.80On the train, Van Helsing went white over the Gazette's story of the children's throat wounds. Seward said whatever hurt Lucy must have hurt them too. The Professor covered his face: "It is worse, far, far worse. They were made by Miss Lucy!"81Van Helsing meant to prove, not argue. At the North Hospital, Dr Vincent showed him and Seward two small wounds on a little boy's throat, just like Lucy's. The child was mending, yet begged to go and play with the 'bloofer lady'.82Near midnight the two doctors climbed the churchyard wall and entered the Westenra tomb. While Seward protested at the outrage, Van Helsing opened Lucy's coffin and sawed through the lead beneath. Then he held the candle to the opening. The coffin was empty.83Seward suggested body-snatchers, so they kept watch among the graves. Long after two, a white figure drifted towards the tomb and vanished. Where it had passed lay a sleeping child, its throat unmarked. 'We were just in time.'84Next day they opened the coffin again. There lay Lucy, a week dead, more beautiful than ever, her lips redder than in life. Van Helsing drew back the lips. 'See, they are even sharper than before. With these the little children can be bitten.'85Van Helsing wanted Arthur to see for himself. At the Berkeley Hotel he said he meant to open Lucy's coffin. Arthur rose in fury, until the Professor spoke of the blood he had given her too. 'At least I shall go with you and wait.'86At midnight all four men stood in the vault, and Arthur saw the empty coffin for himself. Then Van Helsing sealed every crack of the tomb door with a putty of crumbled wafers. 'The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam.' They hid to watch.87Down the yew avenue came Lucy in her grave clothes, her face cold and strange. A child she had carried ran crying toward the men. Lucy ignored him, smiled at Arthur and opened her arms. 'Come to me, Arthur. Come, my husband, come!'88As she sprang, Van Helsing raised his golden crucifix. Lucy recoiled in rage and fled to the tomb, but the Host barred her way. Arthur knelt: 'Do as you will.' The Professor removed a little putty, and she slipped through a hairline crack.89Next afternoon they returned with candles and a leather bag. The stake would free her soul, Van Helsing said, and the hand that loved her best should strike. Arthur stepped forward, pale as snow, and as the prayer was read, struck without faltering.90At last the body lay still, and the hammer fell from Arthur's hand. The cruel Thing was gone; Lucy lay as she had been in life, sweet and at peace. 'And now, my child, you may kiss her,' said Van Helsing, and Arthur did.91Outside in the sunshine, Van Helsing told them their hardest task was done, but a greater one remained: to find the author of all their sorrow and stamp him out. Arthur, Quincey and Seward each took his hand, and the vow was made.92Mina came to Seward's asylum and found him keeping his diary of Lucy's last weeks on a phonograph. He could not bear to let her hear it, until she showed him the diaries she had already typed. Then he handed over the wax cylinders.93Mina typed every cylinder in triplicate, and the Harkers sorted the evidence by date. Jonathan had traced the Count's fifty boxes of earth from Whitby to Carfax. Side by side, the papers showed what no one had seen: Dracula's house stood next door to the asylum.94When Arthur, now Lord Godalming, arrived, his grief for Lucy broke and he wept on Mina's shoulder. Afterwards Quincey Morris kissed her hand. 'Little girl, you will never regret that true-hearted kindness!' They were the very words he had once used to Lucy.95Mina asked to meet Renfield, who first gulped down every fly and spider he kept. Then he talked like a polished gentleman. As she left he said softly, 'I pray God I may never see your sweet face again.'96They met in Seward's study, Mina as secretary. Van Helsing told them a vampire could command wolves and bats, become mist, and enter only if invited, but daylight, garlic, the crucifix and running water weakened him. Dracula was once a voivode who fought the Turks.97Van Helsing asked if they would face this horror with him. 'I answer for Mina and myself,' said Jonathan, and Quincey, Arthur and Seward agreed. The Professor laid his golden crucifix on the table, and joining hands around it, they swore their solemn oath.98As they planned to hunt the boxes, a pistol shot shattered the window. Quincey had seen a great bat on the sill and fired from outside. Van Helsing then told Mina the men would go on alone; tonight was her last part in the work.99As the men set off for Carfax, Renfield begged to see them. Weeping on his knees, he pleaded to be let out that night to save his soul. Seward refused. 'Bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince you tonight.'100On the night of 1 October the men set out to search Carfax, leaving Mina safely behind. On the dark porch Van Helsing handed out their arms. 'Our enemy is not merely spiritual,' he warned. 'He has the strength of twenty men.'101Seward's skeleton key opened the door, and Jonathan led them to the old chapel, where the Count's foul stench almost drove them back. By lamplight they counted the earth-chests: only twenty-nine of the fifty remained. The rest were somewhere in London.102Suddenly the corners glittered with tiny eyes: the chapel was swarming with rats. Lord Godalming flung open the outer door and blew his silver whistle. Three terriers came racing, flew at the rats, and the whole mass scattered into the dark.103Mina, shut out of the men's work, lay awake and lonely. That night she dreamed of a white mist pouring under the door and thickening into a pillar with a red eye that split into two. Then a livid white face bent over her.104Over two days Jonathan tracked down the carters. Boxes had gone to Mile End and Bermondsey, and nine to Piccadilly, lifted by an old man as if they were pounds of tea. The Piccadilly house, No. 347, belonged to a 'Count de Ville'.105On 2 October a yell came from Renfield's room. They found him broken and dying. He whispered that the Master had won him with rats, but he had fought to save Mrs. Harker. 'I didn't mean Him to take any more of her life.'106The men burst into the Harkers' room. Jonathan lay in a trance, and Mina was trapped in the Count's grasp. Dracula sprang at them, but Van Helsing raised the Sacred Wafer. The Count recoiled and slipped away as mist, leaving Mina shaken and ashamed.107Lord Godalming brought more bad news. The Count had burned their manuscripts and Seward's phonograph cylinders in the study, though a copy lay safe in the strongbox. Renfield was dead, and Quincey had seen a bat fly from his window towards the west.108Mina recoiled from Jonathan, crying, 'Unclean, unclean! I must touch him or kiss him no more.' He held her close while she told him what the Count had done. As dawn rose, Jonathan's hair turned white with grief and fury.109That grey morning the friends met in grief. Mina vowed to die rather than harm those she loved. Van Helsing forbade it: 'If he is still Un-Dead, your death would make you even as he is.' So she promised to live.110Before the men set out, Van Helsing touched a piece of the Sacred Wafer to Mina's forehead to guard her. It burned into her flesh like white-hot metal. She screamed and sank to her knees, pulling her hair over her face. 'Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!'111Van Helsing told her the scar would pass away when God saw fit to lift their burden. Then, without a word, they all knelt together and, holding hands, swore to be true to one another and to raise the veil of sorrow from her head.112At Carfax Van Helsing unscrewed each great box, laid a piece of the Host on the musty earth and sealed it again. 'We make it more holy still,' he said. The boxes looked untouched, but the Count could never rest in them now.113In Piccadilly a locksmith opened the Count's door while a policeman looked on. Inside were eight of the nine boxes, title deeds, and a basin of reddened water. They sealed the eight, and Godalming and Quincey destroyed the twelve at Bermondsey and Mile End.114Then a telegram came from Mina: 'Look out for D. He has just now come from Carfax hurriedly.' At last a key turned softly in the lock. The Count bounded in like a panther, and Jonathan's kukri slashed his coat, spilling bank-notes and gold.115Before their crucifixes the Count cowered, then dived under Jonathan's arm, snatched some gold and crashed through the window. In the yard he turned on them: 'You think to baffle me, with your pale faces all in a row! My revenge is just begun!'116That night Mina begged them to pity the Count, for she too might need pity one day. Before dawn, in a trance, she heard water lapping and an anchor chain rattling. 'He meant escape,' said Van Helsing. The Count had fled by sea.117Van Helsing traced the Count's ship, the Czarina Catherine, bound for Varna. Dockers remembered a thin, pale man in black, oddly wearing a straw hat, and a strange fog that held the ship fast until he came aboard with his great box.118Before they left, Mina made each man swear that if she turned, he would kill her and give her rest. Last of all, at her wish, white-haired Jonathan read the Burial Service over his living wife. 