Dracula

The teaching

Taught from Bram Stoker's novel of 1897, told in its own journals, letters and cuttings.

Harker's journal

The story begins in the journal of Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor sent to Transylvania to settle the purchase of an old estate near London for Count Dracula. On the way, on the eve of St George's Day, a landlady presses a crucifix on him, and peasants cross themselves and make the sign against the evil eye; at the Borgo Pass a calèche driven by a tall man with burning eyes carries him through a night of blue flames and wolves to a ruined castle. The Count welcomes him at the door: “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” He is a tall old man with a long white moustache, pointed ears, sharp white teeth, hair on the palms of his hands and a grip as cold as ice.

The prisoner of the castle

Little by little Harker learns where he is. The Count casts no reflection in his shaving glass, lunges at his throat when he cuts himself, and draws back from the crucifix round his neck; the doors are locked and Harker is a prisoner. From a window he sees the Count crawl face down the castle wall like a lizard. In a forbidden room three women with red lips and sharp teeth bend over him to feed, until the Count drives them off and gives them a child in a bag instead. In the chapel vaults he finds the Count lying in a box of earth, his eyes open and stony, his lips red with fresh blood. Fifty boxes of earth go down the road to the sea, and Harker escapes down the wall.

Lucy

The Count crosses to England in a Russian schooner that drifts into Whitby harbour in a storm, its dead captain lashed to the wheel with a crucifix in his hands, and a great dog leaps ashore. Lucy Westenra, the friend of Harker's betrothed, Mina, walks in her sleep to the churchyard on the cliff, where Mina sees something dark bent over her, and afterwards there are two small red marks on her throat. Her old suitor Dr Seward calls in his teacher from Amsterdam, Professor Van Helsing, and four men give her their blood; Van Helsing fills her room with garlic flowers, but her mother, not knowing, takes them away, and a wolf breaks the window. Lucy dies, and soon the newspapers tell of a beautiful lady who lures children on Hampstead Heath.

The stake and the Host

Van Helsing shows the others what she has become. By night her tomb is empty; by day she lies in it more beautiful than in life, her lips red; and in the churchyard they see her come with a child at her breast and call to Arthur, her betrothed, with a voluptuous sweetness. Van Helsing seals the tomb against her with the consecrated Host crumbled into paste, and the next day Arthur drives a stake through her heart while the others pray. Her face goes back to the sweetness and purity they knew, and they cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic. Then the little company swears to hunt the Count himself.

The lore of the nosferatu

Van Helsing teaches them what he knows. The vampire, the nosferatu, does not die like the bee when it has stung once; it grows stronger, has the strength of twenty men, and can command the rat, the owl, the bat, the moth, the fox and the wolf. It can come as mist or as a beast, see in the dark and pass through a crack; it casts no shadow and no reflection. It may not enter a house unless someone of the household has once bidden it come in. Its power ceases with the dawn, and it can change its shape only at noon, at sunrise or at sunset; it must rest in the unhallowed earth of its own grave, and it can cross running water only at the slack or the flood of the tide.

Garlic it hates, and the crucifix, and a branch of wild rose laid on its coffin keeps it in; a sacred bullet fired into the coffin kills it, or a stake through the heart, or the cutting off of the head. The Count, he says, must have been the voivode who won his name against the Turk across the great river, and learned his arts at the Scholomance in the mountains above Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.

The hunt

The Count strikes back at the company itself. He comes by night to Mina, now Jonathan's wife, while her husband lies in a stupor, and makes her drink his blood from a cut in his breast, binding her to him; when Van Helsing touches her forehead with the Host it burns a red scar into her skin, and she cries out that she is unclean. The hunters find his boxes of earth across London and make each useless with the Host, and when they corner him in his house in Piccadilly a slash of Jonathan's knife spills gold from his coat and he flees, crying that his revenge has only begun and that time is on his side.

He sails for home. Through her bond with him, Mina under hypnosis at sunrise and sunset hears what he hears, lapping water and creaking chains, and reasons out his road: up the rivers to his castle, carried in his box by the Szgany who serve him.

Sunset before the castle

The hunters divide and race him across the snows of Transylvania. Van Helsing, with Mina, reaches the castle first, sets her inside a ring of crumbled Host where the three women cannot reach her, and by day destroys them in their tombs. At sunset on the sixth of November the cart with the great box comes up the road with its Szgany guard, and the men fight their way to it; Jonathan's knife shears through the Count's throat as the Texan, Quincey Morris, plunges his bowie knife into the heart, and the body crumbles into dust before their eyes, with a look of peace on the face.

Quincey, mortally wounded, dies seeing that the scar has gone from Mina's forehead. Seven years later Jonathan adds a note: they have a son, named for their friend, and no proofs of what happened, and they ask no one to believe them.

What the story teaches

Stoker's novel sets the oldest protections against the newest age. Its hunters are a doctor, a lawyer, a lord, a Texan and a schoolmistress with a typewriter, who keep their records in shorthand, on phonograph cylinders and by telegraph, and who win only when they join that modern method to the old lore of garlic, the crucifix, the wafer and the stake, and to the faith that gives those things their power. Van Helsing asks the doubting doctor whether there are not things which he cannot understand, and yet which are.

The evil in the book must first be invited in, and it is resisted by a company that holds together, gives its blood for one another and shares everything each of them knows, until the scattered journals and letters become the single record the reader holds.