So, without further commentary, here are the first few pages of “Dracula’s Guest.”

Dracula’s Guest

When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich,
and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were
about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d’hôtel of the Quatre
Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage
and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still
holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door:

‘Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a
shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am
sure you will not be late.’ Here he smiled, and added, ‘for you know
what night it is.’

Johann answered with an emphatic, ‘Ja, mein Herr,’ and, touching his
hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after
signalling to him to stop:

‘Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?’

He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: ‘Walpurgis nacht.’ Then
he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big
as a turnip, and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a
little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realised that this was his
way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay, and sank
back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off
rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses
seemed to throw up their heads and sniffed the air suspiciously. On such
occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for
we were traversing a sort of high, wind-swept plateau. As we drove, I
saw a road that looked but little used, and which seemed to dip through
a little, winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk
of offending him, I called Johann to stop—and when he had pulled up, I
told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of
excuses, and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat
piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered
fencingly, and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest. Finally I
said:

‘Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come
unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I
ask.’ For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did
he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me,
and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with
the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always
just about to tell me something—the very idea of which evidently
frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he
crossed himself: ‘Walpurgis-Nacht!’

I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when
I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him,
for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken
kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue—and every
time he did so, he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless
and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale, and, looking around in a
frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles and
led them on some twenty feet. I followed, and asked why he had done
this. For answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left and
drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a
cross, and said, first in German, then in English: ‘Buried him—him what
killed themselves.’

I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross-roads: ‘Ah! I
see, a suicide. How interesting!’ But for the life of me I could not
make out why the horses were frightened.

Whilst we were talking, we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a
bark. It was far away; but the horses got very restless, and it took
Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale, and said, ‘It sounds
like a wolf—but yet there are no wolves here now.’

‘No?’ I said, questioning him; ‘isn’t it long since the wolves were so
near the city?’

‘Long, long,’ he answered, ‘in the spring and summer; but with the snow
the wolves have been here not so long.’

Whilst he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds
drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away, and a breath
of cold wind seemed to drift past us. It was only a breath, however, and
more in the nature of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out
brightly again. Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and
said:

‘The storm of snow, he comes before long time.’ Then he looked at his
watch again, and, straightway holding his reins firmly—for the horses
were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads—he
climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our
journey.

I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about this place where the road leads,’ and I
pointed down.

Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer, before he answered, ‘It
is unholy.’

‘What is unholy?’ I enquired.

‘The village.’

‘Then there is a village?’

‘No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.’ My curiosity was piqued,
‘But you said there was a village.’

‘There was.’

‘Where is it now?’

Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed
up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said, but roughly I
gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been
buried in their graves; and sounds were heard under the clay, and when
the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life, and
their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye,
and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled
away to other places, where the living lived, and the dead were dead and
not—not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words. As
he proceeded with his narration, he grew more and more excited. It
seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him, and he ended in a
perfect paroxysm of fear—white-faced, perspiring, trembling and looking
round him, as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest
itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain. Finally, in an
agony of desperation, he cried:

‘Walpurgis nacht!’ and pointed to the carriage for me to get in. All my
English blood rose at this, and, standing back, I said:

‘You are afraid, Johann—you are afraid. Go home; I shall return alone;
the walk will do me good.’ The carriage door was open. I took from the
seat my oak walking-stick—which I always carry on my holiday
excursions—and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, ‘Go
home, Johann—Walpurgis-nacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.’

The horses were now more restive than ever, and Johann was trying to
hold them in, while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so
foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was deeply in earnest; but all the
same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his
anxiety he had forgotten that his only means of making me understand was
to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began
to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, ‘Home!’ I turned to
go down the cross-road into the valley.

With a despairing gesture, Johann turned his horses towards Munich. I
leaned on my stick and looked after him. He went slowly along the road
for a while: then there came over the crest of the hill a man tall and
thin. I could see so much in the distance. When he drew near the horses,
they began to jump and kick about, then to scream with terror. Johann
could not hold them in; they bolted down the road, running away madly. I
watched them out of sight, then looked for the stranger, but I found
that he, too, was gone.

With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening
valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason,
that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a
couple of hours without thinking of time or distance, and certainly
without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned,
it was desolation, itself. But I did not notice this particularly till,
on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood;
then I recognised that I had been impressed unconsciously by the
desolation of the region through which I had passed.

I sat down to rest myself, and began to look around. It struck me that
it was considerably colder than it had been at the commencement of my
walk—a sort of sighing sound seemed to be around me, with, now and
then, high overhead, a sort of muffled roar. Looking upwards I noticed
that great thick clouds were drifting rapidly across the sky from North
to South at a great height. There were signs of coming storm in some
lofty stratum of the air. I was a little chilly, and, thinking that it
was the sitting still after the exercise of walking, I resumed my
journey.

The ground I passed over was now much more picturesque. There were no
striking objects that the eye might single out; but in all there was a
charm of beauty. I took little heed of time and it was only when the
deepening twilight forced itself upon me that I began to think of how I
should find my way home. The brightness of the day had gone. The air was
cold, and the drifting of clouds high overhead was more marked. They
were accompanied by a sort of far-away rushing sound, through which
seemed to come at intervals that mysterious cry which the driver had
said came from a wolf. For a while I hesitated. I had said I would see
the deserted village, so on I went, and presently came on a wide stretch
of open country, shut in by hills all around. Their sides were covered
with trees which spread down to the plain, dotting, in clumps, the
gentler slopes and hollows which showed here and there. I followed with
my eye the winding of the road, and saw that it curved close to one of
the densest of these clumps and was lost behind it.

As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to
fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed,
and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and
darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the
earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further
edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude,
and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it
passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must
have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my
feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and
blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The
air became icy-cold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The
snow was now falling so thickly and whirling around me in such rapid
eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the
heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could
see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress all
heavily coated with snow.

I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there, in comparative
silence, I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the
blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night
By-and-by the storm seemed to be passing away: it now only came in
fierce puffs or blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf
appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.

Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a
straggling ray of moonlight, which lit up the expanse, and showed me
that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the
snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to
investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old
foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in
which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while.
As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled
it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses
formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building.
Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured
the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown
colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of
shelter, and I groped my way blindly on.

I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and,
perhaps in sympathy with nature’s silence, my heart seemed to cease to
beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke
through the clouds, showing me that I was in a graveyard, and that the
square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as
the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a
fierce sigh of the storm, which appeared to resume its course with a
long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and
felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the
heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb,
the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning
on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the
sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in such a
place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German:

COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA
SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH
1801

On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble—for
the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone—was a great
iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian
letters:

‘The dead travel fast.’

There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it
gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the
first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice. Here a thought struck me,
which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible
shock. This was Walpurgis Night!

Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people,
the devil was abroad—when the graves were opened and the dead came
forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held
revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the
depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay;
and this was the place where I was alone—unmanned, shivering with cold
in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took
all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage,
not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.

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