'It would comfort me, my husband.'119Mina would join the hunt but must not hear their plans, lest the Count read them through her. On the Orient Express, at every sunrise and sunset, Van Helsing put her into a trance. Always she heard waves lapping and creaking masts.120At Varna they waited for a long week while Jonathan sharpened his great Kukri knife and daily telegrams said 'not yet reported'. Hidden in fog, the Czarina Catherine never put in. She slipped past them and up the Danube, and on 28 October word came that she had reached Galatz.121Mina foresaw that the Count, like the old warlord, would run home to his own country when beaten. He had read their plans through her trances, then cut himself off, not knowing her link still worked at sunrise and sunset.122At Galatz they learned the box had passed to one Petrof Skinsky, who dealt with the Slovak boatmen. Before they could question him, Skinsky was found dead by the churchyard wall, his throat torn as if by a wild animal. The Count had silenced him.123Freed from his promise, Jonathan let Mina into their council. While the exhausted men rested, she studied the maps and her trance words. The box, she concluded, was going upriver in an open boat, up the Sereth and the Bistritza towards the Castle.124That night they split up: Godalming and Jonathan by steam launch up the river, Seward and Quincey on horseback along the banks, and Van Helsing with Mina to the Borgo Pass. As the first snow fell, Jonathan and Mina said goodbye.125Van Helsing and Mina raced across the Carpathians and reached the Borgo Pass at sunrise. There a strange new power woke in her. She pointed to a little-used by-road. 'This is the way,' she said, and then slept and could not be woken.126Near the castle at nightfall, Van Helsing drew a ring of crumbled Host round Mina. She could not step out of it, nor could the vampires step in. In the small hours the mist formed into three women: 'Come, sister. Come to us!'127Mina shrank back in terror and disgust, and Van Helsing's heart leapt: she was not yet one of them. The laughing women could not cross the ring. By dawn they had melted away towards the castle, and the horses lay dead in the snow.128By day Van Helsing broke into the castle chapel. In one tomb lay a woman so full of life and beauty that a sweet, dreadful drowsiness crept over him. Then Mina's long, low wail drifted through the air and woke him like a trumpet.129He found all three sisters and did his dreadful work. Each face grew peaceful before crumbling into the dust of centuries. The greatest tomb, carved DRACULA, was empty. Van Helsing laid the Host inside, so the Count could never rest there, and sealed the castle.130Van Helsing led Mina down to a hollow in the rocks. Below, the Szgany galloped with the great chest, pursued by Seward and Quincey from the south and Jonathan and Godalming from the north. 'They are racing for the sunset,' said Van Helsing.131'Halt!' shouted Jonathan and Quincey, and rifles came up on every side. The gypsies drew knives and closed round the cart, but Jonathan forced his way through, leapt onto the wagon, and with incredible strength flung the great box to the ground.132Quincey cut his way through, clutching his side, and together they prised off the lid. The Count lay waxen pale, red eyes turning in triumph to the sunset. Then Jonathan's kukri and Quincey's knife flashed, and he crumbled to dust, his face at peace.133The gypsies fled and the wolves slunk after them. Quincey lay mortally wounded in the snow, but raised himself and pointed at Mina's forehead, now stainless in the red sunset. 'The curse has passed away!' Smiling, the gallant gentleman died.134Seven years later Jonathan and Mina took their son to Transylvania. Every trace of what had happened was gone, and the castle stood silent and empty. The boy shared Quincey's birthday, and though his names honoured all their friends, they called him Quincey.135Back home, Jonathan found that the old papers were hardly proof at all, just a pile of typewriting nobody would believe. Van Helsing, with little Quincey on his knee, only smiled. "We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!"
Adapted from Dracula by Bram Stoker, public domain. Pictures are AI illustrations drawn for this edition.
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